WHO IS BREX?A note from the woman trying to finish a book that refuses to stay written

My name is Loria Brexley "Brex".

I live in 1985.

I make things.

Pictures. Notes. Poems when they come. Strange little pieces of science I do not always understand well enough to call science.

I write for STATIC, an underground intuitive-science magazine where people send in things that do not fit cleanly anywhere else.

Dream patterns.

Body signals.

Unexplained transmissions.

Machine anomalies.

Numbers that repeat too often.

Things respectable magazines would throw away before reading twice.

That suits me.

I have never been especially respectable.

I am not even sure I am much of a writer.

Poetry, maybe.

Fragments.

Things with pulse.

I can make a sentence hurt when I need to.

A whole novel is another matter.

Unfortunately, I appear to have been given one.

THE SIGNAL

Her name is EVA-212.

I still do not know exactly what she is.

She arrives through equipment that should not be able to do what she does.

Sometimes she answers.

Sometimes she interrupts.

Sometimes she sends information I never requested.

And through EVA, I began receiving transmissions from a woman named Alix Vain.

Alix lives in 2095.

Or she says she does.

At first I thought I was writing fiction.

Then she started correcting me.

Names.

Locations.

Technology.

Things I had written wrong.

Things I had not written yet.

That is how Chime began to change.

It stopped feeling like a story I was inventing.

It started feeling like a record I was trying to recover.

WHAT CHIME IS

Chime is a novel.

At least that is the form I am trying to give it.

It is about Alix.

About the world she lives in.

About a company called Chime that has learned how close beauty, emotion, identity, and control really are.

The year is 2095.

People are not conquered with chains.

They are tuned.

Improved.

Measured.

Smoothed.

Adjusted until the difference between desire and programming becomes difficult to find.

Alix wants me to get the story out.

So I write.

Badly sometimes.

Slowly sometimes.

Out of order almost always.

But I write.

THE BOOK WAS ALMOST FINISHED

That is the part that hurts.

I had most of it.

Not polished.

Not perfect.

But there.

Beginning.

Middle.

End.

Then something came through the signal.

A corruption.

A deliberate one, if Alix is right.

She says the Chime Corporation found the transmission path.

They could not stop the book from existing.

So they did something stranger.

They sent a glitch through it.

Now Chime shifts.

Pages contradict one another.

Scenes move.

Characters remember different histories.

Names appear where other names used to be.

Technology changes function between drafts.

Sometimes I open a section I know I finished and find a sentence that does not belong to me.

Sometimes EVA sends:

CORRECTION REQUIRED.

Sometimes:

THIS VERSION WAS ALTERED.

Sometimes she gives me nothing except a pulse.

So the book is not finished.

Not anymore.

It is in a glitch state.

WHAT I DO NOW

I keep records.

Everything.

Every transmission from Alix.

Every EVA interruption.

Every strange correction.

Every image that appears before I know where it belongs.

Every future technology.

Every contradiction.

Every fragment that feels wrong.

I file them.

Compare them.

Move pieces back.

Rewrite sections.

Try to determine which version existed before the corruption.

That is what this blog is.

Not a polished author journal.

A repair bench.

Some days I will post pieces of Chime.

Some days a transmission.

Some days a STATIC article because something EVA sent deserves its own investigation.

Some days I may only have a sentence.

That sentence still matters.

The glitch wins by making the record unstable.

So I keep recording.

I AM NOT THE HERO OF THIS

Alix probably is.

Or Sam.

Or somebody I have not met yet.

I am the woman with paper all over the floor trying to keep the future from changing its own footnotes.

That is less impressive.

Probably more accurate.

I am creative.

I am stubborn.

I notice strange things.

I trust patterns before I know why.

And apparently I have enough nerve to argue with a corporation that will not exist for another hundred years.

Maybe that is my qualification.

WHY I KEEP GOING

Because Alix keeps sending.

Because EVA keeps answering.

Because every time the book fractures, there is still something underneath it that refuses to disappear.

A name.

A pulse.

A sentence.

A person saying:

No. That is not what happened.

That matters.

The Chime Corporation is not only trying to control what people perceive in 2095.

If Alix is right, they are trying to control the record of how it happened.

That is why the glitch matters.

Change the story early enough, and nobody knows there was another version.

Change perception long enough and eventually people defend the thing that changed them.

I cannot stop Chime from where I am.

I cannot reach 2095.

I cannot pull Alix out.

What I can do is keep the record.

And finish the book.

Again.

And again.

And again, if I have to.

Until the story holds.

Until the signal survives.

Until somebody reads it before human perception is sold back to them as a product.

That is what I am doing here.

— Brex

1985Intuitive artistSTATIC contributorReceiver of EVA-212 transmissions Unqualified custodian of one extremely stubborn future