THE HERMETIC GARBAGE OF JENNY EVERYWHERE
Act I, part I
by Jeanne Morningstar

This is an ongoing story I've been posting on
thejennyeverywhereproject.tumblr.com, writing an average of one segment
per day. (Which in practice varies a lot, but.) I’d been stalled on my
writing for a while and I wanted to write a chaotic, improvisatory piece
where I’d be able to add a little bit to it every day. I decided a Jenny
Everywhere story would be perfect for that.

I’ve made a lot of attempts to write Jenny Everywhere stories that
didn’t work out, including the attempted LNH crossover from ages ago,
but the new and extensive Jenny Everywhere wiki
(jennyeverywhere.fandom.com) and the recent small burst of activity this
Jenny Everywhere Day
(https://www.jennyeverywhereday.com/tagged/2021/chrono) inspired me to
have another go at it. It’s worked out surprisingly well so far, easily
the longest piece I’ve ever written with the character.

A major catalyst for this piece was finally reading all of Michael
Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet. This story involves much more in the way
of sexual content and incendiary politics than previous Jenny Everywhere
stories of mine, in keeping with its inspirations, the
counterculture-inspired Barbelithic roots of the character, and the
general tenor of the historical period in which we are living.

This story involves a number of open source characters and ones from
public domain literature and Golden Age comics; all the attributions
will be gathered in the final post.

====

Josephus telleth us that the semblances of the islands changed
themselves by reason of the divers adventures that by the pleasure of
God befell therein... For, when they had entered into a forest or an
island where they had found any adventure, and they came there another
time, they found holds and castles and adventures of another kind, so
that their toils and travails might not weary them, and also for that
God would that the land should be conformed to the New Law.
--The High History of the Holy Graal, translated by Sebastian Evans

====

I

--and everything was falling apart around her. Shards of time-crystal,
pieces of the fundamental structure of the cosmos glittering like
shattered glass.

She had to pull herself together. Weave the cosmic tapestry back
aright--but every time she tried to pull a thread, it slipped through
her fingers.

Flashes of her lives and memories like fragments of dream vividly
remembered but never fully understood--rendezvouses under the moonlight
and summoning rituals; battles in the sky and card game duels. Through
all that glittering kaleidoscope of possible life, she must focus on
something. If she's everything, she can't be anything. Think, focus--

2021. Jenny rubs her eyes and looks at the google docs screen in front
of her. She knows that there's something important she has to do but
can't remember what...

II

She remembered--a long time ago, longer ago than it felt like it should
be--sitting in front of a test and desperately grabbing for an answer,
then finding herself drifting off into some fantasy about the Three
Musketeers and Dracula. Back then, she really had believed she was some
kind of multiversal adventurer who existed and fought evil in every
universe, sharing the minds and memories of all her counterparts and
sometimes even shifting between worlds. She'd had elaborate fantasies
based on some weird mishmash of 60-80s British counterculture media
(Moorcock, Moore, Morrison and the rest) and half-digested occultism and
quantum physics. Now she was a well adjusted adult, or at least could
pretend to be one; she'd left the whole elaborate fantasy life behind.

She slowly woke up as she drank the coffee and munched on her toast with
jam. She heard Laura stirring on the bed. This universe sucks, but at
least we're friends here, she thought, then violently shook her head,
clearing out the delusions.

"Heya," said Jenny, walking into their bedroom. "I'm going out to the
library in a bit."

"Don't forget to wear a mask," Laura muttered from the bed.

"Don't worry, I won't," said Jenny. She took the huge, bulky gas mask
off the wall and snapped it onto her head. She checked the weather on
her phone; the reality stability was 81%. Time to head out.

III

The sky was a dull staticy grey. Everything was vague and unfocused, too
hot and too loud. A screeching wind howled around that sounded weirdly
like the dialup noise; a world haunted by the wreckage of old
technology. Jenny tried not to take in the world around her as she
walked through it. She ignored all the other gas-masked figures trudging
down the sidewalk, the Chaos-touched homeless denizens huddled in the
streets and parking garages. To get through the daily order of her life,
she had to act like it all didn't exist.

Wasn't she supposed to save this world? Whatever happened to the
Shifter? She'd spent her life waiting for the moment when she'd become a
hero and it had never arrived. But of course, that had been just a dream.

IV

Jenny entered the library, which of course was bigger on the inside.
Keeping a lot of books in one place was dangerous in unstable reality
conditions, so each room was bounded by a carefully maintained magic
circles painted in scarlet. The central area was empty, opening up to a
series of circular terraces rising above, and at the top was a dome
painted with the night sky with the zodiac constellations painted on it
in gold. The librarians shuffled by in their robes and blank white masks.

Activating a glyph on the floor by touching it with her foot and
speaking the right word, Jenny floated up to the second level, which
held the poetry section. She searched through the disparate crowd of
books to find the one she was looking for, the complete poems of Emily
Dickinson. She'd owned a copy of this once but it had gotten lost when
she moved, or the last time reality fell apart.

Jenny sat down on a large armchair, closed her eyes and flipped through
the pages, feeling them flutter under her fingers. She liked to divine
the future by reading Dickinson's poems at random, eschewing more
traditional choices like the I Ching, the Bible or the poems of Vergil.

She knew, though, that she was looking for a particular poem, though she
wouldn't know which one it was until she saw it. Peering through the
lens of the gas mask, she saw it:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –

Something about the words set off a deep resounding echo in her memory.
As she meditated on the words, imagining the house of Possibility, until
she almost felt that she was in another place...

But that feeling was gone as quickly as it had come. Jenny sighed and
put the book down on the armrest. That was when she realized she was no
longer alone.

V

A librarian stood in front of Jenny, deep in their velvet robes woven
with tapestry-like plant patterns in green and gold, their body
concealed beneath a white bodysuit of an unknown material, their face
hidden by a featureless mask of porcelain, the color of a bleached skull.

"Beware!" said the librarian. Its crackling voice seemed to be a
transmission from the distance.

"Huh?"

"Beware the hares of March." Its voice clicked and crackled. "Beware the
march of ideas. Beware of God. Follow the Red Lion. Solve et coagula."

"Okay?" said Jenny. The librarian tried to say something in return, but
it was lost in a storm of static, its voice becoming a thousand voices
speaking over each other. And then it was gone.

VI

Before Jenny could get her book checked out, the chaos alarm blared on.
Everyone got off their sheets and rushed for cover. The shelves shook;
books were falling down from the sky like rain. Jenny found herself
borne on a wave of books, carried into a whirlpool of rustling pages.
The books swallowed her up.

---

Jenny was walking home to her apartment, the library books in her tote
bag. She'd picked up the collected poems of Emily Dickinson for herself,
and a book on time crystals for Laura. She'd also stopped by the bagel
place nearby to grab some bagels and cream cheese.

She knew there was something else important she had to do, but she
couldn't remember what.

VII

Jenny walked in and saw Laura lying dismally on the couch. She patted
her on the head, mussing her red hair. "How goes it?" she said.

"Life goes on, unfortunately," said Laura. "Did you get the book?"

"Sure did!" Jenny handed her the book on time crystals. "OK, so, what
exactly is a time crystal?"

"Well, you can find out by reading the book."

"OK, but explain it to me like I'm five."

"A crystal is a repeating lattice structure in space, and so a time
crystal is a repeated structure in time."

"Huh."

"It's very useful for quantum computing. Or will be, as soon as anyone
actually makes one."

"Ah, OK." Jenny knew there was some part of her that already knew what a
time crystal was, and could explain it properly, but she didn't quite
know how to get to that part of her yet.

XI

Jenny wracked her brain and let out a heavy sigh. "Yeah, I got nothing."

Glendalf frowned in exaggerated disappointment. "Nothing? Doesn't your
mind exist on a level beyond infinity?"

"I guess," said Jenny. "I just haven't been feeling it lately, for
whatever reason."

"It's probably because spacetime is collapsing, I suppose," said Glendalf.

"I guess. I try not to think about it. You kind of have to, just to get
on with the day."

By now, the orcs were done making dinner. Once the feasting was done,
Jenny and Glendalf sat and drank together for a while, and reminisced
about the good old days--battling Lord Grallyx on the astral plane,
besieging the Tower of Zirma with Octobriana, getting high with the
Magician of Mars in Washington to levitate the Pentagon--while the orcs
argued leftist theory and had loud sex.

XII

It was then that Jegrekk Gnashtooth, the Orc computer hacker,
overhearing Jenny's reminiscences of reality shifts past, said "Have you
heard about all those teens reality shifting on tiktok?"

Jenny reflexively groaned at the mention of tiktok, along with everyone
else, even though in another life she was tiktok's most famous
consulting detective.

Jegrekk regaled them all with the story of how teenagers were
hypnotizing themselves into believing they were reality-shifting into a
wizard school to pursue a certain wizarding bad-boy. Some people thought
it was tied to the reality shifting experiments of the CIA. Jenny knew,
of course, that this was all bullshit because reality shifting wasn't
possible anymore.

What Jenny said was, "You could send your mind anywhere you can imagine
and you'd go there? Why can't anyone read another book?"

"It's unfortunate," said Glendalf. "Through her bigotry she's ruined the
good name of magic and alchemy, and made billions of dollars off it."

"You know," said one of the other Orcs, Absoldar, "we could break into
her mansion and steal all her money."

"And," said Jegrekk, "they say that in her basement she keeps the
Legendary Time Crystal!"

"Well that's settled then," said Glendalf. "That's our adventure. Are
you on board, Jenny?"

"Yes," said Jenny. Most of what she felt these days was either anger or
exhaustion, and she was angry now.

XIII

After they'd spent a little bit of time drawing up plans and drinking
some more of the mead Glendalf had brought, the visitors all laid out
their sleeping bags on the apartment floor and went to bed. That night,
Glendalf had a bad acid flashback. He dreamed there were spiders
crawling all over his body. They actually were. That happens sometimes
when you're a wizard. Jenny helped nurse him through it, as he'd helped
her when she was struck by memories of shifting through the overvoid.

The next day, they were all pretty short on sleep but champing at the
bit to get on with it. Jenny and Glendalf packed their things and set
out with four of the orcs--Jegrekk, Absoldar (who'd been a hitman in the
Orc mafia), the con artist J. Barrington Boartusk, and the cat burglar
Agrzaan Lurgpin. The rest of them had all vanished because they were too
many for the narrative to keep track of.

Glendalf rummaged around in his purse and pulled out a miniaturized
airship. Chanting his magic words, he expanded it to full size, and they
all boarded it and set out for Scotland.

XIV

As the airship sailed through the clouds over the ocean, the orcs
regaled Jenny and Glendalf with an ancient song of their history. They
had been formed long ago by a god of great power, who they refused to
name, to conquer the world. In time they had risen up against their
creator and killed him with their own hands. Now every Orc trained for
battle every moment of their life, for the moment of their death when
they went to the afterworld to battle their god and ensure he would
never return. They were famed all over the world for their strength and
skill at arms, but the orcs gathered here were of the opinion that other
kinds of strength--strength of mind and imagination--would be useful in
the unending battle too. Although, as Absoldar pointed out, it never
hurts to have a big gun.

Reaching Scotland, they passed over a thick forest, where they saw
figures scuttling which may or may not have been human and heard
snatches of song and cries that might have been of terror or ecstasy.
These were the woods of Faerie.

"We should touch down here," said Jegrekk.

"Why?" said Absoldar.

"Don't you want to hear what's making all those noises?"

"Not really," said Absoldar.

"We could pick up more treasure there!" said J. Barrington Boartusk.

"Or get ourselves killed," said Agrzaan. "We've got to keep our eyes on
the prize: the Legendary Time Crystal. Isn't that right, Glendalf?"

"Well," said Glendalf, "I'm thinking maybe we should stop here."

"What?"

"Well, what's the point of an adventure without digressions?"

Jenny, as was so often the case, could see both sides of the issue.
"OK," she said. "Let's come back here after we get the Time Crystal and
the rest of the moolah, deal?" The others uneasily agreed to that, and
the ship sailed on to its destination.

XV

The plan was simple. Jenny and J. Barrington Boartusk would pretend to
be filmmakers making a documentary about the writer that would assert
her side of the story. She would never be able to resist the opportunity
to unload her petty resentments for hours and hours. Meanwhile, Jagrekk
would hack into the mansion's computer network and transfer all the
money from her bank accounts and Glendalf would take care of the magical
defenses, while Jenny would join with Agrzaan in sneaking into the
basement and stealing the crystal itself, administering the coup de grace.

The ship closed in on the mansion, a Georgian edifice with bizarre
Gothic excrescences built onto it. It had been built up into something
larger than a castle, joined to several towers and treehouses. It might
have been charming once but had been built up into a huge, bloated
structure that was a disastrous combination of banality and bad taste,
aptly mirroring, as Glendalf noted, the state of her book series.

XVI

The plan went off without a hitch. The billionaire writer was so eager
to pontificate about why trans women were the greatest threat to free
speech that she scarcely noticed everything going on under her nose.
Soon, Jenny and Agrzaan had snuck in through the mansion's elaborate
network of secret passages and made their way to the basement.

The endless rooms of the basement were stacked with detritus and
memorabilia of the British Empire—old photographs, school ties, military
uniforms, fist edition Enid Blytons.

Jenny grimaced and slammed a door shut. “It’s got to be here somewhere,
right?”

“Shhhh!” said Agrzaan. “We're nearJust be careful. Don't make a noise!”

Just then, Jenny heard a harsh beeping sound. It was her phone.

It was her mom, texting her from the end of time. “Goddamn it, not now!”
said Jenny.

Agrzaan sshed her but it was too late. The alarms were blaring. She
heard a hideous clanking noise coming their way.

XVII

It was a vintage East India Company mobile drone cannon, which had been
restored and polished with considerable effort. The large gatling gun
emplacement clanked awkwardly on its spider legs, but Jenny knew from
many battles where she'd faced such things how dangerous they could be.

Agrzaan pulled a smoke bomb from his pocket and threw it at the drone,
confusing its sensors. Jenny whipped the scarf off her neck and dodged
and weaved around the drone, entangling it. Its heavy, swift-moving
spider-legs had a nasty kick to them, but Jenny shifted between the
different martial arts styles she'd learned in her many lives and had it
on the ropes. Agrzaan finished it off by stabbing it in the engine with
his thunderbolt-iron dagger. The drone screamed, spun around and fell to
the floor.

By now, though, the alarms were going off and all the other security
measures of the basement had been activated. They rushed off to the
vault where the Time Crystal was held to take care of it as quickly as
possible.

The vault was already open. The case that held the Legendary Time
Crystal was suspended in midair, surrounded by laser cannons, above a
pool full of robotic sharks, but none of that mattered because it was
empty.

Just then, Jenny got a call from Jagrekk. "Jenny, Agrzaan," he said,
"the billionaire's dead. Someone snuck into the house disguised as one
of her servant robots and shot her. They--"

"I know," said Jenny dismally. "Whoever it was got the Time Crystal."

"Indeed," said a voice from behind them. Jenny turned around. There was
a woman in a sort of deep blue Napoleonic military uniform with a white
cape, holding a sword at her side. It was, of course, Laura.

I.

When Jenny woke up, she was alone.

She felt her face pressed down into sand, the tide washing over her
feet. She heard the seagull cry above her. She pulled herself off the
ground, brushed the sand off her, and looked around. This world stirred
no memory in her, though she'd been washed up by many oceans.

Sitting down on the log of driftwood, she tried to assemble everything
she'd seen and done into some kind of coherent framework. It was hard.
She remembered the multiverse collapsing, the time crystal, the
white-masked librarian's frustratingly vague prophecies--there was
something about a hare and something about a lion, and the hare was bad
and the lion was good, or something like that?

"Why do these things keep happening to me?" she said, resting her head
on her hands with her elbows pressed into her legs.

II.

She looked over the shoreline and the seemingly endless ocean. This
appeared to be a fairly conventional Earth. There were no signs of human
habitation here; seashells were scattered all over the beach bu tno
bottles or other junk. No lion or rabbit anywhere in sight.

"OK," said Jenny, "am I in another book? I think I went into a book
earlier, but I'm not sure. The books are all mixed up now, just like
everything else." There was no one to hear her talk except the seagulls,
who wheeled through the air about her and squawked grumpily.

Jenny rummaged around in her pack to see what she had with her. Most of
her provisions she'd left on Glendalf's ship, so she'd have to make do.
Lots of safecracking tools, which weren't very useful now; some trail
mix and protein bars, a flashlight and--ah. There, buried deep under
everything else and miraculously intact, was the Poems of Emily Dickinson.

III.

Closing her eyes, she flipped through the well-loved pages once more.
She opened and her finger had arrived at:

Funny — to be a Century —
And see the People — going by —
I — should die of the Oddity —
But then — I'm not so staid — as He —

He keeps His Secrets safely — very —
Were He to tell — extremely sorry
This Bashful Globe of Ours would be —
So dainty of Publicity —

Well. Jenny put the book back in the pack and rubbed her eyes. Emily's
guidance, much as she appreciated it, was not always very
straightforward. Sometimes it took a lot of thinking what the relevance
of each poem was supposed to be. And yet--

Jenny saw a strange, small rodent skittering in the grass and realized
that this poem had a very direct, immediate practical application.

For that mammal could only be the insect-eating shrewlike creature that
after many millions of years evolved into homo sapiens. She recognized
it immediately from the memories of all her selves that were dinosaurs.
This was a world devoid of humans, so she'd have to wait around until
some of them came into being before she could get help.

She would put herself into a trance state and speed time up by
meditating. With the state spacetime was in, she just might get away
with it.

IV.

She found a secluded cave nearby in the crags jutting over the ocean.
She sat down by the cave and, speaking a mantra known only to herself,
let time slip by.

She felt a strange sense of deja vu as she saw day and night pass by
with increasing speed like a time-lapse film, turning to a constant
blink on and off. Maybe she'd read a story about something like this
recently. Well, with all of spacetime being collapsed now, she supposed
that was inevitable. This was not the time for originality.

In her mind's eye, her awareness expanded outward, she saw a village
gradually grow up around the shoreline, sending out ships into the
ocean, and that village became a city with high towers. Some of the
people came into the cave and ran out, raving about the sage/prophet/god
who dwelled within. She saw images of herself spring up all over the
city. She knew now was not the time to wake up. She hated it when people
started religions based on her.

Then an army came from over the shore, swarmed the beach and razed the
city to the ground. They burned down all the images and wrecked the
shrines. By now, a rockslide had sealed her cave away. Then a new army
came in and destroyed the old one, and a new city was built, and so it
went on for a while. Jenny wondered what stories they were telling about
the woman who rested in the cave.

Now huge metal towers had sprung up, but then there were explosions and
cries of pain and the empty towers rusted away into nothing. It was too
late. The red sun grew larger and ate the sky. The stars began to go
out. Time was moving faster and faster, and Jenny knew that she would
soon reach the End of Time. The thought terrified her, but not for the
same reasons it would others.

The earth had crumbled away, and Jenny was suspended in an endless,
starless void. There was a silence and a stillness. Jenny knew that the
End of TIme was upon her.

"Jenny? What are you doing?" said a voice.

It was, of course, her mother.

V.

The image of the tall, imposing woman with her dark hair cut short,
wearing a trim white suit, was famous all over the hypercontinuum:
Amelia Midnight, transtemporal adventuress, Captain of the hypership
Zephyrus, and, in a number of different continua, one of the mothers of
Jenny Everywhere.

The details varied, as they so often did. Sometimes she was Jenny's
biological mother, sometimes she was her father, sometimes she found the
infant Jenny adrift in the Overvoid after making an emergency shift. The
result was the same: she hid Jenny away on the secret interdimensional
island of Barbelo where she kept those she wished to protect. There,
Jenny was raised by her other mother, a woman Amelia had rescued from
dire peril, and at times other partners of theirs as well. Her other
mother's name in those cases was usually the Princess Katerina Corwin,
and it was her last name that Jenny often took.

Growing up, Jenny had heard much about her mother's adventures, her
battles against tyrant kings and elder gods, even facing Abstracts
themselves. Inevitably, one day Jenny ran away from home without telling
any of her parents. Or someone--sometimes it was her fellow shifter
Penny Anywhere, or Laura Drake--arrived there and Jenny became curious
about the outside world. Or the Island of Barbelo had been destroyed by
one of Captain Midnight's many enemies, and Jenny had been its only
survivor.

Regardless, all those story-paths had converged and led her here. The
Island of Barbelo was long gone. The Zephyrus had another Captain. The
Princess Katerina lay in a glass coffin, still awaiting a cure for the
curse her own mother had cast on her. And Amelia Midnight had settled
down and achieved a kind of respectability, becoming an Archon of the
Redoubt, passing on her scarf and goggles to her daughter.

VI.

"I'm fine, Mom," said Jenny. "I have this under control."

Amelia, Archon Midnight, her mother, raised a single eyebrow. "You
shouldn't be adventuring about when the hypercontinuum has been
collapsed like this."

"Well I can't just sit down and do nothing!" said Jenny, throwing up her
hands.

"We've been working to deal with this situation already," said her
mother. "You could have disrupted the whole thing even worse than it
already was. If you'd just let me know--"

"Tried working through official channels?" said Jenny. "That's not what
you would have done, when you were wearing this scarf and these goggles."

"And I would have been wrong. There's a lot I understand now, now that I
have responsibilities, that I didn't then."

"Maybe I understand things you never did."

Her mother sighed. "I'm sorry, Jenny, I just worry about you." She
patted her daughter awkwardly on the shoulder. "Let's let this go for now."

"OK." Jenny smiled, a little bit. "Let's head back."

They walked over to the station on the outskirts of Redoubt, almost
deserted, and waited for the Null-Train to come. All around them
stretched the endless void of the almost-dead universe. It looked dull
and foggy somehow rather than truly dark.

VII.

The Null-Train came to a stop with a ghostly screech. Jenny and her
mother stepped onboard the train (which was currently an art-deco
locomotive which would be elegant except for the rivet-covered dull
green of its skin); it was completely empty except for themselves. They
stepped onboard, sat down and talked together for a while. Mostly,
Jenny's mother lectured her about recent developments in Redoubt while
Jenny listened and nodded along.

Redoubt, a city of infinite size (but a smaller infinity than the
universe itself) was composed of bits of timelines that had been
destroyed or erased, chewed up and spit out by the hypercontinuum. The
train took them past the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Sankore
Madrassah of Timbuktu, the Council House of Prophetstown, the Triple
Towers of Neo New York, to a small and unassuming piece of a city that
Jenny knew well: Westbrook, Wisconsin.

On 2021-12-05 18:57, Jeanne Morningstar wrote:
> Now huge metal towers had sprung up, but then there were explosions and
> cries of pain and the empty towers rusted away into nothing. It was too
> late. The red sun grew larger and ate the sky. The stars began to go
> out. Time was moving faster and faster, and Jenny knew that she would
> soon reach the End of Time. The thought terrified her, but not for the
> same reasons it would others.
>
> The earth had crumbled away, and Jenny was suspended in an endless,
> starless void. There was a silence and a stillness. Jenny knew that the
> End of Time was upon her.
>
> "Jenny? What are you doing?" said a voice.
>
> It was, of course, her mother.

That's one of the most inventive ways of Getting Out of Oblivion that
I've ever seen. It ranks up there with Thanos getting trapped in
oblivion, and committing suicide so Death could literally save him.

And in general I like where this series is going.

--
-- (signed) Scott Eiler 8{D> ------ http://www.eilertech.com/ -------

"Your Royal Highness, instead of devoting yourself exclusively
to Minerva, should, instead, rather offer sacrifice at the altars
of Bacchus, Orpheus, Venus, and Morpheus."

- Advice to Prince Duarte of Portugal. From "The golden age of
Prince Henry the Navigator", by Joaquim Pedro Oliveira Martins.
Coming soon to Project Gutenberg.

VIII.

Jenny headed up to her apartment on North Wintle Street in Westbrook,
Wisconsin. In one set of continua, she'd grown up here in the suburbs
raised by generally well-meaning white parents. It tended to pick up a
lot of strange hyperdimensional phenomena for an unassuming city, so
Jenny spent a lot of her life here, even in the worlds where her parents
had cut her off.

She shared her apartment with Julie Jacobs, her sister, who'd recently
become an instagram influencer. She passed back and forth between a
large number of careers which usually tended to end in disaster, from
landscaper to circus acrobat to giant robot pilot.

"How was your adventure?" said Julie, scribbling in her journal as Jenny
walked in

"OK, I guess," said Jenny. She let out a heavy sigh.

"What is it?"

"It's Mom," said Jenny. "I mean, not our Mom. Archon Midnight."

"Oh, right," said Julie. She was wearing a deep blue necklace, glowing
faintly, which nicely complemented her red hair. A gift from her latest
boyfriend or girlfriend, no doubt.

"I know I'm not being fair," said Jenny, slumping down in her chair
after putting on the tea. "There's so many worlds where my parents are
dead, or not talking to me--like the one you're from--and I should be
thankful she even talks to me, but..."

"I mean, she is one of the most powerful people in this city. Seems
completely fair to me."

"Yeah," said Jenny. "We had a talk, I tried to be all hero-y about it
but couldn't really keep it up. I've stood up to so many rulers and
politicians all over the hypercontinuum, but around her I just feel...
argh."

"It's OK," said Julie, stirring up the tea for her. "So my date's coming
over in a bit. I'll be heading out to the seaside. Try not to let the
apartment get burned down while I'm away, OK?"

"It won't. Nothing happens here anymore," said Jenny.

IX.

There was a knock at the door. Julie opened it, and in stepped a
gloomy-looking individual dressed in a black suit, with black lipstick
and nail polish.

"This is Death," said Julie. "I think you've met, right?"

"We have," said Jenny uneasily.

"Hello," said Death in their deep sepulchral voice. They did not look
Jenny in the eye.

"Well, you two have fun," said Jenny. "I'll, uh, sit here a while." She
watched as the two walked out arm in arm and ran the calculations on how
long this one was going to last. "The worm doth woo the mortal, death
claims a living bride," she quoted to herself.

X.

"Well, I'm right back where I started," said Jenny to the empty
apartment. "Why am I so depressed lately?" She tapped her fingers on the
table beside her reclining chair. "Everything's the wrong way around. I
should be able to shift between different stable realities. Instead, I'm
stuck in one place and reality is shifting around me. And now I'm at one
of the few points of relative stability left in the collapsed cosmos,
and I hate that too." She let out another sigh.

She tried to distract herself by checking her phone. She'd made the
mistake of setting an alert for "multiverse," and from her current
21st-century-ish positionality it was mostly articles from
bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping entertainment news sites about the next
phase of Marvel movies, Space Jam 2 or other cinematic franchises. She
turned off the phone in disgust. Maybe she should read something.

She looked at her bookshelf, past the Plasmanomicon, the Jack Kirby
Eternals omnibus, the special edition of the Bible with all the sex
scenes left in, the collection of unfinished stories about her from
across the continua. She picked out Moorcock's Cornelius Quartet and
flipped open to The Condition of Muzak, on page 704:

Perhaps it did have something to do with losing his faith in rock music.
The best performers had either died, decayed or fractured, leaving
behind them a vocabulary of musical ideas, lyrical techniques, and
subject matter, styles and body languages which had never been given the
opportunity to mature but which had, instead, been aped by the very
world of Showbiz against which they had originally revolted. And
everything else was just the same--a load of oily entrepreneurs...

She slammed the book shut and folded in on herself.

What was once a tool of freedom and imagination became another vector
for the accumulation of capital. That was the way it was with
everything--music, the internet, the multiverse, book publishing itself.
Well, there was nothing she could do about it, except go out and get
some more jam for her toast, maybe.

XI.

Beware the march of ideas, the creepy librarian had said. All kinds of
ideas were marching through Jenny's brain, and she needed to focus on
something definite and concrete to manage them. Like toast.

So she headed out to the convenience store the next block over. It was a
beautiful day, but her phone was sending her incessant alerts about
chaos flows from ARCHONET, the computer program that administered the
city with its select conclave of organic advisors. Going about their
daily activities and pretending as best they could that nothing was
wrong, everyone in the city was walking a razor-wire's edge. Grigoris
were stationed all over the city to keep watch. Jenny could see the
winged, many-eyed mechanoids in the distance, patrolling the perimeter
of the local farmer's market.

XII.

In front of her in line in the convenience store stood a balding
middle-aged man in a ratty jacket. "That'll be 14 dollars, please," said
the cashier.,

"Sure," said the man, "give me a minute." He rummaged around in his
purse to pay the cashier--he only seemed to have small change on him, no
bills. "I'm just--fuck you!" He slammed his fist on the counter. "Fuck
you! You're ripping me off!" His flesh began to quiver and warp itself.
Spines of bone grew out of his back. "Blood and souls! Blood and souls"
He screamed. Then abruptly he settled down, the spines retracting
slightly. "OK, give me a minute here. Have a good day." He put the
change down on the counter. "Blood and souls!" he screamed again, and
stumbled off. The battle-hardened cashier hadn't reacted at all.

"Sorry about that," said the cashier. "He just got out of the halfway
house. I'll talk to his case worker about that." Jenny nodded. She
thought back to all the time she'd worked the cashier and daydreamed
about being a pirate.

Just then, an Grigori hovered into the room. Jenny tensed and froze up.
"There has been an incident here," it said. Its voice was like a train
screaming to a halt.

"It's all taken care of," said the cashier, "really." He did his best to
explain the whole thing, only stumbling a little. The Grigori stayed
there and surveyed the room a while, fixing its eyes on Jenny, then
buzzed away.

XIII.

I can't go on like this, thought Jenny, I can't go on like this. She had
to start a revolution against all this, like she always did, but where
to begin?

She sat down on the park bench by the courthouse and slumped. After a
while, someone sat down beside her. It was her ancient enemy, Typhaon,
the Fallen One, the All-Devouring Chaos, in the form of a glowing,
seething green orb.

"Oh god, what is it now," said Jenny.

"Jenny! At last, I have found you when you are at your weakest! Now, I
will destroy you once and for all!"

Jenny shook her head. "I can't do this, sorry. It's just not the same."

The Fallen One floated silently for a moment. "I suppose you're right."

They sat together for a while. "I can't go on like this," Jenny
eventually said. "I have to do something, even if it's just for me."

The Fallen One bobbed up and down, nodding.

"Good luck," it seethed. "But one day, I will return and you will pay
for everything!"

"Mhmm," said Jenny. She got off the bench and headed back to her apartment.

XIV.

No one really knew what had caused the continuum collapse. Some said it
was an aftereffect of the Great Webcomic Crossover Wars of 2007, or the
various crisis events which happened in the big superhero universes,
which had been growing in frequency. Some said it was part of the
natural life cycle of the hypercontinuum. Whatever had caused it, its
effects could not be denied.

Jenny knew that she had to find a way to escape, to take apart the
system she was trapped in. That was hard enough when she was an infinity
of people working together across the hypercontinuum. Now she was just
one. But she still had all the knowledge and wisdom of all her other
selves in the multiverse that had been, and she knew one thing: she had
to start small, find something she could do and then build on that.