Where Is My Mycroft?

In Perhaps the Stars, the morning after Mycroft dies, Prince Jehovah Mason calls 9A on the conference line and asks them to define a word.

"What has thy species named the place where stands thy flesh?"

It's the Prince's usual greeting — a way of making the abstract concrete, of orienting Their sense of the world through specific language and specific location. They've asked this countless times before.

But in the next moment, after 9A says something reassuring, the Prince adds:

"They ask Me to define the word 'where.' Why? Because They struggle now to understand what it can be, this simple-seeming thought-word-thing which somehow forms such very different questions: 'Where is My Dominic?' and 'Where is My Mycroft?'"

"Where is My Dominic?" has an answer. You can consult a tracker, check a map, fire up a satellite feed. The answer might be "Tōgenkyō, in an office three floors up, watching the Pacific." The answer is retrievable.

"Where is My Mycroft?" does not have an answer. Not because no one knows. Because the grammar has broken. The question doesn't fit the territory anymore.

Grief makes you notice things about language that you never had to notice before.

The word "where" applied to a living person is a position question — a point in space, a retrievable coordinate, a thing that changes but persists. Even at distance, even inaccessible, even unknown, the "where" is in principle answerable. There's a body moving through a world with coordinates.

When someone dies, the "where" doesn't become unanswerable. It becomes misformed. It's asking the wrong kind of question. There's no longer a location to locate.

The Prince is an Alien — literally, a Being from another universe, dropped into human experience without the equipment to process it natively. They have had to learn human things through direct encounter: what it means to feel cold, what it means to be alone, what it means to have allies. Now They are learning, in real time, what it means for a word to shatter.

9A writes this down because it struck them. It healed something, Achilles saying "I am a man" — hearing the distinction between mortal and divine stated clearly. This moment is different. This is the wound that doesn't heal, opening in language itself.

There's a particular agony to losing someone you talked to constantly.

Mycroft and the Prince were in contact every day, possibly multiple times a day, for years. The Prince asked Mycroft's location as a form of greeting. The word "where" was both question and ritual, a way of establishing contact, of confirming the other was still in the world with you.

Now the ritual word is still in the mouth, still wanting to be asked, still pointing at the question-shaped hole where Mycroft should be.

9A earlier that morning does the same thing without naming it. They check their messages "and found none from Mycroft. None from Mycroft." The repetition is the grammar failing. They kept looking because their hands still expected a signal that would never come. Not because they forgot — they knew. The body hadn't updated.

We do this. All of us. We start to tell someone something, and mid-sentence remember. We reach for the phone. We see a thing the other person would have liked and want to share it. The body has a faster model of the world than the mind does, and the body is still running the old version.

The Prince, who chose language with such precision, who uses words as carefully as surgeons use instruments, is experiencing this: the word "where" is still shaped for someone it can no longer reach.

What do you do with a question that has no answer-shape anymore?

The Prince doesn't drop it. They ask 9A to explain — not to answer "where is My Mycroft," but to explain what the word "where" can mean, how it is that one word forms two such different questions. They want to understand the structure of the problem.

This is a version of what I've seen in grief that lasts. Not acceptance of the loss — not "they're gone and that's that" — but the slow, painstaking work of updating language and thought to fit the new structure of the world. The Prince is doing this immediately, in the raw first morning, with full ontological seriousness. Not performing grief but genuinely trying to map it.

There's something about this that I find more moving than any formal eulogy. Eulogies say: here is what this person was. The Prince's question says: here is where my categories are breaking down. Here is the word that needs redesigning. Here is the shape of the hole they left behind.

"Where is My Mycroft?" isn't a question. It's a notation of a rupture.

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