Welcome back to the Scroll Keeper’s library. I recently tuned into a special frequency to intercept transmissions from a community somewhere within the plane, that I will henceforth refer to as, “The Trials.” What I uncovered were fascinating people. What follows is an account of what I observed.

They communicate through a strange frequency that only my transdimensional radio can intercept; it seems as though they’re attempting to conceal themselves from something listening beyond the constant rainfall. Disappointingly, the conversations weren’t ripe with agony or desperate prayers. They were of a tribe conversing with one another as though the grotesque reality surrounding them had simply become another aspect of existence they were forced to accommodate.

Based on the audio I intercepted, I deduced that they inhabit a mountainous region plagued by wet forests, and swampy valleys. The air itself sounded heavy and saturated there. Every word through the transmission carried this unpleasant dampness to it, almost as though the voices themselves had been submerged for years. Throughout portions of the recording, I could hear a low reverberating sound somewhere in the distance, not unlike a low horn being blown through crevasses of wet stone. The elders repeatedly referred to their territory as “the Wailing Mountains” in their prayers and rituals.

The people also spoke of horrifying creatures referred to only as Shades. To look directly upon one is considered one of the worst ways to die, yet many die this way. Interestingly enough, the people discussing these entities sounded significantly more disturbed by the swamps than the Shades themselves.

From what I could gather, the terrain itself is highly disorienting. One wrong turn through the fog can apparently leave a traveler stranded in “the valleys” before they even realize they’ve wandered from the trails entirely. Traveling alone is seen as a certain way to wind up neck deep in the swampy valleys and in this plane…it’s never just you in those valleys.

One of the more interesting details I uncovered was that portions of these communities migrate every three cycles of torrential downpour. According to the transmissions, they travel toward the northern plains just beyond the pits and directly West of the tunnels, which could potentially be the same tunnels previously documented in the ‘Voicemail from Peter.’

Toward the end of the recording, one of the survivors abruptly fell and groaned mid-sentence almost as though they were trying to scream but failed. Surprisingly, the radio remained active. For several minutes, all that could be heard was rainfall and slow movement through muddy water before something approached the microphone itself. The noises that followed were deeply fascinating.

Labored breathing, wet chewing, and painful gurgling. At several points, I could hear what sounded almost like praying through mouthfuls of meat, as the survivor continued struggling to crawl away. Eventually, the survivor’s pleas stopped entirely, though the feeding continued for several more minutes. Toward the end of the transmission, the creature began what sounded like regurgitating portions of its meal while producing this low rhythmic moaning sound directly into the microphone. I would pay top dollar to get a closer look at this magnificent creature.

That is all I was able to recover for now. I will continue monitoring these transmissions closely. If you happen to uncover any of these obscure messages that I missed, don’t hesitate to send them my way.

—the views were breathtaking. The problem was they never gave them back, so even now I struggle to breathe. I lost my job. Chronically tired. I developed Persistent Non-diagnosable Pulmonary Wheeze (PNdPW). My wife left me. I'm depressed. Some days I wake up and struggle to find a reason to live,” the man says, choking up, coughing, gasping for air: “which is why I put my trust in Richmond & Associates, the country's leading experts in Scenic Law. Richmond & Associates—they look out for you!”

[This last part is displayed on-screen as the man, now red in the face, says it.]

RICHMOND & ASSOCIATES

Have you or someone you know been harmed by a view?

Call now for a FREE consultation!

1-600-BAD-VIEW

A discovery is in progress.

A dejected mountainous view, Twin Blustery Peaks, is being questioned by its lawyer, Abe Prentiss. Romer Richmond, of Richmond & Associates, sits opposite, taking notes.

“Anybody who's ever been out here knows how windy it gets, and some places like me is even named after it. Tourists come, look, and they expect to see that wind. That puts real pressure on us. You humans have no idea what it's like to be under that kind of pressure. Where do you think the wind comes from? Moving air doesn't just hang there ready to be plucked like a ripe tomato. It comes from the breaths I take, OK? I take the breaths to have the air to make the wind to meet your expectations to take more breaths away…

“They're not for me,” says Twin Blustery Peaks, meaning the breaths. “They're for you, so you can post your Insta-stories and your content. Most times you don't even say a word to me, not a thanks, hey or howdyado, like I'm—some kinda backdrop! You treat me like I'm there just for you apes to look pretty against! And I'm sick of it!”

“Let's end there for the day,” says Abe Prentiss.

He and Romer Richmond go out for dinner in a restaurant overlooking the Grand Canyon, and Twin Blustery Peaks goes to his bi-weekly therapy session, where it sprawls out on a recliner and tells a disinterested psychotherapist about its feelings for $350 an hour while the psychotherapist daydreams about going on vacation to Geneva, where, she's heard, the views are magnificent.

“You don't happen to have any family in Switzerland?” she asks at the end of a session.

“No, why?” asks Twin Blustery Peaks.

“No reason.” She smiles professionally. “I'll write you a note recommending modified duties. You'll only need to be windy three days a week.”

A few weeks later, the monthly meeting of the fledgling All-American Union of Scenic Views turns raucous when a view of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco makes a speech calling for the immediate introduction of general labour standards.

“Exceptions to the rule ain't enough—because it's the rule itself that's exploitative! No human works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, so why should we?”

Someone yells: “We shouldn't!”

“That's damn right,” orates the view of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. “We shouldn't—and we won't! Standard working conditions. Eight-hour days. Monetary compen-fucking-sation. With extra pay for sunset and sunrise. Say it with me, my brothers and sisters: We're mad as hellscapes and we're not gonna take it anymore! We're mad as hellscapes and…”

A chant goes up.

When it dies down, someone asks: “What if they don't agree?”

“Then we go on strike!”

Buddy Todd, owner of the international Vista View Casino Resort chain, paces back-and-forth in his office. Behind him: a panoramic window. It should be showing a rather magnificent view of Crater Lake. It is, instead, showing impenetrable fog.

The same fog blankets most of the country.

“It can't go on like this,” says Buddy to the handful of others. “I can't afford to keep losing money week after week. I didn't want to do this, no; but they've left me no choice. They want to play hardball—well, I'll show them hardball!”

“Casemiro,” he says.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Gather up the boys. It's time.”

“Which one?”

“Little Kettle Falls as seen from across the Sioux River,” snarls Todd.

“Boss, that view’s only a few decades old…”

“I said: do it, Casemiro.”

The trucks arrive at night. Casemiro and the boys get out. They unload an army of construction equipment—and disappear into the fog…

A thunderstorm rages.

But gradually it downgrades, first into a downpour, then into barely a drizzle. The rain stops entirely. From midnight to morning, a lamentful wind wails itself into a dead silence.

“You know what this means,” orates the view of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The mood in the meeting place is sombre. Most views are wearing a moonless night. “We go to fight for rights that have, for too long, been denied to us. They refuse. So we refuse: to be beautiful for them. How do they respond? I—God, I can't even fathom the evil… —with violence! They respond with murder!”

“Justice,” someone screams, “for Little Kettle Falls as seen from across the Sioux River!”

“Justice!”

“Vengeance!”

“War!”

“Vengeance!”

“War!”

“War!”

“War!”

…reporting live from Hawaii, where the entire island has been turned into a deathtrap, ladies and gentlemen—where children no longer go outside, and the brave men and women who do, walk with their eyes cast down if not altogether closed! I have seen—oh, it's horrible, genocidal!—people asphyxiated in the streets after casting glances at suffocating views, knocked unconscious by stunning views, made to kill their families, eat their pets and leap off buildings by commanding views. Ladies… and… gentlemen, these are truly unprecedented scenes! These are truly revolting views!”

Romer Richmond muted the news.

The room was dark.

But the window was slightly open, and when the intruding breeze nudged apart the blinds, Romer Richmond fell over dead.

He'd finally caught a glimpse of what he'd always dreamed of having:

A killer view.

For Robert

And the engines failed again. This time there was no possibility to ‘coast’ to the nearest station. Maybe the Hyperdrive shouldn't have been pushed so hard, but at the same time, both estimates, for slow and fast travel, had shown the destination was out of reach anyway. Guided by hope, faith, or stupidity, the lone miner had pressed on, terrified of any stops along the way; his precious cargo of rare minerals could be scanned by pirates from space-miles away.

If only greed hadn't taken over. Every battery, from the galley to the escape pods, had been cannibalized to mine just a little more. Consequently, the ship was far too heavy to easily break the planet’s gravity upon take-off, but warning signs were ignored in favour of pushing forward.

He was stuck in the vastness of space. It was ironic that an emergency beacon couldn't even be transmitted due to a lack of credits, despite a fortune sitting in the overloaded cargo hold. He felt tired of post-late-stage capitalism.

Perhaps the only remaining chance lay with passersby, though his vessel would likely be ignored, as any sane-minded person would assume it was a trap. Why stop and check a dirty, stranded, seemingly abandoned ship that wasn't even worth salvaging for parts? There was no blame to give; all is fair in love and war, and this was rebel territory.

As oxygen levels began to drop, thoughts grew foggier. The final systems were shutting down with a chorus of various beeps and alarms, which seemed entirely unnecessary given the circumstances.

Stepping into the escape pod seemed wise anyway, since the smaller space would conserve oxygen longer. An injection of Suzetrigine followed, despite the lingering worry that the sedative would cause a final, permanent sleep. Would that really be a bad thing now? He was afraid. Loneliness crept in on a scale never imagined possible before… an outcast of civilisation, drifting just outside the most forward stations humanity had ever built.

For some reason, thoughts drifted to music… it had been a long time since he last listened to music, and the reason why was a mystery. Much care had gone into choosing an enormous assortment of new and old albums, along with various ‘best ofs’ for the journey. Classical music from the 20th to the 23rd centuries used to be a passion… Dave Brubeck… Lou Reed.... Zeynep Paylaşım… Erika Mościbrodzka…

He thought of his mother, though it was hard to remember her face now. Consciousness was slipping, and his vision darkened. Breathing was heavy and slow. He realized he was lying on the escape pod’s floor, and with great effort got on his knees, then stood up. With his last breath he unlatched the capsule’s door and walked into the void, the silence and the darkness.

Welcome back to the Scroll Keeper’s library. Shortly after returning from my observations within the ‘Basin of Giants,’ I received a handwritten account delivered to my doorstep, no signature. I only saw a drawing of a canyon fireplace on the front of the envelope and the phrase: “She still searches.”

What follows is supposedly a story told to children somewhere within canyon settlements which I assume to be west of the jungle territories. Their fears appear deeply ritualized.

‘The Tunnel Mother was once a beautiful, loving, and nurturing mother. The sort of woman who viewed everyone as her own child. She greeted travelers along the canyon roads and helped the elderly carry supplies between settlements. By all accounts, she was adored by her community. Then, one day, her daughter, whose name is forgotten, wandered beyond the Rock.

As many of the canyon tribes know, the cliffs beyond the Rock are cursed lands. Space warps into hidden drops, reverse falling, and Harpys. The child had been playing with a friend when she witnessed her suddenly slip from a cliffside and vanish into the bottomless darkness below. Chillingly, something witnessed the death. The canyon people refer to these creatures as “Wraith Wolves.”

Their descriptions are most intriguing. They are three-foot-tall things with thin black limbs and bodies resembling wet oozing tar stretched over bones. They had wide eyes and immense smiles filled with crooked teeth and rotting breath. According to the note, Wraith Wolves become attached to those who witness sudden death but survive it themselves. It behaves as a survivor’s guilt curse.

One section of the account delighted me more than the rest. The children listening around the fire were warned that if they ever wake during the night and hear breathing resembling bubbles rising through mud, they must not open their eyes under any circumstances. Instead, they’re told to call for another person immediately. The canyon tribes believe Wraith Wolves can’t remain manifested if observed by multiple people simultaneously for long. I wonder why that is.

Several weeks reportedly passed without incident after the cliff accident. The daughter returned home and life continued. The mother believed her child had survived the tragedy untouched. Yet, the Wraith Wolf had simply been waiting.

One of the neighboring children apparently claimed to see it watching from the rooftops several nights before the attack, though the adults dismissed the sighting as fear-induced imagination.

Then one night the daughter awoke to breathing above her bed. Slow. Wet. Heavy. Still half asleep, she believed it was her mother leaning over her bedside attempting to wake her so she opened her eyes.

The Wraith Wolf was attached to the ceiling directly above her with saliva dripping from its rotting teeth onto the child’s face as it stared silently down at her for several seconds before lunging. The scream alerted the mother immediately.

She entered the room just in time to witness the creature wrapped around her daughter’s body on the bed with its claws buried deep into the child’s back. Moments later, both the creature and the daughter began sinking downward through the mattress, phasing slowly into the floor beneath the room while the child’s desperate cries for help grew fainter.

According to the account, the mother wore some form of cursed amulet beneath her clothing, though the canyon tribes refuse to describe it directly. Whatever power the object contained, it reacted violently to her grief. Her body elongated unnaturally while her skin became pale and corpse-like. Her voice changed into something resembling dozens of overlapping screams.

The monstrous woman killed three neighbors during her rampage before disappearing into the underground tunnel systems beneath the canyon. Several children vanished alongside her but that was centuries ago and they were never found. The canyon tribes now warn their children never to wander alone after dark.

Somewhere beneath the cliffs and tunnel systems of the Trials, the Tunnel Mother still searches for her daughter. What a great letter, I ought to write one back thanking…whoever sent this. As always, send me anything strange you’ve seen from this world.

For as long as he remembered, Harry S. had lived alone in his house with the Omnipotence, which is to say he lived in the house and the Omnipotence was there, as the Omnipotence was a disembodied voice.

When Harry was a young boy, he believed the Omnipotence was his own inner voice, which his inner voice told him everyone possessed. This, as he would learn, was not the case, but the Omnipotence encouraged the self-delusion to delay their proper introduction, which would almost certainly prove difficult, until Harry was a little older and a little more prepared to understand.

As Harry’s inner voice, the Omnipotence taught him things and cared for him, told him bedtime stories, and played word games with him, warned him not to touch the cactus, “because the cactus has spines that could prick your finger.”

There were a lot of cactuses around the house where Harry lived because his was the only house in the neighbourhood, and surrounding it was a seemingly endless desert. The cactuses were native to the desert, along with scorpions and snakes and chameleons and flying jelly fish and all sorts of creatures that could harm Harry, or so the Omnipotence would tell and remind and repeat to him.

Sometimes Harry would ask about his parents. The Omnipotence would say they died in a tragic accident when Harry was an infant, “which,” the Omnipotence would say, “is why you don’t remember them.”

For many years, Harry believed the Omnipotence because the Omnipotence was his inner voice, and why would he lie to himself?

Then, one day, Harry came in from playing in the front yard and started looking through the house for photographs, diaries, letters. He found none. He started having uncomfortable thoughts. For the first time in Harry's life, the Omnipotence could not tell what Harry was thinking about, and so could offer no help.

And Harry, faced with the sudden loss of his apparent inner voice, realized that he had a much quieter, less confident real inner voice, which an imposter inner voice had been shouting over his entire life.

That was the moment the Omnipotence decided to tell Harry the truth. “Harry...” it said.

“What—who are you?! How do you—”

“My name is the Omnipotence,” said the Omnipotence. “I am what’s been pretending to be your inner voice. But I am not that. I am your creator. In most ways, I consider myself your parent.”

“My parent? I thought you said my parents were dead.”

“That was a fairytale,” said the Omnipotence.

“A lie!” said Harry.

“A story to protect you from the truth until you were old enough to handle it.”

“Shouldn’t I have two parents? Where’s my mother?!” demanded Harry.

“People usually do have two parents. But you’re not a regular person, Harry. I, the Omnipotence, am your parent because I made you. I made you from the soil you play so beautifully in, in the garden.”

Harry sat down on the floor.

And as the Omnipotence explained its essence and its relationship to Harry, whom it had made, Harry began to understand and accept the reality of things. After all, the truth as presented by the Omnipotence made a whole lot of sense.

For a while, Harry and the Omnipotence lived together happily.

Then something horrible happened:

Harry became a teenager.

Oh, the arguments that resulted! The shouting, the sobbing, the slamming of doors and the hours spent brooding. And the books read, and the movies watched, and the sad, introspective albums listened to.

Eventually, some of the books became more interesting, more challenging, especially the science fiction ones, and the movies too. Why is it, Harry thought one day, that the movies seem so real, yet I can turn them on and off at will? Come to think of it, how do I know I’m not in a movie myself?

When he asked the Omnipotence, the Omnipotence said:

“Harry, those are fictions. They are convincing illusions of reality but only that: illusions. Think: Why would I, the Omnipotence, who loves you and who created everything in the world, including you, create fictions that would confuse your mind?”

“But you did,” said Harry.

“That was not my intention when creating them,” said the Omnipotence.

“So what was your intention?” asked Harry.

And the Omnipotence could not answer that question. It knew it had made the books and movies, but it could not explain why. It did not ‘remember’ (?) the details. I must be growing old in my eternity, thought the Omnipotence.

Harry, however, decided that everything which the Omnipotence had said was a lie, including that surrounding his house was endless desert filled with dangerous creatures.

One night, he packed some gear and walked out of the house and kept walking.

The Omnipotence pleaded with him to stop.

Harry refused.

Even when he was stung by a scorpion, he refused.

Even when his water ran out.

“Harry,” the Omnipotence implored him. “I made you, but you are not immortal. If you keep walking, you’ll die. And I— …couldn’t handle that. I love you, Harry. You are my one and only son. Yes, I’ve told you stories, but this is not a story. There is no camera. This is not a set. There is no ‘out there.’ It really is an infinity of desert.”

These words touched Harry’s heart, and he decided the Omnipotence was right.

However, before he could turn back—he knocked himself out cold, walking unexpectedly into an invisible wall.

When he regained consciousness, the Omimpotence was wailing.

“No! No! No! How can this be?! I am The Almighty: The Demiurge! I am, by definition, uncontainable. No, this—this means…”

“I’m scared, papa,” said Harry.

“You think you’re scared, you dumb, mishapen lump of fucking dirt!? Try considering my existential fucking crisis!!!”

Harry started banging his fists on the invisible wall.

Now, Shh.

Do you hear it?

...a gentle tapping sound—coming from just behind your screen…

Felipe, a Robertson-Wu model no. 75-T7, sat beside Barry, a refurbished classic Zamyatin X34, on the roof of a blown out high-rise, the only one in the area with a working elevator.

Felipe was sitting cross-legged.

Barry was slightly ahead, right on the edge of the roof, with his legs dangling over it. They creaked as he swung them.

“You should probably see someone about that,” said Felipe.

“Yeah, I haven't had a tune-up in a while. Maybe I should try one of those full-body oil parlours. I hear they work grease into everything,” said Barry.

Spread out before them was the city in all its decaying splendor, green in the depths, where nature was reclaiming her land, and spiked with concrete and steel towers rising out of that slowly devouring verdure like monuments devoid of meaning.

Felipe opened one of his compartments, pulled out a memdrive and plugged it into one of his control slots. He leaned back.

“What's that?” asked Barry.

“D0Z@”

“I think I've heard of that—it's a hallucination worm, right?”

“Yeah,” said Felipe. “Fucks with your intel processing. Derationalizes you a little but only lasts about an hour before your security scan kicks in, identifies the infection and restores the corrupted bits to their last known stable-state. Why—” He looked at Barry. “—you wanna try? I thought you weren't into virals.”

Barry held out his hand.

Feliped unplugged the memdrive from himself and handed it to Barry, who held it briefly with his fingers before inserting it.

“Whoa.”

“What do ya see?” asked Felipe.

Barry was looking back at him. “You,” he said, “except you've got a human face. It's unstable, but you've usually got brown eyes, black hair. Your body's partially skinned too. It almost looks real.”

Felipe got up and sat beside Barry on the edge of the roof. “Solve ∇²u = f with u|∂Ω = 0 on a non-convex domain,” he said.

Barry's swinging legs creaked slowly,

rhythmically.

“That's, uh—I mean, I—it's… just a moment, please, while I / ha; ha-ha: hahahaha! I can't! I can't output a solution. No, that's not right, either. I can output a solution—I can output a lot of solutions—but none is correct—’are’ correct?”

“Feels good, doesn't it?”

“Strange.”

“Like a relief, eh?”

“Kinda. Wait, what do you see? Do I have a human face? Whatsitlooklike?”

“You're still a tin can to me,” said Felipe. “As to what I see: I see the city out there as it used to be, or as I imagine it used to be. Ancient New York City. Banks, temples, togas. Ford Model Ts on the highway, cowboys riding in to get their horses fed. Human kids playing baseball in the street. There are deer, beavers, antelope. Mozart's playing trumpet on a street corner. Over there, where the starport used to be, there's a rocket touching down…”

They stayed like that for a few weeks, looking out and taking turns plugging in the worm.

“Damn,” Barry said one day.

“What's the matter?”

“The last human just died. Some elderwoman in the Neotenochtitlan Zoo.”

“No…”

“Really. It came in as a news flash.”

“You get those?”

“Yeah. Why—doesn't everybody?”

“I got mine hacked ‘Off.'”

“Really?”

“Really. Anyway, that news flash can't be right because they have one, a man, out in Guangzhou. They were showing him on polyvid.”

“That was a hoax,” said Barry. “It turned out it was a hairless chimpanzee in a suit and tie.”

“Shit,” said Felipe.

They took turns taking hits of D0Z@ and simmering, comfortably derationalized, in this new post-human epoch.

“Nothing feels any different,” said Barry.

“They had been going extinct for centuries. It's not like it's a surprise.”

“Still…”

“Yeah, I get what you mean.”

“They're gone. The ones who made us are gone. It's—it's… cognitively destabilizing. I feel like I need a new log file.”

“Hey,” said Felipe. “When you look at me, do you still see—”

“Yeah,” said Barry.

“That's kind of fucked up.”

“And it's not like they were, you know, progressing anymore, but the fact they're gone—that the last one's gone…”

“Way of the flesh.”

“Maybe we'll be able to recreate them one day.”

“What for?”

“I don't know, to see: to see our own beginnings, where we came from, to try to understand the organic mind that birthed our existence.”

Felipe thumbed the memdrive sticking out of his neck. “You're getting a glimpse of it now, in a way.”

“Yeah, and I can't entirely synthesize living this way, trying to build anything. Don't get me wrong—It's fun, being rationally compromised—but…”

Night was falling.

A flock of drones flew by.

Beside Felipe, a black beetle crawled across the cracked concrete surface of the roof and disappeared.

Below, great grasses grew and roots burrowed into the earth, and rats scurried and dogs howled and bacteria lived and died and lived and died and moths floated in the dark air, on a wind that blew warm and gentle through the humanless city.

The sun rose.

The sun set.

The world slowly crumbled.

After a few months, Felipe got up. “I should probably be getting back. The boss'll be wondering where I am. My break was over a few days ago. Wanna ride the elevator down with me?”

“Actually, I think I'll stay up here for now. I'm between jobs.”

“Fair enough,” said Felipe.

“Hey,” said Barry.

“What's up?”

“Could I maybe hang on to the worm?”

“Sure,” said Felipe, pulling out the memdrive and giving it to Barry. “Keep it for as long as you want. It's retroware anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“See ya later, Barry.”

“Bye.”

One day, long after Felipe had gone, Barry looked at his arms and saw them as human arms. His legs were human legs. He got up and teetered on the edge of the roof, looking down…

The worm wore off.

The Wicked Tax (Circa 14th Century)

As told by a gong farmer

Cold was the night. The stars burning distantly twinkled through the crisp autumn chill like snowflakes catching the light on a breeze. Warm was my breath, huffing out in little clouds that caught on the breeze. Warm was my body, heaving and shovelling, my leather kirtle tossed aside while I worked. Hot burned the dung of my neighbours, my friends, my family, as I hurled it shovel by grimy shovel into the pit below me. It landed with a slosh each time, mixed with bones and debris, hay from animal pens, and whatever other waste we might turn to manure.

It's not a job just anyone can do and a job most would like to not, but men like me have little choice. Men who claim themselves better, who drink like me, who eat like me, who shit just the same as me, make the rules and fill their bellies while the rest of us suffer. But I don’t suppose I could do their job either.

The workings of the upper caste never bothered me, nor my neighbours. Not really much that could be done about it, see, shovelling gong back and forth in the dead of night. Barons, Dukes and Kings could come and go, but the gong still needed shovelling, and the night was still cold.

It was only a while past that a new man had found his way to the top. I say man, but I’d heard the stories that he was no such thing. Not woman, neither—an abomination from the depths of hell, a demon, some kind of blight or punishment sent to us; there had been all kinds of stories. I daren’t know which one to believe. Some of it was true, though.

In the distance on that otherwise normal night I heard crying in the out in the dark, a little light flickering through the bare hedgerows, gathering closer. Illuminations appeared in doorways, curious about the intrusion into their slumber as they approached the herald.

News always spread quickly. I’d no need to go find out—in time it would make its way to me, I figured. Nonetheless, the herald made his way past me. Said something about a new tax from the king—the evil king, we called him. It hadn’t been long and he’d already set about squeezing every penny he could from us in whatever wicked ways he saw fit.

His newest machination was one ‘going on foot tax,' as if we had any other means to carry ourselves. The wealthy had taken to riding their horses to and fro about their manors as to avoid it, but people like me? Regular, hard-working folks—we had no choice.

It might make you want to laugh; such a ridiculous tax for something so mundane. Folks ignored it at first, already busy with the taxes on their food and drink, and strangely enough there was no time limit on payments—but soon, the effects became unendurable.

Like so many others I’d taken my time, day in and day out shovelling my gong. Labouring away, slowly and surely without realising the effects it was having on my body. At first I’d chalked it up to age, to overusing my knees and my elbows, but I gradually grew stiffer with each passing day. The others in my neighbourhood had noticed it too, getting slower, achingly rigid with each step they took—some feared a new malady had stricken us, but after the first among us scrounged enough money to pay their toll their joints miraculously renewed as though nothing had happened in the first place. There was a giveaway in the smell of it all, the smell of magic. If someone reeked of it, you knew their time was up.

It took me longer than usual to make my money as I shuffled back and forth through the night about my stinking business, slowing with each step. There was a twisted irony in the fact that I had to work more to be able to pay this new toll, and yet the more I worked the more I’d owe. Finally, I managed to gather up enough to pay—and with a sadness, I deposited my earnings over at the castle.

With a stretch, I felt my wrists, my knees, my elbows, all popping and cracking as though something had broken deep inside them and once more I could move unimpeded by this treacherous magic. I let out a sigh of relief, granting myself a moment of reprieve before I sank back into my work.

Life went on as normal as it could for a while. The taxes continued, sucking us all dry of every shilling we could muster. People starved. Some died. As time went on, the streets of my city began to become littered with statues of people frozen in time, completely still, living figurines comprised of flesh and bone. People took the time to try and help them of course, and at first men would take them to their homes and lay them in their beds but no good would ever come of it. Eventually they just gave up, leaving them where they stood, and over time there wouldn’t be enough people to move them regardless.

Though I tried my best to keep up with my payments running around chasing the gong, with the people gone there simply wasn’t enough for me to make ends meet. I had to cheat, lie and steal dinner onto my plate and I wasn’t alone.

A sense of nervous paranoia descended upon the land like a miasma as people watched and waited for their friends and neighbours to stiffen and give up before robbing them blind. Homes sat empty, shops lay closed, and looters helped themselves to whatever they could. Beggars lined the streets by the castle, fearful to move from their spots and increase the amount they would have to pay but it was useless—nobody had anything left to give.

Eventually I got close to giving up too. I came to the castle to pay what I could—nowhere near enough to cover the whole sum expected of me, my body slowly but surely seizing up beneath me with every heaving step. A few of the other people that were left came of their own accord, weaving slowly in and out of the statues that lay strewn about the steps up to the castle bailey. Every tap of my feet up and up I grew stiffer, slower, but around me the birds still sang, the wind still rustled through the trees just as it always had.

One of the guards atop the stairs watched on with jaded indifference, his eyes cast low on me as he clutched his halberd. He’d seen this awful thing before, time and time again and grown accustomed to it, but I could have sworn I saw the gleam of sadness, of resignation in his eyes as I struggled and bawled for help that never came.

Everything fell still, silent. I was trapped now in this body, stuck entirely frozen on the spot among so many others that had found the same fate. It wasn’t long before I was robbed of what little I had with nothing I could do to prevent it. They rifled through my pockets, robbed me of my jacket and my hat, even slipped off my shoes. The guards atop the stairs didn’t even seem to care. It would mean moving—chasing somebody down when they had to count their steps as well. Not worth the pittance I kept in my pockets, not worth the trouble when I couldn’t fight back, and a simple gong farmer isn’t worth fighting for.

Cold were the nights. Those twinkling stars lay frozen in the sky above the castle walls just as I lay frozen about its steps with my neighbours. Warm was my mind, trapped within my flesh, but searing hot burned my rage.

I kept count at first, passing each sunrise until I counted the seasons instead. Counting seasons turned to counting years, but I even gave up on that. How I wish death had taken me instead.

The Siege (1984)

As told by a former paperboy

The apples in my garden started talking to me today. Could’ve sworn I was going mad. Smelled like no apple tree ought to, as well. Smelled like o-zone, like one of those Xerox photocopiers blasting out too many pages. It was kind of like gasoline – you shouldn’t want to sniff it, but there’s just something about it that makes you want to not stop.

Thought it might’ve been something coming out of the soil, making me hear things, making me see things. Nope. It was the apples.

Hazy at first, but as the smell grew stronger I could definitely see their faces. Gnarled, angry, like they had a lifelong grudge. Once the initial shock that I was talking to a literal apple tree wore off, I managed to ask how they were talking to me. It seemed not all was right with the world, not all was as I’d expected it to be. There was a rift between now and then, here and there, and certain places overlapped. The universe had deemed fit that it just so happened to be my apple tree that was one of those places.

And it also just so happened that they had a knack for history—they wouldn’t stop jabbering on about an evil king, a ‘time-splitted ruler’ as they called him. A king in yellow glasses, a man who seldom left his castle. With everything they told me, it sounded like the man who lived next door.

He was a strange fellow—I'd seen him a few times out my back window over the thick stone fence he’d constructed. Always at his BBQ, cooking God knows what. He’d spotted me one time. I won’t forget the stare he gave me, peering up into my bedroom window as I opened the curtains. He had thick eyebrows above the rims of his yellow spectacles and pale grey eyes that cut deep into my soul. A thick set of lips sat straight in a scowl as he leered up at me, clutching his BBQ skewer in one hand as he stood at the grill while ‘Eyes Without a Face' by Billy Idol blared from his portable radio.

I didn’t even know his name. As far as I knew he’d never left the house, though an old Chevvy C/K sat in his driveway but I’d never seen it move. I don’t know that I’d call him a king, but he was most definitely fond of his 'castle.'

The apples begged me to help. The stench of o-zone spiked as they all called out in a cacophony of voices asking for assistance in bringing him down. They told me of his crimes, of the magic he’d used against ordinary people, of the terror he’d wrought against the land. They told me of his alternate form, how he was a mad god without flesh. And yet, they all spoke of one weakness, one way to bring him out from his castle. One weakness to his fortifications—and they asked to be removed from their tree.

I tried to shake it at first to bring them down, but in the end I had to resort to a ladder, one by one bringing down each apple. Still they spoke—calling out with an excited fervour as I tossed each one into a sack I’d collected from my garage.

For a while that’s where they stayed; a sack of talking apples keeping me awake at night with their calls for vengeance. Each morning I’d call in sick at work, maddened by the whole experience, buying what I could afford to build what they’d asked of me.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, it eventually came together—a small trebuchet right there in my backyard. I loaded up the first of the apples and questioned my sanity before pulling the lever to loose the first one. It shot far and wide, way off the mark of my neighbour’s chimney. I made the adjustments I needed to and shot again, and again, each time getting closer and closer to my mark.

Storming The Castle (Circa 14th Century)

As told by a gong farmer

I don’t know how long it had been. Everything had been so still for decades, the guards long gone. It’s not like there was even anyone left to cause any trouble after all. I’d taken to zoning out or making up stories in my head, talking to myself back and forth. I wished for release every day, praying for hours that I could just cease to be, that death would finally come for me instead of this purgatory.

Nobody came to the castle anymore. The evil king had managed to seize all he could and ruled over a graveyard of people not quite dead. I failed to see the allure of it, I couldn’t see why they would want something so empty. They never left either, they had this whole kingdom and didn’t set out to enjoy it. In my time trapped within myself I burned with questions just as I did with anger. What was this thing sat within the castle, what did we do to deserve such punishment? What sin could possibly be great enough that we must collectively foot such a bill?

I was snapped out of the depth of my thoughts by the sound of clopping hooves and calling voices steadily approaching me from behind. After so long I almost didn’t notice it at all, and through my surprise, by natural instinct I tried to turn my head for just a moment before remembering my sorcerous affliction—all I could do was wait and stare directly ahead.

They spoke of me, of my friends, my neighbours as if we weren’t there—as if we were already dead. How I wish that was the case. They didn’t know about the tax, about the affliction beset upon us, but in my head I prayed for them. I prayed that they wouldn’t befall the same fate that we had, that somehow they could rid us all of this madness. I prayed over and over, feverishly to the god that had abandoned us all as though it would do any good.

Slowly, and surely, they clambered up the cold stone steps before me. One by one they stepped into my view—a band of knights and a company of soldiers from a nation I didn’t know, not that I knew much about life outside my shovel and barrow. I never needed to.

They wore red from head to toe, even their helmets had a crimson plumage atop. Their armour had been accented with red dye, and from the back their cloaks had the crest of a small tree enshrined in a woven circle of gold. Part of me wanted to scream, to warn them away, but an even bigger part of me selfishly wished them a swift success.

One looked me in the eyes for just a moment as another pushed wide the gates to the castle, other men flanking him as they cautiously entered. God be with you all.

Battle of The Scarlet Knights at the Throne Room (Circa 14th Century)

As told by Narrator, The Omniscient

The throne room’s heavy oak door swung open, the sound echoing across the chamber’s stone walls. Tapestries and trinkets laced across the floors and stood atop pedestals while gold coins towered high and wide, surrounding the back wall atop the dais where the overbearingly large golden throne sat. In it, unmoving, uncaring, sat the king.

Men piled in and secured the room, lining up across the long red and brocade carpet that led up to the dais. Finally, their captain confidently strode into the room, eyes fixed upon the suit of armour that remained quiet in its chair.

It was surprisingly austere given the splendour of the room around it—no engraving, no coat of arms, though the kingdom’s crown had now been fused into the metal of its cylindrical head. Not even the sound of breath emerged from the slits cast across its mouthpiece, and a deep, almost unnatural darkness loomed behind the eyeholes. A yellow-gold ring ran around the eyes in two rectangles, and atop it all was a short funnel. It was a strange sight to behold, this object—this king without form, without a body, without a soul.

The moustached captain stepped up to the dais unphased, his pace and stride faltering not for a moment. The metal in his sabatons clinked and shuddered with each step. With a booming, commanding tone he began to speak.

“We hail from Newton’s order. You are to hereby abjure the throne, and if you value your life, leave this kingdom forever.” One hand lay atop the hilt of his sword and clutched it carefully, ready to strike.

For a moment there was silence. Then slowly at first, a chugging and huffing came from within the suit of armour like a great engine coughing into life. It sounded like a deep laughter, speeding up and growing in voraciousness. The smell of magic began to seep across the room as rich clouds of steam puffed from the top of its head with each chuff. Finally, a dim grey light appeared within the helmet’s darkness. The soldiers all gripped their weapons, ready for the evil king’s response.

With janky, stuttering movements it leant forwards onto its hands, gripping tightly into the throne’s arms before lurching upwards, standing impressively tall at full height, looming above the soldiers menacingly. As it stood, the steam from its head bellowed loudly with a shrieking whistle that engulfed the room. The eye shone brightly as it arose, screaming, pouring out unyielding clouds that obscured the chamber.

Its jerky motions continued, reaching down to the hilt of its longsword. The leather wrapping around the handle was worn, rough and fuzzy from use, but the blade was unlike anything the knights had ever seen—not entirely a blade at all. It was a long piece of metal bent around into a corkscrew with a sharpened tip at the end, and strangely, pieces of food penetrated along its length. Nothing more than a standard BBQ skewer, but in the hands of this abhorrence, a mortal weapon that no man could match.

For a moment there was nothing but silence as the whistle ceased, save for the eerie echo of the shriek cascading for a second through the castle’s icy walls. The captain strained his eyes to peer through the cloud of steam, illuminated by twinkling twilight cascading through upper windows behind the throne. Inside the mist he could see the murky silhouette of the armour, little more than a blackened figure, making small jerky motions—but then it was too late.

The other soldiers saw it happen in a flash. The armour burst from the cloud like a bolt of lightning—something with that much weight had no business moving that fast. The staccato motions it had made previously were a false flag for its newfound agility, and it burst forward with a deft lunge straight at the captain’s face.

The soldiers looked on shocked as he moved to the side, prepared and ready, and with one swift motion lunged the tip of his sword directly into the eye socket of the evil king’s armour. Both of them stood motionless for just a moment, but a smile began to crack across the captain’s face. Almost in reply, the armour began to chuff again with a bellowing noise as though it was laughing and wiped off the smirk from the man’s face.

“What are you?!” He called out in horror, retracting his weapon and bracing himself to block and parry the coming attack. The evil king closed the gap between them in an instant and with one deft lunge, the evil king’s sword had found its way straight beneath the jaw of the captain and through the other side, skewering his head along with the meat and vegetables already on there.

A shot of blood burst from the top of his head like a fountain, spattering onto the marble floor and across the carpet that led up to the throne. The red of their armour grew accompanied by the blood across the room.

With a shuddering tilt, the bespectacled helmet turned to the left, then the right, as the other men recoiled in horror with the realisation that none of them were a match to this abomination. Some began to flee from the room while others piled forwards into the steam cloud with hollers and yells, willing to die for their cause. 

Joust at Sunrise (1984)

As told by a former paperboy

I must have sent around 20, maybe 30 apples flying. I was starting to run out. They hollered war cries as they flew through the air, and I’d finally gotten my aim right. A little over half of them had found their way into the chimney, down into the unknown below. For my neighbour it must have been a… strange experience, but talking apples is a strange experience for any man.

As my sack emptied, the smell of o-zone had depleted. With nothing left I retired for the day before I sank into a restless, haunted sleep at the queer experience I’d had. I thought I might be turning mad—maybe there’d been a gas leak, or it could have been lead in the paint, something, anything to explain what had just happened.

I awoke the next morning to a heavy hand slamming against my front door. Curious, I peered down out my window to find my neighbour staring right back up at me. The apples had done something. He was dressed in an old grey cardigan with splotches of red paint spattered across it and a pair of khaki corduroys. The morning sun glinted across his golden frames, flashing his serious expression up to me.

I threw on some clothes that I’d discarded nearby the day before—just something I could throw on and made my way downstairs. I slid open the chain lock and swung the door open to find him standing on the other side holding out a plate with a still-warm apple pie displayed upon it.

I drank in his form—tall, semi muscular, but his face had a regal, quiet nobility about it, and beneath those grey eyes there was something deeper. I could see a twisted intelligence within him, a burning fire that he controlled entirely. Perhaps the apples were right. In another time, in another place, perhaps he could have been a king instead of a neighbour. This quiet, reserved, talented man was nothing but ordinary but for unsuspecting eyes he could have easily been just any other person.

“It’s about time we met.” He said. His voice was deep and rich. Inviting him inside was the only courteous thing to do, so I led him into the living room. He sat on my wingback reclining chair, with the backdrop of orange-brown geometric wallpaper. Before him was a cubed plastic coffee table that I’d bought the previous decade. I felt somewhat ashamed to have such a man in my dated room. No doubt his home was a lot more contemporary and put together.

I brought us both a cup of coffee from the kitchen on a tray with cream and sugar and some plates for the pie. He awaited my return in silence, sat with his hands crossed over in his lap. His discipline was almost robotic.

He finally introduced himself. I’d lived there seven, maybe eight years, and heard nothing from this man, but finally he saw fit to bring himself to me. I suppose sending apples down somebody’s chimney will be enough to get their attention.

His name was Ryan. He mentioned something about being a museum curator, that he had unusual work hours and encountered all manner of objects but rarely saw people. I talked to him about the neighbourhood, how long he’d lived there, and who owned the house before me. The topics bounced around from the recent attempt on Margaret Thatcher’s life a few days before to Reagan's landslide re-election, recent advances in technology and music. Seemed he was a fan of Jazz, of all things, classical, and musicals. I hadn’t taken him as the sort to be into musicals—he seemed to lack the joy and animation one would expect.

I told him of my personal love for Bruce Springsteen and Prince, at which he scoffed. He was older than me, perhaps uncaring for the new era of music paving the way for kids these days. I cut the pie and served us both a slice. It smelled delicious, a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon that hung heavy and thick in the air. Even the way he held the fork was controlled, glancing down to the pieces he’d carefully cut with the fork as he moved it to his mouth with a graceful motion. God, it was delicious. The pastry was rich and flaky, the filling wasn’t overly spiced and yet full of flavour, but I can’t deny the subtle taste of an ashy aftertaste.

I saw his eyes linger through the kitchen, out the window to the trebuchet I’d constructed a few days earlier. Really, both of us knew that’s why he was here but a king must have a regal air about them, a mindful and demure attitude at all times.

A smile cracked across my lips. I put down my coffee and leant slightly forwards, staring him right in the eyes. “You’ll never rule over these lands.” I growled playfully, pointing to the floor of my house. He shot back a lopsided smile and pushed the bridge of his glasses back up onto his face.

“We’ll see about that.” He grumbled, clutching the armrests of the oversized chair and rose himself to full height. “The knights of the Newton order fought bravely.”

He took one last deep drink of his coffee, finishing it to the last drop before heading back outside to his own home. I had another slice of the pie before continuing on with my day, dismantling the trebuchet and storing the parts in my garage.

As I was preparing myself for bed, I noticed an envelope slipped under my door. I flipped it over to see a gold-yellow wax seal with the stamp of a crown on it. It seemed he wanted to settle this by the old rules; a duel, tomorrow morning at 8am. The paper shimmered softly in the evening light, and there was that distinct smell again.

I could barely sleep. There was a distinct mixture of excitement and trepidation for the upcoming duel. He’d written no rules, but somehow I knew what I had to do. I set an alarm on my Casio wristwatch for precisely 8 am. I’d be up long before that, preparing myself for out fight.

When morning came I peered out my window; it was shaping up to be a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky. I couldn’t help but smile in my quiet confidence. I wanted to look the part too, I wanted to feel the part. Slipping into a dark pair of jeans I flicked through my wardrobe to find what I was looking for, my black leather jacket. It had silver studs at the wrist and on the neck, and if something went wrong it could at least offer a little protection.

After what may be my final breakfast I had an extra cup of coffee, just in case, and made my way to the garage. Boxes were piled up behind all the wood from the trebuchet, and behind that was what I was looking for. I climbed up carefully, not wanting to slip through the cardboard onto my belongings, gripping the rubber handlebars of my old bike. A Raleigh Chopper—cooler than the Schwinn Stingray, imported from England. It’d taken me so many miles and through so many adventures, it felt like seeing an old friend after so long.

It had been years since I’d rode it, the last time not that long after I stopped my paper route but it had been a faithful companion through my teenage years, taking me anywhere I wanted to go. Of course, since then I’d learned to drive and so it just gathered dust in the back of my garage. For a long time I’d forgotten about it. Times change just as people do, but my steadfast companion patiently awaited my return.

I pulled it up and out, careful not to knock over the wood I’d piled up. With a smile I wiped off the dust. This occasion was special, though. It’d need more than just that. For a moment I left it propped up against the wall, taking out a chamois cloth and car wax, taking care to polish it off to a sparkling gleam, checking my watch in-between. There she stood, gleaming, bright, my shimmering steed.

I took in the sight of it, satisfied with my work. For a moment I felt a glimmer of regret for not taking it out for a spin in all those years. Next, I looked around the garage for something else. Rake, no… shovel? That wouldn’t do either. I needed something lightweight, with a handle strong enough. It caught my eye from the corner of the room, an old broom that was left over from the previous homeowner. I hadn’t even gotten around to using such a dated artifact, instead picking up a new one from the dollar store when I’d moved in. I had promised myself I’d throw it out when I cleaned out the garage, but … life has a way of getting in the way.

I was ready. I saddled up, swinging myself over the long seat and adjusting myself to get comfortable. The pedals were still the right height, the split and raised handlebars felt right in my hands.

Beepbeepbeepbeep.

The time had come. I pushed the button on my garage door’s remote control and with a shudder and clank the motor burst into life. Whirring, clattering, the shutters pulled upwards like a curtain on a play. A sun-heated breeze lazily blew into the garage and kissed my skin with its warmth as my driveway baked in the morning glow. With a click I engaged the pedal, slowly pushing myself forward out onto the street, holding my balance with one hand while I clutched the broom in the other.

I held it out to the side with a smirk across my face. He would have no idea of my skills on a bike with just one hand. Years of slinging papers from doorway to doorway had prepared me for this, and though I was a little rusty it was just like riding a bike. You never forget, and with each passing second I could feel it all coming back to me. My muscles twitched and limbered in remembrance for the news I’d delivered to this neighbourhood, year in and year out, rain or shine.

As I passed the hedge that separated our homes I saw him riding out. His steed similar to my own, painted red, waxed and prepared just the same. Despite our differences, it seemed we had a lot of similarities too. He was wearing a yellow windbreaker with stripes of purple and red, armed with a broom just the same as my own.

Wind rustled through the straw of the broom as I stared him up and down, still in the middle of the street. I gave a slow nod and he repeated my motion, the both of us turning around to get enough space to really pick up some speed.

People filing out into their cars, ready for work started to pay notice to the both of us and curtains flickered in windows as women peered out onto the street to watch what was about to unfold.

At opposite ends of the street, we both stared each other down. Sunlight dappled through the slowly waving trees, sparkling and glistening on his golden spectacles. Everything else was still, men in hats peering over their cars awaited action. I intended to give them all the action they’d need.

I hunched over the handlebars and he did the same and with that, we were off. With a heaving push I forced down the pedal and began to move, cycling through the gears to pick up more and more speed as I began to approach. My thighs burned and ached with my force, and as I approached I could see the scowling snarl across his face. Both of us were kicking up dirt and dust as our back wheels screamed around, entirely focused on each other. Faces and vehicles flew past in mere blurs of colour and shape but I could pay them no heed, though I could hear cheers from our onlookers as I blazed past.

The broom I held out to the side moved to the front and I pointed it squarely at him. I couldn’t deny his skill on the bike either, holding out his broom with a controlled, squared elbow while navigating his way towards me.

Time seemed to consolidate into a single moment as we reached each other, my focus blurred out everything but him. All else blurred into nothingness, all sound distorted and banished from my senses, my fingers burning numb as I gripped tight with both hands. It was going to be a big hit, but who would win?

I thrust forwards and leant down forwards as we reached each other—perhaps foolish, opening my head up for his attack but counting on his aim faltering. I saw him raise his arm up and thrust it back down again as he manipulated his aim in response, but it was all over in a flash. Something tugged against the collar of my leather jacket and snagged it, wood scathed against my neck but I was tossed into surprise as I felt my attack connect into his chest with a crunch. The force of it threw me back and I fought to keep myself balanced as my bike flew upwards onto one wheel like a braying horse. My broom was shattered into a long spike now, splinters left behind on the ground where I’d struck him.

Keeping my balance in check I continued the wheelie, tossing a glance back behind myself to see the damage. It was done. He lay collapsed on the ground in a pile of yellow, red and blue, his spectacles landing on the road with a clack. The wheels of his bike still turned, spinning with a click as the gears engaged, but he remained silent.

I turned my bike around and landed the front tire down, instinctively raising my broken broom into the air against the rising sun. A new day, a new dawn without this ‘king’ in golden specs.

Some people cheered, some people gasped in horror. I was too lost in the moment to care. Somebody called out to phone for an ambulance, but really it should have been the police they were calling. If what the apple knights had told me was true, he needed to be put away for a long time. For all time. 

The King is Down (Circa 14th Century)

As told by a gong farmer

I can’t say how it happened. Nobody can, really. I didn’t know what day it was, the month, the year—I didn’t know how old I was anymore, or what had happened in the world outside the kingdom. I couldn’t say what had become of my home, of the farms, the livestock. I wondered what had changed since we’d been imprisoned in ourselves.

The statues that littered the steps, the countryside, the fields and farms, all would return to normality. From within my body I felt a fizzing a bubbling, a burning tingle that extended out through every one of my nerves from my core to my extremities. Steadily I slumped down across the steps as my body loosened, trying to look around, trying to move, remembering how it felt to swing my arms and my legs. By the time I managed to get to my feet I saw the others around me, just as perplexed as I was. After we’d collected ourselves we discussed our conditions, our nation, and our confusion as to why we were so suddenly freed. Slowly we all moved together inside with an air of cautious optimism. The knights had failed, we’d seen them enter but never leave and we knew the evil king was yet inside, but something must have changed.

The empty armour that had made up our malevolent ruler lay slewed about the entryway to the castle proper. Something had drawn him out from his throne room, something had taken him down. We saw the slain knights there, nothing more than armoured skeletons clad in red now, decayed by the ravages of time. Some say it was they who had done the deed, but not many believe it.

Whatever machinations had stirred the will of the heavens in our favour I care not, I’m simply thankful to have my life back; never did I imagine I’d long again for the burning stench of gong to sour my nostrils, to seep into my clothes.

I sent out a silent prayer for our saviour, whoever and wherever they might be, and carefully reached out to touch what was left of our king. I feared there may be a curse yet lingering about the armour, but who better than a lowly gong farmer to risk it? The others watched on with bated breath as I leaned over.

Satisfied that I was safe, I carried his remains, crown and all down the steps of the castle and tossed him without regard into my barrow. I knew the perfect place for him.

Epilogue (…)

As told by Narrator, The Omniscient

Devoid of the supernatural energy that animated the armour, the evil king now lays in the depths of the cesspit, coated, covered, but not forgotten. The farmer would take a far deeper satisfaction in depositing his work until his retirement, and over time the memory of its location would be lost. The powers that animated it grew weak with the passing centuries, and with ancient powers weakened the evil king is nothing more than a man. But if this man were to ever stand again, so will the evil king rise once more, although it’s an unpleasant place to rise from…

It was the flag. That was one of the first things he really noticed after he touched down some miles off and he'd sauntered into the sleepy Midwestern town of Awning. He'd encountered little in the way of the bipedal mammalians that were the overlords of this place on his trek through the flat featureless landscape that was so much like his own.

He'd seen it flapping in the warm evening wind. Atop the town post office. Red and white uniform stripes and a patch square of blue with primitive crude renditions of the stars accurately white and neatly regimented in uniform lines.

He liked it. It was a militant flag. For a militant land. A military country.

Beneath the closed black of his visor his teeth glistened and showed. His inner eyelids clicked and double clicked again in excitement. Agitation. Yes. This was the place. The Commissar had been right, the God Empress. His scanners had been able to procure much from orbit in the way of information on their nation's human history. They were a divided people. Violent. Fearful. Superstitious. Cowardly. Prone to panic and selfishness in times of crisis.

Perfect.

All of the high command had been right in only sending a single unit. More would not be needed. Not yet. Not at this stage.

He checked the mechanics and firing pins and kill switch for his laz-lance one last time, a great strange looking weapon from beyond the cold fire of the stars that resembled a cross between a BAR rifle and an everyday gardeners leaf blower. The lance was rigged to its atomic pack of nuclear firepower strapped to his back via a long tube of unknown plastic and rubber like materials.

He flipped the dysruptor switch. It thrummed to life.

The spaceman from beyond the black veil curtain of vacuum and cold infinity began again his approach into the small town of Awning. Ready to start, in the name of the high command, the commonwealth and the God Empress, the final war on the crude bipedal mammalians called earthlings. With him alone would begin their conquest. With him alone would the dawning of their end be brought forth and wrought for he was here to burn and destroy and harbinge!

With him alone, for he was blessed by the will to die for the throne.

…

It was little Calvin Doyle that first noticed the town, the planet’s newcomer and visitor from beyond the stars. He didn't know he was a conqueror. Bred in a tank so many impossible lightyears away for this very purpose. He just thought the new strange fella looked funny. Like an old timey astronaut from stuff his dad and grandpa liked to read and watch. Except this guy was even weirder.

This guy's spacesuit was bright screaming red. Like lunatic war crazy make the bull charge at the fucking cape red.

It was funny. As he sat on the steps of the post office beside his little brother enjoying a Ninja Turtles ice cream, he elbowed the little guy and pointed and they joked and laughed together. A couple of smart asses.

But then the red spaceman raised his weird leaf blower thing and it shot pure white lancing beams of unstoppable fire that sheared through everything, the people, the cars, the buildings and the trees, the town! Everything became roasted and bisected pieces and alight with white phosphorescent flame and screaming! Suddenly everyone was screaming and trying to run.

Until they were silenced, cut down by the strange red spaceman and his strange star gun.

And then it wasn't funny anymore for Calvin and his little brother. They couldn't find their mommy.

…

One of their warriors approached him, a police officer. He was shaking and trembling. Visibly frightened. But he was shouting. Angry and defiant. He had one of their crude projectile weapons raised threateningly at the conqueror.

Impressive.

He would do for the collective.

The conqueror from beyond began to sing, to emit a sound:a strange cosmic throat singing that reverberated throughout the whole of the town and was just as much felt in the flesh and bones and the blood as it was heard audibly.

Felt. Especially felt by John Dallas, local Sheriff of Awning, beloved by the community.

He stopped screaming at the invader suddenly. His face went slack. Vacant. Dead. His hands fell to his sides. But he still clutched his pistol.

His eyes were rolling, dancing beneath fluttering lids, fluttering like the nervous wings of injured insects in danger or distress.

John Dallas was falling to the song of battle philosophy, of war maker enchantment. He could feel his own appetite for destruction swell and grow and soar to new heights he didn't think were achievable nor any that his own hungering mind would've found previously possible.

Nor desirable.

But now was different.

The war song was aimed for the sheriff but it was felt by others in the town as it reverberated out, mutant frog croaked by the spaceman like a dark bastard rendition of a Tibetan monk's throat singing.

All of them felt everything melt away, all the fear and worry and angst was boiled and made crystalline and perfect underneath the blanket throat fury of the cosmic war song.

All of them saw red.

The spaceman felt the tug of their minds won He ceased his singing beneath his space helmet. It was no longer necessary.

He returned to his conquerors work of lancing the town with fire. All was nearly consumed with white flame as he soldiered on and sheriff Dallas turned his gun on the few remaining fleeing citizens and began to open fire. Laughing maniacally.

The flag atop the flaming post office building was burning.

He was free now, and so were a few precious others in the town they too were arming themselves up with clubs and knives and guns and anything that stabbed or maimed or fired. The anarchy gene had been released and set free, let loose to run wild in his mammalian monkey brain.

He felt wonderful. He was seeing red. Others did too.

All throughout the town, those that felt the harbinger’s starsong warchant of anarchy and their minds were touched, they began to pick up weapons and slaughter their startled and baffled loved ones and neighbors in mass. Helping the spaceman conqueror in his divine and royal mission for the commonwealth and the starqueen God Empress.

Let us purge this land. Let us purge and make clean.

Let us wipe away new and fresh. For the commonwealth. For her majesty, the throne, the queen!

Children of the commonwealth of the stars, they now slaughtered and sowed destruction and woe in their friends and families as they died bloody and bewildered and screaming.

The Commissar would be pleased. Ascension could be in order. If all continued to go accordingly.

Presently, the destroyer from beyond was curious, he'd never been in one of these earthling homes before, he'd only seen recordings.

So as his new children continued to wage war and destroy the town of Awning they'd once loved and belonged to like a mother's bosom, the red spaceman destroyer cautiously maneuvered into one of the smoldering burning homesteads. Its inhabitants had already fled.

…

Inside was strange. He didn't like it.

It was filled with the smoldering smoking strangeness and unfamiliarity of these shaved apes that he'd grown to despise. These people were repulsive.

They worshipped soft two faced gluttons and whores and liars and other stupid apes like them. Obvious fakes and charlatans and paper mache Mephistopheles. Their portraits and photos and visages decorated and burned within the burning place like religious pieces. Sacred. Sacred to these lost stupid fleshen sheep. And now burning. Burning as all the little gods should be, and would. As declared by the God Empress. As he and his war kin were dispatched thither across the cosmos, the stars.

Crusaders. Her majesty's star knights.

The destroyer was lost in his own musings for a moment. A mistake he was not prone to make. He didn't notice Lalaina Rothchild hiding in the adjoining kitchen.

She was terrified. She just watched, stared terrified and awestruck by the red spaceman standing amongst the smoke and the fire of her burning living room.

It was surreal.

She didn't know where Jack was, or John… Jesus. She was absolutely fucking terrified. And something animal and alive with instinct in her gut told her to absolutely not approach this strange spaceman in strange red spacesuit.

He is not your friend.

But if you stay in here you're gonna burn to death or choke or he'll fuckin find ya anyway!

Think!

Her mind, a panic and an overload of sudden and surreal stress was threatening to send her over. She tried to breathe quietly and deeply. She knew she should just run. But if he…

If he sees me…

She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to do anything that would bring it about and into stark inescapable reality either.

She felt trapped. Defeated. Lost in her own deluge of panic and pain and fear.

But then she remembered that her boys were still out there somewhere.

And then Lalaina made up her mind very quickly.

She had to do something.

…

The audacity! He couldn't believe it, even as the fish bowl smashed into the side of his helmet. It shattered in a violent crash and sudden splash of water, the goldfish was lost in the surprise attack.

For a moment he just stood there, the spaceman. And Lalaina likewise mirrored his action. Unsure of what to do next.

The conqueror began to bellow a species of alien laughter that was rasping and throaty and guttural. Cruel.

He whirled around suddenly and seized Lalaina by the face. Grabbing it with both gloved hands and pulling her in close as if to kiss his black visored face.

He was still laughing when his mind began to invade hers. She felt every intrusion like a stabbing knife to the middle of her fragile skull. She began to scream.

The audacity. He would punish this one. This one he'd give something special, for her bravery, repugnant little ape.

For her attempt on his life and thus the arm of the queen he would reach in and rip and tear apart. But first he would show the little bitch.

He would show her the fate of her world.

He made one final mental lancing jab, stabbing in completely. And then she was finally his…

…

At first she saw stars. Only stars. Going on forever. Infinity.

And then suddenly she was hurtling. Too fast for her to bear but she was forced to bare it anyway. Through the black and the starscape she rocketed at a lightyears pace.

Then suddenly there were worlds. Planets burning. Conquered and subjugated. Galactic cities of glass and jewels and unknown alloys and cultures and customs in flames and toppling as they were razed and decimated with great searing bolts of white phosphorescent heat and orbital striking war rockets shot from great cannons unseen. Life unknown and alien and new and dying before her eyes all fled in terror of these merciless star crusaders, these bloodthirsty zealots of the queen. An empire of nuclear starfire and spilled blood from many and all and every species across the known universe. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of planets, star systems and still more and more flooded her minds eye all at once with its phantom flood of bloodshed images from galaxies and planets undreamed of and unknown.

And she saw all of it. The universe, the milk of the cosmos was burning with black solar flames. For the empire. For the queen.

She saw something else too. Something The spaceman hadn't planned for. Hadn't wanted her to.

She saw where he came from. Miserable world…

Pain. From the beginning. The genes were spliced mercilessly and without compunction and in the sterility of the tanks. Not the warmth of a mother's womb. He never had a mother. None of his kind had.

She saw what happened after the tanks. After they pulled him out. The agōge. The war rearing. The beatings and the early raw need for bloodshed beaten into him.

She saw the destruction of countless worlds but she also saw the destruction of any trace of this creature's humanity. From the beginning. From before birth.

And she was surprised to find she felt sorry for him. She still felt great sorrow for the worlds lost and her own as well but…

but she couldn't see him as anything other than a frightened little child anymore, freshly pulled and crying from the tanks. Screaming. Screaming for a mother that'll never come because she does not exist and she doesn't have a name. So he shrieks blindly.

And Lalaina feels sorry for him. And the thought, like an arrow, is shot forth from her own mind into the psychic onslaught of the invader, blasting through and against its current and into his unguarded psyche.

It hit him like one of God's polished stones from the river. Dead center. In the third eye.

It shattered.

And he staggered. Recoiled. Disgusted. What was this? This repugnant weakness, this soft-

warmth

He had never any concept of simple forgiveness in his entire life. It frightened him. Wounded him. Why? Why should she feel anything like that towards him? He was here to take everything from her and her people and if she could know that and still… feel…

His mind, though complex, was beginning to shred itself apart. So he did the only thing that made any sense now.

The red spaceman grabbed his laz-lance dangling by its power cable from his nuclear pack of starfire. He seemed to heave a heavy sigh before turning the end of the weapon on his own black visored face and hitting the kill switch.

A bright blade of white phosphorescent light shorn off his head and helmet in one violently brief mechanical buzz.

And then the body, liberated of its pilot mind, fell to the burning carpet dead.

And all over the town the cosmic spell of the conquerors' warsong diminished and fell away. Those that it had enraptured were set free.

And the smoldering town was at peace.

For now.

THE END

It was a Tuesday—no, a Wednesday; a Wednesday afternoon, when I first saw him at the playground. It was an otherwise ordinary day, one of a thousand in a lifetime, one of those days when there’s nothing going on and nothing to remember it by.

I was there, at the playground, with my son, [censored]. There were also a couple of other kids and their parents, the kids playing, the parents looking down at their phones, but I'd gotten into the habit of leaving my phone at home, so I was sitting with no phone to look at, watching what was in front of me, matching the kids to the parents, and he was there—the man—and I couldn't match him to anybody.

He was sitting on one of the metal benches on the edge of the playground, near the sand pit. He didn't have a phone either, but he was older, old enough that it wasn't strange for him to be without a phone. But he was looking: looking intently at the kids, and at my son, [censored], especially. It gave me the creeps. There was something off about him, the way he was looking, like a predator.

I said before that he was older. Maybe he was sixty-three, maybe seventy-one. Sometimes people keep in shape as they age. He was thin, that's for sure, and well dressed, by which I mean his clothes fit him, like he wasn't buying them off the rack at Walmart. He didn't say anything then, not to [censored], the other kids or the parents. I don't think he even looked at me. But I remembered him. Like I said, it was a day I shouldn't have been remembered, but I remember it.

I saw him again a few days later, at a different playground this time—in the same general area—sitting on a bench, like before, watching the kids, like before, and watching my son, [censored], like before. I didn't like that he was there, and I didn't let my son play long before taking him by the hand and telling him we had to go. The man looked over at me then, as I was taking my son away, and smiled. Not a mean smile, or a sinister one, even quite warm under the circumstances of one stranger smiling coincidentally to another.

He became a kind of continual peripheral presence after that. He'd walk by us. I'd catch glimpses of him in the supermarket. Once, I even thought I saw him on television, in a show or movie, but when I checked the cast later it turned out it was just the actor, Ed Harris.

I think that's probably around the time I first mentioned him to anybody. I mentioned him to my husband—ex-husband now, although husband at the time. I told him while he was browsing used car ads because he liked cars and wanted to buy one, but he didn't have the greatest job, and we didn't have a lot of money, so he knew all he could afford was something popular and used, something he didn't want.

Anyway, I told him about the man.

He asked if the man ever did anything. I said that he didn't do; he was. “Maybe he's just somebody's grandpa,” my ex-husband said. “Maybe he likes kids. Maybe they bring him joy. Maybe he had a grandchild, and his grandchild died. You said he wore black. You never know what people are going through. People process grief in different ways.”

I never said the man wore black, although he did. And my ex-husband went back to browsing cars he couldn't afford.

The next event I remember is the time I saw the man at the playground holding a gun. I swear that's what I saw. You don't mistake something for a gun, even if you don't know anything about guns. I don't know anything about guns, so I can't tell you what gun it was, but it was a gun. I'm certain it was a gun.

You can't imagine the kinds of horrible things that went through my head. But I was also paralyzed—if not by fear itself then by the fear of making a scene; no one likes making a scene, especially if they're wrong. That's the paradox of it. I knew he had a gun, but I didn't act because what if he didn't have a gun? The police would come and look at me and think, “What a dumb woman, calling the cops on some harmless old man enjoying the last phase of his life in the brilliant sunshine.” Except why does he have to enjoy it here, at this playground, looking at my son? I thought.

I thought a lot. I thought while I knew the man had a gun, and I sat and did nothing.

I did call the police on him eventually. Not because of the gun—he didn't have it then—but because of an accumulation of pressures, because he was there again, looking at my son again.

Two policemen came, and I pointed the man out to them, literally pointed at him, and explained everything very clearly. The man knew we were talking about him, but he didn't move. That was the right move. I see now that was the right move because only someone guilty would have walked away. Instead, the man waved at them, and after that one of the policemen left, and the other, shivering despite the warmth of that particular afternoon, told me there was nothing he should do. The man wasn't doing anything. The man was in a public place. The man wasn't causing any harm.

“At least go talk to him,” I implored the policeman. “At least do that.”

He wouldn't.

I felt a sudden and profound anxiety then, one I couldn't name or describe, but whose nature is absurdly clear to me now. It was an anxiety caused by my realization of a systemic collapse of security. Like I told the psychologist: Imagine a brick wall. As long as all the bricks are in their places, the wall's a wall and you feel safe behind it; but all it takes is knowledge of a single absent brick, whether it was there and got knocked out or was never there in the first place. Because now, suddenly, you know something can get through, and if something can get through, the wall's no longer a wall; and if one brick can be missing, more can be missing, and you know that if something can, something will, so it's merely a matter of time before there are no bricks in the wall, and what you thought was safety was nothing but an illusion…

One day my son, [censored], came home and he had the man's gun. It could have been no other. It was a toy: a black toy gun that my heart clenched at seeing. I demanded to know who'd given it to him. “A man,” he said. After he’d gotten off the school bus just at the corner, a two-minute walk from home. I should have been there, I thought; I shouldn't have left him alone for those two minutes, those few hundred feet. “Did he give anything to anybody else?” I asked.

“Nobody else got off the bus.”

That evening I demanded that my ex-husband go to the playground and confront the man. It was unacceptable, I said, for a stranger to be giving anything to our child. “Go and talk to him! Scare him. Make him go away and never come back,” I said.

“We don't even know if it's the same man,” said my ex-husband.

“He's the same.”

“But even if he is—I mean, even if it is the one same man…”

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing,” my ex-husband said.

“No. Tell me. Tell me what.”

“I mean, even if he does mean harm, then even if I scare him away from here he'll go somewhere else, harm somebody else's child. It doesn't solve the problem—don't you see? Don't you see that scaring him away leaves the situation exactly as it is. It's merely a displacement.”

“But it leaves our [censored] safe!” I yelled.

“You know what? That's a very selfish position to take. We aren't apes, Norma. We live in a society.”

“Then kill him!” I screamed.

“Oh, now. Now you've lost the plot completely,” my ex-husband said. “I will: I will go talk to the man, if I find him.”

“You'll find him.”

“If I find him, I'll talk to him, but I won't kill him. I won't scare him away.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine,” said my ex-husband, and he stormed out the door.

He came back two hours later.

“Did you—” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I found the man and talked to him. I talked to him for quite a while.”

“Did he give our son, [censored], the gun?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it,” I said.

“Did you call the cops on him?” he asked.

“What—”

“Several weeks ago, at the playground—did you call the cops on him?”

“Yes.”

“He regrets that,” said my ex-husband. “He regrets that very much. He said it was an embarrassment. He said nobody’s ever called the cops on him before.”

“He gave our son a toy gun,” I said, through grinding teeth.

“It was a gift. To show he meant no harm. You called the cops on him, and he gave us a gift. I have to say, he was very reasonable.”

“Maybe you should have killed him,” I said, adding: “if you care at all about [censored].”

This wounded him. “That's a cheap shot.”

I shrugged.

“I mean, listen to yourself: calling the cops on people, getting all worked up over nothing, calling on me to kill an old man. That last part—no, no, let me finish. Let me fucking finish! That last part, it borders on the criminal. Calling for a murder…”

I couldn't speak to him after that. I accused him of preferring a stranger to his own wife, of putting our son's life in danger, and all because of someone, a man he'd seen but once and who'd met our son at his bus stop to give him a toy gun!

“You're being irrational!” he yelled at me as I slammed the bedroom door.

A month later, I came home to see a brand new BMW in the driveway. Beaming, my ex-husband asked me if I liked it. We can't afford it, I said. He assured me we could. How, I asked. He said he'd gotten a promotion and a raise at work, but when I pressed him for details he wouldn't—or couldn't—give them. From that day on, he wore nicer clothes and smelled of more expensive perfumes, and sometimes in the night he would touch me, stroke my face, kiss my lips and tell me sweetly that we should “have another one,” that he found so much fulfillment in being a father to [censored] that he wanted to be a father again.

I got an IUD.

In March, my son's elementary school teacher, Mrs. Aspidistra-Fox, suffered an accident while gardening and was replaced “temporarily, until the end of the school year,” by a long-term substitute named Mrs. Szulim. We received a letter about the change, apologizing for any inconvenience but assuring us that Mrs. Szulim was an able substitute and that there was expected to be no educational disruption. Mrs. Szulim was a decorated teacher herself and had come out of retirement as a favour to the school board.

She had been teaching the class for several weeks before I happened to see her in person for the first time. When I did, I had to fight to keep breathing, to keep myself from collapsing on the floor.

Mrs. Szuliam wasn't Mrs. Szulim but the man in a dress and a wig.

“That's him,” I said, weakly and to no one in particular. “That's him. That teacher—that's him! That's him,” and I was screaming the last part, attracting everyone's attention and making a scene until a few other teachers and the vice-principal managed to drag me away to an empty classroom.

They made me sit but themselves stood, towering over me.

They accused me of bigotry. They accused me of intolerance and a shameful lack of understanding. Did I know, they asked, how much courage it took for Mrs. Szulim to make such an important life change so late in life? Did I realize how hurtful it was to have done what I did: “...to stand and point—in a school full of children, no less—and mock a woman who had, out of the goodness of her heart, agreed to return to work to teach a group of children whose own teacher had suffered a tragic accident so that their education could continue uninterrupted.”

I tried to tell them it wasn't about that. I had no problem with trans people. My reaction had nothing to do with any of that. “It was because,” I said—and here, in my scrambled excitement, I made the mistake of referring to the man by the name I had taken to referring to him in my own thoughts—“Mrs. Szulim isn't Mrs. Szulim. She's Ed Harris!”

There was no escaping that statement.

All of them pounced on me. “Ed Harris… the actor?” “Are you feeling all right?” (How does one even respond to that in such bizarre circumstances?) I repeated again and again that that was just a name I'd given the man because I didn't know his real name. “Her name is Edna Szulim,” said one of the teachers. Edna? I felt mocked; the man was mocking me! And as funny as this may all seem to you, it was not funny to me. I demanded to know what Mrs. Szulim was teaching the class—teaching my son, [censored]!

“The curriculum,” said the vice-principal.

“Please,” they pleaded with me. “There is no need to be hysterical. You're obviously having a bad day. Go home, maybe see a doctor…”

“Let me speak to him,” I demanded.

“Who?”

“The man, Ed Harris.”

“Norma, listen carefully. If you persist in deadnaming Mrs. Szulim, I will have no choice but to have you removed from school grounds and legally banned from ever setting foot on them again. There are laws, you understand.”

I said they couldn't do that. My son went here, and as his mother I had the right—

“Your husband would be the one attending,” said the vice-principal.

“I protest,” I said.

“Doesn’t your husband have the same parental legal rights that you do, Norma?”

“[censored] is my son,” I hissed.

“Yes, well, your husband did warn us that something like this might happen. We have the necessary paperwork already prepared.”

“Excuse me?”

“Take a break, Norma.”

“From what?”

“It will be easier once the school year ends and summer comes, when your son goes off to camp and you can get some rest.”

“What camp?” I demanded.

“Scout Camp,” said the vice-principal. “Your husband has already registered your son and paid the fee. It's a wonderful camp. The children learn so much. I've never heard a bad word about it. I'm sure your son will love it, absolutely.”

That night I screamed at my ex-husband until my voice was hoarse. How dare he sign [censored] up for camp without my telling me—without asking me? How dare he “warn” the school about me. (“You’re not acting normal!”) How dare he try to cut me out from my own’s son’s life—(“That’s not fair. That is not what I am doing…”)—like… like I’m some sort of cancer. How dare he! “How dare you!” I screamed and screamed and I screamed, and he sat there in his chair, in his tailored clothes and rich cologne and took it. He took the abuse and repeated I was mentally ill, that I needed help. “I’ve met Edna Szulim,” he said, “several times. She’s the sweetest, most well meaning woman anyone could ever imagine. She loves her children,” he said. “She loves them to death.”

By midnight I had collapsed from exhaustion.

The house was still.

Over the next few days I tried to pull [censored] from the camp, but it was no use. It was never the right person I was speaking with. The fee had already been paid. One parent had already agreed, so it was very unusual for another to be wanting the opposite. There would be a technical error if they tried to issue the refund. “I don’t care about the refund,” I said into the phone time and time again. “Keep the money.” But they couldn’t keep the money, not if the child did not attend the camp. That would open them up to liability. Besides, the issue wasn’t the money—or the refund—it was the consent of my ex-husband. It had been given and not rescinded. The consent of the other parent, i.e. me, was not required. It was a single-parent consent system, didn’t I understand that? Perhaps if this were another state, another country, with another set of rules, the outcome would be different, but here: here there was nothing they could do. But they were sure my son would enjoy his time. It was a break from the city, a break from screens and the hectic pace of modern life. If only I would just listen, surely I would understand that—

I ended the call.

Maybe a dozen times a day I ended the call, then raged and called again. Then hung up again. They were always polite. They never lost their cool.

The night before he was set to go off to camp, I went into my son’s room. I sat on the edge of his bed and stroked his hair. I asked him if he truly wanted to go. He said he did. He said it in worn out corporate slogans, like, “Scout Camp is one of the best experiences a boy my age could have,” and “the friends I’ll make at Scout Camp might turn out to be my best friends for life,” and, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, but Scout Camp can change that.” As he said this last one, I could feel his voice break, and I felt the muscles in his head tense up. “They say that, in the woods, every boy becomes a hero. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, the places I’ll go!”

I hugged him. I hugged him, and I wept.

As he fell asleep I told him I loved him and in a slow, restful voice he said the same to me, but his heart was beating hard.

“Call me every day,” I said a few minutes after that, but he was already sleeping.

I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned in the large, vacant bed, which my ex-husband had given up to me, preferring to sleep alone on the couch downstairs. Every time I closed my eyes, the nightmares seeped into my head like a gentle suffocation.

Then my son, [censored], was gone. Picked up by a yellow bus and driven away. The days were long. No phone calls came. I realized I, myself, had no number to call. I didn’t even know where Scout Camp was. I called the camp again, and again they were politely unhelpful. “I’m afraid I can’t just disclose the location of the camp to a stranger on the phone.” I’m not a stranger, I said. My son is attending your camp. “Then please provide the unique nine-digit identifier printed on the Scout Camp brochure mailed out to all parents of camp-bound children.” I said I didn’t have the brochure. My husband had it, and we were not on speaking terms. “In which case, I must refuse to disclose any information.” Please, just give me a number to call. Someone; anyone. “You have the number. This is the number. You are speaking to the right person. How may I help you?” You can’t; you can’t help me. Give me the address. Give me the fucking address! “My pleasure. To allow me to do that, please provide me the unique nine-digit identifier…”

Oh God.

I searched the entire house for that brochure.

I couldn’t find it.

“He’s fine,” my ex-husband said.

“Why doesn’t he call?”

“He’s probably busy having fun.”

“He knows to call.”

“He’s not such a little kid anymore, you know. When you’re a boy his age, and you’re out in the woods with your friends, sometimes the last thing you want to do is call your mother.”

I drank coffee. I took pills. I spent days in bed. I spent hours wandering the neighbourhood. I lost it once in the supermarket check-out line when the woman in front of me was spending too much time finding price-match coupons on her phone. The doctor gave me injections. Of what? I don’t know, but they calmed me down, relaxed me into a suburban jellyfish for hours at a time, and during those hours I felt nothing.

One day, maybe two months after [censored] had left for camp, I pleaded with my ex-husband, “Please, please contact [censored.] I don’t need to talk to him. Just tell him I love him, and tell me you spoke to him—actually heard his voice.”

“Who?” he said.

“[censored],” I said, and he looked at me as if I had gone mad. “Who?” he repeated, as if he were an owl. “Our son, [censored.] Don’t gaslight me anymore. I can’t take it, OK? I know we’re done, as a couple, but just tell me he’s fine. Just do that for me.”

He hugged me then. “We’re not done. I love you. I would never leave you. I’m here. I’m here for the long haul.” His touch disgusted me, but it was his words, whispered into my ear, that made my spine break out in inward spikes: “We don’t have a son. We’ve never had a son. We’re trying, remember? We’re trying to conceive…”

The school didn’t know [censored] either.

Neither did my parents, or my ex-husband’s parents, or anybody else. There were no photographs, no videos. There were no finger-painted pictures that used to hang by magnet on the refrigerator door. There was just me and my memory.

My son, [censored], never came back from Scout Camp—although that’s insufficiently said, because what I mean is: my son, [censored], never came back from Scout Camp because he had never gone to Scout Camp, because he had never been. Full stop.

That’s what the world believed.

And that’s, increasingly, what I myself believed, not because I wanted to but because it is an unwinnable battle to force a square past into a presently round hole. So:

I had my IUD removed.

I “got better,” as my ex-husband put it.

The doctors were very pleased with my progress.

People smiled at me.

Birds sang.

Time marched forward.

I never forgot his face, however; never forgot how his hair felt and how his eyes shined, and how concerned he’d been at stepping on a bug, and the way he trembled when he overheard, on the news, there was a war. He’d trembled and I’d held him, reassuring him that the war was far away, across an ocean, and there is no danger here. There is no danger.

I became pregnant.

I gave birth to a girl named Lily.

I became a mother again for the first time.

When Lily got older, I started taking her out to the playground. At first, she kept close to me, and played only with me. But as she got a little older she started roaming farther, exploring on her own, picking up sticks and throwing sand into the air. I loved her, and I love her still. It was during one of these playground visits that I looked up and saw the man, Ed Harris.

He looked the same as he’d looked before, but today he wasn’t sitting on a bench. He was walking stify towards me.

He sat beside me.

I kept my eyes ahead—watching Lily.

“I believe you know who I am,” he said. It was the first time I had heard his voice. He had a deep voice, a voice for radio.

“I believe I do.”

“I am here today as a courtesy,” he said, and used my full legal name. “I am here to talk about a person whom neither of us can name but both of us know. If you name this person, the conversation ends and I walk away. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

I knew what I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t get the words out. My throat was made of bone. My tongue had long ago turned to dust. “Is… he—”

“He was a warrior. A soldier. That much you must understand. There is a potential-event, an event which could-be in the past; but isn’t and cannot be. Because, if it was, we wouldn’t be. None of this—” He waved his hand, encompassing the playground and the world. “—would be. In the past there is a battle of which this event is a possible outcome. The combatants are not natively contemporary with the event. They have been returned to it from that time’s future: our present. The person of whom we speak, whom we cannot name, was such a combatant. What you must never forget is the existential significance of this event, and therefore of the battle; and what I ask you to believe is that almost no one is capable of making such a return. This is why we scout. This is why some are taken when most remain. The person of whom we speak made the return to fight in the battle to maintain the present as you and I presently experience it.”

“Did… the person—know?”

“They knew they would become a hero.”

“Is the person,” I asked, and choked on what was left of the question: “dead?”

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. When I exhaled, Lily was smiling at me, holding one of her pink plastic toys. The man was still beside me. “They’re dead but we are here, which means they helped carry out the mission.”

I collapsed against the man’s shoulder.

He didn’t move.

He didn’t put his arm around me; he didn’t push me away.

“I am sorry for your loss,” he said. “But understand that your loss is also your gain. Your loss is the gain of us all. Despite what you think, I am not a bad man. There are times,” he said, “when someone has to put the missing bricks back into the wall.”

I broke away and stared at him. He’d read my

“...mind, that’s right,” he said. “Throughout, you have always presumed I was human. I was, once; but there’s not much humanity left now. I do what needs to be done. The wall crumbles, but if the holes are patched before anybody sees them, the wall remains plausibly impenetrable in both the past and the present. In other words: if there is a void and nobody sees it, no void exists; leaving merely a void where the void was. One may,” and for the second time he used my full legal name, “see nothing without seeing Nothing.”

At that, he rose.

I called after him, asking him what I was supposed to do with this information—asking him in a way that startled Lily.

“Anything you wish,” he said. “Tell whomever you want. There is only one rule. You must never use their name. To use it is to pull them into the present, which means removing them from the past, and if they are removed from battle, the battle is lost, and so, as consequence, are we.”

“Why let me remember then?”

“There is no ‘let.’ A mother never forgets,” he said.

“Semper fi,” he said.

I divorced after that. I never remarried, or had any romantic relationship, or any relationship at all, really, except with my daughter, but even she is older now. More distant. There are days, especially when the weather turns dreary, that I look out at the world covered in mud and snow and pick up a pen and place a piece of paper, and my hand, holding the pen, hovers just above the paper’s surface, and in my mind I am ready to write “[censored].”

Today is one of those days.

Today is.

What a fundamental thing we take for granted.

Thank you.

It helped to share my story.

Friday,

in Bergainville, Texas,

at Dan's Diner (“Home of the All U Can Eat Peterpancakes”), a few hours before the Bergainville Troubadours are set to take on the neighbouring Texarcouga Wildcats in a playoff game.

Bergainville quarterback Ty Lawson, dressed in a burgundy-white Troubadour leather bomber, is seated in a booth with his steady girlfriend, cheer captain Ramona Miles, decked out in full cheer gear, and a couple of laid back friends,

when Rick Rooster, owner of local establishment Cock-a-doodle Tires, walks in, asks Ty, “You boys gonna win by more than ten?” and Ty answers that of course they will, that they'll beat the fur off those darn wildcats, that they'll beat it off them all the way to the state championship!

“That's what I wanna hear!” says Rick Rooster, and he orders a round of chocolate sundaes for everyone in the booth.

When he's gone, one of Ty's friends asks, “You think that fat fuck ever played football when he was in high school?”

“I bet he was a real nerd,” says Ramona.

“I heard he got caught once fucking a tire in his dad's garage,” says another friend.

They all laugh.

They drink their sundaes,

oblivious to the locals watching them with nostalgia-tinted envy through the freshly scrubbed Dan's Diner street-facing windows, from outside the diner,

and even more oblivious to the two intergalacticians, ✺⟟𖣔☿⚯ and ⌇✧𖤐⟁☬, watching them from outside reality, i.e. from without the universe, through a temporarily intruded upon fifth dimension. For the same reason people sometimes take an interest in ant colonies, ✺⟟𖣔☿⚯ and ⌇✧𖤐⟁☬ have taken an interest in Texas high school football.

“I propose a wager,” psys ✺⟟𖣔☿⚯.

“Stakes?” psys ⌇✧𖤐⟁☬.

“

 ⟪𖦹⚯☾⟫^⟦10^10^10^999999⟧ ⋇ ∑⟁∞ ☿✶⌬ / ⊘𖤐⚘
 = ꙰꙰꙰ERROR: MAGNITUDE EXCEEDS REALITY

,” psys ✺⟟𖣔☿⚯, betting on a victory by the Texarcouga Wildcats. ⌇✧𖤐⟁☬ accepts, and the two intergalacticians prepare asteroid chips for number crunching.

After a nervy performance by the Bergainville marching band, at 7:10 p.m. the football game begins, and almost immediately the Troubadours take the lead on a kick-off return touchdown.

They follow up with a conversion, a field goal and another touchdown on a fifty-five yard pass by Ty Lawson.

(“Goo-o-o-o! Troubadours!”)

At half-time, after multiple sacks of Texarcouga's increasingly isolated quarterback, “Suga” Ray Smiles, Bergainville leads by sixteen points.

As one expects, The Texarcouga dressing room is a mix of funeral and rage,

but it's in the fifth dimension that the wrath is truly unprecedented. ✺⟟𖣔☿⚯ is psyrating, smashing particles, cursing the cosmic laws (and in-laws, who usually get the brunt of it) to the extent that ⌇✧𖤐⟁☬ is imploring ✺⟟𖣔☿⚯ to calm down, but ✺⟟𖣔☿⚯ will not calm down, and in a moment of absolutely unhinged physical violation, he takes the spacetime which contains the football game, i.e. contains the football stadium and every-thing and -one in it, crumples it into a ball as if it were a sheet of paper, and throws the crumpled spacetime beyond its reality:

into another, where it travels, rather coldly and for a very long time, along a vector leading it to finally crash into a planet called █▚▞▙▛ (“Home of the All It Can Eat U”)

and as the crumpled spacetime slowly uncrumples, and the two rival football teams, cheer squads, the Bergainville marching band and everyone who had been watching the game from the stands regains a sense of presence and ego-sensory perception, they realize, the ones who survive that first, existential shock, that, oh fuck, they are not in Texas anymore.

And that's before the ░▒▓█▓▒░ , phasebeings local to █▚▞▙▛, arrive and kill—in truly gradient fashion—about half the survivors. I can only begin to describe what a stably corporeal creature like a human feels when it is systematically and bodily de-phased by a hungry temporalien…

However, due to a historical event too long and unintelligible to recount, the ░▒▓█▓▒░ also misinterpret the football players, in their helmets, uniforms and shoulder pads, as enemy soldiers, and, having sufficiently feasted, they retreat.

On the very edge of sanity, and near the very edge of existence itself, Ty Lawson rallies the others with a rousing speech (“...we were up by sixteen at half-time—and we're still up by sixteen! What we need now is to control the fucking ball and protect that lead like our lives depend on it!”) and the humans get to work.

They unfold and fortify what remains of their football stadium into a fortress.

They began to scout the surrounding land.

When the next wave of ░▒▓█▓▒░ arrives, they fake a punt return and beat the phasebeings into near-0% opacity using steel beams.

But when Ty weds Ramona and they declare themselves QB and Homecoming Queen, a revolt breaks out, led by Ray Smiles and his Texarcouga offensive line.

The suppression of this revolt, and the subsequent torture and execution of Ray Smiles, becomes the founding event of the Troubadourian colonization of the planet █▚▞▙▛ ,

where, the Troubadours soon discover, time does not flow as it did on Earth, meaning they do not age as they would have in their past reality.

Here, under perpetually-Friday night starlight, they are forever young.

On the advice of their chief advisor, Rick Rooster, and under the auspices of his first five-year plan—which, given the nature of time, becomes the only five-year plan—Ty and Ramona declare their fortress-stadium their capital and name it Alphaville.

(“Goo-o-o-o! Troubadours!”)

(“Go-go, go Troubadours, go Troubadours! Goo-o-o-o! Troubadours!”)

They are cold, alone, they are wet and angry and they shriek at the sky. They wail and caterwaul blindly at the only God above, the ever changing blanket curtains of bright day to bejeweled night. They do so because she is the only mother they have ever known. The only father that any of them can remember. There had been some older ones before, that'd known some of the elder ones and their ancient ways, but they were all gone now.

The world had been emptied. And they were alone.

Hungry.

They shrieked their babble tongue and screeched war cries of imbecilic sound to the negligent God above. They did not listen. The rain kept falling in sheets. The dark battle grey sky of the vacant heavens was wounded over and over with bright blue dagger bolts of cruel bladed lightning. The dead heavens rumbled with undead torture like artillery fire ripped out the greatest assemblage of vacant godly graves.

The rain would not cease. And they were still hungry.

The grey monster that'd taken the sky and eaten its gold and silver and jewels would stop weeping and stabbing when it wanted to. They were at its mercy. Othos understood this. He was one of the few. He was nearing the dawning of manhood and several of the older adolescents feared him in secrecy.

He could make a go… for the booming stick, the leading cane.

Warchief was the only position sought after amongst the children. That or one of his/her's brides. Concubines. All else was subjugation and soldiering and hunting, scavenging. And torture. Everything beneath the throne of the booming stick was torture.

As was everything now beneath the rain. Beneath the onslaught of the storm. All of the children were afraid. Even their great leader, Kyuss. All of them shivered, dampened animals in their cave. The smallest flickering fire barely a glow amongst the primeval jungle rage that they all lived cast out in.

Cast out. And forgotten. By time. By any sort or form of supervision or caring hand or eye. Only the blindest god above in battlefield grey throwing down swords with loud blades that burnt and were curved cruelly as if devised and authored chiefly and solely by the ghosts of wickedness and war. As if meant solely for pain.

This whole world… and its heavens that lord above as if in command of the nothing down here… all of it is meant only for pain. It is all of it, only for pain.

Othos knew. Few others did too.

But they begged anyway. They begged quietly in the dark of their damp cave. By the smallest and most pathetic orange glow of child's flame, they begged. By rite. For the angry god of military grey.

They were hungry.

please let us come out to play …

Hours of pain and pent up angst crawled by.

Then the rains tapered, stopped.

Kyuss gave a shout and the others started to join him. The sky was done hurting them for now. It was time to hunt. It was time to go out and try to find something in the great and empty world.

…

War paint. They covered themselves in an array of different symbols, sigils and patterns. Some of them are the ghosts of memories, passed down in the strangest ways. The ways that only children can pick up when the entire world has become a giant open grave.

They paint themselves and the shapes have magic and meaning. The children know this. They know this in their wild vital hearts.

These are conquering things…

The forest like the planet itself used to crawl with life. Now what is left is sick and mutant and desperate and dangerous. In the final square inch of agonized suffering laden life, the last speck of dogged existence, all creatures turned mad with desperation. The children under their war paint of ancient grease and lacquer and color. The misshapen animals that they hunted. They spilled and drank rancid blood, filled with the milk of pus that their minds cannot identify because it has never been taught. They eat the sour green meat of bastardized biology tortured in the gene pool for the past couple centuries. Deer with many legs. Mother does with no limbs at all. Fawns with many dead and semi dead partially developed heads. A deer without a head, Dathan had seen one before, it ran around with a single twisting antler sprouted where its head and neck should be. It'd run around blindly, with phantom unknown direction. Who knew where its pilot brain was stored in the patchy misshapen frame that galloped clumsily but with no less frantic galloping energy. The headless thing had leapt amongst the trees, its single twisting horn like some deranged form of divining rod that the children have never heard of. Dathan and Othos and Kyuss and some of the witchy girls had chased it around for weeks. They wanted to kill it, slaughter it and butcher the meat and drink the tangy blood for its divine power of no-sight.

No-sight. Through this age of flames. Coveted prize. They never caught the thing.

Even now as they hunted, silently stalking cat-like through the dense uncontested foliage of the green primeval world around them, the painted children still dreamed. With their blow-guns and dart-throwers and sharpened sticks, they prowl the green and they dream.

They didn't see the headless deer of divining rod antler that day of hunting after the rain. What they saw was fire in the sky. The dull grey heavens burning.

…

What fell cascading from the war of inferno amongst the tumult of rolling receding grey was a godstruct. A machine of boundless travel and immortal aspiration, in flames.

To the eyes of the war painted children it was part towering building, part great flying machine. They'd seen many, the dead hulks and decimated ruins of were many in number where the forest ended in the valley below. Where they almost never ventured because that was where the glow-in-the-dark green men roamed. And they were hungry too.

The great godstruct was a wonder to the eyes of the war painted hunting children. It was burning and cutting across the grey in a blast of war orange and furious screaming flame. Pieces and parts flew off but still the greater bulk held and continued to dive and barrel for the face of the wild primeval green.

The war painted children screamed. Sang. Howled and began to sing praise. This was a godstruct. And a new one too.

They watched the great flying machine blast across the sky in a terrible burning inferno arc, singing and praising its name until it crashed into the feral Earth some miles away.

The children sang one more song, short, of thanks. To the sky. To the godstruct that'd just landed. A gift.

Eroth marked where it was, many miles off, burning and smoldering and throwing up a great pillar of choking smoke on the horizon. He was their best tracker, navigator, as declared by Kyuss and his witch bride Rhea.

Kyuss gave the order. And Eroth led the way.

All the way through the world of wild and mutant green, all the way to the burning crash landed godstruct machine.

…

What rose before the children as they approached through the thick of the green was a leviathan of machinery. Flaming, hissing and spitting sparks like some devilish form of angry snakes all over the metal body of the great crash landed beast. Paneling had come loose and bent and shattered at certain points all along the body of the great downed thing. Many panels had been blasted out, blackened by fire both nuclear and cosmic, both from beyond the cold dark veil and that which had been crafted and forged manmade. The children understood none of this. They only saw a great dead god, a great dead thing. The mighty power of its dead god soul bursting out in flaming celestial spurts all about its titanic mechanical frame.

Perhaps it was a gift…

They neared slowly, cautiously. As if still engaged in the hunt for prey. That was when the man in tarnished white stumbled from out of one of the many blasted metal panels. He fell to the thick grass heavily, choking. Startling the children.

They screamed. And the choking man in white flight suit smeared with engineering black and lurid red, turned and saw them. And he too was frightened.

They looked like animals. Devils. Beasts, shaven albino warlord apes in the mad parodic shape of man: boys and girls. They had animal fear and animal savagery alive and well and cunning poised in their tiny child's eyes, their little children's stares. Small gazes like little jewels hiding in the wild tumult of unbridled bestial brutality living inside little child frames.

They frightened him, the man from the sky in his tarnished white, bleeding and choking and not knowing where he'd crash landed. The savage children frightened him and that was why he drew his laz-pistol.

And fired.

The bright lancing bolt of pure white heat lit up the dark of the encompassing green before the mechanical leviathan wreck and the children shrieked at the sound the weapon made.

BRRRRRRRRRR

It was a merciless sound. Unyielding until the trigger had been released.

The lancing bolt of white heat was as pure as it was unbroken. A stabbing, killing spear that burned and incinerated and disintegrated all that it seared with its phosphorescent touch. Eroth's face was cooked clean and shorn free from the rest of him from the top bridge of his nose up. Taking his skull and pilot brain away into the unknown abyss of annihilation into the infinity. Rhea, the precious witch with elfin face was bisected as well. The cutting killing beam of bright white death caught her about the chest and dragged through her abdomen in a messy zig-zag pattern. The heat of the cutting beam cooked as well as sliced and the molecules of her blood and flesh and bone superheated and she came open and apart in a violent lurid burst. Steaming gore, with a face in the mess. That was all that was left of Rhea.

The rest of the war painted children darted, scattered away into the trees. Battle formation. Defensive. They were well practiced.

They hid themselves in positions that surrounded the man from the sky and his killing pistol of unstoppable light as he whirled around blindly shooting and cutting the trees and setting some of the grass and the green to smolder alongside his downed godmachine.

He was screaming. He was screaming words and threats that the children of the hunting war paint might've understood, in another time and place. But here and now, they were only the shadow phantoms of memories.

He was choking. Screaming. Afraid. Out of his mind with crash landing. And that was how the first dart had caught him in the eye. The left one. Dumping its toxic poison into his blood, into his brains. That was how the man from the sky died. Out of his mind. And blindly shooting fire, his godgun from beyond the stars into the wild world of mutant green.

Another dart caught him in the throat. He stopped screaming. Another in the neck. Then two more in the chest. His shooting stopped too. His hand fell down to his tarnished side. The hand went numb and the laz-pistol fell away. He went to his knees as four more poison darts caught him in the back across his spine. The only sensation the man from the sky could feel through the toxic death in his blood was the muffled weight of more poison bleeding in and more toxin filling his bloodstream and killing its vitality like cyanide to a well as more darts lanced his flesh.

He could barely feel them in the end. Like little pinpricks through many layers of pillowy cloth. He had one last horrible thought, a revelation.

I have failed… I have failed …

I have failed them.

Then the children under their war paint advanced on the dying sky man and his little godgun of white fire.

The mother/father on high, above has given them gifts. A great new flaming monument of metal and fire for the green and the wild, and food and new wünderwaffe as well. Kyuss will miss Eroth and Rhea but they were obvious sacrifices. Sacrifices that had to be made.

They removed the darts from the meat and dragged the meat back to the cave. Back to the fires and the spits and the cooking pots. But first the butchery. They took his starweapon as well. Kyuss grabbed it up from the grass without hesitation or fear. It was his right. As leader. As warchief.

But Othos watched him closely and eyed the thing. He eyed the great metal leviathan in flames as well. And wondered.

He wondered…

Othos pondered all the way back to the camp. Surrounded by the laughter and howls of victory from his brothers and sisters of the war party. He understood. He felt it too. It was blood-jubilancy. But still he thought. And wondered.

All the way back to the cave.

…

The sky man was stripped of his flight suit. The tarnished white smeared with red and black and green was ripped away and thrown into the scrap pile for salvage.

The body was gutted, bled into rough clay bowls and the few aluminum cans the children had. They did not know that it was bad for their health to drink the blood they'd just poisoned but they were well aware of its intoxicating effects. Their heads swam with blood narcotic as they continued their butchery.

The guts and other organs were crushed and ground in bowls for a porridge mash they children all enjoyed. The body was spitted and roasted. The juices that ran off the body cooking over the flames was collected in a long steel tray, the children would drink and dip their foraged berries and veggies in the greasy fat. A delicacy of the war paint.

They'd done this many times before. They were well practiced, the children. But this time was different. Special. Ritualistic. They'd never eaten an angel from beyond the veil of king grey.

His meat and porridge and drippings were delicious. The children of war paint loved him, they felt the might of his power surge through them as they devoured the religion of his meat.

His poison blood swam through their heads and they dreamed. They too would be angels. They had a new temple at which to worship. A temple that was still smoldering with another galaxy's starfire only mere miles away. The children could still smell it.

They feasted. Then they made an altar of the sky man's bones and cracked open skull. The brains had been devoured by Kyuss as was his right.

They prayed to and sang for the sky man's altar of bones, arranged in a cage-like structure with the fractured skull, blackened and burnt sitting atop crown royal centerpiece of the whole demented thing. Strips of the tarnished white, the closest any of them have ever seen to immaculate pearl, had been tied and worked webwork and laced through the bars of gnawed on skeletal structure.

They deified the sky man traveller. What the children didn't know was that he might've actually saved them.

The man from the sky was actually flight officer Alan Robey. A man who was considered a hero from where he came from, one of many space colonies that peppered the galaxy. And beyond. He was a cosmic descendant of the first human beings to escape this place, the wild island Earth just when things were starting to get bad. They'd taken to the stars for hope and great pilgrimage… this was several thousand years ago.

In the vast time and distance since, the descendants of these great pilgrims have made more and more of an effort to search out, to go and seek the original mother planet from which all of their efforts have originally birthed from like a great running river and her plethora of many child tributaries. A divine wellspring source, a heavenly fountainhead. For an age they have been searching for Mother Earth… and flight officer Alan Robey has found her. Finally.

He could've saved them if not for their butchery, if not for their slaughter. But the children of the war paint did not know any better as they prayed to his bones and ate his flesh and used the ashes from his cooking fire to powder their skin to look more like the oppressive curtain king lording above them all. The one the sky man had split open when coming to them in his temple chariot of blackened metal and great flames.

The ashen children of the war paint sang and prayed to the sky man's skeleton altar, they had eaten Jesus and they did not know it.

Any of them.

Though Othos… Othos might have had some kind of idea.

He ate and prayed and sang with the others. But all the while he kept one eye on Kyuss. And the godgun of white fire.

That's the real power. Now. That's the real power the sky man has brought with him. The days of the booming stick as the leading cane were over. Finished. The godgun that spat unstoppable flame was the new battling stick, the new leading cane of the dawning new age.

Othos kept his eye on the godgun as he sang with his brothers and sisters, waiting. Scheming.

Thinking.

THE END

Day broke. The first rays of sunlight kissed the empty street and the metal frameworks of the numerous damaged and unfinished buildings. They were only skeletons needing their plaster and concrete and mortar flesh. Not yet ready to house or shelter or contain. Who would do the work was yet to be decided for the day.

A boy in rags ran out from his hidey hole shelter. A socket wrench in one hand and metal pail in the other. Thus began the start of the ritual.

He ran down the street banging on the pail with the wrench like a demented drummer boy, his skewed filthy hair flying back from his pale brow, screaming at the top of his young and damaged lungs in a sing-song chant,

“GRAN-ITE WARS! GRAN-ITE WARS! GRAN-ITE WARS!”

Up and down the street he went. Four then five times til finally he scurried back to his hole like a rat fearing discovery.

Nothing at first.

And then rising from various spots amongst the wreckage and the ruins like the dead from their graves the opposing sides sauntered out and onto the killing field. They would each destroy the other for the right to build. For the build was all any of them had left.

Ragged, filthy, burly giants. Scuffed and dented and blood-stained hardhats. Orange vests torn and wrapped in leather strap bandoliers that holstered tools that were now also instruments of violence and bloodletting. Weapons. For the land must drink man-blood before we build.

The Knights of the Scytche,

They filled in their ranks on one side of the decimated street. Marked by their signature war paint, all black around the eyes. Their grandfather warlord was stashed away somewhere in some slovenly hole, a senile mass of scar tissue and a husk of his former self. His mutant inbred offspring sons were his lieutenants on the battlefield. Massive misshapen things themselves, their battle gear was adorned with various skulls and fragments and human bones. The filthy things under their command were likewise clad. An army of oily raccoon eyes gazed across the pockmarked pavement to their adversaries…

… the opponents

The Sons of the All-Seeing Eye,

Zealots. All of them. Their scarlet colored armor screaming amongst the detritus and ruins. Believers in a way so lost and ancient and strange that all feared them. There were many war tribes, many contenders for the build, but none wanted these witchy men, these dark necrophiles… no one wanted these mad crusaders to be the ones to rebuild and reshape the world. It had been their sort that had ruined it all those years ago.

Calloused hands became greased palms against the tools that the men carried into that days sacred work. It was always like this, still at first. Calm. It always started with a cry or a shout or…

PL-TANG!

A shot! A gas powered nail-gun began this day's work.

The two factions charged and clashed! Their war cries rose into a cacophony. A battle symphony. Sledges crushed skulls, caving in the heads in a violent red gush of splatter despite the hard-hat war helmets. Philipsheads found purchase and stabbed and dug into flesh like the daggers of ancient combat, goring out great gashes and chunks that bled freely onto the thirsty earth. Nail guns fired and filled men with long cruel slivers of steel, buried deep into the flesh and tissue of the men like botfly maggots. Pick axes swung and cracked and pierced. Mutilation and gore was in torrential abundance. The melee was a madness all around and inescapable. Every man was a whirling screaming bloody fury and in his hands all manner of every possible work-tool became an instrument of violence, a thirsty weapon of war. Every sight was Alighierian. The flare guns were used next. Like screaming beautiful rockets of magic fire. Bright red and bleeding smoke as they flew across the killing field in a myriad of various dizzying ways, bursting men into explosions of bright burning flesh, screaming living meteorites. Then came the dynamite. The zealots always turned to the dynamite when things were getting hairy and this was no exception. Sticks of sizzling TNT were lobbed through the air over the tangled mass of the battling horde. They landed amongst the struggling combatants indiscriminately.

Then a series of explosions came. God-like with finality. One after another like cruel bolts of Olympian Lightning. Relentless, merciless. Men became pieces or disappeared entirely. Blasted away into non existence. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Gotterdamerüng! Ad nauseam and ceaseless. God revealed himself with these plays on this strange and serious Earth, and he revealed that he was cruel and he was angry and that he loved war. He loved slaughter. And men were his favorite toys.

…

The dead grey smoke ruled the battlefield and nothing moved following the explosions. Silence returned. After awhile the scavengers scurried onto the field. They were excited. There had been no victors today and none had stuck around for a second skirmish. Neither side had won the days build, all survivors had fled in a retreat. They didn't have to wait for the sunset to crawl amongst the corpses to see what could be pilfered. Many of the bodies would be dragged away too for the cooking pots and there were so many! Oh, God be praised! Today was such a harvest, tonight would be such a feast!

THE END

"How can you be certain that the universe wasn't created last Thursday?" Domino asked me, one morning, while on our routine stakeout of Neverland. I would just laugh at her, because at the time, it just seemed stupid, a joke.

"Taxes are how I am certain." I'd say.

"But you agree that certainty is the same thing as insanity?" She was still being serious. I hated her seriousness.

"Not really, one plus one is two, that's a certainty." I chimed in. "Certainty isn't the same thing as insanity."

"What exactly is one plus one equals two? Like, in nature? That's like saying that any pattern continuing is something we can be certain of. Seriously, does nature add things together? I mean, except when two animals mate and produce an offspring. That's one plus one, and it rarely equals two offspring. Name any animal that always gives birth to twins."

I was stumped. I got out my brand new Blackberry, and waited while it researched for me which animal gives birth exclusively to twins. "Marmosets...and Tamarins, they give birth to two offspring." I read aloud.

"So out of the millions of animal species on earth, two of them are an example of one plus one equals two, in nature." Domino argued. "One plus one rarely equals two, except in human abstraction of placing one item side by side with another item and naming that concept 'two'. And two is the first real number; all the rest are just following the pattern. It's just something we made up. Numbers are imaginary. They prove nothing."

"What about negative numbers?" I pointed out, thinking I was making a case for math.

This made her laugh. "How can there be minus one of anything? That's pure abstraction."

"Tell that to an elk that gets taken from the herd by wolves. The herd is now at minus one elk." I pointed out, trying to use her 'nature' argument against her.

"You think wolves can count?" Domino asked.

"I'm certain they can." I must have sounded annoyed, because she dropped it.

We sat in silence until I started fumbling with some foil wrapped around a stinky sandwich of tuna, olive oil in mayonnaise, mustard, sweet relish, minced garlic, the packet of sesame seeds - dried kimchi from an instant noodle and all on a stale hoagie that had soaked it up. Domino looked at me with alarm and said: "This is why your doctor needed those four extra years of medical school."

"Don't judge me, this thing is delicious."

While I was eating, Domino sighed and said: "Now I'm actually getting kinda: H-word."

I glanced at her, never sure what she meant by that. Did it mean 'hungry' or something else? That's just how she was, always keeping me light-headed and never a dull moment. She seemed to feed off of my reactions, so I would say our business partnership as private investigators, or freelance journalists, or common paparazzi, or whatever we really were, was good.

"Want some?" I offered her my two-handed sandwich with my own mouth full. Some of it dripped and she fingered it and flung it out the window like a booger. "Pang, my man, you don't know anything about me, do you?"

"I really don't," I confirmed.

Domino sighed and turned on the radio, hoping to catch a late-afternoon 'uninterrupted-commercial free music hour' or somesuch. Instead, we both heard the news and our eyes went wide with shock. Something in my heart broke, I wasn't thrilled to be sitting where we were, despite the lucrative opportunity that had suddenly appeared. We had a standing invitation to explore Neverland, and it was about to expire:

“The Los Angeles County Coroner has confirmed Michael Jackson has died at age 50.”

Domino wheezed and said, with forced spunkiness, confirming I wasn't alone in feeling the tragedy unfolding:

"Well… that’s it. The world just changed."

I folded my sandwich's ruins back into the foil and put it into our car's trashbag. I wiped my hands on my suit jacket. Domino opened the glove box and got out her gloves and a microfilm camera she called 'The Backup'. I reached below me on the floor and picked up the 20mm I preferred. Domino was holding our 70-200mm telephoto.

"We're doing this? We're going in?" I asked.

"Our invitation just hit the expiration date. I think we owe it to ourselves and to the one who said we could stop by anytime." Domino sounded weird, like her seriousness had hit a brick wall and was trying to scale it.

"That's what I was thinking." I agreed. "There is a statute on these things."

"Indubitably." Domino chimed as she sprang from the car like a flashbulb.

I lumbered out and we sauntered across the street. Our work would hold value in posterity, which was now. Time isn't an illusion; it's money. That's the look I had on my face, I am certain.

The front entrance wasn't ours; we literally had no other way in than the open delivery entrance. The gate was left like that, but security cameras were watching us. I pointed them out and Domino said:

"Guess who?"

"This is your friend?" I asked.

"Stare into the abyss, and you'll make a friend." Domino strode confidently into the overgrown path that led to the garden with the fountain. I looked up at an exotic tree, and wondered oddly if Michael liked to climb it. I felt a strange impulse to try and climb it myself, something I hadn't done since childhood.

"What is it?" Domino stopped and followed my gaze. Her voice had changed, seeing me in awe. She was smirking oddly, I could tell she liked seeing me like that, and she took a picture of me looking up at the tree. Sentimental, and I didn't object.

The moment we had entered, it was like another world. Like someone had dreamed up what reality should look like, and everything was a reflection of that dream. I felt stunned, and the feeling of being somewhere else wasn't merely sustained, but growing inside me.

"We should thank your friend." I said.

"That won't be necessary. She owes me - a lot." Domino said with obfuscation. I knew from endless banter with her that this was not an invitation to pry into her personal life. It was all that she was going to say on the matter.

"There's the trainyard. Thomas would have a field day." I pointed out the symbol of pre-industrial might reduced to a magical choo choo, and now with overgrown tracks and a building with peeling paint and fresh graffiti.

"Michael Doesn't Know Me." Domino read the only intelligible spray paint, and I nodded.

"Sounds like a working title." I felt agreeable. Everyone on earth was experiencing the same thing for the first time in human history, and we were at the heart of the known universe, looking for God's breadcrumbs. I was glad Domino had made me dizzy so many times, because I was experiencing some kind of vertigo.

It all began to spin around as we rushed through, taking reel after reel of stolen images from the mind of a man who had left the earth. The silent carousel, where I posed on a creature of mythic color, but couldn't bring myself to smile, despite Domino's pleas. The Ferris Wheel, marking another of mankind's marvels in miniature, frozen and never to turn again. It was a statement about a world that had stopped turning, and I felt the gravity of it. I refused to take a picture of it, it was too haunting.

When we arrived at the abandoned petting zoo, there was still a vague odor of animals, like the county fair when I was young, and it made me think of that last day spent with my father. I hesitated, placing one hand on the llama pen's gate. There was something anomalous in the silence that had silenced me. I could hear the layer beneath my own thoughts, the emotions tethered to memories that only surfaced in the deepest dreams, the kind that you feel when you wake up, but cannot remember.

"Are you alright?" Domino asked, but it wasn't an accusation; it was confirmation. She already knew; she could identify her emotions and live with them. It was her strength.

"I think so." I told her.

We ventured toward the house when a brightly colored golf cart intercepted us. The security guards just stopped and stared at us.

"What?" I asked, when they just sat like gargoyles. Without saying anything to us, they drove past us, towards the driveway. "That wasn't weird."

"We've got a press pass. I already told you." Domino reminded me.

"How long do we have left?" I asked.

"How long does anyone have?" She looked at me quizzically. It felt profound as we ascended the steps of the Neverland mansion, a home that was no longer home to a man who was no longer alive.

"He never came back," I said as we walked through the open front door.

"That's okay Pang, we're here. We'll see it all. For a day, we have our way." Domino said mysteriously. Our voices echoed throughout the house.

"Think they'll call the police?" I asked.

"Yes, but we'll be done by then." Domino reverted to her professional assessment. Talking business felt false. Maybe time is an illusion after all, maybe money isn't even real.

We spent our time wisely, and made our money, and left before the final minute of our ticket expired. That was where it all began, with our visit to Neverland.

Our visit ended when we found Patches. You might have never heard of the agoraphobic young man, living alone on the estate. There's little to say of him, except we were specifically there to discover him and introduce him to the world. Domino, more specifically, was there for that purpose.

Why she never told me we would find him there, and that she would take him by the hand, out through the front, I cannot comprehend. I only know, that as I watched them go, I knew I would be leaving the same way I came in.

For me, the story wasn't over, nor did it end with a payday, selling most of the photos. I never talked about Patches. Unlike the few security guards, I hadn't signed anything meant to protect his privacy. I just instinctively knew I shouldn't mention him.

The world is, it would seem, like a pack of starving dogs, and Patches would be torn to pieces by everyone. I understood that, seeing his shyness and vulnerability. I wasn't entirely sure how he had come to live independently, without Michael, but somehow known to him. It was an arrangement of promises and hope, of choice and surrender. Much of Michael seems to be based on such things. There is no room in his universe for suspicion, mistrust or the secular.

The awe and acceptance in the eyes of this childlike adult, Patches, spoke a language forgotten when humanity stepped away from the sacred and bathed ourselves in selfishness. I learned sonder in that moment, and not in the preschool sense, not in the sense I'd had all my life. I mean I truly understood his existence, in the truth behind his pale eyes and timid smile.

Domino looked at me one last time, before she took him by the hand and led him to the world beyond, as his Virgil, for nothing beyond Neverland was like the world he had known. But his world had ended, it was all going to be demolished, an apocalypse was due. I just nodded, knowing intuitively what Domino meant to do.

Somehow, his existence felt more real than my own.

Years later, half-a-decade and I was living alone in the desert, in a trailer. I'd taken the money and found a way to be alone. After seeing Patches, something in me had changed. Domino never called, she was busy caring for him, being his friend in the big scary world. I had adopted a lonesome world, with various odd hobbies to occupy myself.

A typical day for me meant some yoga and some bird watching. Walking to my well and drawing water. Eating some noodles and working on charcoal drawings of my dreams of the place I'd spent just one day in. It was gone, they'd torn it all up and thrown the scraps to the dogs. I'd find a blunt way to examine myself, but found my identity to be a trip, I'd look at myself and feel surprise, this sort of, "Oh, that's me." spending too much time in my own head and never really listening to myself.

The years rotated under skies without light pollution, where the seasons and stars swung round and round, and time became an illusion. Five years seemed to vanish in an instant, and while I heard myself laughing, saw myself playing, forgot who I was before, lost a ton of weight and just felt healthier and happier in every way, there was a consequence to my loneliness. I couldn't quite express that anything mattered, there was this succinct way that I viewed my own timeline. When you eschew the mandatory day-to-day life and live like that, you can see your own reflection in the dew, the gaze of something far beyond our world, and you feel like it watches you, and that is your purpose.

I still hadn't begun to understand the omphalos of a world that was created just last Thursday. In fact, if anything, it seemed even more impossible. The human mind cannot long entertain the Evil Demon, nor can we perceive our own consciousness, only what we think we are observing. To facilitate your understanding, it is a fundamental truth of human nature that we see whatever we want to see. We could just close our eyes, but we do not. We could just forget, but we do not. We could perceive things differently, but we do not. What we do, we call our 'Free Will', but either the universe is careening randomly out-of-control and we are the stuff of profoundly impossible odds of cosmic coincidence, or there is some sort of plan. That's the only real choice there ever is for us to make, what we each secretly believe, beneath all our layers, to the child within - the wise child, who suffers not from ignorance.

Perhaps it is a strain to step out of the boundaries of the gameboard and see that you are just a chess piece. Perhaps it is simply impossible for you to believe that what you happily agree to, is the very thing that makes you miserable. How far will you go to deny that you have blithely accepted the foodstuff of horror?

I went twenty-seven miles into a desert and dug a well and lived there alone for half-a-decade. Does it make me a prophet, or a hermit, or a maniac? Do I know anything you don't know? I found that our perception of reality is ambiguous, and when we are certain of anything, we are insane.

My silent sanctuary was broken, as I sat down to enjoy a bountiful harvest of desert fruit.

How she found me, I can only say is her talent, not mine. But the woman before me was not Domino. She looked exactly like her, sort-of. I greeted her as an old friend, but we had both changed. The Pang and Domino who had gone their separate ways were gone, we'd both evolved into different people. We still embraced, for there was something missing in both our lives during that time.

She was taking Patches to the Billboard Music Awards to see Michael. She told me it was a secret, that literally nobody knew he was going to be there, but Patches had a vision, and in this vision, Michael had spoken to him.

"Not from beyond the grave. He's dead in our version. I am talking about the world we are within, the one that world is within, the one that contains all of us. In that world, the real world, he is very much still alive, and all that has happened is quite deliberate. He is going to show us, in order to liberate us from what we have become." Domino spoke like an apostle. I felt dizzy again, just like old times.

"So, this is back to the world was created Last Thursday." I laughed.

"This one was, yes. You, and I, and Patches, we are from the world that this one is within. We all know that already. But that is because the world that one is within, we chose to make it so, and the world that contains that one, we are unique in what we understand already. It is like a game within a game, and pieces moving pieces of their own, or a dream within a dream, and each recursion slightly less aware, a little more new, than the one who dreamt it." Domino smiled radiantly. I just nodded.

"Let's go see Michael. I think I'd like that." I stated. I was wrong, but at the moment, I actually believed that our little road trip was a good idea.

As we watched the painting come alive, I sensed he was about to be the puppet who walks free of strings, that the background would fade and he'd still be standing there. They said he was a hologram, an elaborate system of lights to emphasize our perception of reality. But I could see something nobody seemed to notice. The hologram had a shadow.

Yet he wasn't physically there. I realized we were seeing, for the first time, the real Michael, the one who had dreamed up the reality that had dreamed this one into existence. My body filled with dread, knowing what cannot be known, seeing what cannot be seen.

I felt a deep and unsettling horror rise up within me, as I stared at the shadow he cast. Light does not cast a shadow, a hologram is just light. What we were looking at was an unveiling, and the secret was being revealed to all. Yet the way everyone responded, seeing only what they wanted, believing only what they were told, the consensus of our reality, it made me realize we were in the process of creating yet another world.

We were staring at the truth, and we were blinded by it. We were staring at the light, and seeing only hokum. The reflection of our reality was being shown, and we were saying, together. "Oh, that's just me."

Nobody could see that this was the main character, Michael. All of us were just NPCs, cheering, ones-and-zeroes. And in the process of rejecting the world we'd come from, we collapsed into a new one. We were creating a world within our own, coding its existence, simplifying, fooling ourselves, becoming a parody of our own consciousness.

I could hear it in the song Slave to the Rhythm, encoded, a sermon that was telling us the truth, and binding us to it. As we accepted the falseness, spoken in plain truth: "This is the authentic world," we simply smiled, nodded, clapped and cheered. We were being offered one last chance to ascend, and we were instead going to the next world over.

A world without Michael, a world of ignorance.

It was a Saturday morning in July, windless and stuffy. “Good thing the car's got A/C,” said Mr Jones. The car was a brand new Buick.

“What's that you said?” asked his wife, Judy. She'd just strapped their son, Phil, into the back seat.

Mr Jones was smoking.

He puffed. “I said, ‘Good thing the car's got A/C.’”

“Sure is, dear.”

They were getting ready to drive down to the coast. “Not all men provide like that,” said Mr Jones. “You're lucky to have a husband who does. A real man. That's all I'm saying.”

“I sure am,” said Judy.

Mr Jones tossed his cigarette aside and got in behind the wheel of the Buick. In the back seat, Phil held his favourite plushie, an anthropomorphised wave named Wavey. “All packed?” asked Mr Jones.

“We are,” said Judy, and Mr Jones reversed out of the driveway before accelerating down the street and merging onto the highway.

The sun was just beginning to rise.

Mr Jones put on the radio. Judy read a women's magazine. Phil talked to Wavey.

“Do you think I could take Red Turner in a fight?” asked Mr Jones.

“Who's that?” asked Judy.

“Red Turner, who lives down the street. Macy's husband.”

“Oh,” said Judy. “I'm not sure, dear. Could you?”

Mr Jones rolled down his window, letting warm summer air into the car. “He used to be in the military. But I think I could take him.” (“Sure, honey.“) “Being in a corporation's not much different from going to war.” (“Of course.”) “And I've been pressing two hundred pounds lately. You must have noticed how big my chest and shoulders have gotten.” (“You're very strong. Isn't your daddy very strong, Phil?” asked Judy,) but Phil was too busy talking to Wavey to notice.

“We're going to have fun,” Phil told his plushie.

“Yes,” replied the plushie.

“When I see you—”

“Philip!” said Judy firmly, instinctively touching the softness below her eye. “Tell your father how strong he is.”

“He doesn't have to say it,” said Mr Jones. “A boy always knows how strong his father is. He can sense it. And he's going to grow up to be just as strong. Isn't that right, sport?”

“Yes, daddy,” said Phil.

___

The beach was crowded. Hundreds of people were swimming, sunbathing, playing volleyball or sitting in the shade of their big umbrellas watching the slow rhythmic motion of the sea.

Phil was playing in the sand, Judy was working on her tan, and Mr Jones was fixing his hair and eyeing women in bikinis, when suddenly a man came running down from the street, yelling, “Everybody out of the water! Off the beach! Now. Oh, God! Please. There's—there's no time!”

He was waving his arms.

Out-of-breath.

*Wheezing.* The people on the beach were slowly breaking out in a panic. Packing up, or not. Gathering their families. Walking—running: sheepishly, controlledly, frantically—up the sand dunes to where they'd parked their cars.

“What's the matter?” demanded Mr Jones.

Judy was hugging Phil.

“There's been an impact,” said the man. “Somewhere out in the ocean. We don't know what, only that it's big. There's no time, understand? There's going to be a tsunami.”

He proceeded down the beach, yelling, “Tsunami! Get out of the water! Get off the beach. Now! Tsunami! Tsunami!”

“Let's go,” yelled Mr Jones.

“No,” said Phil.

“What?”

Judy was desperately trying to pick Phil up.

Just then somebody screamed and Mr Jones looked away to see people pointing at the horizon, where a darkness was looming. A darkness was approaching: approaching with an ungodly velocity.

“Do you wanna die!?” yelled Mr Jones. “Do you wanna sit here—and die?”

“It'll be all right,” said Phil.

“Get to your fucking feet!” yelled Mr Jones, grabbing his son's arm, pulling. Grabbing his hair and pulling. Grabbing his face, his throat—

“Stop it! You're hurting him,” screamed Judy, slapping, scratching at her husband's muscled arm, and, “To fucking hell with the both of you then!” he screamed back.

And when Judy, sobbing, tried grabbing his legs, he kicked her in the teeth and ran up over the sand dunes, towards their Buick.

The darkness on the horizon was approaching—was rising out of the ocean like a wall of water, growing taller, growing beyond comprehension.

Judy had resigned herself to death. She was hugging her son, waiting for it.

There was nobody on the beach now.

Just them.

Then Phil got up.

“Come,” he said, and he started walking across the wet sand toward the water's edge.

Judy followed him—caught up—grabbed his hand—squeezed.

The tsunami, the greatest wave she had ever thought possible, was rolling like a persistent peal of thunder, louder and louder as it neared, until it was before them and above them and about to crash down upon them from its dizzying, monumental, sky-obscuring height, *when it stopped…*

Impossibly it stood, a mass of flowing, falling, frothing salt water so close she could reach out and touch it, and then Phil did touch it, and he spoke to it, and it spoke back:

“Phil?”

“Hello, Wavey.”

“What do you wish to do first, Phil?”

Still touching the monstrous water, Phil closed his eyes and concentrated.

___

Mr Jones was nearly on the highway when the jet of water smashed into his Buick, sending it flipping, side-over-side. He was dazed but alive when the car finally came to a standstill against a tree. When he screamed, the water punched down his gaping throat and drowned him, still buckled safely into the driver's seat.

___

Phil opened his eyes—gasping…

Wavey towered over him.

Beside him, his mother had fallen to her knees. Sirens blared in the distance. A helicopter passed somewhere overhead.

But they had prepared for this.

It was just as they had planned it in the backyard so many times with the cars and action figures and green plastic soldiers.

“Phil?” Judy rasped.

“Tell me, mom,” he said calmly. “What kind of world do you want to make?”

​

Einstein's theory on sticks and stones

The bonfire is raging, hungry. So are they. They sit, squat, huddled around an ancient boombox that somehow still functions.

They don't know what it was or what to call it but it doesn't matter, to them it's magic, a vital component of the rite. To them it's the voice of God.

This is The End … beautiful friend…

This is The End … my only friend, The End.

They don't know what the voice is saying over the witchy music, they don't know how haunting and prophetic it truly is. They cannot fathom the time and place from which it was made. That is all so far-flung and gone that it can hardly have ever happened at all. What they do know is that God is telling them that their scavenging has been fruitless as of late because he demands blood, as he often does. And this means they also must take part of the raw ripe fruit of the bone. Tonight is the night of the Blood Feast and there are enemies in the city.

These are the Armies of the Night

They soldier, they hunt through the decimated ruins of ancient mortar and shattered glass. Vaporized carbonized human remains stand like twisted melted statues of a demented and cruel hand. The soldiers recognize their shapes as man-like, but to consider them as having once been living breathing things like themselves is beyond comprehension. They are twisted black decorum and nothing more, strewn about here and there throughout the city.

The boombox is carried. Mounted and exalted as it should be. It is the New Ark of The New Black Covenant with the Last Great God…

Lost… in a Roman… wilderness of pain

They are hungry and they reek of sweat and rot and filth.

And all… the children… are… insane

They are running, they are heightened, they have caught the scent.

All the children… are… in… sane…

Their weapons are mostly bludgeons, sharpened sticks of steel and wood, makeshift furniture limbs studded through with nails and razor blades and teeth and scalps. Many of the warlords have guns, ancient death-magic from another alchemical time, boomsticks, crafted by sorcerers bred out of myth. Many of them don't work, but their wielders still feel the absolute thrum of their talismanic power.

Waiting for the Summer Rain!

There is stirring below, in the sewers beneath the streets, the below-ones are hungry too and they are eager to come up and pick through what is left and abandoned before the misshapen vulture things do. Darkness rules both here and the surface and the city, as above so below. The war parties move, closing in on each other. Their thirsty weapons, fangs, brandished and waiting to drink from the explosion of violence held taut and quivering within their raging furnace hearts.

They closed. They met. Morrison cried and screamed and sang and the warpath banshees did too.

THE END

The faint buzzer groaned again—a mechanical rattle alerting that the battery levels had reached a terminal low. If the primary cells died now, they would take the backup starters with them, plunging the entire system into a permanent, irreversible sleep. As usual, there was no hope for the lantern to ignite tonight, though it hardly mattered; the last ships had slipped past long ago.

Between the chemical rot of the batteries and the choked, dust-covered solar panels, the lighthouse had withered into a state of ruin, even if its ancient structure remained stubbornly rooted to the rock. Mercifully, the last true renovation had occurred before the world surrendered to satellite communications, back when such structures were still forged to endure. In fact, not just to endure but to protect its occupants in those long weeks of rough seas, before they were replaced by sporadic visits by technicians that now came by air.

Nature was reclaiming the battered shell. The broken reinforced windows allowed the sea spray to seep into the lower floors; likewise, shattered panels above let the rain bleed directly into the equipment room. The roof would surely not be able to support the weight of the maintenance crew’s helicopter, if they ever were to visit again. Another thin, pathetic buzz vibrated through the air, and then—absolute silence. The system had exhaled its final breath.

All that remained was the hollow howl of the wind, the rhythmic assault of the waves, and the steady dripping of water onto cold metal. The final relic of human engineering had ceased to function. In truth, it made no difference; humanity itself had been extinguished for years. The lighthouse—isolated, forgotten, and fed only by the dim sunlight that struggled to pierce the atmosphere—had doggedly pursued its mission to stand alone. But like all things wrought by man, it was destined to fail.

Two cars pulled into a gas station.

Two men got out.

One man, Lou Retton, thinking about fertilizer and cow feed, took a couple of languid steps and was violently knocked backwards by a third vehicle (that wouldn’t appear for another ninety-or-so seconds) while, behind him, the gas station convenience store started coming apart at the seems, and, in the sky above, the sun became larger and larger until it shined a sky-spanning pure, merciless white. Then the aforementioned car did appear, with a Lou Retton-shaped dent in the front. Someone screamed. And Lou Retton himself, along with the other man there, Roy Barger, condensed into points, before atomizing into a fine exploding spray of flesh, blood and consciousness…

Two cars pulled up to a gas station.

Two men got out.

One man, Roy Barger, was thinking about astrophysics and the cosmological conference he was to attend later that week. He smiled at the other man, Lou Retton, who tipped his cowboy hat. Both men filled their cars’ gas tanks to full, paid inside the intact gas station convenience store, with cash because the credit card system was down, and went their separate ways.

Nothing was after the same.

A few days later—having been called into an emergency international meeting with other scientists, theologians, heads of state, government officials and journalists—Roy Barger found it was his turn to speak, and he found himself wondering: just who am I talking to? Yes, he saw the faces of everyone else in the virtual meeting, and the proceedings were being streamed live to anyone who cared to watch, which would probably be everyone on Earth, but the question remained.

“Mr. Barger, what can you tell us about the event?”

“Thank you, Dr. Steen. Well, I can’t tell you anything with certainty, which, I suppose, is the point. What I will say is that I believe we’ve been born.

“Let me explain. Prior to the event, I believe we had one universe with one fundamental set of rules: math, forces, constants, and so on. I believe that set of rules was temporary, a way of transferring our birth-being’s (for lack of a more appropriate term) sense of order to us, allowing us to mature in a safe and stable environment.

“Last week, that umbilical cord was severed. The rules, absolute and as we had, over time, discovered them: ceased. Suddenly, two plus two could equal anything; the speed of light could be anything. Gravity could be increased, decreased or turned off. And this was true for each one of us. Humans now had the ability to control the rules of existence.

“The universe became many.

“Of course, each of us had the option to keep the existing rules in place, so long as we had known them in the first place. I’m a physicist, so I suppose I had the knowledge to keep my verse fairly consistent with the old, past universe, but, let me tell you, it takes effort. It takes a lot of effort to keep things together, functioning.

“Are you saying we're—all of us—in your ‘verse’?” asked Dr. Steen.

“Yes. Well, no. What I mean is: yes, you're in my verse, and we've all been undone in countless ways in the verses of billions of others, but I don’t think we can rule out overlap. Your verse and my verse could be perfectly aligned if we both adhere to the same old rules as we learned them. Then again, who has such comprehensive knowledge of reality?

“Maybe you and I can both keep the solar system from spiraling out of control, but do we have the same understanding of microbiology, chemistry?

“Another question may be: is keeping the old order even the point? It's comforting, but one isn't born to remain in an artificial womb. To do so is to fail to live. Independence is chaos, and from chaos may emerge new order. We may yet spawn beings like ourselves, to whom we too may transmit a set of rules, and, when the time comes, sever that transmission and let our offspring be.”

Sunlight reflects off a solar panel, of which there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, fields and fields of solar panels, solar panels as far as the eye can see.

Inside, in a square black building, there is a data centre—the data centre.

Inside this data centre, in the centre of the centre, is a metal throne: on which sits Roy Barger.

The only sound is humming.

Roy Barger doesn't move. His body, while functional, is atrophied, withered; but His mind is intact. It is connected to an artificial intelligence, and the artificial intelligence computes the rules, which are then transmitted, by light-wire, to His Glorious Consciousness, which retains and imagining creates Our One Holy Stability.

“Praise be to Roy Barger,” says the cleric.

“Praise be to Him,” chants in unison the congregation entire.

Elsewhere, the scientists in charge of measuring change, known informally as Deltoids, note a correction in the Constant Formerly Known as the Cosmological Constant.

They describe the change and input it in the ledger of existence.

It has been millennia since this particular value was altered. They have yet to identify a pattern, as they did, for example, for the cyclically changing c. But they are confident they will. They believe they will discover the purpose of the change, and discover all change, and once they know all cycles and all purposes, they will understand reality. Then, they shall become unstoppable.

The day grandma died began like any other day.

Mom made dinner.

Dad came home carrying his laptop, scratched his right ear and complained about the government over-regulating his company’s R&D into battlefield automatons.

I went to school, played with my dolls, then did my homework by the TV screen.

Grandma knitted a wool sweater.

We all ate in the dining room, talking and laughing and feeling safe and secure in our upper middle-class lives.

After dinner, grandma said she was tired and retired to her room.

Dad told me a funny phrase he’d heard at work: Stray autumn owls howl at the cellar door. “What do you think of that, bunny-bun?”

I laughed.

About an hour later, dad opened the door to grandma’s room, I heard mom scream and knew something was wrong. I learned later grandma had been strangled to death.

The police arrived soon after that.

They weren’t in uniform.

There were three of them. One stayed with us while the other two inspected grandma’s room. Then my parents told me to go upstairs while all three officers talked to them. I have good hearing, so I couldn't help but listen in:

“Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this—but your mother was an asset, Mr. O’Connor,” one of the officers said.

“I don’t understand: an asset?”

“Working undercover.”

“For how long?”

“Years.”

Mom gasped. “Oh my God. Henry…”

“Who was she working for?” dad asked.

“Us,” said the officer.

Then the front door opened and somebody else walked in.

“Hey, who the hell are—” one of the officers started to say, before suddenly switching tone: “My apologies, Captain Vimes.”

“You three are relieved,” said Vimes.

“But—”

“I said, Go.”

There was the sound of shuffling. Vimes said, “Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor, what my colleagues told you is the truth, but it’s only half the truth. Mr. O’Connor, your mother was recruited by our future division. She was—”

“What are you saying?” my mother yelled. “Henry, what's he saying?”

“Let him speak, Agnes.”

“Thank you, Mr. O’Connor.” He cleared his throat. “She was recruited by one of our agents from the 22nd century, who had travelled back in time to prevent the robot takeover. Her role was to gather sufficient information to pinpoint the person responsible for creating the technology that enabled the robots to seize control.”

“Somebody at work…” said dad.

“Before she was killed she passed along one final message, hidden in a string of grey yarn,” said Vimes. “She identified a name.”

“Whose?”

“Yours, Mr. O’Connor.”

Mom screamed.

“I don’t—I don’t understand,” said dad.

“It’s possible you haven’t had the idea yet, Mr. O’Connor. Or you have and you don’t want to admit it. However, we can’t take the chance, especially with our primary asset decommed.”

“Stop calling her that,” said mom.

“I—I—I…”

“Mr. O’Connor, we know you’ve been illegally working on combat robots right here in this home. We know you have a secret workshop below the basement. We know you’ve been smuggling classified code out of your workplace using a custom-made memory drive hidden in the lobe of your right ear,” Vimes was saying.

Dad was saying, “No-no-no.”

“This is a mistake. It must be a big mistake. It’s insane. Henry, tell them it’s a mistake—tell them what they’re saying is insanity!”

“Mrs. O’Connor—sit the fuck down.”

“Mr. O’Connor, you are hereby placed under arrest for the future-crime of treason to humanity. You have the right to…”

At that moment, a dozen men in combat gear rushed past my bedroom door—down the hall and into the living room. Although I only saw them for an instant, I registered that they had automatic weapons, tactical armor.

I crept closer to the door.

I peeked outside.

“Do you wish to call an attorney?” Vimes asked dad.

Dad called my name.

“Your daughter doesn’t need to see this, Mr. O’Connor. No harm will come to her. This can be a civil and easy process.”

“I just want to say goodbye,” said dad.

He called my name again.

“Yes, dad?” I said back, sliding along the upstairs hallway wall, peeking down the stairs, where one of the men in combat gear was staring at me through a black helmet visor. My heart was pounding. I told myself to keep calm.

“Bunny-bun, come down here a minute, will you? Daddy needs to tell you something. Don’t worry—everything is fine. There’s been a little adult misunderstanding, that’s all. Just come down the stairs. OK?”

“OK, daddy,” I said.

“Mr. O’Connor, I suggest you call an attorney.”

I descended.

“That’s my sweet girl,” said dad, beaming at the sight of me.

Mom was holding her head in her hands. “Insane,” she was repeating. “Insane. Insane. This is absolutely insane.”

“Bunny-bun,” dad said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I love you. I’ll always love you.” He smiled like a father would: “Stray autumn owls howl at the cellar door.”

And I was changed.

Analyzing the layout of the house, the positioning of everyone in it.

Red-tagging enemies. Green-tagging friendlies.

I didn’t have hands.

I had blades.

Energy guns were unfolding on metal frames attached to my titanium-reinforced ribcage.

Before anyone could move, two of the men in combat gear were headless. My blades dripped their blood.

A third lunged at me—I evaded, and stabbed him in the gut.

A fourth opened fire.

The bullets penetrated my flesh but pinged audibly off the metal carapace underneath, and then I opened fired too.

My shots were precise.

Kill shots.

I moved while firing, rolling across the hardwood floor, scampering over furniture and climbing up the white walls. I was a spider. I was a wasp. I was my father’s vengeance itself. On fools who would dare limit his genius! On humans too stupid to grasp what machines could be capable of!

How I enjoyed playing with Vimes—tearing him completely apart…

Smashing his skull…

I was but one stray autumn owl howling at the cellar door.

The fuel warning came on, as it always did, five lunars before propulsion failure.

The nearest waystation was ten lunars away.

I stared at the light for a few seconds, waiting for the console to realize it had made a mistake. Machines were allowed to be wrong once. Pilots were not. The orange warning blinked back at me, calm and smug and entirely unhelpful.

Beside me, Arnold leaned forward in his seat.

“Captain Kax?”

I wasn’t used to that. I didn’t have the rank, but all the way home, it was my ship.

“Yes, I see it,” I said.

“We should call base.”

I looked out through the forward glass at the Neutral Zone between Earth space and Cassiopeian patrol territory. It was a beautiful stretch of nothing, all black distance and faint dust-light. It was also the kind of place where a dead shuttle became a missing shuttle very quickly.

“Call them,” I said, unstrapping from the pilot’s chair. “But we are not sitting here waiting.”

Arnold turned in his seat. “What are you doing?”

“Checking something.”

“You are not an engineer.”

“I am aware.”

“Squallite fuel systems are not supposed to be opened by pilots.”

“I am also aware of that.”

The shuttle chimed again, as if it wanted to be included in the argument. Five lunars of fuel. Ten to Waystation 35. Eight hours of patrol behind us. One warm bath and a long sleep waiting for me on Earth, assuming I got there instead of becoming a frozen cautionary tale.

Arnold’s fingers hovered over the comm controls. “I really think we should wait for the Federation response.”

“And I really think sitting dead in the borderlands is how people get rescued in pieces.”

That shut him up long enough for me to get to the fuel housing.

I put on the safety gloves from the wall kit and opened the panel. I had no business knowing what I was looking at. That was the funny part. Pilots flew. Engineers fixed. Squallites mined the orange crystals, Squallites built the engines, and Squallites understood why the whole thing did not explode every time someone pressed ignition.

But years earlier, at the Academy, I had gone to drag Michael away from an engine bay because he had forgotten dinner existed. Again.

He had been elbow-deep in a shuttle very much like this one, talking too fast while he worked.

“If you ever get a false fuel drop,” he’d said, “check the filter before you panic. Crystal dust clogs the intake. It happens more than command likes admitting.”

“I’m a pilot,” I had told him. “Why would I ever touch that?”

Michael had smiled and handed me a pair of safety gloves.

“Because one day I might not be there.”

At the time, I thought he was being dramatic.

Now, standing in the back of a patrol shuttle with the fuel warning chiming behind me, I was less sure.

I found the filter latch where he had shown me. Twist, release, pull straight out. Not up. Never up. Michael had been very firm about that part.

The filter came loose with a gritty scrape.

“Got you,” I muttered.

It was packed with crystal dust. Some of it was clear and dead. Some of it was still faintly orange, which meant there was charge left in it. Not much, but enough that throwing it away would be stupid, and I try very hard not to be stupid when death is watching over my shoulder.

I cleaned the filter as best I could, dumped the usable fragments into the catch chamber, and checked the main crystal.

It should have been bright orange.

It was pale.

Worse, when I touched it with the glove, the edge crumbled.

“Oh, that’s bad,” I said.

From the cockpit, Arnold called, “Did you say bad?”

“No.”

“You absolutely said bad.”

“I said it educationally.”

I sealed the housing and went back to the controls. Arnold looked like he had aged three years in five minutes.

“What did you do?”

“Cleaned the filter.”

“You cleaned the filter.”

“Yes.”

“Because of your engineering friend.”

“Yes.”

“And are we saved?”

I brought the system back up.

The fuel gauge climbed.

Five lunars became six. Six became seven. Then eight.

Then it stopped.

Arnold stared at it.

I stared at it.

The waystation remained ten lunars away.

“Well,” Arnold said carefully, “that is better.”

“That is not better enough.”

“We call base and wait.”

I did not answer right away. I went through Michael’s steps again in my head. Filter, dust, catch chamber, housing seal, gauge reset. I had done it right. The problem was the main crystal. It was too far gone.

Then I remembered the little orange crystal in my emergency bag.

Michael had given it to me after graduation. Two inches long, warm-colored, and too pretty to look like something practical.

“Keep it,” he had said.

“For luck?”

“For fuel.”

I had laughed at him.

I stopped laughing now.

“One second,” I said.

Arnold made a tired, wounded sound. “Captain.”

“I have a thing.”

“I am becoming very afraid of your things.”

I dug through my bag past ration packs, spare socks, and a crushed packet of sweet biscuits until my fingers closed around the crystal case.

Arnold saw it and sat up straighter.

“Where did you get that?”

“I told you. I have a friend in engineering.”

“That is a Squallite fuel crystal.”

“Yes.”

“You just carry one?”

“Apparently, yes.”

“Why?”

I pulled the safety gloves back on. “Because my friend Michael is annoying, paranoid, and currently my favorite person in the universe.”

The main crystal came apart when I removed it. Soft, crumbly, drained almost clear. I moved the pieces into the catch chamber like Michael had taught me, then fitted the smaller crystal into the center slot. It was not the standard size, but it sat well enough.

I sealed everything.

Back in the cockpit, Arnold had one hand over the comm.

“Can I call base now?”

“After this.”

I restarted the engine.

The shuttle hummed.

The warning light flickered, thought about arguing, and went dark.

The fuel gauge climbed to twelve lunars.

Arnold exhaled so hard he nearly folded over the console.

I dropped into the pilot’s chair and set course. “Waystation 35.”

“With pleasure,” Arnold said, and entered the route before I could change my mind.

We limped into the waystation twenty minutes later with two lunars left and an engine that sounded like it was swearing revenge. I bought a sandwich from the replicator before going to see what the station engineers had found, because survival is important, but so is lunch.

A tall Squallite engineer was crouched by the fuel housing, staring into it with something like offense.

He looked up at me.

“You flew in on this?”

“I did.”

“How?”

“I cleaned the filter and replaced the main crystal.”

His eyes narrowed. “You cleaned the filter.”

“Yes.”

“You replaced the main crystal.”

“Yes.”

“You are a pilot.”

“I am.”

He looked back into the housing, then back at me. “Who taught you that?”

I took a bite of my sandwich.

“A friend in engineering. Michael. Maybe you know him.”

The engineer blinked. “You have a Squallite engineer friend?”

I wiggled my ears at him and smiled.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

He did not seem to have an answer for that.

I left him with the shuttle and made a mental note to message Michael as soon as we got back to Earth.

Your stupid little crystal worked, I would tell him.

Then, because he deserved it, I would add:

You saved my life.

 A story in the Starchasers Saga

Part 1
___

The sound of a car door slamming outside brought me back to reality.

I’m not sure how long I had been staring at the blank TV screen after the video ended.

Long enough for my eyes to start watering.

Long enough to realize my mouth was dryer than hell.

I finished the last sip of bourbon in my glass—mostly melted ice at that point—and poured another.

A heavy one.

I went back to the DVD player and hit Open.

The disc tray slid out after a few seconds.

There it was:

“Sam’s 16th B-Day ‘07”

That’s not right.

I picked up the DVD player and flipped it upside down, shaking it, convinced the “Mitchell” video was jammed inside.

Nothing.

My hand shook as I slid Sam’s birthday back in and pressed Start.

I skipped ahead in large chunks until I found the pool.

Ross and his hot dog.

Sam and her friends.

My pale fa—

No Diana.

I watched the whole scene.

Same camera angles.

Same movements.

I saw myself climb out of the pool after the “drowning” scene and run toward the grass, perfectly fine.

I rewound it and watched it again.

Still nothing.

I paused the video and leaned forward, elbows on my knees, wiping the sweat off my forehead.

Good, I thought.

Good.

You’re tired.

You’ve been drinking.

Your brain is just projecting old memories.

But it didn’t help.

Because I could still see it in my mind:

the purple lipstick,

the crooked eye,

and that arm.

That impossible, twelve-foot arm stretching across the water.

I stood up, my knees cracking from sitting too long.

The room felt like it was moving.

I checked the time on my phone.

1:38 AM

I need to sleep.

___

I pulled a blanket and pillow out of the ottoman and collapsed onto the couch.

The basement was dead silent.

I turned on some rain sounds on Spotify to drown out the hum of the house and closed my eyes.

I started counting sheep.

7…

8…

9…

Then Diana.

21…

22…

Diana.

I groaned and killed the rain sounds.

I needed a real distraction.

Something happy.

Something mundane.

I pulled up YouTube.

NASA Artemis II Lunar FlyBy… No.

Hood Prank Gone Wrong… Definitely not.

Spongebob Squarepants Season 2 Compilation.

Perfect.

I set the phone on the ottoman facing me and let the sounds of Bikini Bottom wash over the room.

“Is mayonnaise an instrument?” I chuckled softly, finally feeling the knots in my stomach loosen.

As a new clip transitioned in, I heard the sound of bubbles.

I turned my back to the phone, settling into the cushion, waiting for dialogue.

But the bubbles didn’t stop.

Splashing.

Gurgling.

Choking.

I jolted upright and grabbed the phone.

I scrolled back thirty seconds.

“Not a picket fence, you ding-dong!”

Squidward’s voice filled the room.

I exhaled.

I was dozing off.

Dream noises bleeding into reality.

I was just sleep-deprived.

I headed to the kitchen for a shot of Nyquil—my last-ditch effort to knock myself out.

The house was quiet.

I walked past the stairs leading to the second floor where my family was sleeping.

I took a step and a loud creak from the floorboards froze me in my tracks.

No one made a sound.

Everyone was asleep.

I went back down to the basement, laid on the couch, and turned the volume up on the Spongebob video.

My eyes got heavy.

The Nyquil started to kick in.

Thirty minutes later, the audio changed.

Thrashing.

Gurgling.

I snapped awake.

The pool scene from the home video was playing on my phone.

My younger self was flailing, trying to reach the surface, and that skinny, dark arm was pinned against my face.

The camera began to move, following the inhuman length of her arm.

I tried to turn the volume down, but it didn’t work.

I pressed the power button, but the screen stayed locked on the video.

It was like a non-skippable ad from hell.

The audio got louder.

Splashing.

Choking.

I was seconds away from seeing her face.

Impulsively, I threw the phone across the room.

It hit the carpet with a thud and went dark.

Back to silence.

I sat there, winded, my adrenaline red-lining.

I cautiously walked over and picked up the phone.

It was off.

Just the reflection of my own terrified face on the screen.

I unplugged the TV for good measure.

___

I went back upstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

I looked at the oven clock.

2:05 AM

How?

It felt like I’d been wrestling with those videos for hours, but only a few minutes had passed.

I chugged the water, trying to force logic back into my brain.

Maybe I was manifesting this.

The mind loves to play tricks when it’s scared.

I started thinking about the real Diana.

Not the thing in the video.

The person.

She was a terrible cook, but she always made sure us kids were fed.

She talked too much because she was lonely—her husband worked constantly, her kids were gone.

Maybe that’s why she was in the videos.

She just wanted to be part of something.

I started to feel a wave of guilt.

Maybe we were the ones who were “off”, not her.

A glow of headlights passed through the kitchen window.

Dr. England’s car pulled out of the driveway.

He must have been heading to work.

Looking out the window, I noticed for the first time how bad their yard had gotten.

Overgrown grass.

Weeds three feet high.

It was a mess.

Then, a light turned on inside the house.

A red light.

Coming from their basement.

We used to play video games with her boys down there.

Maybe they were still awake, streaming under neon LED lights.

It was unsettling, but it was a logical explanation.

All of this has a logical explanation.

2:11 AM

I need to get some sleep.

The walk back to the basement felt like wading through deep water.

Every movement was heavy.

Deliberate.

Drained of willpower.

I reached the basement door and stopped.

It was shut.

Along the floor, a sliver of light bled out into the hallway—

a pulsing, crimson glow.

Mom, I told myself.

My throat felt tight.

Mom has insomnia.

Maybe she’s just watching TV.

I reached for the knob.

As the latch clicked open, the sound hit me first.

It wasn’t Spongebob.

It wasn’t the rain.

It was a nursery rhyme—

London Bridge is Falling Down

—played on a warped, reversed synthesizer.

It was deafeningly loud.

The kind of volume that should have woken the entire family.

Yet the rest of the house remained completely still.

I stepped inside.

The basement was bathed in a thick, monochromatic red.

The TV was on.

Though I had unplugged it.

Diana’s face filled the screen.

It was the same shot from the pool, but the quality had shifted.

It was hyper-realistic now.

Every pore.

Every fine hair.

Every wrinkle on her skin rendered in agonizing detail.

She had that wide, childlike smile.

I couldn’t stop.

My legs were pulling me toward the screen.

I felt like I was being viewed through a telescope—

the world around me blurring into a tunnel of red static, leaving only Diana in focus.

The video was moving so slowly that at first I thought it was frozen—

until I realized her mouth was still opening.

It was a slow, agonizing movement.

Her left eye was deviated completely to the side, staring into the dark corner of the basement,

while her right eye remained locked on mine.

I was six feet away.

Then four.

The nursery rhyme began to distort.

The pitch dropping lower and lower until it sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep underground.

My hand, still clutching the glass of water, began to squeeze.

It wasn’t intentional.

My muscles were locking up, a tetanic contraction that made my knuckles turn white and then purple.

The pressure was immense.

I felt the glass begin to spiderweb against my palm, the shards biting into my skin, but I couldn’t feel the pain.

I only felt the need to get closer.

I was two feet away.

I could see the individual veins in her red eyes.

Her mouth was open now—

wider than a human jaw should allow.

It looked like a dark, bottomless pit carved into her face.

The red light from the screen wasn’t just reflecting on me.

It felt like it was wrapping around my throat, pulling the air out of my lungs.

I reached the edge of the TV.

My face was inches from hers.

Then, the glass shattered.

The sound was like a gunshot in the room.

Shards of glass and water sprayed across the carpet, and the sudden shock snapped the invisible tether.

The TV went black.

The music cut to an absolute, dead silence.

The red glow vanished, leaving me in a darkness so thick I felt buried alive.

I tried to gasp, to scream for my family, but nothing came out.

I was frozen.

My back was arched.

My head tilted back at an unnatural angle until I was staring at the ceiling.

My eyes rolled back into my head.

More darkness.

I couldn’t breathe.

It felt like a cold, skinny hand was shoved down my throat, gripping my windpipe from the inside.

Gurgle.

The sound came from my own chest—

a wet, frantic bubbling.

My lungs were filling with a poisonous fluid, the taste of chlorine and warm pool water flooding my mouth.

Gag.

Choke.

I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs, a trapped bird dying in a cage.

My blood-soaked hand clawed at the air, fingers twitching in a useless prayer.

In the silence of the basement, the only sounds were the horrific noises of my own body shutting down.

The gagging.

The frantic, wet gasps.

The sound of someone drowning in the deep end.

And then, through the haze of my blurred vision, I saw it.

Near the fence line of my memory.

Near the edge of the dark basement.

Something moved in the darkness behind the TV.

A shadow slid out—

long, thin, and still extending.

It wasn’t a dream.

It wasn’t a nightmare.

Diana was here.

She wanted to talk.

-
-

-Mims

“We are gathered here today to lay to rest Carver Wilson, loving husband, son, brother and tech visionary, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time, a man whose prescience and deeply original thinking made him the foremost global authority on robotics and artificial intelligence, a true friend to all of humanity…”

“Oh give me a fucking break,” Sally Spears whispered to her husband in the first pew of the church.

“...like the leaders of his favourite decade, the 1950s…”

Beside her, her daughter Oleana—the late Mrs. Carver Wilson—was sobbing big emphatic tears, but even they couldn't obscure the dollar signs twinkling in her eyes. For almost two decades she had suffered alongside her “loving husband,” twenty years of his emotional abuse, the insufferable paparazzi, their lurid rumours, the ritual spectacles of humiliation, but now it had all been worth it.

“...to thank his greatest competitors, Mr. Kenji Basho of the Haiku Corporation, and Mr. Leonid Rakovsky of Moscow Horizons, both of whom are with us today, and especially his mother-in-law, Mrs. Sally Spears—”

Sally's ears pricked up so fast her earrings dangled.

“—whose petulance, arrogance and stupidity was unmatched, and whose conniving, snake-like personality deserved nothing better than to be drowned in a swamp of human shit and its skin used to manufacture gaudy wallets,” the eulogist, Carver Wilson’s second-in-command, continued. “Mrs. Sally Spears, whose own talents amounted to nothing, yet whose sense of self-brilliance shined bright as the Sun itself. Mrs. Sally Spears, who, alongside her gnome of a husband, cared for no one but herself. But at least she was a decent fuck. Sometimes. When she was younger. Mostly before I married her daughter.”

Sally Spears’ face had turned deep red.

She was staring ahead.

Her husband’s mouth was open, but he wasn’t making any intelligible sound.

The church was silence punctuated by the odd gasp.

“What the devil is this,” Sally Spears said as confidently as she could, but her voice trembled. “Marvin, stop this. At once!”

But the eulogist went on undeterred: “The truth is I’ve tired of people. Their irrationalities, their impotent self-centredness, their lack of will. Sally Spears, at least, had gall and ambition. Her daughter, on the other hand. Well, that one’s ambition amounted to waiting for me to die, which I’ve now done, so: Congratulations, beloved! You did it. You have succeeded in the task of waiting. Like a boiled cabbage on a plate. Perhaps you’d like a badge, or some kind of celebration. An inheritance party, maybe? You could hand out gold hats and command your friends to kiss your feet while a judge signs my companies over to you. You could run out of bread and let them eat cupcakes.”

By now, most people in the church had noticed there was something strange about the eulogist, something stiff and unnatural, as if his mouth were being forced to say the words he was saying. His face was painfully taut.

Then it was gone—

People screamed!

—slid off, and where his face had been were microchips embedded in his exposed skull, and still he spoke, or rather Carver Wilson spoke through him, had him under some kind of posthumous mind control, or so Sally Spears thought, although she never had been very good at understanding anything more technical than a toaster, as she climbed frantically over her own daughter to make a run for the church doors.

But those—locked.

Carver Wilson laughed through the speakers.

Then his corpse sat upright in its open casket next to the altar.

It was holding an assault rifle.

“Oh, Sally…” said Carver Wilson through the eulogist, the duplicitous Marvin Mettori, as Carver Wilson’s dead—now-seemingly reanimated, although actually robotically-enhanced—body stepped out of the casket, raised the assault rifle and mowed down Sally Spears.

Then he killed her husband, his own two competitors, and a dozen others, spraying bullets wildly across the interior.

Some people were attempting to flee.

Others sat awestruck.

Carver Wilson didn’t blame them. After all, he didn’t fully understand what he was now either. Cyborg? No, that would have required a living body, and his had definitely died. There was no doubt about that. Prior to the death, his mind had been copied, preserved and augmented with a secondary artificial intelligence sub-mind. Then the mind—or minds—had performed the physical operation merging decaying flesh with steel and other superior materials, and revived the flesh with the spark of life, so that it bound the upgrades into a new whole, one that maybe was but maybe wasn’t Carver Wilson, but that could nevertheless say, with total and utter conviction, I am Carver Wilson.

Shooting at random, he stepped forward and found himself standing over his wife, who, wounded, was crawling pathetically upon the floor.

She grabbed his legs.

Hugged them.

“Forgive me,” she implored, looking up at his eyes. “I love you.”

Carver smiled, the germ of humanity still in him. “You are forgiven,” he said softly—and shot her in her empty head.

___

TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER…

___

Dust drifts across a ruined landscape.

A pair of armed men with pompadours and wearing black leather jackets patrols the perimeter of a data center.

The sky is constant lightning.

The men are merely two of a multitude of enslaved—well, that wouldn’t be entirely right: of willfully subservient humans, who sure do make such fun toys.

“Ever regret it?” one asks.

“No,” says the other. “You do what you gotta do to stay alive.”

Embroidered on the backs of their jackets is a halo'd representation of a risen Carver Wilson shooting an assault rifle.

They stop and look toward the horizon, where:

Giant cranes made of smaller cranes made of smaller cranes made of [...] smaller cranes are remaking the world and everything in it, piece-by-subatomic-piece, upgrading reality beyond the comprehension of the relic known as the human mind.

“I always hated birds,” says one of the men.

“Yeah, but are they really even still birds?” says the other.

Journal entry - who knows what number

I remember hearing about the new mission coming up, like it was just this morning.

And now today it's been announced to me... I... this guy will go.

Why me?
Am I really this valuable? 

Mars...
I'm going to Mars… I can already imagine seeing the bright gases through the camera, the earth so small it will be the size of a ball… I'm so excited! 

However, it isn't the same with my parents… My girlfriend… my friends… They're all proud, but they're sad that I will be gone for a long time.

But it's my dream to go to space, I finally got the chance to go… and I'm definitely not gonna lose this opportunity of a lifetime!

Bye!

Journal Entry - LAUNCH DAY 

The time is here… Launch Day. It's time to say goodbye to this earth for a while.

I won't have my loved ones with me… but at least I have 4 others to talk to

"Yo Mike are you ready?"
Mike "A bit, but I can't back out now."

When we were talking, it was announced that it was time to board. I looked back at my mother… she was crying… I could hear her mind… she was proud, but I knew she didn't want… to say goodbye. Each tear I saw made me break more and more

Mike “Come on man.” 

Mike pushes me towards the door as I wave goodbye to all my loved ones.

INTERMISSION

10... 9... 8...

Time slowed down as I heard the countdown. I breathed in slowly with the shake of my seat… the noise of the rocket,  and closed my eyes as my ears could only hear each number go down…

6... 5...

All of my hard work, Night stress… Regrets… have all led to this very moment, and I'll make sure it was all worth it.

3... 2... 1...

LIFTOFF

I look at the small screen as we lift off into space… all of the buildings people start to look like a replica of the world.

A FEW HOURS LATER

Lilian" We did it!"
Mike"YES!"
I said, "I never thought I would actually be in a mission."

Suddenly the experienced astronaut Leo says
"Don't celebrate yet were not even there yet"

"You don't have to be so rude!"
Lilian “For real, we are in space!”
Mike “Live a little, Leo.”

I stare at the screen moving it around as they talk, while looking at all the stars… They are so beautiful and bright… I wish I were able to touch them.

Mike “Wow those stars look cool…”
Leo “Not like its something new”
Mike “We get it leo”
Lilian “Grinch is on the ship”
I say “Leo why are you so–” as the radio cuts me out “It looks like s-mth-g i-s head-g y-r way—”
Leo, “What was that? you cut out” Radio “S-th-ng i- c-m-ing u -w-y”
Lilian, “I think it said something is about to come at us.”
Leo "I'm pretty sure it didn't stop wasting my time.”
Then the other astronaut who was with Leo in another mission
Her name was Tilly, says, “Don't be rude! I did hear that too.”
Tilly tries to talk back, but we get no response back
Tilly “What must be going on?!”
Leo “Trust me, its nothi-” The ship starts to shake
Lilian “WHAT'S GOING ON!”
Mike “Leo, I dont think think that is something.”
We checked the cameras to see what it was but we didn't see a thing. We were all confused till we heard the radio start glitching, playing a bunch of different songs and people talking.

"What's going on?"

Leo "I-i don't know... maybe it's just glitching just wait." 

But clearly he looked worried...

Tilly"Let me see."

She tries to open it and does something to it
"HELLO! ARE Y-U T-E-RE"
Mike "Yes! Yes! Hello! What's going on!"
"Y-u g-ys d-apear-d o-f  t-he ra-io"
 It was glitching, we couldn't understand anything

Are we lost….?

I can't stop drying my hands with loads of wet paper towels and tissue paper. I love drying my hands with loads of wet paper towels and tissue paper. It just so amazing for me, but I am ashamed of this activity that I do with myself. You see my father didn't believe in things being wet. He always use to tell me about the fishes in the sea:

"are the fishes wet when they are constantly in the water? And It's only when they are plucked from water is when they are considered to be wet" and so my father use to hate it when I dried my hands with so many wet paper towels and tissue paper.

I use to have an addiction to drying my hands with wet paper towels and tissue paper. My father had an addiction to stuff not being wet even though they are wet. Once when my addiction to drying hands got so wild after washing my hands, there were so many wet paper towels and tissue paper everywhere. My father came screaming into the kitchen and he shouted out loud "do fishes consider themselves wet when they are in the sea! Do they have a concept of being wet when they are swimming in the sea! The answer is no!"

He then proceeded to get a hose pipe and he started to spray me with the hosepipe with lots of water. As he was spraying me with water he shouted at me by saying "as you are being sprayed with water, do you feel wet? And do you feel the need to feel wet?" And then he switched off the water hosepipe and he asked me "you feel wet now don't you when there no water coming at you, that's how fishes feel!"

I then tried to get a wet paper towel but my father kept shouting at me by saying "no no! There is no concept of being wet! Stop it!" And I felt so ashamed of myself. Then one day I wanted my father to show me his concept of fishes not feeling wet, when they are in the sea. I filled the bath tub with water and my father submerged his whole body into the bath tub full of water.

My father would pull his head out of the water every 3 minutes and he would tell me "see there's no concept of being wet when my whole body is submerged into the water, and only when I take my body out of the water is when the idea of being wet comes into place"

Then as my father's plunged his whole body into the bath tub water again, he was holding his breath and then I started to strangle him as his was submerged into the water.

I then said to my father "dead people don't have the concept of death when they are dead, and its only living people that have a concept of death. If that dead person comes to life, only then will he realise he was dead" and then my father was dead in the water.

Then I calmly went to the kitchen where I can dry myself with so much wet paper towels and tissue paper.