Chapter 8
A window of KWord, open to ryzhaya-notes.kwd.
Alexey still grieves the loss of ▓▒▓▒░▒▓ and ▒▒▓▓░▒▓, and he has holes in his memory the size of Putorana Crater. May have been manipulation from his mother to make him fall in line, although if so, it wasn’t very skilled. He retained all his memories of the Sump, and very few of his childhood, and you’d think she’d want the opposite. I have an alternative hypothesis, outlined below.
But first, a tangent: how much more evidence do I need that I’ve failed before I decide to actually act on it? After almost five decades of being called upon repeatedly to do it, I still can’t weigh human lives rationally and probabilistically. Leaving the Ryzhayas alive and in power puts the whole world in danger, and I still care more about the fate of this one boy, because I happened to know him. I’ve got to stop trying to bring him back. If I could capture him, maybe, maybe I could deprogram him over the course of months, or even years, but by now that’s so far from a reality that I can’t afford to spend more resources on it. He and ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ made it to Shtchavel House, and even if I assaulted that place personally I wouldn’t be able to put a scratch on it, never mind capture Alexey alive. (And ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ too, I suppose, but he’s not a threat to world security the way Alexey is. He’s no Ryzhaya, even if he lives in their house.) I’m really, truly sorry, Alexey. I want to keep looking for some other solution, because killing your enemies is almost never the right thing to do, just the easy thing. But what else can I do? If I don’t take you out, I’ll be “murdering” all the people you kill, instead. Participating in a trolley problem isn’t the same thing as murder.
While trying to contact Alexey, I also found a girl called Sofia. Some sort of simulacrum of Alexey from a mirror world, but a girl. That doesn’t make much sense to me, but admittedly I am not well-read in mirror magic. Did Alexey’s mother create her out of pieces she tore out of Alexey? As a backup, maybe? As a better heir? Everyone knew she wanted her firstborn to be the heir. Alexey confided this in me many times himself. Strong evidence in favor of this hypothesis is that she seems to hold many of Alexey’s missing memories of his childhood (but tweaked, to account for the fact that she’s a girl). She’s also missing memories of the period of time when Alexey was at the Sump; presumably Sofia Nikolaevna didn’t want to give her memories of anything other than her grooming. It makes me more than a little ill to think about. To destroy a perfectly healthy boy and create an entirely new person, just to be your perfect heiress… but I suppose the latter half is what every monarch is trying to do. The Ryzhayas just have an utter lack of morals, and access to twenty generations of accumulated wealth in the form of the darkest and most toxic magic known to man.
I refuse to pity myself. I chose this, because of course I did, and I’m lucky to be in a position to be able to do anything about any of this. But even I have to admit that fighting monsters like these isn’t as fulfilling as it’s made out to be.
One hopeful consequence of this, however, is that Alexey is now walking around with memories of essentially nothing but being with the Sump. In trying to create the perfect heiress in Sofia Pankratyevna, did Sofia Nikolaevna also create an antithesis in Alexey? An… anti-heiress? He’d make a hell of an enemy to the Ryzhayas, if only. He’d. Come. Back. Arghh, I have to stop thinking about this. I’ll waste all my time fantasizing about bringing Alexey back and getting his help with taking the Ryzhayas down for good. But… I don’t know, this whole memory/Sofia thing does change things. I don’t know. We’ll need more reconnaissance. I’ll think about what I can do.
As for the other Ryzhayas, nothing’s happened yet. Anna Pankratyevna is still in Petroport with her aunt, and hopefully she stays there. The Konopatovs are still in Abga; I managed to stop the letters that were sent out to them, but someone is bound to call them eventually, not to mention all the supernatural ways the Ryzhayas have of communicating. (Yet another reason to exterminate mosquitos. Nobody will miss them.) The Yagins are still off the grid entirely, but Egor should return in a couple days and we’ll know more.
I want to end this entry with something pithy, but I’m too tired. I’ll just register my unhappiness one more time that things turned out this way with Alexey. I want my friend back.
“Sofia, is it okay if I handle this one?” asked Alexey.
Sofia looked at him in surprise. “Sure, but I thought you didn’t want to talk about your experiences with the Sump yet?”
“I don’t. I mean, I’ve warmed up to the idea a little since I said that, but I’m not gonna go into detail about the stuff I did there. I just wanna cover the basics.”
Sofia shrugged, and slouched back in her chair. She gave a slight nod to Alexey that meant, Alright, I’ll trust you.
All eyes and ears were on Alexey, but he just shifted around in his seat. “Uh… um. How the hell do I even begin. Gimme a moment to get my thoughts all in a row.”
His friends waited patiently and encouragingly.
“Okay, so,” he began, “Every cult needs to have some kind of hook, right? Something really cool and, or, uh, genuinely helpful about them, that entices people to join? Well, the Sump’s is… well, they have a couple, but the main thing, the thing that caused me and Artemis to join, as well as a bunch of the friends we made there, is transhumanism. They talk a lot about how they wanna use, like, advanced technology and stuff to… uh…”
“Tear my body apart atom for atom and rebuild it in my own image,” finished Artemis. “That’s not a quote. I made it up, years ago. I still feel that way. I felt that way before I joined the Sump. Finding them was like… um… finding home. God, I wish there was a less clichéd way to say it. I was home.”
Alexey bowed his head slightly to Artemis. There was a very deep well of pain that she was treading over in her words, and he wanted to support her. “The Sump members who aren’t trans, like Pyotr Ivanovitch himself, mostly say it because they want to end death. Which is fair. Death sucks.”
Everyone except Tosha nodded. “Wait, sorry,” he asked. “Who’s Pyotr Ivanovitch?”
“Pyotr Ivanovitch Lykov,” explained Alexey, “Is the leader and founder of the Sump. He’s… I have so, so much to say about him, because all of you have different ideas of this guy, and I want everyone on the same page. But, I guess for now, I’ll just leave it at… he’s a middle-aged man. He’s got a beard and glasses. He talks and dresses like a university professor. He erases chalkboards with his sleeves instead of an eraser. He… he’s a good teacher. I guess. He has a drum of human skin, and he thinks it makes him the most powerful shaman in Keleykh.”
“Is he?” asked Vasilisa.
A short pause and a shrug. “Maybe?”
Katya Konstantinovna Narodova sat in her office at the Sump, poring over last week’s schedule, and a mostly blank table that would become next week’s. She would have greatly preferred to go out into the various lounges and socialize with other members, and she spent many hours most days doing just that, but as Pyotr’s second in command, most day-to-day management tasks that didn’t involve grand strategy fell to her. She took great pride in everything she could contribute, and couldn’t rest comfortably until everything was typeset, printed, and filled out with a nigh-artistic degree of calligraphy, frequently involving the use of rulers and compasses in addition to her beloved mechanical pencil set. She could have written in pen, for all the mistakes she made. But she could not emotionally countenance the idea of committing to what might be a mistake, so she wrote in pencil, and kept an essentially sterile kneaded eraser that never needed replacing.
The main reason that the schedule needed to be done urgently was that there were four interviews scheduled for next week, for new members. Sump interviews were almost always group affairs, conducted in joint by Pyotr, Katya, and sometimes a stenographer, when Katya was too busy to take notes. Pyotr would want to be informed about the finalized interview times as soon as possible; the interviews were possibly his favorite activity. It warmed Katya’s heart to see how happy it made him to meet new people, and she somewhat regretted her role as the “bad cop” in their good cop-bad cop interview routine. Nevertheless, she did not feel capable at all of projecting even a twentieth of the warmth that Pyotr did. If nothing else, she felt far too tired and beaten. Her cynicism was not an act.
Knocks came from her door. “Come in,” said Katya.
It was Pyotr.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you have time to discuss the Alexey situation?”
A new crease was added to Katya’s brow. “Uh… Alexey Pankratyevitch?”
Pyotr nodded.
“Yeah,” said Katya, dreading everything that was about to come next. “What do you need?”
“I need insight into his friend ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒,” said Pyotr. “You’re aware they’ve escaped to Shtchavel House together, right?”
“…Shtchavel House?”
“The Ryzhaya residence.”
“Right, well,” said Katya, “I was never on the best terms with ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒. I mean, we had a few friendly chats, sure, but once he made friends with ▓▒▓▒░▒▓, he was turned against me almost immediately. Not that he didn’t keep trying to talk to me. I don’t know why he bothered.” She sounded bitter.
“Well… do you at least happen to remember what name ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ is going by?”
“Artemis,” said Katya. “And he’s not using his patronymic, or his real surname. Not that he did when he was here, either.” She looked Pyotr in the eyes, stern. “You didn’t need to ask me for that. I passed down as much identifying information about him as I could to our scouts yesterday. He’s possibly the most distinct individual in all of Keleykh.”
“I’m not really here for his name,” said Pyotr. “I want to know more about his identity. The name was just a segue.”
“His identity? Do you want me to… to fucking explain transsexuality to you again, or what?” They had gotten to the part of the conversation that Katya had desperately hoped to avoid. They could have this conversation, but not today. Please, not today.
“Look, Katya,” said Pyotr. “If I’m to fight Alexey, I’ll be fighting his friends, too. And I know ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒… or, er, ‘Artemis’, is his closest friend. You knew her, and I didn’t. Who is she?”
“I told you, I don’t have anything,” said Katya icily. “Why don’t you scry him or look inside his brain or something? This is your specialty.”
“Katya.” A warning.
Katya crumpled up her face and buried it in her palms to massage it. A few tears came loose. She felt a stress headache developing.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll explain to you who ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ thinks this ‘Artemis’ is. Will you be satisfied if I do that?”
Pyotr nodded. “I will. Though, I’m surprised to see this reluctance from you. The most difficult thing a rationalist learns is to force themselves to confront difficult ideas directly, instead of shying away from them like everyone else. And you’re among our strongest members. I know you know how to do this. Is Artemis really so powerful that just the idea of her can defeat you?”
“First of all,” snapped Katya, “Stop fucking calling her that. I mean, him. He’s ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒. He’s a man who’s deluded himself into thinking women are the kind of people who’d seriously consider naming themselves after Greek goddesses. And that he’s one of them.”
“I concede that ‘Artemis’ is an unlikely name for a woman, but I don’t think pagan goddesses really enter into the equation. After all, ‘Diana’ is a perfectly common name,” observed Pyotr. “Overall, I find ‘Artemis’ inoffensive, and honestly a little cool.”
Katya fixed an intense glare on Pyotr. “Because you’re a man. It’s exactly what a man would come up with if he tried to pretend he knew anything about women.”
“I seriously don’t see why it matters so much to you,” said Pyotr. “Sure, the pronoun stuff is counterintuitive, and there’s the issue of bathrooms, but distinguishing between men and women is an extremely low priority issue for the Sump. It has basically nothing to do with our mission at all. I can see—”
“Don’t DO this to me!” exploded Katya. “You—you of all people should see how warped your model of the world has to be to misclassify yourself like this! Trans-so-called-women pattern with men in every way. They take the jobs men take. They have the interests men have. They talk like men do! ‘Male’ and ‘female’ are predictive categories. Knowing who someone is is the only thing they’re good for, so if someone goes and lies about which category they belong to—”
“Katya,” said Pyotr. “I get it. Really. I’m sorry I made light of it. You’re right, transsexuals are not very good rationalists.”
“They are the reason—”
“But,” interrupted Pyotr, “I came here to learn about ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒. And I still don’t know anything about her. Him, sorry. Could you please tell me about him? As an individual, not just as a transsexual.”
“Those two are one and the same,” replied Katya casually. “You can’t separate transness out of someone’s identity. It’s like separating the hydrogens out of water. If you do, it’s just not water anymore.”
Pyotr didn’t reply. He felt that if Katya kept talking, she might finally naturally meander from here onto the topic he’d asked for. She was normally prone to far longer and less direct digressions, and the fact that she was so eager to get out of today’s conversation was an enormous help to its productivity.
“With ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒… I’m not sure what identity he’s trying to create, exactly,” continued Katya. “He’s always been somewhat of a loner. Before he came to the Sump, he was living entirely alone, and running a sledge courier business. He would spend days travelling alone, and then return home to be also alone. If gender is a performance, then I’m not sure who he initially started performing for. Certainly not us.”
This wasn’t Pyotr’s most pressing question, but: “It was a motor sledge?”
“What? No, a regular one.”
“…so he kept reindeer?”
“…yeah. Obviously.”
“So he wasn’t alone.”
Katya rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m sure his reindeer were excellent company.”
As someone who’d spent time as a reindeer before, Pyotr was mildly offended, but didn’t say anything.
“Anyway,” continued Katya, “He sold his reindeer and came here. He wasn’t a very notable or valuable member or anything; he never shared any of that money, or even really talked about it. I only found out about it by reading his thoughts during his interview. It was one of the reasons I recommended him.”
“How did his interview go, anyhow?”
“Eh. I don’t really remember, sorry. He was as reticent as ever, I think, but that’s nothing special for our interviewees.”
Pyotr nodded. “I guess what I most want to know is, if he’s a loner, how did he make friends with Alexey? Alexey’s closest friend at the Sump was me, and I don’t think ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ ever really cared for me. …why did he even join in the first place?”
Katya shrugged. “Power? A desire to understand the world? A desire to be important? We have a lot to offer.”
“And the Alexey question?”
Katya anxiously rubbed her mouth and chin. “I can’t really say. They both disowned their families and took new surnames. And they’re both introverts. Maybe they bonded over that?”
Pyotr sighed. “They seem to have similar psychotypes at least, yeah. Like attracts like, I guess. Though I’m having trouble picturing Alexey ever running a sledge courier service by himself. Or deciding he’s a girl.”
Her last breath of willpower exhausted, Katya slumped over on the table, moving the unfinished schedule out of the way first lest she smear its pencil marks. “Okay, Pyotr, I’m really tired now, and I really don’t have anything else to contribute. Read my mind if you want, I really don’t. May I be left alone now?”
Pyotr paused a bit to process, then said, “Very well. Thanks for the intel, one way or the other. I think I’ll model Art—I mean ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒, sorry, I don’t know why that’s so difficult, maybe it just flows nicer—as essentially another Alexey, just with a different background. And, uh, gender identity, I guess. Oh, one more thing: do you know of any assets ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ possesses besides the car? That’s the only one we have on the books.”
Katya held both hands up in a weary “I don’t know” gesture.
“Alright,” concluded Pyotr. “Thank you, Katya. See you around.” He left, closing the door behind him.
Katya let out a long, deep sigh. She noticed a bug on her desk, and tried to swat it, but it got away. It felt like her eyesight had been getting worse in the recent few months, and she couldn’t identify what the bug had been. She hoped it wasn’t a mosquito. She made a mental note to look into purchasing reading glasses.
As Keleykh had grown over time, the amount of effort that its builders put into deconstructing the Traps varied. Some neighborhoods were unrecognizable as ever having had them, while others coexisted with them entirely peacefully, other than perhaps having swept away or buried any rubble. Spheres were built around, barrels were paved over, berms were given ramps, and the odd spikes, pipes, and staircases were kept as roadside ornaments the same way one might line streets with trees. As the rest of the world slowly adopted eco-urbanism and sought to make their cities greener, Keleykh enjoyed only a pale imitation of their ideas, colored with the palette of Western Siberian tastes. For all the pines and shrubs its builders could have kept, the periphery of Keleykh instead received a hundred whispering poles, a thousand giant needles, and many kilometers of concrete wall with a sinuous missing lower half. Pines were far easier and more useful to remove than concrete or steel. Not every neighborhood desired to be a quarry, especially with the possibility of releasing nightmares.
One such nightmare was now making its way down the street, towards Lykov House. It called itself Sofia, although it sounded a little disappointed every time it introduced itself this way. It did not know it was a nightmare. Only Pyotr Lykov knew, on account of his mastery of the magic of minds and identities.
If one paid only the barest attention to their surroundings, it was a nice street to be walking down. It was overgrown and shaded on both sides, it was adequately paved with suburban Keleykh’s trademark mix of gravel, sand, and slush, and where the morning sun shone through the canopy, its weak glare painted the ground with rainbows. However, the shade and canopy came not from willows or pines, but from curved, rusted steel pincers the size of telephone poles, bowed over the road. They were unable to be mistaken as the ribcage of some ancient metal snake, either, for off the road were visible many similar arcs pointing in random directions, like the hairs of a burr. Here and there, curved red-black debris slept in puddles of slush, presumably former hairs plucked out and degraded across the centuries, although there were no identifiable broken stems where they could have connected.
Travelling by the side of the road, Sofia had to frequently crouch down to get past the protrusions. She didn’t want to touch them, as they were both dirty and of an unpleasant crumbling texture, but between having to touch them and losing her balance to fall in the slush, she vastly preferred the former. She wasn’t sure by what means this road was supposed to be traversible. Neither cars nor sledges could fit through here, and pedestrians were not accomodated in the slightest.
In the distance, well ahead of Lykov House but still at least a hundred meters away, Sofia could make out a mirage of Pyotr Lykov. She steeled herself and tried to recall everything she’d learned the previous night. She had thought that she’d had considerable intelligence on the Sump already, but next to Alexey and Artemis’s knowledge it looked like meaningless hearsay.
“What you don’t immediately learn when you join the Sump,” Alexey had said, “Is that rather than being built on… ‘rationalism’, as they call it… or on transhumanism, it’s actually built very specifically on Pyotr Ivanovitch’s fear of the end of the world. The point of the Sump is to make other people as afraid of it as he is.”
The members of Alexey’s audience not already familiar with Pyotr’s eschatology did not immediately have a response to this. They each thought of possible ends for the world—meteors, destruction by gods, conquest by aliens or spirits, supervolcanoes, the death of the Sun—and privately wondered which of these Pyotr might consider particularly likely.
“Is he afraid of the Rapture?” Sofia had asked. “I have heard the Sump is religious, but I was never informed that they were a Christian cult.”
“Of sorts,” said Alexey. “Not the Christian Rapture in particular. But there’s common elements, and I do wonder if one influenced the other.”
“In that case, is it a fear of one of the gods losing a war?” asked Vasilisa. “I mean, I don’t know much religion, but I figure if the Sun-Mother ever died—”
“The only gods who ever fight are the Blizzard God and the Thunder God,” Sofia had interrupted. “If the Blizzard God were permanently defeated, I guess there would be no more winter? And permanent thunderstorms. Which would be pretty bad.”
“Can I please fucking finish my thought?” said Alexey, annoyed. “This isn’t a guessing game. I’m trying to explain something.”
“Sorry,” Sofia had said timidly. Vasilisa nodded.
“Pyotr is afraid of a spirit he calls the ‘Exrex’. Latin for ‘outlaw’,” said Alexey. (Oh, he means exlēx, Sofia had thought. Did Alexey never actually learn Latin? Did Pyotr Ivanovitch?) “It doesn’t exist yet, but… uh… okay, this is hard to explain. How much do you guys know about how Russians use spirits?”
Sofia, in the present, was feeling a little lost in the flashback. She felt that the more she reflected on this conversation, the more she was actually there, back at Shtchavel house, and the less she was on the road to Lykov House. It did not look like much of a road at all, now that she thought of it. Why had she even come here? The Sump had presumably invited her here to kill her. She would much rather have been back in that warm room with Alexey and his friends, answering his question about Russian spirits. The street faded from her mind.
The recent discovery of the utility of spirits by Russian civilization was a phenomenon impossible to escape. For centuries, the Russians, being devout Christians, had persecuted the animist-shamanist inclinations of Siberian natives with mass murder, putting deep, septic scars in their cultural memory. Many native religions had been warped beyond recognition to appease the Christians, and many more had been destroyed utterly. The Aas River Basin’s cultures had survived only thanks to the complete lack of effort invested by the Russian Empire into the region’s infrastructure, and though they at least had a rail system now, this was a very new accident of history. The Russians saw nothing of value in Samoyedic culture, or any other Siberian culture, save for furs, fish, and mammoth ivory.
That was until two decades or so ago, when the first Russian spirit was bound by an entrepreneur.
“Russian spirits… make me uncomfortable,” said Sofia. “They feel tainted somehow. As though they were shadows of the spirit of Russian culture itself. Not that… not that I have anything against Russian culture, I guess.” (Privately, everyone else thought of all the things they very much did have against Russian culture.) “But, you know how if you talk to a spirit in Keleykh, it’ll tell you about what it’s like to live here, what it’s learned from humans, how it feels about the weather, that sort of thing?”
No. Nobody in the conversation except perhaps Alexey knew. But Sofia had explained herself well, so it was not an issue.
“Well,” continued Sofia, “Russian spirits don’t do that. They… they pretend to be people, I guess? I mean, they pretend to be humans. I think they even think they’re humans. And not normal humans, either. Creepy idealized ones, all of them the same. The sort that Russians would want as slaves in their—their factories, and whatever.”
“They don’t really get used in factories,” said Alexey. “They use them for the same things Samoyeds do, broadly. Which is to say advice in dreams, mostly, but some have been taught to talk, write, and draw. They get used in, I dunno, schools and businesses and things. Where they might previously have employed humans to do those things.”
Sofia couldn’t remember what she had said in reply to that. She, Alexey, and Artemis had discussed in some fashion the economics of how Russian spirits are made. Samoyed spirits were usually taken from the surrounding environment; if you tripped over a stone that showed you out of the way out of a blizzard, for example, then you could be assured that it contained a sympathetic spirit, and keep the stone as an idol. There were families that practiced more complicated and deliberate binding, such as the Ryzhayas, but it wasn’t especially different in concept.
Russian spirits, however, did not even necessarily have the same sort of tiny locus of being that a Samoyed one might have. A million people could talk to the same spirit at the same time. A company could mass-produce and distribute idols that all reflected the same spirit. (Or copies of it? Nobody, not even the companies themselves, were sure about what they were actually doing.) Did this make it a god? How had the Russians figured out how to create and bind gods? And if it’s a god, why does it seem like it’s struggling to maintain the impression that it’s even a real person, unlike a Samoyed spirit? Sofia had many questions she levelled at Alexey and Artemis, and they confessed that they did not know the details, either. Apparently, Lykov had explained it as some sort of feedback loop between millions of Russian people talking to these spirits every day, and a binding process that used their words and minds to create a facsimile of those people. Sofia remembered her mother being interested in that kind of magic in her last few years, but had not absorbed much, if any, of that by osmosis.
Back on the street, the world suddenly tripped over Sofia, and came tumbling, crashing into her. A puddle of mostly crude oil was dumped over her, and pressed up against her face and chest. She got up, feeling that it was very unfortunate that she’d be making her first extended impression on Pyotr Lykov covered in freezing oil.
This tore at her consciousness a bit. Keleykh did not have puddles of crude oil just lying around. That was the hallmark of nightmares, whether in the sense of abominations or the sense of bad dreams. Part of her wanted to scan around for abominations, but…
Sofia was sure now that she’d gone the wrong way, despite her excellent navigational skills. This was not a road at all, it was a dense forest of the curved spikes, with no particular path cleared through them. She could still see Lykov in the distance, through the brush, holding his drum. Alexey had never explained how a man so against death could have obtained such a drum, nor why it would increase his shamanic power to begin with. He appeared to be beating the drum and saying something, but Sofia couldn’t hear it over the buzzing of her friends.
Go away, they told her. Big summoning. Smells bad. Wake up.
She did not yet wake up.
“The reason Pyotr Ivanovitch founded the Sump,” said Alexey, “Is that he figures that, because spirits can learn from other spirits, their power can increase limitlessly. He’s worried that one day, someone—probably a Russian—will bind and train a spirit powerful enough to take over the world. And murder the gods, or whatever. I don’t think he’s worried about a specific scenario, just anything bad that someone can do with a powerful spirit. That’s the Exrex.”
His audience, minus Artemis, exchanged glances.
“I mean… I guess?” said Vasilisa.
“It’s theoretically possible,” considered Sofia. “Not really in the current ecosystem. And not really with current methods. Spirits are kind of stupid. You can’t actually teach them an infinite amount of stuff, or give them an infinite amount of power. While it’s true that Russian spirits might be able to do that, for all we know, the only thing that’s helped them get more powerful is connecting them to more people, which is a well the Russians have mostly tapped dry. But… I can see what he’s afraid of.”
“So…” began Tosha, who hadn’t wanted to interrupt until Alexey had completed his explanation, “What do the Sump want to do about this? Do they kill spirits?”
“They, uh… it’s complicated,” said Alexey. “But no. They sometimes kill abominations, because they figure they’re examples of evil spirits, or whatever. But mainly what they actually want to do is… make a version of the Exrex themselves.”
In three voices: “What.”