Part 9: El Gusano 3

The radio host's face is a mosaic of countless others.
Kayla, Grace, Cecilie, Newman ... names without weight, faces without permanence. She drifts unseen, a colorless moth in the dark-an existence without self.
From the mirror, they sigh as one-a chorus laced with disdain.

Aleph: *speaking to himself* So alike and so ill-fated. One condemned to remember, yet commanded to forget-a Scheherazade without an audience, keeper of shameful secrets, lost in the tragedy of his own illusions.

Aleph: *speaking to himself* And so ... hyperthymesia is no blessing, but a curse without cure.

Panamerican Arcanist Radio: This story begins in San Francisco, 1990. Our protagonist is a young girl called Cecilie, lost in the flow of things.

Somewhere between 18 and 22, she speaks with a Low Saxon lilt. Behind her, the cry of a black-fronted Piping Guan sounds-so precise it could be real. She may actually be from Blumenau.

Panamerican Arcanist Radio: An arcanist in search of an exit, yearning to slip beyond the grasp of thought's phantoms and power's unseen hand. There is a place she knows-one where the sun does not shy from those who seek hidden truths.

Aleph: The Manus Vindictae.

Panamerican Arcanist Radio: Children of the esoteric, keepers of heresy, zealots of the arcane ... They are as a mighty shoal amidst the currents of upheaval, never still, always moving.

Panamerican Arcanist Radio: Of course, they'd never turn away a stray. The thing she feared remained unrealized-she was taken in and reshaped. For the cause, she became Kayla, became Ms. Grace, then Newman, then Cecilie ... The tree had shed its leaves, and foreign branches took their place. Who she had been no longer mattered. She became another, again and again, until even time forgot what had once grown there.

The whispers of innumerable voices gather on the other side of the white noise.

Panamerican Arcanist Radio: This Monday's edition of The Ushuaia Times reported on the sinking of the "Free Breeze." Among the survivors, some claimed to have seen a great number of islanders aboard, adorned with seashell ornaments. There is reason to believe that some of the Nukutai may have forsaken their homeland.

Panamerican Arcanist Radio: We hear now Louis, reporting from the scene: "Why they departed, we cannot say. Was it the allure of modern civilization or a promise that somewhere in the farthest west, a river of immortality awaits? Their arrival was a moment of wonder, but by the time the night faded, they were already lost.'

A sound hangs in the air, almost a sob. The young lady does not weep; she merely breathes, her sorrow measured in time, her grief a part of the rhythm of existence.

Panamerican Arcanist Radio: And so, this gripping "incident" reached its tragic epilogue-the fate of a people sealed, over nothing more than a shell.