Dead Letters

On a very literal level, every human interaction is a relationship of give and take. Ideas are exchanged, transmitted, and the process by necessity requires an incredibly minuscule amount of psychic energy to change hands, like an electron moving from one atom to another. Phone calls and text messages, e-mails and dead tree letters all served as carriers for these motes of thought and will.

Of all the ways human beings are able to correspond, it was the labyrinthine machinations of the United States Postal service that most interested Christopher Markham, and not only because of his own high position in that particular bureaucracy. Christopher knew that the envelopes he watched over contained more than words and paper, and was one of perhaps three dozen alive who did. What mattered, though, was that he was the only one in a position to do something about it.

The Office of Dead Letters had long been considered a backwater position with little possibility of advancement in the higher organization. For a young up-and-coming executive in the civil service to actively maneuver himself into the directorship of that office was nearly unheard of. To his credit, Christopher ran the Office well, cutting costs by closing the San Francisco branch of the Office and consolidating operations in the main Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta. The savings masked a need to get a warehouse of undeliverable mail away from the untamed water of the Pacific Ocean, and a need to eliminate prying eyes looked better on a balance sheet as "staff cutbacks", but the efficiency was real enough.

Processed by fewer hands, the undeliverable mail piled up. Patrolled by understaffed security, the warehouse went unobserved for hours at a time. Christopher recalled every day of the years that led him to his one big night, as he began to distribute gallon jugs of gasoline throughout the darkened warehouse with every bit of the efficiency that marked his tenure as Director of the Office of Dead Letters.

He would be moving into a new position very soon.

Fires broke out all over the warehouse in unison. Disconnected alarms and sabotaged sprinklers let it spread. Letters burned, and as the paper envelopes were destroyed the fragments of will that were attached to them flew free, beginning to swirl around the warehouse in an invisible maelstrom. Christopher opened his mind, calling out, reaching, hoping, and--

They came to him, like millions of miniature planets orbiting and falling towards their star. He could feel each one as they entered him, filling his mind with thoughts and feelings that weren't his own. Fragments, initially, but as they came together they knit themselves into something more complete, a new collective unconsciousness becoming embodied in the person of Christopher Markham.

Already, what he could perceive passed the bounds of nature. Already, his mind moved into places that no mind was meant to occupy. Already, Christopher was becoming a god. The God of Dead Letters.

Six Points

The chair used to be scary, like a cross between one of those old-fashioned hair dryers from beauty salons in old videos and something from the Spanish Inquisition, but after three months Amanda sat down without any qualms. The needles snaking their way into her skull were scary, too, at first, but it was amazing to Amanda how quickly she could get used to being injected with microscopic amounts of a potent (and highly targeted, the company doctor assured her) bio-toxin. Ignoring the sensation, Amanda passed the time by starting into a small pile of fashion magazines. One of the ads captured her image and superimposed six different hairstyles over her own. Amanda flipped between them, wondering if she could convince the tech to make her hair grow out red after she got off shift.

Fifteen minutes later, Amanda stood and shook her head from side to side like they had shown her in the training session her first day. Her hair fell all at once, trying and failing to stay rooted in follicles that were no longer alive. A jet of compressed air blew down from a vent above her, automatically sweeping stray strands from her face and clothing as a hemispherical cleaning bug slid out of a recess in the far wall to gobble up what had been left on the floor.

Amanda made her way to her station, and sat down in front of the same technician she had sat down in front of for the last three months. She didn't know his name, and didn't really care to. She wasn't even entirely sure the techs were human behind their surgical masks. The techs never really fraternized with the subjects, except maybe for one or two trivial warnings about the procedure.

"You done antlers before, right?"

"Yeah, I already know about the neck brace."

The worst part about it was she couldn't move her head to read her magazine. She had to hold her arms out straight at shoulder level, like a zombie who was really interested in Cosmo, and that made it difficult to pass the four hours of her shift. It didn't hurt, though, when it came time to cut the antlers off. They usually slipped an anesthetic in with the genetically recombined follicle transplants and accelerated growth factors and all that. Besides, how else would some hick in Iowa or wherever get a nice set of antlers for his den? Kill some poor defenseless animal? No thank you!

It could be worse. She could have been assigned to steaks.