Terminal Sunset WIP Alex Beyman
“I miss when ‘night people’ meant insomniacs” Mom called out from the kitchen, elbow deep in dirty dishes. I smirked, but Dad either didn’t hear it or wasn’t in the mood, peering tensely through the blinds. When I knelt beside him, I discovered the object of his interest was a silhouetted figure standing across the street in the alley, just beyond the reach of the street lights.
“Do you think that’s one of ‘em?” I whispered to him. He squinted, pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “I dunno. It kind of looks like Dave, but I just saw him on the way out of the office an hour ago. He even told me not to “get got” on the way home, he’s not the careless type.” So indeed, either it was one of them, or somebody with a death wish.
Mom continued to prattle on about things she missed, the way boomers do. The way I guess everybody starts doing the microsecond after they turn thirty. In her case, longing for a world which never existed outside of Norman Rockwell paintings. “I miss when gas was a dollar” she’d say. “I miss smoking on airplanes”. Or “I miss the sun”.
To be fair, I miss the sun too. That’s a good deal less controversial than some of the other things boomers miss, and something I’m old enough to have faint, fond memories of. I must’ve been a baby, as in the main memory I have about it, the sun was coming in through the partially opened curtains as I laid in my crib. Shadows from the mobile overhead played upon the far wall, fascinating my developing little brain.
It felt so perfect yet surreal that sometimes I wonder if I dreamt it. Early childhood memories have that quality. Whenever I overhear seniors at school talking about it, they make it sound like the blackout was no big deal. Covid only reinforced our impression that fucked up shit was now the order of the day, so we knew to expect more lockdowns.
Kids are resilient. The night world became their new normal after the first year. Their parents, not so much. Predictably there was a contingent of society convinced that the sun was being blocked by a swarm of micro satellites funded by George Soros, Bill Gates and so on. That the sun’s actually fine, and the precautionary measures were all about increasing government control.
They were the first to get got, disappearing into then plentiful unlit alleys, service tunnels and derelict buildings with GoPros strapped to their bodies, streaming to “alternative news” platforms. That was the public’s first glimpse of what happens when an NP takes you. Takedown notices got the videos yanked, but the Streisand effect ensured they would still be available on the darkweb until all the other stars have also gone dark. Then again, maybe they have. We’d keep seeing the light still in transit for millions of years.
In every vid, the same thing happens. They talk a big game about how they’re standing in darkness and nothing’s happening. Then at some point they see someone they know, usually standing motionless in a corner or doorway. In the videos where they shine a flashlight on the figure, it becomes briefly invisible while the light’s on it, fading back to solidity when it’s not.
Light doesn’t kill them, but they sure don’t like it. In the videos they tense up, their outline gets fuzzy and they recoil from it. They retreat, but only far enough to get out of the light. Waiting patiently just beyond its penumbra, beckoning. Irene says they’re ghosts. I don’t believe that, but whatever they are, they can’t talk. Yelling questions at them produces no reply, just persistent beckoning and a warm smile.
Some of the conspiracy types on social media have speculated that the day the sun went dark, Earth became joined to the spirit world at the dark points. Wherever’s sufficiently shadowed. They call NPs “the departed” and say that they beckon to us because it’s better where they are now. Supposedly they just miss us, and want us to enjoy Heaven with them, or whatever the spirit world is supposed to be.
But while that’s what I hear them saying, I don’t see any of them going off-path outside, running for the shadows wherever the city hasn’t put lights yet. Not anymore. Coming up on eleven years post-blackout, and the city still hasn't finished lighting everything up 24/7 like they promised to. Understandably it’s hard finding anybody willing to set foot into the darkness to mount the LED panels, even for lucrative hazard pay. NPs don’t seem interested in the remotely controlled robots which entered use a few years ago, but those are still in short supply.
Dad went back to polishing his rifle. NPs don’t react to being shot at. That would seem to suggest they’re ghosts after all, but high speed photography revealed even before I was born that the bullets somehow never reach them, rather than passing through. Jury’s still out on whether NPs are solid, and nobody who’s ever touched one came back to settle the matter.
“It’s well past your bedtime, young lady.” Mom put a still-soapy hand on my shoulder. “What is that you’ve got on? Is that my lipstick?” She turned me towards her by the shoulders and began rubbing it off my lower lip with her thumb. I pushed her off me. “It’s just lip gloss mom, everybody at school’s wearing it. It tastes good, that’s all.” Mom harrumphed. “So did vaping.” …Whatever that means.
I awoke the next morning to the dull amber glow of the second fake sun, shining in through my window. For a brief moment I felt intense deja vu, as if I was a baby in my crib again. For a scant few seconds there, before I remembered who and where I am, it was absolutely real to me. The first discrepancy I noticed was the lack of shadows from the mobile.
Shadows, obviously, are a no-no. Experimental data is inconsistent about how big a shadow needs to be for NPs to step out of it, but the prevailing attitude is “better safe than sorry”. All bulbs sold now contain two additional backup lighting elements. All buildings have batteries in the basement to cover outages, building power grids have three sets of redundant wiring in case of shorts, and regulations don’t allow switches that can turn the lights completely off.
There is, mercifully, a consensus about the specific lumens value above which NPs can’t, or won’t, appear. Minimum illumination, by law, is about ten lumens above that. So we all sleep with the lights on, if dimly. Mom sometimes talks about what an adjustment that was, but it’s another one of those things I never had to adjust to. If she never told me otherwise, I might’ve assumed it’s always been this way.
I left illumination cranked down to the fixed minimum to spare my eyes as I climbed out of bed, rubbing away the sleep crust with my fingers. A faint glow creeps out under the edge of my bed. LED strips mounted to the bottom. After all, there may actually be a monster under there otherwise. Beneath the blanket is safe, so far as anybody knows. They can’t appear anywhere there’s not enough sufficiently darkened space for an upright human being to instantiate. That saved us, at least, from having to put little lights inside boxes, pockets, our stomachs and whatever else.
I don’t know how Mom and Dad coped. I didn’t lose anything, but they knew the world before. To hear them tell it, any horrors can become mundane if they’re survivable. If nobody you know is affected, at least not frequently. Besides pandemics, the cold war was also supposedly like that. Regular people living regular lives, going to work or school with the constant awareness in the back of their minds that the nuke sirens might go off at any moment.
That’s me, surely? I’m not scared of the NPs the way Dad is. I assume that’s why he keeps the rifle always at the ready, even knowing bullets won’t stop ‘em if they come. Fear, and the frustration of feeling powerless to protect his family, when he was socialized from birth to believe that a father is either the family protector or nothing at all. At least, I hope that’s why.
I take the PATH network to school out of habit. We all did before the first fake sun went up, just a massive, internally illuminated helium balloon suspended a thousand feet over our heads by long, thin cables. The illusion would be more convincing if it didn’t nearly brush up against the tallest building. I always hear what an energy hog it supposedly is, but it only manages to be just bright enough that the dull, diffuse light from it barely exceeds the NP lumen threshold.
It does feel like a waste of money, when the city leaves the building and street lights on all the time anyways. In a dense population center it also doesn’t actually illuminate much because of all the buildings in the way, casting new shadows which must then be blotted out with spotlights. I’ve long suspected the fake sun is more of a symbol, and a comfort object. The public’s big, expensive, floating binkie.
Before the fake suns, we all just commuted using the PATH network, a subterranean layer of the city we already used to escape bitterly cold winters. It grew out of the network of subway platforms, expanded over many decades with space for shops and cafes. It’s where I grab a snack on the way to school if I skipped breakfast. PATH was already exhaustively illuminated, even before the sun went out. Problem solved, for some of us.
Montreal weathered those scary first couple of years well for the same reason, along with the various other far northern cities around the world with underground levels connecting their downtown buildings. Minneapolis was mostly fine because of their extensive skyway network. Helsinki barely noticed because fully half the city is underground, originally intended as shelter space in the event of war.
Suburbanites just kind of ate shit. There was no plan in place for them. Who plans for the sun to go dark? When I was little, I’d watch through Dad’s telescope as the distant constellation of lights I knew to be the windows of suburban homes went dark, little by little. Not quickly, there’d be perhaps one or two fewer lights out there in the darkness each time I looked. Now there are none.
I read once that ancient man believed stars to be distant campfires. What a comfort that must've been for our ancestors as they huddled around the warmth and safety of their own crackling fire, which kept the wolves and other night creatures at bay.
Back when I watched those distant windows going dark, one by one, I often wondered what prehistoric man would think if he knew that the tiny campfires in the night sky would wink out one day. Surrendering to darkness, a few at a time, until all light is gone from the universe. If there's anything out there in the endless black void which the stars keep at bay, I imagine it's worse than wolves.
Years later, I still feel sick to my stomach thinking about what it was like for suburban families to die stranded, scared and hopeless. Until solutions were found permitting safe expansion of street lamps and other outdoor lighting, there wasn’t any way to send out repair crews to fix downed power lines. When an outage knocked out power to a neighborhood, they were all simply gotten. Eventually the city fixed external floodlights to repair trucks and sent them out to fix the power lines, but when the lights came back on, the houses were empty, save for a few bodies.
I’ve seen some TV interviews with the pale, shaky handful of survivors who lasted long enough to be rescued. Preppers mostly, their eyes subtly twitching as they describe the ordeal. Everybody else either starved in place, got taken when the power went out, or…took themselves out of the equation, along with their spouse and children. Family annihilators, I think they’re called.
By the time I’m washed, dressed and out the door, Dad has long since left for work. Despite growing up with it, I still sometimes boggle at how much the world didn’t end, even though the world ended. There’s still politics. There’s still commercials on television. People still watching TV, still buying shit, still gossiping about rumors. Still fucking, getting preggers, and bringing new life into a world where the sun is gone.
“The sun, of course, is not gone” Mr. Groenewald informed the class. We have a few other teachers with weird names, his is the only one I can reliably spell from memory because he spent a full ten minutes of our first day with him writing it in big letters on the board and pronouncing it for us. His pet peeve, I guess. I remember asking him if he was supposed to be teaching us life skills. He replied that it was absolutely a skill we should master, if we wanted to live.
The other reason everyone knows his name is because he accidentally opened a browser tab with foot porn on the projector once. We would’ve eventually forgotten if he didn’t get so embarrassed and butthurt about it. He’s been an unbearable hardass ever since, but once you lose your dignity, you can hardly get it back by yelling at kids. Or by wearing an obvious hairpiece, the reason everybody calls him Groenebald behind his back.
“If the sun were gone” he continued, “Earth would not continue in its orbit. We would all be skeletons encased in glaciers right now. Instead, it’s a seasonally typical eighty degrees or so outside.” He gestured to the translucent window display which showed not just the time and temperature but a radar-like indicator used to detect nearby NPs. “Can anybody tell me why Earth didn’t freeze?”
Alicia raised her hand, and was called on. Fucking Alicia has always been a pick-me. “The sun is still there, but something changed it. Sunlight is now in the portion of the light spectrum not visible to humans.” I clapped sarcastically, stopping when Groenebald threatened to keep me after. I’ve heard some rumors. He’s not on any registries that I know of, but that doesn’t prove anything except that he hasn’t been caught yet. Maybe I’m too suspicious, but balding middle aged men shouting inappropriate compliments at me on my way to school is a disappointingly common occurrence.
“That’s right Alicia. Such a good student. So smart. I only wish the rest of my students were just like you” he gushed. Oh, I bet he does. “Besides the immediate effect of bathing the solar system in darkness, plant life on Earth quickly began to struggle. Unmodified plants only ever made use of around 1% of the sunlight which struck them. So, a coordinated increase to the proportion of acetate in fertilizer compensated nicely, preventing total crop loss in the first year. Only a band-aid on a gaping wound though, as photosynthesis relies entirely on visible light.”
He popped a disc into his PC. Physical media came back into widespread use after the internet fractured due to the impossibility, in the first couple of years, of maintaining it. A recording of some boring dildo in glasses and a lab coat yammered at us about Project Strangelite, an only somewhat successful government program intended to avert famine.
Stage one involved the hurried expansion of heterotrophic cultivation, indoor farming, and outdoor grow lights installed in farmer’s fields. Vast grids of illuminator pylons resembling oddly colored street lamps, spread out across the landscape like cities seen from the air. Stage two saw government biolabs CRISPR up variants of staple crops, algae, plankton, trees and grass that could photosynthesize under the new conditions. Crops because of the ruinous energy cost of the outdoor lighting, plankton and algae because of the impracticality of applying that same solution to the entire ocean.
Sometimes I feel like we owe thanks to the NPs. If not for them, we probably would’ve been bombing and invading each other when the famines started. Even a much smaller disruption of global agriculture would’ve starved millions, and the blackout fucked up farming a lot worse than that. All I heard about for many years was starvation and strife in countries I couldn’t pronounce, tragedy on a scale my kid brain was unprepared to comprehend the seriousness of.
Processed cheese and meats are still comfort food for me, after growing up eating long expired MREs mixed with whatever Mom could scrounge up. Culinary Stockholm syndrome. I suspect the same reason a lot of starvation foods our ancestors ate out of desperation, like moldy cheese, are delicacies today. MRE food isn’t far off from cafeteria food, more suited to the palette of children than adults. Which tracks, given the age range usually targeted for enlistment.
The beeping window display shook me from my contemplation, followed by an irritating tapping sound. Groenebald shut up for what must be the first time in his life to investigate the source. He cupped one hand to his ear and followed the sound to one of the windows along the classroom wall. We’re on the second floor, so I figured it must be a bird or something. He pulled up the blinds.
Alicia screamed. A pale, smiling woman’s face peered in at us. Tap tap tapping at the window with one hand, beckoning with the other. Groenebald fell backwards against a desk, grabbing hold of it to steady himself. Everybody was out of their seats now, pressed up against the opposite wall, some recording the window face on their phones. “Don’t look at it!” Groenebald commanded. “It wants you to look!”
He got out his phone too. Frantically dialing, then engaging whoever was on the other end in feverish, hushed conversation. I made out “...unscheduled illumination gap just outside of classroom B-24”, then something about the automatic breaker failing, and “...activate the backups manually from your end”. A few moments later the LED panel under that window kicked on, and the face vanished. But the damage had been done. There wasn’t any chance of keeping our focus for the rest of the period, not after that, however hard he tried.
There were a lot of “eyes up front, class!”, “eyes on me, not the window” and threats to keep us all after, which amounted to nothing in the end. Defeated, he put another video up on the projector and went outside to smoke. When lunch came, the face was all anybody wanted to talk about.
The chattering crowd was so noisy I almost didn’t notice Alicia crying by herself in the corner. Curious, I made my way through the agitated throng and set my tray down next to hers. “You don’t look so hot. Need one of these?” I offered her one of the vitamin D tablets they always serve with our lunches. Alicia asked me to sit somewhere else without so much as making eye contact. I couldn’t blame her as we’re pretty far from speaking terms, but I had to know.
After prying for most of a minute, she caved. “It was my mother” she bawled. I just kind of sat there, quietly stupefied, before recovering. “Your mother? Who disappeared…what, a week and a half ago?” Alicia nodded through the tears, which ran down her cheeks and fell into her food. I asked if she could be mistaken, given that she’d only glimpsed the face from the other side of the room.
“No, it was her!” she insisted, “and she looked right at me! She was beckoning me, she wants me to join her!” I writhed a bit in my seat, increasingly uncomfortable with the implications. “Alicia, it wasn’t your Mom. NPs aren’t people. They’re illusions or something.” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then her drippy nose. “It was her. That’s always how it happens, whenever someone gets taken. After a while, they start showing up in the shadows.”
“Or an NP imitating them” I corrected. Still tearful, she seemed to consider it for a moment. By now more than a few other students noticed the two of us talking. Much as I wanted more info, everybody already thinks I'm a nerd on account of the vocab I've picked up, bookworm that I am.
I’ve seen the popular girls kicking the shit out of her in the stairwell enough times to know that I shouldn’t be seen sitting with Alicia for too long, so I dipped. For the rest of the day, I replayed her words over and over in my head. First you get taken. Then people start seeing you as an NP. Or an NP that looks like you.
She heard that from a conspiracy blog, probably. I have flickers of memory corroborating it, bits and pieces I overheard from the news, but it’s like any other big issue of the day. Everybody pretends to know what nobody else does about it. Speaking with a confident sounding voice, telling scared people what they want to hear. That the danger is understood. Quantifiable, controllable.
On my next bathroom break I lit up a cig, then busted my phone out to look up NP conspiracy videos. No more receptive to their bullshit than usual, but wanting to see if I was right about where Alicia got her ideas from. Some fat dude in an anime shirt was complaining that “night people” is gender neutral PC lingo, and back in his day everyone called them “bogeymen”.
I cracked a smile, remembering one of mom’s stories about her own parents scolding her for being scared of bogeymen, because they’re not real. Rather, they weren't at the time. I skipped to the next one, in which he showed off a spreadsheet he made comparing the names of people who disappeared, their date of disappearance, then if/when they were later sighted as an NP.
In every case where the identity of an NP was visually confirmed, it corresponded to someone who disappeared exactly eleven days prior. All down the spreadsheet, row after row, the interval was always the same. Wherever you go when they take you, evidently it’s a long trip. I tucked my phone back into my sports bra as some seniors came in, then hurried back to class.
Word got around quickly about the possible connection between the window tapper, and Alicia’s mother. She accosted me by the lockers after last period, accusing me of betraying something she’d told me in confidence. I denied it, swearing up and down that I didn’t know how it got out, but perhaps understandably, she didn’t believe me. Nothing was lost, it isn’t like she trusted me to begin with.
I took the surface route home after school, for a change. I had a lot on my mind and needed to be able to hear myself think, which I couldn’t in a crowded, echoing concrete labyrinth. The “sun” loomed large overhead, thin fabric surface visibly billowing from a light wind. It comes down during storms, ever since the first one tore free from its cables and got blown the fuck away to Zanzibar. That might’ve been a lot less funny had there not been redundant sources of illumination.
I squinted as I passed another row of out-facing lighting banks, mounted at intervals to the exterior of every building. They have filters to scatter the light somewhat but it’s still that irritatingly pure, sterile white light LEDs make. The subway tunnel, mercifully, is still illuminated along its entire length with bulbs that haven’t been changed since before the blackout.
The saving grace is that the white light blends somewhat pleasantly with the dull yellow light from that obscene parade balloon above me. I nevertheless wished I had sunglasses with me right then, smiling to myself at the irony. The leaves on the trees lining the boulevard also rustled in the evening breeze, their weird reddish coloration standing out all the more beneath the never-setting sun.
A billboard advertising sunlamp therapy for seasonal affective disorder cast a partial shadow, blotted out in the middle by some judiciously angled spotlights, per regulation. The ones underneath the billboard looked to be burnt out, though. That’s where I spotted my first dangler. I didn’t realize at first that’s what I was looking at though, as my brain didn’t process the silhouette as a person until I got closer than I should’ve.
Life returned to some semblance of normalcy about a decade after blackout. Insofar as everybody who was going to die from global food shortages already had, none of the nuclear armed countries pushed the button, and people went back to their routine of mindless labor and consumption. What nobody expected, after painstakingly adapting themselves to the mother of all black swan events, was another one.
Disappearances began immediately after blackout, and the first NPs appeared exactly eleven days after that. They became a constant fixture in everyone’s lives, moving forward. Always dangerous, but at a tolerable background level. Once we worked out that they behave in a predictable manner, public fear began to fade. Only to return when some of the NPs started changing.
Where your garden variety NP is just a smiling, beckoning likeness of a recently disappeared person, a dangler is that same NP several months later, apparently dead, hanging from a noose. The rope doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. It trails up into the sky, fading into nothing. Danglers are a rare sight, but have been documented enough times to confirm that they’re not just urban legends devised by trolls to stoke public fear.
I still sort of wondered if they were real though, and had so completely given up on ever encountering one that I didn’t even consider that possibility at first. The silhouette wasn’t moving, so I figured either it’s some sort of floating NP, or maybe a prank…until I saw the rope. It was obscured behind the billboard, only visible when I crept around one side of it. That’s when the dangler seemed to abruptly take notice of me, turning to face my direction and starting to move.
I froze, hoping without good reason that it would lose interest. When it didn’t, instead accelerating towards me, I turned tail and ran. I clasped one hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, on the off chance it could attract more. Glancing over my shoulder, the body dangling from the rope wasn’t looking at me or even moving at all, except to jostle and bounce on the rope as whatever was on the other end accelerated the swinging corpse after me, manipulating it from above like a perverse marionette.
Once I made it into the spotlights, the dangler halted, just beyond their reach. It turned this way and that, the corpse's arms flailing along with the radial momentum as it spun. Like it was searching for some alternate, shadowed path it might still reach me with. I stared at it, then fished my phone out of my shirt and fumbled with it, trying to get the camera app open to record the apparition. Before I got it running, the dangler retreated into the darkened alley behind the billboard, as if camera shy.
Adrenaline blinded me to my own exhaustion until then. I’m in alright shape but I sneak cigarettes in the school bathroom pretty often, so I’m never going to be a track star. I doubled over coughing, pounding heart knocking down my ribcage from the inside. Only now, in the sober clarity afterwards, did I accept that I’d really seen one. That in fact, it had almost nabbed my dumb ass.
I just about choked on my tongue when a car I didn't hear stopping just behind me honked twice. “What’s wrong with you?” the driver yelled, “Get out of the damn street!” I staggered to the sidewalk, mesmerized by the blanket of light cast beneath the car by LED strips along its undercarriage, as it silently sped off towards the city center.
I didn’t dare to deviate from the most brightly lit stretches of sidewalk after that, and took the first staircase I spotted down to the PATH network. I’ve heard that curiosity killed the cat. If that’s true, it got off easy. Then again, NPs don’t show any more interest in animals than they do in robots. I don’t know what makes humans special, but for whatever reason, they’re only after us.
I didn’t tell Mom about the dangler when I got home, and not Dad especially. It was hard to keep my mouth shut, though stuffing it with dinner helped. Mom can sense when I’m hiding something and interrupted the meal to ask if there was anything I wanted to tell her. Cheeks puffy, full of mashed potatoes and eyes wide, I slowly shook my head before struggling to swallow.
After dinner I holed up in my room, hunched over my decrepit PC with the blank keys, letters worn off long ago. A hand me down from Dad, something of a luxury as nobody’s manufactured any new consumer electronics since the blackout. The school computers are the same, frozen in time. A snapshot of the latest and greatest from eleven years ago, perhaps never to be surpassed.
After checking my email, I got busy browsing websites that just yesterday were a punchline to me. But in all my admittedly scant years of life, I averaged perhaps one NP sighting per week, and now I’ve seen two in one day. A dangler, no less! I needed to tell someone, but couldn’t trust my parents not to lose their shit and ground me. Online anonymity to the rescue, though it’s not what it used to be in a functionally smaller world.
The sudden failure of every solar powered telecom satellite contributed greatly to the balkanization of the internet. Certainly, the consequences were far reaching. For me though, all it amounts to is that the only websites consistently available from my home or school are all hosted in my city. Supposedly city workers are still busy erecting radio towers to bridge the gaps. Then again, we were also supposed to have 100% external illuminator coverage by last year.
A smaller haystack to hide my needle in means markedly improved odds of accidentally being identified by someone I know. After a few bad experiences along those lines, I learned not to leave any trace of personally identifying information connected to any of the accounts I use. Still, it was with tremendous apprehension that I emailed the author of the spreadsheet video. He’s probably on all sorts of government watchlists. Ones I meant to stay off of, if I could help it.
I found his address in one of the usual places. Ads plastered all up and down the left and right sides of the page, hocking male virility pills, healing crystals and all sorts of other garbo I doubt if I could successfully place an order for, even if I wanted to. The ads remain though, like the billboards of a virtual ghost town.
A forum link caught my eye. Even as I composed the email in one tab, I opened the forums in another, switching back and forth as I thought of more questions to add. I had some uncharitable ideas of what sort of topics they might discuss in such a place, but the reality far eclipsed my expectations.
“NPs are aliens” seemed about equal in popularity to “NPs are demons”. Someone commented condescendingly that they were saying the same thing, since as everybody knows, aliens are just fallen angels in disguise. “Oh of course” I thought with a smirk, “how foolish of me to forget”. Silly as I felt reading what may well be schizophrenic cries for help, I did slowly grow to appreciate the culture.
Viewing it as a collaborative storytelling community alleviated my irritation. Every thread just seemed to be some loser’s attempt to spin a wilder yarn than the guy before him. To captivate an audience of commenters as large as possible, for as long as possible. A bunch of lonely dementoids vying to one up each other, each wanting to be the most interesting, made all too much sense with escapism in such high demand.
Some of the more interesting theories were religious. Though we go to church, I wasn’t raised to believe in any of it…but nothing about the blackout or the NPs ever struck me as rationally explicable. My gut told me, from the earliest age when I was able to grasp that the figures outside weren’t people, that something went terribly wrong with the world eleven years ago. The blackout was the tip of the iceberg. In some difficult to quantify way, everything’s been cursed, or tainted, since then. Every square inch of the Earth is wrong now. Every second in every minute, in every hour of every day.
Since NPs broker no scientific explanation I’m aware of, entertaining unscientific alternatives doesn’t feel like a trespass. It’s anybody’s guess what’s behind the phenomenon, so I’ve grown more and more comfortable listening to anybody. One thread proposed we’re all in purgatory now, and “the departed” are friends and family who have passed on, a common and popular narrative.
“They can’t be ghosts” one of the comments insisted, “otherwise why the danglers? They’re all hanging. If they were ghosts we should expect a more diverse representation of deaths. Some should appear burnt. Some shot, some drowned, and so on. But we don’t see that. Every one of them hangs. Why are they all hanging?”
Someone suggested it’s a message. That hanging is the only escape, a way to move on from purgatory to the afterlife proper. “That’s dangerous talk” someone responded. “My sister hung herself during the first year post-blackout. Lots of people did, and those of us who didn’t are all still very much on edge. Unless you have evidence, don’t go around telling scared, desperate people that salvation lies at the end of a rope.”
OP protested, but was dogpiled, seemingly a frequent occurrence as I browsed the other threads. Doing anything to put a spotlight on yourself risked attracting as much negative attention as positive, so I didn’t post anything. Instead I lurked, jotting down the occasional note.
One thread had a series of photos that caught my eye. The same NP in each, the pictures taken at weekly intervals over the span of a year. A few photos in, a noose appeared around its neck. It gave no indication, same blank smile they all have. Then the rope trailing up behind it, loosely, as if they were about to be hung. Still it stood calmly, smiling and beckoning, feet firmly planted on the floor. In all the photos after that, it appeared to have become a dangler. No longer standing, no longer moving or giving any signs of life, except that whatever it hung from would drag it around in pursuit of the living.
It made a strange sort of sense to me, though I couldn’t pinpoint the reason. Not so well received by other commenters however, whose pet theories the photos contradicted. Many accused the OP of doctoring the pictures with either editing software or AI. A few seemed intrigued as I was though, allowing the possibility that the images were legitimate and moving forward with their speculation from that premise.
Loads of threads were posted by apocalyptic types, trying to reconcile the blackout with passages from Revelations. One of them was just a long, convoluted argument over chapter 8, verse 12 which describes the sun and moon both darkening, as well as a third of the stars going out. They seized on this similarity and ignored, with great determination, the rest of the passage wherein only a third of the day and night are without light, with the Moon remaining visible…albeit blood red. I’d prefer that to the pitch black Moon we’ve got. It looked so pretty in pictures, like a giant nightlight for the world.
Some of these exchanges stretched back for several years, the same few users bickering endlessly. Trying to make sense of the blackout I suppose, to find meaning in it. I felt something like a digital archaeologist, scrolling back in time. Unearthing ancient posts from people who may well have been gotten since then, or even died of natural causes. The blackout was a dream come true for people like this. Just the shot in the arm world religions needed after decades of prosperity diminished public need for escapism, comfort and easy answers to the dwindling number of mysteries left in the world.
To hear Dad tell it, we got too comfortable. Solutions to problems like climate change and resource depletion were finally coming online. Poor India had just about finished solarizing every home, air conditioning the entire country…now so much obsolete e-waste rusting in landfills. Europe stabilized their grid, phasing out natural gas entirely by the time I was born. Mom and Dad grew up in an uncertain world, but by the time they married, the dragons of their day had been slain. For the first time in what must’ve felt like an eternity, life was like a dream…until the dream turned dark.
I took a break from doom scrolling about an hour in, rubbing my eyes, already sore from staring at the bright monitor in a dimly lit room. When I glanced out the window…like clockwork, there was one of ‘em in the alley across from our building again. So I busted out my nocs, knelt at the windowsill and took a closer look.
The face was entirely in shadow, so I couldn’t tell if it was the same one from yesterday. It was dressed like a normal person. A growing unease tempted me to turn away, but something in me wouldn’t allow it. I sat there for maybe ten or eleven minutes in stillness and silence, waiting for the NP to do something I’ve not seen yet. Unhealthy fascination I guess, my version of birdwatching. It was interrupted some minutes later by the arrival of a Strangelite pest control van.
I squinted, then raised a hand to shield my eyes. The van was lit up like a Christmas tree! Covered top to bottom, end to end in out-facing illuminator banks, the underside in particular. Eye searingly bright, I couldn’t bear to look directly at it. The occupants climbed out, better able to tolerate the mobile light show because of adaptive goggles which could filter incoming light by spectrum. An enviable lens through which the world, for them, appeared absolutely normal.
Gogs are in short supply, and in high demand on the black market, if the news is to be believed. They’re like a portal back in time one can peer through, but not traverse. Alice’s looking glass, seen from within, the world as it once was on the other side. At school, I’ve seen footage captured with the image sensors from a pair of gogs. You can see the sun in the sky and everything, right where it’s supposed to be. You can also see the NPs, plain as day.
If that was supposed to clear up any mysteries, it didn’t. They’re not revealed, in the light of digitally revealed day time, to be alien monsters or anything of that nature. They just look like people. They’re us, by every appearance. The city workers blasted painfully bright light in all directions from their illuminator harnesses, a sort of upper body wearable rig which covered their torsos in out-facing LEDs.
I expect that saves them from lapses of judgment. Through their gogs, everything looks deceptively safe. The natural sunshine, plus all the outdoor lighting, makes it so they can’t see where the shadows are. The harness ensures they’re never in shadow, regardless. One of ‘em tosses a light ball down the alley. “Photon grenade”, by illuminorb ltd. A silly, sensational name for what's really just an internally illuminated transparent plastic capsule with as much battery as they could pack into it, for several days of run time.
Each of ‘em carries a dozen or so on their belt. Superfluous next to their harness, but it’s not for them, I don’t think. I’ve seen these guys on TV rescuing someone from a lone functioning street lamp during an outage. When they escort somebody not wearing their own harness, that person casts a shadow away from the harness, in which NPs can appear. Light balls prevent that, carving an illuminated path to safety out of the always-hungry darkness. Still, I miss when they simply used flares. This used to be a proper country.
I smiled despite myself as they walked by a sign, lighting it up in passing so I could make out the words. “Toronto” it read, “famous for nightlife”. As I spectated through my nocs, the NP reacted to the encroachment, inching slowly away, its expression changing to one of anxiety and frustration. Little by little they backed it into a corner, which it vanished into when at last not even a sliver of shadow was left for it to inhabit.
I turned away, losing interest as the uniformed professionals got busy repairing the banks of lighting in the alley. So bright was the van, so bright were the harnesses and light balls however, that an ever-shifting influx of that sterile white light intruded through my window even with the blinds shut. It proved sufficiently distracting that I couldn’t focus on reading, and instead surrendered myself to sleep.
I awoke to the sound of faint knocking at the door. I yawned, rubbed my eyes and swung my legs out from under the covers before shifting my weight onto them. In a few steps I was at my bedroom door. Only, upon opening it, there was nobody on the other side. “Mom? Dad?” I called out, keeping my voice down in case I’d imagined it and not wishing to wake them. Then I heard the knocking again…this time from behind me.
I turned, slowly. Still unsure if I really heard what I thought. But sure enough, the knocking came again. This time, unmistakably originating from within my closet. I stiffened subtly. As my bedroom light was still dimmed for sleep, I could see there wasn’t the usual light creeping out from under the closet door. Instinctively I backed a few steps away from it, as if that would make any difference to my guest.
As I stood there sweating bullets, the knocking just kept coming at fairly even intervals. No voice accompanied it, nor did I now expect such a thing, increasingly certain that it wasn’t a person knocking at the other side of my closet door. I considered waking Mom and Dad to tell them about the intruder. Dad in particular would certainly want to know. But I decided against it, as my anxiety slowly gave way to curiosity.
I meant to get a closer look, didn’t I? I meant to learn more about NPs. There was no safer, more discreet means I could think of. But how did it get there? Fixtures all have triply redundant lighting elements. The odds against all three failing at once seemed staggering. The socket itself, I decided, must’ve been what shorted out.
I surprised myself, feeling my heart begin to race as my hand neared the knob. How many close calls have I had over the years? Somehow, the fear stays fresh. I wrapped my fingers around the smooth, cool metal. Gripping the bulbous contours, I twisted until I heard the bolt retract. Then slowly, so as not to alert my parents in the other room, I eased the closet door open.
There she stood, looking exactly the same as she did outside the classroom window. Same dress, same sweater, not a single hair out of place. Only that vacant smile gave her away. Standing, staring, smiling. She raised a hand as if to grab me. Reflexively, I flinched. But of course the moment her hand crossed the penumbra, it faded into nothing. A smooth gradient of transparency, only reaching full solidity halfway to her elbow.
She withdrew her hand, visible and presumably tangible again, once shrouded in darkness. She frowned slightly, but otherwise didn’t emote. Didn’t even break eye contact. My heart throbbed, my mind moving at a mile per minute. What does this mean? Did she follow me here after the incident at school? Why me?
I leaned in as close as I dared to, and whispered “What are you?” …No reply. No visible reaction of any kind, save for slight wincing when her hand entered the light a moment ago and the frown afterward. Does it hurt? I asked her what light feels like. Where she’s from, what’s on the other side of the shadows. As ever, I received only stubborn silence in response…and that gentle, dead-eyed grin.
Glazed over, some kind of trance maybe. But I’ve seen them move in a purposeful way? My brain burst at the seams with possibilities. All the experiments I’ve ever wanted to try out on these things, whatever they are. So much idle guesswork I figured would remain forever confined to daydreams, and internet conspiracy theories-
I tensed up the moment it struck me. The realization that I alone, in that sea of prideful pontificators, have my very own pet NP to poke and prod. Put it down to the immaturity of youth, but the first place my mind went upon accepting the reality that I’ve got a real live NP trapped in my closet…was how much clout it might get me.
It was the work of perhaps five minutes, moving my desk and PC across the room so the little integrated webcam in the monitor pointed towards my closet. I snapped some stills initially, with myself out of frame, before it occurred to me that I should fashion some sort of mask to protect my anonymity. It also seemed likely I could be identified from my clothing, should anyone from school find these pictures online.
Lacking any better options for a disguise, I fetched a dusty, disused white sheet from the linen closet. I then tip-toed back to my room with it tucked under one arm. There, I cut a pair of eye holes in the center, then draped it over myself. I didn’t put it together, how that would come off…until the mean comments began rolling in. “Is this a sick joke?” one user posted. “I bet she’s naked under the sheet” said another, followed by a suggestive emoji. That set off a string of “lift the sheet” comments which only died down when someone suggested I was actually the adult woman standing in the closet, not the girl beneath the sheet.
“The old timey ghost is obviously composited into the shot for laughs” the theory went. “See where the sheet touches the floor? It's wrinkled all wrong. Besides, anyone can stand in a fully lit room, then lasso tool around the closet doorway and selectively darken that portion in an image editor. That way it looks like she’s standing in shadow.”
All the sycophants fell in line behind the alpha nerd, vigorously agreeing with his galaxy brained debunking of my very real bedsheet disguise. Their consensus that I faked the image now firmly established, my thread was deleted by a mod and I received a 24 hour suspension for “stoking fear with a low effort hoax”. I turned off my monitor, feeling equal parts frustration and disgust.
I flopped down on my bed, groaning. Forgetting for a moment that the thing resembling Alicia’s mother still stood there, waiting quietly in my darkened closet. Somewhat calmer now, having realized it wouldn’t be so easy to prove my situation to terminally online strangers on a post-truth internet, I wracked my brain for solutions. Mainly to questions like “how do I monetize this” and “How do I prove it’s real without doxxing myself”. But also “How the fuck do I sleep from now on, with an NP ten feet from my bed?”
That proved to be the easy part. It’s amazing what you can get used to! Underground commutes. Popping vitamins with every meal. Digestive disorders, hallucinations. An eleven year long night. Of course she was still in there when I awoke. It shouldn’t have surprised me except that, for those first few groggy minutes of unwelcome consciousness, I forgot about her.
That short lived fog of forgetfulness is at once merciful and cruel. Mom remarked once that every day when she wakes to a black, starry sky, it’s briefly surprising. Then, as dreams fade away, reality bleeds back in to replace them. It all comes back, little by little. The blackout. The NPs. Gamgam.
Gamgam was among the survivors rescued from suburbia soon after the blackout. They found her huddled in a corner, surrounded by candles. She collects prayer candles, the ones in the tall narrow glass jars wrapped in a paper sleeve depicting the Virgin Mary. I’ve seen a few others bearing the image of Jesus, the Apostle Paul and so on. Gotta catch ‘em all.
To my knowledge, she hasn’t spoken a single word since that day. Every day except Sunday, she wheels herself into the corner of the nursing room’s common area, clutching one of her candles. Just in case, I suppose. On Sundays, we pile into the car and pick her up from the nursing home, then we attend church as a family.
That’s today? It creeps up on me every time. I reached for the closet door knob. I twisted it, still not remembering until I was just about to reach inside for my church dress. The woman inside frantically lunged for me, grasping at the air. Her hands never connected with their target, fading into nothing where they trespassed into the light.
I only didn’t scream because I choked on my spit, stumbling backwards and falling against the bed. Dad heard my coughing fit and knocked on the door. His muffled voice asked if I was okay. “I’m fine” I called out. “Don’t come in, I’m not decent.” I sat there on the edge of my bed for another minute, quietly staring into the vacant eyes of the stowaway. Her frustrated expression once again replaced by placid calm, content to resume lying in wait within her cozy oasis.
Another close call. I scolded myself for the lapse, wondering if I shouldn’t tape a reminder on the outside of the door, or wedge it shut with a doorstop. I decided against either one, as it would only catch Mom’s attention. She snoops through my things once or twice a month, presumably to read my diary and search for my cigarettes.
She swears she can smell smoke on my clothes, but I gaslight the fuck out of her. Part of that entails writing new diary entries every couple days, painting a picture of perfect obedience, sobriety and chastity…precisely ‘cause I know she’ll read them, and still thinks I’m none the wiser. That’ll stop working one day, but for now, it throws her off my trail.
“Hurry up, we need to be at the nursing home in twenty minutes if we’re gonna make the morning service” Dad shouted from the kitchen. The NP in my closet took notice of my church dress dangling beside her. She removed it from the hanger, held it out in front of her and shook it a little. I laughed, despite my discomfort. As if I’d fall for that! I retrieved a broom from the corner by my desk, held it by the business end, and with the handle…I knocked the dress from the night woman’s clutches.
I then flipped it around and used the bristled end to tug my fallen dress across the carpet, until far enough from the open closet that I felt comfortable picking it up. I sighed. It’s all wrinkled now. Whatever, I can wear my baggy grey hoodie over it. The bigger problem is that I’m gonna have to figure out someplace else to store my nice outfits from now on. The woman-thing seemed mildly frustrated again. “What’s that?” I cupped my hand to my ear. “Got something to say?” As ever, only