Moments before Marigold and Maxwell were transformed into a multi-colored splat on the side of the passing the train, a small portal slid open and swallowed them whole. Before Maxwell could make sense of the strange combination of acrobatics and locomotive engineering that were involved in his rescue, he found himself lying in a heap next to Marigold in an empty boxcar. He lay still for a moment and tried to make sense of his journey from a purgatorial spa to the rusted-out floor of a floating locomotive. No sense came. The floor below him was patched together from wooden boards, metal plates, and whatever else had been at hand. Some of these panels looked permanently wet. Others looked as if they were holding on for dear life as the train rattled along. Whatever had been stored in here before had left the whole place smelling of vinegar and rotten apples.

Maxwell tried to resist the urge to hyperventilate by consoling himself that he was not dead, though this was a diminishingly minor consolation.

“Alright, up,” Marigold said, dusting herself off and getting to her feet.”

“Just—I need a moment—a moment, please.”

Marigold sighed but let him rest. She reached into her bag and pulled out a thick, round object and set it down on the floor. It swivelled around in a circle as if it were getting its bearings.

“Move your foot, frog, I can’t see him,” the object said as it maneuvered around Marigold. It looked up at Maxwell with the flashing red sensor in the center of its glossy, black casing. It was another robot. This one didn’t have a face.

“So, this is him, huh?” the robot said. “What’s that black stuff on his head?”

“Don’t be stupid, you know what hair is,” Marigold replied.

The robot continued to study Maxwell’s head. “I guess, but it’s so thick on top and all patchy and thin around his mouth. I’m not sure I like it. He looks messy.”

“Are you a vacuum cleaner?” Maxwell asked.

“Absolutely not,” the vacuum cleaner said. “I am a localized IT chatbot that just happens to be housed in an autonomous cleaning unit at the moment. I was forced inside this frame for lack of options. It was the only receptacle available at Monitoring and Control. Typically, I help with troubleshooting. Marigold came to consult with me, and I realized she was going to need my help. We were forced to improvise.”

“Right,” Maxwell said, processing very little of the information he had just been given. “Do you have a name? The last robot didn’t have a name, at least not at first,” Maxwell said.

“I just told you, I’m IT, as in eye-tee. It’s a function and a name. By the way, don’t lump me in with those other robots. I’m different. How are you holding up?” IT asked.

“Oh, uh, well, you know. I’m glad I’m not dead. If I’m really not dead . . .”

“Right, right, of course. Yeah, it must be overwhelming.”

“Yeah,” Maxwell agreed. He was wary. Different or not, he wasn’t quite ready to trust another robot just yet, and this one kept getting closer, studying his face.

“I guess you might cry, huh?”

“What?”

“Crying. I heard humans do it when they’re feeling overwhelmed.”

“Uh—I don’t think I’m going to cry.”

IT made a tutting sound. “I’ve always wanted to see someone cry.”

“What’s going on?” Maxwell said, looking up at Marigold.

“Ignore it,” she replied. “It was trapped in a computer until about two hours ago.”

“This is all very new to me,” IT said. “Very exciting. Videos don’t do it justice at all.”

Maxwell stood up straight and scanned his body to see if he’d broken anything in the jump. He was sore but mostly undamaged.

“Why are you both helping me?” Maxwell asked.

“Not here,” Marigold said. She motioned for Maxwell to stand up and walked toward a door that led to the front of the train and disappeared through it. Maxwell and IT followed behind, crossing a short gangway connection and entering a new segment of the locomotive.

Like everything on the train, the dining car they entered was in an advanced state of dilapidation. Pipes hung from the ceiling and dripped a mysterious brown liquid below. Miscellaneous refuse and a thick layer of grime had colonized the floor. At either end of the car, someone had hacked two triangular windows into the wall. They leaked a harsh white light into the dark car. There were tables and chairs arranged at random intervals, and across one wall was a bar where something large was smiling at Maxwell.

It appeared to be a sentient tangerine—a dimpled orange sphere with humanoid features that included jagged white teeth, a triangular nose, and black pits for eyes. The nightmare was smiling and waving in a terrifying attempt to seem welcoming. Maxwell wanted to scream but waved back instead. His hand hung in the air for an awkward amount of time.

“I see you found your boy,” the tangerine said.

“Here’s his ticket,” Marigold replied. She retrieved a small green piece of paper from her apron and set it down on the bar.

K thanked Marigold and turned his attention to Maxwell. “Hey there, human. I’m K, and you’re standing in the Backend’s number one cafe, transportation, and smuggling service.”

“Number one, according to whom?” Marigold asked.

“Everyone, Goldie, everyone. Now, what can I get you?”

“Just coffee,” Marigold said, answering for Maxwell who was still struggling to reckon with his new reality.

K reached out a hand and pulled a series of ropes and levers. A complex Rube-Goldberg machine of tubes, weights, and gears spun, tilted, and whirred into action. Two tin cups fell on the table at the far end of the car, and a black liquid streamed into them from the ceiling. Marigold thanked K and took a seat. Maxwell sat across from her, a faint glimmer of hope in his eyes. Everything might finally start making sense.

“First off, we don’t know why you’re here,” Marigold began.

As far as explanations went, it was not a promising start. Maxwell also did not know why he was there. He did not even know what here was.

“More importantly, there’s only so much we can tell you. Our goal is to get you back where you belong. For that reason, it would be best if you knew as little about this place as possible. You’ve already seen more than enough.”

“Of the afterlife?” Maxwell asked.

There was a long pause. Marigold looked down at IT and then over to K before returning her gaze to Maxwell. “Right, yes, the afterlife,” she said.

“But I’m not dead?”

“As far as we can tell. This place, the, uh, afterlife, well, a computer network, runs it. It seems to have made a mistake.”

“The System didn’t just make a mistake,” IT added. “It’s broken.”

“Because of me?”

“Possibly,” Marigold said. “We’re not sure, but IT is confident that if the robots back at the Spa processed you, we would never find out.”

Maxwell thought about all of this for a moment. “I don’t understand,” he said at last.

“Which part do you not understand?”

“Um, I’m not dead?”

Marigold pursed her lips.

“You’re terrible at this, frog,” IT said from the foot of the table. “Don’t worry, you’re not dead, but you would’ve been if the robots got you. They call it processing since you’re already supposed to be dead when you arrive here, but there’s dead and there’s gone. We stopped you from becoming the latter. Only the weird thing is you’re not even the former. That’s where the System stoppage comes in. When you showed up here, the computer that runs your side of the universe shut down.”

“My side of the universe?”

Marigold glared down at IT.

“What do you mean, my side of the universe?” Maxwell asked.

Marigold spoke before IT had the chance. “As I said, there are limits to what we can tell you. Parts of this place are the afterlife, parts are—”

“You’re in the Universal Backend,” IT interrupted. “The place where everything comes from, and everything goes. It’s—”

“Stop it,” Marigold said. “What are you going to do if he goes back home and tells everyone?”

“Who cares? Nobody’s going to believe him.”

Marigold and IT fell into an argument about several things that Maxwell did not understand. He might’ve been able to piece some of it together from context if he was better at focusing, but he was having flashbacks to family road trips where his parents had spent the long hours between pit stops screaming about things that had happened before he was born. Then, as now, Maxwell tried to make himself as small as possible and waited for it to stop.

Eventually, Marigold turned back to Maxwell. “Fine, like the vacuum said, this is the other side of the universe. It keeps everything running, but that’s all you need to know.”

“And how’s he supposed to make sense of all the places we have to go?” IT said. “Look, your world moves forward because of what happens here. There’s the place where things happen—that’s you—and then there’s the place that generates the possibilities of the happenings—that’s us. You’ve moved from one to the other.

Maxwell thought about this for a moment. “I don’t get it.”

“Hmm, not too quick is he, frog?” IT paused, then spoke very slowly to Maxwell. “Do you know gravity?”

“Of course, I know gravity. It makes things fall down.”

“Kind of, I mean, sure. Let’s go with that. Well, gravity doesn’t just happen on its own. Some kind of mechanism generates it. We’re in the place where those mechanisms operate. It’s called the Backend. When the gravity engines in the Backend run properly, things, well, as you say, they ‘fall down’ in the Frontend.”

“Backend and Frontend—those are computer terms, right?” Maxwell asked.

“They’re new,” Marigold replied. “This used to be called the Backstage, before that just the Back.”

K chuckled from behind the bar, “Human-eating times,” he muttered.

Maxwell had been unaware the tangerine was listening. Marigold looked over at K with a stern expression and shook her head. K shrugged and began to polish a glass.

“But does that mean everything is just a program? That’s what you’re saying, right? My world is some kind of virtual space?”

“No,” Marigold said.

“Yes,” K said.

“Sort of,” IT said. “The universe has always had a front and back. Order has to come from somewhere. Otherwise, everything would just be chaos. We generate everything that stops the universe from being an indecipherable jumble, but that doesn’t make your world virtual and ours real. It’s just two different kinds of real, or rather two parts of the same real.”

“So, my world is a simulation of yours?”

“You’re not listening,” IT said. “A simulation would suggest imitation, but there’s only one universe. It just has two sides. You produce new moments, and we produce the conditions that allow for those moments. When stars explode, or birds migrate, or two atoms bond, that happens because the Backend has created the conditions that allow it to happen. What are you not getting?”

Everything was what Maxwell was thinking, but he was afraid of what new insults the vacuum cleaner might throw out if he admitted it.

K called out from behind the bar. “We’re the soil, you’re the plant.”

“Huh,” Maxwell said, understanding, at least somewhat, for the first time. “That kind of makes sense.”

“No, no,” IT said. “Don’t listen to him. That’s a terrible analogy. We’re more like a series of digital and analog modules that cause minerals and organic matter to cohere into soil, and then another series of modules that dictate the conditions in which a plant will grow from it.”

“Do you know what an analogy is?” Marigold asked.

“How dare you,” IT replied.

Marigold continued, “What K said is fine, Maxwell.”

Maxwell thought about what he had been told and tried to force the jagged, confusing pieces together into something legible. “OK, I’ll pretend I get it. I kind of, sort of understand what you’re saying about universal generation or whatever, but why giant frogs and talking tangerines?”

“I ain’t no tangerine. I’m a sun god, or I used to be until your lot forgot about me,” K said.

Marigold clasped her face in her webbed hands. “Great, alright, let’s just tell him everything.”

Maxwell turned around in his chair to look at K. “God?”

“That’s right.”

“Of the sun?”

“A god of a sun,” Marigold corrected. “There are dozens of sun gods in the Backend.”

“Doesn’t make us any less godly,” K said. “This place has always been the source of your monsters and demons and what have you. We lived in this place and worked in yours until you stopped needing magic to explain the world. Then we started to run things behind the scenes.”

“What changed?” Maxwell asked.

“You did,” replied Marigold. “Our—”

She was interrupted by a whirring sound at her feet. She and Maxwell looked down to see that IT had begun to vacuum the floor of the dining car.

“I thought you weren’t a cleaning robot,” Marigold said.

“Well, apparently my explanations aren’t needed, and this place is filthy,” IT replied. “Keep talking. I can do two things at once.”

Maxwell lifted his feet to let the robot pass.

“As I was saying, our work reflects your understanding of the universe. The complexities of the planets’ orbit around the sun only needed to be generated once people looked at it closely. The more observations you make, the more physical laws we need to generate.”

“Personally, I miss hauling the sun across the heavens. I ain’t ashamed to admit I liked the worship,” K said.

“That’s ridiculous. The sun never really moved across the sky. People back then just didn’t understand the reality of what was going on.”

“Humans have always created new realities by observing them. The Earth was always going to move around the sun, but until you noticed it, other mechanisms were at work,” Marigold said.

“And this is where the mechanisms come from? You make the universe work?”

“And we do more than that. We have our own lives. Some of us do very little to keep things turning,” Marigold said. Her gaze moved back to K.

“Hey, we can’t all get cushy Caretaking jobs. Everybody has to get paid. You have your work and I have mine. I’m lucky to have anything the way things have been going.”

“He means the computers and the robots,” Marigold said. “The same System that runs your half of the universe controls the infrastructure in ours. It’s been causing problems.”

“Like me,” Maxwell asked. “I’m here because of some sort of glitch.”

“Runtime error,” IT said, turning its attention away from a stubborn blob of grease. “But that’s all we know for now. I can’t be sure until the System is up and running again. I would guess it’s some type of memory allocation issue, but all I can say for certain is that you shouldn’t be here.”

“Then I can just go home, right? I mean, if I’m not dead, you could just drop me off back at my apartment.”

Everyone in the dining car paused. For a moment, all eyes and sensors were on Maxwell.

“What is it?”

“At the moment, there’s no home for you to return to,” Marigold said.

“What does that mean?”

“Tell him the whole truth, frog,” IT said.

“Yes, yes. I was just about to.”

She took a deep sip of her coffee.

“It’s true that you haven’t died, but the fact is, nobody has died, not in the last day. Everything has stopped in the Frontend, and if we can’t fix the problem, then it will stay stalled until the temporal reserves run out. When that happens, your world and ours, the entire universe, will disappear.”

 

* Side Note I *

K’s train was one of the few untouched by the Backend’s system outage. It had been constructed by the Adequate Engineering Works (AEW), a company formed during the Great Expansion when several integral parts of universal administration, monitoring, and maintenance were moved to the Backend’s less populated corners. While other companies were linking the frontiers of the Backend with immaculate, luxurious, and extremely expensive transportation routes. The AEW carved out its niche within the fledgling locomotive infrastructure of the Backend. Corporate success was not because of the company’s “stellar record of management and timely results,” as touted in PR documents, but because of the principle embodied in their motto: Let no spare be expensed. True to form, everything the company had built in the last couple hundred years was a hodgepodge of recycled metal and repurposed scrap.

Even the AEW board of directors (a board consisting entirely of a single individual named Dan) was surprised when the Backend’s near-universal system outage turned the company’s thrift into a provisional virtue. While the rest of the “smart” architecture of the Backend’s locomotive network ground to a halt, the AEW’s trains continued to function as poorly as they ever did, which at the moment, was substantially better than just about everything else. Dan had long ago decided that electronic systems were an unnecessary expense, and so, his barely engineered machines, like K’s tastefully named train the Chuggernaught, continued to wobble, jostle, and crash their way down the line, arriving, as promised, within three stops of their intended destination.