Weapons of Mass Entanglement

Dennis Mombauer

O ne day, Panduranga Mohan found a strange plant growing next to her door. It hadn’t been there when she went to sleep, but it was already waist-high, with a big, closed bud at its top. Panduranga shrugged and drove to work in the tourist town. When she returned in the evening, the bud had grown a little more.

This continued over the following weeks. While Panduranga guided visitors from foreign planets through the war-torn countryside and showed them the souvenir shops and active battlefields, her mind often wandered to the mysteries of the plant. She had seen nothing like its broad leaves and bulky stem before, and she didn’t know where its seeds might have come from.

Her work tired Panduranga out, and the plant soon became just another part of the house she came home to. Then, one day, as unexpected as had been its sprouting, the bud was open. Inside it, Panduranga saw an object of non-biological origin.

T he object was a remote with one button. Panduranga examined it from all angles before she tried to touch it. The plastic surface felt warm under her fingers, smooth, not at all like the plant surrounding it. Panduranga plucked the remote like a fruit and tentatively pressed the button, but it didn’t seem to do anything. She pressed it a few more times, pointing the remote in different directions, then walked inside the house.

As she passed her living room, the button glowed faintly. It boggled her mind how something like this could grow from a plant, but she was no botanist, merely a tour guide. She pressed the button one more time, and her TV came alive. This was doubly strange, because Panduranga didn’t watch TV often and it shouldn’t have any energy stored—but even more surprising was what it showed.

On the screen, Panduranga saw another living room like her own, a dollhouse with little furniture: the couch, a fish tank, lamps. Nothing happened, there was no movement except for the fish and the constant rise of bubbles within their tank; so, after her initial curiosity died down, Panduranga wandered into the kitchen. But she left the TV on and, later in the evening, she entered the living room and found a man sitting on the couch inside the TV, staring toward the camera.

It felt unsettling to see him there, in her house, even though he was just a recording, probably some kind of propaganda entertainment for one of the war parties. Their actions had become increasingly incomprehensible since the latest stalemate, and swarms of psychological warfare experts pilgrimaged here. The tourists seemed to like it, at least, and Panduranga could show them the trenches in relative safety—but the respite wouldn’t last, it never did.

The button on the remote didn’t glow anymore, and there seemed to be no way to change the channel, so Panduranga watched the man sit there, get himself something to eat, scratching his back, and finally falling asleep, just as tiredness overcame herself as well.

I n the morning, the man wasn’t there. Panduranga ate breakfast, cleaned up, and drove to work. The tourist town lay in no-man’s-land between the front lines, as did Panduranga’s home, but the war parties excluded it from their attacks, and only rarely did a missile, airstrike, or orbital bombardment hit close to it.This time, there was a huge load of visitors from a remote planet, gawking and gaping at the soldiers, at their weapons, at the desolation the war had brought upon the planet.

The workday was long, and Panduranga returned in the dark, the purple-bruised horizon occasionally lit up by flares and distant skirmishes. The plant still grew by her doorstep, but it wasn’t the reason Panduranga stopped dead in her tracks.

Someone had been inside her house.

All the furniture in the living room had moved. Someone had turned the couch sideways, put the lamp next to it, propped the now rolled-up carpet against the wall. On the TV, these changes were mirrored: the man’s couch, although bigger and darker than Panduranga’s, was turned in the same way, as well as his carpet and his lamp.

In the middle of his room, the man sat and stared at her with anticipation, as if he was waiting for a reaction.

Panduranga didn’t want to give him any satisfaction, and as she couldn’t turn the TV off, she started restoring the room to the way it should be. Only after she finished did she look at the TV again: and she realized the obvious.

The man stood in the middle of his room, confused, or maybe angry, everything around him changed. She tried moving her lamp again, and the lamp inside the stranger’s room moved simultaneously, as if carried by a benevolent poltergeist.

There was no way of manipulating the aquarium, because Panduranga didn’t have one of her own, but she could move everything else. Late into the night, Panduranga experimented with this and watched the man’s reactions, until he finally left the room and let her go to sleep.

The next morning, Panduranga was late for work. She only noticed in passing that he had rearranged her living room again.

And that the plant was sprouting another bud.

M ore people than usual crowded the tourist town. Everyone was excited over the resumed fighting. In the distance, visible only through the stationary binoculars, a major offensive was in full swing, with uncertainty fighters flickering in and out of existence across the northern horizon.

Panduranga did her job, but she was distracted, and almost lost a tourist when he wandered off toward the killzones.

When Panduranga got home in the evening, her body only wanted to sleep, but her mind was wide awake. The second bud of the plant had opened, and there was a light bulb in it, just the right size for the lamp in her living room.

She took it inside, checked on the TV’s inhabitant—he was sitting on the couch, reading a newspaper—and screwed the bulb into her lamp. When she switched it on, the man’s living room turned dark. She flipped the switch again and saw him standing there, staring at his lamp.

Now, she had leverage: Whenever he moved her furniture, she killed his lights. This way, she could keep him at bay during the evenings, but not during daylight hours, when she went to work.

O ne evening, there was a new bud on the ever-growing plant, and Panduranga hoped for another gadget in her silent war against the TV man. The next day, for the first time that Panduranga could remember, missiles hit the tourist town and leveled a shopping street in the outskirts.

With tourists having little appetite for observing war quite so close up, she returned early from work to find the plant offering a new device: an air conditioning filter, that (she discovered) sucked in any smells or smoke from her house and belched it out from the man’s ventilation.

Over the following weeks, the rate of sprouting objects increased while tourist numbers in the town dwindled. The fighting got closer and closer, and the streets no longer felt safe. Panduranga didn’t care, as long as she found something new every time she came home: a cigarette lighter that produced flames inside the man’s living room, which he tried to extinguish with aquarium water; a cup that poured out into his fish tank every fluid she poured into it; and so on.

Still, the man didn’t give up, even though Panduranga’s expanding arsenal of manipulation far outmatched him. Every time she returned from work, he had rearranged her furniture and made her home seem foreign to her.

She did her best to inconvenience him and make him surrender, but the man endured. Every evening, she filled the room with smoke and flooded the floor, then turned off his lights and made him stumble through a dark and toxic swamp. She almost heard the splashing off his footsteps and his curses, even though the TV transmitted no sound, and slept in the knowledge that he would have to spend the whole night cleaning up.

Then, perhaps inevitably, one day Panduranga drove out to find the tourist town destroyed, annihilated by weapons so advanced that not even ruins and rubble remained. It was as if the town had never been there, or wasn’t there yet, just the unbroken emptiness between two front lines.

There was nothing to do except to drive home. So that’s what Panduranga did.

I n the short time she had been gone, Panduranga’s plant had grown bigger than her house. The house itself wasn’t there—it had vanished as tracelessly as had the tourist town.

Only the TV stood in the middle of the wasteland.

Panduranga could see the room with its little man and his couch, lamp, carpet, and fish tank: and also something new. The man held a remote similar to the one she had found months ago, and he pointed it at her.

Their eyes met, and he pressed the button.

Panduranga stood alone with the plant and watched reality ripple in the sky. No TV, no house, no tourist town: only the plant. It carried a newly blossomed bud, and as Panduranga looked inside it, she saw herself lying there, asleep next to the man from the TV.

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