“And he's dead?”
The dude was dead as hell, that was for sure. JJ had seen people die in front of him before. It wasn't as hard as he thought it would be to get used to. Or maybe it was the best for him that he got used to things as quickly as possible. Waltzing, traipsing through life. A lucky little ballerina. Shoes as pink as a rose. But the special shoes. Poinsettias. God, he could just see himself now.
He hadn't even had time to use his stand.
JJ bent down, picking up a screwdriver that had fallen from the dead man's coat. He tested it in his hands. A nice heft. Warm, still. The dead man had held it in his hands as he stepped inside. For protection? Why not get a knife? Weird. But it fell out of his hands when he had fallen. And now, JJ decided, it was his. Useful little tool.
But the body. Esther was still in the bathroom. He was pretty sure she was, at least. He hadn't seen her with clothes yet, so she could've been still on her hands and knees trying to find her contact right under his nose. Probably not, though. It probably felt weird to be naked in the same hotel room as a guy who just died. He wrinkled his nose. That was stupid. Like something Jude would say. Too much time with him. Some of the things he said were contagious. The ways he had of putting things. They got into his head.
But the body.
“Yeah, dude. He hit his head bad. He's dead as hell. Did you get me the Diet Coke?” said JJ.
Jude handed him the bottle. JJ had seen it, of course, but he liked to ask him. Jude had a way of forgetting about something even when it was in his hands. Probably because he was a dumbass. Probably because he had just bought weed behind their hotel room and pretended like he was getting a snack.
He had no reason to lie. But he did. That was just the way people were. And the longer JJ lived among people, the better JJ got at recognizing that the little details that pop out always mean something. Like noticing Jude hadn't brought back anything for himself. Or the smell of weed in the room. Or the weed and the new pipe that bulged in his pocket. Either that, or he was seriously packing and had managed to keep a grip on himself around JJ (as if).
But the body.
“He's dead,” said Jude. Like JJ didn't know. Like the massive head wound and the not breathing wasn't the fucking big enough hint. Doobie Hauser M.D., here to set shit straight. He smiled, beside himself. Jude had bent down, pressing the inside of his palm against the dead man's neck. Was it a move he had seen in a movie?
“Knew him? Definitely seemed like one of the stand users. He was, uh, sayin' a lot of shit before he tripped. And died. Lots of talking.”
“Yeah. The Performer.”
“Shitty name.”
“Terrifying stand, though. Achy Breaky Heart. Good thing you guys got him down before he could get you under his spell. You'd've all died. He's got, like, a final boss level stand, if you ask me.” Jude stood up, cracking his back and his neck back into place. Like an old man.
“What does it do then?”
“Being around him makes all your bodily functions voluntary instead of involuntary. Gets smaller and smaller. Even if you can figure out how to get your heart beating, it's real hard to figure out how to do cellular respiration.” He rifled through the dead man's pockets. Jude pulled out the wallet and sat on JJ's bed. He pulled out a few bills and stuck them in his jean pocket. Then stuck his hand into his shirt. Jude pulled out a folded piece of paper, which he unfolded, stared at, then refolded. JJ cursed himself for forgetting to rob the corpse first.
“That's not a final boss level stand,” Esther said, opening the door and dazzlingly fully-clothed. All obfuscation gone, it was good to see her talking again. “There's no gravitas. Even I know this, idiot.” She had her glasses on, which was good since the bitch turned into Velma Dinkley with her ass up in the air when she couldn't see. Jinkies! What was Yiddish for Jinkies? She'd say that.
“Yeah, it's like. A really good monster of the week stand, I guess. But not big bad. You find your contacts?” JJ shrugged hopping onto the bed next to Jude. He reeked of weed. If he hadn't seen the bulge, the proximity would've given him away. JJ's hands crept up from Jude's knee and then grasped the bag and the pipe in his fist. “Planning on sharing, Papa Smoke?”
Jude blushed. He always blushed. Tongue-tied little Catholic schoolboy. “Stop calling me that. And, uh, yeah. I guess. Can we do it in the car?”
“No,” she said. No hesitation. She was in pajamas. Comfortable. Her hair was wet. Had a shower gone on while he waited for Jude with this dead body for company? “Do it in the bathroom or go outside. Behind the hotel. I'm sure you'll be fine. Actually, please go outside. The fan won't cover up you two giggling all night.”
The poster she had drawn dominated their vision. Right in line of sight from the doorway. A real cancer of cognition. Which was hell for the Performer, of course. Poor guy didn't even get to see what he fell over before his skull cracked and his brain throttled against the cage enough to kill.
“That's cool, but uh,” and Jude coughed. “Am I gonna be able to see naked people again?”
“Naked women. And no. I mean, yes. But not now. Tomorrow. I'll make a little cure for you turds tomorrow. Now let me get to sleep.”
JJ stuffed his hand into Jude's pocket. Suggestive wink, practiced flip, and the bag with the pipe was in his hand. A chillum. One-hitter, almost. Glass. But longer. It was nice. Clear and greenish. It would probably look blue when it was caked with resin. Which, given Jude, it probably would be. Super soon. Ultra soon.
Jude stared ahead. After doing nothing like some weird mannequin, he leaned forward, pressed his palm on the dead man's back. His fingers splayed out like tracing the hand to draw a turkey. He took a breath, and something flowed. And the body gave way to dust and then nothing, clothes and all. After it was done, there wasn't even enough to vacuum.
“That's awesome, Jude. How did you figure out how to do that?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Esther had already gotten under the covers and faced the other direction. She didn't hear when JJ took the keys, all the while keeping up those suggestive winks. It felt right. The car was always the safest place. A parked car. In the dark. Who would see them? And the smoke that filled the small, dark place. Anticipation ran through his body like a weird orgasm tremor.
Was this providence, or did the weed really smell that good?
It didn't matter. He clutched the keys to his chest. Jude would be nervous, sure. He didn't like to fuck with Esther or her wishes. But, if the boy liked anything, it was to be in a small, dark place filled with marijuana smoke.

The note was simple. Jude could recite it from memory, which wasn't too impressive since he had only first read it moments before. Clumsy fingers yanked it from his jeans pocket. Folded the same way the Performer had kept it in his shirt. Jude showed it to JJ in the dark car. Only lit by a purple lighter.

Hey Jude. Don't make it bad.
Take this sad song and make it better!!!
:)
Come and see my electric eye.

And then an address. Some directions, even, all written in blue ballpoint pen. The handwriting was legible, but it was clear the writer was more used to writing in cursive. JJ assumed it had been written by the Performer.
Jude wasn't sure. The note was perfumed. He had pointed it out between sucking on the bowl, taking greedy gulping hits, multiple, before even passing it, that the Performer didn't like to wear scented anything. But the Critic did.
Jude said the smell made him think of bad things, so JJ said that they should cover up the smell with good weed. And they did.

The afternoon after their binge, and the car still reeked of high-quality marijuana. Jude, despite having taken a shower nearly an hour ago, still had a kind of off, sweaty smell about him. A very male scent. He smelled older than he was. Like he was working. Esther was fresh, as always. Clean, scrubbed pink. Sure, she was pissed beyond belief that they had smoked pot in the car, but Jude's discovery got her anger down to baseline levels.
“He thought he was gonna kill you, you know,” said Jude. “Like the two of you. Both.”
Esther frowned. She almost turned from the wheel. Her favorite thing to do was to just stare at Jude until he shriveled. Instead, she looked through the rear-view mirror, all the terror of a Midwestern mother driving cross-country to grandma's for Christmas or something wholesome like that. “What do you mean?”
“He knew I was gone.”
“Electric Eye is watching you. There's nothing you can do about it,” JJ said. He rubbed his hand against the seatbelt, up and down. The texture, each individual thread hard and stiff to hold, made that feeling run down his spine.
“Then, something about an explosion. I know the song. But what I'm saying is, how much does this thing know? How do you think it's watching us?”
“Big television screen,” Esther said. “A bug. There were crazy cockroaches in the last two places we stayed. It's a bug power. Bug type.”
Jude frowned, splayed in the back. “I think he wants me to see something.”
His long, weird body stretched out and almost over, taking up more of the backseat than he thought possible. It'd suck if they had to get nasty back there, he thought. Jude was too big. Not even, like, dirt-ways. There was something ungainly about him. A young sasquatch. A beardless Santa Claus, but. Young. Gallumphing.
“Who?” said Esther
“The Critic.”
Esther slid her hand to the console and put on her sunglasses. She pulled down the sun visor. Sunlight poured in through the windshield. Another frown. JJ snickered. Too goth for all this.
“I'm coming. In case you wanted to know,” said Esther, staring ahead. Hard to read without the sunglasses. “You can't tell me I can't know. Weirdo tried to kill me with some pervert Billy Ray Cyrus shit. I did some drawing before you woke up. Great work. Got a migraine, you know. But great work.”
“But you didn't reverse the nudity spell?” JJ flipped down his sun visor, sliding the plastic and staring into his reflection. He slid his hand on his forehead, pushing his hair up. No blemishes. No acne. Good, good. The sweat never did good things to his complexion. And he liked to keep pretty. Luckily, he only ever rarely sweat. But even good luck couldn't fix Esther's broken AC. Or move the sun.
“I had better ideas. And who knows when your fucking providence bullshit makes you knock my contacts out of my hands and all over the floor.”
“You were invisible. Not my fault.”
“Only because you have a weird look whenever you see people naked.”
“It's not my fault.”
“It kind of is. You look too hard. You're a fucked up dude, JJ.” Esther smiled. “G-d, you think this sun is going to fucking move or is this a stand?”
JJ waited. But Jude didn't correct her. It was a stand already. The Sun. The boy was too quiet. He was high, sure, but not that high.
“You don't always have to be naked. Nobody else has to be naked to put on and take off their make-up and shit. It's a weird move. I think you're the weird one.” JJ ran his fingers up and down the seatbelt hard enough to make a noise that zigzagged down through the core of his being.
Esther smirked, turned up the radio. Loud. Bad sound quality, but at least it drowned out most of the horrible sounds the car had started to make. A CD. She had been playing a lot of The Cure. He wondered if she was trying to think of a stand name for herself. JJ toed at the CD holder, one of those zipper up multi-holders.
JJ fidgeted, rearranged the screwdriver in his pocket, and leaned against the window. It was still The Cure. JJ liked them, sure, but not as much as Esther. It wasn't providence so much as a desire for something different. He would've even taken Siouxsie and the Banshees, maybe. He drummed his fingers on his thigh.
“Can I pick the next album?” JJ said. He flipped the sun visor to look at Jude.
Jude was staring into the air. Not reading. Not looking at his phone. Just breathing. His expression didn't change. His eyebrows were raised upward, lips pressed tightly together into a line. His gaze was unfocused. Not out the window, looking at the door handle. Nibbling on the inside of his lips.
“We're almost there.” She didn't look over. “And this one isn't over yet.”
The road went on before them. JJ never paid much attention when Esther drove. He only rarely paid attention to the direction he was going. North and south didn't mean shit on the dancefloor, right? There were trees. They had gotten denser. The directions started to pipe in from the GPS a bit more regularly, so she turned down the sound.
The car turned down a gravel road. Left, right, right, left. Too many turns, and then, the car stopped in front of a rusted gate. Claustrophobic, lecherous branches reached down and scraped the roof. The engine settled noisily. The wood was quiet.
The place was big, for one. An old place. Crumbling. A palatial mansion. Like something out of Faulker. The columns crumbled, but the windows were intact. They were dark. Opaque. JJ wondered if they painted over the glass. But it looked like plastic. Kind of like plastic. Hard.
“Freddy Kreuger lives here.”
Three stories. It probably was beautiful when it was kept up. Weather-beaten, colorless wood untouched by graffiti. The windows weren't knocked out. Not a single one. Point one for them being covered in steel or something. Going into a weird fortress made out of a shitty, ugly old house should've been the last thing the motion of the rotation of all that was should take him.
But wasn't it? The tremor, again, and it felt so good to look at it. JJ knew he had to get out of the car. He knew he had to go inside. He wanted to.
“He lives in dreams, idiot,” said Esther. “Shut up.” And she stopped the car in front of the gate.
They were quiet for a moment. Jude was the first to sit up, open the door, and step out of the car. Esther and JJ followed.
JJ lagged behind as they walked to the large porch and the front door. The house loomed above, and providence sang within him. Sometimes, it listened. Even if it didn't, he would have gone. He watched Jude twist the knob. Muscles tensed. Jude was sweating, more than usual.
Inside was surprisingly cool. It smelled clean. No dust. Jude stepped in, then Esther.
JJ stepped through the threshold, and there was a crunch beneath his feet. He lifted up his shoe. Dead bug. Filled with what looked like pus. It probably wasn't pus. Maybe it had been green? But damn, it was huge. JJ dragged his foot across the carpet, staring down at the streak. Shell. Lots of shell. But mostly that white liquid.
The chandelier hung low above them. Cobwebs formed a living mesh over the great, elegant light fixture. Like a mummy. Two stairways at the end of the room curved to meet each other at the second floor. There were too many doors. Paintings that were stained beyond recognition hung upon the walls. A moldy tapestry here and there. A broken vase. But it felt warm. The air hummed around him.
Esther screamed. Sharp, shrill.
JJ tilted his head.
The entrance slammed shut behind them.
There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They slid along the walls, out from every crevice, out from behind paintings, from unseen corners. From the broken vase. All the size of a half-dollar. Green beetles. Leaf green. Weed green. And they chittered, chirruped. Spherical like robotic. But they weren't, were they? Robots didn't bleed pus. He couldn't see their legs, could barely make out their heads. Twitching, long antennae.
But JJ only smiled.
“Oh shit,” said Jude. “Shit, shit. Jitterbug Stay calm.”
Esther put her hands over her mouth. The flashcards covered in scribbles wouldn't work on bugs probably, JJ thought.
“Don't touch them,” said Jude.
Then, from speakers all around their heads, the Breeder spoke.

The Breeder hated having to listen to it. Electric Eye spoke constantly. Its voice was raspy, low. It never stopped. Didn't help much to keep it lubricated, either. The thing sucked up anything like it was cacti. He sucked the tip of his right index finger. Then his middle finger. Then the other two on the other hand. The tips of his digits were wrinkled. They no longer tasted salty.
The thing still gave good news, though. He leaned back in his chair. A bug scuttled across his torso and slid around his face, stopping on his glasses. Left lens. Its antennae waved in the air, a conductor of a complex symphony. Or maybe it was more like sempahore?
“Mary, Mother of God, forgive all us sinners, or, I mean, tell God for me that I'm really sorry and I'm sorry in their name, too. Not in an offensive way. I guess. They don't need my help. They're good and they're so good to me and stay chill, stay chill.” Electric Eye croaked each word as though it were unfamiliar with the tongue. “Don't wanna see and can't help but see, and going blind in the face of it. Turned toward god and the pillar of salt, but turned toward the mansion. Don't trip. Too high. Moony. Head in the sky.”
It was always moving, but he tried his best to ignore that. They were there. Of course, he had known that, since that thing never shut up, but it was great to see the little ones getting so nervous. It scuttled along his body, and the Breeder let it. He sucked on his right pinky, then his left.
“Too many, to be or not. Like a walnut. Thanks for the boots. I bought them. Sales clerk, sales clerk with brown hair and bright blue eyes. Cute. JJ. Not the bugs. Crunch. Still. Quiet. Where?”
Its mad dashes slowed, as it sensed no worry from its father. The bug slid down the Breeder's ankle and down through a vent in the floor.
The Breeder pressed the button and pressed his lips against the microphone. The sensation, up and down, of his lips against the rigid plastic made him want to moan. But he reined himself in, and he spoke to the Murderer and his Sex Fiends.
“Hey, Jude. Fucked up you didn't die.” His nose was crushed against the microphone, which probably didn't do much for his sound quality. But it felt too good. “I know you're feelin' a little nervous down there. Do the babies bother ya? You can keep dancing, but I think the fire burns hot.”
A pause, his finger depressed the button, and he turned to Electric Eye.
“A pervert. Like a muffled stupid son of a bitch, and they creepy creeping creepily creep. JJ. Esther. Okay. Two. Okay. Sounds like a siren, screech a cheap. Reepicheep. Fell down a waterfall? Into God?”
“Shut up for a second. Initiate Dance Commander.”
The thing snapped back then forward. It said, “What is your command?”
“Stand by.” And the Breeder swiveled in his chair once, twice. His finger pressed down on the button, and he said, “You're an idiot for coming. This isn't an anime. Sometimes, you get two stands. And Electric Eye, Jude, has the Dance Commander.” Button depressed. “Dance Commander, cancel all movement.”
“Movement canceled.”
“Sweet.” Button pressed. “Jude, Jude, Jude. You're gettin' real nervy, aren't you? When you fall down that waterfall and see God, I want you to know that he's gonna send you to Hell. And he's gonna make you watch him send those two to Hell, too.” A cackle, shrill, and then he said, without bothering to depress the button, “Dance Commander, fucking fire at will.”
“Engaged.”

Jude wasn't himself. Not even close.
His jaw was shut. But those eyes danced in fear. Right, left. Esther, then JJ. Esther, then JJ. And after that cackle, the muffled voice said, “Dance Commander, fucking fire at will.” Then, Jude lifted his hand.
Electricity crackled between his fingers in a fragile webbing. It rose up on the back of his hand, then down his wrist, up his arm until it rose and over took his chest, spreading to the next arm in a reverse fashion. He held his hand out toward JJ, and a column of blue-white electricity flowed, like water, from Jude's right hand.
Dust flew in the air. The carpet around Jude crackled with static fuzz, following the lazy back and forth movement of his left hand. It rose, and the blue light curled like a snake then lashed out like a whip toward Esther.
JJ smiled. The dancer clung to him. Pale. He imagined it was pale. Long limbs, intertwined with his. A passionate tango. An ever-waltz. A forever, ever mambo. And the providence whispered, but mostly, it was quiet and smiled and breathed. The oldest thing, the oldest thing there ever was, but it loved him, didn't it?
It felt like dancing when he dipped down and then fell forward, bringing Esther screaming onto a pile of bugs that burst against her back and his side like little pimples.
The bugs that had lived began to crawl over Esther and JJ. Esther screamed, covered her mouth, but then she screamed again, before biting down on her hand.
The bugs crawled along her skin, stopping occasionally to press down and burn her in a perfect circle, like a nickel. And they continued to do so. Rapidly. She shook her hand and stood up, before JJ reached up and pulled her down, as electricity whizzed above their heads.
“You should probably strip,” JJ said.
Esther who had been doing breathing exercises reached out to JJ but then stopped short. She sighed and flipped her top over her head. She immediately fell from his view. But most importantly, both of Jude's hands focused on JJ.
Two bolts, once, twice, and then JJ frolicked, jumping on the banister and climbing upwards and sliding through the doorway. The banister fell behind him, crumbled and burnt and scorched by electrical discharge. The rhythm pulsed and beat within him like a second heart. The providence pressed its mouth against its ear, and it felt almost like a kiss.
There were bugs everywhere. They crawled and scampered, but they didn't seem anxious. They ignored JJ. Cooler heads always prevailed. And they fed on fear. They fed on discomfort. They turned the heat up when things got nervous, but JJ had never been nervous in his entire life. Not for his own life, at least. Never for his own.
The thing that loved him brought him to the left. Then the right. Long hallways. Little accouterments. It wasn't exactly homey. But it smelled lived in. Every so often JJ noted a fast food burger wrapper. Always a different place.
And then, he stopped in front of a door. Identical to all the others. But it pulled him toward the wood until the heat and tension threatened to burst out like a kind of lust or a kind of fire that wanted to take it all in and take it all out.

The Breeder said, “Progress report.”
“In-progress. One has disappeared, and one has escaped.”
“What?”
“Disappeared.”
The Breeder gritted his teeth and stood up. He reached out to Electric Eye, and his long fingers encircled her throat. He throttled its head to the front, and to the back. The blindfold momentarily slid down its face, but he pushed it back up. The thing freaked out when it could see.
Its face reddened, and it fought against the confines of the straitjacket.
The Breeder depressed his grip, and he said, “Find them and kill them. If you weren't his daughter, I'd take the life out of you. You piece of shit GPS bitch.”
As he spoke, the door opened. The bugs skittered, and the Breeder's head swung to the noise. In the doorway, stood one of them. One of the Sex Fiends. He grinned, spread across his bearded face. The area around his mouth, wet with drool. The Breeder looked down at the little Sex Fiend. He breathed in, then out, shallow, broken with laughter.
“Mr. Lucky, right?” said the Breeder. A bead of sweat fell down his forehead. “That's gettin' me pretty fuckin' scared, dude. Real fuckin' terrified.” Giggling, and the bugs converged upon their father as one living thing. They encircled him, pressing their bodies against his skin. Like a weird armor. They left room for his face as he spoke. “And don't worry about your buds. When Electric Eye stops babbling all of Jude's stupid bullshit, it's pretty great at controlling them. Idiot never even questioned why the Critic wanted a lock of his hair. Poor, poor stupid Jude and that soon-to-be dead fat girl. But that leaves me. And luckily for me, I'm the Bomb. Sub-ability.”
The Breeder winked. The air went wavy. As JJ crossed the room, the microphone near the Breeder burst into flame.

JJ wondered what was with this guy and Electric Six. The heat cranked up, and he reached into his pocket. As he drew closer, his skin blistered. The dancer held on, pulling him toward the door, but JJ persisted. Strained against it.
No longer a dancer but a jealous lover. He calmed it, as best he could. He sent it the idea in his head, and it grumbled.
It no longer mattered, however. As the heat turned up, JJ slashed out with the screwdriver into the Breeder's neck. Immediately, the bugs fell to the ground, some on their back, and they scurried into corners, confused like little dogs.
The Breeder fell to his knees, blood gurgling from his lips. He looked at JJ, eyes flashing confused and angry.
“Shh, shh. Your first mistake was thinking I'd ever be afraid.” JJ's sunburnt lips crackled into a smile. It hurt. The first bursts of pain he had felt in his memory. JJ bent down to the man, pressing his forehead against his.
The Breeder was sweaty, and life was falling from his eyes as his heart betrayed his body and pumped every bit of blood out of his neck and into JJ's shirt.
“Your second mistake was thinking I'd hesitate in killing you.” JJ kissed the Breeder's forehead, hands on the dying man's temples. It didn't matter if he heard it, but what mattered was saying it. Out loud. “He's an idiot, but I think I love him. Like a brother. Like providence loves me. I don't want anyone to hurt him, dead dude. God, look at all that blood. You can't hear me at all, can you?”
The Breeder's eyelids fluttered, and in JJ's uncaring arms, he died.
“He's good. He tries. He hurt a lot of people, but so have I. He's sorry. And I wish I could be that sorry. I wish people could be that sorry.”
That was when Esther blinked back into JJ's cognition and said, “Dance Commander, disengage. Oh G-d, you poor girl. What did they do to you?” She bent down to the girl, whose chair had broken. She was splayed on the floor, quiet, unmoving, seemingly unfeeling. Esther wrapped the girl in her arms and looked up at JJ.
JJ looked down at her.
“You didn't hear any of that.”
“Sure,” said Esther. “What do we do with the girl?”
“I don't know right now,” said JJ, standing up. His clothes were soaked. The bugs trundled mindlessly in circles with their father dead. Downstairs, JJ assumed, Jude has passed out.
“He's going to find something here. And he's gonna keep going and find this dude. You're super aware of that, right?”
“Yeah,” said JJ.
“And you're still gonna go with him?”
“Until the end of the world.”
“Du farkirtst mir di yorn. Then I am too.” Esther sighed, and she stood up with the small girl. Light. She must have been so light.
Her hair was blonde, and her eyes blue. She couldn't have been more than fourteen. But she was small for her age. Withered. Hungry. And she didn't speak. Her jaw was slack.
“It's the Critic's daughter,” said JJ.
“I heard.” Esther bit her lower lip, and then said, “Let's go see if Jude's okay. Then I guess we gotta get this girl to a hospital. Or something.”
“Maybe then you can reverse the nudity thing?” JJ grinned. As much as he could while covered in a dead man's blood.
“Don't rush me,” she said, looking down at the small, blonde girl. She brushed her hair across her forehead. “G-d, poor thing.”
JJ watched Esther rock the girl until she fell into what seemed like an uneasy sleep. As she walked down the wrecked stairs to find Jude, JJ stood up and began to look through the room. Information, clues, anything. Anything to forget the way his heart beat, just a tad out of sync, when he had seen Jude first pause.
He looked at his arm. A perfect circular burn, inner left wrist.
Sometimes, even the blessed feel nervous, JJ figured.

« Bong Rip Tendency | Jude's Bizarre Adventure | Diamond Is Not Kush »


« Deus Vulture | Conqueror Worm »

Some twenty-eight parsecs from the planet Earth, in the atmosphere of a gas giant in a binary star system, a small hovering drone entered a long-abandoned library. The library was an ancient place: an enormous organic temple in the sky and the tombstone of a once-mighty race of oblate spheroids. The inside of the library was shaped like a teardrop, its pulsating walls lined with physical scrolls both outlandishly and prudently archaic; the ferocious storms constantly rolling through the atmosphere would have destroyed any digital information eons ago. Even the drone could not withstand the electromagnetic fields for long. Quickly, it floated to the outermost shelf and extended its soft grippers to carefully extract the uppermost scroll in the top right corner. The drone gingerly unrolled the scroll, took pictures of it, and then transmitted that information to a command module suspended in orbit seventy-three kilometers away. Just as gently, it placed the scroll back and moved to the next scroll.
As the drone examined each scroll in turn, floating down the spiraling shelves, the command module overhead analyzed the images and began translating. Soon, a pattern emerged. The library was no mere information repository; it was a warning. Each scroll in the temple contained stories, myths, legends, and even scientific studies of an ancient, enormous creature, slumbering in the deepest reaches of the cosmos, of such might and power that its mere shadow was enough to swallow entire star systems.
On top of a mountain on the planet Earth, a group of people trying to save the world were taught by an engine how to channel the Worm. With nothing more than a hope, a manuscript stolen from Vonnegut, and a metafictional condenser, they generated the perfect heroine. She could've been taken straight out of a book. She was intelligent, witty, charismatic, and strong. She wanted to save the world.
They rewrote the script, hollowed her out, and filled her up with as much Worm as they could.
Two-hundred-seventeen parsecs from the planet Earth, deep underground on a small rocky planet dotted by continuous volcanic activity, a three-kilometer-long platyhelminth vomited its undigested meal, which was quickly set upon by its offspring. It was the matriarch, patriarch, and offspring of its clan: an enormous, world-spanning clonal colony of equally massive flatworms. The patriarch had arrived on the world some billions of years earlier, carried on a chunk of rock from its original home by the Impact. It had adapted to its new, ferociously hostile world, swiftly out-competing the native life and developing a symbiotic relationship with the bacterial colonies of the planet. It had even developed a kind of sapience, passing down the knowledge of millions of years to its offspring.
The most crucial, and possibly even venerated (inasmuch as an eyeless acoelomate could venerate) memory of all was that panspermic instigator, the Impact: the obliteration of the homeworld by a creature of size enough to dwarf even the patriarch. One moment, the sky over the homeworld was darkened by a massive shadow; the next, the planet was rent asunder, simultaneously ripped to shreds and flattened and compressed into a disc and bent into a helix and twisted. The patriarch had survived by mere chance; its foraging had trapped it on a remainder of the homeworld thrown into space by the Impact. Some of the nerve clusters at the 'head' of the worm lit up briefly at the memory. It began to vomit faster, that it might forage sooner.
She snarled at them, a wild animal, driven mad by the Worm's essence; by a fractional distillation of the power, of the age, of the immensity of the Worm. The animal thrashed outwards; the essence of the Worm lashed outwards and twisted. The men and women trying to save the world were warped: their spines contorted and their eyes plunged inwards, stealing brain matter to make more eyes and their lungs started muttering under their own breaths as their skulls rotated counterclockwise to reality.
There were always people trying to save the world. A few more came and rewrote the script again, scrubbing her mind clean and conditioning her.
Two thousand parsecs away from the planet Earth, a hive mind construct that existed solely through the changes in the magnetic field of a half dozen red giants lightyears apart detected a mental lensing: a change in infospace, a shifting of priorities, a warp in information two thousand parsecs away. Something shifting. Something… twisting. Sunspots popped up across the half dozen stars simultaneously as they ejected great gouts of plasma into the solar systems around them, wreaking havoc on the dozens of inhabited moons and worlds around them. Then cores of the six stars collapsed in on themselves simultaneously, in a cataclysmic stellar explosion that lasted for months and briefly outshined their resident galaxy. Even as the cosmic bombs wiped out all life for trillions of kilometers around them, they were seeding the materiel of new life for trillions more.
The Worm briefly broke through into meatspace, twisting as it did so. The stars were remade, the life was redone, and then all was obliterated in its presence.
They told her that they had found her amnesiac in the snow. She was special; they were a secret rebellion attempting to save the world from itself. She was their Chosen One: a leader, a champion, a messiah, given special powers by fate. She believed it, of course; aside from knowing nothing else, why wouldn't she? It was almost like her destiny was written out for her.
And who wouldn't want to be special?
A billion parsecs away, an ancient race of sapient machines assembled a weapon powerful enough to collapse an entire universe.
«I worry that the machine shall fail,» the architect chirped, integrated into his own machine.
«Did you not design the machine? Are you not confident in your own creation?» came the response from the amassed workers, combining themselves to form the apparatus of destruction.
«This machine is powerful enough to annihilate our universe. The Wyrm is not our universe.» the architect feared.
«Was it not us that slew the Progenitors, the gods, before we were born? Was it not your creations that chained them to the floor of reality, and subjugated their minds that we might consume them? Was it not you that heralded us into the pantheon of divinity!» roared the masses.
«It was. And yet…» the architect worried.
«And yet we have constructed the ultimate weapon. The machine to pull the Wyrm into the under space and cast it into nothingness! We shall save our race or die trying!» the workers roared.
The machine came together. Great plumes of light streaked down the side, illuminating the apparatus and terminating in a central barrel.
«I fear that we have merely awoken a sleeping dragon,» the architect declared.
Throughout the universe, a million singularities suddenly became linked. In the spaces in-between their atoms, their protons, their quarks, the Worm awoke and twisted. The singularities suddenly inverted. The machine consumed itself, and with it, the machine race - the artificial deities - were expunged from the universe.
On top of a mountain on the planet Earth, a young woman's favorite pastimes were imagining ways to save the world and attempting to drown herself.
It was quite exciting, really. All she had to do was stick her head into the bathtub and hold it there. Her lungs would burn, her head would spin, her vision would darken, and she would start drifting. Then the tendrils running down her spine would twist, and start sucking up oxygen from the water. The water's oxygen content was limited, nor were the tendrils particularly efficient structures, so she still got the same kick. Little recreation could be found within the rebellion's hideout, and she was far too busy being their God to enjoy it anyways. She had to steal what little pleasure she could.
One trillion parsecs away, an aquatic race of cephalopods sensed the tremors pulsating through innerspace and prayed in fear. They were devotees of ancient, powerful beings who were old when the universe was young: eldritch abominations who were feared even by the gods themselves. Surely these ancient masters would slay the Worm, crush it beneath their heels, assert their dominance over all of time and space. The cephalopods would sacrifice their own people to gain the favor of the Ancient Ones, crafting an enormous apparatus that would siphon away the souls of their sacrifices to feed them. The last thought to pass through the minds of these sacrifices was that their prayers must surely be answered.
One trillion-i parsecs away, ancient, powerful beings who were old when the universe was young performed their idiot dance, deaf, dumb, and blind to the creatures that sought their favor. Yet even as these hideous, blighted things - creatures of sounds and shapes utterly incomprehensible to any being within meatspace - continued their song and dance in the space between the void, their hellish frolicking was muffled. It had been muffled since before time had meaning and would be muffled until after time ceased to have meaning. To dance louder was to attract the Worm as it burrowed through the spaces between realities.
A young man with the misfortune of being able to commune with the dead sat in a cell, surrounded by the specters of all the men, women, and things that had died in it. They haunted him, endlessly vomiting up words like so much verbal detritus. As one spirit explained his plans to escape and then butcher the man who had framed him, the young man contemplated his potential avenues of suicide. His planning was interrupted by the door being blown into the room. Had someone come to rescue him? The man got a better look at his savior and started backpedaling and screaming.
The person that stood in the doorway had no head. Instead, a writhing mass of worm-like tails snaked from its back over its neck, each tipped with a single eyeball that rotated, swiveled, and even dipped and ducked around to scan around itself in a 360-degree radius. From nowhere, it spoke: "Hullo, I'm Ramona Vonnegut. I need your help to save the world."

« Deus Vulture | Conqueror Worm »


« T Plus | Deus Vulture | Conqueror Worm »

Captain Sarah Hughes felt ill-at-ease, standing in the center of the lobby as scientists, engineers, programmers, and mathematicians streamed around her; a lone figure in a sea of geniuses.
"Ms. Hughes?"
She turned to face the speaker, a slender Russian man in a crisp suit and tie walking towards her.
"Simon Pietrykau, director of the Department of Analytics. Pleasure to meet you," he said, shaking her hand.
"Captain Sarah Hughes, a pleasure," she responded.
"Let's get started," Pietrykau said. He led her down several winding corridors until they stopped in front of a nondescript blank door with a card reader next to it. Simon pulled a card from his pocket, swiped it through, and stepped through the door. Hughes followed him and was suddenly accosted by the sight of dozens of people flitting through an enormous, steel-and-glass atrium. Holographic screens, personal assistant robotics, and all kinds of futuristic technology populated the room.
"Tell me, Captain… what do you know about eigenweapons?"

The two of them sat inside a small conference room off in one corner of the atrium, with a projector playing a slideshow in front of them.
"As long as mankind has existed, no human endeavor has hosted as much ingenuity, creativity, brilliance, or imagination as weapons development. Since the first ape picked up a rock to bash his rival's brains out, we've been building bigger, better, and flashier ways to carve holes in each other," Pietrykau said. "And like all such endeavors, it inevitably culminated in the anomalous - the eigenweapon. In this context, an eigenweapon, also known as a superweapon or wonder weapon, is defined as a weapon that is either of anomalous origin or incorporates occult slash paratechnology for mass destruction. It is effectively a fourth category of WMD."
Pietrykau clicked through a series of slides showcasing various anomalies while he talked.
"Anomalous artillery and paraweaponry is nothing new; people have been building golems and throwing spells around since the beginning of time. But the modern age of eigenweaponry - really, the age of eigenweaponry in general - began with the industrialization of the anomalous. In 1942, shortly after the Allies retook Africa, the Nazis got nervous and resorted to occult means to ensure the success of their Third Reich," Pietrykau said, clicking to the next slide to show a grainy, black-and-white photo of several hooded figures wearing cloaks with swastika badges.
"From what we can gather, the Thule and SS occultists uncovered some ancient ritual to summon… something," said Pietrykau. "Nobody was actually certain what, but if the Nazis wanted to summon it, then you can be damn sure the rest of the world wanted to make sure they didn't. The Seventh Occult War was really just a glorified scavenger hunt - the Allies and even some Axis mages working together to stop the Third Reich from acquiring the relics they'd need to complete the ritual."
He sighed.
"The Allies won both Wars, otherwise we'd probably be speaking Deutsch in some camp right now… but the thing is," he said, "the Germans still completed the ritual - and that's all we know. We have no idea what came from of the ritual or how the Allies destroyed it. The only reason we know it exists is because they didn't expunge the memory that it HAD existed. God only knows why." Pietrykau threw one of his hands to the side in an accusing gesture. "Presumably it was to warn us against trying to replicate it, but if so that was a terrible way to go about it. And even after they killed 'it', nobody could actually find the relics afterwards, not even fragments. It simply vanished - and nobody cared."
Pietrykau chuckled dryly.
"Sums up the attitude to eigenweapons in general. Nobody was paying attention to the world-ending threats because they were too damn focused on building their own. With all that power up for the taking, something as small as the threat of total global annihilation wasn't going to stop anybody. Especially not the CCCP. Stalin was so far up his own ass that he wanted to use anomalies to spread the Red Menace. That was the genesis of Project Redline."
"Redline?" Hughes asked.
"Redline. The world's second eigenweapon, developed by the Soviet Union. I led the team that created it," Pietrykau declared with a hint of pride. He clicked to the next slide, showing a picture of a flat concrete building. "Stalin wanted a weapon that could brainwash people into becoming Communists, and damn the cost. The Division wanted to create a brighter future for mankind - so we built a weapon to brainwash people into pacifism by kidnapping and electrocuting children to unlock their psychic potential. Because that was what passed for logic during the Cold War," Pietrykau snorted, shaking his head.
Hughes nearly heaved at the next picture - a grotesque, nightmarish mass of legs and arms sticking out of a bloated child-sized torso, topped by a misshapen head with three unhappy faces. It was strapped into a plastic dentist's chair, surrounded by sharp medical instruments and grim-looking scientists.
Pietrykau clicked his tongue. "Even madder, the thing actually worked. Redline could turn entire gulags full of political dissidents into perfect passive puppets. And when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, we fired it on Washington and Moscow. It worked all too well - Khrushchev had Redline shut down. The Division didn't like that. They decided to turn it into a weapon of conquest."
The next slide showed a picture of a massive rainbow-colored bubble in the middle of a frozen tundra.
"So that turned out all right. After the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and Redline was put on ice, eigenweaponry development stagnated. That's not to say people stopped using anomalous artillery; on the contrary, paraweaponry abounded. Demon-guided munitions in Korea, hunter-killer locusts in Vietnam, Mandelbrot vacuums in Afghanistan, basilisk grenades in the Gulf… the list goes on. But eigenweapons? The Americans made a few more half-assed tries in the eighties, but they failed and forced us to clean up their mess. It would be over thirty years before anyone figured out how to make eigenweapons not just practical, but profitable."
Pietrykau clicked to the next slide and Hughes' jaw dropped. The picture onscreen was of a gigantic, floating eye, rotated on its side. The central pupil was composed of innumerable camera lenses, laser apertures, and weapon barrels. An incandescent pink torus made up the iris. Surrounding the iris was a featureless, blue- and white-striped surface. Six silver arms hovered on the left and right of the eye. Suspended just out of reach of each arm was a single, silver-and-blue spherical palm with four rectangular fingers.
"In 1998, Prometheus Laboratories developed the world's first practical eigenweapon: the PL-76 Shiva, a sapient war machine that cost the same as a B-2 stealth bomber. Enough firepower to level a continent without leveling your bank account."
"Prometheus Labs made that?" Hughes asked.
"Indeed," Pietrykau responded. He made a knowing face. "Tell me, what do you know about Prometheus Laboratories?"
"Umm, high-profile scientific corporation. Did a little bit of everything…? Used a lot of anomalous tech in their products… most of it didn't work that well," Hughes responded cautiously.
"And where did you learn this information?"
"Ah… the internet, the Foundation file -"
"Ah yes, the Foundation file," Pietrykau cut her off. "With the advertising transcript, correct? Here's the dirty little secret that every member of Analytics needs to know." He leaned down to retrieve a folder from his briefcase, then slid it over the table to Hughes.

This document is classified Level 5/Analytics. Unauthorized access is considered treason and is punishable by administration of Behemoth-class amnestics or execution.

1. Code Name: Operation EMERALD LUPUS
2. Dates of Operation: 03/09/1998 - Ongoing
3. Location: Worldwide
4. Objective: Assert materiel and information control over the assets of the former Prometheus Labs conglomeration as part of Operation BYRON FUTURE.
Task Organization:
1. Asset Acquisition: Foundation front companies will endeavor to purchase all assets being liquidated by the former Prometheus Labs conglomerate. This acquisition will be overseen by the Department of Analytics. Mobile Task Forces may be commandeered to acquire assets when legal purchase is nonviable or when other Groups of Interest are competing to acquire said assets.
2. Paratech Forecasting: The Division of Statistical Prediction will continue to investigate, instigate, and exploit trends in the global paratechnology market as they appear. This will enable continued proactivity on the part of the Foundation in controlling the distribution of anomalies into the global marketplace.
3. Information Control: The Division of Informational Security will manipulate global and internal media and information to provide the impression of incompetence on the part of Prometheus Laboratories. Defective Prometheus Labs assets may be given anomalous status and internal documentation modified to reinforce this control. A continued campaign will make Prometheus Labs assets less desirable to external paratechnology and obsotechnology interests, facilitating the increased success of Task 1.

Hughes looked up at Pietrykau. "So you're telling me…?"
"Prometheus Labs would have never survived for over a century if they weren't good at what they do," he answered. "The truth of the matter, Captain, is that the Foundation managed to convince the whole world that Prometheus Labs were incompetent mad scientists so we could steal all of their work. It remains one of the greatest single Maskirovkas of the modern age."
Pietrykau gave a short bark of laughter. "The day after the PL-76 was unveiled, the GOC and Chaos Insurgency both tried to steal it for themselves and somehow opened up a portal to hell at the center of the base. Defense wasn't just turned into a crater on the map. From what we can gather, the entire facility - all of its its projects, people, and knowledge - was quite literally transformed into information and uploaded into the world's safest external hard drive: the Shiva."
Hughes tried to process this information and decided to go with the simplest question. "So what happened to the Shiva?"
"It disappeared." Pietrykau gave a slight shrug. "In the aftermath and confusion, quite a few of Prometheus' remaining assets went… missing, and several of its subsidiaries suffered from so-called accidents. That was how the postmillennial age of eigenweaponry began: a half-dozen different organizations trying to cobble something together from stolen research and paratechnology. All of us trying to get ahold of the next big thing that would make the rest of the anomalous world quake in their extradimensional boots.
The Global Occult Coalition assembled something codenamed Gaius Prime - all we know about it is that they sent it to Siberia in 2000 to kill Project Redline and succeeded. By 2001, the Church of the Broken God had no less than three mechanical messiahs, who ended up excommunicating and then killing each other. When we salvaged Samsara in '02, we had this grand plan of making them the template for all our future Task Forces. The trouble is that the equipment we salvaged was damaged, so all we could do with them was test offensive paratech and handle thaumaturgic threats. Even that bloody gentleman's club, Marshall, Carter, and Dark, got in on the fray: they got their hands on an oracle to predict the stock market. As I recall, Samsara's second-ever mission, just before you were assigned to them, was to steal it."
Pietrykau clicked to the next slide. On the screen, a gigantic, four-limbed man that appeared to be made of rock was caught in mid-charge towards a collection of massive, ornate orbs surrounded in flames and suspended in midair. Hundreds of people were in the foreground of the image, all of them like ants watching the two behemoths duke it out.
"The arms race came to a head in 2004 with the First Eigenweapon Crisis. That year, the ORIA built themselves a thaumaturgic android codenamed Ifrit. It could fly, shoot fire, whip up hurricane-sized sandstorms… and sermonize. See those orbs? Every single one of them contained the brain of a priest. The Iranians sent it to India, probably so they could blame the Pakistanis and take advantage of the ensuing conflict. They had built a god in almost every sense of the word - and then used it to start a proxy war. "
Pietrykau looked disgusted by the memory. "The Horizon Initiative was less than pleased by this and took matters into their own hands. They were working on their own eigenweapons project - an absolutely enormous golem, even by the standards of golems, mind you - and deployed it to kill the Ifrit. In the process, the two reshaped the Indian coastline. Whatever the hell was powering those things, we couldn't put a dent in them."
"Then how did you destroy them?" Hughes asked, leaning forward.
Pietrykau chuckled. "We didn't."
The next picture also showed the orbs, but they were now extinguished and half-buried on a beach, with the tide pulling away in the background.
"I can only call what finally did them in an act of God," Pietrykau said. "But the aftermath… the Veil was torn to shreds and nobody had a sewing kit. Amnestics, PARAKEETS, antimemetics, you name it, we used it. A century's stockpile of the best mind-wiping tools known to man - gone in a flash."
He closed his eyes for a moment. Hughes was about to ask about the logistics of amnesticizing the whole world, then thought better of it.
"The only good thing about the Crisis was that it finally knocked some sense into everyone's heads," Pietrykau said. "A month after the crisis ended, the Coalition convened the Third Hague Conference and managed to corral all the major anomalous powers into disarming and deactivating their eigenweapons. Almost assuredly everyone who signed did so with crossed fingers, but much like nuclear weapons, nobody wanted to be the first to push the button. All we had to do was make sure things stayed that way."
A thought struck Hughes. "What about Able?"
Pietrykau snorted. "Omega-7 was the degenerate brainchild of an American general with an anomalous erection. The Yanks were all too happy to let us cover it up. We got off easy."
Then another thought struck Hughes."First Eigenweapon Crisis?"
Pietrykau clicked his tongue. "As of six months ago, the number of active eigenweapons increased to one."
He played a video on the projector. Onscreen, a young Japanese man stood in the middle of a barren field.
"In June, we determined that the Japanese department of anomalous research was developing an eigenweapon codenamed Oyamitsumi."
Onscreen, the Japanese man closed his eyes and stood there. Then his skin began to bubble and ripple, changing color from a pale tan to a deep purple and bulging outwards. A helmet and facemask burst forward from the sides of the man's head and slid over his face. A sharp, block-like weave pattern emerged on the skin around his arms and legs, granting it a distinctly mechanical appearance. Two smaller arms burst out from underneath the man's armpits, but there were simply holes where the hands should have been.
"From what intelligence has been able to gather, Oyamitsumi was the first production-ready model of a new bio-mechanical force-multiplying armored endoskeleton. All the power of a GOC Orange super suit… grafted to a person's bones." Hughes could hear the admiration in Pietrykau's voice. "Twin auto-aiming plasma railguns underneath the regular arms. Armor tough enough to withstand a direct hit from Hellfire missiles. Strong enough to lift a tank. It was fast, too."
The man onscreen had ceased to look like a man and now looked more like a purple Transformers action figure. Numerous tanks rolled into view around him and then stopped. Their cannons bellowed as Oyamitsumi was bombarded on all sides and then engulfed in smoke. While the smoke cleared, the men inside the tanks clambered from their vehicles and fled from view. Oyamitsumi strode out of the smoke towards a tank, completely unscathed. He disappeared behind it, and then the tank was suddenly hoisted into the air as if it were tissue paper and thrown at another one. Behind it, Oyamitsumi's railguns began swiveling and firing. Within seconds there were only chunks of scorched metal left.
Hughes was so caught up in the spectacle that she almost missed Pietrykau's word choice. Almost.
"Was?" she asked.
"Was," Pietrykau confirmed. Onscreen, an Asian woman in a plain black dress walked into view. At first she looked perfectly normal - if incredibly out of place - and then her body suddenly exploded into a million tiny worms, all writhing around themselves and squirming and making up the general body shape of a person.
As the creature stared at Oyamitsumi, he appeared to crumple inwards on himself. The railguns at his side forced themselves back into his body, displacing his internal organs in the process. Then his head quite literally bent over and stuffed itself into his stomach, before his legs, arms, and torso followed suit. Then the stomach simply ceased to exist onscreen. Hughes blinked and suddenly the humanoid mass of worms ceased to be a worm and started being a woman again. It walked offscreen, and then the video cut to black.
"What the hell was that?!" Hughes exclaimed. She looked to Pietrykau.
"At 0900 hours on June 16, Oyamitsumi was destroyed by what we have determined is another eigenweapon of unknown origin, based on its deliberate choice of targets and clear control of its abilities. At 1100 hours on June 16, my counterpart in the Global Occult Coalition called me demanding to know what the hell we'd done to Oyamitsumi."
Pietrykau stood up. "If the GOC knows, then the whole bloody UN does. Make no mistake, Captain - this is a crisis. The button has been pressed and we have no idea by whose hand. We need to act fast if we don't want history to repeat itself."
He started making a list on his fingers. "We need to find out who created that thing, where it is, and what else it can do. And we especially need to make sure nobody else tries to follow its example. The Department of Analytics is reopening the Eigenweaponry Division to nip this situation in the bud, and we need someone to command the Division's field assets. That's where you come in. You were the most qualified candidate for the job, especially given your experience with Tau-5."
"Are you offering me a new assignment?" Hughes asked bemusedly.
"A promotion - to commander of Mobile Task Force Tau-1, 'Deus Vulture'," Pietrykau said. "Congratulations, Major."
Hughes' head was spinning. "Well, er… thank you. Where do I start?"
"Excellent," said Pietrykau, rubbing his hands together. "We've already received reports of some suspicious temporal anomalies occurring in northern India; you'll be flying down there first thing tomorrow to establish what it is and what to do with it. The Department of Analytics will handle the paperwork and logistics - you won't even need to pack toiletries. A car will arrive at your residence tomorrow morning at six to take you to the airport. You'll receive a full briefing and dossier on the flight."
He stood up. "Any questions?"
"Just one," Hughes said cautiously. "Why didn't I just get an orientation lecture and dossier? Why did you sit down with me personally and tell me all this?" While still telling me nothing about my new job? she added silently.
Pietrykau paused at the threshold of the room. "You needed a human perspective."
He beckoned Hughes to leave with him.
"I was there when all of these things happened, and I saw what the one common element among all of these eigenweapons was: somewhere along the line, everyone unconsciously decided that there needed to be a human mind in control in the process. Remember this, Major. A monster can be leashed and even trained - they are predictable. Men are not. Perhaps we needed to put human faces on inhuman creations, perhaps we needed to think we always had control, or perhaps it was simple hubris, but we made monsters with the minds of men."

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