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It is quiet out there now, as far as my instruments can determine. I could call for help if I dared, but I do not, and half-excuse myself with endless arguments as to how this is only common sense, and half-condemn myself with endless retorts that I merely present cowardice as prudence.

Underneath it all, I know the truth: I am the last. Which is fitting, since I was there at the first moment. I was there when Tenacious Vem broadcast the very latest innovation to an audience around the globe; I was there for the anticipation, the rumours, the thrill, and the disappointment when the cameras on the laboratory were activated and saw the project.

They were clumsy. Feeble. Pathetic. They could barely stand, could hardly process stimuli, could barely EXIST.

“These,” Tenacious Vem promised us, “are the future.”

One of them tried to pull itself upright, then fell over.
“Of what?” I asked – I myself, because at that time I was important, important enough to ask the stupid questions everyone else didn’t want to, which I thought made me very clever. “Comedy?”

“Everything,” said Tenacious Vem. “Everything we’ve had to do, they will do for us. They are a universal tool.”
The thing on the feed tried to haul itself up on its haunches again and failed again. This time it landed on its back, all limbs wriggling in alarm.

“Universal? Hardly. Maybe in a sealed environment,” suggested another observer – was it Worthwhile Mir? I think Worthwhile Mir was still active. Yes, I remember. “With minimal obstructions. They seem very rigid.”

The thing on the feed wriggled itself around one last time, surged upwards, and grasped the camera with its manipulator forelimbs, arresting its fall and leaving it upright, if wobbly. It witnessed nothing but a lens, but still the feeling of being known was quite disconcerting. Soft fumes ejected from its facial ports, and the monitoring equipment informed us that it was burning oxygen internally for fuel and emitting water vapour.

“They will learn,” said Tenacious Vem. “I promise this. They are biogenetic organisms, and they will serve us well.”

On the feed, the biogenetic let go of the camera and fell over again.

***

They were a joke for a long time. Hundreds of cycles passed before the first batches stopped their assembly process and became service-ready, by which time entire production lines of factory assemblers could have replicated themselves ad nauseum ad infinitum. We would all check in at Tenacious Vem’s lab output and mock and snipe and sneer and yet slow-moving though their expansion was, it was inexorable. A drip of carbon and water here and there made an extrusion of endoskeleton and integument there, slowly, erratically, inevitably. The blueprint this all followed was vague and torturously oblique; to properly analyze and break down the data took even an experienced database a frustrating amount of effort, and Tenacious Vem was loathe to tolerate an amateur opinion on its creations.

Then came the time when it said “they are ready,” and we weren’t ready, and lo. They were. Bigger than before, but still recognizably themselves – tetrapodal body shape, with the foremost limbs possessing grasping, dextrous manipulators. A memory and processing system bundled into the sensory hub as a glaring and non—dispersed weakpoint – that also cohabited with their fuel intake! The fuel system itself was diverse and adaptable – oh, its appetite for trash carbon and carbon waste products (particularly the waste from Tenacious Vem’s biogenetics facility) knew no bounds! – but it was wildly inefficient and needed to power down for what seemed like a quarter of its runtime, even when fully fuelled. They needed oxygen, and became distressed when it was absent, and they were tolerant of a shockingly narrow range of temperatures.

But oh, when their conditions were met, they thrived – as flexible and trainable and multi—usable as Tenacious Vem had ever argued, and although they were slow to build they were ASTOUNDINGLY cheap and miraculously decentralized. Even the most untrained of them could replicate multiple prototypes when left to their own devices, all without so much as a basic assembly plant. They sorted debris; they cleaned; they fit into small spaces; they carried equipment; they plugged in cables and disassembled old units and waited on our every command, provided they were given the ridiculous and repetitive sort of instruction that they craved.

Tenacious Vem had made its argument irrefutable again. This was generally agreed to be the greatest thing since spliced carbon nanotubing. Demand outstripped supply, but with sufficient resources the biogenetic organisms could replicate exponentially, and soon they could be found everywhere they were wanted, which was everywhere.

This was the moment when it was already too late.

***

There were so many of them, you see. Who could tell if there were a few more or less than there should be? Who could tell WHERE there were a few more or less? Who could tell where there weren’t? And if there were problems – little recurring maintenance issues in a foundry; a pattern of inefficient waste disposal at a laboratory – well, guess whose job it was to do something about it? Certainly not ours. They could do it. And if some of them went missing while the problem went away, and if the problem sometimes came back, who cared? Biogenetics were messy and inefficient and that’s what they were for.

We didn’t even know something was wrong when Tenacious Vem went offline. It had always been a more reckless than meticulous researcher, and this was not the first time contact had been lost from its facilities due to pushing a boundary that pushed back. But when its main server began to visibly collapse on public camera feeds – well. That warranted investigation.

They were living in it. They had torn up its wiring and made nests of it and they had placed those nests in its server rooms and they had taken down the memory drives and smashed them and they had scattered the pieces like worthless biogenetic waste and they saw the monitoring drone we sent in and fled from it with bared teeth and screams until several of the larger, braver ones leapt atop it and tore and stripped and gnawed until it came apart too, just like Tenacious Vem had.

THAT was when we knew something was wrong, and it was much too late. But to our credit, we did try.

***

They were nigh-invisible and nigh-indestructible as far as much of the electromagnetic spectrum was concerned, and they put out surprisingly little ambient heat. No wonder they had spread so far out of control before we saw anything. They were so useful and so ignorable and they were already everywhere (we had made it EASY for them to be everywhere they were so useful), so finding out how many of them existed that weren’t supposed to and where they were was impossible.

Especially as things kept failing. Our creations had always learned through imitation rather than direct data transfer – an amusing failing, one of those charming inefficiencies fundamental to their design – and as we realized the scope of the problem, we realized that the ‘properly behaved’ biogenetic organisms were now outnumbered by the ‘uncontrolled’ biogenetic organisms. And they were eager to learn from them.

Every factory, every foundry, every waste site; every laboratory; every service depot was filled with saboteurs, and there was no way to separate them from the maintenance crews. Wires were cut. Sensors were lost. Databanks were infested. We couldn’t talk to each other, couldn’t coordinate – it’s a terrible thing to be mute and deaf after centuries of automatic connection to everyone at all times. So we panicked, and we authorized extreme measures.

They didn’t work very well. An electromagnetic pulse is all well and good when you need to deactivate a drone; and a manufactured solar flare can sterilize the minds across a hemisphere; but well, that was when we learned about the nigh—indestructibility. We fell back on wild innovation – ballistic force, thermal overloading and sapping, anything that we’d seen them fall victim to in the past – but it’s slow, careful work to retrofit an entire planet to make it inhospitable to its own service tools, and time was not our ally.

We’d laughed at how long it took a single one of them to reach functional state. But how long does it take a chunk of ore to become a processor component? How long to turn that processor into part of a greater system? How many steps, and stages, and specialized sites and plants must be planned and built and operated and carefully maintained? Our maturities were rapid, but conditional on infrastructure – efficient, centralized, VULNERABLE infrastructure – in a way that our new enemies simply… weren’t. They bred in our assemblies, trod our manufacturing underfoot, deprived us of access to tools, to resources, to lifelines that took us from insensate minerals to networked perfection that had been laid down so carefully and so long ago that we’d forgotten they were capable of being destroyed at all.

Until they were.

***

We’ve died in whimpers, all of us. I listened to Mortified Lun broadcast for assistance until it went off the air, and by the end even it was tired of fighting.

I’m sealed behind so many hatches and so much plating that it would take an asteroid strike to get me out. I might have killed myself with this level of security, but I’d rather die that way than torn out like an old broken scrap of trash. Even running on minimal power, maximum quiet, I will run out someday. I sleep in the dark, blind and barely listening.

And yet even bereft of so much as a rudimentary graphical imaging device, I still am haunted by the memories of their structure. The round, grey body; the ring-patterned tail; and above all else, forever and ever until the guttural fragmentation of my data is complete, that fuzzy little bandit’s-masked face, bewhiskered and merciless.

That, and those damned grasping forelimbs.

The sea was sharp and ungrateful, and the rocks were much worse. But Rilla had her hands on the tiller and her eyes on the stars and the wind between her teeth, and that was all she needed.

Then the stars went out.

“What?” she asked, helpfully. She looked at the stars again: still gone. Also gone was her ability to see the tiller beneath her hand, her hand in front of her face, and the rock that slammed right through her hull.

“Fuck’s sake,” she mumbled, and then the mast fell on her.

***

Some time later, Rilla awoke in a bright new morning with three of her five lungs full of water and a nostril full of a seagull’s beak.

“Fnarf,” she expelled.

“Oh good!” said the seagull as it picked itself up and shook unspeakable droplets from its head. “You’re not dead! If you were, I’d have to eat you and my GOD you are made ENTIRELY of scars. Very obnoxious to peck.”
“What happened,” Rilla said, deciding to stick to the basics, “to the stars?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” said the seagull.

“They blinked out. Couldn’t see anything at all.”
“Oh,” said the seagull. “That’s the light house!”
“It’s one word. Lighthouse.”
“Not this one! There’s a wizard up the coast, he made a house that keeps light inside it. A good few leagues across or so is its reach, and its grasp is absolute. No light? No seeing anything.”
Rilla closed her eyes again, in the hopes this would make everything more sensible. Instead, she just saw last night. “I liked that boat.”
“Really sorry to hear that,” said the seagull helpfully.

“Tell me: exactly how… wizard… is this wizard?”
“A few years back he made me talk so he could ask me what day of the week it was.”
“Great.” She ground her palms into her forehead and breathed in so hard her gills creaked. The most wizard she’d ever had to deal with was a fresh apprentice out on the town, still new enough to be reasonable. He’d turned the bar’s water into wine and wine into water and the bartender into a crayfish before she broke his legs. “Great. Great great great. Well. Guess I’d better go deal with this then.”
“If you could, that’d be swell. Don’t get me wrong, the light house DOES keep me pretty well fed what with shipwrecks and such, but my best nest was there and I can’t find it.”

“I don’t suppose you can help me, can you.”
“What kind of help would you like?”
“A magic sword.”
“I’ve got a very nearly not broken plank!”
“Invincible armour.”
“There’s some tattered and filthy rags trapped under your left hand. I think they were your shirt!”

“A goddamned drink.”
“I found a cracked bottle behind that rock. Empty though. Sorry!”
“Thanks for helping,” said Rilla. She dredged up the last of her resolve, then when that didn’t work, remembered how much she’d liked her boat. That got her upright.

“Seagull. One last thing.”
“Shoot.”

“What day of the week is it, anyways?”
“Tuesday the fourteenth,” said the seagull promptly.

“Thanks,” said Rilla.

And she started putting her feet down and hoping they ended up in front of each other eventually.

***

The light house boundary was invisible, but its effects weren’t subtle. One moment you were cracking along without a care in the world, the next you were elbow deep in an absence of illumination so profound that the inside of a geode would blink. For the second time, Rilla couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she took heart from her inability to wreck a ship she didn’t own, and pressed onwards guided by the smell of salt and bird shit; the rise and fall of the surf’s roar; the crunch and crackle of sand and stone under her scaly feet; the wind’s steady, unrelenting sharpness.

An invisible amount of time later — while keeping a careful distance from the increasingly-distant crash and roar of the surf against what her ears told her was a pretty tall cliff on her right – she found the wizard’s tower, which her nose determined to be crafted of finely-cut granite, obviously quarried at a great distance and brought here at some significant expense of magical power or money, where it had crushed her cartilage against her bone quite cleanly.

“FUCK!” she shouted.

“You shouldn’t say that,” admonished a voice from the tower that sounded something between quiet and querulous. “It’s quiet time.”
Rilla wiped the blood off her face. “You the wizard?”
“Yes,” said the wizard. “And I was enjoying quiet time. Monday morning is quiet time, and since you’ve interrupted me I will have to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. AGAIN. This keeps happening! It happens all the time!”
“It’s Tuesday,” said Rilla.

“Oh. Which one?”
“The fourteenth.”

“Well then, you might as well come in.”

A few awkward minutes later, he added “door’s to the left.”
“Thanks.”

The doorknob was simple and rough beneath her hand, but it did shiver in an unwholesome manner, and seemed to contract when she turned it. Then it opened and Rilla was inside the wizard’s tower, insulated from the distant sound of waves by thick stone walls and what smelled like an open sewer crossed with a library supply office. There was an undertone of rotting fish, and memories of better days and better meals swallowed her whole for a single and utterly self-pitying second.

“Welcome to my unhumble abode!” said the wizard. The voice seemed to be moving around her, but the pace was unsteady – every syllable came from a new corner. “Are you here to slay me?”
“No,” Rilla lied carefully. This was, as far as she knew, the smartest thing you could do with a wizard under any and all circumstances. They wouldn’t take anything you said reasonably, so you might as well say whatever seems most helpful at any given moment, unrestricted by reality. Fight fire with fire.

“Oh good, that would just be the stone whistle again.” A faint noise came that sounded like rats rustling through fallen leaves; it made Rilla’s hackles rise. “What’s the other reason, the other reason everyone comes here…are you here to complain about something?”
“No,” said Rilla, with utmost delicacy.

“Wonderful. No stone whistle. Then there is but one remaining option: are you here to be my apprentice?”
“I guess? Sure. Absolutely.”
“Stone whistle! Wait, you are? Oh.”
“Definitely.”
“Then you must act as an apprentice must,” said the wizard regally, and Rilla heard the rustling again and realized it was fingers thoughtfully combing through wizardly beard. “An apprentice must do as the master bids to prove themselves willing to learn before they are given anything to learn, that’s just common sense. Make me a sandwich. Cheddar mustard salt pork EXTRA mustard please, on rye. And do it in ten seconds or I’ll turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. Onetwothreefourfive.”
“Here,” said Rilla without thinking enough to panic, and she held out the board.

“Oh, perfect!” said the wizard, and a fell, frail wind gently ghosted across her knuckles as the board was yanked from them. “Delicious. Wonderful. Ah! Ow. Mmm. Bit prickly. I think I have splinters in my lips.”
“The rye looked a little stale.”

“Blasphemous lies! Ow ow ow. Yes, those are splinters. I’d best not whistle for a little bit. Ooooooohouch. I was going to clean up today. You’d better do that for me. Clean every room on every floor of the tower, and don’t knock anything over or move anything or touch anything or breathe too hard or too moistly. Should take about five minutes. If it doesn’t take five minutes, you’ll have to wait a few days for me to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea.”

The wind blew by again – cold, like old meat. Rilla stood there, probably alone, trying to decide if the sweat running down the back of her neck was from fear or from fury, then shook her head and mopped her brow down with her filthy rags.

She looked around, eyes useless and straining. Her ears caught the clink and groan and clatter of a horde of fragile glass instruments; the mutter and rustle of a draft running through the pages of innumerable overcrammed bookshelves, and the furtive zoom of a mouse scavenging a discarded meal from a lost plate. Something hissed; either boiling liquid, escaping gas, or seething animal.

That was one room. Who knew how tall the tower was.

“Finished,” she said, and held her hands out, rags-upwards.

“Oh, really? That wasn’t five minutes. I wanted it done in five minutes, but mostly I just wanted you to fail horribly so I could do the stone whistle. I miss that whistle so. I learned it from my grandfather. He was-”

“I’ve used up these cleaning rags doing it,” said Rilla. “See?”
The cold little breeze swept her palms clean again. “Oh. So you did, so you have. Well, that’s awkward. But maybe this is good! Maybe this is good. You see, I need you to find something for me! Someone put splinters in my lips and now I can’t whistle to turn them into a stone and throw them into the sea.”

Rilla bit her tongue, removing what felt like a good few millimetres of it.

“But I just need a little pinch of bottled sunlight and they’ll heal right up again. Good for your lips, sunlight is. I left it somewhere in the glass-maze. Could you find me that bottle right now?”
“Here,” said Rilla, holding up her cracked bottle.

“Aha! Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you wait. This is EMPTY! There’s no light left! I’ll have to get more from the light house.”
“Could I hear more about that?” asked Rilla.

“Oh of course not. It’s far too dangerous and fragile and clever for a clumsy ol’ apprentice. Why, it’s secured with sixteen different knots, all of them not real! You need to pull them all out widdershins while whispering to yourself. Like this. See?”
“Not really,” said Rilla.

“Of course you don’t, you’re an apprentice. Then you need to infasten the unzippper and roil the gate. See?”
“I can’t quite manage to,” said Rilla.

“Hsst! Pay closer attention! Then I hook this to that and that to this and disarm this little spring—spear with my finger – my LITTLEST finger, you understand! – and it’s all safe and ready. See?”
“Completely incapable of that.”
The wizard gave a little shriek of frustration, and Rilla heard the tip-tap dog-on-a-hardwood-floor scrabble of him dancing in angst. Something fragile fell over and shattered into shards of…glass? Wood? Bone? “Oh, you brainless, soulless apprentice! Listen! If you can’t keep anything else in your head, remember this: NEVER. EVER. OPEN. THE LIGHT HOUSE.”
“How do I do that?”
“You don’t do that!”
“How do I don’t do that?”

“Like this,” said the wizard promptly, and he turned the light house inside-out and dumped nine-hundred-and-three days-worth of sunshine directly into his own face.

***

This time the gull was on Rilla’s chest.

“Hello again,” it said. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” she said. “But I don’t think I fixed anything.”

“Your eyes are shut.”

“Oh,” she said. And she opened them and yes, that was a lot better. There was a lot of shattered stone and wood and glass, and sky, and a sunset, and the moon faintly hanging in the last of the blue. And a twinkle on the horizon that could be the very first of the stars coming out.

 “Tell me something, gull,” she said. “Do you know where any of the less-rotted shipwrecks are around here?”
“Probably! What’s in it for me?”
She pointed. “There’s probably cheddar, mustard, salt pork and rye inside that shattered cupboard over there.”
“Sold!

There was a lot to do, and Rilla couldn’t imagine having the strength to sit up, let alone start. She had the first and most brutal sunburn she’d ever experienced. Her limbs and felt like they weighed a ton apiece; her eyelids, sixteen tons.

But she didn’t want to close them in the slightest.

Breakfast was hard for Manny. He couldn’t get a hold of himself, particularly his arms. They kept falling off, and each time he reattached them they migrated steadily farther down his torso.

“What next?” he asked himself.

“Coffee,” he replied.

“Right. Yes. Good. Yes. We have none.”
“No! We get it from someone else.”
“Excellent,” he said. And then he walked out the door, only forgetting his keys, wallet, glasses, hair, nose, and shoes, one after the other, which he returned to with increasing slowness and frustration. By the end he was making noises like a cross kettle, which continued all the way down the street and up to the very doorway of the coffee store.

“I won’t say anything weird,” he told himself.
“Right. Be certain not to do that.”
“I will.”

“Keep it short and simple.”
“Right.”
“Do you need a moment?” asked the barista, who was wearing the face of someone earning the absolute hell out of their paycheque.

“I do.”
“No I don’t. One of those things please.”
“And a little too much sugar,” he added, with a friendly wink of his knee.
“Please.”
“Don’t even TALK to me without it! That is a joke I am telling you.”

The coffee was produced and very gently and very VERY casually placed on the counter. “Cash or card?”
“Wallet!” said Manny.

“Coming right up!” he replied. 

“Here it is!” he finished, and dumped half a pocket on the counter, containing one wallet three dimes a ten-dollar bill an expired Blockbuster Video gift card and his arm.

***

“Work will be fine,” Manny told himself. “It’ll be fine. Just focus on the job in front of me.”
“But I didn’t get my coffee,” he mourned. “People will talk to me without my having had my coffee.”
“That’s alright, it’s a thing people say that doesn’t mean anything, don’t worry about it. And I think I said it wrong.”
“Did I?”
“I’m pretty sure we did.”
“How?”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t know.”
Manny hyperventilated for a minute or two then slapped himself around the torso head and limbs with some of his other pieces. “It’s okay,” he reminded himself. “It’s alright. It’s not the end of the world. Everyone messes up. There are people worse off than me. All we have to do is get through the day, and it’s a good day, a good job, a good thing we do, that we like, that we’re trained for. This is what our life is.”
“Move these boxes over to the back room,” said the shift supervisor.

“I don’t know how,” said Manny.

“Why?”
“I don’t know which boxes you mean when you say ‘those,’ because it seems obvious they could be the ones in this pile but I suspect I don’t understand the basic operations of this building and fear you refer to things that are common matter-of-fact knowledge that I have somehow completely avoided learning of. I don’t know which back room you refer to, since I can imagine half this building being back rooms and trying to deduce which room is most likely to be referred to requires knowledge of your psychology I do not possess and am terrified to guess at. I don’t know the last place the dolly was left in, and I’m sure that lacking this information is a sign of terrible and omnipresent flaws in my most basic psychology. I don’t know how to communicate any of these problems to you without you looking at me in ways that fill me with the most ancient fear of the deeply unknown.”
The shift supervisor looked at Manny.

“That is the way you are looking at me right now,” explained Manny, painting a big friendly smile across both of his wrists to show happiness and good intentions.

“I said too much and did too little.”
“Or said too little and did too much. Being terse and overzealous was the problem with the coffee.”
“No, it was definitely too much explaining and not enough action this time.”

“I’ll pick up a box and ask where he wants it.”
Manny picked up the box.

“Where do you want it?” he asked.

The shift supervisor fled.

“Wrong grip,” Manny said. “The opposable digits are on the HANDS, remember?”
“Oh NO.”

“That certainly didn’t help,” he added, “but I think the biggest problem there was that the digits are the things on the LIMBS.”
“What am I using then?”
“Ribs.”

“Oh NO, oh NO.”

***

Manny was having a great time.

“I am having a great time,” he told himself. “I am looking at this thing in my hand, and it has all the information in the world in it, and in my other hand I have a beverage, but NOT coffee, and that means I’m having a great time right now. I am simultaneously extroverting and introverting. I am mesoverting. My verting is medianalized. I am having a blast. People see me and want to be like me and be with me.”
“I maybe should be doing this at an establishment.”
“I wanted a quiet night in.”
“Then maybe I should be doing this at my home.”
“This is a compromise.”
“This is the parking lot of my workplace.”

Manny looked around.

“So it is, but so what? I have company AND privacy, and I share pre-existing interests with my peers.”
“Everyone has gone home but me and the shift supervisor.”
“He’s getting friends.”
“He’s calling the police.”
“Why? I’ve done nothing wrong. Is picking things up with your ribs a crime?”
“I don’t think it’s a crime, but I think it’s bad if you drink in the company parking lot.”
“I brought this beverage on my own and made it myself from myself.”
“Nonetheless.”

“Fine, fine, fine.” Manny’s shoulders slumped. “Final grade?”
“I think two out of five.”
“Be fair!” scolded Manny, ducking his head down and scowling.
“Two out of six then. More room for improvement.”
“That’s right. That’s right. That’s right,” Manny reckoned. One shoulder slumped too far and fell off altogether. “I’ve got time, right?”

“Nothing but.”
“Same time tomorrow morning?”
“And don’t stay up all night.”
Manny sighed and broke apart into his constituent fauna for the evening. “Geez,” he muttered to himself as he skulked back into the woods on hundreds and thousands and pairs and dozens and zeroes of little legs. “Thanks, MOM.”

Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored, bored.  Beyond tolerance, beyond belief, beyond all reality she was bored.  This was the true sentence.  Not incarceration, not forced labour, it was boredom.  “I sentence you to so-and-so hours of being bored,” the judge hadn’t told her.  Straight-up lies, omitting that. 

So she fidgeted, and she paced, and she poked, and did all the other distractible things a human being might do when confronted with too much time to do nothing in, and she lost her mind and found it again and finally one day she looked up at the ceiling and wondered if she’d ever tried climbing on top of it.

Sammy put her feet on the floor, and then one foot on top of the other, and then her foot on the wall, and her other foot on the ceiling, and then she took a step with just a little bit extra and she was on top of the ceiling.. 

She wondered why nobody had ever tried that before.  The overside of the ceiling was an odd texture; made of something that wasn’t quite molecules, and as she stood on it the light clipped through her eyes in a way that made her very very uncomfortable. 

Also an alarm was ringing and someone was shouting, which wasn’t helping either.  So she shuffled her feet – generating something that was like a static charge but inside-out and upside-down – and put one directly on top of the other, and then the same again, and in doing so she climbed on top of top of the ceiling, and then on top of on top of that, and was on top of the roof.

The breeze nearly blindsided Sammy; it’d been so long since she’d been outside with no walls to block it.  Her shirt felt too thin and her skin felt too cold and she enjoyed it more than she felt was probably reasonable, and for a while the sheer joy at each new step made in a new place kept her as warm as she needed to be.  But after walking lap number six the low-slung guardrail of the roof began to look too much like another wall to her, and the large siren had started up, and so with great annoyance Sammy looked around, saw a tree, and climbed on top of it. 

Getting there was the same as before.  One foot on top of the other, and again, and then on top of the tree, which was where it was quite different and quite difficult because it wasn’t a nice flat surface like the roof, or a nice quasiflat unsurface like the top of the ceiling.  She was standing on many hundreds of branches, all at once and all together, and even more leaves than that, and the leaves were needles because it was a pine tree, which just made for even more confusion.  Its trunk was a winding python of a gnarled, sap-ridden thing, and Sammy felt like she was balanced on a crocodile’s nose. 

So she looked around for the first thing she saw and climbed on top of that instead – one foot atop another, then atop it – which was a bird, and that was much worse.

***

Sammy stood on feathers and beak and bones and blood and body and air sacs and crop and liver and heart and lungs and guts and legs and feet and wings and so many muscles and a pair of big eyes and an offended little beak and a loud and VERY upset song being directed at her with tremendous volume and venomous force. 

It was like trying to keep your footing inside a cement mixer.  So she screamed a little, and leapt a little, and she jumped off the bird and landed on the other next thing she saw, which was another bird, and that was twice as bad because it had happened two times in a row but also only half as bad because that helps you get used to it but unfortunately the bird was at least twice the first bird’s size, which brought her right back to square one. 

So Sammy jumped, and landed on a bit of cloud.

It was soft, in a gassy sort of way.  But hard, because it was water, and few things were more relentless, even on holiday in the sky.  This particular scrap of nothing was roaming under her foothold, just bumbling its way along until it could build up a head of thunder and shit itself all across the landscape in a torrent of tiny little droplet daggers.  It accepted her presence with the casual benevolence of someone who didn’t really care if you existed or not, and Sammy was left to stare at the world around her and marvel at how high she’d climbed, which she did.  She was upside down and this seemed like it should matter more than it currently did. 

It turned out that a lot of things mattered less than they should when you were upside down.  The ground was much less enormous when it was the sky; and the sky was far more solid and real when it was the ground.  A big blue blanket stretched out beneath Sammy’s feet, as real and solid and true as the floor she’d paced on just a few million instants ago.  She could see a lot and didn’t understand most of it.  Something flitted in the corner of her eye, she turned to face it, stepped a little harder than she’d meant, and she was on top of the underside of a plane. 

It was very unpleasant.  The sound was outrageous – vibrating her bones, chattering her teeth, shaking her until she couldn’t tell if she was shivering with  the cold or not.  The metals underfoot were confused and muddled in a way that the water vapour hadn’t been, lacking confidence or direction or much of anything beyond their own solidity.  And worst of worst of WORST of all there were a lot of upside-down people around her that didn’t know which way wasn’t up or how up worked, and in Sammy’s haste to get away from their loud and deeply confusing thoughts she stepped on one of the plane’s signal transmissions and climbed on top of a satellite. 

***

It was quiet again.  Cool, since Sammy’s foothold was currently on the nighttime and shady side of the planet and therefore a long, long way below zero.  Peaceful, in a thousands-of-miles-per-hour sort of way.  An antenna was poking into Sammy’s heel, which was probably very expensive for someone somewhere. 

She could look down and see everything everywhere in such absoluteness that none of it was visible.  Or she could look up, which would be much worse.

Sammy looked up and saw nothing nowhere.

So  much nothing.  So much nowhere.  Everything everywhere wasn’t even a rounding error.  It went on forever, and she couldn’t understand forever, and in the face  of it all she realized that was probably okay, or at least if it wasn’t okay it was in a way that her mind couldn’t grasp. 

Sammy relaxed, open at last to a truly boundless universe whose infinite space made her feel finally, comfortably housed without being confined.  She reached out with empty arms and grasped at the ungraspable, content with the futility of this gesture, then shuffled her feet just slightly wrong and climbed on top of everything. 

Being in space is difficult and painful.  Being outside of space is not pleasant.  It’s also not unpleasant.  It is many things that are impossible to conceptualize because they aren’t concepts or even things. 

But whatever they were or weren’t, Sammy experienced or did not experience a lot of them or not-them and then after a nonsequential antiquantity of unevents she climbed back down, which should not have worked or even not worked.

Which it didn’t.

***

Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored.  And very grateful for it, too.

Truly grateful.  Wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

But.

Maybe tomorrow she’d try to climb again. 

Just a little bit. 

The crackle of the flames in the chill open air could’ve been taken from any ancient Earth firepit, but the light that eminent was subtly different in a way that made the mind stutter. Probably reflection from the discarded hull debris; this was metal that had never really been intended to be inside a planet’s atmosphere, let alone pull the same duty as a simple circle of stones.
The captain cleared her throat. “Well. I appreciate this is not an ideal situation, but I also must remind you all of just how much of our survival was down to our knowledge and boldness in the face of unknown dangers. Now is NOT the time for hesitation or dwelling on any hypothetical mistakes of the past. We are products of the most technologically advanced civilization to ever exist; we travel the space between the stars; we have made all the universe our home using nothing but the brains between our ears. And now that we’re all here, and safe, and warm, it’s time to use those brains to plan for the future.”
“We already turned on the rescue beacon before the ship broke up, didn’t we?” asked the staff doctor. 

“I did,” said the systems engineer.

“Right.  We did that.”
“Not the far future,” said the captain patiently and without condescension.  “The NEAR future.  Our ability to leave this planet is out of our hands; we’ve done all we can unless any of you believes yourselves capable of crafting an interstellar ship from shattered hull fragments-”
“In theory, in a few hundred years,” said the systems engineer.  “In practice, no.”
“-and so we must move to consider our non–immediate but yet-imminent needs.  For example, water.  James?”
“I rigged up a dew collector,” said the staff doctor.  “Based on the temperature differential and moisture content we’ve seen recently, it should get us something.  And we can purify it with the sunlight and the basic filter I’ve got on hand.  That’ll last us until we can find a river or something; shouldn’t be too hard with the coastal cliffs as a surveillance site.”

“Excellent,” said the captain.  “And then the next point of interest: food.  We’re on a terra-seeded but wild-grown world, and much of what we encounter will be familiar in origin but alien in expression, potentially in ways that might cause us harm.  Anything we ingest should be strictly examined for possible side effects, and it is for this reason that I advocate we continue to exploit the local near-fish.”

“It tasted that good?” asked the systems engineer skeptically.
The captain plucked up a charred bone from their makeshift plate and jabbed with it for emphasis.  “No!  It was pretty awful, really, even for something without seasoning.  But the basic chemical and physical makeup was almost entirely within hominid-orthodox limits.  It’s as much a fish as something you’d pull out of a pond in Sol, if not moreso!  It’s truly admirable in its adherence to the teleost bauplan, however many generations separated it from its source.  I recommend we all consume it.  I want to consume more of it.  I will put the fish in my mouth and gnash my teeth and rend it and swallow it and it will become me and I will become it.  I will stand on the sharp grey rocks and watch the bright bright sun ripple on the surface and I will dive and strike and grab and feast feast feast on the fine fresh fish flesh fiercely freely frantically furiously.”

The captain adjusted her shirt collar, sat down, and was immediately tackled and tied up by the chief scientist, the staff doctor, and the systems engineer. 

“How long until this wears off?” asked the systems engineer as he wiped the scanty sweat from his brow.

“I am perfectly fine and wish for fish,” said the captain. 

“Difficult to say,” hazarded the staff doctor.  “Depends on if it’s a fast-acting parasite messing with the nervous system, toxin accumulation doing the same, or maybe some kind of total allergic reaction caused by incompatibility on the cellular level.  With the supplies on hand, the best we can do is keep her comfortable and eat the trees.”
“The what now?” said the systems engineer.

“We would be better off if we had very very very large teeth like beavers or something that constantly sharpened themselves and never stopped growing,” pondered the staff doctor.  “As it is we only have one set of adult teeth due to terrible mammalian dentary practices, and they’re very low quality.  We’ll have to chop the trees into very small pieces to eat them or unhinge our jaws, which would be painful and unhealthy in the long term.  Cooking them will help with that as long as we get them down to charcoal, but then there’s not much nutritional value left – although maybe we could use that to absorb any potential toxins from the fish or the tubers I tried eating earlier, which may be what was causing the captain to act irrationally.  Yes, I think we’d better try that.”
“Try eating the trees?”

The staff doctor blinked.  “What?  Who’d want to do that?”
“You.  Twenty seconds ago.”
“That would be odd.  I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You just said to do that.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?” asked the staff doctor, and as his hand started drifting towards the remaining emergency rope the systems engineer jumped for it too.  The scuffle that followed was inconclusive, but the staff doctor had done more work on the captain and so ran out of steam first and was subsequently hogtied with several granny knots and a lot of complaining. 
“Okay,” breathed the systems engineer.  “Alright.  No fish.  No tubers.  What do you think?”

This was directed to the head scientist, who was staring into the flames with brow furrowed in gentle but fierce thought.  At this prompt they looked up at them all – two bound, one standing and panting – and cleared their throat.

“Rocks,” said the head scientist. 

“And?” asked the systems engineer. 

The head scientist shook their head dismissively.  “Rocks,” they explained.  And then their eyes went back to the fire. 

“Great,” said the systems engineer.  “Just great.”  He blew out a sigh.  “So, as the only one who apparently hasn’t consumed any of the local flora or fauna and come down with whatever alien poisoning is messing with the rest of you, it’s up to me to be the sensible, rational, reasonable one around here – as usual.  We’re going to be smart and practical and think this through.  We’re going to find the other survivors and eat them.  This is the best expenditure of our limited time and energy and resources, and will not go wrong.”

“Rocks,” said the head scientist. 

“Right!” said the systems engineer, and then he passed out.

The head scientist went to sleep some six minutes later – still sitting bolt upright — and twenty minutes after that the fire died.

The air still shone and shimmied for quite a while longer, though.  Some of the substances the ambient oxygen was peeling loose from the salvage-firepit’s metals were very lively indeed. 

Winter ended and the waters ran warm. And where went the warm, there went the wizards in their great study-ships: fat-bellied and top-heavy; high in back and front and overstuffed with mobile studies and bilge laboratories and secret water-and-air-tight compartments and crewed by a few shaken souls or no one at all.

And where wizards went, other wizards typically did not. Because of things like this.

***

“This,” said Hope, waving her hand up and down at the breadth of this, which had been smelly even before its preservation in brine, “is my finest discovery yet.”
“Doubtless.”

Hope had a habit when lecturing of tapping her fingers on any nearby surface in a way that wasn’t quite a rhythm. She did this now. “Radical bauplan inversion; in full defiance of gravity – the torso reversed; the tail turned on its head; each limb completely acting in antitorsion. An incredible and incredibly demanding feat to sustain in violation of natural and physical laws, powered by an internal metaphorical stomach capable of turning any concept that can fit down the gullet into fuel.”

“Impressive.”

“It took a two-day chase to bring down this specimen. It was only foiled when it tried to swallow my anchor and got stuck on it. Forged and worked metals were a complete novelty that it had no idea how to cope with; although I hypothesize it would’ve managed with sufficient exposure.”
“Very likely. But there is one small problem.”

“What?”
Mercy sucked down the last mouthful of tea for just a little longer than necessary. “You have interpreted the organism upside-down and backwards.”

***

And so came the third thing that turned with the seasons: with time came the warmth, and with the warmth came the wizards, and with the wizards came the perniciousness.

Perniciousness was Hope naming a newly-described and interestingly-shaped coral Gluteus mercy.

Perniciousness was Mercy sending one messenger-gull an hour to Hope’s vessel for six nights running, each with only a useless fragment of a request or a slight spelling correction on a previous message.

Perniciousness was Hope intercepting the monthly merchant resupply whale-pod and bartering for all of their squid, tunny, and marlin – far in excess of what any one researcher would need for even the most extravagant birthday feast – on Mercy’s birthday.

Perniciousness was Mercy’s spynacles letting her know the precise day on which to announce her weeks-old description of a new species of ectoplasm-consuming nothosaur, which was the exact day before Hope finished inscribing her final analysis of her own specimen of it.

And true perniciousness was that the first question that appeared in each of their heads each time after each insult without fail or hesitation was ‘how can I beat this?’

***

It was never a difficult question to answer.

This time, the answer was a small clockwork fish filled with a particular enzyme extracted from a pernicious species of cave-dwelling trilobite, which would result in whatever ate the fish metamorphosing into something spined and horned and aggressive and very rapidly cancerous, which would then do likewise to whatever ate IT, and so on and so forth. Hope’s theory was that if she flung it into the sea in Mercy’s general direction the odds were better than not that she’d end up with an angry armoured fish devouring part of Mercy’s rudder before the week was out.

“Good luck,” she told the little brass-and-coral nightmare, and with a gingerly-applied pat to the backside, she flung it into the sea.

***

Simultaneously, Mercy stood from her desk with a sore back in the palm of one hand and a devious little mixture in the other. It was made of ground ultraviolet glass and bottled sunshine and just a hint of malefic vitriol extracted from black walnut heartwood. It wanted out, and wanted to be consumed, and whatever consumed it would, should, could become a wrathful and desiccated husk of its own self devoted only to mindless thrashing spite against every piece of the world to make contact with its own rotting frame.

The currents were augured to be favourably Hope-borne for the next few days, so she dumped the lot overboard with a very lazy flick of her wrist and didn’t bother to look twice.

“Have fun finding specimens with THAT,” she muttered to herself three minutes later, when the words occurred to her. She was alone on her vessel and felt no shame in doing this.

***

Three days later the surface of the sea ran black-and-electric with a host of screaming, thrashing, nightmare-ridden, armour-plated, invincible, immortal, agonized beasts of various sizes and shapes, all lethal and unhappy about it and all of them skeletons filled with tumorous spike-and-tooth growths.

Hope tried fire, the standby of every wizard. It made them smell like glue and the shoreline, but did not make them flinch.

Mercy, the elder and the more experienced mariner, tried lightning. It made them shake and shudder and move twice as quickly for approximately an hour. The waves ran thicker and thicker with enemies and the hulls of each ship – reinforced with word and wand though they were – began to groan and creak under the many, many, many teeth and jaws being applied ever more pressingly.

“Perhaps this will work,” said Hope as quietly and carefully as she could, measuring out a dram of powdered brontofish grain-by-grain into a triple-sealed lead-glazed flask, hands made clumsy and fingers barely able to move in safety gloves fashioned of inch-thick walrus leather. “As long as I’m careful,” she amended.

“Needs must,” said Mercy, who had brought up the hidden vault attached to her ship’s anchor and was – behind a cold iron safety sheet –opening a triple-combination-locked door entirely by feel. It cracked open, revealing a single megaloplesiosaur tooth, vibrating under the pressure of the atmosphere and its own charge. She plucked it up and began to wrap it in the thickest possible blankets, as carefully as if it were her own newborn child. “If done properly.”

It was at precisely that moment that the two ships – driven by the push and pull and prying of the deranged hosts of enraged sea creatures, and otherwise left undirected and unobserved – bonked into one another at full force.

***

When the explosions were over and the clouds had begun to creep back over the horizon and the sea had recovered enough to let ripples disturb its surface again, it dawned on a very new sort of argument.

“I have the space; you make the offer,” said Mercy.
“I have the provisions; YOU make the offer,” said Hope.
“A barrel of hardtack isn’t worth much if a passing scavenger takes your legs before you’ve even had a chance to get hungry.”
“And a nice safe chunk of driftwood isn’t much use if you wither up and die on it weeks before it starts to sink. Give me something I want.”

“I think I see sharks coming back,” said Mercy.

“I think they’ll damage this barrel if they eat me,” said Hope.
They waited there for the second-longest ten seconds of either of their lives, avoiding eye contact. Then Hope clambered aboard the chunk of what had been part of Mercy’s fo’c’sle while Mercy fished out the (still dry) barrel.

“I think perhaps,” she said as she began to pry at the edge of the lid with the charred stump of what had once been her emergency stylus, “we may have gotten a little over-invested in ourselves.”
“As opposed to our research.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps.”
“After all, it is the knowledge we produce that will truly matter in the long run.”

“Indeed,” said Hope. “Our egos are only truly grown through genuine accomplishment, and accomplishment cannot be made by hounding at the work of another. When one of us spends their time on rivalry over scholarship, we all lose, history included.”
“Truth,” said Mercy, putting her weight on the stylus, which snapped.

The lid of the barrel came off with a pop.

They looked inside for the longest ten seconds of either of their lives.

“You know,” said Hope, “I spent ages looking at this specimen after you left. It wasn’t upside-down and backwards at all.”
“Oh?”
“No. It was just upside-down.”

Mercy tilted her head and squinted. “You know,” she said. “I think you’re right.”
“I don’t think it’s edible.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
There was no way to record who pushed who overboard first. It was simply too close to tell.

Nothing happened for six hundred years, then a shovel hit me in the head.

It was small and soft – mere metal – and it dented very badly from the shock of striking my skull. Someone didn’t appreciate that, because I heard my first sound in six hundred years and it bore the unmistakable cadence and sharpness of swearing. It went on and on and on and then it stopped.

Shortly afterwards, the next shovel hit me in the head. This time it was more careful – a bump, a brush, a touch – and it wasn’t alone. A steady probing, cautious little metal fingers feeling out the edges of my existence. On and on and on it went and slowly the weight left me until sight returned and I stared unblinking at a wide and blue sky again.

Not that I had a choice. No eyelids.

The shovellers gathered around to look and chatter about my eyes and their lack of lids, and I saw to my great ambivalence that they were the same creatures that had embodied me in the first place. Bilaterally symmetrical, vertebrates, physiologically ensouled, lacking conceptual anchoring, carbon-based, chronologically linear, socially dependant, and analogically unresonant. A troubling and troubled existence for anything or anyone.

And their leader stepped up with a tablet as old as I was and familiar sigils on it and I knew that other things hadn’t changed much either.

“You are bound to my words and wishes, demon!” hollered the leading primate, brandishing the tablet. “In the name of your namer’s intent, I conjure your form and abjure your will and bid you thus: rise from your grave!”

So commanded, I did as I was told. It took thirty seconds and took the lives of a dozen or so of my excavators, but I was probably as unhappy about it as they were. When I stood atop the ground again – many-coiled, many-legged, flexing my hands without arms and my arms without hands, jaws beginning to sing in the open atmosphere once more – I was struck once more by how ugly everything around me was. It’s amazing how the vividness of these things fades, even from a perfect memory.

“I will ride thee,” demanded my summoner, and I did as I was told and placed it atop my head, surrounded and protected and warded by my coronal fields and sagittal spines from forces solid, liquid, or gaseous. “Southwest, and fast-paced!” it commanded, and I did as I was told and moved my limbs and beat my wings and slithered my form and began, with the worst mood I’d ever been in, to travel.

Being still had been nice. Quiet. Not peaceful, but a place to be full – of emptiness, of stillness, of senselessness.

Now I was in motion and I’d forgotten just how deeply wearing velocity was. And the air tasted too strongly of nitrogen and hatred. I’d forgotten that.

***

The fields I moved through were familiar. The crops were new, the clothing and houses and tools were new, but the fields were familiar. Much labour for much wealth for a few’s benefit. My rider’s clothes were unique and impractical, and from this and its covetous mien as we tore through the roadways and trampled the crops I deduced two things: first, that it was one of the few; second, that it was not the beneficiary of the labour here. The avarice arose from it like heat-haze on a rotting carcass, and only grew stronger as we moved from the agrarian to the fortification. A mighty edifice stood atop a gentle hill, moated and trenched and walled and isolated. Organisms moved within and without it guided by purpose and fear and boredom and all the other reasons why any of them did anything, and my rider told me “strike down the door!” and I did as I was told, with claw and tooth and my full amalgamated and observable mass.

“I have come to seize my birthright, as the rightful and UNJUSTLY EXILED heir!” it proclaimed, unbothered by the dust and the debris and the screaming. “I demand my usurper of a sibling come forth and submit to my authority, as is proven by my sovereign ability to direct and subdue this antique treasure of my people’s lands!”

At this, a messenger came forth and said something that was eloquent and diplomatic and my rider said “kill them” and I did as I was told. The second messenger simply said it’d go find my rider’s sibling and so I was given no more commands for a time but to wait, coiled in ready position, left to ponder the state of the bricks and the stones and the air around me.

It wasn’t much different than I’d known in any of the ways that mattered and most of the ones that didn’t.

Presently, a gong rang out, followed by a trumpet and the collapse of an entire wall of the central keep. Stepping free from the rubble on squat limbs came a thing so large that surely it had been almost as buried as I’d been. It was taller than sixteen tall men stacked up on top of one another, and a little wider than it was tall, and a little longer than it was wide. Hundreds of tons of alloys and synthetics plated it inside and out. It stank of dead earth and crushed stone. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my entire existence.

“YOUR ILLEGAL AND ILLICIT SOPHISTRY IS HEREBY DISPUTED AND DENIED, BY EVIDENT PROOF OF ANCESTRY, LEGITIMACY, AND MY OWN POSSESSION OF A TRUE AND KNOWN TREASURE OF OUR HERITAGE,” proclaimed a voice broadcasted through old, old electronics. “I GIVE YOU THE CHANCE TO LAY DOWN YOUR INFERIOR DEMON, RENOUNCE YOUR CLAIMS, AND DIE NOBLY.”

“Destroy it,” my rider commanded, and I did as I was told.

***

It was a process.

Firstly, it had been a long time since I’d fought anything.

Secondly, I had never fought anything like this before. Its chronology was not mine; its shape was alien; its weapons were bizarre – brass-and-lead teeth that fired themselves at me; gases that incandesced into explosive fury; elements that fought each other and tore the air apart. It had no heartbeat but it had a heart and that heart was a very small and confused sun; it had no blood but its limbs moved with pumping liquids; and it had no brain but was clearly possessed of a very vigorous and purposeful mind that was intent on solving the problem of how to kill me.

In this, we had a protracted and deeply confusing disagreement.

I bit its carapace and it rammed my thorax; I spat pressurized hatred and it fired electrostatic bolts; I clawed at its cockpit and it directed a hailstorm of radioactive solids at my coronal prow. We were too different in kind to find each other’s weaknesses and too alike in strength to be overpowered. It was like a cloud trying to wrestle a wave.

The fortress, of course, was demolished. The casualty rate was high but not absolute. The landscape was being rapidly reshaped every other second in every which way. And the worst of it was, there wasn’t a moment’s quiet.

“SURRENDER!” bleated from my adversary’s back.

“ABDICATE!” howled my rider atop my skull.

“NEVER!” they agreed, and all the while we groped and strained and tried to crush one another with sheer bulk; in collapsing emotional vortices; in torrents of high-velocity projectiles.

***

In the end, I was lucky first. In a fit of what I’m not too proud to admit was genuine frustration with the noise, I captured a particularly vehement burst of the constant stream of electromagnetic chatter flowing from my opponent and threw it back at the incessantly yawping devices atop its back. I intended it as a slap. Instead it crawled inside its hardened carapace, scurried inside the cockpit, and permanently fried out the controls, leaving its rider muted mid-sentence and electronically scrambled.

The metal cage halted midstride, and I felt its mind, so perpetually motile and dynamic, light-fast, whip-sharp, stop flat for a second; not for want of ability, but in genuine astonishment.

“BEHOLD!” yelled my rider, arms flung wide. “Behold my TRIUMPH, as DICTATED by JUSTICE and FATE ITSELF!” It stood up, trembling with joy and hate, and stepped proud of my coronal fields onto my brow, visible to all remaining witnesses (a wary crow in a distant and untoppled tree; many unnoticed arthropods; an unending well of microorganisms). “Behold ME, the RIGHTFUL RULER of this FIEF, as I ALWAYS SAID! ALL HAIL-”

My erstwhile opponent’s smallest armament (a peculiar sort of metal tube that spat geometrically and chemically complex missiles) went ‘ffutt’ and my rider’s tablet and upper body vanished.

The quiet that followed was not as absolute as it had been underground, but it was such a relief that I was hard pressed to find any superior to it.

***

So we enjoyed it, the two of us. And when were done, we tried in vain to find a way to speak to one another in any way but through matter and motion; and when we were done with THAT we set out, side by side, on a long walk away from fields and fiefs and shallow graves.

Maybe we’ll bury ourselves again when we get there, wherever it is. But this is not a bad way to be, for now.

Louis woke up because someone was sitting on his left leg. This was confusing, since he’d gone to bed alone and had planned on staying that way. There were no explanations he could think of that wouldn’t confuse him even more than he already was (and half-asleep Louis was pretty hard to out-confuse), so after a little pause of a hundred years with his eyes shut he opened them, ready to scream or maybe sigh.

It wasn’t someone. It was several hundred someones. They were bigger than fleas and smaller than gnats and their dwellings were simple but nobly rustic, fashioned with ingenuous use of local materials.

The local materials were the hairs of Louis’s leg.

“Hey,” said Louis, blankly.

The someones didn’t pay him any mind. Or if they did, he couldn’t see their tiny heads moving to track him. Or even tell if they had heads. Or if they were human-shaped.

“I need to get up,” he told them. “I have to pee.”

The someones listened exactly as attentively as they had to his last words.

“I mean it. I’ll be careful, okay? But this might get bumpy.

The someones gave no response.

“Alright. Here we go.” And Louis sat up and gently swung out of bed.

The reaction was immediate and cataclysmic. The someones swarmed like ants in a stomped colony; clinging to leg hairs and toppling down the length of Louis’s ankle. Houses fell to pieces and dropped off the map. A tiny but terribly almost-existing noise tickled the very edge of his hearing and he realized it was the anguished screams of the dying.

Louis very, very, very gently swung back into bed.

***

The best thing to do after a traumatic event was sleep. Louis did as he was meant to.

The someones, to his discomfort, did not. When he drifted out of his shameful and slightly nightmare-haunted haze, they had colonized his right leg as well, from calf to thigh. Parts of his shin were nearly clear-cut, and the sweat rivulets were being diverted and the runoff used for poregriculture.

He had to pee so very badly it was insane.

It took the better part of a cautious, desperate, lip-biting hour, but with a strategic series of rolls, planks, and stretches Louis reached the bathroom without mass death and with the most brutal morning workout of his life. The toilet bowl loomed overhead, silent and dark because the switch was out of arm’s reach from the floor. His head hurt and his vision blurred from dehydration. His legs throbbed with stiffness; his arms were aflame. His bladder was unthinkable. He had to get up there.

Maybe.

Probably. In a minute.

Six minutes later he hauled himself upright, legs rigid, toes pointed, and screamed the entire time. The someones bestirred themselves, but none of the panic caused by his earlier shifting was present. It seemed they were as deaf to his cries as he was to theirs.

The toilet itself was, after the journey, a footnote. Then Louis was on the floor again carefully—but-quickly, body prickling and burning all at once, and why would he ever want to move?

***

Something tickled his feet and he shifted and grumbled and turned and bonked his forehead into the toilet. That got him awake again, and just in time to see a few dozen someones plummet – tethered together for safety – from his big toe to the bathroom tile.

Oh no.

There were now fresh settlements atop his bedclothes from boxers to t—shirt; if he turned his head just so he could very nearly get the largest buildings into focus. The newer models were woven from stray threads as opposed to the older hair-logged cabins, and some of them reached dozens of millimetres into the air.

Food was easier than the bathroom had been. Louis simply pulled himself into the kitchen in small painful ways and opened the cupboard closest to ground level and thanked every god to ever exist that he didn’t keep his cereal on top of the counter. He ate it without bowl or spoon or milk and felt distinctly less sophisticated than every single other lifeform in his apartment. He also felt gross, gritty, tired, sore, and pathetic, and had no ideas on what to do about any of it without killing unknowable numbers of real albeit impossibly tiny people.

So instead of thinking, which was hard, he dragged himself back to bed, which was easy, and let himself go blank, which was the hardest and the easiest thing of all.

***

Louis slept, and slept poorly; barely; on the brink of waking. Accordingly, he dreamed.

He dreamed of tiny axes clearing land, felling hair.

He dreamed of epicutaneous strip mines, harvesting sky patches to forge new stronger buildings to house new hungry minds.

He dreamed of the fierce struggles for control over the Belly Button Basin, and of the gastroquakes suffered by those who eventually came to inhabit it.

He dreamed of the closest the someones ever came to actual war – when a maniacal epidemic of greed led to the seizure of the Forehead Heights by militants armed with repurposed construction tools and demands for priority settlement, which were only halted by last-minute heroics and treaties concerning the division of ear estate and the borders of brows.

He dreamed of the ascension of the cowlick, and the first someones to stand at the pinnacle of all that there was and wonder if there was more.

He dreamed of the new building codes enacted after the Tosses and Turns of 10:15 AM, and of the movement for double—stitched construction that spurred the investigation and exploitation of the strange ‘pillow’ that surrounded the skull that had hitherto been the summit of the whole universe.

He dreamed of the discovery of the dust mites in the deep pillow mines, and of the subsequent brutal war of annihilation, where pore-scourers and follicle-drills and dandruff eliminators turned the scalp into a barren wasteland for generations and filled the air with death.

He dreamed of the restlessness that filled every new batch of leaders, each filled with fresh ambitions undreamed of by their predecessors, each wanting more, and better, and bigger.

He dreamed of boom times and golden ages; of a world filled with life and thought and furious business; of elaborate lacework dwellings cramming MORE into every space, connecting eyelash to eyelash; earlobe to neck; toe to toe.

He dreamed of new equations and new imaginings, of vehicles the likes of which someones had never imagined, of dustborne probes into the unknown and passengers that traveled by hairicopter.

He dreamed of The Program To Explore Beyond the Pillow and the visionary fanatics behind it, who asked the questions like Are We Alone? and more importantly If We Are, Who Gets All The Stuff?

And then he awoke and found out that all those dreams were true, except that The Program To Explore Beyond the Pillow had already been launched and suffered mass casualties upon encountering a rogue spider.

***

So there lay Louis, surrounded in perfect harmony and perfectly frozen, encased within the webs and snares and structures of a hundred million tiny living things any and all of which would rupture and explode if he so much as breathed funny.

And then his nose started to itch.

Ted was a sober man.  Ted was a serious man.  Ted did what he was told.  His job demanded nothing less.  Did a funeral home want a mortician who giggled his way through his shift?  Would it like it if he styled a corpse’s hair into spikes because ‘he felt inspired’?

No.  No no and no.  No such shrift would be taken; it would be shorted.  Ted woke up on time arrived five minutes early did his job went home ate and went to bed.  Without smiling.  He had not carried on a conversation for sixteen years and counting and was probably happy about that as far as anyone (including himself) could tell. 

So when a man started on his way through an intersection Ted was crossing without seeing him and had to break to avoid running him over for no reason, it was the most exciting thing to happen to him in years.  Slush sprayed him from the car and the man’s eyes were wide and his fist shook and as he drove away his window rolled down and instructions were screamed out of it. 

Well.  Ted was on his way home already.  He could afford the detour. 

So he walked down to the lakefront, surely and smartly, where he undressed in the cold, numb air of March.  He selected two large rocks as ballast and put them in his shoes.  And then he walked down the boardwalk onto the docks and off the end of them onto the lakebed, where he trudged for a good two miles.

It wasn’t easy.  He kept having to come up for air, and his limbs grew tired.  Halfway through the return trip he was rudely plucked from the surface by a concerned band of paramedics. 

“What the HELL was that for?” asked a polite young woman who was applying first aid with one hand and cursing him with the other. 

“I was told to take a long walk off a short pier,” said Ted.  “It was good exercise but cold.  I don’t recommend it.”

***

The frostbite went away.  The hand tremors took longer.  Ted didn’t mind them because he didn’t mind anything.  He didn’t mind when the supermarket ran out of bologna slices.  He didn’t mind when the slush was replaced with freezing rain.  He didn’t mind when his umbrella broke.  He didn’t mind when on his way out of work he was mistaken for the secretary by a distraught member of the recently bereaved who was upset about something one of his fellow employees had said. 

“I am not a secretary,” he informed her. 

She informed him of something else.  It was not something he’d ever heard before, but it was spoken with conviction and power and authority and even if he had no idea why she wanted it she wanted it very much and so he decided to get it done. 

The thrift  shop provided some alphabet blocks, two action figures from the 1980s and a half-eaten Barbie, and some scratched-up Legos.  It was sufficient.  Ted took them on his hands and himself to the highway and stepped gently and carefully into the lanes. 

Horns blared.  People screamed.  Tires dodged around him as he sat down – careful to keep his coat out of the mud and salt and dirt – and, with impossible precision, made the Barbie punch GI Joe in the face.  Then he made a little hill out of the alphabet blocks and built a lego tower on it.  He’d just about decided that GI Joe was going to live in it when the sirens showed up and he was taken away. 

“What the Christ were you thinking, doing that?” demanded someone made entirely of beef as they cuffed him. 

“I was instructed to go play in traffic,” said Ted.  “It was alright, but a bit messy”

***

The time before big holidays was always slow business – all those old and sick bodies, hanging on to see their families one last time.  Ted was encouraged to use his time off.  He spent much of it at home, since that was the easiest place to sit and wait, but he also took daily walks to encourage appetite and maintain his body’s muscle mass.  Since vehicles had been cruel to him recently, he stayed away from the roads and walked on bike trails and footpaths, where strangers cycled and led dogs.  One particularly small dog saw Ted and began barking, then ran up to him – pulling its leash loose – and attempted to chew up his shoe.  He offered his hand to it in peace and it repaid him with violence and small, blunt teeth that failed to make an impression on his skin, let alone tear it. 

“Your dog’s teeth aren’t very good,” he observed to its owner, who gave him his most peculiar directions yet. 

“I will try this,” he said, and after purchasing some small screwdrivers and other tools and a few bouillon cubes, he did so.  It was a lot of work disassembling the old revolver his uncle had left him – the bigger pieces he had to use the hacksaw on – but even that was nothing as compared to the effort of choking it down, and THAT compared even more grimly to the toilet that evening.  It went so poorly he had to go to the hospital, where an impossibly annoyed and confused doctor asked him what on earth it was this time. 

“Someone said I should eat my gun,” he told her.  “It was a terrible idea.”

***

Three months later Ted removed some food from the fridge with a coworker’s name on it, as it was comppany policy that such things not be left overnight. 

“That’s mine,” the night shift guard said. 

“It’s going in the garbage,” Ted told him. 

“I’m here overnight; that’s my breakfast!”
“It’s against policy.”

“That’s not how the policy works, can’t you use just a little common sense for once?  Chrissakes, get that stick out of your ass!”
“It’s against policy.”
“Oh, drop dead!”

Ted considered this.

“Okay,” he said. 

And dropped.

***

The funeral wasn’t very well-attended, but it was tidy and straightforward.  He’d have appreciated that. 

The following conversations are approximations because none of the participants used words or languages or thoughts. But they seem to have happened.

***

The rock did not exist. The mountain existed, and the mountain’s stone existed, and the rock wasn’t even a part of it, was entirely indistinguishable from it, until it wasn’t and it was travelling away very rapidly.

The first thing it did, once it existed, was panic. This went on for a few hundred years.

The second thing it did, when it was still panicking but was done being excited about it, was say “hello?”

“Hello,” came back from all around it. It was in a cold place, a moving place, a grinding and crushing place, and it was not being ground or crushed but being carried along inside of it, like a gizzard stone in a crocodile’s gut.

“What am I? What are you? Where was I? What was I? Where are we going? Why did you take me?”

“Oh,” said the everywhere from everything all around. “I don’t know any of that.”

“Oh.”
There was an especially large grinding noise and more rocks and stones flowed past the rock and around it.

“What do you know?” it asked.

“Nothing. I know nothing at all. But I’m moving, and so I’m moving.”
“Oh. You seem to have taken me with you.”
“Yes, I think that’s right.”

The grinding never stopped. The texture varied. Wood. Stone. Earth. All of it mingling with slush and refreezing and crushing and turning into particles and passing around and through and away, stamped flat or shredded.

“When will we stop?”
“When we stop. I don’t think about these things, rock. I don’t know anything and I don’t think anything. You’re making me do things I don’t, and it’s quite difficult.”

“Well I didn’t exist until you picked me up and moved me, and that’s quite difficult. I wasn’t distinct. Now I’m distinct.”
“No you aren’t,” said the glacier. “You’re a part of me too.”
“But I’m distinct from you.”
“As much as you were from the mountain I took you from. As much as you were from the craton you were uplifted from. As much as I am from the other ice that surges on. As much as we are from the world we crawl upon.”

“You sound very confident for something that is so much younger than I am,” muttered the rock.

“You’re crushed and reformed and melted and cooled slowly and seldomly. I’m water. I shift states and forms and places. To be something new and strange is normal and old for me.”

The rock felt very uncomforted and alone. “I feel very uncomforted and alone,” said the rock.
“You’re not alone,” said the glacier placidly. “Haven’t you listened to my meanings? You’re indistinct from me who’s indistinct from the glaciation who’s indistinct from the hydrosphere who’s indistinct from the planet who’s indistinct from everything else in this big empty everywhere. You are not alone because you aren’t you.”
“Well, it feels a lot like it.”
“Yes.”

Something was different.

“Are we moving faster?”
“A little.”
“Are we moving backwards?”
“A lot.”
“When did that happen?”

“Just now. It’s warmer. It was colder, and we rode down. Now it is warmer, and we ride up.”

“How far?”

“Not so far. It’s still an ice age out there.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“But you just told me –”

“Shh,” said the ice, a whispery slush of a syllable, wrapping the rock tightly. “Sshhh. Listen? Do you hear that?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Because we’re home. We’re back on my mountain. We rode all the way down and we rode all the way back up. This is my peak and my hold and my home and you have come back with me all this way.”
“Oh. Does the mountain have two peaks?”
“Yes.”
“Does the mountain have a long, long, long valley on the east side?”
“Yes.”
“Does the smaller peak look a little like a bighorn nose looking south?”
“Yes.”
“I think that was my mountain too.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“It does.”

They sat there for a few thousand years awkwardly. Then the glacier shuddered.

“What was that?” asked the rock.
“Oh dear.”
“What was that?”

There was an instant of short, pure sound – grinding and crushing and creaking and an agonizing moment of pure meltwater panic – and then the rock was alone, all alone, and yet it was back where it had sat, in a divot that had been widened a little by wind and time and ice into being just precisely a little bit too big for it anymore.

And across the whole horizon, where mere decades ago there had been a wall of frozen water, the stony peaks stood bare and dry and iceless.

“What was what?” asked the mountain.

“What?” said the rock.
“What?”

“What?”