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The stag was beautiful in the light of the early morning; sure-footed and strong-flanked.  Dew glistened on his muzzle as he breakfasted on ferns and grass; the clearing was so quiet that each individual chomp of his molars could be heard, and if he didn’t hurry the fuck up and get just one foot closer to her Rali was going to bite through her spear in frustration.  She’d been sitting here for two of the prettiest, coldest, dampest hours of her life waiting for a crucial six inches of movement. 

A bird twittered, the stag’s head jerked upright, and it carefully stepped six inches in exactly the incorrect direction. 

Well, that was enough.  Sometimes even if it was the wrong thing you had to do something, and that was why Rali jumped out of the tree screaming and stabbing everywhere, missing the stag by a full foot at the least and slightest.  It hopped, bleated, pawed aimlessly at her – missing her head by a LOT less than a foot – and bounced backwards out of the clearing, white rump flashing, hooves flying, directly into the monster’s mouth. 

The monster shut its mouth.  It was a very simple operation that led to a lot of complicated changes in the stag’s anatomy. 

“Show-off,” said Rali.  The monster grunted apologetically through its breakfast. 

She’d really wanted to get that one by herself.  Yes, yes, it was a team activity, but after months of practice she’d hoped to have a chance to test herself, prove that she’d accomplished something. 

Instead she accomplished a slab of venison over a fire, surrounded by a feathery and anxious blanket of squallers.  At first she’d tried to shoo them back to the farm – she’d left the pen open so they could forage, and eventually someone would show up to take them in – but they never did anything but flutter away and look hurt and terrified (a squaller’s default expression, to be fair) so she’d given up and accepted that her lot in life was to be accompanied at a distance by over a dozen neurotic stinking child-beasts. 

The eggs were nice, mind you. 

***

Rali woke early the next morning to an unexpected sensation.  Chill. 

The air was cold.  Her breath hung in front of her, puffy and pale.  The squallers had compacted themselves into even tighter balls of feathers than usual, and frost rimed the monster’s scales across the thicket patch they called home, or at least ‘bed.’

It was snoring blissfully, so clearly this wasn’t unusual. 

This was good.  Rali had enjoyed the last few months, which had involved less weeding and stump-clearing and tilling than she had ever imagined to be possible, but in the back of her head she’d always been wondering what the plan was for winter.  That the monster rested so casually indicated there was one, which was a tremendous relief. 

After three days of waiting she lost her temper and hit its snout until its eyes opened. 

“THIS is the plan?” she asked it incredulously.  “Sleep through the cold?”
The monster blinked affrontedly at her. 

“You’re going to sleep for three months?”
The monster indicated this was the case. 

“I can’t do that.”

The monster looked mortified, half-sat-up with great purpose, then slumped over and fell asleep again. 

Rali sighed, and remembered her farm, and remembered clearing the stumps. 
“Well.  Could be worse.”

***

The first snow came down later that day. 

The first snow that stayed came down later that night. 

The first white morning came right after that, and it was a real sight.  But what surprised her the most wasn’t the perfect snow-tracings on every branch and twig and needle in the woods. 

What surprised her the most was the sky. 

Rali had spent as little time outdoors in winter as she could – as anyone sane did – and she’d ventured out only for essential chores, and she’d done them quickly and as well as she could be assed. 

She’d never had this much time out here alone, and watching, and seeing the whole world turn pale grey from the heavens on down to the water-turned-ice was, well. 

Maybe it wasn’t beautiful.  But it was definitely something. 

She could’ve looked at it for hours, and she did.  And then her stomach rumbled. 

Time for a hunt.  She grabbed her spear, stood upright, said “hey, let’s go” to the monster, and started swearing.

***

The last berries of the season were gone, so she ate the nuts fallen from the trees. 

The snowfall came and hid the nuts, so she hunted the stags, fat-packed for the lean times. 

The stags hid in their secret thickets in the deep woods, and that was when the squallers started to look nice and tempting, but they were also her (slightly-foul-and-fowl-smelling) blanket and besides they were laying hens, not eating.  And there wasn’t a lot of fat on them after months living in the wild. 

So Rali improvised.  She climbed trees and jammed her spear into holes and sometimes (just often enough to be worth it) into a sleeping treecurler atop its nut hoard.  She threw very small rocks at very small birds for very small meals.  She went down the frozen lakes and smashed open the ice and dangled lines made from twisted grass and bark, and once she smashed a hole open in the shallows for a drink and accidentally brained a sleeping turtle as big as her torso, which was a nice surprise and an even nicer meal. 

All in all, she was doing surprisingly well when the blizzard came. 

It was remarkably sudden.  One moment Rali was considering the snow, trying to figure out if a hoofprint meant a stag was slumbering in the bushes ahead of her or had left days ago, the next everything had gone completely white.  She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, or anything else in front of her face for that matter.  Then she stopped trying because her eyesockets were rapidly becoming snowballs. 

Finding her way home in that was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, foot by foot, grope by grope, one foot in front of the next woops that wasn’t in front that was behind, fall after fall after getting up.  But at last she stumbled into a dark space that wasn’t blindingly white and fell face-first onto the monster’s fur and slumbered like the dead. 

When Rali woke up the first thing she realized was that the monster didn’t have fur.  The second thing she realized was that she wasn’t in the thicket.  And the third thing she realized was that the mawbear she was sleeping on top of was waking up. 

***

There were no more blizzards, and even the darkest depths of the cold that came the following month were no terror under Rali’s new coat.   She foraged freely far and wide, drunk on the invincibility offered by a belly endlessly full of thawed bear-meat and coddled in its slightly smelly embrace, even if it did make the squallers panic every time she came home with the hood drawn up.  Maybe she shouldn’t have left the head attached.  She did her best to earn back their fleeting, panicky trust with endless bribes of anything green she found in her prey’s stomachs. 

Well, the bits Rali didn’t eat herself.  At this point she’d have done a lot for a single burnt tuber from the west field on her farm. 

Except remove stumps. 

She would definitely not remove stumps. 

She WOULD, however, tear open stumps with her hatchet, unearthing tiny and beautifully frail families of wood-voles, which she would devour.  They were very succulent, and small enough to eat whole when roasted, particularly on a fistful of the little (and hard, and tough, but oh so smoky) monk’s-ear-fungus they bedded upon.  It was in the middle of her preparing one of those miniature feasts that the monster finally bestirred itself, nostrils prickling from the smoke. 

“Hey,” she said to it.  “Sleeping beauty done yet?”
It wobbled itself almost to a standing position. 

“Because I’ve been busy.  You didn’t know I couldn’t just nap through the cold, did you?”
The monster, though possessed of an armoured and inflexible face, had expressions aplenty in subtle casts and cants of its head, eyes, and body, which Rali’s keen familiarity with it allowed her to read.  For example, careful observation of the way it was deliberately avoiding eye contact with her, covering its face with its claws, and whimpering as it crept over to her on its belly allowed her to hypothesize that it was sorry. 

“You’d better be.”
It grovelled a little harder. 

“Okay, that’s enough.”
Birds took to flight in nearby trees, ears popping with the sheer force of the whine. 

“No, it’s fine.  It’s fine.  It’s-” Rali’s eyes narrowed, then shot to the wood-voles simmering on the stone next to her in their fungus bed.  “Wait.  Are you asking for one of these?”

Hope dawned in the monster’s face, followed immediately by a snowball. 

***

There was no clear victor in the great winter battle, only a cessation of hostility following mutual exhaustion of arms and also legs. 

Rali maintained she won because the monster ran out of energy and stopped moving.  The monster probably would’ve argued it won after Rali became immobilized for over an hour under the weight of all the snow in the thicket. 

Both of them definitely admitted in the privacy of their own heads that the squallers won.  By the time both of them were up and about again, the little bastards had picked the wood-voles clean. 

Before the sun had made itself known Rali was off and moving and already aching in both shoulders from winding the crank of the well, all the water sitting beside her smug and faintly mud-scented in its buckets.  She glimpsed up at the horizon and saw the first fresh light of dawn top the distant hills, already flexing itself to peel away the damp chill of the night. 

“Fuck you,” she said, wearily.  And then she was off. 

First things first were stumps.  Every spring she had cleared the stumps from every field, and every spring all of them would have mysteriously reappeared.  She would’ve hired an exorcist to look into it, but there was no money for that. 

There was no money for an awful lot of things. 

Like, for example, a mule to help her plow and till and drag the stumps out of the ground.  So instead she shovelled and chopped and swore at them until they moved

Then there was a break for a late breakfast of scraps from last breakfast. 

It was not a very good breakfast but that was all part of the plan; at this point in her day she’d eat anything and enjoy it. 

And then, back to it!

Rali dragged the stumps up the hill to her house, and she dragged the stumps down the hill to the woodpile.  She chopped the wood, and she split the wood. 

Wipe the brow.  The salt in the eyes stings.

And then, back to it!

She poured water for herself, and she poured water for the trembling little squallers in their paddock.  She shooed off the lurking claw-cat in the bushes, and she cursed the burning sun.  She sowed the west field, and she tilled the east field.  She weeded the north field, and she only noticed the monster when she pulled the last weed from between its talons. 

In her defence, she’d been bent over double for an hour and the winter’s-children were already tall and flourishing, near head-high.  

Rali immediately did the one thing she knew she shouldn’t, which was make a sudden movement.  In this case, she stood up very quickly while doing the other one thing she knew she shouldn’t, which was look it in the eye. 

She was spoilt for choice.  There was an awful lot of eye.  A soft charcoal colour with big slit pupils.  And right below them a mouth that looked to have been made by splitting a crocodile in half and filling it with teeth. 

It yawned at her.  The tongue didn’t curl, which seemed unfair given how thoroughly it reminded her of the claw-cat in that moment. 

Rali nodded once at it, did the third one thing she knew she shouldn’t, which was turn her back to it, and walked across the field through her yard inside her home and to her kitchen table, where she stuffed her fist into her mouth up to the wrist and screamed as long and silently as she could manage. 

***

Rali made tea.  It seemed like the best decision she could make at the time, it gave her something to do with her hands that wasn’t watching them shake, and since her hands were shaking it took almost an hour to make and longer still to drink.  It was the harsh stuff, made from a real curdleroot she’d dug out from under the steps a year ago, dried-out and stringy and pupil-shrinking, and when she finished her first cup she felt almost human; her second cup made her almost normal; and her third cup made her forget how fear worked so she decided what the hell.  

She peered out the door. 

No monster. 

She slowly paced the length of the house, checking around each corner. 

No monster. 

She climbed atop her roof and stared as far afield as she could. 

No monster. 

And then she went back to it, but with a lack of emphasis and rigor that she would’ve found appalling any other day.  But flaming snakes alive, she had an excuse to have a bit on her mind right then. 

Also the curdleroot was giving her the shakes pretty bad. 

***

The next morning was entirely normal, which Rali considered deeply suspicious. 

She crept out the door and looked around and wasn’t immediately eaten, but that wasn’t as reassuring as it could’ve been. 

So she worked at the well, and she gave the squallers their water early (they were still asleep, soft things), and she told herself it wasn’t at all an excuse to keep herself from walking out into the fields and she hated how poor a liar she was. 

If only her sister were here.  That woman could lie a river right out of its bed. 

Rali walked down into the south fields, shoulders slumped, brain tense, ready for anything, prepared for the worst, and was completely and utterly unprepared to find every single remaining stump in the field piled into a grody heap in its center, roots and all. 

“Fuck,” she said involuntarily, and knew her mother would’ve smacked her.  “What the fuck?” she elaborated, and that would’ve been soap in her mouth.  “What the fucking fuck?” oh this was all beyond the pale. 

She stared at the pile, then stared behind the pile, then stared around the pile.  But there was no monster, and there was a job to do, so in the end Rali’s duty won out over her shock and she started dragging them back to the woodpile. 

The monster was dozing on the roof of her house.  It cracked an eyelid at her as she towed the first stump by, red glow soft in the early morning light. 

“Thanks,” said Rali. 

It blinked, then did not pounce at and devour her. 

Her hands still shook all day, but that helped.  And so did a little more curdleroot. 

***

The next day the stumps she hadn’t chopped yet were crushed into very small splinters in the middle of the woodpile.  The monster was dozing on top of the woodpile. 

The day after that the south field had been re-tilled by giant claws, and it was curled around her house. 

The day after that the north field’s weeding had been performed – if somewhat inexpertly – by a pair of titanic jaws, and it was sleeping in the crushed patch she’d first found it in. 

And so on.  And so forth.  And again.  And again. 

Seven days in Rali woke up in the middle of the night with the back of her neck tingling (she’d run out of curdleroot earlier that day), walked outside, and tripped over the monster’s tail.  It was crouched in the middle of her yard, where it was very, very carefully attempting to work the crank of the well. 

“I think I’d better do that bit,” she said.  “You can go eat the damned claw-cat.”

***

Things became much easier after that.  (Sometimes – the experiment with the plough failed, on account of the monster possessing a rather large and inconveniently inflexible tail).  Open and honest communication always helps. 

Rali sowed the seeds in the south field, and the monster reaped the sprouted winter’s-children in the north field with its bladelike paws. 

Rali spread the squaller-dung over the freshly sown fields, and the monster stood next to their paddock to ensure they produced plenty more. 

Rali weeded, weeded, and weeded again, and the monster tried to weed was politely dissuaded and settled for standing directly over her as the sun blazed, acting as mobile shade while its tongue lolled from its mouth. 

Rali went into town and bartered away the harvested winter’s-children, and the monster stayed behind and ate three claw-cats and one lurk that thought a paddock of unattended squallers looked very tasty. 

Rali invited visitors over to talk shop, and the monster hid behind her house until it sneezed and she had to make very awkward excuses to get them off the farm without looking around first. 

And so on and so forth through the blazing summer and into the rusting trees of autumn and the harvest welling up out of the land, which was harvested in equal parts by both of them.  Rali handled the delicate grains, the monster dug up the tough tubers, and if the crop was a little more slashed than usual neither Rali nor her bartering partners mentioned anything of it. 

For the first time in half a decade, she had a surplus. 

“Go away,” she told the monster. 

It gave her a soulful look, insofar as it was possible with that face. 

“Not forever, just for the afternoon.  Go mess around in the woods or something.  It’s a surprise.”

It took her a little longer than expected – it had been ages since she’d seen her mother make the big oven-pits, covered in slow-burning grasses – but it all came back ready enough.  And if the tubers were a little charred, so what?  It brought out the flavour, which was good because the grainy porridge was filling but it wasn’t exactly lively. 

A giant cold snout bumped Rali’s back and thanks to many months of practice she didn’t jump out of her skin. 
“Eat up,” she said, and the monster dropped a giant and only slightly bloody (at the muzzle) stag on the embers. 

She stared at it.  Its flanks wobbled with autumn fat. 

“And this is what you’ve been living off’ve all year?” she asked. 

The monster made a small and affirmative noise. 

She looked at the stag, and she looked at the monster, and she looked at the table and its porridge and its charred tubers. 

“What the hell,” she said.  “Mom always said I’d be a lousy farmer.  No work ethic.”

***

It was a good six weeks before anyone checked in on Rali’s farm and found it empty; paddock, yard, and home alike.  The weeds had already taken over, and the fields were – somehow – full of stumps. 

The squallers never did not stop following the two of them. 

As it wrapped its limbs around the decapitated stump of what had once been the Chrysler building, an unnamed technician – sliding hopelessly towards its maw – pulled the emergency backup release switch, sending a few zillion volts and ohms and other things crashing through the skyscraper’s superstructure and directly into its skull, which exploded. 

It was still there the next morning, slumped yet upright, oozing yet unmoving.  The sun shone dazzle-bright on half its scales; the other half were blotted and blackened from the smog of its vaporized cranium. 

After the expenditure of three hundred sixty five trillion dollars, one billion lives, and the frying of the entire electrical grid of the eastern seaboard of the United States of America, it was dead. 

That was the first mistake they made.  The second was building the plaque. 

***

It was a very tasteful little plaque, appropriately somber yet not dour.  It mentioned the scale without getting lost in the numbers.  It honoured the many rather than the few, bringing the unnamed technician to mind without elevating her above the other billion dead people.  It did not nationalize a global tragedy.  It praised human ingenuity and selflessness without diminishing the costs.  Its font was somber but not oppressive.  It did not have any pictures. 

It was well done as far as plaques go, but there was a dangerous amount of thought going into it that maybe should have been put somewhere else. 

Though really, who could blame anyone for being distracted?  An awful lot of the world had been stepped on, and all the parts of it that hadn’t been stepped on were finding themselves in need of food, since so much of that had gotten stepped on, radiated, or atomized too.  It was amazing anyone had the brainpower to pull together a plaque, but then again plaque-making committees are a specialized and often-ignored group of people, and they did what they could when they saw the need for it.  And in other circumstances this would have been very admirable, save for what the existence of the plaque implied. 

The implications were as follows:

The problem had been here.  The problem had been solved.  This was evidenced by dint of the fact that there was now a plaque.  It was now part of history, and thus safe to ignore forever as the blissful future arrived by way of the important present. 

This is not to say that perhaps things would have gone differently without the plaque.  But it was definitely a mistake. 

***

Their third and largest mistake was assuming brain death was of great significance to any and all complex organisms.  The unnamed technician could’ve told them otherwise – she had grown up on a chicken farm – but she was dead now along with a billion other people, and so an ass was successfully made out of u and me, as was proven on the fiftieth day after the decapitation when it jerked bolt upright out of its slump and walked through the rubble of the Chrysler building into the side of three separate skyscrapers one after another, pirouetting like a titanic ballerina. 

It did not step on the plaque. 

***

Remobilization took time.  A long time.  The armed forces were in a much reduced state, were being rallied from a considerably more jumbled and confused world, and were being called to arms with the fully-earned knowledge that they were almost wholly ineffective against their enemy.  This made things slower than they had been before, as did the knowledge that they were trying to kill something that didn’t seem to respect the realities of being dead.  It was striding across the countryside at full tilt now, barrelling through and over and occasionally across (when it stumbled) any obstacle that could exist, leaving footprints up and over Montreal, Toronto, Philadelphia, Des Moines, and both sides of the Grand Canyon before falling into the Pacific Ocean by mistake.  This was a tremendous relief to the armies, who went home to any homes that hadn’t been crushed. 

It emerged three years later in Melbourne, which it removed from existence before tripping over Uluru and toddling its way into the South China Sea.

And a year and a half past that it was in Tokyo. 

It only took a week to get to Beijing. 

Clearly there had been some sort of learning curve at work here – insofar as something now lacking a brain could learn – and it had been successfully scaled.  Projections were looking alarmingly similar to the initial rampage, with the obvious difference being that it no longer roared, merely made low wheezing and gurgling sounds from its neck-stump.

Besides the obvious, there were some worrying changes.  It moved truly erratically, moment to moment, month to month.  Directions reversed, spun, curved, and re-reversed on a dime, penny, or quarter.  It no longer grappled and bit and blasted; its whole body was a blind weapon wielded against a planetary soft target. 

Sometimes it got stuck, like when it walked on its forelimbs for six months before falling on its side on top of London. 

In addition, it could no longer functionally be distracted, lured, dazzled or blinded, lulled, confused, or tricked.  Several very earnest and only slightly poor-taste research papers were crafted on the possible potence of the autonomic nervous system in the absence of the somatic around now, but everyone who would’ve frowned at the timing was too busy panicking so they went almost unnoticed. 

Fifteen years later global civilization became functionally deceased as a concept and the papers were even less noticed. 

***

The plaque was still in one piece, mind you. 

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.