5. The Hawk's Bells

An Area J aperture session on Santiago's history with Spillers

Previously—In part 4, The Calabozos of la Princesa, we learned about Jesus Santiago, a jibaro who is dropped off at the old colonial prison. Right away, he meets the warden, who suspects the old man of having some connection to the wooden crate recovered by the FBI, now in the hands of John Spillers. Santiago, it turns out has history with Spillers, going all the way back to 1518.

In this post—We find out more about Spillers and Santiago’s shared history, while also learning about why the operators of Area J are so interested in these events.

Area J

Dr. Esteberger, from up on the dais, faces the wall-mounted aperture, absently twirling a silver drafting pencil in his right hand. His eyes narrow down to slits once in a while as he stands there in neutral position, his weight back on his right foot. The aperture screen hangs in front of everyone, from a distance like spiral galaxies of slow-moving marching white ants against a backdrop of impenetrable obsidian. The audience members sit silently in their chairs like rows of silhouetted Easter Island heads, occasionally outlined by ambient light from the aperture. The only sound coming from them is the occasional drubbing of fingers on armrests. They wait for Esteberger to draw their attention to the next point along the FOJIP polyhedron of this live demo. He’s seen its contents, knows what’s in store. He thinks back to the conversation he had with Dr. Vandyck, when she had first showed to him the things he’s about to show his colleagues—that John Spillers is a man who somehow became unclamped from the human layer of the event stream, and keeps popping up in different times: first in 1492, then in 1518, 1804 and 1950—at each point, nodding and saying “You see him? That’s him again.” Spillers had started out normal, but became different—the shape of his luminescence permanently altered. Luminescence, when viewed by operators, acts as a sort of fingerprint of consciousness. For humans, that shape is more or less spherical, with a predominantly whitish yellowish hue. When a person is born, the hue is at its brightest. Over a lifetime, it dims, but there should be no significant change in shape. It’s the shape that keeps people squarely inside the human layer of the event stream. As far as Esteberger knew, there was no available documentation explaining what would happen if a human’s luminescence were to change shape. For Spillers, the most obvious side effect was his inability to die. Esteberger and Vandyck wondered: was it true immortality, or just exceptionally slow aging, or maybe something else? The two of them had sat in silence for a long while, drinking their coffee, occasionally taking turns at driving the aperture session. And then she had said out loud the thing she was afraid to put into a report. “I know FM-5137 discourages talk like this, but I really think the event stream behaves like an organism—that there are underlying immutable laws—” She trailed off long enough for Esteberger’s face to sag in a frown of empirical disapproval. He might have even muttered a half-hearted well. He couldn’t remember. Her retort though, was immediate. “I know it sounds crazy to you and the others,” she added icily, “but just remember—not that long ago, the entire FOJIP methodology sounded crazy.” This was as close as she would come to saying what everyone on the third floor knew: Vandyck is not like the rest of us. She not only discovered FOJIP, she literally wrote the book on an entire branch of point cloud geometry. She didn’t think like an engineer—wasn’t overly fixated on the mechanics and procedurals of field manual algorithms. She was an explorer, an artist, sometimes so tongue-tied and derailed by the dizzying loop de loops of her own feverish thought processes, she would excuse herself to go run—just to exhaust her mind, until the only thing there was left to focus on was the physical act of movement. Esteberger’s frown had nudged her just a bit past her running threshold, so she gathered her things up, pausing briefly to say to him: “We don’t even understand what makes any of what we do here… work. We study the event stream constantly, but are discouraged at every goddamn turn from even casually remarking on how un-fucking-believably mysterious it is! Do you even know what’s up on the 7th floor? Or who’s reading our reports?”

Esteberger’s fumbled apology, which had come out in a pileup of run-on sentences, nearly made her laugh out loud. She looked at him, and thinking of all the kindnesses he had shown her in the past, released the tension from her face, and said finally, “OK, last thing I’ll say, then I’m gonna’ shut up and go for a run. This guy Spillers is like an energetic curve ball, but I’d bet you anything—there’s going to be a countermeasure.” And then she walked out.

“Alright everyone,” he says finally, looking out from the dais. “We’ll start at 23 December 1518 in the northwest portion of the island of Puerto Rico, in an area the Taino called Aymamio. This is the same region that would much later come to be known as Aguadilla.”

23 December 1518

It had been five months since Spillers had visited Santiago’s village, and distributed the hawk’s bells. On the morning of 23 December 1518, he and twelve men left their encampment in San Germán. They loaded a single mule cart with food rations, ropes, axes, saws, dowels, spikes, spades, a long piece of lumber, and various small blacksmithing tools, then marched along the edge of the rio Culebrinas, through fourteen miles of forest. Above them for most of the journey, was a canopy of green. Stones, shrubs and snarls of grass brushed against their feet as they trudged up steep hills and around mounds of deadfall, accompanied by the chatter of parrots and the croaking of frogs. By late afternoon, they arrived exhausted, stinking and hungry. All the children ran out to meet the men—all except Santiago—hoping they had brought more copper toys. They brought Spillers’ men roasted hutia and cassava bread, which they gorged along with a bit of cheese and wine they had packed. Within an hour of pitching camp though, the realization began to spread among the men that every single hawk’s bell was empty. There was no gold anywhere. Spillers grunted and laughed, then went to sleep.

The Gibbets

The next morning, he woke early, just in time to spy a teenage boy creeping off into the tree line with a satchel. The distance was too great to know for sure, but it looked to be the same boy with smooth fine features he had seen climb down from the ceiba tree months earlier. Spillers let that memory dance around in his head for a while, but released it the moment his men began waking up to relieve themselves. Within minutes, he had them dig holes to stake down two ten foot high wooden gibbets. Along the top, they laid a fifteen foot long piece of lumber they had brought with them. Below this, he had them dig out a shallow pit and pack it with kindling and logs. When the gibbets and cross-arm were all firmly staked down, they lit the kindling and soon had a blazing fire. The Indians would wander up to it from time to time, curious to see what the Spaniards were making, but said nothing. After a few hours, the flames from the fire pit died down and the logs, now ashen colored, could be cracked open to reveal red hot embers burning within.

A few miles away, just as the first logs were cracked open and examined, Santiago was collecting his second bullhead, marveling in his luck. His father, Arasibo, had shown him a method of catching fish using the dehydrated roots and stems of the senna plant—shredding them to make a fibrous sort of bait. When eaten by fish, the senna paralyzed them, causing them to float to the top of the water, unable to swim away. People of the village fished in this way often, preparing the bait in advance, throwing it into rivers and streams, and returning later to collect their catch with their bare hands. Santiago had never done it alone, and was looking forward to returning home with a satchel full of catfish to show off for Anagui. He would check two more spots along the river, then begin the walk home.

It was not quite dusk when Spillers ordered five men to go fetch some children. The logs in the fire pit below the gibbets were all white and grey on the outside. He explained to the men who stood around him in a large circle, that the thing he was about to do, he had first seen done by Alonso de Ojeda at the village of Xaragua. “Be playful,” he said, “not too rough.” Then, to a group of three men sitting down by the gibbets, he ordered them to the forge wagon to bring the bellows and shovels. Also, the chest with small tools. “Leave two men behind to guard the wagon.” he added.

A while later, the first group of men returned with five children, aged three to ten—the youngest one Anagui, Santiago’s sister. The children all smiled and giggled as they walked over to the gibbets, having no idea what its purpose was. Seeing the children approach now, Spillers eyes his men sternly and says, “Timing is important. Watch Garcia. He’s done this before.” Garcia, taking his cue, gives a head signal to four spearmen, who casually walk over to a spot fifteen feet away, slowly forming a perimeter, holding the points of their blades down to the ground.

Spillers ambles over to the children, smiling and crouching down, making apish faces, lurching forward as though drunk. After a few false stumbles, he extends his arms out and waves his hands, signaling them to spread out to the corners of the large circle. When this is done, he laughs clownishly and collapses on the ground, waving with his hands again, inviting the children to follow—which they do. He sighs deeply. They sigh. He rolls over on his stomach. The children roll over. Spillers spies left and right, sees the children beaming at him, all smiles and still giggling. He shushes them through a toothy grin. Some of them quiet down; others copy his shushing. There’s more laughter. Lying there belly down on the ground and stiff as a board, he extends his arms out in front of his head, stretching his fingertips out as far out as he can. In a playful voice, Spillers calls out, “Garcia?” Garcia walks over, and drops two shiny hawk’s bells six inches in front of Spillers’ hands. Five little voices repeat in unison—Garcia? Then one by one, the other men lay down two hawk’s bells in front of each of the children on the ground. Spillers groans and stretches, tries to reach out and grab the hawk’s bells, which are just beyond his grasp. The children see this, and copy his movements and his exaggerated groaning. Anagui, who can’t stand the suspense, shimmies forward on her forearms. A few of the adults have ambled over to watch the game, and are also laughing.

Suddenly, Spillers gives the command—“¡Ahora!” and Garcia, who already has his sword drawn, makes a two-handed axe-chopping motion, and in one stroke, severs the hands off of a ten year old boy to his left. His name is Guayucana—the brother of Anagui and Santiago. It happens so quickly, the boy doesn’t cry out; doesn’t make a sound. Everyone continues to believe this is part of the game, and for an agonizing moment, the Taino parents are confused, thinking maybe a mistake has been made—that is, until the first soldier sets off a chain reaction. Like Garcia, he brings his sword down in a two-handed chopping motion. And then, the only sound is the whistling of Spanish steel through air, followed by a series of four thuds—each one announcing the rending of bone and flesh and muscle. All the soldier’s eyes are on Garcia, who’s now pressing his knee into the back of the handless child below him. Anagui, who had, just moments early been overjoyed at grabbing hold of her two hawk’s bells, now stares at a pair of tiny severed fists in the dirt. They are hers. She wonders where her brother is.

The sound of high pitched crying and screaming comes all at once—scorching the air like fire, and immediately setting adults into a scramble. Taino parents and elders who had been watching the pantomime game from a distance now sprint toward the gibbets, clutching their faces and pulling at their hair, shrieking as loudly as the children. Spillers, who’s now up on his feet, commands his spearmen to form a line.

The mother of Guayucana somehow manages to get past the spears. She enters the circle, rushing at Garcia, intending to peel him off her son, then feels the tip of a thin blade go into her back from up high. It comes out of her front, piercing her right breast and collapsing one of her lungs. When she falls to the ground, she’s unable to draw a breath. A second Spaniard approaches with a sword. Guayucana and Anagui watch their mother’s lips move frantically, mouthing a silent scream that will never escape her body, as a dirty bearded man with a sword shears through her arms and legs, like a carpenter using a planer to shave down wood. The ruins of her body lie in a pile.

A Taino man enters the circle on his hands and knees, babbling incoherently through tears and snot. He crawls toward his dead wife’s mangled parts, wanting to embrace them, not knowing what else to do. He is Arasibo, Santiago’s father. The Spaniard who cut down his wife says nothing, sheaths his sword, then picks up his spear and returns to his spot on the line. Through the wailing and chaos, Arasibo hears his two youngest children, Anagui and Guayucana—crying from beneath the knees of the Spaniards. When he locks eyes with them, his mouth and eyes go dry. The world collapses—becomes telescoped into a tiny moment—a sort of bubble, which he observes through a pinhole-like aperture. The background noise recedes. Arasibo’s body, latching on to whatever force has wedged itself inside the moment, understands and responds at once. His amygdala sends a signal to quicken his heart rate, simultaneously coaxing the chain of intercostal muscles along his ribs to begin contracting at a faster cadence, forcing his breathing to quicken. Small airways inside his lungs expand to their maximum diameter for increased oxygen uptake. Dilator muscles force his pupils to widen, permitting maximal peripheral data input. Along the tops of his ears, tiny hairs bristle like pine needles. This, he experiences as tunnel hearing—a sort of hyper arousal that zeroes in on tiny fractions of the pinhole world he is inside, amplifying their detail and clarity to astounding resolution. Blood vessels to the large muscle groups—legs, back, chest—all dilate in anticipation of a titanic struggle, while smaller ones—those leading to hands and feet—constrict. Pain receptors are dulled in anticipation of catastrophic injury. Arasibo absorbs this pinhole world not through eyes, but through every cell of his body. He sees a village elder standing amid a throng of Taino bodies on the outside of the circle of Spaniards. The old man is holding a macana, which he tosses to Arasibo as soon as he holds out his hand to receive it. Its handle is wound with sisal, and at the end of it is polished stone, carved into the shape of a star. The Spaniards don’t notice.

Arasibo scans his immediate surroundings, sees his son Guayucana pinned under the one named Garcia—a wide man with thick legs and a greasy beard. Arasibo takes a vaulting leap from his crouched position, sailing seven feet up into the air, bringing the macana high above his head. Garcia stares up, his brain temporarily paralyzed, unable to understand why a half naked brown man is suspended in midair; cannot look away, even as the stone tip of Arasibo’s macana comes smashing down into his forehead. Working quickly, Arasibo yanks it away, pulling small fragments of eyebrow, skin, and brain out with it. Garcia blinks and purses his lips as though practicing at a greeting, but instead of words, he manages only to expel air. As his knee slides off of young Guayucana’s back, Arasibo’s arms move like insane figure eights—on each pass, burying the pinwheel-like stone edge of the macana into the Spaniard’s head, over and over, until there’s no longer a face—just a pulpy moist cavity, revealing disintegrated meat and a partial upper row of teeth. The men behind Garcia are stunned, gibbering in Spanish. Arasibo counts two—just two witnesses. The others, with their backs to him, have no idea he’s even in the circle. Could that be? he thinks. Part of him knows that the noise from the children’s crying and the shrieking of parents must be deafening; is certain of it as a fact. The Spaniards add to it with their yelling and snarling, likely in a misguided effort to shout down the anger and grief of people who have just witnessed their children have their hands cut off. All of this noise is there, but it draws not a single ampere of attention from him. It lies just on the outside of the pinhole Arasibo now moves within. Yes, he thinks. They’re distracted, while I see clearly. There are only twelve of them: four men spread out here, each pinning a child; four more forming a line of spears; another three far away up at the mule cart. Counting Garcia, who’s dead, that makes twelve. Only two are aware I’m inside their circle.

Arasibo flares his head left, sees the old man who earlier tossed him the weapon. He’s now flanked by three younger men, all with their own macanas, all inching closer to the line of Spaniards, who jab the tips of their spears frantically into the air. In an unbroken series of movements, Arasibo kicks Garcia over, hoists his son Guayucana up to his feet, kissing his head the whole way, and tapping his back and chest furiously, as though shouting through his hands—run my boy!—then pushes him in the direction of the men with the macanas, hoping he’ll sneak past the Spaniards from behind while they’re jabbing their spears. The boy runs. Arasibo looks away, toward the two men that separate him from his daughter, each kneeling down into the back of a small child. They’re both still gibbering, slightly hunched down, tapping at the ground from time to time with their non sword-wielding hand, unsure if they should spring up to their feet. Behind the ground-tappers, he sees the backs of Anagui’s legs and the tip of her head poking out. The man who cut her hands off is standing, pressing his boot into her back. Right in front of him, Arasibo sees Garcia’s sword lying on the ground. He picks it up, taking just a moment to absorb its weight and feel. It’s heavier than the macana, but whatever power is forcing his hearing and vision to pass through the tiny pinhole aperture, now infuses the muscles of his arms and fingers with the information necessary to do the next thing. With a savage strength and ironclad certainty, he brings the sword up over his head, back and flings it toward the man who stands on his daughter’s back so that it passes, end over end directly between the two gibbering Spaniards. Like Garcia, they are mesmerized, unable to resist the urge to trace the sword’s trajectory with their eyeballs as it sails past them, traveling from Arasibo’s hands, along a near perfectly straight path, making two full rotations in transit, then pluging into the back of their compatriot Luis Salazar. The sword lands just above his hips, and penetrates his body cleanly, all the way to the hilt. The Spaniards continue looking at Salazar, processing the information, as though, through the accumulation up molecule sized fragments of evidence, they’re accelerating toward the realization that yes, a fresh adjudication is warranted—that what they’re witnessing is both frightening and awesome. Salazar, unable to catch his balance, falls face forward into the smoldering logs of the gibbets. The sound of his screams prompt the two witnesses to come up off their feet, at last freeing the children who up until that point, had been pinned down. There’s a third Spaniard somewhere—outside of Arasibo’s pinhole. He scans left and right, hears one word over and over—Spillers! There’s a sting he feels on his head, followed by a ringing noise—the impact of iron wolfjaw tongs on the crown of his head. Arasibo experiences a sense of weightlessness. Then the sound of the world melts away and everything goes black.

Slowly, he opens his eyes to see that he’s sitting on the ground, fastened with ropes to a wooden post that keeps him upright in an l-position. Blood has dried along his ears and neck, its gumminess intensified by the not unpleasant radiant warmth of the gibbet logs. Not far away lies the charred remains of Salazar’s body. By his feet, a pile of broken macanas. Arasibo can hear the cries of children and the wailing of parents, but does not see them. He knows he’s no longer inside the pinhole aperture.

Dr. Vandyck

Through another kind of aperture, one very far away, Dr. Esteberger from up on the dais, narrates the remainder of the events to those gathered in Area J’s conference room. “It’s late evening, 24 December 1518. The Taino man here—” Esteberger says, gesturing at Arasibo, “for a brief time, his luminescence changed shape.” He pauses, then adds, “not like Spillers.”

In the next moment, John Spillers step into the viewport of the rectangular aperture, holding a long set of blacksmith tongs. Esteberger pans out so everyone can see how the gibbets have been arranged. Ten villagers are hanging from the top cross-arm, suspended by ropes a few feet above the logs. A few are unconscious, while others kick their legs as a Spaniard walks around the fire pit with a bellows, fanning the embers at various points. Two other Spaniards standing nearby use ropes to adjust the dangling heights of the Taino men and women who now roast inside. Their goal is to burn them to death as slowly as possible. Many of the taller villagers have already begun to sizzle at their feet. Spillers had first seen this used to great effect by Alonso de Ojeda when he burned eighty Caciques at Xaragua back in July 1503.

Outside the fire pit are the children of the village. Not just the five who were pinned down earlier, but all of them—lined up from tallest to shortest. All with their hands cut off. A few inches above their bloody stumps, are leather tourniquets, prepared by Spillers’ men to slow the process of bleeding out. Dangling at the ends of these straps, where hands once were, there are now hawk’s bells. One by one, the children are brought to Spillers who uses his tongs to pull and stretch their lips, noses, and chins, then slices the skin off with his poignard. When Guayucana and Anagui approach, he removes their eyelids as well, doing all of this in full view of their father Arasibo. When it’s finished, there’s a small mound of skin and lips by Arasibo’s feet. Spillers has his spearmen march all of the children to the tree line and commands them to go into the forest, to follow the river’s edge. Crying and howling, they do as they are told. Anagui and her brother, who can no longer blink, each stumble forward, chins high up in the air, fighting to pull their eyeballs back into their sockets, to moisten them just a little. It takes several minutes, but the darkness eventually swallows them all, leaving nothing but the sound of tinkling hawk’s bells.

When the children are gone, two men splint Arasibo’s legs tightly to short sections of lumber. Using a two handed long sword, Spillers cuts the man’s feet off, then uses straps of leather as tourniquets. Below the straps, his fingers go to work at the stumps—pulling back or cutting away at the skin and fat until he can grab a hold of each of the end pieces of bone. It’s very slippery, and he must cut away at substantial amounts of tendon and muscle to grab on to it. Once he finds them though, he uses a small punch drift, no bigger than a nail, to drive a hole an inch into the soft spongy part of each tibia. That first strike is like a spike entering porous wood. With a succession of slightly larger punch drifts, Spillers widens these holes a bit at a time. At first, nothing comes out, which was expected. The next part is what interests him the most. Using a small set of picard tongs, he would occasionally bring over tiny pieces of ashen logs, still burning bright red, and carefully insert them into the holes he had made. Then he would blow into them and watch. For twelve hours, he did this, until cooked marrow emerged from those holes. When he woke up late in the morning of Christmas day 1518, John Spillers was permanently changed.

Esteberger freezes the aperture to speak to the audience members, some of whom have left the room. “This is the event Dr. Vandyck identified as the one that caused the permanent shift in Mr. Spillers’ luminescence. Of equal importance is the fact that the other man’s luminescence changed. The Taino man tortured by Mr. Spillers. Dr. Vandyck has a theory about this that—well, not everyone is in agreement on. We’ll take a ten minute break for refreshments, and when we return, Dr. Vandyck will take over, and explain that part to you all.”

Dr. Esteberger descends from the dais amid the sound of murmuring and paper shuffling. When the break is done, and the room has quieted down, a woman in a pale blue sleeveless tunic ascends the stairs of the dais and walks into the speaker’s spotlight at the lectern. Not holding anything, she grips both sides of it with lean powerful arms. Her skin is the color of burnt clay, and though she and Esteberger are the same age, she shows no signs of wrinkles. Her thick black hair is pulled back tightly in a bun. She has the build of a greco roman wrestler who holds herself with the measured tautness and poise of a dancer. Her physicality, always there and impossible to cover up with a tunic, sets her apart from the other operators. It makes Esteberger nervous, like an unexploded bomb of fantastical energy she keeps imprisoned and locked away in her joints and ligaments—a force that may at any time come exploding out. When she at last speaks, the audience leans in, hoping to catch some of that energy.

“The man we’ve been focused on here—Mr. Spillers—” She stops herself to look at a chair in the first row to her right. Though it’s impossible to see Esteberger’s face in the low lighting with her eyes, she sees him clearly enough. With a sniff, she adds, “I’d like to do something a little different. Rather than read from prepared slides in this presentation, I’d like to have a conversation with you. Before we move on to the next FOJIP point of this story manifest, does anyone have a question?”

She feels an itch behind her nose and looks up and out toward the middle section, around row 6. “Ah, Dr. Kiser has a question.” she says. Vandyck tilts her chin up, and with tiny movements of her nose, coaxes the words out of the itch coming from the sixth row. “Oh, it’s a good one too.” she adds, smiling. “OK. So if I’m hearing you right Dr. Kiser, you’re wondering if these acts of violence are worthy of study. We all know humans are violent. What makes Spillers different?” She cranes her neck forward a bit at Kiser, as though beckoning her to make a correction if necessary, then continues. “To that, I have a simple answer. Forget for a minute that Spillers is a truly shitty person. He’s the only human we’ve ever seen whose luminescent configuration has permanently changed. He’s an energetic anomaly… a regression… call it what you will. His current configuration doesn’t comport with his biology, and this man is moving through the event stream, incapable it seems, of dying. And I believe, he may have access to other capabilities.”

Another itch arrives from the sixth row. “Ah, Dr. Kiser has a follow-up.” Vandyck says, grinning. “Are there more like Spillers? Well, that depends on what you mean by like him. We all saw the Taino man Spillers tortured—Arasibo. He exhibited classic physical manifestations of a fight or flight response, but there was something that went beyond that. Just for a moment, his luminescence changed. Not drastically like Spillers. It was more of a small constriction, followed by an increase in brightness and intensity. This has never been recorded in a report as far as I can tell, but suggests that humans may contain the basic blueprint for generalizable energetic plasticity, and that this has something to do with their ability to record and play back data. Which brings me to an interesting observation I’d like to share with you. Several hours prior to the killings we just witnessed, and just a few miles away, a young boy named Hayuya was fishing. He’s the only survivor of this village. Just as he was returning home, his younger brother and sister were having their eyelids removed by John Spillers. Hayuya caught up to them in the forest when he heard the sound of the hawk’s bells. I’d like zoom the aperture in on that moment.”

Hayuya

Santiago had been walking for forty five minutes. His satchel, weighed down by three bullhead catfish bangs against his leg as he walks. Up ahead is the tall ceiba tree, just a quarter mile from his village. Believing himself to be as quiet as a lizard, he loved walking in the forest alone at night, attempting to discover worlds of unseen movement in things that appeared to be standing still. Looking up and around, he watches the light from the moon spill out on to the canopy of leaves above him, the tree trunks, the rocks—occasionally ricocheting along the edge of something that barely nudged—the yellow stripe of a caterpillar, the wing of a resting bat or the eye of a frog. Now, as he approaches the large diagonal plank buttresses of the ceiba tree, there in the grass, he sees something that shouldn’t be there, feels his neck and back stiffen up. Tiny fragments of light bounce off of copper and white, and slowly reveal themselves to be held within a dark outline there by the buttress root. Now two shapes. As he approaches, he softens his footfalls and hears panting. Twenty feet away, he wonders if it’s a dying hutia, perhaps having received a mortal injury from a run-in with a hunter, now coming to rest and die undisturbed. Something is not right though. At ten feet away, Santiago drops his satchel and lunges forward because he recognizes what is inside those shapes. It is Anagui and Guayucana, barely moving, barely breathing. In the moonlight, from this close distance, he can see their mangled faces and arms. Anagui is leaning against their brother, her cheek pressed into his chest, her face angled away so the exposed surface of her eyeballs do not have to make contact with his skin. Down by their waists, there is the occasional soft low tinkling of metal clappers inside two pairs of hawk’s bells.

As Santiago looks at them, unable to speak, Dr. Vandyck addresses her audience on the other side of the aperture, “This boy here.” she begins. “He’s going to stay with his siblings for another several hours, bringing water for them, comforting them. His sister will die first. The younger brother will last another two hours. Hayuya will then run to the edge of tree line outside his village, and see the gibbets. He’ll realize what the Spaniards have done; see what Mr. Spillers is doing to his father. He’ll watch for hours, hidden at the tree line.”

Vandyck feels another itch in the back of her nose—barely there, faintly worming its way around just below her eyes, like a grain of rice trapped in her nasal passages. This time, the itch comes from the first row. Esteberger.

“Dr. Esteberger has a question.” she says, looking directly in his direction. “‘Why?’” She pans her face for a long moment from left to right. “That’s a wonderfully simple question, why. Earlier he had mentioned that there’s some disagreement. He’s right. And the disagreement is on the topic of why. Why exactly did Spillers come to be? I have a theory. For a moment, I’d like you to consider the human layer of the event stream through the lens of evolutionary biology, imagining it not as a system of point clouds, but rather as a consciousness producing biome.”

Vandyck pauses to take a sip from a bottle of water, then continues. “Regarding Spillers,” she says, pointing to the aperture which still shows the young boy crouching down at the tree line. “This boy is the lone survivor of Spillers’ massacre.”

Still looking up at the viewport, she clutches at her necklace and draws in two short belly breaths. The points of light on the aperture blur, fade out, then recompose into an entirely different distribution of spiral galaxies. Vandyck locates a small portion and zooms in until it fills the viewport. “Here is the same boy 432 years later, sitting alone in a filthy dungeon in San Juan. He’s taken the name Santiago.” Vandyck, hearing the murmurs, quickly adds, “When we look with our eyes, we see an old man, yes. But if we see his energy—look at it closely—we see he’s the same person as before. Like Spillers, this human is very long-lived. Unlike Spillers, his luminescence has retained its shape. And there’s something else. This man can change his appearance at will. We’ll see that shortly. This is what I alluded to earlier with Dr. Kiser’s question—a sort of energetic plasticity. This man Santiago possesses it. ”

The Countermeasure

Vandyck clears her throat, trying to punctuate this portion of the presentation. “So… why Spillers? Why Santiago? Why any of it?” she asks, looking out again at the audience. She lets them wait a long time in silence before speaking again.

“You know, the event stream is a deeply mysterious thing. We study it every day, but sometimes get so carried away with describing what we see, we don’t bother to ask the big question of why. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do things happen at all? Humans operating within the event stream, are actually a lot like us. They feel like they’re players of a game they understand. And while that’s true, it’s only half true. They’re players of a game yes. But they’re also the pieces of another game, one that’s being played by the event stream itself. My theory is simple. The event stream is not only like an organism, it is an organism. It has agency and intentionality. And it views Spillers as intolerably destabilizing—as an abomination.To that end, it will deploy as many countermeasures as necessary to put itself back into equilibrium. Santiago is the countermeasure.”