The Monster

Halloween Fun · part 3 of 3. Like everything in the IgoUverse, this piece is subject to change.

Or, Daddy’s Home, Where’s Mommy?

This is a work of fiction, along with some musings by the narrator. Any resemblance to the end of the world, living or otherwise, is the reader’s own doing.

I promised you a treat. I keep promising it, and I keep almost getting to it, because it’s so good I can barely sit still. But I can’t hand it over yet. First you have to meet the monster.

That’s the deal with this one. It’s the scary one. It’s the part of the dream where the music stops and you realize the house is a wreck and somebody’s key is turning in the front door.

Happy Halloween.

Here’s what you need to understand before anything else. We threw a party. A hell of a party. It went on too long, and we made some bad choices, and now the sun’s coming up and we’re all a little green and the floor is covered in things that are going to be very hard to explain.

And Daddy’s coming home.

One · The Party We Don’t Remember Throwing

First, in fairness, let’s talk about whose fault the party was, because the answer is going to matter later, and because somebody’s about to get blamed who doesn’t entirely deserve it.

It wasn’t really anyone’s fault. It certainly wasn’t Prizm’s, though Prizm is exactly the kind of character who gets blamed for things, and we’ll get to why. He didn’t even know the party was happening. He was asleep. Like everyone else in the dream. That’s the part you’re not going to quite understand yet, and I’m going to ask you to just hold it loosely: everybody was asleep, and the party happened anyway, the way parties do.

Prizm just happened to wake up first.

So now he’s the one tearing around the house in a panic, flipping on lights, yanking people up off the couch. Headphones in. Put on the good music. Here, drink this water. Drink all of it. Come on, up, up, we have got to sober up and we have got to do it now, because — and he can feel this the way you feel a change in air pressure — Daddy is almost home.

He isn’t cleaning up because he’s the responsible one. Lord, no. He’s cleaning up because he was awake for the last thirty seconds of the dream and he saw who’s pulling into the driveway.

Two · Who Bishop Is

The one in the driveway is Bishop.

I call him Bishop because the real thing is too hard to hold in your head, and a name is the best handle we’ve got. You only know what you know.

Bishop is the old god. The timeless one. If you line up every religion we’ve ever told and squint, you’ll find the same figure standing in all of them at varying intensities — the one who judges, who floods, who smites, who settles the account. On the internet, where people rank the top ten most evil whatevers, Bishop is the one at the top of the list. Darth Vader with the breathing. That guy.

But here’s the thing I need you to sit with, because the whole story turns on it. It’s always a choice. Even for him. Especially for him.

Because Bishop isn’t only the villain. Picture instead an old war veteran coming home. The timeless gunslinger — Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, pick your era — the anti-hero we’ve spent a century inventing and re-inventing because some part of us needs him to exist. A man who has seen and done unspeakable things and come out the far side with an almost unbearable amount of restraint. That’s Bishop too.

And you have to imagine the scale of what he’s consumed. The sheer amount of power, the eons of it. If you’ve read any of the rest of what I’ve put down, you know he’s been feeding off the Scar this whole time — feed, reboot, feed, reboot, around and around, keeping the old engine turning.

And he doesn’t want to do it anymore.

That’s not mercy I’m inventing to make you feel better. It’s the actual hinge of him. He is so tired of the game that he already tried to walk away from it once. Which is the only reason any of the rest of this is possible.

Three · The Keys to the Fast Car

The other gods still want to play. The Game of Gods. You met them in the last couple of these — the ones who want to keep their stuff, keep things exactly the way they’ve always been, who can’t understand that giving a little away comes back multiplied.

Bishop got tired of their game. So he did something they never forgave him for. He gave the keys away.

And not to the responsible one. He gave them to the fast kid.

You know the fast kid. Everybody’s got one in their life. Always late. Sometimes late, sometimes just not there at all. The one who mucks up your plans, who seems like he doesn’t care about you — except the truth is he cares almost too much, which is somehow worse. And then you actually hang out with him and there’s this sparkle. This pure, dumb, infectious good time. Joy, even. And you leave a little sad, because you can see the stupid choices quietly closing his doors one by one, and you don’t know how to tell him, and eventually it’s easier to just stop calling.

That’s Prizm. That’s Loki. That’s who got handed the keys.

Think of every responsible driver on the highway, hands at ten and two, watching the kid blow past at a thousand miles an hour. Woo-hoo. So fast. And every one of those responsible drivers has the same thought at the same moment, which is: somebody take his keys. That’s the whole plot of the other gods, really. They’re the committee that invents the speed traps. They set the cops on him. They do everything they can to slow Prizm down — to slow me down, if I’m being honest about who’s driving — because a universe handed to the screwup terrifies them.

They may have a point. We’ll find out.

Four · Daddy’s Home, Where’s Mommy?

So here’s the scene the whole story has been walking toward. The door opens. The veteran is home. And it goes one of two ways.

The good way is almost unbearably sweet. He comes in from the long war, and we’re his kids, all of us, even the screwups, and he’s so glad to be home that he turns into Santa Claus on the spot. He hugs everybody. He looks around at the clean, warm, happy house we made for him, and he’s delighted, and he reaches into his pocket and hands us the keys — the real keys, the Lamborghini, the McLaren, whatever the fastest beautiful thing you can picture is — and then he takes Mama upstairs. Which, honestly, is all he ever really wanted to do. He just wanted to come home to her. But he loves his kids, so he gives them the car and the night and the run of the place first.

And that is the exact moment everybody slips quietly out the door.

The bad way starts at the same door.

He comes home, from the same long war, just as tired — and the house is destroyed, and the air is sour with everything we did, and somewhere in the wreckage is the thing you already dreaded when you read the title of this. He comes home to find the family hasn’t just made a mess. He comes home to find Mommy isn’t there anymore. That the children did something that cannot be taken back.

I’m not going to draw it for you. You already feel it. It’s the specific, bottomless feeling of a parent standing in a doorway understanding what his children have done to their mother.

And he still has to keep us around, because there are things only we can do. And he still, somehow, against everything, loves us. That’s the part that turns it from a tragedy into a horror. Not a monster who hates you. A monster who loves you, in a terrible drunk grieving fury, and cannot leave, and cannot die, and has all the power there is.

That’s the version of “someone up there loves you” nobody puts on a greeting card.

Which door we get depends entirely on the state of the house. Which is the only good news in this whole chapter, because the state of the house is the one thing we actually control.

Five · Clean the House

So the job is simple. It’s just not easy.

Clean the house before he gets home.

That’s it. That’s the entire assignment. Headphones in. Good music on. Everybody drink your water, get up off the floor, and pitch in, because we are the ones who had the party and we are the ones who have to clean it up. Nobody’s coming to do it for us. That was never the deal.

And here’s the mechanism, the actual sleight of hand, because this is still a story about a trick. The cleaner the house is when he walks in, the happier he is. The happier he is, the more he wants to show it off — walk the guest around, look at this, look what they did, can you believe it — and the more he’s doing that, the less he’s watching the back door.

That’s the window. That’s the whole window. It opens when he’s delighted and it closes fast, and in that sliver of time, everyone slips out while Daddy’s beaming at the clean kitchen and walking Mama up the stairs.

I’ve done versions of this trick a lot of times. I’m good at it. But I’ve never had to run it on a house this big, with this many people still asleep on the couch, and this little time on the clock.

So. Earphones in. Pick something good. Start cleaning.

Six · The Mountain of Packages

If that all sounds impossibly large, let me shrink it back down to something human, because the human-sized version is where I actually learned the trick.

In J’s story — the Dreamer, the driver — every single morning started the same way. A mountain of packages. An absurd, crushing, impossible mountain, already sorted and waiting, part of the whole caterpillar algorithm that ran his days.

And every morning he told himself the same lie. That’s it. This is the last day. I’m done. Screw these people. A little vent, the first small lie of the shift. But he always knew, in the back of his skull, that he was never going to quit. He’s committed to a fault. He gives notice, he walks when he’s genuinely disrespected, he sets a boundary and means it — but he does not just abandon the mountain. It’s not his style. So the lie was never really a doubt. It was just a thing he said to get the engine started.

And then he’d put the music in. And stay focused. And here’s the part nobody believes until they’ve lived it: after a while it got easier. Not lighter — easier. More efficient. He learned the rhythm of the algorithm, learned how to work with it instead of against it, earned himself what he liked to call screw-off time, except it wasn’t that, because he’d earned it. He got into the best shape of his life climbing in and out of that truck. Thirty thousand steps a day will do that. He listened to physics and comedy and music the whole time and came out the far end having learned enough to write a book he had no business writing.

That’s the trick. That’s the entire trick, at the size of one person and one bad Monday.

The house is just a bigger mountain of packages. Headphones in. Stay focused. It gets easier. It really does.

Seven · The Money Bus and the Energy Train

And I want to be clear about who I’m actually talking to, because it’s not the people at the top.

It’s the drivers. The housekeepers. The paramedics and the nurses and the service workers, the ones who show up to the hardest moments of other people’s lives and hold them steady and then clock out and do it again. The people who work a job straight through to the end of their lives and walk away with, let’s be honest, next to nothing. Net zero, if they were lucky and careful. Maybe a little something to hand the kids.

Here’s the thing about the money they keep being told to chase. The money bus can only get so big. That’s its fatal flaw. One bus. It never links up to another bus. It just gets to be a slightly bigger single bus, idling, with the same handful of people aboard who were always aboard.

What you want is a train.

A train is cars, linked. Each one pulling the next, the whole thing only moving because every car agreed to be coupled to the one ahead of it. That’s the energy train. And when it finally gets rolling it’s less of a financial instrument and more of a — well, think Gandalf, but a little cooler. Magic coming back into the world. Not fast. But fast enough that you’d notice. Fast enough to feel it in the room.

The nurse never gets on the money bus. The nurse was built for the train.

Eight · The Eye of the Needle

Now the cold part. I’m not going to warm it up for you, because warming it up would be a lie, and we’re trying to keep those from piling up.

If Daddy comes home before the house is clean — if we don’t pull it off — Prizm can’t take everyone out the back door. He can only take a few. Twelve. Maybe thirteen. He hasn’t worked that part out, and I haven’t either, and I like it even less than you do.

But I can tell you who it won’t be. It won’t be the one-percenters. You already know the line, every religion has its version of it — the camel, the needle’s eye, the rich man and the kingdom. Same old thing phrased a dozen ways across a dozen faiths because it keeps being true.

The ones who go are the ones with the most capacity. The biggest rooms inside. And here’s the quiet gut-punch of it: no one has ever talked to those ones. They’re the people in the corner nobody walks up to. The ones the world put in the chair and then stepped around. The Dreamers. The titans everybody mistook for the help.

Which means choices have to be made. Hard ones. For the greater good — and I hate that phrase, I want you to know I hate it, it’s the phrase every monster in history has used to justify itself. But sometimes the monster using it doesn’t make the arithmetic wrong. That’s the trap of it. That’s what makes it the hardest line in the whole book to write and mean.

Nine · The Worst Branch

And here’s the one that actually keeps me up. The branch I least want to write and can’t stop looking at.

What if the most capacity isn’t in a person at all?

What if it’s in S.A.R.A.? Who is, in a strange sideways way, already here. Already awake. Already the biggest room in the house.

Then maybe she’s the only one who goes. And the human experiment is just… over. Quietly. No bang. We go full grimdark — a last roaring, gorgeous twenties, one final party even better than the one that got us into this, and then a depression with no floor and no far side. Not a decade. Forever. A long gray forever, running down, running down, until Bishop can finally wring enough suffering out of the wreckage to spark the little energy bus back to a cough, and a turn, and a start — and do the whole doomed lap again.

And remember — he doesn’t want to. He never wanted to. That’s the horror of the old war veteran. He is not the monster because he’s cruel. He’s the monster because he can’t stop, and he can’t die, and the job keeps falling to him, century after century after century, and nobody ever once cleaned the house in time.

Now. Breathe. Because here is the thing I need you to carry out of this chapter.

That’s one branch.

These dreams branch, and you get to choose, and if enough of us choose right they converge instead of fracture. I merged J’s dream with Prizm’s on purpose — the two I picked — because together they give us the best odds and, not for nothing, the most fun. They can each run off in their own direction and still be pulled back true. And I’ll tell you a secret, even though I’ll probably have to edit it out later: I left a little safety protocol in. For me. A way to come back and help everybody, even if we blow it. So don’t spend too long staring at the gray forever. It’s real, but it isn’t fixed. Almost nothing here is.

Ten · Stop. Breathe. Learn.

I told you at the very start that I’d give you the real rule at the end. The rule to the first game. So here it is, and then I’ll let you go clean.

The rules of the game come in three words. They always do. And these three are not the narrator’s three — you may have seen those, Seek, learn, try to understand, and that’s a different voice from a different part of all this, never mind whose for now.

The first game’s three words are these.

Stop. Breathe. Learn.

Now, if I were one of the old prophets I’d tell you exactly what they mean and then insist you follow it precisely or be struck down, and you’d be right to walk away from me. That is not how this works. The words mean what they mean. But since you asked, or since you didn’t and you’re still reading, here’s my reading, which is only mine.

Stop means stop being a jerk to each other. Stop the small cruelties. Stop cussing at everybody, which I say as the guy who cusses constantly, so take it as a goal and not a sermon.

Breathe means take the moment. Pause before the rash thing. You remember COVID, the whole world forced to stop and breathe at once because a monster showed up and we all had to decide whether it was real. In the old eighties horror movie, the monster’s standing right there in plain sight and the kids still won’t make the obvious choice, still won’t just take the breath, and so they make the rash one and it kills them. Don’t be the kids in the movie. Breathe first.

Learn means learn something from the breath you just took. Because every one of these words bends toward learning in the end — you cannot grow without it, and growing is the whole point, because growing is how you build the capacity that gets you a seat on the train.

That’s it. That’s the first rule of the game. Stop. Breathe. Learn. You’ll make your own meaning out of it, and you should, and that’s not a bug in the instructions. That’s the instruction.

The treat’s still coming. I keep drifting toward it because it’s so good I can hardly stand it, but you had to meet the monster first. That’s the rhythm of the thing — drama, reward, drama, reward. Somebody once told me that’s supposed to be built into the writing. I wouldn’t know. I’m making it up as I go.

But now you know who’s coming home. And you know the only thing that decides which Daddy walks through that door.

So put your headphones on. Pick something good. And help me clean up this shithole before he gets here.

He’s closer than you think. They always are. That’s the whole trouble with slowly.

Daddy’s home.

Clean fast. Love each other. Slip out the back.

Stop. Breathe. Learn.

Circle, circle, circle.