A Glut of Nothing, and Yet… Something

From: Issue 5

Some moron’s car horn woke Jenny up. Through the haze of her morning breath, she saw yet another scientists’ van, packed with nerds and geeks, pull up next to her truck. She almost went back to sleep, sprawled lengthwise in the bench seat, but her eyes locked onto the head geek: white, East Coaster, dirty blonde hair in a pixie cut, academic with a crisp, white blouse and slacks, a wool longcoat draped over her arm, useless in the New Mexico air. The button-down type ready to break out of her box.

Jenny kicked her door open. “You don’t want to go to the Glut. Whomever you got to guide you there, dump ’em.”

“Our guide came highly recommended,” the head geek replied, matter-of-factly.

Jenny, Taiwanese Pasadena city-rat gone good gone bad, black ponytail tied back such that her hair had a permanent crease, sporting naturally worn-out blue jeans, t-shirt, cowboy boots, trucker cap, all unwashed, sat up and threw out her best line. “The guides here fuck groundhogs.”

“They must have tiny penises then,” the head geek shot back as she unpacked the van.

Jenny refused to laugh, but she did raise an empty whiskey bottle as a salute before falling asleep again.

— # —

Some moron knocked on the passenger side window of her truck, waking Jenny once more. “I’m Tara. Take me to the Glut, right now. I need to see it up close.”

Jenny shot upright, unrolled the driver’s side window and waved her hand to air out the miasma. Tara, the head geek, frowned and walked around the front, stopping when Jenny motioned back to the passenger side window. The blonde woman held up a wad of cash.

Jenny’s eyes drifted to the bills bound by a rubber band. She knew Tara was manipulating her. Who carries that much cash anymore? “I’ve never driven there. I don’t know the way. Let’s get a drink instead.”

“Yeah, no. I’ve asked around. You’re a driver, a guide, you’ve been everywhere across state lines, so you must know the area around Rock Point, especially where the other guides copulate with wildlife. Are they part of the tour?”

Jenny pressed her lips into a line, suppressing a laugh, snatched the cash, and tossed it underneath the seat. Tara held her breath and climbed into the passenger side, kicking the empty bottles of whiskey next to empty bottles of antacid.

In the roaring silence in the cab, Tara twisted the wedding ring on her finger in a steady rhythm. Jenny tried her best to ignore the oddity: a dark gray ring set within the lighter metal band, a ring within a ring. Click, click click click, click click click click click.

“Primes,” she found herself saying, the word escaping her chest, as if squeezed out through a crack by her rapidly beating heart.

Tara took a deep breath. “Yeah. I wondered if you would notice.”

“On a wedding ring?”

“It’s like a clicker cube but in ring form. My husband’s idea. He had…” she trailed off, staring at the horizon, “has one too. When we first met, Michael wore a bracelet of lotus seeds, and whenever he’d get frustrated, he’d meditate and count.”

“Buddhist?”

“Mildly. Tangentially.”

“My parents too. Did he engineer your ring?”

A pause. “Yeah, how did you know?”

“You looked at the Glut when you mentioned him. You paid me in cash, so this isn’t science. It’s personal. He worked there, didn’t he?”

Tara didn’t answer her. Even in the absence of information, Jenny could parse out meaning.

— # —

The Singularity had come, but not the one people wanted, not a melding of minds or an uplift toward transcendence. Squashing information down with a revolutionary form of quantum storage, turning data into both a particle and wave, compressing knowledge smaller and smaller, had broken the divide between the quantum and the relativistic. The futurists and engineers of the Gnostic Data Preservation Project accidentally created an informational singularity, a massive and dense data packet in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert.

With the truck parked on a little hill, Tara and Jenny could see-not-see the Glut, that informational singularity. It hurt to look at, like pressing your nose against a painting and expecting to understand the images. Or turning up the volume so loud that you can’t even hear yourself scream. For Jenny, the Glut was a spot of ‘too much’ forcing her to look away, to focus on the stark blue sky and orange cliffs, trying to calm a panicked heart threatening to crack her open.

Tara, however, stared straight into the Glut, eyes shaded by a beat-up cowboy hat Jenny had behind the back seat. Stolen from an unfortunate one-night-stand.

“What do you see?” Jenny asked.

“Too much. And not enough.”

Imagine ten billion people all pumping information up into the Gnostic Project every second. In real time. Including context, citations, and epistemology, from the first evidence of Sumerian script to the latest erotic Russian fanfic. Computational algorithms to predict stock market shifts. Every marketing bot on every social media platform stored in a single location. How could anyone not expect reality to collapse under all that density?

The locals called it the Blur, the Nothing, the What The Fuck, but media across the world eventually named it the Glut: a grayed-out area that evaded vision, comprehension, and perception. Media interest waned, however, because the Glut, even recordings, made everyone uncomfortable. Bad news brought clicks, schadenfreude, ‘engagement’, but audiences couldn’t bear to see this thing, so Rock Point quickly returned to sleepy. Except for the random tourist, conspiracy theorist, military checkup, or scientific team.

Jenny picked up a sensor spike from the back of the truck, stabbed the earth, and turned the camera and sensor mounting toward the Glut. A gauge indicated power from the sun through the solar panels. A light indicated it was on. Another light flickered, the radio signal.

“I don’t know what you expect to find,” Jenny said. “The military sent drones in there and nothing came out.”

“It’s an information singularity,” Tara said. “No information can escape. And drones are information. Light is information. Matter is information.”

“Yeah, a black hole.”

“Not quite. Governed by information, not gravity.”

“Wait, if no info can get out, then how can you verify your husband’s still in there? How can you get him out too? He’s matter. He’s info then?”

Click click click. “A gut feeling? My husband made the same ring for himself, from the same material. Maybe there is quantum entanglement between them.”

Jenny’s chest sealed up the cracks and she returned to her well-worn smirk. “That’s not how entanglement works.”

Clickclickclick.

“It’s a pleasant fiction. We should get back to Rock Point,” Tara eventually said, as she pulled herself away from the unlookable.

— # —

On the drive back, Jenny noted the absence of the click click click and realized Tara was staring at her. The blonde woman said, finally, “You have a scientific background. You set up the sensors and calibrated them.”

“Just bored. Nervous energy. Had to do something. And waiting for you to stop staring at that fucking thing.”

“You knew I was clicking out prime numbers. You know about black holes and quantum entanglement. You said ‘whomever’ when we first met.”

Jenny exhaled in small, sharp breaths. “Climate scientist. Studied and trained only to find out it was too late. We have ten years at best.”

“Only if we give up. We’re working on solutions like the solar shade project.”

“Fucked by that comm satellite net launched by that rich asshole.”

“The ocean reflector agreement.”

“China and America’s territorial dick-wagging have stonewalled everything.”

“Cloud seeding?”

“A resource death spiral. Lighting the last forests on fire would save time.”

In the silence, Jenny expected the usual anger, frustration, dismissive sneer. Instead, Tara uttered a light, floating laugh. “You are such a country-western stereotype. Your trucks. Your boots. Your whiskey. Calamity Jenny. A cowboy-boot-wearing Cassandra. Did your dog leave you too?”

“And you think you’re going to save the world?” Jenny bit. “What makes you the expert?”

Tara went quiet. “I’m not. I’m an astrophysicist. My husband was the practical one. He could engineer a solution if it were the other way around.”

Jenny’s chest did that familiar dance, heart beating faster to crack open versus compressing it, crushing it, keeping it from beating.

— # —

Jenny shivered. Tara had placed a cold hand on her arm and said, “Can we stop here for a moment?”

Jenny slowed and stopped the truck about a mile off from town, the sun melting across the sky turning it all orange and red. They sat in the cab for minutes before Tara said, “It’s beautiful.”

Jenny started the engine, kicked the accelerator, and spun the wheel, causing the truck to lurch and spin 180, the front facing the Glut. As the truck rocked back and forth and the dust settled, she threw open the door and clambered onto the truck bed, boots clanging against the metal. Tara, fingers still wrapped around the grab handles, slowly unfurled them, exhaled, and exited. “Is this the part where you chop me up and leave the pieces in the desert?”

“You wanted to watch the sun set? The town lights come on in a little bit.”

Jenny had laid down a thick wool blanket, and when Tara climbed up and sat down, Jenny immediately realized that this was her ‘fuck-me’ blanket, the one she laid out for quick one-hour stands, and almost yelled at Tara to jump off.

“So you lied before?”

“What? No! This blanket’s clean.”

“What’s wrong with the blanket?”

“Nothing. Just dusty.”

“No. You said you had never been to the Glut. But you drove there like you have. And you hid your scientific background. I’m guessing you lie a lot, Calamity.”

“Do you try to get inside the head of everyone you meet, Freud?”

“Only the ones I find interesting.”

“Ah. Haha. Yeah, that’s me, full of interesting things. So full of it.”

They both lay down to watch the few buildings and many trailers of Rock Point flicker on their lights. Compared to the Glut, this was calm, serene, and full of decipherable meaning. Tara remained still, while Jenny fidgeted, trying not to jump out of the truck, out of her skin.

Tara turned to Jenny and asked, “So do you have any full bottles of whiskey, or do we have sniff out the dregs in the cab?”

— # —

As the sky turned purple, they did have to sniff out the dregs, and Tara even offered a vape pen.

“Fuck no,” Jenny replied, almost knocking it out of Tara’s hand.

“You drink this crap. You sleep in your truck and smell like it. But weed’s too much for you?” She flipped the pen around and took a drag. “I thought you were the hard-drinking, flawed, grizzled, lonely burnout stereotype, at the bottom of her character arc.”

The cracks returned, and Jenny pressed her fist to her chest. “And you’re the heroine? The idealistic ingénue? Save your husband and get the happy ending?”

All Jenny heard was the hiss of the vape pen. When she looked at Tara, actually looked at her, she saw the glistening in her eyes. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok.”

Jenny pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes, the pressure confining, the darkness reassuring. “Cannabinoids affect memory, right? Blocks short-term memory, messes up perceptions of time. Well, I just end up reliving over and over the worst moments of my life.”

“What happened?” Tara said, her voice soft and low.

Jenny’s fingers squeezed her forehead, trying to crush it closed. “Nothing big, ok? Funding dried up. I spent more time begging for money than working. Endless grant writing, traveling to potential donors, Washington D.C. Then my grandpa died.”

“Sorry.”

“No, he was stuck in bed. So thin. Always sleeping.”

“You don’t… you don’t have to emotionally flagellate yourself. You already apologized.”

“Ha, that’s my default state when I’m not drunk.” Tara’s cold hand squeezed her shoulder. “So my department closed. No job. Dean said no funds, but they rebuilt their stadium.”

Both hands now, one on each shoulder, pulling Jenny close. “I went a little weird. Moved in with my parents. Mistake. Tried a non-profit. Solar panels to underserved neighborhoods, but NIMBY and bureaucratic crap and no one with any real power gave a shit. And parents on my case to get a real job.”

“You are a country-western song.”

“My partner broke up with me too, yeah.”

Tara giggled, actually giggled like she was six, and Jenny let go just a little more, letting that crack expand, expecting to lash out, bite the blonde woman’s head off, but instead the sound that came out of her closed mouth was laughter, a laughter that came out in gasps, squeezing her ribs until she split open.

— # —

They woke the next morning, shivering in the lukewarm New Mexico air, breath mingling, brains and hearts sanded smooth by the desert dirt, clothes disheveled and half-discarded. In the drive back to Rock Point, Tara refused to say anything, click click clicking with her ring, while Jenny closed her heart like a fist. She silently dropped Tara off and collapsed on her lumpy bed in her lumpy trailer.

That afternoon, after the haze of her hangover sharpened into dry determination to text Tara, Jenny opened her door to see her standing there. “I need you to take me closer to the Glut.”

“We were just there? Suffering from weed brain?”

“No, I mean, I need to get as close as possible to the gnostic horizon.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Jenny, please.” Click click click. “I have to really look at it. Confront it.”

“Confront? It’s like a hurricane or meteor. You cross over, you don’t come back. You know what else can’t be escaped? What disappears you if you cross over?”

“A black hole.”

“No, death. The Glut is death. And you don’t confront death.”

“Then maybe… maybe I have to accept it.” Tara turned away. “Maybe I can get one of the groundhog fuckers to drive me.”

Jenny touched her arm, a light brush but with intense gravity. “Ok, ok. I’ll take you. Just… that close to the Glut, it does weird things to your head.”

“Why are you afraid of it?”

“I’m not afraid of the Glut, I’m afraid I want to walk into it.”

— # —

“Can you feel it?” Jenny said through gritted teeth.

Not only did the Glut loom large in the truck’s windshield, the orange slantwise rays of the sun turning the hood of her truck gold, but Jenny could feel that strange wrongness and inhuman certainty.

Tara took a deep breath. “Oh, yeah, wow, that’s… weird.”

Jenny’s heart raced. She refused to place her fingers on her neck to feel that rapid, steady pulsing, for fear of making herself panic even more. Her heart wasn’t just pumping frantically; each beat throbbed in her head, and the roar of blood overwhelmed her hearing.

“Do you know why I like driving?” Jenny said. “It’s because I want to keep moving. If you stand still, you die. Being near the Glut is like standing still.”

It felt like the moment before a storm breaks, the pause as the atmosphere takes a deep breath and the heavy air presses against the skin. The thunder rumbles, echoes, and answers. Another round of thunder, this time rolling in closer. Then the flash of lightning. Jenny imagined that energy building and building but never finishing.

“Sounds like my sex life.”

She realized she had said this out loud, but Tara hadn’t replied. Jenny definitely didn’t turn to look at the other woman to check because the Glut was right in front of them, fifty yards or two feet or a million miles out.

“This is close enough.” Jenny slammed on the brakes and the truck skidded on the dirt and dust. For a brief moment, enough for her heart to crack open her chest, she thought the truck just might slide right over the gnostic horizon.

Tara didn’t even wait for the dust to settle before she leapt out of the truck. Jenny found herself climbing out as if in thick syrup, like those dreams where your legs no longer act like legs, the ground soft and slow, the horizon far and impossible. The air not only pressed against her skin, but shook her, screaming.

“Tara.” Jenny’s voice cracked. “Come back.”

She did, grabbing Jenny by the hand, pulling her slowly but purposefully toward the Glut, the massive wall of nothing, the gray expanse (no, not even gray, not black, what is the color of nothing?) stretching from horizon to horizon. She couldn’t even look at Tara. The nothing hurt her eyes too much, hurt her heart too much. There was so much nothing and not enough Tara.

“He’s in there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I feel it. Remember the quantum entanglement?”

Jenny looked for the ring on Tara’s other hand, but she couldn’t focus. Too much detail, too much like the painting. “Wait. Stop. The Glut messes with your head.”

“It isn’t. I’ve never been more clear. Let’s go, Jenny. Let’s leave the rest of the world.”

Jenny thought of stupid things to say: What about your team? What about your research? What about saving the world?

“You can go back with me. Get some real whiskey. We can watch another sunset. I can drive you to Albuquerque and show you the worst dive bar. I know a crappy karaoke place.”

Tara turned around, damn her, turned around to look Jenny in the eye, easier for her than for Jenny for so many reasons. “If information is preserved in the Glut, then Michael’s love is preserved too. Isn’t that beautiful?”

You’re beautiful, Jenny thought but did not say.

“If you’re such a nihilist,” Tara said, “if you really don’t care, then walk in with me.”

Jenny’s feet stopped, planted firmly in the dirt of their own accord. She tried to take in a breath to say anything.

“Ok, you did make me think twice, you know, and it’s not because of your gloomy attitude.”

Jenny’s hand twitched, and she lost her grip. For a moment, she couldn’t tell if Tara was hundreds of feet away or just within arm’s reach. She tried to fling herself forward, like so many times before. Now she had a real reason to reach out.

She turned her gaze toward Tara and saw nothing. And, also, too much of everything.

— # —

Without Tara, her visual anchor, the Glut, the end, loomed above her. She fell to her knees, her palms grasping at the dry and desiccated earth. She turned away from the Glut to see the thunderous sky ready to flash lightning to turn dirt to glass. Where to go? Rock Point? To yet another bottle of whiskey in that crappy trailer, slowly converting alcohol to sugar and fear into nihilism?

She stumbled and slammed into her truck, grabbing the warped frame. Pulling herself along with the rips and tears, the rusty edges cut into her skin, tearing her open, leaving a frantic, beating heart, raw against the wind and the sand.

A black hole grows when more matter falls past its event horizon. Does an informational hole grow when information falls past its gnostic horizon? How much will it grow from a Tara-sized packet of information?

She laughed, her chest unclenching, having thought of the phrase, a Tara-byte of information, and launched herself into the cab. She fired up the engine, cranked the gears to reverse, and kicked the accelerator, rocketing backwards, away from the certainty of the Glut and back to the chaos of civilization.

— # —

When Jenny got some good distance away from the Glut, she swung the truck around to point the right way, climbed out of the cab, and vomited onto the desert earth. She cried for a good half hour after that, her chest shrinking and collapsing in on itself, periodically releasing its grip on air and allowing her to gasp in breaths.

She drove straight to the scrapper to dump off all of those empty bottles. The scrapper, up early as usual, looked on as if everyone in this town had gone through the same ritual and had simply been waiting for Jenny to do the same. “Let me make you some coffee, hon.”

That started a whole new round of crying and laughing, and when Jenny opened her eyes, she saw a steaming cup of coffee, a first aid kit, and a box of tissues lying on the roof of her truck. The scrapper had gone back into her house, to do whatever she did in-between waiting for another total mess to unload their baggage onto her scrapyard.

That’s when Jenny saw it. The round, dark gray and shiny, metal thing, Tara’s wedding ring-within-a-ring, lying on the passenger seat floor. Before thought, it lay in the palm of her hand, still warm. She slipped it on, not her left hand but her right. She took a sip of coffee to suppress the rising bile.

With her thumb, she traced the texture of the ring, the slightly raised, black, center piece with small ridges for friction, the rest of the ring shiny and smooth. Click.

She felt the click as much as she heard it, subtle, understated, solid. Click.

How many times had Tara done this? How many years had she been married? How worn down is this thing by now? Click.

This stupid nerdy symbol of love was the only proof that Jenny had even met Tara. Click.

She didn’t even know the woman that well. There wasn’t enough time. Click.

She’s no romantic. She didn’t believe that people could connect to each other. Click.

Quantum entanglement? No. Click.

Life is suffering, and to want things is to suffer. Click.

And yet… Click.

Matching the click of the ring, Jenny’s heart slowed, and for the first time in a long while, her mind and body were still.

Click.

Click.

Click.

And breathe.

© 2021 Monte Lin

From: Issue 5

About the Author

While being rained on adjacent to Portland, Oregon, Monte Lin writes, edits, and plays tabletop roleplaying games. Clarion West got him to write about dying universes, dreaming mountains, and singularities made of anxieties. He can be found tweeting Doctor Who news, Asian-American diaspora discourse, and his board game losses at @Monte_Lin.