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# CHAPTER FIVE — Crystallized Laughter
- URL: https://ephergent.com/a-ch05/
- Published: 2026-10-13T00:19:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-13T00:54:26.000Z
- Author: Ephergent one
- Tags: Crystallized Laughter, The Ephergent Novels

*Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER FIVE*

Nocturne Aeturnus is stuck at twilight the way a song is stuck on one chord.

The sun went down there sometime before the dimension's history begins and it has been going down since, at a rate you could measure with a sundial and a great deal of patience, so the light is always the light you get in the last twenty minutes of a day, which is to say kind, and low, and entirely wrong for the work being done in it. Perpetual gothic twilight over a valley where every feeling anyone has ever had has already been mined, cut, and catalogued, and the sky is the color of the inside of a jewelry box, and the ground crunches.

Not with snow. With shards. Emotions crystallize here on their own, the way frost forms, and a feeling had once held in the open air will set into a small hard thing on the ground, and the harvest crews walk the valley every morning with brooms and dustpans, and this is called, on the side of their vans, GRIEF COLLECTION.

You get used to the crunch in about a day, and then you never do, because every step is on somebody's worst hour. The sound is a shoe on gravel. There is no way to walk quietly in that valley and no way to walk lightly, and the harvest crews walk it all day in steel toecaps and do not appear to hear it at all.

A1's crystallization reading came in at thirty-four percent year over year, and he delivered it the way other people deliver a terminal diagnosis, which is to say exactly the same, because A1 has one register for bad news and it is the register for all news, and if you want to know how bad a thing is with A1 you ask him for the second number.

"What's the second number?" I asked.

"Thirty-four percent is the collection rate," he said. "The second number is prevalence. Sixty-one percent of residents in this dimension now report a reduced emotional range, and of those, the majority describe the reduction as, quote, a relief." His light dimmed. "They have begun to file thank-you letters."

"To Corporate?"

"To the collection authority, which is Corporate under a shell name, which I have now counted four of in this valley alone. The fourth is called Definitely Not Evil Mega-Corp (Trust Us), the third is Business Business Inc., and the second, my personal favorite, is Your Friends In Feelings LLC."

Clive, riding my shoulder, tapped: The names are the joke. Kid, write down the names. When the whole thing comes down, somebody's going to want to know what it called itself.

The comedy of Nocturne Aeturnus is real and I refuse to apologize for it, because the comedy is how the people there have survived it, and because Corporate's harvest operations are, at close range, extremely funny, in the way a fire is funny if you are the one holding the extinguisher. The crews had shift supervisors who held clipboards. They had a break room, at the top of the refinery, with a refrigerator in it and one container that had achieved statehood, and they had a benefits package, and the benefits package included, and I have the pamphlet, two complimentary emotional clearings per calendar year, deductible.

The pamphlet was called Feeling Good, Within Limits, and it had a smiling cartoon on the cover, and the cartoon had no eyes, and I have kept it because it is the single most honest piece of corporate literature I have ever read.

The crews are worth a paragraph of their own, because they are funny in the specific way that people doing an unfunny job have always been funny. Their mornings began at the depot with a briefing, and the briefing was delivered by a shift supervisor holding a clipboard, and the clipboard always had a sheet clipped under it, and the sheet was always the previous day's totals, and the totals were always up, and the speech was therefore always the same speech: the valley yielded more yesterday than the day before, and the target moves with the yield. The crews would nod. Somebody in the back would mutter "the target moves," the way you mutter a phrase you have heard too often for it to still mean anything, and then they would go out with brooms and dustpans to sweep the valley like it was a school hall.

There was a poster in the depot break room: FEELINGS ARE A WORKPLACE HAZARD, REPORT THEM. Beside it, a suggestion box, and beside the suggestion box, a form, and the form had a field for the suggestion, and the field was marked OPTIONAL.

But there is a second thing in Nocturne Aeturnus, and it is not funny, and I got to it on our third day, and I am going to put it on the page exactly the way it happened, because Issue One's whole argument is that you write the true thing even when the true thing ruins the joke.

We were in the market town at the valley's mouth, doing the thing zines do, which is standing where people talk, and the man at the stall next to us was selling jars. This was ordinary. Everyone in the valley sells jars, because a feeling held in the open will set and a setting feeling has to be swept and a swept feeling can be sold, and the jars on his stall were labeled the way all jars are labeled: FIRST HEARTBREAK, 1994, UNOPENED; GRANDFATHER'S FUNERAL, MILD; RAGE, MINE, 2011, DECLASSIFIED.

Prices were chalked on the awning pole: ordinary grievances by weight, first heartbreaks by the decade, and a single card propped at the front that read ASK ABOUT THE TUESDAYS, which is not a thing you can ask about anywhere else in the multiverse.

And a customer came up, a woman in a collection crew's high-vis vest, off shift, and she bought nothing, and she said to the stall owner, quite pleasantly:

"I've got a hole. Tuesday afternoon. Something happened on a Tuesday afternoon and I can't get it back. Do you have anything like that?"

And the stall owner said, "Ma'am, you don't want to buy a Tuesday afternoon. You want a Tuesday afternoon. I sell what comes out of them." And he held up a jar labeled TUESDAY, AFTERNOON, SOMEONE'S, UNIDENTIFIED, and the light through it was the color of a school corridor in September, and the woman bought it, and she stood there in the market with the jar against her chest, and she did not open it, because opening it would not put it back in her, and everybody who has ever had something mined out of them eventually learns that the jar is for sale and the feeling is not.

That is the body horror. Not the wand. The jar. The knowledge, in your hands, that the best afternoon of your life is a fourteen-dollar item on a stall in the town where it used to happen.

The crew came for the woman's stall that evening. Not for her. For the inventory, because the harvest authority had issued an irregularity notice (the stall was selling unlicensed grief, cut with unlicensed joy, unlicensed by any shell name), and the irregularity notice required a sweep, and the sweep took eleven jars, and the woman whose Tuesday afternoon was in one of them was not on any form, because the form was about the stall, and I stood in the market and watched a man get his heartbreak confiscated by an agency that did not know his name, and he signed the receipt, because they had the pen.

He was mid-sentence when it went. He was saying, I remember it because I wrote it down that night, "That jar isn't the stall's, that jar is mine, I only ever," and the crew's man lifted it off the stall in both hands and set it in the crate with ten others, and the man finished the sentence standing exactly where he had been standing: "left it here for safekeeping." Smiling. Then he asked whether they needed help lifting the crate, and nobody in the market said anything, because saying something is a form and nobody had brought one.

I did the only thing I have ever been able to do in the presence of a machine that big. I wrote it down. Every jar number. Every label. The man's face, which I will not describe because it is not mine to describe, only his, only the way he watched a white van with Your Friends In Feelings LLC on the side pull out of the market with his interior life in a crate.

And then we stole one back.

Not the man's. We tried. We were, at this stage, three fired office supplies with forty copies of a zine and no operational plan, and I want that on the record, because the thing that comes next was not a heist, it was an indignity that happened to work.

We argued about it for a day first, which is our version of a heist meeting. Clive's plan was to walk in and tell the truth, which he offered knowing it would be rejected, and which he has never stopped mentioning. A1's plan involved seventeen pages of precomputation and no discussion whatsoever. My plan was to write about it and not go. The three of us held our positions until A1 said, "I am going now," and then all three of us went.

Here is how it happened. A1 walked into the refinery.

Not metaphorically. He re-inflated from tabletop scale to full size in the yard, with the green light on, and he rolled through the gate the way an appliance rolls when it belongs there, which is to say with total conviction, and he announced himself at the gatehouse as a replacement beverage asset awaiting reassignment, and the gatehouse guard, a man whose job was to check badges, looked at a machine with no badge, and a work order that A1 had generated out of thin air because A1 can hold seventeen pages of anything in his memory and Corporate's work orders are not, fundamentally, complicated, and the guard waved him through, because the form was there, and when the form is there the gate is open, and that is the entire security philosophy of a dimension that harvests feelings for a living.

Inside: shelves. Rows of them. The intake floor, where the day's collection was logged and set, and a long aisle of crates waiting for refinement, and every crate labeled with a number and a name, and A1 went down that aisle at appliance speed, reading labels at a rate no gatehouse could follow, and he stopped at a crate, and he said:

"This one."

"A1."

"Unregistered intake. Look at the tag, Pixel. The tag says VOID, which in Corporate's system means it was scheduled for destruction, and destruction requires a supervisor's signature, and the signature field is blank, and so the crate has been sitting here for nine months, unclaimed, unrefined, and about to be swept into a disposal run that itself has no signature. It is, by the standards of this building, nobody's. By the standards of nobody's, we are allowed."

"Allowed by whom?"

"By the fact that nobody will file a form to report a crate that the form says doesn't exist," Clive tapped from my shoulder, which was a mistake, because Clive had ridden into a refinery, and this was going to cost him, and we both knew it.

The crate held one jar. The label read: FIRST HEARTBREAK, UNOPENED, SOURCE UNVERIFIED, DO NOT DESTROY, and under that, in handwriting, in a different pen, in a different decade: I couldn't.

Somebody had almost destroyed it, once, and had not, and had written "I couldn't" on the label, which is not a signature and not a form and therefore not recognized anywhere in this dimension, and which is, I would argue, the most legally subversive sentence in the multiverse: I couldn't.

We were out in four minutes. A1 rolled, I carried, Clive did not speak again until the current, because Clive had been in a room full of feelings on shelves and he had spent fifty years on desks knowing exactly what that room is, which is the place where everything people bring to the office goes after the office is done with it, and when we were through the seam and back into Wreckfall he tapped one line, alone, under the gray, and did no poetry for a day and a half:

They keep it all, kid. Every desk I ever sat on, everything that was said over me, and I never once thought to ask where it went.

The jar sat on the laptop for a week. We did not open it. That matters. Everybody in this story eventually opens a jar of somebody else's best day, and the ones who come back are the ones who knew not to swallow, and we did not know why we weren't opening it, except that it was not ours, and the label said DO NOT DESTROY, and destroying a thing and consuming a thing are the same act with different adjectives.

A1 ran the numbers on it anyway, because A1 runs numbers on everything, and what he found was that the jar was not, technically, a feeling. It was the residue of one. The feeling itself, he said, was still somewhere, still in the person it belonged to, the way a hole is still in a wall after the picture comes down, and the jar was the hole's shape, and a hole's shape is not the wall.

"Then why did she sell it?" I asked. "The woman at the market. Why sell the shape of a hole?"

"Because the shape is the only part she has left to sell," A1 said, "and in an economy where the hole is the only asset, selling the shape is what passes for income."

We ran the jar as a photograph. Luminara is not here yet; she is coming, and when she arrives she will understand, before anyone else in this crew, that a picture of a thing is sometimes closer to the thing than the thing is. But the camera we used was mine, a cheap one that came through the current with everything else lost, and the photograph of the jar came out wrong in the right way: the glass was ordinary, and inside the glass was a color that does not appear in photographs, a color that the camera recorded as an error and the error was the point, and we printed that error forty times and put it on the front of the supplement.

The headline was one line:

THE SORROWFUL MOON IS NOT FOR SALE.

Which is not what anyone in the valley called anything. There is no moon, sorrowful or otherwise, in Nocturne Aeturnus; the twilight never gets far enough for a moon to come up. I invented it. I invented a moon, because I wanted a name for the thing that is up there watching while they sweep your best afternoon into a dustpan, and because the valley needed a symbol that was not on any shell corporation's letterhead, and within a month the crews were using it, and stenciling it on crates, and a symbol nobody owns is a symbol nobody can file.

The first one I saw was on a crate at the depot, stenciled in the crews' own paint, slightly wrong, one stroke of the crescent too long, and underneath it in biro, in a hand I never found: FOR TUESDAY. We did not put that there. Somebody in the valley had picked the moon up and started using it, which is the only distribution metric I have ever trusted.

A1 told me it was statistically unsound to name a moon that doesn't exist.

I told him to run his second number.

He ran it. It was worse than the first, and I printed it too, and that is the whole method of this zine, and you have now seen it: find the arithmetic, print the arithmetic, put a moon on the cover so people will pick it up, and never, ever round up.

The crews read it. Nobody warns you about that: the people who sweep your best afternoon into a dustpan are also people, and they read it in the depot, in shifts, folded into the clipboard. One of them wrote on the back of a shift sheet, in biro, WE ARE NOT THE MOON, and the sheet turned up in a drift in Wreckfall two weeks later, which is how lost things come home, and I have it, and I print it again every issue.

\---

Nocturne Aeturnus field report continues on the reverse. Stay weird, keep your phase-shifters calibrated, and never let a stranger hold your joy without a receipt.

, Pixel Paradox, signing off