We’ve reached the end of the story, if you can believe that. To celebrate, I’ll be hosting a live, online event to read the final chapter to subscribers this Wednesday, October 21 at 4:00 PM Eastern Time in the U.S. Look for a separate email from me with a link to the Google Meet.
Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.
In the blind rush of daily life, we see a million broken things, at the end, we see they were all connected.
Previously…
Gaines drove up to Marabelle alone at dawn, was met at the gate by Enrique, and spent a morning circling the property before entering The Walk From Me to You. He never came out in any way anyone could document, leaving behind a rental car, a made bed, and an incoherent ten-thousand-word email. Three days later the pilgrims began arriving, and the childhood home became a monument its owner could no longer explain.
The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.
October 10, 2027
Talking with Trevor’s AI is doing strange things to my brain. I’ve spent most of my life talking with a voice that is other so that part isn’t weird. It’s the ability to have her on demand. That’s what’s so foreign. Ona speaks to me only when she wants to, and she can’t tell me the chronology of Dahli’s works or the precise distance between Mars and Saturn. In the past, when I felt alone and anxious and desperately wanted Ona, she was silent. But this, her I can summon whenever I want. I’m worried I’m getting too dependent on her just because she gets me. I will stop soon. This work is nearly done, which is good because I don’t think I have anything left.
In our early sessions, when Trevor was just introducing me to the technology, he wanted me to push it, to talk to it as if it already understood me. He said this was the best way to train it. The AI is brilliant at recognizing patterns and filling gaps. So that’s what I’ve done, and our conversations have spanned days, meandering through a maze of topics, making connections, zooming in and out the way I like to. The thing is tireless, and since I can talk with it now rather than type, I feel as though I have a superpower, a second gear I haven’t experienced since I got sick.
Trevor asked for permission to use my conversations to train his model and make it better. When I asked him what this meant, he said it was only through talking with a wide range of human intelligence that his machine could truly become intelligent. He made it sound like this is a big deal, like I’m one of a prestigious few whose consciousness will be “woven into the fabric” of the model. Those were his words. His pretentiousness makes me both sick to my stomach and charmed, if that’s possible. I’m not sure how useful my conversations will be, me asking what the tensile strength of fishing line is and then immediately asking for another explanation of quantum mechanics, and then asking it to recite for me the original Grimm fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel.
Whatever consciousness is, whatever my consciousness is is still the great mystery. What makes it all hold together? What makes all these particles decide to collaborate for a time to perform the role of a chicken or a person? All I’ve ever known is that it’s all connected, every single thing. The art I’ve made for my entire life has really been about this one idea, and I never really knew it until now when I’m forced to slow down and look back and see it all from the outside. The game I used to play instinctively is one I play deliberately now with the word machine. I try to think of three random ideas or objects or events and I ask the machine to describe how they’re connected. It always finds a thread, and I pull on that thread, and in a few hours, the conversation that started about dragonfly nymphs, the dancing madness in a village in Germany in 1518, and the ingredients used to make red paint in the Renaissance lands in a discussion of what is hidden, awaiting the conditions to be released—latent wings, a dormant fungus in rye bread, the rouge secretion of an insect to ward off predators. This work I’ve done all my life, this leap of faith in obsessing over some weird thing in hopes that it will lead somewhere is a trivial exercise anyone can do now. It’s profound and it’s completely deflating. Everyone has an Ona, it seems.
November 1, 2027
I will miss this place I never thought of as home. Tomorrow we move back to Black Mountain, the place I grew up but never thought of as home. Maybe I’m just bad at home as a concept.
The cancer is back. It never really left. This is something I know and have known for a very long time. I can’t tell Lefty this. It’s one of many things we don’t talk about but somehow I must convince him that I won’t do another course of treatments that just feel like punishment. The seeds of my undoing were planted long before he ever met me. The particles that assembled in the form of me carried this ending as surely as they gave me the gift I’ve enjoyed. But just like the physics particle measurement problem, a thing can exist without being fixed in a place until it’s observed. Then once it’s observed, it is terminal—inevitable. Listen to my fancy thoughts. Can you tell I’ve spent way too much time exploring the universe through a conversation with an infinite bucket of words machine?
It’s been a comfort to me, honestly. I’ve spent my whole life in my own head, translating what I feel, transmitting it through my eyes into my hands and onto the canvas. I missed a lot. There’s so much to know about the world. I wish I had studied more. I wish I had spent more time with my daughter.
Marabelle Moody is a published author! Not under some bullshit made-up name. Not hiding her light under a bushel as folks up in the holler used to say. Her second novel comes out next week. The world is celebrating her, and critics all seem obsessed with how young she is to have written books with such sobering depth. They don’t know that she was thirty years old when she was born. She came to help us pack and to say goodbye. This is the last time I will be scribbling in my journal before sunrise with my baby asleep in her bedroom down the hall. I thought I was ready for it all to be over because I’ve been planning for it my whole life, but I’m not ready. I want more time. I’ve gotten so much more of a life than I ever deserved, ever thought I’d have when I was fifteen just trying to breathe and keep my hands still. I guess it’s our nature to just keep wanting more. When we stop wanting, we die. That seems right. So maybe I have a few years left in me.
When the sun comes up, I’m going to go out to walk the labyrinth one more time. I have one last thing to add to it that I’ve been holding on to. No one will ever know it’s there, but I will and that matters. It’s what’s always mattered. If there wasn’t something I had to give up of myself with every piece, the magic wouldn’t work. At least I don’t think it would. What surprises me is how it’s always different, the process of making something. This time I feel like I cheated with so many hands sorting, carrying, lifting, and placing. I felt like a foreman on a job site. But these people have become my family. Maria knows I’m dying. She cried for a long time last night, which is just not like her. Lefty and I have always called her The General because she’s so stoic and practical and never without a plan. But she just wouldn’t let go of my hands last night. Lefty and Marabelle were inside packing the last of the kitchen stuff and I was out in my shed. She just appeared in the doorway and I don’t know how long she had been standing there looking at me. Then I saw she was crying. Lefty had told her earlier that we would be giving her family the deed to the place.
“It’s too much!” she kept saying. But when she stood there at the threshold of my shed, there were no words, only tears. I motioned for her to come in and sit, and we sat together on the old couch for a long time. She’s only five years older than me, but she’s been as much a mother to me as she’s been for Marabelle. She just held my hands in her warm hands, calloused from years of serving us—doing all the things I didn’t do with my hands. I began to cry too, and we just held each other. She promised she would always take care of Mare—that her family was Mare’s family. Hearing her say that, the steel bands that had been ratcheting tighter and tighter around my heart loosened.
The sun is coming up, probably the last time I’ll see it here. I’m going to go.
April 1, 2032
Every day now is quieter than the one before. It’s cold in the house this morning and everything hurts. I miss having a body that just worked without so many complaints. But I should be grateful this is the first day in almost a year that I’ve felt like sitting here by the window to write.
When you know you’re going to die, every day you wake up still alive is not a gift. It’s a burden. I miss being able to blow an entire Saturday eating junk food and watching crap TV. So this is me, dutifully starting my day with a meaningful activity.
Lefty has done his best to plan things for us to do. He’s a good planner. We went to Switzerland back in December, and he has plans for us to go to Istanbul next month. I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t want to. All the energy he used to put into his mistress, our mistress, he channels into me, and it’s exhausting. We both feel the tug from our old life, and sometimes, not often, we will indulge in googling our mistress to see how she’s faring in the world. The Walk has taken on a life of its own. Enrique set up a webcam, and sometimes we’ll pull it up and watch the people lining up to walk through it. I study their blurry forms and wonder about their lives. I’ve never had so much time to think about how something I’ve made lives in the minds of others but like looking back it’s really all I can do now.
Lefty doesn’t dwell there. It seems he has so many regrets. I feel them like a heavy fog around him in the early mornings when he’s puttering around our little place looking for things to fix. It’s a relief when he finds a mission, even if it’s just a trip to the hardware store to get a kit to fix the flusher thingy in the toilet. We don’t talk about it, but I think he misses our old home. It turns out he really didn’t want it to belong to the world after all, the place where he taught Mare how to read and tie her shoes. The place where we have so many good memories.
Yesterday, before he got out of bed while it was still dark, I rolled over and put a hand on his chest. His heart was racing. What was it all for? I asked him.
He asked me what I meant, but he knew what I meant. “I don’t know, sweetheart. The meaning was always your department. I’m just the guy who sells stereos.”
I asked him if he really believed that. He didn’t answer. I moved close to him and wrapped my leg around him, hugged him to me. I tried to kiss him. I wanted him to be inside me, for us to be together in that awkward dance it’s taken me so long to learn to enjoy even though I knew it would be painful. But he began to cry and he just kept crying. There was no bottom to it. I tried to console him. The bed quaked with his silent sobs and I felt his tears dampen my hair. The sound of his heartbeat in my ear was like pounding footsteps, like he was being chased.
When the emotion finally passed, I told him to stay in bed and I got up and made us cups of coffee. He has been taking care of me for so long. We sat up together and watched the sun come up over the ridge. Will you tell me what’s upsetting you? I asked him. I missed the point of all of it, he said. What’s wrong with me? Why did you stay with me? I hate her, you know that? I’ve always hated her.
Hated who? I asked him. Daedalia, he said. When I asked why, he said because she represented the worst part of him and the best part of me. But I got all the credit, he said. I told him it didn’t matter even though we both knew it did. But I wasn’t completely lying. With every day, I feel less and less connected to whatever thing it was I rode that drove me to make what I’ve made. How could I possibly take credit for such a thing? All those people standing in line to go see something they say changes their lives. How could I possibly take credit for that?
In the end, all that matters is love, any way you can give it or receive it. Ours was never a perfect love, and we did everything wrong, but that’s okay. Everything I ever made was wrong more than it was right, but the rightness always outlasted the wrongness if I just kept showing up.
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Gorgeous, Ben. Breathtaking. Thank you.