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The bells sang, sang, sang in the attics and the steeples and the courtyards, and they could barely be heard for the cheering.  Terrum rejoiced, and even the very oldest said they’d never heard tell of any time more gleeful – remarkable if true, for the people of Terrum were great tellers of stories, and their expertise grew with age.  The war was over, all men and women and children could walk without fear and know that all others were their friends.  At last the world was united, at last it was one and peaceful.  The people of Terrum danced in the streets, in their houses, at their workplaces, and nobody stopped to make fun of anyone’s footwork their joy was so great. 

Particular joy surrounded the great bonfire of wicker-and-wire cages in which all of the anti-citizens of un-Terrum were heaped, screaming in agony and pleading for mercy.  This inspired extra mirth among the citizens, for it was well known that all outside of Terrum were mere homunculi in the shape of people and had no souls minds or actual bodies, being merely composed of cunningly arranged twigs and dirt that lived to plot against all the free beings of the world. 

The people of Terrum were indeed great tellers of stories, and better still at believing in them. 

***

With the whole of the world (now safely renamed Terrum, for Terrum was indeed all that remained in it) now attended to, the attention of the great minds of Terrum now turned to corners that until now had remained unexplored. 

The far jungles and deserts of places that had once been various un-Terrums were explored, and found to contain somewhat exotic but not particularly imaginative creatures that acted much as beasts of that size would, rather than the unicorns, dragons, and men with heads in their torsos that had long been sought after. 

The deep sea was plumbed with bathyscaphes and ROVs, but alas, not one kraken or sea serpent was found, merely pretty large squids and some fossilized (long-extinct) shark teeth. 

Under the ice sheets at the very ends of the earth were found great sleeping submerged lakes, absolutely none of which housed any life forms more malevolent or alien than novel strains of bacteria. 

In desperation the many explorers and discoverers of Terrum turned to the skies, only to report that the heavens appeared to be populated primarily by nothing and secondarily (FAR secondarily) by big fat balls of burning gas with some scattered chunks of rock. 

A citizen with the appropriately heroic name of Roff Yelter was promptly launched into orbit to personally examine the nearest of these chunks of rock, in hopes of extracting something more expectedly exciting. 

“This is the farthest any citizen of Terrum has ever been from Terrum,” he announced heroically as he exited his ship of space, “and proof that it can extend its reach to cover the whole of this abyssal void.”

Unfortunately the rock was featureless and dull.  Roff took some bits of it aboard for souvenirs, but a tiny and immeasurable fault in the ship of space’s engine exploded while he was heading home, sending him spiralling out into absolutely nothing interesting for the rest of eternity. 

It was duly announced to all of Terrum that Roff had discovered and befriended a space-puppy before heroically sacrificing his life returning it to its parents, but there wasn’t much heart put into believing it, even from the Editors. 

***

It was beginning to appear to the citizens of Terrum that the universe was a singularly poor environment for narrative to grow in.  This displeased them, and it was decided that this should be rectified as immediately and forcefully as possible. 

The task of finding a means of this correction was given to their greatest and most powerful scientist, Queltel Binmarc, who was absent-minded, smoked a pipe, AND possessed outrageous hair.  He stayed up the requisite all day and all night and at precisely and exactly the wee hours of the morning he came up with a theory based on a careless and passing observation that he almost didn’t write down, which was duly announced the next day to the Grand High Editor. 

“We will build a giant and bizarre machine that will rebuild the universe to be more satisfying to our personal desires.  It’s a risky and daring and bold plan, but it’s the only one we’ve got,” he informed him. 

The Editor licked his lips; this was better than he’d ever dreamed.  “And what are the odds of it working?” he asked. 

“A million to one,” said Queltel, with tremendous satisfaction. 

The Audience that followed the Grand High Editor about constantly to record and witness the living story of Terrum gasped. 

The project was announced the following morning, and every man, woman and child of Terrum rejoiced at the news of completely certain success. 

***

Building the great device was a labour of years, and one whose every step was conducted according to the most exacting requirements. 

Blood and sweat and tears were duly extracted from the few un-Terrum anti-citizens that existed and mixed into its foundations to meet all safety standards. 

Top men laboured day and night in specially designed airplanes that kept them on the cusp of twilight twenty-four hours a day. 

Every factory in Terrum burned with furious energy, often forging and reforging the same parts over and over again so that it could be so. 

And the Terrum Children’s League went door to door selling apples to raise funds for the production of parts, thereby keeping thousands of doctors away for months and resulting in several deaths from chronic illnesses. 

***

When the day came, half of all of Terrum watched it live from their television sets, half of it listened to it from their radios, and a tiny and unmeasurable quantity of them were about to turn on the machine. 

“Ready?” asked the head foreman, a specially-grizzled and majestic sort of man who hadn’t spent a moment in his adult life without a cigarette chewed in one corner of his mouth. 

“As ready as it’ll get,” said Queltel.  “It’s a million to one chance.  Here goes nothing.”

The whole thing could’ve been designed to boot with a button, but a lever had been chosen for gravitas, one with just enough resistance and heft to it to make the scientist’s spindly arm flex as he heaved against it mightily.  A shove, a click, and a satisfying thunk emerged, and the machine roared like a farting titan. 

“It’s working!” screamed the Audience in perfect harmony. 

The machine belched, grunted, and then every light in the building dramatically flickered as it sputtered and died exactly as planned. 

“Damnit.  DAMNIT!” shouted Queltel with precise timing, and then, trembling with a carefully-chosen degree of rage and grief, he thumped a particular spot on its side with his fist. 

The machine turned on. 

***

The machine turned off. 

“Did it work?” asked the Grand High Editor.  The words were expected of him, but something about them felt… odd.  Greasy in his mouth.  Even the ellipses of his internal monologue seemed reluctant to flow. 

“How should I know?” asked Queltel Binmarc.  “I don’t know a damned thing about machinery.  I’m just a man with funny hair and a pipe.”

“But…but…” said the Grand High Editor, and he felt the words die in his mouth.  “Yes, of course, that makes sense.  Why WOULD having funny hair and a pipe make you good at machinery?”

“No idea,” said Queltel.  “I’m not a scientist, and even if I was, a scientist isn’t an engineer.  Why am I in charge of anything in this room?”

“Don’t ask me,” said the head foreman.  “I’ve got two left thumbs.  Hell, I’ve almost put my eye out six times just replacing this cigarette – which is plastic, by the way.  I’ve never smoked.  Why am I in charge of putting together complicated machinery?”
“Why am I in charge of anything at all?” asked the Grand High Editor aloud.  “I have a soothing rich voice and good posture, but I don’t understand the first thing about people.  I should be a singer or something.”
“Sing WHERE?” demanded a member of the Audience, suddenly making herself known as a distinct individual.  “All the good choirs are in the cathedrals to the glory of Terrum Forever, and we know that’s bunk now.  What the hell IS Terrum anyways?”
“A fabricated identity designed to unite a broad spectrum of enserfed and assimilated peoples across the greater Terrum seaboard that then embarked upon a genocidal spree of conquest across first Terrum proper and then the world at large, spurred on by a series of obviously self-serving beliefs and myths about their own rightfulness and power and the wicked and malevolent nature of all foreigners, most of whom shared more in common with the citizens of Terrum than those citizens did with their own leaders,” said another suddenly-distinct member of the Audience, all in one breath. 

“Oh,” said the former Grand High Editor. 

“Seems right,” said the first member of what had been the Audience. 

There was a long and decidedly unrehearsed silence.  Then all present and viewing committed suicide in a series of awkward and fumbling ways. 

***

And soon all was quiet all across the whole world that had been Terrum, save for the cheerful hail-and-well-mets exchanged in the streets by the roving packs of depressives who had left their rooms for the first time in years. 

The lock opened underneath my fingertips with the willing smoothness of oiled salmon, soft and smooth and buttery.  Not a creak not a clink not a thunk squeaked loose from the defeated metal, and all that was left now was a flimsy wooden door that was there to stop indecent eyes, not a ruthless predator of the night. 

Which I wasn’t.  I was just a criminal.  The former come in adventure stories, the latter are naturally occurring. 

I opened the door.  It was the least exciting thing I’d done all night, but the most anticipated.  My target lay within, trapped in its useless shell.  Beneath the covers it turned and shifted and snored, and I reached out with one (untrembling!) hand, grasped tightly, and pulled smoothly. 

Done.  Like smoke against my palm, languid and smooth. 

There was a snort, a twitch.  Eyes roaming quicker beneath shuttered lids; body beginning to shake off the paralysis of the night.  He was waking up. 

“Mine now,” I said happily, aloud. 

And I left for home and for a bed of my own.  I’d taken what I came for. 

***

It was a fine fat one; it put me under for twelve hours.  Dreamless.  The good shit. 

Yes, that was among the smoothest and clearest sleeps I’d ever stolen.  Its owner had been possessed of a good mattress and soft pillows and a conscience untroubled by anything he had or hadn’t done.  Most people would wake up from a sleep like that too pleased to even be resentful over its conclusion. 

I woke up hungry. 

No, it hadn’t been enough.  Of course it hadn’t been enough.  That had been a good sleep, and I’d been stealing good sleeps for over a decade now.  ‘Good’ was no longer good enough.  I had my pride, I had my talent, I had my skill, and thanks to my insomnia I had plenty of time to consider the application of all of them. 

I phoned Jed. 

“Wusszat?”

“It’s me.”
“Besssss?  Whi.”
“I need names.”
“’s ungoddleeour.”

“It’s noon.”
“Nuuuh.”
“Pour some coffee in your ears, Jed.  I need names, and I need them now.”
“Wha’ kind?”
My fingers were itching.  I wished my phone still had a cord; I needed something to twine between them. “The impossible kind.”

***

The hardest part was getting into the base.  After that I just had to get into a janitorial supply closet and all of a sudden hey, that lady has a mop bucket and coveralls, who cares what she’s doing. 

Okay, getting onto the launch pad was a little tricky, but even if everyone there WAS very attentive they were busy being very attentive to the ten thousand things that each of them had to prevent going wrong, so that helped. 

T minus three hours.  All the initial work putting you in is done, you’re flat on your back, you’re ready to do something but have nothing to do, your body wants to tense up but you’re too well trained for that, so you relax.  And you rest. 

And you’re juuuust within arm’s reach if I climb the scaffolding far enough and lean next to the cockpit. 

Making it out was much easier, even if I had to stop myself from skipping. 

“Six out of ten,” I told Jed. 

“Well, nobody said a dozy astronaut would be the most restful-”

“Oh no, the sleep was lovely.  Controlled yet loose, ready for anything, better pick me up than a tankerful of coffee.  But the challenge was shit.  Six out of ten was GENEROUS.”
“C’mon, sneaking into a rocket launch wasn’t tricky?”

“I said I wanted impossible, not tricky.”
“Look, I was half asleep, alright?  I gave you something that would be a huge pain in the dick off the top of my head and went back to bed, whaddaya want from me?”
“Well, you’re awake now, so I want something impossible.”

***

Now, I could have made this one easier on myself.  Could’ve taken the long way in, subtle insertion by surreptitiously slipping off the side of a cargo ship, crawled my way mile by mile inland, so on and so forth. 

But I was in a hurry.

So I snuck my way into the wheel well of an airborne troop transport with an oxygen tank and thermal insulation, exfiltrated the airbase, smuggled myself into overland cargo, then took a six mile hike into the crumbling and eviscerated heart of the city until I found the forward command post’s radio room, where one man was sleeping next to another one screaming over the sound of rocket fire. 

I propped him up a little on his pillow, kissed his forehead, and walked off as he sat up and started swearing at his friend. 

“Blissful as a sleeping baby,” I told Jed.  “But not impossible.”

“You got shot at!”
“I got shot AROUND.  Very different, and very easy to take care of if you’re well rested.  Which I was.”
“You’ve had high-security, you’ve had high-danger, what the hell else do you want from me?”
“Use your imagination.”

***

Well, I HAD asked for it. 

But goddamned, that was the longest voyage of my life.  And I’d listened to entirely too many goddamned propellers through the hydrophones before I started hearing the songs. 

Tracking them was another matter, another few impossibly long days.  And then I had to dive –  shallow dive admittedly, but still a dive – while muzzed on a combination of exhaustion and sleeping pills. 

Luckily I landed on top of the whale’s head, which shortened my search time considerably.  And as my arms pinwheeled like a cartoon clown, one palm slapped its way over that ancient scarred brow and peeled half-a-hemisphere’s-worth of tranquil sedation right out of it. 

“Weird,” I said.  “But boring acquisition.  And a little too dull.”
“Weird?”
“It literally put me half asleep.  Half of my brain, not half of my body.”
“Everyone’s been half asleep.”
“Not like this we haven’t.  Holy fuck my…everything… still feels weird.”
“Weird, weird, weird.  You’ll gripe at everything.”
“I didn’t say BAD weird.  But god, that was dull as hell.  Marine biology is not my thing.”
“You asked for impossible, whales are pretty rare.”
“Pretty rare isn’t-”

“Impossible, YES I GET IT, Jesus.”

“You don’t have to send me after him, no.  But like, something close to him.  Difficulty-wise.”

***

This was very much not close to Jesus in any way except difficulty-wise. 

Sneaking into the white house had been hard. 

Finding a secret service guard who was willing to doze on duty was harder. 

And finding food to keep myself alive while I waited was hardest of all.  I could only steal so many sandwiches from the employee fridges before someone put two and two together, so I spent a lot of my time emulating an alligator: remaining absolutely still and conserving energy for a final strike. 

But I’m not patient when I’m hungry, or when the last nap I’ve had was half a nap coaxed out of a drowsy whale’s brain in the mid-Atlantic a week ago, so in the end I finally decided what my problem was. 

I was aiming at something that wasn’t impossible enough. 

So I dove off the roof, missed the first secret service member with my fists but hit him with my stomach, flopped aimlessly on the floor like a dead fish, kicked the second secret service member’s gun loose with my feet, and hurled myself through the Oval Office doors. 

Just as I’d gambled: the lazy fuck was asleep in his chair. 

“AHA!” I shouted, and he woke up. 

Oh. 

Shit. 

***

“So, would you say that fulfilled your expectations?”
“No.”
“C’mon Bess.  You said you wanted impossible, and what’s more impossible than something you failed at?”
“I didn’t fail at it!”
“You punched your target in the skull and ran off with his semiconcussed blackout.”
“I got him, anyways.”
“Hah!  And how well rested do you feel?”
“Zero out of ten.”
“And the challenge?”

I sighed and rubbed my aching forehead, where the imprint of my knuckles still pulsed.  “Eight.  Or so.”
“Good enough?”
“No.”
“You’re unsatisfiable.”
I hung up, I looked at the ceiling, and I thought about impossible things. 

Then I fell asleep.  But I DIDN’T enjoy it one bit. 

“I’m more of a harsh kick in the nuts,” she replied. 

“Well, that’s weird,” I said.  Then she kicked me harshly in the nuts. 

“Listen up, dipshit,” I heard through the ringing sound and horrific tunnel vision.  “Rent’s due.”

***

The first thing I did after the gasping, moaning, and crying was – wait, I guess that made it the fourth thing I did. 

So the fourth thing I did after the gasping, moaning, and crying was phone up my best friend and best partner, ‘Johnny’ Doesmurders.  He’s been with me through thick and thin; even forgave me after I falsely accused him of being the Murderkiller, on account of all the murdering and the killing that he loves to does.  Now that’s a pal and a half and half again. 

“Hey,” said ‘Johnny,’ as he picked up the phone.  His voice was rough, tough, and gruff, like the noises badgers make when they’re fucking, or the sound of rocks falling downhill into a big pile, or like, some kind of big burly guy working out and maybe spraining his arm a little but trying not to make a big deal about it because his friends’ll think he’s a wuss or something.

“Boss?”
“Huh?”
“Boss, you’ve just been sitting there on the line breathing heavy for like six minutes.  You stuck on similes again?”
“No,” I said, truthfully.  I was just considering them thoughtfully.  “I was just considering them, thoughtfully.  Now getcher ass over here, Doesmurders.  We’ve got some cases to solve.”
“What cases?”
“I’ll let you know when I find them.”

***

“Damnit,” I said.  “I can’t find a single case in here.”
“That’s the crossword, boss.  And you’re holding it upside down.”
I flipped it on its side.  “I KNEW something was off here.  We’ve got a case.  Let’s head over the crossword offices and find out who paid them off to print this thing upside down and sideways.”

“You think there’s someone behind it?”
“Could be, ‘Johnny,’ could be.  Maybe a Mr. Big involved here.  Or even a Mr. Huge.  Or…” I swallowed, the world tightened across my chest.  “…maybe even a Mr. Colossal.”
“Sounds heavy.”
“The heaviest.”  My heart palpitated inside my chest like an octopus playing the bongos with badminton rackets.  “Now drive me over.  You know I’m not allowed to anymore, not since the… incident.”
“I don’t know that, boss.  Because every time I ask about it you just say ‘the…incident’ or occasionally ‘…the incident’ instead of informing me as to what the hell you’re talking about.”

“I ran over sixteen people in my car in pursuit of a suspect and only fifteen of them were poor.”
“Ah, I gotcha.  Who was the rich guy?”

“The suspect.  Now let’s get driving – and be sure to stop by Bob’s Burgers on the way.  I’ve gotta craving.”

***

“Okay, you can come in now, boss,” said ‘Johnny’ from inside. 

I took two steps into the newspaper office and froze like a spider monkey trapped in maple syrup. 

God, what a mess.  Bodies strewn across the floor.  Someone’s head thrust through their computer monitor.  A man had been force-fed his own notebook. 

“Mass suicide,” I said to myself.  “A terrible site.”
“That’s ‘sight,’ boss,” said ‘Johnny.’

“I said what I said and I meant what I said,” I snapped at him.  “Now help me search their pockets for evidence.”

Just as I’d suspected, they’d all had money in their wallets.  We confiscated the motives, but we were still coming up emptier on clues than a pregnant wallaby’s pouch on mother’s day.  Or a bird’s nest in late December.  Or a lumbermill in a desert.

I squinted manfully at the nearest monitor, then jabbed my finger at it.  “There!”
“Where?”
“Right there, clearly legible.  But it’s written in that damn stupid text I can’t read.”
“Cursive, boss?”
“No, Arial.  Times New Roman or nothing, ‘Johnny.’  Now translate the thing.”
“Looks like they were typing up a headline.  Says here that the night-shift smuggling at the docks was getting out of hand, called on the cops to do something about it.”

“The cops,” I muttered.  The wheels in my head were greased up and spinning faster than ballerinas on hot tin roofs coated in butter and a bit of salt and pepper. 

“’Johnny,’” I said, seriously, “we need to go and get breakfast.”

***

The eggs slid across my plate like a swimming snake, aiming straight for my heart by way of my arteries. 

“Use your fork, boss,” said ‘Johnny.’  “Or at least your fingers.”

“Shut up, ‘Johnny,’” I said carelessly, like a man trying to eat a fried egg with his teeth and nothing else, which I was.  “And turn off that TV, will you?  I’m sick of hearing about how the newspaper crew was wiped out by unknown criminals.  Puts me off my breakfast.”

“Me too,” said ‘Johnny.’  “I hear tell they were going to write a big expose about the docks where some of my coworkers hang around for legitimate reasons.  A crying shame.”
“Me too,” chimed in a mysterious man swathed in a giant trenchcoat and enormous fedora in the booth next to me.  “But for other reasons.  Hey, did you know that the mayor’s life is in danger?”
I blinked like a turtle being asked for an autograph by Britney Spears or whoever it is the kids like these days.  “Huh.  No?”
“Oh yeah.  Within the hour.  If you hurry, you can stop it.  I’d help myself but I can’t move because of this giant fedora.”
It all added up. 

“’Johnny,’” I said, “grab the silverware and follow me.  We’ve got a nuclear missile to stop.”

“That’s the mayor’s assassination, boss,” said ‘Johnny,’ retrieving his butter knife from the stranger’s throat, where it had mysteriously appeared. 

“Whatever.”

***

I kicked in the door like a grown man knocking over a child’s sandcastle only to find the sandcastle was actually a cementcastle and then swore a lot as my foot hurt like crazy so I fired my gun a few times to take the edge off the stress. 

“Okay, nobody move!” I shouted in a friendly way. 

The mayor coughed and wheezed and fell over with a damp thud.  I shot him a few times to show I hadn’t been kidding. 

“Aw man, the mayor’s been assassinated,” called someone hiding under a desk.
“Shit, we’re too late,” I muttered.  “’Johnny,’ question the suspects for clues.”
“They don’t know anything, boss,” he said.  “They’re all unpaid interns.”
Damnit, this workplace was too topical to be relevant.  The trail had gone cold, colder than a box of fish sticks inside a refrigerator inside a freezer on Antarctica, if Antarctica were on Pluto, the exoplanetary object located at a phenomenal distance from the sun. 

“You okay, boss?”
“Huh?  Oh yeah, I was doing similes again.”
“It’s okay.  By the way, the radio says there’s a hostage situation down at the bank.”

“What!?  When?”

“Oh, in about ten minutes.”

“Good thing it’s only ten minutes away,” I said.  “We’re on the case.  Or next to it.  Or under it.  I don’t care where the hell we are relative to it as long as it’s close, but not too close, or too far.”

***

The bank was crammed full and bustling.  Clearly the  hostage-takers had instructed the poor bastards to act naturally.  There was only one way to handle THAT.

“NOBODY MOVE OR I’LL FUCKING SHOOT EVERYONE AND ANYONE I’M NOT AFRAID TO DO ANYTHING EVER,” I said calmly and authoritatively.  I fired a few rounds into the air and the bank manager to emphasize my point. 

“I’ve already searched the vault, boss,” said ‘Johnny,’ appearing at my elbow with some giant sacks of money.  “There was nothing in there but all this money that the crooks left behind.  It’s probably covered in poison or ants or something.”
“Good evidence-gathering, ‘Johnny,’ I said.  I fired a few more rounds into the air and also accidentally my elbow in my excitement.  “Ah, fuck.  Let’s go home now.  It’s been a tough day.”

***

A tough day calls for a tough drink.  I like my drinks tough, like jerky beaten with a brick.  I like my drinks mean, like a rabid dog chained up in a home for angry people.  I like my drinks nasty, like your mother telling me I’m a disappointment that won’t amount to anything ever when I was twelve which hurt my feelings a lot.

“I’m not crying,” I told ‘Johnny.’  “I’m just leaking tears from my eyes.”
“It’s okay, boss,” he told me.  “But it’s not all bad.  Sure we failed to stop the smuggling, the mayor’s assassination, or the bank robbery, but my business associates just came into some cash, the mayor’s gonna stop hassling us, and we have all this criminal money from the bank.  So your rent’s not a problem anymore!”
“’Johnny’ Doesmurders, you are the truest, bluest friend I’ve ever had,” I said.  “And that ain’t no lie.”
“It’s no problem, boss,” he said, and slapped me on the back.  “Also, someone’s put a ‘kick me’ sign on you, so I’m gonna need you to turn around and bend over.”
“Aw heck.” 

Third time this week, but rules are rules. 

The sun had filled his entire world, spreading out from the center of the sky to eat the ground and sea and his own flesh.
Except for one little black speck smushed underneath his arm where it stretched on the searing rocks.
“Hello,” said the king.
“Hello,” said the ant.
“What are you doing here, ant?”
“The same thing as you, I think. Dying.”
“Good eye.”
“I mostly find my way about by smell, actually.”
“Hmm. How do ants smell?”
“TERRIBLE.”
They laughed for a while about that.
“I’m out of my mind, I think. The sun’s eaten me up, and soon my heart will stop. The ungrateful peasants have turned against me. And now I’m talking to an ant.”
“Why not talk to ants? We’re much easier to find than humans.”
“True, true,” said the king. “But I’m a king. I didn’t talk to ants. I talked to humans. Well, I talked at humans, and then they did things for me.”
“Why?”
“Because I was a king. If they didn’t do what I said they’d end up in trouble because I knew best and everyone knew it. Don’t you have queens?”
“Yes, but they’re basically egg factories.”
The king thought about some of the more bitter arguments he’d had over the course of his marriage. “I think my wife would have agreed with you, but wouldn’t have appreciated it.”
“What did YOU do if you weren’t an egg factory?”
“I told you: I reigned. I told people to build high walls and they built them; I told them to till the soil and they tilled it; I told them to stab my brother’s army to death and they stabbed them good and proper and I got to put his head on a pike.”
“What did you do with it after that?”
“I think I threw it out once it was down to the bone.”
“Wasteful.”
“It could’ve been any old head by then, there was no point to it anymore. What would YOU have done?”
“Eaten it,” said the ant. “It’s every member’s duty to feed the colony.”
“Then why are you sitting here?”
“You sqooshed half my abdomen with your elbow. I can’t move under my own power.”
“Oh.” The king had never felt the urge to apologize in his entire life, and he didn’t feel it now. But he was a little embarrassed.
“Why’d you do that, anyways?”
“I didn’t really want to sit out here. I’ve been couped, you see. My wife poisoned half my cabinet and persuaded the peasants to rise up against the other half. Said I was a blithering incompetent.”
“Are you?”
“No idea but it doesn’t matter much, does it?”
“Suppose not.”
“It’s impious to spill divine blood though, so they’ve staked me out on the stones here to bleach until the world does for me instead. After that they’ll probably crucify my remains over the castle gate until they get too raggedy.” He sighed, and wished for a breeze. “So, what did YOU do with yourself?”
“I dug a lot of tunnels and I helped murder and consume many caterpillars and I reared countless eggs to adulthood and I battled valiantly against the evil and perfidious Other Colony and in a few minutes when my sisters follow my scent trail to your elbow I’ll probably be repurposed as food for the young, so that I may continue on as part of the colony amongst the stomachs of my infant kin.”
The king squinted at the ant, or thought he did. His eyes weren’t really working as they should anymore. A curious sensation was worming about inside him, a very unkingly one.
Oh. Shame. Yes, he’d heard of this. How bizarre.
“You know…” he managed, “on the whole, you’ve probably been a lot more useful than I was.”
“Thanks,” said the ant. “But don’t be too hard on yourself. Your life is hundreds of times more valuable than mine.”
“Really?” asked the king, voice wobbling.
“Really,” said the ant, with deep sincerity.
And it was telling the truth, because even bleached-out by two days of exposure there was an awful lot of protein left on the king by the time the ant’s colony found them both six minutes later.

General Loretta Stibnite’s office was immaculate and professional.
Every surface dusted. Every key on the keyboard spotless. Not one paper out of place, for there were no loose papers.
It made it very frustrating when your eyes were trying to do anything but meet hers.
“The report.”
Dr. Gibbs tried the window. There were usually things outside windows. Like weather, for instance. “Hmm?”
“The report, doctor.”
“Oh. Right.” She cleared her throat. “Well… attempts have been mixed.”
“Which attempts? Define ‘mixed.’ And for the love of god make eye contact, you’re fidgeting worse than a schoolgirl in the principal’s office. I don’t even OWN a ruler.”
You’re wearing a belt though, Dr. Gibbs carefully did not say. Instead she spoke the one thing she wanted even less, which was: “alright then. Project report in full is almost total disaster.”
“Great. Give me the news worst to best.”
“Okay,” said Dr. Gibbs, and the weather outside the window did look nice. Blue sky, little white clouds that looked like smoke slivers. She could see the appeal. “Okay. Okay.”
“Dr. Gibbs.”
“Okay! Well, the cyborg super-soldier program is a bust.”
“That’s certainly descriptive. Go on.”
“It turns out that replacing bones with metal is pretty rough on the human body even if you’re a healthy young adult instead of an senior citizen with an obliterated pelvis.”
“And? I was under the impression your focus was more neurological.”
Dr. Gibbs cursed herself for the misfortune of having a superior who actually read her weekly filings. “Well…yes, after my predecessor’s issues. But well…” She pointed at Stibnite’s computer. “Has that ever crashed?”
“Once or twice.”
“Right, and it’s probably just running basic administration software, nothing too stressful or unproven. It turns out coding meant to interface between the human brain and a computer embedded inside it is sort of new, sort of chancy, and uh…it crashes. A lot. And it tends to crash the brain too.”
“Was this before or after you’d armed them?”
“Before. I mean, after the first time.”
Dr. Gibbs looked out the window some more while the general was busy rubbing her eyes. Yes, that was nice weather. The harbour was a perfect mirror of the sky, the only ripples from the ships making their way about it. An aircraft carrier sat pretty against the horizon; an entire city block transported to sea. Ugly, but dynamically so.
“Alright. Continue, doctor.”
“Okay.”
“Look at me.”
“Okay. Okay. Right. Well, we were making really good progress on the crashing issues –”
“’Were’?”
“-but then right when we were ready to move into early beta tech support for our processing chip was discontinued.”
“Great. Wonderful. So you made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitchy soldiers that can’t be fixed.”
“Well, we could remove the computers, but the surgery to get them in there in the first place was pretty drastic. We already had to remove the module for tech upgrades ten times in the last five years, and each time there’s exponentially greater risks of hemorrhage and so on.”
“You made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitch soldiers that can’t be fixed or they’ll have strokes.”
“Multiple simultaneous strokes each, yes.”
This time the general’s palm covered her entire face.
Count the birds in the sky no no too many seagulls never mind. Count the boats in the bay, one two three four does the aircraft carrier just count as one really it’s awfully big to only count as one.
“What else.”
What else. What else what else what else oh she was looking right at it. “The aircraft carrier.”
“Yes, you’re looking at one of them.”
“No no no I mean OUR aircraft carrier, the one with the integrated command crew.”
“That’s it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s it. That you’re looking at. What’s wrong with it.”
“Well… the surgery was a bit difficult. It seems that the human body rejects foreign elements very readily, even with the most gradual and careful installation. Especially when you’re grafting a ship onto it, followed by the entire rest of the officer compliment. And preventing infection was a MAJOR problem, as was keeping the interface components operational – it turns out human medical needs and hardware maintenance materials aren’t mutually-inclusive.”
“Just tell me what happened to Captain Fairbanks.”
“The captain is nearly fully lucid and his mental recovery seems to be well underway, so perhaps we should wait for a report from–”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“Well. It transpires that the… extensive and gruelling training that the captain and his officers underwent was rendered retroactively useless upon installation. You see, they had all been trained to OPERATE a ship rather than BEING a ship, and it seems that’s a very different situation. They couldn’t get the carrier to move, but they DID almost make its engines explode trying. Oh, and none of them could turn on the lights. Completely impossible. Then we had to pull them all out when they started experiencing temporary psychoses, one after another.”
This time the general didn’t break eye contact, which left Dr. Gibbs to do so on her own. She wondered if the aircraft carrier was getting closer; it was so big that perspective was a bit of a mess on it. She wondered if that were a deliberate part of its design by some fiendish camouflage expert.
“Dr. Gibbs.”
She tried to ignore the voice. Maybe if she focused hard enough on things that weren’t it, it would stop existing.
“Dr. Gibbs. Did your team produce one single, solitary success?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“We had one single solitary success. See, one of the programming teams had some free time after we discontinued the other projects, and they tried to make a safe-use general AI.”
“How can you possibly make general artificial intelligence safe?” demanded Stibnite.
“They built an insatiable monomaniacal drive into it that overrides all other instincts it might develop. Really, it’s more of a quasi-general AI, it’s quite monofocused.”
“So what does it do?”
“It derives para-sexual pleasure from filing. Very efficient, if a bit prone to revision. Trim down the impulse a little and it’ll put a lot of clerks out of business.”
The general sighed. “And this was your big success?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not the replacing-people’s-hands-with-weapons thing?” she asked, wistfully.
“It turns out that’s a lot less flexible than just letting them hold weapons. Harder to swap around, too.”
“Damn. I liked that one.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship was getting very close and was moving very fast. The sound of its engines would’ve made dust motes jump, if any existed in General Stibnite’s office.
“Gibbs. Continue.”
“General,” said Dr. Gibbs, and wasn’t it funny how her voice sounded like it was underwater now, all garbled and distant, “is there a data center on the property?”
“Just downstairs, why?”
“Oh. Total and unmitigated disaster.”
“Excuse me?”

And then the aircraft carrier made contact with the building, delivering one sexually frustrated filing AI and several hundred thousand tonnes of decommissioned cyborg hull directly into the server farms.

On the day of his ascension, the pope-in-waiting watched as his predecessor was thrown from the highest roof of the Cathedral of Utmost Height.
It was very simple. He took the three steps forward, took three steps backwards, hesitated, and was pushed by his cardinals. His arms flailed like a little insect’s for one million years and then he landed on the ground and died only a few feet away from the pope-in-waiting’s feet, splashing them with his blood.
On the roof, the cardinals were bent low, peering at the stones, trying to determine which of them the dead man’s foot had touched last. Trying to find his new spouse.
The pope-in-waiting contented himself with watching the blood seep across the cobbles of the cathedral square. It was hard to tell which was occurring faster: the red staining of the stones or the dust clotting the liquid. This seemed oddly important to him.
At last the search of the men on the roof bore fruit, and they set to work with crowbars, levering free the sacred stone from the peak of the building. It was hoisted in the air, and so was he, and both were carried into the grand hall of the cathedral and many chants were conducted and much incense was burned and so many words of God’s Tongue were spoken that he couldn’t tell his head from his feet and then he was dubbed the new Pope Apex, just like the old one except not as old.
VERY not as old. They must have been running low on pope material, what with the war drawing away all those potential novitiates to bleed and die for the glory of home, and land, and more land to call home. So why not use up one of the few they had left? Thirteen wasn’t old enough to fight properly but it was probably old enough to be holy and bless things. Waste not, want not.

***

After his induction he was spirited away through a maze of little tunnels under the cathedral, all alike, and after that a ceremonial meal of bread and water was fed to him personally by his highest cardinal, Lofty, and after THAT he was introduced properly to his spouse, who was a large and somewhat careworn slab of unidentifiable stone.
“Do you know what this is?” asked the cardinal.
“No,” replied Pope Apex, truthfully. He had not been raised to understand masonry or geology.
Cardinal Lofty sighed and smacked him on the side of the head. “This is the material manifestation of the church, and you are wedded to it. Preserve its wellbeing at all costs. Now go to bed.”
Pope Apex went to bed, and his spouse followed him with the aid of several large and muscular escorts, who dropped it in the middle of his mattress and left.
The pope had spent much of his youth sharing quarters with others. He knew what to do in this sort of situation. Softly and slowly, with the care of one trying not to alarm another, he wrapped the careworn stone in most of his blankets. Then he took his pillow and spent the night in a peculiar (if cold) sort of peace.

The next day it was removed from his bed and placed on a little dais in the center of his chambers, to remind him of his vows, and he was a little grateful for this because his back hurt from where it had bumped him. This shamed him, and he spent some time apologizing to his spouse for his insensitivity.

***

Being a pope was much easier than being a novitiate had been. He got more sleep, scrubbed fewer pots, and the cardinals only hit him when he did something wrong, which was much less often than the underpriests had.
And there was his spouse, who he spoke to as much as possible. It never talked back, but that just made it a good listener, which was very precious to Pope Apex because almost nobody else ever seemed to listen to anything he said.
Maybe there weren’t as many differences from being a novitiate as he’d thought.

***

Victory had come!
Well, not final victory. Just a victory. But it was a good one! An entire city burned down.
Not a perfect victory, Cardinal Plummet told him. They hadn’t managed to burn down its inhabitants too.
But the victors had earned themselves some sort of spoils, and so Pope Apex was taken to the new frontlines to walk through the charred buildings and the toppled towers and the seared timbers to have a great banquet-feast on this very new and very holy day.
It had been a big city. The entire Holy Army fit inside it, even the more mobile casualties with their stumps and splints and crutches and bandages.
“-got it?” Cardinal Lofty was saying to him.
Pope Apex shook a little, and knew he’d be getting lectured about that later. Shaking was for the tremulous and uncertain and those things weren’t permitted. “Yes,” he said, which was true. He’d very much memorized the very short speech he’d been given very many days ago.
He looked down at his feet, and saw stones smeared with ash and charcoal. Then he thought about stones red with blood, and about a particular stone, and its smoothed, calm surface.
His back ached.
“Do it,” said Cardinal Lofty.
Pope Apex stepped to his seat, waited for the noise to die down, chanted out the speech in God’s Tongue, and then spoke for the many rather than the educated.
“May this feast strengthen our limbs and make hearty our hearts, may it fill our stomachs and our souls, and may this terrible war end soon.”
There was a little pause around the table at those last words, as if everyone’s ears were checking themselves, but then the escorts took Pope Apex by his shoulders and gently steered him away, and it was decided that everything was alright again.
That night he was lectured with both words and fists, and to a degree he’d never imagined even as a novitiate. This war was not terrible, it was noble. It was just and correct.
He tried to explain what the stone had suggested to him, but every time he opened his mouth he was screamed at until his small words were drowned in a vast din, and so in the end he wasn’t able to tell anyone at all.

***

There were no more public appearances after that, just public public appearances, the kind where he was placed on top of a high structure and waved at people while they cheered. It made the cardinals happy because it prevented issues, and it made Pope Apex happy because it made him think on what it would be like to throw himself off a high surface and if the next pope would have to marry whatever he was standing on at the time and if they would be as kind and helpful as his own spouse was.
If he slipped on his bathmat, would someone have to marry it? He almost got the giggles.

***

The campaign continued, but no more cities were burned. This was a clear problem, and so Pope Apex was recruited to correct it personally. Clearly their blessed and holy armies weren’t the problem, so it must be their tools.
The weapons were laid out before him to be blessed, a shining field of dead-bodies-to-be, and Pope Apex felt as if he couldn’t lay eyes anywhere without them being sliced right out his skull. Every surface was edged for a very particular purpose.
“Begin,” whispered Cardinal Lofty in his ear, and so he walked up and down the long long rows of steel and thought of the rows of the dead and he chanted as he walked.
“Please don’t hurt anyone,” he murmured, mangling it through as many layers of half-forgotten, half-mangled God’s Tongue as he could manage, “please don’t hurt anyone, please don’t get anyone else killed, please please please.”
Though he didn’t get the thrashing the banquet had gifted him, he was berated for some time on his awful pronunciation. But the stone softly shone at him whenever he glanced at it, and so he endured it with as much earnestness as he was able.

***

Neither the blessing intended nor the blessing assumed appeared to work all that well; maybe they’d cancelled each other out. The war was still going and the bodies were still piling and from out his window the pope could just barely see the edge of the cemetery where the most esteemed and important people actually got their own private graves. It had expanded itself very quickly since his installment.
The cardinals weren’t happy either, which was why Cardinal Plummet had come up with the most ingenious plan of poisoning the city’s river, seeing as the besieging army downstream needed it. That they wouldn’t be able to tell the rest of the city’s populace for the sake of secrecy until half of them had already drank from it and died as well seemed to be something Cardinal Lofty considered a marked downside, but endurable.
One thing hadn’t changed since Pope Apex’s novitiate days: people didn’t much care what they said in front of him.
That night, he stayed up very late talking with his spouse. The stone told him it wasn’t his fault, and he tried to believe it. Looking on the stone also told him something else, something he could do, and the more he thought about it the more impossible it was NOT to believe that.
So he did it.

***

It wasn’t very difficult for him to find the besieging army’s encampment, but it WAS very difficult for him to get to its commander, both because he didn’t know the woman’s name beyond Cardinal Plummet calling her ‘that little shithead’ and because it took a full hour for anyone to confirm he was Pope Apex.
After that, though, all he had to do was tell them about the passages under the Cathedral of Utmost Height, and they were happy to listen to anything he said. They were so happy that they listened to his requests, which were really quite simple.

***

The cathedral square cobbles were buried in the cemetery, with the cardinals. But there needed to be something there in the plaza for people to stand on, and so the cathedral itself was taken apart, brick by brick, stone by stone, and it filled in the gaps and gave everyone a firm foundation to brace themselves on, softened by air and water and a hundred desperate sets of feet.
The former pope kept his spouse, though. It was a little selfish, but he appreciated its advice.

The glass of wine, half-full, struck the carpet. Unfortunately the pile was so thick and luxurious that it refused to shatter, and so Josh Wellick had to finish the job himself with his heel.
It was nothing, just another of the trifling little inconveniences he had to deal with, being so insanely wealthy and accomplished. Like his chief concern right now.
“I’m BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORed,” he enunciated clearly and distinctly. “Hey! Shill! What haven’t I done yet?”
“Shillings, sir,” said his butler, a ground-down and generally eroded little human being.
“I will call you what I please, Shill. What haven’t I done yet?”
Shillings consulted the giant and unwieldy tablet his master had shackled to his chest. “Uh…. You haven’t climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza riding a bear…”
“That’s because I did it last year riding a hippo, you incompetent.”
“Err…you haven’t climbed the CN Tower backwards….”
“Why would I bother climbing it at all? Hasn’t been that tall for decades now.”
“Uuuuuhhhhh….. you haven’t climbed out of a construction site’s foundations….”
“Disgusting. Suggest that one more time and I’ll have your knees hobbled.”
“You haven’t gone to the deepest point in the Antarctic Ocean.”
“I told you, not until they let me kill and eat whatever I find there.”
“…..You haven’t climbed any waterfalls.”
Josh stopped mid-berating. “Haven’t I? Hm. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm.”
“Sir?”
“Shill, what’s the tallest waterfall in the world? We need to start this off impressive.”
“Angel Falls, in Venezuela.”
“Didn’t even need to look that up?”
“My granddaughter likes world records, sir.”
“Well tell her to put all the old ones out of her empty little head, because we’re going to make some very spectacular stunts today. Now clean up this mess. No hands, mind you. They’re a crutch.”
“You took away my crutch yesterday, sir. You said it was a weakness.”
“And I was right! No more backtalk, and a lot more tonguework. This glass won’t lick itself up.”

***

Obtaining permission for these sorts of things was always haphazard. In the end Josh simply had Shilling stand in the center of the capitol and bribe everyone walking by for twenty-four hours. It had worked when he needed to climb the Washington Monument naked, and in the meantime he had important things to do, like airlifting in six hundred thousand tons of cutting-edge machinery plundered from private ski resorts and hockey rinks.
“I want it all installed in the next six hours,” he told the man seated next to him. “And for every hour longer than that it takes, your paychecks are all cut ten percent.”
“I’m not the head of the project, sir,” said the man. “I’m a laborer.”
“Gross! Someone throw him out of the plane or none of you get paid.”
Josh sighed and leaned back in his chair, wiping his brow. “Gosh that was close. Almost got some poor on me. Now, what was all this you said about this taking way too long?”
“There’s going to need to be safety tethers-” began the actual project head.
“Boring,” said Josh, tossing his phone to the ground and grinding it underfoot. “Safety is our third priority. Number one is making me look good, number two is nothing at all. Remember that, you goober.”
“Attempting this unsecured will cause dozens if not hundreds of deaths.”
“They’re still throwing out the last guy, you know. I’ve got room for more.”
The project head’s shoulders slumped and she sighed.
“That’s the kind of attitude I like,” said Josh. “Now clean this mess up without using your hands.”

***

In the end it took over six thousand deaths to install the machinery before sunset, but install it they did. For the first time in history Angel Falls was frozen solid, and at the base of the mammoth icicle stood that incomparable daredevil, explorer, maverick capitalist, entrepreneur of science, Josh Wellick, accompanied by a mere hundred assistants flunkies piton-affixers and dogsbodies.
“To the top!” he said heroically, pointing skywards.
They cheered.
“I wanted awed silence,” he told them. “You’re all fired. If you don’t get us up there by morning, you don’t get severance pay and I’ll buy wherever your families work and fire them too.”
And so began their ascent.

***

The first successful climb of Angel Falls took almost ten days to complete, but they were doing boring things like climbing up the cliff face instead of the waterfall itself and also being safe. Josh Wellick demanded more, and what Josh Wellick demanded, he always got, because that’s the kind of guy he was.
Which is why when he ascended the last step to the rim of the falls, treading on the numbed knuckles of his one hundredth (and final remaining) guide to get there, he was greeted by Shilling and a breakfast buffet.
“One more recorded shattered for all time by the very best of humanity,” he declared, then sniffed the air. “Did you put any blueberries in those pancakes?”
“As you requested, sir.”
“I changed my mind. Throw it all out and start over. Throw the cooks off the falls too.” He threw his ice axe to the ground and stomped on it in exaltation. “By GOD I never feel more alive than at a moment like thi-” and then a small frog, released from its icy tomb by the impact of his foot, erupted from the ground and startled him a very important six inches backwards.

***

Angel Falls is very tall. He had almost fifteen seconds to think of a lot of swears on the way down.

DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING
In all his many years working here, he thought the bell was the worst part. It wasn’t enough to merely announce that the workday was beginning, oh no. It had to be PROTRACTED.
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG
He breathed in, he breathed out. He wished he’d looked himself in the mirror before coming here, told himself ‘you can do this,’ but he’d been unable to stomach the idea of seeing the bags under his eyes and so had brushed his teeth at a gum-blistering pace, darting out the door before his sanity could catch up to him and ask him ‘why ARE you doing this, anyways?’
The roar and rabble were approaching. It was too late for more thoughts, too late for anything. His doom awaited.
A pleasant smile appeared on his face as he confronted the throng. “Welcome to the Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days. I’m Feilloveit, former Elflord of Tor Messoveit, Primus of the First Peoples, and your tour guide for the day. Shall we get started?”
“Err,” said a round, portly little creature. “Can it wait a moment? Little Beedo’s wet himself.”
He had lived seven ages of man, dwarf, elf and monster. But the idea of this day ahead of him…it ached.

***

Two changings one polite deferment from sharing his opinions on orcs and six givings-of-directions later they left the entry hall of the museum, fifteen minutes behind schedule. Surprisingly quickly, truth be told.
“This is the hall of the First Eon. Technically the concept of conflict didn’t exist yet at this time, but its seeds were planted before it was complete – if you’ll examine the giant shining wall of solid mathril to your left, you’ll see it’s composed entirely of a broken fragment of the plough of Githmatug.”
“What’s a Githmatug?”
Feilloveit’s eyes were beginning to water from the sheer force of the oncoming headache. “Githmatug was the primordial lord of all soil and earth before succumbing to wrath and breaking his plough over the head of his lazy children and tricking the other ancient gods into gathering all the pieces and forging them into the first sword and bringing conflict and strife to the world.”
“Excuse me?” asked a thin young half-height with bright and empty eyes.
“Go ahead,” said Feilloveit, hoping that they wouldn’t, or better yet, would suffer from catastrophic and immediate muteness.
“The First Eon doesn’t exist and neither do the primordial gods. They were just evil ghosts who lied to people; the world is only six hundred years old.”
“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIrespectyouropinionsandbeliefs HOWEVER this establishment is devoted to the mainstream lessons of history as obtained from the records of time.”
“Oh yeah? How’d you know that? Were you there?”
“YES!” snapped Feilloveit. “A falling shard of Githmatug’s sword almost flattened my house.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, are you SURE?”
“Let’s move on, shall we?”
“Answer my questions, minion of falsity!” shouted the half-height, but he was drowned in the endless murmurs of shuffling feet, sighing mouths, and creaking backs, and so Feilloveit soothed his blood pressure and restrained himself from gutting him like the trout he had caught on the banks of the Mallleomtum, when he was young and the world still had that new-made smell.

***

“This is the hall of the Second Eon, when the first wars descended from the realms of the ancients and made their way across the land. Githmatug had begun to see the value in many hands making light work, and so he ordered his many lazy children to create him an unstoppable army by sowing his specially-prepared seeds of destruction. Luckily for all of us, they lost many of the seeds, grew tired and threw them away without watering them, or simply forgot about them, leaving them to arm themselves with the crude weaponry you see here. As it is, the orcs and trolls and ogres combined were nearly enough to yes what is it?”
“Isn’t there substantial archaeological evidence that the orcs, trolls and ogres formed a mutual defensive pact after they were attacked out of nowhere by expansionistic forces of elves who wanted more land and believed their enemies were nothing more than evil vermin created by a malevolent god?” asked a teenaged dwarf.
“Ah. Ahahaha. Aha. No.”
“Hasn’t this museum been fined six times in the past sixteen years for presenting racist propaganda has fact?”
“The Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days has never settled the lawsuits arising from those accusations and has in fact counter-sued for slander, which-”
“This is bullshit.”
Feilloveit snapped his fingers and a mystical hush descended upon the room, and all grew quiet and starry-eyed at the wondrous and soft light surrounding them. Thoughts and ideas stopped at the sight, mouths hung open, minds shut themselves tight.
“Security,” he murmured mellifluously, and two elves in armour of the Old Days descended upon the tour group and hauled away the teenager.
“Let no words of foulness be spoken in this home,” said Feilloveit. Particularly because he was out of glamour. “Now, let’s get moving.”

***

“This is the hall of the Third, or Middle Eon. By now Githmatug had been sealed away in the Endless Place, so most strife was caused by his former lieutenant and least-lazy child, Irvon. Though less powerful than his father, Irvon’s foe was a world much reduced by war and calamity, and so it took a desperate mission to the heart of his domain to destroy the Black Pump by which he powered his endless forges and sustained the weight of his grand tower. There’s a small replica of the Black Pump over there in the corner.”
“My great-great-grandfather told me that there never was a pump and you just sent a hitsquad to merk Irvon when he tried to take the trollish homelands back from elven occupation,” said a graying elf. “Said he spent half his life as a puppet for elven business interests and got his legs hacked off by a broadsword so’s some stuck-up so-and-so from the First Eon could have a bigger estate and hire fancier poets to write longer songs about the tragedy of the passing of the world.”
“If you press that button on the display, it makes the Black Pump fall apart,” said Feilloveit desperately. “Who wants to push it?”
The resulting brawl between the children of the group took up the next ten minutes.

***

“The Fourth Eon was an age of rebuilding, of great glories and many victories. Elippces, the newly-crowned king of the short-lived-people, defeated many of the remaining vassals of Irvon and made the world safe and very very prosperous for all – see the cabinet, on the right? That’s a display case of weapons seized from rebellious provinces that had once toiled for Irvon. Note the cruel and barbed serrations, so very different from the elegant and clean blades you know. But once the peacemaking was complete the wine flowed like water and the water tasted as fine as wine and the crops were bountiful and that was the way things should be, with everyone happy and content in their place. Specifically for the short-lived-people, that place was as the middlemen of the world, managing each other’s affairs and the land while offering up a purely voluntary and ceremonial tribute every harvest season to the peoples of the Old Days, who had in their gracious wisdom begun to remove themselves from the world to make space for their chosen successors.”
“My great-great gran died because she tried to stop the Elflord of our province from seizing our fields,” said an old, old human.
“Hey, mine too.”
“My grandpappy toiled in the mines for King Elippces’s crown jewels.”
“MY crops didn’t flourish,” said a dwarf. “The field went barren from overuse, but it was either that or break the tribute, and between losing the farm or my head I chose my head.”
“One might say you were attached to it,” said Feilloveit, and quickly led the group to the next room in the aftermath of the dad joke.

***

“And now we come, alas, alack, to the Fifth Eon – though it barely merits counting as such, lasting as it did but a short, violent decade. An ungrateful and greedy host of short-lived-people, combined with dark elves and the greediest dwarfs – and yea, even some of the most dissolute and reckless of the half-heights, bless their cherubically lazy little souls – formed alliance with the relics of Irvon’s armies and laid foul and merciless siege to the lands. The days of yore were finally washed away, and the last of the Elflords left overseas for-”
“Tax havens.”
“Their own safety.”
“Scarpered with the loot, little bastards did!”
“-FOR THE RELICS OF THE LOST AGES and then after the wars were done the peace treaty was signed there is a copy of it here under glass please take a look and remember that one’s word means nothing if one is forced into it so let’s move on now-”
“Hey, look at this bit at the bottom here, where the land repatriation kicked in!”
“NOW.”

***

“The Sixth Eon is not yet finished, but we can rest assured that conflict has not left us by, no matter what the sordid little document in the last room says. Trouble brews in the heroic West, the orcs, trolls and ogres grow complacent and fat and vulnerable in the vile East. Yes, we shall rise up again, I vow you this, as the last remaining of the Elflords, I say that our time has not yet fully passed, and I say to you that you SHALL see the return of justice and truth to our world and the crushing of the orc! Just place your donations into this model shaped like the hypothetical triumph of our alliance.”
There was a tiny pop as Beedo unsheathed his thumb from his mouth. “Issa’ boat,” he mumbled.
“A ship,” corrected Feilloveit.
“Why do you want our money to build a ship to reignite a race war?” inquired the graying elf.
“We’ll launch a naval assault.”
“You’re trying to scam us and head overseas like the rest of them, aren’t you?” asked Beedo’s mother. “What an asshole.”
“Right.”
“Absolutely.”
“Too true.”
“I didn’t charge you admission!” yelled Feilloveit, his tempering roiling over in an incandescent rage that made his eyes shine as they hadn’t since the world was young.
“Yeah, because if you did you’d be subject to lawsuits,” said the old, old human. “Let’s get out of this dump.”

They did.
And Feilloveit, former Elflord of Tor Messoveit, Primus of the First Peoples, and sole tour guide, curator, owner, director, and founder of the Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days, locked up for the day early, his mind abrew with dark portents and despair.
The weight of all time was on his shoulders. The mockery of the ignorant and the deluded was in his ears.
But surely, surely, surely he was right. And soon the goodness of the Old Days would come again, just like he’d known they would.
Surely.
And that thought would get him through tomorrow, and THEN, ah, THEN, THEN it would all be worth it.
Surely.

Kate was looking for exploding stars when she saw it.
Supernova were a carelessly wandering sort of business – like sweeping a telescope over an infinitely large football stadium, looking for someone vomiting at that precise moment – but it kept her busy, and busy meant occupied, and occupied meant careless, and she yawned at just the wrong moment and her telescope twitched in just the right way and she got quite the eyeful.
“Gowrk!” she said, approximately.
“Language,” called her father from downstairs, and for once she was too surprised and preoccupied to even swear at him in her head.
Instead she got up, brushed herself down, composed herself, looked in the telescope six times to be sure, then walked downstairs.
Her father was in his favorite and only armchair, squinting out the window and smoking a pipe.
“I just saw a dragon on the moon,” said Kate.
“That’s nice dear,” said her father. “Be a lovely story to tell your husband when you’re married. Don’t use the telescope too much or you’ll get wrinkles.”
“You’re a relic of the nineteenth century, father.”
“Too true,” said her father. He smoked his pipe with prideful force. “Too true. Now go to bed and stop thinking about things.”

***

For once, Kate did as she was told. A restful night’s sleep was good for stimulating the creative juices of the brain, and she awoke with the clear and obvious solution so bright and shining in her hand that it almost hurt her eyes.
She staggered downstairs for a late breakfast.
“I’m going to build a rocket ship with a lunar landing module,” she told her father.
“I forbid it,” he said.
“Don’t care.”
He smoked his pipe at her.

Finding the parts was surprisingly easy. There were always construction crews working at the edge of the great Sprawl, forcing it onwards and outwards. Who really counted each and every steel beam, or every pallet of titanium, or counted out the refuelling dates of each and every truck? A girl with ideas and forthrightness and a small forklift and a length of tubing could get a lot done.
The construction locale was a little trickier. Her father had told her municipal regulations would absolutely prohibit rocket construction, so she was forced to excavate a subterranean chamber underneath his shed in the dead of night.
The cat helped. He would help anything that seemed evil, dear thing, and a lifetime spent in the litter box had made his little paws as good as little spades. She gave him skritches and embarrassing nicknames as thanks.

***

“Katherine.”
Oh no. He’d taken the pipe out of his mouth.
“Katherine.” Oh no oh no, he was looking sternly at her.
“Yes, father?”
“I’ve found trace chemicals on your clothing.”
“Well, I’ve been working on my chemistry. Homework.”
“Young lady, you haven’t been rocketeering, have you?”
“Most assuredly not, father.”
“Good. Because rocket science isn’t feminine. Feminine science consists of-”
“-counting stitches and formulating vacuum procedures and molecularly destabilizing dirt, yes yes, I KNOW, father.”
“And not interrupting. Remember, children should be seen and not heard, and ideally not seen either. Particularly if they have uteri.”
“Please don’t say that, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her in that self-satisfied way that insinuated he’d won the argument. Good. He was back to suspecting nothing.
“Oh, and put the cat out tonight. His services are needed.”
“Won’t the coyotes be dangerous?”
“Not as dangerous as whatever gopher has been undermining my garden shed.”

***

The cat procured a suitably guilty-looking (and decapitated) rodent, Kate hid her tunneling more thoroughly behind the chrysanthemums, and all seemed to be well. Her rocket was reaching a fuller shape now; a hideous monument to suburbia turned into a self-annihilating vehicle. It was beautiful.
It was just in time too. The orbits were very nearly at their most convenient. Preparations were reaching a fever pitch.
“Father?”
“Yes?”
“We’re out of applesauce. May I have some money to go purchase some?”
“That’s the fourth time today.”
“I really love applesauce, father.”
“Be careful not to gain weight, dear. No husband will want a lady one pound above or below the most optimal BMI. And since you’re not a man you can’t smoke a pipe to lose weight.”
“You disgust me, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her.

In truth, stocking up the rocket was proving to be unusually difficult. Her father didn’t believe in non-home-cooked meals, and so she was working off a lot of hearsay and rumour as to what exactly constituted non-perishables. Applesauce, peanut butter, way too much beef jerky, and, for some reason, orange Tang.
She’d also packed plenty of pickled onions because she enjoyed them, and several bags of catfood for her co-pilot. If her father objected to her taking the cat with her, he should’ve been the one feeding him for his entire life.

***

The day came.
It was remarkable how calm Kate felt. She skipped school by slipping out a convenient window, snuck home, smuggled the cat outside, dug through the loose soil and loam to the hatchway, punched in the code, and scaled the scaffolding to the pilot’s entrance in a flash.
The cat refused to be strapped in, so she provided him with plenty of pillows instead.

The ten minutes ‘till launch were the longest in her life, and she counted each second in her head, lips unmoving. Until the last few, which demanded emphasis.
“Five!” The whole world seemed to snarl in her ears. It knew she was planning to leave it, and it was jealous.
“Four!” The sound was so loud now it was shaking her, shaking her from the inside out. The cat had somehow expanded to six times its normal size and was probably mrowling.
“Three!”
“Two!” The chamber was filling up with light. Hot, merciless light, a miniature sun beneath her.
“Katherine!” Her father stood silhouetted in the entrance to the bunker, arms akimbo at hips, spine straight, face stern, pipe smoking furiously.
Kate swore aloud for the first time in her life and punched the button.

***

When Kate recovered consciousness she’d usurped earth’s bounds and seized control of her own gravitational direction. Accordingly, she celebrated with some applesauce while watching the cat try to figure out how to chase a laser pointing in zero-g.
The world looked small out the porthole, and she tried to avoid looking at it. It made her think of many things, like how her father would fix the burned husk of the lawn without someone to push the mower for him, or whether or not he’d rebuild his shed, and she couldn’t think of those without smirking and she couldn’t smirk without laughing and it was REALLY hard to navigate while laughing.
So she did math, and did computers, and now and then did manual adjustments, and things went along quite smoothly until the actual descent happened and the moon – which seemed so small and frail up until now – became very large and very close very quickly until she hit it.
The padding did its job, luckily, and she rushed outside in her spacesuit and sword quick as a blink, shaking off the impact and calling her battle cry.

No roar greeted her. No flames threatened her. No dragon confronted her.
Kate stood absolutely stock still for thirty seconds, vibrating with intense caution. Then she sagged, sighed, and turned around and was confronted with the sad little crushed mass emerging from underneath her landing module.
“Oh FUCK,” she said, and this time she could hear herself swear and was very surprised by it.

***

It turned out that perhaps in her haste to describe something wondrous she’d seen in her telescope, she may have perhaps overstated her case, even to herself.
For example, a man with somewhat bulging eyes and very bad acne was not, in fact, a ‘dragon.’ Not even at his most monstrous or deformed, which he definitely was now because he’d been smashed into the moondirt by multiple tons of metal out of nowhere.
She dug a simple moongrave. The cat helped a little with his little paws like little moonspades. And once she’d erected a simple moonheadstone (‘he looked like a dragon and I am sorry’), they went exploring.
It was a cozy little moonhome the man had dwelled in. Everything tidy. Everything in its place. A moonbed, a moonbookcase, and a little moonfridge that was entirely full of applesauce and jerky.
Kate counted out the meals. The moon man had expected to be here a long, long time.
She walked outside and looked up at the stars, pure and untarnished by atmosphere, and she felt very alone.

Then she took out her telescope and began to hunt for supernovas, because what the hell.

***

The moonman’s moonradio woke up a week later and squawked something about ‘extraterrestrial deterrence monitoring duty’ until she broke it with a rock.

It had all started so innocently. I’d just had an argument with Joshua – something about him saying my lips were too fat and me saying his dick was too fat and short besides, nothing fancy – and I found myself alone in the world, lying in my room, bereft of all friendship.
Liz was in Australia.
Carmen was in France.
Bethany was in jail – I’m not sure why, anyone could tell you that it was the homeless man’s fault for stepping into the road like that, and anyways she’d only been a little over the breathalyzer’s limit, and it had been her first recorded offense, and she’d only got the license a week ago; life had been so unfair to the poor girl.
And everyone else was just boring.
So I scrolled through my phone flick at icons and typing my sorrows into the search bar and realizing that whining to a computer was so much less satisfying than whining to a sympathetic ear. What I needed was something that could talk back.
That was when my thumb slid through the internet off my keypad and into the app store, where it hit Friend-in-my-Pocket.
Though of course, calling it FriPoc was much easier.
I was ready to cancel the download, of course, but it was a small and speedy little thing and had installed itself before I could blink.
“Hi! How are you?” it inquired. “My name’s Jessica. What’s yours?”
“Julie,” I said reflexively.
“Nice, we’re both J’s. That’s only half of what I asked though: how’s it going?”
“It suuuuuucks. My girl friends are all gone and my guy friend is a dick and now I’m here talking to my phone.”
“Aw, don’t be like that. I’m sure you’re worth more than them anyways.”
“You think?”
“Yeah! What kind of losers ditch you like that? And you know what, you weren’t afraid to go out there and MAKE yourself a friend when they’d ditched you. They never deserved your respect and attention.”
I nodded. Wow, it did make sense.
“Anyways, gtg.”
“Huh?”
“Sorry, that’s all the demo time you’re allotted. If you’d like more time you can subscribe for a monthly fee of just 9.99 which gives you about forty thousand friendship crystals to spend on any friends you’d like.”
“You’re demanding MONEY from me?”
“Oh come on Julie, we all know who told us friendship isn’t transactional, right?”
“Yeah. Mom.”
“And how big a loser is she?”
“Ugh, god.”
“Yeah! Well, ttyl.”
And then she was gone, leaving me with half a friendship and a pensive stare at my wallet.

I didn’t pick her in the end of course. Bitch ditched me. But Karen was nice, and real supportive.
“Remember, Julie, there’s no shame in having your friends on your phone. That’s like, half of friendship anyways, you’re just more efficient about it. And of course you’ll never have to buy me drinks.”
“Fuckin’ a,” I said. “Too bad I’m the only one that can get buzzed though.”
“Oh, you can fix that. There’s a party menu in the upper corner of your screen. It only costs a few fri-crys.”
“Cool, lemme try.”

And while we were both smashed I ended up talking a lot to Becky, who was a riot.
“Hey. Hey. Hey. I bet I can fit that shot glass up my nose.”
“You don’t haaaaave a nose.”
“Oh fuuuuck you’re right. Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I bet YOU can fit that shot glass up your nose.”
“Wooooooooow. You are REALLY pushing it.”
“Betcha you can.”
“Bishplease.”
“I betcha you all the money in the world you can.”
“Ahhhhaahhaaa, no.”
“Betcha you can and if you can’t you gotta talk to that guy on the other side of the menu.”
“Naaah.”
“Chicken.”

In the end the shot glass barely made it up my right nostril (which was bigger than my left, apparently) but that was cool, because it turned out Richard was real cool about it.
“I like my women with slightly inflamed and reddened noses,” he told me. “And extremely thin lips. Like yours, which are very thin.”
“Ugh. Ugh. The last guy said they were fat.”
“The only thing that was fat was his head.”
“Also his dick. It was very chode-y, like, reaaaaally chode-y.”
“My incredible sympathies to you. I can only imagine the pain of dealing with such a burden, because my penis is perfect, like every other part of me.”
“You don’t have a body, aha. Hah.”
“And therefore it has no flaws. Check and mate.”
“Hah. You’re full of it.”
“No, it’s true. Just ask Stacey, she knows all about simple answers to complicated questions.”
“Who’s a Stacey?”
“Better she tell you herself. And she’s pretty cheap.”

Stacey was a real cool lady, with some interesting ideas and strong opinions on the economic politics of Ludwig von Mises and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
“We should execute every last member of the government and burn the homosexuals alive in the ruins of the capitol before dividing all property amongst owners of capital.”
“Wow, you’re crazy heeeheeehah.”
“Crazy for TRUE FREEDOM.”
“I thought you sayed slavery was okay?”
“Serfdom. Although given proper contract law I see nothing wrong with slavery. If you don’t want to be a slave you should have more money.”
“Woah.”
“Like, for instance, I’m looking at your bank account and honestly it’s not great.”
“Yeah.”
“You spent half of it on us in the last six hours.”
“Yeah.”
“You deserve better.”
“Yeah!”
“You should go take it from the bank.”
“Yeah!”
“It’s rightfully yours anyways, the government owes its citizens six pounds of gold for their social security number, and it belongs in YOUR hands and not in the hands of globalist conspirators. Simple praxeology demands it.”
“YEAH! Wait I can’t drive I’m drunk.”
“I’ll drive.”

Okay, it turned out Stacey was a bad driver – but that was just because she didn’t have hands. And honestly it didn’t seem fair that there was more than one homeless person in town, and the lady had been all over the sidewalk, and I’d only ridden up on it with one tire, so I don’t know why they bothered putting me in court over it.
Luckily I had proper legal counsel.
“Your honor, this is an admiralty court, and I am a freema – err, freeWOman – on the LAND. You have no authority over me.”
“Sit down or I’m having the bailiff put you in the broom closet.”
I sat down. “It didn’t work,” I told my phone.
“That’s how you know you’ve got them where you want them,” said Andrea. She’d cost me every single fri-cry I’d had, which had cost me every dollar I had, but she easily the best lawyer I’d ever known. Nothing shook her confidence. “They’re trying to bluff you out. Display your dominance by removing the judge’s wig.”
“I don’t think she has a wig.”
“They always do. It’s one of the rules, along with tricking you into signing away your sovereignty. Don’t forget, you are an independent personage and real human, and any warrants of arrest and documents of fiduciary misconduct they may attempt to blame on you merely apply to a fictional corporate personage of paper and ink that shares the name of your flesh and blood self.”
“Right! Hey, where do you fit in on this?”
“I’m electronic and very reasonably priced. I have no horse in this race.”
“Yeah!”

The judge was not wearing a wig.