Gabriel Jeroschewitz, December 10th, 2025, abridged

THE OCEAN TINKERS

I Stopped Taking Notes

There was a morning, or perhaps it was an evening wearing a morning’s torn coat, when the dust clouds began to rise out of the wet ocean. Not the ordinary salt mist that clings to fishermen’s eyelashes, but colossal, bruised clouds — the colour of old bronze — swelling upwards like the breath of some drowned god deciding to cough.

It was at that moment that the otroverts arrived.

They didn’t march, or swim, or fly. They appeared, like thoughts that had been pacing the edges of existence and decided to step bodily onto the stage. The first I saw was Dr. Rami Kaminski himself, wearing a scarf the way most people wear an argument — wrapped tight, with only the loose ends showing. His eyes didn’t dart like an introvert’s, nor beam like an extrovert’s. They sat there, calmly holding their own council. Even as the nude choirs began singing ancestral voices that no one understood — in a language made entirely from the sounds of rain striking old violin and cello strings — he tilted his head, listening without needing to belong to it.

The otroverts gathered in small constellations, never forming a crowd, but never truly alone. One of them, a woman named Yelena who wore the moon’s reflection in her hair, stood beside me on the black sand.
“Do you understand their song?” I asked.
She didn’t blink. “Understanding is a debt. I prefer credit.”

There was laughter somewhere behind us, deep belly-laughter, but I couldn’t tell if it belonged to one of the high IQ gods or to the devil himself. The gods stood in jagged rows, their foreheads wider than landscapes, muttering equations about peace in the universe. They spoke in voices like Russell Hoban scribbling his last manifesto — urgent, raw, half in jest — as if peace might be wrestled out of chaos by sheer willpower and mathematics.

One of them, I think his name was Thales, but he could have lied, screamed into the thickening dust,
“The neutrinos are bored! The variables are lonely! We must unhook the hinges of expectation!”
Nobody argued. The other people nodded, privately agreeing or disagreeing in places that could not be seen.

The devil, of course, was there too. He did not wade into the surf, though the huge waves rolled in like scrolls of scripture being flung at human souls. He leaned forward from the horizon, ugly-faced and grinning with the patience of erosion. His claws held something invisible — perhaps the very idea of “belonging” — and he squeezed it to make the hold.

I watched as day turned into night without consulting the sun, and then moonlight morphed into starlight, and the starlight melted back into sunlight like a drunk clock forgetting which way its hands should go. The otroverts didn’t flinch. They seemed accustomed to time doing tricks without asking permission.

One man, Jericho, was telling a story to a single starfish he found stranded in the wet grit. His voice was rich, warm, and hilarious, but it didn’t translate into group amusement.
“I only talk to one listener at a time,” he told me, “because audiences dilute the truth. And I can’t stand diluted truth — it makes my tongue itch.”

Meanwhile, the choirs of nude angels kept singing. Their harmonies curved through the air like architecture, building cathedrals no mortal could inhabit. You could hear fragments of history in their notes — collapses of empires, kisses stolen in alleyways, the sound of a library burning while moths burst from the pages. The otroverts didn’t sing with them, but kept their own internal music running quietly, an independent radio nobody else could tune into.

It was strange to watch them. Unlike introverts, they didn’t withdraw into solitude — and unlike extroverts, they didn’t seek the friction of company. They stood, occasionally exchanging a single glance or a sharp joke, but mostly they fed themselves on their own thoughts. You could see it: their eyes glowing faintly as if their minds were a fireplace that didn’t need wood, only sparks.

At one point, the gods began a heated debate about whether peace could exist without boredom. The otroverts listened, but their faces betrayed no allegiance to any side. And then, quite unexpectedly, one of the angels — naked as a truth you’re not ready to hear — drifted down to stand beside Kaminski.
“You are not part of the choir,” she said, not accusing, merely observing.
“I am not part of anything,” he replied, and smiled as if to soften the edges of that fact.

The angel laughed, a sound like shattered crystal being swept into a velvet bag. “You are a ghost who refuses to haunt.”
Kaminski shrugged. “Or a living man who refuses to herd.”

Beyond them, the waves swelled higher, covering pieces of humanity I recognized — photographs, confessions, masks worn to work, names whispered to strangers. All washed over by salted enormity. And the otroverts… kept talking to themselves. Occasionally aloud, occasionally in whispers only they could hear.

The devil grew restless. His ugly face twisted with irritation, because he knew he could tempt crowds, rattle loners, but these people who defined themselves outside those categories — they were slipperier than smoke. He shouted into the dust clouds,
“What are you?!”
Jericho shouted back: “A question with legs!”
Yelena added, “And no leash.”

The gods roared with laughter, the kind that shakes tectonic plates. The angels, unfazed, continued their indecipherable hymn. The otroverts returned to thinking, unbothered.

I kept watching. And soon I realized the comedy here was not in punchlines or pratfalls — it was in the sheer futility of all forces trying to recruit the otroverts. The gods wanted their intellect, the devil their obedience, and the angels their voices. The waves tried to swallow them, the dust clouds wished to hide them, and the starlight wanted to illuminate them. But the otroverts…  were. They didn’t resist, didn’t fight; they just remained in that third space outside of alignment, drawing energy from unshared musings.

As the surreal atmosphere churned — night/day/stars/sun cycling like a drunk carousel — one of the gods approached me. His brow was a mile wide and furrowed with equations.
“You are observing. Are you one of them?”
I hesitated. “I think I might be. I never cared for the crowd or the quiet — only for the conversation I have with myself.”
He nodded, as if I’d handed him a rare leaf. “Then you will survive this.”

From the edge of the shore, the devil scowled and tried to crush the invisible thing in his claws harder. The dust clouds kneaded the sky into shadows. The angels’ song rose to impossible pitches. The gods resumed screaming for the universe’s peace. But the otroverts… they smiled when the humour of existence struck them, which was often and without warning.

One by one, they wandered off — not together, not apart — into corridors of their own thought. Some stepped into the waves without sinking. Others walked into the dust clouds as though entering a warm bath. Yelena turned toward the horizon and let the changing lights paint her in sequences: moon, star, sun.

I stood alone, or perhaps in company of myself, on that dissolving shore. The comedy of it all tasted dark — a kind of cosmic joke I couldn’t explain, as laughter heard through a wall. And as the ocean continued to cough up its bronze dust, I finally understood why the otroverts could stand in the middle of gods, devils, angels, and chaos without losing their balance:

They neither fought nor fled from it. They lived in the uninterrupted stream of their own thinking, a current that no wave, no choir, no dust cloud could interrupt.

And in that quiet independence, the universe could neither tempt.