Leo,
I’ve rewritten this letter eleven times. Which you’d find funny, because the whole point of this project is that I need your help getting things clear, and I can’t even get the invitation clear. So I’m going to stop trying to make it sound like me and just say what I mean.
The Apex is not finished. That’s not an apology. It’s the design.
I’ve built the architecture. The GATE program, the Bridge, the mechanics of how it all works. I know what Artie can do. I know what Malachi wants. I know the shape of all three seasons and I know how it ends. What I don’t know is why any of it matters. And I don’t mean that in the way I usually mean it, where I’m being hard on myself and you tell me to shut up and finish the thing. I mean it structurally. There are rooms in this story that I built but can’t furnish, because the furniture comes from places I’ve never been.
Let me be specific.
Artie steals traits. That’s the engine. But the question the series needs to answer — the one I can feel but can’t articulate — is whether there’s something underneath the traits. A soul, a self, a whatever-you-want-to-call-it that the Bridge can’t touch. I’ve written around this question for two hundred pages and I still don’t know how to write INTO it. Because I don’t have the vocabulary. You do.
You grew up in that church. You read Aquinas in high school because you wanted to, which is still the most alarming thing I know about you. You can trace a line from the concept of the soul in Aristotle through Augustine through Descartes through whatever the neuroscientists are saying now, and you can do it while making it sound like a conversation instead of a lecture. I grew up in a house where we went to church once because my mom’s friend was getting her kid baptized and we left early because my dad couldn’t find parking and decided God would understand.
That’s the gap. And the gap is the point.
I don’t need you to write a theology of The Apex. I need you to read what I’ve written and text me at 3 AM and say “Elias, you accidentally wrote the Book of Job” or “this is literally the golem myth” or “the reason this scene doesn’t work is because you’re trying to solve a problem that Gregory of Nyssa solved in the fourth century and you just don’t know it yet.” That’s what I need. Your voice in my ear telling me what I’m actually writing about, because I can feel it and you can name it.
Here’s what I know about what I don’t know:
GATE is a conspiracy, but it’s also a theology. These children were selected, set apart, given abilities they didn’t ask for. That’s election. That’s grace. That’s also the gifted program at Lakeview Elementary where they pulled you out of class twice a week and gave you logic puzzles while the rest of us learned long division. I know there’s something in the overlap between government programs that identify exceptional children and religious traditions that identify chosen people. I can feel it. I can’t build it.
The Reverse Bridge — giving back what you stole — requires sitting in someone else’s emptiness. That’s penance. Or it’s empathy. Or it’s something I don’t have a word for. You have a word for it. You probably have seven words for it in three languages, and you’ll tell me the Aramaic one is the most precise and then explain why, and I’ll use it wrong in the script and you’ll text me a correction at 4 AM and that correction will fix the scene.
Malachi believes the GATE children are the next stage of human evolution. That the ordinary people are the chaff and the Bridge is the harvest. That’s eugenics, but it’s also eschatology. He thinks he’s building the kingdom. I need someone who actually understands what the kingdom is supposed to look like to tell me where Malachi’s version breaks. Because I can write a villain who’s wrong. I can’t write a villain who’s wrong in the specific way that makes the audience understand why he’s convincing.
Artie is hollow. I wrote him hollow on purpose. You’re going to read this and see yourself in him, and you’re going to be wrong. Or — you’re going to be right in a way that’s more interesting than I intended. Because I wrote Artie as the man who can be anyone in any room, and that’s you. I wrote him as someone whose gift for reading people might not be wisdom but a condition, and you’re going to push back on that, and your pushback is going to make the character better. That’s the invitation.
You are the least empty person I know. You carry everyone. You carried me for twenty years and never mentioned it. But you perform emptiness — you present yourself as a system, a structure, a function — because admitting how full you are would mean admitting how much you have to lose. Artie is the version of you that’s actually empty. I wrote him so you could see the difference.
I left gaps. In the mythology, in the moral architecture, in the places where the story needs a foundation I can’t pour. The gaps are shaped like you. They’re the spaces where I need the guy who reads Borges and the Bible and Gray’s Anatomy and sees the same story in all three.
This is how we’ve always worked. I throw an idea into the group chat at 3 AM and you’re the one who texts back: “That’s not what you think it is. It’s better.” I say something about music and you connect it to contract law. I describe a character and you tell me I’m describing the Prodigal Son and I say who’s that and you sigh and explain it and the explanation is better than anything I would have written.
The difference is that this time I’m not disguising it as a casual conversation. This time I’m telling you: I wrote this for you. The gaps are yours. Fill them in. Tell me what I’m actually saying. Tell me the name for the thing I can feel but can’t see.
Read it. Text me. We’ll do what we always do.
E