[Original Novella] Mansionarium, Part 4

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The two resumed discussing business, or what passes for it in their line of work. Try as I might I could pry nothing more from them, and was repeatedly shushed until I gave up and wandered off. Among the platforms landed on the ground floor, I found one being serviced by a pretty girl. Pretty as she could manage in that stuffy black uniform, anyway. Her hair also black, slicked back over her scalp, not one strand out of place.

“What are you up to?” She looked up from the open panel in the platform, elbow deep in its greasy cogs and pistons. “Oh, I just started today. I’m fixing the motivator, these things don’t break down often but when they do they’re a bitch to fix.” I gestured up at the other floating platforms and the oscillating animations playing out on them, asking what any of it was.

I noticed a brief flash of fear in her eyes. Even after that, she remained subtly nervous but did her best to conceal it. “Haven’t you read anything in your own offshoot? It’s everywhere.” I told her the text was always unreadable, and she seemed relieved. “Don’t fiddle with your remote. There’s a button on there that’ll unfrazzle text so you can read it. Trust me, you don’t want that.”

I asked why. It only frustrated her. “Look fella, if I knew why, I couldn’t be here talking to you about it. That’s how it spreads. I want no part of it, I’ve seen what happens.” So for a time, I left her to her work while I studied the buttons on the remote more closely. The first one I tried was mute.

Rather than silencing the distant voices of those two self-important old men or the clinking and clanging of the girl nearby digging around in the guts of the platform, it instead un-muted the ticking. Must’ve been on mute by default until then. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. A rhythm which matched exactly the movements of the flickering, monochrome spectres on every platform. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

The girl didn’t seem to notice, still absorbed in her work. So I picked out the next button to try. Closed captioning seemed as good a guess as any. It only made transcriptions of whatever was being said aloud nearby appear in the bottom half of my vision. Finally I pressed language. Nothing seemed different, but then, there was no text in view.

I opened a book sitting on the desk next to where she was working. Same desk they all have. Aha! The text inside was now Italian. Still unreadable to me but a huge step up from the swimming, garbled mess it had been before. I pressed the language button again, and it became French. Despite the language barrier it was quite obviously just the same phrase, repeating.

I continued bashing away at that button until at last, the page was in English. I don’t know what I expected. For some great mystery to be revealed? That being able to at least read what was written, apparently everywhere, might clue me into something the professor was keeping from me. “Backstoppers”, I muttered. The girl’s head whipped around to face me, pupils dilated. “What did you say!?”

“Backstoppers. That’s all it says, over and over. Backstoppers backstoppers backstoppers, page after page of it.” A bead of sweat formed at her hairline, then traced its way down around her nose, collecting on her upper lip. “The Backstoppers”, she whispered, face contorting in a mixture of terror and agony. “Backstoppers. Backstoppersbackstoppers. Stoppersback.”

The two men, arguing until now, suddenly took an interest in the commotion and came racing over. “What have you done, boy? What have you done?” The girl was crying now, but couldn’t stop saying it even through the tears. “I told you to give him a simpler remote”, Travigan’s superior barked at him. He looked wounded. “We don’t have any simpler than that. I hardly thought he could get into any serious trouble with it.”

Professor Travigan sighed, deep sadness in his face. He put a hand on the girl’s shoulder as she hunched over, head in her hands, rocking back and forth as she babbled. “I’m sorry dear. So, so sorry. It always destroys me when this happens, but you know what comes next. There’s no other choice”.

“Stoppersback” she frantically blubbered, reaching for the drawer. “Backstoppers. Backstoppersback. Stoppersbackstoppersback. Backstoppers.” She withdrew a pistol, stained with black sticky oil. “Backstoppersbackerstoppersbackstoppers” she cried as she reluctantly raised it to her temple. “Stoppersbackstop-”

Before I could stop her, she pulled the trigger. A startlingly loud report. Her blood and brains sprayed across the wall just under the clock, and her soon to be lifeless body slumped over on the desk. Travigan laid into me while the other fellow hung back and muttered “She knew the risks.”

“Do you have ANY IDEA what you’ve done? Any inkling at all of what went into her training, you clumsy fool? The countless years she dedicated to The Institute, just to be here as a greasemonkey? Did you even find out her name?

It was Julia. She had promise I can’t even quantify for you in a way that you’d understand. And what did you do, despite careful repeated warnings, but wander right into the minefield and get her killed! It’s all your fault, boy. All your fault.”

Killed? Surely not! But he affirmed it. “We’ve all got pacemakers. Something that works similarly anyway but for the opposite purpose, to stop the heart should it be necessary to ensure that one of us does not wake up. That what you exposed that poor girl to doesn’t leave the Manifold with us. Do you now appreciate the dangers involved?” I sensed genuine fear from him. Even from his superior. What had I stumbled onto, exactly?

“Can you destroy it?” Truly curious but also seeking to defuse their anger. “In here? Easily. It’s basic maintenance, like pruning the hedges. Otherwise it just spreads until it consumes everything. Here, watch.” He pointed his own remote at one of the apparitions and pressed play.

The faceless ghostly figure sat down at the desk, withdrew the gun from the drawer, and shot itself. Professor Travigan then pressed stop. That was it. No reversal, no repetition. It faded away, leaving only the platform, desk, wall, and clock behind.

“Of course you have to do it one by one, so it’s quite a chore. Still, a much simpler endeavor than if it were to escape the Manifold. We’d then have to track down every instance of their name in print, or spoken aloud in audio recordings or videos and destroy it all.

But they don’t make it that easy, either. Otherwise, especially in the era of internet searches, identifying every instance of their name would be trivially easy. You could have a list of all the works you need to destroy compiled in an hour or less.

So, they tie themselves to something. Attach their name to it. Something big and influential usually, that people cherish. So you cannot set out to destroy it without your whole city, country, or species allying against you.

Where I’m originally from, they used a children’s hospital. It was the last name of the guy they’d dedicated it to. In another I’ve visited, it was the name of a holy city. It’s always something you can’t destroy.

Countless have tried. Mail bombs, suicide bombings, arson. Always condemned by the media as unhinged losers out to harm the innocent. They really stack the deck against you any way they can. They have a great many powerful enemies, after all.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 5!}