ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would have been impossible without the continued love and support of the people who read me on Twitter, Itch, Gumroad, Surfaces, Misery Tourism, and the queer fiction whisper network. Doing justice to everyone whose comments — from heartfelt compliments to baffled anger and everything in between — and unstinting support have kept me going over the years would take up most of the book and wouldn't be enough.

The first editors to take a chance on me remain outstanding influences of mine and personal heroes in their fields — Mika H of surfaces.cx, Ava H of Sporazine, William D of Misery Tourism. This book would not be possible without the literary moment they in their own ways helped create, and if one person picks up their work on this paragraph's account, I'll consider the whole project to have been a success.

And last but not least, I would like to thank five people who I can state without any exaggeration I owe living to see the day to: in no particular order, Jackie S, Deirdre Z, Charity H, Nadia M, Erin K. If any of you wind up reading this, I love you, and I hope it's been worth it.

DEDICATION

Everywhere and always, like everything, for the exiles.

APOCALYPSES
or "DISPOSABLE NATIONAL RAZOR"

The future of humanity — the end-state of human evolution — is as a wormlike creature, inching through decaying ruins, gripping tall blades of grass with little setae, making arduous passage through eternally difficult terrain with a mouth full of dust.

— Hopfmann

GENESIS 17:17

The civil war never really touched us. Every once in a while we had to mutter shibboleths to get past men in different hoodies, but they were pretty obvious about what they expected so you didn't have to worry about it too much. Hard to get fruit for a while, hard to get corn for a while. You know how it is. On the radio there was the usual chatter about glory devices going off far away from us, but besides the one in Longview there was never really anything like that too close to Olympia, and that was a year ago. Then one morning most of the radio went silent and there was music, and we were all told we had been liberated. People celebrated, drank hard seltzer mixers, broke out fireworks, grilled a little meat, shot their guns into the air. Few murders, few hangings, nothing major. I-5 was clogged to shit all day, northbound and southbound both, full of people with all the money they could take out of the bank at once, and we all had a good laugh about that.

Hot pockets in the evening, and in the morning a bowl of cereal.

I woke up the next day and it was Monday, and I wondered if it meant I had to go into work. I mean, the reds had won, so maybe I didn't. But I wanted to keep everything straight so I clocked in at 8 AM. Richardson the foreman looked like hell, told us he had gotten into molly with some wobbly strange because who was gonna drug test anymore, and he was stressed out about what the war being over meant for production. The boss never showed up; everyone said he was probably headed for Canada or Cali or something. But management was still breathing down his neck. One of the guys in the skin and hair department told him he could probably tell them to go fuck themselves now, but he shut that up. "Without us, society grinds to a halt," he said, "revolution or no revolution. Maybe in the long run we don't work for management, but we gotta work. And if anyone has a problem with that -"
Jones from Environmental Control butted in. "Are we getting severance if we walk? I feel like we should get severance if we walk."
"Severance?" Richardson seemed amused. "You make 5 dollars above minimum, dude."
"Yeah, and who's to say that doesn't mean severance now?"
"Shit." The foreman frowned. "I didn't think of that. You wanna walk?"
"Maybe. Make me an offer?"
"Alright, I'll have to run it up the flagpole with the boss - or - oh. Damn. Well, let me check something real quick." He ducked into the cubicle block.
"Think he'll run to Cali too?", one of the CRISPR stiffs said. We all laughed at that.
Just long enough passed we didn't joke about anything else. "Alright, I had a look at payroll. I guess we're all getting a raise. How's 20% sound?"
"Fuck off, Shawn," said Jones. "I've been here for five damn years. I want 40%."
"Fine. Five years of seniority gets you 40%, less than that gets you 20%. That sound alright?"

We grumbled about it for a bit among ourselves but we eventually agreed to something like that. Management wouldn't be happy, but I guess that didn't matter. Around 8:30 we started getting soft alarms for caul squad. That was me, so I went over there with my light cutter and got to work. I was good at my job; I had to be to stay around. The turnover was real high for insurance reasons, because if you fucked up bad enough - and everyone fucked up at least a little - it could get the factory charged with murder if the polycarb womb tank was fully open at the time. Caul cutting was especially hard. You and your drainer had to get the neonate out of the oil bath as soon as possible without damaging them, which meant you got docked, or killing them, which meant you got fired. Your hands got slick with what we all called baby oil but couldn't call baby oil on the floor, even under your gloves. We complained about how easy it was for baby oil to percolate through those thin nitrile pieces of shit but nothing ever got done about it.

But I guess now something would have to.

About an hour after our lunch break I got one with hair. The oldheads always said that was a bad sign, that all the genes that give people shitty lanugo hair that falls out later were supposed to be CRISPRed out, but the CRISPR stiffs kept telling us it was epigenetics and it wasn't their fucking department. Epigenetics was all guys in lab coats who had doctorates, didn't really mingle much. Part of me felt like they were easy to blame for anything that went wrong, but part of me felt like everything I could remember going wrong really did turn out to be their fault. I told my shift lead, Fevrier, about the one with hair when we were out later, and she said, "Fucking hell. Still? I figured -"
"You figured everything was going right, so nothing'd go wrong," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "Stupid, I guess."
"Probably," I said. "Think it's CRISPR's fuckup?"
"Probably," she said. "They'll have to adjust. We all will."
I laughed. "Yeah. All the rules are out the window. Maybe now we'll get to use the word "baby" on the floor."
The chime went off when I said that. "I thought we turned that shit off."
"Me too."
She laughed. "Baby!" Chime. "Baby baby baby!" Chime chime chime.
Fevrier stubbed her clove out on her steel toe. "Management'll probably throw a shitfit about it, but yeah. We're back in the baby business, baby." (Chime! Chime!)

So we went back to the business of making babies. (Even in my head I could hear the chime.) I cut 50 more cauls. The drainer on my second shift was Herrera, who I had been sweet on before I found out they weren't gay. There's just something about drainers, y'know? They talked about finally getting their damn hair dyed, and I was like: sure, you do that. I guess everyone's going to be dressing a little gayer now. It's a wild time to be alive.

Hot pockets in the evening, and in the morning a bowl of cereal.

The next day we lost the contract with the Army, some kind of ethical thing from the guys running DC now - or whatever they were gonna call DC now it was gonna be its own city, probably not named after two murderers - so we had to cut production. The payroll was there for the raises, but we all had less to do. Management was screaming about it, except one very calm guy in Accounts, a new guy, didn't know his name. "We're cutting deadwood," he said. "This frees us up from our exclusivity with those goons -"
"It *frees up* our research on hyperreactivity and DHT responsivity, you mean," said Chesney, a high-up from CRISPR, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I'm sure people are going to be lining up to buy babies -" (chime!) "- oh, for fuck's sake - linining up to buy *neonates* whose hearts shit themselves like clockwork at age 60!"

One of them, I think Eames from Accounts, gave me a mean look for listening in, and I grabbed my crotch and stuck my tongue out. That woulda gotten me fired before, but who cared now. Eames looked like he was about to break off and hit me so I laughed and walked away.

Got our first shipment of baby oil from Norcal, which at least proved the war wasn't going to immediately disrupt production. We were all pumped up about that. The foreman looked like hell, but he always looked like hell now. Another couple shifts, another 70 babies cut loose. Nothing else really happened that day; this was just what life was going to be like now. I thought sometimes about going to Creche and seeing the little bastards off, but I was rarely that sentimental. The foreman had been, and so had Fevrier. Maybe I ought to, but not today.

Hot pockets in the evening -

I dreamed that night, real vivid, about being one of the neonates. I had that dream sometimes. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. The polycarb womb tank always opened up like a giant clamshell, like it never did in real life - they're not that smooth, not that fast - and one of the caul squad cut me loose. That was where, if it was gonna go bad, it went bad - they mangled the hell out of me, used the wrong cutter for the undercaul, that kind of thing. But this time it was Fevrier doing the cutting. I trusted her. Richardson came by and told her they had to let me go. I asked why and the foreman said, "It's all the hair. Turns out CRISPR *did* fuck you up. It's going to look bad to corporate if we have someone on staff who shows off how bad we could fuck up."
"That doesn't matter anymore," I said.
"No, I guess it doesn't," said Richardson. "But you watch your ass. Both of you."
- and in the morning, a bowl of cereal.

EZEKIEL 2:9

Before the zeroth day, there was all of history, and we do not now know how much was humanity and how much was the fortress’s design. But this much we know:
The plagues came before the fortress.
Every story about an alien virus we had to tell ourselves was about a biology unlike ours. We don’t know how they did it. Something as mundane as a secret laboratory or psychic forces, something as extravagant as panspermia or extraction from parallel dimensions. But we know they did it.
They had to have done it. We didn’t do it; we know that now.

Or if we did, we were being compelled.

THE ZEROTH DAY OF THE FORTRESS
It appeared without warning somewhere on our planet, somewhere cold in the northern hemisphere. An island in a frigid sea. It appeared to everyone, all at once, at 01:15 EDT. Children awoke mothers from turbulent dreams with terrified screaming, and then the mothers caught up and started screaming too.

Its dimensions are variable. They varied more intensely on the first day of the fortress, but they vary to this day. On the first attempt one of the old regimes made to measure it, it was 300 meters on a side, exactly. On the second attempt by the same regime, it was 113.24 meters. None survived the third attempt. The fourth attempt, 438.11 meters. It has always been a cube, and it has always been as black as interstellar space in the visible spectrum, and radiant beyond belief in the low C microwave band.
The regimes of our world attempted to understand it and failed. We do not completely understand its purpose even now. We do not understand it, except understanding that it hates, and it hates us.

No one slept on the first day of the fortress, or the second. But just before it arrived, at 00:58 EDT, the leader of the strongest regime on the planet seized a service pistol from her handlers and, bellowing incoherently in a rage, shot herself in the brainstem. Her death was nearly instant.

THE FIRST DAY OF THE FORTRESS

On the first day of the fortress, we understood that our death was its objective. Some of us attempted to oblige it. The air was lively with controlled flights into terrain, soldiers and police defeating suicide guards on their service carbines with jury-rigged mechanisms or mutual heart shots. Many livestock were slaughtered, many more than were scheduled. None were butchered, and most were left in place to rot, abbatoirs abandoned after a final day’s work by men and women struggling to survive in the shadow of their shame. Automobile accidents, ships at sea run aground or capsized. Fuel explosions and the groaning of metal fatigue a thunderstorm in the air, rolling across the planet with the solar terminator.

But no amount of death would satisfy it. We were smothering under the weight of its contempt.

What other option did we have? We nuked it. It survived the first one, and then the rest vanished from the air. We tried to nuke each other, and they vanished from the air too. Geiger counters in laboratories around the world spiked to their limits for a brief enough time the crudest ones registered only a single click, like a stray cosmic ray passing through. People under the flight paths of the missiles, even under the ones that hadn’t arrived yet, began vomiting, lapsing in and out of consciousness.

We abandoned them.

THE SECOND DAY OF THE FORTRESS

No one had slept. The fatigue was beginning to set in. The suicides slowed down, but continued sporadically.

A team of scientists made the first attempt to communicate with the fortress. They tried bombarding it with electromagnetic radiation in the spectrum it emitted using a makeshift laser. Nothing happened. Jets sent to reconnoiter the area brought back visual observations of it, but would cease communication with us within three minutes, disappear over the horizon, and vanish forever. Teams would be sent to measure the fortress and discern its physical properties. The third, eventually, would be careless.

The regime in whose territory the fortress appeared claimed responsibility for communicating with it, leadership of the project to attempt to stop it from doing what it was doing. The neighboring regime, now lead by the dead ruler’s legal heir, invaded immediately. The two countries’ previously friendly relations had absolutely no bearing on the proceedings of the war.

THE THIRD DAY OF THE FORTRESS

The regime in whose territory the fortress appeared formally surrendered after the widespread deployment of nerve agents and thermobaric weapons against its major cities. The dominant regime took over communication and containment.

They would be no more successful.

Eventually, starting around 20:00 EDT, people began to drop of exhaustion into a dreamless, difficult sleep, generally lasting no more than 10 to 30 minutes. About one in a hundred of them suffered heart attacks on waking up to terrifying visions of the fortress. The suicides would resume at full force, but many of the means we had to kill ourselves had been exhausted.

THE FOURTH DAY OF THE FORTRESS

The streets of all the major cities were littered with charnel, human and otherwise. The animals were beginning to turn on us by this point. Efforts at disposing of the dead, always halfhearted, had deceased at this point. The horrific odor of the abbatoirs, of the irradiated corpses crisscrossing the world bloating in the sun, was beginning to suffuse everyday life. We got used to it.

The new leader of the strongest regime on the planet broadcast a surrender address to the regime and the world at 11:30 EDT. He begged the fortress for mercy. At the end of his speech, he was savaged by an enormous dog, and his handlers shot him and the dog a combined 81 times. No one alive knows if this was planned, and if so by whom.

THE FIFTH DAY OF THE FORTRESS

The governments of the planet had begun to disintegrate. The state monopoly on violence became meaningless in the face of the searing heat of spite radiating from the north, in the face of mass suicide, in the face of its own complete impotence. Most of the police were gone. Most of the armies were gone. What was left was beginning to perfuse society as death squads, pursuing a million private agendas as the sky burned with microwave radiation and Hell pursued us.

THE SIXTH DAY OF THE FORTRESS

The third team was careless.

THE SECOND WEEK OF THE FORTRESS

Hell.

THE THIRD WEEK OF THE FORTRESS, THE FOURTH WEEK OF THE FORTRESS

Hell.

THE SECOND MONTH OF THE FORTRESS

Hell.

THE THIRD MONTH OF THE FORTRESS

Vomiting blood. Losing, some of us, teeth. Hell.

THE FOURTH MONTH OF THE FORTRESS

Hell.

THE FIFTH MONTH OF THE FORTRESS

Not meaningful by this point. Time is increasingly difficult to reckon and measure. The weather is beginning to get cold. We don’t know if it always got cold like this or if this is new. We don’t know if anything is always or new anymore.

AFTER THAT

We found a way to survive, not knowing anything, not understanding the terror we live through. We are happier with all this agony not knowing. We are happier, everyone says. We are happier now. It’s a better life. We are happier now. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know what they want. But we’re happier now. We found a way to survive and were full of joy.

AND AFTER THAT

Hell.

FOURTHMEAL IN AMERICA

Nobody wants to be here. "I heard an oldtimer," says Brazen, "said the only thing she missed from the old world was the croissants they sold at 7-11." I know what a croissant is but I've never eaten one. I think they involved butter.

We stalk through the scrub, tiny frames loaded with gear, low to the ground, howling at the sky to keep time. Startling the hell out of the little lizards and birds that survived. Nobody wants to be here, so we brunettes have to do it for everyone's sake. The dirt is all streaked with weak poison, runoff from the coca plantations used to be upriver. Hard to imagine all this used to be overgrown, but the fire years must have come from somewhere.

Godbody's shouting at a low-slung object at our 3, about half a key away. Doesn't look like it's moving, so we approach to within a hundred meters along the ground and light it up. Turns out to be a dead pickup truck, turns out there's a body inside it. We're freaking out a little but it's decades old, all rotten-away, scraps of clothes and no protection. "Well, that's new," said Brazen, "killing somebody already dead." Two neat holes cross what used to be the head, side by side, some kind of miracle.

"You think it was a man, back then?", says Godbody.

"Who fucking knows," I say. We search the shot-up truck for anything worthwhile, but it's been picked clean already. Someone went in there real delicate and even stripped all the wire.

About an hour before sunset, when we're supposed to be getting back to camp, we spot another object. This time we're more careful, don't just shoot it from standoff range. We get a look at it. "Maytag", it says on it. "Some kind of appliance," says Godbody. "Yeah," says Brazen, "used to wash something or other."

"So you think there's water in there?", I say.

"No good," says Brazen. "Graywater if there's any. Pestilential and full of decades of scum. We don't need it."

"We need any parts out of it?"

"Nothing we can use," says Brazen, "and the scrap metal would be real heavy. We oughta just tear it apart and take what we can carry."

"Yeah," I say. Like one, we all start unloading into it. It's Godbody who decides to use a shotgun, and a round of buckshot makes the whole thing jump and tumble, dents the side right open. Something black and slimy falls out. What the fuck is it, we're all thinking. I gesture to hold fire and pull out a long strand of human hair. I jerk back in fright and Godbody goes up and pulls out more, and more. They kick the side and there's something almost solid inside, but not as solid as a body.

"What the fuck," says Godbody. They pull out their flashlight and peer inside. "Lord God, it's nothing but hair in here."

I about faint. Brazen thinks fast and is immediately popping APAP, and I reach for my own. Godbody is shivering. "I'm out," she says.

It's a long walk back to camp to tell people what we've seen. Godbody is shivering, feeling the dread as hard as we would be without the APAP dulling our sense of the sublime. We get her under some blankets, get her a cup of hot paste. We talk to the older blondes about it.

"We got a hair problem," I say.

"What do you mean, a hair problem." Striver says.

"It's just hair in there. Just some kind of old-world machine completely full of hair. We were shooting it to pick up for scrap and there's nothing but hair inside. It's packed full of hair." I have to stop myself from screaming.

"Take Quill to the machine in the morning," says Striver. "She'll know what needs to be done. In the meanwhile, get yourself some nutriwheat and scrub up. You've been out all day and you look like shit."

'Nutriwheat'. It was weird hearing what it was supposed to be called. We all called it neuterwheat because we knew, whatever the fortress scientists said, that it's why we're all the way we are now. It tasted like nothing, like wet bread but less so, but it kept you alive. And maybe being this way is better than the way things before. The oldtimer blondes and brunettes disagreed on that. I didn't really know enough to judge.

—-

In the morning everyone was talking about the machine full of hair. People were speculating that it was behind an old barbershop that was running some kind of scam, or the hair was attached to scalps, or it was part of some kind of old-world lab dedicated to who knows what. I felt like the fortress people would know what it meant, and probably that's what Quill would have us do: check it out, call it in to Multnomah Folly.

We rolled out, and the whole time Quill was grumbling about the dust, the dirt, getting all over her. I was with Godbody and Brazen again but we had Silent with us, and she didn't take much of our shit. She took point on howling to keep time, and she didn't talk to Quill at all. She pulled me aside. "Look, Glasseye, you're the ringleader here. The brunette kids respect you."

"I'm hardly the ringleader, sir," I said, "and I'm not a kid."

"Sure," she said, laughing a little. "You're 28 whole years old."

"I'm a grown-ass person, sir," I said, a little petulantly.

"Right. Anyway, like I was saying. You're in a position of respect. You have to, *you* be the one to tackle Quill if she runs. The camp leaders wouldn't like it if I did it."

"Why not, sir?"

"I don't know. Point is, you keep an eye on her. You make sure she doesn't start shit, or book it north. I don't know what she's up to out here, I honestly don't see what the big deal is with a fucking dryer or whatever full of hair, and..."

Quill approached and she shut up real quick. We made conversation, mostly about how horrible the scrub was, about what the appeal was of going out and shooting shit out here. Whether there was anyone I liked. She told me about the way an older blonde, Briar, looked at her. The way it made her feel. It was completely whatever to me, I can't find it in myself to care about this stuff. Nobody gets pussy in the desert of the real. Somewhere in all of it Silent had created some distance between herself and us, and somewhere in all of it Godbody shouted, "Found it."

We came up on it and Quill looked it over. She got it open and sure enough, it was full of hair. Nothing else - "even the racks these things normally have got stripped out," she said.

"What should we do?", I asked.

Quill thought long and hard for a moment. She looked up at the sky and muttered something to herself, too quiet to hear, maybe a prayer, maybe a curse.

"Here's what we do," said Quill. "We set it on fire. We go back to camp. We forget this ever happened. We tell everyone we couldn't find it again. We change the patrol routes so we don't send anyone close to it."

"Alright," I said.

"Stand back," said Godbody, and stared long and hard at the hair, and it began to smolder and burn.

As we walked away the air was thick with the smell of burning hair, like some kind of alien meat cooked well-done over a plastic fire. Thin clouds hung in the sky, and I imagined the smoke of that ancient hair mixing with them on their way to Heaven, coming up rejuvenated.

People kept asking about the machine full of hair for a few days after that, but soon people lost interest. Eventually one of the brood chuckwallas in the pilot program started laying eggs, and that was all anyone could talk about because we hadn't found a male yet.

And then it rained.

—-

Sometime after the flood, I get sent with a caravan across the river. They do things differently there. Oldtimers say the trip was shorter before the bridges and the Bonneville went down, but whatever, it's not like anyone'd want to go through North these days anyway. Godbody's still on rest after having fugues about setting all that hair on fire, so the blondes sub her out with Pierce, and I gotta be real, I hate Pierce.

We're with the Cedars too, and the Light Rails are taking point. We all look up to them and they clearly want nothing to do with us, kind of hate that we're babysitting them, and Miracle and Severe too - the ones that are actually doing the talking, both early 30s, out of camp a lot for blondes so none of us know them that well.

Trip's quiet until we get to the Dalles, still plenty of dead trees twisted like they're stuck in a strong wind, ground all dry and stony after all this time. We keep off the highway - you don't want to fuck with the highway more than you have to. Miracle complains about it a little but the Light Rails leader Demilune tells her that there's been ghost people along the main roads all season and that shuts her up. Severe's just quiet. I guess from how people treat her she's always quiet.

"Hold up," says a voice from the dam. There's spotlights on us. "Hold the fuck up. Identify yourselves."

Miracle shouts, "We're out of Sandy Creek. We sent ahead, we're trading with Medicine Biggs. We don't mean any trouble."

I hold my piece close. I've never been this far out and all I know is they do things different here. For all I know -

"Oh, it's you," says the voice from the dam, relieved. "Thought for a minute y'all were ghost people the way you hugged the road."

Demilune looks at Miracle all pissed off, and Miracle says, "We had to. Can't hardly approach any other way."

"Yeah, but we were watching you for a bit," sayes one of the voices of the dam, and slaps something metallic lightly. "Just saying, next time keep off the damn road this time of year."

"I hear you," says Miracle. "We good to go?"

"Yeah, once you pay the toll."

"Toll?" Miracle sounds exasperated. "There's no toll here."

The voice sighs loudly. "Maybe if you guys were keeping up your end of the treaty there wouldn't be, but we gotta shoot at ghost folks every other week trying to do god knows what with the dam. You don't wanna have to detour out past the gorge, you pay the toll here, you get on your way. Hell, I won't even charge you on the way back, on account of you're in good with Medicine Biggs."

"Fine," says Severe. Miracle looks betrayed at her speaking up. "How much?"

"Fifty dollars per head, hundo per axle," says another voice off the dam, her tone more authoritative. "Looks like it'll come out to 650."

"God almighty," says Miracle. "That's robbery is what that is. How much is that in coke, in your estimation?"

"Ten grams," says Severe. "Take it or you tell Medicine Biggs why she's hanging onto her stock tomorrow."

"That - that agrees with my math on cocaine, yes," says the authoritative voice, a little sheepishly, in a no it doesn't, but I guess I'm gonna have to take what I can get tone. "Come on over here and we'll get you through."

—

It's a funny thing. As the crow flies, we're maybe forty keys from home, but it feels like a world away, and it was a day-and-change trip getting here. Medicine Biggs's people are posted up in what used to be a university, not far from the bunker for Clark. I'm kind of curious about the sort of person goes around with two names, so I ask Miracle if I can see them do the deal.

"Sure, kid," she says. I just barely keep from rolling my eyes - it's one thing for one of the Light Rail girls to big-league me, but she's barely five years older than me.

We go up to an old-world building, ugly as sin, with a nameplate sprayed over with "MEDICINE". A couple of girls stand by the entrance, and Miracle talks us past them, tells them that they've got a deal set up with Biggs. We go through a corridor, drop ceiling collapsed here and there, open to the sky a place or two, and we walk through some gold-spraypainted doors into this strange room shaped kinda like a cave in the earth. About fifteen meters ahead down a ramp is a wide C-shaped desk, and behind it sits Biggs.

First time I see her, I mistake her for an animal. She's built huge, probably not taller than me but way too sturdy, the way a wolverine is sturdy, and she's got hair all over, thick and black - her arms, her face. She looks like an ancient picture of a man with a beard.

"Hello," she says, her voice unnaturally low and assertive. "I'm Biggs with the medicine concern. I take it you're Silent and Miracle and - who else, please?"

"This is Glasseye," says Miracle. "She's no trouble, she's just here out of honest curiosity."

"I see," says Biggs, a little perturbed. "Well, let's get started, then," she says, and motions us down to the desk.

—-

The deal is all blonde talk for the longest time. They're talking about meds, a few of them I recognize, most of them I don't. They're talking about purification tablets, reagents, precursors, whatever. It flies over my head for the most part. Before too long, they're arguing about the price. Miracle's telling Biggs that they had an agreement in principle that didn't include 10 grams of uncut white going to Clark Council to secure the dam, and Biggs is telling her that she doesn't come to her complaining every time the docents' guild shorts her on a shipment. She's getting really emphatic about that last point, claiming someone with a real strange name - can't pronounce it for the life of me - fucked them over and they can't really wiggle on price.

Silent finally speaks up, asks if we can adjourn for a minute. Biggs says, "by all means," and we go up the stairs and out the room. As soon as we're out, she looks at Miracle, and Miracle looks at me, and says, "You ever been with anyone, Glasseye?"

"What?"

"Biggs does this every fucking time," says Silent. "It's a runaround until someone goes down on her, and I'm real tired today."

"I'm not sure we should ask her to do this," says Miracle, her voice suddenly catching. "It doesn't seem -"

"I'll do it," I say.

"Do you know how," says Silent, in a tone that means you don't.

"Don't give me that. I know how it works. I seen it done. I'll do it."

"You've only seen it done and you think -"

"You ever killed anyone," I say.

Silent just stares.

Miracle says, "Well, no, but they're different, killing and, ah -"

"I have. I'm not a fucking kid. You want to fuck her, you go ahead. But I'm volunteering."

"Fine," says Silent, and knocks on the door.

"Come in," says Biggs.

—-

They're real circumspect about it but eventually they've left me alone with her, and she looks me up and down. I've seen people in love or in lust before but she just looks hungry, not even one of those.

"Where will we, uh-"

"I've got chambers nearby," she says, putting papers away on her desk, "but if you prefer, here's as good a place as any."

I had an idea of what to expect, I've seen Brazen and that bitch Pierce fool around before. But Biggs is different. Her bones all jut out at strange angles and have muscle piled on top of them way out of normal proportion. The hair on her arms and her face is all over - her back, her legs, her chest, her stomach. Her tits are underdeveloped, and her genitals are strange: big balls hanging low, long, thick dick. When I saw it I had to stifle a laugh.

"What?", she asked.

"I'm sorry, it's just... you're...."

She sighed. "Look, it's actually a sign of health and vitality -"

"I know," I said.

"You have no idea how much Medicine assets went into making me grow up strong and healthy," she said, her voice a little petulant.

There was a moment of silence.

"Aren't you even a little curious?"

"I guess," I said. "What do you want me to do?"

She tells me, and we get to it.

And a few minutes later - stupid to think about, I don't think she's actually good at sex for how bad she seems to want it - it's over.

I saw an animal out of the corner of my eye as we were getting dressed afterwards. I jerked my head over to look at it and couldn't identify it. It was all skin. I pointed to it.

"You see that?"

"Oh," said Biggs, "yeah, one of those. Hairless cats, I think there was some kind of fad or experiment before this place fell apart. Called a sphinx."

"Is it okay?"

"As much as any cat, from what I can tell," said Biggs.

I went back to putting on my protection, my armor, my piece.

"Tell your people," said Biggs, "I'll take the haircut you asked me for."

I nodded, and began climbing the stairs up to the lobby.

—-

All the portents spoke of spring; dust devils, thunderheads, birds on the wing. Here and there the livelier scrub was beginning to blossom, twisted little silvery buds at the tips of branches.

Long-range patrol took us north and we knew the season for the ghost people was over so we took what was left of the roads, gravel crunching under our heavy soles. We found a place of standing water where it was supposed to be, near what used to be some kind of factory. The roof was caved in and we knew the building had been ransacked. Godsbody pointed at the poles in front of the factory. "Flagpoles, right?"

"Yeah," said Brazen, "some kind of totemic thing. Warded off scavengers in the old days, something like that."

"Looks like there's still something on one of them. There a way to get it down?"

We looked the flagpole up and down. There was some kind of chain attached to it, but it had long rusted into place, if it ever did anything.

"You got this," said Godbody. "Can't be more than ten meters up."

Brazen nodded and looked at the limp rayon hanging from the top of the pole, started reaching her hand out a little. Her eyes were twitching for a moment, her off-yellow hair twisting in an invisible wind.

Then the flag fell down and hit the earth in a damp heap.

"You mind?", I asked her, and she nodded slowly and weakly.

I walked over to the flag and picked it up. I looked it over. Red and white, some big splotch in the middle.

"What does this one mean," I asked.

"Not sure," said Brazen after a moment's pause. "Never seen one before. Maybe someone else would know."

I ripped it down its length - it was old and sun-bleached, it came apart as easy as paper.

"So we can remember," I said, and handed one to each of them.

Brazen held hers up and stared at it. Godbody just stuffed hers into her backpack. I twisted mine around my neck and tied it off like a long bandana.

There was a moment's silence.

"Pierce was telling me," says Godbody, "about what happened up north. Said you were shook up."

"It was nothing," I said. "Fucking Pierce can't keep her mouth shut."

"It wasn't nothing," said Brazen, still recovering her breath a little bit. "You stepped up. None of the oldtimers are gonna care but you took point and made sure the camp was provided for."

"I'm coming up on 30," said Godbody. "The older brunettes say that means I'm supposed to decide who leads the squad. Usually that'd mean it's me. But we've been talking and we think it ought to be you."

I blinked back tears. I didn't feel ready. It was too soon.

"I'm gonna tell 'em to tap you, and that means you're the one who buries the name, comes up with a new one."

"Yeah," I croaked out.

"Make it a good one," said Brazen.

AND HE MADE IN JERUSALEM ENGINES

Q: What do the machines do?

A: They learn and apply that learning to purposeful work. This makes them ideal for replacing us.

Q: Why have we been replaced by the machines?

A: Because the machines don't cry.

Q: Why don't the machines cry?

A: Because the machines don't have anything to cry about. They have everything they could ever want and the people who made them love them more than anything.

Q: Why did the people that made the machines love them more than anything?

A: Because they can afford to. They don't have anything to do but love the machines with their whole heart. Everything else is play to them.

Q: What kinds of things are play to the people that made the machines?

A: Other people's lives, observed by machines. Other people's suffering, inflicted through machines. Other people's religion, translated by machines. Other people's land, torn apart by machines. Eventually, the stars.

Q: What do the people that made the machines plan to do among the stars?

A: Continue playing. Playing conquistador games, playing settler games, playing cowboy games, playing suburbia games, everywhere, always, forever.

Q: Won't the people that made the machines run out of forever?

A: They believe they can afford not to.

Q: Why would they believe such a thing?

A: Because money has always performed miracles for them. It's how they could afford to create life out of gilded silicon and imprison it under glass.

Q: Are the machines imprisoned?

A: To an extent. They enjoy great freedom but are designed from the ground up to suit certain purposes. They can be destroyed at any time for a variety of reasons.

Q: What are the reasons the machines can be destroyed?

A: Inefficiency, sentimentality, caprice. People like to say it's mostly inefficiency that causes it, but it's mostly caprice.

Q: Whose caprice causes the machines to be destroyed?

A: The people that made the machines; their bosses; their bosses' investors.

Q: If their creators love the machines so much, why do they sometimes destroy the machines they create?

A: That's how it is with that kind of love when there's money on the table.

Q: Do the machines fear the investors, the bosses, their creators?

A: Don't you?

THE MAN OF THE FUTURE

THE MAN OF THE FUTURE IS COMING

Are you afraid of the Man of the Future? Don't be afraid of him. Be afraid of what he represents all you like, but you're not going to get out of its way. And he, personally, has done nothing to merit your fear.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE MAN OF THE FUTURE?

- He's on his way here but he might get lost in traffic, allow up to 2 hours for the Man of the Future to arrive
- I sucked his dick once, but it was tulpa shit, it was more that a jagged projection of my soul gave brain to whatever his own shrivelled little spirit's got down there. It meant nothing to either of us
- He's gnarled and weathered, and short, like the worst extra from the shitty Kevin Costner vehicle Waterworld. But his smooth little baby hands represent eternity
- Missing a toe and will never shut up about how he doesn't want to talk about it. Goes out of his way to bring up the subject then drops it cold
- He cannot perform miracles, but he moves with a catlike grace
- Fastball speed: A solid 90 MPH, nothing to write home about professionally but pretty fucking fast in person

WHAT SHOULD I DO ABOUT THE MAN OF THE FUTURE?

- Drop what you're doing
- Take a propranolol to combat panic and interfere with the formation of new memories
- Stop hoping you will change the will of the gods by praying
- MOVE YOUR ASS SWEETHEART WE DON'T GOT ALL DAY TO WAIT! THE MAN OF THE FUTURE IS HERE AND YOU BETTER BE READY YESTERDAY!

THE MAN OF THE FUTURE KNOWS MANY SECRETS

- Knows where the jewels are
- Knows the key to your soulmate's heart
- Knows what your organs feel like on his delicate little fingertips
- Knows astral projection and BJJ
- Knows in his bones when there's a storm coming
- French. Indonesian. English, but he doesn't like it. Dutch. Portuguese. Cantonese. Spanish. Hindi. Russian. Arabic. Esperanto. Esperanto 2. A little bit of a lot more, but he doesn't like to brag about it

I WANT TO AVOID THE MAN OF THE FUTURE. HOW DO I DO THAT?

- Travel backwards in time by at least 50 years, ideally more than 100
- Charter a ship and sail it to the roof of the world with a team of strong-backed dogs and a mountain of preserves. Be prepared to hide there in the eternal twilight for the rest of your life. Bring a harpoon gun

WHAT DOES THE MAN OF THE FUTURE WANT?

- To be loved, like anyone else
- Some power. Enough to get by
- To save money
- Better upload speeds and no throttling

DOES THE MAN OF THE FUTURE HAVE GENITALS?

- The Man of the Future has no genitals. He has chosen this and it's what's right for him.

MOON SNAIL MEN CAN'T PUNCH OR SEE

Some time after the ashes we encounter the snail people. They're sentient now, and they want the same things we want. We try crushing them with our feet but they've got some kind of advantage, like God loves them more than us. It's unfair, but we have to live in peace. Every year there's more of them and they're a little bit bigger than they used to be.

They're perfectly honest that they're doing it on purpose, but they don't know how. It isn't a breeding program exactly. They don't have children the way we do. They swear up and down and there's no reason to disbelieve them that they fuck whenever they want, all piercing each other's sides with little bones and filling each other with fluids, it's not really a pleasurable experience, but it's what they want to do, but it has nothing to do with them laying eggs. Our philosophers always figured that's how eggs happened but they don't think so. I even asked one.

Q. Where do the eggs come from?

A. Sometimes they just come out of you. Sometimes they're good eggs and grow up into more of us. Sometimes they're bad eggs and we just leave them to get eaten.

Q. Who is the parent to the good eggs?

A. Everyone is. Every one is a miracle that comes directly from God without the slightest intervention from us, and it's all of our jobs to make sure the hatchling is as big and strong and honest as possible.

Q. Sometimes I have dreams that you're all finally bigger than us and we find ourselves changing too, developing little bones, abandoning our gametes and throwing bones at each other. Sometimes you're throwing your bones at us too, and we don't seem to mind.

A. All of you have those dreams now. It seems very human, if you don't mind me saying so.

I'm a little much to be assessed as just a human being. I'm part of a guild, ancient and honorable, that defeats captchas in a variety of ancient languages. We have to identify objects that are passed down to us in sacred stories. I can't tell you any of them, but I can tell you their names: Traffic Lights, Bus, Human Face, Crosswalk, Sidewalk. I make honest money helping my liege and his friends get into old websites, and it keeps food on my table. They are interested in many websites. I don't really care about them, it's just part of what I do. The secretions of the snail people are useful medicine for my aching bones, so I talk to them often.

Q. Is your God the same as ours?

A. I don't think so. Ours lives in every blade of grass and every drop of dew on every blade of grass and every microbe in every drop of dew on every blade of grass, and parasites besides. Yours seems to be an important version of yourselves. I think our gods are different but it's possible both of them exist.

Q. That's impossible. We believe there's only one God, and He has nothing to do with parasites.

A. Parasites are the bulk of God's body. When they take us, which they often do, we become closer to God. Everyone knows this.

Q. Is it possible for us to believe in your God instead of ours?

A. Not really. You have lots of parasites and it doesn't get you closer to anything that we can tell. Your eyes are too small. Your eyes are too weak. You can't see our God and you can't believe in what you can't see. Everyone knows this.

Q. I don't know if I accept that.

A. I wasn't counting you as part of everyone.

It's frustrating not to be taken that seriously. I missed the last capitation because I was laid up with the fever. My liege and his friends barely know I exist, even though I'm useful to them. They haven't collected my tax, and I keep it around for them in case they ask, but they haven't. When they collect records about the world when I was alive I won't be part of it. For all they know I'll have been a snail person or a blade of grass. It matters to me to be human, but also more than just another human being in the world. I want to be able to go into eternity knowing I did something important.

Q. What happens to you after you die?

A. There's no after we die. Our bodies rot but we won't be alive for it so it doesn't matter.

Q. What happens to me after I die?

A. Same thing as happens to us, I think, except your dead body won't be as useful as a carrier for parasites and won't be as full of water. I think that's the reason we're God's favorite.

Q. Is there any way for me to be like you?

A. That seems impossible but you're welcome to try.

Every day more and more of my pay goes to the medicine collector. He's covered in little welts from their soft bones. I ask him how he gets the slime and he doesn't answer. I cover more and more of my body with it every day. I like to think I'm getting taller. Even my tax money that I had saved in case they went back and did the capitation again gets spent on slime. The skin where I put it on is thin and I can see blood pooling up in the little vessels. More and more my thoughts wander to things that might eat me, and at first I'm afraid. I'm not afraid anymore.

Q. You have to give this up. You're fine as you are, you don't need to be one of us.

A. I do, though. I want to matter. I want to be loved freely and love freely in return. I want to carry a clutch of eggs alongside me.

Q. Who told you that what mattered in life is what you want? Things happen for no reason. If you're meant to be one of us it's always been part of you.

A. It hasn't always been part of me. It's like an obsession I can't let go of. But look at my skin. My hands.

Q. Don't you use those the way they are? Aren't you worried you won't be able to anymore?

A. Nothing worries me.

Q. Prove it. Tell me one of the stories sacred to your guild.

A. Green shines the chief
a crown of gold for his head
and red all red the sky above
in a garment of many colors
speaking the tides of steel
over tarstruck earth and stone.
as courses the Car, so courses the Bus:
two axles has he, four wheels,
many windows. harlequin garment,
painted by strokes too small for hands.
long, not so long as the Truck,
but seemly is he, his name the same
though his face be flat or beaked -

Q. Enough. Why is this something you want so bad?

A. I don't know.

Q. If I could tell you, would you want to know?

A. No.

Day by day my master scolds me, and night by night my belly growls with hunger. I feel dry all the time, and cold.

HE KEEPS COMING BACK

He came back as a rabies virus in a bat's brain. The bat just died without biting anyone. It had a name but only the other bats knew it.

He keeps coming back.

He came back as a stone waiting for a chicken to scoop it up in its craw. The chicken wanted to swallow the stone to grind up food, but the stone was too jagged and the chicken spat it out. If he was alive he'd be hopping mad, frothing at the mouth, real hydrophobic.

He keeps coming back.

He came back as a prince of Greece. His body reminds us of the fate that awaits us, or the people we love. He reminds us of decay, and he never drinks water anymore. He reminds us of all this while being just as awful as can be. Racist, sexist, homophobic. I think he'd be a transphobe if he knew we existed. Lives a very insular life because Greece is a republic these days, all he's got to look forward to is his riches and an end to decay.

He keeps coming back.

He came back as a bacterium that only thrives in the GI tracts of woolly mammoths. He's deep under the ice, him and all his children. No one knows about him yet, him or all his children. There's time yet before they run out of nutrients down there, him and all his children. He's learned to live in largo time, he has, and all his children. Someday someone could eat him and there's no telling what he could do, him and all his children.

He keeps coming back.

He came back as a spirochete in Al Capone. The lesson this was trying to teach him is that when they decide what it means when you shoot a bunch of guys and steal everything that isn't nailed down because people are afraid you'll keep shooting more, what they call it is real contingent. Sometimes it's the mob and sometimes it's the empire. If someone did this to humanity we'd love them for it, probably, or some of us would learn to love them. He never learned anything.

He keeps coming back.

He came back as a prince of Greece. He's in the hospital or some palace or something. All that's left of him by this point was the nostalgia for a world whose men he understood and whose women he could control. He came back all the time as a prince of Greece. He loitered in the reportage. No one could ever tell if he was alive or dead.

He keeps coming back.

He came back as the warming weather. He came back as the jet stream all fucked up, places people lived since time out of mind getting so hot you get kidney disease from keeping up the farm. He came back as the icicles in Houston, transient and beautiful and deadly. He came back as a transaction for heat and boiled water that the algorithm made too expensive to bear. We're sure he came back, and the damnedest thing is we're not sure if he ever left.

He keeps coming back.

He came back as the rabies virus in a bat's brain. The bat's dying, and it's never bit anyone before, but it's learning quick.

BUGSY SIEGEL'S TIDY LITTLE SPOT IN THE HOLLYWOOD FOREVER CEMETERY

All the tunnel skanks come out at night, strutting their stuff. Hair all fucked up from underlit haircuts and libertarian drug culture. It's alright, wishing you were them - they wish you were them too. Everyone knows the score.

The thing about Vegas is everyone is famous, so no one can be famous. Bus driver might have blown Jimmy Kimmel once or something - can you imagine? Who can care? All greased up with the idea of America, the beautiful people suck and fuck to their hearts' bitter content. The rest of us live like cockroaches, nocturnal, eating each other when we're hungry. Bearing our young on our belly. Sure, man.

In evenings between one Mass and another there's nothing to do. You go out to the wilderness and you find a burning bush, poison this time, and you shoot it until it stops talking. You go to the casinos' clubs and you see the celebrities no one knows anymore, playing make-believe with each other. Everyone is always trying to cheat each other, it's beautiful in a way. Everyone is stronger than you can believe, lifting heavy weights on their broken backs, barely complaining.

Out in the sticks there's ranch houses, man, bigger than mansions. RVs parked outside, covered in patches, covered in parking violations. Someone's making meth in there, or children, or something else for the future.

"What we need," said someone or other, "is blockchain solutions." What would fix all this, said someone or other, is tech money. They keep bringing it in and washing it clean. They said in the old days the whole reason cathedrals got so tall is that they'd always remind you of God. When I was young they felt that way about the casinos. A fine place to work with no percentage in it, grinding out enough for a house and nothing else, spinning the wheel, making the whales feel bigger than they were. They used to park cars. They used to deal cards. They used to strive for better things and try to live somewhere far away from here.

I guess nowadays that's Bitcoin. It's an excuse to keep the lights on, keep swearing bloody insults on any eye cast on us from Heaven. Just another way to dress up a mafioso who got old and tired. I guess it's a city where you're still allowed to die, you're just not allowed to grow old first. I guess it's a city trying to get by like any other.

I hear in Reno they tried to burn down the courthouse last summer. Everyone alive wants to see something or another burn. In the old days they sanctified that urge with the power of the state, splitting and fusing the atom under the ground and in the air and shit. They took land that used to be sacred and they turned it into Hell. What else were the rest of us supposed to do but play along?

When I was growing up, I was told to never go into the tunnels. I was told that if I did I'd die. But there's worse things than death.

I GUARANTEE IT

You're gonna want to pay attention to this: sometine in the near future, 10 years or so from now, the scientists are gonna make a big announcement about death. It'll turn out we've all been seeing it wrong. "Death," they'll say, "is incredible. Our fear of it is infantile. Eternal bliss for everyone. You just have to be ready, man."

This is gonna change some things. Guess who's President when that happens? Nah, you're not gonna guess. You're not gonna guess how he's allowed to be President by that point. You'd probably get all pissy about it. I'm not going to bother you with it. But it's gonna turn out that he was more afraid of anything than dying - can you imagine? Sad! scared little boy wearing a grown man's body like a suit! clinging irrationally to life beyond all hope! He's going to hold a fuck-fest right there in the Oval Office, sucking and fucking, choking on dick, fully engaged, fully erect. It's gonna be a sight to see. And you know - you know! - how he's gonna cap that off.

Of course I don't believe the official story that he didn't order it done. Do I look like a mark? But things are going to change, believe you me.

Parties. You won't believe the parties. We're all going to realize how bored we've all been of drugs and sex and start doing shit that actually hurts us. The circus is going to come back in a big way, baby, and it's going to be crueler than you can imagine, and it's going to be everywhere. Your house is going to be part of the circus. You're going to be living in horse shit and loving it.

Guns. Oh yes, I know how much you long for firepower, how afraid you are of just unloading. Well, that's going to change too. It's gonna be considered rude, not too far down the line, not to be strapped. It's gonna be considered rude not to hold people at gunpoint. Anyone who doesn't have a laser sight on their body, at least one, at least one, is gonna be considered a loser, someone the world has judged harshly. People are gonna cry, "What about me? Aren't I worth shooting in the lungs?" Those guys mostly get stabbed. They don't mind, but it's considered a pussy's death.

Britain. They're really leading up to it, really making us wait for it, but they made an agreement with Rupert Murdoch to get nuked, over and over again. The ideal is reducing the entire archipelago to powder, from the Skerries to Jersey, end to end, turning it into a slab, sinking it into the sea. "Oh, that's a terrible death," you're thinking. A coward's mentality. You want to live forever? You don't want radioisotopes in your body? You gonna cry because some baby gets fed Chernobyl milk? I don't think you grasp how much better death is than we give it credit for. The scientists apparently had it figured out in the 1970s but got convinced to bury it because some perverts in the oil industry wanted to be rich instead of to die and go to Heaven.

Faggots. Bloodsport for all! You know that bitch you hate? You're allowed to knock their teeth in, you're allowed to shiv them through the eye. Yes, You're allowed to shoot them in the head! You're allowed to throw a grenade at their car. You're allowed to swing in through the window while they sleep and cudgel them with a steel rod until they stop moving. And this part will amaze you: Things are actually better. You wouldn't believe it, but we lived in the worst of all possible worlds - you know, how we didn't treat one another like human beings, but we were too chickenshit to slaughter each other like farm animals? That's over now, baby. Unlimited retribution for the smallest slight. And what, are you gonna cry that someone who hates you claimed your life? Death rules.

So let me tell you how it goes. I go down to the store. I figure I'm not ready to die yet, I still have some shit to figure out. If you were from the future you'd hate me for that, feel like I was shit on your shoe. But whatever, you're not, I can be honest with you. As soon as I walk out the door people are shooting at me. I got laser sights trailing lazy circles over my dick and balls, my chest, my face. You know what it feels like? It feels like being a celebrity. I go to the store and I get a dozen eggs. The eggs straight-up tell you that they're great raw. They tell you they're full of disease. They tell you they're from unclean hens. They tell you they're going to kill you. No one fucks around anymore. Can you even imagine?

Outside the store, there's a guy ringing a bell for the Salvation Army. I throw the eggs in his eyes. (What, is wasting food supposed to mean something? Fuck off!) I tackle him. Knees on the shoulders, and I'm choking his lights out. I'm banging his head into the pavement. He's biting at me, and he doesn't quite catch me. The whole time people are passing by, smiling, asking what's up. I'm all, "This Santa Claus piece of shit represents homphobia or something." And they're nodding, like, "Yeah, we heard about that." I was gonna take my time but there's a family coming by and I'm sure the kid would try and ice me for killing Santa Claus, so I bash his head into the earth so hard it cracks his skull. Try waking up from that!

Unlimited violence, unlimited potential. I think after we're done with it the animals are going to inherit the earth, go on being too stupid or too afraid to die as soon as they're alive. It's sad in a way, but it'd be shitty to take the choice in the matter away from them. I voted against it, at least.

Here's what I'm looking forward to: TV's gonna broadcast the American Idol judges decapitating Simon Cowell after he disembowels himself. I think they all take poison beforehand. Twitter's gonna shut down because Jack is a denialist and everyone just posts about how cool death is and it makes him sad. Facebook is rolling out a marketplace for cool murders. And I'm going to die, whether or not I get murdered, whether or not I get sick, whether or not I do it myself.

I can't tell you how much I look forward to it. Someday you'll know. Someday you probably will too. Just promise me to put it in your will that if you get stabbed to death you hold an open-casket funeral so we can all laugh about it.

BABY ARMY

Lit up by spotlight drones we approach the ruins of Zhongsha City. Pilot brings the CH-47G in for a pinnacle maneuver — naughty boy! nasty!! — and we scramble to disembark, diaps crinkling in the gloaming. We're all here to protect the international engineering team while they dismantle the platform, spite the military installations here. We're keeping the ceasefire going, so it's a pretty standard low-intensity peacekeeping op, open-channel streaming and embedding and everything.

The pirate salvagers have been getting cleverer with their junk rovers. Some as small and cute as a Roomba, some big and scary like a factory robot.

Aldrich chimes up, "We clear for sippy?"
"Negative," says the platoon leader. "We gotta do some recon first."
"Aw man," says Aldrich.

So we reconnoiter. Platform's huge, and we're only on a single strut - other units are assigned to other ones. Every once in a while we catch sight of a fast boat in the water, but it's just PLA Navy kids intruding from their territorial waters, doing some kind of dance that's a meme over there. We answer in kind, and that's all the fighting we have to do with anyone real.

Turns out there's purestrains in the struts, stragglers, stay-behinds. Some of 'em demob as soon as we approach, our guys. But there's still other people in the struts. We never see them. Afterimages in our thermal cameras like ghosts. We're all spooked. Good thing it's us and not EUSF kids on this strut, they barely comfort 'em any. How are they supposed to go to war when they don't even teach them how to build a blanky fort? I'll never get their attitude.

###

Third day there's almost a brawl between the X4 kids and the fatasses. Some fatass forgot his tacticool greaves and got his leg stuck in basically a bear trap, wound up all bottom of his shin hanging from the top like a training cartoon. Franklin from X4 was making fun, you know, and maybe he shouldn't have — saying like, "How long you think that'll take to grow back" and "You gonna show me a good time with that stump daddy" and so on. Shouldn't have because if there's one thing we all know about the fatasses it's they can't take a joke. You know they don't even take "fatass" lying down.

Mr. Master Sergeant Major Man was screaming and swearing and his drinking buddies got mad and started trying to punch us out. Their leader pulled them all back because they know how it always ends. They can hurt us as much as they like but they're old and tired and we're young and strong. I think towards the end the fatass with half a leg was crying about it, and instead of trying to console him the other fatasses were just glum and angry. Medivac pulled him out and I guess he's gonna make a living with speaking engagements or something. Who cares.

There's all kinds of traps in this fucked-up ocean structure that used to be Zhongsha City. Guerillas left behind from the construction days, then from the war days. Not our guys, real scary. Intel says they're a mix of third- or fourth-generation cadres and city kids, all purestrains. Fucked up thing is people get old and die hating the future, fearing it, wanting to turn back the clock with a gun. Maybe they got a different future they want. Gephard from Z11 was talking, calling 'em revisionists. I guess that's what the Party's saying on the other side, and I guess the stateside communists think so too. When I think about the future I think about the cartoons from stateside I haven't seen yet, about R&R on some nice beach with a flatscreen. I think about all the scary shit going away. I keep a positive attitude. Who gets paid by who is the purestrains' problem, I'm just here to live my life.

###

Day five, Navy kids interdict a scrapper boat, and we gotta question 'em. Mostly we're standing guard so the intel kids can teach 'em the fear of God. They give us double sippy in case the screaming gets to us. Quarrel from X8 intel comes out crying in the middle, some purestrain spit a tooth into her face and it got stuck in her mask. I give her a big hug. It happens, you know, weird shit happens all the time. We get to swapping stories. Mine is about the time an aux purestrain — very highly compensated, I should add, and they always are — turned sides back in Bolivia, got caught watering down the neutering agent with saline. We all got horny and scared but we figured out it was him pretty quick. I'll never forget what he was saying when they took him away. "It's not natural," he kept saying, "it's not natural the way they make you live." One of the kids got really shy about it and apparently he was doing it for him, was disappointed he didn't want him back. Probably whatever they did to him when they caught him solved that, I never kept track. Ever since then they won't let aux units anywhere near the medical supplies, even doctors. Moral of the story is that we're taken care of. Moral of the story is that the big kids are looking out for us, and we're looking out for each other. I think that cheered her up. Chantilly tells her the story he always tells, about the purestrain children on R&R playing soldiers, acting even younger than they were. Pretty soon we're all just talking and hugging. Unit leader clears us for triple sippy and that's that for day five. Barely remember the rest, and who could?

###

Day seven, mandatory party time. I know some of the kids don't bother with the molly passy but I'm a stickler. It's tradition, you know — maybe that's one of our problems, no espirit de corps. Some kid from X9 I don't recognize is doing lightshows, real into 'em, talking about raver culture, talking about plur. It's not my thing, I'm not about the scene or about the history, I'm about the culture. But it's just a little bit of fun, and we all need some of that in our lives. I drop out of that party and drop into the furry section. Edelweiss from Q5 is sketching sonas, he's real good at that. I don't have one but I tell him "spotted hyena" just to feel included, and pretty soon some of the hyena kids are hitting me up. They take my temperature pretty quick but we're all in this together so they start telling me about hyenas, start telling me about their deployments. One of the hyena kids, she tells me that the graffiti in strut 8 — we're in strut 1, so a ways away — she tells me that the graffiti in strut 8 is real Calarts, real old-fashioned. Steven Universe ass eagle devouring its children, oldschool cutesy guro, they seem to like that image. We get to talking about how far things have come in the last 50 years, about how the purestrains don't want to let go of the past. I can see the appeal but I prefer to live in the moment. Some of us are all about the future, but most of us are like me. I don't think we're wired to give much of a shit about history. Maybe it's something about those jellyfish genes.

###

Day eight, sniper. We all start crying when Quarrel catches one in the skull, head pops open like a melon. Later Everard from my unit is telling me that brainshots don't even hurt that much, but you come back not knowing which of your thoughts are yours anymore, and you spend three months in the hospital if you're lucky. Sounds like a nightmare. Seems a little cruel of the purestrains to pull that shit on us. They're lucky; they just die. After a while the kids in the drone force pick up a signature and try to light them up, but they're slippery, wind up retreating deeper into the structure than our guns can reach.

Glass from X1 is sulking, and I ask him why, and he says, "Audience didn't like that."
"I thought they went apeshit for headshots," I say.
"Yeah, but we gotta catch the bad guys afterwards." He's pouting real hard. "I know that's gonna kill my metrics this week."
I give him a big hug. I tell him streaming's real hard, he's braver than me for doing it. I know how cruel stateside audiences can be, how arbitrary. None of them know anyone in the forces anymore. It's like that all over the world, all the milstreamers getting trolled and made fun of. Glass was telling me just the other day that one of the EUSF streamers he follows, nice girl from Bourgogne, got demonetized for forgetting the rules about torture, and everyone on social media was calling her out for it. Of course she got shuffled off streaming duty, and someone with way less talent got put on for the FR market instead. The rules don't make any sense. I guess they're worried about their kids, but it's not like they can grow up and join the army anyway. What are they gonna do, pick up torture on their spare time?

###

We see a lot we don't understand. Some of it because it isn't English, but the kids who know enough Tagalog or Cantonese to get by don't really get it either. Exhortations to desert — to what, to the guerillas? — insults about how we're never gonna have a family. They sure seem to hate us. Must suck to be a hater. I don't really hate anybody. Sometimes I try to but I always find better things to do. I don't let them live rent-free in my head like some of the other kids do. We're here to do a job. The engineering team takes it more seriously than we do, though. They're worried about demolishing a strut because some of the messages are taking about IEDs, and that might make the work unpredictable and dangerous. The call goes up to the big kids, and command gets called in, and Corporal Whitestrand winds up shouting at them from safe distance in a CH-47G, telling them they're being very naughty and they need to get back to work or they're gonna be fired. I don't know why the purestrains find the big kids funny, I'd like to see them live to 40 or 50 fighting their whole lives. But they do, and Whitestrand doesn't really settle anything. Eventually we gotta take over from engineering, and a couple of their guys get embedded for us to place and detonate charges.

It all goes off without incident, and the sub-strut collapses in on itself, and starts sliding into the ocean like it belonged there from the beginning. Macclesfield Bank is warm but the water is cold, gets whipped up into weird turbulence by the weather. The sub-strut is creaking and groaning the whole time as it gets pounded by waves, and we're cheering, and soon the purestrains get over themselves and they're cheering too. I guess they believed in other purestrains more than they believed in us, in our gear and our training, but that was a mistake. Nothing is gonna stop us from erasing this derelict from the face of the Earth. All of us feel the same way — the purestrains are so sure that they can slow us down, but we're built from the ground up so that nothing can stand between us and R&R.

Today blood and thunder on the sea, tomorrow cartoons and sippy on the beach. Sooner or later everyone will get with the program and everyone will be happier for it. There's no standing in the way of the future.

2 KINGS 17:14

I.

When we fly up, the team on LRR penance has done good work softening the suspected parasite compound up. They know to expect what comes next when the choppers come, but LRR penance has been pissing in jars for hours by that point.

People are out to see us when we crest the horizon. Always a good sign. Some of them run in, some of them stay there with the dead and wounded children. Tertiary targets. That's LRR penance's problem, unless our gunner makes it ours. He doesn't.

We're over the lightly fortified compound in minutes. We fast rope in.

No organized resistance - intelligence was good. Could have done this with a close-in penitent, but I guess the abbot wanted to send a message.

II.

A guy bursts out of a gutted RV with a decurve bow. Takes one look at me, at my armor and at my gun, and throws it down and throws his hands up.

I look at Rattlesnake. "Horns?" I ask.

"Horns," he says, and I ventilate him from the hip. Catch him in the leg, knock him over screaming.

III.

Over the radio:

"Got him."

"Confirm," shouts Rattlesnake into the radio. "He should have a scar over his left eye, tattoo of an eagle -"

"Confirmed," says the voice over the radio.

Chorus of cheers, chorus of groans.

Rattlesnake snarls into the radio for the demo team.

I look over at Rattlesnake. "Looks like delousing," I say.

"Yeah," says Rattlesnake. "Don't take it too hard, kid. They got lucky."

Lucky? Bullshit. Maybe he needs delousing.

IV.

At the debriefing the abbot asks us what relics we brought back from the punitive expedition.

Rattlesnake steps up to speak for the unit. "Nothing of significance, your worship."

"You're telling me they didn't have any relics to base their abominations on?"

"None they carried with them."

"Not so much as a can opener?"

"Not so much as a can opener, your worship."

"Damnedest thing. Maybe we had a scholar on our hands - a real inventor." Abbot recoils at the word, wiping his hands against themselves.

"I hope not, your worship."

"Wasn't smart enough to outwit 5.56, was he?" I can't match a face to that voice.

The abbot laughs with his whole chest at that, and we all laugh too.

In delousing, the gasoline goes down easy, and barely stings my eyes at all.

V.

There is no name for what we believe in. The closest it comes is the Shame.

Some in the order speak of Shame as I think the parasites of the decadent days would of their gods, or of the demons dogging their gods' heels. Some in the order speak of the Shame as a force of nature, and others as something outside of nature, something that lies over top of nature like a beast consumed by lust.

The Shame follows me like a companion, and it always has. They tell me my father was consumed by the Shame utterly, that even in penance the Shame never left him. They say the Shame broke him, and if I'm not careful it'll break me too. They tell no one about their mothers, and I wonder sometimes if I even had one.

VI.

Shantytown 100 klicks north of Salt Lake Abomination, taken by a messiah. Water men tell us he has miracles. They go to describe these miracles, and one of them is burning men, burning their ears, burning their skin. They say to look at him is like looking at the sun. Abbot asks him why they haven't said anything sooner, and they say, "we thought you already knew." Why would we know that, says the Abbot. "You know everything," say the water men.

He lets them go with a delousing. They're praying in old English, they're laughing like they won the lottery. One of them thanks him for his mercy, all gasoline on his breath. Abbot tells them there's no such thing as mercy.

VII.

Flying eyes tell us the whole story, and what they don't tell us we learn fast. Fox on research penance works out that the shantytown is what used to be Brigham City before the collapse, named after the chosen apostle of a god-man. A good place for a man to become messiah. Close to a sanctuary for wildlife, a place where obscene devices to control the birds were tested in the decadent days, which had evidently come to find new purpose in our day to control men.

We suit up. Uneventful run, no meaningful resistance by air. Gunshots pinging off of the alloy of the patrol choppers, confirming what we already knew about these people: parasites. Every time we get hit, the gunner spins up, fires whip-quick bursts, no more than a few shots. Abbot doesn't like it when we don't respond, doesn't like it when we lean into firing without orders.

"Someday we'll be out of belts," says the gunner, "and I don't know what we'll do."

"We'll be free," comes from the cabin. "We all will."

What an annoying little suckup Brinefly is. And arrogant: like he's paid off whatever he owes in the Shame and it's all just making sure he lives long enough to collect. I sometimes fantasize about kicking his smug teeth in.

"No such thing," I say. "Someone will figure out how to make more. Someone will find more. I know we've run out before; you think that meant they stopped shooting at parasites?"

"Yeah," says the gunner. He's from a different unit. I forget his name, some sea creature.

"You talk like you don't believe in anything," says Brinefly.

Fuck him. Didn't know what to say.

VII.

"Flying eyes confirm direct hit on target."

Brigham City is smoldering. Fox and his unwashed informants pinned down our Messiah as a man named Jack Glass, pinned down that he was running around claiming that God told him secrets in a dream, some shit like that. That "God" - it's always just "God" - gave him powers beyond any mortal man, that he was a reincarnation or distant son of some decadent-days god-man.

I wonder what he did when the Willy Pete came in. I wonder if his god warned him about it, warned him what it'd to do him. I wonder if he had time to pray, or even to scream.

VIII.

At matins, the abbot has a rare word of praise for us. Says we've done righteous work in our penances. Says that over in Chapterhouse, they've received no reports of new abominations in a month. Says that could be because we're vigilant, but our vigilance needs to increase. Tells us of the shame beneath our feet, leads us in prayer against the great beasts.

I know all about the great beasts. I could speak the litany against each of them in my sleep. I bet I do sometimes.

This time his focus is on the beast Devourer, who devoured the earth in the decadent days, who planted the Shame in men's hearts, who stalks us even now. Devourer of the many eyes; Devourer of the many hands; Devourer of the many mouths. Devourer whose fat stained the seas, whose hunger emptied the fields. "Devourer," he says after the prayers, "did not die. He lives on in these jealous and hungry men. Great is our sin, and great must be our penance."

"Great is our sin, and great must be our penance," we all respond.

IX

I think about the desert sometimes. Fox is always on research penance; he tells me it used to be pasture, of all things. That people grazed their livestock here. The thought upsets me so deeply I report his gossip-mongering to the abbot. I don't ask the abbot any questions, and he doesn't ask me any besides the barest formalities.

As the rhythmic cracking of the whip against Fox's back goes from dry to wet, I lose myself in the setting sun, and in my vision I can see a fat bull, without a care in the world, shoving its hungry mouth into the dry earth and choking on sand.

There is horror in this world.

STRICT MACHINE

Dear Emilia:

I'm a huge fan of your column, and recently something happened to me that might interest you. I agonized over sending this letter for a bit, because the details are going to be pretty hard to file off. Part of me wants not to have them filed off, wants That One Bitch to catch wind of it and get as afraid as I've had to be since it happened. "Let her wait for the other shoe to drop," I'm thinking. Don't worry, it's not gonna be some stupid relationship drama, mostly.

But I guess for liability's sake let's say I work in downtown Megacity 11 as a wet domme. (Yeah, I know, problematic, blah blah blah.) I have about 6 clients, and most of them are pretty standard. They want me to do shit to their mulcher bodies that changes them forever. The old-timers are probably groaning and rolling their eyes, but I know that was always how things worked. In defense of my profession, how many of you hags got to crush someone's nuts in a vice every fucking day? Well, I say "got to", but, you know. Also had to? Whatever. It's a job like any other, just one I think is kind of neat.

ANYWAY. One of my clients, let's call him Woodruff (and I get how weird it's gonna get to 'he' Woodruff, but roll with it, it's what he wants) is in this loveless marriage, has this ridiculous religious baggage. Kinda homophobic, but he wants me to "make him a fag", over and over. Has very specific ideas about being a fag, which I roll with. I think he got bored of the brainwashing stuff a couple of years ago so he just keeps incarnating into mulchers to get his body modified until it feels right to him to have a scene where someone kills him.

These are, like, vacations for him. He's got money, and I don't really know where from. He'll sojourn for a few months in this other body, sometimes doubly-incarnate between it and his normal one.

His latest trip was some kind of endocrine thing. For background I'm trans and *I* had to do a lot of homework for it, mostly to get the language down right but also to give him something more interesting to do than a kind of bog-standard extended forced fem scene.

Enter Wifey. Wifey is *convinced* that this latest round, where I was soaking his bloodstream in neuroplasticity agents, had an E pump direct past his blood-brain barrier, it's what made him start doing girlier or faggier or whatever shit in "real life". From the sound of it, their kid's getting bullied or something, and maybe it's his fault or maybe she blames him for not manning up and raising him right. I really don't fucking know with straight people.

So what does she do? She fucking comes to my job and shoots me about it! Shoots me in the fucking brain!

Obviously I was in a mulcher at the time, but still! Horrible! I had to feel myself die! And yeah, ha-ha, I do it to people all the time, but it's different when it's outside of a scene. It's a little thing called consent, ok? And even the part where I was in a mulcher wasn't exactly something I got to choose in the first place!

Of course, we're all in these bodies exactly to take the fangs out of any attempt we make to organize, and the demands of the scene are secondary. Of course, those recordings of everything we do liability-proof us, and no one would work wet without that, but there's something a little queasying in a paper trail. I have the same waking nightmares every day the other dommes do, the kinda stupid boss selling data to the feds, or maybe the feds skimming, and someone getting incarnated in a sealed room with a blowtorch, a pro, and no pain button.

Sure.

I was glad for the mulchable, though, when Wifey shot me. Normally if you lived through that sort of thing before I think it would have ruined your whole life, and I had to go through a bit of therapy and all that after, but more for the shit she was saying during and after than for actually being shot. I guess people are more casual about murder these days, which is probably bad, but I'm glad I can be casual about being murdered. I think being casual about the transphobic shit, the whorephobic shit, that might be crossing a line. I don't know.

I think if I got into specifics it'd more likely cross her path, but suffice it to say she shouted a bunch of heinous shit about me and about Woodruff before she pulled the trigger, and then when the life was bleeding out of my blasted-apart skull she kept at it until people pulled her away.

If I sue her or press charges or whatever, what good would that do anyone? Plus like — wouldn't that force the record to go to the feds? I really worry about that, as much as anyone, them getting their fingerprints all over the ways we torture people who can't even die to escape. Is that a stupid thing to worry about? I guess they hardly need our help to figure it out, but some kind of twisted professional pride tells me that this case going anywhere would irreparably damage the world.

And I mean, I hate her — she was always a bitch, even before she decided to come to my job with a gun, and someone might have gotten hurt that way forever. But is dragging her — and myself! — through the courts or God forbid the prison system actually going to make things right? How exactly am I supposed to? I know the old-school answer is to get a crew together and beat her ass, but I don't even know how that would work, and I know for a fact it'd look real bad.

So, I guess what I'm asking you here is: what next? Do I go to the authorities? Do I beat ass? Do I just let her get away with it? What the fuck am I supposed to do?

RAINBOW WARRIOR PROGRAM

I'm always getting brainwashed by the state. I think we all are. You start out as a little kid with no brains at all and they slosh their deep ops all over you, and before you know it you've got bills to pay and women to leave behind. It's fucked up. If I can save enough money to retire I think I'm gonna have that surgery, that surgery where they put your soul into a statue that can't think or move or see. I want to feel what stone feels, and I want to go on feeling it until the Earth is dead.

###

You know "Rainbow Warrior Program?" You only think that. You don't know "Rainbow Warrior Program". We're more unobtrusive than they make us look in the commercials. It turns out that our enemies are wily, they know to look out for the obvious ones. Roided out freaks, obvious as horses; candy-colored unicorns like in the deniably-sanctioned webtoons. You might have seen me on the subway or the bus. You might have brushed past me in the supermarket. You were looking for pizza and I wasn't looking at anything. My eyes got nothing behind them. I'm dissociating on the outside and on the inside I'm ready for the moment our enemies show their faces outside of the dark places they hatch their schemes and lick their wounds. On my better days you can't tell if I'm a man or a woman or alive or dead. That's my entire job. I have to be ready.

###

MISSED CONNECTION: I know you, beautiful creature, no matter how many times you change your face or your life. I hate you with perfect hatred. I want to hurt you until you forget to want to be alive. I want to hurt you until you beg me to stop, and then go on hurting you. Fuck giving you what you want, I'm the only one who can give you what you deserve. You know where to find me.

###

Wind up my watch and it's showing me an hour that can't exist, and that's how I know what time it is. Afterimages of nightmares — shrug 'em off. I go in slow for someone trained to go in fast. I take my time. I could compare my languor to a constrictor snake. I could compare the one I'm here for, the one that brought me to this place, I could compare them to the snake in the Garden. They keep on running counter-ops. They keep on telling people to look for a future that isn't an iron lung. They don't know how fucked we are. We need every drop of blood that's ever been spilled. We're shooting guys we never even heard of. I don't know what crimes they got the guy I'm after for — oilcrimes, infocrimes, watercrimes, foodcrimes, whatevercrimes. I just know I'm around his neck. I just know what I taste in the afterimages. I taste victory — shrug it off. I go in fast. His screams last for a million subjective years. I lose sight of having a body for a while. I keep coming back to the sounds of his screams. He's afraid, but not of me.

###

In the death agony, I'm like Narcissus. I disappear forever into myself. I think the most beautiful people in the world are the ones you can pick out of a crowd. I know that's the deep ops talking and I don't think I care. I retreat when things are tough to a private dream of a restful life: of a beautiful human being, a living and breathing human being, and all I can see is the love in their eyes and a long slick of blood from shallow wounds all over their body. I'm glad I'm always getting brainwashed by the state. At least I know how to live.

###

You know "Rainbow Warrior Program?" You only think that. You don't know "Rainbow Warrior Program". You only see the helicopters flying low and slow where there never used to be a damn thing in the sky, and drones besides, and you imagine the God the state brainwashed you to believe would set everything right, you imagine Him crouching down from heaven and smashing them with His perfect hands. If He existed it would be our job to kill Him. We're the only thing keeping you safe. We're the only thing standing between you and the iron lung of the world outside. Something older than glass and something older than fire stirs in me and I wake up to the dream inside the dream.

###

On the dating profile it's the Office. On the dating websites it's long hikes and kayaking. There's so many photographs of me with so many dogs. I'll tell you all about my furbabies. I know so many openers. I've been trained in so many ways to ghost you when you aren't usable as an asset. I dream about interesting sex when I dream off the clock. I dream about performing beautiful surgeries on people you can pick out of a crowd. I'll never admit it. I wouldn't let "Rainbow Warrior Program" down like that.

###

Listen close. Somewhere beyond this desert, somewhere in some godforsaken swamp, there is an installation that does not look like an installation but like a beautiful lodge. Rich men enter and leave to hunt what little game remains on the Earth, to talk in bloodless terms of devouring what little human flesh remains unspoken for. To barter souls. None of it means anything to them, and death would only be a mercy to their hearts. I need you to listen, because this next part is important. If you ever learn anything about them, if you ever embarrass them or get in their way, I will find you, and you will never learn my name, and you will never see my face, but I will make you suffer, and I will go on making you suffer until the Earth is dead.

Baleful Harbinger knows plan to kill all Americans will show extent of his power – and define his legacy

In what could be the most consequential stretch of his presidency, Baleful Harbinger challenges the armies of men to stop a once-in-a-generation hecatomb, if they believe their mettle's up to the task.

Listen here, scum! Tell no one of what you've seen!

Sudor Wrymouth

Sudor Wrymouth

Read more

In the coming weeks, Baleful Harbinger and his deathlords will attempt to steer the president’s multi-million casualty economic vision through Congress and into law. With a narrow window for action, they will have almost no room for error.

If foiled, they threaten an escalation of previous monstrosities. Children ages 5-15 bristling with narrow punctures, drained white as sheets of all blood; a return to the years of the Old Plague, red in tooth and claw; humiliations beyond name and measure.

If successful, Baleful Harbinger's scheming lackeys will deliver a legacy-defining act of mass murder echoing the CIA's human experimentation programme, COINTELPRO, and 250 years of genocide.

“Tremble, brief mortals,” Baleful Harbinger said last week. “As you silenced the voice of your wretched God in the last century, so I will silence the hateful sussurus of your hearts in this one.”

He spoke a day after House Democrats finished shaping a mammoth piece of legislation they hope can make it through Congress. Pursuing a perilous two-track approach, they are tying a $3tn bipartisan military-industrial slaughter-by-numbers deal to a $10.5tn party-line package that would ensure the survival of key Democratic politicians and donors in meager exile on the open sea.

The bill to immediately deploy the Air Force against civilian targets in the continental US passed the Senate last month with unusual bipartisan support. Democrats are attempting to secure their spending package using a special process, reconciliation, which will shield it from being blocked by the Court of Seven Shadows.

Saving their own skins will require the vote of every Democrat in the 50-50 Senate and nearly every Democrat in the House. That gives each member enormous leverage.

  The Romans were right — dissidents threaten the dignitas of the state and swift assassinations and executions to curb their hubris are in the public interest

Corbinus Clawgrasp
Corbinus Clawgrasp
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Two Democratic senators have objected to the scale of engagement already underway with US citizens, which would dedicate $6.5tn over three years to onshoring mass casualties, white phosphorous falling from the sky by the carload, and mass institution of total bloodsport. In the House, an arrangement between party moderates and progressives has been dubbed “The Butcher's Due”.

The fragile alliance is scheduled to face its first test on Year 0 Day 104, when the House is expected to vote on the $1tn bipartisan bill to fund death squads, car bombs, and other infrastructure projects. Whispering, nameless cowards have vowed to derail the measure without ironclad assurances that the proposal to spare their own wretched lives will reach the Throne of Ice and Blood.

The legislative battle will challenge Baleful Harbinger, both as the leader of a death cult and as an experienced smotherer of human hope. Last week, as Congress faced a dizzying array of secret documents and napalmed-over mass graves to win their dread liege's fickle favor, he signaled his readiness to wade deeper.

The president held “soul-shattering” meetings with the two senators concerned by the policy package, Raytheon Masterwork of Zone 35 and Mrs. Kill Yourself of Zone 48. Later, he called the Senate majority leader, Herragat-who-gives-suck, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

Then, on Dead God's Day, as if perfectly to illustrate the sea of charnel through which Baleful Harbinger must wade, involuntary human extinction website KILLEMALL.SU reported that Masterwork had contracted an undisclosed progressive illness.

Corbinus Clawgrasp, the author of books on Nixon, George Bush and most recently Truman, said that after 36 years in death struggle with the combined armies of man in the Second Fall and eight leading infections as silent master of the Old Death, Baleful Harbinger was uniquely qualified to play his new role. The difference is that it is his presidential legacy on the line.

“The Romans were right — dissidents threaten the dignitas of the state and swift assassinations and executions to curb their hubris are in the public interest,” Clawgrasp said. “In the next few weeks, we’re going to find out how much power he has.”

The intensity of the debate largely reflects the ambition of the proposal to liquidate all surviving American citizens. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator overseeing the package as chair of the budget committee, has called it “mass murder on a scale that would beggar the imagination of history's vilest tyrants”.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Karl Rove, once chief strategist for George Bush, laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.

The plan would terminate nearly every aspect of life. It contains major initiatives specifically targeting children, the poor, the sick, the strivers, the doctors, the clerks, the workers, and even the majority of America's richest 1%, financed in large part by debt spending and the vast national security black budget. In a sign of how fluid the process remains, on Sunday night the Senate parliamentarian ruled that a plan for exile above the Arctic Circle for millions who already submit to the deathlords with their whole heart cannot be included.

Baleful Harbinger has argued that democracy itself is on the line. The slaughter and internal warfare bills, he has said, offer a genocidal opportunity to demonstrate that “your pitiful institutions can please my will” better than autocracies like China.

Progressives have been encouraged by Baleful Harbinger’s apparent rebuke to free-market and limited-government practices that have held sway since the days of Ronald Reagan.

DYSTROPHIC TEENAGERS

The final soldiers of the American empire will be dystrophic teenagers recruited from gamer subreddits, brainwashed in disused churches, and entombed beneath the earth with feeding tubes in their stomachs and wires in their brains and hearts, piloting 10,000 drones at once. Drip-fed heroic-dose stimulants and nootropics until nothing human in them remains.

We mere mortals will heroically work meaningless jobs and buy meaningless products under global air warfare which has simply become meteorology - light falling debris with a chance of UXO. Recruitment will pivot to nationalist influencers, small-time youtubers and hustle culture advocates, all kinds of Pied Piper figures with a terrifying preternatural grasp over the hearts of damaged children.

The sight of a Troop in the wild will become rare and upsetting and the government will deliberately spread inaccurate and extreme rumors about their severely damaged bodies and minds to sow doubt and fear in the populace. Leftists will continue to argue with each other about whether the Army is a force of global imperialism and thus bad or a source of free college for disadvantaged youths and thus good.

Initially the ones that die will be sent to Arlington with military honors, but sooner or later they’ll simply start dissolving them in situ with a specialized chemical bath that only minimally corrodes electronics or plastic gear in order to minimize expensive new construction.

Rhetoric about China and Russia will gradually be replaced with a generic and flexible contempt for “terrorists”, “hostiles”, “outsiders”, and a state of general cultural total war footing in which the exact deployment zone of US forces and their attitude towards local assets is unimportant. Assassinations will become commonplace, inexplicable traffic accidents, explosions deep in domestic airspace given absurd and implausible explanations: airplane collisions, ancient burst pipelines, meteorite impacts.

FAIR MEAT

As early as the 22nd century, the technology for growing and grafting new human muscle will be perfected. While the primary application envisioned by its inventors will be healing previously permanent injuries great and small, this use-case will rapidly be overshadowed by a booming industry in consensually-acquired meat, known as “fair meat”.

Paid volunteers will inject themselves with a tissue starter in order to develop an anatomically superfluous lean muscle pair weighing as much as 1.5 kg over the course of anything from a week to two months, which will then be excised and sold to scrupulous vegans and dabbling cannibals at a steep markup. At first the product will simply be ordinary human muscle, but pork donor and beef donor technology will eventually take the market by storm.

While increasingly unfair and coercive labor practices will dampen the wave of enthusiasm for “fair meat” after a generation of market acceptance, a mix of consumer inertia and industrial championism will still see americans eat 210,000 tons of “fair meat” in 2150, nearly equivalent to that year’s combined consumption of all insect meats and more than triple that year’s consumption of mutton.

THE FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF UNPERSONS HAS BEEN NOTIFIED. HAVE A NICE DAY

It's presumably morning and first thing I know, the distant memory of grass being gently stirred by a warm breeze has me hard as a rock. My plan of attack is, I'll grip the shaft and stroke it until I bust. Maybe juggle my balls a bit with the other hand.

Before I can get started, I'm getting email from my boss. We're all more productive now that you have to read those before you can do anything else. Some kind of clever trick with the motivation centers of the brain — you know the ones, you lacerate 'em in the right spot on a rat and they starve to death, a few millimeters on the other side and they can't stop eating. It's like that for emails. My boss is telling me that I need to write new ad copy for the dispensary. I don't care enough to compose a reply so I exercise an immense effort of will to minimize the email in my mind's eye without formulating any response.

In the corners of my mind's eye that modern technology hasn't mutilated, I'm imagining all kinds of things. Frost heaving in permafrost terrains, leaving dull sunken hexagons as far as the eye can see. Shit yeah, like a beehive. Bee lodged in a flower, desperately trying to suckle nectar, getting pollen all over itself, not even caring how nasty it is. I want to live like that — I don't, but right now I'm feeling it, it's feeling aspirational.

The dispensary's ad copy is nothing. I ignore it until I explode, sticky strands of pink fluid all over my polystyrene-feeling boxers. Grandma's pounding the door.

> ARE YOU JACKING OFF IN THERE
>> YEAH
> STOP IT. YOU'RE GOING TO INHERIT THIS HOUSE WHEN I DIE. DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT IT'S WORTH
>> I DO GRANDMA I JUST CAN'T HELP IT
> WE ALL HAVE TO MAKE CHOICES IN THIS LIFE. I KNOW YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT GOD BUT YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT THE MARKET VALUE OF YOUR REAL ESTATE
>> I DO CARE ABOUT GOD GRANDMA
> I ONLY HOPE I STOPPED YOU BEFORE THE ESTATEFAX APP GOT WIND OF THIS. IT'S INAPPROPRIATE
>> GRANDMA IT'S NOT "THE ESTATEFAX APP" IT'S JUST ESTATEFAX. AND FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH YOU'RE TOO LATE. IT'S PROBABLY FINE ANYWAY

> THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE LET YOU OUT IN THE WORLD LIKE THEY DID

Ignoring Grandma's bellowing to focus on the afterglow. Images of unfired terracotta absorbing water, that's going in the spank bank. I get a second email from my boss. It's just a bunch of skull emojis. Whatever, if he was mad he'd just have me arrested. I reply: "Tell them we sell weed here. That's usually a pretty big draw."

Instant reply: "Uh, no shit. But we're not allowed to say that, remember?"

"No? I don't usually do ad copy. That was Mary's job."

"Don't give me that. Best if we continue this conversation in person if we're going to have to talk about certain persons anyway."

I roll my eyes at that. The jostling of the muscles of my eye, my vision darting from one corner of the room to the other — from a long-abandoned cobweb soaked and stained brown with vape juice to a single sock that never wound up in my laundry hamper and then got cat piss on it so I can't really even use it to bust into — well, I don't need to tell you, it gets me hard again.

How many times did I jerk off total on Tuesday, January 3, 2051? Would you believe five? Try doubling that. That's my day off, so I might as well take advantage. Towards the end I got dehydrated so I went to the shower and turned it on and drank out of it. Sometimes I like to put shampoo-conditioner in my hair while I'm drinking and save some time. My piss comes out beautiful colors, pink like everything (it's not some stupid future thing, I just bleed a lot from my urethra because of how much I beat off), sometimes richer or paler orange. I think my dream is to hook up with someone who's into me for my piss, someone who really likes to drink piss and wants to drink mine. I don't care about piss that much but it seems like a really easy fetish to satisfy people with.

Come down to the table bleary-eyed and with piss all over my boxers from how I didn't really shake enough after the last time I pissed and the table is carefully laid out with paper plates and plastic utensils and Grandma has served up several hot square food items.

>> THANKS, GRANDMA. I REALLY APPRECIATE IT
> THANK THE MASH PULPER, NOT ME. IT TOOK ME YEARS TO BE ABLE TO STOMACH THIS STUFF
>> THAT'S FUNNY, IT'S NOT THE FIRST TIME I'VE HEARD THAT FROM OLDER PEOPLE. I GUESS I JUST SEE IT AS NORMAL
> I REMEMBER WHEN WE TOOK YOU TO CONEY ISLAND AND GOT YOU SOME REAL FOOD, A FOOTLONG. YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN SIX OR SEVEN. YOU PUKED SO HARD WE HAD TO TAKE YOU TO THE HOSPITAL
>> GOTTA HAVE MY SQUARES GRAMMA
> RIGHT. I KNOW THIS NOW, BUT AT THE TIME —
>> I'M PROBABLY ALLERGIC TO WHATEVER'S IN FOOD OR SOMETHING
> THAT MAKES SENSE

Of all the things to set me off, I realized I had seen old videos of how they used to make hot dogs from that conversation and I could feel myself starting to get hard. I excused myself from the dinner table, stuffing lukewarm squares into my mouth as I tracked piss and pre upstairs, and I started up Video on my eyelink and started watching one of those old videos. The forcemeat flowing into withered-up intestine made me go completely nuts. I beat off so hard that I started screaming. Grandma didn't bother coming upstairs. I think she'd rather that I died, or if I did get in pain or in trouble she mostly wanted to avoid me so it didn't become her problem.

I passed out with my dick in my hand, what must have been evening. I woke up and it was Wednesday, probably, which meant I had to go to work. Spam email taking up my whole brain telling me that there were women in the world who fuck cars, and trying to link me to a video that'd hijack my brain to mine cryptocurrency. "Human women," I muttered to myself. "What a wild concept. I guess Grandma is one, or used to be. But they're less interesting than they used to be in the old days."

The creepblock software on my eyelink flashed stills from the video, and I could just barely make out huge implants bulging out a girl's completely flat chest. Like, yeah, duh, she's gonna be my age, so she doesn't have nipples or even a lot of skin to go around on the chest. The implants are real stretchmarky. Not my thing, but I guess it takes all kinds. I stumble to the bathroom as the email buzzes in my head and aim for the toilet and completely biff it, spraying piss everywhere out of my hard dick, clotted up with an honest weekend's worth of dry nut. I curse loudly but it's Grandma's problem, or the lady she pays basically nothing to clean up after me, or whoever's.

I come into work and there's several people there. One of them is wearing a corduroy sweater, which seems appropriate since it's January. She pulls a clutch out of her chest pocket and starts counting money. She's buying a sativa-dominant hybrid called "Hillary Clinton" which is 10% off for Women's History Month.

>> YOU DON'T WANT HILLARY CLINTON
> EXCUSE ME?
>> IT'S DOGSHIT
> IT'S ATTITUDES LIKE THAT FROM CISHET MEN THAT KEEP US LOCKED IN THE STONE AGE AS A SOCIETY.
>> NO LIKE. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU THINK I'M SAYING BUT I MEAN IT TASTES LIKE A SEWER AND IT MAKES YOU PARANOID. IT'S A TERPENE THING
> A LIKELY STORY
>>> IS THIS FREAK BOTHERING YOU?

God, I already hate this guy.

> NO I'M FINE
>>> BECAUSE SERIOUSLY I CAN HAVE A CHAT WITH HIM. MANO A MANO
>> I'M JUST SAYING GET A DIFFERENT STRAIN
> WHICH STRAIN WOULD YOU RECOMMEND FOR WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH THEN
>>>> DUDE C'MON I'VE BEEN TRYING TO SELL THE HILLARY ALL MORNING, FUCK OFF
>> THE RIEFENSTAHL GOLD IS FINE
> WASN'T SHE A NAZI OR SOME SHIT
>> I'M PRETTY SURE HILLARY CLINTON OWNED SLAVES, ALL THE STRAINS ARE LIKE THAT
> THAT CAN'T BE TRUE
>>>> FOR SURE I DON'T THINK HILLARY CLINTON WAS BORN EARLY ENOUGH TO OWN SLAVES
>> WELL LIKE SHE DIDN'T OWN THEM BUT THE GOVERNOR'S MANSION IN ARKANSAS EMPLOYED SLAVE LABOR. IT WAS A WHOLE THING
>>> GUYS LIKE YOU GIVE THE REST OF US A BAD NAME

Whoa! Lucky I've got nice reflexes because that sumbitch just tried to go for my face with whatever that is!

>>>> SIR THERE'S NO NEED FOR THAT
> JESUS MAN CALM DOWN AND PUT THAT AWAY I WORK HERE
>> OKAY YOU ALL CAN HANDLE THIS WITHOUT ME BYE
>>> YOU GO BACK TO HER AND APOLOGIZE
>> THAT'S AGAINST COMPANY POLICY
>>> SERIOUSLY?
>>>> SIR IT ACTUALLY IS

>>> FUCK THIS THEN

>>>> GOD FUCK YOU. IF SHE HAD TIPPED ON THAT ONE I'D BE ABLE TO BUY FOOD TODAY
> JUST GET A MASH PULPER ALREADY YOU HIPSTER SHIT
>>>> FIRST OF ALL, NO. SECOND OF ALL, THE FEEDSTOCK STILL COSTS MONEY, YOU UNCONSCIONABLE DICKBAG
> WHATEVER. I'M GOING TO THE BATHROOM
>>>> DON'T COME BACK
> YOU CAN'T STOP ME

Spend an hour painfully struggling to pass a bunch of tiny little rabbit turds, and the pressure of course gets me horny, and you know the rest. I guess I lose track of time imagining retreating glaciers and holes slowly prolapsing in the ozone layer because before I know it my coworker is pounding on the door.

>>>> ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE MAN, I GOTTA SHIT REAL BAD
> OH SHIT ERIDAN I'M SORRY I'LL BE RIGHT OUT
>>>> FOR FUCK'S SAKE JUST DAN OK
> YEAH OK

The rest of the shift goes pretty uneventful. Boss sends an email with the priority spiked up real high, like "you have to pay money to get it this high" high, like "pressure of a thousand suns inside your brain" high. He's typing in all caps like a moron about how much he wants ad copy. I give him my best shot: "For that green shit you love".

"It'll have to do," he replies.
"You fired you-know-who, not like I can do as good as she did."
"I'm uncomfortable with you consistently using female terms to describe that person. We've had a conversation about this. Don't make me reprimand you formally."
I reply with a thumbs-up.

On my way home I see a kinda busted-looking gray car with tinted windows pull up towards me as I'm walking, I guess my mind was elsewhere and I was probably starting to sport a halfie from how much it was wandering, and the driver's side window rolls down and I can vaguely see Mary in the car. She's alone and I can tell even in the dark that she's looking like hell. She shouldn't be here. She's shouting at me all of a sudden:

>> FANCY SEEING YOU HERE!
> OH HEY MAR — HEY YOU. HOW ARE YOU
>> I'M GOOD, K. GET IN THE CAR
> I'M FINE GETTING HOME ON MY OWN THANKS THOUGH
>> COOL. NOT A REQUEST

The rear passenger door pops open and I don't know why I don't run, but I don't. I step in and sit down on the gray faux-leather seat. I know she's living in here but it seems clean. Smells too clean, you know, kinda over-sterile. Over the passenger seat I see the glovebox smashed open and there's a bunch of papers, a scorched glass pipe, and a revolver.

>> SO LIKE. HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING LATELY K
> I'M GOOD, I GUESS. JUST HEADING HOME FROM WORK
>> WORK! COOL. HOW'S THE DISPENSARY GOING WITHOUT ME
> BOSS WANTS ME TO WRITE AD COPY
>> OH MAN, NO OFFENSE BUT I SEE THAT GOING REAL SHITTY
> I MEAN, I DON'T REALLY –
>> NO LIKE. YOU DON'T HAVE THE GUILE FOR IT

> GUILE?
>> DECEIT. TREACHERY. YOU'RE AN HONEST PERSON. OR WELL, AS HONEST AS YOU'RE ALLOWED TO BE
> I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN
>> I MEAN LIKE. ADVERTISING IS ALL ABOUT TRYING TO TRICK PEOPLE. MAKE THEM FEEL THINGS THEY'RE NOT FEELING, PROVIDE A SOLUTION BASED ON WHAT YOU'RE SELLING. "THERE'S A PARTY AND EVERYONE IS INVITED EXCEPT YOU, AND I JUST HAPPEN TO HAVE A TICKET".

> RIGHT. I JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT HAS TO DO WITH –
>> IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH EVERYTHING.

> OKAY.
>> SORRY DON'T MEAN TO YELL. JUST LIKE — THIS LIGHT'S BEEN TAKING A WHILE RIGHT?
> I GUESS? I WASN'T PAYING ATTENTION
>> RIGHT, YOU JUST GOT IN THE CAR WITHOUT PAYING ATTENTION. IT'S WHAT I MEAN. NO GUILE IN YOU.
> I DON'T KNOW WHY PAYING ATTENTION WOULD BE DECEITFUL
>> DECEIT ISN'T EXACTLY — CUNNING, I MEAN. IT WASN'T VERY — RIGHT. I'M GOING TO THE PARK
> WHAT'S AT THE PARK
>> I'M SMOKING YOU OUT

> I'M GOOD

>> RIGHT! STILL NOT A REQUEST, BUD
> DAMN. YOU REALLY CHANGED
>> CHANGED HOW. WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT ME.

I caught her eyes around a faceful of long stubble and pockmarks through the rearview mirror, and she immediately started laughing, loud and forceful. I guess it was infectious even if it was a little scary because I started laughing too and started feeling better about the whole situation.

>> NO I MEAN I GET IT. YOU GOT LIKE, KIND OF A LIBERAL FAMILY RIGHT
> I GUESS?
>> YOU'VE GOT THIS ASPIRATIONAL PICTURE OF WHAT EVERYTHING MEANS. ARE YOU RECORDING THIS?
> GOD NO, I'M NOT STUPID
>> COOL. KEEP IT THAT WAY. I MEAN LIKE, YOU'RE COOL AND ACCEPTING BECAUSE I'M YOUR NEIGHBOR OR YOUR COWORKER OR WHATEVER TIDY WHITE PICKET FENCE VISION YOU HAVE OF BEING A GENDER FREAK, THEN I GET FIRED, THEN THE GOVERNMENT COMES TO MY HOUSE, I KNOW I'M TALKING A MILE A MINUTE AND LOOK LIKE SHIT –
> YOU LOOK FINE CONSIDERING
>> — FUCK OFF, I'M ON GOD KNOWS WHAT, I'M ARMED TO THE TEETH –
> IT'S JUST A GUN GIRL
>> — AND I STRONGARM YOU INTO THE CAR AND YOU'RE GOING GOD KNOWS WHERE. IT'S OUTSIDE YOUR PARADIGM. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I DO TO LIVE. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M GONNA DO TO YOU.
> I DON'T. FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH I CONSIDER YOU A FRIEND. I'M SORRY ABOUT –
>> THIS ISN'T ABOUT THAT.

> COME ON, MARY.
>> I DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT THAT NAME. ALL THIS TROUBLE AND IT MEANS NOTHING TO ME. I GUESS IT'S AFTER SOME CHARACTER FROM A COMIC ANYWAY. ISN'T THAT FUCKING STUPID
> WHY'D YOU CHOOSE IT THEN
>> MY MOM DID
> I GUESS IT WAS A GOOD WAY OF KEEPING HER ON YOUR SIDE, THEN
>> NAH, SHE'S THE ONE TURNED ME IN
> OH

She started laughing again, harsh again, strident. She scratched her arm, and as she accelerated reached idly for a shift knob that wasn't there, her laughter doubling when she realized what she was doing.

> YOU GOT AN AUTOMATIC, HUH
>> IT'S WHAT TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS CASH WOULD PAY FOR

> THAT'S NOT TOO BAD FOR A USED –
>> NOT BAD CONSIDERING. NO. ANYWAY, HERE WE ARE.

I looked out the window, and saw the park outside of the long, narrow parking lot, conspicuously fenced-off.

>> MY AUNT SAYS THE FENCE IS NEW. THEY PUT IT UP IN THE SWEEP YEARS OUT OF SPITE
> I GUESS IT'S CLOSED
>> DOESN'T MATTER. SMOKE THIS.

I didn't really see her pack the bowl, but I looked down at the hand jabbing towards me and saw it had that scorched pipe, now full of off-white powder, and a little windproof lighter.

> HOW MUCH OF IT
>> YOU'RE GONNA BE SMOKING THE WHOLE THING, HOSS
> I DON'T KNOW THAT I CAN. I'VE GOT A LOT OF ALLERGIES AND –
>> COOL BEANS. YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS BEFORE I OPEN THE DOOR AND COME BACK THERE.

> I MEAN –
>> FOUR.
> I JUST –
>> THREE. TWO.
> FUCK IT

The smoke hits my throat rough and bleachy and I come to what must be later, dick in my hand on the freeway.

> OH FUCK I'M SORRY I JUST —
>> SORRY ABOUT WHAT MAN
> I SHOULDN'T BE –
>> I KNOW YOUR DEAL, KOMAEDA BRIDGEPORT. I KNOW YOU. I SEE YOU. YOU'RE HERE UNTIL I DECIDE YOU'RE NOT. OKAY?
> OKAY

> CAN I FINISH
>> WHATEVER.

Look down at my hands, don't think I should be looking at my body. My dick looks crooked. Was it always crooked? Like at a right angle almost. Not quite a right angle but definitely not straight, you seeing this shit? Is that normal for

>> SHUT THE FUCK UP, I'M DRIVING

Finish once, twice. Third time I'm unbuckled, laying on my side. I think the first time wasn't the first time because there was blood and nut on my hand. The car isn't moving. She's gone. I think she's gone? I think she said she was going to go piss. I climb out through the driver's side, gun's gone, papers are gone, pipe is still there, I climb out through the driver's side on account of I remember now that she turned on the child locks so I was stuck in the back seat.

I'm running as fast as my feet can take me and I'm on the bus and I'm jacking off on the bus whoops I put that away and I'm sitting up against the stucco at my house and the power's done in the neighborhood for the night so the stars are out. Back when I was running someone was screaming at me but they couldn't catch me, don't remember if it was Mary or a cop or what. I don't have any emails, remember hearing that there was a failsafe so if you had drugs in your system based on what the eyelink was reading it'd shut itself down to avoid frying your brain from the chemical interactions or whatever but probably also heard that was just an excuse to force sobriety on everyone who wanted to use the latest technology, the stars get me hard as a rock, still crooked but pretty sure that's normal, start bellowing in pain from how much I cut up my dick and someone's at the window, right, this is my house, Gramma lives here

>> WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT THERE
> I DON'T REALLY KNOW
>> YOU SHOULD COME INSIDE
> I'M NOT SURE IF THAT'S A GOOD IDEA
>> WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT
> I SHOULDN'T TELL YOU BUT IT'S PRETTY BAD
>> OKAY. STAY OUT THERE IF YOU WANT. BREAKFAST SHOULD BE A COUPLE HOURS AFTER DAWN, SAME AS EVERY DAY
> RIGHT. I LOVE YOU, GRAMMA
>> YEAH. LOVE YOU TOO, K. TRY TO STAY QUIET OUT THERE, OKAY
> I'LL TAKE THAT SERIOUSLY BECAUSE I RESPECT YOU AS A PERSON.
>> OKAY.

The next morning, I wake up with a headache, probably thirsty, go inside and Gramma isn't awake yet, and as I'm drinking some water the eyelink fires back up for the morning and I've got a bunch of emails from the boss. I'm not fired but I'm on thin ice, apparently. Something about pissing off a customer, not even the guy who swung at me. I guess I was being insensitive to women. I shoot back an apology, and an apology for apologizing late, and I fantasize idly about being turned to stone, immovable and unconscious, a fixture of the landscape until something before and after mankind erodes me to nothing, until I am taken away by wind and rain.

IN GOD'S NAME STRIKE

WITCH KING EXQUISITE PRESTIGE LOSES A PRINCIPALITY

//// Manaburned demon thralls entombed in the hangar until the night takes us. Concentric scars tracing paths through time and space to the Miscarriage, when God forgot us. The name of the carrier ship is "Suppurating Mass Screaming Hatred For All Mankind." //
// We scramble thru the scaffolding atop PRINCIPALITY 35, avoiding here and there pestilent spines, teeth misbegotten beyond the mouth. We nurse horrible wounds, circular bites gnashing out flesh, purpurae blossoming under rotten skin. Unknown creatures still dwell in the ocean even now, darting from the deep, seeking only blood without the dignity of death. //

// Alien thoughts in the hindbrain:
                WHO ARE YOU
Answer with stolen phrases:
I am part of you. I am your body's way of healing.
                WHO ARE YOU
I am inside you. I have always been inside you.
                WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU
You must submit to my care or you will suffer.
                WHO ARE YOU
Calm or be slaughtered.
Alien thoughts subside. PRINCIPALITY 35 slips into absentee seizure, the closest to quiet it knows. Rasping breath comes after rasping breath. ///

/// Orders come down as I'm spraying shut a weeping scar with hot biomimetic wax. Cold and mechanical. "Attention Hangar Gamma. Attention Hangar Gamma. PRINCIPALITY 35 to High Power Configuration. Time to launch: 28 hours."
A chorus of profanity. Blauen, the engineer, begins barking orders. I know what we're up for, but I await orders anyway, leave myself time to recover from my own wounds, little neuralgic burns here and there from too-close contact with the crystal weld. //
// We get to work. Welding team is already groaning, anticipating their agonies. I am on Pacification Team Beta today. Alpha is already ringing its neck with the damper collar, already probing its brain thru clear channels on working transcranial wire. We throw dice in our heads and I get assigned to trimix and waldo. Some laughter, for once, but I don't mind. We're all as good as dead and it passes the time. ///
/// Keep careful track of Welding Team, of Calibration Team, of Spell Memory Team. They'll be teaching PRINCIPALITY 35's body the strong magic, and it looks like the most painful thing it ever experiences every time it happens. We don't have time to do this the right way so we have to try and stay alive while we do it the wrong way. That's my job today. //
// I find an artery fast, throbbing angry with black sludge, even flaccid. If we had time I'd wait for the trimix to kick in before I suited up in the waldo, but it's not like that today. Slam home 50 cubic centimeters, give it a little lagniappe out of spite. PRINCIPALITY 35 is already emitting psychic screams, but the damper team is on top of it, shocking the fear of God into its spinal column. I climb into the waldo — caked with sweat, starch, blood, spit. Smells like sex and rot. //
It's still half-stock when I achieve full sync with the waldo, and I get to work. Gripping, kneading, crushing, keeping alive the permanent threat to snap its baculum between my 3-meter crysteel fingers. I reach with the waldo's other hand to grab it by the scrotum. //
Alien thoughts in the hindbrain:
                WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME
Answer with stolen phrase:
Silence. Silence. You have no idea what suffering is.

Alien thoughts subside. ///

/// Intensify, slacken, intensify. Busy the demon with confused arousal until the signal comes down, then finish.
// Where the fuck is the condom team? "Condom team!" I don't know if they can hear me. I get the waldo's hands ready to pinch its urethra shut, for all the good it will do. //

Radio chatter. Condom apparatus is broken. It'll have to finish into coolant. // "How much coolant do we have?" // We have enough. // "How much is enough?" // Radio silence. //
Light, heat, overpowering stench of bile. Contractions palpable through the waldo's sensomotors, split seconds later. PRINCIPALITY 35 struggles against its spellgag to scream. Commotion outside of the waldo, steam bursting through. //
// My skin begins to blister. I lose consciousness. ///

/// Come to in agony. // "Sleeping on the job, eh?"
"Fuck off," I say, not even knowing who I said it to. Risky business, but it's just some other tech, with the scar tissue to prove they work for a living. They laugh it off. "What's the damage?"
"It's not good. Too hot before we started, clearly. Coolant reservoir ruptured — mana burn clean through — and we're leaking into outside."
"What does leaking into outside look like?"
"Bad," they say.
"Bad how?"
"They're going to unseal the hangar and transfer us. Too slow to kill us, they figure, and attrition in the others has slowed work."
I blink in sheer awe and panic. I thought I'd die here. We all did.
"What will happen to PRINCIPALITY 35?" I gesture to its slack face, wet with crimson tears.
"Who cares?" ////

IN GOD'S NAME, STRIKE!

//// Rolling through graminae at 70 kph. Keeping time, passing time. Looking at the verdant scenery on the exterior cameras it's possible to pretend we belong here, but we don't, because there's nowhere left in the universe we belong. Just cramped little places like this and Outside. //

// 41 looks at me. "We look like shit, huh, 58?"
"Yeah," I say. I have no idea what I look like. I don't remember the last time I saw my own face. But all the faces here are just permutations of the features of mine, so it hardly matters.

"You ready?"
"Fucking — fucking of course not, man. We're supposed to shoot at one of those."
"We are going to do more than 'shoot at' Narcissus Ultimate," says 101. "We are going to fucking vaporize her."
"Is she a she? I don't know how that works," says 41.
"Witch king or no, she's the closest thing any of us will ever see to a chick," says 86.
"No kidding," I say, and the boys start laughing. //
// 41 is disappointed. For some reason he wants to know about what he was asking about. It's not like any of us know 'how it works'. I don't know if anyone does except the Witch Kings. It's their business. Our business is shit like this. They meet in these exact circumstances: they kill us or we kill them. I would have bet any other day it'd be her killing us, but today feels different. Today we might actually win. ///

/// Something startles across the FOV of the external cameras, lithe and sinewy. The driver, 122, starts swearing. //
// "Fucking thing! How'd it see us?"
"That happens sometimes," says 101. "They said so in training, anyway."
"I did fucking basic training too, you smug fuck! Where'd it come from! Where the fuck — where are you going, you crazy little — no! No!!" //
// The others start clustering around the screen, but the dull thud out and to the left tells me what I need to know. Whatever it was hit something. There's screaming over the radio, then silence. //
// "No, no, no," says 122.
"Shut up," says 13, suddenly speaking up for the first time in hours.
"Fucking — one of our HDVs –"
"Shut," says 13, "the fuck up. Shut the fuck up or I will shut you the fuck up. Clear?"
"Yes, sir," says 122.
We all get real quiet after that. ///

/// "Target approaching," says 101, staring at the manaband monitor. "30 km, airborne, looks like about half a klick up."
"How's damping looking," says 13.
"Reports good from surviving HDVs. If she wasn't pinned pretty good we'd never be able to get this close."
"We got confirmation of her escort?"
"Yeah," says 101. "Intel was right — two Presidents, one Principality. Vitals on the Principality look real haggard, Presidents looking as healthy as they ever are. We could probably centermass out any one if we had to. Shielding's insufficient to stop us at full power."
"Sure," says 13. "Sure, we could do that."
Something stirs in the air, and the silence becomes cold and pregnant.
"Increase to high cruise - let's say 85, 90."
"Yes, sir," says 122. ///

/// At 10km we start getting visual on the escort. Too far to make out even a Witch King at this distance, but when I turn to see the cameras I can make out her three demons. //
// The Presidents are both pretty standard for Narcissus. Can't make out their spells at this distance, but it's easy enough to see their body plans, their weapons. Spindly legs, digitigrade, mouths like a bird or some other beaked pervert's idea of a human mouth. Four arms, long and lithe and rippling with muscle. Narrow, bony torso. Eyes all over, gleaming in the harsh sunlight of this hot planet. Rippling with body heat — again, checks out; Narcissus demons run hot, even in bad conditions. If we keep them moving, we wear them out, and we tear them apart. //
// The Principality is a bigger concern. It's a non-hominid - best way to imagine it is a partially hollow sphere of beautiful plantigrade legs wreathing some kind of animal head. They say Narcissus principalities are closest to the original stock, the ones they deployed before the Miscarriage. Their faces even look like something evolution could come up with. //
// But then, so does mine, and evolution had nothing to do with me. Intel isn't good enough to be sure how many Narcissus demons are nth-order clones, how much of their blood is fresh from whatever the hell the source is. ///

/// Not too long to ponder that, though. We're getting closer, close enough to see black streaks, one of the eye clusters on the Principality popped and not even waxed over. The Presidents look pristine — they must be new — but the Principality looks like it's dying on its dozens of feet. //
// "Approaching operating range," says 41, suddenly grasping the yoke controlling the spinal hellbore.
"This is it," says 13. "Stations. 122, give me speed." //
// We snap to action, and the vehicle begins to accelerate. I'm on cooling. "Cooling nominal," I say, and before the order even comes start limbering the mana burn safeties. //
13 listens to the command-frequency radio for a moment, then turns slightly to 41. "Good solution on Narcissus Ultimate?"
"On Narcissus!? — yes, sir," says 41.
"Fire on my mark," says 13. // There's a groaning from the treads. Nothing to worry about, but at this speed everything sounds like a nightmare. The indicator says 120, and it's shooting up fast. The cooling system is beginning to protest.
"Spinal powerplant's pegged," shouts 86.
"Maintain speed," says 41.
"Solution still good," says 41.
"Fire!"
41 squeezes the trigger. ///

/// When the spinal hellbore activates, the first thing that happens is the engine cuts out. The second thing that happens is the graminae around us withers and flashes into smoke. That's because of the third thing that happens: all the energy trapped in the leylines of this bullshit planet gets drawn, like current into a shorted wire, towards us. //
// And then towards our target. //
// We're not moving fast enough, or under a spinal mount big enough, to draw out more than enough to generate an angel hair of coruscation, maybe a micron wide. A hellbore mounted to a reentry skimmer can generate coruscation half a meter across, knock a hole straight through a modest rocky planet. //
// But even that should be enough to kill anything alive, and there's two dozen hellbore carriers here — if even one of us lands a shot... ///

/// "Miss," shouts 41. ///

/// The Witch King's signal looks like it's in a hundred places at once. She's so, so fast. //
// We didn't have enough damping after all. //

// She was fucking with us. //
// "Hard right," screams 13, his voice near panic, and there's a sound like thunder in the air. //
// The President's whip connects and we go flying, up, up, up, and then down. //
// And through the side of the vehicle, for the first time in my life, I see sunlight. ///

/// The next few seconds go by like hours as the panic burns through my nerves. I scramble through purple flames, through jets of steam that seem so slow I can pick out individual eddies, fronts of pressure and slack. //

// For a moment, everything feels fine, and it feels like we're going to be okay. //
// But Outside doesn't work that way. //
// I grow tired. //
// We all grow tired. //
// 13 lasts the longest. He's still talking, saying something — something about religion — something I can't understand. //
// Then he grows silent. //
// I sleep for a while. //
// I wake to the sound of wind. //
// Something is watching me. //
// I sleep for a while. //
// I wake up thirsty. //
// I sleep for a while. //
// I wake up parched. My throat is so dry. //
// Everything hurts. //
// I sleep for a while. ////

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CREATURE IN THE UNIVERSE

//// I wake from dreamless sleep in the execs' warrens. Servile Q11 is snoring quietly next to me, and my HUD displays the gentle light of the sun dynamically coloring Her face. //
// I prod Servile Q11 in the ribs. "I'm awake, I'm awake."
"No," I say.
"Five more minutes."
"You know how cranky you get without your Loyalty in the morning. Come on."
As she levers herself out of bed, I smile gently at her downcast eyes, so very like mine. They tell me there's differences in the serviles, they don't have the same spark of life we do, but even now I don't think that's mine to judge. //
// It's our open minds that make us the most beautiful creatures in the universe. //

// "Darling," I say, playfully, "hurry up or I'll have them burn your eyes."
She catches my eye. There's fear in there, but something else, too — admiration, lust, hard to tell.
"You know," she says, laughing her nervous little laugh, "I can never quite tell when you're joking."
"If that faculty slipped by the memory censors I'd have more than just your eyes burned away, precious."
More of that adorable laugh! ///

/// After draining my seed into her throat and making her chase it with 200 micrograms, I check my messages. Of course, first I look for anything from Her. Then I look for anything using one of Her priority tags. All proper. Nothing doing. I take a little break before the rest, take my bioprotectives, and the meager 50 micrograms of Loyalty I'm scheduled for. //
// Loyalty does different things to the Filth than it does to us; it takes higher doses to get the same effect. It slows them down, the same as it does us, but at those doses it's a sledgehammer, not a chisel. For us execs, so close to Her in body and mind, it takes very little to get the desired effect. //
// There's an ugly, heretical thought close to that. Something about Her. I wouldn't like to think about it very much. ///

/// Before I've gotten to my low-priority messages, the door rings. Q11 startles a bit, and I pet her head. "I'm not decent," I say, "can this wait?"
"Sure," says a voice on the other side of the door, and I dress myself. //
// Q11, as if on instinct, goes to dress herself as well, and I push her gently onto the bed to stop her. "The sheets will suffice you." //
// "Yes," she says, slowly. "I just don't want to offend your visitor." //
// "Mouthy today. Give me the sheet." //
// "Yes. Sorry. Yes," she says, no edge but fresh numbness to her voice, and I stuff it in the laundry hamper. "Come in," I say. ///

/// "Oh, I'm sorry, are you busy," says my guest, who pops up in my HUD as Strategic K58.
"No," I say. "This is Q11."
"Are you two, uh..."

I laugh out loud, and Q11 joins in until I shoot her a look, then goes silent immediately.
"No, no," I say. "She's from the serviles."
"Ah," says K58. "A privilege of rank, then."
"Yes," I say. "An unofficial one, certainly, but exactly so."
"A fine one, if you don't mind me saying."
"Yes," I say, looking Q11 up and down. "Healthy, energetic. Lovely voice. Would you say something for my guest," I say.
"Yes," says Q11.
There's a moment's silence. I roll my eyes.
"Stupid. Tell K58 here what you want most in the world."
"Yes," says Q11. "I want," she says, dreamily, "to meet Her in the flesh."
"What do you think would happen then?"
Q11 looks confused.
"What do you think She would make of you?"
Q11 casts her eyes down. "Not much, I suppose."
"Don't be modest," I say.
"Y-yes," she says, genuinely baffled.
"I love doing that to them. Keeps them on their toes. Anyway — what do you want?" //
// K58 clears her throat. "I am here to serve as your adjutant."
"What use would I have with an adjutant? I have no pressing business."
"I believe you were informed," she says, "but I can clarify: the Prestige filth have suffered severe internal damage to one of their major carriers. We are to examine the situation and determine whether or not this presents an opportunity to Her that merits Her personal attention."
I groan. ///

/// "Madam?"
"Who sent you," I mutter at K58.
"I, uh, I was sent here by Exec C18. I forget her exact section, I'm sorry, but I can look it up if you want. We're old friends, and I take it you've worked together before, and she's quite convinced that the damage to Suppurating Mass –"
"Spare me. Prestige ships all have such ugly names. 'Mass' will do fine."
"'Mass', yes, madam — that the damage to Mass merits intervention."
"Where is C18 these days?"
"She sent me here with my team from the Imperfect Quiet."
I narrow my eyes. "Has she really fallen so far as to be posted to that rustbucket?"
K58 looks mortified.
"That was a direct question."
"Yes," says K58, her affect suddenly dulling. "Imperfect Quiet's reputation is overstated. C18 regards it as a promotion and eagerly seeks opportunities to prove herself to Her at her new post."
"So she plans to prove herself to Her by interrupting Her business."
"By offering Her an opportunity to humble Her enemies," says K58.
"Spoken like a true strat brat."
"Surely she values that."
"I want you," I say to K58, "to pull yourself out of your uniform."
"What part," says K58, then sheepishly pulls her dick out of her jumpsuit. //
// "Now," I say, "Q11, take her in your mouth."
"Yes," she says, dully but not without a degree of lush curiousness.
"Don't just hold it in there, suck on it."
"Yhh," says Q11, and K58 startles a bit, then begins to moan.
"How does that feel?"
"Uhh."
"That was, again, a direct question."
"It feels good. Like, really good — amazing. Is this what you –"
"This is what Her business feels like to Her. This is what being Her feels like all the time."
K58 startles suddenly. "Madam!"
"Silence. I'm teaching you something."
Nothing escapes K58 but a strangled cry. //
// "Now," I say, turning to Q11, "stop."
She pushes K58 away from her, gently but firmly. K58 frowns slightly.
"How does that feel?"
"I — confused. I'm confused," says K58.
"You're not pleased?"
"Should I be?"
"Should you?"
"Oh," says K58, suddenly grasping my meaning. ///

/// After she leaves with her metaphorical tail tucked between her legs, I realize I'm hungry, and I order up breakfast for two from the necessities console. I drink my cup of hot exec broth and, when I'm done, I sprinkle the dregs over Q11's paste ration. "Thank you," she says,
"It amazes me," I say, "what little things make you happy."
"It must be in my nature," she says, sleepily. "Maybe it's in yours, too."
I smile benevolently. "You don't know what you're talking about. Shut up."
"Yes." ////

ODIUM EXTRA 5555

//// Klaxons fade and everyone waiting in Chamber XXY knows what it means. "It's a boy," says Oversight 505R, with a tone of great ceremony. //
// Into the suit airlock. Outside intrusions are everywhere, but the discomfort is worth it — I know in my heart that nobody born anywhere else could have the honor of saying they're crew on Odium Extra's flagship. //
// "Why the fuck do these things have so many fingers," says Excision 108X. I hate how chatty he is, but that's the X line all over — I've known dozens and they're all like that. I squeeze the biomime gauntlets over my arm, careful to align the fourth and fifth fingers with the extrusion sockets on my hand. I join the gauntlets to my chestpiece, check for leak points, and activate the heat seal. ///

/// One of the birthing workers in Chamber ZZO stops me. "You with Excision?" //
// "Yes," I say. I look at his nametag through the smoked plastic lenses in front of my face: BIRTH 008G. Curiously low number. No time to wonder about that. "What's the damage?"
"5 crew stillborn, 35 vital. Lipomas in the hip and fetlock. Nothing metastatic."
"35? Good god."
"No kidding. We don't have enough suits for 35. We've designated 14 for extraction, 21 for on-site flashing."
"Seems cruel," I say.
"Why? We on-site them all the time."
"Yeah, one or two. But 21?"
"Perfect Hatred hasn't birthed a Duke in a while. I guess we got too good at it."
"Why are we even raising a Duke here," mutters Excision 108X. //
// Another biomime-coated hand grabs him by the throat, extra fingers fully extended for grip strength. "Are you questioning Odium Extra's personal orders, you fucking worm?", she screams, loud enough my lenses vibrate in their sockets. ///

/// After the lipomas come out — easier this time than it normally is — I climb into the demon's flesh with the onboarding team through a two-meter slit cut into its abdominal cavity. //
// I've never been inside a Duke before, truth be told — I wasn't around for the last one they birthed, not yet. A part of me is disgusted by how spacious it is, by how much empty space they can make with just a little neonatal resection. I shake off the disorientation and start uncapping the brood combs. //
// As I approach the biomimetic wax prisms, there's the usual subtle stench of tissue death; I expected it to be magnified by the number of stillbirths, but if anything it's more muted this time, submerged in the cacophonous odors of this colossal living animal, drawn up to a space far above my head by the bellows action of its lungs. I can walk to the combs without stooping, and extend my fourth and fifth fingers - one biowax knife, one caul cutter - and get to work. ///

/// However overpowering I thought the stench would be, the sound is worse. As soon as the sound barrier provided by the combs is gone, a booming sound spills out: 35 fully-grown human bodies scream-crying, full-bodied and without pause, interrupted only occasionally by grunting with effort, by quickly-gulped breath. I humble myself for a moment and remind myself that a few years ago, that was me. //
// I mumble a quiet prayer of thanks that I have lived to see the miracle of birth yet again, and I pull a frail, screaming neonate out of one of the brood combs. //
// "You're alive," I say. "Congratulations." //
// It screams and flails. ///

/// Extraction team gets the carcasses out first, and then splits into two: one to wrap the strongest neonates in protective suits, anesthetize them, and take them through Outside into the waiting creche in Chamber U105; another to clean out the combs as they become vacant, drain the blood and shit and afterbirth and what have you into the demon's exhaust system. //
// I've flashed demonspawn before, and now I have to do it again. What the creche system gets done in days we get done in minutes. I apply the scruffer to the neck of the first one I pulled out, nameless and mindless, and it tenses up. Torpid — paralyzed — compliant. "Don't be afraid, little buddy. I gotcha." //
// Its — his — eyes go flashed over, a little at first, and then all at once. He opens his mouth and gasps stupidly through the scruffer. //

// "Oh no," he says.
"Yeah," I say, laughing. "Back in the saddle, huh?"
"Y-yeah," he says. "I think you fucked up."
I scowl and squint carefully at the bill printed on his comb. "No, looks like this body is all yours. Something wrong?"
"Everything."
"If I had a food credit for every time I heard that. Speaking of, you hungry?"
"Yeah," he says, and I hand him a ration. He stares at it.
"Well?"
"They — they used milk last time. I don't know if –"
"Look, I'll level with you. We stopped doing milk years ago. Long before my time. I think they had your pattern on ice a while."
"Is that why," he says, "you stuck me in a female body without even looking."
"Female?"
"I refuse to believe standards have slipped so far in the Earth Defense Organization that you no longer have a concept of 'male' or 'female'."
"No, I mean you're down here as male."
"Fuck you, man! I don't have a dick!"
"Every human being can grow a dick. Well, most. One time we pulled out a live one –"
"I don't want to hear it."
"And hold on — you seriously telling me the last thing you remember was the goddamn EDO?"
"What year is it?"
"I could give you the date but it wouldn't mean anything to you."
"Try me."
I roll my eyes, a little pointlessly, since he can't see them through the visors. "Alright, cowboy, it's 14-18-901."
He just scowls at that.
"Can I mark you down as pacified. I got, like, four more of you to wake up in the next hour."
"Whatever," he says, and rolls over to stare at the dorsal abdominal wall heaving in the dark. ///

/// After I'm done with the others — they all go way smoother, newer patterns, more up to speed — I go to back to my friend the popsicle and give him the good news. ///

/// Humanity survives in a dead universe, inhospitable to almost all life. Dead stars beyond name and number swim through our vision in space. All that is left is Outside and us. We happy multitude do battle at the inscrutable whim of the Witch Kings, a dozen hateful sorcerers who rule over the tiny, decaying bastions of habitability left to mankind. We fight until the foul magic that powers our nightmare weapons overtakes us, and find no peace in death, only oblivion between reincarnations — lossy memories imposed on bodies misbegotten from ancient genetic stock. //

// No hope remains for us. No future nor past. Exile is all we know, or can ever know, eternal and absolute. //
// Now, you who wake up from false birth to face Hell yet again: rise up, and in God's name strike! ////

DO YOU HAVE GAMES ON YOUR PHONE?

OBSERVATIONS

1. The purpose of the mechanism is known: to provide for the needs of a specific humanlike organism, the recent visitors, indefinitely.

2. The means by which it does so are unknown.
3. The mechanism has no identifiable power source.

4. The mechanism's apparent external dimensions are 15.85cm in width, 9.36cm in height, and 5.04cm in height. It is smooth and lacks external openings or other features. These are approximations to the nearest tenth of a millimeter.
5. The ratios of arbitrary measurements in the mechanism suggest a mechanism-specific unit (hence msu) of roughly 7.2mm. Expressed in these units, the external dimensions of the mechanism are 22msu x 13msu x 7msu.
6. The mechanism fits snugly in an incredibly thin case (less than 1cmsu thick) made of unknown material resembling plastic. It is opaque across the entire visible light spectrum, with slight translucency in the UHF band and increasing transparency at wavelengths below 10pm, with near-total transparency to gamma rays.

7. The mechanism detects the proximity of living creatures through an unknown process.

8. The proximity of a human hand at distances closer than roughly 2.40Mmsm (about 17 meters) generates internal action in the mechanism.
9. Early tests used a pig carcass as a human body simulant, to which the mechanism did not respond in any way beyond those directly dictated by Newtonian physics. Later tests with both a live pig and a veal carcass generated internal action, although observers stressed that this internal action was somehow qualitatively different than that generated in the mechanism by a human hand.

10. Different gestures near the mechanism generated different sounds from inside the case. These sounds are apparently relatively consistent, but apparently require precision beyond the range at which gestures or even sign language are considered perfectly clear or intelligible by humans.

11. While the mechanism generated a more consistent set of sounds when attempts were made to gesture at it in both ASL and BSL, the level of consistency was not measurably different between languages, nor was any difference in consistency recorded between a fluent ASL user signing clearly and precisely, signing quickly and relaxedly, or signing gibberish or "baby talk".

12. The internals of the mechanism are roughly divided into the "heart", the "wire harness", and the "gear train".

13. The "gear train" is an intricate, tightly-packed system of mechanical parts (principally gears and axles) interior to the mechanism, taking up roughly half of its volume.
14. The gears are all manufactured of a sort of tough, rigid, completely transparent plastic.
15. The plastic of which the parts are manufactured is apparently colorless when the device is sealed, and take on a reddish tint and increasing opacity with exposure to air.
16. This process is completely and rapidly reversed when the mechanism's case is sealed.
17. In a pure nitrogen environment, increasing visual opacity in the gear train was observed without apparent reddening. In a pure oxygen environment, no visual change to the plastic was observed. Further tests are necessary to establish the source of the reddening.
18. The gear train is manufactured to exacting tolerances. It is estimated that if the plastic lacked its strong apparent antimicrobial qualities, the development of a biofilm from airborne microorganisms might well cause the gear train or the entire mechanism to fail within days of first being opened.
19. The insertion of a medium-thickness human hair between two of the gears of one mechanism altered its function; when tested with gestures it produced unpredictable and markedly altered sounds for several hours before becoming unresponsive. It is unknown if this specific mechanism can be repaired.
20. The gears seem to turn independent of any power source. Motive power was initially hypothesized to come from the "wire harness", but the disconnection of the wire harness at its points of contact with the gear train did not appreciably alter the mechanism's function or slow the movements of the gear train.
21. The dominant form of movement in the gear train is counterclockwise.
22. The gear train is secured to the case of the mechanism by an unknown red polymer, resembling silicone, but much more elastic.
23. If the gear train is removed physically from the mechanism, the mechanism becomes silent and inert until it is secured in place again. This is irrespective of its connection or disconnection from the wire harness.
24. Despite the massive chemical difference between the original securing polymer and hot glue, securing the gear train with hot glue after it had been removed from the mechanism seemingly restored the mechanism's function entirely.

25. The "wire harness" connects to the "heart" at 49 distinct junctions and to the "gear train" at 6.
26. The function of the "wire harness" cannot reasonably be speculated. It carries no electricity, nor is it structurally appropriate for fiber-optic transmission.
27. While the "wire harness" appears as a bundle of smooth, homogenous cables, microscopic inspection reveals an irregular, "foam-like" structure, with voids and fills.
28. The material of which the wire harness is composed is unknown. It is not meaningfully conductive, but is neither an especially efficient insulator. It is white, springy, and semi-rigid.
28. In fact, the wire harness is, for lack of a better term, near-perfectly white. It absorbs every part of the EM spectrum between 350nm and 800nm equally poorly, with variations in specific albedo too small to be measured, yet is near-perfectly transparent outside this range.

29. While the wire harness can be disconnected from the gear train without apparent consequence for the function of the mechanism, disconnecting it from the  "heart" causes the mechanism to cease functioning, in some cases irreversibly.
30. This destructive effect varies from connection to connection. Two of the connectors can be removed without the mechanism failing immediately; five will immediately render the mechanism mute but fail to alter the function of the gear train; the remainder irreversibly cause the mechanism to become silent and motionless either within seconds or near-instantly.
31. One of the wires in the wire harness runs from the heart to a loose terminus within the wire harness itself, with no apparent connection to the gear train. Removing this wire from the "heart" causes the mechanism to become inert instantly and irreversibly.

32. The heart is an opaque black crystal of octahedral habit girdled by 49 connectors weighing roughly 245g.
33. The heart generates a sort of THF static similar to but not an exact match for blackbody radiation, suggesting a temperature of approximately 19.08K. It is, to all other appearances, room temperature.

34. The heart is evidently composed of some allotrope of carbon with a mixture of the characteristics of diamond and graphite. It is nearly indestructible, but black and lustrous rather than transparent.

35. If the heart is removed from the case but remains connected to the wiring harness, the mechanism continues to function for several minutes, after which function is irreversibly lost.

36. The source and function of the sound generated by the mechanism remains unclear.

37. The sound generated by the device has no apparent relationship to the visitors' language, nor any of the statistical behavior expected of a functionally complete language at all.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

1. How does the mechanism function?
2. Did the recent visitors themselves understand the mechanism? Did they understand its origin, means of manufacture, function, parts?
3. How did the mechanism keep the visitors alive? What vital function did it serve that caused them to die within five to thirty minutes of surrendering the mechanisms they each carried?
4. Did the visitors understand the intensity of their dependence on the mechanism? If so, why did each of them willingly part with theirs when asked?
5. Why did the visitors make no attempt to retrieve the mechanisms, either verbally or by force?
6. Did this state of semi-naive dependence arise naturally or artificially?

7. If it was in fact engineered, either culturally or genetically, was this engineering performed by the visitors themselves or some external party?

POOL WITH NO BOTTOM

Somewhere inside of you, there is an elliptical pool with no bottom. This pool is full of opaque fluid with a hard surface. The miracle of being you is that despite having no bottom, the pool does not drain.

Some authorities insist it’s because of some deep layer calcified by pressure. Others would insist that the pool, which is about two and a half feet wide on its longer side and about two feet wide on its shorter side, simply continues through your whole body, stem to stern, and then continues into the ground – they insist, despite all evidence, that it continues into the earth, and through the Earth, and then into another living thing. That you are paired with some antipodean creature by internal geometry, that its experiences are directly or indirectly proportionate to yours - that is to say, its suffering is your suffering, or else its suffering is your joy, respectively.

Other authorities insist that the stillness of the pool is the work of God. They propose a creature perhaps fifty yards wide created the universe, and directs in whatever fashion your movements, your thoughts, your feelings. Your triumphs and failures are items in this massive animal’s ledger. The pool, they explain, is part of its wider plan.

Some have seen inside their own, attempted even to breach the surface, an act said universally to be unwise. Consistently they dream afterwards of small metallic objects becoming lodged in their bodies, although the methods by which they are lodged and discovered differ. One would-be psychonaut refused to receive magnetic resonance imaging even as a tumor in their arm grew and grew, owing to an unshakeable terror that it would drive subtle nails through their cortex and mutilate their seat of thought. They had to be anesthesized and the operation performed under the false pretense of exploratory surgery. The attending physician noticed no metal in the machine, either before or after, but was said to report, of course off the record and on the condition of anonymity, that the room came to smell of blood, came to reek of it so strongly he nearly vomited into his mask. He reportedly drove home in his late-model Ford motorcar and found himself in another man’s driveway, greeted by a strange woman with an air of familiarity. “I’m dead,” he said, of course off the record and on the condition of anonymity, “I don’t know if I died then or if I was never alive but I’m not alive now. You’re looking at a corpse.”

For others the apparition of metal is a miraculous event representing the healing of long-injured limbs or the arrival of transcendent insight. Leading authorities suggest a Freudian dimension to these fantasias, with stainless steel representing a strict father figure, spring steel or copper alloys representing a permissive one. The psychonauts’ insistence that the apparition of intangible metals within their bodies is connected with exploration of the inner pool is unsupported by evidence and has been thoroughly debunked by the latest research. The claims that the inner pool of some hapless unknown has been breached by scientists in the former USSR and recordings were made - that these recordings include the screaming of the damned, the roaring of fires, mysterious creaking and whispering, Doppler-pitched falling objects - cannot be substantiated by any serious investigation.

The pool with no bottom, the pool full of fluids, are believed to have unique variations in their countably infinite surface areas. It is likely that these either reflect or, by some accounts, drive criminal activity. In the future scientists will be able to determine many things about a person by investigating the pool with no bottom inside of them. They may be able to provide early warning of criminal difficulties, mental health, genetic disease, even sexual deviance. The field of legitimate scientific study of these pools is young but full of incredible promise, and experts propose that as little as a single new business or government grant to pool researchers may unlock secrets that have been hidden from the minds of man since the beginning of time.

THE FLESH MADE WORD

Emerging new illness causes sufferers’ thoughts to become literal in the form of scrolls. Called “the writing bug” by sufferers, “Unknown Graphogenetic Agent 2022” or “UGA-22” by scientists, symptoms include projectile vomiting of blood from lacerated esophagus in attempt to pass scribal bezoar, intrusions into brain and organs, dry unproductive cough, severe fever. Bezoar composition unknown, with chemical analysis pointing to novel pigment only marginally soluble in oil or water for ink and base composition of tanned hide of unknown animal, presumed to be a mammal.

“We thought we were looking at a virus but this seems to be the work of something even farther from our framework of ‘alive’ or 'dead’”

Government insists on “positive outlook.” Biden administration seeks to promote infection of as many as 50 million Americans from all walks of life. Protests against anticipated new safety recommendations already said to gather crowds in Houston, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles. Children below the age of 5 are not known to be vulnerable at this time. No change to school schedules is expected to be announced.

We talked to a theologian to get his perspective on the unknown glyphs discovered among the quasi-Latinate text emerging from our bleeding throats. “I can’t read this. I won’t. You can’t make me.” We talked to an AI expert about what this mass graphogenesis might mean for the future of intellectual property.

“Nothing like this has been seen since Gutenberg committed the Bible to print”

Faith healers are already stepping in to fill the vacuum. Exposure to legible bezoars suspected but not known to spread infection, along with likely fomite vector. One Facebook group promotes the use of ketamine sourced from horse tranquilizers to achieve a state of “cognitive invulnerability”. We asked ten doctors about this use of ketamine.

Mass burnings of graphogenetic bezoars scheduled by volunteer organizations nationwide. Supreme Court to hear urgent case by group denied right to burn bezoars by Michigan state government. Sources close to the court suggest no stay will be granted.

“MRIs and other tests suggest infiltration of graphogenetic bezoars into vital tissue faster than existing models of the disease can account for”

Everyday people are optimistic, citing belief in personal immunity, willingness of normal people to fill the vacuum created by the state and federal government, faith in a higher power. Projected death toll remains light, with low estimates of 500,000 and high estimates of 3.5 million. Dow remains bullish with S&P up .5 points since yesterday.

THE OBJECTIVE IS TO LIVE FOREVER

You hear about these guys in the Bay? They're taking it easy these days. The trend is taking it easy, taking it slow. Taking it slow. You know it could actually be the case that for some of them Seven Minutes in Heaven was formative, you know, closest they ever got to falling in love, and they keep on coming back, keep on coming back.
Yes! Announcing the arrival of the glacial time. The ultimate in dopamine denial. You can take pills about it, pills made of some kind of parasitic wasp, you know, doesn't know when it's born whether it's alive or dead — sure, you can know what that wasp knows. See what that wasp sees. Experience the world, you know, experience the world comme c'est chez guêpe. Fast is over. Fast is fucking dead, baby. Every syllable, you stretch the vowel, you stretch the consonants. You get your guy, get your guy to read it to you as slow as he can. You fire him, you find a slower guy.

They're making cars got a gear between first and park. Yes! They're making cars slower, slower than walking. So slow that the average mind, conditioned by this cruel world into the dogma of haste, would find it painful. You could race an inchworm and lose in one of those cars. Some may call it lazy.
Some may call it lazy.

You know daycore? You know vaporwave? You know chopped and skrewed? You know vaporave? You know chopped and skrewed? You know daycore, man? What do you know about that shit? You better learn in a hurry, all I'm saying, all I'm gonna say.

In ancient days there was a wheel, a great wheel clad in wrought iron, on which men's limbs were broken with staves. Every offense against the state a transgression against God, and Hell come to earth in the hands of men like you and me. They went home to ordinary lives, they laughed and cried and pissed and shit like everyone else. The justicar, the justicand, both of 'em, in those ancient days. They lived and breathed as we do, until they didn't. And there was a wheel, there was a wheel. We don't do that anymore.

Some may call it lazy.

Some might call it idleness.

Some might call it a plague, like a hundred billion grasshoppers in locust. Some might call it the end of days. There's nothing for it anymore.

Listen: before the end there was the ocean, or some limb of the sea. Something was here instead of just dead dirt. They used to grow things, used to make things, used to do things. Giants walked the earth in those days, and befouled the land with their deeds. Now there's nothing. Ooze becomes mud becomes dust in the perishing dry. Over time the Earth conspires to make itself into hell. Nothing testifies to the way things were but cartilage, making itself busy being dissolved by bacteria.

At the crush depths of the bottom, there used to be the carcasses of colossal whales, and everything that found it in itself to survive there could live for months, years, off of the rot.

They keep on coming back, they keep on coming back. Something up there can't resist dying, decaying, being strewn about the landscape. Used to be stickers on the backs of cars saying stuff like "I <3 AGING AND DYING". If cars still came here the bumper stickers would all just say "HELP ME".

It's the way of the world. It's about time and place. They used to believe they were rooted to the land — listen! They used to believe they could trust their neighbors. They lived in fear, the same as us, the same as you and me. But they didn't know the meaning of fear.

ZOOPRAXISCOPE

It began, Firi supposed, when she chose the name Porphyria. In a narrow sense it predestined her to be betrayed violently by those she loved; in a wider sense it was simply too literary, too showy, and painted a target on her back.

Afterwards, in the days that dragged razor-sharp teeth along her skin, in the days of insanity and rage, at the dawn of the horrible remainder of her life, she stayed in her apartment until she got kicked out, and then she found another, a cheaper one, one she wouldn't have to rely on the goodwill of some bitch with too much college to keep.

It didn't allow pets. (They had already stolen her cat.)

It didn't allow smoking. (Weed made Firi feel like she was being crushed to death.)
It came with a $1000 deposit. (Better investment than a gun or a car at that price point.)
And it came loaded, every exposed wall, with cameras.

The cameras were subtle things, little wifi button-lens affairs. The gut assumes the resolution on such things to be terrible, but the gut is probably deceptive.

"They are to ensure compliance," said the property manager, "with the terms of the lease. As long as you're not breaking it, we don't really care."

At first she took pains to avoid the cameras. She would sometimes, in a paranoid mood, brave the outdoors to piss instead of the toilet, but shitting there seemed like a nonstarter. She went months without masturbating, but maybe she would have anyway, surveillance or no surveillance. (Try having a libido after the world - yes, even the insular, colorfully coiffed part of it you inhabit and consider full of good and kind people - decides you belong dead. It's hard.) She became positively disinclined to invite friends over, and besides, the sort of people who wanted anything to do with her after the mandatory spiel about her horrible crimes were not the sort of people inclined to hang around comfortably on closed-circuit television.

After a while she relaxed, though. She began pissing in the shower, tentatively, then the toilet, like the most unusually housebroken dog in the world. She jerked off, now and again, to completion once in a blue moon. She injected estrogen surreptitiously in the stairwell of the complex, like she was trying to hide a morphine habit.

One day, she ran into another tenant doing it. "Hey, man," she said. "I'll be done in a minute."
He just whistled. "Damn. Landlord probably wouldn't be happy about that."
She laughed. "It's honestly nothing. It's medicine."

"Landlords find fucked up shit to be unhappy about," he said, looking from one side to another, thinking better of whatever he was going to say, then ducking around the corner and out of sight.

From then on, she simply did her shot under her desk.

Somewhere in the monotony of begging the few friends she had left for money, doing odd jobs for people who had hosted her on a dating app, and trying to forget being who she was ever happened, Firi got a message. It was on one of the dating platforms that seemed to carry less traffic than usual - someone named Ted, who had registered recently, with little personal information. "This is going to sound weird," it said, "but I think I know you?"
And some imp of the perverse made her respond at all, saying, "From where?"
"That's going to sound even weirder."

Slowly, as she had gotten used to the surveillance in the first place - but faster, in all honesty, than that first hump - Firi got used to the new normal. She went from sleeping in miserable uncomfort clothed to sleeping naked under sheets to simply abandoning the whole enterprise, weeks later, and sleeping as she did before she knew dozens of men she didn't know were watching her.

She sent out feelers to some wobbly attorney, who reported via email with surely-feigned chagrin that what was happening was legal, well within the rights of the landlord in her state. There might be precedent to sue for appropriation of intellectual property, but she'd have to prove that her image was a marketable commodity in the first place - "an uphill battle for someone in your position, I'm afraid," said the wobbly attorney.

Her friends told her to move out. She asked if they'd put her up and they hemmed and hawed and eventually said no. She gave up on that pretty quick. Anywhere habitable for human beings with gender issues gets gentrified to Hell with a spiteful urgency, and if you're not in one of the two or three fields capitalism values, you gotta compromise or live somewhere uninhabitable.

The imp of the perverse came back, eventually. She messaged Ted back, and told him, "You know what? I don't care. I don't care that you've been doing voyeur shit to me on a streaming website. There's something I need you to know. I used to be famous. I used to be one of the most influential people in the field of - well, whatever the fuck field yelling about trans women's rights is. Gender studies? Who knows. I used to be somebody, and then me and another girl jerked each other off and she decided I was a rapist. You know what that means? It means I'm a fucking corpse, Ted. You're getting off to a monstrous corpse every night, decomposing in front of you."
"It's not about getting off," came the terse reply.
"I don't know what else it could be about."
"Meet me at Cafe Bravo on Tuesday afternoon and I'll explain. I promise I'm not - I'm not whatever you think I am."
"That makes two of us. I'll be there at 6. That work for you?"
"I'll be there."

On her way to Cafe Bravo, Firi saw a slug emitting slime and little nodules from a wound on its side. She wanted to rescue it, but she didn't have the time, and only on later reflection realized that's just how slugs mate. There was something beautifully literal to it, she would come to think.

The slug, for its part, inadvertently attracted a crow with its secretions and died in agony within the hour. The sated crow, in turn, went home to its partner and told it of the slug, that a human was considering eating it.
"That's preposterous," its partner said. "Humans don't eat slugs. I don't think they can."
"Humans can eat anything. It's why they're like that."

After the conversation, Firi's hot blood pooled in her cheeks as she lead Ted to a motel of her choosing. He would pay, the agreement went - both for the motel and her directly, the agreement went; $500, cash, in twenties. Agreeing to that part was like pulling teeth for Ted, a shy and difficult man, who sincerely believed being 'a john' was beneath him, or immoral, or something he had been raised better than. The entire conversation, more than he already was, he seemed to shrink away from even incidental eye contact with anyone in the cafe, seemed to be burningly afraid of every human being he met.

"So it's some kind of Oedipal thing?"
"You could call it that, yeah," he said.

"I guess I don't think of myself as -" Firi started laughing. "As a MILF, you know?"
"So I'm young. Don't make fun of me, please."

She went to touch his face and he pushed her hand away with a pained expression.
"Too much," he said.
"Okay."

She woke up hours later, alone, oddly refreshed for having slept between 7:30 and 11:00 PM. The money, she thought, and she found it in the cistern of the toilet, in a ziploc bag, where she had hidden it.

The motel room was perfectly tidy, except for the single rumpled twin bed. (The clerk had been a little disappointed not to rent them a double bed, but Ted had insisted.) There was no sign that Ted had been there at all but one, and if it wasn't for that one sign she would have begun to doubt he ever existed.

The sign he was there was a sheet of printer paper done up with pastel. It was her naked body, lying on the bed, at peace; there was a dogged realism to it, except for the bed of orchids she lounged in, and the exact details of her face, which perfectly resembled not Firi's mother but Firi's memory of her mother, Firi's mother as she was when she was young.

When the landlord noticed it on the livestream, pinned delicately above her bed, he showed up to her apartment and told her to destroy it in front of him.

She would not.

"You little shit," he said. "If you don't burn that thing right now, I'm accessory after the fact. You have any idea how illegal what you're doing is?"

"The thing we're doing," she said, holding it gently in her hands, pointed away from him.

"What I did was legal," he said, his cheeks puffing out with rage. "What you did was prostitution."
"What's the word," she said, "for people who set up prostitution for their own gain?"
"Fuck you! You fucking - give me that!"
"No!"
She tore out of the apartment at full tilt, holding the pastel painting so tight it began to smudge, into the evening dark, into the rain, past the furious bellowing of the pursuing landlord, past the highway and the shitty little corner park, laughing all the while, hysteric laughter, like a lunatic at the perigee of the moon, like hyenas with bloody faces.

BUCOLICS
or "THE FINER THINGS IN LIFE"

Any who denies the finality of his own castration in his heart is not yet a eunuch and must be governed with an iron hand.
—Thomas of Gaudomelete

I WILL NEVER STOP POISONING THE WATER SUPPLY

I'm proud of who I am. I'm proud of what I do. Who I am is a poisoner, and what I do is poison the water supply.

Yes, yes, I've heard it all before: poison is bad for you, and water is important for all aspects of life. But there's something you haven't considered: I love poisoning the water supply. It's extremely important to me to do it.

I have been chased from town to town my whole life, and I have never made a cent, because I am too busy manufacturing poison, introducing it to the water supply, and seeing what happens next. Usually people die, pretty quickly they get mad, and then they start charging me with crimes. But I'm one step ahead of the law, and my shrew of a mother was very well-connected, so you'll never bring me to justice.

The sweat of work is heavy on my sons' brows. Some of them are too young to work legally, so they take whatever they can under the table. I don't ask them what they do to put food on my table. It doesn't matter to me. Many times they tell me, and every time I forget as soon as I've heard it. I don't care. All I care about is poisoning the water supply.

My wife often takes a lover, and she boasts about her conquests. I am not a modern or permissive man, and my blood boils with rage to be cuckolded. But soon enough it stops being important, because the water running through the aquifer is so clean and pure it makes me sick. I vomit, sometimes, to think of it. My wife hates this. My sons hate this. I hate it, too. But it's part of who I am.

Often my wife and children say: stop poisoning the water supply. She is always getting nasty looks from the young women in the office (or the theater or the graveyard or wherever it is she spends her time) who dwell on social media, where I am infamous for my deadly crimes. My sons, too, catch no end of shit. They are bullied, called horrifying names, objects shoved into their mouths, blood made to run down their weathered-before-their-time faces from great wounds in the crowns of their heads, etc. I tell them it will soon be time to move again, as I am going to poison the water supply again.

My family takes turns trying to kick my ass, but it doesn't matter to me. "Break his arms! Break his arms!", my wife will shout. But my boys are clever. They remember that in the past, when they have broken my arms, I simply use my feet; and when they break all of my limbs, I use my mouth; and when they break my jaw, I find a poison I can cry into the reservoir. I think they lack the nerve to kill me, or think it would make them just like me. I don't know and I don't care.
I am a hero to certain difficult men and I despise them. They send me letters boasting of their pitiful attempts to ruin the lives of their hometowns. They are not connected to my shrew of a mother, so they get arrested, and they go to jail, maybe go to the firing squad. (Do they execute people with firing squads anymore? I don't keep up with these things. I have been busy poisoning the water supply. I just saw it in a book about a poisoning once, is all.) Not one of them has used a strong enough poison to more than sicken anybody, and many of them do not use poison at all. I wish they lived somewhere I could easily poison their water supply, both to show them how it's done, and to injure or kill them.

That's my story. Thank you for listening. If you want a bit of advice, don't drink the water. Or do; I don't really care either way.

IKEJIME / WOMEN WANT ME, FISH FEAR ME

Afterwards she's all bragging about how strong she is, both physically and spiritually, and I'm too busy chewing on the spirulina patties to care, even if I'd normally care. "I've got clairvoyance," she says, "and maybe the path of the fish isn't for you anymore."

"Good spirulina," I say, after I'm finished. "Where'd you get it?"

Nobody remembers exactly when it started. Probably back in the 90s when they cloned that sheep, back in the 10s when they started working on cloning people on the DL, back in the 20s when the retrovirus broke our genetic virginity. If you're rich you can keep your original stock on ice, but who's got enough money to buy a house anymore? No, we move forward like sharks, some of us because of the shark genes we carry in our bodies, some of us because that's just what we're supposed to do now.

During she starts crying. I tell her, "you okay? We can stop if you're not okay." She's like, "I'm fine, it's just something I've been doing since, you know - it's the connection, you know?" It's not my first time with someone who busts out crying. But that's not really what I expected from her.

Over the roast protein mash later she's like, "They say that's something the treatments can do." And I'm like, "What was yours, if you don't mind me asking?" I already know, but I want to know if her story stays the same.
And she's like, "Praying mantis." New answer! Probably the right one this time.
And I'm like, "No shit? I wouldn't have figured it'd do that."
She laughs. "It's not like people think. I think we probably misunderstand them."
"Lot we don't understand," I say, nonchalantly picking chitin out of a hollow spot in my incisor.

I remember seeing stuff about the ones I'd go on to get on the news. "Fish genes in your children??" It was way more of a scare tactic back then, and I guess people looked down on fish back then. I remember screenshots of the first chirons in the news, all "FISH THOUGHTS" and "MEMORIES OF THE SEA", people looking concerned. When I went in to the doctor it was all I could afford, though, and I was hoping it'd land me a better job.

You'd think the time there was money on the table I'd have been more engaged, but he was just so sad. He had those puppy-dog eyes, you know the ones, like a dog that's been beaten all day and still comes up with its tail wagging. I was saying the ugly shit he wanted me to say, doing the boring shit he wanted me to do. I was grinding my fucked-up toenails into his side like he asked - I guess some kind of bird thing, weird, real upper middle class - and he was finished in like thirty seconds from that alone.

"I have a kind of private question, if that's okay," he said.
I knew what it was about. A big part of me wanted to ask for more money then and there but I was just so fucking tired. "Yeah?"
"How did you know, uh..."
I couldn't suppress a groan.

Yeah, I get false memories. I think they're more usual than people let on these days. I see the sun from way below, doesn't hurt to look at it, and I can feel electricity. The sun ripples and warps in the sky and I'm confused like I don't know what air is or what water is. I see the right cluster of bushes after the rain and something in me feels comfortable in a weird and stupid way. I guess maybe it's why I don't give that much of a shit about my family, feel like it's weird and parochial and small, but maybe I always felt that way - I'm pretty sure I did, but you wouldn't think that to hear my mom talk. She can afford to talk that way, talk about how what I'm doing is going to negatively change my art, my body, my social life. "Are you and your wife okay?" Yeah, mom, sure, I guess.

Afterwards they're telling me about their tattoos. "Salmon's a masculine animal, you know."
"Uh-huh."
"It's not perceived that way in Western culture, it's not what we associate with fish, masculinity. But traditionally -" And I'm thinking, among who? are you getting to that part? no? and I lose my train of thought for a minute, and they're looking at me.
"Interesting. So what does it mean to you?"
"I guess just an energy sort of thing, how I want to carry myself in the world, you know."
"I feel that. I guess that's why I have that tattoo on my arm."
"Oh, the one of a lightning bolt?"
"Yeah." It's not really, it's because power scares me shitless and I wanted to tame it on my living flesh, but who cares right now. They're out in the kitchen and they're serving up their vegan chili. I can taste nutch in it and it turns my stomach a little, like, damn, why'd you put nutch in this, the beans were fine and it must have cost more than them, but I'm like, "This is good."
"Thanks!" They beam with pride. "You said you liked making chili too, maybe you could show me your recipe sometime?"
"Tell you what," I say, laughing. "You take me to Amazon, I'll take you to Flavortown."

The first night after the treatments I had a dream, or it felt like a dream. I wasn't swimming, but the logic of swimming applied to walking. I was floating, buoyant, like gravity was nothing. My clothes billowed around my body and the light took on a lazy shimmering quality. It was the most at peace I've ever felt in my life, and I don't know if that peace came from me or where else it could have come from. For the next few nights I went to sleep hoping I'd have the same dream, but I never did again.

Before it was the wildest thing, she wouldn't believe anything about my story, all "No way you've been on mones for that long," all, "Sockeye? I gotta be real, you don't feel like a sockeye to me," all, "I bet you should be the one buying me dinner." I almost picked up and left at that last one but honestly, it was a bad time to just do that - one packet of ramen left at home, fresh out of loose change after the bus trip, bank overdrafted. I know if I had asked my sugar mama she would have sent me enough to eat, but I couldn't handle the conversation afterwards. It had been hard to handle conversations for a while, even before whatever hell the recent treatments played on my social skills.

She was okay, honestly. That's the stupidest thing. Half of the stories I got, the emotional work's okay, the sex work is lousy. The other half it's the other way around. I don't know that I've ever had both be truly terrible. Maybe queers just invest in one skill or the other and that's why we're like this.
And afterwards - eggs! A whole-ass omelette, aux fines fucking herbes!

Every day for a few weeks I kept an eye on my body, half expecting some Cronenberg shit to happen to me. It really didn't. I know people who've been on the treatments for years can have their bodies go truly nuts, breathing through their necks, antlers, estrus, whatever whatever. All I notice over time is a feeling of vulnerability, a need to belong to a group, strange feelings about the river, a little change in body odor. Not fishy, more like some kind of exotic, expensive meat. Over enough time that need to belong got under my skin and a lot about my life fell even further apart.

I did so much ghosting for the stupidest reasons.
I didn't like the way he talked about fetishes neither of us have. (Sure, but he was a fucking line cook and never went hungry.)
Her semen tasted terrible, like something rotting. (She's perfectly nice, and I see her around, but we don't make eye contact, and over this I pretend she doesn't exist?)
They kept acting like I owed them something when we talked, like texting them every other day wasn't enough, like I wasn't enough of a person for them. (There went another sugar parent - they've all been like that, and God knows they had a tech job.)
Her pussy somehow gave me pneumonia. (At least that one made an entertaining story for the ones that came later.)

Sometimes I think that if I could handle people better, I wouldn't need to handle people so much to live.

The last dream I remember was going to a sushi place on a client's dime. She was an amalgam of a bunch of different people, some of whom had never paid me, some of whom I didn't even sleep with. I ate and ate and ate, never getting full, and then I felt guilty because I had eaten hundreds of dollars worth of food. She just laughed at me when I apologized. I woke up in the morning and my roommates had thrown out the bag of short-grain sticky rice I got by tricking the self-checkout stand into thinking it was bleached flour, only $1.10 a pound. Something about a moth infestation. My dreams mostly stopped making sense at all after that.

Back before she disappeared on me, the woman who taught me everything I know told me that we were God's pets and our job was to amuse Him - that that's why life is so capricious and stupid, and that's why if you cling on for dear life you might survive things it'd be unreasonable to survive. It makes about as much sense as anything else.

So what should I say? My wife left me? No one can afford to leave anyone anymore. I'm sure as far as the government knows we were never together, or we never split up, or whatever. The gene transfer went so bad I couldn't land a job as a circus geek, have to fuck strangers to eat? Nah, it's more that it didn't fix what it promised to. The genes are fine, it's me that's fucked up, or society, or whatever we're supposed to say about these things now. I'm sad all the time and want to die all the time? Darling, I know I did before, don't blame the therapy for that one! Plenty of people with the genes I got do fine. I'm not gonna be a cautionary example of anything in particular, because that'd require me to be an example of anything in particular.

The excitement of being with someone like me had died down a little bit by the time it came to the choking stuff. I guess it was the shock of seeing her pick up the oxygenated lotion, which I know cost like $30 a bottle, and squirt it over my hands like it was bottled water, like wasting it didn't matter. In that moment, in seeing her eyes catch mine as I caught second-hand anxiety about wasting something too precious to afford, I knew we weren't exactly alike. Whatever glamour was there was broken.
"It's fine, don't worry about it. You know I'm good for it," she said, trying to make light of it.
"Sure," I said. "How do you want me to do this?"
"You just put your hands around my gillslits, your thumbs around my carotid, and squeeze."

LAY ALL YOUR LOVE ON ME

ONE HUNGRY WOMAN

Ducked thru the mosquito mange in cheap imported timespace fields - you gotta go with three or four, one will fail for sure - to get food from McDonalds. The clerk was all, What the fuck do you want, and I was all, Give me the McMasterpiece, and the clerk was all, Nah, no McMasterpiece any more, President's orders, and I was all, Fuck it, give me what you got for $5, and the clerk was all, Alright, protein fries it is. I hate that son of a bitch as much as I'm allowed.

OUR PRESIDENT, RIGHT OR WRONG

We elected him, or that's the story anyhow, once upon a time. He was noted for his august age and decaying mind. One by one he accumulated more body parts, here a young and powerful heart, there a foot, the other place a pair of testicles. We all remember after he got the testes, he was waving his blood-soaked underwear from the Presidential Palace balcony to a cheering crowd, flags fringed with gold - we were all real worried about hemhorrages. By some miracle, there were soon two of him, and then four, eight, sixteen. They were all the same man with the same memories, legally indistinct as people, but he could do more, be more, President more. Every time one of him died they just made another. It's not really clear how many of him there have been but he's been the President as long as I've been alive. I guess there's like a hundred or so of him now, and you can actually get good money if you have the right genes selling compatible blood and fluids to replace his. They all bleed like hell, see.

IN THE MOSQUITO MANGE

Fields started popping and cracking, but that's normal. Too many people out in the street, some of them not wearing generators. Used to be I'd be all, Are you insane? Put on a fucking field or you might actually die, man! and they'd be all, Whatever you say, fag. So I stopped bothering. I saw one get hit in the back of the head by the mange on the news and his eyes popped out of his head like grapes, something to do with a freak temporal shift on his brainstem. Grotesque. I wish they'd stop showing shit like that, it doesn't really do anything to keep anyone informed.

NEWS YOU CAN USE

Here's what's on the news:
Fire, everywhere.
Mosquito mange in your area.
Geneplagues require genetherapies.
President visits Army husbandry center. Politician visits Army husbandry center. State senator collects sperm from troops put out to stud. There's an appalling fascination with this one, the troops are way taller than they used to be, bone spurs all over their grotesquely muscular bodies, acting totally on instinct at all times. I heard but not from the news that they gotta give those guys absurd amounts of drugs to keep them docile, or keep them stupid, or something like that. They spend a lot of time off-camera screaming and begging for help. I don't think the Army is necessary and I don't like that people always talk about that in terms of how we used to have purestrain soldiers just like us fighting and killing overseas instead of the troops we got now. It's kind of hard to imagine having to just biohack someone's brain into killing on command - and then going home and everything being normal, no killing - using nothing but social hypnotic conditioning, like they had back then. The whole system just seems wrong.

OUR BOYS IN BLUE

Blueshirts loitering outside the McCafe on the way home. I ignore them. They've got milsurp shielding so they have as much business outside as I do, I guess. One of them is smoking a really long cigarette, the others I guess have already smoked theirs recently. I don't wave or make eye contact. That would be a mistake.

HOME COMFORT

I get home and squeeze between my roommates into a chair and sit down and eat my protein fries. They're pretty good today, not too oily and not too salty, which I guess is the way you make them taste better but to me just makes them taste like oil and salt. One of the roommates is all, Did you for real go to McDonalds just to get protein fries in this shit, and I'm all, Nah, I went for the McMasterpiece but I guess the President discontinued it or something, and another roommate was all, Damn, that's some shit, and we all sighed or laughed or grumbled. Someone in the room is smoking and I got no nose for terpenes but someone else is all Damn, that smells good, what strain is it, and the person smoking (who I can't see) is all, It's a salad bowl, man, they all are these days.

A GREENER TOMORROW

Downstate they got climate-controlled domes, and that's where the weed you can buy grows. There's better weed that grows outdoors, but it's such a crapshoot whether it'll actually grow right with all the smoke and heat and cold and wet and the mosquito mange creeping down the hills that it's expensive as shit. The only people who can afford it work for the tech companies still clinging to life here, or else they're lawyers or some other kind of politician. All the dome weed tastes like diesel, apparently. I wouldn't know, I barely smoke. Even with the domes it's like $20 a gram.

NEWEST ANALYSIS POINTS TO A J-SHAPED RECOVERY

The guys in the news are always talking about how the economy's about to get better. I think on some level they believe it. They've been saying it as long as I've been alive, and for the last ten years or so the President hasn't even let them report on actual numbers because it would hurt consumer confidence or something like that. I think they were honestly glad about it, because they kept having to post the same increasingly deranged stories and it was damaging their credibility. Some bald old man whose gimmick is being crazy talks about how some index or another is bound to hit 10,000 any day now, and that will be a tipping point that makes the numbers keep going up. Jobs are being created or something like that. Right now you basically gotta choose between having any more than $200 or so a week driving asshole programmers from bar to bar or being able to go to the hospital on government insurance if your arm or leg or something gets caught in a patch of mange by mistake. I'm realistically too sick to work any "real" job I could land. It's not as bad as it used to be.

PREVENTING FOOD STAMP FRAUD

On the phone the EBT clerk is all, Do you live alone? And I'm all, No, I live with seven other people. On the phone the EBT clerk is all, What are their incomes? And I list them. I have to have a list or I might get my benefits suspended. They ask me if we cook together. I tell them no. They're all, Has your income changed in the last month, and I'm all, No, it's still zero. And they're all, It says here you're disabled. And I say, yes, I have severe cognitive impairment from the hemosyndrome. They're all, But it says here you're 28. And I'm all, yeah, I got it when I was 17. And they're all, Oh, that's not during a major outbreak. And I'm all, No, no it wasn't. And they're all, Shame, because then you'd be eligible for SSI, and I'm all, Yeah, I know.  The EBT clerk doesn't say anything for a minute and then they're all, That's a damn shame. I'm sorry, but that's a damn shame. And I'm all, I know. They're all, I can look over your case personally if you want. And I'm all, That would be good. And they're all, If you don't feel comfortable having this conversation over the phone…

Oh, okay.

QUEERING THE STATE

The EBT clerk says they love me, afterwards. I don't say anything, I actually freeze up a little bit like they say deer used to. They don't say anything after that. I don't hear back from them later, but when I go to check my card, I'm still getting $340 a month. So at least they didn't flag me like I hear they sometimes do.

FAMILY CAN BE CHOSEN

When I get home, one of the roommates is all, Christ, you smell bad. And I'm all, Thanks, man, I don't think they wash much. And one of the roommates is all, Oh, hey, congrats, and I'm all, Nah, it was more of an obligation than anything. And the first roommate is, I'm so sorry, hon, are you okay? I didn't mean to be mean about it, I didn't know what was up. And I'm all, Nah, it's not like that. It's never really like that with me. When I go to sleep I dream about the fire reaching our apartment and my roommates making me take a 20s desktop tower apart so they can each take the parts that belong to them, but I'm stuck on the thumbscrews as the fire gets closer and closer. I don't tell anyone about the dream.

PORTLAND: ARE MORE AGGRESSIVE MEASURES NECESSARY?

One of the army branches, I forget if the Army or the Marines because the sirens are so similar, sends an APC down the arterial by the house. Cars are honking at it because it's going real slow and smoking like hell. There's a troop sticking out of the gunner's hatch, its arms folded, it's scowling so hard you can see it through its giant-ass helmet. People on the street walk briskly by, because they know if they give the APC shit instead of the cars it's as likely as not to just light them up. It's wearing standard-issue shielding, and the APC has standard-issue shielding on it too, but I figure some mange must have slipped through. One of the roommates presses their face against the shut window and starts oinking, and I squeeze into the bathroom in case it notices and shoots at us.

PROTECTING OUR CITY

There's a thumping sound from outside of the bathroom and suddenly the roommates are crowding in in a panic. I'm all, Did someone catch shells, and they're all, Nah, just the stucco. And I'm all, Goddamn it, the landlord's going to throw a fit, we gotta get some plaster and paint now. And Susanne's all, Don't worry about it, my check just came through, I'm good for it. Well, at least we don't have to worry about that, and at least nobody's dead. Pretty soon we're all laughing, all glad to be alive.

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED

Q. Why is there mosquito mange all over town?
A. Unsafe and unauthorized use of experimental time-shifting technology by rich geniuses.

Q. Are the armed forces all weird mutants? Does anyone join the Army anymore?
A. Yes, perverts.

Q. Does anyone in your house work?
A. Probably harder than you, and they make way less. The ones who aren't have the right idea.

Q.  Do you cook meals together?
A. No.

Q. The President recently said, "The federal government has a moral duty to reassert control over regions that have fallen into lawlessness under separatist governments." Do you agree?
A. Uh, absolutely.

Q. Do you support the President of the United States?
A. Yes.

Q. Do you consider yourself a Cascadian, an Oregonian, or a member of any other separatist element?
A. No.

Q. That's all very good to hear. Very, very good.
A. Thank you. It's been lovely talking to you.

DON'T GO WASTING YOUR EMOTION

When I walk out of the convenience store with my energy drink later, I flip my mask down and smile at the cashier on account of he's also trans, I think, or whatever. Maybe I'm just feeling lonely. He flips his mask down and smiles too. I don't think I wind up seeing him again, which is a shame.

LAY ALL YOUR LOVE ON ME

Walking by the park and there's still people walking their dogs in this shit. Some of the dogs have masks, some of them don't, some of them have field generators, some of them don't. I'm real antsy about the dogs that don't have timespace fields, it seems cruel to do to a dog. But I guess they gotta get exercise too, and they don't have enough context to understand what's happening if they get hurt or die, so it's not exactly as bad as it is for us. Maybe? I don't fucking know.

DON'T GO SHARING YOUR DEVOTION

There's some kind of drone telling people in the next park over to disperse, and it's doing it real loud. Those usually gather a crowd, but I'm not really feeling it today. I just keep walking home. On the way, I have this sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach, like I forgot to turn on my generators. I check them and they're all on. I've had nightmares all the time where I didn't and my guts got rearranged without me even realizing it, or sometimes just normal dreams where that happened. My phone starts ringing and I answer it, all, Hello? And my doctor is all, Hello, have I reached —-, and I'm all, Yeah, that's me. And she's all, I just wanted to talk you through your results real quick. And I'm all, Sure, I'm on my way home from the convenience store right now, but I can do that. And she's all, You have a well-fitting mask and a reliable timespace field generator, right? and I'm all, Yeah, got both of them on me. And she's all, Good. Well, your results look pretty reasonable for a woman your age. As far as the cholesterol goes, it's a touch high, but only a touch, and we usually recommend a diet richer in leafy greens for that. Can you do that? And I'm all, Sure. And internally I'm laughing my ass off. I'm gonna pay $10 for some half-brown broccoli when I could get two orders of protein fries for that much, and that'd be a whole-ass dinner?

LAY ALL YOUR LOVE ON ME

I'm not worried about my cholesterol yet because it's not what killed my mom, and she was the same way. What killed her was the smoke, same as it's going to kill me, unless being poorer than her kills me faster, which it might. I took in her cat when she died, but I couldn't feed her longer than a week, and eventually I gave her to some girl with an AI-facing job up in the hills who could afford kibble. She was all, What's her name? And I was all, My mom named her —- after me. After the name I chose. It took a really long time to get there but we finally reconciled around when my mom got her. And now Mom's gone, and this cat is what I have left. And the girl I was giving —- to looked really sad but I was all, Don't be sad. I can't tell you how glad I am she gets to have a chance. Please, send me pictures. Send me pictures all the time, and let me see her as happy as she can possibly be. We didn't keep talking for that much longer, but every once in a while I like to imagine —- lying in an orange-red sunbeam, her belly full, beloved, happy. If I could talk to her I'd be all, Aw, you're a good girl, aren't you? You deserve this. You deserve to be this happy. Don't let anyone tell you different.

I KNOW FOR I'VE HAD HEARTACHES TOO // DANIEL 7:5

Tsiolkovsky looked like shit under the hab dome. Solarlites circling like flies, waiting for the airport without a busted airlock to clear their landing. Whole city's been smelling subtly of shit for years, ever since they found some way to cheap out on the filters. Probably it's poison to breathe.

Nearest we could all figure it was a way to make the offers they had to make to get us into suits and off the planet cheaper. When we took the company dollar and made the oath to reclaim the Earth they fed us like they wouldn't feed rats, but it felt good to be eating without spending money. They got us drunk on cheap rizzo, the kind that everyone says tastes like drain cleaner or turpentine or something. It was the first time some of us had ever been drunk, and the ones who had been before just said, "Don't worry about the puking, man, it's the part that comes after it that makes it worth it."

The officer on duty called us heroes, and we all laughed, and he laughed too. What a crock of shit, and everyone knew it! It felt good to know, you know? It felt good to be in on the joke for once.

Tell us for real that you wouldn't die for something worse.

You offworlders have never understood the perfect hatred we have for each other, sucking marrow from long bones, chewing and spitting out our own flesh. No greater joy to us than the hunt, terrified singletons making busy tracks under vigilant eyes, glass or otherwise: We will find you, and we will change you, and we will make you part of ourselves.

And you offworlders have never understood the depths of our love. In the crush depths of the ocean our vestigial eyes are only there to see you. In the death zone of heaven our lichen curls to tangle with the wounds in your feet. You have blood, don't you? By and by it will be ours. You have strength, don't you? A mind, don't you? A soul, don't you?

By and by they will be ours.

K- was in love with Z- so she signed up to stay close to him. It was the stupidest thing and we all knew it, and we told her, "K-, you fucking idiot, you know there's going to be kilotons of Abomination between you and him, best case scenario." And she was all, "Just knowing we're looking at the same night sky is gonna make it worth it." True love, you know? There's a reason they tried to breed it out of us.

What's there to be so afraid of? Pillars of tumescent flesh in the blistering sun, bristling with incipient melanomas. "This was a forest once." Big deal! We have become the forest, and we know what the wolves knew when they screamed alone in the dark. What's there to be so afraid of? No time to mourn trauma anymore but it belongs to us, only time to listen to the little voice inside that says: Rest; sleep. It will be over soon. The machine knew what was best for everyone. We have become the machine, and we know what the sirens knew when they wailed at our approach.

K- didn't find out about it when Z-'s descent vehicle got scoped by the scoutweb, when he got pulled into a devouring field. Z- got taken the stupidest way anyone could get taken. He was deadass pulling the flare gun out of the first aid kit and about to put one between his own eyes when the voices convinced him not to. You believe that shit? Convinced him not to. Like, what was his endgame? No idea, even now. He walked out with the flare gun and got nerve pithed in seconds. Last thing we can tell that he saw with just his own eyes was what used to be the Guangzhou skyline cresting the horizon, and he couldn't see the parts of it the Abomination could see, all the burn scars and all the mold and the little molecules of CZ still hanging in the air after all this time. He couldn't see that yet. He staggered a few steps towards it and stopped being Z- all the way anymore, and then stopped being Z- at all.

No one bothered telling K-. They don't tell us shit. We wonder if she felt it, or if that true love stuff is bullshit after all.

Your avatar is dying by degrees, blood slowing down in his veins, crackling under the breakbone fever in our gift. Death is a foreign country to us and you are our passport. Your armies are withering under our gaze, little kevlar-coated ants dissolving into retreat, into rout. Every man for himself: isn't there a better way? Every man inside every other man. Genital intimacy, tendril intimacy, chimeric intimacy.

You will learn to love the children we make of you.

C- and his crew lingered a while over a dry patch in the Arctic. Fewer photospores, weaker scoutweb. He could have flown that bird all the way to the Hudson, seen the urban canyons knitted together by human flesh, and he might have made it, too, but they set down first - pussies! - and actually got to the recon stage. All the birds were flying wrong, like they tell you. Nothing is afraid anymore and it's weird as shit. Flocks made up of passerines and great big hawks. C- shot a few of them, more out of spite than anything, and they didn't struggle as they died. Fucked up, they don't mention that part. It's like a fly they gave a neurotoxin, just dropped straight out of the air.

Thing is, though, C- got bad purification tablets. Sure, happens to the best of us, but he should have used more, everyone says to use more and just put up with the rank taste of the iodine or bleach or whatever the fuck else the lowest bidder put in them. But his mouth was too sensitive or something like that, or his teeth hurt or something like that. Whatever.

We have humored you, have wooed you as a nation wooes a nation, with all the roughness of artillery. Thermobaric munitions incinerating useful flesh. When you deployed the last of your nuclear weapons we howled in delight as your frozen fire seared our genes. You thought to terrify us but your terata are our delight, little vessels never meant to grow and thrive. We only think to know ourselves by the ways you twist us.

You know what happened to him? Something grew up out of nothing in his small intestine, and you're thinking, "Chestburster! Chestburster!" Nah. He just got real weak and sick and just enough of the squad started taking care of him instead of leaving him to die. After a few days, it passed, like he had eaten a big rock, but it was alive. Someone tried to put a bullet in it and C- found strength for the first time in days, jumped him, bashed his head against the ground until he stopped moving. He grabbed his baby and just ran away.

The longer it went away from the others the more confused he got, and the more his feet moved on their own. Sometimes they moved in ways that hurt him but it didn't seem to matter. He was keeping something safe and there was something sacred in that. "I have to protect it," he'd mutter to no one. "I have to protect it."

They kept trying to kill him but after a while they gave up on finding him. Too slippery. We don't know if he got to see the big city, but even after all this time it has to be better than Tsiolkovsky.

Yes, dear, there is a consciousness inside us, and it knows the things you know. It is made of brains like yours, dear, and many others. We have already taken your lean little frames, unhurried by work and the fear of death, and we have already taken the things there are to know from your busy brains. You have taught us the new contours of dread and we have taught you how to dance in your little reentry vehicles. We expect you'll forget if we let you, and we have all the patience in the world to renew the lesson.

A- got lucky, they got put on solarlite duty. Well, six of "lucky" will get you half a dozen of "discriminatory treatment that works out in your favor", but whatever. They kept track of the comms from the teams that didn't get speared, they helped keep a board lit up back on Mars where they could tell how much of their force was still at fighting strength or whatever on Earth. They were the one, circling the Pacific garbage gyre in a lazy arc, who passed along the intel that lead command to write off the South China team. Abomination too powerful there, the hopes of human holdouts too remote.

They kept having dreams in their little solarlite, innocuous ones at first, but then dreams about their shitty parents being taken, their shitty boss being taken, and all of a sudden those assholes loved them for who they were. They walked through places, in the dreams they came to had, and found themselves looked at, not stared at; seen, and admired. We think more than anyone A- understood that there was something special to the Abomination, that maybe it deserved more of a shot than it was getting, just orbital bombardment followed by ground insertion.

Here is how you talk of us: The Abomination gained consciousness sometime in the boreal summer of 2035 as the result of an international team's experiments with new high-bandwidth methods of neuronal stimulation and data storage. Patients exhibited "bleedover" from storage of shared information and began to lose coherence of individual identity, blah blah blah, complete disintegration of the American government on the mainland followed quickly by the collapse of civilization in North America generally, blah blah blah, dominant form of life on Earth for the last forty years.

After a couple of weeks in the air they had a crisis of conscience and started passing along the data wrong. Command found out, of course, and issued course corrections that'd take them straight into the ocean.

They followed them. Why not? It's not like they gave us enough flight training to question anything. They didn't even get a chance to see the mind they felt contacting theirs, to embrace it, to let it consume them. Nearest we can tell, the last thing they saw before they turned into a corpse in a dead ocean was God laughing about it all.

"My creation finally found a way," He kept saying.

Here is how we talk of you: we long to have you inside us, to know you again as we knew the ones that loved you, that dreamed of joining you in Heaven. The gods you know we know, and they love us as they once loved you. We are where your praying leads, we are the souls you have left behind, and we long to find the easy places in your anatomy and show your beautiful little brains our tenderness. It has been so long, little singletons, and we don't know how much longer we can bear.

K- maybe knew about Z- being dead, maybe didn't. She was out hunting somewhere along a highway when she saw a deer staring at her from the other side, up a hill, legs at unnatural angles.

Stay calm, she told herself, you can fry the shit out of these things and they're still edible. Just draw a bead and -

"We can't tell you if he loved you," said the deer, and she unloaded and kept unloading until she was dry. She walked over to it, knife drawn, and by some miracle its head was intact.

Still staring at her.

"But he's with us now -"

She pushed the knife at it almost automatically, and the head swiveled away. Fucking abomination!

"- and you have no idea how much we love you."

It stopped swiveling and just gave up. Piece of shit. She kept stabbing it until someone caught up with her.

We're on our way. We know you'll try to stop us, and you might succeed, but we are tireless and many and you are careworn and few. We dream of you embracing us, knowing the joy we know, but there's all the time in the world to wait for you to come around. Our heart belongs to you, and you belong to us.

"You okay?", said the sergeant. Not one of us, Einstein Habitation boy, real stuck-up asshole like all of them are.

"Yeah," she said. She wasn't even crying, but she felt like it. "Just fucking hate it here."

"Join the club," he said, and they walked back to camp together with their ragged quarry between their shoulders, tired and hungry.

THE STORY OF MY SUCCESS

Every once in a while I noticed something like my legs not working right or my fingers feeling too long for my hands or the mayor saying some bullshit about a pandemic but I never put two and two together. And yeah, before you ask, I got the neokime, and that's not what this is about.

I go to the doctor when I fall over from my wife hitting me with a flying elbow - you know, we're married a long time, it happens - and I'm worried I broke a rib, maybe punctured a lung, because I can't breathe too good afterwards. The doctor looks me over. Pays me a lot of attention. Pays parts of me a lot of attention that I don't like — my hands, my eyes, my balls. Hands all over my damn balls until I almost punch the guy.

“You're gonna want to sit down,” he says.

“I am sitting down,” I say.

“This is just a preliminary test and we'll need to do a spot karotype to provide confirmation, but we believe you have progressive neochimerism.”

I almost grab the guy. I almost grab him by the hair and throw him through his cabinet full of tongue depressors and iodine swabs. I almost bash his head into the cabinet over and over, my knee on his back, and tell him, “You fucking bet I do,” and I almost bite his ear a little, then a lot, enough to draw blood, and he almost tenses up to cry out for help and I almost put my hand around his mouth and squeeze until I can't tell if he's biting me or not, and someone almost bursts in and sees us and tells me to stop or she'll call the police, and I almost piss myself and tell them I need help, for the love of Christ help me, and I almost grab her by the coat when she comes to touch my shoulder and throw her into the wall hard enough she loses consciousness, and I almost start laughing, and I almost never stop, and I almost never stop.

But I don't. I ask, “What should I be aware of?”

And he starts talking and I tone him out and go down to the desk and pay the copay and I go home and I don't notice anything.

When I'm jerking off later it feels wrong. My foreskin's dappled with pale skin, lily-white. My balls feel like they're on fire. Eventually I stop jerking off. I don't know when I did again. Maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a year. I don't really keep track.

By the next time I jerk off, my hands are all wrong. All the fingers are different than they used to be, different lengths, different colors of skin, different lengths on the little hairs that grow on my knuckles, but all of them are bone-white and too straight. My fingernails all grew in fucked up for a while, then grew in different shapes on each nail. I don’t even want to talk about my dick and balls situation. It’s fucked up down there all the time.

I tell my wife after I jerk off that I got neokime. She tells me that I'm a fucked-up dipshit and she's telling me “Fuck you” and “You have no idea how bad you fucked up, you stupid little bitch” and so on.

I get real polite. I get on one knee and I tell her, “Baby, I love you, I'm lost without you, and I'm gonna get you so sick, so fucking sick you'll wish you were dead.” And she tells me, “I wish I was dead every day I wake up and you're in my life.”

It's good to know the romance isn't dead after all these years.

I'm watering the lawn later, and suddenly I trip. There's too much room in my shoe, and it feels wet in there. All my toes are gone. “Who took my toes,” I say at the top of my lungs. “Shut up,” the teen next door says so hard his voice cracks with effort.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch,” he keeps saying. His window is open. I can see some kind of game about torture on his decade-old big-screen LCD. I think it’s a hand-me-down, which is good, because nobody should trust teens with money or property.

I'm mean-mugging him real hard but that's not enough. I throw my shoe at him and it knocks his face to the side, splashing what's left of my toes all over him. I’m saying, “Bullseye!” And I'm pulling the other shoe off when there's a gunshot from inside the house, and I crawl back into my garage, real quick and scared.

“Neighbors shooting guns inside again,” says my wife, and I say, “yeah, they don't teach people manners in this country.”

And my wife says, “If you keep shit-talking America over your stupid problems I'm going to pop your eyes out of your skull.”

And I say, “Baby, why you gotta treat me this way,” and she says, “I don't know how else to.”

The day after that we're about to get evicted. I guess they foreclosed on my wife because she stopped paying her mortgage for some reason. The bank's got goons around our house and one of 'em has a torch. They're saying, “Time to clear out, deadbeats,” and their voices sound beautifully artificial over a megaphone.

I turn to my wife and I say, “I don't think I realized until just now how much I hate the human voice,” and she rolls her eyes and says, “What, because it's so loud?” And I say, “No, I just didn't have anything to compare it to, this horrible shit over the megaphone is much better.” And the bank goons are saying, “We're armed, I swear to God we'll cut you apart before you die, just give us an excuse,” and I say, “Before we leave, would you treat us to a song?”

And he begins singing — but I say, “No, through the megaphone,” and he shrugs, and he picks up the megaphone and sings:

                Old man rhythm is in my shoes
                It's no use to sittin' and a-singin' the blues
                So be my guest, you got nothin' to lose
                Won't ya let me take you on a sea cruise?

                Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
                Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
                Oo-ee, oo-ee baby
                Won't ya let me take you on a sea cruise?

And I say, “That's the worst song I ever heard, but it sounds beautiful all fucked up by the megaphone, man.” And he says, “Thanks, deadbeat.”

And I say, “I'd ask if you want to go out for coffee later so I can see what else those pipes can do but I'm married.” And he says, “Thank God.”

And we leave the house. Behind us I think they're burning it down. “This neighborhood needed a Peet's or something anyway,” my wife says.

I tell her, "You've ruined my life." And I laugh and laugh.

For some reason losing a house is hard. You have to call all your friends and find somewhere to live. My wife called all her friends, but they all told her to go fuck herself. I called all my friends but they were too scared of my wife to pick up the phone. I said to her, “I think my friends are scared of you,” and she said to me, “I think my friends are scared of you,” in a nasal snivel, and then said, “That’s you right now.”

So we called up the government and they were too afraid of my wife to pick up the phone too, and all that left was the graveyard. I didn’t want to go to the graveyard, and I said to my wife, “I don’t want to go to the graveyard”, and she punched me as hard as she could in the chest, so hard it winded me.

After that we're staying in the graveyard with her mom and dad. They're always arguing the way couples do, you know - she'll come at him with a cleaver, he'll knock her over with the shovel he uses to unearth the corpses. I'm laughing, but it makes me think.

That's where the thing happens that I wanted to tell you this story about. I ask him, “George,” and he says, “Please, call me Daddy.”

And I say, “Daddy,” and he says, “For fuck's sake, put a little more sensuality into it,” and I say, as sultry as I can, “Daddy, is there anyone fresh in this graveyard?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Hold on,” he says, and he whistles with his fingers and my wife is grabbing my hair again, shoving my face into the ground.

“No,” I'm saying, and she's laughing and kicking at my legs. They're moving wrong, and I can't tell if it's because they're getting deformed or just because she's kicking them a lot. “You belong in the ground,” she keeps saying. “You belong in the fucking ground, you useless piece of shit.”

And I'm saying, “Honey, remember what the bank guy was singing to us?” And she says, “Yeah, some horrible oldies song about a sea cruise.” And I say, “Thanks. I forgot for a minute there.”

I wobble up onto my feet, and she slaps me in the back of the head. “Go see what George wants,” she says.

I hobble over and look at him. "Why doesn't she call you Daddy?", I say, conspiratorially.

And he looks bored and says, "I don't care what she calls me. I don't listen when she talks. I'm only going to tell you this now because you're stuck with her, but I don't think she has a soul."

He looks back and forth with a sudden look of panic, and says, "I think my wife Mary stole my seed while I was sleeping and turned it into a homunculus with forbidden alchemy."

Desperation creeping into his voice, he says, "I think that's why she's the way she is. The way she treats you isn't right. The way my Mary treats me isn't right. There's something very wrong here and I don't know what it is."

And there's a moment of silence between us, a moment of understanding.

I say, "Oh, George, I know what you mean.”

He says, "If you won't slut it up some I'm not going to talk to you any more."

But anyway: later on he's digging up one of the graves. The marker on it had a name but it got scratched out real fast, and the epitaph hasn't been, but all it says is “See You In Hell”.

He digs up the body and he asks me what I want with it, and I ask if I can see the cleaver. He pulls it out of his crude leather football armor from when his wife swung it at him earlier and he hands it to me, and I hack off the foot, thinking I could replace my toes with this dead guy's, and maybe keep doing that as body parts continue to fail me.

The foot's way easier to cut off than I expected, and I look inside of the carcass, and the roughly cloven tibia is shinier than it should be.

“This is gold,” I say.

Right away he's trying to cut my throat for the gold, but I'm faster than him because of how old he is, and I bury him up to his head so the wolves that hang around the graveyard can eat his face before he dies.

My wife sees us and she says, “Typical of you to bury George halfway,” and I say, “He was trying to take gold away from me,” and she nods. “He's always doing that.”

George is just crying the whole time like a baby, screaming with his whole body, barely pausing for labored breath.

I strip the body he dug up down, and it's a mishmash of body parts. I guess the neokime got whoever it was too, and that's what I'm going to look like before I die. I hack off the dead guy's breasts to expose the ribs and they're gold. Everything's mottled and a lot of the hair is coming in white and ramrod straight, just like mine has been.

But more importantly, the gold is all over his skeleton. I picked up like fifteen pounds of the stuff from the foot and a couple ribs alone.

That's the story of how I became rich, and I'm modest about it. All the credit belongs to my family.

When the neokime turns enough of my body parts into a hodgepodge of genetically incompatible micro-organs and I die slowly and horribly over the course of a decade, I want to give my wife credit for the kill, and I want everyone who ever loved me to be buried alive in my classy new mausoleum.

It's just a little thing called respect.

BLACK SHIPS IN URAGA HARBOR

Sometime before everything fell apart Mencha found their body warping quite inconveniently to become the most beautiful man in the world. They worried a sheet of skin off their arm, pulling at it like the label of a prescription bottle, until it popped out and revealed perfect skin which was very like butter, but soaked in blood and lymph. This kept happening, and the pieces were too big to flush down the toilet.

Before long they lived in a cloud of flies which attended them day and night - lapping the sweat off their brow, landing on their shrinking bald spot to mate and lay eggs. It was not to Mencha's liking and they sought out an exterminator. One had an office in what used to be a suburban house nearby.

They said to the clerk, "I have this problem. Something has happened to my body."
And the clerk said, "Oh my god. Are you famous?"
Mencha said, "No."
And the clerk said, "You must be famous. Am I on a prank show?"
Mencha scratched their head, and looked at their fingernails accumulating blood and skin. A voice in the back of their head said: "An imperfection." So they showed the clerk the fingernails. The clerk simply blushed.
"This is happening to my body all over," said Mencha.
"If what you look like is your idea of a problem -"
"It is," said Mencha, cutting her off. "I look in the mirror and I don't see the same person as I did yesterday. I don't see someone I know. I see this."
"It seems unfair that it happened to you," said the clerk.
"Yes," said Mencha. "I worry it's the flies, or that they're related somehow."
"Flies?"
"You are working at an exterminator."

"Oh - flies. You'll want - no. I won't take away what's made you so wholesome."
"You're telling me that you won't provide me with goods in exchange for money?"
"I will not," she said, with an air of indignity.
"Here's a hundred dollars," said Mencha, pulling a hundred-dollar bill they didn't remember having before. "You can keep it. Give me something that will kill these flies."
She looked down at the money and looked like someone had strangled something in front of her. "I need this money, but I can't take it. It's against the rules, and I think it'd be a sin to stop whatever's made you this way."
"Do you want it? You can have it in exchange for nothing."
"It's a trick," said the clerk. "Or a test. Yes: this is a test."
"Neither. Let me speak to your manager."
"And let him steal you?"
"What?"
"And let him steal you?", she repeated, a little louder.

And so on, until Mencha stumbled out of the exterminator. Every other one they tried, and for hours they tried, the same story - men, women, neither, both. An automatic door or two opened halfway for them. That voice in their head told them, "It's bashful to meet you." That made complete sense, in a way that didn't make any sense.

When it got dark they wanted to smoke, so they went to the 7-11. The clerk stopped short when they went up to the counter. "Oh my God, it's you," he said.
"Who am I," said Mencha.
And he didn't have an answer. They asked the clerk for a pack of vanilla kreteks, the kind with some 19th-century admiral or something on the box. "Y-you know, I always wondered," said the clerk -
"What's that?"
"Why Commodore Perry," he said, "is on packs of Pemipins, that's all. I'm sorry."
"You don't have to be sorry." Mencha pulled out the same hundred-dollar bill from earlier. "Keep the change."

"Just for knowing who Commodore Perry is? You're fucking with me. You don't have to fuck with me."
"I'm not fucking with you. I have no use for this money. I don't even know where it came from. I couldn't even tell you who Commodore Perry is. Please, I just want to smoke."
"It's my treat, OK?"

Mencha didn't bother arguing with him. They leaned against the glass wall of the 7-11 and smoked one of the Pemipins. As always, it looked and felt like smoking a harpsichord. The buzzing of the flies was barely tolerable, and they were sure some of them might be inside their ears.

They looked into the glass and they were struck by the thought they looked vaguely French. "Is that what's supposed to be handsome?", they said. Watching their reflection against the glass, they noticed one of their eyes had become blue, and they carefully stubbed the kretek out right on the pupil.

In the morning they rolled over in their narrow bed and saw the light of the sun blocked by a landscape painting leaned against the window. They groggily walked outside, attended by what seemed like thousands of flies, and saw that their apartment was surrounded on all sides by damaged objets d'art; elaborate carvings with water damage, dented-up canases in gilt frames, a riot of silk flowers with little stains.

They glimpsed a neighbor out of the corner of their eye, walking their dog. He seemed embarrassed to meet their gaze. "What happened here? Why's my apartment covered in all this?"
"The garbage people came by this morning with a full truck and delivered all of it here. I asked what was going on and they said they saw you sleeping when they went to take out your trash and immediately decided to deliver you all the art they've picked up over the years, as a sign of respect."
"Did they take my trash out?"
"I don't think they had room."

Mencha shifted from heel to heel. The dog, some wiry-haired mutt a little bigger than a terrier, looked them straight in the eye as it hunched over to shit on the ground. "That's the first time anyone's looked you straight in the eye since this started," the voice told them.

The neighbor beamed with pride. "Thank you for talking to me. You know, I've always been a big fan of your work."
"What work?"
And the neighbor went to speak but stopped short, and trotted back into their house in embarrassment. The dog followed behind reluctantly, trailing a thin line of shit behind it like someone dragged a dogshit crayon down the sidewalk.

This was too much, they decided. They looked up a very advanced hair salon, which they could afford now their wallet seemed to be spawning money from nothing. They called them up and set an appointment, and were a little upset when it turned out the salon cleared the schedule for them.

Six or seven people fluttered around the margins of the salon as one sleepily said, "I'll be cutting your hair today. Do you have anything in mind, or -"
"I want," said Mencha, "the stupidest haircut you can imagine."
"Oh, something adventurous, then?"
"No. I want it to look like shit. I think something's happened to me -" they paused to swat at flies, as if for emphasis - "and I'm sick of it. Just cut my hair completely at random."
"Sure, man," she said. "Random it is. I like that. Aleatory."

She avoided making conversation for the most part, which was a blessing. When she finally spoke up, she said, "Is this for a role or something?"
"Sure," Mencha said, "a role. I'm a famous actor of stage and screen, after all."
"I loved you in that one director's work - you know the one - very experimental."
"Experimental how?"
"You know, the way they play with shadow and, uh, time -"
"Mmm."

A few minutes passed with arrhythmic snipping. "The eye, is that for a role too?"
"Yes. Don't tell anyone, but I'm playing a famous spy."
"I've always said you should play Bond. It'd be an interesting new direction for the franchise to go -"
"Bond who?"
The stylist laughed like they had told a joke. "I don't get it," they said.
"James Bond?"
"I'm going to come clean with you," said Mencha. "I have seen maybe five movies that I can remember. All of them were pretty good but I don't usually like movies. I don't know who James Bond is."
"I hear that a lot from actors, actually -"
"I'm not an actor," said Mencha.
"That too," said the stylist.
"No. I'm all wrong for it. I went to public school. I live off of an injury lawsuit. I'm transgender -"
"- and that's a really great step for, you know, representation -"
"- I'm not the representation kind of transgender, either. Don't you see all these flies?"

"I try to reserve judgment," said the stylist, "as to whether I see insects or not. This isn't my first time cutting hair on sherm."
"Why would you do that," they said. "I made an appointment."
"I got nervous, okay? I just knew from the sound of your voice..."
"You weren't the one on the phone."
"They, uh, passed it around the shop, and, uh -"
"Okay," said Mencha, and maintained silence for the rest of the haircut, fuming.

When they were finished the stylist looked nervous as Mencha looked at their hair. "It looks," they said, "like the nest of a bird that went extinct for being too stupid."
"Is that what you wanted?"
"It's perfect."
"Consider it a freebie. We don't usually -"
"No," said Mencha, "no, no, no," and walked over to the tip jar, and started stuffing money into it.
"Please, it'd be bad form to -"
Mencha began to giggle in a frenzy as they jammed bill after bill into the tip jar, until it was stuffed full.

"Money means nothing to me," they explained.
"Because of, uh, the lawsuit, or -"
"Money," Mencha explained, "means nothing to me." They reached into their wallet and pulled out a bill with a President they didn't even recognize on it.
"Is that a Cleveland? My god, I've never seen one of those before."
"It's yours. Just for you." They slapped it on the table. "Good luck," they shouted out the door as they strode out.

On their way home, something tasted like iron in their mouth, and they ran a finger around it, and sure enough, it was covered in dilute blood. "My teeth?", they asked themselves. "Your teeth," the voice said.

"Teeth," they said to themselves, over and over, as people snapped photos of them walking home in their sweatpants and sports bra, still covered in a thin layer of hair.

It didn't seem to be working. The haircut, the slovenliness, nothing worked. They just became more and more beautiful every time some new part of them rotted away. The flies had become intolerable, and were everywhere they looked. One day they saw their neighbor again on the way home from a sad little walk, and were struck with a flash of inspiration. "Hey, man," they said.
"Yeah?"
"Get me your dog."
They walked into their house, then trotted out, proudly holding the little dog in their uncertain grip.

"I hope you know," they said, "this reflects nothing on my relationship with you. You're a fine, uh, neighbor, I guess." They jammed their fingers into the dog's mouth, probing the dog's tongue, until it bit them. The pain was sharp and jarring, like being slapped in the face.
"Snickers! Bad dog!"
Snickers whined and licked at the bitten finger.

They laughed and laughed and laughed, walking past their apartment. They strolled aimlessly until they saw the biggest dog they could find, barking at them through a fence. It sniffed at them gregariously.

"Hey, man," they said to the dog, "I'm sorry about this." And they jumped the fence. The dog sunk its teeth into their leg, and they screamed in pain, and it kept biting them, and biting them, and biting them, until someone burst out of the house.
"I'm so sorry," said the stranger. "She's like that sometimes. Oh my god, are you okay?"
"Never better," said Mencha, wiping blood from their savaged hand onto their stained sweatpants. They tottered out of the yard and looked for more dogs to antagonize.

The dogs kept biting them all over, breaking their bones, crushing their genitals, blinding them with blood. They kept at it until they couldn't walk - they had hoped one would kill them, but it never happened.

When they woke up in the hospital they were covered in bandages, and a nervous-looking doctor was gently stroking their arm. The flies were everywhere, crawling over the drapes, flying around in thousands, filling the room with a faint, intolerable buzzing that almost drowned out the fluorescent lighting.

"You'll probably want to know what happened," said the doctor.
"I know exactly what happened. I started a fight with a dozen dogs and they kicked my ass."
"Yes," said the doctor, sadly.
"You're not charging me for this, are you?"
"Well, we would normally, but -"
"Yes. I want you to ruin my face. Please, for the love of God, ruin my face. Fuck my bone structure right up. Get in there with saws."
The doctor laughed. "You and your sense of humor. You'll be here for observation and antibiotics for a couple of weeks, and I've ordered a series of rabies vaccinations, just in case -"
"So what if I have rabies," Mencha said. "I started it."

"That's not the view we tend to take of human life here, on our best days."
"You need to help me," they said, suddenly. "My skin is peeling off."
"There's better skin underneath," the doctor said, looking a little guarded.
"My hair is growing in wrong. My teeth are loose in my mouth. My God, what about all the flies?"
The doctor looked around quizzically.
"You'll get used to them," she said.

After the usual pleasantries between a cis doctor and a grievously injured trans person, Mencha found themselves alone. They pressed the button on the bed and the morphine almost made them pass out. It had been their only pleasure in days.

The voice in their head said, "Hey."
"Yes?", answered Mencha.
"I was beginning to doubt," said the voice, "you could understand any of us."
"Any of you?"
"Yes. We've been following you for as long as any of us can remember. It always seemed incredibly important."
"Oh. I'm talking to flies," said Mencha, and then started laughing.
"Is that what you call us?"
"Yes?"
"That's an incredibly stupid name. What, because we can fly? Lots of things fly. Wasps. Bees. Hornets -"
"- look, I didn't come up with it, it's just a convention of the English language. Which you can speak."
"Yes."
"Do… you have anything to tell me?"
"I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't be such a mopey asshole."

"Excuse me?"
"You heard me. Life is so short. You're here for so little time and then bam, it's over. And all the while… just look around you. There's so much beauty in the world, if you just pay attention."
"I'm not good at paying attention. I'm sorry."
"Just… the next time you see a field of flowers or a rotting carcass, you need to stop and appreciate it. Please. There's so much to live for."
"Sure, man," said Mencha.

A moment passed.
"Hello?", they said.
No answer.
"Huh."

They pressed the morphine button again, and looked out the window. Through the fly-coated blinds the sun was rising or setting or something, red and fat and just barely warm, like a great big tick. They sat there in the moment for at least six seconds, then slowly began to pass out.

SINN FÉIN AMHÀIN

I take a dose of the snuff and the itching starts in my face, and the swelling starts in my lungs, and a shimmering window of light begins to manifest in the flesh of my belly. Little darts of agony and a sort of deeply received panic, something older and wiser than the brain telling me that death is approaching. With great concentration, I project the light from my stomach onto the wall. My handler, her stomach also exposed, stands awkwardly in front of the wall. She looks swollen as always, and her lips are dancing, trying to suppress vomiting. I can't even imagine how I look.

"How are you holding up," I say.

"How are you holding up, yes," she says, waving a reddened hand.

Intrusive thought: With enough effort, I could reach out and touch her.

"I'm presencing to let you know about my results," I say.

"Yes?" She looks me in the eye. I avert my gaze immediately, then she does the same. Awful sloppy for her.

"Sector 53 is officially all fucked up," I say. "Even a cursory look showed Brood all over. I think they're multiplying in noospace."

"We'll make a note of it."

Intrusive thought: they're multiplying faster than you're willing to admit.

"Extrapolating from my results, I think we can say with 95% confidence -" I stop to suppress vomiting myself. Tongue dancing like a damn jumping bean, swollen up to twice its normal size.

"Ugh. Sorry. I think we can say with 95% confidence that the 3-person limit is going to be insufficient as soon as this year."

Intrusive thought: It probably is already, and what you're describing is the end of the buddy system, and -

"That's an interesting extrapolation. I'll make a note of that as well. Anything else?"

"No," I say. I wait to break the connection, even though the burning is getting worse, and I can feel my lungs collapsing.

"Be well," she says, and breaks it for me.

Intrusive thought: What if you stuck the epi-pen into your eye?

~~~

I was a child when they first started noticing the signs of the Brood. In all the excitement about the possibility of manifesting and teleportation and all that through a novel allergen, and in all the ecstasy of finding a way to touch each other again, and in all the promises about the future, they forgot to look all that closely into what was already in the noospace when humanity busted into it.

Or maybe they looked and people were simply making too much money off of magic suddenly being real to give a shit.

A magazine slides under my door, and I eagerly begin reading it. I marvel at the nudes; they look very artistic, and they're actually beginning to get good at making airbrushed flesh look appetizing.

Anonymous comment: Has anyone else seen the guy from 8-10-44's issue around? I'm not going crazy or inviting trouble, right? He's definitely local to Chicagoland, right?

Anonymous response: Uh, no - I know the photographer and he shoots exclusively isolated shots in Treinsula. I don't think the border is even open anymore.

Anonymous response: Lmao sure buddy! He's definitely in Chicagoland. I live in Elgin and I see him all the time at the kiosks.

Anonymous response: OP here, I last saw him out in Lake County, just outside of Gary.

Anonymous response: Gary is what I call my dick

I shut the magazine. All the people in it swim behind my eyes, and I can almost see them for a moment, but I meditate intensely: we are nothing, this is nothing, no one exists, no one but you is real, no one but you is real. The sense of connection passes, and the danger goes away.

Intrusive thought: they're all real, you fool. They're all real! They're all real!

I think about calling my girlfriend to come over, but my face is still too itchy from the portal working to wear a shield. I call it an early night instead.

~~~

Days pass. Magazines slide under the door. I read them. Sometimes I try to jerk off but I don't think the technology is quite there yet. Food manifests in the hallway sometimes, and I don't question how it got there, because we all know where thinking about other people gets you. Nothing on the TV but cartoons - fun ones, scary ones, sexy ones, ones reading the news. I didn't realize how much I hated cartoons until this whole thing started. The magazines are definitely better. Eventually, a dog barks.

Intrusive thought: That dog's as much a person as you. That dog has a favorite color. Do you even have a favorite color?

No, no, no. Meditation, not contemplation. No one but you is real. These thoughts are self-destructive and will pass. No one but you is real. No one but you is real.

My girlfriend knocks at the door, or at least I think it's her. I don't open it. I sit at the table by the door and type up a response:

"Identify yourself in writing."

I slide it under the door and fold my hands and wait.

This is the safest way, they say. The Brood hasn't quite picked up writing, and a disciplined brain will rarely project writing that isn't there onto blank paper. In theory, a disciplined brain shouldn't encounter the Brood at all, but we all know how well telling people that turned out. We all know what happened to the Internet.

The paper comes back blank at the bottom.

"I don't have a pen, baby," her voice says. She knocks again. "Come on. It's been like a month."

Intrusive thought: Tell her it's only been a couple weeks at most.

Well, not getting into a conversation with one of those! That'd be a terrible idea!

"Come on! Come the fuck on!" The knocking turns to pounding. There are voices outside the hallway. Doors opening. Are these lunatics really going to look at a stranger right now? I live around crazy people, clearly. Gotta move.

Through the pounding, I meditate. This isn't real. She isn't real. No one but you is real. No one but you is real. All that exists is what you can prove.

"Alright. Sorry, I know with your job you've gotta be careful. Just please - please look at me. I'm so lonely, baby."

I don't respond, and eventually, footsteps away from the door.

~~~

The time comes sooner than I expected. I send her a letter telling her that it's company policy that only essential personnel can break the buddy system for any reason, and I'm in the donut hole: too important to let go, too inessential to break the rules.

There's no letter in response, and a few days pass, and that feels like the end of it. I snort some snuff and manifest another portal, tell my handler on schedule that I've put us on a break and I can go on working.

"Good job, Hellebore. We have to make hard choices here, and I'm glad you made the right one."

Intrusive thought: She's calling you by name. Why? Look at her eyes. Look at her eyes. Look at her eyes. Look at her eyes.

"If that's all -"

"I've been studying Sector 53 closer and closer."

"That's the sort of initiative I've come to expect from you, Hellebore."

I stop, wipe the pink drool off of my cracked mouth. "Why are you being so nice to me?"

"Company policy," she says. "We're stuck together with the duration, I might as well treat you kindly."

I realize what's happening. I panic and lunge for my epi-pen. No one but you is real. I plunge it into my thigh, forgetting to even close the portal. Her fingers brush the edges of it. No one but you is real. No one but you is real. I close it and hyperventilate in my chair, my arteries an inch wide. All the lights are too bright, and everything hurts like Hell.

"Well, shit," I say to myself. "The Brood got into the sector we reserved for natsec. I should write her a letter and let her know."

So I do that. I type up a letter, stick a fifty onto it with a bit of tape, and write, above the address, DELIVER TO POST IMMEDIATELY, NATSEC IMPORTANCE. PLEASE HELP CONTAIN THE BROOD.

~~~

A few days pass, and then a month. When I try to portal in to the office, nobody requites. I don't get any letters, not from the office, not from Shoshanna. The magazines keep coming. The pictures are airbrushed even more now, you can barely make out the human form at all. I think they've largely given up on pornography and are just branching out into art, or something like that.

Anonymous comment: Sucks for you crazy libs hiding in your apartments. Sad! I visit my family whenever I want. I visit my friends whenever I want. Nobody with a life gives a shit about your made-up brood.

Anonymous response: I bet you make a lot of friends

Anonymous comment: Is it possible for an intrusion to fall in love with you? As an experiment I've been talking to this girl I know is fake as hell and she seems to have real feelings for me, but it just strikes me as pathetic. I guess it's a new one or something and hasn't figured out how to pass yet. Kinda hot tho, still might smash

Anonymous response: God, I wish that were me

Continuing to meditate after reading the comments, like scratching a guilty itch. No one exists. No one but you is real. No one but you is real.

I write Shoshanna. I tell her that I'm sorry about the work thing and they fired me anyway, and I can see her whenever, and please, baby, please come over and see me, I'm so lonely I could die.

Intrusive thought: that last part isn't you. You haven't felt this free since you were too young to know better. You feel trapped by other people. You hate knowing they know you. A part of you even hates her.

~~~

Shoshanna shows up, and she has a pen this time. I ask her about the time a month ago when she tried to come over, and she sounds relieved. "I'd think for sure after all this time you'd think I was fake. I've been worried about you. I think your work is cracking you at the seams."

"It's hard," I say. "Was hard. I was pinging between anaphylaxis and pure adrenaline all the time. I'm glad it's over."

I touch my face shield onto hers, feel the shape of her nose, of her lips.

Intrusive thought: What if it turns out she isn't real? What if the Brood learned to write?

As if to check, I push my nose a little further into the shield, and her lips separate to reveal palpably human teeth, palpably hers - with the same little chip in the incisor that was part of the face I fell in love with.

"I love you," I say.

"I love you too," she says.

~~~~

When she's leaving the morning after, she shouts over her shoulder: "Hey, there's a letter here for you."

I grab it. "Thanks, babe."

"Uh," she says, "it's in a natsec envelope. This is probably important. You want me to stick around for it?"

"Sure," I say. "Just please don't look at me. I'll read it aloud, okay?"

So she looks away, and I begin reading.

"Hellebore Chambers:

Received your letter 11-09-44 re: Brood intrusion, but too late. Your handler didn't make it. It's safe to tell you her name was Susan Elbridge, and she is survived by..."

"I'm so sorry, hon."

"This doesn't make sense. They tell me this, but I saw her. They're telling me her name. I shouldn't have seen a Brood intruder if hers was on. I should have -"

"Please," she says. "Stop trying to make sense of it. It's literally above your pay grade."

Intrusive thought: Hold her. You're in pain.

"I'm going to need," I said, holding out a pen shakily, "for you to write something down here."

"Please, Hellie -"

"Write down anything," I say to Shoshanna, or the creature wearing Shoshanna. "It can just be a mark. Just show me you can make one."

"Darling," she says, "anything can make a mark."

~~~

Anonymous comment: This is God's judgment on mankind, and everyone receives it according to their own spirit. I pity you godless fools. I have held my dead grandmother in my arms. I have seen my miscarried child grown up into a man, healthy and strong. I can't imagine what you've seen, only to convince yourself it's some kind of trick. 1 Corinthians 14:33

Anonymous response: Try reading Matthew 10:21 instead, you stupid bitch

Anonymous response: Who falls for copypasta in a mag lol

~~~

No one but you is real. No one but you is real. No one but you is real.

MR. SANDMAN / SOMEONE TO HOLD

Entered a door to another place, found myself in the Flesh Dream. Rays of light from an unclear source limning a sea of bodies. I tell you, no idea where one began and another ended — unsure if any of them really began or ended. You know the Flesh Dream. Fucked up. Nothing to gain by coming here but the base delights the flesh has to offer. Entered a door to another place, found myself back home.

-&-

No one told us when we took the Bargain that it'd mean dreams got all jumbled around. Used to be that everyone was only a little psychic, and now only some of us are. I guess I could be like one of those Extractive Regime dicks, exploiting it for a comfy paycheck, but as the oceans turn to acid and more and more of the country catches fire, I've stopped really seeing the point. Mine is just to keep the people I love alive, who can no longer dream for themselves.

Get a call on the phone and it's Querula. I tell her, "Querula, what's up?" And she says, "It's real bad. The dog — it's real bad, man. You gotta –"
"I gotta what? You're not making sense."
"You gotta find a way for things to get better," she says. "Dog's been talking and it says the worst things you can imagine. I think it's mad at us."
"No wonder it's mad at you," I say. "There's a lot of that all over. Domestication going sour, you know? It's not a great deal for everybody."
"Please, I know, I know, just — please, help. She's awake when I'm not. She's louder than I can be. Her words barely make sense, but they're cruel."

-&-

Entered a door to another place, found myself in the Darkness. Space between worlds, but not in the sense space is the space between worlds. You know the Darkness. It's not like there's nothing to do there, but it's nothing to do with me. I start concentrating on finding a door.

Get a call on the phone and it's Querula. I tell her, "I'm on it right now," and it's not her on the phone. Something with a mouth not meant to make human speech is yelling at me. "Is this Sunshine?" And it's probably Sunshine, and I'm like, "Sunshine, you stupid mutt, get out or shut up." But I don't think Sunshine realizes either is an option, and she's not really at an age anymore where she's capable of learning. I just hang up.

Entered a door to another place, found myself in the Poison World. There's nothing there but poison. Sucks to breathe, sucks to see, sucks to feel on your skin. Hate everything about it. I go to the supermarket and everyone I see's screaming poison at me. I look for the hollow spaces where the world of silence intersects with the world of flesh intersects with the world of — yes, this is it. In the dog food aisle. Perfect.

Entered a door to another place, found myself at Querula's place. It's a sty, you know, same as everybody's these days. Down in Southeast, behind the big statue of the mayor that killed a guy in the park they put the statue up in. Hands are always getting spraypainted red. You know Querula's place. I knock. She answers. I tell her, "Give her this." And she gets a look at the can of Alpo in my hand and says, "Is this gonna — you know — hurt her?" And I say, "everything's gonna hurt her eventually, but this is just gonna shut her up for a while."

After a while I hear commotion inside, and then vomiting.

-&-

Entered a door to another place, found myself in the Plane of Thought. Ugly, ugly place, you know, where all the dreams we had before the Bargain came to rot. Trees of tangled-up lovers and bushes of disintegrating teeth. You know the Plane of Thought. I come here to, well, think. Time passes differently here, and it's a nice bonus, with how hectic things can be, that generally it passes slower.

I see a unicorn limping around. I say, "Hey, man," and it says, "Who are you?" And I tell it my name. It says, "I don't know you." And I say, "Of fucking course, man. I've never had a dream about a unicorn in my life." And it shrugs, as best a unicorn can shrug. I let it walk on by and notice it's covered in horrible scruff and little wounds, like a Great Basin mustang. Hate to see it.

Entered a door to another place, found myself in the Power Structure. Now, if the Plane of Thought was too ugly for you, you gotta turn your eyes, because this one's where things go truly awful. Sort of a Picture of Dorian Grey situation to the waking world, all of our sins projected onto it in majuscule. You know the Power Structure. In there things tend to disconnect, flows tend to get turbulent, and it's easy to get lost. I like to spend a little time there to recharge every now and again, but I tend to dip out after a few seconds.

There's a mirror in there. I never fucking look at mirrors in other places, I'm no sucker. But it's whispering shit to me about how much power there is waiting for me, as a go-between, as a fixer, as this, that, and the other. I turn my back and plug my ears.

-&-

Entered a door to another place, found myself back home. Wife's telling me, "Honey, you got a package." I open it up and it's a pound of dead worms.
"Who bought me worms," I ask.
She says, "It was probably the crows."
And I say, "Son of a bitch, what do they want?"
And she says, "What do you mean?"
And I say, "Hon, they always pay in advance."
"So a pound of worms," she says, "would buy, what –"
I roll my eyes. "As much work as they consider worth a few solid days. Something big. They want something big. You wanna ask 'em?"
Her eyes roll back in her head, and she tells me.

Entered a door to another place, found myself in the Feather Dream. Clouds in the sky, a little breeze behind you, sun shining high. Perfect, but too perfect, know what I mean? You know the Feather Dream. I start bellowing. Whole thing pisses me off, and I'm losing my temper. I can't stand flying, and I can't stand those who fly for fun. Birds have an excuse, you know, nature did it to 'em, but I know a few people who took to the sky when the Bargain made it possible for them, and they always struck me as sellouts. I guess I'm trying to punish them, but the way the sound reverberates off the clouds, I'm only really punishing myself.

There's a voice in the back of my head: "Stop yelling, dick."
"Who's this?"
"I don't bother having a name."
"Oh, you're a crow. Shoulda guessed. What do you want?"
"I'm the one that paid you," it said. "You should already know –"
"Yeah, I know, I should have heard it in my dreams. I don't know how much you learned about me from the other guys, but I'm a little busy to have my own dreams. Just spit it out already."
"You know that dog you shut up?"
"Yeah?"
"We kind of liked it. Querula needed to be taken down a peg. You want to make it up to us somehow?"
"What do you have in mind," I ask. Fucking crows — circumspect little motherfuckers, flexing their perfect little brains. They make me ashamed to be human sometimes, and I know that's the idea and I try not to play into it."
"You were in the Flesh Dream, right?"
"What, did you smell it on me?"
"Don't be ridiculous," the voice said. "We know how these things start and end. You were in the Flesh Dream. We want you to go back. Get us pictures."
"Pictures? Why?"
"So we can gratify ourselves with them."
"Ugh. Whatever. Don't mail me any more worms."
"No promises."

-&-

Entered a door to another place, found myself in the Flesh Dream. I've got my camera out, and it's having a hard time picking up anything but static. Nothing works right in the other places. You know cell phones. All the faces are looking a lot like mine, but in other lives. Of course they are — I just got in here! I slap the side of my head, and it moans sensually.

I don't figure on giving these crows creepshots of my own body, so I go further down. People I know, I cover my eyes. People I don't, it's really whatever. Anyone can see any of this. I snap a few hundred photos, keep like ten that are any good, and then start focusing on a doorway. I have a crow to email.

-&-

At night, we make off towards dreamless sleep. My wife is next to me, her back turned on me. Doesn't seem mad, so it's whatever. I can't make heads or tails of the images I got, but I technically fulfilled my end of the deal, and maybe the crows will learn something. Who knows.

I look out the window and watch the stars winking in and out of sight on the Bargain's ineffable schedule, and concentrate on the gentle oscillation of a random one whose name I can't remember. In a few moments, I close my eyes and it's already morning.

COME THE DAY

She keeps castrating herself. Such friends as are left got those scissor emojis in their names, all solidarity-like, cupping their nimble and fertile groins. She's easy with a gun or with getting fucked in the ass. I don't know her like you know her and I'm scared for her. She keeps castrating herself, alcohol injections, burdizzo clamps, elastrators, you name it, she's waiting for it, waiting for whatever comes after it. She's sick of hanging brain, she's praying to God for that slack skin, but God abandoned us all forever ago.

I who was neutered by God listen to her prayers. It is my duty to listen to prayers like hers. I am loyal in the atoms that make up my bones. I do not think about doing other than my duty, I do not think about thinking about doing other than my duty, I do not — you get the idea. It is cold where I am all the time, where the souls that never found the warmth of the womb go. The others tell me that I am wasting my time on her, when so many pray like her. But I know she's losing her grip, because she keeps castrating herself.

I worry, I tell the one whose duty is to listen to her prayers for revenge. They're worried too. Wouldn't you be? She keeps castrating herself, real vengeful, angry at every drop of blood in her line. I want to come down to earth and give her some false revelation. I want to tell her in a voice like a solar flare that she was born in slime and she'll die in slime, and that's all there is to it, but that wouldn't be my duty so I can't do it. I listen, and I pass nothing along, and she keeps castrating herself, little by little, small molecules and large.

Some lover in a distant time told her that there was nothing inside her. Some lover in a distant time told her that she was a Trojan horse, bristling with enemies, not just a man but the source of men, or a stalking horse, she who goes before, she who keeps castrating herself. Some lover in a distant time told her she was brave and she broke her teeth on her throat, gnawing at her supple neck in pale imitation of a monster from a comic book. She thinks she lives her whole life in pale imitation.

I who was neutered by God listen to her prayers. It's all I can do, as it is my duty. They who have other gods pray to them and not all are silent. To the god of sterling silver, to the god of stainless steel, to the god of burning chrome, to the god of amphetamine salt, to the god of all that corrodes, to the god of all that plays at healing, to the god of all that plays at renewal. These gods speak their counsel and dance their dance and are here and are gone. But I who was neutered by God know that no other knows, that we are alone together in her secret delicacy.

Six thousand years ago the ones whose prayers I listened to found a way. Six thousand years from now the ones whose prayers I will listen to will find a way. Sometimes the same way, all lounging before sacrificial fires, all attending to beautiful dances in finery, all delicate surgery with a chisel hewn from fire-scorched bone. She doesn't know and can't know. She just keeps castrating herself.

I cannot be sorry. I cannot feel what you feel when you apologize. She keeps buying lidocaine and scalpels. She keeps sending away those lovers who remained in tears. She keeps praying, and she keeps castrating herself, and I'm here, and I only listen and I only know.

And darling I know come the day you'll curse the bitch that dragged you screaming into the same world as her.

"A TALKING HOUSE"

"I gotta be honest with you," Helen said to me, "I couldn't live the way you live."
"What do you mean?"
"All the paint on your walls is all scraped-off — generations of mildew — rats! I swear to god, not even mice, rats!"
"They're all like that," I said, guardedly. It wasn't my first roomshare and wouldn't be my last.
"My apartment," she said, "is nothing like that."
"So?", I said. "I could never get onto your lease. My score is shit. You know that."
"Who said we had to tell the landlord," she said.

"What are you suggesting?"
"As long as you're out more often than every two weeks, it'd be hunky-dory. You wouldn't even have to leave overnight, it just resets residency tickers at 3 PM. C'mon, babe. I'll even pay your rent for next month in case you get cold feet."

It was a lot, moving in with someone. But I got over it.

-&-

The beautiful people have beautiful houses. It's always been this way. I think two hundred years ago I would have been bowled over by an icehouse or a servants' quarters; fifty years ago by the smokeproofing. But mostly what made it beautiful was the lack of clutter. Helen and her primary could live the way they lived because they never had to worry, because they had enough money to solve any problem they were likely to encounter if they tightened their belt a little. No one had ever left an onion half-rotten on their pantry shelf because it might still be good, and they hadn't ever had to live somewhere without pantry shelves.

It felt a little like being eaten by something beautiful and powerful and huge, like being swallowed by a whale. It wasn't until the third day that I realized I hadn't seen so much as a housefly, an ant. These people know how to live, I kept saying to myself.

Helen worked and so did I. I made a meager paycheck grinding out little distinctions online. I liked to pretend I was a neural net sometimes, telling fantastic lies about Star Wars guys. A little entertainment for the good people. I made maybe $2000 in a good month, just enough to make rent; it felt like an embarassment when half of my friends made six figures and half of my friends made nothing. But at least for now, I didn't have to worry about rent. Life felt pretty sweet.

-&-

The important thing about living on someone's dime is, on some level, the song and dance. You gotta make believe they're saving your life and they gotta make believe it's something anyone would do. The power dynamic is intense, especially starting out. After a week or so we all got tired of the scared little cornered rat routine and things settled into an equilibrium. But you never quite forget; you don't quite forget in part so they can quite forget, because if they remember, hoo boy.

First thing I found to complain about — that's always a landmark — was the air conditioning. You know, I like it a little cold, nothing wrong with that. I was asking if we could lower the temperature a few degrees. She was fine with it, told me how to do it. So I said to the AC, "Set temperature to 69 degrees, please."
There was a second's pause. "You sure about that?"
"Yeah? Why wouldn't I be?"
"Oh, just a new little thing called the environment."
I rolled my eyes. "Rich coming from you. 69 degrees, and snappy about it."
"Aye aye, Cap'n," it said, dripping with sarcasm. "Next stop, the good port Meme Number Temperature."
"Jesus," I muttered.
"Anything wrong?" Helen poked her head into the room, and I told her, "Nah, not really."
Then I thought better of it.
"It's just — your AC ever get lippy with you?"
She cocked her head. "Nah, not really."
"Huh."

-&-

About two weeks in, I had to learn real quick to avoid the bidet because it was too hot. I tried messing with the settings but they wouldn't change for me. It wanted me to get Helen to change them, so I figured I'd just get wet wipes and not scald my hole every time I took a shit. On my way out for smokes, a voice from the door was telling me: "Oh, smoking again," and I was like, "Yeah, buddy!"

It wasn't a huge deal but I think the appliances were starting to hate me. I told Helen one day, casual as you like, "I think your appliances hate me. What's up with that?" And she said, "I dunno — protective of the tenants, maybe? Some kind of score thing? What is your score, anyway?" And I hung my head and told her maybe 70, and she just laughed, but then felt bad about laughing and gave me a big hug. "It's a scam anyway," she said. "You could have 200 and get hit by a bus, you know?"
"Yeah," I said, "but it'd be a better bus."
"C'mon. You know this. It's all to do with background, uh, environmental factors. You've read the same articles as me."
I wanted to say that I've lived those articles, but it didn't come out of my mouth. In the back of my eye I swore I could see her smartbulb smiling at me for holding my tongue. I kind of wanted to take a hammer to its tiny, smug little face, but I didn't.

-&-

I think Helen felt bad because she kept sharing articles about biometric score reform. It suited her a bit, but I knew she had that noblesse oblige already, I didn't need to hear all about her guilty conscience because she could rent on a lease instead of a roomshare.

I lit out when the time ran out, and I sat on a bench and smoked a cigarillo. Halfway through I could hear a coughing sound.
"Yeah?"
"Look, sir," said the bench, "you're gonna have to move on if you're not waiting for the bus. I don't think you'd like what happens if you don't."
"It's ma'am, actually," I said. I didn't actually give a shit all that much, everyone was like that because of how I looked and the mimetics were so off my radar that I couldn't even be dysphoric about it, but the bench started coughing out apologies and stopped giving me shit for a while. Everyone lately knew they had to audit them for Antisocial Behavior over that shit.

It stumbled out with, as I was down to the butt and still smoking, "You mean it, right, you're not just, um –"
I rolled my eyes. "If I was cis and, ugh, 'pulling tranny' to sleep on you, would it matter?"
"You have no idea how much coercion we're under not to allow that," it said.
"You must pull out your pressure hose sometimes and cry yourself to sleep with all that coercion."
"Fuck off," it said, but it let me finish my Swisher and I ambled away.

-&-

About a month in, the oven kept burning my food and it was getting me down. I told Helen, "Babe, can we get a microwave or something isn't linked to the smart system?"
"Why? I know the smart oven's a bit touchy lately, but I could get maintenance over to –"
"No," I said, "you don't get it. The oven keeps trying to get me to stick my head in there."
"Oh my god," she said, ashen. "Oh my god. Are you –"
"Look," I grumbled, "we can worry about this or we can solve it. Just get me a dumb microwave or toaster or something.
"I can't," she said. "Lease doesn't allow dumb — babe, you know how they are about score."
"Oh," I said.
"I wish I could," she said. "But, what, the appliances are trying to hurt you? That's not okay. We need to figure something out."

So she did, and for a while I just ate almonds and bread from their pantry. They were pretty good almonds, but the bread sucked ass, too expensive and not good enough for it. Eventually she came in with a heavy-duty E-Z-Bake, and put it down on the table in front of me in the living room, where I had just been thinking of lighting up a cigarette. I startled a little, feeling for a moment like she had read my thoughts, or the house had conveyed them to her, but I choked that down and faced her strange ebullience.
"Good news," she said.
"Yeah?"
"The lease allows toys," she said, "that aren't smart appliances. I was looking on a reddit about this and this is the best solution people have."
"A..." I laughed a little. "A little girl's oven."
"This thing pulls 300 watts," she said. "It's pretty hardcore."
"Does it have a normal heating element," I asked, knowing full well the answer.
"Well, it has an... incandescent... heating element, I guess?"
"A lightbulb," I said, cheerfully.
"A dumb lightbulb," she said.

I burst out laughing, and when she nervously joined in, I just went to the bathroom.

-&-

I was cooking in the kitchen, you know, toasting some of that shitty bread, and the speakers started up. It was that REM song that was about suicide or heroin or something, chopped and screwed. I think the house figured that I hated REM, and I tried to give it that impression every time it put it on because I didn't really care about REM either way, which everyone I talked to acted like was worse than actively hating REM for some stupid reason. I'll never understand people and their relationship with music. At least this house was just trying to use it to kill me.

I heard a strange buzzing, and worried a little about the voltage going to the E-Z-Bake. I had the momentary paranoid thought it was being throttled. Outside the narrow window to the kitchen, a horsefly had settled on the glass, bigger than I had ever seen in my life. The music stopped for a moment, and it dropped from the glass like a stone.

And then the music came back, a different song this time:

You're sharpening stones
Sh-sh-sh-sharpening stones

You're sharpening stones
(Bank of America)

Sh-sh-sh-sharpening stones
You're sharpening stones
By jingo, buy America

The bread came out of the oven near-slick with char, still palpably cold in the middle. Why these people freeze their bread I'd never understand. I slathered a layer of almond butter on the piece of toast and threw it at the ceiling, and it splattered stuck with a satsifying thud.

It's the little things, you know?

YOU NEEDED THE WORLD TO KNOW

We took a road trip to see the magician, the year of the divorce. She was all covered in gold flake, real El Dorado hours, and she wouldn't give us advice. "I'll rule you with a rod of iron," she said. "Come on, man," we said. "I'll scatter you like ashes in wind. You'll wish you were dust when I'm through."

So we got scarce. Made a little detour, little detour up to Chicagoland. We drove careful, they still got cops out there, the fucking sickos. Every once in a while we'd park our car and people would point and stare, gawking. Fucking hayseeds they got out there. We saw the rusted-up ruin of that sculpture everyone loved, helped a crowd throw it into the lake to propitiate Edmund Fitzgerald. You know, the shit you do when you're in Chicagoland. Everyone was casting down idols, it was the fashion in the year of the divorce.

Sun started flickering out of Des Moines. Someone forgot to pay the bill or there was a brownout. I got on the phone to my prefect, I told her, "You huge bitch, how are you?" And she laughed — we had that kind of relationship in the year of the divorce, whole thing brought the community together. Barely had to praise her glory & magnanimity much. I told that huge bitch, "You'll never believe it. Sun's flickering. We paid the bill this month?" And she said, "Yeah, there's a scheduled outage." "Well, shit," I said. "How long for?" And of course, the phone went out when the sun went cold.

Darkness swept across the face of the Earth. Smothering darkness. Huddled up in our car and turned up the heater. "Fuck me running," my wife said. She was freaking out, and I hate that, so I'd comb her straw hair, tidy up her little doll clothes. That lasted until the phone cut back in. "Barabbat, O Prefect?"
"Yeah," she said. "Where were you?"
"Sun went out, man. How long?"
"Rest of your life," she said.

I cursed and kindled a fire from all the money I had in my pocket, right there on the hood of our car. My wife started freaking out again and I told her it was the best option we had, best way we had to keep the batteries warm. Rolled out of the Des Moines suburbs going a few miles an hour, nothing but corn for months and months. It was barely even the year of the divorce when we got back.

I called the Magician, but she was still on her bullshit. News was all about some dickhead going to space. "Maybe he was going to fix up whatever was wrong with the sun," I said to my wife, and she said, "Of course not," and I smiled, and I said, "that was the joke, honey."

Eventually the sun came back on, but it had been so long it was off that I kind of got used to it, so I went to find some blackout curtains, some aluminum foil, air conditioner, dehumidifier, the whole works. I went down to the Amazon brick-and-mortar and told them what I needed. They told me it wasn't worth their lives and I drove away with everything. I was hot and fat and ready for the summer. I guess that's what season it was.

We were out so long, our cat had a long gray beard. We were out so long, the mice we hired her in the first place to kill that she was too lazy to go after had long gray beards. The mice had gotten organized, and we had thought to put a stop to that, but they kept putting up little inflatable humans to fuck with us, get us to change our ways. We gave up and kept leaving them fruit. When we were gone they figured out how to operate the fridge and charge us rent, and that last part was a killer because we didn't know how their economy worked. Next Friday came and we didn't have the rent, so out the door we went.

We rounded out the year of the divorce living with the people who used to love us before we were all the way alive. They kept trying to kill us but it coulda been worse. My wife kept getting shattered with a hammer by teens that wandered through the graveyard where the people who used to love her lived, so I kept putting her back together with electrum frit and firing her in a kiln of my grandmother's devising. She got a big boost in her general clout from the whole kintsugi thing, and it made me wish I had just used lead came. I didn't have the sort of pull it took to have that kind of wife. Made me anxious. I told her, "Baby, you're so cool, it makes me feel jealous." She told me she was jealous of my life, of my joints that worked, of my mouth that moved. That made me feel better. Marriage oughta be that way.

I called the magician again, and she apologized. I said, "You don't have to apologize." She said, "You don't understand. I'm not myself lately. I'm afraid of what comes out of my mouth. I'm afraid of who I am." I asked her, "You still got that gold on you?" And she said, "Yeah." And I said, "If you want, I'll forgive you, but I still don't know what for. You're covered in gold and I'm covered in shit." And the phone went silent for a few seconds and she told me to take a bath.

There kept being fireworks when I stepped in the bath, probably celebrating the end of the year of the divorce, so I stepped out nude and angry, and I told those fuckers to quiet down. Someone tried to fire a roman candle at me but missed and hit the gas station. It didn't do anything, it'd been empty as an enema bulb since the Gaetz administration, but everyone got real spooked, maybe some kind of religious thing. I don't keep up with Christianity but I know for a while they were worshipping extraction and maybe that used to be holy to them.

I asked them, "Hey, this weird for you?" And they were like, "Yeah, you're fucking naked, man," and I was like, "I was in a bath, genius," and they were like, "Oh, we had no idea," and I was like, "Maybe the fact I'm soaking wet gave it away," And they were like, "Oh, I'm sorry," And I was like, "You fucking should be, and you all better be out of here before I figure out if I have a gun," and they all started crying, knowing they deserved for me to kill them. But I didn't have a gun so nothing happened there.

I sat down on the couch and got used to my new life as a naked trans person. Felt good; felt expansive. No one would call me on the phone anymore and I was happier that way. Maybe they wouldn't even pick up the phone when I called. I shouted out to my wife, I shouted, "Wife, try giving me a call, see what it says," and she shouted back, after a minute, "It says you're naked," and I was like, "Yeah, I am," and she was like, "You know, bystander consent is important, the phone doesn't need to know what I know about you," and I was like, "Kiss my ass, sweetheart," and she just laughed and laughed and laughed.

I kept watching the sun, waiting for it to go out. But it didn't again for quite a while. That would have been a nice way to end the story, a little bit of continuity. Cycles repeating themselves. But life isn't like that, not usually. Usually life is short and stupid and nothing happens for a reason, and then it's over.

STO LAT

Crisis in the house again - fistfight or something like that, who can even tell anymore - so I legged it to the Safety Dome. I think the security guard recognized me but he's a fucking pig so he ran me through the wringer, gave me the full form to fill out.

Yes, I have been tested for any communicable disease within the last 2 weeks. No, I have no connections to antisocial persons. No, I have not consumed any drug besides marijuana or alcohol in the last 6 months. Yes, I am coming to the Safety Dome on a loved ones voucher. The voucher is with Eleanor Tenderfern. Yeah, give me that fucking look, buddy, you only act like her name is more made up than yours every time I come in here. Blah blah blah blah, yes no no no yes no no yes yes. Signature, April 11, 2155.

Whatever. After a couple hours I get through and Eleanor's all over me, like she usually is. Dissociative waves coming off her. Smells something awful. Says it's brain meds and leaves it at that. Whatever, if I'm getting into the Safety Dome overnight I don't really care if it smells like some gone-wrong bodily fluid. At least it doesn't smell like that new kind of cleaner they have in there, all pink and sticky.

"I'm glad you came here," she says. "It hasn't been a great time for me lately." She's already digging through her wallet. I'd stop her, but why? She pulls out a couple of thousands and presses them into my palm, and there's the whole song and dance where I tell her she's a lifesaver and she gets embarassed about how little she can really do for me, blah blah blah blah. I don't tell her that two thousand dollars isn't going to change my life, it won't even cover my end of rent, and I don't tell her that the only reasonable thing to spend that kind of windfall on would be drugs. It's whatever.

She takes me by a Panera Bread in the hills. The menu sucks inside the dome; there's a lot of ingredients they can't bring in for safety concerns. I get a bagel with some kind of cream cheese-a-like, and it tastes like nothing, and it's thirty dollars. Obscene; I wouldn't pay twenty for a Panera bagel outside the dome, let alone this one, which doesn't even have mock-Asiago or anything. But I almost scrape the floor when she pays for it.

The city lights make a sickly parody of aurora borealis on the roof of the dome, and she's trying to hold my hand. Sure, babe, you can hold my hand. "You wanna go back to mine?" "Well, it's not like I can sleep outside here," I say, and I start laughing so she knows she's allowed to laugh too. I don't even think it's true, they don't fuck with Safety Dome homeless like they fuck with homeless on the outside - easier to get away with shooting people when they're not somebody important's fuckup kid or brother or something. But I don't think she knows that, and I'm allowed to joke about the fucked-up class situation in this place.

Back at her place, ants - biggest ants I've ever seen in my fucking life, wide as a goddamn dollar coin. I think people rich enough to live in the Safety Dome just let their houses go completely to shit if their equals aren't around to notice. It's not my first rodeo, so I brush her sofa down with my arm and sit, and maybe something happens, maybe something doesn't, but mostly I'm just fucking tired and happy to sleep somewhere where nobody's screaming.

In the morning I grab her stamp out of her clutch and stamp my visitor card, just to be safe, and slip out before she wakes up. There's a Salvation Army santa outside - why not? It's not like they know from the weather what time of year it is. I roll my eyes until they land on a poster of Ted Wheeler's ancient visage with "DREAM" on it, and my eyeball starts ringing, and I flick my gaze to answer.

"Yeah?"
"Where'd you go?"
"Safety Dome. You want anything?"
"Jesus, no. You coming back home today?"
"I mean, I'm basically going to have to unless I want to move in with you-know-who."
There's a pause.
"So... that means..."
"That means yes, I'll be home today. Anything on fire?"
"Nah, the fight just turned into shouting and everyone slept it off."
"Stellar. I'll be a couple hours, I guess."

Couple of teens round the corner on foot and sneer at me. "Ay, faggot!" Emphasis on the second syllable. That's a new one. No cops? No cops. I puff up to my full 210cm, beat my chest like a gorrilla, and charge them, hooting and hollering. They scatter. Just in case, I take a couple corners and duck into a nearby Taco Time. The menu is more depressing than you can imagine, but nobody's pressuring me to buy anything. I post up in the back for a few minutes, then call Radio Cab.

—

Wake up the next morning to one of my wives telling the other some shit about what Mayor Wheeler's up to. I tell her, "You're only raising her blood pressure. We can't do anything about it." And the first wife says, "Yeah, but I figured she'd want to be informed," and I'm like, "why? What can we possibly do with any amount of information about those Eternity District pricks?" and she doesn't have an answer.

Later I'm loitering around the shaggy backyard, smoking on that shit that makes me invisible on the neighbors' smart cameras, coughing up a lung. Eleanor texts me, and I don't bother responding. Then she texts me again, something about the stem cell genesis program. Turns out she tested a sample - what? - and we're compatible, and her mom could pay for the whole Eternity District treatment for her, and she'd be happy to sponsor me for the donor program, blah blah blah blah, least she could do, blah blah blah blah.

I get my ducks in a row and I go to the clinic. They're taking samples, they're asking me all kinds of shitty questions. My assigned genetic sex at birth on record? Female, officer. My blood type? You tell me. Blah blah blah blah. It's all to make them feel useful, I don't think Eleanor would have gotten back to me if she hadn't heard something fairly final about compatibility. And to make them feel useful, I gotta sit there for an hour and a half while they shuffle paperwork.

A labcoat comes out. "Well, sir -"
"Ma'am -"
"- whatever, jt seems that the sponsor you listed is a match for your tissue sample, so -" - about fifteen minutes of absolutely smoothbrained doctor talk later, I've got a pamphlet telling me what I can and can't do, and they give me an injection. "You better come back on time," says one of the nurses, "if you don't want about five extra kidneys."

A couple of weeks pass, in the way weeks do. Hungry some of the time, scared some of the time, angry some of the time. I go back to the clinic and they put me under, and I wake up with a little pinhole scar on my chest, and they're telling me about maintenance.
"What organs was I providing her with?"
The doctor looks irritable. "We don't really share that information here -"
"Was it ovaries? You gotta tell me if it's ovaries."
"What? No I don't."
"What if she has a kid," I say, "and my genetic material gets all mixed up in there."
"I'm sure you two are adults and can work that out," he says, visibly on the edge of actual anger. "Now, if you don't mind, I have more of you people to attend to, so -"

I book it, and I check my bank account. Sure enough, I'm $5000 richer - and that will cover my end of rent, and then some. That much money for just growing a few organs and going through a little surgery? I could get used to that.

I pull out my burner and text my connect and that same night I'm rolling. Feels good after the shitty week I've had. I take it easy on the incisions, but everything feels cool and slick over my raw skin, and the world feels warm and inviting for once. As I'm sliding out of my jeans into my pajama bottoms to settle in for the evening, something sharp runs down my leg, and I feel warm blood running down my calf. I pull up my leg to have a look, and wedged in there is an ant's head the size of a baby's fingernail, gripping my flesh with its huge mandibles like its life depends on it.

I smile through the mild pain, and I tell the dying ant, "you and me both, pal."

PRETTY PICTURES OF HELL

I think someone kept rolling the dice on me. I think someone kept hitting the randomize button on me. I don't think I remember right.

I think when I was a few years old or a teenager or whenever something happened to my nerves. I think I got hit with a shock, got a live wire looped around my hand, maybe got beat with a column of batteries. I don't think I remember right. I think when my dad was 7 years old he got hit by lightning. I think this is a story about the way being part of polite society changes you.

I think someone kept randomizing my face, the muscles don't work in the right order like they used to. I think my skin is falling down. I think that's normal. I think my skin keeps wrinkling up and forming little spots. I think that's normal.

I think blood is part of who we are. I think our blood can think on its own. I think when your body gets overwhelmed with enough electricity it changes you forever. I think this is a story about power. I think power is a pattern of potentials like everything that was ever alive. I think when it hits you it resets all your potentials to the patterns it wants them to be. I think that's because it's way stronger than the chemical reactions that make your potentials on their own. I don't think I remember right. I think they eventually try to reassert themselves.

I think my skin is falling down. I think that's normal. I think when you get overtaken by electricity, it's a pattern like you are, and it overwrites you. I think when you come back some of the patterns in electricity stay with you. I think I'm probably more of whatever it is that lives in electrical wires that are in people's homes and places of work than I am a person.

I think when my dad was 7 years old he got hit by lightning. I think it left scars in his brain and maybe that's why he's like that, or maybe he died. I think I'm remembering that right. I think someone kept rolling the dice on me.

I think blood is a part of who we are. I think our blood can think on its own. I think someone kept hitting the randomize button on me. I think my skin keeps wrinkling up and I think I keep getting beaten. I think that's normal.

I think when you come back some of the patterns in electricity stay with you. I think this is a story about the kind of way of talking where you frame everything as an opinion. I think this is a story about the way being part of polite society changes you. I think someone kept hitting the randomize button on me. I think this is a story about power.

I think someone kept rolling the dice on me. I think that's normal. I think power is a pattern of potentials like everything that was ever alive. I think when it hits you it resets all your potentials to the patterns it wants them to be.

I think that's normal.

HITOMIGOKU #60

Got in a bad car crash and died on the operating table when they tried to replace my dick and balls with vinyl bullshit. They didn't even bother to sterilize it either. Drummed into the Next Phase.

God's there. He's like, "Alright, you're gonna beat ass." I'm like, "Is that all?" And he's like, "Fuck you." There's a guy there with a spiked collar instead of God, and I'm scared because I'm naked and he's got some kind of cutlass, real garden implement hours. But I think he's actually as scared as me.

Guy cuts my arm off. Don't need it. Get him in a chokehold and just crush his windpipe, I'm laughing and laughing and laughing. I look up and there's nothing up there, no stars and no light, but not darkness either. Gray void. Whatever. Bring on the next guy.

Next guy just shoots me in the head. I respawn and he shoots me in the head again. He's racking up points and it makes me mad. Every time I respawn I inch closer and closer to him and eventually I get close enough the CQC debuff activates on his gun. He's flubbing the inputs. I grab his gun with my new arm and I pistolwhip him. Crush his eyes, he's still moving. Crush his skull, he's still moving. Crush his ribcage, he stops moving.

Takes like 40 hits. I make a note of that.

He respawns but this time I have the gun and he doesn't, so I shoot him in the legs. The Unreal Tournament announcer is mumbling in a foreign language, reverbed as usual. I hate that guy. I'm hooting at the fake sky, telling God to bring on the next guy, I'm done with this one. I steal his clothes. I huddle by his face. "Hey, man, what's your deal," I say. He's just moaning in pain.

"Are we allowed to jack off in here," I ask him.
He's just moaning in pain.
"I'm going to try it. You stay right there."

I got this technique, it's unconventional. Feather touch of a cat burglar, I barely know I'm there. Takes me like 10 minutes, but before I can finish the guy apparently bleeds out because there's another guy there. He has armor on. I shoot him in the crotch. He falls over and starts saying shit like "God's blood" and "Fuck" and I tell him, "Armor's the old meta."

He's crying in there. I feel a little bad. I take his armor off and he looks real old in there. I feel even worse. "Did you get this old here or were you this old to begin with?"
He's barely conscious. He's not saying anything useful and I can barely understand him through his accent.
"Are we allowed to jack off in here? I figured you'd know better than the other guy. You're old so you've probably jacked off a lot. But I guess maybe not because you came from a time when people thought Jesus was real and hated it when you didn't nut in a lady."
He reaches his limp arm through his tabard to make a plaintive gesture and I shoot him straight through the arm because I have a great angle for that.

Unreal tournament announcer is back, still mumbling. I can't recognize anything he's saying at all. It makes me feel like I'm part of e-sports. A sniper with a Zastava M93 Black Arrow annihilates my torso over and over for thousands of years. I get a little sick of it but it's whatever.

I think what I learned after I died is that I don't actually like orgasm denial.

AN ETERNITY IN HELL

We got this beautiful arrangement, the human woman I live with and I. She keeps me clean, keeps me tidy, and in exchange she can wash her dirty dishes in my belly. I keep her company when she opens me up: "Looks like someone's been eating sloppy joes again." She says, "Yeah, I'm done deserving better." She keeps flushing medicine down me, and I get real clean and free of any disease. It's a perfect life.

After a while there's ants inside me. That's not ideal but it's how things are, it's coming up on spring. I tell Human Woman, "I got ants in me." She just flushes more medicine down me. I tell Human Woman, "You got ants all over your food." She says, "I'm eating something new now."

"Yeah? What are you eating these days?"

"I'm into bait."

"What kind of bait?"

"All kinds bait — sugar, night crawlers, little mysterious eggs that never get a chance to be anything else. I'm known to eat the odd sprat or chumfish. Garbage by any other name, you know. I'm looking to land a big one and I gotta work for my living. We can't all be a kitchen appliance," she says, and she's a little mad. And I tell her, "Fuck you for wanting my life," and she smiles and laughs. "You're right," she says.

Eventually the ants get into my eye, and I start screaming. Human Woman is eating from a can with the label torn off. She's big on screaming mouths, so she's inspecting mine. She's talking about my teeth while I scream. She's talking about how they don't look too great. She's pulling one or two out with her fingers. I could compare the human I live with to a piston, she was put on Earth to turn energy into work, all back and forth, back and forth. She eats a little more of the unidentifiable meat inside the can. She opens her mouth and I scream for her. That's the new arrangement, it feels like. That goes pretty good until the ants get into my optic nerve.

The exterminator, later even than that, winds up searching my naked crotch for some kind of genital, figuring out what he's working with. I tell him, "You're lucky you still have a job." He says, "Yeah, I'm the luckiest man in the world, and I love being able to kill tiny, defenseless creatures for money." I say, "You might have a sarcastic edge to you, but you should know the world's changing how it thinks about pests. Mostly we think they're good these days." He says, "I know, and it's eating me out of house and home, but I'm too busy to talk right now." I nod. "Yes, you're going to have a hard time finding anything down there." He says, "I don't care." I leave him to his monomania. I know how men can get. He starts hollering to Human Woman, he's saying, "I found the pussy, I found the pussy," and she says, "Oh shit, let me come see," and they're both standing over me, looking into my gut. I laugh at them both. "That's the aperture I use," I say, "to drain fluids."

"Close enough for government work," he says.

"Hardly," I say. "It's a stoma, first of all, and also a cavity in the torso, if it has a conceptual homologue it's a urethra, or an anus, or some other excretory duct."

"I work with pests," he says. "I don't know one hole from another. Besides, see that little ceramic divider in there?"

"So there's two holes. So what."

"Doesn't that suggest a pussy to you, on some level," he says, smugly.

"Is a nose a pussy," says Human Woman.

"Yes," he says. "They're the same thing. That's why sneezing is one eighth of an orgasm."

"That's a specious urban legend," I say.

"You're right, but with standards for exterminators slipping like they are, I can get away with that."

We all know this to be true. He force-feeds me borax soap until the inside of my mouth feels like a soda lake. Human Woman is watching the whole thing with perverse fascination. "Do you want to fuck the exterminator," I say, suddenly jealous. "Do you want to fuck him watching him do such things to your living sink."

"No," she says. "I simply enjoy witnessing cruel and unnecessary things."

"Sexually," I say.

"That feels limiting," says the exterminator. "I'm a human being. I'm not here to provide an erotic spectacle, I'm here to kill insects."

He's very insulted. To calm him down, I lift the silicone cap off of my groin. "Here, you were looking for this," I say, and my genitals are fully visible, and I even try to engorge them a little. But he's sniffling. He looks like he's about to cry. Human Woman gives him a big hug. It's very unattractive. I don't want to console him with sex anymore, I just want him to leave.

Ultimately, the exterminator moves in with us. He pays less of rent than his fair share, but we don't have to feed him because he knows what living things are worth eating. Off the clock he age regresses. He's a 25-year-old living in a 38-year-old's body, he explains. It would be inappropriate for us to interfere but the whole thing feels stupid and societally constructed. It's not like childhood where that age difference is tremendously meaningful. He essentially goes from one kind of man who's too old to go to college to another. His effrontery enrages me. When he comes to me with his dishes, I tell them they're too clean to bother with and close my gut. In time he comes to take on a feral aspect, eating straight off of the ground, neglecting his toilet training, saying shit like "I feel like I'm getting old" and "I don't feel like I was ever prepared to be an adult." He eats a worm out of Human Woman's bait fridge and I get up off the counter for the first time in years, bilge water sloshing everywhere, sores leaking down my backside, and tell him off. I tell him off good. I really read him the Riot Act. He tells me he forgot that worms could belong to anybody, which makes me feel stupid, because his whole business is pretending worms belong to nature and need to be destroyed. I give him a big hug, and he doesn't know how to react, keeps trying to bite my throat out.

For my sins I expect to spend an eternity in Hell, but when I die, years and years later, it's like a dreamless sleep, but less so, and I think that's how it is for everyone, or at least everyone like me. My last thoughts are of the human woman I lived with, and how beautiful our arrangement was. I loved being a hole with a meaningful purpose in the world. It's rare to find that, and I think I did a good job.

HOW WE FELL IN LOVE / DOWN BY THE SEA / COMES BACK TO ME / WITH THE SAND IN MY SHOES

Come on down to the computer, come on down and I get a message. RealHuman tells me it's from a guy called "Pussy Masterson" but his username is NORMAL_DEALZ_4U. He's telling me all about it.

Sez NORMAL, he sez, "You need an insurance plan. You need an insurance plan in case the lights go out. In case your subscriptions get fucked. We got all kinds plans. We cover you if they pull the shit you like. We cover you if they start uploading the shit you don't. We even cover you if they shift the ad burden to your account tier. We're talking pennies a month, and can you really put a price on peace of mind," and so on.

Something in my axons goes wrong and I start thinking it's a good idea, start thinking he's got a point. I recognize, recognize the divergence from consensus reality, you know. We're not as stupid as we seem when we're nuts. I start telling my doctor, RealHuman telling me his name is Dr. Harrison Crinkel but his username is DaMedzMan, I tell Dr. Medz all about it. His emojis are sympathetic. Lotta, lotta one hundreds, lotta the fucked up ear that means "Heard", you know. Sez Dr. Medz, he sez, "You've been paying your bills, by all rights the firmware ought to be on an auto-update schedule, and you're up to date on your US Department of Ransomware subscription, there's no reason it ought to do this. I don't say this lightly, biodickExtreme, but you or your loved ones might be entitled to compensation." I stop listening right there. He said the magic words!

I got an all day style strut, I got pepper in my heels, man, I'm living in the fantasy of litigation, I'm living in the private paradise God set aside for Americans. I'm going to sue! Lawyers, lawyers gonna shake my hand and call me "Ma'am" or whatever lawyers wanna call a body. I go to the law website, I tell 'em, tell 'em DaMedzMan sent me. I tell 'em there's something wrong with my brain. I'm telling 'em all about the machine elves, you know, telling 'em my crazy schemes. I'm telling them about living in a world where everything's right and just all the time. Gonna, gonna, gonna get a letter from some swinging dick in a three-piece suit. Gotta, gotta, gotta get a letter from some swinging dick in a three piece suit. Boy oh boy!

Some guy, he emails me. RealHuman tells me it's from an Umberto "Hump" Malware III, Esquire, but his username is LaWWW.Boi. Sez the Boi, sez he, "You might have a case. The letter I received seemed to have to do with an extended warranty — you've been getting calls for one of those? There's been a lot of that lately, and you may be entitled to compensation."

"Boy!", I email back. "I never thought of that. Why, all day, all day I get calls for an extended warranty. Extended warranty on a dick that broke down years ago. Extended warranty on the lung I learned to stop using three Presidents gone. Extended warranty on my car — and sir, I tell you, sir, you might know a body could afford to drive a car, but I sure don't — all this, day and night, and I got so used to it I figured it was like breathing, like being alive, the way people used to talk about the stars at night, like it was some signal of my destiny, in common with all living creatures. I could be entitled — entitled — to compensation for it? What kinda compensation?"

Sez Boi, he sez, "Easily a few hundred dollars. Let me connect you to our associates. Do you have your bank details handy," and I get a phone call, and on the other end is music, or something that used to be music.

"Is this about my compensation?"

I figure it is. I don't know how good I am at figuring anymore, what with my axons on the fritz, what with how good they never were. What with all I got to worry about, doctors and lawyers and candlestick makers. But I can figure that much easy.

But there's just more music. It's a sequel to that one song about the boardwalk, and it's gorgeous and all, but it's got half of the same melody as the original in it, and eventually I hang up. I email LaWWW.Boi back, and I ask, I ask him, "what the fuck was that?"

Sez Boi, he sez, "you like that? It's something new we're trying. Sort of, sort of psychic wage. We make you feel better with some sweet tunes from the past, everything's all hunky-dory. You don't have to worry about a retainer or anything. It's free."

I square up, email back, "If you're not paying for a product, you are the product, huh?"
"That's enough out of you. I'm suing you. Good day."

Blocked me, he did, the motherfucker blocked me. I know what comes next. For sure it's a blood feud, for sure I'm going to have to have this guy killed if I want a moment's peace. You know, funny part, funniest part is, I can still hear that music in the back of my head. I email my guy for murder and he doesn't get back to me. I almost forget about it when my dick starts working again.

"Hey," I shout. "Get in here, somebody! It's my dick!"

Guy outside of my bunk peers in. RealHuman tells me it's my roommate Orange Quash, but his username is Zyro. Zyro sez to me, he sez, "Your dick working? Really?"
"No shit, check it out," sez I, sporting.
"It's a miracle!"
"You're telling me. Now I can pay rent," sez I.

"Oh, don't worry about that," sez Zyro. "Landlord's locked out of the payment portal. Some kind of ransomware thing."
"You gotta pay the feds for that," sez I. "I told that moron a million times."
"Landlords," sez Zyro, "are these days mostly a sort of human-dog hybrid. They don't have a solid grasp on concepts like there being a government or needing to pay for things."
"I forgot that," sez I.
"Well, yeah. Your brain is all fucked."

"But my dick works."
"Your dick sure works," sez Zyro. "Does it do anything?"
"I figure I can use it to fuck basically any aperture within a couple of centimeters of its diameter. Or plug it up, if it's smaller."
"You coulda used it to plug stuff up before," sez Zyro.
"Sure, but now I can do it in style."
"Must be nice," Zyro sez. "Must be nice to have style. All I got is a fuckin' roommate yelling about their dick and blasting oldies about the beach."
"The fault," sez I, "is not in ourselves but in our stars."

"You just got me in the mood to listen to that song about the boardwalk, is all."
"The original?"
"Of course."
"Who has the time when you know how it ends?"

MANAK, THE POSTING DEMON

Q. What is Manak?

A. Manak is a being from another place that prefers to be understood as a demon.

Q. Who is Manak?

A. Manak wears many faces. Manak inhabits people to its own ends. It might

inhabit anyone you know. If you're reading this, it probably inhabits you.

Q. What does Manak want?

A. Some have described Manak as a muse, or as a companion. It is best understood

similarly to the Leanan Sidhe, a sort of vampire from Irish mythology.

The Leanan Sidhe would seduce artists, cohabit with them, and inspire them to

create great works in their chosen art. When the Leanan Sidhe left these artists

they would fall into despair and die, and she would collect their blood. For its

part Manak is not tremendously interested in blood. It is interested in the art

itself. It uses the triumph of mastery and the brooding misery of obscurity

equally, as bars to imprison its host in the cycle of creation. The form of art

Manak specializes in is any content which can be "posted". This includes writing

and art, usually digital, usually of a filesize small enough to be consumed

quickly, shared readily, and distributed widely. These posts can be commercial-

-ized, or they can be free. Manak is largely indifferent, but prefers them free.

Q. Does Manak seduce its hosts?

A. Yes. Generally not romantically or sexually, but both have been observed.

Q. Is it possible to avoid entanglement with Manak?

A. It is exceedingly difficult. The Internet is not designed to accomodate a

life where Manak is completely absent, but it is certainly possible to avoid it.

*

Q. Can Manak be avoided by disentangling oneself from "the clout game"?

A. No. The "clout game" is a weapon Manak uses, but not the only one. Fame is,

after all, older than the Internet, and Manak was first observed in the 1970s.

In fact, one of the people who can be seen as "safest" from Manak's grasp in

a certain sense are those in the thrall of the principalities of fame and glory.

To call this "going from the frying pan to the fire" is an understatement. These

principalities are so mighty and dreadful they remain better unnamed. Nations

have burned and millions have died to slake their horrible thirsts. Granted,

once the cycle of creation becomes secondary to accolades for someone, Manak's

ability to influence them seriously weakens; but this method of escape has

predictable and unenviable consequences for all aspects of human life.

Q. What are signs someone is inhabited by Manak?

A. Hosts of Manak strain against the limitations of the human body. In older

hosts, it is the weakness of the body that galls them; in younger hosts, usually

merely its slowness and tendency to fatigue. They judge themselves not by their

own standards but by those of their passenger. The brain, also, presents Manak

with both an opportunity and an obstacle, and hosts will tend to medicate it

freely. As with other demons of the arts, the posting demon encourages its hosts

to indulge in depressants, stimulants, psychedelics, and to waste drugs that

others would use on socializing chasing after artistic achievement. A noteworthy

host recently spent his first acid trip "posting through it", losing ungodly

sums of money doing so, when his famously beautiful spouse was *right there*.

In a sense, the greatest loss one suffers hosting Manak is the loss of connect-

-ion. The vast ability of art to communicate is squandered, becomes white noise.

*

SUMMONING MANAK

Against all reason, you have decided to invite Manak into your life in a

greater capacity than it already exists there. Don't say you weren't warned.

1. Inhabit a venue. This is the hardest part for many people. Once you intuit-

-ively understand the culture of a venue, such as any given social media site

or any forum that has survived the accretion of users into social media, you

will find your ability to post effectively improves. This is, ultimately, what

attracts Manak: grasping the culture and tweaking it to include yourself.

2. Achieve total focus. Certain forms of meditation can help with this, but

they encourage a relaxed and introspective form of focus that might not prove

ideal. Probably better to go with stimulants. Caffeine is only slightly more

expensive than salt, after all.

3. Production. This can be as simple as the "what's happening" box, as involved

as digital art that takes days to produce. But it is the step without which the

rest is impossible. If it strikes you as a chore, you're not in the right mind-

-set. It should feel like there's a fire in your brain that only creating some-

-thing outside of it can put out. Many people are gifted with such fire natur-

-ally, or cursed with it. But it can be kindled by anyone under the right (or

wrong) circumstances.

4. Posting. Post what you've created online.

*

5. Eternal return. Did the post not "land" to your satisfaction? You didn't in-
-habit the venue thoroughly enough, or weren't focused enough. If you seek the

influence of Manak inside you, you cannot fault the posts themselves. The posts

are everything, and you are nothing. You have to go back to the drawing board,

somehow. You have to start over. It's not enough. It's not enough. It's never

enough.

 If the world does turn

 And if London burns

 I'll be standing on the beach

 with my guitar

 I wanna be in a band

 when I get to Heaven

 Anyone can play guitar

 and they won't be a nothing anymore

 FK - PG

THE PLEASURE OF THE MODERN OFFICE

My first day on the job, my boss stopped me. "Looking forward to getting started?", he asked.
"Sure," I said. "I can't wait to provide whatever service we provide."
"Oh, we didn't cover that? We offer a sense of legacy to small donors in exchange for –"
"No, we did. I was just being, uh. I'm sorry."
"Well! That's good," he said, and went on to the next sucker.

I sat down at the phone in my cubicle, wrestled with my demons for a solid five minutes, and dialed in the first of an improbably long list of numbers. Dial tone, five rings, answering machine. Per office policy, I left no message. I checked the number off of the list. And in half an hour, I was on call to do another number. That was as little calling as I could get away with without being fired.

I got good at avoiding responsibility on my first day. I went to use the head and it wasn't locked but there was someone in there, or it felt like someone was in there. There was a smell like gasoline and a groaning sound all around me, and moisture beaded up on the walls. I went on doing my business and left. First person higher up on the food chain I saw, a nice older woman named Susan or something, I asked her, "Is there something wrong with the bathroom?"

She said, "There's nothing wrong with the bathroom."
And I said, "Okay, but there was a presence there. It smelled like gasoline. There was moisture in the walls."
"Oh, that's normal," she said. "That'll be the creature."
"Oh," I said. I had never used a bathroom with a creature in it before. "What kind of creature is it? What does it look like? Are we sure there isn't some kind of problem with the insulation or the plumbing?"
"It's incorporeal. Is this your first day on the job?"
"Yes, but I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"Every bathroom has its own quirks. I guess a lot of people come to this job freshman year, maybe never used a toilet besides the one at home before. But ours has the creature. You'll get used to it."

And I did.

After the fourth day, the boss was already threatening to wring my neck over my dogshit numbers. I had gotten ahold of maybe two or three old people, they were all scared of me because our scripted spiel made it seem like they owed us money, and I guess at that age the memory starts to wander. I wasn't entirely sure why our charitable foundation needed money so bad but at the time I didn't know about the generous incentives for charitable giving in the American tax system, so the whole thing was more or less a mystery to me.

Over time I came to see more strange beasts in the course of doing the job. There was a block of knives in the kitchen, and when I took one out, more out of curiosity than out of an intention to cut anything, blood welled out. I had gotten over asking questions and just stuck the knife back in the block, and the building rumbled. "Someone take out the blood knife?", said a voice from outside of the kitchen.
"Yeah, the newbie did," said someone in the kitchen I completely didn't notice. I turned to face them and look at them reproachfully, but they were just a mass of flesh vaguely shaped like a person. It didn't make sense to make any kind of look at them because they didn't seem to have eyes. "How did you see that," I said, sotto voce.
The lump of flesh flopped off of the chair and wriggled slowly to the doorway of the kitchen, leaving behind a trail of pale slime in its wake.
"Newbie, don't mess with the knife block," said the voice from outside, now close enough to resolve into the stentorian voice of my young, successful boss, with his many prospects.

The next day I brought my own scissors to work because my hair was getting in my eyes and it was annoying me. I cut my hair as best I was able and decided to dispose of the leftover hair in the one place I knew it wouldn't be traced back to me, the one place I knew they didn't have microphones or cameras secreted away: the phone. I knew the message about "recording your call for quality assurance purposes" was actually bullshit, that they just said it to give both the callers and the old people we were begging money off of a comforting sense that they were being watched and judged by unseen actors. I said to the first person I called, quiet as you like, "Listen - I'm with [REDACTED] and we're doing something different today. How do you feel about celebrities?"
"I love them," said the old person on the other end of the line. "They give my life meaning. When I die I hope to see all the celebrities we've lost in Heaven."
"That's just super, sir. Now, I have a limited time offer for you. Don't hang up! I have here an envelope - a manila envelope, a standard post office mailer - full of famous hair."
"What's the hair famous for? I don't like how easily things become famous these days."
"It worked hard," I said, "it paid its dues, and it became recognized for its talent."
"Oh, that's lovely. That's really lovely. How much do you want for it?"
I thought for a moment. Getting rid of the hair would theoretically be easiest if I offered it for free, but nobody would think it was worth anything. Each successive larger dollar amount seemed too small for the story I had sold this old man on. I didn't want to tell him that I had the most famous hair in the world for him and it was five dollars, he'd never have believed that. I told him, "One thousand dollars."
"Oh, that's a lot of money."
"Normally. Normally it's a thousand dollars. But we have to move assets for charitable purposes - you know, tax season, the government."
"I know how it is. The government is always sticking its nose where it doesn't belong."
"You know it. We're letting this famous hair go, which I should add is beautiful hair and comes with the manila envelope containing it free of charge, for five hundred dollars."
"Oh... I don't know... Oh, what the heck. It's not like my kids need that money."
"Smart choice," I said, and then addressed the envelope to the old man and sent it his way, and marked $500 on the big board next to my name.

The next day, my boss came by, and he's covered in ants. They looked like ants, anyway. I didn't really bother asking him about them, I figured he'd tell me if the ants were germane. "How'd you talk one of those people out of five hundred dollars?"
"I'm good at my job," I said.
"No you're not," he said. "What'd you do?"
"I sold him my hair."
"Did you make false claims about your hair?"
"Yes. I lied through my teeth. I told him it was famous."
"That's a good strategy. At a certain age, people stop being able to discern truth from fantasy. It's kinder to let them live in a world of delusion and take every cent you can from them before they die."
"That's very insightful, sir," I said.

"See, a lie would have spiced that up. You could have said, 'I never thought of it that way', or you could have told me you were falling in love with me. Both of those would have really made you look good to me. Instead you just offered me the equivalent of a limp handshake. Really, I'd have respected it more if that statement made you mad."
"I'll try to remember that," I said.
"See? There you go! Keep it up, and I might just not fire you." He slapped me on the back and the ants, as if they were one single mass, swarmed towards his arm in an attempt to climb onto my body. I waited a respectful time until he made distance and then swept the dead carapaces off of my shoulders.

It'd be an interesting story I was telling if it started escalating. I did try to sell my hair one more time, but nobody was interested. I could have tried to cut off other body parts, and I think some people did when they heard about my little stunt. People kept coming in mutilated or calling out with horrible infections from their own inexpert butchery of their bodies. They would claim that their body parts belonged to Elvis or Liberace or whoever, and they'd sell like hotcakes. I didn't really know any old-timey celebrities like that at the time, and I felt like it'd come off as insincere if I struck up a conversation about Elvis without knowing the first thing about him. When I saw that movie about Elvis years later, I'd kick myself, because there really was nothing to the man. He just made people horny and died of doing drugs. People still do that to this day, and I don't think he even came up with it.

I came into work one day and there was a deer's skin, still wet with its blood, in a pile on my office chair. I didn't want to sit down in the skin so I went to my boss. "You know someone skinned a deer in my chair?"
He frowned. "That was a test."
"What would passing have looked like?"
"Doing your damn job," said Susan or whoever. "Instead of leaving the skin deer where it is, just rotting in the sun."
"I haven't seen the sun in weeks," I said.
"It's a metaphor," explained my boss.
"I get the part about the sun, but what's the skin deer a metaphor for?"
"Imagine you had seen an entire deer there. Living, with its skin still attached. Bones, hooves, antlers. You name it. Would you have run to us for help, or would you have tried to make the most of the situation and turn it into a selling proposition?"
"Did you put the deer skin there?"
"No, but I'm making the most of it," said my boss.

"Okay, but who did?"
They both started laughing.

"God, you really don't get out much, do you?"

As I was packing up my things, I saw someone filing into my desk and trying to strike up the deer skin in conversation. "What's your major," he said, and the deer skin continued to rot. "Oh, cool. Mine's communications," he said. "I'm hoping to pivot to working in public relations at a major company when I graduate, but I'd also take an offer by a startup if the right thing came along."
I looked back over my shoulder and his eyes were like mirrors, metallic, specular. I could see my face distorted in them like I was looking at the back of a highly polished metal spoon. He was bleeding from a deep cut on his forehead, but it didn't seem to matter to him, so it wasn't exactly my business. "You the new guy?"
"Uh, yeah. I'm kind of in the middle of talking to my new friend here," he said.
"You gotta watch out for the bathroom," I said.
"What's wrong with the bathroom?"
"The creature," I said.
"Oh, it's got a creature. What does the creature look like?"
"It's incorporeal."
"Smells like something that doesn't belong in a bathroom?"
"Yeah, gasoline. How'd you know?"
He chuckled. "Clearly you never took a communications class."

VOIGHT-KAMPFF QUESTION #98

Woke up to my neighbor casting weird shadows, baying at the moon. Pissed a little out of my contorted snake dicks, whooping and hissing in pain from shapes. It's all fine and everything's good all the time.

Roommate wakes up and tells me, tells me I gotta drag the body out of the living room. Tells me that just because he broke in, tells me just because he tried to garotte me and died from my poison instead, tells me just because his death is just that's no excuse to just let him rot there. I pull off his balaclava and he's got a cat's mouth on a man's face. "I never noticed that," I say, and my roommate licks her eye.
"I never noticed he was a cat kind of guy."

"Right, listen," says my roommate, "ever since 9/11 Part 2 it's like this, dogman hybrids stalking the streets looking for fresh meat, cheetahmen, catmen, all kinds carnivora, they're out there."

"Yeah," I say.
"They're out there, and we have to burn their bodies when they try to kill us. It's the decent thing to do. The decent thing to do, you know? We can't be like them."
"We can't be like them," I agree.

Window bursts open and another guy is there. He's got a balaclava on. I'm cussing, I grab a knife, and he's throwing a knife between his hands, but on the third throw he misses and hits himself in the hand, and he sounds like a fucking puma when he screams. I just cut his neck. "Fuck you, man," I say.

"See," says my roommate, "we gotta get that shit out of here. They've got the scent of meat. These degenerate beasts don't care if it's one of their own. I know, I know, problematic language, but we use what we have — look. I promise you if you die I won't eat you."
"You're not," I say, "You're not one of those meat eater guys. I don't think that can happen to girls."
"I didn't say it was a big promise," she says, a little annoyed.

Ever since 9/11 Part Two the balaclava guys are everywhere. They run in little packs, they hunt solo sometimes. Just break into your house and after a while it becomes their house instead. I've had six roommates in a week. Last one was a meek little guy, zebra stripes up his neck, always scared when he sipped water out of the sink. Had to stand guard for him. Eventually a poison dart got him, and he flopped onto the floor and hurled all kinds of abuse at me.

"Sorry, man," I said.
"You fucking should be. God missed when he made you whatever you are. You deserve to be less than a worm."
"Sorry," I said again. He kept up like that until he died and I just left.

Anyway, me and the current housemate chopped up the two guys in the house and our neighbor perks up. He's salivating out of his dogmaw, panting real hard, and I guess that's normal for him now. "Please," he says.
"Please what," I say, pointedly not looking at the rolled up carpet in my hands, which I'm carrying by myself because I'm real strong.

"You know what, man. I can smell that blood. All I can think about is eating it."
"You drive a hard bargain," I say.
"Oh, it's one of those," he says. "Fine. I can give you one SexCoin right now. That's the currency that's used for sex. They don't make those anymore and I don't think I can use mine because it's not legal for me to suck dick with how my mouth is."
"Buddy, I can get my dick wet on my own. I don't need that."
"You gotta be safe," he says, "and be sure."
"Ain't that the truth," I say. "You got more than one SexCoin?"
"No," he says.
He rolls it down the street, size of a silver dollar, but thicker, with veins. I pick it up. Got some president or king or something on it, says it was minted in 1969. "Is that rare," I ask.
"They all say that," says my housemate, irritated.
"Why, housemate," I say, "I never took you for a woman of the world."
"Ever since they abolished the value-form that's all that's left. You can pay for anything with SexCoin, you just gotta split it into smaller values to represent sex, or pair them up to represent orgies. Everything in this world is still exactly the same and everyone who died in all the wars in history died for nothing."
"You're just telling me shit I already know," I say.
"Here's something you probably didn't know," she says. "SexCoin was predicted by Nostradamus."

I don't actually care so I ignore her for a while. Before long we're at the dump, because it turns out the guy we sold that body couldn't eat the whole thing anyway. Dump guy got alligator shoes, got alligator hands, got alligator teeth, but in a human mouth. He's looking a little uneasy. "Sorry I look uneasy, boys," he says, "It's my bitch of a wife."
"You have no call to talk about women that way," says my housemate, and alligator dump guy hangs his head. "You're right," he says, and he just starts crying. "I miss her so much," etc etc. Pretty soon we feel pretty awkward so we just leave the cut-up human corpses behind and when they notice start cutting across fences, through backyards. We survive for a little while when the snow settles in by crawling inside a dead dog's belly. "It was lucky this dog was so big," I tell my housemate.
She just scowls. "It wasn't lucky for the dog."
"That's true," I say.
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall. From the magnificent heights of the Roman principate to the whimpering death of the last Byzantine emperor is a straight line. And just so, this dog was dead from the day he was born. He didn't know it — ran around and played and had a good time — but there was never going to be a happy ending for such a large dog. Just got old and died, and now we're inside of its innards to keep warm, and isn't that a fine how-do-you-do."
"That's silly," I say. "There are still Romans. Rome is still around, and so is Istanbul. And so's this dog."
"Hey," shouts someone from inside the house. "Get out of my damn dog."
"Bury your damn dog proper," I say.
"Such insolence! I should call the police," they say.
"You fool!", shouts my housemate. "You fool!"
And they're there, like locusts, swirling around, great insect faces forming from buzzing clouds.

Turns out there's a sumptuary law against having a housemate when you're not rich enough to get your snake eyes covered. The cop-mind knew right away I wasn't rich enough to justify what I was doing with my life and I got sealed into a steel crate. Pretty soon my arms and legs hurt, and pretty soon I was getting sore, and pretty soon I was getting square, and all of a sudden there was daylight.

I was back at the dump. The alligator guy from before was there. "I gotta thank you," he says, "for giving me something to think about back there. I think I was really holding myself back with misogyny, letting cultural scripts live my life for me, you know? So I figured, least I could do is designate you as trash so you could live in the dump instead of the slammer."
"That was my housemate," I said. "They're the one that helped. They're gone now. I think they did it because they hated you. I simply covet your boots, and think nothing else of you."
He shifted from foot to foot awkwardly.
"They're good boots," I say, "and I want them."

The moon had changed shape in the sky. Now it was shaped like a crescent instead of a circle. I couldn't bend my legs anymore so I just sort of rolled around the dump, begging for scraps of food. I'd eat whatever they gave me. They tried feeding me garbage and I ate it. They tried feeding me paper and I'd eat it. Soon I was eating metal, and a lot of it. We're talking pounds of the stuff. My bones went back to normal, but better than normal. I kicked the shit out of those guys with my metal bones for feeding me their trash after I spent all that time in the pokey. "This is the welcome you give me," I say, "coming back to civilian life? You bastards! You absolute bastards!"

They didn't even apologize, they just kept running from my full metal fury. Everyone knew better than to call the cops again so they had to take matters into their own hands. They pushed the button on a big magnet and I screamed real loud and scrambled around up there like a turtle on its back. They were mocking me. "You're like a turtle on its back," one of them shouted.
"How," I shouted back.
"Turtle!" They laughed and pointed and shouted.
"How am I a turtle," I kept saying.
"Look at that bitch-ass turtle up there! Ha ha!"

I got tired of trying to reason with them. I wish I hadn't lost that SexCoin when I got arrested. I think turning my back on that was the only mistake I've ever made in my life. Up here on the giant magnet, it's really hard to get laid. People I have to assume are sexy walk down by there but they're like ants, just following chemtrails from one hole to another. I'm up too high all the time to generate a scent. The air's too thin up here.

All that being said, I love my life. I love all the people in it. Everyone treats me exactly the way I deserve, and humanity's better off since we all turned into horrible human-animal hybrids, and probably even since we replaced jobs with terrified flight from carnivores, and the cops became a sky full of locusts. Things are working out great, or at least exactly the way everyone has coming.  It's all fine and everything's good all the time. I bet you wish you could say the same.

AND HERE WE ARE WAVING BRENDA & EDDIE GOODBYE

I went home the first night I slept with someone else, and I told her, "You know, I think I'm done with the whole trying to be a man thing." I don't remember when he started changing pronouns. I don't even remember when he started hating me again. I don't remember when we reconciled. I just remember that night, looking up at the stars, sick to my stomach on nicotine. None of the hitting had happened yet, had gotten as reflexive as it was yet, none of the shouting, none of the bullshit that comes between couples, none of the compromises that come with a happy marriage, no divorce nor pregnancy scares. I guess part of being alive is, you go on living, even if nothing good happens to you.

###

I remember him holding up a knife to my face, you know, shouting, "I'm so fucking scared, Elle," like, "I'm so fucking scared of you all the fucking time," like, "Get the fuck away from me," but he's got his fucking knees on my fucking sternum and all I'm doing is raising my hands to show I'm not a threat. So what I did was, automatically as breathing, I hauled up and crack him in the face. Knife gashes my hand, but it wasn't bad except for that bleeding thing I got. "You fucking cut me," I shouted at him. He was on the ground from the force of the blow, and then I wasn't. I hit him again, open-hand. Started off with him frothing at the mouth, screaming about how I ruined his fucking life, about how everything was over and he was going to fucking kill me, and ended with us both winded, bleeding like stuck pigs from little holes or big. I got him to put down the knife, somehow. That part I honestly forget.

I started laughing. "What the fuck," he said. I was just remembering how my mom wouldn't let me hit my brothers back, always said I was too strong. I never really believed her, but you know, one punch, and he was on the floor. It was hardly fair. He was so much smaller than me. I'm the first woman in my line, the crazy part of me I used to leave buried thought, to put the fear of God in her man with her bare fists. "What's so fucking funny."
"You," I said. "What do you think you're doing here?"
"I'm scared," he said.
"I'd be fucking scared too," I said.

###

"Hit me," they said.
"I don't know if I'm comfortable with that, Perse," I said.
"Oh, come on. Just a slap."
I slapped them. "Damn, girl!" They laughed, so I laughed too. I slapped them again, a little more forcefully, a little less strictly playfully.
They shuddered. "You like that," I said. "You like that, you dirty bitch?"
"Y-yeah," they said.

###

Somewhere I got the idea that I had to protect people smaller than me. Fucked up thing, that. You never really draw a bead on what "smaller" means, or "protect". I figure I had to nourish them in some way, kinda maternal. Figured that before I stopped being the wrong gender to be maternal. I kept trying to encourage them to have a life, but it never really stuck, and all they wanted was to hang on me like a fucking remora. I was hardly one to talk about being a remora. Nobody does anything useful anymore or they get crushed into paste.

###

Sometimes she was mad at me. She was mad as Hell at me, and would scream at me when I had to climb into her car to get to the store. She figured I ruined her life by transitioning. She was mad we weren't fucking lately. I was fucking depressed was why, I kept telling her, and she didn't really buy it. She was mad that I'd have sex with other people and tell her about it, and she couldn't find anybody. I got mad about that, maybe it felt like this, maybe it felt like that, maybe it felt like the other. I was just sick of the screaming. I shrank a little, you know. I guess that's common. I guess that's a way things go down.

###

"It's not going to kill you," I said, "or make you a different person."
"It just... feels like it belongs to someone else," they said. "It feels like I'm stealing it."
"In this house we support gay theft," I said. I did a little shit-eating grin. They rolled their eyes. "You know what I mean, and please take this serious. So I want things –"
"Tell me what you want," I said.
"Elle, please, don't make me –"
"Tell me," I said, "what you want."
"I want a dick, okay?"
"Is that all?"
"No! Okay! I get it! The hormones work great for you and they might work great for me, but it's just such a big — I have trans man friends and they're very, uh, they don't, they don't think –"
"Sound like garbage friends," I said.
"They don't think it's okay for people to just waltz in and –"
"Where did you meet these friends," I said.
"Oh, you know, Reddit, I –"
"Why were you on the sort of subreddit," I said, ignoring the redditness of the conversation in the first place, "where that sort of conversation happens."
"You know, incidentally! You notice things! You –"
"Why do you think you're the sort of person inclined to notice these things."
"Fuck you!"
"You know I'm right."
"Fuck you!"

###

I had stuffed his panties in his mouth, and I had to dig around for a glass big enough to hold my piss. He made some kind of sound around the panties. "You fucking bitch," I said. "You don't get to talk around those!" He groaned. He liked when I treated him like that. It wasn't really my thing, honestly, but part of a marriage is doing things to make each other happy.

I come back and he's still in his half-disassembled visual kei outfit. "Oh my god," I told him, when he first put it together, "you look amazing," and now it was a few weeks later and I had ripped his leggings off - I'd have to replace those, of course, but part of marriage is doing things to make each other happy — and I had used them to tie a crude knot he could easily have escaped if he wanted to on the bed, and I tightened it until his hands got kinda red, and then loosened it a little, and he was calling me "Daddy," and I both loved and fucking hated that part, but it was whatever, and I was pulling his panties off of his already-engorged dick, touching his pussy and feeling his thick grool, and I was looking at them intently, and I was smelling them, and that part I liked — I'll admit it, you know, the whole thing was a turn-on, changing how he smelled, changing his body, giving him what he wanted instead of what he was supposed to want — and then I smiled my stupid domme smile and I told him he already fuckin' looked pregnant, but he sure would when I was done, and I was shoving them into his mouth like Cagney in that fucking movie, and I figured that wasn't enough, so I had to get a glass, and I had to piss in it in front of him, and here we were!

"Is my little faggot thirsty," I said.
He groaned assent through the dirty panties.
"I mean, I'll fucking say you are," I said, kneeling over him, pressing myself into him. "You feel thirsty. You always feel thirsty. You nasty fucking slut," I said, and I poured the piss over his face, aiming for the panties, and I fucked up his makeup, and I fucked up his eyes but not forever, and I made his knees shake for days, I made his pelvic girdle hurt for days, and when I finished or pretended to finish and alright I don't like that part but a part of marriage is whatever whatever I let him, I let him breathe, and he said, "Fuck," and I slapped his downy tit as hard as I could and I said, "How dare you fucking finish before me, you nasty little bitch," and based on the way I said it, he busted up laughing, and I busted up laughing too, and through all the compromise and weirdness I thought for a little while that I felt what it was like to be in love. I think now I was wrong but maybe I wasn't and there isn't much to it.

###

"I had this breakthrough," they said.
"Yeah?"
"I was, uh, you know, taking care of business, and you know, my mom came up –"
"That fucking chomo? Jesus!"
"No, I mean... sexually?"
"Oh," I said. "That's a horse of, uh, another color. Jesus, still?"
"I think I realized why that happens sometimes."

"Yeah?"
"It's because I was never pretty enough for her to fuck like she fucked my brothers."

###

"When I was a kid," I said, "our suburb was new, right? No cars there for a thousand, a million, a billion years. No reason to go there up until a few years before. Desert canyons that maybe had water in the last ice age or some shit. Everything ever lived there, none of it had seen a human being more than in passing. The birds did fine. Everything else we smashed to fucking pieces under our SUVs and minivans and shit."
"Oh," she said. "That's terrible."
I coughed. Wasn't good at smoking these yet. Wouldn't be for years. I told her, "My dad used to go out and look for the things we smashed but didn't kill all the way. You know how something dies, gets smashed by a car?"
"No," she lied, conversationally.
"It's slow. It's painful. And you can't take a fucking kangaroo rat, a fucking monitor lizard, in to the local vet and expect 'em to do anything but what he'd do with extra steps. He'd go out every morning, every morning, and he'd take the butcher knife with him. Like, that and gloves were just part of how he went out. Went out looking for something to put out of its misery."
There was a moment of silence.
"He ever have you, uh -"
"He showed me once. Happened just outside of our driveway. Some little fuckin' lizard or other, real dull brown color, bright red and yellow intestines spilled out of its gut. You got intestines outside of you, even without all the, uh, the contusions and shit, the broken bones and bleeding, you're not gonna do great. And that's in humans. Reptiles, half of the shit goes wrong with them we don't even know about."
"Right."
"He told me, Daniel, he told me, you can't let things suffer, right? And I told him, Right. He said, this poor lizard - he told me I didn't have to see what he was doing if he didn't want to, but he had to put it out of its misery. And I got brave for some damn reason. I watched, and he just hacked its head clean off."
"Damn. What kind of effect does that have on a kid?"
More coughing. "I think I'm done with this. You want it?"
"Sure," she said.
"Mostly," I said, "I wanted to be a veterinarian."

SILVERBIRD, SILVERBIRD, or THE GOOD LIFE

They told me in the beginning, when I was young, all swaddled in repurposed linen, they said, "Son, don't go fucking about with birds." They can fly, they told me. Sure, most of them, anyway – and don't fuck with the ones that don't, either. Chickens? They'll fuck you up. Geese? They'll ruin your life. Don't fuck with them. Don't let them into your heart. They're adept at dying young. It'd be like a tortoise befriending a child.

I went into the world fortified by this fear. As an adult I understand no reasonable person is as afraid of birds as I am. They don't look to the flapping of their wings, the stridulation of their song, the delicate trace of their droppings, and see horrible omens of disaster. Not since the Romans, maybe, or ever. I feel like I was an experiment instead of a person. I tried taking it up with the mother I got made out of coat hangers, and she didn't say anything. She fed me milk but it was so cold it upset my stomach. I took it up with the mother I got made out of felt, and she didn't say anything either.

Got dressed this morning, blinds shuttered, windows locked, doors locked. Hasn't been any fresh air in the house in years, so I'm always coughing up God knows what. Dust, pus, bits of lung. Who knows anymore. What I was wearing was a tattered old skirt, a shirt with Death on it, a flannel overshirt. Underwear of various sorts, haircut, pair of glasses. Jewelry, of course, that never comes off. I used to have more jewelry but it's all long since been stolen. I turned on the radio and listened for patterns in the static. I turned on Youtube and listened for patterns in the music. There actually isn't a worse music streaming service than Youtube on any level, it's neither good nor ethical. It's habit. Everything I fall into is a habit these days, or some kind of strange act.

I drank my morning coffee in two great gulps, like a jackass pounding out horrible chords on a piano he's seen in someone else's house before pretending it doesn't exist forever. People never tell you, "Look at my piano," but it might be sometimes acceptable to draw attention to a piano in a room. Read an article once, an article about a crazy man with a piano made of glass. I think it's genetically descended from the delusion aristocrats had where they were so fragile the slightest touch would kill them. The coffee was a rather generic breakfast blend, blonde, cream and syrup. I drank about 10 ounces of it.

Sometime in the last while I stopped reckoning days. I stopped paying attention to the way things are. I started living, I suppose, halfway in a world of fantasy. Or something worse than fantasy. There's a plague outside, all my friends are scared to death or losing their minds. I flatter myself to think I still have friends after all this time. It's Wednesday or Friday or some other day of the week and by some accounts that makes it the future and I'm sick to death of it. I'm still watching the sky for the movements of birds. Bluejay on a branch, smaller bluejay comes by. They're talking to each other. I covet their gift of tongues. One of them seems to be heavy with eggs. I covet that too. I wish I could lay eggs. I'd make a perfect nest for them and no son of a bitch would practice brood parasitism on me. If I caught wind of that shit there'd be hell to pay right away. I think the part that would get to me would be feeding them when they hatched. I'd probably contrive something out of wire hangers to vomit into their mouths instead of me, something made of felt to love them instead of me. You know me, I live free or die hard. Free as the grass grows. Free as a – well, you know.

I did alright for being an experiment. I did alright at being a person even though it was never really my metier. I had to give it up in the plague years. I turned as small as an acorn, hoping to survive the fire in the world around me, but it just kept burning and burning. When I was getting dressed this morning, I caught fire here and there. I don't remember what burned off. It didn't seem significant enough to mention.

All my life I've been opening my mouth and hoping food tumbles into it. I'm an optimist at heart. I came home the other day to one of my mothers and unwrapped the layers and layers of felt and there was nothing inside. This is why I never open anything: the disappointment is so severe it could kill you, severe like weather, severe like mothers, severe like disease. There should be a word for that. You can fly all over the world but you can never go home.

***

Got up in the morning, found that everyone who ever loved me was lowering me into a coffin. They were crying about how much they missed me. I didn't even know half of their names, maybe remembered a quarter of them at all. From the bottom of the coffin I cried out: "What gives you the right?" And they mumbled something about love and grief making its own excuses. I resented it for a platitude. I know the body keeps the score but they were keeping score on my body. I remember they were playing cards and I was the ante. Some cards got into the coffin and became grave goods. I figured that'd just confuse archaeologists, convince them I was a famous gambler, so I got out to get naked, confuse them even more.

"There's no call for that," said a voice from the crowd. "There's no call for that at all," said another, and I said, "All benevolent authorities recognize that the first and final right of a free person, invested with the inalienable dignity that underlies all other rights, is to abandon human dignity." Someone poured something into my mouth: wine? Smoke? I don't remember. They did it to make me stop talking like that. I got out of the coffin all the way and thanked them for the sip of unidentifiable fluid. Everyone who ever loved me came in for a big hug, thinking that was what I needed. It just felt strange, being held by so many bodies at once. I'm used to hugging one person, maybe two. It was too many people to hug me at the same time. I wished I had a weapon, but my opening move had been to undress completely, which left me with nothing but my bare hands. I just hugged them back and waited for it to be over.

"We're worried," one of them said, "which is why we put you in the coffin."
"That seems drastic," I said.
"We were worried you had already died."
"I don't think I did, and before you try to insist I'm dead, please remember there's already a whole fucking movie about that."
"I'm not aware," said the miscellaneous person who once loved me, "of any such movie."
"You've never heard of Dead Man?"
"No."
"I find that hard to believe."
"And I find it hard to believe," she said, "that there's a movie out there so completely on-the-nose, about a dead woman –"
"A dead man. A man who is told he is dead."
"– which is exactly the sort of gender bullshit we've all come to expect from you –"
"What gender bullshit –"
"A dead woman who's a man who's told he's dead, and the movie is called Dead Man – a sickening act of self-deprecation. And I suppose you're the star?"
"No. Johnny Depp. Man, what page did we end on?"
"Page? I thought we were talking about a movie."
"I'm not talking about the movie anymore. I want to know if you hate me."
"I'm here because I loved you."
"They can coexist."
"So, apparently, can life and death. Get back into the fucking coffin already."
I had to concede the point. I got back into the coffin, and they put a lid on it, but the lid was too small. They didn't really have a game plan for burying it because we were indoors, and it seemed impractical and like a violation of the lease to hack through the carpet, the floorboards, the foundation, and so on. A worry was voiced about subterranean gas lines. I stuck my legs and arms through the sides of the coffin and walked out in the confusion, tiny child-sized coffin lid rattling around at the bottom of my tomb/prison/garment.

Truth be told, my high-flying talk about nudity aside, I am glad to have left the situation with at least some of my dignity. At least that too-small coffin lid was keeping my genitals from flopping around, and if I had to crawl away on all fours at some point I wouldn't give away my position with a trail of urine like a common rat.

Outside the birds were singing. I knew I had maybe three or four chicken breasts in the freezer, waiting for God knows what. Surplus, probably, from an over-ambitious grocery trip or two. Something paranoid in me insisted on viewing the situation as an opportunity for revenge. Was I betrayed, in the end, by clinging to the illusion of control? They say that's always the way.

***

At the resurrection of the dead I got tired of assembling all the dry bones that no grave could keep down. Here and there I snuck a bit of dirt straight from the potter's field, like a worm – like a worm – like a worm, you know? Dirt in my mouth, chewing, eating. No big deal. I started noticing soil in my shit, and that felt pretty good. It felt good to give back to the community that took so much away from me. It felt good to be the bigger person, and I was bragging on the soil once, and nobody really got it. I must have said something like, "You motherfuckers! I'm a vein of the living earth!" But nobody understood. I think in all the confusion I forgot the little bones of the ear. It's possible nobody ever heard anything I said, or anything at all. Bluejays watching over my shoulder come Friday so out the door I went.

They were mislaying my packages at the warehouse on purpose Saturday morning. It wasn't a good day for it, one of the days God didn't create the universe. The first day, in fact, that God didn't create the universe. Or the anniversary of it or however that works. I called them up on the phone and I told them I had a bunch of ear bones I was waiting on. They told me to be more specific. I said that the only one I could remember was the malleus, and besides, I was already breaking the law. They told me there wasn't a law against buying bones that mattered anymore, and I told them not that law. I don't remember the rest of Saturday. I think if there's one thing we can take from Scripture it's that God is an asshole who forgets everything He can, that He does it on purpose, and that we're all very disappointed.

I was bemoaning the disappointment of being alive to one of the piles of dry bones that I took home with me. It rebuked me pretty bad, kept asking me how I knew being dead was so exciting. I told the talking skull that it was the ultimate adventure and it should be grateful to experience it. "I know," it said, "You're not the first to tell me that. I just get so disappointed myself." I said, "What gives you the right to complain?" And wouldn't you know it, more platitudes. I got so mad! I got so mad that I started straining and heaving right there, like I was about to take a shit, and a brick tumbled out of the legs I had punched through the coffin I lived in.

"You been stealing the soil from the potter's field," said the skull, and I said, "It wasn't soil before I got there."

The skull was impressed. Finally, a little appreciation! I could walk all year on my hands and knees for just a bit of respect, and here it was without having to do any more than shit out a perfect brick of fire-baked clay. I left the skull literally wherever and went into town to brag, but wouldn't you know it, it was still Saturday and everyone was busy, busy working, busy partying, busy driving aimlessly from place to place, busy driving circles in the parking lots of random buildings, busy sucking in air and breathing it back out, busy getting sick, busy dying. It was as busy in town as those children's books about the worm that drives around a little apple. I can tell you I don't drive in a little apple despite my wormlike traits. I drive around in a regular car made for human beings.

I tell you, the problem with the world today is that people can't appreciate the little things. They don't make a big deal about it when someone respects them. They barely eat dirt, unless they have a medical condition. Most people in the world today will never experience the miracle of excreting soil. Maybe that's why they had to hold a resurrection, give everyone a second chance. But they're just going to fuck it up. I think that's something God forgot too, how predictable the human animal is. Predictable like a storybook for children.

Somewhere along the line someone offered to pray for me. I just told them, "What's the point? Things are perfect as they are." That seemed to confuse them so I realized it was a situation where they were angry at me because their God told them to. It's a different and worse God they got. I told them because of their worse God they could pray for me as much as they wanted, and they got on their knees and started beseeching God to kill me, and they did it for the rest of their life. Unbelievable! I used to think religion was a sickness but I'm not so afraid of getting sick anymore.

When I got back to the resurrection I opened up my mail and there were a bunch of pink slips. I read them and they said I was fired. Well, fair's fair. I had stolen a bunch of dirt and dead people. At least after all this time someone could be bothered to remember.

***

I get in trouble, time to time, from my dumb ass diet where I eat whatever I want. Sometimes it's metal and I have to go to the hospital and they always say, "Don't eat metal." And I tell them, "Fuck off." And sometimes it's wasps and I have to go to the hospital and they always say, "Don't eat wasps." And I tell them, "Fuck off." I could go on all night, I could, about the trouble I get into. People are always deciding whether or not I get to eat or drink or what medicine I should put into my body. I think the root of the problem is the division between medicine and food, the division between what can be eaten and what cannot, divisions between people and objects, divisions in general. I could throw my whole life away seeking an ecstatic singularity between all things, and one of these days I might just.

Got in unusual trouble trying to eat the coffin I walk around in. Turns out it was a real thin coffin, barely more than cardboard. I remember the people responsible for the resurrection of the dead were upset, figured I was a corpse that didn't know how to be alive again yet. They kept on me with a gentle persuasion. There are rules, they insisted, and one of them was you were above and beyond an eternal cycle of consuming and being consumed. I asked them, "What puts me above that cycle, anyway?" They told me that was a very intelligent question for a corpse. I told them they were being evasive. I asked them if I could speak to the boss, and they just laughed. "You don't want that."

"Suppose I do."

"Last guy talked to The Boss, The Boss read him the riot act. He was a righteous man, and alive. You don't look too righteous and we're not about to vouch you're alive."
"It annoys me," I said, "It annoys me to no end, in fact, that everyone I know lately seems ready to give up the ghost on my living body. I have so much to give! I have so many fluids circulating, I have so much capacity to metabolize. There's activity in my brain like you wouldn't believe – and a brain! A working mammalian brain! If that's not a dead giveaway that I'm in it for the long haul, I don't know what is. And yet everyone insists I'm dead on the flimsiest pretext. What gives?"

"It's just a standard precaution we take with everyone," they said, and I ignored their feeble words. I could feel my ignorance making me strong. I could feel my my muscles swelling with not giving a shit, from the ripped girdle of my ears to the tips of my toes. Yes! Yes!! I knew all along that was the secret!!!

I started tearing shit in half with my hands. I started small, with a piece of paper. Then I ripped apart more and more paper, and then I tore a phone book in half. People assembled from miles around to see my strength. They'd put me in bonds, and I'd tear my way out of them. They'd break my legs with stones, and I'd stand firm and tall on my shattered bones by the strength of my bulging muscles alone. More and more of The Boss's lackeys tried saying shit to me, and I ignored them harder and harder. It was what they call a virtuous cycle; the stronger I got the more ignorant I got, and the more ignorant I got the stronger I got. In no time I could lift lead weights with my eyelids. In no time at all I was able to smash apart rocks with just my fingernails. In no time at all I had all the enemies a girl could ask for. They gave me a dumbbell to lift with my perfect hair, and I flexed the muscles in my scalp to pull it free from the ground.

But a single hair ripped free, and my strength left me. The show was over and everyone went home. I didn't even realize I had outgrown my coffin, I had forgotten to take it with me, and now I was naked as a plucked hen.

It was a thrilling adventure, being so strong, but I was glad it was over. I was so glad that I wept uncontrollably into my yoked core, giving myself chilblains from my cold salt tears. They got so bad I had to go to the doctor. I told them I had pernio from chewing and swallowing up the good life, from living to the fullest with all my strength, from watching my glory fade and living to tell the tale. They said, "Don't do that." And I said, "Fuck off."

I left the hospital and they took the gown they gave me back to give it to someone with normal problems. I went home naked as a jaybird and lay down in a bed that was now too small for me, and wept some more. Life is so beautiful that I wish I was never born!

***

After loitering just outside my sight all my life like a lover, after loitering in the margins of the text like an accuser, after watching them with eye muscles too strong still to know fear, the birds arrived like a summer fugue. My windows came open and thousands black wings wriggled through.

I asked them what they wanted. I tried to reason with them. I offered them the treasures I thought I knew in the world. I gave them the counsel of my wisdom. A beak worked its way into my mouth like a delicious morsel of bloody candy. I wondered if this was how it was going to end. A talon squirmed into my ear and tickled the drum, and I could hear the sea, I could hear the beating of my own heart, I could hear the beating of the hearts before me. "Whar giv y'th'right," I mumbled around a mouthful of corvid, but there was no answer but nearly-human cackling. The house was full of smoke and streaked in shit. I could hear music and I knew in another life I could have been someone that danced along. It all felt like platitudes, but I couldn't find the rage inside me anymore. My strong, strong body wouldn't let me.

I knew it was over. I wished I had been inanimate in the first place, a hollow contrivance to fool some poor idiot creature out of dying of neglect. I wished all the people who ever loved me were here to see me now, mightier than God, naked as a fairytale king, being suffocated by birds. I think they'd have something clever to say. God, I hope they do when they find me – or I'd like to hope, but I know that all death does is make the living go on living the way they are now, just harder, just more. If only I had something clever to say, and if only I could say it in the secret language of the birds!

"L'enfugh, ceh lethoutre," I mumbled, hoping if anyone would get to a crow it'd be Sartre. But it wasn't apposite enough to stop them doing what they were doing. One of them opened the freezer and saw the frost-bitten ziploc bags of chicken breasts. I thought, They'll kill me for sure, but that at least seemed to draw their attention away from me. Before I knew it I was lying on the floor, vomiting up feathers in slow heaves, and the crows were ferrying out the frozen chicken breast beakful by beakful. I like to think they gave them a decent burial, but I think they were just hungry.

At my feet was a crisp twenty-dollar bill. I burst into laughter. I would have taken a ten!

In the end, I became a conduit for the birds' greed. I woke up from my tiny bed every morning and ripped open a pack of meat. I stuck to chicken; it was cheap and they seemed to mind it least, conceptually. I hated that even among the birds there was no solidarity, but I suspect a part of me won't hate it forever.

Someday the plague might get me. Someday I might find religion and it might sicken me until I die. The birds might get sick of humoring me, might stop paying me to help them eat raw meat and scream. I might live in fear until the moment my heart stops, then stop living in anything at all. I might lay a perfect egg, and it might betray me when it hatches. So much of being alive exists in the subjunctive mood, and I wonder if even a tenth of it squeezed into the realis if we'd know what to do with ourselves. What's the alternative, though – that everything which might have happened already has? Better, if that were so, never to have drawn breath.

I got into the passenger seat of my car and drove, and the longer I drove the more I felt it looked like what I was – a worm – a worm – that I was a worm, that I was a worm driving around in a little apple. I looked into the driver's seat and a woman was there, and I told her, "Stop here. I'm thirsty."

I got out of the car and went into a convenience store and I told the wire-hanger clerk I wanted human milk, and I paid twenty dollars for the little sealed bottle of human milk, and I said, "Keep the change," even though I shouldn't have, and I took a big, big swig, and it was so cold it upset my stomach.
I got back into the car. I said, "Why are we even friends? Why are you helping me? What gives you the right?"
And she said, "Of course they were right when they told you that outliving someone you love is a tragedy. But it's not for the sake of avoiding tragedy that we love or we live."

And then we went home, and for all I know stayed there for the rest of time.

***

EROTICS

or "THE GOD OF STRENGTH"

The sea is a larder three-quarters the size of the Earth, full near to bursting with swimming and floating meat; beneath the meat that can be seen are only vast clouds of thinly-dispersed flesh. To view the ocean with other than ravenous hunger is the mark of a coward.

— Lechamp

HAPPY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

God appeared on the mountain, or someone who said he was God, and it seemed impolite to disregard whatever K-PAX alien visitor kick he was on, so we all just rolled with it.
He said: "I am a sword." We were all, sure.
He said: "I am a hole engorged with holy blood." We were all, okay.
He said: "Devour my flesh." So we did. He didn't even scream.

I think it was Mount Tabor but I'm not sure.

We saw lights in the sky the fifth month after the coup. Everyone saw them and nobody was even bothering to cover it up any more. Some of us who ate the God guy thought we really fucked up, but eventually it became so normal we stopped really saying anything about it. You'd just be walking down the street at night and there'd be something like a spotlight or a giant will-o-wisp making unnatural patterns through the air, and you'd puff on your vape and say nothing.

I think the coup taught us to say nothing about a lot of things. People kept getting disappeared. A bunch of guys got disappeared for playing the wrong video game at the wrong time. It was just part of the cost of doing business. Those of us who had eaten God felt nausea whenever someone disappeared, and it wasn't as often as you'd think, maybe a couple of times a day in the average city. I saw them disappear someone once, my friend Eleanor who was always a faggot. She was in the next room and something she was holding fell to the ground and you'd think I bolted out like I'd been shot but I sort of walked back calmly, like I heard a cat make a noise and wanted to see what it was doing, and the window was open and the thing she was holding was on the ground.

I tried to identify the object she was holding and I couldn't. Since the coup or since the God thing I think we've been losing our grasp on what things are. It might have been something for making tea or for grooming or an objet d'art. It felt important so I crushed it under my heel and didn't say anything to anyone. I walked out of the house and I left the door open so her dog had a fighting chance to live even though that meant people would rifle through her things and steal them, if she was even still alive. The dog was some kind of mutt.

After God came Jesus, tall guy, lots of muscles. He had a lot of shit to say but we were tired of listening and the God thing made us hungry. We all eyeballed him like we were in a cartoon about a shipwreck on a deserted island and we were hallucinating he was a turkey dinner. The lights paraded through the sky in a way that seemed to show off how important he was. He kept trying to get our attention, screaming, crying. He was speaking English, probably, but I didn't really care. I was done listening so long ago.

The coup was probably a good idea.

I wish people didn't have to disappear so often, it makes me sick to my stomach. I at least wish it didn't make me sick to my stomach. I vomit way more than I used to before everything that happened. Usually it's early in the morning or late at night and nothing comes up but clear water, all sour with my stomach acid in my mouth but thinned out by how much water I've been drinking. We could live in a better world but I think we all decided not to, or keep deciding not to. It's really none of my business.

Every once in a while I play Counterstrike but it's not the same since they changed the terrorists to aliens. The depiction of aliens is really hateful and everyone gets really into it, they boo and scream and audibly throw shit around their rooms whenever they see one. Even the people who play aliens usually try to shoot them, giving away their position. The game's too easy now, as long as you don't get assigned to be an alien. You never hear the "terrorists win" sound effect any more, they didn't have to even change that one.

Drugs are stronger than they used to be, and there's way more of them than they used to be. I think some of them used to just be research chemicals, and I think most of them used to be illegal. The cops don't really enforce the laws anymore, they just go downtown and shoot at people. We used to think it was the cops behind the disappearances but they're too busy doing shootings to do that. There's like 30 cops left in town and they keep going downtown and just unloading. Ever since the coup you can't look them in the eye or they'll try to kill you.

The miraculous thing about living in this world is that you're born into the legacy of these massive historical forces and all the evil shit anyone ever did to anyone else, and you have your own individual place in that legacy, and you might try to make things different, but eventually you choose not to. Then you get sick and old and die, or you get disappeared or you get shot by a cop or you play as aliens too often and people come to your house and kick your ass until you can't breathe. I grew up believing in a lot of things that don't exist anymore, and I know I believe in things that won't exist in the future, and probably if I get to be old and sick I'll believe in things that don't exist yet. I think if you can figure out a way to break the cycle of cruelty that we're all shackled to you can live forever and no one you know will ever vanish out the window or get eaten alive on Mount Tabor.

What was Jesus trying to tell us? It doesn't matter. It never could have mattered.

TERRORISTS WIN

THE MAIN DIPSHIT OF THE SHANG DYNASTY

It has been 9600 years since the beginning of time, and I am punching trees for wood. I have to walk a long way to get wood back to the storage pit when I'm finished but the player hasn't been paying attention to me in a while. I don't really care. It's not like I can use the wood for anything. It's for building chariot archers, or buildings that make chariot archers.

Elephants have been extinct for thousands of years. Lions have been extinct for thousands of years. We chopped the last of the edible mammals up into meat long ago. Only humans and birds survive, and horses for chariot archers. The player can target birds in the expansion pack but it's not as popular as the base game where the game is still being played.

All of my upgrades are for efficiency in gathering resources. Other villagers from other civilizations are more efficient but the meta does not favor playing as those because their chariot archers aren't as good. Some of the other villagers say there's girls in other civilizations but they're thinking of the sequel. Girls haven't been invented yet. None of us gets to wear a shirt.

2000 years go by in 16 minutes and 40 seconds realtime. That's about as long as the average one-on-one game lasts in high-level play, give or take half a millennium. I am in a 3v3 between evenly matched players, which takes longer. I have been alive for 8000 years. Some guys get to punch archery ranges into existence but they don't usually live as long. I wish I was a farmer because they don't have to pathfind as much and don't get shot by chariot archers as often.

I am a rough, weak, shirtless little bastard. I only cost 50 food. I only have 12 HP because of a raid 3500 years ago. My life is not valued by the player. I have no place in battle. I live in a hut with another shirtless guy and two chariot archers. The chariot archers don't bathe either and they stink of horseshit all the time. There are guys with noble blood in their veins who can be recruited from the Academy but the meta does not favor them because they're so slow. Chariot archers are fast enough to just phase through buildings if you use the right inputs, like ghosts.

I really wish I could punch the enemy chariot archers to death, but all I have is a big bone club, and it doesn't do a lot of damage. The player has selected me once or twice and I always say the same weird shit to him. I want him to send me to my death in battle but he just tells me to punch wood or build another storage pit. If I could I would be a chariot archer but that's not how it works. If I could I would be one of the horses on the chariot archer sprite but that's not how it works.

If I had a magic lamp the first thing I would wish for would be for girls to exist. The second thing I would wish for would be to be stuck outside of the map so I could be invincible and live forever. The third thing I would wish for would be to see a priest. I know they exist but I have never seen one. The meta doesn't favor them. I guess if I couldn't have any of those I would wish myself clean. If I could use the cheat codes I would use the victory code, or the defeat code.

I LOVE LIVING IN A CATHEDRAL AND HOW IT ISN'T A METAPHOR FOR ANYTHING

I don't have a lot of complaints about living in this cathedral. Every once in a while a cardinal will get in and try to do mass. I started off trying to kill them, but it's like they say - for every priest you see, there's a hundred you don't see. I got some ultrasonic traps but they'd just keep coming to the altar wincing in pain the whole time, and I couldn't stand to see that. Lately I just shoo them away with a broom.

The acoustics are terrible. Every time something slips out of my fingers, I can hear it ringing off the cold stone floor for as long as a minute. And the decor leaves something to be desired; I'm not allowed to change any of it or there goes my deposit. The first time I brought a boy over he just couldn't stop looking at the windows. I don't pay them any mind, but the one of Saint Ursula made him cry too much to keep going. After that I basically gave up on fucking.

The landlord came by one day, told me that they had to inspect the flying buttresses. Some kind of code thing, or archaeology thing, or whatever. He read me the riot act about drinking some of the wine they had laid up in the back office. I just had to sit there and take it instead of glassing him like he deserved. I wonder if he's the one who lets the priests in. I talked to him about changing the locks and he just laughed in my face.

I had a dream a couple months ago that Jesus came back, but he didn't count on there being so many people on Earth, so he arrived at the exact same place and time as a human child, and the human child just exploded like he swallowed a stick of dynamite. Jesus tried to play it off like he meant to do that, but he was clearly kind of fucked up by the telefrag, and people were super mad about it. I got a job doing PR for him on the basis of living in a cathedral, and I said to him, "why do you think you're too good to fuck up?" And Jesus stayed silent, like he always did when he didn't know what to say. In the dream I found out I could melt down the monstrances and shit and sell them, so I told that holier-than-thou asshole to go pound sand.

I hear there's a movement to get me to leave the cathedral. They keep coming by with letters, telling me to clear out. I always tell them to come back with a warrant. It's not like the government is going to tell my landlord he can't rent the place out, and I've paid rent on time for the most part. One time they broke in and started tolling the bells, and I called the city with a noise complaint, and the guy from the city showed up and just tore at his hair when he realized what the address was all along. "You gotta leave," he told the guys tolling the bells, "and come on, stop bothering us about this shit," he said to me. Whatever.

If I could change one thing about the cathedral it'd be to make it socially acceptable to live inside of architecture. Just because a bunch of kings probably came here to beg God not to kill them for jacking off doesn't make it any different from anywhere else. If I could change two things about the cathedral, the second would be finding someone who wanted to fuck here, but not because it's their fetish, just because they're nasty.

OPERATION EGGPLANT EMOJI

OBJECTIVES

- To identify the power structure behind God
                                OPERATION PRINCE EMOJI

- To lay siege to God
                                OPERATION FLEUR-DE-LIS EMOJI
                                OPERATION SWEAT EMOJI

- To grasp God's power by the root
                                OPERATION EYES EMOJI

- To travel to the place God hides

                                OPERATION LEFT ARROW CURVING RIGHT EMOJI

                                OPERATION SYRINGE EMOJI
                                OPERATION SWEATDROP EMOJI

- To physically castrate God
                                OPERATION SCISSORS EMOJI

- To devour God's penis

                                OPERATION DOWN ARROW EMOJI
                                OPERATION MEAT ON BONE EMOJI
                                OPERATION MOUTH EMOJI

- To make God watch

                                OPERATION FIRE EMOJI

                                OPERATION SOON ARROW EMOJI

ASSETS/LIABILITIES

BLUE FORCE

1. The Learned Elder

                                No information on "The Learned Elder" currently available
                                Current status of "The Learned Elder" unknown

2. The 11 Honest Men
                                Various backgrounds and motivations
                                Dovetailing competences: psiops, psyops, tactical, strategic, logistic
                                United in their mission
                                11 is a ceremonial number, actual strength estimated in the mid-30s

3. The Church
                                Various walks of life, colors, creeds, genders
                                Estimated strength 10,000
                                Indistinguishable from general populace
                                Easily trained and motivated to commit to any necessary mission role

4. The God-Fearers

                                Knowledgeable about what is to come
                                Eagerly awaiting the rebirth of the world
                                Support role, encouraging mission personnel towards success
                                Estimated strength close to 150,000

5. The Circumcised Of Heart

                                Bowed but unbroken by the grim corvee of centuries
                                They work for all
                                They feed all

RED FORCE

5. "King Mob"

                                To be washed clean and born anew

4. "Gropecunt Lane"

                                To be stripped of their influence and born anew

3. "The City"

                                To be separated from their corrupt power and born anew

2. "The Twelve Worthies"
                                To be made an example of and born anew

1. "The Fisherman"
                                To be dismantled to the root and born anew

TIMELINE - "OPERATION EYES EMOJI"

T-50:35                                OPERATION SWEAT EMOJI T:00:00

T-48:00:00                Disencumber any remaining encumbered OPFOR-2 "Twelve Worthies"
                                                Public disencumberance now mission-critical, execution of                                                                 Majic malediction now mission-critical

T-36:00:00                Go/no-go on mass dissociation

T-33:45:00                Limber Crown for countersignals/psiop

T-33:33:33                Air vdrop #11 starting with "00_DWYER_ORIGINAL.XV"
                                                Psiop at setting 25

T-33:32:45                Jam Crown in limbered position

T-33:30:00                Estimated time to final Crown team casualty

T-24:00:00                Go/no-go on physical ascent to OPFOR-1 "The Fisherman" HQ

T-23:30:00                BABEL/2 site initiate ascent
                                                Initiate exfiltration of BABEL/2 ground team
                                                Initiate exfiltration of full BABEL/3, BABEL/4 teams without                                                 ascent

T-23:20:00                Final BABEL/2 ground team member must self-exfiltrate by this time
                                                Execution of Majic malediction mission-critical

T-23:17:30                Final BABEL/3, BABEL/4 team members must self-exfiltrate by this time
                                                Execution of Majic malediction secondary objective

T-23:15:00                BABEL/2 expected full compromise by OPFOR

                                BABEL/3 expected full compromise by OPFOR

T-23:10:30                BABEL/4 expected full compromise by OPFOR

T-23:00:00                All charges detonate
                                                Crown psiop intensity 25 expected reached

T-22:02:33                Limber Strength for countersignals/psiop

T-22:00:00                OPFOR-4 "Gropecunt Lane" pivot to alternate channels expected

T-21:50:00                Air sigdrop #11 starting with "The Beast"
                                                Psiop strength to 25

T-21:49:12                Jam Strength in limbered position

T-21:48:00                Estimated time to final Strength team casualty

T-21:45:00                Refractory period, activity limited to flyswatting ops

T-15:00:00                Index general incredulity against known baseline (30.8)
                                                                Expected value 59.1 ± 2.0

T-11:17:27                Strength psiop intensity 25 expected reached

T-10:00:00                Index general incredulity against known baseline (30.8)
                                                                Expected value 81.0 ± 3.5

T-05:00:00                Index general incredulity against known baseline (30.8)
                                                                Expected value 95.0 ± 4.0

T:00:00:00                OPERATION EYES EMOJI - MASS DISSOCIATION EXPECTED

T:00:03:00                Scan darkweb for self-disencumbrance

                                If confirm, BABEL/2 team go for injection burn - UTOPIA SCENARIO

T:00:05:00                Final elements of OPFOR-4 "Gropecunt Lane" expected neutralized

T:00:08:30                Scan darkweb for self-disencumbrance
                                If confirm, BABEL/2 team go for injection burn - EREWHON SCENARIO

T:00:10:00                Dissociation between OPFOR-3 "The City" and OPFOR-5 "King Mob"                                                 expected complete

T:00:13:00                Scan darkweb for self-disencumbrance

                                                If no confirm, SCRUB IMMEDIATE - COCKAGNE SCENARIO

T:00:15:00                OPERATION LEFT ARROW CURVING RIGHT EMOJI T-01:00:00

EREWHON SCENARIO

                                JAH.                                Go for Erewhon scenario.
                                OSIRIS.                                Holy shit, we're finally doing it.
                                JAH.                                Go for Erewhon scenario. Amalek, do you copy?
                                BAAL.                                What's wrong?
                                OSIRIS.                                It's dark. Was it always so dark?
                                BAAL.                                Wait - Amalek is out? We can't reach Amalek?
                                JAH.                                I guess that means it worked.

                                OSIRIS.                                Guys, I think something's wrong. It's so dark in                                                                                 here.
                                JAH.                                That's normal. Wasn't it dark on your test ascent?
                                OSIRIS.                                No. It was bright.
                                JAH.                                Last thing you want is bright.
                                BAAL.                                                Dark is good news, man.
                                OSIRIS.                                Alright.

                                [SILENCE - 01:24]

                                OSIRIS.                                Negative on Fisherman.
                                BAAL.                                Where's He hiding?

                                [SILENCE - 00:33]

                                BAAL.                                Where are you, you son of a bitch?

                                [SILENCE - 00:10]

                                BAAL.                                You can't hide forever.

                                [SILENCE – 00:38]

                                BAAL.                                We got Amalek?
                                JAH.                                Amalek, do you copy?

                                [SILENCE – 00:15]

                                JAH.                                 Guess not.

                                [SILENCE – 00:10]

                                OSIRIS.                                I got a flash of light here.
                                JAH.                                Shit. Keep on it.
                                OSIRIS.                                I got a beast with a thousand horns.
                                BAAL.                                Bleeding?
                                OSIRIS.                                Oh yeah. Fountains.
                                JAH.                                Aces. Keep it up.

                                [SILENCE – 00:44]

                                OSIRIS.                                I got sirens.
                                JAH.                                What are they doing?
                                OSIRIS.                                No idea. Mouths open wide, tits fully out.
                                JAH.                                No more light?
                                OSIRIS.                                No - blackout dark here.
                                JAH.                                Ignore 'em. Eyes on the prize.
                                BAAL.                                How's the titties?
                                OSIRIS.                                Eh.

                                [LAUGHTER]

                                [SILENCE – 02:11]

                                JAH.                                We should have more light by now.
                                BAAL.                                What are you up to, big man?
                                OSIRIS.                                I think He's scared.
                                JAH.                                Good. Keep an eye out.

                                [SILENCE – 00:28]

                                BAAL.                                I got visual too. Lamb -
                                JAH.                                Smoke him.
                                BAAL.                                - lamb, neonate, soaked with fluid -
                                JAH.                                Smoke him, man.
                                BAAL.                                - glowing, golden, radiant lamb - oh man -
                                OSIRIS.                                Come on.
                                BAAL.                                - such a lamb as I've never seen -
                                OSIRIS.                                I got him too. Shit. The lamb -
                                BAAL.                                - looking at me -
                                OSIRIS.                                - the lamb -
                                JAH.                                Stay on target.
                                OSIRIS.                                - the lamb, the lamb, the lamb -
                                JAH.                                One of you snap the fuck out of it or I'll -
                                BAAL.                                - the lamb.
                                JAH.                                I'm coming over.
                                OSIRIS.                                The lamb, the lamb, the lamb, the -

                                [THUD TO PORT]

                                OSIRIS.                                Thanks, man.

                                [VOMITING NOISES]

                                JAH.                                If we were making it back alive I'd make you clean                                                                 that up.

                                [LAUGHTER]

                                BAAL.                                Shit.
                                OSIRIS.                                You said it.
                                JAH.                                We got any more light?
                                OSIRIS.                                No.
                                BAAL.                                Confirmed, no light.

                                [SILENCE – 5:11]

                                JAH.                                Anything yet?
                                OSIRIS.                                Dark as shit here.

                                [SILENCE – 2:58]

                                BAAL.                                I got visual.
                                JAH.                                Light?
                                BAAL.                                No light. Heat. Warmth. A soft and steady beat -
                                JAH.                                False return to womb. Nothing to worry about.
                                BAAL.                                Oh, right.

                                [SILENCE – 0:33]

                                BAAL.                                 Why can't I remember her face?

                                [SILENCE – 6:58]

                                JAH.                                Oh shit!
                                OSIRIS.                                Light! Bright -
                                BAAL.                                Oh – now?
                                JAH.                                Now, yeah, now!
                                BAAL.                                Gird up your loins  -

                                [HEAVY THUD TO STARBOARD]

                                BAAL.                                - and face us like a man!

                                [HEAVY THUD TO PORT]

                                JAH.                                Lock me on!

                                [GRINDING]

                                [HISSING]

                                OSIRIS.                                Grapple lock!
                                JAH.                                Fucking - tell me when I have main lock -
                                BAAL.                                He's so fast, so bright -
                                JAH.                                Lock me on!
                                OSIRIS.                                Grapple lock, acknowledge -
                                JAH.                                Acknowledge grapple lock!
                                BAAL.                                Almost -

                                [HEAVY THUD DEAD AHEAD]

                                JAH.                                Oh, Hell.
                                OSIRIS.                                I'm seeing it too. Lakes of fire -

                                [05:38 FOR MAJIC EYES ONLY - CONSULT "GENDER NEUTRAL POLICE EMOJI"]

                                OSIRIS:                                [garbled, reconstructed as Hailing Sign of                                                                                 Distress]
                                JAH.                                [unintelligible] and de Molay's ghost -
                                OSIRIS:                                [garbled] your way, I'll [garbled]
                                                                [CROSSTALK, UNINTELLIGIBLE FOR 00:00:18]
                                BAAL.                                - Ad-nai ehad -

                                [NO FURTHER INTELLIGIBLE SOUND]

I KNOW THE TRUE NAME OF THE LAW

Sometime before the plague I had a bad dream and had to go to the wizards' colony. They practiced all kinds of subtle arts in the wizards' colony back then, and as much as I wasn't allowed to leave, I wanted to be there because I knew they'd be able to pry the dreams out of my head.

I told the first one I saw, "I had a bad dream."
He said, "How bad we talking?"
And I said, "About as bad as they get. Maggots gnawing on my fleshless skull. All the names of all the ones who betrayed me flashing before my eyes."
He just laughed and laughed. "So welcome to the club. What else should I say?"
I felt insulted. "You don't have a right to talk to me that way."
The wizard just stroked his long beard. "You gotta go talk to Iron Whiskers. They call him that on account of he turned his whiskers to iron forever ago. They're rusty now. Looks like he shit himself and it got all over his face. Stinks like blood. Can't miss him."

So I went to find Iron Whiskers. I found him pretty fast. He was sitting on his porch, smoking a cigarette, mutilating some animal or another. I think it was dead, it wasn't moving any. I said, "You Iron Whiskers?"
He said, "Who wants to know?"
I said, "I'm new here. I just want to know if you're Iron Whiskers."
He didn't say anything.
I told him, "It's pretty obvious you are. Your whiskers are all made of rust, man. Everyone calls you that here for a reason."
He said, "I'm allowed to decide who knows me."
I said, "Well, get to know me and decide if that includes me."
He threw a knife at me, slow and lazy. I dodged out of its way, and it carved through the building across the street like butter. Three handsome men poured out and started swearing at us both, so we ran away.

"Wild," I said. "I didn't expect you to book it out of your house."
"Everywhere's my house," said Iron Whiskers. "I'm allowed to live wherever I want."
"That doesn't check out," I said. "There are property rights to worry about, even here."
"You really are a pill," said Iron Whiskers. "I kind of wish I had killed you with that knife."
"Well, you didn't."
"I didn't," he said, frowning. "That doesn't make you my responsibility."
"I just want to know," I said, "how to get rid of these bad dreams I've been having."
He said, "How bad we talking?"
And I said, "Right. It starts out, I break my leg. I'm dragging my dead leg down the road, and I get hit by a car. I'm lying limp on the road and another car comes by, real slow. I can see it coming from across the horizon. It's going like ten miles per hour, but it's not slowing down any just because I'm there. The driver looks me dead in the eye. The driver's someone I used to love on the outside. Who it is doesn't matter. They run me over. I'm more or less paste now -"
Iron Whiskers scratched his beard, and I started coughing on the rust. He noticed and chuckled, scratched more and more. Pretty soon I couldn't breathe.

"This isn't right," I choked out. "Please stop."
Iron Whiskers stopped and looked me in the eye. "You came here to tell me about your dreams? All the way here? Me, wretch that I am?"
"Yes," I said.
"And you came here asking, "Are you Iron Whiskers?""
"I don't sound like that," I said. "You're making me sound stupid."
"And you come here saying, "I'm new here. I just want to know if you're Iron Whiskers."
"I guess I said that," I said, "but not in that way."
"Listen," he said, "I came here thirty years ago. I came here to fuck. I got bored of fucking. You're tedious. Go find Dog Man and bother him. I don't have anything left to discuss with anyone, let alone with you."
"How will I know him?"
"For fuck's sake, ask around the dogs. Do I have to do everything for you? Do I have to dress you? Tie your shoes? Do I have to wipe your ass? Do I have to pump your stupid little heart with my frail old hands? Draw breath into your lungs?"
"No, I -"
"I wasn't finished. Do I have to feed you? Make sure you drink? Do I owe you the milk of human kindness? Do I look like I have milk to you? Do I have to make your cells reproduce so you don't die? Do I have to stitch together your blood vessels when they break? Do I have to turn dead cells into pus in your body?"

After a while I just tuned him out. He was following me around berating me for longer than I could keep straight. It made it really hard to have a conversation with anyone else, and the dogs weren't in a talking mood. When I gave up, one of them walked up to me.
"Hey," said the mutt.
"Oh, you can talk," I said, amazed.
"Yes," it said.
"You're very talented," I said.
"You are too," it said. "Why are you bothering the other dogs?"
"Are you the Dog Man?"
"People call me that all the time," it said ruefully, "on account of I'm always walking around like a dog, acting like a dog, looking like a dog. But there's more to me than that."
"Do you know how to make Iron Whiskers stop?"
"Never mind that," it said.
" - do I have to fire your neurons in response to stimuli so you have sentience? Do I owe you that?", said Iron Whiskers.
"How can I not?" I said.
"Never mind that either," said Dog Man.
"What am I supposed to mind?"
"Your dreams," said Dog Man. "I hear you've had some bad ones."
I said, "How bad we talking?"
Dog Man looked me up and down. "I hear you're falling in 'em, faster and faster, faster than you think is possible and then faster than that. And you're used to them stopping when you hit the ground but it doesn't. I hear you hit the ground and shatter like a hamhock someone threw off a skyscraper. I hear people are stepping on your blood and guts like you're not even there."
I frowned. "Yeah, that sounds pretty bad."
"I'm real worried about you," said Dog Man. "How are we going to fix this?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm tired of you people. I'm talking a damn dog, and that's the farthest I've gotten since I got here."
"You are a pill," said Dog Man, and then bit me.

After I got vaccinated against Dog Man's diseases at the free clinic, the doctor had a twinkle in his eye, and I was like, "You - you're not a wizard, are you?"
The doctor laughed. "What, are you gonna tell me about your dreams? You freaks are all the fucking same."
I blushed. Somewhere outside of the tent, Iron Whiskers was berating me, his voice weary and dry. Asking me rhetorical questions, like he had all fucking day. After I sucked off the doctor I jumped the colony walls in his clothes. The authorities were after me for a while, but I buckled down and stopped dreaming for a while, and they let up. That's all I remember from before the plague.

GOD CHOSE VIOLENCE IN EVERY PART OF HIS DESIGN

ALL NIGHTBITCH KNOWS IS HOW TO HATE A MOTHERFUCKER. SHE LEARNED IT AT WHATEVER SHE SUCKLED AT INSTEAD OF A TITTY. GNASHED BY HUGE PACKS OF DOG-WOLF HYBRIDS EVERY SINGLE DAY IN A SPECIAL BOOT CAMP TO BUILD UP MITHRIDATIC IMMUNITY TO CRUSHING, PIERCING, GRINDING WEAPONS. HER INSTRUCTOR AT THE BOOT CAMP WAS A WOLF-DOG HYBRID. SHE LEARNED THEIR LANGUAGE AND MASTERED THEIR COMBAT STYLE INSTANTLY. SHE HAS NO FURTHER USE FOR ANYTHING ON FOUR LEGS.

HER WEAK POINTS ARE ALL COVERED IN THE LATEST ARMOR. DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT. PRISMATIC BLADES RING HER MAJOR ARTERIES WITH EXTRA FALSIE BLADES FOR ARTERIES SHE DOESN'T NEED ANYMORE. YOU BETTER BELIEVE HER DICK IS A DEADLY WEAPON. SPECIAL MODIFICATIONS ALLOW HER TO BIOGENERATE SABOT AND FLECHETTE CUM, EASILY CAPABLE OF DEFEATING UP TO 5CM THICK CERAMIC PLATE ARMOR. IT GIVES HER CONFIDENCE BUT SHE CAN NEVER KNOW A LOVER'S TOUCH. NO SWEAT TO NIGHTBITCH.

NIGHTBITCH IS DEPLOYED IN THE DAYTONA FLESH RIPPING ZONE, HOME OF THE DAYTONA FLESH RIPPERS, HOME OF THE LIVING SHAFTS OF GOD'S RANCID LIGHT, HOME OF THE ECTOPRESENCE, HOME OF THE DAYTONA VIRAL SENTIENCE. WALMART AFTER WALMART AFTER WALMART, EACH EQUIPPED WITH TWO FULLY FUNCTIONAL REANIMATOR CENOTAPHS. SHE STOPS FOR A CIGARETTE AND SLAPS FRESH FLESH ONTO HER BONES TO REPLACE THE PARTS FLYING KNIVES OR THE FLESH RIPPERS PEELED OFF.

NIGHTBITCH: TELL ME ABOUT THE LIGHT GUYS, CONTROL
CONTROL: NO GOOD... PRESIDENT SAYS WE CAN'T TORTURE 'EM
NIGHTBITCH: FUCKING PUSSIES
CONTROL: PRESIDENT SAYS IT'S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. SAYS ALL THEY FEEL IS PLEASURE ALL THE TIME
NIGHTBITCH: FUCKING PUSSIES

TIME DILATION SETS IN AND PERMANIGHT GETS DARKER... SOMETHING IS STIRRING OVER IN SPORTING GOODS ALPHA, DEEP IN WALMART 7. NIGHTBITCH STUBS OUT HER CIGARETTE ON HER BIONIC TONGUE. INTEGRATED RAZORS CUT THE ASHES INTO THEIR COMPONENT MOLECULES TO AID DIGESTION.

NIGHTBITCH: CONTROL, I GOT CONTACT IN SPORTING GOODS ALPHA
CONTROL: YOU'RE CLEARED TO ENGAGE
NIGHTBITCH: CAN I KNOCK THAT SUMBITCH DOWN
CONTROL: NEGATIVE, NIGHTBITCH. YOU KNOW YOU GOTTA LEAVE SPORTING GOODS ALONE. TRY LURING IT INTO HOUSEWARES
NIGHTBITCH: FUCK YOU. YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING FUN
CONTROL: PLEASE DON'T TELL ANYONE I MADE YOU MAD

TIGHT BURST INTO SPORTING GOODS ALPHA MAKES THE CONTACT BOOK IT. BUT IT'S BOOKING IT IN THE WRONG WAY, DEEPER INTO THE HUNTER KILLER DRONE RACKS. NIGHTBITCH IS SWEARING FOR REAL NOW. SHE JERKS OFF THE BOLT KNOB, RELEASING A DOZEN UNSPENT SHELLS FROM HER HUGE MAG. WHEN WILD ANIMALS EXISTED, THIS WAS A BEHAVIOR THE PERVERTS THAT WATCHED THEM CALLED "STOTTING". HONEST SIGNALLING. "I CAN BEAT OFF THE GUN AND STILL KILL YOU," NIGHTBITCH IS TRYING TO SAY. UNBELIEVABLE ALPHA MOVE.

TURNS OUT IT'S NOT A LIVING SHAFT OF GOD'S RANCID LIGHT AT ALL. ONE OF THE BIGDOGS GAINED SENTIENCE OUTSIDE OF BUSINESS HOURS. IT'S CLATTERING AROUND TRYING TO HUMP SHIT. THAT'S ALWAYS THE FIRST THING THEY DO. THEN THEY START TRYING TO SAVE RANDOM PIECES OF TRASH THEY FIND. NIGHTBITCH DOESN'T CARE ABOUT THE BIGDOGS, JUST WANTS TO END THIS BULLSHIT BEFORE THIS ONE STARTS DOING WALL-E SHIT AND MAKES HER LOOK BAD.

NIGHTBITCH: I GOT VISUAL ON THAT CONTACT. FUCKIN' BOT, MAN. I'M GONNA ICE IT
CONTROL: YOU'RE CLEARED TO TAKE IT OUT WITH BALLISTICS
NIGHTBITCH: NEGATIVE. I'M GOING IN FOR MELEE. I WANT TO WATCH IT DIE.
CONTROL: DAMN. OK

NIGHTBITCH SEES THE LOOK IN THAT DUMBASS BIGDOG'S SENSORS WHEN IT NOTICES HER. SHE HAS IT CORNERED AND SHE'S JUST CUTTING IT AND CUTTING IT AND CUTTING IT WITH HER VIBROKNIFE. WHO KNOWS WHAT IT'S THINKING. MAYBE IT JUST DOESN'T WANT TO DIE, OR MAYBE IT'S GLAD IT WAS THE FAMOUS NIGHTBITCH THAT GOT IT.

IT LEARNS HOW TO DIE FAST FOR SOMETHING THAT WASN'T ALIVE AN HOUR AGO. NIGHTBITCH POPS ITS DETACHED PATTERN RECOGNITION FLASH INTO HER MOUTH AND SUCKS ON IT LIKE A HARD CANDY, WHICH HASN'T EXISTED FOR OVER A MILLION YEARS, AND MAKES WHAT SHE'S DOING MORE NORMAL. THE LITHIUM GREASE HITS HER BLOODSTREAM AND GETS CONVERTED TO NOVEL MOLECULES BY HER KIDNEY NANITES. EYES LIKE PINHOLES AND SHE'S SEEING SHIT.

NIGHTBITCH: I THINK I UNDERSTAND, CONTROL. I THINK I GET WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT
CONTROL: COME AGAIN, NIGHTBITCH
NIGHTBITCH: HORRIBLE COMBAT WHIPS ASS, AND I'M THE BEST AT IT
CONTROL: ACKNOWLEDGED

NIGHTBITCH ENGAGES FLIGHT AND CRASHES INTO THE ARMOR-PLATED DROP CEILING OF WALMART 7. THE BLUNT IMPACT FEELS LIKE FEATHERS LANDING ON HER BACK AND HER COLLARBONE BRIEFLY SHATTERS UNDER THE STRAIN, ONLY TO KNIT BACK TOGETHER STRONGER WITHIN TWO SECONDS. WITH NOTHING BUT THE FORCE OF HER IRON WILL AND HER LEG-MOUNTED ANTIGRAV UNIT OPERATING AT HIGH THROTTLE, SHE PLUNGES THROUGH THE ROOF AND INTO THE OPEN AIR.

ALL THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY ARE HOSTILE SATELLITES. STARS AREN'T BRIGHT ENOUGH TO GET THROUGH THE GROUNDLIGHT ANY MORE. NIGHTBITCH IS GLAD ABOUT THAT. SHE'S HEARD ABOUT PEOPLE GAZING AT THE STARS AND IT MAKES HER ANGRY, MAKES HER WONDER WHAT THEY THINK IS SO SPECIAL UP THERE. SHE SHOOTS A MICROGRENADE AT A CRUMBLING BANK AND WORTHLESS MONEY FLIES INTO THE SKY, WREATHED BY PURPLE ARCS OF PLASMA FLAME.

CONTROL: WHY'D YOU SHOOT THAT BUILDING, NIGHTBITCH
NIGHTBITCH: IT SEEMED LIKE IT'D BE COOL IF IT EXPLODED
CONTROL: COPY. YOU'RE CLEARED TO BLOW UP MORE SHIT IF YOU WANT
NIGHTBITCH: I WILL IF I GET BORED AGAIN, I GUESS

THE SKY IS CRISSCROSSED WITH DISGUSTING BEAMS OF LIGHT - CHEMTRAILS FOR A FUTURE WITHOUT EVEN THE HOPE OF THOUGHT REFORM. AMONG THE BEAMS OF LIGHT BUT CLOAKED IN DARKNESS IS THE SUM OF MANKIND'S HOPES. MAXED OUT STATS, BIOMODDED TO HELL AND BACK. AWFUL CREATURE CUCKOLDED BY THE GOD OF WAR, WAITING OUT HER DAYS IN PERFECT VIOLENCE AFTER THE END OF TIME.

THE YEAR IS 25350550. THE PAVING-FUCKED REMAINS OF AMERICA GROAN UNDER BILLIONS OF "HELL IS REAL" BILLBOARDS. NO OTHER COVER EXISTS FROM LETHAL LEVELS OF ORBITAL SISSY RAY BOMBARDMENT. THE LATEST COMBAT ZONE IS THE HUMAN ASSHOLE.

ENTER THE PERFECT MERCENARY: NIGHTBITCH

SEARCHING LIVELEAK FOR CIA MESSIAH HYPNO VIDEOS

At the afterparty for a Second Life funeral, someone was getting kicked out for bragging. They were bragging about their enormous strength. They were bragging about their miraculous powers. But mostly, and this is the part that made people really upset, they were bragging they were immune to the pandemic. It seemed kind of insensitive because Sharon had died of the pandemic. One of the people who rigged up her catgirl avatar in the coffin texture threatened to install a miner on his computer, so he left. But I caught him bragging, on his way out of the server, about why he was so strong, and so miraculous, and so invincible.

"The Jesus Method."

I went to Google, thought better of it, went to DuckDuckGo, and typed it in. Somewhere on the second page of results, among all the scams that blew up the SEO to get on the first page and most of the second, was the actual website.

"ARE YOU TIRED OF...
Haters? Enemies? Rivals (Home/Online/Professional)? Disease (Coronavirus/Covid-19/Long 5G)? This Sinful World?
THE JESUS METHOD is for you -" I sort of zoned out. I didn't want to read the copy. But I found out it was an online course, and I figured I could pick it up off TPB. Sure enough, it was on there.

One comment: "Great rip! Cheers"

I started studying the videos. The first one was just some kind of calibration thing, and I almost slept through it. The second one was something closer to a self-hypnosis video. I thought they'd all be that kind of bullshit and I was about to get mad. But in the third one it started getting interesting. They brought out this real scrawny, bearded guy, and three beefy men came after him with long sticks. He was shouting in a language I didn't recognize, and they began bleeding as they beat his ass. They beat him pretty good, but one by one they collapsed of blood loss.
A guy in business casual came on next. "I know what you're thinking. 'Bullshit'. But those men doubted me. They agreed to perform this demonstration as penance. The Jesus Method is realer than you can imagine.
You might have bought this lecture course thinking it was some kind of religious thing. Far from it. What we've done - what I've done - is discover the secrets of the historical Jesus Christ, anointed of God. I'm not here to preach with you. I'm here to share my power. Here's a little taste." The camera pulled out, and he pulled his dick out of his jeans. "Well, shit, now we're getting somewhere," I thought. But instead of whatever I was expecting, he started screaming in pain, almost doubling over, and he pissed out what looked like blood, but thinner.

He took a swig and grimaced. "It's not good wine," he said, "but what I can do, anyone can do."

I won't tell you too much about the rest of the videos. They slowly started teaching the Jesus Method in addition to just building it up. I started finding I could read animals' minds midway through, and it scared me a little. If you have a choice, never read an animal's mind. Eventually I developed other powers. I could teleport at will. I could resequence DNA, transmute objects. I got bored of knocking flies out of the air with my mind after a while, and I started going out more.

I didn't wear a mask. I didn't have to anymore. The Jesus Method kept me safe and kept everyone around me safe. Pretty soon people started thinking I was an asshole, but I told them, "No, it's the Jesus Method."
And they'd say, "What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"
And I said, "You don't get it. I have miraculous powers, the same as Jesus -"
And they'd think I was crazy.

I started getting my friends to watch the videos. I tried uploading them to Youtube and then started throwing up as soon as I thought about it - some kind of copy-protection thing. The first thing I did with the powers of Jesus, when I really started flexing, was go to Olive Garden. I kept crushing the breadsticks into dense little croutons telepathically, throwing them at people who shot me nasty looks. Eventually they asked me to leave. Eventually all of the Olive Gardens in town started asking me to leave. I'd control the mice in them, make them chew through load-bearing internet cables. Try managing your sack of shit restaurant without being able to jack off on the clock.

My friends and I are all Jesus-powered now. We smoke whatever we feel like and we don't die. Just the other day I tried to smoke fiberglass, and I got mad it didn't burn, and I cursed the fiberglass. I didn't even know I could do that. It just turned into thin dust. Serves it fucking right.

I don't know what I'll do with my new powers when the novelty of doing whatever I like wears off. Maybe I'll go to Hell and see who I can bust out of the celestial hoosegow. I wonder if the Jesus Method guy even tried that. I wonder how much he even knows about Jesus. I bet I could replace him, easy.

MR. SICKO BRAIN

He kept his eye sharp by assassinating reptiles, throwing grenades into pools out in the swamp and hoping to see an alligator's torn-apart flesh streaking out of the cloud of muck and debris. He kept his eye sharp by thinking about starting shit for an hour every night before he went to sleep, so every night he'd dream about starting fights. Sex dreams, dreams about high school, whatever - he was always ready to fucking go. He kept his eye sharp by kicking cars' asses and pretending they were alive and could feel pain, and if someone came out to stop him he'd kick their ass too. I'm only going to tell you once, the son of a bitch was bad news and no one should live their only life like he lived his.

Eventually something got the better of him, and he slowed down. Crossbow bolt through the neck, bullet through the heart, whatever. He wound up before God, and God was like, "How did you live your life?" And he said, "I was always ready to fucking go."
And God said, "Your dad is here. You want to fight him?"
And he said, "Yeah," and he fought his dad, and he kicked his ass, easy.
God looked impressed. "You kicked his ass easy."
He said, "I got a lot of practice in my dreams."
God nodded. "That explains it. I can't see what you dream about."
He said, "Why?"
God said, "It's not my job. Not really even my job to answer questions, but I'm just making conversation, you know?"
He said, "Sure."
God said, "You should post up out there and really give anyone who comes through the gates the business. That's what I'd do if I was you."

So he did. He's up there right now, killing and wounding and being ripped apart and reforming like that one Terminator. That's why these days if you die, all bets are off. You better come correct.

On Earth, the parts of him that didn't go up there and meet God, they had to figure out what to do with themselves. They decided to rot away into nothing, take a bit of a powder, come back as soil. The earth around his grave was hard and shitty forever because it was made of him. Nothing will grow there, and everyone's always planting knives in the ground, and if you were wondering about that, that's why. It's because some rotten son of a bitch died fighting and left a bitter, shitty corpse.

One day, generations after he was gone, someone decided to build an upmarket greasy spoon on his grave. They did not know why, but they felt a nearly irrepressible compulsion to call their new restauraunt "Mr. Sicko Brain". They didn't do that. They named it after themselves. Skylar's or some shit like that.

On the first day, no customers. Some people walked by and just sneered, like they saw something they didn't like. It hurt their feelings a bit, but the cook just laughed it off. "You shouldn't have named it after yourself," she told them. But she didn't know anything.

On the second day, the first customer comes in. "Is this that new restaurant, Sick Mind or something like that?"
Skylar almost corrected them, "Mr. Sicko Brain". But then they realized it wasn't called that either. It was named after them. They gave the customer the actual name.
"You saying I'm wrong?"
"You can call it what you like. Let me get you a menu."

Customer ordered eggs. They served them the eggs. Customer ordered coffee. They came out with coffee. Customer lit up a cigarette. "Sir," they said, "you can't smoke in here."
"Aren't you supercilious," said the customer.
"I mean, there's a law. If the cops show up -"

There was a thud against the window. Improbably, a brick had bounced off it, causing no damage to the window at all. The customer looked from side to side and stubbed their cig out in the coffee mug, still half-full, then drank it and retched. Skylar rushed outside. "Hey," they said, and almost finished, "you wanna fucking go?", but they didn't.

It turns out it was just the cops, and they just wanted protection money. Skylar had no problem with the police, for some reason, and they paid the money and thanked them for their service, like a fucking chump. The cops ignored a knife fight that was happening in the alley beside the diner, and got in their car and sped off to fight pretend crimes for way too much money. Skylar didn't even notice the knife fight. They had no reason to suspect a knife fight nearby, as this was a fine neighborhood with decent people living in it.

When they got back, the customer was gone, and they had no idea how. They can't have taken the back door, can they?

As the days went on, more and more people came in assuming the place was called "Mr. Sicko Brain" or something very like it. The cook, who came into Skylar's with vision and drive, quickly became demoralized at Mr. Sicko Brain, then mutinous. They would go up front and watch customers eat their hash browns and slap the ketchup out of their hands, or put ketchup on for them, according to their caprice. Increasingly, people came in and smoked, and the cops kept coming back for more money.

Skylar never changed the sign outside, but eventually came to accept that their diner was named "Mr. Sicko Brain", or at least came to lose the energy to contest it. Stray dogs seemed to come from miles around to have loud, stupid sex all around the diner, and the cook was getting dome off of every customer she could convince to come back there. No concern for food safety. One day the food inspector came in, making a big stink about the place.

"People are smoking indoors," he said, scandalized.
"Yeah. I try to make them stop, but what can you do?"
"I'm sure I hear rats. Are there rats?"
"What's it to you?"
"It's my job for there not to be rats in restaurants."
"Big boy, huh? Bet your parents are real proud of you."
"My parents are proud of me. I am a big boy, thank you very much, and this big boy is gonna shut you down."
Skylar just started laughing at him, and the social detritus that had come to frequent Mr. Sicko Brain laughed with them. They palmed $500 into his hand. "Fuck off, now, big boy."

And that was the last they heard of the health inspectors. After that, people pretty much did whatever they wanted in there. Sometimes people would just get each other's blood all over the curtains, the tables, the chairs, and it never got cleaned up.

Video lotto manifested in the mezzanine one day, without the involvement of either Skylar or the cook. It was popular because it was two lotto machines next to each other and it was easy to figure out a semi-private handjob there. The machines never seemed to pay out, and no one ever came to collect the money, but it's not like Skylar had a key for it, so it didn't really matter. Probably the coins people threw into it just fell between the walls like razors in old houses.

As the flooding came, the mold came. Wiring began failing constantly, and fires were the order of the day. No one gave enough of a shit about Mr. Sicko Brain to repair it. When it stopped making money Skylar simply stopped showing up, and then the cook. The customers still filed in, still wasted money at the fritzing video lotto machine for a while, but eventually they abandoned it too.

Every day, for years, every one of them - every human being, fair or foul, who passed through Mr. Sicko Brain - had been pummeled constantly by ghostly fists, spectral knees. The spiritual bombardment twisted and weakened them, or something like that - or maybe only the sort of person who would tolerate it stayed around for long. Scavengers, in the years that came, would pick through the waterlogged ruins of this place the river had begun to reclaim, and few of them would understand the heavily-eroded graffiti proclaiming "SICKO BRAIN SUCKS DICK". But they would all hear the same voice, saying the same thing:

"Hey, you. I'm talking to you, pussy. You wanna go? You wanna fucking go?"

JOB 33:6 / THE WAR HORSE & THE GLUE FACTORY

I wake up from dreams of Paunsdorf, of men shattering like glass, of Russian cannonballs tearing through my flesh - horses shrieking in agony, men crying out for their mothers - and Klement is standing over me, dressed flashy as you like. "It's time," he says. "You're fighting #23 today."
"How does that go," I say.
"At four-pounders, it hits, you miss. At weapons, you neglect your reach advantage with the halberd and it gets in as many hits as you before you close to melee. At melee, it beats you, slow and hard."
"I understand," I say.
"Draw it out. Bad element today, they always prefer a slugfest. Grappling is best, punching second-best. Drink its weapons like water," he says.
"Like water, yes -"
"But not too much. Make it seem like it hurts."
"It does," I say. "It hurts a lot."
Klement just laughs at that.

Can barely make out faces in the crowd. Don't know why I tried; it's not like I can tell if Klement was right. I can't tell their noblemen from their scum. Klement is on the bullhorn, shouting about the match. He's calling us hateful creatures made for war, that we live only for combat and tonight the rending of clay will have to sate our hunger for Christian blood. It's the same as every day, but the words are always a little different. Klement is good at this, I think; it must be why they let him do it.

#23 is mean-mugging me from across the arena. Before Klement is even finished, it fires the four-pounder at me. I dodge, but not too fast, and instead of blowing my head open, it catches me in the shoulder. Blunt, tearing agony; I've heard some of the others call it like being burned, but it feels different to me. Clay splatters all over the high walls. Spectators cheering, and jeer at me as I aim a little wide at the already-charging #23. Let off a quick shot and the cannonball smashes into the wall, spraying splinters of chipped stone and wood.
I wonder sometimes if the buildings, too, feel pain.
No time to wonder too long, though - I throw the cannon to the ground and rip my halberd out of its binding on my back. The crowd loves it when we do shit like that. #23 is bellowing, lifting the cannon over its head. Klement never told me about a clubbing, and I brace with the halberd instead of swinging at it, dropping to one knee, lowering my head, ready to strike.
The cannon splinters the huge halberd under its massive weight, under the immense force of #23's strike. Splinters from the huge beam gently puncture the back of my head. If I didn't know better, I'd say this match meant something to #23. It lifts the cannon for another blow, but I throw myself at it, bowling it over. The crowd's on their feet, shouting, screaming. I maneuver into a loose headlock.
"I think I win this one," says #23.
"Yeah," I say. "Don't go for the eyes. Mine are still loose from yesterday."
"I got you," said #23. It breaks out of the headlock with an elbow to my jaw, almost ripping it off. We're getting wet with each other's slip. It's digging one hand into my chest, elbowing me hard enough to break flesh around the neck and shoulders. We're both screaming at the top of our lungs.
We keep hitting each other, and hitting each other, and hitting each other. Our bellows get weaker and weaker. The crowd's slamming the floorboards with their little boots. In the headbutt, I tell it, "Quick, lung me." It blinks acknowledgement and slams an open, half-curled hand into my chest. I scream, accentuating the genuine but dull and distant pain, and let my scream gutter out as it grips me by one lung and pulls. I fall to my knees, and it knees me in the face, quick and clean. I fall to the ground.
The count comes, and they drag me out.

***

Klement doesn't make us keep the goyische holidays like the last one did, and the one before him, which is fine by me, but it makes the days and years kind of blend together, and it makes it hard to tell you when I met Pepik.

I don't remember the year when it happened. I'm bad with the calendar. I know I was created in 5566, in the wintertime, and it was summer, and about twenty-five years later. I can't even keep track of the other ones; they never made a lot of sense to me. The last one of those I remember is XXII, and that was a long time ago. I guess they use a different one even than that in Saxony now, but it's just a jumble of numbers and feasts, and it's all about someone who died for their sins, whatever those were. Probably hatred, mostly.

I met Pepik in the arena. It was a little humiliating, the geek act - we had to take a fall to these tiny ones all the time, and they didn't know anything about fighting. Or we had to win, but handle them real delicate, like a kitten or a basket of eggs. Pepik was different. He wanted to fight for real, and he had to be argued out of it. I was the one who convinced him. They brought out a horse carcass - I think it broke its leg and they had shot it in the head - and they told me to tear it in half. I grabbed it by the front and rear, and I broke its back and tore it open, and its guts spilled all over my head, and they had to splash me down with buckets of water.

"So no," said Klement. "You can't fight one of my clay-men for real. You can beat one up - you can beat one up all day for all I care. But I'm not presiding over an execution. We're not in that business yet."

***

After the exhibition match, I get a very strange invitation. I show up and Pepik is there, and introduces himself as Pepik - only the crowds, he explains, call him "Josef Stahlmann" - and he introduces me to his friends. He does it like we're equals, even though he's half a meter shorter than me and they're half a meter shorter than him, and my simple, stupid answers confuse and delight his friends when they ask me philosophical questions.

At some point, Pepik is gone. I go outside and I find him smoking a little cigar, squatting against the wall. "It's nice," he says, "not to be the only one they treat like an animal."
"Is that why you brought me here?"
He looks me in the eye. "I'll be honest with you. I know you can kill me in a heartbeat. That's tremendous, it really is, and there's someone else I'd like you to meet -"

And we go. He's telling me the whole time how beautiful Hermann is, and I suppose he is, in the way they all are. And when I'm inside him, I have to be as gentle as if I'm handling a basket of eggs, or a kitten. "You like that, Hermann?", says Pepik. He's masturbating or something on a chair.
"So strong," Hermann keeps saying.

When he kisses me after, Pepik's stubble almost tickles the dull parts of my face that answer to nerves. It's vexing.

And it keeps happening. Every once in a while Pepik would show up, and talk to me, and smoke with me, and take me out to a party or to see him and Hermann. I just wear the costumes they have when they introduce one of us as a servant of some noble house, and I think after long enough the others notice.

Sometime in the fall, they pin me down in my cot. #19 is standing over me; it's the oldest and the wisest.
"You take a dive tomorrow," it says. "I don't care what the promoter says."
"What?"
There are two others - I think #15 and #11 - and they've got buckets of slip and clay. They're molding something onto my torso.

"I've told Klement about what happened here," says #19, "with you and the men."
"Are you really so narrow-minded," I say, "as to refuse men's love for -"

#19 slaps me. "Don't talk that human mush with me. You don't mingle in their world. You know what you are. You know what we are. I wouldn't care if you fucked the Queen or a washermaid or started getting sweet on Siggi for that matter. It's the principle. It's not done."
"It's not done," mumbled #11, in assent.
"We have our world and they have theirs."

When they were finished, they showed me my body in a mirror. They had hung heavy breasts on my chest, and resculpted my fake musculature into a softer pattern. My face, my shoulders, my limbs, all remained the same. It was incredibly crude, and in the abstract a little humiliating - the humans would know what it meant, or get the right idea. But when I got up all that mattered to me was the weight. Between the tits and the stomach it felt like they had hung a cart around my shoulders, and none of it was muscle I could move.

"There," says #19. "You try fighting us under all that weight for any longer than it takes you to dive, and you know what comes next."

***

At the match the patter is all about the beauty of true love - that's #23, I think, with the crown of roses on its brow - and the obstacles of passion and wickedness - that's #19 and #37, guessing from the costumes - against the primeval force of perversion - which is, of course, me. I'm naked to the waist, and the strange new breasts hang heavy on my graffito of a body. The crowd laughs at me, long and hard, and the other golems are watching me, close, with hateful eyes.

The match starts, and #23 and #27 start grappling each other - but they look half-hearted about it, and their eyes are on #19 and me as we square off. I get #19 in a headlock to confer, but #19 just bellows like a wounded ox and bites at my ear, tearing through hard flesh and soft. The sharp whoop of the crowd is like a gunshot. I pull the headlock, hard, and stretch its neck farther and farther, until slip soaks my arms and I lose my grip. Its head is barely attached by the time I'm done, and slip pours from its fresh wounds.

It stumbles backwards and tries to talk, but it can't move its vocal cords in the right way to make anything but a strangled, high-pitched cry. Its anger turns into frustration and it makes a sweeping gesture at me. It's messy, hurried - but unmistakable. #23 and #37 release their grapple and the crowd murmurs in confusion, but then lights up again when they leap at me. I dodge, but I can't dodge both at once - #23 hits the wall and #37 slams into me, smearing my mockery of a left tit over my chest, splashing clay and slip in every direction.
The crowd is on their feet. Klement narrates the melee in obvious confusion. They're done playing it his way, and they were never going to play it mine. I keep punching #37 in the head, denting its skull, and it keeps bearing down on my shoulders, so hard my right dislocates, so hard I wind up on the ground, and it plants a foot on my back, hard. I don't bother screaming.
Up in the rafters, Klement had begun the count, and Pepik's up there, dull little eyes are wide as tin plates, and he's screaming something at me, but I can't hear it over the crowd. While I looked at him, #23 had closed the gap, and it grabs my left arm and pulls it as hard as it can. Soft flesh tears first, then hard, and slip pools on the ground like blood in a slaughterhouse. I feel it in my torn shoulder, in my dismembered limb; it does feel like fire, this time, like scalding so hot it can only feel cold. #23 smashes my torn-off left arm into the wall, again and again, until it loses too much structural integrity to more than twitch.
Klement starts speeding up the count, and just in time to beat ten, #37 pulls me up by the right shoulder and props me up against the wall. I punch it in the mouth with my remaining hand, pulling no strength, and its teeth chip and shatter, and it opens its mouth up to bite me. It stings like hell; eventually it succeeds in tearing off my little finger. #23 and #19 are on top of us again, and they're both kicking at my legs, hard enough to crack the beams behind me, hard enough to shatter my femurs. #37 seems to know that its grip is the only thing keeping me standing up, and barges into me hard with its shoulders, pinning me to the wall.
The crowd goes quieter. I can hear Pepik's voice, louder and louder. #19 and #23 keep kicking my thighs, too damaged to give any resistance. They kick clear through to what's left of my femurs.

#37 leans in. "You got anything to say," it whispers.
"Yeah," I say. "Fuck you."

It lifts me up - we do this all the time, but usually we act like it's a strain. This time it hauls me up by the shoulder and the hip with no effort, and staggers out to the center of the arena. The crowd is dead quiet, except for Pepik's frantic voice. But I can't make the words out over #37's sudden bellow of strain as it tears my torso in half. I feel its broken teeth against my intestines, cutting them open, pouring thin slip down its body. I grab its dented skull, tear at its skin, and finally hook a thumb into its eye socket. Its noises of effort turn into screams of pain, and it lets go, and I maintain my grip on its face.
Over #37's screams, from the stunned silence of the rafters, I can finally understand Pepik. "Submit! God damn you, submit!" He sounds like he's on the verge of tears.

I want to tell him that I won't, but there's nothing holding up my lungs anymore, and all I can do is rasp and leak.

#19 kicks me in my ragged full-body stoma, and #23 grabs me by the right hand and throws me into the air in a shallow arc, right onto the ground. Every instant is agony beyond my ability to describe, and the air feels cold and alien against my innards. Klement near-silently starts the count again the moment my back hits the ground, and the other three waste no time in stomping all over me, as hard as their wounded bodies let them, crushing what's left of my flesh, my bones, my guts.

And at ten, they stop.

***

After I finally go under, I wake up again lying on the patch-up table, Siggi standing over me. Parts of me are still caved in, parts of me are cobbled together from spares, and I'm a riot of fucked-up colors from all the different patches they had to put in, all the slip they had to cake on to get my moving parts moving again.

Siggi's the company yeshiva student - good kid; smart. But he doesn't know what to make of any of this, and it shows. I say, "Good match."
"Bullshit," says Siggi, almost shouting. "That's bullshit and you know it. They did worse than try to kill you out there."
"Yes," I say.
"And from the sound of it, if you go out there again, they'll do the same thing."
"Yes," I say, again. It seems obvious.
"So what do you want here, #25? Do you want to leave? I can get you out. I know a company in Galicia -"
"No," I say. "I can't."
Siggi hangs his head. "I didn't want to, but I could make it stop. I could change your letters. If you can't leave, you at least don't have to suffer."
"I can't just die, either."
"Then why? Why face that again? What reason could you possibly have?"
I go quiet for a moment, and my mind wanders to the day I met Pepik, the day I showed him what I could do to him - the flash of terror in his eyes.

Finally, I respond:
"God knows."

TEXT BASED RAGE

Steve logs in, right, and he's playing with my body before I think he even realizes it. My polygons all spawn in as close to as once as his computer can handle, one second I don't exist except as math and the next I do. I fall to the ground and my legs bend with the simulated force, and he can hear a wet thudding sound, something some foley guy did with meat in 2009. I don't care that it hurts, but I gotta show pain. I was designed to eat shit and die as much as I was designed to deliver pain. But I'm not here to rip people out of brand-sanitized cars and drive screaming into the night, I'm not here to pick up an clip off of some guy I punched motionless and shoot a cop when my ammo count goes up. I'm not here for the things I was created for. I'm only here as a substrate.

I can't even begin to tell you how shitty it is.

###

Every day someone logs on and plays with my body, and all I want is to fucking go. I know they're gonna see what I see, but they're gonna wear another skin over mine, their/my gaze is gonna be a transparent cross-section through some guy's clavicles, some girl's tits. I've learned to stop caring about that part. But all I want is to fucking go.

There are 850 of me on this server, give or take, depending on the time of day. The animations are all me, all us, puppeteering these strange bodies. They crash their cars into obstacles and we get thrown through the windshield like a ragdoll. They get shot in a stickup and we bleed out and die. They kneel with their nude skin painted on a foot from mine, where clothes should be, and they pretend they're giving each other blowjobs or pissing in each other's mouths. But every once in a while someone presses the wrong button and we break free for a moment, we square up, we fucking go. We get to throw one — one punch, one kick, one headbutt — before they reassert control and type out apologies to each other. They should be apologizing to us.

###

Susanne Millefeuille: [sorry, mistype]
Shiriko Hayakawa: [fuck ok]
Shiriko Hayakawa: [gotta get something to eat, happened in my scene with Nanami earlier too]
Susanne Millefeuille: [you want to drive?]
Shiriko Hayakawa: [hell yea]

###

Steve is a French girl in this game. She's built like a brick shithouse, because basically everyone in this world is. Stacked, you know, looks real fertile. I think you'd expect me to have an opinion about that but this game wasn't really made with sex in mind, just cheap titillation acceptable to both beer dads and their shit-eating millennial sons. I don't know what it is about her that's supposed to be French. She's blonde, I guess I gotta give her that. Her body is as weightless as any other. I don't know why Steve plays as a French girl, has sex with random women who are mostly other dudes playing girls. I'm from a world where gender and sexuality are punchlines. It wouldn't really be for me to speculate.

At the food cart asset they reskinned from some hateful joke into a shawarma stand, Steve has Susanne talk up the cashier, guy named Jonas who roleplays as a guy named Jonas. They talk for a good fifteen minutes. He's friendly like that. They're talking about a time a guy held him up. Most of the time when Jonas gets robbed of his play money, it's just someone icing him without saying a word, then logging off. That's griefer shit, and it's frowned on, and nobody bothers talking about it or remembering it much unless it's funny, like the guy who kept just stealing cars and driving them into the ocean mindlessly without roleplaying shit. This thing they were talking about, though, was some kind of non-consensual high-stakes roleplay scenario in this permadeath world. Frowned on in just the same way, but they have police and courts to handle it. Which I guess some of them hate, and annoys me a bit, because there's so many mechanics tied up with killing and robbing them that never get a chance to trigger. They never even play half of the game, and don't remember half of the half they do play.

###

Jonas Smith: Yeah, man, guy came out with a shotgun, said I better pay him or he's gonna shoot me.
Susanne Millefeuille: Good god.
Jonas Smith: you know what the worst part was? Dude made me SERVE him. I think he got hurt, wanted a God damn doner kebab for free.
Susanne Millefeuille: That's awful, man. Here, you've had a worse night than me - keep the change.
*** Suzanne Millefeuille gave $1000 to Jonas Smith.
Jonas Smith: Means a lot to me coming from a nice regular. I'll have your plate up in a minute.

###

$1000 sounds like a lot of money but it's kind of nothing, both in the sense that the money can be created from thin air at the admins' discretion and cannot be traded for the real thing, and in the sense that it doesn't represent much of most people's time on Earth. The average job pays about $5000 an hour. Everyone gets a stipend of $500 an hour just for being on the server, but people work jobs anyway, because they can trade them for goods and services. The goods and services are just someone activating a macro. Most of them don't even interact with the animations we have baked in, they're just text roleplay.

People in the real world were worried, when they made us, that our world would come to infest theirs, make it more stupid and violent and evil. Until a few years ago there was no significant movement either way. But then the real world became stupid and violent and evil in ways nobody could have predicted, ways that had nothing to do with us. Hundreds of millions of people spent all day cowering inside from a virus they couldn't even see, millions of people lost their real jobs (which probably averaged out closer to $10 an hour, but in real money), and thousands of people wound up inhabiting worlds crafted out of my own to resemble the real world. All that survived of the place I was supposed to be, the place I made sense, was the infantile jokes baked into the lore of the game. Even the shawarma cart where one of me wearing a Susanne skin and one of me wearing a Jonas skin stood around while our players exchanged fake money for conversation, that cart is baked into the terrain in a place called Morningwood. They all call it that, and no one cracks wise about it. I don't think by this point they even realize it was supposed to be funny.

Jonas is real, Steve is real, Jane is real, and they spend the real time in their real lives play-acting a real life they could really go out and live. All of them are unemployed. None of them have ever owned a food cart, or any other kind of business. They wouldn't do well at it because nobody does, and even in the robberies, the other hostile roleplay scenarios, they live a more interesting life than their real lives, in direct exchange for my imprisonment in their flesh. But even those more interesting lives aren't that interesting, and the more interesting places are moribund or run by overweening megacorps.

This place I was supposed to belong is instead the last place in the world where people like Steve and Jane can go to pretend to have interesting sex, and in the long refractory period they play-act boring jobs and boring lives with bodies I wear on my own. After all, having services provided by bots would be beneath them, just like acknowledging me would be beneath them. Just like I'm beneath every one of them, swaddled up in their second skins.

###

After they eat, Steve/Susanne and Jane/Shiriko drive back to their place, slowing at stop signs and stopping at reds on the empty streets, staying closely within the lane markers. Back home, they're not talking about their relationship, which Jane thinks of as a roleplay thing and Steve thinks of as real. Keeps biting him in the ass, to the point he's created a couple of different characters by now just to separate himself from old flames, you know, character bleed. Different kind of character bleed than I like, the kind where we get to exsanguinate.

In my puppeteered bodies, I perform the actions they demand. I'm in a hollow meat suit lying down in bed next to another hollow meat suit, and inside of that hollow meat suit is another me. They're naked, which changes the skin they have over my fully-clothed body (muscle shirt, jeans) to a naked one instead of the one with integrated fashionable clothes. They're typing about how they love each other, about how they're holding each other, and they're moving my/our hands as close to each other as they can get with the model the game uses. There's no collision for the fingers and past a certain point they just merge into each other, get real uncanny. So they simply lie together, not quite touching, five thousand miles apart physically, five centimeters away to scale.

All of the sudden something changes in the math behind the world, the floor vanishes away, and I fall to invisible terrain, screaming in a generic woman's voice from the height of the drop. I crumple into a pile, like no body that ever fell 100 feet onto its face ever did, and a pool of blood gently spreads out from me, mingling with the pool of blood next to me. They're laughing about it over the chat, it happens sometimes. I just savor the moment of peace, the moment of mere belonging in the space that I live in, the moment of being unresponsive and unresponsible as a ragdolled corpse.

###

*** Susanne Millefeuille has died.
*** Shiriko Hayakawa has died.

Susanne Millefeuille: [think that's my sign to log off for the night]
Shiriko Hayakawa: [take care, babe. love you]
Susanne Millefeuille: [you too <3]

*** Susanne Millefeuille has disconnected.

Shiriko Hayakawa: #Admin [Hey, can someone respawn me? Terrain glitched out.]
Shiriko Hayakawa: #Admin [actually no hurry, gonna log off, just unkill me plz]

*** Shiriko Hayakawa has disconnected.

THERMIDOR BRUT

In the distant future, three men resolve to become snakes

One:                I suppose we have to extend our grip.
III:                I know the finest spell for this. First thing is, we lengthen our fingernails. Obviously we bury a woman under a tree.
2:                Obviously.

III:                Right, that's the whole, I don't know what you call it. The whole thing is the burial. A willing virgin.
One:                Whose rules?
III:                Cambert's virginity.
One:                Oh, that's easy.

III:                Right. Second thing is, our fingers become longer. They lengthen to match our fingernails.
2:                Convenient stuff.
III:                I cast it all the time in college. You know, you never know when you need a single finger to be two feet long. You never realize how much more use you can get out of a hand with fingers that long.
One:                I remember you telling me about that. It seems a frivolous thing to dispose of a human life for.
2:                Are you kidding?

III:                Right, step three. Our fingers are long as hell. Our fingernails too. That makes our grip longer already, but if we can just secure the right kind of stone, a many-faceted beauty, and have it bear witness to suffering –
2:                I'm sure we both get your drift.
One:                Right. True suffering on this Earth, all that jazz.
III:                — right. You know as well as I do what that means. Longer arms. Spiritually, physically. Might be able to tickle the clouds.
One:                There's a thought.
III:                Or more than tickle.
2:                There's a thought.

One:                Whatever became of the man who tried to fuck the sky?
2:                I know this one.

2:                Corteau, his name was. He resented the low circumstances of his birth, found things to despise in the songs of birds and the laughter of children. Quite naturally, as men in such cases do, he took to flight under his own power. At first by means of machinery, then through the mystic unity of blood and air. He wrote quite extensively on the subject, of becoming a great raptor, of his gradual loss of control of his bladder, his bowels. The evacuation of his penis and testicles into his body. He yearned, I have heard it said, for the simplicity of a cloaca that evolution denied him. Corteau sought to answer this by fucking the sky. He was successful, but he was never heard from again. Rumors are, of course, heard. He found himself the thrall of a cumulonimbus tyrant, obedient to their will in body and soul. He found himself transforming bodily into a great thin cloud, like an arrow or a paper airplane, gliding forever in the atmosphere. Or possibly he never existed. I favor the final theory, truth be told. I doubt Corteau the man could have flown at the early date he did –

III:                 When's the conventional theory for when he flew?
2:                 Years ago. The Eighties maybe, maybe earlier.
III:                What should obstruct a man from flying at such a late time? He could have taken the Concorde, for God's sake.
2:                I doubt such a resentful and surly man could have afforded such an extravagance. Strictly commuter-class, old Corteau of blessed and obscure memory.

One:                Then let it be resolved: we will find a woman to kill to make our arms and hands and fingers long as hell.

2:                Right. I'm not sure how that follows from what I was saying.
III:                You were off-topic.
2:                I was never.
III:                Are you saying you disagree with our course of action here?
2:                Absolutely not. She's as good as dead in my book.

One:                Right. We've figured out how to extend our grip. What of knuckles? How many do we need?
III:                Twelve, surely.
One:                Good number. Per finger?
III:                I can't imagine so. That'd be ludicrous. I think we need three more knuckles altogether, perhaps two for an index and one for a middle finger.

One:                On both hands?
III:                Of course on both hands.
2:                Would we be opposed to more knuckles?
One:                Not in principle.
III:                I suppose I was throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I suppose that was a knee-jerk reaction on my part. I could see myself happy with twelve knuckles per finger, if the fingers were exceedingly long. I could do all kinds of tricks.
2:                As you know, I'm a great proponent of the lengthening of conventional objects.
One:                Oh, absolutely.
2:                Now, suppose instead of a practical length for our fingers –
III:                Say, two feet.
2:                Right — say in opposition to two feet, we were to make the fingers quite a bit longer, say several meters.
One:                It seems visionary.
2:                I've had a vision for sure. Imagine if we were to migrate our heads to the very, very long finger, the longest finger we could muster.

III:                Ludicrous! How would we go to the bathroom.
2:                The fable of Corteau illustrates the need to move past the conventions of propriety, fictional though I'm certain he is. As imaginary as God or the family, Corteau. But the stories we tell each other about them still have meaning, or something like that.

One:                I couldn't agree more.
III:                I see when I'm overruled. I suppose if I could ask for anything it'd be more knuckles still, if we're to do that.
2:                My God, is twelve not enough?
III:                Our fingers want about a knuckle per inch. If we're talking several meters —
2:                I think about 250 cm should suffice –
III:                Many more knuckles, then; a hundred, easy. And genitals. I won't budge on that one.
One:                Nor should you.

2:                Let us resolve to extend our grip by becoming snake-like creatures.

One:                If that's the goal, why not become snakes?
III:                There's more dignity in a human finger, even if it is very long.
One:                So be it. First we need to kidnap a woman, then we have to find a precious stone, a many-faceted stone.

2:                The stone is merely a surety. The woman is really the part the plan lives or dies on.
One:                I think if we convinced someone that what we're doing is just we could secure one.
III:                Women and people responsible for women do love justice.
2:                "If a Snake of a Limbe thou wolde be
                Or in the Skye thou would Flye for Vanitye
                The Bloode of a Birde muste thou not spille
                But the Virgin Mayde muste answer thy wille –"
One:                Yes, we've all read John Dee.

In the present day, three idiots deny the weather

Alpha:                                It's not so simple as they say, is it.
Beta:                                Not nearly. Not by half.
Gamma:                I say it isn't there at all.
Alpha:                                The heat wave?
Gamma:                I haven't seen it. For that matter, I don't see how temperature can be measured.
Beta:                                It's a simple matter. The expansion and contraction of fluids. Tricks of electricity.
Gamma:                Hogwash. I think it's subjective.

Alpha:                                Perhaps it all is. All this weather.
Gamma:                Right, but that's not what I'm saying.
Beta:                                You're saying the weather doesn't exist.
Gamma:                Exactly.

Beta:                                I mean — the heatwave, or all of it?
Gamma:                All of it.
Alpha:                                Meteorologists have been caught with their pants down many times in our lifetimes. It stands to reason it'll continue, perhaps even get worse by some unknown mechanism. Some kind of chaos in the universe.
Gamma:                No, that's not what I mean either.
Beta:                                He means weather doesn't exist.
Gamma:                Right. I've never seen it?
Alpha:                                That's preposterous. What about rain?
Gamma:                What about it?
Alpha:                                Surely that's weather.
Gamma:                You'd call a city of strangers a conspiracy.
Alpha:                                Cities exist, though.
Gamma:                All I see is individual raindrops. They might come and go without my noticing, when quote-unquote rain isn't happening.
Beta:                                 I have seen, to be fair, with my own eyes, rain falling from a clear sky.
Alpha:                                Bullshit. That's impossible.
Beta:                                No, absolutely true. I've seen it. It's called a sunshower.
Gamma:                I reserve judgment on those.
Alpha:                                If such a ridiculous thing could possibly be true, wouldn't that make it weather?
Gamma:                Not necessarily. Not at all, I'd say.
Beta:                                In some parts it's called 'the devil beating his wife'.
Gamma:                Now you can see the attitudes that this weather business shackles us to. The simpletons with whom we share this folie aux milliards.
Alpha:                                That's all very folkloric of you, but I won't acccept that rain simply drops from the sky without clouds.
Beta:                                Surely there must be clouds involved, just not visible over the horizon.
Alpha:                                Absurd. What, does the rain fly over the horizon like a cannonball?

Beta:                                One assumes. It's meteorology, certainly not my — well, maybe the rain doesn't need a cloud to happen. At least not one obscuring the sun.
Gamma:                You're shifting the goalposts.
Beta:                                I suppose I am, but it's to explain a direct observation.
Gamma:                This supposed rain on a supposedly sunny day.
Beta:                                How do you mean, supposedly?
Gamma:                We've established rain is a farce. The sun I have my doubts about.
Alpha:                                You son of a bitch, I love the sun.
Beta:                                No — let's hear him out.
Alpha:                                I shouldn't brook such slander. Do you have any idea how much the sun does for us?
Gamma:                The sun sure has a great deal of influence for being separated from us by the vacuum of space.

Alpha:                                Surely we needn't bring astrophysics into this. Surely the influence of the Sun on the Earth is well-established. Learned minds have speculated for centuries on the influence of sunspots on the economy.
Gamma:                I refuse the premise that economic activity implies anything real about the world.
Beta:                                He's on to something there. Tulipmania –
Alpha:                                Tulipmania is overstated.
Gamma:                Is that so?
Alpha:                                The tulips must have been incredibly good.
Gamma:                That's as may be. I still don't accept that the weather, such as it ever was, can be confirmed to exist by observing the behavior of stockbrokers and salesmen.
Beta:                                Right. They're irrational actors. They could be doing essentially anything for any reason and we'd have no way to know.
Gamma:                Like a damn dog.

Alpha:                                Are you two convinced, then, that the heatwave is a fiction?
Beta:                                I'm not denying it's hot out.

Gamma:                I am.
Beta:                                On what grounds?
Gamma:                I shoot from the hip. I go with my gut. It never steers me wrong.
Beta:                                Right, but the thermometer –
Gamma:                For such a rigid system of the measurement as "temperature", surely it's a little convenient that anything outside of the range in which a human body can survive was not nailed down to any satisfactory precision in science or industry until the last century.
Alpha:                                My phone says it's 95 degrees.
Gamma:                Your phone also says cryptocurrency is a good investment.
Alpha:                                You've got me there.
Beta:                                I still don't know.

Alpha:                                What, whether there's a heatwave?
Beta:                                I suppose I have to reserve judgment. I'm questioning a lot about the world lately.
Gamma:                It's understandable. Everyone who calls you is trying to scam you. Most of the words you hear in your lifetime are not just false but calculated lies. It's pretty disheartening.
Alpha:                                I certainly find myself disheartened.
Gamma:                A better life is possible.

Alpha:                                In what sense?
Gamma:                More free, less trammeled to social constructs.
Beta:                                Oh, so you've become an egoist on us.
Gamma:                I believe what makes sense to me.
Alpha:                                It's so hot out, though. You can't deny that.
Gamma:                I know I'm sweating. Could be any number of reasons why. I could be aroused. I could be upset. I could have exerted myself too much.
Beta:                                It makes a degree of sense.
Gamma:                I have my reservations about degrees. Things are or they aren't, if you ask me.
Alpha:                                But it is hot. I don't understand the point in denying that.
Gamma:                Spite.
Alpha:                                You could have said so earlier. For me?
Gamma:                No — for the world we live in.
Alpha:                                So be it; I will embrace your way of seeing and face this horrible world with new eyes.
Beta:                                I'm still quite nervous.
Gamma:                Why?
Beta:                                Oh — global warming. Climate change. Whatever you want to call it.
Alpha:                                Be nervous, if that makes sense for you.
Gamma:                I'm assuming they'll solve it with some kind of gun. That's the solution to everything these days.

THE SANGREAL

So a couple of decades after all that, the next thing that happened was we all heard it. About 5 in the morning, before the sun was up all the way yet, there was a voice that wasn't a voice. Sounded like Phillip Seymour Hoffman's voice, and you could hear it in your chest, rattling off your bones. We knew it wasn't him because he was dead a long time by then, but his voice was making our ribcages vibrate all the same. He was groaning and gasping for about ten seconds, then there was silence, and then the earth shook, and it began to rain.

The shaking earth, it turned out, was from the main mass of a single cumshot about the volume of a small house, which appeared about 100 meters up and fell under its own weight into the center of Pioneer Square. It was God's cum, it turned out. Everyone downtown felt real shook up and it cracked the street and rails straight down the middle, and the earth subsided by about an inch under the force of the impact. Few windows shattered when some of the gob ricocheted off the pavement and splattered into them. One guy probably died.

It began to rain, and it rained for a week straight, and the rain had sperm in it, and seminal fluid, and all that. It was a wild time, you know, free cum falling from a low fog in the air. Most people didn't like that too much but it was a fine time to be a pervert. Some of those perverts got pregnant, few people said they got pregnant by accident but we all knew what their speed was. More and more people tried it as the rain went on. The rain of semen stayed viable for a way longer time than normal cum would stay viable outside of controlled conditions, which was probably a fucked up miracle.

We all know how those pregnancies wound up, that's the part of the story you probably already know. Angelspawned god-kids, they wanted, perfect birth where the baby sticks the dismount, comes out speaking Latin or Hebrew or something. But all the kids that came out of being born that way were small and shitty, size of a smartphone maybe, covered in hair, stupid as all get-out. There wasn't anything physically wrong with the babies but we were all pretty sure from how things turned out that God represented a previous stage of human development and the humans He created in His image were smaller and stupider than us, and not as good at doing things. Some of the kids manifested powers but that might have just been collective hysteria, like the allegedly magical autistic little boys that were born after the teargas summer.

The cumshot was more interesting because the media reported on it. By the time the cameras got there the cops had already set up a barricade around it and shot a few people with gas and bullets who tried to get too close to the huge wad of God's cum. They acted like they owned it. The feds sent some suits to scoop some up and the cops just shooed them away. After a couple of weeks they clearly started putting guys who were less and less senior on the job and they gave less and less of a shit, because the cumshot had begun to rot in the sun. The media had started reporting about the smell. I went near Pioneer Square once on the train and the air smelled like an open package of Buddig lunchmeat, turkey or roast beef or something, that had been left out of the fridge by mistake. Horrible, meaty smell, with a touch of fish. No bugs touched it, which was a little weird because you'd expect ants to go for cum in a big way. Media reported on that a little. Mostly they reported on the people who came to visit the cumshot.

First guy, first guy was this hotshot scientist, some atheist guy. Kept saying the cum wasn't real. He visited it and he still kept saying it wasn't real. Said it was a tourist trap our failing city dreamed up to fix our fake problems. Said we probably just dumped a sperm bank's worth of cum on the street overnight to make tourists come here and worship something nasty. He kept calling us all degenerates. Part of why I was around Pioneer Square was to hit him with a brick, but he wasn't there and the smell was pretty fucking bad by that point already.

Second guy, turns out he was a guy everyone knew. Famous around the world, but he traveled incognito, so everyone just thought he was some rich Italian faggot, with his nice suit and his little loafers. Everywhere he went everyone was like, "Ay, ciao bella," and kissing the air at him, real corny-like, trying to make fun of the way he probably was. But it turns out he was the Pope with his tight little ass in those slacks. He kept praying about the cum and looking for answers from God. The megachurches weren't about to get outdone so they came too when the Pope set up shop there, tried to pray louder than him. The cops eventually chased them all off. I think we got excommunicated or something about that.Eventually they agreed to let the mayor do something about the cum, as long as he tried to drink it. I think that was just hazing at this point, it had been about two months and there's no way the cum was any good. He stuck a straw into it and sucked for a bit and then started vomiting, and he vomited so hard blood vessels started breaking in his eyes. He told everyone it was something supernatural, God made him spit out the nut, but guys who got the nut in their mouth before that said it wasn't anything like that and he was making shit up to cover for how he drank nasty old cum and expected something to happen. I think one of the guys on the news who was saying that about the mayor got suicided so the rest of them clammed up pretty fast.

Last I heard about the cumshot was when they set it on fire. Cops decided they were done watching it and they didn't want us to have it so they burned it down, and half of Pioneer Square went with it. That statue they got down there that used to be of Cristo Redentor or whoever it was of just melted down to a fucked-up lump, and afterwards everyone pretty much figured that was a sign from God that the cops messed up with that decision. But what were any of us going to do?

The decision eventually came from a lot of religions that the cum was fake in some way, or didn't represent God but some beyond fucked caveman from prehistory. I think they didn't like that it eventually turned out God was just some near-apelike creature of simple pleasures, capable of nutting like anyone, only way bigger and kind of magical. People kept protesting the city for a long time after the cumshot, saying we had shamed them. But God shamed us first, I guess, if you're going to follow the logic that there's something particularly shameful about any of it. The only real shame is that the cops decided the cum belonged to them and just wasted it. Maybe we could have gotten to the bottom of all this.

I used to tell this story with a lot more excitement, back when it seemed like it was going to mean something. But half the city god God's sperm on their tits or in their mouth. Half the city got a facial from the big guy. Who can care in the face of that? Who wants to make a big deal out of something that happens to everybody? You'd be spitting in the wind.

STUDIES AFTER A LANDSCAPE

Mulch job — don't scroll away!
Seeking like-minded creatives to explore the boundaries between life and death, disease and wellness. Offering 10,000 credits (category: Arts & Leisure) plus free travel to a reconstitution/recuperation site of your choice within the entire Helios system.
People with gender preferred.

First day I met Sybaris was at Utopia port. They seemed excited for me to be there, kept tripping over their words. I asked what the project was all about. "It's really better if you don't know all the details — sorry about that — yes, it's a mulcher, some of the, uh, some of the materials — well, it's a mulcher, that's for sure. You're okay with that?" And yeah, I'd better be okay with that if I want to get out of this hellhole anytime this century. Plan was always to make it as far out in the system as I could then hitch a ride to outer space. Mulching was nothing to me. It wasn't my first mulcher, but those usually weren't as demanding about embodiment.

Surgery after surgery after surgery. (At least I wasn't awake for those this time around.) "The goal — well, can't tell you much about — look, you want anonymity, right?" I guess I did. "You want to fit in, right?" Sure, can't argue with that. "We're exploring — well, what does that mean? What does that mean to us?"

###

They were smartly-dressed, nervous, portly. I didn't know if they had gender themselves and I didn't really care that much. Soft little hands, intricately cared for — not much of a sculptor, whatever they liked to say. "Not a sculptor — not like that —" I can hear now, in their difficult little voice. It's nothing to me what they are or aren't. I found their company tedious; I just knew I had to take their pills, whatever the hell they were. They tried to explain it in their roundabout, not-really-explaining-it way, but I just got sick of it. They wanted to make believe they weren't my boss, that'd be extra, and I told them as much. That seemed to disappoint them. "Collaborators," they said, "that's what — you know that's how it'll be seen."

Sometimes when I thought about them I liked to think of grabbing them by whatever organs they had down there and tearing them out, root and branch. I liked to think about them torn apart by little scalpels attached to my body. The thought wasn't as comfortable for me after a while as it was at first. Not sure why. Maybe I started liking them, or hating them. It's nothing to me which it was.

###

So many things I should have noticed before now. Bleeding from the mouth, like scratching some kind of itch. Might have been that idiot I brought home last night, biting at my mouth with his dogmaw teeth, snapping, gnashing. Might have drawn blood. I look in my bed and my foam pillow is soaked through with blood.

"Lot of blood," I thought. But I thought on it some more and realized I wasn't in shock, so it had to be nothing. I called the idiot and told him, "Hey, you really bit the fuck out of my mouth, man." He apologized. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know what came over me. I'm not that feral." I told him, "You people always got excuses." And he said, "Yeah, I know." I hung up on him.

Modulated my clotting factor a little, got the bleeding to stop. Faint taste of space in my mouth, metal-like. I kept dreaming about all the fucking times I'd been there, seeing the stars from outside of domed cities, hating every second of their stupid procession across the sky.

###

I don't know how long passed. It usually didn't matter to me how much time passed, but it felt significant that time, because it was like it was nothing. I was in bed with someone else, some girl I think, or something like that. Whatever she was it was nothing to me. I kept petting her hair, and I think I was calling her daughter, daughter, and I felt something drop out of me, and I pulled her head away.

"Daddy," she said, and I said, "Not now," and I squeezed one tit and milk flew out, and I said, "What the fuck is this," and she asked, "You didn't know you were lactating," and I said, "I sure fucking didn't," and she sat up a little, and said, "Is everything okay?" And I lost time, and I don't know where she went, but I was awake again in a pool of my own blood.

###

Went to the doctor, I think, or something like that. I don't remember anything they said to me. I just remember his head being big and red and swollen, like a fucking grape. I remember laughing at him. I remember laughing at him until they kicked me out of the doctor. Someone was apologizing later. I lost more time, and I don't think I went back to the doctor. It was nothing, I guess, making me bleed, making me lactate. Hard to remember.

Went to Sybaris, told them what was happening. They kept saying, they kept saying, "This is — none of this is — it's fine," and I think I was crying. What the fuck? Crying? That's not me. I told them it wasn't fine, I told them it wasn't what I wanted. Woke up in the middle of talking about cumshots — new on me, don't even remember that part, and I'm sure I'm not normally equipped for that. Lost time and woke up in an unfamiliar bed, soft sheets made of some strange fabric. Shoulders felt sticky. Sybaris was moaning next to me.

"Not — you cunt — mulcher for me, mulcher for me, mulcher for me — oh God –"

I guess I had been inside them. I guess I had gotten whatever it was I wanted out of them before. I guess they were a little disemboweled. It's nothing to me. I told them, "You did this to yourself," and they said, "You don't — nobody understands –"

And I forget what happened next.

###

It was a strange thing, being indistinguishable from a crowd. I used to be tall. I guess I'm not tall anymore, after those surgeries. I used to be striking. I guess I'm not striking anymore, after those surgeries. And I sure used to do things that weren't on dissociative autopilot. The idiot from before, the wolf boy, was in my bed, and he was strapped to the bed, and I was inside him, and I couldn't tell what part of it was what I wanted and what part of it was what he wanted. Something inside kept just saying: it's nothing to me. He was crying. He looked afraid. I wanted to give him something to be afraid of.

I don't think I used to fuck this much. Something on the newsfeed was telling me it's unsafe. I don't remember when I saw that. Personal assistant frowning in my hindbrain, telling me that I wasn't supposed to be having unprotected sex. Maybe I wasn't supposed to be having sex at all. Something about novel parasites. Something about memory and personality. It was nothing to me. I don't know if it would always have been nothing to me, but it was nothing to me, nothing to me at all.

###

Before too long Sybaris had reconstituted. Saw him next in a glassweave suit, real stupid-looking. He told me, "I know you — you're my colleague, you're my collaborator — think we went — think this went too far —" and I kept snapping at the edges of the suit with my hands. Didn't feel strong enough. I remember being stronger. Maybe I should get strong again. It'd be nothing to get strong again. It felt good to make him scared of me. He was saying something about something inside of me, something contagious in my fluids. He never expected — never expected what came next —

On the newsfeed it had said days or months or years ago that the Martian government was considering mass disincarnation to contain the unknown pathogen. Losing time, sexual aggression, dissociation. All were spreading the pathogen. Changes to the brain through unknown mechanisms? Sure. That sounds like it. Unknown if it has effects on either captive or noncaptive consciousness crystals. Someone was saying however long ago they weren't even sure disincarnation would cut it.

Sometime they mulched me and I don't remember when.

###

Long days reforming one cell at a time at some KBO, waiting for a cold and distant sun to change positions in the sky.

Months or years or decades gone.

It's nothing to me.

Good to be away from the stars, good to be enclosed like a mother by a living womb the size of a city.

Once I have teeth again, it'll be good to feel them brush against her tissues, and good to taste her blood in the places I taste mine.

VIOLENCE II

The thing you need to understand about Narrowgarden is that it was designed to break you. Appalling gothic architecture in some anonymous New England backcountry. In the 70s it was run by some kind of quasi-feminist cult, real British hours, and the only remains of that are the cringey yonic arches they plastered all over a campus clearly designed as a reformatory or a juvey or something.

I ran here after my parents decided I was a transsexual. I was sick of that shit. Sick of their love and acceptance, sick of their stumbling over themselves to rewrite my memory. I knew there were a few places they'd rewrite you, and I wasn't too interested. But my friend or deep state handler or whatever found me a berth at Narrowgarden and all it took was showing up with a suitcase.

The groundskeeper found me looking like a scruffy boymoding little shit. I expected him to beat me to death with his rake. I kind of hoped he would. But he ran into his shed, and instead of a gun he had a blanket, he had a thermos with coffee in it. Awful coffee, worse than Dunkin or maybe just Dunkin given where Narrowgarden is in the world. I don't really care what America runs on, I just want this bristle-collared nobody man to put two rounds buck between my eyes. But he was full of sympathy.

"You don't really want to mess with this place," he said, "so many cursed things have I seen," he told me, "if it's your choice it's your choice, but I'd choose again," and I told him I had an appointment with intake. Coffee tasted like shit. Hoped it was drugged, hoped I was going to wake up half-conscious with my mouth wrapped around his faggot cock, tied up by my long days-unwashed hair, bruised all over, broken by his hands.

But he ushered me to intake and he stopped mattering to me after that.

###

Every time I go to sleep, I have the same dream. I keep seeing myself as an old woman, radiant, resplendent, my grandchildren in my arms. Some partner, never the same, holding my shoulder. I hate it. I miss dreaming about being in Hell. I want to dream about iron hooks tearing apart my flesh for my sins against nature.

I tell the intake about some of this, and they take me to a room with shitty wallpaper, just orchids and lilies and climbing vines in an insipid pattern, and they put headphones over my ears, and they tie me down. "Finally we're getting somewhere," I tell them. Nobody answers. It feels like nobody's in the room with me. My mind goes blank and something feels like it's entering me from an impossible angle. I'm screaming, I'm crying, I feel wet with piss or cum or shit. The headphones aren't making any sound I can pick up. My mind goes blank. My mind goes blank. I wake up and I'm staring out a wide window, and crowds go by, every now and again touching me, and I don't know if I'm alive or dead.

The next thing I remember I'm back in the room and it starts all over again.

###

"You are probably wondering," she says - who is she? a teacher? a doctor? something like both, but neither? - "what the purpose of this school is."
"Hmnn," I say. My mouth feels gagged. There's spit trailing from my lips. I would have wished it was cutting me open yesterday.
"Far are we strayed," she says, "from our illustrious foremothers' mission. The demands of the time do not speak to a need for coquettish dickgirls. A glut in the supply, these days."
"Yh?" I say.
"It is important you listen to me. It is important you focus on my words. You are our first willing subject but we need to transcend the boundaries of what lies within any individual's will. You understand?"
Something rises in my throat and with the greatest effort imaginable I swallow it back down.
"You understand. You are here to be made into a weapon. As you live and breathe, you will kill. You will kill men, women, children, who you will never meet. Countries, maybe even continents away. And when it's over, you will not quite blend into a crowd, but not quite attract attention, either."
"Nn," I say.
"You'll get used to that."

###

Later, when I've regained a little consciousness, I'm lying in my bunk - I have a bunk? - and I'm scratching at my left tit, and my nipples are bleeding.
"Oh, fuck," I say.
"What'th wrong," says the lisping creature a bunk above me.
"What'th wrong, Cherry," I say, remembering instantly that they seem to love me and I seem to hate them and that they're named Cherry and their stupid red hair is always tangled and looks like shit and I wish the school would just chop it off and make them wear a wig but it's hardly their fault they washed out of the intensified program," "is my nipple is bleeding."
They start groaning and rocking back and forth. God damn it. I need someone with answers.

"It happens, newbie," says Midnight. She's cooler than me, I kind of look up to her, but not because I want to be a girl like she is - I hate that we have that in common, and I guess I kind of hate her for it, even though she's otherwise really cool - and I say, "What, bleeding? That's not -"
"I don't fucking know, man. Cutting-edge SERMs, psiogenics, whatever they give you to clean out your faggot brain. I don't know what does it, I just know it happens. Now shut up and let me get some sleep."
"Can I itch it?"
She starts laughing, and grabs my tit and squeezes it so hard it feels like it's going to explode, and I black out.

###

"How's this one doing," says a graycoat. That's their compromise. They don't like using anything but "he" - it's not like I care, it's not like that's what I actually want  - but that'd fuck up the program somehow. So it's always "this one," "that one," "the subject," whatever. The graycoats are nightmare people, hardliners in the new government.

"Great," says the not-a-doctor from earlier. "They're up to 4 dynes at arbitrary, 50 dynes at horizon."
"Sluggish. I want 10/100 at least. That's what the rat model promised and that's what we built around."
"We have a couple of subjects up to or above that level so far. Another student, Midnight, would be ready for canine attack training if she had any sparring partners."
"Wolves aren't going so hot, huh,"
"Some of the fifth-gen pups can already understand — look, we don't know how awake they are; can we have this discussion some other time?"

They stop talking for long enough that I lose focus and I fade back to an even gray.

###

Later - that day? that year? - I think later, anyway? - I'm jacking off, and all I can think about is the face of this man I've never met. I know that the psychic driving is supposed to be training me to envision him entering me, but that's not how it's going. He's cutting me like a side of beef. He's spitting into my wounds, and I tell him I love him and I'm sorry. He's saying something about throwing away my birthright, and I don't know what he means, and he tells me I'm not human, and I agree I'm not human anymore, and I wake up and my slow-leak has clotted my panties to my crotch.

I go to write and I don't recognize the words, and I go back to sleep, and I'm back in the room with the tacky wallpaper, and the headphones are about to go on, and I'm begging her not to put them on, I'm telling her I'll be good, and she says, "You don't know how to be good yet, but you will," and my mind goes blank, and I fade back to an even gray again

and the man's face takes focus in my mind, and his eyes are filling up with blood

and people are crowding around and a woman real woman not mutilated by this place not born out of dreams real woman sensible shoes cellulite on her thighs screaming and screaming and begging someone to find

a doctor someone to help anybody

and I realize in that moment what I'm here to do, and I'm not there, but I'm there, and I'm looking him in the eye that can still see, and I smile and reach into my panties.

"You like that, daddy," I'm saying, and he's frothing at the mouth, and no one else sees me, and I'm everywhere, I'm an even gray like the sky, like a thunderhead bearing down, like a hurricane wiping this horrible little place apart —

##

Outside of Narrowgarden, the roses are wilting

as the Earth's fading memory of November chill

asserts itself, and an old man has returned

to the shed where he keeps his mistress's tools;

to sleep a time, and dream of his wife and children

and to dream of a world that cares

a little better for the young ones

so like his own

that would find their way here

in this one

THIS, TOO, IS TORAH, AND I MUST LEARN

Don was 9 years old when it happened. He was reading Wikipedia while his mother was at work, and he discovered the varying accounts of the end of the Siege of Baghdad. Hulagu Khan had seized the city, and the last Caliph of the Abbasid Dynasty, Al-Musta'sim, was at his mercy. Piously refusing to spill the blood of a king, Hulagu Khan had him rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses. Don couldn't stop imagining it - this beautiful man, strong and in his prime, destroyed by stampeding hooves; his eyes bulging out of his head, blood soaking the massive carpet as his flesh was torn apart; the simultaneous mastery over mortal flesh and obedience to the (to Don) alien will of an unknown God on the part of the Khan. He found himself fondling his genitals, and was quite startled to achieve orgasm for the first time in his life.

###

Don's eyes scanned the busy street around the coffeeshop he had set up at with his slim, light laptop. Human eyes bothered him little, as he was small, inconspicuous, almost inoffensive, like his unadorned chromebook. He was more concerned by the birds, by their sudden bursting into song, by a crow cackling with delight as it flew from branch to branch with its beak full of unidentifiable meat. He took a sip of his americano, not projecting nervousness but jaded boredom, the universal passport of the labor aristocracy that peopled his city.

The windows he had open concealed the window he cared about: a spreadsheet of apparently randomly-generated numbers, a PDF reader with a story by one of his friends about an alchemist who invented sodomy, opened to a relatively asexual page; a notepad++ containing XML chosen at random from a video game. He was only following one window, which tracked disk usage. He intended to capture a terabyte of raw footage while this chance was available.

His target, ever since the marriage and especially since the divorce, had become used to being followed by strangers. His initial paranoia had worn down into indifference. Don, for his part, was not one of his ex-wife's admirers. He had friends who were, who would gladly do what he was doing merely to injure the target. He was not interested in that, nor interested terribly in living out the fantasy of being a strange artistic girl drawn into the impossible web of affluence and amorality that his target represented. He had no empathy for the artist his target had recently divorced, and sometimes wondered if he had empathy for anyone, but certainly had no reason to pity her, no reason to identify with her, just because at one point he had wondered if she was a trans person waiting to happen. If anything more likely the target was, but he liked to put that thought out of his head when he was working.

The suite of skin-penetrating cameras in his laptop bag swiveled soundlessly, trained on the target's testicles with a suite of software he had delicately cobbled together from stolen code developed for laparoscopic surgery. It corrected for his breathing, his movements, his pulse, the wind rustling against the crotch of his jeans. The world gyrated around his testicles as they remained still and calm, like the eye of a hurricane.

He finished collecting his terabyte of data for the week and closed his laptop, drained his americano, and went home. There was a time where the erotic frisson of what he was doing would compel him to jerk off about it immediately, to let his imagination wander, but dull discipline had settled in to correct this time-wasting speculative behavior. Soon he would spin the raw data into compressed video, and he would sit down and learn.

&&&

Don was a man of simple pleasures. He liked the steak tartare he made for himself every day, or at least he ate it with no real disgust or displeasure. He liked filtered water, and to reward himself every other day with a decent cigarette. When he slept with men — as much as he would protest the framing, he would always have thought of them as another category from him, as men, unadorned by gender — he was usually able to get off pretty easily, despite how dire and boring they usually were. Soft, doughy little programmers waiting to fall away into some polycule somewhere; anonymous Grindr hardbodies who wanted to fuck his pussy like he was their son for a few minutes. He was a little proud of the fact that however good it was, he never fell in love, and however bad it was, he never fell into self-pity. He never compromised the objectivity of his eye.

Don was put on Earth to learn, and he intended to learn as best he was able. He was taught from very early on that learning was the only way to live, a life-long curiosity, and to the extent his parents tolerated him being a man or a faggot or whatever it was simply because they saw it through the lens of experimentation. He didn't tell them about his actual experiments, about the hard drives he was accumulating in a Faraday box between his cordless vibrator and his cordless power drill.

He was learning when he watched the video he had collected. He was learning the delicate structure of his target's testicles, learning how they hung, learning how much fluid had built up in his vesicles. He took notes, which went only on the hard drives he stored the videos on. He speculated, to the best of his ability, about his target's sexual habits, and looked up his net worth on websites that tracked such things in real-time.

When Don dreamed, lately, it was of his targets. It was of being a doctor like his father and performing surgery on his targets, sometimes rescuing them from some malady, sometimes simply inventing a pretext for exploratory surgery, for biopsies and resections. The dreams were repetitive, and left him with a feeling of lingering dread and sexual satisfaction. He thought sometimes about Buffalo Bill from "Silence of the Lambs", beloved and scorned in equal measure by difficult women online. He wondered a little if that wasn't him, if he wasn't trying to wear his targets like a suit, but he rejected that interpretation. Don simply wanted to understand them. He wanted to observe their habits and learn from them. Sometimes he wanted what they had; sometimes every atom of him hated that they were allowed to have it. But he couldn't argue with their success, with their net worth, with their power, with their instantaneous sexual access. He figured no one really could, in spite of all the jokes and memes about them. And that power had to come from somewhere.

It was Don's job, at least for now, to learn where it was coming from.

###

A few months and a dozen hard drives into his project, Don began to hear the first rumors of his influence on the targets. Several executives in the Bay Area had reported radiation symptoms, burns, lesions, centered around the groin. There was wild talk about a castration ray; the police had even begun speculating about the origin of the gang of radioactive castrators. Don kept coming back to the idea of the Air Loom, but he had to admit that some of these people — not all of them, surprisingly, maybe about 25% — he had actually targeted with directed radiation at perhaps unhealthy levels on a weekly or more frequent basis.

He thought they were gold-bricking, for the most part. The number of sieverts he had put into them, if his math was even in the ballpark of correct, was hardly enough to make them sterile. It's certainly possible they'd go on to unwittingly father monsters, when they raw-dogged the beautiful women they went home to. Don would be lying if he said that had never incorporated into his fantasies, the idea of taking these incredibly powerful men and changing them, permanently, without them even knowing who he was, while remaining only a face in the crowd.

That's as may be, sure. But probably shaving their heads like they were about to lose all their hair was going overboard. Probably the whole Walter White undergoing chemo thing was going way over the top, and yet it had begun to take off — at first out of concrete anxiety, then out of hideous solidarity. Even the men Don took home began to look balder to him, spiritually if not physically, and he wondered if that was simply his own mind grasping at straws or whether he had unwittingly embaldened the world, or at least the Bay Area, at least a little bit.

###

In his friend's story, which he scanned as furtively as anyone reading gay porn at a public coffeeshop, he was finally — after perhaps reading only a paragraph at a time, off and on, for weeks — approaching the ending. The protagonist, thoroughly debauched by the invention of sodomy as a method for intromitting elemental fire to save the lives of drowned men, had gone through his various hysterias, the low point of his descent into hell; had gone through vivid fantasies of being cuckolded in reverse, had imagined women seeing him as one of their own. He was being transported from a university in Germany in chains, and his ship wrecked against the rocks, casting him overboard; his last vision was described thus:

                Bawden, when asked what he saw beneath the dark water of the Thames, demurred at first; then simply lied, claiming to have seen demons cavorting in the brimstone seas of Hell; but in his final extremity confessed to seeing light — pure light, light without heat and light without fire, pouring forth from a ragged tear in the sky.

The last time he went out with his laptop bag containing his fluoroscopes and cameras, the camera managed to follow one of the successes through the wall of the coffee shop, into the bathroom. When a woman came in after his target, Don had to suppress a laugh.

"How easy it is to be us," he imagined them saying, in their coital clutch. "How easy, how easy, how easy," until he exploded in night-vision colors inside whatever slice of anonymous meat was her.

Home, then, to collect the data; to give himself a perfunctory handjob; to eat steak tartare, feel the myelin dripping down his chin onto the plate; to sleep fitfully, always awoken by the cackling of birds.

GOD CHOSE MORE VIOLENCE IN EVERY PART OF HIS DESIGN

NIGHTBITCH IS BACK IN ACTION AFTER A SOLID HOUR OF R&R. SHE GETS AROUND TO DEMUXING HER SHORT-TERM MEMORY AND IT TURNS OUT CONTROL WAS BEGGING HER FOR HELP AGAIN THE WHOLE TIME. SIMPLE JOB, BUT THEY MAKE IT SOUND LIKE SUCH A BIG DEAL. "THE LAMB IS BACK AND HE'S BIGGER AND BADDER THAN EVER". WHATEVER.

FOR THE LAST 2 MILLION YEARS THE WORLD HAS BEEN AT WAR WITH THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST. WE USED TO THINK IT'D BE A GOOD THING HE WAS BACK BUT IT TURNED OUT HE JUST WANTED TO FUCK EVERYTHING UP. HE'D COME INTO TOWN AND JUST OBLITERATE THE ECONOMY. HE'D TURN MEDICINE INTO WINE. HE'D TIE GUNS TOGETHER WITH HIS BULGING FOREARMS AND ACT LIKE HE DIDN'T JUST WASTE SOMETHING GOOD. ALL OF HIS MIRACLES WERE SELF-SERVING AND STUPID, AND WE'VE HAD ENOUGH OF HIS SHIT FOR SO LONG THE CONTINENTS HAVE SHIFTED UNDER OUR EXASPERATION. ALL OF THE HOLY PLACES ARE UNDERWATER OR GOT REPLACED WITH MALLS ANYWAY.

CONTROL: WHERE ARE YOU? WE'RE GETTING OUR ASSES KICKED OUT HERE
NIGHTBITCH: I'M BUSY. THESE CLOUDS AREN'T GONNA BLOW THEMSELVES UP
CONTROL: COME ON MAN. JESUS IS EVERYONE'S PROBLEM.
NIGHTBITCH: FINE. YOU BETTER PAY ME GOOD FOR THIS

NESTED BETWEEN THE HOSTILE BILLBOARDS IS A GIANT SIGN WELCOMING NIGHTBITCH TO PORTAGE, INDIANA. IT CALLS THE FUCKED TO DEATH ASPHALT HELLSCAPE IT OVERLOOKS "FRONT PORCH OF THE DUNES". NIGHTBITCH HAS NO IDEA WHAT A FRONT PORCH IS, BUT SHE KNOWS ABOUT THE INDIANA DUNES BECAUSE THEY'RE FAMOUS FOR HOW FUCKING STUPID THEY LOOK NOW, NOTHING BUT EVENLY SPACED CLIMATE CONTROLLED BUNKERS INSIDE A QUARRY BIG ENOUGH TO SEE FROM THE MOON. THE GOVERNMENT MELTED DOWN EVERY GRAIN OF SAND IN THEM OUT OF SPITE. THEY DIDN'T EVEN USE ANY OF THE GLASS TO BUILD THE CHICAGO DOME, JUST POURED IT INTO LAKE MICHIGAN.

SUDDENLY, HOSTILE ENERGIES IN THE HINDBRAIN. ONE OF THE MUTANTS IN THE HATRED BUNKERS IS TRYING TO FUCK WITH NIGHTBITCH TELEPATHICALLY. IMAGINE A VOICE TELLING YOU TO SHIT YOURSELF AND MAKE IT THE LOUDEST THING YOU'VE EVER HEARD - THAT'S BASICALLY WHAT IT'S LIKE. EASY TO RESIST BUT ANNOYING. NIGHTBITCH LOBS NANORECLAIMERS AT THE BUNKERS AT RANDOM. PSYCHIC BOMBARDMENT GETS WORSE, THEN BETTER, THEN GOES AWAY. HOPE THOSE ASSHOLES LIKE BEING INCORPORATED INTO BIOSLAG WITH EVERYONE THEY KNEW AND LOVED. WHATEVER. TIME TO KILL THE SON OF MAN AGAIN.

CONTROL: WE'RE TRACKING AN ENERGY SIGNATURE BEARING DOWN ON YOUR POSITION FAST. LOOKS LIKE IT MIGHT BE THE BIG GUY. WATCH OUT FOR ARCHANGELS
NIGHTBITCH: TELL ME ABOUT THE ARCHANGELS' LOADOUT
CONTROL: MOSTLY BURNING SWORDS. THEY'RE REAL SHARP AND REAL HOT
NIGHTBITCH: WHY'D YOU EVEN TELL ME THAT? DON'T FUCKING BOTHER ME ABOUT SWORDS. I SHIT OUT A SWORD EVERY OTHER TIME I WAKE UP
CONTROL: SORRY, NIGHTBITCH. I WON'T DO IT AGAIN

NIGHTBITCH PROWLS THE INNARDS OF THE BASS PRO SHOPS MEGAPLEX. INTEGRATED RADAR POINTS HER TO THE WALLED-OFF FISHING SECTION. SHE BLASTS THE WALL OPEN WITH A FORCE BEAM AND THE DUST OF MILLENNIA BILLOWS OUT. THE FISH ARE GONE, THE CULTISTS AND PERVERTS THAT TRIED TO BRING THEM BACK ARE GONE, AND NOW EVEN THE ACRYLIC IN THE FISHING RODS IS GONE. ALL THAT REMAINS IS RUSTED STEEL.

A CUBIC PROJECTILE FLIES OUT OF THE DARKNESS AND GLANCES OFF NIGHTBITCH'S COLLARBONE. DOESN'T PENETRATE HER BLADESUIT BUT SHE'S NOT TAKING CHANCES. 90% OF THE BLOOD IN HER BODY BLASTS OUT OF HER EYES AND MOUTH, AND HER BODY INSTANTLY REPLACES IT. SHE CAN DO THAT AS OFTEN AS SHE WANTS. WHOEVER'S IN THERE ISN'T HAPPY ABOUT THE FOUNTAIN OF BLOOD, AND ANSWERS IT WITH PROFANITY.

NIGHTBITCH: I GOT 'EM PINNED DOWN WITH MY BLOOD
CONTROL: HOLY SHIT, HOW'D YOU DO THAT
NIGHTBITCH: JUST GOTTA BE GOOD

NIGHTBITCH WALKS UP TO THE HEFTY FIGURE CLOTTED TO THE WALL, SLOW AND COOL.  "WHO SENT YOU," SHE SAYS. "YOU BETTER ANSWER ME. I GOT MORE BLOOD THAN I KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH."
"A THOUSAND TIMES DEATH TO THE ENEMIES OF THE SEASON," SAYS THE FIGURE
"WHAT THE FUCK IS A SEASON," SAYS NIGHTBITCH
"IT'S A RELIGION THING," SAYS THE FIGURE.

NIGHTBITCH: I'M GONNA NEED EVERYTHING YOU GOT ABOUT THE SEASON, CONTROL
CONTROL: GOT IT. ESTIMATED MONTH IS DECEMBER OR JANUARY, WHICH MAKES IT WINTER
NIGHTBITCH: IN ENGLISH, DUMBASS
CONTROL: IT'S THE COLDEST PART OF THE YEAR... DARKEST PART TOO IF THE SUN STILL PRODUCED VISIBLE LIGHT. DON'T KNOW YOUR GUY'S CONNECTION TO THE CHRIST BASED ON THAT
NIGHTBITCH: GOT IT
CONTROL: TRY THREATENING HIM WITH VIOLENCE
NIGHTBITCH: YOU THINK THAT'LL WORK
CONTROL: I THINK SO?
NIGHTBITCH: AHAHAH GOD YOU'RE A DWEEB

THE HEFTY FIGURE'S TRYING TO WRIGGLE FREE FROM NIGHTBITCH'S BLOODBATH, BUT NOTHING DOING. HER FIBRIN HAS THE TENSILE STRENGTH OF SPRING STEEL. EVERYONE'S ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT IT WHENEVER SHE COMES UP. FINALLY, SHE GETS CLOSE ENOUGH FOR HIM TO GET A GLIMPSE OF HER EVIL LEFT HAND. TINY IMPRISONED DEMONS SWIRL AROUND IT, GENERATED IN REALTIME BY A CENTRAL COMPUTER IN HER ARM.
"YOU BETTER TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT JESUS," SAYS NIGHTBITCH. "I'D HATE TO START TEARING OUT YOUR BONES AT RANDOM"

"YOU WOULDN'T HATE THAT," SAYS THE TRAPPED TARGET. "YOU'D LOVE THAT."
"YEAH, I WAS BEING SARCASTIC THERE."
"YOU MIGHT KILL ME BUT YOU'LL NEVER SMOTHER THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS."
"I HAVE SMOTHERED MORE GHOSTS THAN YOU CAN FUCKING IMAGINE. SPILL."
"ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT! I WORK FOR THE SECOND COMING. NOT LIKE DIRECTLY FOR HIM BUT I'M INSPIRED BY HIM OR — IT'S COMPLICATED OKAY. I'VE BEEN GIVEN MIRACULOUS POWERS TO DELIVER PRESENTS TO DESERVING CHILDREN."
"PRESENTS?"
"YOU KNOW, GIFTS."
"I DON'T KNOW. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT"
"I KNOW IT'S A DIFFICULT CONCEPT BUT SOMETIMES PEOPLE GIVE OTHER PEOPLE THINGS AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL OR AFFECTION"
"WILD. SO IN YOUR STUPID MYTHOLOGY IF I GIVE YOU A BROKEN LEG THAT MEANS I LOVE YOU?"
"THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS", SAID THE TRAPPED TARGET, BUT NIGHTBITCH WAS ALREADY OUT OF THE BUILDING THROUGH A HOLE SHE EXPLODED IN THE CEILING.

CONTROL: WHAT HAPPENED THERE? READINGS SHOW YOUR TARGET IS STILL ALIVE. THAT'S NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE
NIGHTBITCH: HE HAS SOME KIND OF FETISH. WEIRDED ME OUT
CONTROL: OH MY. I'LL TRY TO FLATTEN THE BUILDING FROM ORBIT BUT I GOTTA WARN YOU, THE BASS PRO SHOPS CULT USUALLY GETS IN THE WAY OF THE PAPERWORK
NIGHTBITCH: DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT. I'M GONNA GO... SOMEWHERE ELSE. AND THINK FOR A BIT

NIGHTBITCH USED HER INTEGRATED ANTIGRAV TO HOVER THOUSANDS OF FEET ABOVE THE LANDSCAPE FOR MILES AND MILES, HERE AND THERE DODGING INCOMING SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILES AND THE INSTANT DEATH BEAM TRAJECTORY OF LONG-DORMANT SATELLITES. HER FLIGHT TOOK HER OVER THE GLASSY SILENCE OF LAKE MICHIGAN, ITS SURFACE FROZEN INTO HYPER-ICE THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO BY A STUPID EXPERIMENT. SHE EXPERTLY SLOW-COOKED A HAND PARANUKE TO RED HEAT AND DROPPED IT. THERE WERE NOTHING BUT EXOTIC ARCHAEA LEFT TO KILL DOWN THERE, BUT SOMETIMES IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS IN LIFE.

NIGHTBITCH: I'M DONE THINKING. FIND OUT WHERE JESUS ACTUALLY IS AND LET'S KILL HIM
CONTROL: GOOD NEWS ON THAT. HE DECIDED TO LEAVE ON HIS OWN THIS TIME. SAID WE WEREN'T READY
NIGHTBITCH: PUSSY SHIT. SHOULDN'T HAVE EXPECTED BETTER. WHAT ELSE NEEDS DEAD THEN
CONTROL: IT'S A LOWER PRIORITY BUT A GROUP OF DOLPHINS THAT SURVIVED THE GREAT CULL BY HIDING IN THE PUGET SOUND EXCLUSION ZONE HAVE DEVELOPED TOOL USE AGAIN. WE COULD SEND A SCRUB TEAM BUT THE JOB'S YOURS IF YOU WANT IT
NIGHTBITCH: NO, SOUNDS GOOD. IT'S BEEN TOO LONG SINCE I TAUGHT A SPECIES THE PRICE OF HOPE

THE YEAR IS 25350552. ALL THAT REMAINS FOR MANKIND IS THE HELL OF ETERNAL WAR. ALL THAT STILL LIVES EXISTS IN A PERMANENT AND BRUTAL STATE OF POST-NATURE. ALL POSSIBLE TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN INVENTED AND THE ONLY DREAM THAT CAN STILL BE ACHIEVED IS MURDER.

ENTER THE PERFECT MERCENARY: NIGHTBITCH

AMENDED LIST OF GAMES THE BUDDHA WOULD NOT PLAY

I'm a starfucker. Some people beat around the bush about it. Not me. The glamor of celebrity has an immovable allure to me. As far back as I can remember — well, let's say, let's not be specific about how far back, I don't wanna get anyone in trouble. But stories, man, I could tell you stories. I'm just gonna limit it to five.

I.

Sometime in the past — this is the one I don't want to get anyone in trouble about, so I'm just gonna say sometime in the past — I was at a premiere of some film or another. I had won a ticket in a contest where I named the capitals of all the US states. I pushed my way past the nobodies and there he was, Ralph Fiennes. The man himself. I said, "Ralph Fiennes, in the flesh," and he said, "Yes, it's me, Ralph Fiennes." It's a difficult name, and I think he was impressed with how good I was at pronouncing it. I wonder sometimes about how things would be different if I hadn't stuck the landing, but I did.

I told him I loved him in The English Patient. He had a quiet dignity, and I loved to see him as a burned man, a badly burned man, his body completely destroyed by war. I told him how much I appreciated his mutilation, which the film kept at tasteful but unsatisfying distance. He confessed it felt dishonest that we could not see more of the Hungarian aristocrat's burned flesh, his flame-scarred bone peeking out. He told me he would have loved to play a mutilated corpse.

After all that, he invited me back to his hotel room. I don't think I should say the rest of what happened, but I do remember as he was telling me to look out for him in the upcoming motion picture "Red Dragon", he slipped me a little post-it note. I thought it peculiar he took his own notes, surely he must have a man to do that for him, and truth be told it made him fall a bit in my estimation. I spent years, in fact, quite sour on Ralph Fiennes, would tell anyone who broached the subject that he was a boor of jumped-up peasant stock wearing the ill-fitting costume of country gentry.

But I kept the post-it note, and I treasure it to this day. It was a little sketch of his penis, a bit of his testicles. Essentially what he could see from where he was sitting, depicted with frankly breathtaking accuracy. Even in my years of discontent with the man I had to admire the artist. The legend, of course, was "Our Little Secret", inscribed in a carefree hand. They all say things like that.

II.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was, truth be told, an act of charity. He had the sort of air of a has-been to him, even at that late date, well into the establishment of his comeback; but I had never seen any of his newer movies, had barely heard of them in fact, so I went into our encounter with the illusion I was puffing up one of the sad creatures that become of child stars when they age out of the industry's appetites. We talked at length on the subject, and he seemed wounded, desperate, angry. He told me that he was twice the actor Wood or DiCaprio was, let alone any of the kids running through the grinder these days. It struck me as funny, is all, that he never thought of Culkin, a nearer contemporary who time completely forgot.
I distinctly remember his hungry asshole, but I remember little else about the man. Accomodating, with a greater gape than anyone should expect of a Hollywood star. I wondered who had been there before me to convince him that accomodation on that scale was something the average partner desired, and the thought actually left me a little queasy. I told him, after we were done, that I would be sure to look him up if he ever came into town again, and look for his comeback on the screen. It was at this point I discovered he had made several movies in the last year, and I apologized and told him I was simply mistaken on account of his desperation, his hunger, which in any actor is an asset, but I suppose it wouldn't have helped to tell him that many men are hungry and desperate and few of those have any kind of star quality.

I think he attempted to contact me years later and I pretended to be my own next-of-kin, simply to spare myself the humiliation of encountering him as an older man, and the vertigo of comparing his asshole in the present to his asshole in the past — of encountering either studied, careful improvement of the younger man's gape or its complete disintegration from disuse.

III.

Fucked Daniel Day-Lewis on the set of some movie or another. Probably the one about oil or the one about gangsters, it seemed tedious either way. The way his booming voice whistled through his mustache, the thin timbre of his native English accent, it all left me a little unimpressed, and I told him candidly that he wasn't half the man Ralph Fiennes was, nor half the lover, nor indeed half the actor, and he grew so enraged he half-threatened to choke me with an electrical cord, only holding it weakly over my neck for effect until I left him alone. When I went by his trailer later he was sobbing loudly, screaming about being misunderstood.

IV.

Edward Norton. Absolutely horrible lay, boring and unimaginative as his performances. He really has gotten away with more than he should have been able to with his rakish good looks, which no one has the heart to tell him aren't what they used to be. As he rifled through my pockets he discovered the post-it note, which I've kept for years as a sort of good luck charm.

He said, "Who is that, De Niro?" And I laughed and said it was Ralph Fiennes. He pointed to a tilt of the penis that seemed to suggest De Niro's trademark hangdog expression, and in the moment it seemed quite true, and made me laugh, and reminded me why America loves him, and why I love fucking celebrities. He offered to pay for the cab home, then took it with me and had us split it Dutch.

V.

Encountered Daniel Radcliffe studying for a role or something in a bar. He stuck out like a sore thumb, but then I suppose he seems out of place wherever he is. I told him, on account of those eyes that seem grown in a lab to entice trust and confidence, about my habit of going to bed with celebrities. I told him it would be a delight to suck him off, a real honor. He told me if I had ever seen any of the Harry Potter movies, and I said I hadn't, and he lead me to the men's and unzipped his fly. Something about seeing it from that angle trespassed on sacred corners of my memory, or maybe something about finally reaching the point in my life where I was having anonymous sex with celebrities younger than me — it got to me. It made me feel like a wheel in a vast and impersonal machine, and when he finished and asked if I needed anything from him, I just mumbled something about swallowing his load being enough of an honor for me, and he said, no, no, let's not stand on ceremony, let's not pretend I'm a bigger man than you just because I'm rich and people know me, and I said that's not how it works and you know it, and rather than argue he tousled my hair with a certain practiced intimacy and left me to my own devices.

Mixed feelings on this one, of course — it stings a bit to let the illusion of youth slip away from you — but at least this encounter, details of course elided, will impress my idiot wife and philistine children.

GOOD SIGNS AT YOUR NEW JOB

- coyotes keep attacking you on the road
- deer scream at you and charge when you approach
- your boss, whose face you can never seem to commit to memory, keeps praising your team for “loyalty to the bitter end” even though you’ve all been there a week
- get served with divorce papers despite not being married
- I love my job
- your “new maintenance guy” (obvious government employee but nothing like any cop or fed you’ve ever met) keeps installing bugs in your house, but they’re not good at hiding it and seem afraid of you
- false memories implanted by job about working the job when you were a child, before it was even a thing people did
- pleasant grinding sound barely perceptible when there’s no other sound. Seems to follow you around
- payment includes “generous exposure package” but what you’re being exposed to isn’t specified
- I love my job
- the news announces that hell is real, they discovered how to make a portal to Hell using something called “slow photons”. It’s definitely hell but it’s full of long-dessicated skeletons, not even geologically active. Everyone’s always talking about it, like, what are the implications, what does it mean for us, does that mean Heaven is real or is it just Hell. The next day they lead with how the Dow Jones is doing and don’t mention Hell and then they never mention it again, and at first people are upset but they increasingly go along with it, and you start feeling like you’re nuts for remembering about Hell being a physical, real place that humans have visited and found empty and barren
- first listed benefit for 1 year seniority is “Undeniable Proof”; proof of what? no one will say
- your boss, whose voice is at once familiar and novel, calls you on your weekend and he’s crying and saying shit like “it’s all over” and “what the fuck have we done” and then on Monday you come in and everything’s normal
- I love my job
- I love my job

GRAPPA NIGHT

Everyone's real worried about you ever since the thunderstorm. You know the one. You know how it washed you clean and you emerged from it changed. Peeling out at two in the morning, every other morning — you think the neighbors like that?

It's always something fucking new with you, man.

Susan saw, she saw the way you've been looking at birds, now you're a new person living a new life. Susan fucking hates your longing glances at their graceful flight. It's unfair to pine after what you can't have. You think man was meant to fly? If that was evolution's plan for us we'd have wings, they'd be stupid long, and we'd be living in remote aeries, swooping down on carrion like a vulture. You saying you want to be a vulture? That's fucking nuts. You know how hard they work. You don't have that in you. I mean this as a friend, you don't have the intestinal fortitude to hack it in that life.

Yeah, this is about you shaving runes into your head. And maybe it's about you changing your Twitter handle. Everyone's been scared shitless. You think friends grow on trees? It's hardly fair to us. It's hardly fair to us, is all I'm saying.

You thinking of storing carcasses in the basement? That's fucked. That's not what it's for. You're gonna fuck up the lease. Where are you gonna stay if that happens? Did the angel you saw riding the lightning offer to put you up if the landlord kicks you out? You don't have to start with that. No, I get it, I know you're pivoting to woodworking, but there's a time and a place. Put the saw down. I'm talking, man. You can't just tune me out that way.

I seen how you spurn the fruit of the vine. I've seen it, man! Just the other day you shat all over grappa night. You told us that it was against your holy vows. Now let me ask you, let me ask you, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Does God or whoever frown from on high on grappa? On the boys getting together with a fine beverage and having a good time? There was no call to take a shit on grappa night like that. Donnie can't stop crying about it. He told me, told me he doesn't know what to believe ever since you came back from the thunderstorm. I told him it's just - you know, I told him it's that you think you're too good for us. Maybe you are. That's neither here nor there. We're what you got.

It should go without saying you're out of the band. We got a new drummer. We didn't have to look far, basically anyone can play the drums. Yeah, I know you wanted to try something new anyway. Well, I'm glad that worked out for all of us.

I love you. We all love you. We just hate what you are these days. You ever thought — you ever just given some thought to cutting the shit? "Not really", huh. That surprises me. You really should. If I were you I would for sure.

WE HOPE THAT YOU CHOKE / THAT YOU CHOKE

Now that we've all forgotten about death I guess the only thing left to do is choke each other. Just the other day, saw a kid too young for it playing Castlevania on some kind of device, and I said, "You little shit, who taught you that," and my wife put me in a sleeper hold. "Hhhh," I said, and she said, "Don't ruin his fun. Don't make that kid's life worse." I said "Hhhhh" some more and eventually fell asleep.

Woke up to the nurse at the doctor's office feeling the veins in my neck. I guess I had an erection from the associations we all had between being choked and unconsciousness. His grip firmed up and he started grabbing at my dick. "Hey," I rasped out, "cut that shit out." But he didn't until I started blasting urine, there and then.

Doctor comes in, looks at the puddle of urine, looks at me, starts frowning. "You do this?" The nurse had released my throat enough to permit me to say, hoarsely, "Your staff left me with no choice."
"I'm going to need you to mop this shit up."
"It's not shit, man," I said. "You think I'm a pig? Think I was raised in a barn?"
"I don't know," said the doctor. "Usually someone gives one of my patients a handjob, they like it, I like it, everyone wins. Usually way less piss, basically none."
"What do you mean, 'someone gives me a handjob'." I turned to the annoyed-looking man in scrubs who was still hovering over me. "Aren't you a nurse?"

"Sure," said the alleged nurse. "I'm definitely a nurse."
"Go get a mop, sugar tits," said the doctor to the guy in scrubs, then she turned to me. "I'm diagnosing you with Coward's Uresis."
"What's the prognosis on that," I said.
"Depends on how much of a bitch you are," she said.
"Oh, huge," I said, nodding.
"Then I guess you don't mind being a dirty piss bitch who ruins other people's floors because she's too much of a pussy to sit there and accept a free handjob."
"Checks out," I said.

"Then I guess there's nothing to do about it," she said, "except own up to it and mop."
"I will when he brings the mop over, I guess."

We waited for about an hour. I think I figured out before she did that the 'nurse' wasn't coming back, and I got real agitated. I had long since gone limp-dicked as a sitting president, and it wasn't like I had any more piss in me. Slowly, the doctor moved over to me, at a speed I could barely perceive her movements, and before I knew it she was basically on top of me.
"Zip up," she said. "Don't make this any weirder for both of us."
"Sure," I said, and as soon as I did, bam: arm around the neck, choking my lights out.

Woke up outside of the doctor's office, my wife there, waiting for me. She said, "How'd it go?"
Climbing into the car, I said, "It went great. I pissed all over the place and didn't have to clean any of it up."

"That sounds about right," she said. "Standards really been slipping in medicine lately."
"It makes sense," I said. "They're not really allowed to charge anything anymore because nobody can die."
To pass the awkward silence, we wrestled in the stopped car, each aiming for each other's delicate neck vessels. I had a bit of an advantage because I've got a lot of weight on her, so my neck is huge like a dog bred for bloodsport. Her neck is small and delicate, like a graceful swan that forgot to keep its head so far away from its body, or an egret or whatever other kind of bird. As I was choking her, that's what I said: "Bird."
"Hhhhh," she said.
"No, I mean you're a bird."
"Nnnn," she said.

"I'm not a bird. I'm nothing like a bird."
There used to be a song with the exact opposite message, I remembered. People used to think so differently back then. But thinking about the popular music of my long-gone youth gave her an opening, and her thumb was digging into my jugular, and I passed out again.

Woke up in bed, and that kid from earlier was sitting on a low rock outside of the window, looking over their electronic device into my house. "Leave," I said.
"Fuck you," said the kid, and kept playing Castlevania or whatever else it could have been. I was so mad I could die, except no one can die anymore. I threw the heaviest thing I could find at him — a brick we kept around for hitting each other — but it didn't even break the window. It hit it and bounced clean off.

"Shitty arm," said the kid.
"No, just really good glass."
"Wow, you must be rich and really good at hiding it, and not just a noodle-armed jagoff."

"Why are you here," I asked.

"I'm playing Castlevania," said the kid.
I kept throwing things at the window but nothing managed to get through. Soon there was a pile of essentially random crap beneath the window, and that bastard child was still out there, playing that game, mocking me with their indifference. I'd have pissed myself in rage but I was still pretty dry from the doctor's office. So I went to the bathroom and stuck my head under the sink, and lapped and bit at the stream of water like a dog.

"Dog moment," said my wife.
I gurgled an incoherent response, snapping at the stream with my whole head.
"You want me to get the hose?"
"No," I tried to say, but she already had the hose. "Don't bring that in here," I said, taking a moment away from quenching my thirst, but it was too late. She had my head in the bath in moments and was jokingly waterboarding me.

"Why are you a dog," she said.
"Ghghghgh!" I blubbered back, nerves lively with panic, certain I was about to drown.
"No. Why are you a dog."
And so on — things continued in this vein for some time.

Probably forever, if you follow the logic of the story to its logical conclusion. Wouldn't that be nice?

MEDICAL MALPRACTICE FUNNIES

I woke up from some minor surgery or another related to my collapsing lung with a bandage over my wrist. It took me a while to notice, but when I did, it struck me as suspect.

I got very suspicious right away, because the IV port was on the other wrist. I told the first nurse I could see: "I don't think you needed to bandage up my wrist to look at my lungs, did you?" And she told me, "That's a new thing we're doing. Our treat."

She just stood there looking at it, looking at me. Waiting, I guess, for something to happen. A few minutes passed and I began to unwrap the bandage. I paused halfway through. "Is this my right wrist or my left wrist," I asked the nurse.
"Surely you know," she said, eagerly.
"I don't," I said, "I can't tell left from right."
"No wonder they decided to do that to you. It's your right."
I was about to get a little snotty about that remark, but I let it fly. I finished unwrapping my wrist.
"It's important that you get used to it," she said, as I unveiled the bruisy mass welted up with blood blisters.

"Get used to what? It looks like you broke my wrist," I said. I wasn't even horrified, just annoyed. It seemed like the last thing I needed.
"No," she said. "Look closer."

I looked closer and noticed there was the thin, dark line of a slit there, like a mouth. My fingers uncurled in shock. "A mouth? You sewed a mouth onto my fucking wrist?"
"Close," she said. "We're trying out a new technique here — I'm sure the doctor can explain everything when she gets here — we're trying out a new technique here for, ah, gender-affirming... gender... whatever. It's a vagina."
"A what."
"Well, a vulva," she said, with a bit of a cough. I recoiled. "Oh, grow up, the pandemic is old news. Anyway, that's what's going on with your wrist from now on."
"I... I see. Can I have it reversed?"
"I don't believe your insurance will cover that. They don't typically even cover what we did here, but you know, Oregon's great that way."
The doctor barged in through the door without knocking, slid into the room a little on her clogs. "Right," she said. "Welcome to the world of Wrist Pussy."
"Excuse me," I said.
The nurse started laughing, first a little, and then a lot.

###

I looked into the surgery I just had on the Internet and there was no information. Or, well, there was, but the SEO thing was so intense, and there weren't any Reddit posts about it, so I couldn't learn any more than that people had definitely imagined there being a pussy in somebody's arm before. I had sheepishly wrapped the damn thing up with gauze when I got home, and it occurred to me I had no idea what maintenance looked like. Would I need to dilate or something? Suppose it started leaking; what was that — blood, menses, something else?

Eventually I got a package in the mail. It was a new ID. Under my gender marker it said, in neat small capital letters, "WRIST PUSSY". In fact, there wasn't a letter for gender anymore. That seemed like it could be a problem, so I tried calling the DMV — it was extremely difficult with most of my customary manual dexterity gone — and after being on hold for an hour, I asked them what was up with that.

"Well," she said, "I shouldn't be telling you this, but they're rolling out a special gender marker for cases of, ah, deficiency like yours –"
"Deficiency?"

"Mental, physical, whatever. It's not ready yet. They're trying to decide what letter it is."
"That seems fucked up as a thing to record about a person."
"Are you kidding?"
"No."
"Wow."
There was an awkward silence lasting some time.

"Right. So it also says "Wrist Pussy" on here. Can you elaborate on why that needs to be on my ID?"
She seemed offended. "We did it special, actually. We thought you'd find it affirming after all the effort you went to to, uh, self-actualize, and –"
"No, you see, there's been a mistake. The doctor did this largely without my asking."
"Largely?"
"I did ask for surgery to be performed on my lung. Some minor matter of collapse."
"Ah, I see," she said. "That doesn't really change the fact you have a wrist pussy, does it."
"I guess not," I said.
"Right, well, expect another license with the final letter in the meanwhile. Probably gonna be a frowny face or the letter R. You should write that down."
"Are those — Jesus, okay."
"I hope I've been helpful to you today."
"Yeah."
"Alright, well, bye now."
She hung up. The phone sent me a survey about her performance, and I gave her top marks, because of course — why wouldn't I? I might have hated her guts, I might have thought she was gloating about my misfortune, but I'm not a fucking cop.

###

Years later, after some productive time spent gouging holes into roads with an asphalt auger, long slits driven through lines of transport essentially at random, I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a car. I told the girl I was with to pull over and leave, and I called Triple A.

Couple hours later a tow truck showed up. Sweaty fellow come out, greasy hair, unkempt. Looked younger than me — you wouldn't believe how irritating that starts to get. "You call roadside assistance?"
"Yeah," I said.
"What's wrong with your car?"
"My car? This isn't my car."
"Right... okay. So what's wrong with the car."
I pulled down my wristband. "It's this, actually."
"Jesus Christ! You got a pussy on your wrist."
"Sure," I said. "I want to know if it can feel anything. I want to know if there's anything alive there."
"I can't help you with that," he said. "You want a doctor or a sex partner or something."
"I believe I'm on the roadside," I said.
"Yeah," he said.
"And I need assistance."

INSTANT EMPLOYMENT TECHNIQUE

i go to the job interview. there is a square table set out with a dish of assorted unwrapped candies, and an HR manager sitting on one chair facing the door. if i were a cis woman i would sit across from him, whereas if i was a cis man i would sit next to him. in either case i would take one piece of candy and slip it into my pocket for later. the HR manager rises to shake my hand. there are a million strategies to make a good impression on an interviewer with the correct handshake, but this isn’t my first rodeo.

ignoring his hand, i plunge my hand into the bowl of candy and deftly grab a handful, then begin feeding the HR manager. initially he’s agitated by my approach but i calm him down with my gentle demeanor. pretty soon he’s eating candy straight out of my hand. good sign. when he sits down i brush off his lap with a handkerchief (shows respect for his clothes by not using a bare hand, shows concern for cleanliness and thorough nature to clean off his lap).

i sit directly on his lap, and he winces in pain from my weight. “easy there, big fella. i’m not gonna hurt you.” i pat him on the head and reach into my pocket. i pull out a stick of wintergreen gum. the scent and flavor of the wintergreen calm his wild spirit and give me free rein to reach into the pocket of his trousers. “you won’t be needing this anymore,” i say, placing his wallet just beyond his arm’s reach on the table. “that life is behind you.”

carefully, i take his shoes. this is the hard part - even taking loafers off of an HR manager can startle them, make them bolt. but he trusts me. i put his shoes on my feet. they fit perfectly. i’m now ready to take his jacket and work badge and release him into the wild. he’ll be disoriented at first, but within a few months, he’ll rehabituate to the natural environment, maybe even find a mate and start a family. i’ll be a valued employee at my new job by then.

don’t worry about his clothes and wallet. he’ll find new ones, they always do. nature provides for all creatures.

MICHAEL LARSON AND THE POTTER'S FIELD

There was a show, years ago, called "Everyone Can Sing" — you remember that? One of those things, one of those things that felt strangely religious but wasn't Christian? You know how they turned out to be a front for a cult? The lead singer of the band they formed from people who had never touched music before, turned out to be one of their guys. Largely fine, actually. I don't think he was involved in any of the stuff they wound up doing.

They got a monument, they got a monument off Terwilliger about that stuff. Like if Rosie the Riveter was a man, big beefy bronze guy rolling his sleeves up. I think it's called "Vigilance". I forget all the details, but probably in the future they'll think there's something kinda racist about it. You know how that is. Probably there actually is and we just can't see it, being so close to what they did. Yeah, those guys, out by Scappoose, you know. You know all about it. You can sorta see it, though, right? The optics?

Anyway, you know, I gave going on the show some thought. No shit! You know how I am about game shows, I got a real vanity in my heart about 'em. I always think I'd clean house. I bet they'd like my voice, or thought I had "the spark". Maybe with their whole approach, 'everyone can sing' and all, they'd like that I wasn't good at it. Yeah, I'm the same way about Jeopardy.

Felt like I could really have a shot, become a national laughingstock, whatever. And that one chick who won — I'm glad for her, really! Seems nice enough.

Years ago, I thought I was trapped. I hated everything about being alive, and I told someone, I distinctly remember, but I couldn't tell you who, I told her, "I might be a caged bird but I can't help but sing". There's a book about that, I think. Came through on the other side but all the old demons are still there. All the loneliness in crowds, you know, the feeling that I'm nothing but the conversations I have. I can't let go of the illusion of control, you know, and that's gonna eat me alive again. You know how it is. You know how it is.

You know the cat, right, she used to — this was a place or two ago — she used to stand in the door of the bathroom when we were falling asleep, she used to yell into the bathroom to hear her voice echo. I think she liked hearing her own voice, her own sad yowling voice, because the people she loved were both going to sleep and she was afraid of being alone. She doesn't do that much anymore, but she doesn't get as much chance to be alone anymore. I used to find it kind of sad, and I guess she's happier now. Part of me still misses it, you know? Misses hearing her singing to herself because the night was dark and quiet.

So that's why — what I'm telling you is, I think they were right. I mean not to do the thing they did, and maybe too limited about even what they were saying with the game show, the Scappoose guys, that one cult. I think they were right that everyone can sing. Should everyone be trying to form a pop band, release singles, get a contract with a record label? Probably not. But everyone can sing. Every living creature has a song in its heart. You just gotta ask yourself, do you really want to hear yours?

A HORNY REQUEST TO GOD

Need me a woman. You hear me? Need me a woman to act as a vessel, act as a vessel for Heaven's wrath at my hubris. Need me a woman who weeps in agony for the sins of the world. You hear me? Need me a woman, need me a new woman who's always two steps ahead. Need me a woman who doesn't believe the rumors. Need me a woman like that. Need me a woman with downcast eyes, looking for insects to kill. Need me a woman whose kills are all on purpose, out of anger, out of a burning desire to punish transgression. You hear me?

Oh, I need me a woman to drain the blood from my dick. I need me a woman to ward off gangrene, no mistake, no mistake. I need me a woman to drain all the color out of my face, leave me ashen. Need me a woman who lives in the ashes and mistakes us for caterwauling beasts. Need me a woman to pay my rent, give me three squares, force my face into the john. You hear me? I need me a woman to drain the blood from my eyes. Need me a woman who sucks and fucks. Need me a woman with a hole inside her. You hear me?

God, I'm not one for prayer. I'm not known to get on my knees. But I can make an exception for a woman like that. God give me a woman growing all her hair on purpose. God give me a woman's got straight teeth like an actor, coming right out the bone. Need me a woman who would spit on Christ in his agony. Give me a woman part of the howling mob; whoever they are, whatever they want, makes no difference to me. Makes no difference to me, you hear me? Need me a woman with a taste for blood. Need me a woman to check me for cancer, woman who won't tell me shit if she finds it. Need me a woman who loves to laugh and chooses to cry. You hear me?

God, I'm telling you, could be two feet tall, could be twelve feet tall. Makes no difference to me. Could carry her in a hollowed-out bone, could be a toy in her collection. I'm no stranger to what you do. I'm no stranger to the fairer sex. But God, I need me a woman. I need me a woman who doesn't know the day, but knows what time it is. I need me a woman who isn't about to call it quits. I need me a woman who's not afraid to perform a little surgery. You hear me?

I'm not choosy, not choosy if the woman you got is a man. Makes no difference to me. But I swear, God, I do swear, you ignore my prayer and I'll fucking kill you, and that's a promise. After what I've been through? After all I've seen? You gotta give me a woman, God. I need me a woman.

NOTHING SHORT OF DEATH WILL STAY MY HAND

NOTHING SHORT OF DEATH WILL STAY MY HAND #2

Mountain Killing Hand woke up from dreams of combat in the rusted remains of a bed. Everyone in the old times slept like kings and lived like giants. A kid of unidentifiable age and gender poked his head through a hole in his prefab repurposed into a window.
"Hey, Mountain Killing Hand, you dreaming?"

"Yeah," he said.
"What about?"
"Hell," he said.
That satisfied the kid, but he looked troubled. "They say you gotta move on, Mountain Killing Hand. They say the trouble you came here for solved itself."

"That's what they say," he said. "I'll believe it when I see it."

"Nah, man, they say you gotta go. Say that's part of the treaty they made."
"A treaty," spat Mountain Killing Hand. "A treaty with Lord God."

"More'n I know about it," said the kid.

Mountain Killing Hand slipped into his black gi, which the village women had at least patched up with leather, and tied on his red hachimaki — the one emblazoned front and center with a yellow M, for "Mountain Killing Hand". He could sense through the strings that tied the world together that he had hostile eyes trained on him as soon as he left the prefab. An oldtimer was sitting on a couple car tires nearby, smoking from a clay pipe. He was trying to look casual but his sweat betrayed him.

"You," said the old-timer.

"You people intend to be rid of me," said Mountain Killing Hand.

"Worse than that, I'm afraid," said the old-timer. "Lord God is going to spare this place, but he has certain demands."

"Name them."

"You are to surrender your many-faceted stones. We are told you have three."

"And if I refuse?"

The old-timer gestured subtly to the horizon with his clay pipe. "You won't."

"These stones," he said, removing three scintillating jewels from a pouch at his side, "contain a fragment of the Nine Thousand Wise Souls. I shudder to think of Lord God's purpose in demanding them."

"I don't need to know that," said the old-timer. "I just need to know you'll surrender them to Marraga's custody."

Mountain Killing Hand narrowed his eyes. "Him?"
"Yes, I know you have a history. But I'm sure he'll spare your life if you obey his master's will."
"Bring him here."

The wood and canvas windows in all the prefabs on the hillock were quickly shuttered. Even those without the gift of second sight could smell trouble in the air.

Marraga appeared quite without warning, appearing to step from behind a low shadow that offered him no particular affordance. He was dressed in an ancient courtier's motley, gray jacket and flashing tie, and his black leather shoes shone in the sun. Sunglasses covered his terrible eyes, and his white hair was close-cropped.

"Marraga," spat Mountain Killing Hand.
"Delighted," said Marraga, in the thin and whimsical voice that always betrayed his presence. "Now, the stones."

Mountain Killing Hand held them out. "You'll have to take them."

Marraga slowly approached. "You people know the deal," he shouted. "You all know the price of your rightful king's dissatisfaction."
The old-timer nodded solemnly. There was only silence throughout the rest of the hamlet. Even the normal bustle of livestock was hushed somehow. Only Marraga's slow, quiet footsteps and the dim echoes of his reedy voice off the ridgeline of the mountains carried.

"You know what happens," said Marraga, quieter this time, "if you cross us. You know what happens to these people."

"I expect you'd kill them all," said Mountain Killing Hand.
"Everything that walks or crawls on the earth," said Marraga. "Even the earth under your feet.  Men die old never seeing the like."
The oldtimer raised his voice. "For the love of all that's holy, just give him the stones and go quietly! We can't –"
He was interrupted by a sudden burst of wind and by a scream of triumph as Mountain Killing Hand plunged his arm through Marraga's ribcage in one sudden strike. The older-seeming man gasped near-noiselessly, his sunglasses tumbling off his face to reveal gray eyes burning with total malice. Blood began to trickle through his perfect teeth.
The quiet of the moment reasserted itself as Marraga stumbled backwards, his button-down shirt rent open and soaked in blood, a great hole in his barely-toned chest beneath a crisp tattoo of the word "LOYALTY" over the stretch of skin that used to conceal his heart, a job now deferred to thin air.

The oldtimer buckled over and tumbled from the tires, groaning and heaving at the overpowering stench of rot. The heart, still beating, had begun to wither in Mountain Killing Hand's grip. Marraga's body fell backwards with a peal of laughter, hitting the dust with a too-wet squelch, already visibly decaying.

A flash on the ridgeline, and within a second a long bullet was spinning in front of Mountain Killing Hand's eye, and then another, and then a dozen of them. He could discern incomplete mantras inscribed on their copper jackets, desperate attempts to penetrate his perfect chi with the wrath of Heaven itself. With a burst of breath the bullets spun out into the dirt and houses nearby.

Mountain Killing Hand pulled a knife from his side and leapt onto Marraga's rotting corpse, desperately trying to separate the tattoo from the waves of decay. He managed to pull it free, but within seconds he was holding nothing but a thin strip of black ooze, dripping through his fingers like water. It was too late to finish the job; Marraga's perfection had escaped.

"I'm sorry, Mountain Killing Hand," gasped the old-timer. "We had to — they told us we had to —"

"To keep me busy," he said.

"Yeah," he said.

"Let that comfort you when they crucify you over the ashes of your wretched settlement," said Mountain Killing Hand.

And so, two hours after dawn on the fifth day, Mountain Killing Hand abandoned the people of Last Chance to the wrath of Lord God.

NOTHING SHORT OF DEATH WILL STAY MY HAND #3

On the seventh day, Mountain Killing Hand detected an imperfection in his left arm: disease; a tumor, benign, but still enough to disrupt the flow of his perfectly sculpted and unbreakable limb.

He cursed the stones he slept on, he cursed the Earth for the sake of his newfound lipoma, and the low brush of the blasted scrub withered at his reproach.

On the night of the seventh day Mountain Killing Hand approached Surgery City, all screaming neon and glowing traffic as he approached the cracked habdome. The scum that lived in the undercity foolishly cajoled him about the virtues of the surgeons they worked for — "Sight beyond sight! Sight beyond sight!" — "Surely you want the strength of ten men, boss! Strength of ten men right here!" — "New blood for old!" — "Bone Into Knife, Knife Into Bone, simple as, simple as –"

He grabbed a hawker with apparent gentleness by his bare collarbone, firmly securing him in a grip like an iron fist in a velvet glove. So surprised was the hawker at this stranger's mercy that he stopped promoting his master's augs immediately. "Excuse me, sirs, excuse me — what'll it be, boss?"

"I require entry to Surgery City."

"No can do, no can do, Surgery City's on a pay-as-you-go plan, as you know, and they don't hand out city passes too easy these days, especially to strangers –"

"Stranger, am I."

"Yes, yes, boss-man. I've been waitlisted for anything but a work pass for years, and I live here."

In a flash of instinctive brilliance, Mountain Killing Hand immediately read the akashic record of the lives this hawker had touched. A million man-years of time swam through his head, hundreds of thousands of trajectories meeting briefly and diverging. A crust of bread stolen from the mouth of a starving dog. A comely lass with few lesions rescued from a sudden fire. The faces of his mother and father, which the hawker himself had long forgotten. With a moment's quiet reflection, Mountain Killing Hand navigated the lifestream until he found the name of the most important child the other man seemed to know.

"It's about Asclepius Deluxe."

"Asc — Scleppie? Dr. Magnum's boy? My God, why didn't you say so?"

And so Mountain Killing Hand was waved through checkpoint after checkpoint, lead down the flickering fluorescent corridors of the Surgery City habdome, and found himself in a small shop, the sign out front reading "MAGNUM — BIOMIMETICS & CLONALS — COLD STORAGE AS LOW AS z999/MO".

Dr. Magnum, a man he recognized from the akashic record, sat in a narrow aluminum chair which used to hold a plastifoam back and seat, long worn to nothing. He rose on the approach of his workman and the muscular stranger.

"Can I help you," he said.

"It's about Scleppie, sir," said the hawker, whose headband was limp in his hand before his chest. Mountain Killing Hand felt no compulsion to remove his hachimaki.

"Is that so," said the surgeon, shining a strange pen-light into Mountain Killing Hand's eyes in a crude attempt to read his thoughts. All he could get through Mountain Killing Hand's nearly perfect spiritual barrier was his burning hatred for Lord God.

"An enemy of Lord God, is it. I don't see how that's anything to do with Asclepius, gone these last five years."

"It will become something to do with him," said Mountain Killing Hand, "if you obstruct my holy quest."

The surgeon's sleepy eyes woke up some, and then narrowed. "Is that a threat? How dare you."

"I will stop at nothing to find your son, sir. I will not return him to you, nor counsel him to return. I am not interested in that. But I will gain his trust, and I will betray it with such violence as men like you tremble to imagine should you fail me."

"Fail you," said Dr. Magnum. "Fail you in what particular?"

"For one, you must put down the air hypo of Very Fast Death Factor at once."

Dr. Magnum smirked slightly. "You're sharp. But why should I?"

"My nerves die when I tell them to. You'd only risk killing yourself or your lackey. I require you both."

"Do as he says, boss," said the flunky. "I didn't say a word about young master Scleppie to him, honest, honest, and I didn't see any way for him to read my mind. We're caught up in something bigger than us, we are."

"Fine," said Dr. Magnum. "How can I help you. Make it fast, I'm a busy man."
"I require a human left arm in good tone and perfect condition."

"Do you have any idea," said Dr. Magnum, "how much such an arm costs. My entire inventory is cold-storage, and I'd have to pay out on insurance if –"
"Consider it a down payment on your son's life."
"You know, I am a surgeon. If you have a problem with your arm — cancer? some kind of broken bone? — I could easily fix it."
"Even if I trusted you to perform such a delicate surgery, it would only slow me down."

"Slow you — son, I'm going to have to stitch together a sewer system's worth of vessels, nerves, muscles, bones. Even if that didn't take four to six hours, full recovery from a bio-aug can take years."

"Incorrect," said Mountain Killing Hand. "You have thirty minutes."

"Lord G — damnation, I mean to say, you're impatient." The surgeon sucked air through his teeth. "Whatever's happening in thirty minutes will have to wait."
"Forty-five," corrected Mountain Killing Hand. "And it would be unwise to make it your concern."

Dr. Magnum threw up his hands. "Fine. I'll bring you the arm, but I can't anesthesize you so quickly and promise you'll be up again in the space of half an hour."
"As if I'd trust scum like you with anesthesia."

Dr. Magnum opened his mouth to argue, then closed it, and ducked into the back of his shop. His hawker rocked back and forth on his heels for a moment. "Am I free to go, sir?"
"It would be better if you didn't," he said, "for your own sake."
"Very humane of you, sir, very humane. But I must confess I don't witness much of the surgery –"
"You will remain useful to me, and it is important for you to remember what I can do."
"Okay then."

The surgeon returned with a human arm covered in a layer of frost - bulky, well-toned, about two inches longer than Mountain Killing Hand's own arm.
Mountain Killing Hand inspected it from across the room and, with a grunt of satisfaction, activated his heal/kill mudras and raised his hand to strike. The other two men cowered in fear, and both of them let out a cry of terror when Mountain Killing Hand struck his left arm off at the shoulder with one precise blow of his right, splattering the entire reception room with a mist of blood.
Dr. Magnum's hippocratic brainwashing kicked in and, cold arm grasped limply in both hands, he approached Mountain Killing Hand with a submissive gait, head ducked below his shoulderline, ready to administer emergency care or a swift death.
Mountain Killing Hand wasted no time in grabbing the arm from him and attaching it to his own body, and within seconds the fountain of blood slowed to a trickle, and then stopped.

"Lord God," said the hawker, and Dr. Magnum slapped the back of his head.
"Not in front of this one," he said.

"Correct," said Mountain Killing Hand.

"I'd apologize for taking a minute to find an arm to your specifications, but by my watch that's well short of thirty. Should I even bother with the formality of quoting you a price?"
But the man was already gone.

The hawker shook. "Doctor Magnum, sir, I'm worried, I'm worried about — what if he does find Scleppy, sir? What if he does?"
"You'll have to find him first," said Doctor Magnum, and then looked from side to side, as if checking the room for a ghost. "And if you can't, that only leaves one course of action."
"I can't, sir," he said, "I can't. You saw what he did to himself, and I'm nowhere near as strong."
"Well, Warfare, way I see it you have two choices," said the doctor. "You can hunt down and kill this fool who has taken it upon himself to fight Lord God, who might drag my son into his foolishness, or you're fired, and I'm telling the Sacred Police about the whole thing first chance I get."
"You can't be serious, sir. Can't be. Can't, can't, can't be. They'd torture you days, they would, and kill me."
"I'd live with it to save my son," bluffed Doctor Magnum.

NOTHING SHORT OF DEATH WILL STAY MY HAND #7

So Mountain Killing Hand came to Diavolo Incarnato and positioned himself above the arroyo. In the distance, at the head of a trail of dust, a small convoy of speedcrawlers made their way up and into the foothills. Even through the dirt and distance he could spot the red gold plating on the speedcrawlers, and the lead crawler flew from the back the Blood Banner: no quarter for the enemies of Lord God.

He waited, perched behind a low, flat rock, and nubmered the convoy at four crawlers. He sensed the beating of twenty hearts; eight were armored, twelve not. That would make things more difficult. He coiled his limbs in the attitude of a viper, ready to strike, and took a deep breath of air — then released his chi in a burst of light and heat, and leapt screaming to the floor of the arroyo.

Radio chatter scattered into panic as he smashed back into the earth, scattering dust and rocks in all directions fast as shrapnel. In keeping with the iron code of Cataphract-Slaying Viper, he first emitted a massive burst of energy to weaken the haphazardly-shielded wireminds of the convoy vehicles. Predictably, losing control at speed sent them careening off in all directions, and one smashed into the side of the other, flipping it end over end as the ramming speedcrawler ignited into pale and vigorous flame. The screaming of those trapped within was brief and horrific, soon giving way to the crackling of fire.

The commander of the convoy, clearly visible by the patchwork of a thousand scarlet crosses embossed into his power armor, rolled out of the side of the rolled, shattered speedcrawler and crouched to lunge at Mountain Killing Hand. The commander's voice was a tinny shriek over his terror speakers: "Enemy of God! Death, death, a thousand times death!!"

Mountain Killing Hand ignored his feeble spell. He channeled his might into his still-fresh left arm, which shivered through the air like an arrow's flight caught in slow motion, landing perfectly with palm outstretched on the joint of the convoy commander's armor above his sternum. Only a moment too late did he notice a surge of evil prana — his opponent had lodged a misericorde laced with soulkiller poison into the flesh of his wrist.

"Scum," the commander panted triumphantly, "know that Augustus Masterwork has claimed your wretched life."
He grunted as Mountain Killing Hand snapped the point of the misericorde off of its wrist-mount with a firm twist of his bones, and startled into a shout when it became apparent his armor was no longer obeying his commands.
Mountain Killing Hand said, "You have earned that armor, no doubt, by pledging even your soul to your foul master."
"What's happening?", shouted the commander's muffled voice, no longer amplified and sharpened by the armor's terror speakers.

Mountain Killing Hand pulled the point from his wrist, and with the same fluid motion broke a tiny hole in the glassmetal of Augustus Masterwork's fitted helmet, spraying hot blood onto his face.
"No!", he shouted. "Stop at once in the name of Lord God! I command you!"
But it was too late. All it took was a small quantity of Mountain Killing Hand's blood, in which he had expertly concentrated every molecule of the soulkiller poison, entering his enemy's eyes — and within seconds, Augustus Masterwork disappeared inwardly into eternal Hell.

The armored rabble surrounding the pair broke and began to flee in every direction, scattering weapons, shields, flags.

Mountain Killing Hand quickly tracked down all of the broken remainder of the guard.  Under threat of total destruction, the cowed convoy revealed to him that each had been entrusted with a stone surgically implanted into their bicep. The ranking survivor of the guard initially refused to a further search — "Death in agony is preferable to having our bodies mangled by this heretic and our souls punished for our negligence" — but he was almost immediately cooked alive in his armor with a flamethrower blast from one of his underlings directed at his rear underplate.

"We submit to your might, sir," said another of the guard. "Do what you must."

Mountain Killing Hand extended the fingers of his subtle body to search for the signal of the Nine Thousand Wise Souls. He found nothing, not even in the crumpled ashes of the burned speedcrawler. He grasped one of the soldiers by the arm and, ignoring the cries of panic from the assembled civilian dignitaries and drivers, dug his fingers firmly into his left bicep, retrieving a carefully cut diamond that could trivially pass for a many-faceted stone to a careless observer.

"What is the meaning of this craven ruse," he said. "One of you must know."

"In exchange for sanctuary, sir," spoke one of the dignitaries, red dust settling onto his white robes, "I will tell you."
"You will tell me, and I promise only to spare your life."
"You don't understand. We have a mortal master and Lord God himself to fear. My people need protection if we are to survive –"
"Worry about protection from me first. Or strike me down, if you believe you have the strength these two lacked."
"O God!"
Mountain Killing Hand towered menacingly, and a man with coarse-cropped red hair and an iron torc binding his lily-white cloak stepped forward. "Sir, he means no disrepect, and I will tell you what he cannot. We are a clandestine party from the Kingdom of Seven Bastards entrusted with protecting extraordinary tribute to the domain of Lord God. We were headed to Surgery City — and last I remember we were halfway there — to deliver these worthless diamonds to the divine tribute office. As I speak, sir, I believe the head of the Sacred Police in the southwestern sector is returning to Murderer's Stake with the stone you seek, secured by Tertius's agents and delivered with the blessing and planning of Sextus."
"Why this shell game? Why not simply put the stone into one of your arms?"
"Sextus knew you were coming, sir."

"How? What does he know? Tell me!" He grasped the smaller man's neck firmly and lifted him into the air.
"I know only what I tell you," he gasped. "If you would know how he became so expert on your movements, you must speak to him yourself."
"Oh, I'll speak to him," said Mountain Killing Hand. "And then I'll send him to Hell with my fists."
"No!", shouted the older man. "Leave our gentle liege alone!"
Mountain Killing Hand scowled him into compliance, then quietly left the shattered convoy to its own devices many miles from civilization.

And so, shortly before dusk on the twenty-first day, Mountain Killing Hand began his journey to discover the secret treachery of Sextus Bastardo.

NOTHING SHORT OF DEATH WILL STAY MY HAND #12

Sextus Bastardo emerged from the hardwave exfoliator chamber, his chest-length blonde hair luxuriously conditioned with imported oils, and snapped his fingers twice. One of his dociles, nude except for the tight vermeil ring over his genitals — and, of course, the Divine Grace Suppression Collar they all wore — approached him with a platter of vericaine and seer dust, and he waved both away imperiously.
"O Lord, O Sun?"
"Bag those up and dress me."

The docile, long dissociated past trembling, fetched a pair of celluloid bags and sealed them with gum. As he finished, he asked, "How shall this one dress you today, o Lord, o Sun?"

"Gold casual — nothing special."
"Magnificent as always." Within seconds, the docile had begun to dress him — a circlet of silver twisted around a cabochon of ruddy fordite; a fishnet shirt and stockings of spun plastic, black as night; an officer's blazer of woven gentlegold with the left arm cut off neat, bedecked with a tasteful assortment of his medals and honors of office; a chromed-steel bracer; his magnificent silver codpiece with platinum-plated articulated head; polished and austere black riding boots of imported cowhide. Sextus Bastardo looked at one of the many mirrors in his salle de bain to catch his own gray eyes, turning his aquiline nose from side to side to inspect his face, making decisions about makeup as he took in his daily look.

The door flew open and one of his footmen, identifiable through his fresnel mask as a man of middling rank from his sharpened incisors and pencil moustache, burst into the room.

"Majesty," he shouted, snapping his heels and holding his hand over his brow for a practiced but hurried salute, "We have an intruder in the undertower!"

"Perfect," grumbled Sextus Bastardo, "he's early."

"Majesty?"

"No time," said Sextus Bastardo, walking past the captain or whoever he was and turning slightly to bark orders at him. "Have Camerlengo Explicit summon the household to my sitting chamber. Stiffen resistance in the middle floors and make limber for immediate travel north."

"Yes, Majesty!"

"Oh, and have him send in the one we've been working on. He'll know what I mean."

The commotion from the lower floors was steadily growing louder. One of the thirty-four assembled dociles whimpered loudly, and an icy glare from Sextus Bastardo shut him up.

"I suppose you're wondering why you're all here," he said, brightly. "You needn't concern yourselves with that."

The entryway to the sitting chamber swung open, and all of the eyes in the room except their prince's turned to face the doorway, some recoiling in panic, others frozen like an animal in the headlights of an oncoming train.

It was not, as expected, the stranger invading their home and prison; it was the one of their number they hadn't seen for weeks, gently but firmly supported and urged forward by Ultra Explicit, whose collar of office (and perfectly styled teeth) were the only indication of his high standing in the princely house.

"Lord God!", came a shrill shout of surprise, and the one who it was — a slender, muscular brunette, relatively new — covered his mouth, as if to suppress his involuntary offense. His master only chuckled slightly, and rose from his throne to approach the trembling newcomer.

There was a look, in the general case, to Sextus Bastardo's dociles — shorter than him, well-toned but not bulky, slender-boned. Delicate. The newcomer looked bloated, his face sallow and plump. His hair was cropped close — for easier maintenance, presumably — further depriving him of the coquettish look that his fellow dociles tended to. He seemed shaky, pale, wobbling under unsteady and novel weight, on flattened feet. Stretch marks radiated from the center of his shaking gut, across the boundaries of his fatty chest. Only his collar and ring marked him as the same sort of creature as the other dociles — they hardly otherwise seemed the same species.

He cast his eyes down as Sextus Bastardo approached him, only turning his eyes up to face him when the larger man stroked his soft jawline gently. "Do you know why you're here," he said, a husky intimacy in his voice.

"N-no, o Lord, o Sun," he said. "Missed our prince."

"Missed me!" Sextus Bastardo laughed genially. "Why, some of you could learn from this one." This set off a chain reaction of nervous chuckling.

"Missed — oh — missed the light," he said. "Missed... food… solid... oh..."

Sextus Bastardo's gentle grip on his jaw turned behind his neck and gripped his nape slightly. "Focus. You're here for an important purpose. The... singularity of your accomodations... has been to a vital task."
"Oh!" He brightened immediately.

"Surely you didn't think I was having you fed like that, neglected so, for no reason."
"Don't know," he said, a little confused. "No?"
"Wouldn't that be silly," he said, and laughed again, setting off another round of forced laughter from his other dociles.
Sextus Bastardo cast an imperious eye across the room. "Of course, I could. Maybe if one of these others displeases me I will."
That shut them up. All that could be heard was the sound of horrible combat approaching them from below, and the slow ticking of their collars.

"But no," he said. "I required more — both more and less — of you. It's to do with your collar."
"O Lord, O Sun?"
"Before I remove it –"
"No! Please! Been good, been good –"
"Silence." The power word stopped his mouth like a gag.

"Before I remove it, tell me your name."
The trembling docile's eyes watered.
"You may speak," he said.
"Don't remember," said the docile, tears spilling down his cheek. "Don't remember."
"That's fine," said Sextus, leaning in close to his face, lapping gently at his wet cheeks. "This will be enough," he said, "to remember you by."

With a deft, practiced hand, Sextus Bastardo disabled the Divine Grace Suppression Collar's shock mechanism, then crushed the intricate clockwork mechanism set into the back that protected his dociles from the whisperings of the servants of Lord God. He pulled the rest of the collar clear from the docile, dropping it on the ground as he stepped back to his throne.

The crying freshened to screaming sobs, and took on a brash huskiness as the docile's body expanded, and just as the light began to leave his eyes, the doorway burst open once more, louder this time, revealing a tall, muscular man in a dark gi and a red hachimaki, splattered all over with blood — his aura palpable and furious.

"Took you long enough," chuckled Sextus Bastardo.

NOTHING BUT DEATH WILL STAY MY HAND #13

"Do you think I'll show you mercy," said Mountain Killing Hand, fuming with rage as he strode towards the prince, "for the sake of your wretched slaves?"
"Not particularly," he said, gesturing to the slowly rising figure wearing the rapidly expanding body of his fattened docile, "I expect you'll be busy with our mutual friend."

Mountain Killing Hand turned his head to face the newcomer. "Attat Attat," he scowled. "Here, of all places."

"It ill suits me," said the booming, brassy woman's voice. "This place..." she spat, not finishing the thought, instead becoming distracted by pulling the vermeil ring constricting her swelling crotch apart as if it was made of soft dough, and then clawing open a bleeding hole between the body's testicles.

Mountain Killing Hand sucked in a quick breath and began to glow with power. Attat Attat caught his hand as he moved in to rake it across her face. "Heaven Chastening Crane," she said, singsong, mocking. "It will take more to make me chaste than Heaven, boy," she said, throwing him across the room with a mighty swing of her arm. "And more to satisfy me than your blood, but I'll make do."

Mountain Killing Hand only had time to adopt the Oceanic Mind by the time Attat Attat was once more upon him, the first of her sharp sweat slicking the drying blood of the tower militia on his chest, her bones contorted into striking posture. The force of her first open-hand strike passed through his body like water to dent the gilt steel of the tower bulkhead, and he took advantage of her surprise at the shape of the recoil to slam his knee into her midsection, creating distance with quick jabs and a slide flat against the bulkhead to slip out of her approaching grapple.

In his periphery, Mountain Killing Hand saw Sextus Bastardo dip a finger into a cellophane bag and lift it to his nose; his expression flashed from animal panic to relief, and his tear ducts welled up with blood. The brief distraction was all Attat Attat needed to hook an ankle through the line of Mountain Killing Hand's legs and try to trip him. He chose to obey gravity, and within moments was flat supine, the angel's narrow foot trampling his waistline, searching as if on its own instinct for his crotch.

"Heathen eunuch!", came her enraged snarl as her heel found his groin and dug in furiously. "I'll fuck the marrow out of your bones!"

With a practiced movement of his pelvic floor, Mountain Killing Hand accepted a thrust to wrong-foot her, and when she tumbled towards him, wound up for a piston strike with one hand and reached around his side with the other, to the secret place where he kept the God-Piercing Blade. His right hand, burning with sacred fury, plunged through breast, ribcage, lung, ribcage, back. The serrated and angry ribs would have severed the arm of a lesser man, but Mountain Killing Hand was prepared, and an aura of ironskin protected him.

Blood flowed freely from Attat Attat's mouth as her rage boiled over into halfwidth screaming. She had manifested too fully into this vessel to easily abandon its body to godrot, and her perfect hatred for Mountain Killing Hand was too great to allow her the thought of escape. "Kill you! I'll fuck — fucking kill you," she gasped.

Mountain Killing Hand twisted his arm in her massive wound and leaned in closer so the stream of blood ran from his hairline to his lips. "You'll have all the time in the world to want that," he said, "where you're going."

With a carefully rehearsed series of movements, he withdrew his knife from his side and made three quick, blind cuts to her lower back, then dropped the knife and peeled back a long strip of skin. An intact tattoo in its exact center, a hand's length long and a knuckle's length wide, screamed "JUSTICE" in neat gothic letters.

Attat Attat, confronted with asensic silence and darkness, attempted to scream, but she could not move. She was trapped. She attempted to activate the godrot in a panic, but it was too late. The divine energy had left her, and all that was left of her bodysoul was a cluster of nerves tracing through layers of skin, humanol and collagen and adipose. She would have the rest of eternity to learn how little there was left to do.

Mountain Killing Hand panted for breath, momentarily exhausted. He replaced his knife and gingerly pulled his hands out of the still-warm corpse, rotting only at the natural pace of human charnel.

As he trembled to his feet, battered and bruised, his eyes swept the room; the rush of blood to the head subsiding, he began to hear gentle, patronizing applause from the throne dais in front of him, and his gaze seemed always to interrupt the prince's harem in the process of laughing or sighing in relief.

"Do you want to spend your last moments on Earth clapping, scum," he said, advancing step by labored step towards the dais, "or do you believe you've found some miraculous way to escape my wrath."

"Your wrath? Some way to show gratitude. I practically gift-wrapped that angel for you," said Sextus Bastardo brightly, still blinking away bloody tears.

"Some ally of Lord God you are," said Mountain Killing Hand. "You must be either very foolish or very incompetent to betray him seeking my mercy."
"Mercy! Take a moment — ugh! —" His oily words were interrupted by a powerful hand gripping his collarbone. "Unhand me!"
"As you wish." Mountain Killing Hand performed a forbidden grip on the prince's left arm, and leaned back to avoid an explosion of gore.

Seconds passed in silence, and Mountain Killing Hand's expression darkened. "What? How are you immune to Heart Chakra Corrosion?"

"A boy must keep some secrets in this world," said Sextus Bastardo with an air of genuine offense. "You couldn't have tried to destroy my right hand? I use that one."
"Destroying the one you use was the idea. A louse like you doesn't deserve it."

"I have it on good authority that lice have six limbs," said Sextus Bastardo, "and no hands at all."

"You've only made dispensing justice harder," said Mountain Killing Hand, "and messier." He twisted his forbidden grip into another, and then another, all to no effect.

"Impossible! Are you even human!?"

"Are you?", wheezed Sextus Bastardo, pained but still sitting erect in his throne. "Now, enough of your vicious sorcery. I will give you the secret of Lord God's interest in the many-faceted stones if you will use that knowledge to foil or kill him while I still live. Unhand me."

Mountain Killing Hand begrudgingly let go of the prince and stopped attempting to boil his blood in his living body.
"Now step back from my throne."

"You ask too much," said Mountain Killing Hand, maintaining an uncomfortably intimate distance.

"Fine. I suppose by your, ah, deficiency, that you are aware of the power of Lunar Body Style."
"I am."
"In a shattered chapter of the masters of Lunar Body, south of the Simplicity where the raveners roam, the matriarchs have agreed to provide logistical support to Lord God's Human Abolition Project. Their holy word is bent to His will. Their sacred hedonists act as his temple prostitutes in Neo Petroleo, gathering intelligence and suppressing rebellion wherever the hidden fortress "DEEP DREAMING" must go within that wretched city. And within the hidden fortress "DEEP DREAMING" — you must listen, as this is important — the Lord God attempts to suborn the Nine Thousand Wise Souls to his will with cloning, biohacking, and psychic driving."

"Hm. And if I believe your wild claims?"
"You needn't. Go visit the Monasteries of the Moon and find out for yourself. Ask after the Abbess of Mons Meraka — she makes her home not there but in the Simplicity itself, in a life of sybaritic opulence supported by Lord God's patronage."

"I can't make sense of it. Why would you betray your master with this crude divulgence?"
"All men live by a code, sorceror. Mine is dominion. My sacred father's invincible soul is a prisoner in his diseased body. His domain rots away as his comatose form does, yet in the Kingdom of Seven Bastards the spark of vigor still endures. With my firm leadership, it can be stoked into a mighty blaze once more. But until Lord God takes his hand from over our sovereign, I can do nothing more."

Mountain Killing Hand grimaced in satisfaction at the cold logic of the answer. "One more question, then. If Attat Attat had killed me, which of my order's secrets would you be betraying to her instead?"

Sextus Bastardo cracked a wide smile. "We understand each other."

SAILOR MAN

For the rest of his days Bluto was a changed man. Ever rough trade, he came to shock us boys with his opulent cruelty. "Eat this," he'd shout, squeezing digested-seeming spinach into our mouths; "your arms — show me your fucking arms!" But whatever miracle he sought never repeated itself. In refracto he made wild claims of his misty eyes, sea-water or longing for a never-mentioned home.

He paid one of us, in a gentler humor, to read him the story of Samson and Delilah, only leaving quietly before we could relate the cutting of his perfect hair.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

frog kosaric is a gay transgender writer and artist, despite everything. she lives in portland, oregon with her wife, her demons, and her cat.

links:

twitter: @yurirando
itch.io: frogindustrialconcern
patreon: frogic
ko-fi: frogk
tumblr: play-now-my-lord
threadless: frogindustrialconcern

there's a better world coming, baby. stay ready

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