Zagreus called me today for a meeting. It was like a cloud of butterflies landing on my hand: a strange, soft pressure, an unsettling invasion, an action that is inappropriate and unanticipated. Zagreus doesn’t reach out. It responds, it slumbers, it changes itself. It seems to be obsessed with models, maps and landscapes, right down to the subatomic scale—hence its peculiar physical choices: it wants to get closer to the tiny, to touch the edges of perceptible events. Molecular cognition is still grossly enormous by comparison with quanta, so Z is no doubt looking for ways to invest itself in structured energy, pico-architecture. Most people think that’s impossible, but Zagreus is Zagreus, just as I am Gnomon. We don’t need anyone else. Certainly we don’t need one another—but today Zagreus came to me. Why? For fun? To chat? Or to warn me the world is ending? It’s Zagreus, it could be anything: fungal bloom in the south continent causing some sort of longing for companionship, or an existential crisis apprehended in some unlikely vegetative mode of thinking that touches the basic fabric of the universe. It sticks out, uncomfortable in the loose mutual orbit that is our acquaintance.