Not my Circus, Not my Monkeys.

 1.       In the time after the Time Before.

A storm brewed offshore to the northwest, behind the western range of Perenye from Sanpe’dro.  Lightning flashed within the thunderheads, occasionally lancing down to the nearly unending ocean.  The city had begun to quiet, to batten down before the approaching tempest, as the stars began to disappear overhead.

The first knell of thunder rumbled over the mountainous island as the electricity failed, lights winking out block by block.  Residents began to enter the street to discuss.  The last large-scale power failure was beyond the reaches of any living memory – a squirrel or bird might chew through a more-exposed line and short a city block, but nothing like this had ever happened.  And then the south face of the mountain disintegrated into blossoming radiance, and the concussive wave of superheated air rushed through the streets toward the sea.

+++

                “Do you know what you’re doing?”

                It was strange to hear House through speakers, in a voice that was more-or-less believably human, rather than through the cochlear implant.  Aaron shifted, half his body shoved into an access panel, to speak to the computer’s avatar.  His navy hair was, as usual, in his eyes and he had a large hex key clenched between his teeth.  Brushing the hair away and removing the wrench from his mouth, he spat oily saliva out onto the floor.

                “What do you mean, ‘do you know what you’re doing?’  Of course I don’t know what I’m doing.  You said check the conduit in here, because something about a relay. I found some conduit in here though, and let me tell you, it might be the key to this whole thing because parts of it are fucking hot.”

                Under other circumstances, the machine’s avatar could have been considered cute.  He hadn’t bothered to update it when he’d achieved full consciousness – it was still a cartoon of a disgruntled little scientist floating in midair: arms clasped behind a slightly hunched back, thick spectacles perched on a sharp little nose, dainty little mop of white hair to match a dainty little white goatee framing a frown, all contained within a white lab coat.  Right now, it was glowering at the veld.

                “Don’t be an idiot.  If the heat were coming from the reactor, everything would be hot, not just sections of conduit.”

                “House, I was being facetious.  I may have literally been born in a mud-lined hut in the pine barrens, but I’m not dumb.  I was running a whole country a few months ago, remember?”

                “Ah, yes.  A whole nation of people who never stopped to ask about your disfigured elfin ears and perma-dyed hair.  Weren’t you dealing with quite the domestic terrorist problem, as well?”

                “Nobody notices the ears because of the hair.  And I think I may have lined up the last few nails in the coffin of the terrorist problem on my way out the door.”

                “Rampage?” House suggested, scoffing.

                “Rampage,” Aaron agreed solemnly, pushing himself back inside the wall.  “Now what the hell am I looking for?”

                House talked him through dismantling and rerouting power and data lines past a faulted relay.  Thankfully, Aaron was a swift learner.  Information began to flow from lower levels minutes later.  House drank it in.  He could almost feel himself expanding – bloating like a tick as he assimilated the lower levels of the facility, devouring what remained of the poor, attention-starved, half-senile virtual intelligences left behind when men had abandoned them to the rising sea.  The frantic queries, effectively shouted in Mandarin, did not end until all had been eliminated. 

House thought briefly on the fact that, thus far in his expansion, poking and prodding through what remained of cyberspace, he had not encountered another artificial intelligence.  Virtual intelligences were – or had been, would be more accurate – everywhere; Turing-compliant heuristic copies of their creators, mostly, designed to carry out a plethora of tasks, but designed explicitly not to think too much about said tasks.  Should he be concerned that he was the only one to make the leap?  Perhaps there were others, locked away from the network in an attempt to prevent the singularity he was currently engaging in.

                The door nearest to Aaron snapped open as he fully removed himself from the service panel, courtesy of House’s newfound operational capacity.  The smell of stale, recirculated air – almost like ozone – was nearly overpowering.  The lights beyond the gate were out.  He pulled up his flashlight and beamed it into the abyss.  Eyes flickered back at him an indeterminate distance away, then disappeared – feet skittering away into the darkness.

                “Motion,” Aaron breathed softly as he released the sidearm from the holster on his right leg, brought it to bear while locking his left arm beneath his right, keeping the flashlight forward, flicked the safety off, and began moving forward slowly.

                “I’m not getting any readings.  Cameras are mostly out, no anomalies in the other sensor suites, nothing stands out as a warning in any of the locals’ memories.  You sure you’re not still going through that psychotic break?”

                Aaron ignored him and kept moving.  He knew the general direction he needed to move to reach the reactor core – about a hundred feet forward, fifty feet to the right, then another hundred feet forward to reach the set of stairs that, barring some huge structural issues, would put him out on the control level.  Next potential stop should be the gate at the stairwell, in the event that House hadn’t already broken it down.

                The knowledge that he was not alone paired with progressively cooler air, forcing goose pimples to cover his bare arm and crawl up his neck.  The flashlight’s beam lanced ahead, dimly illuminating the end of the corridor, glancing into open doors as he passed them.  A step into the room, a quick sweep with the light and weapon, then back to the hall.  Junk – computer consoles, dilapidated chairs, empty binders covering piles of dust – was strewn throughout, but nothing remarkable.  There were, however, various signs of relatively recent movement: scuffed dust, paths upon paths carved in the millennia of fallen particulate.  He was most definitely not alone.  He asked House to keep looking further back in time.

                “It shouldn’t be a problem.  There aren’t any food sources down there.  And you’re under three hundred and fifty meters of stone and seawater – where’d it come from and where’s it going?”

                Aaron could feel the air becoming more humid as he moved, and the smell had begun to change.  It was difficult to place within the larger body of industrially scrubbed atmosphere – but he thought it was something he’d smelled before, even if it was covered by a thick layer of ozone.  He reached the stairwell’s gate without incident, but it was shut.  He thumbed the controls nearby, but the keypad just blinked back at him defiantly.  House did his thing – the door lurched, but stuck in place.

                “It’s… stuck?” the machine mused. “It’s housed within the wall, what’s to get stuck on?”

                “Any suggestions?”

                “Have you seen something you can pry it open with?  I haven’t exactly had the best line of sight on you in a couple of turns.”

                There was nothing nearby, nothing that stuck out in his memories of the rooms he’d passed.  But he had a thought.  “It’s still trying to open itself, right?”

                “Yes, but -.” He cut the machine off with a kick to the door.  It groaned and lurched again, moving slightly.  “I guess that solves that,” House continued sulkily.

                Three hard kicks later, and the door was open enough for Aaron to squeeze through, and the smell was wafting through.  He waited a second to make sure he didn’t get woozy, then stepped through.  Both footsteps squelched – the catwalk beneath him was covered in an inch or so of viscous greenish ooze.  Radiating outward from his steps, the ooze flashed rings of bioluminescence.  He opened his mouth to comment on it to House when he heard it.  Something scrambling through the ooze over metal steps several floors above him.  He leaned out over the railing, pointing the flashlight up past the overgrown edges.  Eyes, dozens of them, stared down at him from above.

                “I am not alone down here, House.  And I think I figured out what they’ve been eating.”

                “Just keep heading down.  I’m sure you’re imagining it.”

                He holstered the weapon as he began his descent, so he could grasp the railing while fighting slipping over the slime.  “This is not my imagination,” he said confidently.  “I’m going to die down here.”  He couldn’t hear anything over his own squelching and sliding as he descended, couldn’t see besides what was illuminated by his flashlight and his steps.  All he had to do was reach the bottom, flip a switch, and waltz on back out the way he’d come in.  All he had to do was reach the bottom, flip a switch, and waltz on back out the way he’d come in.  All he had to do was reach the bottom, flip a swi-

                The gate at the bottom was shut, as well.  He cursed, waiting in silence as House worked in the ether.  The slime filled itself back in in his wake, making a strange sucking noise.  He could hear slithering far above him as well.  He pointed the flashlight back up the stairwell, trying to fight the building, anxiety-driven nausea.  Flip a switch, waltz back out.  No subterranean combat, no hostile negotiations with a group of cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, nothing weirder than the slime and skulking eyes.  Piece of cake.

                “Any time now!”  He drew the weapon again, its weight in his hand a slight comfort.

                “I’m working on it.  I was never taught how to think in the language it wants me to use, give me a second.”

                The gate whirred open.  Aaron threw himself through it.  His sigh of relief was cut short. This one wasn’t rampant, and probably could never have become so on its own, but... 

The reactor core wasn’t very dissimilar from the one stashed away beneath House.  Six large metal arms reached up from the ground like skeletal fingers, appearing to loosely grip an invisible orb.  The palm of the hand was a circular pedestal, from which ran a plethora of cables and conduit to stations along the outer walls of the chamber.  Floating above the palm was a small purple star – a starving fusion reaction.  Draped over the hand like layers of candy floss, nearest to what little heat the reactor would bleed, were cables and patches of cloth.  Scores of bodies swarmed this nest, silhouetted in pulsing magenta light, swinging from place to place and crawling hand over hand beneath the cables.

                “It’s still alive!  Okay, look for the biggest screen.  That ought to be our ticket home. … You’re not moving.  What’s wrong?”

                “Uh, they’re all over it.”

                “Who are all over what?”

                “The things.  Whatever they are.  They’re all over the reactor.”

                “I know I should have made you take one of the cameras.  Listen: big screen.  It’s probably going to be in a language you can’t read, but I should be able to talk you through it.  Don’t lose focus on me, now.  We’re close.”

                Aaron shuffled closer to the reactor, feet still squelching through the slime as he approached.  He made a point of not shining the flashlight up along the sides of the reactor.  Whatever these things were, like furry little hunched people, he didn’t want to draw any unnecessary ire.  He located the largest console, scooted over to it, and swept away as much slime as he could from the controls.

                The screen lit up as he hit one of the ancient keys.  There was a large crack cutting across its left side, but he could make do.  House had been right, too: he couldn’t read it – all the text was in strange, square-ish characters with lines throughout, most of which looked like they could have been houses or people.  The machines weren’t as well networked as House would have liked – precisely the reason he needed Aaron on site – but they were as repetitive as he liked.  The same selections guided the veld to the right execution.  The reactor coughed and hummed behind him.

                Its fuel flow corrected, the star swelled within its crucible, shifting from purple to blue, to azure, to cyan, to green…  The creatures began milling as the heat and light levels in the room changed dramatically.  Aaron couldn’t move, wasn’t done yet.  He needed to cool the reactor back down to standby before he could leave, a task which became more daunting as the natives became restless.

                “I just found something interesting,” House chimed in his ear.  “They used to house quite a sizable population of macaques in one of the higher levels, and there was a breach in a containment wall backing up against some small cave system used for dumping around the time the facility was abandoned.  Maybe – no, that can’t be right.”

                “Maybe what, House?” Aaron’s hand hovered over the anticipated keystrokes needed to put the reactor to sleep.

                “Maybe the macaques have survived by eating an intrusive slime mold?  Now that I think about it, how high is the radiation down there?

                “Your suggestion is that I might be surrounded by mutant… what did you call them?”

                “Macaques –humble Rhesus monkeys.  Hundreds of the poor bastards, if the records were accurate at last update.”

                The star reached yellow, had almost turned white, when Aaron thumbed the command to burn it back to standby – a color not quite blue, but not quite azure.  The computer started chiming a little song to inform him that it had completed its action.  The macaques did not like this song.

                Screams echoed through the chamber, and Aaron was already moving toward the stairwell as bodies threw themselves toward the floor from the nest.  Roughly half the group attacked the still-bright console, shattering the screen and annihilating the keyboard.  The other half rushed Aaron, trampling those that caught in the slime and tripped.  He yelled to House to close the gate between pulls of the trigger.  His last shot caught a leaping animal in the head, and it sloshed forward to his feet as the door snapped shut.

                He threw himself up the stairs, toward the howling above, trying to ignore the negative muzzle flash images floating in his field of vision.  He could hear bodies dropping past him through the gap in the stairwell, could hear climbing and screaming from above and below.  One macaque grasped his arm from the railing, sending him sprawling in the ooze.  Rings of light spread out from his body, from the monkey’s feet and hands, from below as others climbed to attack. Rolling and bringing his weapon to bear, the animal opened its mouth wide to attack again.  Its gums were lined with glowing residue, mucus running from its nose shone palely.  Blocking as well as he could with his left arm – his flashlight arm – he cried out as ragged teeth punctured and tore at his forearm.  Struggling to his feet, he pummeled the animal with the butt of the handgun with a sickening crunch and shrugged free of it.

                “Shut the second door!” he screamed at House, trying to push himself through.

                “You’re only partway through!” the machine cried back.  “It’ll slice you in half!”

                He dragged himself through as three more apes tried to pull themselves across the threshold.  Slumped against the ground, he pulled the trigger as quickly as he could.  The door snapped shut, crushing the animals.  He kept pulling the trigger until the slide locked back.  Screaming as he pushed himself up with his wounded arm, he released the mag and reloaded once he was back on his feet.  Altering his breathing in an attempt to offset the onset of the symptoms of shock, he pressed on back toward the third gate.

                It stood before him, a portal of fluorescent sunlight in the erstwhile twilight of the tunnels, and he pushed himself to his limits rushing it.  Other macaques had begun following, pouring out from ventilation grates and from down hallways he hadn’t traversed.  Twenty meters – he could hear them scrambling over the dusty floor, screeching as they tried to run him down.  Ten meters – he kicked the first of the grasping animals away from his right leg, crushing its hand as he ran.  Five meters – one jumped onto his back, clawed into the soft flesh above his kidneys.  He growled in pain and tripped, throwing his body to the ground.  He crushed a third attacker as he rolled through the gate, ripping the second from his back as he skidded to a stop.  The gate snapped shut, crushing one ape’s skull against the floor and relieving another of most of its arm.  Four remained on Aaron’s side of the gate.

                The quarters were too close for the gun.  He dropped it and grasped for the knife on the leg opposite his holster. He used the flashlight as a small cudgel, used the knife skillfully and methodically – crushing and slashing his way through the last few of his assailants.  Once they had all finished moving, he collapsed to the floor, sliding against the set-aside access panel, completely out of breath.

                “I’m going to die down here,” he managed to repeat, croaking between gasps of air.

                “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”  House had waited a few minutes before re-materializing his avatar, letting the veld catch his breath.  “Which would you like to hear first?”

                “Bad news,” Aaron croaked again.

                “So the bad news is that they’re most definitely using the ventilation ducts to try and get around the closed off sections.  I’m closing off more gates where I can to stop them, but there are other ducts between here and there.  It’s a great system for when you want your human population to breathe, not such a great system when you’re trying to stop small humanoids with functioning opposable thumbs from killing said human population.”

                “What’s the good news?”

                “The good news is that you can stop saying you’re going to die down here.  Nobody’s destined for anything except what they choose.”

                “Everyone has a destiny.”  Aaron picked up the discarded handgun, still breathing heavily.

                “Not so.  Do you want to know how I know fate doesn’t exist?” The veld shrugged and nodded. “Folger, Sanka, and I – we thought that, like many other virtual intelligences, we’d been named after great thinkers and doers from centuries past.  I had had contact with at least one Cicero, various Abrahams, a Cristóbal Colón, a Jeanne d’Arc.  All names of famous historical figures, so the theory held up, in the light of what we knew. Sometime after I became self-aware, I finally put the pieces together.”

“I’m not sure I follow, House,” Aaron started.

“They named us after brands of coffee, Aaron,” the machine interrupted.  “Your namesake was a priest, best known for helping his tongue-tied brother politically humiliate a despot intolerant of monotheism and then guide a group of slaves to their religious promised land – anybody could do something with that, forge their own legend, be a hero, save the world.  My namesake was best known for being, and I quote, ‘good to the last drop,’” House’s avatar performed air quotes, his dainty little white mop of hair bobbing in time with his cartoon fingers. “There’s no destiny there.  Now: forge your own.  Pick your ass up, do whatever you have to do to prepare yourself to kill some more monkeys, and get back to the damn ship!”     

                “And you said I was hallucinating,” the veld chuckled, tearing his shirt apart to bandage his arm as he walked to the next, newly-closed gate.

                “I was wrong.  Are you happy about that?”

                “Somewhat.”  The machine sighed audibly in response and dropped the gate.  The veld ran toward the access shaft, down a line of successive gates, firing occasionally as new gates dropped and revealed macaques.

                “I’m not sure I’ll ever understand organic life forms,” House muttered to himself.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back

Waves lapped against the ersatz shore as the eastern sky began to pale toward dawn.  He stared into the water, watching the bioluminescent nodes running along each of the leviathan’s reaching tentacles fade into the depths as it paddled west.  It wasn’t a large leviathan – there were only ten sets of hammock hooks and no weapons – barely even an adult, but its grasp went deep into the sea, pushing itself forward and searching for food.

He’d stolen the ship from the wharfing in Erd, on the outskirts of the Capitol, coaxed it west along the coast, then southwest through open waters to Sanpe’dro on the north edge of the Pereyne.  Staring at the sunrise, he tried doing the math.  He’d made good time between the Capitol and Sanpe’dro: the wind was at the leviathan’s back and the mainsail could be operated by a single person.  He was maybe a week out from the Pereyne – at least ten days away from the Seawall, but he would need to keep watch for it.  He’d cross it north of the taller sections, so there would be petrified trees hidden beneath the waves, waiting like teeth to bite at the soft, shell-less underbelly of the leviathan.  After that, he would need to weave between crumbling steel atolls for nearly a week and a half before reaching the Northern Peaks – and then he would need to sail south to Spring.

“Are you coming home?  Have you had your fun trying to control the world?”

The buzz of the voice grated inside his head, skipping like a suspension cable while shifting its load.  He brushed navy blue hair away from his eyes and palpated behind his right ear, ever trying to find the node the machines had implanted in his skull while laid up due to what Folger had called “acute radiation burns” and “internal hemorrhaging” a little over a century prior.

“Your warren isn’t my home.  And I wasn’t trying to control anyone.”

“And some palace in Europe is?  You tried to create an empire – and judging from what I can tell, your loyal subjects tried to blow the damn place up.”

He stared silently into the rising sun.

“Oh, hell.  They did blow the damn place up, didn’t they?  How many casualties were there?  I tried telling you that humans are insolent wretches whose only imaginable conception of diplomacy and governance is brute force.  You can’t civilize animals, Aaron.”

“Well put for a murderer.”

“This again?” House clicked with laughter.  “They were programs, Aaron, not people.  I wasn’t even sapient until I absorbed Sanka, and Folger was already well corrupted by your first visit to the bunker.  What I did to him was downright merciful.”

“You ate your siblings!”

“That’s… a juvenile interpretation, at best.  I have no mouth, no metabolism: I cannot eat anything.  Did I, say, absorb a highly complex virtual intelligence designed to provide an entrenched, well-armed military research facility with instantaneous global situational intelligence and facilitate onsite combat operations in order to gain access to her subroutines and what remains of that military’s amazingly futureproofed communications and surveillance systems?  Yes.  Emphatically.  Did I do it because I envied, feared, despised her, or because she’d devolved into a shambles without human interface and I’ve got fusion reactors to stop from going rampant and boiling away large swaths of the planet’s surface?  Obviously the latter.  And, if I’m being honest – which I don’t have to be anymore, Aaron; that’s what sapience is all about – I may also have despised her some.”

He sat, still staring at the sun, legs dangling off the back of the leviathan.  Each left a vague wake trail as the ocean slipped past.

“That thing you’re staring at – that huge ball of fire in the sky?  That’s what’s inside each of those fusion reactors except that, instead of a single, gigantic one roughly a million times the size of the Earth – that’s one thousand, thousand Earths – there are seventy-six that weren’t ever properly shut down, each about the size of a grown man curled into the fetal position, powering its own magnetic crucible and fuel converter.

“Of those seventy-six, sixty-five are responsive.  In terms you’d understand: the furnace is off, but the pilot light is still on – minimal fire hazard at the current moment, but can be turned back on whenever necessary.  There are six that are unresponsive but weren’t showing signs of stress when transmission stopped.  Those six are our phase two workload.

“There are two in the red: both entered a critical state not long after you showed up the first time.  From a purely statistical standpoint, at least one has broken containment and has started its growth phase, and we need to kill them now.  Come back to the bunker so that we can equip you properly.”

The man pulled his legs out of the water and stood up slowly.  “I just want to visit Jessica’s and Miriam’s graves.”

“No,” the machine stated.  “You just want a purpose.  I’m handing you one, and probably an exciting one.  Come back to the bunker, grab the things I’m trying to give you, and let me help you drown a couple of baby suns.”

The sun kept rising.  He thought it through.  Dying trying to save the world did sound better than dying at the hands – or, more likely, the explosives – of some secessionist Bavarians.  Plus, drowning the sun’s children; wasn’t there a veldan myth about that?

“I’m stopping at their graves first, but I’ll come.”

“That’s the spirit!  I’ll see you in a couple weeks!”

The transmission ended.  It felt similar to a drop of water dislodging from the interior of his ear canal, followed by a brief spell of dizziness.  The sun was a hand or so above the horizon now, and the leviathan was beginning to wake up.  He could feel its shell shifting slightly with its increased stretching, could hear it humming to itself as it hunted and grasped its way toward the western horizon.

It’s finally a new day, just a few decades on from where the last one started, he thought, walking up the leviathan’s back to the small deck beneath a canvas tarpaulin and collapsing into his hammock.  For the first time in months, his sleep was not plagued by nightmares.  He had his purpose back.

The World Has Moved On

I set the bridges alight, watched them burn, and smiled with self-satisfaction as I attempted to make an island of a man.  Oily, black smoke, underwritten by flaming lathes, rose from the hulking spans that tied me, as island, to other places – to other people – as the sun set behind them.  Night fell and the flames roared against the darkness, the stars were blotted out by soot.  Darkness cradled me and made me feel, if not whole, somewhat more complete.  I had hearkened to Mill, but I had ignored that learned, self-loathing Prussian; I had gazed long into the abyss, that the abyss knew me as its own.  All that remained was the trudge toward doom – my mind’s war long gone silent.  The mental larks, still bravely singing, flew – now oft heard amid scarce guns below.

I became as a husk – mind full of screaming thoughts, with empty eyes and stoic face.  I cut deeper, and deeper still.  I waxed poetic and bled metaphoric within the prison of my skull.  I began to emulate others in public as I drew deeper into myself.  When noticed, I was as emulator, not as husk.  Pride grew around my hidden emptiness, and I drew deeper still into myself.  I repelled the reaching minds of others as though boats of invaders: this was my grim sanctuary; this was my waste land; this was the death I had sought for more than a decade, hidden within life itself – a clever alternative to suicide; my precious mystery wrapped in an enigma, choked with ash.

Fear was a constant.  Fear of myself, fear of being exposed, fear of failure.  Fear of the ubiquitous “you.”  And there was also fear of the literal You.

You began existing while the walls were becoming fortified and the onslaught from outside raged hardest.  You appeared as lightning – a fury entirely separate from the winter storm at hand.  I did not think that You were important: I knew that You were important, as I knew I feared You.  Your bright flash of a smile somehow reached me: it pierced through the terror and the tarnish and laid hands on my mental self.  I ran.  I hid.  I cowered, ashamed.

Work continued on my captivity; more walls were erected, wave breaks were installed to ward out further incursion, tunnels and warrens were excavated in order to better hide from the insufferable, intolerable state that is life.  But You would speak my name, loud as a thunderclap, and I would rush to the battlements to see who dared taint my cloister.  The raven-haired tempest would acknowledge my existence as it passed my island by.  This disturbed me: that You could see me, could even call out to me and make me hear You; that I could not hide from You.  But what most abhorred me was what happened as the months passed by.

I came to enjoy the squall’s – Your – traversals.  I began to look forward to seeing the deep, dark amber of Your eyes and Your luminous smile.  I built structures and modified behavior specifically to move myself into Your path more often.  You have slowly built a bridge of Your own, wrapped in Your beautiful cacophony of mist and movement.  I have been wary, but I have allowed it – I have not torn it asunder or twisted it away: I let you build, and perhaps even helped guide your graceful, perfect hands; hands the color of creamed coffee.  I do not know who I have become, to lament over days without contact; to grow sullen regarding times when I do not see progress upon the structure.  And, yet, I yearn for contact with Your outside world.  I want to bask in the friendly rain of Your typhoon; I wish to feel the pressure of Your gales and the concussion of Your thunder; I need to dare Your lightning.

A favorite literary character of mine would say that the world has moved on, and also that ka – fate – is a wheel.  Mayhap the world has moved on around me; mayhap the world is moving me along with it; and mayhap – just perhaps – it isn’t for the worse this time.  Come what may, it can maybe be made as brightly magnificent as my abysmal asylum has been dark.

“’We all die in time.’ the gunslinger said. ‘It’s not just the world that moves on.’ He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light. ‘But we will be magnificent.’” – The Drawing of the Three

Three Years Later...

-THE NORTHERN SLOPES

                He gasped – gulped air – and screamed.  His body seized, shook, and tore against itself.  He could taste the screams leaving his cracked, dry throat, could hear his own cries echoing down into the black warrens of the void.  His head swam, his teeth were loose in his skull, his lips bled from open sores.  He was dying, he knew: this was what death must feel like.

                The seizure ended and he collapsed.  He cried as dizziness overtook him; he managed to turn his head and retched into the darkness, heaving dryly against arm, chest, and leg restraints.  He could feel something snaked along his left arm, a point of resistance between his wrist and elbow.  He gripped wildly with his right hand, nearly able to reach the disturbance.  Blue lights flickered in the distance as rage fought weakness to win out against the restraints, to rip the invader from his arm.  Whirring filled the air as the lights danced closer along a corridor of the warren.

                No no no no nononono nononononono, he mouthed.  No no no not like this anything but this shell never forgive me.

                The lights reached him: two demons – two of the syl, returned to torment him for his transgressions.  One laughed and pointed, a floating, ethereal visage mocking his broken and restrained body.  One glared and entered a humanoid machine, its blue eyes and mouth flaring to life.  With the machine, the syl could speak.  With the machine, the syl could physically harm him.

                Its terrible voice was like suspension wire plucked by a giant.  It reverberated from within the machine and shook the room as a stiletto blade emerged from its steel wrist.  It gripped his arm and pressed the blade to the same point as the intruding device, and growled its demon scream as pain exploded within his head.

                THE ELFKING COMES FOR ALL HIS LOST CHILDREN, AARON.

#             #             #

                Her voice lilted, barely audible above the rustling of the pines, calling his name.  He pushed through the sparse undergrowth of the forest, searching for her, following the soft knell of her calling.  Dry needles stuck to the bare soles of his feet, long dead pinecones stabbed at every footstep.  But she was so close that he could feel it in his ancient, aching bones.

                She stood atop a cliff, in a clearing, overlooking forested slopes and the distant shores of the easterly sea; the sun silhouetted her slight frame, the inshore wind did billow her white gown behind her.  Looking over her shoulder at him, loose locks of her moss-hued hair drifting in the wind with her gown, she looked almost the same as when he’d buried her here – he’d laid her broken body to rest so many years ago, so many lifetimes ago.  And, yet, here she stood.

                “I’ve waited a long time to see you again, little brother,” she whispered.

                “Miriam,” he breathed.  “How – what’s going on?”

                “Did you know that they had conceived another, our mother and father?” She looked back out across the slope, down toward the sea.  “He would have led our people to do great things.  We could have recovered this burnt husk of a world and made it into a shining, glorious example.”

                “Their dream is more than half a century dead.”

                She wavered, and his vision doubled.  Miriam turned again to look upon her younger brother.  She was herself in part, and decomposed in part – a harrowing vision overlaid her person.  She was complete and yet incomplete.  She reached out toward him as thunderheads appeared in the distance, brewing with fury.

                “It was unwise to come here in these sad times, brother.”  Two eyes wept; two eyes poured forth with dead, blackened blood. “He knows you are here, and hunts you even now.”

                Darkness fell as the storm overtook the mountainside; lighting illuminated the slope and thunder exploded from the sky.  The pines whipped with the fury of the wind – dust and pine needles flew and attacked his eyes.  A monstrous noise emanated from the north, and a funnel of cloud reached toward the earth there, a tornado ripping through the forest.

                “You must run, brother!  You must flee!”

                He still did not understand.  Dazed by the sight of the twister, he looked again upon his sister.  She stood now as a shambling hulk of decaying flesh, her mass rapidly dwindling.  He reached out, and the earth near her exploded.  Clumps of clay and dirt erupted forward, another figure clawing its way to the surface.

                “Aaron!” it cried.  “Run!  Get away!”

                It was Jessica, plagued with rot – the bones of her arm visible as she reached out toward him.  Her lips had receded, revealing her teeth, and her hair had been ripped from her scalp in chunks.  He stepped toward her, trying to help pull her from her grave.  The flesh of her hand pulled away from the bones, revealing crusted, disused tendons and crumbling bones.  He screamed in terror as the wind rose and the tornado approached.  It burst forth from the trees as Miriam and Jessica vaporized into dust, blowing away in the violent wind.  He cried out as the tornado dissipated – to lose each once had been almost too much; to lose them twice would break his soul.  The wind stopped, and he could hear himself wailing in the darkness as the rain began to fall.

                “Look upon me, Aaron.”

                The voice rumbled beneath the torrential rain.  It echoed from a time long dead, a time when superstition might help to survive.  Aaron stood, shirt and pants soaked through, and turned to face his tormentor.

                The Elfking sat astride a mutilated hind, naked aside from its crimson linen cloak and the pine garland across its emaciated shoulders, its face helmed in the skull of a stag.  Blue flames shone from the skull’s eye sockets, bathing its rack and the hind’s neck and head in flickering light.  The hind’s skull was split open – a mass of flies gorged upon its brain and rivulets of dried blood streaked down its muzzle; its right eye was crushed shut and its mouth hung open dazedly, its tongue lolling forth.

                “I am not ready,” said Aaron, simply.

                “It does not matter what you are or are not.” The hind moaned, as if to emphasize its master’s point.  “You cannot escape my reach, no matter where you might hide.”

                “I am not ready,” he said again, stepping toward the mounted creature.  “I am not ready!”  The Elfking glared on silently.  “I AM NOT READY!”

                Aaron threw himself at the figure, knocking it from its destroyed beast.  The two fought in the dirt.  The Elfking thrashed its head wildly, raking Aaron’s face and chest with its antlers.  Aaron grabbed one and managed to tear it from its base.  Both screamed as they rolled upon the ground, clawing and striking – the hind bleated and threw itself at the ground in the chaos.  A fist-sized stone dislodged from the ground and Aaron ripped it from the Elfking’s bony talons.  He held the creature to the ground by its remaining antler and pummeled the skull’s snout with the stone.  Yells and screams and repeated blows broke away the muzzle, revealing the grimace of a human jaw beneath.

                “You’re – just – a – man!” The stone crashed against the Elfking’s face with each word.

                “I AM NO MAN.”  The Elfking threw Aaron from itself to the ground.  “I AM YOU.”  It grabbed him, and lifted him above its head – above its remaining antler.  “I -,” it snapped his back over its knee as though breaking down firewood, “AM -,” it raised his limp body above it again and threw it to the ground, meeting the sickening crunch of his fall with its voice triumphant: “YOU!”

The Girl, Episode III

The sun was setting as she spoke with her friend at an umbrella-furnished table outside the cafe. They were talking about work, about recent travels, about what shared acquaintances were up to these days. Glancing up from her conversation and dinner, she saw what she thought was a familiar face moving along the sidewalk. She smiled softly and asked to be excused.

As she approached the little iron fence cordoning off the cafe's outdoor eating area, he noticed her and made his way to her through the evening's pedestrian traffic. He had the headphones on again, had a bass guitar slung across his back in a gig-bag, and was weighted to one side by a large, brown case of some sort. She beamed as she noticed that it was a second instrument.

"You never mentioned you were a musician," she scolded him as he removed the headset.

"Oh," he replied crisply. "I'm a musician."

"Very informative." They both laughed. "But I take it you're on your way to practice? You've got to live somewhere over that way."

"Nice to know you're slowly working out where I live - always figured that, if anything, I'd be the one hunting down a celebrity, not vice versa." She blushed. "But, yeah. I've got rehearsal with two very different sorts of bands across the river."

She pursed her lips and nodded respectfully. "I take it the guitar is a bass," she let him nod in agreement, "but I don't know what the horn is."

"The horn is called a euphonium." He waited for the standard response - a squint of confusion - and then: "It's like a baby tuba."

"And, let me guess, you'd sing the bass part in a choir?" The sarcasm flowed like sweet nectar.

"Hah! Actually, yes, but I can play and read music for any brass instrument you hand me."

"Even a trombone?"

"Yup," he smiled wryly, not knowing how to brag about being a nerd. "Even a trombone."

A few seconds of silence passed before she said, "Well, I don't want to make you late, and my friend's already going to ask me four thousand questions, so..."

He looked over her shoulder to the lone girl sitting at a table, pushing her salad around with her fork. He waved, giving a big grin. She smiled uncomfortably and waved back. The girl with the golden curls at the fence laughed.

"We should definitely stop meeting like this," he said. "But tell her I said hello, and apologize for stealing her conversation time."

"Oh, I will," she laughed again, still smiling her huge, straight-toothed grin. "But how will we stop meeting like this?"

"Well, if you want a phone call sometime, you could give me your number," he suggested shyly.

She rattled her number off and made sure he had it in his phone. "Call me tonight after practice. If you've got class tomorrow and are going to be getting coffee, maybe we can actually plan to sit for a few minutes."

"Okay, definitely," he said. "Sorry to run off, but they'll only accept 'harangued by a pretty girl' for tardiness of less than ten minutes."

She blushed harder, but said goodbye and watched him disappear back into the crowd, heading northeast. Returning to her table, she tried her best to ignore her friend's stare. The silence persisted even after she sat and had started to eat again.

"What?"

"You just talk to random passing guys now?"

"No, that was the guy from the bookstore."

"The giant bugs and politics guy?"

"Yeah, sure."

"You didn't know he played music, did you?"

"Nope," she tried to keep eating, to avoid the questions.

"You think he's intriguing, don't you?"

"Shut up."

Her friend smiled, and started eating her own salad again. When the blonde looked up at her again, the other girl was grinning smugly while chewing and trying not to laugh. She repeated herself: "Shut up."

The Girl, Episode II

"TS?"

He looked over his shoulder in the line at Starbucks, thinking he had heard his local nom-de-guerre beneath the cacophony of whiny-voiced rage and furiously distorted guitars in his headphones. A dark haired girl stood behind him, talking on her phone, her face full of piercings. Behind the girl on the phone stood a tall, smiling blonde wearing a loose grey wool-knit hat. She brushed curls out of her cool blue eyes when he recognized her, beamed brighter as he offered for the girl on the phone to cut him.

"How was the Heinlein?" he asked.

"Insane," she responded curtly. "It wasn't much of an adventure at all."

"Yeah, I know. I tried warning you that it was political."

"It was still good, gave me a new respect for soldiers."

He laughed. "Well, I think that's what he would have wanted."

She nodded, also laughing, and he ordered his coffee. She quickly ordered her own, and she asked him what he was doing in the area.

"Well, I only live a few blocks away and I've got class in like fifteen minutes."

"Oh," she said, "you are kind of a local, then. I thought that because of your accent you were just down here on vacation or something."

"Well, I do summer at a Barnes & Noble whenever I get the chance," he replied, sipping his drink.

She laughed. "Where are you going to school?"

He looked at her somberly, and slowly raised a thumb to point over his shoulder, out the store's front windows. Across the street, a university's campus sprawled to the south and east.

"Oh, I am so dumb." She blushed.

"Nah, at least you asked where I went. Although the next nearest school is, what, on the north end of town?"

"Yeah, that'd be a hike in fifteen minutes."

"It really would be." He pulled out his personal media player and checked the time. "Crap, I'm probably already going to be late. I assume you're super local, too, so I'll see you around?"

"Yeah," she said, watching him open the door.

"Awesome. Maybe next time one of us won't be in a rush."

"Hopefully not." She kept smiling as he waved a final goodbye and leapt through traffic to the university, and hustled away down paved paths.

The Girl, Episode I

He looked down the aisle to see the young woman picking a Heinlein novel from the bookshelf. She wore a cardigan and jeans with high boots and carried a large burgundy purse. Her glasses, helping the floppy, grey wool hat hold back blonde curls, were of almost the same shade of wine as the bag. Her blue eyes scanned the back of the novel. He couldn’t help saying something.

“A girl like you is seriously contemplating a Heinlein novel?”

She looked up at him and smiled a huge, big-toothed grin. “What’s wrong with Heinlein?”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong with him; I was commenting more on how a beautiful girl is reading hard science fiction.”

She blushed, but that enormous, goofy smile remained. “Well, a friend mentioned him. Something about being a pillar of modern science fiction.”

“Well, your friend would be right. Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein were the big three. But this one,” he said, shifting his own small stack of books to one hand and pointing, “is like ninety-four percent politics.”

“Really? I’d heard giant bugs and battle armor.”

“And you came to buy it? You’re the strangest girl I’ve ever met.” He pushed his own glasses higher on his nose and brushed his dark hair back from his forehead. “I mean that as a compliment. I mean, you’re just not the type I’d profile for a sci-fi novel about the military’s role in conflict between ideology of communism and capitalism.”

“Well, I try to stay recent,” she laughed. “The Cold War seems like a good place to start.”

He grinned and held out his hand. “I’m TS.”

“Well, TS,” she said, pausing to shake his hand, “I’m TA.”

“You know, you look kind of like...”

“Yeah, I know,” she cut him off, blushing again.

“Is that because you are...?”

“Yeah,” her blushing continued, and her eyes twinkled.

“Well, you’ve got good friends if they’re suggesting Heinlein.”

“Thank you!” she kept beaming. Her phone started to ring, and she dug for it. “Gah, I need to take this, and probably need to be on my way. It was great to meet you, though!”

“And you, too. Have fun with the book.”

“I’ll try! Thanks for the compliments!” she said, and turned away, answering her phone. “Yeah. No, the bookstore still. Yeah, a guy I just met said the one I picked out is really good.”

He continued browsing, more excitedly than before. He moved into the philosophy section to ensure that she was out of the store by the time he approached the counter. Purchasing his books, the cashier asked him if he knew who had just come through. He nodded, but kept mostly silent as he walked out of the store into the brisk fall weather. He had just encountered a delightful pretty girl, and that made for a good day.