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We found our first catch just upriver of Eldermann’s Crick, sunning himself on a boulder-beach pullout. He was too filled with bliss to be wary and by the time our hooks had lodged themselves into his flesh and began to drag him under the slaughter-cannon’s mouth he was still only half-bestirred, resentful at being pulled from slumber as much as being pulled to death. He was a grand old bull-terrorpin, some seventy tons or more, and it took nearly three volleys to crack his skull deep enough to shatter his brain-pan. Ah, the bloody smell in the air that day when his lungs emptied for the last time! It was as if one were inhaling molten iron all afternoon as one cracked through shell and carapace and scale, fit to turn the stomach but also to invigorate the arm and toughen the palms. The same sun that had bestirred the old bull’s veins now scorched us burnt-brown and sweated our backs until his gore ran away from our red-streaked limbs. It was a vision as if from hades to see us mine through him bit-by-bit, chiselling away the finery of his shells and the trophies of his bones and the tender comestibles of his flesh until at last his heart was before us for the retrieval, still-beating, and we cheered as one raw voice.

***

When concerning yourself with terrorpin-hunting, the first and most important detail of which to be aware is your goal: the heart, that precious muscled mass which burns so stately and so strongly with ponderous life that it may continue to churn onwards for decades in proper conditions. This accordingly will fix your targets: the largest of terrorpins, which in due time will lead you to the eldest as they never quite cease to grow, and the eldest of the grandest sort such as the shark-jawed and leather-capped which are correspondingly scarce to be found as their great appetites prohibit a sizable population.

***

The long afternoon ended in good spirits, but it was only the beginning of the troubles that were taken with the old bull’s corpse. What meat we couldn’t consume fresh was smoked; what couldn’t be salted was salted; what couldn’t be salted was chopped for bait and chum to keep the fishermen of the crew busy; what remained was thrown overboard for the sport of the gyrfrogs to snap and fight over, with some rapscallions even going so far as to bet on the outcomes of these most cruel brawls. His bones were cleaned with knife and boiling water before being wrapped and stowed deep in the hold; his shell was polished as lovingly as the ship’s own deck until every speck of mud and muck that had decorated it in life was no more, leaving only the most gorgeous glassy shine; and his heart was taken to the ship’s surgeon-mate for soothing and massaging and immersion in only the most carefully-chosen brines. There it would marinate for the rest of our voyage, sealed-tight against outside intrusion until it could be taken home to a machinery and be canned for its final purpose.

***

The killing of a terrorpin is a matter of care as much or moreso than it is violent force; though the beast is vast and courageous in its own defense it remains but a beast and its defeat at the hands of brave and clever men is assured, should it not flee. The terrorpin’s shell armours it most thoroughly, and force sufficient to breach its armoured breast may also cause harm to its heart, if not directly than from the transmitted force of such outrageous impacts. Accordingly, to preserve the prize the best target for the killing is the terrorpin’s crown, and the key thing must be to maneuver the beast such that its retracted and reticent head is facing the ship’s killing-gun – a great brute muzzle-loader of a thing that can crush its skull in as few shots as possible, thereby reducing the stress felt by its target as much as possible so as to gently lull its body into somnolence eternal about its precious ever-beating cargo.

***

Even as we dealt with the matter of the old bull’s body we searched afresh for new game, for the only thing better than a terrorpin in the hull is another in your hooks – and our diligence was greatly rewarded. As we ventured down the nether reaches of the Brinkmore River, the lookout did cry a nest! a nest! and no sooner was it said than every man jack of us did behold it: a great thrashed-up trench of earth that had once been a river-bank and was now an incubator for the infants of behemoth, still dreaming in their soft-shelled wombs. But wait! – our thoughts were proven but fancies; there came trembling in the soil, such that the river-water did lap against the sides of our ship from its force, and trembling with fatigue the infants of the terrorpins burst above ground as one, already the size of dogs and panting with fatigue and weight of the world.

Ashore, ashore! Roared the captain, and every man seized a hook and a piston and an oar and made for the boats, all laughing in the spirit of competition as we brought down the hatchlings without a care but for the thrill of the sport, for their shells were yet thin in their youth and their hearts would go unharmed by dashing them to bits – such small, frivolous organs were of no matter or use for a ship or a ship’s paymaster but were trivial things that could be held in private by each member of the crew for resale at home, perhaps to be fashioned into engines in children’s toys. I claimed only three, for I was a green hand still, but I prided myself that not one did I put to waste through accidental force: each little heart beat firmly and proudly in my palm, and I consulted carefully with the apprentice surgeon in how best to preserve them for the delight of my own youth far and half the world away.

***

Once removed from its natural resting-place the terrorpin’s heart – until now a thoughtless lump of meat and force whose duty was fixed by dull routine and whose purpose was to please one thankless brute beast – becomes the epicentre of improvement for ten thousand lives in ways big and little too varied to imagine, let alone describe. A heart-canister is sealed and attached to a pump handle, and it saves ten thousand aching arms a year in turning a crank. It is placed in a mill, and a hundred thousand loaves of bread are baked from grain ground painlessly. It sits amidst the smoke and fury of a great steel foundry, and dozens of hammers, bellows, and forges roar at its behest. Truly, the thanks for such a miraculous organ cannot be granted merely to the terrorpin, but to Providence itself.

***

On the third day of the hunt the air itself seemed determined to repel our efforts; it grew devilish thick and heavy with foul humours, such that the stoutest lungs seemed to spasm and cough after the merest labour. With it came a fog that resembled nothing so much as a foul bean-soup grown wings that set the lookout unable to see the ship’s deck, let alone our quarry. Our journey was schooled now based on hunches and signs – an urge to turn to port rather than starboard, or a chance discovery of fresh feces lapping at the bow-wave. In such an environment of keen attention and painstaking waiting the minds of many are free to gnaw at themselves and each other, and here the adages and superstitions of the life-long terrorpin-hunter showed their shameful aspects: mutters that arose in corners and barbs flung at backs and schemes and gossip fit to make a fishmonger’s-wife seem discreet and the model of temperance. Who might be bad luck? Whose habits were leading the prey astray? Whose decision to cut their hair, to shave their beard, to spit in the wrong place or sing the wrong song at the wrong time might be to blame for the state we all found ourselves in? There were as many theories as there were theorists, and none of them kind; the sole fact all agreed upon was that the terrorpin we chased surely had the Devil in it, and matters would be set right as soon as its heart was freed from that mischievous body.

***

While the fruits of the terrorpin-hunt’s chase are rich and justly-praised, what cannot be overlooked are the benefits it brings beyond the material, which to the ignorant eye may be seen as romantic fancy but to the experienced and worldly may be recognized as that rarest of treasures: the spirit of manhood. For where else but the terrorpin-hunt, when human brilliance and muscle must work in concert with their fellows against brute nature; when the brave and few willingly risk their lives for the benefit of the feeble and many; when the prize is priceless but gifted to others with a glad heart; can be seen the freest and truest face of humanity in its naked glory?

***

The ship is lost, the crew is lost, and I am not to be found for much longer. The shattered planks between me and the songs of the gyrfrogs are thin and leaking, and I fear my blood shall find its way to unsavoury nostrils forthwith.

Such a travail has already taken place once today, when our hooks tore the flesh of our quarry at last, only for its alarumed thrashing to draw the eye of a greater beast. It was indeed a Devilish terrorpin, but the monstrous creature that rose from the depths was no terrorpin; nay, it was no less than Satan Himself, rose to claim all our souls for vanity. His great toothed jaws snapped our keel in twain and tore deeper bite after bite even as we foundered, and with half our boats lost on this damnable chase we were short of places to be manned and long on men to flee – all of them armed, all of them filled with rage and fear. Oh God, oh my God, the sounds! The screams! Only in death will they leave me, and only in death did they leave the poor devils; in the fury of the waves as our prey tore loose and our besieger’s giant armoured tail rent us stem from stern I saw not one boat leave for shore.

May this canister preserve my writings, may another tell my family of my begging their forgiveness.

God be with you.

***

In conclusion, the terrorpin-hunting trade, though often overlooked these days to its exceedingly brief lifespan and limited economic import in the grand scheme of the fortieth century (with the development of the ‘steel heart’ taking place less than a decade into industrial-scale terrorpin harvest and its improvement to rough parity within six years of that), was of notable importance ecologically. Many of the larger species of readily-visible terrorpins were extirpated regionally and some breeds such as Blandly’s terrorpin and the timber terrorpin were brought to the brink of extinction. This led to massive faunal turnover in the equatorial swamplands, as sediment ecosystems that depended on terrorpin churn for nutrient cycling clotted and stalled and many species of greater water-weed that relied on terrorpin predation of their major grazers were brought startlingly low and remain historically reduced to this day.  Finally, terrorpin-hunting led to the near-extinction via starvation of the superpredator known as the Amerogan Annihilgator some two decades before any sightings of the beast were confirmed by scientists. The ongoing impact of even the briefest and most petty of human avarice cannot be underestimated.  

Early one morning, the worst noise in the world began. It was bright and harsh and cheerful and it sawed into the warm thick fog of sleep with all the tenderness and love of a cheese grater applied to bare flesh. After some forty cruel seconds of this it summoned an arm attached to a body attached to a very suffering brain and all three of them fumbled together until the alarm was silenced and the air was clean again.

Twenty minutes later it came back.

And then ten after that.

Then five, and there was nothing for it but the last resort. George awoke, and found that amidst his dreams he had been transformed into a monstrous ape with a calendar and a schedule and a to-do list.

He stared at the ceiling instead. It was a good ceiling; he barely had to crack his eyelids open to hold all of it within his grasp, and it was a soft and giving texture that demanded little effort to understand. The walls were a soft blue that neither reflected light into his face nor soaked it into gloom.

Getting up was difficult. The blankets kept holding him back, and they had more warmth and vigour in their grip than he did. Far, far below the carpet gently cupped his toes, sucking them deep into its plush abyss. He swayed like a drunken oak and felt the cruel whip of cold air around his shoulders.

Coffee. He just needed coffee. Coffee would trick him into believing this was sane.

***

The coffee was nearly as warm as George’s bed. He put extra sugar and milk in it on a bizarre impulse and nursed it as lovingly as any mother would her child. Outside the kitchen window the world looked like the sort of thing you’d see growing in an old open jam jar: soft, feathery, fuzzy, grey. George looked into it with what he decided could be interest as he sipped.

The coffee ran out. He made another, choosing to do so without conscious decision.

There were no clouds in the sky, but presumably there was a sky somewhere in all that cloud.

The coffee ran out. He made another.

Somewhere outside the window a bird mumbled something and fell asleep. A dog didn’t bark. Far in the distance traffic snorted and rolled over.

The coffee ran out and he still wasn’t awake. He looked at the bag, and the words ‘decaf’ looked back unto him.

“Never mind,” he said. And then yawning, he went back upstairs and went to bed.

***

Time passed. Now and then, if George felt particularly close to waking, he rolled over and felt that subtle bliss of the cool, gentle touch of a fresh section of pillow. Sometimes one of his feet escaped from his blanket and tasted the empty, lonely chill of the air just long enough for him to treasure its return to the warmth of under-the-sheets.

Eventually he was hungry and went downstairs for breakfast. Someone had replaced his house with a server farm and he nearly tripped over some stray cables.

“Mornin’” he grunted to a passing vacuum drone. The kitchen was missing but a janitor had left a nutrient bar on top of a rack of burnt-out bitcoin mining rigs so he ate that and savoured the sensation of an appetite filled without any waking thought paid to flavour or texture.

“I think I’ll sleep in,” he told the security camera. It fell off its perch and shattered; a sticker on its back said MADE IN CANADA.

His bed yawned open, and he fell into it.

***

Bright light woke George, not all at once, but in a slow and creeping way that made him uncomfortably aware of his own body and its limbs and their creeping, bulging sensation of acquired energy. Suddenly keeping his eyelids shut felt like an effort rather than a relief; staying still became an itchy and restless torture. And there was some godawful siren wailing outside that wouldn’t shut up.

With no other choice, George committed a grave sin and stood upright, muscles wobbling and leg hair charged with static. The light was coming from his window, and if he pressed his face close against the glass he could just barely see a bright flash in the distance: some giant mushroom cloud was consuming the metropolitan center.

“Fuck,” he mumbled blearily. The room spun around his inner ear in loops as he fumbled clumsily through the detritus of his closet, knocking over moth-eaten clothes and dusty shoes and – there it was!

He pulled out his spare sheet, double-folded it, and hung it over the window. Then he went back to bed.

Ten minutes later he gave in, got up again, and put his second spare sheet on top of his other blankets. Then he fell asleep.

***

There was an extra weight on George’s chest; thick and yielding and with a warmth all of its own. Air wheezed from it, in-out, in-out, in-out, in-out forever, intercut and interwoven with a high-pitched little squeak.

This was all well and good as far as George was concerned until it licked his face, and even then it was okay until it started chewing on it.

“Erf. Off. Geez,” he grunted, shoving his way upright. The creature on his bed stared at him wide-eyed; it looked like a rat that had forced its way into a pigeon by way of a cocker spaniel. Its face was a mess of jowls and teeth and no less than four separate arrays of whiskers, which twitched and made soft crickety noises as it padded downstairs after George’s unsteady footsteps. The server farm wasn’t there anymore but neither was the rest of the city so it was a little hard to find anything in the roots and grasses of the vast wetlands that stretched from horizon to horizon to newborn seaways but after some grumbling and rooting around he managed to find the corpse of a small mangled thing that looked like a miniature horse with a flexible trunk. The ratter spaniel accepted it with a squeak.

“Happy breakfast,” muttered George. An eerie wail crossed the horizon as an insect the size of a red-tailed hawk shot across the sky. He shook his head in irritation, staggered back upstairs, and got into bed the wrong way round. It was easier to reach down and move the pillow up to his head than to turn himself around, and he was lulled to sleep by the whistle of the long wind through things that weren’t quite reeds, sedges, or grasses anymore.  

***

It burned. Burned. Burned. A cinder that grew greater and grander until its sensation spread through every inch of George, head to heels. He squirmed, torn between bliss and hell, but at last he had no choice. He stood up, nearly fell over, and was forced to open his eyes.

The world was aflame with light that cut. No moisture for his sleep-crud-filled eyes; no atmosphere to dull the terrible brightness of the sun, no soil, no water, no sound, no life. Nothing could be seen but slow-cooked rocks and the terrible, terrible light of a senile and overburnt sun.

George reeled under that awful glare, tottering like the long-gone trees, but he would not halt.  Sun shine, dead world, boiling bedrock – nothing would stop the furious demand within him until oh look there that would do.   After a short adjustment of pajamas he whimpered in relief as his urine cascaded and the fire in his abdomen abated. Then he turned around and – with a little wince every time he stepped on a particularly hot stone – slipped and staggered his way back into the crevice that was his bed.

***

The next time George’s eyes opened a crack they didn’t see anything. No matter, no light, no energy, no movement.

He sighed and snuggled a little deeper down into himself.

Bliss.

The hour was at hand and so were my tools. There was nothing more to be done.

“If I’m not back before the end of the day, you know what to do.”

My second gave me the thumbs up, and then there was nothing more to be said either.

The peak lay ahead of me. All that had to be done was to enter it. Twin blackened holes lay beneath the summit, odd fumes wafting out from their silent gapes and down the long, overgrown path. The ground roiled uneasily, and if I weren’t wearing an oxygen mask I’d be turning green already.

No room for self-pity. I had a job to do.

***

My machete was blunted and chipped by the time I gained the entrance, better-served as a club than a blade. I discarded it; my walking stick could serve the same purpose now, and any weight could be fatal here. My headlamp was a masterpiece of modern engineering, but in the cramped and humid recesses I moved through it was the atmospheric equivalent of a flashlight in a muddy lagoon – any space in front of me it illuminated was just as much hidden by reflected glare from filthy air particulates. Sight fell away in favour of touch, and that was an iffy prospect at best with my hands wrapped in three layers of insulation and antibacterial coating. I walked on three limbs, stick swinging and prodding and shuffling me onwards, finding the bumps and dips and divots before my feet could and only half-stumbling, half-falling – collecting bruises instead of breaks, strains instead of sprains.

Then my head slammed into a slimy, low-hanging hummock and I moved at half speed, tapping my stick up and down in a full arc, pushed onward by the hissing clock of my air tank and held back by the need to make sure neither foot nor skull went awry. Minutes passed like hours and three times I was reduced to crawling, squirming, forcing myself through crevices that caught and clung at my clothing before I took a step and swung the stick and felt nothing.

Nothing below.

Nothing above.

I used my eyes – straining harder, harder, coaxing the useless things to give me information – and in the distant reflections of hazy air and fetid depths I saw my destination.

The cavity. And beyond it, carved rough and wet through the murk, clogged with long, fibrous strands of indescribable colours and textures, the canal.

I was in.

***

The air cleared in here. Farther from the fetid fumes of my entrance, kept cloistered and pure by the buffers of the spaces I’d suffered through.

Pity that there was less of it than ever. What space that existed grew more cramped by the moment, and every step I took I wrested farther, fought harder. It was like wading through a tide of passive-aggressive waterweeds coated in molasses.

I thought of my machete and indulged in a brief and gloriously violent fantasy that sustained my muscles through another twelve steps. Then I focused like a professional, which would have to do for the remaining uncounted hundreds.

The space only grew thicker. And then it started to bite. Small shocks and sparks leapt from surface to surface as a matter of fact, snapping against my mask like dying fireflies, dancing through my fingers and out through my feet, making my jaw twitch and clench and my fingers ache.

I knew where I was going. I’d looked at the charts, made them myself, based my theory in fact and my fact in well-proven evidence and my faith in myself. I was in a warren of lumpen murk and endless lightning where the sun was never meant to shine and there was no space and there was no time and there was only me and my rising pulse and my falling oxygen levels and oh.

There it was.

***

It was small and cramped and thick and dull. The liveliness that infested the entire rest of this dank pit didn’t touch it, the endless mass that weighed down on me was pushed back by it. Here it stood in one of the most bizarre places on earth or anywhere else with resolute, placid, unthinkable solidity and changelessness.

It was almost admirable.  But I had a job to do, so I reached into my backpack – which took two years, or, if you trusted my mask’s clock, four minutes – and pulled out a collection of large, sharp, cruel implements, which I assembled with breathtakingly premeditated cruelty.

The swollen intrusion squatted at my navel, uncaring. It had created itself through denial, it had enlarged itself through denial. Denial would serve it well against me as well.

But not well enough. .

I pounced.

And slid.

And cut.

And hacked and swore and sawed and fought and spat and swore and snarled and kicked and punched and pried and got up to my elbows shoulders chest in it and took it apart piece

by

piece.
Still, that first pounce really felt good. Not as good as I did afterwards though. Arms aching, lungs heaving, covered in the worst of things and feeling the adrenaline slick my thoughts down to a nice lean nothing. I even had enough space to stand up straight for the first time in forever, in the shrinking hollow that the swollen lump had made for itself.

So I stretched, breathed in, breathed out, and tried not to think about disassembling my cutting instruments and packing them again along with placing every single fragment of my prey inside a drag-bag and pulling it and myself down the entire damned way I’d just taken.

Well shit.

***

Light bloomed so joyously it was almost offensive, my feet crunched on thick carpet, and I was well downslope of my entry.

I looked up, up, up, up, up into the sky, which was filled with the face of my second: surgical nurse James Holiday.

“Clear,” I said.

He gave me the thumbs up with one hand and aimed the perispectralizer with the other. Everything crackled and tasted like limes and then I was on the floor of the operating room with a terrible and deeply ironic headache.

I peeled off my oxygen mask and took a deep breath that wasn’t from a can for the first time in ever. “Fuck,” I said with its exhalation.

“How’d it go?”
“Oh, just peachy. Fuck. Wish they were all just peachy. Fuck. We can chuck him in the CT scan later to be sure but FUCK FUCK pretty sure I got the whole lump root and stem. FUCK there’d better be coffee waiting. I HATE this.”
“Speaking of that….a surprise trip just came up for tomorrow,” said Holiday apologetically.

“Shit.”

“Sorry.”

“Is it not more brains at least?” I begged. “Anything but brains. I think I almost got crushed to death by ganglia back there. I can feel the sinuses in my sinuses, don’t ask me how. I BROKE a titanium machete on nose hair. No more brains, please.”

“No more brains,” said Holiday.

“Great.”
“It’s a colonic tumour.”

Exploratory surgery really could be a shit.

The election was won. Applause, speeches, champagne, adulation, interviews, articles, plaudits, and many other less decorous things flowed like wine.
But regrettably, all good things must come to an end.

“Sir, you’ve been in office for sixty-three days,” said the wise-guy, smart-alec, insolent, churlish, insufferable reporter. “When were you planning to DO something?”
“I’m in the middle of lunch,” said Mister Leader, who was actually only into the first inning of lunch – he hadn’t touched his fries yet. “I can’t believe you’re interrupting my lunch.”
“You pulled that out in the middle of a press conference.”
“This is incredibly rude behaviour and I want no part of it,” said Mister Leader, wiping the crumbs from his face with palms that trembled with rage. “I didn’t elect you to misrepresent me this way. See if I ever vote for you again!”

He stormed offstage in such a snit that he nearly ran over his own campaign manager.

“Nobody understands me,” he wept piteously into their breast. “They’re all so mean.”
“There there,” soothed the campaign manager. “I know just what’ll cheer them up.”
“Empty promises?” piped Mister Leader, tear-streaked face turning upwards like a hopeful baby bird.

“Fulfilling campaign pledges,” said the campaign manager.
Mister Leader burst into tears and tried to jump out the window.

***

“Pick one,” said the office manager.

“Pick one,” said the secretary.

“He’s not listening,” said the campaign manager.

“Yes I am,” pouted Mister Leader. He kicked his legs under his desk fitfully, rattling the heavy chains that secured him to the spot.

“Let’s make a deal,” coaxed the campaign manager. “If you pick the campaign pledge you want to fulfill right now with no complaining, you can have your dessert right away.”
“Remind me,” said Mister Leader with fierce intensity.

“There’s the plastic edict. You promised that you’d outlaw the use of recyclable plastics in school drinks and replace them with lead-lined bottles.”

“Lead costs money,” muttered Mister Leader. “And the other three?”
“The motion to turn the central metropolitan park into an oil field needs work. You’d have to go and hire geologists, or at least people willing to pretend to be them for five minutes.”
“Rocks are dumb.”
“You said you’d fire the head of property safety inspection out of a cannon into the lake.”
“Would that take paperwork?”
“For the cannon? Yes. And finally, there’s the matter of the road to nowhere.”
“Where’s that again?”
“Nowhere. It’s not connected to anywhere, so it can’t be somewhere. It’s just nowhere.”
“I like roads,” said Mister Leader. “Do they have suburban development in nowhere?”
“I don’t see why they would,” said the campaign manager. “It’s nowhere special.”

“Is the land cheap?”
“If the land were worth anything, it would be somewhere instead of nowhere.”

“I like what I’m hearing,” said Mister Leader. “Let’s do it.”

***

The preplanning was complex, and was accordingly delegated with great aplomb and ceremony to less important and less well-paid people by Mister Leader personally.

“I can’t find nowhere on any of our maps,” complained the cartographic planner.

“Of course you can’t,” said the campaign manager. “If anyone knew where it was, it wouldn’t be nowhere.”

“If we don’t know how far away nowhere is, how do we know how much of a budget we’re going to require to construct the road?” asked the project manager.

“Not that big a budget,” said the campaign manager. “Everyone knows it’s nowhere important, so we won’t need a particularly impressive highway.”

“Are we meant to just start building without any directions and just hope for the best or what?” demanded the head foreman.

“You’ve got it exactly right,” said the campaign manager.

“Why are you answering all the questions and where’s Mister Leader?” asked the press secretary.

“None of your business,” said the campaign manager. Then they called the meeting early and went home to feed Mister his diet of Tums and bourbon. All this stress was really getting to him.

“Do they love me yet?” he whimpered, buried beneath his sheets, blankets, duvets, comforters, covers, mattresses, and an entire foam pit.

“They will soon, they will soon,” soothed the campaign manager. “You’re going nowhere fast.”

***

Construction began on April the first and ran into problems immediately.

“My men keep fucking up and clearing ground or laying asphalt with regards to the environment around them,” warned the head foreman. “Every time I turn around some idiot’s taken us off target from nowhere and started wandering towards somewhere. How are we meant to work like this?”
“Work blindfolded,” said the campaign manager. And it was so.

“I’ve been trying to inform the inhabitants of nowhere that thanks to Mister Leader prime real estate opportunities for developers and also them I guess are coming their way for weeks now, and no luck,” mourned the press secretary. “How can I drum up votes from these guys when I don’t know their addresses?”
“They’re nobodies,” said the campaign manager. “And they live nowhere important. It’s okay if they don’t vote, because they don’t vote for everyone equally. What’s important is that our pre-existing voter base sees that we keep our promises.”
“The workers are beginning to ask why we haven’t paid them yet,” warned the project manager.

“We’ve been paying them nothing for days on end, what more do these greedy little moochers want?” replied the campaign manager. “Once we get to nowhere they’ll be able to spend all of it. Tell them they’ll get twice as much nothing and that should shut them up.”

“I woke up tonight and I was blind,” confessed the cartographic planner. “No dark, no light, no anything. Only nothing. Then it was gone, and everything was here again.”
“That’s just nowhere,” said the campaign manager. “Go back to drawing your maps.”
“They’re all blank.”
“Well, draw them blanker then,” snapped the campaign manager. Then they went home and handed a nice big baby bottle of benzos to Mister Leader, who suckled its rubber teat softly and dewy-eyed as they sponge-bathed him.

“Do they love me yet?” he hiccupped as a particularly potent gulp went down the wrong pipe.

“Nearly, nearly, nearly,” murmured the campaign manager, patting his back until his burps came out. “We just need to find the middle.”

***

“I can’t see anything,” the cartographic expert said softly, his mouth the only moving part of his face. “I can’t see something. All I can see is nothing, and I don’t know where it is.”
“Great,” said the campaign manager. “That’s great. Just keep drawing that map so we don’t go off-course.”
“I’m not drawing anything. All my pens and paper have vanished.”
“Exactly.”
“All my workers have left,” said the head foreman. “Nobody’s doing anything.”

“Excellent, perfect, great, wonderful,” said the campaign manager. “Don’t you start doing anything either.”

“My office vanished this morning,” said the project manager. “I phoned my landlord to complain and my voice was unfamiliar to him. Eventually he couldn’t hear me at all and hung up. Do I even exist?”

“Everything’s going poorly, and nobody’s involved,” said the campaign manager. To themselves.

“Mister leader needs to give a speech about the project now that it’s complete and nobody’s seen him in over a month,” said the press secretary. “Where is he?”
“He’s already there,” said the campaign manager.

Then they got up, went out to their car, and drove down the road to nowhere.

Inside their trunk, carefully blindfolded, was Mister Leader.

And then they let him out.

***

There were giant novelty shears. There was a ribbon.

And there was nowhere.

“Cut it,” said the campaign manager.

“Who’s watching?” said Mister Leader, dripping perspiring eyes twitching behind his blindfold. “I hear a crowd.”
“Nobody important. All of them. Only the most important nobodies are here, and they’re all watching. Are you ready?”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Oh good!” said Mister Leader. And he snipped the ribbon and the road was open and with that, it was done. Nowhere was now part of somewhere.

Nobody applauded.

“Wait,” said a belated bystander in the crowd, “what’s somewhere?”
“Everywhere nowhere isn’t,” replied another.

“Oh. Where’s nowhere?”

Then the conceptual laws of physics caught up to them, and also its own feet.

***

The universe did NOT end. Just three dimensions of it.

The new guy wasn’t much to look at. Quiet. Big eyes. Slim. Bipedal, but only mostly. A dusting of dull skin integument that was halfway between scales and feathers and halfway to something else entirely.

“Everyone pull your dicks out of your ears and listen up: this is Jhairi,” said Kurt, “our new line inspector. His qualifications are blah blah blah blah blah, he’ll start work on lines 12a through 12c come Thursday, in the meantime he’ll be shadowing Rox – that’s you, Rox – so he knows his head from his ass or whatever else he’s got.”

Rox was me.

“Also he’s got some instinctual sensitivities, so uhh don’t make direct eye contact with him or corner him or make sudden movements near him or sneak up on him or grab his nose or whatever bullshit. Now, coffee rota: Rox isn’t buying because the new guy’s shadowing her; Clarke is up Monday to Wednesday; Eunice is up Thursday to Friday. Known issues: the belt on 7d is cracked, so don’t-” and so on and so forth and on and on and on because a Monday morning meeting put Kurt in a fine and high drone fit to burrow your skull through from ear to ear, which was probably why it took me a good two minutes after leaving the meeting to realize the new guy was standing right behind me.

“JESUS.”
“Jhairi,” he corrected quickly. Everything about him was quick, and what wasn’t quick was quiet. His voice sounded like a cross between a whimper and a whippoorwill. My teeth tried to grind themselves just looking at him.

“Jhairi,” I said. “Sure. New guy Jhairi. Follow me and watch what I do, and for the love of fuck don’t try to do anything yourself.”

He did and he didn’t and by the time Wednesday’s shift was over he was carefully checking marks and making eye assessments and everything was looking smooth enough – more than smooth enough for his first few days on the job. Those big eyes weren’t just for show and his fingers may have been stubby but they were precise and strong.

So I told him to report to Kurt the next day and considered the matter settled and maybe I’d have to care about Jhairi once a week on Monday meetings, the same as anyone else.

***

The very next day I got called down to take over line 12a. It had been riddled with production errors all morning, and when I got there I saw why: fuckin’ Clarke. She was standing just on the far side of the belt from Jhairi, leaning on the observation stand, and chattering in a really friendly way that was in no manner at all real.
Who’d have thought having to pay for coffee one rota early would make you such a spiteful little fucker.

“C’mon,” she was saying. “C’mon. Be polite to your seniors, don’t they have manners where you’re from? Don’t ignore me now, c’mon, c’mon. Just look at me now and then. Heck, you don’t even have to say anything, just make eye contact and nod. C’mon.”

I cleared my throat. “Got a problem?” I asked.

Jhairi’s ears swivelled through one hundred and eighty degrees and back. “Sorry,” he whispered.  

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him, Rox,” said Clarke. “I just came up here to introduce myself – what with us being line-neighbours and all – and he won’t so much as meet my eyes.”
“It’s a sensitivity thing, remember?” I said.

“Ooooohhh. A SENSITIVITY thing. Jesus, you buy that? Kurt was just saying that so HR wasn’t on his ass, no need for that kinda bull down here on the floor. What, just ‘cause he was born some kind of fancy alien sheep-birdie means we’ve got to treat him like a delicate little rabbit? Might as well call Jhairi a wuss to his face, right Jhairi?”
New tactic. “Clarke? Line 11d is backed to fuck and back.”
“SHIT! Why didn’t you-“

“Well, you seemed busy.”

She left, swearing left right and center.

“You okay?” I asked Jhairi. I tried to emphasize my sincerity while looking sort of up and to the left of his ears.  

“It’s better now,” he said. And yeah, his fur was lying back down. When had it started puffing up?

“Okay. Just you know, you know you can talk to me if this stuff happens? Right?”
“Yes.”

Clarke was twice as mad when line 11d wasn’t backed to fuck and back, but there was a time and a place to call your coworker a lying weaselly scumshit to her face and the second half of your shift wasn’t it. And so peace returned, and there was only one day left until the weekend, so everything was going to be just fine.

***

I celebrated Friday by rolling out of bed fifteen minutes late and decided to treat myself by getting dressed extra-slow before trudging out of the dorms down to the breakfast station.

Me and coffee and Clarke made three. Then I heard a little whispery mumble from behind her, and no wait that was Jhairi.  Four people.

“That’s good coffee,” she was telling him. He was crammed between her and the coffee machine, her arms a fence around his body, knuckles resting against the cheap painted plaster wall. “I paid for it. I only buy the best for my people. And you’re my people, Jhairi. You and me work the same job, practically work the same belts. We watch each other’s backs.  You saying you’re too good for my coffee is like saying you’re too good to watch my back. You really too good to watch my back, Jhairi?”

“No,” said Jhairi. Sort of.

“Then why the fuck you don’t want my coffee?”
“You’re blocking it, that’s why,” I growled directly into Clarke’s ear. “Back off and let me at the sugar before I bite my way to it.”
She jumped half a foot up and to the side, releasing Jhairi from his corner. “JESUS! How long you been standing there, Rox?”

“Feels like five years. Piss off and leave me alone with my lifelong romantic partner.”
Her mouth opened.
“The COFFEE, dumbass. Don’t make me ask again.”

She didn’t make me ask again.

“That was very very close,” said Jhairi.

“If you won’t talk to me about this stuff, try HR,” I told him. “Don’t bother with Kurt; the guy thinks going through the motions is going above and beyond. Just don’t sign your name on anything, that’s how they get you, confidentiality or no.”

“That was very very very close,” whispered Jhairi. He shivered from toes to crown in one long ripple, each feather-ette rising and falling in perfect rhythm. “Thank you. Thank you. It’s alright. I’ve got it under control.”

“Are you-”

Jhairi looked at me, or at least a few inches above me and a bit to one side.  “I think I am. Thank you very much.”
And he left.

Well. The weekend could heal all manner of wounds, from stress to new-job-woes to Clarke’s grousing over paying out for coffee. Anyone could heal from anything with enough booze.

***

It was a bad Monday from the start. I’d maybe overdone it a touch trying to burn away the old week, and there’d been a few times I’d mistaken Sunday for Saturday, and I’d gone to bed a little earlier in the morning than I planned.

So when I woke up and rolled out of bed into yesterday’s clothes and sprayed myself down with deodorizer until I smelled less medicinal, I was in no mood to make conversation. I stamped down to the meeting room without even the energy to get a coffee, slouched into my chair, grunted a greeting at everyone else, and stared at nothing right in front of my face.

Clarke walked in, looking as bad as I felt.

Jhairi was on the other side of the table, and I grunted a more specific greeting at him. He looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I wondered if he’d overpartied or abstained.  The first weekend you usually did one or the other, and that could tell you a lot about a new coworker.  

Clarke walked by me, brisk and quick like someone with places to be and hangovers to coffee.

His eyes were real glisteny – woops, I was looking at his eyes, sorry Jhairi, my bad – and his body was tense. A coffee cup was clutched in his hands, untouched.  I hoped he hadn’t taken it just to fit in. Nobody needed that kind of hassle.

Clarke walked by Jhairi and with a single slightestt stoop whisked the chair out from under his descending rear as quick as a greased lizard and resumed her stride.

And that was a dick move, but a classic one, well-executed. Guy falls over, we all rib her for being a shithead, she laughs a bit, new guy admits it’s a little funny, maybe everything’s fine. Maybe.

But Jhairi’s eyes were so damned big, and he must’ve seen that flicker, and it must’ve been in just the right place, and she’d only just hurried past him when he saw her retreating back and the next thing there was blood everywhere and Clarke’s throat was in Jhairi’s mouth and the rest of Jhairi’s mouth was full of apologies and Kurt was standing up and yelling at us all at the top of his nicotine-parched lungs.
“I told you! I only went and TOLD you stupid fuckers! Don’t you go messing with predatory sensitivities! No direct eye contact, no fencing him in, and NO SUDDEN MOVEMENTS! Do you have ANY IDEA how many seminars we’re all in for now?!”