The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 15, 2100

« < » > Table of Contents

Mateo spent the rest of the 21st century poring through thick and dusty books. He read classics like The Count of Monte Cristo, and novels that had been published after he began jumping, like The Last Refuge. He didn’t have to read one all the way through before being assigned another one, and he wasn’t always told to start at the beginning. There seemed to be no connection between them, though Mateo kept waiting for The Cleanser to reveal some bizarre mutual theme. But then he was ordered to read a math textbook, and a technical manual, and even a brochure. Apparently this tribulation wasn’t about the stories themselves, but about the work he was putting into reading them, much like the Stranger Things tribulation.

Then something even weirder happened. Following a night of rest and a jump to June 15, 2100, Mateo was taken to participate in a holographic Tai chi class. It was the calm and clarity from the exercises that helped him realize what was happening. This was not really a tribulation. It was a training montage, but one that he had to experience in real time. “Are you recording this?”

“Why would I be recording this?” the Cleanser asked.

“I figured you would edit it together and play it for all your evil friends.”

“That’s a stupid idea, Mateo.”

“Then it’s right up your alley.”

“Good one. No, I’ve recently watched this movie called Doctor Strange.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen all of those.”

“So you know that all kinds of trippy spacetime stuff goes down.”

“This is true, but I thought you weren’t into movie-based tribulations.”

“I have the right to make an exception.”

“You have no right at all! This is immoral, don’t you see that?”

The Cleanser shrugged his shoulders. “Eh, eye of the beholder.”

“No,” Catholic Mateo said.

“Either way, we’re about to have a lot of fun.”

“Eye of the beholder.”

“Touché.” He waved his arm in front of him and opened another spark portal. “I’ve called upon an old mutual friend of ours to help us build a playground. I’m not ashamed to say that he possesses a particular temporal power that I do not.”

“Kayetan?” Mateo asked as he casually walked through the portal.

“Very good,” the Cleanser answered. “You’re getting smarter.”

Mateo never actually saw The Merger, Kayetan Glaston. He must have been too busy orchestrating the city’s temporal obstacle courses. He found himself standing at home plate in a baseball diamond. In the distance, and in the sky, streets folded over and buildings warped into themselves. Cars disappeared from one side and appeared from another. It was a beautiful recreation of a particular chase/fight scene from the first Doctor Strange live-action film.

The Cleanser pointed to the building about 200 feet away. “Your task is to make it to the FBI building. You won’t be fighting demon-worshiping bad guys, and you won’t have any help, but it will be difficult and interesting.”

A normal person in this position would run straight for the finish line, but Mateo could already see space shifting around them in unpredictable ways, and it was only going to get worse. If he had any hope of reaching his destination, he would have to be just as unpredictable. He turned to face the building and prepared to start running. He could just feel the Cleanser’s sinister smile from the edge of his view. Just before taking off, Mateo spun around and ran in the opposite direction.

“Like I said!” he heard from behind him. “Smart!

A sidewalk swung in front of him and continued to spin clockwise as he ran across it. It slid out from under his feet to be replaced by the narrow ledge of a single-story building. As he kept running down it, the ground below stretched away and the building tipped over towards it. He hopped down and kept going, now on the wall leading up to the edge, the gravelly roof itself right next to him. The perpendicular ledge up ahead blinked away, revealing open space which Mateo choose to dive right into. As he was falling headfirst towards his death, the whole world flipped over, altering the direction of gravity in respect to his movement. The Cleanser didn’t want him dead, he wanted to be entertained. That was all that mattered to him. He continued to shoot upwards before losing his momentum and beginning to fall back towards the new direction of down. After only a few feet of this, a street appeared under him. Cars drove all around him, crisscrossing and rolling around all axes. He rolled himself, dodged, and even slid across the hood of one vehicle like a 70s TV cop.

A door to a small shop felt like the right call at this point. He burst through it and ended up in a bathroom. The mirror had been transformed into a widow to the other side of the city. He pulled himself onto the vanity and jumped through it. As he ran, the buildings and streets around him flew around. They replaced each other like overlapping curtains over a stage. The scene changed dozens of times, forcing him to zig and zag to avoid roadblocks and other impediments. At one point, the road became like fluid, rolling up and down in waves. Mateo frequently lost his balance and injured himself against objects, but he never stopped.

He could just picture the Cleanser and Kayetan in a control room of some kind. Kayetan is wearing headphones with a microphone and a white shirt with a black tie. He’s dabbing sweat from his forehead in between manipulating a joystick and frantically typing in macros on a keyboard, constantly adjusting time and space. The Cleanser stands at his flank, watching the progress on a giant screen in front of them. “He’s good,” one of them says. “Oh, he’s real good.”

“Too good,” the other one agrees.

And then the Cleanser says, “give him something to run from.”

“Yes, sir.” Kayetan reaches over and lifts a plastic cover from a big red button. He hesitates over it for a few seconds, but then he composes himself and presses it.

Back in reality, metal pieces were starting to fly in from all directions and assembling themselves in a giant game of tetris. Mateo stopped running, but kept moving, stepping onto new pieces as they fell in line. One of them flipped him over like a revolving trash can lid. As Mateo watched from the sidelines, Mads Mikkelsen showed up.

“Are you really here?” he asked as they were circling each other. They were standing on the roof of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. The horizon was at an angle, but Kayetan was allowing gravity to hold them in place when they should have been sliding towards the edge.

“This is my design,” Mads said as a response.

Mateo shivered. That was not a line from Doctor Strange. Before that, Mads played Hannibal Lecter on a television series. Mateo loved it, but he was only able to watch through the third episode of the second season before his life changed.

The figure of Mads Mikkelsen shuttered, which indicated that it was not actually the actor, but a holographic representation. “I know what you’re thinking,” Holomads said. “That I cannot hurt you. But I am happy to inform you that this is not Star Wars. This is Star Trek.” Holomads shuttered again, but this time for longer, revealing the figure of the Cleanser in its place. “I am more than just light. I can hurt you.”

“Can I hurt you as well?”

Holomads sported that creepy sociopathic pseudo-smile so often seen on the show. “You can try.”

Mateo kept quiet and hoped that he would not be discovered.

The Cleanser pulled his fists apart and apported a long-blade. His opponent remained still, not at all fearful of the weapon. The Cleanser swung his sword up and then swept it in a circle, missing his target each time. His opponent was expertly avoiding each strike as if this was nothing more complicated than walking up a flight of stairs. The Cleanser tried to bash him over the head, but he avoided it once more. The opponent stepped on the Cleanser’s hands and knocked the blade to the floor.

“What is this? How are you doing that?”

The Cleanser’s opponent showed his own sinister smile. His face shuttered as well and revealed the figure of Darko Matic behind it. The real Mateo was watching from the other side of the roof, completely safe, and somehow invisible. He didn’t know how Darko ended up there, why Kayetan was allowing him to take Mateo’s place, or whether the Cleanser could stop it. All he knew was that he was grateful to be out of the fight.

“Where is he?” the Cleanser demanded. “Where is Mateo!”

“He is where he needs to be,” Holomateo replied. Then he attacked.

The two of them swung and kicked each other, but neither of them were able to land any significant blows. The Cleanser was a surprisingly adept fighter. He had spent so much time torturing Mateo verbally and emotionally, that Mateo never really knew how physically formidable he was. Now he could see that the Cleanser probably spent years, possibly even centuries, training himself to be the best at nearly everything, probably in case something like this ever happened to him.

Still, no matter how hard the Cleanser tried, his were noticeably inferior to Darko’s skills. There was just no beating Darko’s ability to be creative and improvise. Before the Cleanser had worn out entirely, Darko stopped and spoke into the aether. “That’s enough, Glaston. Take us to the end.”

A street merged under their feet, replacing the roof. They then slid across it, up the ramp, down the highway, and back into the FBI building campus. It reminded Mateo of when he and Gilbert went back to 1944 and hovered down the streets of Germany. He now walked up to the wall and touched it deliberately with one hand.

Through heavy panting, the Cleanser asked, “how are you here? How did you do that?”

“Kayetan doesn’t always do what he’s told. You know that. He can’t be trusted.”

“Then I shall kill him.”

“You will not, brother.”

What? Brother? They were brothers? This whole time? “Darko. You never told me. He never told me.”

The Cleanser shook his hand and worked to regain his breath, but he didn’t say a word.

“We’re only technically brothers,” Darko said. “You and I share a father. Zeferino and I share half the genetic code from our mother. But he wasn’t born in the same way normal people are.”

“Stop talking to him, Darko,” the Cleanser pleaded. He did not want Mateo to understand what was going on.

“I will respect your wishes,” Darko said to the Cleanser. “As I always have, despite the things you’ve done. There will come a day, however, when not even our connection can protect you.”

“Thank you.” The Cleanser sounded genuinely humbled. Was this it? Was this his one weakness? The revelation certainly explained why he was so incredibly passionately upset when Leona accidentally killed Darko in the alternate reality. What Mateo didn’t understand was exactly why this made the two of them only technically brothers.

“Now give my other brother a break.” He deserves it.

“I will give him tomorrow,” the Cleanser agreed, “but then it’s back to work.”

« < » > Table of Contents

Clean Sweep: Formerly Known as The Artist (Part II)

« < » > Entire Story

In the beginning, a lot of people worked in The Gallery. It was one of the first places created once time travel was discovered long ago. Actually, the dimension where the Gallery is held already existed, but its interface was difficult to interpret. Only certain people were intelligent enough to grasp its complexities. And so Baudin, a.k.a. The Constructor, was contracted to design for them a new interface. He chose to help others understand time through art. Each painting represented a single view of a single moment in time. Now, you might think that the Gallery is used to engineer outcomes, which is something it could technically be used for, but its only purpose was to clean up the timeline, and rid it of inconsistencies.

Time travel within the temporal gallery itself is not possible. Though people inside are capable of perceiving reality manipulations, they are not allowed to modify these manipulations further. They are tied to what’s known as the Master Timeline. This is the reality that takes precedence over all others once time travel events have been fully exhausted. Now, this does not mean that the gallery workers understand perfectly how it’s all going to turn out. It’s just that every time a time traveler goes back to alter reality for the upteenth time, the gallery workers only remember that particular alteration. And they only remember this one because, from their perspective, that’s the only one that ever took place. Human perceive time in much the same way, except that they don’t have memory of the alteration, only of the result.

Over the years, gallery workers grew tired of their responsibility. They did not age, and would not die, but they also did not know love, or adventure. They could see people in the timestream making interesting choices, but they could make none of their own. They were slaves to their condition. So they left, but because of the nature of the gallery dimension, they were unable to return. They were free to live out their lives as they pleased, but this caused the gallery to experience diminishing returns, for no new person would be able to enter either.

Recently, relatively speaking, only two people remained in the Gallery, and found themselves struggling to maintain it. The funny thing about time travelers is that they are generally drawn to modifications during a certain period. As exciting as it might be to ride a dinosaur, it offers little satisfaction in the long-run. Despite the fact that most choosing ones can go to whenever they want, they tend to stay within a range of a couple hundred years of their birth, forwards and backwards. Furthermore, the closer one gets to the year 2100 of the Gregorian calendar, the more choosers there are. It is not quite clear why the 20th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd centuries hold such a concentrated number of time travelers, but most simply accept that this is just the way it is.

The two Gallery holdouts spent some time trying to run the place as best they could, but in the end, they were forced to admit that they were just not good enough by themselves. As time was moving ever closer to a higher concentration of alterations, they grew desperately in need of some help. And so they got creative with how they went about exacting this help. Zeferino Preston was one of their new hires. Though all of them showed signs of rebelliousness, The Curator could see that Zeferino was the most dangerous, because he would sow seeds of doubt in the others.

Zeferino was never happy with being so powerless to change or reverse what the choosing ones were doing, or what the powers that be were forcing the salmon to do. Unlike the original workers who neglected their responsibilities to live out their lives in peace, Zeferino sought power. He wanted to be able to shape the timeline as he saw fit, and he was able to convince Nerakali and Arcadia to share in his dream. He began to generate entirely original temporal paintings, Nerakali began to rearrange people’s memories to her liking, and Arcadia began to establish a disastrous imbalance in reality. Together, these three were causing so much damage that the original two workers were forced to take drastic measures.

“Where’s Arcadia?”

“She’s gone,” the Curator, Erlendr said.

Zeferino repeated himself more deliberately, “where. Is. Aradia?”

The Curator chose to be brave and honest. “I sent her away. I sent her to Earth.”

“But you can get her back.”

“Decidedly no.”

“No, there’s a way. There’s a way to get her back. You have to do it.”

“I am afraid that it’s not possible. If we could do it, we would have brought back our original crew, and you wouldn’t even exist to have this conversation.”

“This is not a conversation!” Zeferino yelled. “This is a travesty! This is mutiny!”

Erlendr remained calm. “It is not mutiny. I own this place. You’re the one trying to take over.”

“Oh, don’t you speak to me in that jazz voice. Get angry! Get passionate! I sure as hell am!”

“I will not become you, Zeferino.”

Now Zeferino was seething. Banish his sister, fine, but insult him personally, and we have a problem. “How does Fury feel about this?”

“He understands. He knows that it’s best.”

“Well, of course he does. Once you’ve cleansed this place of all of us, he can just make more. He can replace us whenever he wants, with whatever he wants.”

“I am not removing you. I want you to stay.”

“What about Nerakali?”

“She will remain here as well. As long as you toe the line, you both have a home in the Gallery.”

“So Arcadia’s banishment had nothing to do with her. You just wanted to punish us. To punish me.”

“I wanted to teach you a lesson.”

“Oh, it’s been taught.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m saying that I understand now. I know what I have to do.”

“What are you talking about, Zef? What is it that you have to do?”

“You’ll see.” Zeferino started to walk away. At one time, the Gallery had a set of workers for security, but they were gone now, and no one could stop him.

“Zef,” Erlendr pleaded. “Zef,” he repeated. “Zef!” he finally yelled.

Zeferino turned around. “That’s my boy. Hold onto that anger. You’re gonna need it.”

Realizing Erlendr was assuming that Zeferino would need time to plan something for the future, he had no choice but to act immediately. He carefully stepped into The Artist’s room carrying temporal painting of a pond at magic hour, and shoved him inside of it.

From the other side of the Gallery, Erlendr could feel that something was wrong. He ran down the hallway and rushed in. “What have you done?”

“Now you’re stuck with me. You banished Arcadia, so I banished Fury. I believe the humans call this eye for an eye.”

“Oh my God, don’t you get it? You’ve doomed the timeline. Now it doesn’t matter whether you stay or go. This place is useless without Fury.”

“Fury does nothing. Well, he did nothing. Now he can go screw himself, for all I care.”

“You still don’t get it. There’s a reason we call him the Artist, instead of The Sculptor. He kept this place running just by being here. His temporal energy powered the gallery paintings themselves. We are hopeless without him. All your dreams of universal domination have been shattered. And you were the cause of your own demise. Congratulations. In only a few days, the paintings will die, and I won’t be able to banish you if I wanted. You were right, I’m stuck with you.”

Zeferino was heartbroken. He didn’t care about the timestream, but he did still long for control over it. Without the power to alter reality, his life had no meaning. Not while in the Gallery, anyway. He would have to leave, like all the others before him. “These paintings aren’t dead yet?”

“They’re running on fumes, but soon the energy reserves from Fury’s power will be totally expended. The paintings will continue to show us the timestream, but we won’t be able to do anything with them. What you see is what you get. You saw to that.”

“Then if there’s no power in the Gallery, Nerakali and I will have to find power in the timestream.”

“You can’t draw energy from the timestream. Believe me, we’ve tried.”

“I ain’t staying here. This place sucks anyway,” Zeferino lied. “I never liked it.”

Erlendr laughed. “Do whatever you want, Zeferino. It doesn’t matter anymore. Go down to the timestream, for all I care. At least you can’t do any worse than you’ve already from done up here.”

Zeferino walked away and muttered under his breath, “are you sure about that?”

« < » > Entire Story

Microstory 445: Floor 41 (Part 2)

< > Table of Contents

Beta: Gamma, Delta, what can I help you two with?

Gamma: Would you like the good news first, or the bad news?

Beta: Good news.

Delta: The good news is that you’re getting a promotion. The bad news is that we have no choice but to push Alpha out.

Beta: That’s not bad news. That’s no news. That’s positively not happening. I’m not going to push out my business partner.

Gamma: That’s the real bad news. Not even for the good of the company?

Beta: Not even. I’ll tear this whole building down before I betray a friend for the corporate ladder, or anything else.

Delta: I don’t think you understand what’s going on. We’re not pushing him out so that you can take his place. We’re pushing him out because it has to be done. We would like to do it with your cooperation, but it is not required. We are expecting to vote on this on Tuesday. Feel free to lobby the rest of the voters, but I don’t think you’ll have much luck. Our clients need to see a major change.

Beta: Alpha is more than a symbol...more than the face. He worked his ass off to make this. He came from nothing.

Delta: He started out with a million dollar loan from his father.

Beta: Still. He deserves better than this. We know he’s not at fault. He can’t be responsible for every single little mistake the workers make.

Gamma: We know that, and trust us when we say that this is not easy, but we have investigated the defective windows, and have been unable to trace the actual source of the problem.

Beta: Let me do it.

Gamma: Do what?

Beta: Investigate. You say the vote won’t be for another few days? Give me a few days.

Delta: What do you think you can do in such a short time that we’ve not already tried...that you’ve not already tried?

Gamma: Now, hold on, Delta. If he wants the time then give him the time. He’s right. Nothing is happening today. We might as well continue trying to find the source.

Delta: Omicron will not be happy about this.

Beta: This is Omicron’s idea? I should have known. That son of a bitch. I need to talk to him first. Where the hell is he?

Delta: I believe he went to speak with the vice presidents.

Beta: Can’t you see what he’s doing? He’s mining support. This has nothing to do with saving the company! This is all about his own ambitions! Why the hell is this thing taking so long? No one should be using the executive elevator this early!

Microstory 444: Floor 42 (Part 2)

< > Table of Contents

Construction Administrator: What the hell are you doing up here?

Research & Development Head: I’m here to discuss moving our department back to the original facility. What are you doing?

Admin: Honestly, I’ve come to lobby the president to institute a complete overhaul of the personnel and department system.

Head: Figures. I always knew that you were gunning for my job.

Admin: It’s not about you. You must admit that something went wrong with the defective windows. We have to do something to take care of this problem. I know you know the definition of insanity. We can’t just leave things be and expect them to work out on their own.

Head: I understand that, but what we need to do is find the source of the problem. You can’t cut off your entire arm when you have an infection. You find the damaged tissues and only remove those.

Admin: No, you take medicine that clears up the damaged tissue no matter where it is.

Head: My God, you know what I mean. You want to destroy the whole company and rebuild it, hoping that solves the issue. And yeah, it probably will. But then a lot of good and innocent people are going to be out of work, and that’s not really fair, is it? Why should they suffer for someone else’s mistakes?

Admin: No, it’s not fair, but it’s not the company’s responsibility to keep people employed. Its job is to make a profit, and we can’t do that if we don’t have any clients. This requires a response, so that people know we’re serious about safety and customer satisfaction. The employees we let go will find work elsewhere, because other companies are having their own problems, and they’re looking for new personnel as well. That’s how the job market works.

Head: But you even admit that you don’t know whose fault it is that the windows were defective.

Admin: It’s not my concern if that person, or those people, start working for some other company. I don’t really care about that.

Head: No, you wouldn’t, but you should. What if they start working for a vehicle manufacturer, and start putting parts in backwards? Or what if they design a cell phone battery that explodes? You could end up purchasing their bad products. But that’s not my point. My point is that it would be impractical to fire everyone in the company, and my guess is that you don’t want to let go of anyone in your department. Sounds pretty self-serving to me. What if one of your people is the culprit?

Admin: We don’t build windows, we can’t be at fault for windows. It’s that simple.

Head: Maybe not. Maybe it’s more complicated than that. Maybe you contributed to our issues without even realizing it.

Admin: I can’t imagine how, but we can let the president decide. Where is he anyway?

Head: Maybe he went to the basement after that earthquake.

Admin: I’m starting to think that wasn’t an earthquake...

Microstory 443: The State of Things

< > Table of Contents

I’m going to take a bit of a break from our story to go meta. As I brought up in the introduction, this was first planned as two feature films. I almost wish I had moved to Los Angeles and pitched the concept to...I dunno, who’s a famous filmmaker you guys like? I was worried about not understanding how companies work, and it turns out that I was right to. I especially don’t know what it would be like to run, or work for, a company that builds windows and doors. As you might have guessed, just from the titles, each installment took place on a different floor, in descending order. The movie would have had dialogue, and I tried that here, but it didn’t really work. I ended up transforming it into a sort of spiritual follow-up to my Perspectives series. Half the time, I probably failed to make it clear who each voice was, and what they did for the company. Sorry about that, my bad. I wish I could tell you I will do better for this next set, but I can’t promise that. I recently read a tweet from a writer/filmmaker named Christopher Leone (that’s it, I should have asked him to make my movies) who said, “whatever I’m currently writing is highly annoying but I’m really excited about the next thing. This is a constant state.” This rings true to me, but I hope it changes next year. I am really excited about Headlines, and 121 Taikon. These are two things I’ve never done before, and I’m interested to see how they turn out. I’m especially anxious about the second one because it exists within a mythological context of my primary canon. If you think that’s confusing, just wait. It’s basically the Book of Revelation, but as written by a different author with different ideas about what’s going to happen. It’ll be crazy. Now you’re asking what this has to do with the series at hand. I’m sorry that I’ve digressed. What I’m going to be doing is continuing the story by going back to each floor and adding to the perspectives. My thought right now is to write them in conversational mode, which is something I’m planning in full for a 2019 series. This could act as a test for that concept. Welp, I’m about to dive back in and hope that it works out. Wish me luck. Or don’t, whatever.

Microstory 442: Basement (Part 1)

< > Table of Contents

People are usually quite surprised when they come down to the basement and discover it to be clean and well-lit, but I insist on it. It’s important to me for my entire workspace to be easily accessible, organized, and free of pests. Insects, like cockroaches, thrive in the dirt and dark. I know it’s not great for the company’s wallet, or for world resources, but I have to keep the lights on at all times. I’m the only one who works down here, so that’s my right. At the moment, the company is going through a great deal of turmoil. Everyone is afraid of being laid off. Everyone is worried about what’s going to happen to the company, or whether they’re going to be sued. Of course, as a humble custodian, I have no such worries. I’m quite well-versed in the latest automated cleaning technologies, and would be able to find another position in a flash. I’m not educated enough to repair the little robots, but there will always be a need, at least for the foreseeable future, for someone to clean and maintain them, and to make sure that they’re actually doing their jobs. I spend a good amount of time in my basement, but the automation also affords me to go out to the floors and observe people. That’s always been my main draw towards large corporations. People leave you alone, and don’t notice when you’re there. I’ve learned a lot from the office workers. Everyone thinks they know the root of all their problems. Many of them are partially correct, but no one has the full story, because you have to see Analion as a single unit of many parts. Look at any one of these parts and you fail to understand the truth behind the unit. You can’t break down something like this, analyze it, and expect to find any useful answers. No one person is at fault the defective windows. Everyone contributes in their own way, and so everyone had a hand in the deaths. Some were more involved than others, but no one can be completely removed from the equation. I can tell you what happened. I can tell you everything. Just let me first get to the other side of the building. The elevator is about to crash.

Microstory 441: Floor 1 (Part 1)

< > Table of Contents

I am the gatekeeper. We’ve started receiving so many calls about those deaths that we had to hire two more people for reception. They built a little post for security in the corner of the lobby that wasn’t there before, for a now much-needed protection. You might laugh, but we have seen people come in just to scream and fight against “the man”. The security guard has done an excellent job of protecting us, but nothing could have prepared us for a threat from within. Ya know, I’ve always considered myself very well in tuned with nature. I take care of a beautiful garden that goes around my whole house. And I swear that I know what my plants are feeling. I know what they need, and when they need it. I am the most self-aware person you’ll meet, so don’t think this makes me some kind of delusional crazy person. When I tell you that I have all day sensed that something bad was going to happen, you can be damn sure that I’m not lying. The world and time, they talk to me, and though I’ve sometimes had a hard time interpreting it, I can always tell. I can always feel it. Today is unlike any other day. Today is exception and dangerous. Just before it happens, I feel a rush of wind come over me. This is the spirit, warning me to get out of the way. Only as I’m moving away from the desk did it register that something was falling towards me. I look up and witness the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I try to urge my trainee to move away too, but there is not enough time. Both the window and the man hit the reception desk. Glass shatters and flies everywhere. Something hits me in the chest and knocks me over. And then it happens. I hear a loud crash in the elevator shaft.