All Night Laundry (chapters 3-5)

This review was commissioned by @skaianDestiny


The following chapters of "All Night Laundry" don't get any less mind-blasting than the first two. If anything, the more one learns about what's going on in the story, the harder it is to make sense of it all. For multiple reasons.

First - and with massive kudos to the author - this story succeeds where many others fail in portraying a "monster beyond human comprehension" as actually beyond human comprehension. The time-warping, observer-effect-feeding maggot entity that Bina eventually comes to call "the botfly" has rules that it works by, but the reason and method behind them remains totally opaque. At the same time, the botfly isn't infallible or invincible. It HAS limitations. You can learn over time what it can and can't do. It's just mindbogglingly hard to understand how and why it can or can't do those things.

Second, while Bina was introduced as an everywoman young adult protagonist, it becomes clear over time that she's much stranger than she initially appeared. It's not clear if she was always like this, or if being implanted by a parasitic outgrowth of the Botfly changed her...in part because the changes that this things make to the world are often retroactive. We get more interludes of Bina's childhood and teens as time goes on, and she's gotten up to some mightily strange things over the years even before Piotyr the dog starts appearing in her memories from before it was ever born and we see Bina's six year old self wearing decorated armbands to hide her alien parasite scars.

Is reality actually changing behind her, though, or is it just her memories? Is it some of both? Like I said, everything increasingly pushes up against the borders of human understanding.

And then, there's what Bina does during the events of her actual one-on-one time war itself. And ohhhhh boy.

Like, take this sequence from the end of chapter 3. After fleeing from Gregor (the botfly's murderous human lackey/worshipper who runs the laundromat), Bina finds herself hiding in an office trailer in the construction site out back. Inside, she finds the dead body of a construction worker who must have gotten in Gregor's way earlier that evening. And, when she tries to investigate, the body and blood start warping in and out of reality.

Interacting further - in particular, bringing her infected hand in contact with the crime scene elements - causes Bina to be transported back in time to the point at which Gregor - due to other transtemporal events that Bina's gambit with the botfly caused - was sent on the course that led to him murdering the man. Bina decides to try and save the construction worker by cutting a warning into the picture hanging on the wall, which leads to her discovering...this:

Until the moment that she involved herself with the events taking place around the laundromat, Bina was a person. From that moment onward - and, retroactively, backward as well - she has been thirteen people and counting. Some of them died very early on. Others have had partial successes, and left caches of supplies and information like this one for herselves.

On one hand, knowing that this was originally a quest, this is a really cheap way for the QM to throw the players a bone or drop them much-needed exposition when the circumstances wouldn't otherwise allow.

On the other hand, knowing that this was originally a quest, this is a completely fucking brilliant way for the QM to throw the players a bone or drop them much-needed exposition when the circumstances wouldn't otherwise allow.

And it doesn't stop at just quantum schizo-conversations written on walls. A minute later, when Bina's changing of the timeline in a way that effects her own past and future causes violent seizures from her brain glitching out while something (either the botfly, or a more natural cosmic force) drags her back to some version of the "present," she gets some...erm...help?

Notably, Bina-12 still has the magic scarf that she pulled out of a childhood memory and used to escape the Corpse of a Day. Presumably, she picked it up from the intertemporal void where she(?) left it. Or else there are several instances of the magic grandma scarf rather than just one.

...

After this whole incident, the comic shows Bina entering the office trailer and not finding any blood or body in it. And then having an epileptic seizure that she fortunately still medicates herself against using the medicine taped to the wall by all the mad scrawling.

I'm not even sure how many different Binas we've been following in the damned comic. At what points other instances of her might have branched off, and if we've occasionally alternated between several of them after those branching timeline points.

In fact, the Bina who appears in person to give "our own" Bina some information in person to her childhood self attending her grandmother's funeral in India not long after this in the comic might be the instance of her we WERE following up until the previous retcon.

Or else that part is just an epilepsy vision as her mind tries to process information from multiple sets of memories, and for some reason imagines it happening as a meeting during her childhood. Who can even tell.

The author/QM must have had one hell of a spreadsheet to keep track of this. Possibly one that exists in more spatial dimensions than the typical software can support.

...

All that is just a couple of scenes from late chapter 3 and early chapter 4, by the way. There's plenty of more sanity-blasting setpieces, this is just the most extreme and illustrative one.

With my description so far, I might be making it seem like "All Night Laundry" is just some nerd's mental masturbation about time travel. I will now take this opportunity to assure my readers that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this story's commitment to the human element is not only an important part of its themes, but also the anchor that keeps the reader hooked and invested through even the most baffling mind screws.

Ironically for a story about time travel, this is very much a "coming of age" narrative. Unusually for those, though, it's a grandparent rather than a parent who Bina needs to live up to. To the point where her retconned memories about her grandmother and her retconned memories about talking to herself may actually just be the same thing in different guises. Notably, the memory/dream that she got the scarf in back in chapter 2 comes when Bina is a hapless victim, and it has her grandmother as the wise mentor figure. The next big childhood flashback/dream/whatever comes when Bina has just made the proactive decision to save the construction worker and knowingly change the timeline despite her own fear of the consequences...and this time, the vision has an older version of herself stepping into the wise mentor role after her grandmother's death.

If anything, Bina's parents are portrayed as a coddling, pacifying, neutralizing influence that she needs to push back against in order to get in touch with her grandmother's power, bravery, and self-reliance.

...

I don't think it's a coincidence that Bina is the daughter of small-business-owning immigrants, who sent her to get a four-year degree in a subject Bina rarely even sees fit to mention to the reader. The embodiment of the appearance-obsessed, desperate-to-assimilate model minority stereotype. Bina's grandmother who stayed in India, meanwhile, was a fiery investigative journalist well into her old age, and who fought against her daughter's desire to raise Bina in the liberal mind prison. With the subtext of the botfly embodying millennial lethargy and despair (literally forcing its victims to sit in place amidst a frozen landscape and stare at a screen forever), Bina only stumbling into it because of her parents setting her on this course in life is...well, yeah.

Now that I'm thinking about it from this angle, I wonder what the story is getting at by making the botfly's most prominent minion - Laundromat Gregor - also an immigrant to the west who has a strained relationship with his small business owning family. Or what the symbolism is of Bina kinda-sorta psionically adopting an uncorrupted version of the mutant zombie dog that Gregor works with. Yeah, the story is definitely going somewhere with this, but I don't yet know where.

...

Another area where the story makes sure to stay human and heartful and not just get lost in the high concept scifi weeds is with the introduction of new character Kendra. A traffic cop who Bina meets when she wakes up after her quantum paradox-induced seizure in Gregor's captivity, awaiting their turns to be fed to the botfly.

This sequence presents new kinds of challenges for both Bina and (presumably) the quest participants at the time. Getting Bina's fellow captive to help her would ordinarily be simple enough, given that "locked up together in a serial killer's basement" is the type of situation that encourages erstwhile strangers to cooperate. Unfortunately, Bina is still having aphasia issues in the wake of her recent seizure. And, bringing us back around to the high concept stuff a bit, she's been informed by her future/alternate selves that due to a combination of structural damage and high energy timeline fuckery, the laundromat is going to collapse on top of them within a few minutes of Gregor leaving them alone.

So, getting Kendra to both understand AND BELIEVE this, and thus modifying the timing and nature of their escape accordingly, is both harder and more urgent than it would otherwise be. Good thing Bina also packed herself a lockpick in one of the envelopes she taped up to the wall behind that framed picture, because without that fortuitous "coincidence" it would have been a very hard sell.

Just running away isn't possible, unfortunately, on account of maybe-Piotyr guarding the stairs. This thing seems much bigger than before. Apparently, every time Bina causes a time paradox, that dog monster gets bigger and more powerful. Which might imply that the botfly may actually be benefitting from what she's doing, come to think of it.

Chapter four ends with Bina and Kendra freeing themselves from their restraints, and then fleeing down the ominous hole in the basement floor to get away from Maybe-Piotyr just seconds before the building collapses.

Presumably, this hole (which Gregor left a ladder near) leads down to wherever he can access the botfly's extratemporal lair from. So, going down there is going to be dangerous, even without the ceiling following them, but they don't have a lot of choice.

Something that reassures Bina as she wakes up under the rubble (fortunately, the underground space they fell into is covered in a shallow layer of mud or water, so the fall doesn't kill them) is that she's now saved two people. The construction worker, and also Kendra. In her (mental?) conversation with her previous quantum fork, Bina was told that she doesn't always manage to save Kendra. Her last self did not. In the context of Bina growing to fill her grandmother's shoes, finding the power deferred for a generation, this is a really inspiring moment.

As for what Bina and her new friend finds underground beneath the laundromat and adjacent construction site, well.

...

Bina encountered a question before, possibly poised by herself, possibly by someone else. "What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of a day?" The underground discoveries to come seem to point to a related question. One that Bina might just be too afraid to think about asking.

"What kind of insect lays its eggs in a freshly-killed day?"

...

In the second chapter, Bina escaped from the corpse of a day. In the fifth, she explores its coffin.

There were indications all throughout the story that the construction site behind the laundromat wasn't just doing normal construction. Snatches of glimpsed documents and overheard conversations during the trailer-office scene. Strange details of the site layout and oddities mentioned by the botfly's imprisoned victims glimpsed even prior to that. Now, in chapter 5, it comes together.

The landowner wanted to put in a normal building of some kind here, but the construction crew punched through into a massive hollow space underground. A space that probably shouldn't have been able to bear the weight of the city blocks overhead, but seems to have been doing so anyway. The city government quickly took over the site and suspended further development until they could figure out just what this archae/geological site was, and then (implicitly) the national government took it over from them.

Beneath the breach in the floor of the construction site sits the rusting corpse of the sugar plant. The factory where the early twentieth century scientist performed her quantum electrical generation experiment, on a day that has since been dead and verminous with alien life.

How and why did the ruined factory end up covered up by a half-dozen meters of soil? Unknown. A century certainly isn't enough time for geological processes to do this, and it isn't just built-over the way that cities often build themselves over. Something weird happened with the factory. Either intentionally by the botfly (or, perhaps, the cosmic horror that seeded it there), or as a weird natural consequence of its presence interacting with terrestrial elements.

Something from down here made it up through the breach into the construction site. And somehow got the botfly's hooks into Gregor. Possibly using the dog as a vector, now that I think about it. Since then, Gregor has dug down from the laundromat's basement to create his own entrance to the buried sugar plant, and he's been using that passage to bring victims to a spot where the botfly can pull them into its lair from. This undermining, along with esoteric fallout of Bina's timeloop shenanigans, is probably what ultimately causes the laundromat to collapse into the ground when it did.

When it comes to exotic effects of time-warping on the material environment though, we haven't even gotten to the weirdest part yet.

It's improbably cold down here in the buried ruin. And, after a certain event involving a quantum-entangled television set, Bina realizes that when she exposes her botfly-wound, its eerie green light can reveal "cracks" in the middle of reality. These cracks in spacetime are the sources of the unnatural cold.

And...about it being so wet and muddy down here. The mud and water might have saved their lives from the fall, but Kendra points out that it's the middle of summer. And that it was a clear night. And yet, despite that, it is now raining cats and dogs, with the breach in the construction site overhead being the source of the water creating all this wetness.

The cracks in time are thermoconductive. Energy that comes in contact with them is distributed away across the timeline.

Every loop, every retcon, every mind-warping gambit between Bina and the botfly, has caused the cracks to spread and deepen. Retroactively siphoning more heat away from the "present" and into the past. To the point where it's now created a cold spot strong enough to effect the local weather conditions, causing an unseasonal rainstorm directly overhead.

It was a clear summer night when we started. However, it has now been raining the entire time.

So. Yeah. That's the level of environmental WTF we're operating on.

And yet, within that surreal, highly theoretical backdrop, the problems that Bina has to deal with for most of chapter 5 are very mundane, very visceral, and very humble. First step, after they tumble down into the half-flooded factory shell, is for Bina to make sure she isn't seriously injured, and then to find Kendra. The enemy here is...darkness. Just ordinary, mundane darkness. With only the hungry green light of the botfly shining out of the wound in her hand available to push it back with.

There's an incredibly tense, incredibly page-turning sequence that goes on for quite a while, consisting JUST of Bina trying to find Kendra in the darkness. She doesn't even really know Kendra yet, but she's lonely and scared enough - and her loneliness and fear are transferred effectively enough to the reader - that by the time she's reunited with her it's downright cathartic. I actually breathed a sigh of relief, out loud, in real life.

Well, technically it wasn't just the darkness. It was the darkness, the cold, the fear of open wounds being exposed to so much filthy water with no medical aid in sight, and the possibility of Gregor or the dog being around any corner. Even when Bina hears Kendra's voice again, there's still the problem of underground acoustics making the source of any sound impossible to track down. And Bina still recovering from the aphasia. And the fact that if Kendra looks at the green light, she'll start getting all high and hypnotized and Bina will start to think she can see luminous tentacles reaching out of her wound at Kendra. Resulting in a Marco Polo game in the cold, rubble-filled mud where the echoes are endlessly deceptive, it's pitch black except when Bina unwraps her wound, and Bina can't explain to Kendra why she needs to close and cover her eyes whenever Bina does unwrap her wound.

It's an incredibly strong juxtaposition of power and powerlessness. Struggling through cold mud and broken rebar, even though you have the power of (limited) time travel.

One thing that keeps Bina going through this prolonged sequence of misery and horror is a snippet of conversation with her previous/alternate/older self that remains in her mind:

And, that knowledge is what enables her to pull through until the two finally can cling together for warmth while Bina's ability to speak slowly returns.

Not that the ability to speak is really adequate for all of the information Bina tries to relay to Kendra. Because, uh, well. I consider myself to be quite a good communicator - I do it for a living and all - but I still struggled to make my first "All Night Laundry" review comprehensible.

I feel you there, Bina. I really do.

The big setpiece that chapter five leads up to concerns the television set I mentioned before. It's the same one that was set up in the laundromat, before the laundromat fell into the earth. The one that kept turning itself off and on by itself when Bina was entering the laundromat for the first time, and that she was seeing weird fragmentary images through. It turns out that the reason it kept turning itself off and on is because Bina and Kendra would later find it down here, and Bina would accidentally infect it with the botfly emanations from her hand, causing it to become interlocked with an earlier version of itself. It turns itself off and on down here in the ruins because of Bina messing with it back in chapter one. It kept turning itself off and on back in chapter one because of Bina and Kendra messing with it down here in chapter five.

The botfly seems to have a particular affinity for electrical devices. Makes sense, considering that the ground zero for its infection was an attempted electrical entropy-reverser machine. Whenever Bina puts her hands near an electrical device, it behaves strangely. For instance, back in the office trailer, an open laptop's monitor started displaying ripples of green light when Bina put that hand near it. Various lights and machines have turned themselves off and on when she approached them. Etc.

And this might be important to something that happened back in chapter four, too. See, when the dog-monster cornered Bina and Kendra and forced them to retreat down the hole instead of up the stairs, Bina also saw flashing green lights upstairs behind the monster. The narration described it as "like someone waving a lime green flashlight around." In retrospect, it's pretty clear that Bina will shortly be going back in time and be upstairs in the laundromat with a flashlight in hand at that moment, looking at the Piotyr-monster as it goes downstairs to menace the versions of herself and Kendra down in the basement, right before the collapse.

A theory somewhat validated by the fact that Kendra accidentally's herself back in time while she and Bina are messing with the TV.

Thus forcing Bina to figure out how to "recharge" the TV's intertemporal properties using the botfly's emanations so that she can follow her. Which, sure enough, deposits her a few hours back in time, in the laundromat, where she and Kendra now have to find each other and avoid Gregor again while hopefully not melting their own brains with epileptic time-seizures.

Also, when she travels back through the pattern of reality-cracks that have been spidering out from around that TV, the light of Bina's hand shows that she's breaking them open even further by doing this. And...she grabs a piece of spacetime as she vanishes through the gap.

It feels like a piece of glass, but it absorbs heat and shows glimpses of the underground ruins when she looks in it, no matter where she takes it from this point on.

Presumably, she'll be able to use this broken time-shard to quantum-entangle other things together to create more two-way time bridges. And also probably spread the spacetime corruption even further, fucking up the weather and structural integrity of the nearby objects even more and probably giving the botfly the power to shoot lasers or something, but what can you do.


I did technically include some information in chapter 6 in this review. Because it was that hard for me to stop reading when I reached the end of 5, and ended up going a little bit further.

All Night Laundry might have started out as a quest, but its webcomic incarnation - with its cookie-based retcon system to let readers follow the branching timelines as they wish - elevates it greatly. To the point where I'd say that this is the medium that the story is best suited for, even though it's not the one it started out in.

In fact, this might be my favorite webcomic period now. I never had this much trouble putting Kill Six Billion Demons down.

Read it. Seriously. Just read it.