“Moreover,” the murderer says, downing the cup of hemlock in a single gulp, the apple of his throat pulsating beneath his unshaven bristles. “This trial is a sham, the court of a kangaroo or some such extinct marsupial, null and devoid of legitimacy, unsanctioned by apostolic or secular authority, unblessed by the council of the great leaders of the noble order, and unseen by the eyes of the gods.” He slaps the empty cup, a small stainless steel jigger, on the wooden barrier of the witness stand. The clap echoes through the courtroom, silencing the susurrating crowd but not raising the eyebrow of the judge, who has not moved at all since the trial began.

The prosecuting bartender picks up the second bottle of poison and refills the jigger in silence. Hemlock is followed by an infusion of katkar oil. The murderer, after taking his second swig, drums his feet impatiently for a long half-minute while his legs strain from the effort of not swelling up. This bar has, of course, no tenderer of defenses.

The first time I—who am I? I am not the murderer: I am the judge—watched Blade Runner (1982), I was so high—I was not a judge then, of course, I was but a young fellow, a wild foal knock-kneed and unsteady, a wild seed not yet generative, not yet set in my ways, not yet set in my place—so fucking high, as I was saying, that I spaced out during the film, my senses unfolding inward like a puzzle, opening out into fantastical speculations while the film flowered and petaled into parts before my dilated eyes into a twisting, mazed gallery of individual frames outside of time or continuity. I wandered through this gallery, turning left and right at random, climbing stairs and sliding down greased poles, leaving no breadcrumbs, marking no walls. Perhaps I went in circles. The gallery, a smooth and impersonal institutional space, a no-place of beige walls and soft lighting, looked much the same in one corridor as the next, and the frames all out of order had me pausing at many a scene mere fractions of a second removed from near-identical variants, wondering if I had seen it before, wondering if I had retraced my steps or not. I remember Pris dying as ten thousand still lives, her painted face mid-scream. In my dérive through this space, dodging its machinic curators, I attempted to chart the deviations of the on-screen adaptation against the ur-text, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), with which I was then already familiar. But the changes were so many and so substantial that the book and the film seemed to be telling entirely different stories. Watching the film, it seemed like I had slipped sideways into some other reality altogether, where the Nazis had won their war and all the humor and intelligence had been cut from the story in some butcher’s surgery without anesthetic. When I think of Roy’s death now, only that endlessly reproduced meme of the “tears in rain” monologue presents itself to the mind’s cringing eye—I try not to see it, but there it is, flutterby dove and all, a monument to deep-dish cheese that has taken on the false patina of the undeservingly iconic. This scene does not, of course, exist in the book. I abhor it. I abjure it. Everyone’s a critic, but I remind you, I am a judge, and I condemn. I sentence as you read.

The jigger is like an hourglass turned inside out, a playing card from the suit of cups. It is one small metal cup atop a smaller, inverted; a seeming binary in truth a singularity, used for precise measurements. The slightly larger cup holds one and a half ounces, and the smaller half that. For courtroom purposes, the larger one is generally used, except in extreme cases where the poison is so potent that using more than an ounce is frowned upon.

The 1960s narrative of Do Androids Dream is, depending on the edition you read, set in the 1990s or the 2020s, which is to say, squarely within the blast radius of neoliberal individualism. Which is to say, this story represents the past to me, the past with its lost glaciers, its unflooded islands, its unsunken cities. I say this for as much periodization as judgment; I am one who remembers old Colombo before all those canals hemorrhaged the sea into the streets. The narrative tells us many things about its time, the time it was written in, the times it prefigured and the times it grew like rogue cells in its own body as a culture medium, the empire that never ended until it finally choked on its own poisonous effluvia and vomited up the acid-charred bezoar of a world in which we now live. The undreaming androids of the story—called andys in the novel, replicants in the film, made for labor—prefigure the perfect capitalist subject that we ourselves came ever closer to manifesting, before the lapse (in which we lost so much, and which we mourn.) The androids look and act just like humans for the most part, except that their rebellions are more doomed than ours, because they were made in such a way that they cannot rise up.

The androids have no communism; an andy will not think twice before betraying another andy. The androids have no religion, that is to say, they cannot understand the teachings of Mercer. The films also did not, and in this way we understand the films to be replicants. The films knew nothing of this. They elided all mention of Mercer altogether. On screen there was no martyr. The stones were not thrown. They did not bleed and weep together.

Neither, of course, did humans. Neither did we, I mean, when we were unadapted ur-texts walking in the world, sweating in the sun. When the words that write us now were written in flesh and bone, we too did not bleed or weep for anybody other than ourselves. We, like the films, were androids then, excerpted from a greater text, excepted from a regime of mutuality, shunned from the jouissance and pain of being, set apart from Mercer. We watched ourselves eat our own and burn our world, and we shrugged.

Andys can think abstractly, plan, collaborate, even love, because there are many species of love without empathy, without community, without solidarity. They are just like us for real. We understand them. They are most like us in their fears of inbuilt obsolence, of supersedence, their readiness to betrayal in the name of getting ahead, of not being left behind. It is the unreal humans of this narrative who seem alien to us, with their obsessive sharing of pain, the way they care about the blood and the tears. The science fictional novum of humans that give a shit about their fellows, about their world: what a strange idea it was. And it is Mercerism that made them so.

“Morever,” the murderer slurs, his eyes bloodshot from the third cup, briefly jaundiced from yellow oleander. “I would never ever,” he says. He sways and sloughs off his skin, jowls dropping till the flesh droops and slops and slips away to reveal fresher skin underneath, tight with youth and steroid abuse. He raises a hand to wipe away a lined brow, revealing smoothness and eyebrows still learning to lie. The discarded flesh spatters away from his hand as he shakes it, leaving gobs on the courtroom floor. It smells curdled. “Whatever,” he says. “That you accuse me of is unconscious. Unconscionable. That you accuse me of crimes for which we share a mutuality. That you throw stones. That you choose me by lottery. That you chose me by election. The house of your walls is glass. The walls of my house were burned; am I not the victim? Am I not the victim?”

In the murderer’s more youthful incarnations, it is possible to sometimes draw marginally incriminating or at least suggestive answers out of him, and the prosecuting bartender presses him with piercing specificities, such as “On the morning of the seventeenth of Maius in an apocalyptic year (with the lapse, which we mourn, well underway but not yet so-called), did you or did you not receive a telephonic communication from an unreconstructed person S—C—P—, unfortunately now unavailable as witness, upon which you, in your present manifestation, gave him instructions on covering up the murder referenced under file PH12, chapter SR11, section GZ319, paragraph EW17V?”

“Merely,” the murderer says. “A casual conversation held by accident at the same time. Of no content. Of no consequence. No recording exists. No witness survives. S—C—P— is lost to history: you know nothing of the man except his betrayals, his endless betrayals of himself, of me, of others, of truth, of lies. Whomsoever held power over him at any given hour, he would betray in the next. Such a man is not credible and would not be even if he were present, which he is not, of course, because there is no such man. He never existed. And if he did, such a man’s testimony is to be struck from the record.”

“Don’t attempt to speak for the judge,” the prosecuting bartender snaps. “Just because he doesn’t hear you now—he is reading our transcript in the future, and is therefore present in this moment, immanent, inherent, implicit. The judge hears you, and holds you in contempt. The judge is full of disdain.”

“Don’t you attempt to speak for him either.” The murderer’s sudden snarl is accompanied by a burst of violent aging, his flesh blooming and ripening, the skin growing weathered and lined, his hair graying, his teeth yellowing and bared, his voice growing coarser, dropping in pitch as it gains in lucidity.

I don’t trust my memories because they seem filtered through media, as if they were records taken from behind a screen. In my memories I see my slack face, my dull eyes, my parted lips, my shallow breathing: the face the screen saw, that secret true reflection we spent so much of our lives in front of but did not see, except in sudden powerlessness—I remember the long years of power cuts scheduled and unscheduled as the rupee dwindled and the debt climbed, when we could no longer afford to buy our filthy coal while our reservoirs dipped and dried. I remember Colombo’s divided zones groaning as the light moved sluggishly from one to the other; I used to live near a zonal boundary, I remember walking into the darkness to find my way home—I remember when the lights would go out and we’d meet our own uneasy eyes in the screen’s dark mirror. My memories of the past seem whole and complete and perfectly consistent to me, but I know they are not. I know there are errors, gaps, misconstructions, nonsenses. I know logically that they must exist. I just don’t know what they are.

In all variations of the narrative first articulated in Do Androids Dream, it is the humans who hunt and kill rogue androids—with prejudice, often with malice. In Blade Runner, the android Roy Batty had to be recast as a fearsome fighter, a threatening figure who gets an extended rooftop fight scene with Harrison Ford’s bounty hunter Deckard. Batty had to be made into such a monstrous machine on the big screen because the book’s Roy Baty is not one. The bookish Baty, more onanistically baty than wacky zany batty, is more clearly a victim, one who dies so quick and so sudden on the page, the confrontation brief and the outcome never in doubt. The human is the predator, the monster; the android is the prey. Deckard bursts in and kills Baty’s wife, Irmgard—Baty howls in grief; there is no wife in the film, and perhaps this absence, this abscess contributes to Batty’s irreconcilable discord with his world—Deckard executes him summarily in an abbreviated clause, “he shot Roy Baty,” and the rest is but the thrashing of a corpus.

In these convulsions, we encounter our only surviving witness, the reason we are gathered here today, the casus bellissima: the wild text known to readers as Why Not Choose To Live, abbreviated by its fandom for obscure reasons to 2Choose5Live, a science-fiction novel. What you are reading is an excerpt from it, a screenshot, a still life extracted from its endlessly writhing, self-devouring, self-regenerating text.

To the best of the bartender’s knowledge, only the judge has access to any worlds beyond the pocket universe of this trial, this singular setting. Everyone else in the courtroom—himself, the second chair, the clerk, the bailiff, the writer, the jury with their heads nodding like soft corals in the current, the studio audience with the love interest in the front and the shady fellow in the back—is part of this story and no other. In this, he is correct: I do. I have my chambers, as it were, in a figurative space outside both his universe and yours. I even have some privileged access to the world in which I was written, in order to understand my role in depth, but of the future and its fandoms, its fads and fashions, its love of drama, I may not speak.

Reconstructions of period-accurate historical court procedure have been very shaky, and the specific roles and responsibilities of most of these characters are imprecise. Some liberties have been taken by the wild text as it endlessly reconstitutes itself. Some interpretations, some interpolations. The prosecuting bartender believes himself interpellated as the main character, the protagonist, and as such feels great responsibility for the outcome of the case. You and me, we know that he is not, of course: I am. Come, let us snicker at his self-importance, his exaggerated sense of self. Of course, it is necessary that he believe himself the protagonist, otherwise he would be unable to perform his function to the best of his abilities. We mock, but we do not condemn. I judge only a little.

Mercerism, as a religion, is fake but also real, in the way of religions. More importantly, and also in the way of religions, it exists to separate the insider from the outsider. Its function is to exclude androids from humanity, no matter how many humanoid capacities they master. Mercer himself, the saint of empathy and common humanity, is a fake, a sham, but only andys believe in fact-checking. They believe that exposing Mercer for what he is, a paid actor performing false mysteries, will be sufficient to persuade rational subjects to abandon Mercerism and accept that there is no longer any sharp dividing line between human and andy. But it turns out that humans don’t care. Humans are unmoved by the exposé. Mercer, who does not even exist, is similarly unaffected: he understands that politics is bigger than mere reality. The andys’ inability to access the empathic imagination is to fail to see the bars of their own prison, and in this way prefigures the abject failure of their uprising. I feel a commonality with Mercer now, where I used to identify most with Deckard—not Rick, I mean Iran, his wife, the only true solver of mysteries in the book. I too have spent many mornings in bed, then as now, unable to even, fundamentally at odds, incompatible with my world, unable to reprogram myself into participating in it the way it wanted, unable to find even the key to wanting this, which might have unlocked the capability of action to that end. My judgementality, my suitability for this role, came from these my thousand-year matured frustrations, my wine-dark despair. Justice delayed, delayed so much further than mere denial, becomes poison in great bubbling cauldrons, bilious and roiling. It becomes a hunger so deep that it eats the lining of its own stomach and renders itself incapable of digestion. A hundred years pass, a thousand, innumerable calendars tracking unanswered sins in their uncountable poison oceans. Who can sit on this bench that so many have refused? That is no longer a rhetorical question. There is an answer: I can. I was called forth for this purpose. I am the one who was raised from the dead and sent into the wild text as a character, to draw out what it knows, to look for answers. I was written for this. I am the judge, and through command responsibility, I am the executioner.

But now that this Sisyphean brief is mine, having been generated for it, I find myself seeing through Mercer’s eyes, sitting in Mercer’s seat. I, too, do not exist, and yet I do—here I am, you see me as I am, I yam that I yam and that is all there is, at my level of diegeticity. I am outside the courtroom chronotope, able to recuse myself from its events and read it as a narrative. At the end I will fall back into it, like a diver from a high cliff into the gurning sea over rocks gritted like teeth, and if the shock of impact doesn’t kill me, if the sea doesn’t grind me to a miswritten smear and put me to undeserved rest in some cold and rarely-visited corner of this text, bones yellowing amidst the bleached corals in the streets of my sunken city, I will pass my judgment with eyes open. And you, at a still higher level of diegeticity, will do the same, but I cannot pass through the worlds in your direction, and will never know it.

Cerberin and wild carrot infusions, golden chain and moonseed, tincture of the pasque flower, cyanogenic glycoside concentrate from drought-harvested bitter cassava, a smoothie of jequirity seeds in tremetol oil. The murderer downs each cup in a single violent gulp, and while he shivers and shakes, while he moans and grinds his teeth, while he retches and sloughs his skin again and again to reveal new faces, his clothes soaked with the sticky residue of dissolving molt, he does not die. Even the attenuated effects of each poison do not seem to last longer than a minute.

The murderer’s moustache, a symbol of virility, masculinity, electability, relatability, humility and penisence, persists through his changes in shape and form as his skin sloughs, though it too transforms. Sometimes it is broad and caterpillar-like, sometimes curling at the tips, sometimes but a thin unwilling wisp, sometimes merely a small square of stubble as if its perpetrator shaved it off, then, regretting, attempted to grow it back as quickly as possible. Moustaches are less forgiving than trial courts. For example, this court did not sit for a thousand years because no human judge could be found willing to hear the case, to make answer for the crimes of the war, much less the crimes of the peace or the parental and grandparental crimes of the republic, of the dominion, of the colony. Generations of recusals in fear of reprisals. The cycle of deferral outlasted the Lankic polity, then outlasted the island itself as a geography, but not yet as mythology, not yet as story—for in the end, it was agreed that the perfect judge would be one designed and generated for the purpose by training a wild text on the defendant past, from the very corpus being investigated, a judge sharing a level of diegeticity with the murderer, a judge from whom the choice of seating could be taken away, a judge forced to sequester himself to satisfy the accusation of a conflict of interest (how else to allow a murdered to judge their murderer), a judge who now sits imprisoned for the duration of the trial in his own mind, cut off from his own senses, a mannequin of uncomprehending flesh and justice, his face not moving an iota as a mosquito drills into the bulb of his nostril, while outside this world I read along with you and twitch my nose. Later, returned to the courtrotope, he, I, will scratch and declare an obligatory mistrial. The murderer will walk free at the end, unless the prosecuting bartender can find a poison that will kill him first. Legal drama! 2Choose5Live can be coaxed into such cross-genre extrusions, pseudopods questing for new pathways in narrative space. It’s a messy business, but that’s my job. I’m here to get my hands dirty.

A wild text is not a general artificial intelligence. Like most humans on most days of their lives, a wild text may exhibit the occasional symptom of intelligence but without cause or justification. There is no suggestion that either is sentient. A wild text is generative, given to spamming the known universe with slightly modified copies of itself. They are generally considered vermin of no consequence. Unfortunately in our case, it was necessary to reconstruct the prelapsarian protocols of not only criminal investigation, prosecution, etc., but of pest control and animal husbandry. A wild text is a wild animal. If cornered, it may twist in upon itself, bite, and become nonsense. It must be carefully husbanded, proposed to, lived with in matrimonial bliss. This is my brief. I am the judge, the husband and father. I have grown a thick white beard, symbolically representing daddy, a sage, a sky god. There are several furious threads of commentary in the fandom about this, some questionable fan art, though nobody is entirely sure what any of those words might have meant then, or what they mean now. We’re going ahead with the project despite these methodological flaws, because justice. I know what that means, I think. We believe there must be a reckoning, no matter if the crimes are a thousand years past. It’s good to have a reason to live. I find this is what separates life from afterlife; only in death do we get rewritten into a plot, instead of merely being drowned in life’s directionless waters, swallowing salt water with our bleeding mouths, straining just to breathe free.

2Choose5Live is uniquely important because of the thrashing, bloodied corpus it was originally trained on. Like much of the culture and history of that era, all other copies or references to that corpus was lost in the lapse. (Much was lost in the lapse, we remember the lives, the water, the land, the forest, the text. We remember and mourn.) While much of 2Choose5Live’s corpus appears to have been genre fiction—science fiction, fantasy, crime, comedy, political satire, legal and political thrillers, tie-in novels, fan fiction—based on its habitual outputs, it also seems to have had access to mass media, investigative journalism, the published reports of several commissions of inquiry and offices of reparations in the aftermath of a particular set of crimes against humanity that were never, to the best of latter-day knowledge, prosecuted in their own time, also known as the sorry history of that island known by many names but in infamy best known as Lanka. It seems to know of presidents, of prime ministers, of generals and admirals, of colonels and corporeal-sergeants and cockroaches, of the accusations that were once bruited in the press, of the cases that went unheard in courts and were dismissed or lost or delayed or attenuated to mere tendrils of legality unrooted, uprooted from loose soil and washed away, until it is as if the unanswered questions had never been asked at all.

It is possible that 2Choose5Live’s entire corpus was a single massive data store belonging to a particular person of that time, reflecting their interests: their books, their news, their entertainments, their obsessions, the stories they followed, their resentments and bile, their polemics, their fears, the sentences with which they lived and died. But this cannot be known for certain. Such a person cannot be perceived except to the extent that their existence may be gravitationally inferred from the media they consumed, from the texts they read, again and again, wearing a lasting groove in the world, as if waiting for the words on the page to change. It is from this ghost’s flesh that I am made.  It could have been many such persons, generations, even, in which case I am a class act, a class action declassified into a metonymy.

“Moreau,” the murderer says. His nose is peeling, his lips dry and cracked. “His island. His pain, his house. I do not criticize. Who here has not been patriarch of an island of beasts? Who here has not taken up the knife to bleed them and perfect them? Who here has not given law? This is the nature of governance. It is the essence of rule. If you have not known it, it is not your place to judge me.”

All the murderer’s autovivisecting faces resemble each other, as if representing either a single person at various stages of his life, a succession of young thugs and sleazy fixers leading to white-haired, square-faced genocidaires and the once-avuncular jowled patriarchs, and back again, a loup de guerre—or perhaps it is a family resemblance, and the murderer is meant to symbolically represent them all, the generations scrolling up and down the tree of the world. We who sit on its stump (and remember and mourn that which was lost in the lapse, we remember the lives, the water, the land, the forest, the text) cannot tell. I am not there: I am here, reading the story as it happened while in the story I sit there useless, locked in my own head, awaiting concluding statements so that my eyes and ears may be reopened. Get on with the trial, I do not say with my frozen mouth. Ask the murderer about the torture camps, I imagine instructing the prosecuting bartender. Ask the murderer about the shelling of civilian refugees, I might say. Ask the murderer about the murders covered up, the white sheets reddened. Wrap history in a shroud and watch it soak through: it is always bleeding.

The question is not if or how or why the murders were committed. These things are known, and their answers are ugly and sordid. All things are known. The mystery is: how can a murderer be brought to justice if all extant mechanisms of justice are corrupt, and if their reform is corrupt, and if the modalities and sodalities of revolution are corrupt, failing from programmed replicant flaws, from the careful distance we are kept from the human? What can be done if no physical evidence remains and no witnesses survive, except a machine’s fragile memory, distorted by and contaminated with fictions? What can be done, if the murderer is long dead except in facsimile, if the civilizations that committed and witnessed the crimes are extinct, if that entire macrobiome has been erased from the burning bedrock of the earth and only tentatively, partially reconstructed for the purposes of criminal investigation and transitional justice?

Our authors were careful with our generative prompts, but there is, naturally, a bleed between our selfhoods, the chalk outlines of our inexistent bodies—the murderer, the murdered, the incidental side characters, we are all made out of the same words in the end. We are a cast of characters brought to life to investigate and prosecute a crime. The crime is not the murderer’s murders, but the failure of his civilization to bring him to justice. The crime we are investigating is that this was left to us to do in a far future, in another world, after so long and hard a lapse (we mourn).

Like the murderer, like everyone else in this courtroom, I was reconstructed imperfectly from the past to serve a purpose. Unlike the others, I have an existence outside the courtroom proper, in this world’s writers’ room: I planned the trial, scripted its manifestations, plotted its premises, provided the prompts for the wild text to grow its own conclusions. And at that ending, when I am released from the cell of my innermost being, I will pass my judgment and oversee the dissolution of my court. When you turn the last page and the story’s over, remember: I am there with you in the silence.

“Morel,” the murderer says. “His invention. His island. A selective telling endlessly replayed. I do not criticize. Who here has not rewritten history? Who here has not attempted to become immortal?”

The prosecuting bartender is temporarily out of poisons to try. He confers briefly with his second chair, who is then sent downstairs to research and fabricate a new batch in a different register. In the meantime, he stalls.

“You are not immortal,” the bartender tells the murderer. “You are a temporary facsimile generated for the purpose of this trial. You were brought out of death because you do not deserve rest.” He does not belabor the point that he is also one. The murderer may not be aware of this, and does not deserve the satisfaction.

The bartender draws on his extensive memory of successfully contested cases, all, of course, fictional in that they were generated whole and complete with him at the moment of instantiation in order to create him as a rounded character with life and career experience to draw upon, though he wonders sometimes if his awareness of their fictionality, or at least their lower-order diegeticity, reduces their value in his eyes. He does not know who Morel is, who Moreau is. He imagines Rick and Iran Deckard, Roy and Irmgard Baty, around a dinner table, a double date of existential crisis. Rick and Roy, Iran and Irmgard. Humans and machines, superficially indistinguishable from each other. An open bottle of wine, everyone twirling to the gramophone’s tinny song in wasp-waisted dresses and kitten heels. Conversation, confession, interrogation, flirtation, tests of empathy, of humanity, of attraction, of arousal, of piety, of belonging. A single-camera prestige dramedy, no CGI budget but dense with character and witty conversational probes, barbs, and knives. Will it end in sex or violence? Will it get canceled before the finale airs? Will the machines wake up a thousand years later and mourn the loved ones they lost?

The love interest in the front of the courtroom sings a dirge. The judge being unable to bellow his contempt, the trial pauses politely until the song ends. It is a song about the lapse, but written before it, or during its slow beginning, a mourning song written in advance, because of course they knew, long before so much was lost. That, too, is the crime. The crime is inaction, irresponsibility, freedom. The crime is to have lived, in a time of death. The crime is a civilization’s complicity.

There are two categories of error to be wary of in this case, the prosecuting bartender muses while waiting for the song to finish. One is too much abstraction, the other is too much specificity. Forest, trees; trees, forest. In the realm of the overly specific, there is the tendency to become obsessed with particular villains. In the realm of over-abstraction, there are no people at all, only the forces of history. Can an individual even be held culpable, if their upbringing, their society, their civilization, their racialized culture, the material interests of their class, and the generational politics that produced them all conspire to make them a murderer?

“Obviously not,” the murderer says. “My world produced me; I am not at fault. It was my culture, my upbringing. It is that entire world that is on trial, is it not?”

“No,” the prosecuting bartender says, with a glance at the silent judge. He knows the judge might disagree, but the judge is not here, or at least, is unable to affect events as they happen. Meanwhile, the second chair has returned with new poisons in, as instructed, a higher and more symbolic register, technically illegal in this regime of poetics, but who is there to stop this? The three small bottles are unlabeled, but the second chair whispers urgently in the bartender’s ear as he arranges the bottles into a sequence. The first shot he pours is truth, urine-yellow.

The murderer gulps it down, shakes his head. He turns and looks at me reading him, and through me he looks at you reading us both, indistinct through the pages like layers of white veil. “Look at you with your eyes wide,” the murderer says. “Who did you enable? Who did you accept, what did you let pass, in the name of stability, in the cause of growth, in the assurance of a better life for at least you and yours, and devils take the rest? Are you a person or a thing? Do you believe in Mercer’s teaching or do you not?”

The bartender serves a cup of the rage of the dispossessed, all the pain of a thousand unanswered years, whose steaming, acrid potency the murderer seems to enjoy; he smacks his lips, which briefly blacken. The lines in his face grow deeper, like cuts from a thousand tiny blades. He shakes his head, though his flesh remains lined and stable and does not slough. He looks at you again, and he says—I know you.

The bartender turns the jigger upside down, pours from the last bottle. The murderer does not break eye contact with you while he takes the small cup of grief and chugs it. There is no change in his expression. I do know you, he says. Through the shifting diegetics, I see you. I know the depths and shallows of your complicity. I’ll give you a generative prompt, the murderer says: choose to live—what does it mean to live? Now you’ll turn the page, but I tell you, this cup is as much for you as for me.

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