It was morning and the boy was late. It was too early for anything alive to stir, but everything was serving to get in his way: the stop lights, the dribble of early runners, even the lampposts he wished from the side-walk. And it was raining.

If the walls of the bus stop were paper he would have torn them apart. The tail lights of the bus bounce away from him in the distance, he sprints after them for a block but eventually stops. He lumbers back to the bus stop with a head echoing curses, everything – that bush! – upset him. At the bus stop, he settles, sodden, on a bench made to comfort people made of stone. The curses in his head finally quiet and he looks around, but only finds a history written in litter.

“Why me,” he says into the rain.

He is not alone. There on the ground, a styrofoam cup, still full. He lifts a foot to kick it, but before he commits, its brown contents ripple. He rubs his eyes.

“Why anyone,” says the cup. “If you had just woken earlier, if you had just checked your phone one time fewer, if you had gone to bed a little sooner, sat a little shorter, talked less with your friends, slept more this week, exercised a minute more, why, you would be riding along fine now.”

The echoes in the boys head begin to cook hot again.

“But, you have it totally backwards.” The boy picks up the cup, and holds it up to his face. It is torn away in a few places.

“Backwards?” he says.

“There is a force in the place, you see. You cannot grasp it, hold it, but it seizes you by the second and it will not let you go. It holds the road, the walls, the people as they move between doors.”

“I don’t understand. Where is it?” says the boy. He looks across the road, at the grocery store that has just turned on its lights.

“This force cannot be pointed to, it cannot be drawn out in equations on pages. Its existence does not satisfy the physicist, and so they largely choose to be ignorant of it. Even disregard it.”

A newspaper flies by and clings to the toe of the boy’s shoe. He stands up and tries to shake it off, but it is soaked by the rain. He walks down the street.

“This force,” he says, “it sounds strong.” He holds the cup before him as he walks on.

“Great feats of strength are not how this force operates. It is more subtle in its tinkering, like an aeroplane pilot at a thousand controls. Each nob, switch, dial, these serve a singular function, perhaps bend, drive, turn, stop, but one part only.

“Hmm,” for a moment the boy looks up at the sky. It has not shaken its heavy morning layer yet. The cup and the boy walk past a parked car with the ignition still on. Its window is down, but no one is inside. The radio snaps to life:

“-ood morning! Let us start this day with a story. Picture: morning is announced by reams of smoke coughed into the air by giants, they are ignited by an ostracised sun. Things wake and move and stir, like the fur of a winter beast. The streets and walls begin to warm, and with it, energy is turned into motion. What started as a leak has become a breach, a waterfall of wheels are set on the roads. They have everywhere to go but where they came from, they attack in every direction at once, gorged on gasoline and violating the road in a thousand ways at once – urgency on fire and uncontrolled.”

The boy studies his reflection in the car’s wing mirror, how it bends a little at the edges. A man then walks up to the car and opens it. He sits inside and then turns to address the boy:

“But the gentle touch of the force steps in now. With a million arms and ten more, it works with a patient velocity, it diverts, it merges, it fabricates a hundred rivulets to satisfy its longer vision. It is weaving a thread made of chaos and its fingers are so gentle. By the time the sun reclaims its land, the thermodynamics of this system have been tamed by the force.”

The man smiles and drives off.

“Wow,” says the boy and he runs on. “What an incredible thing, this force. But we must find it – where to?” And he turns a street corner into a square. From the door of a bakery a queue of people grows like a fresh icicle. The boy and the cup run past and find themselves among tight streets and bends – the bricks off the wall kissing their shoulders. Up ahead, loose from the others, one brick yells out, “Don’t go looking! There is nothing to find.”

The boy stops his stride and asks the brick why.

“It would be foolish to believe this force runs according to any clock, that it exists at any one point. There is growth in this place, pulsations and sensations that drive it outward like an expanding heart. Forceless, this land would be constructed like a hall of mirrors, everything on top of itself a-hundred times and duplicated to infinity. It would be inoperable and indiscernible.”

Another brick pops out, this one a more gritty, worn at its edges:

“Instead, the wood of this world has been worked by a whittler with calloused fingers, the design self-discovering as you hold it longer in your hand. Mistakes are adopted rather than rubbed out. The way the light elevates the surface – it introduces texture that was invisible in the shade. The best carvings do not fight the flow of the wood, they accentuate the knots – adorn them even – and it is obvious in how the people of this incised land move through it. This, the force is again the orchestrator of, for it knows that motion and the place through which something moves, these are inseparable.”

“Then it is must be a ghost, surely!” says the boy. They thank the bricks; the boy and the cup continue on. They enter a park through a gate. Here the sun has now turned the trees green. Centred in this commons is a library adorned with a great door that questions any who enter. They ask the door about ghosts and it creaks its reply.

“This is no ghost force. It is above that. Its realm is five dimensions more than what we perceive. It has axes and functions that are more indiscernible than the spins of an atom. Even a microscope four-thousand times the magnification of what we have now – say, one the size of the moon! – it would fail to find the constituents of this wonderful force.”

The door offers a crack and the boy and the cup push through. “That’s a bit technical for me,” says the boy. “I still do not understand.”

Buried among the maze of shelves, they come across a woman holding a tome, the edges of the pages painted gold. She turns a page and reads aloud, “An example would probably help your understanding. Within its higher plane, the force works with many materials, but one it especially enjoys twisting is more conceptual and hard to describe, but it can be noticed like a reflection in a window. It is sometimes called the concept, the idea, or the voice.”

On one shelf is a book with a nice blue marble cover. With a nod of the cup, the boy grabs it and they settle in an armchair by the window. Outside the park has begun to fill with movement. Putting a finger to the first page, the boy reads:

“It moves like a water-bug on a pond, this conceptual material. It is found in the ‘good morning’ of a passer-by, or even just the nod of a head. It is in the chatter of two friends over a coffee. Sometimes it can be parsed from the mere movement of eyes and what they study. It also can amplify over distances, through screens and speakers. It propels itself through this place and duplicates itself a thousandfold right into ears, spinning tales and emitting facts about weather or terrors or love gone astray. This all, again, is merely another method of the force, it is how it transmits and manipulates and operates.”

Imperceptible at first, a noise can be heard and the boy and the cup look out the window, beyond their reflections. In the distance, over the park’s fence, a crowd marches by, they are holding signs and they shout at the air around them. Someone with a megaphone blares loud:

“The force keeps things calm, or – should the need arise – it brings together voices into one and has them rise up and speak out against faults in the system, injustices! This is the force embodied! It is how it wishes its machinations to be perceived, if a great eyeball the size of a planet were to look down upon us from space!”

The boy’s reflection runs toward the horizon.

“Which way?” asks the boy to the cup.

“That one,” says the cup and they walk away from the park, down an alley that leads them into a different place. Here the bricks are grafted with glass and alloys. Everything a little more organized and planned. Through a building that looks like a square drinking glass, they see people in white coats hunched over rows and rows of tables drowning in leaves and roots and soil. They see a cactus, deep in conversation with a peppermint plant:

“My dear peppermint. Listen, there are false rumours: that this force can be harnessed. Scientists, certainly physicists, adore the idea. Through pushing everything towards logic and control – a rigid state of movement, like a machine – they say they can bring about order, peace, prosperity, profluence, a cultural penache, pleasantries abound, pride, punctuality, poverty gone!, purity, a solution to every problem, predictability, a distillation of the air and a binding together for a common goal. They are a migrating species of bird, these scientists, that every century cry out, ‘the future!’, and take to the air.”

From the ceiling, a metal claw reaches down, grasping the cactus, lifting it high into the air. The cactus cries out:

“Do not be fooled! The force is not algorithmic, it is not made from plates of steel, with cogs and cognition to make it spin and churn and rumble. It may be entirely out of control and ballistic, but it is organic and fluid.”

The arm seizes up like an inert muscle, the people around it rush to a corner of the room and begin frantic typing on a computer. The cactus falls through the air:

“It is as crazed as a hurricane flying at the shoreline. Yes that is one storm you might see, but where does it begin, where does it end, and my oh my it is a blur if you put your eye right in there and have a good look – ”

No one runs to the impact point, where there is no longer a cactus but a hundred piles of soil and plastic. The boy gasps. Peppermint turns to them at the window and says in a soft voice:

“Even these scientists sometimes fail to see they are part of the very system they wish to predict, the force driving their very thoughts.”

The cup ripples a few times and they move on. Onward, the colour palettes begin to evolve. They saturate and reduce, the street crinkles, the side-walks are punctured. More than a few windows are patched with objects that could not stand a hard rain. The spire of an old church hides the sun, darkening the buildings around. The boy looks around uncertainly, walks a little quicker. The church bell rings deep:

“(Drang!) And then, through the knowledge of this force, we start to see purpose in places we would have turned away from before (Dong!). Disregarded (Drang!). A leaf, dead, fallen from a tree (Dong!). Run a finger along the cracks and seams and we find an ecosystem of schloopy, sick, ash (Drang!). The air coughs plastic (Dong!). Beastly noises are revealed: screams, (Drang!) tears, (Dong!) unkind words (Drang!).”

Over on the other side of the street, indistinguishable from the puddle they lie in, a figure reaches out to those walking past and offers a question: some change? Most consider the question rhetorical. The figure yells towards the boy and he looks over:

“Even a lamppost! Ha! It alone could source new discoveries for a lifetime, but people walk by with their ears and eyes and mouths plugged, gorged on synthetic stuff. The force has created these all for us too, perhaps even far more intentionally than its menial work. These are symbols with a subliminal function to make change. Ha!”

The boy crosses the street. With the cup’s insistence, the boy empties it out and hands it to the figure. It bows its head and takes it.

“Again, we find a brand of people that try to bury these parts – ‘how embarrassing!’, they say and pour champagne into each other’s brains and laugh and live up high in glass houses, pretending that they can still see the stars in the sky at night. The force will work on them, too. They are just a few of the million cells in a larger plan. Some change?”

In the cup the boy puts a few coins from his pocket. The boy and the cup exchange a glance, smile, and the boy turns to go. The cup calls out:

“And so, this force shows us the false sense that we have a decision to make: whether to ride the wave, or to divert it. Either way, the wave will still hit land. Better to ride the wave then to fight it!”

Twisting through streets, the boy finds his way back to a familiar part and walks on. He notices the people as the move by, even stops for a moment to admire the slant in the roof of a building. He does not consider where he is going, or when to turn, or when stop. He looks up, finds himself at a bus stop. A roar from behind him and a bus pulls up. He hops on and it rattles away.