PREVIOUS: Jump the Gun
FIRST: The Chosen Few

It's worse than hell: it's Diya's subconscious, VIP access courtesy of magic. My recoil of horror saves my life — I fall ass-first onto another face right as Diya slashes at my chest, then scramble to my feet and run. Thank God I'm wearing boots or I'd fall flat on my face. The ground sinks and crystallizes with soft shrieks at every step. It's all I can do to keep my footing and everything's so painfully orange I can barely see where the walls meet the floor. Not that I want to when they're already screaming at me.
Instead I glance over the shoulder to see Diya's swapped out bipedalism for chimerism. Every step I take puts her predatory grimace and bared incisors closer to my throat. Then I take one too many glances and slam into a wall of foam-Natashas that harden into glass and knock me on my ass. Diya springs on top of me. No thoughts. Act or die.
Act! A palm to the chin knocks Diya onto her back. She spits up a Spinal Tap guitar riff and then the tip of her tongue. Need to finish her off quick — axe stomp! — but a tail wraps around my ankle mid-strike and pulls me onto my back. Where the hell did that come from? I sit up and take a breath. Nope, should've done that in reverse, there's a tail around my throat.
What's our safe word again?
Diya rolls onto all fours and snarls. The furry choke chain around my neck tightens — strangles — yanks me under her forepaws. My hands are still at my neck as a pair of feline jaws go for my throat.
Hands that aren't mine wrap around Diya's fangs and hold her jaws open over me, cutting themselves to ribbons to keep me alive. Instead of my life flashing before my eyes, blood splashes into them that curdles into acid-green grain and solidifies into a memory I don't recognize.

The couch is familiar. It used to be Natasha's favorite. Our feet are propped up on the coffee table, with a quarter-full bottle of red wine and coffee mug on their left. The plate is piled in pierogi, slathered in sour cream and pork bits and hot sauce. We look around at a gut-wrenchingly familiar rotunda made from lunar regolith. Something big and blue looms outside, visible through jagged holes blasted into the cavern walls. For a moment I pretend it's the sky — then the Earth continues to rotate and leaves only a view of empty space through the window.
We look back across the room to the TV: a flatscreen plugged into a surge protector that's plugged into itself, stood in the center of a pentagram shaped from ash and blood. On the screen — it's [me? Her?], it's Rukmini five years younger, in jeans and the first bomber jacket [she?? I??] stole, nursing a copper mug in a near-empty dive bar. Behind [her??? me???], a mournful-looking clock on the wall displays 11:30 in the AM.
Diya chants quietly from the couch on our left. She must be scrying [me??? Rukmini???] through the television. There are bags under her still-human eyes, her still-human hair is a jet-black rat's nest, and she's still in her actually-identically-sized waffle-pattern pajamas. Her still-human hands are outstretched and wobbly.
"What the hell are you doing?" a voice says.
We languidly look left to see Tracy Tzu standing in the kitchen, hands on her hips. She's wearing a red floral print sundress and that fancy lipstick she keeps saving for a special occasion. Even did her hair up in a bun. Through the wine haze, we recall she has a lunch date today. Some sports reporter from Three Ports. Wonder if they wear jorts.
"Lookiter," we say. "Can you believe her? It's not even noon and she's drinking."
"What about you?" Tracy asks. "Diya, you promised you'd take the wine home!"
"I did!" Diya says. "I must've missed one and then while I was in the shower she went and opened it!"
"So you just let her keep drinking?" Tracy says.
"I'm sorry! She's been so sad I didn't have the heart to take it away."
"God dammit. Turn off the scrying and pour it out."
"No!" we shout. "Diya, don't even think about it. Keep that screen on or so help me God I'll throw that bottle in your face." We spear a handful of pierogi with a fork and stuff it into our mouth, then wash it down with wine.
Diya looks at Tracy. She sighs and walks towards us.
"Tasha, you gotta stop torturing yourself like this." She sits down next to us and reaches for a pierogi but we slap it away.
"Come on," she says. "You know this isn't good for you. Don't wait for her. You're better than that."
"No'm not," we mumble through a full mouth. "I wanner back."
Tracy pushes the mug away with two fingers. As if in response, the pierogi-wine cocktail in our stomach comes to a chemical climax. There's a moment, right as our cheeks puff up, where Tracy's eyes widen in horrified recognition. Then we soak her in a stew of starches, sauces, and stomach acid.
"God dammit. God dammit," she says. "This was my favorite sundress. God damn it, Natasha. Pull your shit together!"
"Hey!" Diya says. "Don't talk to her like that!"
"Diya, for the love of God, don't enable her!" Tracy says. "She can't keep fucking doing this! It's been six goddamn months, being sad is one thing but she's been a wino for five of them! I can only regenerate her liver so many times before it stops being a liver and starts being a tumor. She won't see a therapist, she won't go to rehab, and she won't stop watching Rukmini if you keep on showing her!
"Hey!" we say. "Don't… don't talk to 'er that way. At least Diya wants me to be happy!"
"Natasha, please!" Tracy says. She wipes her hands on her sundress and takes hold of ours. "I lost Rukmini, I lost Zabu. I don't wanna lose you too. I want you to be happy. I do. But you have to meet me halfway!"
We pull away and sulk. "Don't you have a date to be on?"
"Not anymore," Tracy says. "My sundress is ruined and I need a shower."
"I'm sorry about the dress. Okay?"
Tracy rolls her eyes. "Tasha, this isn't about the dress," she says. "This? I can fix it easy."
She stands up and clears a space around herself. "Kaṭikārattai mīṇṭum cuḻaṟṟuṅkaḷ!"
The vomit on Tracy's being extricates itself from her. Time rewinds itself around us as the puke reconstitutes inside our mouth and works its way down our esophagus. It's deja vu and jamais vu and sleepwalking and sleep paralysis all at once and we can't move and —
"AAAAAAAAA!"
Our scream only dies when we run out of air and the choking fit reboots our mind. We're lying on the couch in Diya's arms. Tracy looms behind her nervously and starts babbling the moment our eyes come into focus.
"Oh crap, oh shit, oh fuck I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry about that!" she says. "I didn't think about where the puke would go —"
Panic subsides into resentment and curdles into anger. "Of course you didn't think," we say. "You were just thinking about your stupid dress and that stupid date! You never think. That's how you got Zabutom killed!"
Tracy's jaw tightens.
"That's not fair," Diya says. "Zabu's death was an accident…"
"It was an accident because she got in a standoff with security," we say. "It was an accident she got stuck in the vault cause she didn't have enough narcos to get back out cause Tracy took too many and killed her!"
Tracy slaps me. The humiliation hurts more than the sting. There's nothing more humbling than a palm to the face.
"Hey!" Diya says.
"Shut up," Tracy says. "Natasha… fuck you. Don't you dare hang her memory around my neck! We've done nothing this whole time but support you! Get your fucking act together or so help me God I'll quit."
"Oh, quit!" we say. "Quit when the going gets tough, yeah, quit when I need you most. Quit because you can't handle the pressure. Ditch us like you ditched Zabu, you cunt!"
We regret our choice of words immediately. Tracy's eyes harden. She stalks towards the kitchen, then pauses on the threshold.
"I hope you get better, Natasha, I really do," she says. "Diya? Spines are in these days. You should get one."
We know instinctively that if she vanishes into the kitchen, we'll never see her again. She'll pack her bags and vanish from our life — unless we call out to her. Apologize and beg for her forgiveness.
She's looking at us. Waiting for us to salvage our friendship. Diya looks between us helplessly.
Our jaw sets. We have nothing to apologize for. The love of our life betrayed us! Tried to kill us. Crippled us. Ruined our dreams. What else is there to do besides mourn?
Tracy should have understood that. But she doesn't. There's no room in our life for people like that.
"Diya? Keep scrying."
We reach for the coffee mug as Tracy walks out of our life.
My consciousness reasserts itself resentfully. It's the worst fever, brain freeze, and hangover I've ever had at the same time. Diya looks even worse than I feel, draped across my chest with bloodshot eyes and fangs lightly caressing my neck. The lack of blood flow to my brain is less severed carotid than catgirl hickey. I don't even feel a bruise.
We blink at each other. My critical thinking skills are at a nadir right now. A sound escapes from Diya's mouth.
"Eh?"
I suplex her off me — face-first — into the wall of foam-Natashas. Their screams are echoed by the walls. She staggers to her feet as I flee past, deeper into the bounce house of death. Each turn I take is random; I can only pray the next one won't be a dead end, but my luck only holds out so long. I crash into the end of a one-way corridor and turn around in time to face Diya again — half-cat, half girl, all anger. I'm not interested in seeing if my deathlessness holds — I need to distract her and find a way out of this nightmare.
"That's what happened to Tracy?" I say. "You drove her off?"
"She left by herself!" Diya says. "She didn't care about Natasha. You didn't care about Natasha. I stuck with her. I helped her get over you!"
"Did you ever look into… I dunno, therapy?" I say.
Diya's claws gain an extra inch. “Don't you dare make fun of her for not healing from wounds you inflicted!” she shrieks. “How many times do you think she burst into tears each day? How many nights she woke up screaming because of what you did?”
I wince. She jabs her chest with a sharpened thumb.
"I was there for her," she says. "I took care of her, I started a family with her, I built a life with her! I'm not gonna let you steal it!"
She's on me before the last word is out of her mouth and I'm already throwing myself to the side. Her momentum carries her through the wall of faces. A half-dozen Zabutoms shriek in fear before shattering before my eyes. I sprint through the breach into a jungle-gym from hell.
An enormous orange dome stretches overhead to freedom. Huge chains of orange faces, large enough to stand on, criss-cross walls of frozen terror. Where the fuck do I go? My eyes flit across the condemned terrain, seeing only a basilica of pain shot through by horrific neon chains. The first shrink I see is going to make a killing — assuming I live long enough to see one.
I look back and see Diya. Her eyes dilate. My hands hook around a pair of jaws that promptly close around my fingers and suck on them. It's like being groped by condoms full of Styrofoam. Whose faces…
Please, God, I think, don't let them be mine.
No such luck. I want to go mad but that would be letting Diya win. My indignation boils over and condenses into a plan: climb to the top and throw Diya to her death. She dies, she wakes up, the spell breaks, I wake up.
Maybe?
I have no better ideas. I fixate a phrase into my phonological loop: none of this is real.
None of this is real — each probing mouth of mine serves as a handhold. None of this is real — Diya sinks her claws into the face-chains and swarms towards me. None of this is real — crawl up the chains of doom to freedom, working my fingers into orange eyes and nostrils of throats.
None of this is real. Sure as hell feels real. A soft crackling fills the air: the sound of face after face petrifying as our touch pollutes Diya's mind.
I'm not even sure where I'm climbing. Up, mainly. I forgot how I was scared of heights. That's okay. None of this is real. As long as I don't look down or think about the extremely nettled catgirl stalking me through her own mind, I'll be fine. Just gotta keep climbing aaaaand I've reached the ceiling.
Do not look down! I look around instead and see no escape, only an all-pervading light bouncing off a million agonized faces that stopped being traumatizing about fifty meters down.
"Oh shut up already," I tell my foam self as it screams silent hell. To my surprise, it shuts its mouth. I hold my breath and look for Diya right as she clamps her claw around my leg. I lock a hand into foam-me's face and hold there, gritting my teeth and reminding myself that the aggressively sharp claws biting into my thigh are not real.
Then Diya's actual teeth bite into my thigh. They sure as hell feel real. I scream and let go, falling awkwardly and toppling backwards onto her. We both go ass-over-end, shouting and yowling and bouncing the long way down. Need purchase — something, anything — my hands tear through ears and lips and throats, catching off dreams of meat that arrest our fall into an even worse spin — and then my spine catches on a chain of faces.
Folding is the last verb you want to connect with spine, which makes chain the last noun I want to connect with mine. They meet so fast it feels like a shotgun wedding to the back. The only benefit of explosively separating all of my vertebrae is that I can't feel my collision with the ground.
Aren't those damn things supposed to be foam? Knowing my luck it saw me coming and turned to glass. As has the ground, which promptly implodes under our weight and sinks me into yet another nightmare.

The sky above us is a black velvet ocean devoid of stars. The Moon below stretches off into a sea of cold bone dirt. The Earth is half-buried in the horizon, level with our perch at the peak of Mons Pico, like a shipwreck on the abyssal plain of heaven.
A radar screen pops up in our eyes. Someone's behind us. We don't turn around.
“Wasn't expecting you to come outside,” Diya says. Her voice carries through a place other than space to reach our inner ear. “Surprised you took the emergency suit.”
“Needed some fresh air,” we say. “Had stuff to think about.”
“Doesn't it make you claustrophobic? I could conjure up an atmospheric shield for you…”
“I wanted to be penned in. Needed to be locked in with my thoughts.”
“That doesn't sound healthy. Tell me about these thoughts, sweetie! Let me help you.” Her head leans against our helmet and her arms wrap around our suit.
"How do you start a revolution if you can't even trust the people besides you?"
Diya looks taken aback. "You don't trust me?"
"No, you've been good to me. You love me. That's the problem. It's not enough."
"What? Why not?"
"Love isn't enough. Motivation isn't enough. People just wanna walk through life asleep to all the problems in the world. Especially when all the cracks can be papered over by money and magic."
"…Right."
We stare at the Earth. "How many centuries do you think it took to pull that off?" we say. “How many spells and memes and volumes of pro-capital propaganda are we buried under? How many fucking brainworms do you think are burrowed in my head right now, telling me there's no hope for revolutionary action?”
“Where are you going with this?”
We stand up. “We can't willpower our way into a better world. I'm thinking a spell, Diya — one that spreads across the entire damn planet and scrubs the id right out of our brains. That burns the ennui out of humanity and fills it with revolutionary impulse overnight. One night, one year, one century where humanity is compelled to rise up as a single unit, to tear down the structures and prejudices of the old world and build a better one. However long it takes to create a society where people actually care about each other. By the time the spell dies we won't even need it. People will just be born better."
“So brainwash people?”
“Why not? You are not immune to propaganda,” I say. Diya's laugh, impromptu, fills the space between us with —
We look her in the eye. "Rukmini tried to kill me."
“I wasn't —” Diya splutters.
"No, listen to me. The moment she had a taste of power she went fucking bonkers and tried to kill you. She tried to kill me! Face it, Diya. The revolution's only going to happen if we can turn the rabble into Rakhmetovs.”
“Ruku's her own special brand of awful. She never cared about your dream. Not like I do, or Ingrid or Zabutom or –”
"She's not special!" We push her away. “We're all broken in the exact same way she is. We all hate each other in some tiny irrational little way that stops us from working for each other's betterment. We've had the power of gods at our fingertips since time fucking immemorial and wired each other to be selfish with it. We prefer the lesser evil because we don't want each other to receive the greater good.”
“How do you hate me?” Diya asks.
There's no response. She takes our face in her hands but we refuse to see ourselves in her eyes. The Earth stares balefully down at us.
"Natasha – I'm in,” Diya says. “I'm all in. One hundred percent. But we can't just snap our fingers and make everyone see the truth. Have you even thought about how we would reach seven billion people, much less keep a single thought in their heads for more than two minutes? We could spend the rest of our lives just trying to formulate that kind of spell. "
“Diya, we're witches on the moon!” we say. “It might take us a thousand lifetimes or we could solve it next week. But we'll solve it. Together.”
We reach down and take her hands into ours. Ten human fingers, coated under a sheen of thaumic energy, bury themselves in our metal fists. We can't feel her through the suit but the warmth is cathartic.
“It's us against the world, Diya. Just how it needs to be.”
I wake up and see orange. Who am I… who am I… I'm Rukmini. I'm trapped inside a monument to Diya's own neuroses. She's trying to make it my tomb. And… I'm paralyzed. Underneath her.
Diya shakes her head slowly, taking stock of the situation like it's a hangover. She spots me underneath her and springs up, then leans in closer.
"Are you paralyzed?" she asks.
"…No."
"You are!" She laughs, hesitantly then rapidly. "You're paralyzed!"
Under pretty much any other circumstances, I'd appreciate being underneath a giddy catgirl. Too bad Diya's my worst enemy. Need to stall her until I can come up with something.
"That's Natasha's plan?" I say. "Brainwash the planet? That's what she's doing with my heart?"
"It's already fucking brainwashed!" Diya says. "Natasha's going to save this shitty rock from itself. She's the only person who cares enough to try."
”And that qualifies her to be the mistress of mankind?”
"Of course it sounds stupid to you," she says. "You don't get how intricate her idea is. You don't see any of the details she can. It's the only thing she's thought about since you left."
I've never shied from the nuclear option. “Well, besides me. I think she might love me more than you?”
Diya squints her eyes and shakes her head like it's the most obvious conclusion in the world. “Of course she does. You think I'm an idiot? I've known since you left her.”
I gawk at her. “Then why did you stay?”
“Because you left her! I built Zabu and Ingrid for her. I founded Wraith Enterprises for her. I conquered hell for her! What else do you have that I don't?”
I'm actually lost for words. “How the fuck should I know?”
“How can I make her stop?” Diya glares at me through watery orange eyes. "How can I be better? Do I need to look like you? I'll do it. I'll wear your damn face if I have to."
"God dammit, Diya." I don't even have a clue. "What do you even see in her? Why kill yourself for her?"
"I can't help it." Her eyes dilate. "I love her."
My last thought before Diya curb-stomps me is how hot dying will be. I'm definitely going to hell.
Her talons fill my vision but something else intrudes on them. A sharp green hand pops into my vision like a sunspot and closes on Diya like it's catching a fly. The hand disappears in between blinks. All that's left of Diya is a vaguely echoing shriek.
Something grabs me by the nape of my neck — but instead of pulling me out of the ground, Diya's labyrinth of screaming faces hurtles away from and through me. Each of their faces passing through mine feels like being killed in a dream a thousand times over until — I'm outside. There's nothing. Less than nothing, it's a void, it's not real. Are my limbs still there? Something's wrong with my eyes!
"Ruku!" A voice drips like caustic honey in my ear. "How do your limbs feel?"
Acid floods my eyes and I scream. Through my screaming I feel a sloshing click in my neck bones that plugs my mouth with bile. I try puking but nothing comes out. Breathing doesn't come easy.
"I feel sick," I rasp. Even my voice is barely there.
"I'm asking about your limbs, dummy!” the voice chides. “Can you feel them?"
"…No."
"Perfect!" Natasha croons. "Wanted to make sure your spine was still detached!"

NEXT: No One Gets Out of Her Alive


The Ontological Vacuum Chamber had been intended to create a pocket of absolute Nothing, in the purest, philosophical sense of the term. It was to be completely devoid of not only mass and energy, but space and time as well. This would not be like the vacuum of the observable universe, filled with diffuse hydrogen and ever frothing with random quantum fluctuations. This would be Nothing; no caveats, no asterisks, just the pure unadulterated absence of being down to the Planck scale. There would be much ado about this Nothing, since it would be, by any conceivable metric, the greatest technological achievement in human history.
The specifics of how the Ontological Vacuum Chamber worked were highly classified, and most of those with clearance didn't properly understand it themselves. In principle though, it worked like a normal vacuum chamber, pumping out its contents until there was nothing left. That required, or at least implied, an impressive capacity to manipulate spacetime itself, possibly derived from NASA's dabbling experiments in the Alcubierre warp drive concept. And yet, even this would pale in comparison to the engineering that went into the wall of the chamber itself.
It was a perfect, flawless sphere; necessary to evenly distribute the pressure of all external reality crushing down on it. It was comprised of some sort of Trans-Planckian substrate, made out of something smaller than the smallest scale in the universe. As a result, it was completely indestructible; anti-matter couldn't annihilate it and even the most supermassive blackhole couldn't spaghettify it. It was Clarketech, pure and simple; indistinguishable from magic no matter how egg-shaped your head was.
While the sphere was over thirty meters in diameter, its walls were said to be less than a single Planck length in thickness; completely two-dimensional for all intents and purposes. While it may have seemed that there would have been better uses for such a miraculous substance, allegedly the sphere needed the constant pressure of all reality trying to snuff it out to hold its shape, and it was otherwise unstable in any other conditions.
Though the sphere itself interacted more or less normally with the fundamental forces of the universe, light couldn't pass through it since there was no spacetime inside for it to pass through. Thus, in theory, the Ontological Vacuum Chamber should have appeared as a total void to any observers.
Eventually, the day came when all the required components were assembled and ready. The precursor of the Trans-Plankian substrate had been evenly applied to the interior of the chamber, and as the spacetime within became thinner and thinner, the precursor became more and more condensed. The instant the true Nothing had been achieved, the precursor material around it was catalyzed to transform into the impossible substance needed to contain it.
But when the researchers peered into the oblivion they had created, they were greeted by a most unexpected sight.
It was a creature; a beast several times the size of a human being. Its mottled skin was a pallid and sickly grey, pot marked here and there by moulting feathers, and at the end of a long, serpentine neck sat a vaguely owl-like head. It had an owl's hooked beak, at least, and its unblinking eyes were too large to move on their own. Its eyes were asymmetrical in their size and alignment, however, and heavy, liver-spotted jowls sagged from its cheeks. Its body was mostly an amorphous lump of wriggling blubber, possessing only a single pair of appendages that most closely resembled naked and emaciated wings.
From the moment it first appeared, the creature spent most of its time curled up against the surface of the sphere, its moist folds of fat creating enough suction to hold it in place regardless of gravity. It would occasionally use its withering appendages to drag itself along to a new spot, but otherwise, it did nothing except mutter unintelligibly to itself in an almost human voice.
It should have been impossible for any sound to pass through the sphere, of course, but yet the creature's incessant muttering went on without end. It was recorded, every nanosecond, subjected to analysis by the greatest human minds and the most powerful AIs, all of them unable to attribute any plausible meaning to what the entity was saying.
Research was limited to passive study of the light and sound that emitted from the Ontological Vacuum Chamber, since nothing and no one could get inside – if there even was an inside to speak of. Despite the Owl's vague - if deformed - resemblance to Earthly life, spectral analysis failed to confirm the presence of any known elements or molecular compounds in its body. In all the time it had been there, it had never shrunk or grown, never required any sustenance or produced any waste, never stopped muttering long enough to inhale even once. It had also never reacted or responded to external stimuli of any kind. If it was sentient, and it was far from clear if it was, it was thought to be solipsistically unaware of the rest of the universe.
The Owl was certainly an anomaly; an impossible and likely extradimensional being of utterly unknown origins and nature, but one that seemingly couldn't interact with the outside world at all and thus posed no threat. With its ontological prison being both inescapable from within and impenetrable from without, there was simply nothing to be done about it. And so, it was left where it was. Everything was recorded, everything was analyzed, and sometimes new experiments were conducted, but otherwise, the Owl was largely forgotten about.
***
“Okay, that time it said ‘Crayola-coloured Kraft Dinner simmers unheeded as the scullery implodes under the matron's arduous tutelage',” security officer Joseph Gromwell claimed, somehow managing to maintain a straight face.
“Shut up. No, it didn't," researcher Luna Valdez laughed, punching him playfully in the arm.
The two of them stood on a concrete walkway in front of the Ontological Vacuum Chamber in its underground bunker, the entire setup being fairly reminiscent of a public aquarium. While the Dreadfort Facility didn't exactly condone its staff treating the low-risk, non-humanoid containment level as a menagerie, on-site recreational opportunities were somewhat limited. As such, the occasional impromptu date among madness-inducing cosmic horrors was tolerated.
The Owl clung to its two-dimensional wall directly in front of them, folds of slimy pale flesh squished up against it, pulsating in time with some unknown internal bodily rhythms. Its large-black eyes were filled with wandering white pinpricks of starlight as it idly gazed outwards, despite everyone being fairly confident that it couldn't see anything.
“Luna, I'm telling you this Owl's coming up with some Lewis Carroll level nonsense,” Joseph insisted, before finally cracking a smile. “What do you think it is then, smarty pants?”
“I think it's a Boltzmann Brain of some kind – a being born from astronomically improbable vacuum fluctuations,” she said contemplatively. “We tried to make Nothing, but there can never truly be Nothing, because it's too unstable. Nothing is a perfect, absolute state and something is any deviation from that state, so Nothing will always deteriorate into something eventually. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all.”
“Okay, but why wouldn't it just collapse into some hydrogen gas or some radiation or something? Why would Nothing turn into…that?” Joseph asked, gesturing towards the enormous owl-like monstrosity before them.
“Well, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. We tried to make an Ontological Vacuum, which necessitated something as equally improbably and complex to balance it out, which apparently meant this thing emerging fully formed from the void like Aphrodite rising from the sea,” Luna replied.
“Yeah… I'm not seeing the resemblance to Aphrodite,” Joseph smirked. “What really messes with my head is the thought that since light or sound can't exist inside the bubble, what we're seeing and hearing is just a hologram on its outer surface, and there's nothing actually inside the bubble at all.”
“It could be that it's emitting its own form of radiation, and that when it crosses the threshold into our reality it's transmuted into EM and acoustic waves," Luna speculated. "But if that's the case, we're lucky it's limiting itself to visible light and some unintelligible muttering, otherwise it could really do some –”
“They wept like anything to see such quantities of sand.”
Luna and Joseph both went dead silent, turning their full, horrified attention to the Owl who, for the first time in its recorded existence, said something they could understand.
“Did you hear that?” Luna whispered softly, stepping slightly further away from the Owl and slightly closer to her armed escort. The Owl itself showed no change in its demeanor, and had returned to muttering nonsense, its head trembling about like a chicken in a factory farm cage.
“I heard it, Luna,” Joseph said, swallowing nervously. Resting one hand on his sidearm, he slowly raised the other to reach for his radio. “Site Control, this is Gromwell. Valdez and I both just heard the Owl speak a single comprehensible sentence. Please confirm that you heard it as well. Over.”
“Gromwell, this is Site Control. Deviation from the entity's established behavioural norms is confirmed,” Site Control replied. “The AI flagged it and it's showing up in the recordings too, so it wasn't just in our heads, thank God. Standard protocols have been automatically activated. Site's on lockdown, and no one gets in or out of the Owl House until command says so, so sit tight.”
“Roger that,” Joseph radioed back.
“It could be nothing,” Luna suggested, though she sounded far from certain. “It's constantly muttering; eventually some of it is going to sound vaguely recognizable.”
“That line was from The Walrus and the Carpenter, Luna,” Joseph told her. “I said it was coming up with Lewis Carroll nonsense, and then it quotes The Walrus and the Carpenter. It can hear us, Luna. It's probably always been able to hear us.”
“Or you saying that is what primed us to interpret it that way,” Luna countered. “It's just pareidolia, like seeing a face on Mars. Let's not assume anything until we have more data.”
It was then that the Owl fell silent, itself an unprecedented occurrence. It raised its long neck back and coiled it slightly so that it had a better view of the outside. It cocked its head towards Luna, and then Joseph, before beginning to speak again.
“In ages yet to be, the Cydonia Mesa shall be carved into a face by Martian settlers, validating the delusions of their forebearers,” the Owl muttered.
“Fucking hell,” Joseph cursed under his breath. “Is that enough data for you, Luna? It can hear us, and it looks like it can see us too.”
“Don't engage it unless we have to or command orders it; that's the protocol,” Luna reminded him. “Even if we can't leave the Owl House, we can probably still get out of its sight.”
“An odd notion,” the Owl muttered. “For an enlightened mind, a single glimpse of an object, from the tiniest particle to the most massive galactic supercluster, is enough to read all its intrinsic nature and infer the rest of its worldline. Its past, its future, and everything else it will ever interact with. The worldlines of these objects can then also be inferred, and so on and so forth, albeit with compounding levels of inaccuracies the further one strays from direct observation. I perpetually extrapolate worldlines from everything I see and compare them with one another, allowing me to minimize the margin of error for those I cannot see directly. I see all the universe, all of spacetime, in ever-growing clarity.”
“So… you're saying your perception of reality is like high-level psychedelic geometry?” Luna asked with a raised eyebrow, her curiosity momentarily getting the better of her.
“Sadly, that may be the closest your kind is capable of experiencing consciousness as I do, yes,” the Owl muttered.
“Well, that's… ironic, considering we thought you experienced nothing at all in there,” Luna remarked. “So, the light, sound, and whatever else that makes contact with the Ontological Vacuum are transmuted into something you can perceive?”
“They become me,” the Owl muttered. “And what you see is that which I return to keep the balance.”
“Luna, I think you were right about keeping to protocol; the more we interact with this thing the more we risk being compromised by it,” Joseph whispered to her as he gently grabbed her by the arm and pulled her aside. “Let's at least get where we can't see it and wait until –”
“You've already been compromised, Gromwell,” a commanding voice said over his radio. “Valdez is to continue her dialogue with the entity and obtain as much information as possible. That's an order, understood?”
Joseph sighed, before reaching for his radio to reply.
“Understood, sir. Over and out,” he said with a shake of his head. Luna smiled at him sympathetically and gave him a consoling pat on the shoulder before turning back to face the Owl.
“Why is it you've never attempted to communicate with us until now if you've been aware of us this whole time?” she asked.
“That question doesn't make sense to me,” the Owl muttered. “I'm speaking to you now because now is when I speak to you.”
“Alright. Let me rephrase the question, then,” Luna suggested. “Up until now you've been muttering constantly, but what you were saying was completely unintelligible to us. Why were you doing that?”
“I wasn't speaking to you,” the Owl muttered. “I spoke to others, a plethora of others in a plethora of tongues, all scattered across space and time and planes, holding up a lantern in daylight in the hopes I might illuminate a being worthy of the title.”
“You're saying that you're looking for a being worthy of being?” Luna asked, her voice lowering slightly at the potentially violent implications. “And if you find us unworthy?”
“Nothing,” the Owl muttered. “Extropy continues and reality marches onwards to the Omega Point as always, and I search elsewhere for a worthy being.”
“Good. Good,” Luna said with a nervous swallow. “In that case, I'd very much like to learn more about you. You mentioned that you speak with other worlds and times and realities. Can you see them all from inside your chamber?”
“It's not my chamber,” the Owl muttered. “Now, what do you see when you look at me?”
Luna froze at the question, her mind rapidly shooting off multiple responses. What did it mean by that? The fact that it had deliberately compared itself to Diogenes suggested to her that it valued virtue and detested convention. It would not have asked what she saw if it did not wish to hear itself described as she saw it.
“I see a very large creature with a passing resemblance to an Owl,” she replied. “Your size and deformed appearance are unsettling to me – monstrous, even – but you've revealed yourself to be a highly intelligent creature, and I'm eager for the opportunity to learn more about and from you.”
The Owl stared silently at her for a moment, and she stared silently back in wretched anxiety, wondering if it expected her to say more.
“You do not see enough, then,” the Owl muttered, and then returned to muttering incoherent gibberish once again.
“That's it?” Joseph asked irritably. “Just some ‘the meaning of life is 42' bullshit? Unbelievable. Apparently, it's too much to ask timeless Lovecraftian abominations not to waste us mortals' precious time.”
"Well, we know more about it than we did a few minutes ago, so I call that progress," Luna said through a forced smile, even though it was obvious to Joseph that she was disappointed. "Let's go find someplace to sit down until they let us out."
“Don't let it get you down, Luna. Maybe it will – oh, shit!” Joseph cursed, immediately drawing his pistol.
Luna spun around and saw that the Owl had shifted in position to raise its long, boney, claw-like appendage into the air, then immediately brought it down to strike the invisible wall of the Ontological Vacuum Chamber. Cascading shockwaves of light moving as slowly as molasses danced through the air, sending Luna and Joseph ducking to the floor to avoid them. The Owl began to drag its wing along the wall of the chamber, creating a ghastly and ungodly screeching as it went.
“What are you doing?” Luna screamed, her hands clutched over her ears.
The Owl didn't respond, but its mutterings had grown louder so that they were still audible over the racket it was making. Joseph opened fire upon the entity, only for his bullets to bounce harmlessly off of the Trans-Planckian barrier.
“That's not helping!” Luna shouted. “Radio Site Control! Tell them there's a breach!”
The Owl began to furiously peck at the interior of its chamber, sending concussive waves of vibrations rattling through the concrete bunker, shaking it like an earthquake. Strange, sparkling sand began falling down from the ceiling like snow, accumulating on the floor at an unnaturally quick pace.
“I'm pretty sure they know!” Joseph shouted back.
“If that thing succeeds in creating even the tiniest imperfection in that sphere - " she screamed. With a reticent growl, Joseph reached for his radio.
“Site Control, this is Gromwell. The Owl is attempting to breach the Ontological Vacuum Chamber. Tell me there's a contingency!” he shouted.
The response came in the form of seven ontological stabilization pillars spaced evenly around the perimeter of the room whirring to life. Crackling with static and glowing with a strange indigo aura, Luna and Joseph could both feel the reinforced weight of reality as they stood in the pillars overlapping fields. This should have, in theory, strengthened the ontological differential between the inside and outside of the chamber, toughening the Trans-Plankian substrate and making it harder for the Owl to affect anything outside of it. Perhaps it did, but the Owl just struck at the chamber even harder, and the force of its perturbances was still felt in full.
The pillars spun even harder, bolts of ethereal lightning flickering off them and striking the chamber, all to no avail. One by one the pillars were pushed passed their limits, shorting out in a small explosion that left only a smouldering metallic husk behind.
When the final pillar had died, the Owl unleashed an earsplitting screech as it struck the wall of the chamber one final time before it cracked. While a basic understanding of osmosis would've led one to believe that reality would have started rushing into the chamber, instead the Nothing inside began leaking out.
Pure void began to seep out through that nigh-infinitesimal hairline fracture, oozing out to the ground below and pooling at its base. The walls of the chamber began to quiver and groan as its compromised structure struggled to maintain integrity, and as the void around it continued to accumulate, it slowly began to sink into it. The Owl itself was placid once more, seemingly content with what it had accomplished.
Luna and Joseph raced to the sealed exit, banging and pleading for it to be opened, but Site Control had already written them off as collateral damage. When Luna turned back to see what was happening, she was just in time to witness the last of the Ontological Vacuum Chamber submerge into the void it had created. Once the last of it was gone, a downwards implosion punched a hole deep into the Earth, if not deep into spacetime itself, creating a banshee-like shrieking as the air rushed in to fill the hole left in its wake.
The draft was strong enough to pull both Luna and Joseph off their feet and to the ground, but thankfully no further than that. When the whirlwind abated, the room they found themselves in was deathly quiet, the strange coating of sand absorbing sound as effectively as freshly fallen snow.
Weeping and trembling, Luna slowly raised her head and saw that not even the emergency lights were working. But even in near-total darkness, the void in the floor where the chamber had been was unmistakable. The sheer absence of reality before her could never be mistaken for something as mundane as darkness. She knew that she should have gotten as far away from it as possible and waited for help to arrive, but she had to know what had become of the Owl.
Slowly, cautiously, she crawled across the debris-strewn floor, cutting her hands and knees on shrapnel and flotsam as she inched forward, until she was at the edge of the void. Making certain her hands were still on solid ground, she timidly peeked her head over the edge of the void and peered down. At first, she saw nothing, but then spotted the starlight-filled orbs that were the Owl's eyes staring back up at her from fathoms below. For the second time, the Owl stopped muttering, and for a moment the two just stared at one another in dreadful silence.
“Gaze until you can finally see, or until the world is no more, lest I look elsewhere for a worthy being,” the Owl muttered.


PREVIOUS: Prey and Obey
FIRST: The Chosen Few

To be honest, I'm glad that Diya jumps right to murder. It's a lot less awkward than talking. Six extra arms unfold from her sides and begin inscribing symbols into the air. My subconscious warns me of the oxygen concentration building in the chamber.
Diya snaps her fingers and six jets of flame lance towards me. I dive out of the way, cartwheeling behind the beer crates as I struggle to stay ahead of her killer hand signals. I'm hoping she'll accidentally hit the crates and throw up a smokescreen I can use, but nothing happens. The Shock Top must be more satisfying than my death could ever be.
This is fine. It gives me time to figure out the best way to kill her.
I try to stifle my bloodlust. My trip down memory lane has left me conflicted about my former clique. I honestly kind of feel bad for them. Natasha's devolved from the anarchist I loved to a corporate stooge. And Diya's gone from a tankie bitch to Natasha's bitch.
I think about Alliott bleeding out in my arms and harden my heart.
"Hang on, Amma," someone says. "We'll handle this."
I peek over the crates to assess the situation. The space elevator is a barren metal circle rocketing up through a thick glass tube. A bunch of crates lie around the arena, shaken from their moorings by Diya's pyrotechnics. The only sign that we're exiting Earth's atmosphere is a faint vibration and phantom queasiness in whatever passes for my stomach.
On the other side of the elevator, Diya starts carving something into the floor. If not for the tail and cat-ears I'd say she was wearing armor — but those orange plates aren't covering her skin, they are her skin. Her bodyguards take up a defensive stance in front of her. They're not the nyandroids Alliott and I fought through on Earth. These are proper cyborg catgirls with furry ears and spiked tails that cautiously lash back and forth. One of them is dressed in red body armor; the other is clad in blue. They both look vaguely like Diya, but have Natasha's eyes.
"Absolutely not," Diya says. "This woman is psychotic. She —"
"Tried to kill you and Mum, we know, Ma," Red says.
"Let us take care of this." Razor-sharp talons pop from Blue's hands. "We're programmed for this. You built us for this."
Thank God, they're not actually her kids. Just her androids. But who's Mum?
Natasha. It's clearly Natasha. God dammit.
I push those thoughts out of my head and focus on the products of her hubris. On cue, my subconscious feeds me an acoustic analysis of the catgirls' construction. Their claws are sharp and their reflexes primed. Diya's clearly invested, both financially and emotionally, in her robo-kitties. There's no way she'll be willing to risk blowing a fiery hole through either. As long as I can stay up in their faces, I'll have all the time in the world to beat the kawaii out of them.
Diya pinches her forehead. "There is no way in hell—"
"Hello!" Red points a metallic claw at me. "My name is Ingrid Montoya. You killed my mother.
Prepare to die."
"Five outta ten reference, sis," Blue says.
In the split-second I take to register the reference, the two of them are in my face. Two pairs of red and blue fists slam into my chest. I stumble back but they close the distance immediately, pounding me into the floor with simultaneous flip-kicks to the head. I taste phantom blood.
"Kits!" Diya shouts. Her hands scrabble through the air.
As I roll onto my back, the second Desert Eagle comes out. I empty one clip into Red's face and the other into Blue's. The bullets plink harmlessly off their faces.
An orange pentagonal aura glimmers around the two catgirls. They pat their faces in confusion, then look towards Diya. One hand is pressed to her forehead and two others scribble thaumic patterns into the air while the rest continue their mystery work on the elevator.
"Thanks, Ma!" the catgirls say in unison. Protective visors slide down over their faces and light up, sneering at me with twin >:3‘s.
"Get back here right now!" Diya yells.
"Sorry, can't hear you!" Blue says.
"Ears are shot!" Red says.
The dynamic dumbasses barrel at me again, raining down a flurry of blows that I can barely see, much less dodge. It feels like being smashed between two trucks at once. As I reel back, Blue spins behind me and sweeps out my legs with her tail. Red jumps up and plants both feet in my chest. I skid across the ground at a hundred kilometers per hour and crack my head on a crate of Shock Top. The spider in my brain warns me that it needs to fix my newly acquired TBI.
"Vibe check!" my tormentors chant.
Goddamnit.
Rookie! Alliott thinks. What's happening in there? You ok?
Ow…
That's a no. Listen, that's a kinetic redirection field around them. You try to grab 'em, it'll zap you off. Bullets will just feed it. You need to take out whoever's generating the magic!
Which reminds me that Diya is assembling a spell that I know nothing about.
"Shoot her!" Diya says. "You have guns! Use them!"
"Where's the fun in that?" Blue says, mid axe-kick. I roll to the side to avoid it and come up to parry Red's flurry of blows. Red leaves her neck open, so I chop at it with enough force to topple a redwood. My hand bounces off the same pentagonal aura. It hurts like a bitch. I clutch the hand instinctively and then take red and blue backhands to the face.
Owww!
"You're not very good at this, are you?" Red says.
"Focus!" Diya says. "Don't talk, act!"
I don't like my chances with the commando catgirls. I'd rather try my luck on the root cause, who is currently glaring daggers at me. I break and sprint towards Diya. The khanda comes down on her head.
"No you don't!"
Red comes from behind to parry my blade with a magically-reinforced forearm. Behind her, Blue pulls Diya away. She's still scratching symbols into the ground.
Alliott, what's she writing?
No clue. Need a better angle.
"You trick bitch," Red snarls. Her face switches to >:[. "Mom's off limits!"
I pull the blade up and stab at her midsection. "Kid, she's not your mom, and this is strictly between us."
She parries again. "Wrong us. Zab!"
Twin machine pistols appear in Blue's hand and she empties them in my direction. I parry a kick from Red and juke. The bullets rattle off her back like raindrops on a tin roof.
"Look," I say, "let's try this again. I'm not going to try to kill your mom, okay? I just want to see Natasha."
So I can kill her.
Red twitches in Blue's direction and my eyes snap to Blue. This is an error. Red's foot snaps up into my chin and she follows up with a spin kick that lifts me off the ground. I berate myself mentally and prepare to crash down to earth. Instead something electric and sharp bounces me up. The world spins up and down as my brain pieces swirling colors together to form Red: lying on her back, metal claws up, batting me up and down like a ball of yarn.
That god damn >:3 is plastered across her faceplate.
I go spread-eagle to halt the spinning and aim both swords for her metal belly. Her tail intercepts mine first.
RUKU!
Alliott's voice rings through my ears. Subconscious diagnostics inform me that Red punctured one of my oil tanks. The pain is excruciating, like a taser wired directly to my liver. My brain bounces around between my ears as Red whips me back and forth. I try to pull myself loose but only manage to shock myself stupid on her force field.
The world goes horizontal for a moment. Then Blue plants both feet squarely in my solar plexus. The blow ejects me from Red's tail and tosses me directly into the Shock Top. The crate doesn't survive our collision.
"Stop messing around and shoot her!" Diya says. "Zabu, watch where you're kicking!"
I let the debris zap me to semi-wakefulness and groggily probe the results of Red's traumatic tail play. It's a perfect cylinder, boring right through me and draining my Castrol blood. My limbs are already starting to feel stiffer, the twin teenage terrors are stalking towards me, and Diya's still putting together her whopper of a spell. I need to patch my wound up and then put the kibosh on her. There are too many things happening at once. I need time to think.
Let's make some.
My nonexistent teeth clamp down on the spider in my skull. It protests vigorously and scrabbles for purchase, but I grab it with my mind's hands and seat it atop my subconscious throne. The spider's legs bite into my head — migraine coming out, clamp it down. Clamp it down and focus!
The spider accepts its position and jams itself in. Mind and matter go nuclear under my hood, boiling the cerebromantic fluid pumped through my brain. A twitchy energy floods my nervous system, forcing the grinding gears and slowly seizing servos in my battered bionic body to spin under its own accord. My mind speeds up. Bottles fall impossibly slowly. The gravity pushing me down lightens and the catgirls become visible as I invade their world of slowed time.
Now how do I handle their shields?
Red's foot strikes out, but I catch it on hopped-up reflex. The pentagons sizzle against the oil coating my hands. Both of us look at it in surprise. My head hurts.
"What the fuck?" Red says.
I yank Red to the ground and scrabble to my feet. My head hurts and my chest cooks painfully. A perversely cold shock runs through me as I realize I'm overheating. I look around desperately for some kind of fluid replacement as Red comes at me again. I duck and let her trip over me. She spins, digs her foot into my gut, and launches me into another crate. New plan: hurt as she kicks me a few more times for good measure and then kicks me into another crate.
That's just excessive.
I pettily throw a pair of stray cans at her, then pause to look at my salvation in hand. I pop two holes into the can and then slam it into the hole in my liver. The can slides smoothly into place and I instantly feel better as coolant and brew flood my system again. Are my insides waterproof? I'm not going to think about that.
I have Red to worry about anyways. On cue, she throws a punch that I catch with accelerated ease. My grip remains steady; the coolant covering my hands crackles. Red immediately drives a foot into my crotch and makes me grateful that MachineGod already stole it. As I roll with the blow, the CPU in my brain cranks even faster, connecting the dots I need before I know I need them. The oil must be acting as a barrier, like dipping a hand into liquid nitrogen. It won't go through the field… but there's nothing wrong with a little blunt trauma.
Red comes at me again, but I backflip away and hastily wipe more of my bionic blood on my boots. She hops to her feet, >:[ shining on her face, and charges. The brewskis I keep shoving through my belly prove enticing targets that make her strikes easy to predict and easier to block. Her tail gets too close to the ground and my left boot slams it home, pinning the tail between the foot and heel. Red yowls and tries to pull away, but I'm planted to the ground. Then I punch her in the face.
The blow hurts me more than Red, but distracts her long enough for me to step off her tail and grab it with my hand. I spin her tail around her, pinning her arms to her sides. When I run out of tail, I spin her around so that her back is facing me. I cap off our impromptu swing by bringing one arm around her chest and pinning the end of her tail between them.
"You're not very good at this, are you?" I say.
Red struggles against me, but I've tied her up with her own tail. "Get off!"
"You got it," I say. One hand shoves her away; the other yanks her tail like a top, spinning her towards her family before she reaches the end of her tether and stops short. I imagine the look on her face as I reel her back in.
Red turns around mid-reel and lunges. I sidestep and let her trip over my foot. As she falls, my hand presses itself to the small of her back. With my other hand, I wrap her tail around her arm and dig my fingers into her claws, locking the tail between our hands.
I wink at Diya. If she weren't half-machine, she'd be half-eggplant at the sight of me dipping her daughter. Red regains a modicum of composure and slashes at my eyes with her free claw. I release her back and catch her wrist a centimeter from my sockets, then slam it back into her own face.
The sound Red's fist makes as it passes through her own protective barrier fills me with frisson. It's like cracking a perfect sixer in cricket or beating a bobby with his own baton. My own hand stops at the barrier, but it's a start.
"Gotta be honest with you," I say as we sashay around the elevator. "You're a rubbish dancer."
Red hisses at me and I bop her in the face. "Don't worry, this dance is easy. Just follow my lead. Serious question — laser pointers. Do those work on you?"
I push her away as she tries to knee me in the stomach, then yank her back in and hit her with a haymaker. "Hey!" I say. "I asked you a question. Blue, what about you? Laser pointers. Yay or nay?"
Blue takes a few half-hearted swings, but she's pulling them for her sister's sake. We dance around them easily.
"If I had to guess… yay," I say. "Diya's anal about those kinda details."
Red's fist bounces off her face again.
"What about catnip. That work on you? Do they make cyber-catnip?"
I shoot a look at Diya. The veins in her forehead throb. She's using six hands to scribble and two to mime strangling me.
"What's the deal with the catgirl thing anything? Mum's fursona's a wolf, innit?"
I'm mouthing off but my options are drying up as fast as my hands. I'll have to drop Red soon. Worse, Diya seems content to finish her work regardless of how I disrespect her little girl. I need to do something drastic.
"Ah, c'mon, talk to me!" I say. "You were hammin' it up less than a minute ago."
The next blow cracks Red's faceplate clean in two, exposing a glare with upsettingly full lashes. I stretch my arms apart as far as they'll go and draw her right up into my personal space. Diya's bots look old enough to drink. This next bit will really make her mad.
"What else are those lips good for?"
Excuse me?!
The barrier over Red's face jolts me back the instant our lips make contact. A split of a split of a split-second later, laser-thin explosions lance through the air, dicing through the orange pentagrams along Red's neck and damn near blasting both our faces off. In the instant Red's shield needs to reform, I let go of her hand and wedge my own into the gap along her neck. The kinetic barrier seals around it and locks my hand into place around her throat. Automatic morphine deals with the pins and needles biting into my wrist.
"Nobody move!" I shout. "Take another step and I'll put a sword through her pretty little neck!"
Blue has to hold Diya back. Red sneers up at me. I feel her terrified excitement buzzing through her bolts.
"I think we got off on the wrong foot," I say. "Diya, why don't you apologize for trying to kill me at first sight, and then I'll apologize for taking Red here hostage?"
"You. Little. You — What. Do. You. Want?" Diya forces each word through her teeth like broken glass.
"Whaddya think?" I say, tapping my chest with a free hand. "About fist-sized, bright red, Natasha ripped it out of my chest —"
“Make a new one!” Diya seethes. “You got a new girlfriend! You got a new life! Why come back here?” She's shaking. "Why ruin ours?"
"I'm not the bad guy here!" I say. Red shifts and I tighten my chokehold. "I did Natasha in once by accident. She's tried thrice on purpose!" My voice hardens. "Almost killed my girlfriend."
"And what does that have to do with me? With my kits?" Diya's voice turns shrill.
"You got in the way!"
The four of us stare forlornly at the phrase hanging in the air. I exhale and hold out my free hand in what I hope is a gesture of neutral will.
"Look," I say, "I don't want to hurt Red. I don't even want to hurt you. I'm sorry for what I did to you. I'm sorry for hurting Natasha and I don't want back in your lives any more than you want me. Give me my heart back and I'll leave you alone forever."
"Sorry?" Diya's face contorts further. "You're sorry? Look girls, she's sorry! You're sorry? You're sorry. You.. are telling me… you're sorry."
I exchange worried glances with Red and Blue as her rant continues. "You break onto my island, threaten my kits, and then you want to apologize? You had your chance to apologize. You could've apologized at any point in the last five years and Natty would've forgiven you. I might've forgiven you."
"I was stupid and scared, okay?" I say. "I didn't know how to apologize. I didn't think she'd forgive me."
"So you left her to rot?" Diya's eyes dilate and her hands tremble. "I kept promising you'd come back. I kept hoping you'd come back. Because I didn't believe anyone could actually be that impulsive and selfish and —"
Her daughters look as uncomfortable as I feel. She might actually start frothing at the mouth she doesn't have.
"You don't get to waltz in here, vandalize my life, and waltz out!" Diya snarls. "Not twice! Ingrid Model — voice override! Shut down!"
The light in Red's eyes dies and her protective shield dissipates. I stumble as she ragdolls in my grip, then look up into a face that will give me nightmares. Diya's skeletal steel hand wraps around my throat as she barks out a string of syllables. The symbols on the ground pulse orange and the world spins around me. Not spinning, crashing. Not crashing, falling. Not falling, spiraling. Fragments of memory wash over me: love, lust, betrayal, transformation. Dimly, I realize that I'm spiraling around inside of someone's gray matter.
"You bitch," someone says in my ear. The fragments are cast aside by the very real visage of Diya choking the life out of me. But this isn't right either. I shouldn't even be able to choke. She's human. I'm human.
"You trick bitch," Diya repeats. Her eyes are twin vertical slits against murky yellow irises, backed by pointy ears and bared incisors. "You don't get to apologize. You don't deserve that. You barely deserve a quick death."
She batters my head against the void. I headbutt her and roll away, gasping for air. Oxygen fills my lungs and my vision is restored. Self-assessment: I'm naked. Comfort fashion comes to mind — combat boots, KMFDM tee, and jeans. On instinct, my fingers tighten the straps of the fingerless gloves materializing on my hands. Some kind of lucid dream?
Correction: nightmare. Every square centimeter of the place is a face: mine, Natasha, Zabutom, Tracy Tzu, Red and Blue. Their mouths are open, their eyes lack pupils, and they wail at me silently. Light comes from everywhere and nowhere, filling the monstrous orange bounce house lesbian obsession nightmare.
"What the fuck is this?" I say.
"Hell," Diya says. "Now shut up and die."

NEXT: Leather Pig


PREVIOUS: Hard Machine
FIRST: The Chosen Few

I feel like an asshole in this tiger fursuit. Alliott is turning purple trying to hold in her laughter. But it's our best shot yet at opening a Way onto Natasha's island fortress.

We've booked a conference room on the third floor of the KMZ to go over the heist. The Inside Man hooks up his laptop to the room's projector and opens up his presentation. Alliott tosses him a laser pointer. He tosses it back.
"No thanks." A telescoping cane swings out from his fist with a flourish. "I brought a pointing stick."
The projector lights up with a birds-eye view of a deeply industrialized mountain. A shaggy steel lotus squats over the center. The Man raps the lotus with the stick. "This… is the Lift. It punches through hell and comes out on the Moon. Wraith Enterprises uses it to shoot stuff into space and bring in what they strip-mine from the asteroid belt. Their taxes fund the logistical divisions of every paranormal spook on the planet. Slide!"
Alliott rolls her eyes but clicks over to the next slide: a zoomed-out birds-eye that shows the infrastructure supporting the Lift. A thin gray ring extends around it, surrounded by a smattering of warehouses, themselves surrounded by another thin gray ring running around the island. A web of industrial paths connect the various points around the island's base and inner ring, but they all congregate into a single road that stretches up to the lotus flower.
"The island around it is called Novagrad. It handles the shipping and handling for the lift — makes sure the spice flows. And it's what we need to raid. Slide!"

Alliott reads off the occult scripts of power on the whiteboard. The air in front of me distorts slightly. I walk forward into the newly generated Way and immediately regret all my life choices as crackling energy poaches my sight like a hamster in a microwave. As the sensation returns to my body, I find myself lying in one corner of the metal closet we've been using for our experiments. The Way is gone in a puff of acrid smoke, along with the fursuit and the fake skin on my fingers.
God damn I hate magic hacking.

The next slide plays video: a tracking shot of a bird flying towards the island. Between frames, the bird's skeleton becomes visible. Its charred remains fall out of the sky, burning blacker with each bounce off an invisible bubble over the island until only ashes plop into the ocean.
"First problem!" the Man says. "An anti-intrusion thaumic net round the island, twice its diameter. Filters out anything with an unapproved thaumic signature… like, say, a portal from another dimension. For all you non-gamers, that means no walking or Ways unless you want to be grilled like peri-peri chicken. Alliott?"
The two switch places and exchange the pointing stick on the way over.
"So here's the thing." Alliott raps the screen. "This is a big fuckin' net. No way in hell it's impermeable. There's all sorts of things they'd have to handle perfectly: refresh rate, access method, routing, signature checking… there's too many variables in this equation for there to NOT be an exploit. And if I've learned anything from the Library, it's that you can pipe a Way into damn near anywhere."

Easier said than done. Alliott and I have been cooped up inside a bubble of accelerated time for almost three hundred hours — or twenty-four in realtime— trying to punch through the anti-intrusion net around the island. By my count, we've tried a dozen different exploits, including but not limited to sacrificing a cyber-wehraboo, boffing on top of the Way itself, and walking through it in a fursuit. It's hot, unpleasant, unsexy work, made all the worse by the stuffiness of time-dilated ventilation. I swear I can feel the coolant boiling right out of my innards. So when the fursuit hack fails and I find myself wanting to blow Alliott up for no other reason than frustration, I realize that I need a change of scenery.
For me, that change of scenery means hotwiring some idiot's bike and doing wheelies in the KMZ parking lot. The Inside Man even found a box of fireworks for me to drive through. It's nice to decompress by blowing shit up with him — or it would be if I could stop thinking about the goddamn hack. I'm even mouthing the bloody activation phrases.
And right as the sparklers go off and I drive through the fireworks, I realize exactly how to break in.
Unlike other, slower exploits, there's no way to test this gently. The Inside Man rattles off a list of consequences with names like ‘unspace' and ‘deconceptualization' that make me think he's making half this shit up until Alliott backs him up. We're not just climbing into another universe, we're throwing ourselves into another one at mach speed. If we miss?
We better not miss. So I'd better be really fucking confident in my math. Or prone to suicidal ideation. One out of two ain't bad.
To perform this stunt, you will need: one self, one incantation to generate a motion-sensitive Way, and one gravispatial locking flechette for each member of your party. For example, if your party consists of one cyborg witch, one Black Queen, and one motorbike, you will need three flechettes.
Step 0: Find a nice, open area to work from. Like the parking lot of your local anarcho-syndicalist fashion boutique. Make sure you're packed.
Step 1: Position yourselves in front of the Way. Stab each member of your party with a gravispatial locking flechette.
Step 2: Recite the Way's activation phrase. Immediately activate the flechettes. If performed correctly, you will be flung through a hole in space-time at the speed of the Earth's rotation.
Step 3: Pray that your aim is true.
Step 4: If you still exist by then, deactivate the flechettes the instant you feel the moment of passage. You will be decelerated to net zero velocity with respect to the planet you have just landed on. If you're a cyborg witch, it'll make your guts feel like an elephant stomped on them. If you're a Black Queen who was smart enough to throw up a kinetic redirector around herself, it won't even sting.
Step 5: Shut off your ears — or refer to the aforementioned kinetic redirector — to avoid having them blown out by a sonic boom. Turn them back on right as the island becomes bathed in emergency lighting and wailing alarms.
Congratulations! You have successfully broken into a sovereign nation on an alternate Earth. Try doing it quietly next time.

The slide changes and a sleek gray servitor comes into view. Pink lines run the length of its body, from the tip of its cyberneko ears to each clawed digit to the tip of its dozen-jointed tail. The next slide zooms in on its face — burnished platinum sculpted into a permanently smug visage, eyes burning acid green.
"Problem two!" the Man declares, taking back his stick. "Far as I can tell, Novagrad's run entirely by androids. Not as weird as actual man-cat hybrids, but it's bladdy close. My guess is Natasha and her nyandroids" — Alliott and I boo — "don't wanna risk anyone on the island being bribed." He sneers at us. "Probably all tied to some kind of central computer. Best option, once you've snuck onto the island, mind you, is to keep sneaking past the vrotten things. Slide!"

My chest burns with the sudden ignition of an engine almost four hundred thousand kilometers overhead. I'm almost home. I don't have the patience to skulk back to my heart. I'd much rather do things with a bang.
I close one hand around my thumb and yank. My thumb slides back halfway along the arm to the elbow and my fingers splay out along the edge into curved panels. Fins along my arm pop open as the underside of my arm pushes itself downwards into a stock. A fat silver barrel protrudes from what used to be my palm.
The motorbike pounces forward at the twist of the throttle. The road climbs upwards from the receiving docks to a checkpoint manned by a pair of nyandroids — one of many against the steel wall that runs the island's circumference. Bullets rain down on me. A single pump from my arm sends an RPG spiraling into the checkpoint, reducing the guards to scrap metal. I flick my wrist back and my entire arm spins at the elbow, feeding another grenade into the chamber. Another pump of the arm turns the checkpoint into a smoldering crater.
The next gate is a thousand meters and ten seconds away. I take pot shots at the worker bots as I weave through administrative buildings and warehouses, then pick up on the pearly whites of a sniper taking aim from the battlements. Overhead, the air snarls. A bolt of lightning splits the sky in two and blows the sharpshooter to bits.

"Sneaking around is gonna be a pain in the arse. There's bound to be some magic motion sensors or something, so you'll want someone to make a ruckus. Cause a distraction. Raise hell," the Man says.
"Which is where I come in." Alliott hefts a large apparatus onto the table. The most obvious thing about it is a pair of twin turbines with a large antenna poking up from between them. A long, thick cable extends from the turbines to a sleek plastic sniper rifle in her hands. It has a fat stock, thin rectangular barrel, and an anachronistic bolt action.
"This," she says with glee, "is a high-altitude positron rifle. The Poles built it to kill Russian angels. It's a jetpack that uses lightning and a bit of magic to smash atoms together and create a focused gamma-ray laser. Perfect for raising hell."

I snatch a glance behind me at Alliott hovering a kilometer in the air. In one smooth motion, she yanks the bolt action back and retrieves a long glass fuse from somewhere on her back. A scorched black cylinder falls from the bolt action into space. Alliott slides the fresh round into the newly-empty chamber, rams the bolt action into place, and pulls the trigger.
The sky turns gray. Lightning crashes down on her. A burnt fuse hangs in the air.
The antenna on Alliott's back absorbs the full impact. A split-second later, a flat beam of light streaks across the sky and reduces a second sniper to giblets. Two more bolts of harnessed lightning disassemble the mortars aimed at me into burning battlement shrapnel. I fire two grenades and obliterate the checkpoint just as Alliott's first fuse hits the ground. My artificial eyes barely waver as I careen through the smoke at a hundred kilometers per hour.
If I still drew breath, the Lift would have taken them away. Words can hardly do it justice this close up: eight glass towers ringed around an enormous black cable, as thick as a hundred redwood trees, ascending into the heavens. Green electricity crackles along the cable's length, the only sign of the deeply occult magicks and esoteric paratechnology supporting its weight as it vanishes into swirling scarlet clouds.
Just down the hill is the lift's control building – a squat concrete block, marred by a single steel hatch guarded by two of Natasha's kawaii death machines. Their eyes flare like emerald flashbangs and their machine guns spray with pinpoint precision. I yank the throttle into a slide, careening towards the door full tilt at an angle so my motorbike eats their hot lead hate. I let go of my ride seconds from impact and leave a bandolier of rockets on the seat to face the firing squad.
As I roll on the pavement at a hundred kilometers an hour, trusting my metal frame not to flinch, I feel the characteristic pinprick and then breath-stealing swell of poorly defused shells. Heat melts my Kevlar weave into my neoprene skin as I look upon a tiny fluorescent sun birthed of plastic explosive. The sun implodes in a silent instant, stealing the nyandroids and most of the building facade with it. Air rushes into the void with a clap that jolts me upright to look upon my destruction.

The slide returns to the zoomed-in view of the mountain. The Inside Man taps a small grey square next to the lotus.
"So this is kind of where my intel starts breaking down," he says. "Side note, you'd better fucking appreciate these pics, I had to trade myself a LOT of bladdy favors to get them. I owe me three satellites and a blowjob and I don't even like blowjobs!" The Man shakes his head. "Anyways! This has to be the control tower for the Lift. It's not really a tower, more like a bungalow, but what's important is what's inside. My guess is a supercomputer — a really bladdy powerful one, too. It runs the androids and controls the Lift, I assume by coordinating with the computers on the lunar end. Get me access to that computer and I can get you an express elevator up. Slide!"

The first floor is nothing but a straight hallway of security checkpoints and HVAC closets. Every sprinkler in the building has gone off, drenching the four androids that fill the hall. Eight eyes burn with jade light that ionizes the air around them. Four metal faces contort into snarls as forty light grey fingers peel back like lotuses to reveal burnished steel claws. With a twitch, twin broadswords leap from my wrists and buzz hungrily. Violence ensues.
I put both blades through the first android and flex my elbows as fast as I can. Oil spills everywhere as I split her from the crotch up. Number Two slips on the stuff and I dive forward, slicing her skull into cybernetic sushi.
I roll off her remains and into Number Three's grip. She takes hold of my waist and whips me into the wall, then she pins my arms against it. I slam my head into hers and see stars. She doesn't so much as blink.
From the corner of my eye, I see Four leveling a shotgun at me. A few more desperate slams against Three's head only rewards me with a self-induced concussion. Four almost looks amused before her finger closes around the trigger. My ears automatically seal themselves at the crack of the bullet.
Which is strange because it means that I'm still alive.
Three and I turn our heads to look. A split-second later, the remains of Three's head splatter against my faceplate. As her body topples over, I see Alliott sitting against the wall near Four's corpse. Her left pant is rolled up to reveal a horribly mutilated limb, split open like a lotus flower with the barrel of a sniper rifle poking out of the stump.
"Where the hell did you come from?" I ask.
"Got bored of shooting things and wanted to see what you were up to. Good thing too, huh?" Alliott snaps the rifle barrel out of the stump, folds her foot-flaps back into place, and slides the pieces of the gun back into her cybernetic leg.
"Why didn't you tell me you could do that?" I say as I walk over to her. I retract my khandas and then pull her up.
She shrugs. "Never came up." Then her eyes widen. "Down!"
We drop like rocks. A hail of bullets fills the space overhead as my hands close around Four's corpse. I spin it in front of me and let it take the full brunt of the next volley. The Desert Eagle comes from my holster and I fire four times. Ahead of us, two androids collapse with bullet holes where their eyes used to burn.
Another bullet knocks the pistol from my hand but I'm already lunging at the shooter. Behind me, I hear Alliott struggling with an eighth android. I'm too busy wrestling for Seven's gun to wonder where these new ones came from.
Seven fires just as I wrench her arm upwards and embed the bullet in the ceiling. I tear the gun from her hand and pistol-whip her with it. The bot stumbles back slightly and then bounces back with a series of lightning-quick jabs. The gun goes soaring.
Neither of us bother to look at it. Seven is busy trying to punch my head from my neck. I'm busy deflecting and predicting her strikes. She's good… but I'm better. There! I lock the bot's fist against my side and wrench it clean from her socket.
Seven's face contorts into confusion with a screech like a car crash. I reply with a spin-kick that crumples her head case against the wall. Then I dive for my Eagle and shoot twice more, coring the nyandroid grappling with Alliott.
"Christ!" she says as she pushes its shell off her. "Warn a girl before you shoot that close." She wipes oil off her face. "Ahh, you got robot blood all over - behind you!"
I spin around just in time for a ninth android to deliver a series of jabs hard enough to dent my chest. I lurch backwards. The khandas finally come out and I swing upwards.
Nine dodges and rips my guts out. I reel, barely remembering to retract my khandas before grabbing at the gash. Words wash over my brain — corrosion to battery casing detected! — and present me with the possibility of melting down mid-fight.
Nine sees the way I totter around like half of a three-legged sack and goes in for the kill. She sweeps my legs and knocks me to the ground, then pounces for my eyes.
Desperation gives me inspiration. I kick at her crotch, arresting her dive and pushing her backwards, and swipe at her head with my good hand. Most of my fist slides right by her forehead, but my thumb gets caught on her ear and slides back halfway along the arm to the elbow.
In such a tight space, the explosion is deafening. A hole opens up in the ceiling and a server rack falls through, crushing Nine from the waist down. She takes a final feeble swing with what's left of her body and then shuts down with one claw on my chest.
I scrabble out from under her and probe the wound. My fingers close around a thick cylinder with a rough, bumpy surface. Thankfully, the battery isn't cracked. I'll live to see another day.
I look up and see a tenth android pointing her pistol right where my battery is.
I wonder if cyborgs can go to hell.
Alliott dives in front of me, hands sparking. She shouts an incantation at the same moment Ten pulls the trigger.
One bullet bounces off Alliott's arms into the wall. Two more ping off her chest and bite into Ten's. A fourth spikes neatly off her forehead and drills through Ten's.
Both of them collapse.
I heard five shots.
I drop to my knees and roll Alliott over, pressing two fingers to her neck. There's a pulse there. It's weak, but speeding up.
"Alliott? Alliott!" I cry out.
"Fuck," she coughs out.
I pull her shirt up. There's a half-inch hole through her armored vest. The color is draining from her face.
"What the fuck was that?" I say.
She coughs again. "Thought that… spell would handle it."
I think she's going into shock, the Man says.
"Shock? But she's not bleeding!" I say.
"Internal," Alliott says. "Fuck… 'm thirsty."
"Can't you heal yourself?" I ask.
She clenches a fist slowly. It glows briefly, then dims. "Ohh… that's the aorta. Definitely the aorta. Can't heal that myself."
"You dumb bitch!" I cry. "Fuck! Fucking fuck goddamnit shit!"
Alliott grips my hand tightly. "Hey…" she whispers. "Always have a backup plan, right."
My eyes widen. "Well what is it? What do I do?"
"We need a ritual circle."
"What? What am I supposed to draw one with?"
"You're covered… in oil."
"What?" I rub my face and my hand comes away covered in grease. "Oh."
I hastily draw an oil ritual circle around Alliott. It looks more like an oval and the pentagram inscribed within is hideously asymmetrical. I can only pray that it'll suffice.
"Great," Alliott says once I've finished. "Now we need the… energy source. Everhart resonator." She coughs blood onto my lap.
"Okay okay do you have one? Where do I get one?" I'm becoming frantic.
"Just build one."
"What?" I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams. "How?!"
"Easy. We have… all the parts." She gestures towards the cybernetic corpses in my wake. I'm already scrambling towards Six.
"What do I need?" I shout to her.
"Head. Gunn diode."
"What the fuck is a Gunn diode?"
Microwave diode, the Man says. Used for radio communications. Check their heads.
Unbidden, an image of a small metal switchbox with a bundle of multicolored images appear in my mind's eye. I thank the Man briefly and then pluck Six's eyes from her sockets, using the holes as leverage to pry her braincase apart. The diode is near the base of her skull. I rip it out and drop it by Alliott's head.
"What else?"
"Superconducting magnet."
"Where the hell am I supposed to find that?"
Battery. See if there's one in their chests.
Five's upper body is still intact. I saw into her chest and pry it open, then start digging. My hands close around something so cold that it burns. I jerk back, then cautiously probe the spot. The source of the chill is a small ceramic cylinder wrapped in engraved wire. It's an integrated Maxwell's Demon — the demon inside wraps around the ceramic, eating excess heat and keeping it at superconducting temperature so that it can hold a charge indefinitely.
I carefully pluck the magnet from its case.
"What else?"
"Need a box to keep it in…"
I have a box right in front of me. It's just filled with junk. So I disembowel Five until there's nothing left in her chest.
"I got everything! What do I do with it?"
"Get some wire… okay, start with the green wire and tie it around the diode cable." Alliott's voice rapidly wanes to the point that she's practically breathing into my ears, but she's a good teacher. Within minutes, I have a jury-rigged Everhart resonator — an electricity-to-magic convertor — that'll save Alliott's life.
"OK, now just touch these two wires to one of those batteries," Alliott says.
I dig through robot remains for several panicky seconds and nothing. All the superconducting batteries are dead for no reason. I might have killed these things but I know I left most of them intact.
Then I take a closer look and everything falls into place. I did a project on these things in my sophomore year. They're far-field wireless power receivers. Something far away was shooting electricity into them and using the superconductors to maintain efficiency.
But that something is stopped. There's nothing left. My girlfriend is about to bleed to death because of a dead battery.
Dead battery. My brain finally coughs up an idea. I wrap my hands around the edges of my stab wound and start tearing it open. There's one battery left — the one inside me. If I can get to it, I might be able to use it to charge the resonator.
It feels like lava is pouring into my chest. I see stars. But I keep pulling. I'm terrified that if I stop I'll be too afraid to restart.
I pull my own guts open for what seems like an eternity. My metal innards warp, pop, and tear as I expose them for the world to see. I really hope that the battery isn't leaking but that's the least of our worries right now.
"Give me those," I gasp. I snatch the power cable from Alliott's hands and jam them into my chest.
My brain does a hard reboot, going from void black to full stereo ultra-high-def oversaturation. I see Alliott's hands pressed to her body. The pentagram sparkles around her as a bullet slowly worms itself out of the hole in her chest. The color starts returning to her face.
She takes a deep, gasping breath and stands up. The Everhart resonator falls to the floor and immediately shatters to bits.
A long, drawn-out “fuck” fills the air as she stretches her limbs. "Jesus, my back is killing me. I think that hit my spine."
I crush her in a bear hug.
"Oh my god oh my god oh my GOD," I babble into her ear. "Fuck! You stupid idiot don't ever do that again! Oh my god I can't believe that worked I thought you were dead -"
Alliott interrupts the flapping of my lips by pressing them to hers. "Hey, hey, hey," she says. "I'm okay. I'm okay. It's fine. My back hurts, but that's everyone my age."
Her forehead touches against mine. “Thank you. Hey!” She pulls away and examines the results of my impromptu self-surgery. "Look at this! What did you do to yourself?"
"Needed some parts," I say.
"What the hell," Alliott says. "Thank you."
She presses her hands to the gash on my side. The oil around us runs backwards up my legs and congeals over the wound. Sparks dance across the grease as it hardens into solid metal. I probe the seamless surface with my fingers. "Thanks."
There's a soft noise behind us. I spin around and empty the Desert Eagle's clip into Four's corpse as it slides down the wall. Nothing else jumps out at us. The only sound left is the faint hum of the air conditioning.
I count to sixty before lowering the gun.
"I think we got them," Alliott says.
"You almost died. Oh my God. You almost fucking died! Oh my fucking God!" If my breathing wasn't mechanically regulated, I would be hyperventilating.
Alliott grabs me by the shoulders and shakes. "Relax! Key word there is almost!" She draws me into a hug.
"Don't you fucking scare me like that again," I say, nestling my head against her neck.
She wheezes, “You're kinda crushing me."
The second floor is a single windowless room with a large cylinder in the center: Novagrad's primary supercomputer. I snap back the first joint on my pointer finger to reveal a tiny serial bus and jab it into the first open port on the machine. There's a pregnant pause as the software in my finger fucks the computer. Then:
I'm in.
I pop my finger out of the machine and both my swords from my arms. They carve out an unnecessarily large hole in the wall for us to jump through and roll as we hit the ground. Alliott and I sidle up to the wall and poke our heads around the corner. At a glance, there's at least two dozen androids with their guns trained on the front door. Perfect.
"You'd better get outta here," I say.
"What are you, kidding me? After I literally took a bullet for you? Fuck outta here."
"You almost just died! There is no way in hell I am letting you fight more of these fucking things," I protest.
"Oh no. I let you throw yourself through your Way at sixteen hundred kilometers an hour instead of doing them mine," she counters, "and look where it got us."
"I mean," I say, "my Way worked."
"We're doing it my way," Alliott says. "Far as I'm concerned, this?" She taps the sealed-up bullet hole in her belly. "All you."
She backpedals at the look in my eyes. "Wait, wait, wait, shit, I didn't — I didn't mean it like that. It wasn't your fault, it was Natasha's, her robots, I don't blame you — Look, I'll tell you what. I'll stay here, clear a path for you. Take the elevator up and keep it open for me. I'll follow you once I'm done here."
"You can ride in that thing, right? It's not going to pancake you?" I ask.
"I'll be fine! I'm almost as much metal as you are."
"Alliott, I swear to God, if you die again I'm going to fucking kill you."
She gives me a peck on the cheek. The turbines on her back spin up and she blasts off into the sky.
I quietly pull back from the wall and sneak up the hill towards the Lift. Most of the towers are sealed, and there's no way I'm going to cut a hole in one of them. Luckily, I don't need to wait for the Man to hack them. One tower still has an opened entrance hatch. Whatever the cargo is, it must be pretty important to bring it up while the island is under attack. There's only three androids that I can see inside, but I don't want to risk damaging the platform with a grenade.
I reload the Desert Eagle and wait. Above me, the sky splits in two as Alliott brings down the wrath of God on the militia down the hill. The moment I hear a thunderclap, I pop off three shots that are drowned out by the roar of the sky. I don't waste the opportunity, sprinting forward, vaulting over a crate onto the elevator platform and yelling, "Send me UP!" to the Inside Man.
The hatch slams shut. There's a jolt, followed by several seconds of being crushed against the floor before whatever systems MachineGod installed kick in and I'm able to move without feeling like I'm being squashed under an elephant. I slump to the ground in relief and then notice three more androids staring at me from the far side of the platform.
"Shit."
The curse comes out of all our mouths at once.
"Rukmini?!" The android says my name like a swear word.
Everything falls into place. The furry androids. The centralized intelligence. The crates — they're labeled with an orange. Wearing a mohawk. I know that brand of beer.
"Diya?"

NEXT: Jump the Gun


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⚠ Content warning: This article contains harm to children, antisemitism/racism, and the n-slur.

⚠ content warning

There were three things Ronald Wilson Reagan had never been able to explain.
One: When Reagan had been called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, there was a brief moment during his extensive testimony where, along a far wall of cameramen, he spotted a bluish-grey figure stumbling along the wall, drenched in what appeared to be solid gold. It was gone almost as soon as he noticed it.
Two: On his way to sign the Mulford Act of 1967, Reagan swore he'd bumped into Phyllis Schlafly in the capitol halls. It was only later, when he related this story to his aids, that he realized that no one had seen Mrs. Schlafly but him.
Three: After Reagan sent the California Highway Patrol to deal with those uppity student protestors, he'd returned to his home to find a letter slipped under his door. The text was so tightly packed as to be utterly illegible, and it came with no return address, so Reagan assumed it must have been some sort of mistake, and threw it away.
All three of these memories would play through his head as, shortly after his inauguration, President Reagan was lead down an inconspicuous trapdoor in the Oval Office, into the tunnels that crisscrossed the Washington Underneath.
He'd heard tell of the Underneath, from somewhere. Quigley? Something about a system of tunnels to ensure the safety of government officials during a disaster. His inauguration certainly didn't seem like a disaster, and well, he had some deregulation he'd rather be handing to the oil and gas industries.
Thing is, nobody was telling him anything. Reagan was the most important man in America, and whatever was pulling him down the Underneath, it didn't care.
Finally, after what felt like years, the nondescript agent who'd led Reagan through the Underneath stopped at an inconspicuous door near the far end of a concrete tunnel. The agent, if that's what he was, inserted his finger into the lock, twitching once, before pulling a now-bloody finger back as the door unlocked and…
… well, Reagan couldn't quite understand what he was seeing.
Before them was a room with a semicircular conference table, about as rounded as the black-flecked grey walls that loomed around it. While Reagan couldn't quite explain the Bible, bull statue, fountain pen, tray, and what looked like a large piece of calamari that sat on the table, they were ultimately less important than the figures sitting around it.
To Reagan's right was a wizened old man with gangrenous facial flesh, which might have been the least notable thing about him. For one thing, he was practically plated in gold and precious gems, decorated in the finery of… well, he knew it wasn't the Catholic Church, but it didn't look protestant, either. For another? Through all that rot and bloat, the man looked suspiciously like those images of Tsar Nicholas II.
"Well, excuse my rudeness, but…" but Reagan's attention was now drawn to the figure on his left. It was… well, she looked like Phyllis Schlafly, but Reagan had never seen Mrs. Schlafly with as much blood around her mouth as right now. Neither had he ever noticed a jagged edge or uncanny cleanliness in her teeth, or bluish-purple gills in her neck, or the way her fingernails seemed to retract and protract at random intervals. Beneath her cowered a young boy, Jewish-looking, with bite marks all over his neck; surely, Mrs. Schlafly would never do that to a child, right?
Reagan looked to the man in the center for explanation, and nearly recoiled. He wouldn't have been able to say why; nothing stood out about the man on the level of the figures beside him. Even so, there was something dreadfully off about the bearded old man before him. It was as if he was an actor, portraying with body language alone a villain of the utmost depravity. Worst of all: Reagan swore he recognized him from somewhere.
"You might want to take a seat, Mr. President." The man in the middle had the smooth voice of a preacher, if a little higher than he would've expected. "We have a great deal to explain."
Instinct pulled Reagan's facial muscles into his movie star smile. "Well, I don't want to—"
"Sit. Down."
Reagan blinked, swallowed, nodded, and took his seat. "Well, gentleman, it's… it's been a pleasure meetin' ya. Would it be, uh, too forward to get some names?"
The Schlafly look-alike cackled.
"You'll have to forgive Mrs. Schlafly." The man in the middle threw her a disproving glare, and Reagan hoped he never directed it his way. "God made Woman in the image of imperfect Man. She can't help herself."
"Well, at least Woman behaves herelf around canines, Mr. Rushdoony."
Right, Rushdoony. Reagan remembered that name; something about an important theologian?
"Regardless," Rushdoony turned back to Reagan. "I do want to apologize, Mr. President. Mr. Bundy and Mr. Pilate are off on business."
Reagan felt his brow furrowing. "'Pilate?' Quite the name. Wouldn't happen to be related to ol' Pontius, eheh?"
Mrs. Schlafly laughed again, but it didn't sound like she was laughing with Reagan.
The man-thing that looked like Nicholas II cleared its throat, and spoke in perfect English: "You might have noticed, Mr. Reagan, that we are not quite… 'bound', to the strictures of humanity." Other than its mouth, it was deathly still. "It might help if we introduced ourselves, who we represent, and our various… 'contributions', shall we say.
"You may know me," it struggled under the weight of its riches to lift a hand to its chest. "As the Once and Future Tsar, Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, the II."
"That don't make sense. He's dead, ain't he?"
"I assure you, Mr. Reagan: I haven't been dead since 987." It smiled, and a worm slithered through a gap in its teeth.
Mrs. Schlafly rolled her eyes, a hand going down to the inexplicable boy's neck. "You'll have to forgive Vlad, Ronny. Bolshevik cock through the head and his brain's as splintered as his church."
Reagan felt like he'd just swallowed a bug. "Mrs. Schlafly, that seems mighty… rude, don't you think?"
Mrs. Schlafly looked back to Reagan, expression stuck between wild bemusement and utter contempt. "Come on, he doesn't even believe in Filioque! As the woman who actually killed Jesus, I'd say I'm a little more credible on Christianity than discount Koschei."
"… I, uh, I must've misheard that."
"You didn't." She settled on a smirk. "I crucified that stupid hippie in 1962, and John XXIII called Vatican 2 to hide it." Another cackle. "You know they used to measure popes by the balls? Give me Pius XII any day."
"Off-topic, Mrs. Schlafly." Reagan's attention was turned back to Rushdoony. "Mr. President, I'd love to talk about my time as a lawyer in France, or a general in Britain, but such matters are secondary to the imperative."
Reagan smiled. This was a joke, a little prank the Secret Service put together to rattle the new president. Well you know what? Reagan loved jokes. This was all very funny, the two biggest names in Christian culture teaming up with a Nicholas II impersonator to play a joke on little ol' him. Reagan laughed, and felt his blood chilling as nobody joined him.
He swallowed. "Well, gentlemen, I've got some, uh, important business to attend to. If that'll be all—"
"It will not."
Reagan nodded. "Right, right, uh… thank you, Mr. Rushdoony. Eheh, do you prefer Rushdoony or, uh, King Charles?"
A sudden look of immense fury passed over Rushdoony's face… and then it was gone. "I do warn you against wasting our time, Mr. President. There's work to be done, work that can be passed off to Mr. Bush if you're not up to the task."
We don't need you.
Reagan scratched at his head. "Right, apologies, Mr. Rushdoony. Well…" His lips were dry. "How can I help y'all?"
"In 1865," spoke Mrs. Schlafly, still feeling around her boy's neck, "President Johnson made a deal with a… powerful benefactor, to hand the presidency over to something that'd use it for good. Of course, the Presidency isn't as powerful on as granular a level as we'd like, but we've always owned a share of the Arc of History." She paused, stopping at an artery and furrowing her brow. "… I apologize, I've got a lot on my mind right now. Nick?"
"What Mrs. Schlafly means, Mr. President," continued 'Nicholai'. "Is that the Presidency holds… more than a few expectations, one could say. Of course, you are accountable to," he sneered, "your constituents. You are also, however, accountable to a higher power."
"Do you, uh, mean the Judeo-Christian—"
Rushdoony slammed his hands on the table. "We do not serve a Jewish God, Mr. President." From his mouth now seemed to come his every previous iteration. "The Jewish God would let an eight-and-a-half month pregnancy be terminated by its mother as it forces our farmers to let the unwashed monkeys of the third world eat of their fruits. That God would release every reprobate in Hell from its justly-deserved eternal torment after only a year. That God propped up sodomites, unitarians, socialists, usurers, and nigger-lovers as its chosen! We do not serve a Jewish God!"
The air in the conference room grew colder still, and not even Mrs. Schlafly or Nikolai dared break the silence. Finally, Mr. Rushdoony cleared his throat. "God as you know him is… dissimilar, to God as he is. The totalizing mission of Christ is not fought through feel-good sermons or some "social gospel", but through crushing dominion over the secular humanist establishment. Only when the reprobate Children of Mud and Clay know their place can we consider our work over."
Reagan glanced one last time around the conference room, looking for cameras, hidden panels, smiles, anything that might reveal all this to be a dark prank of sorts. It almost seemed to come as Mrs. Schlafly reared back and made to look as if she sunk her teeth into the child, except it felt far too real.
Steadying his smile, Reagan nodded. "Right. Well, what's the nature of the work?"
"Simple, Mr. President."
Mr. Rushdoony leaned in.
"To birth the Neoliberal Egregore."

They wheeled it into the Oval Office on the twenty-eighth. Some kind of bull statue. Good for the stock market, they said.
President Reagan didn't think he'd ever get used to it, looming over the office like a big bronze shadow. It was always too hot to the touch, the few times he was comfortable enough to do that, and the stink of sulfur hung so heavy he'd pass out just to stand by it. Worst of all, though, it felt like there was something behind its eyes, something old, something mean, something bigger than he could imagine. Not even the false wall they put in for photos seemed to block its presence.
A little after 4:00, it spoke in a voice like President Reagan's. "Executive Order 12287: decontrol of crude oil and refined petroleum products." When Reagan looked down, the fine print was already on his desk, ready to be signed. Very agreeable.
Reagan did his presidential duty.