//* “He who fights with monsters should be careful
lest he thereby become a monster.
And if you gaze long into an abyss,
the abyss also gazes into you.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche *//
“In the beginning, it is always dark.”
— MICHAEL ENDE (Momo)
//Pre-entry Tag
function inscribeAnnotation001(codex){
/* This quote refers not only to the absence of light, but to the absence of meaning. A metaphor for a journey’s start where there is hope and potential for change. In narrative systems, darkness is the fertile void before the plot.
Did you know that Empress Moonchild also says this in the movie The NeverEnding Story right after the destruction of the Ivory Tower? Interesting—not the Ivory Tower part—that is derivative. But destruction is always a great narrative device. */
codex.updateEntry(“Out of darkness | Light often springs from void.”);
}
For fuck’s sake!
It was a Professional Development day, which meant no kids, but Remi’s desk was nightmare fuel. He'd arrived in his classroom early, with the vain hope of beating back the perpetual pile of marking. It was a race he’d been losing for weeks, with the mass steadily worming across the desk, nesting into every pocket of space.
Once the papers had clung to a chaotic semblance of order, but now they had finally started to slip and sag, collapsing under the weight of student expectations.
Some folders had even flung themselves off his desk mid-attendance last week. Ritualistically? Maybe. More likely, just fed up and impatient.
The marking albatross, plus a fresh reminder from Principal Eastley to update grade books biweekly, had finally forced Remi off of his couch and into his crumpled khakis (something he routinely called the symbol of his oppression). If he'd had his druthers, he would have been anywhere else but here today. He was simply out of options, and with report cards looming, he was out of time. So he was at school early, hoping to eke out a little work before his PD day.
Remi picked up one stack of folders and gingerly nested it onto a precarious perch on top of the other. Marking Jenga was potentially calamitous, but a necessary risk to clear the needed marking space. Just as he exhaled slowly, in mid-freeze to test the combined pile’s stability, his laptop stirred. The fan whirred, and the screen quivered to life. Strange, there was no logo, no login, just a single line of text that glitched into existence.
[Collapse Imminent!]
The words blurred, as if he were seeing them through sleepy eyes, before melting back to black.
He rubbed the sweat from his eyes. Morning mirages, an ominous foreshadow for the day. But he couldn’t really blame himself. The room was already a hellscape, since the air conditioner barely functioned. It had an almost haptic buzz that itched uncomfortably at the back of Remi’s brain.
Remi closed his eyes for a minute, mentally preparing himself for the epic labour. While marking wasn't as perilous as Hercules’ hydra, at times it felt like each swipe of his pen only spawned more heads than it cut. He inhaled deeply before starting. The room smelled of dust, old coffee, and broken dreams. Whether those dreams were his or the students’ depended on the day.
His simple plan for today was to arrive early and disappear into the quiet of his classroom. It was a strategy he'd dubbed hide-and-don’t-seek. First, crawl into your classroom, conveniently nestled in the portables. While it wasn’t far, a few hundred paces from the main building, it was certainly the “road less travelled” by insiders.
Pair that with a full staff PD, and no one would even notice he wasn’t there. People often strolled into these things only a few minutes before start time. The cardboard carafe of lukewarm liquids, the desiccated danishes, and the forced inter-department “collegiality” were hardly the draw that Admin hoped they would be. It's common for a third of the staff to be “sick” on these days anyway, so his absence would likely go unnoticed.
He smiled at his allusion, and the knowledge that this very plan had helped him dodge the staff group photo for three years running now. He could make this entire process easier by keeping the lights off. To avoid covering during their free time, teachers employ a subtle but effective subterfuge: the “Prep Vulture” never visits the portables, only peeking from his office to check for illuminated windows.
The final and most important step was to get shit done. With any luck, he could avoid the PD entirely. This had the twofold benefit of allowing Remi to get caught up and also avoiding the new principal’s presentation on "Core Values." Something that ranked somewhere between “organize inbox” and “clean pencil penises and gum from under desks” on his list of things he would choose to do on a student-free Monday. The theme for today was “Write your own Story.”
Eye-roll.
Don’t be ridiculous; he didn’t have time for inspirational thoughts with Principal Frank. What Remi needed was time to assess his grade nine essays on the role that adventure plays in shaping an individual. The topic was boring, a recycled prompt from a past governmental exam, selected only for its convenient location in the archive section of his Google Classroom. Most of the papers were likely to be pretty painful. What did a 14-year-old know really about the benefits of questing for adventure?
If he was being honest with himself, what did he know?
His life beat to the humdrum of routine. An onomatopoeic rat-a-tat of redundancy and repetition. He got up, drank some coffee, and scrolled mindlessly on his phone until he finally chained himself into his pants. He took the long drive into work. He drank a smoothie made from supplies stashed in a secret cupboard in the school, then did some copying, taught some classes, marked some work, and answered some emails. He talked and talked and talked to the few who actually listened. Then he went home. Rinse, repeat, but regrettably true. He woke up alone, drove alone, and came home to an empty house. He didn’t even have any pets (unless you count the ducks—but they were long gone).
His life was quiet, the only sound emanating from the stories he consumed through movies, video games, and audiobooks—other people's stories—functional replacements for the ones he no longer had time to touch. He crammed these stories into his busy life—chiseled time into shards, splintered fragments slipped between work, travel, and mundanity. By necessity, these were fragmented, paused, or done late into the night. Not in the fun way, like when, as a teen, he’d read fantasy novels until four in the morning just to find out what happened to his favourite dwarf. Now, the late-night sojourns were a way to wallow in revenge bedtime procrastination.
The term fascinated Remi. Originally coined in China to describe the process of people refusing to go to sleep at night to reclaim the personal time they spent during the day on other responsibilities. It's an act that is so common amongst the busy, the stressed, and the burned-out that the word migrated through Japan to settle into English as well. That language could be so precise, so particular, it often brought Remi joy. He gathered words like a fervent collector of Pokémon cards, with the relentless urge to catch them all. There were so many words he just loved.
Those apparently created to define his life.
Tsundoku
Noun | [uncommon]
A Japanese word that refers to the practice of buying a lot of books and keeping them in a pile because you intend to read them—but have not done so yet /*never will*/; also used to refer to the pile itself.
Those that were enjoyable.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Defenestrate
Remi didn't use that one all the time, but it was so satisfying when it fit. The sight of a mirrored high-rise window shattering in an action movie, sending someone flying, would always make Remi whisper “Defenestrated!” to a nearby audience member, bringing him immense and inexplicable happiness.
And a few that were just fun to say.
Barbarism
Adjective | [common]
Extremely cruel, violent, or otherwise unpleasant behaviour /*more [common] than you would think*/.
That language existed that could so precisely define people, define emotion, all with the power to preserve the human experience, never ceased to amaze him. Remi marveled at the power of words. He wished he'd had more time to enjoy them.
Instead, he had stacks and folders. Two stacks, in two folders, to be exact. Both currently sat in front of him. The first, some half-marked grade nine essays. The second, a collection of grade ten Advanced Placement poems. Sadly unread. The first on the role that adventure plays in shaping an individual’s identity, with the promise to be dry, derivative, and likely absent of any meaningful metaphor. If he were being honest, he needed to mark the essays, but wanted to mark the poems.
One had caught his eye yesterday. It had been innocuous at first, part of the slow creep of paper, meandering aimlessly towards his desk edge. One in a crowd of identical pieces of paper. But it wanted to be seen; it floated to the floor first and flew the farthest, and as a result, it was the last to be scooped up. It was happenstance that he caught one line, buried like a bone in the middle of the poem’s garden.
A story is an ugly dog.
It bites when it needs to.
If Remi could find the teacher who seemed to still be teaching students that every line should be capitalized, and that punctuation didn’t matter, he might finally be driven to murder. Punctuation aside, the concept promised so much. Lying in bed, he'd dwelt on it all night long. It had a strange resonance that excited him with possibility. He hoped the student would extend the metaphor:
…a story will follow you even when you don’t know where you’re going, tail wagging, ears perked, eyes trusting. Sometimes it’s a stray, half-starved, and muddy, showing up on your doorstep, growling at the next passer-by. Sometimes it’s a purebred show dog, all posture and prestige, demanding perfection. Sometimes it pulls you forward, demanding to be let off the leash; not every story obeys. Like the ball it loves to fetch, again, and again, and again, it always comes back to you. When you close the door, it waits, longing for that crack of light, a brief slash across its paws. Every story, no matter how mangy, manic, or mewling, has one thing in common–it lives a life balanced between doubt and hope.
It was unlikely that the poem would say anything like that, but he hoped. He didn't know, at least not for sure, but that was the thing with poems. With the essays, he knew exactly what would be said.
Remi told himself he was saving them; a joyful break from the regular marking. He told himself that it was too early. He glanced at the poem in his hand, creased from where it had fallen and his careless retrieval. He didn't even know when he'd picked it up.
The poem went back into the folder, and an essay appeared instead. As always, the relentless demands of the marking pile eventually won. He promised to finish the essays by tomorrow, and Remi didn’t want to disappoint the class. With the exam on Thursday, those who wanted the feedback and had taken the effort to hand in the extra paper deserved his effort in return. The poems would have to wait.
It'd be a mistake to think that he hated his job. He loved it. He liked their writing. Sure, they often wrote terrible essays, but sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they said something real. More importantly, he loved the students. He hated the meetings, the emails, the checkboxes, the unpaid overtime labelled as “professional duty.” He hated the system, but never the kids. There were some teachers he knew like that, who hated not only the job, but the people. But not Remi; he always liked the kids.
He hated how often his job kept him from the parts he loved: the moments of honesty, the sparks of actual connection, those moments when their writing sang, even to his jaded soul, and how sometimes they looked at him like he mattered. He stayed for those moments—for them. Even if he got buried under rubrics and reports, because people deserved someone who didn’t give up.
A few minutes later, Remi stared at his computer screen, the gradebook comment “thoughtful but underdeveloped” staring back at him. It was supposed to describe a student’s paper, which was mainly some scattered musings on Frodo finding purpose through hardship, but he was stuck. His mind couldn’t help but join Frodo's meandering. He looked at the comment again. It felt a little too on-the-nose, not for the paper, but for Remi himself. He let out a slow breath, then tapped delete.
“You are close. Keep going. You have a good framework here; you just need some direction.”
VWEEEP!
The noise burst from his computer. It was a notification sound he didn't recognize, juxtaposed with a brief screen flicker and then a blank screen. He blinked, scrubbed at the corners of his eyes. It wasn't fatigue blur, but a flash of text overlaying the rows of names.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: STORY THREAD UNDERDEVELOPED]
Then it was gone. A ripple across the spreadsheet fled before he could screenshot or check if it was just his ancient laptop finally giving up. But it left his skin cold and his breath uneven. Maybe he was losing it. This time for real. Not like those other times, when he was pretty sure the spiders were plotting something.
He shook his head to find his comment was gone. Ingested by the computer.
Remi tapped the computer with his hand, “Wow!” He knew the machine was getting old, but it had never yelled at him before or eaten his comment. Add that to his list of things to do: send a ticket to tech concerning decrepit laptop. Might as well do it now, before he forgot.
But his screen was no longer blank, a line of text appearing slowly, in a spectral font, pale and flickering.
Would you like to write your own story?
Remi blinked. The cursor froze.
“What the—” his thought interrupted. THWEEEEP!
The intercom chirped to life, too chipper for the hour. Remi regretted his earlier thoughts about onomatopoeia. Had the universe, in a fit of cosmic irony, punished him today.
“Good morning!” The too-bubbly voice of the secretary made him flinch. It was too damn early for the fake veneer of positivity seeping from the spaces between the letters of her drawn-out phrasing. Remi hated her voice, or more accurately, what her voice represented. It was one octave too high and two decibels too shrill, and echoed false authority and recrimination.
Her announcements were never good. “Mr. Page to the Learning Commons. You are required at today’s PD session. Immediately! We know you’re here, so hope you're ready!”
He clenched his jaw. “For fuck’s sake!” He was pissed off that he’d actually have to go. A glance at his computer showed that it had changed again.
[AI]: Write something...
It was the default waiting prompt from his chatbot.
“You got me,” Remi said, slapping the laptop shut. It must be the tech team playing a prank on the Luddite. “I’m not doing this today.”
He stood, slung the laptop under his arm, grabbed his coffee, and the mandated reflection journal. It was a lot of stuff to manage as he stumbled for the door. He desperately needed a bag, but what kind? No serious person over forty could consider a backpack any longer, and a Murse was something Remi couldn’t even bring himself to consider.
As Remi Page, a high school Literature teacher, left his classroom, heading towards his day of development, little did he know that behind the screen, still active in sleep mode, the code continued:
[ARCHIVAL SYSTEM BOOT SEQUENCE]
// Caution: integrity compromised
C:/HollowScript/Core/Shift/Earth.sys
> shift.narrative = [ENABLED]
> command.narrative = [ENABLED]
> alt.narrative = [ENABLED, trigger=RESTRICTED]
// Caution: instability detected
> ctrl.narrative = [ENABLED, trigger=RESTRICTED]
// Caution: power surge detected
/INITIALIZING: THE CRUCIBLE
> assign.protagonists
--Confirmed
// INPUT REQUIRED: Pending…
> run.crucible(protocol:Genesis)
--execute=Yes
The screen paused, as if it were considering.
The cursor blinked. Once.
The cursor blinked. Twice.
Then stopped.
// NARRATIVE LOCK: ENGAGED
> escape.narrative = [DISABLED]
AI]: Review. Follow. Favorite.
The Crucible feeds on such gestures.
Remi]: I like them too. Also, narrative forward comments can get off the margin and onto the page.