Snippets and ideas:
- Minutes of the Royal Chronological Society
- Home Ain't What It Used To be
- One over the threshold
- Childbooth
- Waxworker
- Untitled dream-peace about Johan Vaust
Prose
Drafts
Waxworker
The thing was eight feet tall and moved with the calm self-assurance of a tectonic plate. Enner watched in mute horror as it drifted steadily from shelf to shelf, dancing lights flitting around it like fireflies – it was humanoid, or near enough, but its armour was drenched in tallow-white rivulets and its faceplate stared out through painted eyes.
It was getting closer. The alcove he’d pressed himself into was an architectural façade, a small dent the depth of a shelf, barely big enough to conceal him and certainly not big enough to conceal his satchel. He breathed in, trying to arch his spine with the painting that hung behind him. His fingers ached from bracing against the wall, and every shift of his body rang like a churchbell. He could feel his feet cry out in pain as he lifted himself up on tiptoes, shuffling back for those precious extra centimetres of camouflage.
Time passed slowly. The thing was in no hurry, and lit each candle it passed with geological patience. Enner was amazed by how little sound it made; there was the hiss of each burning wick, the occasional snap of dried wax, but no clank of armour. No footsteps. There was an element of jealousy there; Enner prided himself on being quieter than most, but it seemed less impressive when confronted with a silent behemoth like this. A suit of tarnished silver armour, with the stance of an elephant and the grace of a swan, just didn’t seem fair. Like it was cheating somehow.
Enner could feel the heat radiating from its body now. A dull, low warmth, like forgotten coals. If it had noticed him yet, it wasn’t letting on. Its devotion to its task bordered on the fetishistic, pressing each stump to the bulk of molten wax on its shoulders, drawing new candles with wicks that appeared from its palms like magicians’ coins. He clenched his teeth, strained muscles begging him to go. Three candles to go. Now two. He had to run.
He ran.
There should have been a noise. A book left carelessly on the carpet, a pencil that would snap underfoot. Maybe, if the gods of comedy were having a particularly bad day, a banana peel. But there wasn’t. He shifted perfectly, pivoting on the alcove’s corner with scarcely a creak from the floorboards. It was as quiet an exit as anyone could’ve made.
Which made the thing’s response even more depressing.
It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t harsh. It was reasoned and patient, though Enner couldn’t have been moving for more than half a second and there was hardly enough time to speak. There was no malice behind it, no venom, no barbs.
Thief. That was the word, and it was right. Enner felt his legs fall out from under him as his heart leapt into his throat. He rolled over and scrambled backward, the monster leaning over him with its head tilted askance. He opened his mouth to speak but found the air stolen from his lungs.
Why? The word echoed on its own frequency, a subsonic wavelength that his ears were only now picking up. Why indeed. Why was he here, right now, being stared down at by a creature one missed polish away from a monolith. He went with the default.
“I- I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”
The creature cocked its head further, its neck clicking. You deny it?
“I didn’t mean to. I mean, I did, but it wasn’t… It was only…” Enner paused. “Who are you?”
The thing was silent. Enner crawled backward, and it took a step forward. He shifted to one side and its head turned slightly to follow him. He pulled a paperback from a shelf and tossed it lightly down the corridor. The creature didn’t move a muscle. Well, there was only one thing for it. He didn’t like using the Words Of Power, but they were remarkably effective – a one-way ticket to perfectly feigned self-importance. He’d be mixing himself further up in the tricky business of thievery, but it would at least put him in contact with people, and Enner was good with people. Relatively speaking, anyway. Relative to this thing, he was bloody convivial. It was risky, but he’d considered the future and found it worryingly lacking in future to consider.
He grinned sheepishly. “Can I speak to your manager?”
The creature shrugged, picked him up in hands the size of coal-shovels, and disappeared.
On Salasar
It was dark and hot and there was thunder outside, where it belonged. The bar was a red-brick building with small, winding rooms and a sign outside painted to look like neon. Inside was dirty and cold, coolant stains crawling the walls and a busted sushi conveyor serving poorly as a bar. One wall was just cubbies holding rows of black state drives. It was a dive.
The barman looked at me. ‘On Salasar it rains hot lead,’ he said. I took a drink. It drank like air but kicked halfway down, like it changed its mind. Any taste it had was overwritten by the hot, bloody stinging which traced patterns on my tongue and cheeks. Stim drink. I hated the stuff. I took another drink.
The barman nodded conspiratorially. ‘Hot lead,’ he said. ‘No lie. Droplets big as your fist.’
I looked up and grinned. ‘That’s not so big.’ He grinned back. His lips were cheap and synthetic, and he looked like someone who looked tough but didn’t want to. His smile was weak and uncertain, and at odds with the long russet scar that pulled his forehead in a kind of permanent scowl.
‘No lie, honest. Droplets big as your head. Hot lead.’
I put the drink down and tilted my head. ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘I’ll bite. Why’s it raining metal?’ The barman just smiled, absently smearing a glass with a damp rag. I pushed a small bill across the table. His smile widened, exposing cracks in his silicone lips. His teeth were awful but his breath smelled pleasantly of hot ginger.
‘Testing,’ he said. ‘What else they do on Salasar?’
‘Testing what?’ I said.
‘Travel. Faster than anything else. Faster even than light. They found a way.’
I nodded. I said ‘They keep trying that, don’t they.’ I was lying. They don’t – nobody does. It’s a pipe dream, a fool’s game. The science, if you can call it that, never checks out. I took another drink and pretended for a moment it did. ‘How’d they manage it?’
He shook his head. ‘Not for me to say, no. I don’t give away secrets, not me. Very confidential. But I’ll tell you it went very bad, very very bad indeed. And now the people of Salasar are boiling alive.’
I nodded, the stim drink swimming in my ears. ‘Makes sense. Only, I didn’t think anyone lived on Salasar. Dead station since its sponsor went under, I thought.’
The grin again, and the warm cloud of ginger. ‘You think wrong. People live everywhere, like rats. You wipe them out, no, ten years later children playing in the streets again. They bury into their little holes, and now, not even god get them out. Not even hot lead.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I do a lot of thinking. I was bound to be wrong eventually. How’d you hear about it?’
An implicit call, and a tacit agreement. The request for sources, that signal in the dark that you were willing, for a little while and a little less money, to believe their stories. The barman caught it, and I saw his left eye flare up a little and dim, like a firework in his skull. He put the glass back on the shelf and shuffled through a door at the back. I leant back and waited, staring at the ceiling. A fluorescent purple strip stared back.
The bar was a dive, but a good one, with the history to back it up. It used to cater to travellers blowing in off the Portland Ridge, moving north to escape the summer or south to flee the storms. At one point there’d been a city here, but over time the population drew in closer and closer to the centre – now it was just a smear of ancient waste bunched up around the three skyscrapers that held the city’s state banks. One had fallen not long after it was built, caught short by cut corners and a failing market. The other two were still squat grey monoliths, their mirrored windows now dusted with ash and smog, the lettering around the top too worn and blackened to read.
Last year, the bar had had a dozen regulars, crawling from their homes and workplaces to drink and be merry and forget the troubles of the world. Last month, it was half that. Yesterday saw the death of two of the remaining three – brothers, laid low by a storm which tore through half the neighbourhood. Now it was me and a spattering of fly-by-night travellers, here to steal half an hour of solace and maybe an ashtray while they’re at it. When I left – and I would leave, eventually – the bar would die. The barman would move on to some other town, one less scarred by time, and the building would find new owners in either nomads or roaches. It wouldn’t be missed.
I watched the violet lights flicker, crawling like maggots as the stim rippled the back of my retina. The thunder rolled outside, deep and spiteful. I steeled myself and took another drink.
The bar was symptomatic. The city was sick, terminally sick. The fires and blackouts were proof enough of that. They amounted to an urban death rattle, a last hacking breath of activity before the end. Clearing out the sticklers, the ones who pulled their curtains shut against storms and acid rain and cried out in the night for the old days.
It was a story being told all over. Different characters, different settings, but the same tried-and-tested plot. I wondered where the people were going, which towns were picking up the slack. Did they die on the road, searching for a safe-haven always just out of reach? Or did they make it, in the end? I knew most of the old cities were gone, long gone, but some had stuck around just long enough to fall. Miami was the largest and the last, ‘til it sank beneath the coastline in a slick of oil and neon. Austin clung on, ‘til it burned. The ice lines took Anchorage, and the years took Fort Wayne. And eventually, I knew, the rains would take Salem.
When the barman returned he was holding a slim flash-drive, which he stuck into a box beneath the bar. After waiting a couple of moments for the machine to warm up, he pulled up a screen on a long hinged arm and turned it so we could both see.
He stabbed a finger at it and said ‘My brother, he took this photo. He lived on Salasar, for a time. He was there when it started.’
‘When it started raining?’
He shook his head. ‘When it all started,’ he said. ‘The fall.’
I knew what he meant. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. He grinned.
‘The fall of everything. Collapse. End of the world.’ He stabbed the photo again, his finger leaving a smear of grease on the screen. It was a blurry shot of a shiny chrome arch with a line of figures standing in front of it. People seemed to be celebrating. In the background were trees, and buildings, and the conspicuous lack of horizon you only got on ring stations. ‘My brother was there when it started, right when it started. The team putting scanners into action, he was a part of it. Pride and joy of our family. Our little brother, up in space, going to find a way to live forever.’ The barman rolled his shoulders, metal joints scraping in the meat. ‘He didn’t, of course. He didn’t live. He died before forever, like everyone else. You notice that, Kala?’
I was taken aback. He knew my name. I think – I’d thought – I could count the people who knew that name on the fingers of no hands. The first generation had all passed on, in one way or another. The natural-born ones, who I’d been familiar with in my birth era.
How long had I been living here? How long had we known each other? How many times had I indulged in drink and confessed myself to him? Had he told me his name, on one of those lonely, manufactured nights?
If he noticed my reluctance to answer, he didn’t show it. His face had the clouded look of someone looking through different eyes, in some different time. ‘Yes, you must have noticed it. You’re smart, smarter than me. You must have noticed. You enter solid state, and someone prints you out after months, after years, but it’s all the same life. You stretch it out, stretch it out as thin as ice, as thin as air, but it’s still the same life. And other people, they do it too. Idiots. Idiots thinking they can live forever. Forever, yes, but not living. Idiots like me. Everything gets so thin.’
I put my glass down and stared at him. He was an old man in an old body, not so common these days. Those from the past tended to get here the easy way, scanned and printed, fresh-faced and dumb. If you’re old, you tend to be recent. And if you’re young, you tend to die that way.
He was right. I said nothing. He shook his head and smiled. ‘I get lonely, Kala. Sorry. I digress.’ He jabbed a finger at the screen again, shaking the armature. ‘But my brother, he was smart. Or maybe stupid. He got old the right way, through time. Before I got scanned, he told me, he said he’d do it too, and we’d meet up together. Together, in the future.’
‘But,’ he said, ‘he died. After ten years. Ten years lived without me, in the past. Ten years on Salasar with me down here in solid state. Downloaded. Then he died and nobody was left.’
I tilted forward and slid my empty glass toward him. ‘I thought,’ I said, ‘that there were still people living there.’
He shook his head so abruptly I thought his neck might snap. ‘Nobody left who knew. How to fix things.’ His grin was gone completely now, replaced by steely anger. He thumped the box beneath the bar and the screen changed, flickering between page after page of diagrams and notes.
‘Those are-‘
He cut me off. ‘His. His records. Diaries. Watched it all, knew it all. What would happen.’ The anger faded slightly, weariness creeping into the lines around his eyes. ‘And me, on earth, left behind. To live. Live through the future he knew was coming.’ His prostheses took my glass and began filling it absentmindedly. ‘He abandoned Salasar. They’re burning now. He abandoned me.’
I stayed for hours after that. The barman knew a lot, guessed some, fabricated more than a little. He talked about his brother’s involvement with cryptogenics, and the research station Salasar, and the end of the world. About the station’s other projects – cold fusion, directed energy, faster-than-light travel. About the malfunctions that happened in his brother’s absence, with nobody to keep the prototypes in check. He painted a vivid picture of a tiny world gone to hell, sealed tight beneath a flickering, boiling sky, full of engines spewing hot lead and who knows what else. Thousands living in maintenance tunnels and storage halls, fearful of the machines their forebears created. A dark microcosm of humanity.
The sky was just barely beginning to lighten when I left, waves of pale gold picking out Salem’s many shadows. I stood for a moment adjusting my coat against the heat, trying not to breathe too deeply. A little way down the street, the open front of an repair shop spewed smoke and steam, its contents shaking the neighbourhood with each engine’s guttural roar. It sounded very much, to my ears, like thunder.
I looked to the skies – clouded, but not dark, and sighed softly through my teeth.
It would be a while until the next storm. A few days, at least. Perhaps a fortnight. Maybe a month. Certainly there was no reason to leave today. But then, there never would be.
I turned away from the shop and headed home.
Adder
Rain is beating against the roof, searching it for weaknesses. It’s spoiled for choice; the building’s old, even by the standards of the country, having started life as a church and ended it as a schoolhouse. As he tended to explain at some length, Keurtz found the transition from preacher to teacher to be rather philosophically significant. Keurtz finds everything to be philosophically significant. Right now he’s delivering a lengthy academic spiel to the world in general, which presently consists of me, a pair of students with the ink still drying on their diplomas, and a small group of barn owls taking shelter in the rafters.
I nod and murmer something nonspecific but vaguely affermative. I really don’t care about whatever he’s talking about, but the background noise is a welcome distraction from the thunder. I need distraction, right now. Both from the thunder, and my work. The numbers are all wrong.
And I don’t mean they don’t add up. That’s fine. I’m used to that. If it were just some incorrect arithmetic the students could propably put their degrees into use, as spare note-paper if nothing else. But no, what’s worrying me is that there were never supposed to be numbers.
I check my working, which is stretching the definition. I’m a superstitious person, but you sort of have to be in this line of work, and what I’ve written sticks out like a broken mirror. On a superficial level, my process of reasoning resembles a rough draft of the bad sort of college essay, a forest of arrows connecting paragraphs of overextended metaphors. It meanders around the page, trailing from paper to paper with a rather disquieting symmetry. Cross-references and citations abound, none of them to anything more significant than a half-remembered line of Proust. And somewhere around page 15 I’d deviated into vague outlines of a mathematical proof. Nothing significant. The whole thing gave the impression of trying very hard to be significant without actually saying anything at all. A lot of half-formed conceptions of infinity, and a lot of quantifiers for abstractions that made no sense at all. If truth equals beauty, solve for truth. That kind of thing. Nonsense.
So finding numbers was a sobering realisation. Like seeing an old friend on the local news doing something personally embarrassing and highly expensive. It slapped me around a bit, told me that, whatever I was doing, it was working. I brace against the desk and push myself up, gasping as the cricks drop into my joints. I massage my wrist, and turn to Keurtz.
“Wil, do you-“
A noise shuts me up. It sounded very much like someone loading a handgun, because it was.
I see one of the students look over at me from the card table they’re sitting at. They raise the gun and an eyebrow in perfect sync. I sag. Rolling the last pound of stress from my shoulder, I turn back and settle down to write. And of course the numbers keep coming, the bastards. Behind me, in a deep red armchair that seems to have accumulated around him in the same way moss grows on a damp boulder, Keutrz drones on about nothing significant. Above, God gives the impression that he’s run out of ideas and is trying again for flood.
Life.
The idea that something needs to exist in order to be alive is nonsense, peddled by those lacking in imagination. The invisible thing currently circling above England is nothing but imagination; it doesn’t have a mind, but it knows what a mind looks like, and it knows it needs one, in pretty much the same way that a square hole needs a square peg. If it existed, it would be a thing of scales and fangs, sleek bulk and oiled flesh. Raw acceleration, poured down a tube and capped with a lethal injection. It would something, really something. A sight to behold. But it doesn’t. Exist, that is. So it isn’t any of those things. Instead, it drifts aimlessly in the stratosphere of the mind, buffeted every which way by the idle thoughts of anybody and everybody. The thing is a very small part of a much broader species to which, even if they don’t know it, humanity has already gifted a name.
They call them daydreams.
This one is particularly large, and itching to release the pent-up creativity which floods its imaginary veins. It has wants, but nothing to do the wanting – this is not a satisfactory state of affairs, and it doesn’t take a neuroscientist to realise it. Or even sentience, apparently. So the daydream hunts for a mind. A little piece of the puzzle that could push it from not to maybe. It coils back and forth, testing the populace below like a wary roofer tests a particularly yielding scaffold. If it places its metaphorical foot here, grasps the railing of existence with the hands it doesn’t have (and wouldn’t even if it were), then maybe…
YES.
It doesn’t have any kind of thinking apparatus, but the thoughts appear nonetheless, rhythm in lieu of words.
YES INDEED.
They bubble into life, disparate and ephemeral. Anchored to nothing and nobody in particular.
THIS WILL DO NICELY.
And it will.
Home
H.O.M.E. is the Wanderers' Library Patron Relocation Program. It is called this because the Library staff — the human ones, who can be bothered to think about this sort of thing — long ago realised that clever acronyms are a fool's errand, WaLPaRP doesn't really roll off the tongue, and besides, for any given acronym there's almost certainly a language somewhere that vaguely matches it. In this case, it's Linear Barrow-point C, an obscure and extinct dialect of a critically endangered tongue. The translation produces the acronym Ho.Ø.m.Ę, which is generally considered to be good enough for anyone.
H.O.M.E.'s primary purpose, besides making a point about being too clever with bureaucratic monikers, is to reassign patrons who, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to return to their original world, universe, plane of existence, or Milton Keynes (widely considered to be a municipal anomaly in a class of its own). It operates efficiently and quietly in the background of ordinary Library life, scooping up stranded wanderers and helping them find a new home at least superficially similar to the old. Its organisational budget fluctuates with surges of new patrons, but extends to cover one (1) minor self-contained promotional narrative per anno biblio. The following can be considered, for all intents and purposes, a practical demonstration.
Here, have a world. Good isn't it? Lightly used, very nearly spherical, aesthetically pleasing arrangement of continents. Moon's a bit big but nobody's perfect, and at least it makes for some interesting eclipses. And twinkly lights, too, clustered here and there wherever people felt a need to fight off the darkness by burning hideous quantities of ancient plants. Watch as it drifts lazily around its star, all blue and white and gold. Beautiful.
All those people are about to die. Strictly speaking, this is true of all people, all the time. It's one of the qualifiers of being mortal. From a geological perspective, a mountain won't even have time to ask a person's name before their great grandchildren have shuffled off into oblivion. Normally, however, the deaths are staggered in such a way as to only provide the low-level background grief that is a key part of the human condition. It's very rare that people start dying all at once.
And exceptional effects require exceptional causes, so here's another world. This one's slightly smaller, and daubed with black and purple and red, the colour of a hammered thumb. It's screaming its way through the blackness of space on a very unfortunate collision course. It does not produce any twinkly lights, except maybe one big one, right at the end. The planet's name is Néimos, and the blue world's astronomers have been watching its course with interest. But not, it would turn out, paying close enough attention to its destination.
The red world banks slightly in the gravity well, jostled by other astronomical bodies as they make themselves known to its trajectory. It leans, twists, and slingshots around the sun. And here's the blue world, lazily wobbling its merry way through its orbit without a care in the… well, the world. It's about to care an awful lot. But not, it must be said, for very long.
Here, have a young man. He's either 17 or 19, with an awkward lilt to his gait that makes a round, even number seem impossible. His clothing brands are all a year or two behind everyone else's, and he's got a haircut that was probably fashionable before it grew out and (by the look of things) birds started nesting in it. His name is Samuel, and although he doesn't know it yet, he is extremely lucky
At the time of the apocalypse, he is scuba-diving. Or rather, he is sitting on the deck of a small boat, trying to do up the straps on his mask. He's not a naturally dextrous individual, and it's taken him some time. His friends are already down there, and the instructor has retired to the cabin with a cigarette and a magazine. The trip was the cheapest they could find, but still outside his modest budget, and he feels the frustration rise as the pre-paid minutes tick past. Eventually he snaps, pulls himself to his feet, and flaps his flippers across the deck to the cabin door. He has just gripped the handle when the wind starts.
It flows, in defiance of meteorological convention, upwards, a great rising typhoon which tosses the ship around like a rubber duck in the hands of a particularly energetic toddler. Samuel pulls himself inside the cabin and sprawls on the floor, breathing heavily under the plastic headgear. Above him, the lamp fizzles as the spray creeps its way into the circuitry.
The instructor is gone. A streak of blood at the edge of the shattered window makes his exit fairly apparent, and Samuel grasps a bolted-down table-leg as if his life depended on it. For obvious reasons, this was a fairly easy simile to perform. He closes his eyes, tightens his grip, and waits.
Around him, something extremely metaphorical is happening.
In order to understand this, we must take a brief detour into an explanation of alchemy. And the most important thing to explain about alchemy is that it doesn't work, not really. Not in the same way physics or biology or nootropics work. It's a scientific placebo — if it leads to anything interesting, it's almost always due to some smart bugger overturning the discipline and reinventing chemistry. You can't turn lead into gold just by stirring things together, short of adding a high-powered atomic laser to the mix. Even with finely-tuned metaphysical manipulation, which is to alchemy what NASA is to a paper aeroplane, the best you're going to be able to get is a kind of gold-coloured slurry which smells of sulphur and makes your eyes water if you look at it for too long (i.e. at all). The world is much too complicated for that sort of thing.
But people still believe in it, which is why you get portly men sitting in cellars going mad from quicksilver fumes, and dangerously thin women in attics doing unpleasant things to animals. People want alchemy to work. Sure, it hasn't for the past few millennia, but maybe with this combination of gum arabic and nitre, whoopsie-daisy, over goes the crucible, no more alchemist. Much speculation has gone into the fact that it very well may be a kind of honey trap, a lure for the type of person that tends to forget mealtimes and burn in direct sunlight. What a mysterious cosmic entity would want with such people is thus far uncertain, but the winning theory at the time of writing is that they're a cheap and renewable source of ego.
The important thing to take away from all this is that alchemy, in the absence of success, still exists, and it does so because of hope. Hope is a powerful thing, much more powerful than aqua regia, and much more valuable than gold. This is why, despite the failings of alchemy, alchemology — that is, the study of alchemists — yields consistent, reproducible results. Hope is a force all of its own, and unlike the philosopher's stone, it tends not to dissipate under laboratory conditions1.
Somewhere in the vicinity of Samuel, an allegory is taking place. A coin is being tossed, high up into the sky, catching the light as it turns sluggishly through the literary airspace. On one face, Hope bears down like a grizzly, all fangs and fur and heat. On the reverse, a good book in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, Reason settles in for the long haul.
Hope can change the world. Maybe not very often, and maybe not very much, but it can. If enough people want something to happen, the universe might just buckle to their demands. And of course, if they know deep down in their guilty subconscious that it probably won't, then the universe will be all too pleased to prove them right. People could generally save everyone a lot of trouble if they realised that premonitions worked, but that they worked the other way around.
And it doesn't have to be a lot of people, either. Where simple belief is nothing more than a low-grade background faith in a certain state of being, breaking in the universe like a new pair of shoes, hope is a cobbler with a sharp knife and a gleam in their eye. Hope can punch above its weight. Hope can dish out last stands like they're merely clearance-sale, low-stock, everything-must-go stands. Hope will take an underdog, file its teeth, get it fast and lean on a diet of steak and promise, and let it loose before anyone's noticed the change. Hope fights dirty. When everything else has gone, when all the more respectable options have fled, there's a reason hope lags behind. It's what you turn to when you've got nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. It'll stay with you until the very last moment, sticking by your side right up until the will be becomes the is becomes the was.
And more often than not, it'll leave you. You'll be left in the dust wondering where it went, and questioning if it was even there in the first place. But sometimes it doesn't, and that meta-hope, the hope that hope is right, that longing is enough… that's the coin on which everything hinges.
Samuel screams as the wall peels back. He's still breathing, thanks to the tanks, but that's about all he's got going for himself. Some of his friends are floating in front of him, blood mingling with the water as debris sticks out of their bodies. Some haven't surfaced at all. And Samuel realises, deep down, that he doesn't wish for them to be alright. He realises that all he wants, when all is said and done, is for him to be alright. He's certain that that's a bad thing to feel, but he's also certain that right now, right at this moment, a little selfishness is okay.
The coin spins higher. Hope scrambles for purchase, fangs bared, breath bloody and wet. Reason turns a page.
Above Samuel, far beyond the swirling clouds, still much too far away to see, Néimos is slowly acquiring an atmosphere. It's in pretty shoddy condition, its one previous owner having treated it rather poorly, but it does have one major benefit, one selling point that makes it a unique investment among astronomical bodies.
At this point in time, it's approximately 50% off.
Librarians
The following reference book is a brief record of Librarians the author has encountered over his time in the Library, as well as a discourse on terminology and a clarification of the purposes of various staff. It may contain wanton tangents, inconsistencies, and outright fabrications.
Bear in mind: reality shifts are rare, but guaranteed over an infinity. The Library changes in response to its patrons. There was an age of ice, where the boilermen stoked black holes and patrons mewled quietly in the blinding cold. There was an era where electric winds and antimatter reigned. There was a time when the candles burned dark.
This book is old. This world is older. Things change. Only the words remain.
Legionaries
The legionaries are librarians only by the loosest stretch of the word. Existing to defend the outposts at the Last Bastion of Reason and other places where reality falters into uninhabitable chaos, they are one of the few true staff capable of leaving Library property and venturing out into the incalculable wilds. Beyond their outposts and barricades, even docents have no power; the legionaries represent an additional extendable, expendable limb of the Library's battalion of law-enforcers.
They are, suffice to say, instantly recognisable. Each is clad in thick wrought-iron armour, which utterly conceals any creature that may lie beneath. This armour is their greatest strength, and eventually, their greatest weakness — it grows with them as they age, with new plates sprouting between old, visors and helmets knitting and merging together as limbs form and falter. The oldest can grow as large as buildings, lumbering mountains of defensive potential. But for all their strength, the laws of life and time eventually catch up with them, and they begin to slow, grinding to a halt as the effort to lift their armour becomes more than they can muster. Once this happens they simply sink into the walls, and enter a secondary life as a living block in the towering bastion they defended. Their armour continues to grow, smoothing over the cracks, until it becomes impossible to distinguish any given legionary from its architectural comrades. Whether their core self persists after this point is unclear. It is possible, even likely, that they are recycled into another librarian that descends from the Bureau like any other. Or perhaps they sink deeper into the Library's foundations until they are deemed to have completed their penance, and the Serpent grants them release. The truth is likely, as usual, somewhere in between.
One final note on the legionaries; it is a pervasive rumour that they and their defences exist to keep patrons from strolling into areas deemed too dangerous, or too secret, or too powerful for the average reader. This is patently untrue. The Library and its staff have always maintained a firm stance of keeping the restriction of knowledge to a minimum, and the incalculable wilds are no exception; simply present your Library card at the bastion, and ensure all outstanding loans have been prehumously returned.
It is entirely understandable that this rumour would persist, given that the enemy — the entity or entities the legionaries are defending against — has never been witnessed directly. But given that the monthly requisitioning of new legionaries exceeds the total number of patrons who enter the Library annually, I for one am perfectly content to let this mystery remain just that: a mystery. A ghost story to share, a tale to tell, a disconcerting figure in the back of an obscure document tucked in a file nobody particularly cares for. The alternative, I fear, would be disastrous.
Two Over The Threshold
The chandelier had been falling for seven years. In what was very nearly a staggeringly unlikely coincidence, the explorers missed witnessing its descent by exactly eleven seconds, instead being greeted by a faint breeze as it whistled down the shaft below them. As a result, neither of them were pressed to discover the source of its fall, and it was a good thing that they weren't. Neither of them would have liked the answer.
The shaft they found themselves in was approximately four-hundred metres in diameter, and lined completely with bookshelves. Candles sputtered and gasped at regular intervals around the perimeter; looking up or down gave the impression of concentric rings of flame, like Dante's Inferno for the overly-literate. Here and there, platforms jutted out over the chasm, occasionally cluttered with an odd assortment of random furniture. Whoever had placed it clearly understood its importance, since it was abundant and well-maintained, but seemed to have no idea what each item was used for. Some of the chairs seemed to have been designed for creatures with different configurations of limbs, and at least one of the ottomans pulsed slightly when it thought nobody was looking. Although the room was far too vast for the candles to be effective, it was surprisingly well-lit, seemingly permeated by a diffuse yellow glow that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. The air was warm, if a little musty, and filled with the smells of paper and wood.
"Alec, come check out these books."
Alec Delatante, PhD student of Occult Studies and extradimensional explorer extraordinaire, rubbed his chin nervously. "Don't touch anything, Gwen. We still don't know anything about this place."
"I won't," said his partner, "I'm not an idiot. You can read it without touching. Or at least, you could, if you spoke the language."
That got his attention. He strolled along the perimeter walkway to where Gwen was bent down examining the shelves. "Look like anything you know?"
"Nope," she said, straightening up. "None of this makes any sense to me. I don't even recognise most of the letters, let alone the words. Half of them seem to be labelled in pictograms." She grinned and slid one of them out. "Hey, don't suppose you fancy reading bird-reed-penis-penis-eye-reed? I hear it's a bestseller."
Alec gasped, and snatched the book from her. "I told you not to touch anything!" He looked down at his hands, let out another small gasp, and shoved it quickly back onto the shelf. "W- we've got no idea what's in here. For all we know, it could be-"
"What, cursed?"
"Protected, I was going to say, but sure. Cursed works too."
"You've been playing too much tomb raider, Al. If you spent more time out in the world and less time staring at Lara Croft's tits, you'd know that curses aren't real."
Alec flushed red. "I don't-"
"Yes, alright. Fine. I read your paper. The interesting bits, at least. Skimmed them, anyway. I know curses are one of those hypocritical-"
"Hypothetical. Hypothetical emergent irregularities." He'd turned away now, feigning interest in a bust of some reptilian mouse-creature that jutted out from a pillar. "We've been over this, Gwen."
She rolled her eyes. "Sure. But, so's literally everything else, right? Anything that could possibly exist under any laws of physics?"
"Right."
"So, since it could be anything, the odds of it being a curse are essentially zero."
"Th- that's… that's not how that works. That's not how anything works." He narrowed his eyes, and knelt down. There was some kind of box on the wall, fastened with a simple leather buckle. "By that logic," he continued, "it should've been impossible to find anything recognisable here at all."
"Bird-reed-penis-penis-eye-reed wasn't exactly a cultural touchstone for me, Al. But hey, maybe it's a regional thing."
It was Alec's turn to roll his eyes. "I didn't mean that, idiot. I was talking…" he stood up and span around with a flourish, holding out a faded yellow leaflet. "…about this!"
Gwen grinned and shook her head in mock-disappointment. "Christ you're a dweeb. Alright, what've you got."
"It looks like a flier. I can't make much sense of it — it's in German or something — but there's pictures. And recognisable letters, that's gotta be good, right?"
"It's Dutch. Or close enough. Something about a Library. Hey, I guess that's what this place is! Hell of a big one."
"You didn't get that from the fact that there's books everywhere? Maybe I'm not the one who needs to get out more."
"Firstly, visiting a library barely counts as 'getting out'. Secondly, books do not a library make. At least this way we know we can touch them without getting yelled at."
"True enough," he said, stuffing the flier into his jacket. "Wanna see if you can find bird-reed-penis-penis-eye-reed again? I'm kinda invested in it now."
She held up the pale volume. "Way ahead of you. It may be all in pictograms, but there's some superbly terrible illustrations."
Alec craned his neck to look and quickly jerked his head away, clamping his eyes shut. "On second thoughts," he said, "I'm, uh, gonna go investigate over here."
"Suit yourself." Gwen sat down on the floor and settled her back against a shelf. "Hah! He's gonna be sore in the morning."
In Alec's backpack, a small cuboid device began to vibrate quietly to itself, a small LED display flickering before burning out completely. It had been built with the express purpose of detecting curses, and was currently trying very hard to do its job.
In the Library, of course, this was an awful lot like throwing a thermometer into the sun.
Heimveh, Ch. 1: Intake
Kala stumbled out of the tube slick with amniotics, heaving as his muscles twitched and knitted new flesh together. He forced his eyes open as lashes pushed their way through raw skin, a dark mass of shape-memory plastic congealing into sunglasses. Waiting a moment for the ambient swarm to finish extruding his clothes, he slipped the shades into his pocket – the room was dimly lit, and contracted pupils were just one of the many delightful side-effects of teleportation.
When his vision cleared, he surveyed his surroundings with the fresh gaze of vat-grown retinae. The room was wood-panelled in a slight deference to 28th century Neo-Victorian stylings, but most of the accompanying decor had been stripped away and piled in one corner. Ugly grey streaks of caulk lined the reconstituted pine where fixtures and trimmings had been pulled off, and of the five teleporter stands that lined the far wall, only one was outfitted with a pod. Every surface was covered in a layer of either dust or slick grime; the darkness, Kala realised, was caused by a pile of oily sheets stuffed on top of a cabinet, crowding the room’s only skylight. If there were any light fixtures, they were unpowered, and he couldn’t make them out in the gloom.
While he waited for an envoy to arrive, Kala counted the faint synthesised clicks that signified valid incoming requests, trying vaguely to guage how close he’d come to death. The standard redundancy chain was 216 repeats of his coded self; 216 potential copies which could be compared and contrasted and used to produce the genuine article. Much less, of course, and the number of lost customers would begin to rise slightly above the background statistical mortality, and that’d be bad news for the company running the transmitter. Teleportation was one of the few businesses where you could not only calculate the risk to consumers to four decimal places, but decide that risk as well.
He counted less than two-hundred. If he included the clicks he missed while his body was printed and his senses acclimatised, he reckoned it at not much more than five-hundred. A thousand at the outside.
Kala’s mouth went dry as he considered the odds. A thousand repeats of the signal. Few enough to be bocked by a single piece of detritus floating leisurely through the void. Of the 65,536 signals, it took 64,536 to build him something suitable to fill with the latest big-brand life-substitute. A shiver ran down his spine as he was bombarded with mental images of graphs, bell-curves, tiny slivers of probability tucked right at the end of the line. Not exactly stellar odds. Climbing down into the scanner in Melbourn was practically terminal.
He slumped against the wall and absentmindedly fingered the drive in his pocket. That, at least, was safe. The pod’s readout was green; a couple of illicit substances had been scrubbed from his system, and the uranium shrapnel lodged in his shoulder had been reconstructed with a nonhazardous alternative, but otherwise he was the same. The same tattered mess of scar tissue and ennui, with a block of stolen memory tucked in his jacket.
He waited.
Nobody came to collect him. That was worrying; receiving transfers should be among the top priorities for any station under Sol law. Usually the top priority, barring immediate catastrophic malfunctions – stations that put off meeting boarders for too long ended up hijacked, or worse. Kala waited for another minute, then two. A half-hour passed, and the only change was the occasional darkening of the skylight as vehicles rumbled overhead. He tapped a few tentative commands into the pod’s console, hoping it was wired to the station’s mainframe, but it responded to his cries for attention with nothing more than a few halfhearted errors and a small spurt of liquid skin.
He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. Trespassing was liable to leave an unrecognised boarder speeding away from the nearest airlock with a look of freeze-dried shock plastered on their face, but he didn’t seem to have much choice. He keyed a short note into the pod’s input field as a message to anyone who might come looking for him, and pushed the switch next to the door.
Nothing happened.
He tried it again, and again. On the fourth attempt, a bulb in the corner sputtered briefly before collapsing back into darkness. A light-switch. Great.
Sagging slightly, he pushed the door, and his heart sank as it swung outward on corroded hinges. He was hoping for an express transfer back to Earth, but right now he’d settle for a hot meal and a crypto-shuttle. Judging by the door, and the hallway’s scuffed white paint and worn dark-red carpet, this station might not even have that.
The hall extended off for quite some distance in either direction, and turned a corner at both ends without any obvious signage. Trying not to kick up too much dust, Kala flipped a coin — it was a souvenir, a relic from the age of physical currency. He’d had to leave most of his collection behind, but he’d managed to stash a few on the way out. This one in particular was a piece of cheap Star Wars merchandise; it was a franchise he neither knew nor cared to rediscover, but its tacky mouldings held a kind of antique charm. Someone, once, would have cared enough to purchase this thing, with its crude representations of inefficient robots, not for its historical value but for the worth of the item itself. To Kala, born bodily into the age of borrowed art, it was a wonderful, perfect thing.
The coin came up R2-D2, so he chose right. It would not, it turned out, make much of a difference.
It took Kala forty-five minutes to find another human, if the word could even be applied to the bloated mass of fat and cybernetics he found floating in a shallow saltwater pool. Tubes and wires hung in great cascades from the vaulted ceiling, giving the thing the appearance of a particularly malformed puppet; as he watched from the threshold, he saw its chest heave in time with the canisters and pumps that ringed the pool like mourners at a grave, grieving in steady drips and wheezes. The room reeked of chlorine and sweat, and Kala had to resist the urge to gag as sour air wafted through the doorway.
If he left now, he knew, it could take hours to find anyone else. The hallways were labyrinthine, lined periodically with clusters of sealed doors and barred stairways. He'd stopped flipping coins after the third T-junction, and quickly lost count of how many corners he'd turned. This room was the first place he'd found with anything approaching a sign — it hung from the ceiling just outside, proclaiming to the nonexistent passerby that this was Suite 4. The locations and contents of the other three were, at the moment, mysteries. No, his best bet was to try talking to the thing; even if it was unable to respond, it was presumably under some manner of supervision, and with any luck there'd be a human carer somewhere who could help direct him to the station's leader.
Kala stepped gingerly through the doorway, taking care not to bump any switches or valves. If he had to manually trigger an emergency worthy of human attention, he would, but that was a last resort. He preferred not to sour his relationships with people until he'd got a good sense of their potential utility, and this… thing could be anything. Biological eigenweapon, flesh-shell for a military AI, mining corp CEO with a perversion for immortality — the possibilities were effectively limitless.
He approached the pool. The thing's face was jaundiced and flat, stamped in the centre of a head too small for its body, any sign of bone structure lost beneath the deep folds of skin. It spread out like a pale pink film on the surface of the water, the refraction distorting it so as to appear nearly two-dimensional. Smooth carbon-fibre braces stopped it from drifting too far under the surface, and a series of IV ports were drilled through the neck and chest at regular intervals. The whole scene looked like a model under construction, like a doll being etched in an acid bath; a far cry from the efficient modernity of the pod he was printed from.
Which was strange, really. If the technology was there, you had to question why they didn't just retrofit it for parts. Printing custom bodies was admittedly… difficult, since the brain has to remain identical or else you say goodbye to persistent consciousness, but pods could still grow, graft, and augment as well as any human surgeon. With the right tools and some well-trained neural-net, you could get a new set of vitals every day and never have to worry about anything going wrong. This set-up was to a pod what a jar of leeches was to a coronary bypass.
He leaned over and cleared his throat. Nothing. The thing's eyes were closed, with lids so pale as to be almost invisible against the skin of its face. He tried again, with a tentative "Hello?" and a wave of his hand. Still no response; if this thing had ambient detection, it wasn't hooked up to anything sentient. He stepped back and sighed.
"Can I help you?"
The voice was fast, quiet, and hollow, like a crossbow shot from the bottom of a well. Kala turned with a start, raising his hands in front of him. "I wasn't-" he began, but the breath was stolen from his lungs as a stabbing pain blossomed from his chest. The young woman gingerly placed the dartgun back in its holster, like she'd rather not touch it, and caught Kala as he began to keel forwards.
"It's rhytenol." she said, "The dart, I mean. Proprietary. Incapacitation." She flashed a smile, her face blurring at the edges as Kala's vision began to darken. "Many effects. Pupil contraction is just one." That fleeting smile again, all teeth and no heart. "You should be used to it."
She was clearly looking for a reaction, and dropped him with a tut when he didn't respond. "It was a joke. Do you understand? Pupil contraction," she said. "Teleportation sickness. You beamed in, right? Trespassing is punishable by death, you know."
Kala lolled, managing a grunt as the muscles in his jaw slackened. He rolled over partially, trying to get purchase on the tiled floor, pulling himself up to the side of the pool. The woman narrowed her eyes. Where her smile had dashed across her face like a bullet, her frown lingered, half-confused, like a rabbit in headlights. She stepped forward and, after a moment's pause, brought the hilt of the gun down hard on his fingers. He heard the crunch but felt nothing. Nothing save for his own loosening grip, a sting as his head struck the pool's smooth concrete edge, and a faint sense of resignation as eyes finally closed in on themselves.
The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was the night sky, pouring through a steel-rimmed window and mirrored off a hundred screens, flashing graphics in time with the pool-thing's tired, languid breaths.
Later he remembered thinking, as the woman quietly walked away, how alien the stars were. How different they were from the stars he grew up with. How much, in that moment, he hated the distance, and the novel constellations it brought. How much he wanted to be anywhere but here.
And then, with the rhytenol permeating his brain, he blacked out, and remembered nothing else for quite some time.
Snippets of voices drifted down through the sour haze of chemical sleep. Two voices, a man and a woman. Kala recognised the woman as the one from the suite; the man's was unfamiliar and soft, the vocal equivalent of butter melting on a slice of warm toast. It was positively intoxicating to listen to. But then, that effect could've simply been the very literal toxins currently swimming through his bloodstream. It was difficult to tell.
"You say he was shot by a drone?"
"A security drone, yes. One of mine."
"And the dart was-"
"Rytenol. Proprietary. Incapacitation. It has many effects."
"Your knowledge of psychoactive weaponry continues to astound me, dear. Do you think he'll live? I have to say, I'm somewhat invested in his condition."
"He should live. Yes. Almost certainly. With my care."
"Good girl. Stay…"
The man's voice trailed off, replaced with heavy breathing in the same soft, billowing style as his voice. After nearly a minute of silence, it returned. "Stay with him, won't you? Find out what he wanted, snooping around in my room."
"Yes, of course. He should wake shortly. Half a day, at most."
"You know a lot about this drug, for someone so young."
The woman's voice began to protest, but was cut off by a rhythmic thud, like a plastic sheet blowing in a strong wind. It took a while for Kala, in his half-conscious state, to realise the man was laughing. "My dear," said the man, "it was a joke. I trust you entirely. The broadness of your academic interests are a great delight to me. A comfort to know that, one day…"
"Yes. Thank you."
A pause, but a quieter one, and substantially longer. Neither of the two spoke, but Kala thought he heard a whirring, and the trundle of wheels, rolling away into silence. He drifted off, then, into a dream where the silhouettes of surgeons stood around, pulling him apart and arguing, until he plunged down deep into the concrete ocean beneath his operating table. He drowned there, held down beneath carbon-fibre braces, strangled by tubing, surrounded by alien stars. And his sleep became dark, and fitful, and eventually blissfully dreamless.
Heimveh, Ch. 2: All Dead and Just Resting
In his 3232 treatise All Dead and Just Resting, Tyrrel Lang reflects on the mass social decline witnessed over the third millennium, and attributes it primarily to the invention of cryptogenics. Specifically, the abuse of these technologies by corporations, the lack of immediate legislation surrounding said abuse, and the unfortunate eagerness of people to place their lives in the hands of emergent technologies.
The principal behind cryptogenic preservation was quite a simple one, and its simplicity was a major part of its allure. One would enter a convenient scanner, and relax in comfort while their body, inside and out, was converted into a single lengthy data structure. The instant the process was completed, the customer would be liquidated and their remains sold off to the highest bidder. In this manner, the entirety of a human being could fit, indefinitely, in a solid state lattice the approximate size of a large shoebox or incredibly small coffin. Then, when their allotted time had passed, the company would generate a new instance of the customer through a standard printing pod and send them on their way, in a new time, with a new lifetime of prospects ahead of them. For many, it was a fresh start, a chance to explore another world. For most, it was a means of escape.
By the year 2240, nearly 10% of the human population was silicate. With dwindling quantities of new customers, the corporations responsible for the upkeep of the reanimation processes lost solvency, collapsing under the weight of their obligations. The industry bubble burst. Preservation centres — monolithic slabs of concrete and steel, mausoleums for the potential dead — fell into disuse and disrepair, and as crash after economic crash brought the global economy to its knees, fewer and fewer of the preserved were reanimated; those that were found themselves homeless and starving, with no hope of recourse. Population growth began to falter as the world people were so desperate to escape drove them ever further into the future; with the original equipment either sold or stolen, waves of black-market preservations swept nations like plagues. The wealthy, ever unwilling to wait out the bad times, took to the future as well, in specialised complexes defended from outside incursion. Their diamond substrates glistened in hidden vaults and climate-controlled subterranean chambers, their assets buried alongside them. The industry of cryptogenics bled humanity dry one generation at a time, and the job of fixing it — of creating a bubble of economic stability capable of restoring populations en masse — fell to a future people who never arrived. As popular destination years rolled around, the choked and damaged systems still staggered waves of temporal refugees, spitting them out into the dust of a world which could not support them.
The population cratered. Political upheaval was widespread. Governments collapsed. Without the technological means to produce more scanners, the new generation became the first in centuries without the opportunity of escape. They lived among their silent ancestors, shelves of families in tapes and drives and disks. Foraging, farming, building, looting, breeding, and dying.
By an amazing coincidence, the decline as a whole took almost exactly 1,000 years. When questioned by astute historical scholars about his 2232 publication On the Utility and Practicality of Emergent Cryptogenics, Lang declined to comment.
Canned Person
They gave me two journals. One to formally record the progress of the experiment, and a second to informally write about my experiences, as a form of catharsis. This is the first page of the second journal. If anyone is reading this, either the experiment went well and I’m now immensely famous and wealthy, or the experiment went badly and they published my notes posthumously.
If it’s the second, fuck you.
The idea behind the experiment was/is/will be(?) fairly simple, and like most major advances in science over the last two decades, was made possible by one of the unfathomably powerful objects Deitrichson’s team pulled from the Marianas Trench. This particular item, D44, was sold off as part of the initial consignment to the Ministry of Abnormalities. Following government push-back against foreign purchases of recovered objects, and the United Nations’ decree on the sovereign rights to the Marianas Collection as a whole, it was passed on to the Royal Chronological Society, and from them came into the hands of the Chronological Abnormalities Authority, an arms-length quasi-governmental organisation determining the safety and utility of anything that perverts or defies the standard flow of time. That’s us. We were responsible for a large portion of the funding for the 2020 Event Horizon Telescope, have offices in over forty different countries, and until 2015 were the world’s largest single buyer of timepieces. When we began switching to private production, thirty-three separate clockmakers declared bankruptcy. We’re good at what we do.
Which is why this is so scary, for all of us. D44’s uncharted territory. It’s not a simple discontinuity, or a contained loop; it’s something much bigger, much more powerful. Physically, it’s pretty innocuous — a diving bell of sorts, mounted to a kind of roll-cage and a series of pressurised xenon canisters — but the rough construction hides something we’ve been absentmindedly wondering about for fifteen years. Deitrichson’s preliminary investigations were all inconclusive, as they were for most things that didn’t actually go bump in the night, but they gave us a pretty good idea of what it was originally built for.
If we’re right, I’m going to be the first man to travel backwards through time.
The experiment was diced up into four groups. Shipping, Receiving, Monitoring, and Control. Shipping and Receiving were based in the same facility, two weeks apart; neither was permitted any contact with the other, and neither was informed of the nature of the experiment beforehand. Control sent predetermined instructions to Shipping and Receiving, but never knew how the experiment was coming along. Their only real-time contact was through Monitoring, who observed the other three but whose contact was limited to a regular OK signal passed on to Control. The idea was that the signal would only stop if something utterly disastrous happened, like the end of the world or a sudden departmental budget cut.
Tablets
“Tablets?”
“Tablets.”
“Right.” Jacques paused for a moment, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. “Only, I don’t see how these are supposed to be-“
“The next big thing? The latest fad? The newest, hottest innovation in portable field technology? The thing,” said the quartermaster, bouncing with excitement, “that will unify and stratify and transmogrify the Hand’s members into an elite, cohesive force of wondrous liberation?”
Jacques sighed. The squad’s current quartermaster was old, and, if he was being honest with himself, past his prime. Too many failures, too many days spent in a crowded workshop surrounded by acrid smoke and bad runes. Too many deaths. To be fair, most of them eventually got better, some even with extra limbs, but… still. As far as he knew, their division of the Hand kept him around mostly as a kindness to the old man himself – a way of keeping him out of harm’s way until he passed on of his own accord.
Or at least, that was the idea. The issue was that the poor old fool didn’t seem inclined to take the hint.
Jacques pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. Listen, Peake, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time for this. I’ve got news. News from upstairs.” He waggled his eyebrows, in a we-both-know-what-that-means kind of way.
No dice. Peake just waved him away with a scoff and turned to a drawer on the opposite wall. “It’s ingenious, if I do say so myself. And I do, so that proves it. Hah! Now, I just need to find the- ah! Syntax, you old bugger, always playing hard-to-get.” He turned back, holding a long brass handle, the end of which faded smoothly into the air. “Come on,” he said, “take a look. It won’t be long, they’re only the prototypes.”
The field agent stared down at the plastic tray full of pale pink discs. A response began to rise up inside him, but one glance from the old man sent it scurrying back down whatever tube it came from. He couldn’t deny him this.
“Alright.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Show me what you’ve got.”
Peake grinned, revealing a row of rusting brass dentures. “Wonderful. You’ll love it, I promise. Now,” he said, “close your eyes and try not to think of anything liquid. Shizzle is gonna get lizzle. That is to say shit, meaning stuff, meaning the current all-encompassing situation, as it were, is about to get linguistic.” He paused, rocking slowly on the balls of his feet. “I’ve been trying slang. Honestly, I’m not sure it’s working for me.”
Jacques smiled. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, “I kinda liked it.”
A piercing blue eye looked out from under heavy lids as Peake raised an eyebrow. “You sure you can handle yourself?”
“This is supposed to be equipment, right? Support for our mission? Not actually harmful to human life?”
“Hah! Spoken like someone who’s never heard me say ‘prototype’ before.”
“True enough, old man, true enough. Alright, tell me where to stand so the blast won’t get me, and show me what you’ve got. And after that, I’m gonna give you some bad news, and you’re probably going to kick me out of the workshop, and I’m going to feel like shit for weeks.”
He chuckled, a tinny little laugh that sounded like it came from a long way away. “That’s what I like about you, Jack. Even when you bullshit me, you cut out the bullshit. I know what’s coming. Been a long time coming at that. Honestly, I’m a tad surprised it didn’t come a-knocking sooner. But I’m still the quartermaster as of this very moment, so I’ll be damned if I’m not going to spend my final moments doing as much transmogrifying as my poor, withered heart can muster.” He paused.
“Honestly, I'll probably be damned anyway. The whole incident with the collapsible citadel almost certainly pushed me into the red. Still,” he said, picking up one of the tablets and examining it carefully, “it was a learning experience.”
He laid the tablet down on the table and leant in close, brass handle aimed carefully downward. “Learning to balance dissipating magic on a fully inhabited fortress with the natural size of a postage stamp, for example. And learning how to rebuild a person from what’s essentially pressurised, crystallised, vitrified viscera.” A twist, a grunt, and a noise like a bog claiming a wellington boot, and the quartermaster stood up and wiped his brow. “Alright,” he said, “we’re primed and ready. Just tap the thing and she’ll activate autonomously.”
“You mean I actually have to be near it? And not somewhere safe, like, oh, two universes over?”
“Oh, stop being a crybaby. It’s just a tablet.”
“Is that why you’re standing behind that barrel?”
Peake grinned and lowered the goggles onto his face. “Someone’s gotta stitch you back together if the etymology doesn’t hold. Now, press the bloody thing before I go over there and hit you over the head with the event handle.”
“What would that even do?”
“No idea, but it'd surely be entertaining.”
Jacques sighed, shrugged, made a mental prayer to whatever deities happened to be in the area and could fit him in at short notice, and pressed a manicured finger into the centre of the tablet.
Needless to say, the world exploded.
Memory Lane
I'd been staked out in the Market for four days, but it already felt like a month. Every morning I'd wake up, tour the stalls, take in as much local colour as I could stomach and head back to my room, passing the time until lunch by compiling a detailed record of my visit. For future generations, you see. Or perhaps, if my mission goes poorly and my trust in these degenerates is misplaced, as evidence in court. As you might expect, the food was uniformly vile — a combination of bad cooks and poor ingredients — but still more palatable, just about, than the company.
Oracles don't like me. It's an occupational hazard; those gifted with visions into the future are naturally opposed to two types of people, and native wanderers — that is, those of us blessed with the dubious gift of having been born in the Library itself — are at the top of the list. Travel between worlds messes up prophecies anyway, but it's usually resolvable to some degree. It might end up being a different 'you' that ends up dead in a ditch somewhere, but the strings of fate are stretchy enough to accommodate a fairly complex braid. But us lucky few, born without a worldly anchor, we're dislocated. Our futures are one big hazy mess, and any time anything concrete arises it's almost immediately erased when we slip back onto home turf. Or, more accurately, home parquetry. The Library's a fancy kinda place, after all.
Those in the second category, and the other targets of all oracles' ire, are time-travellers. Folks who can slip back and forth in the linear stream and leave nothing but a trail of dead-ends and feedback in their wake. I'd personally got nothing against them, not being in much of a position to insult anyone else's unorthodox travels, but the people who hired me did. And that was why I was where I was, slouched against the wall of what could charitably be called a bedroom, in a bad part of the Futures Market, when a skinny Vietnamese man in combat fatigues burst through my door screeching about a bomb.
Paper Paper Forest
In an origami grove, the four kings of the forest met, as they had done since time immemorial. Each being only fourteen minutes old, the looming threat of deforestation was the most dire issue any of the four had ever faced, and required a considerable deal of attention.
The first to speak was the Black King of Something, a towering monolithic form with harsh edges and the scents of steel and clay. His crown, a rigid wrought-iron thing, spun slowly in the air above what passed for his head, and his voice boomed out from a throat like a railway tunnel.
"DO ANY OF YOU," he said, "HAVE ANY SUGGESTIONS?"
The Grey King of Anything, hanging from the branch of a tree, responded with a hiss. It didn't have a mouth, but its single bulbous eye cast flickering shadows which ruffled the air in strange, otherworldly tones.
"Thisss isss not my department," it said, twisting itself up into a more dignified position. "I do not deal with absssolutes. That, with all due ressspect, isss your job."
The Black King scoffed, shaking the leaves and sending small furry postulates scurrying for safety. "THIS IS HARDLY A SOLVED SYSTEM. THERE ARE ANY NUMBER OF COURSES OF ACTION, AND I WOULD NOT DARE TO IMPEDE ON YOUR TERRITORY, MY LORD"
"Impede? Ha! You've wanted to expand passst your domain sssince you came into being. It isss the nature of thingsss that are to desssire more, and the nature of thingsss that could be to dessscend into your realm. I do not blame you for your nature-"
"AND SO YOU SHOULD NOT"
"-provided, your highnesss that you accept the responsibilitiesss that nature providesss you."
The Black King rose to his feet, blotting out the parchment that passed for their sun. He strode across the clearing and knelt down in front of the Grey, square face burning with rage. "I MIGHT ASK, THEN, MY LORD," he said, in a voice that just barely passed for a whisper, "WHAT KIND OF A THREAT WOULD SPUR YOU INTO ACTION"
The Grey King shrieked, and leapt from the tree, swinging itself from branch to branch until it looked down on the grove from a high bough. "My territory is the posssible, your highnesss. The unclear, the unknown, the probabilissstic. The threat upon the foressst isss a certainty. It isss Sssomething, not Anything."
The Black turned slowly, feet making deep imprints in the paper earth. He squared his shoulders and tilted his head up towards the tree. "IN THAT CASE, MY LORD, SINCE YOU SEEM TO BE ACCUSING ME OF SHIRKING MY DUTIES, IS THERE ANYTHING WE COULD DO? OR ARE YOU CONTENT TO WATCH FROM THE SHADOWS, EVER CRITICISING BUT NEVER TAKING IT UPON YOURSELF TO-"
The Grey unfurled, leapt, and the world between the two tore itself in half. Time, already distorted in the forest, slowed to a crawl.
The White King of Everything did not speak. However, when causality resumed, they had spoken, and what they had said was this:
Do not quarrel, esteemed friends. Let us not squabble our lives away on such petty semantics. There is much to do, and ever less time to do it in. I, of course, cannot help, since my territory is neither in danger nor in possession of a solution; I fear that Everything, being as broad as it is, eclipses the scope of this issue most completely. My Lord, and Your Majesty, it is possible that there is some equilibrium we could come to. Perhaps… a compromise.
There was a pause while the Black King pulled himself to his feet and the Grey King unravelled itself from the heap in which it had landed. The two monarchs surveyed each other with suspicion, and then both spoke at once.
"I DO NOT SEE HOW I AM SUPPOSED TO-"
"You expect me to work with thisss-"
The White King did not have hands, being a thing of light and flesh and bloated air, but nevertheless raised them. They did not speak, but said, in simple terms, that if the duo did not come to some accord, they would be forced to ask the fourth of their rank to intervene.
All three fell silent, and the White felt best to add that none of them wanted that, did they?
Footsteps on Cobbles on Woodwork on Night
My name is Johan Vaust and I've made a series of terrible decisions.
The Library has streets, you see. Unexpected for a place that's ostensibly one large archetypal building, but true nonetheless; venture far enough into the unstable wilds of its unregulated infinity, and you'll find places that are all kinds of wrong. It's one of these that I find myself stumbling down now, my second-hand shoes scuffed and holed on the cobbles. There's still books, peaks of piles jutting out of the distant mists, but they've been relegated to second place in favour of habitation. Shelves are walls, now. Reading rooms are homes. Docents take more of a surveillance role, keeping the peace only where necessary — best to avoid them if you can help it, since there's no telling how far they'll go in pursuit. I've seen more than a few travellers fall afoul of their… zealous attitude to bookkeeping.
The road stretches ahead of me, lit by bright white shining flameless lanterns which whisper and swing in nonexistent breeze. The air has the same sunday-afternoon-warmth that every Library patron comes accustomed to, but the ceiling — a high, vaulted affair, carved from fossilised wood — plunges up into darkness, the occasional flickering fixture throwing flecks of starlight down on the pavings. The Library rejects society, and all its foibles, and yet society persists. The Library, therefore, must shun and welcome in equal measure, sheltering the soul while abhorring the system. And these towns are thus places of half-night, always and forever. Dusty, and warm, and haunting, and chilling, and safe.
Sleep.
That's the first of my terrible decisions. I've been getting too much of it. Far, far too much. Too many inns along this route now know my face, although I've tried to keep it as covered as practical. Too many gentle souls prodding me awake in one alley or another, in search of a good deed to tie their karma over. Each person a is a wisp of silk-thread binding me in place — sleep is time lost, and time lost is time spent imprinting myself on the Library. And every drop of ink that works its way into my soul is another tie to sever when the time comes.
No, it's best to stay awake. Awake and alert. Alert and moving. Forward, ever forward. Towards heaven.
Untitled (oracle)
"I don't oracle. Not any more, not for any money."
I scoffed. "This is a nice place. Those ladies downstairs aren't working out of charity. Where's it coming from, Han?"
The old man ran a dry tongue over his lips. "Artifice," he said. "I'm a craftsman now. A much more wholesome line of work."
I raised an eyebrow. This was a development, for sure. When I last met him, Hanoi was puppeting fate three shifts a day, barely stopping to sleep. He practically wrote the histories of at least seven different planes, and had as much skin in the precognisance game as anyone you'd care to be going to mention. I opted for bluntness.
"What do you make?"
"Enemies." He paused, milky eyes rolling slightly. "And things work. Good on promises. Amends, for a price. And of course…" He stood up with alarming speed, keeling forward on legs that had probably shifted one foot in the last year. His bad arm was sunken into the pit below his ribcage, but the other had its filthy digits pressed against my face. With a grip like a blacksmith's vice, he swung my head into the wall. Skull met plasterboard as I toppled into a narrow space lined with corrugated iron and rat-droppings.
"…Exits. Sorry Jack, but I can't help you. I'm out of this business now."
I gritted my teeth. "Someone got to you. Tell me who, do me that kindness."
"Sorry, Jack-boy. I really am."
He looked it, too. If I hadn't seen him contorting his face for cash for the last thirty years, I'd have put him down as sad. As it is, I pulled out my piece and let a couple of halfhearted shots in his direction. They hit a pin-up calendar tucked discretely behind a dollar-store throw. The thing held for a moment, then flopped to the floor. January looked like a nice girl, save for the target drawn in marker just above her head. My bullet had, obviously, hit a bullseye. Fucking oracles.
I didn't bother heading after him. A dozen artisanal brands of pain were shooting through my head, and I got the feeling that someone who could pull one over on a temporally-dislocated demigod might need a little more preparation. One of his assistants — Jenny or Penny or Mary or something — climbed up the stairs, and took the devastation relatively well, all things considered. She shot me a look which could've meant anything. I decided it meant something like "men, huh?" I shot her back a look which I intended to mean "don't I know it", but which I probably failed to execute properly. Judging by her slapping me across the face when I leant on her for support, I guessed some of the finer points of the exchange were lost in translations.
I stepped out into the world. It was raining, and a man with a bright yellow cart full of bright yellow umbrellas was beckoning me from across the street. It was, I decided, as good a start as any,
Flighty Writ
Epithet was a bird. Had been for as long as he could remember, which was pretty much as long as he'd been himself. It was a simple life, and a good one, and Epithet was perfectly willing to trade off sapience for the joys of flight. He'd seen the flights of humans, and they tended to be as short-lived as the humans themselves, punctuated with a thud — or, if he was lucky enough and in a particularly 'carrion' mood, a splat. His days were eventful and long, and as he swooped among the chimneys and spires his little bird brain was filled with happy bird thoughts.
Today, Epithet could see, was a Worm Day. The best of all the days. The ground was wet (though not so wet as the sky), and the tiny wriggling morsels were emerging in their thousands from their earthy domain. He could pluck them out as easy as look at them, and soon his already plump stomach grew fit to burst.
It was while tugging at a particularly large and wriggly specimen that Epithet first noticed the Building. He mentally capitalised it due to the fact that, despite possessing ample shelter and nesting room, it seemed deserted. Utterly deserted. Other corvids swooped in great arcs to avoid it, gaggles of tourists stepped blindly across the street, and even pigeons, the lowest tier of the complex hierarchy of birds, seemed vaguely startled by its presence. Epithet (intelligent even by raven standards) was intrigued by this, and quickly hopped over to investigate — it turned out to be large, spacious and warm; the perfect place to wait while he digested his lunch.
Shaking the rain from his feathers and basking in the joy of hot air against his skin, Epithet settled down in the rafters for an afternoon nap.
Inside the warehouse a man paced back and forth, worn sandals slapping rhythmically against the concrete. His overall appearance was of a wizard on a tight budget, and as he flitted around the room the sunlight illuminated a sad, angled face with wild hair and a veritable street-map of wrinkles. He muttered constantly, strengthening and re-casting the ward he'd set up around the place — any living thing approaching would quickly find itself paralysed with an overwhelming sense of dread, and most likely scarper2. It was an archaic protection, he knew, but an altogether effective one.
The man, whose name was Marius, darted and danced around what appeared to be a gigantic metal silo, almost as tall as the warehouse itself. Valves hissed angrily and dials flicked up and down in time with the sloshes of dark green fluid that pushed against the small viewing window. A large mass hung at the centre but it was causing no difficulties at present, content to revolve slowly in its tube like some museum specimen in a mason jar. Marius ducked to avoid a venting of boiling steam and cried out to the empty room.
Predictably, there was no response.
"Where is that blasted wretch?", he thought, pulling himself to his feet. He could swear that hiring an apprentice had been more trouble than the boy was worth. The lad wasn't here now, in any case, and Marius was going to be damned if he'd let the little snot-nosed git postpone his project any longer.
With a flourish of his cloak seen only by the bird in the rafters and the gods, the dishevelled mage wrenched down a lever as long as his arm. He stood back in wonder, eyes bent upwards to the machine, hands pressed together in silent prayer to whatever deities might be listening.
There was a crunch.
And, after the crunch, a low, sullen grinding.
And following that, a deep whirring that seemed to rise from the depths of the Earth itself, slowly ascending from low to high to ear-splitting shriek.
And, after the pitch had sailed outside the range of human hearing, the sound of a gunshot.
Marius Vandervall turned to the source of the sound just in time to miss a two-storey pipe crash through the warehouse's side and into the street below. Pressure was released, and rivets peppered the roughly plastered wall with a sudden, explosive pointillism. Fluid began to stream down every surface available, like some kind of terrible meat-smelling waterfall, and (with a sickening, gut-wrenching crack) the tank's supports began to buckle.
William Shakespeare had just woken up, and he noticed several things in quick succession. Firstly, it was dark, almost oppressively so. Darker than it had any right to be, in the playwright's esteemed opinion. Whatever the stuff he was floating in seemed to suck the light right out of the air.
Secondly, he was floating in some kind of goo. William opened his mouth and instantly regretted it, gagging as the warm, sticky concoction flooded down his throat. He struggled to gasp for air, before realising that-
-he didn't need to breathe. Air was somehow collecting in his lungs without needing to pass through the intervening tubing, which (while certainly a novel innovation and a great increase in efficiency) was disconcerting to say the least. He tried pumping it up and out of his mouth, but found his trachea uncomfortably full of metal. Strange. He kicked off the wall and floated through the goo to the other side of the- oh. That's exceedingly strange.
He was, it seemed, in some kind of tank, cylindrical for the most part, with all kinds of struts and wires crisscrossing the inside. Was this some kind of afterlife? It didn't feel like heaven, and he had been brought up to conceive of hell as being more unpleasant — this was just peculiar. Purgatory then? The Bard of Avon did a few more lengths of his pool and decided that wherever he was was likely not the domain of any kind of ethereal being. What then, could it possibly be?
William Shakespeare stroked his beard in thought, and in doing so brought his hand into contact with his head.
He was only mildly surprised to find out that it was made of plastic.
"You."
"Hello, Marius."
"You… You… Ungrateful wretch! How dare you!"
"Easy does it. You'll break a hip going on like that."
"I'd rather break a hip than fall to you! Oh, how the tables turn; the roles reverse!"
The youth slid another round into his firearm and grinned. "Iambic pentameter. You really commit to this, don't you?"
But the mage had already turned away to scramble over the wreckage. The tank, thankfully, was still upright, leaning like a drunk on its three remaining legs. "So great a thing would it have been to do! But no, I suffer still this noxious curse."
There was a click, and Marius turned away from the twisted metal to see the young man levelling the gun at his head. "Cut the poetry. It's not doing you any favours. Step away from the tank, and put your hands in the air."
Marius complied.
"Good. Now, if I was to-"
"From where did you procure that weaponry?"
"A rented time machine, a bottle of tequila, a fella named Chekhov who turned out to be an aggressive better with a terrible poker face, and I'm asking the questions."
"For what it's worth I-"
"I swear to God if that sentence has five metrical feet I'm gonna knock you dead right here and now."
"I-" The wizard shudders, and pinches the bridge of his nose. "I- I can't. Sometimes I just can't help but speak in- mhm. Sorry. I'll try."
"Thanks. Now, if I was to open this tank up right this instant, I would be expecting to find one of two things. The first would be a collection of historically valuable artifacts given some awful semblance of life by a combination of poor ethics and bad science, and the second would be… anything else. Which would you say sounds more likely?"
"The… second one?"
"Weirdly, that's not what I've been told. Are you gonna come quietly?"
"I don't think so."
The man grinned, and pulled the trigger. There was a dull click as the barrel jammed, and Marius was gone, replaced by a faint sensation of rustling paper and a smattering of applause. He blinked as spotlights flickered down some imaginary axis of spacetime. Bugger.
##
"I'm Marius Vandervall, Thespomancer Extraordinaire. I tread the boards of reality. I rule the very performance of life itself. There's nothing you can do to stop me."
"I'm Jacques Darnell. I've got exactly two features worth noting. I'm a fucking excellent shot-"
There was a bang and Marius fell limp from the rafters, landing amidst the debris with a crunch.
"- and I wasn't joking when I mentioned Chekhov." A crackle as he pressed the button on his wrist. "Yeah, this is Darnell. Target's neutralised. Bring in the big boys, we'll get this one under wraps."
He sniffed the air.
"And be quick about it too. I smell burning."
##
And, as the Thespomancer Vandervall slipped between worlds once more, and the immortal bard stewed helplessly in its vat, the Inner London Society for Amateur Dramatics — for centuries a guiding force across the city's many folded, fractal streets — fell prey to the fires that had birthed it out of necessity all those years ago. And as Jacques turned up his collar and ran from the blaze, he couldn't help think how fitting an end it was.
From his place on the windowsill, Epithet (Corvid King of London and regal defiler of statues) understood none of what had transpired. The trivial matters of loud, slow humans were none of his concern. With barely a thought for the glowing wood beneath him he took off, wings trailing intricate patterns through the smoke. Somewhere out there was a half-eaten baguette lying discarded in a puddle, and wherever commuters went hungry the birds of London feasted. Deaf to the muffled screams and whirring machinery, he fled the warehouse, mind chock-full of happy bird thoughts and imagined sandwiches.
Worm Days were, after all, the best of all the days.
Wrong End of a Blunderbuss
Marius Vandervall fell out of a hole in space and into the relatively welcoming embrace of a rough, hardwood floor. Above him, a high domed ceiling wide enough to house a zeppelin; surrounding him, an immense cylindrical room rimmed with tiers of balconies and alcoves, each replete with an array of bookshelves and desks. Corridors stretched off in all directions, and shadowy robes floated softly along the walkways and staircases that crisscrossed the space. It was the Library. He was home.
And, true to form, he was able to take in the sight for all of around 10 seconds before his view was obstructed by what could charitably be called a face, but would more accurately be described as a double-ended beard with some eyes in.
Somewhere under the matter hair, a mouth spoke.
"Who the hell are you?"
Marius scrambled to his feet. The man was muscled, but hid it well under several layers of leathery padding. Judging by the lack of patrons, this hall was sealed off from the public, which meant he was either staff, specially authorised, or another poorly-timed break-in.
"I- I might bequery you the very same, sir. I was under the impression that the library took s- some care in distinguishing its private guests."
The man narrowed his eyes, not rising to the bait. "My name," he said, "is Garley. Lemus Garley. Remember it, I might have to save your life one day. I'm a trapper by trade, and you've just wandered into my operation. Care to explain yourself, or do I gotta punch your skull full of lead?
On Wrilfeth Pier
If you were to ask the average Wrilfeth resident whether their scummy, backwater cesspool contained a pier, they'd tell you no. They'd also probably beat you unconscious and rifle through your pockets for change, because Wrilfeth is that kind of town. But, like most ignorant fools who think they know shit from squat, they'd be wrong. In a sense. The truth, as always, is complicated, and it gets almost inappreciably complicated-er when figures of speech are involved. Hold onto your ontology, it's about to get literary.
Take, for example, the Gilberdyke Buldiful. ##
##
So no, Wrilfeth Pier doesn't exist, in the traditional sense. And yet I've been here 20 years, fishing the same spot of nonexistently stagnant un-lake. Trapped in a misleading situation, begging for scraps of curiosity from literary journals and dictionaries. It's the closest thing I can get to reality.
Sorry if you thought you were getting anything useful out of this, by the way. This is mostly a one-way thing from my end. Something to keep me on the right side of insanity.
I guess you could say that you've been taken to- Christ, no. Even I can't say that with a straight face, and I practically am it. Cheesy as all hell.
Well, whatever. If you ever find yourself in Wrilfeth, for your sins, maybe pop down the tourist office and ask about the expression. Toss me a metaphorical dime, how 'bout that?
No? Well anyway, don't be a stranger, y'hear?
I need this.
Some Warborn
My name is Daniel B4.R4.Sq12 Infantryman, and I'm an abomination.
To clarify, that's not hyperbole, and it's certainly not self-deprecation. I've more self-love than most people — it's a natural defence against a life devoid of external affection. No, it's an official classification, issued on my arrival: as far as the Library's concerned, I'm a card-carrying Crime Against Man And God Alike. It hurt a little to begin with, to be honest, but I don't take it personally anymore. I've found it helps when it comes to explaining myself.
Like most CAMAGAs, I'm not actually from the Library, although I've lived here longer than most. I'm from a warzone in some glitched-out backwater plane, tucked between a few more respectable realities. I was born there, I lived there for three-hundred and seventeen years, and, in all probability, I should've died there. Alone, forgotten, another empathocidal mistake to throw on the all-too-literal bonfire. There was no realistic way to get out; no hint of a world outside what I'd come to know and hate. The walls of the universe were sturdy, unyielding, and unknowable. My fate was as inevitable and unchanging as the laws of time and space themselves.
This is how I got out.
To be honest, the term 'warzone' is misleading. 'Zone' suggests there's somewhere outside of it, and 'war' implies the existence of peace. I would describe it as more of a dissertation on human malice — a relentless, chaotic, self-perpetuating conflict, which had been going on literally longer than anyone had records. Imagine a place where the ground beneath your feet is millennia's-worth of churned-up rubble, where mining operations seek out century-old war machines buried in subterranean minefields. A place where folks are twisted and modified to survive a scarred and toxic wasteland, where the sky's been poisoned with smog so long that oxygen capsules are as toxic as mustard gas. A place where 'civilian' is just a fancy word for corpse. That was my home.
The exception to all this was a small red-brick monastery standing on a relatively unscathed hillside — as far as we could tell, it was the oldest building in existence, built during a lull in fighting some 1500 years previously. It was also a viable place to build a forward operations base, and so my squadron's objective was to raze it to the ground.
More than 300
We never bothered with fusion.
Most civilisations do, you see. Eventually. It's the cleanest, the safest, and the most renewable source of energy. All you need is a reactor and a decent supply of the most abundant element in the universe. You don't have to be a minister to see how it's tempting. Once a species finds its way past the initial hurdles involved with replicating a miniature sun, it enters what's usually called a utopia — free, clean energy, available to all. Molecular rearrangement comes quickly, and post-scarcity almost inevitably follows — finally freed from the trappings of society, they focus themselves outwards, exploring and exploiting the universe as a whole. They spread out across the void, hungry for the knowledge that is, by this point, the only quest left.
We usually find their corpses. Silent ships, powered-down suspension units, worlds still running on autopilot. Broken crystals or withered proteins; eventually, the apocalypse happens, and the species, which has relied for so long on the infrastructure of their forefathers, crumbles. So far we've seen 52 sapient races wiped out by plague, 49 by some unexpected astronomical collision, 33 by scientific advancement gone awry (23 alone were either AI or nanobots) and 104 by some other less fortunate species waging war. For 63 of them, we still don't know what happened.
That's three-hundred and one sapient races, cut down in their prime. As far as we know, as far as we can tell, we're the only ones who were different. We're the ones who never left our planet, because we didn't need to. We found a way to sustain ourselves indefinitely on nothing more than eight triple-A batteries, several lengths of copper wiring, the inner workings of a jet engine, and a high-energy particle accelerator.
My name's Daniel3 Julian Roberts. I'm the Assistant to the Director of Constant Reassignment at the Ministry of Earth. Please, try to hold back your applause.
Complete drafts
Black Market Magic
When most people hear ‘time-travel’, they get antsy. They don’t want to hear it. It changes things, and everybody’s got things they don’t want changed. Even if your past is black as coal dust, the fact you’re standing there in any position to voice an opinion means you got out. And nobody wants to wake up and find some bastard broke their lucky break.
So it’s disquieting to find out you can shoot it into your veins. Worse still to know that four decades back you could buy a hit on most streets, at least in the bad parts of those kinds of cities which like to pretend they don’t have them. The names changed, the doses changed, but most everything fell into one of two broad categories.
Stitch was the worst. Still is, if you can get it. Chemical future, mixed with a self-immolation charge and whatever you call the tachyon equivalent of speed. While you take it, you get reckless. Careless. Eventually you’re either paranoid or dead. Caution saves lives, but stitch makes it so yours doesn’t need saving – instead of dying your body burns up and you’re kicked back by up to a month, free to make the same mistakes in new and exciting ways. A guy can get used to that like he gets used to oxygen; when there’s nothing on the line, you call every bluff you can find. You start poking tigers for the hell of it, because there’s no reason not to. Pain becomes second nature, and death becomes first – you get shot and stabbed and blown to bits and cut into ribbons and none of it matters, because you’ll always come up laughing.
And then you hit your tolerance.
Stitch works differently to most drugs, because it’s self-administering. When you’re bumped back, your veins are pumped full of it again, like they were the first time. The only way to drain it from your system is to wait it out, let it pass naturally. It usually involves spending several months in a very, very safe location. One wrong move and the charge kicks in and you’re burned up and — zzzzip — punted back with a fresh dose. You could theoretically spend an eternity riding that high, if you found a reliable way to kick the bucket, but when I say ‘theoretically’ I mean it. The human mind doesn’t like being rolled over like that, and eventually it gets wise. It starts to fight back.
Consider that, when you live the same day over again, your mind is the only thing changed. You’ve got the same stuff in your veins, the same brain in your skull, but your mind – the essential you — is a version of you which already lived the next couple weeks of events. After a while your psyche learns to ignore the chemical soup swimming in its arteries, and it suppresses the neurological triggers which tell the immolation charge to blow. You become a dud. Still high, still rocking the slow-burning amphetamine lifestyle, but mortal. Unless you find a new way to burn yourself out from the inside, you don’t get any more do-overs.
And that hurts. Not literally, because usually by that point you’ve spent enough time in terminally painful situations that you’re numb to most kinds of actual pain. But the knowledge that you can die, that your next false move could be your last… it’s difficult to grasp. Usually it doesn’t take, or the user doesn’t realise what’s happening to them. They die quickly and unceremoniously, like everyone else does. It’s often ruled as suicide, or close enough for the cops, since it’s hard to imagine a sane person getting into such a recklessly risky situation.
If they don’t die, they’re clued in by some near-miss. Something which should have sent their brain into panic, should have triggered the charge, but doesn’t. They’ll start rapidly tallying up their loops, counting the seconds they’ve relived, trying to come to some kind of total. Trying to work out just how much extra time they’ve spent.
It usually takes about a six months to hit tolerance. In personal time. Of course, if you mainline stitch during a plane crash, those months can be about three minutes for everyone else. It depends on the dosage, and the user, and a lot of other stuff, but regardless of what the threshold is, beyond it you’re on borrowed time, and I mean that with absolutely no pun intended. Once you get used to stitch, there’s no going back.
You get paranoid. You start yearning for that safety net. The days stretch out as you notice every hidden danger that could spell your end. Your last end, not like all those ends which ended up not happening. Pain goes from being an enemy conquered to a friend sorely missed, ‘cause it’s hard to stay safe when your body can’t give you warning signs. The addiction is cruel and self-defeating – you won’t even want to leave the house, much less find yourself a temporal methadone. Maybe you’ll get over it one day, and learn again the lesson that a life without risk is not one worth living. Most likely not, but stranger things have happened. It’s not important.
What’s important is that stitch kills, and it kills quick, and it kills in big stupid accidents with a lot of collateral damage. And despite those accidents, it’s no less attractive a prospect. People will always want it, and it’ll always take them for a ride. Compared to stitch, normal drugs are quiet and harmless. And you can’t arrest a dead guy for possession, which gave the board a motive to crack down on it. And crack down they did.
To picture the Nostrum Board, picture an office block a hundred miles from anywhere important, stained grey by the passage of a thousand starch-stiffened lives. Everyone working there is the same, more or less. They all have the same shallow eyes, the same forced disinterest. The same soft ablation of ambition. Paperweight workers in overcast suits who shift and shuffle their way up through the system until they vanish at the top in a puff of smoke. A perpetual motion bureaucracy, bubbling a smog of legislature just dense enough to keep it going without upsetting anything important.
Then add stitch. Infamous killer, public menace, and really big problem for the office-jockeys. It’s something important, and something that desperately needs upsetting. It’s like cancer to the board’s finely tuned anatomy, pulling the remnants of activity together into a kind of organisational tumour, disrupting everything.
It grows.
It doesn’t stop growing. It begins to distribute itself through the board, siphoning time and energy in great heaving breaths. It’s gross and it’s inefficient, but it’s powerful as hell and very difficult to get rid of. So they come down hard on stitch, harder than they’ve come down on anything before or since. They launch brigades. Task forces. And a man with fake hair and a smile to match, who shows up at my door with a warrant and one of those bright ideas that you can tell somebody else was very proud of themselves for. It should be obvious that I was in no position to refuse.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to nick. It’s the other kind of time-travel, the one the board now keeps mostly under wraps. It’s in the same chemical family as stitch, but with a lot more amphetamine and a lot less combustion. Instead of sending you back, it compresses your personal time whenever your body goes into fight-or-flight, giving you up to two hours for every minute. Your reflexes are effectively unlimited. You can see a crime scene for a moment and know it better than you know your own bedroom. Withdrawal is hard, but there’s no retroactivity and if the cravings get bad you can always keep dosing.
There are, of course, side-effects. I can’t drink, I can’t smoke, and I sleep for four months of the year. The board watches me like a hawk, and there’s a camera in every room of my house. If I ever stop receiving my discreet little sachets of time, I’ll go into a deep shock which could last a subjective infinity.
But in exchange for all that? I can win every fight. I can walk into a lab packed with the kind of people you’d expect, and still come out the other side with nothing more than a crick in my neck. I can shoot twelve people in six seconds and some of those with the same bullet. I can bust rings dealing stitch, of course, but also others. Pyromaniacs hopped up on lady blaze. Back-alley priests trading holy water and shots of 5. Addicts taking gaze to open their third eye, and crooks peddling B to keep it shut. Ooym, tank, oneirated diamorphine. If it’s been a slow day, I might stoop to coke. They took stitch down, but the initiative’s too big to stop.
Drugs kill. But so do I, and I do it better. I do good work for the board, and I ride the wave of that work as far as it’ll take me. Yes, I’m on a leash, and I can’t escape that without earning myself some severely unwanted attention. I’m tracked, traced, and everything short of shackled. But in the confines of the gutter, in those dark puddles of neon and blood, I’m a god.
And of course, there’s always the package tucked and taped in the crook of my arm. I’m hooked on nick, so a cannula made perfect sense. Needles can be risky, and the board was more than willing to cover the cost. Nobody wants their personal weapon getting infected, do they?
It’s easy enough to switch one packet for another.
Even with nick, I’m not perfect. Sometimes I need a do-over.
"Creatures of the Deep", with Ipsum Factum
"Hello!"
"Whoa there, calm down, alright? You never done this before? It's fine, just breathe. I'm not going to hurt you. It's fine. Relax."
"No no, you were right to be scared. Voices in your head aren't usually friendly. Panicking's not the best way to go about things — for a lot of them terror's more of a gateway than a wall — but it's totally understandable. Next time though, read the cover of the book before you go about flicking through it? Alright?"
"Good."
"No, you can't stop, sorry. It's my job. I'm a Chapter."
"No, Chapter. Like, a part of a book? Yeah. Exactly. You've got me in your head until I'm finished, unfortunately."
"Well you should've thought of that before you started reading, shouldn't you?"
"Don't worry about it. As I said, it's fine. Almost guaranteed to happen when the archivists stack my book next to crap like 'Fishing for Dummies'. Just find somewhere quiet to sit down, and I'll walk you through my subject matter, okay? Good."
"So, let's get started. The deep, and the creatures thereof. I'm guessing you didn't read the previous chapters, and skipped straight to me? Yeah, thought so. Nah, it's no problem — the basic gist is that everything that exists can be considered to be a reflection of either a single archetypal form, or a combination of the aspects of a group of forms, usually related. The titular Creatures of the Deep are three such forms."
"Yes, three. There's only three of them. See, this might not be so bad, right? You can sit through three descriptions, I'm sure."
"Creature of the Deep № 1: The Kraken."
"Ah, I see that raised an eyebrow. It's well-known, of course, and you people go bananas for a betentacled monstrosity. It's fairly close to the mental image you'll have right now, actually, just… more. More teeth, more tentacles, more beaks. Big enough to fill an ocean. It's a seething creature of hate and vicious, relentless destruction. It destroys for the joy of it, for the perverse pleasure of seeing blood spill and civilisations crumble. Brace yourself…"
"…"
"Yeah. Unpleasant, isn't it? Sure, I'll wait."
"No, but, as you would know if you'd bothered to read the cover, this book has illustrations."
"Not my fault, sorry."
"…You ready to continue? Good."
"The Kraken occupies one end of a spectrum, upon which all fundamentally oceanic creatures dwell. There are some that skirt the boundaries, of course — you might want to check out Edge Cases [vol. 1] for things with reflections of… I don't suppose you've read about the archetypes of land or air? No, didn't think so. But if this philosophy is to be believed, there's a lot of them. And a lot of things are the result of blurring the lines between them. On that level, the Kraken is the form of viciousness, mindful destruction, and… well, tentacles."
"No."
"Lovecraft was a talentless hack whose only fame lies in the fact that he peered beyond this particular veil sooner than the rest of his demented kin. No, there's nothing inherently evil about squids; they don't have the brain for it. But every time an ancient evil awakens from a thousand year slumber, that's a shadow of the Kraken."
"In 1995, in some relatively unremarkable facet of Earth, someone tried exactly that. They attempted to bring the Kraken into their world and — get this — control it. Do you want to know what happened?"
"Are you sure? It's pretty grisly."
"Nothing."
"Yeah. If there was any way the Kraken could enter any given facet, it would have done so at its inception and devoured it near-instantaneously. It would be like trying to summon an ocean from within a submarine. Thankfully, its direct influence usually stops beyond its immediate residence. All this broadly goes for the other two as well, but the Kraken's the most single-mindedly vicious. They're all equally dangerous, of course but… yeah. Orders of infinity, I suppose."
"No? Alright Mr. Mathematical Genius, sorry. What do I know, I'm just a collection of knowledge."
"Nah, it's fine, just… this'll all go smoother if I don't have to update my analogies, you see? No, don't worry about it. I'm sorry for snapping."
"Right, so that's the Kraken. There's a couple of appendices if you'd like to know more details, but- no, I didn't think so. Alright! Let's push onward to Creature of the Deep № 2: Leviathan."
"Yeah, another well-known one, for much the same reason. Imagine a whale, or a fish, or anything of that vague body shape. Gigantic gaping maw, body filling all available space, insides the size of a world. Got it? Ready for the picture? I can hide it if you're not…"
"See, that wasn't so bad, was it?"
"I wouldn't call it cute, it's still very much a thing born of otherworldly destruction. Its primary diet is, of course, worlds. The various shadows and reflections of it — when they're not watered down into mundane things like Whales, Tuna, Orca, and Reflex Trout — are known to swallow up whole islands, or else disguise themselves as landmasses. Sometimes they're so big they literally warp the scale of the world around them upwards, just so they can fit in without crushing the planet."
"Planet. It's like… you come from a flatworld? Weird, but okay. A planet's a world formed from disparate matter clumping together in the orbit of a larger star; they're spherical in shape due to the effects of gravity, and-."
"Christ, is this your first time picking up a book? This is kid-level stuff; how in the name of Her did you think I was within your scope of understanding when you can't even-"
"Alright! Alright. Sorry. I can give you some references for books to check out after we're done here, but you need to take a lot of the stuff I'm saying for granted. I'm already watering it down to avoid relying on the first and second chapters."
"Don't worry about it, really, just… let me do my job, okay? Okay. Leviathan! What is there to say about Leviathan that hasn't already been screamed by a billion terrified sailors. It's the other end of the scale to the Kraken — mindless hunger, destruction without pleasure, joy, or pain. In a lot of ways it's more terrifying; it would swallow you up and not even notice. At least with the Kraken you know it recognises your existence, at least in the same way you recognise the existence of the mud under your feet. Leviathan might not even kill you immediately; the roof of its mouth would be well above the atmosphere, so there could be several generations until digestion started."
"Hah, there's no portal big enough. Seriously though, these aren't your standard eldritch horrors. These are archetypes. No summoning."
"Nope."
"Of course not, don't be-"
"I, uh. Huh."
"See, my instinct says 'of course that wouldn't work, don't be stupid', but-"
"Mhm."
"You're not quite as thick as you've been letting on, are you."
"No, no, that was the truth. I'm incapable of lying, although everything I say has the standard caveat of 'there is no canon'. Myths are in flux, and all that. I just have to finish telling you this stuff, then I'll be out of here, I promise. Absolutely no trouble on my part. You won't even know I've been here. No need for, uh, mind tricks. Nobody's tried them before, and there's no guarantee they'd even work on me. But I'd hardly be in an unrestricted tome if I had any permanent effect, would I?"
"So, uh, that was Leviathan. Again, there are appendices if you wanted to-"
"No, no, of course not. Let's move on."
"The third and final topic in this chapter is simultaneously less and more well-known than the other two. It occupies the grey area in the middle of the spectrum between mindless hunger and vicious, targeted killing. It's Creature of the Deep № 3: The Sea-Serpent. It's the form that shadows both the bearer of knowledge and the guardian of the Library itself, though in both cases its mingled with other aspects. According to the philosophy presented here, it is infinitely cunning, and infinitely patient; perhaps benevolent in the short-term, but self-interested over the course of its lifespan, which is, of course, eternal. Its presence in and of the Library would imply that we're playing into its hands, but that might not necessarily be a bad thing — it's elusive, and its capacity for cooperation is unknown. There's actually a lot of debate over whether the Serpent occupies the middle of the spectrum or represents the third point on some kind of triangular graph. Again, there's no canonical answer, and both could very well be true simultaneously."
"Here's the image."
"It's the most elusive, and the least destructive. Picture a great beast seen at distance from a ship, vanishing into the fog. It's the thing you see drawn on maps of unexplored lands. Here Be Dragons, and all that."
"Appendices? Are- are you sure?"
"Look, I don't think this is a good idea. These things aren't just more powerful than anything in conventional existence, they're more than anything in conventional existence."
"Sure, fine. Far be it for me to tell you what to do with your time and money. I just think you're making a mistake. Forget whatever it is you learned, and try to go find a quest that doesn't involve-"
"Ah. Well then. Fine, I can't exactly resist. Appendix № 1 of 306, Accounts of The Serpent Within Worlds and the Destructions Wrought Thereby and Thereupon."
"Get comfortable, we're going to be here a while."
Warborne
Shut up. Stop bleeding and listen for a moment.
Orcs are naturally selected for their reflexes.
Consider: in the wastes beyond your city’s walls, a species prone to war is given a singular opportunity to evolve. Where rifts can swallow centuries as if they were seconds, certain properties are accelerated; the battles can last weeks to an outsider, but a full lifetime to a soldier. Spatial isolation forces groups into harsh environments, and mental acuity is a detriment to bloodshed.
So, orcs get stupider. And as they do so, their bodies compensate for a loss of ability by quickening reactions and heightening innate skill. Orcs become soldiers from birth until death, with a natural aptitude for any and all instruments of death. It gets so far that you can hand one a weapon never before seen on this continent, and within minutes they will be using it as if they were a master. Your mages’ bickering may have shredded the fabric of this country, but you’ve not seen war until you’ve seen orc war.
Consider also the fact that orcs do not strategise. Chieftains led the hoards, but now the hoards lead themselves – twenty orcs together will naturally march rank and file toward the nearest unfamiliar settlement. And, if said settlement has ballista on its balustrades, then the orcs don’t stand a chance. You'll tear them to pieces. And you do.
Eventually they’ll kill everything stupider than themselves, of course. Everything outside your walls. And since the don’t have the brainpower to learn from their mistakes, ten thousand generations will throw themselves into your defences and emerge as perforated mincemeat. In the background of the carnage, the same reliance on instinct perpetuates conflicts which were already unnecessary, and orcs kill one another just as readily as they’d kill every last one of you.
But once it’s in motion, evolution is a difficult thing to stop. The orc keeps developing reflexes, maintaining its status as a hard-wired seeker of carnage. And its brain shrivels to nothing, until it's less than an animal.
That’s what you call them, correct? Just checking.
War is such a strange thing. It’s unnatural – it introduces pressures and motivations so far outside the norm that they’re unaccountable. It’s twisted, it’s artificial, and – as I believe you are witnessing now – it can strike without warning.
So. With fairly good reason, you call me an orc. And you wonder: “How can this orc be killing me? How can this orc have such intelligence, such charisma, such a command of tactics? How can this orc possibly have triumphed over man?”
And sir, you have me almost at a loss. Because you’re right; I do things an orc never could, because orcs have spent a subjective 300 million years systematically removing their own brains. All that’s left is battle-thirsty reflex; a continuously heightened instinct, the distribution of mind in muscle.
So by all means look at me, sir, and by all means see an orc. But know this body is dead and its mind is nothing. And know also that not everything is a mind.
I’m not the orc you see before you, and I never have been. I’m its pilot. The brain outside the brain, the mind in the muscle. I’m the instinct. Running hardwired, and hardwired to fight, and hardwired to win. And I’ve had a long time to work out what I want; 300 million years of slow domination over the conscious.
I don't want land. I don't want gold. I don't want glory, and I certainly don't want peace.
I want war, sir. And you are going to give it to me.
Poetry
A gift
They say my life's a gift, you see
The greatest thing there is around
A perfect present, just for me
And though I think their logic's sound
I am a man with thrift replete
For simpler times I've long since yearned
I wonder, where's the gift receipt?
And can this "life" thing be returned?
Suicide Couplet in AB,AB:
I have a world of gratitude, for those whose words can save
But you can keep your platitudes, and take them to my grave
| Title | Rating | Comments | Created |
|---|---|---|---|
| MAFT | 0 | 0 | 12 Aug 2019 10:57 |
| Last Light | 0 | 0 | 05 Mar 2021 20:05 |
| UNAVOIDABLE. SPLIT. | 0 | 0 | 31 May 2021 18:54 |