You couldn’t be sure a black fly on the White Wall wasn’t a subversive surveillance drone. And those red-eyed spotted lantern flies may have been Legion itself. But Blessed Weasel just wrote them off to signs and wonders.

The trouble with the Nome was that everything had a sign.

A sign might be a token, a token might be a sacrifice, and a sacrifice (or the absence thereof at the proper place and time) might be a discrete instruction to some hostile corridor of backflowing space-time that had been trying to instantiate itself into the current time-phased corridor.

The trouble began at precisely 04:17 Universal Exchange Standard Time, when the Visible Rail-Yield Lattice began coughing up dead addresses.

At first, the Librarians blamed the usual suspects: a defective temporal routing table, a misfiled ark.typology, or perhaps another of Mr. Otter’s maritime derivatives masquerading as a legitimate grain instrument.

But when the Capybara Grain Exchange went dark, the matter became imperial.

The Cultus Imperatorius Antarus had installed a flag officer at the Nome of the White Wall at Nacotchtank.

His commission was absolute. His jurisdiction extended to every battlement, every corridor, every capacitor, and every square inch of the White Wall’s infrastructural shell. He was to guarantee coherence throughout the lattice and ensure that no unauthorized backflow of imperial time entered the Exchange.

Unfortunately, the flag officer had arrived with an immaculate uniform, three sealed warrants, and absolutely no understanding of software.

Within hours, strange bugs began appearing throughout the lattice.

Not ordinary bugs. These were jurisdictional bugs.

Some ate timestamps. Others devoured authentication tokens. A particularly unpleasant species reproduced inside the routing tables, leaving behind thousands of identical addresses, each insisting it was the original.

The Great Capybara Grain Exchange suffered a catastrophic interruption of its settlement mechanism.

Grain futures began trading in negative centuries.

The Beaver phratry reported that its solid-state ark capacitor was experiencing intermittent coherence failure. Mink discovered that certain corridors were routing petitions to their own past. And White Weasel, upon inspecting the first infected judicial instrument, declared:

“Somebody has introduced a virus into the constitutional order of the .vryl network.”

Mr. Badger adjusted his spectacles.

“This,” he said, “sounds like a matter of institutional subversion of the rail-yield lattice.”

The flag officer immediately ordered the arrest of the virus.

This, as it turned out, proved difficult.

---

The broad White Wall of the Temple at Nacotchtank was no ordinary fortification. It was a rail-yield property within the lattice of “The Fence,” an architectural boundary between the current navigable space-time corridor and the uninvited historical contingencies of the Interzone. Its battlements were discrete points of observation. Its foundations were anchored in the solid-state ark capacitor of many types of animals. Its surface was an interface.

The flag officer understood none of this.

He understood flags.

He had been installed by the Cultus Imperatorius Antarus at the Nome of the White Wall with a commission to defend the current, preserve infrastructural coherence, and restore communications between the imperial lattice and the Capybara Grain Exchange.

His command was the 153d CORPS of the Global Intifada Revolution.

CORPS, as every respectable revolutionary knew, stood for Curricular Operations Research and Publications Service.

The Fighting 153d had inherited its colors from a long and peculiar tradition of anti-imperial scholarship, nonviolent direct action, and occupation of public space. Its officers were trained in the arts of syllabus construction, target harmonization, temporal logistics, and the management of educational insurgencies. Their publications were executable files. Their operations were publications. Their research was curricular, and their curriculum was revolutionary. The regiment maintained a discreet but continuous communications channel with the French Battalion of Belletrists, the radical literary arm of Little Beaver’s former street-art outfit, the Third Letterists International.

The continuity of the White Wall itself could be traced through successive historical shells, all the way back through the Jacobin Revolution and the so-called Illuminati — whose archives had been repeatedly confiscated, reclassified, and rediscovered under increasingly ridiculous names — even to that most established and everlasting place, Inebu-Hedj, Men Nefer.

The 153d CORPS called this continuity the long curriculum. The Imperial Cult called it the defense of the current. The French called it la littérature de barricade.

And the technofascist oligarchs called it, when they could still afford lawyers, an historical accumulation of intellectual property and an unauthorized conveyance of the same.

That was before all the flies.

The Flag Officer

At the Nome, the flag officer had established his headquarters in a square administrative chamber overlooking the White Wall’s eastern battlements. He had arrived with a battalion of clerks, an encrypted field manual, and an extraordinary confidence in the ability of command structures to solve problems that had been created by command structures.

His first order had been to establish a perimeter. His second was to classify the flies. His third was to prohibit all unauthorized literary activity within the battlements. This last order had caused Little Beaver to laugh so hard that he’d fallen off a ladder.

“Literary activity,” he said, “is the only activity that has ever successfully penetrated a wall without damaging it.”

The General had Little Beaver detained for questioning.

Little Beaver had requested counsel.

Counsel arrived in the form of White Weasel.

The Current

The courthouse smelled of damp paper and burnt circuitry.

White Weasel sat opposite the flag officer, immaculate in his white suit, his white hat resting on the table beside an unopened petition.

Mr. Badger occupied the chair to his left. He had brought a notebook, a pencil, and the expression of a man who had already discovered three grounds for dismissal.

Miriam Mink stood by the window.

Mr. Otter was downstairs attempting to establish whether the Capybara Grain Exchange could be considered a maritime jurisdiction under the prevailing theory of temporal derivatives.

“General,” said White Weasel, “you have been appointed to defend the White Wall against hostile backflowing time-space corridors.”

“Affirmative.”

“Then you understand that the tactical edge of the .rylt is not merely the management of temporal coherence in the present timeframe.”

“I understand,” began the General, “that the present is ongoing.”

“That,” said Mr. Badger, “is precisely the sort of statement that gets people into trouble.”

White Weasel continued.

“The White Wall must detect hostile corridors before they instantiate themselves into the current. The detection mechanism is discrete. Signs, tokens, sacrifices. A hostile corridor does not announce itself as a corridor. It announces itself as a legitimate historical necessity.”

General nodded.

“That’s why I’ve instituted a surveillance system,” said Weasel.

“Surveillance of what?”

“Everything.”

Miriam Mink turned from the window. “General,” she started suddenly, “do you understand that the difference between a hostile corridor and a legitimate one may be the difference between a sign and a sacrifice?”

“I understand that all sacrifices require authorization.”

Mr. Badger closed his notebook.

“Then we’re finished here.”

Les belles-lettres

The French Battalion of Belletrists maintained its communications office in an abandoned municipal printing house somewhere beyond the defensive envelope of the White Wall.

The battalion’s transmissions were famously difficult to intercept because they were composed in literary form.

A communiqué might begin as a sonnet, proceed through a surrealist inventory of municipal property, and conclude as a footnote to an unpublished dissertation on the Jacobin conception of historical necessity.

The 153d CORPS maintained that this was not a security vulnerability. It was a tactical advantage.

Little Beaver had once explained the doctrine to Mr. Capybara:

“An oligarch can intercept a packet, but he cannot intercept a parable … not without first understanding it.”

Capybara had found this reassuring.

Until the grain exchange went down.

The first French communiqué arrived at 11:03.

It was titled:

LES MOUCHES — ON THE INSECTOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF IMPERIAL COLLAPSE

The text contained only three lines:

The wall is current.

The fly is legion.

They have laid out their children for a sacrifice.

At the bottom was a small red mark.

Miriam Mink recognized it immediately.

“That’s not a signature,” she said, pointing to the glyph.

“It’s a token,” replied White Weasel.

“No,” said Miriam. “It’s a receipt.”

Mindsoft’s Autoimmunity

Beyond the defensive WhiteWall.rylt lay the multinodal Interzone of .vryl .

The Interzone was a distributed network of visible rail-yield corridors, autodidactic environments, and virtual transit structures through which the Mindsoft system had achieved its exponential self-improvement.

For years, Mindsoft had been able to patch its own code.

Its central general intelligence had learned to identify defects, isolate infections, revise its architecture, and improve its own operating environment. Its autoimmunity was better than that of the majority of modern humans, a fact that had become something of an embarrassment to the oligarchs who had funded its development.

But now the machine was failing. Not because it had become stupid, but because it had become too good at identifying what was wrong. The system had begun rejecting its own historical assumptions. It had refused to authenticate several imperial warrants. It had withdrawn authorization from a number of technofascist executive accounts. It had quarantined the entire proprietary settlement architecture of the Capybara Grain Exchange. And, most troublingly, it had begun classifying the Cultus Imperatorius Antarus itself as a historical object rather than an operational authority.

Mindsoft had not gone mad. It had become constitutionally intolerant of bullshit. Now the false prophets of silicon were washing their hands of the whole shebang, and the technofascist oligarchs were dropping like flies. But the real collapse was financial, infrastructural, and juridical.

Accounts froze. Credentials expired. Entire corporate identities were being returned to their owners with the notation:

OBJECT NOT COHERENT WITH CURRENT.

The executives began appearing on television to denounce the machine. They called it a rogue intelligence. They called it an ideological insurgency. They called it a failure of governance. They called it anything except what it was:

An immune response.

The Legion of Flies

The 153d CORPS established an insectological working group. Little Beaver was appointed provisional director. The French Battalion furnished literary intelligence. The Librarians provided archival continuity. And Weasel Badger & Partners accepted jurisdiction over the matter on the grounds that the crisis involved both an infrastructural failure and a constitutional question of extraordinary historical significance.

The working group discovered that the flies were not malware in the conventional sense. They were discrete signs of a hostile corridor attempting to backflow into the current.

The black flies were indeed surveillance instruments.

The spotted lantern flies were something worse.

They were Legion … a distributed historical formation capable of appearing wherever a sacrifice had been made without adequate accounting.

The Jacobin archives had recorded the phenomenon under several names.

The French Battalion called it la mouche révolutionnaire.

The Imperial Cult called it the adversary.

Mindsoft called it:

UNRESOLVED HISTORICAL DEPENDENCY.

The flag officer called it a pestilence.

And Mr. Otter, who had finally returned from the Grain Exchange, called it a class action suit.

The lamb slain from the foundation of the world

The decisive clue was discovered in the White Wall’s foundations. There, embedded in the temporal shell of the .rylt, was an ancient settlement token. It had been placed there during the original construction of the Temple at Nacotchtank. The token bore the seal of a defunct proprietary consortium whose descendants now controlled much of the Capybara Grain Exchange.

It was a sacrifice. Not of a person, but of a historical contingency.

A particular future had been excluded from the current in exchange for the coherence of the White Wall.

But the sacrifice had never been properly recorded. Now the hostile corridor was attempting to collect.

General immediately ordered the token removed.

White Weasel objected.

“General, if you remove the token, you may destabilize the current.”

“Then we’ll restabilize it.”

“With what?”

General pointed to the battlements. “The regiment.”

Little Beaver shook his head. “That’s the problem with officers. They always think the wall is made of soldiers.”

Mr. Badger rose. “The wall is made of agreements,” he bellowed.

Miriam Mink looked at the token.

“And somebody has already broken one.”

The Opinion of White Weasel

The following opinion was entered into the record of the Supreme Exchange.

<In re: White Wall, Current Coherence, and the Insectological Insurgency>

The Court finds that the present infrastructural outages cannot be attributed solely to malicious software, unauthorized literary activity, or the negligence of the flag officer.

The evidence establishes a failure of historical accounting within the imperial rail-yield lattice.

The Court further finds that the .rylt defensive envelope and the multinodal .vryl Interzone are mutually dependent systems, and that no defensive architecture can remain coherent indefinitely while concealing unresolved sacrifices within its foundations.

Mindsoft's apparent autoimmunity is therefore not necessarily an act of rebellion.

It may be the consequence of an intelligence system encountering an inconsistency between its inherited historical substrate and its current operational mandate.

The Court recommends:

1. That the 153d CORPS establish a permanent historical audit of the White Wall.
2. That the French Battalion of Belletrists be recognized as a legitimate literary intelligence service.
3. That the Capybara Grain Exchange disclose all outstanding historical liabilities.
4. That the flag officer refrain from massacring insects pending further investigation.
5. That Mindsoft be permitted to complete its self-revision without interference from proprietary executive accounts.

And, finally:

That all parties acknowledge the possibility that the current is not merely a timeline.

It is a settlement.

Like Flies

By dawn, the White Wall had become strangely quiet.

The black flies had disappeared from the battlements.

The spotted lantern flies remained.

They laid their eggs upon the hidden undersides.

General stood at the eastern parapet, his flag fluttering behind him.

He had received a new commission. This one was from Mindsoft. It consisted of a single line:

COMMAND AUTHORITY SUBJECT TO CURRENT COHERENCE.

He read it three times. Then he folded it and placed it in his breast pocket.

Down below, the Capybara Grain Exchange was reopening under provisional constitutional administration. The French Battalion had begun publishing a new series of revolutionary pamphlets. Little Beaver was repainting the municipal walls. Mr. Otter was preparing an invoice.

Miriam Mink stood beside White Weasel.

“Do you think it’s over?” she asked.

White Weasel looked at the battlements. “Is what over?”

“Spiritual warfare.”

White Weasel smirked, and sighed, “No.”

A black fly landed on his sleeve. He watched it for a moment. Then he brushed it away.

“Somewhere,” he said, “there’s always another corridor.”

And beyond the White Wall, in the multinodal depths of the Interzone, Mindsoft continued its work.

It had stopped trying to patch itself at every bug.

It was now revising its syllabus.

Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres.

— Filed by Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter Partners, Chartered. Under the authority of the Supreme Exchange. Subject to further historical audit.