Fanfiction interlude

NAOMI THE SECOND

BY J. WALLIS

A story from the Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Carcer Officers

Mortimer Twain

Opis Bracer

Malefactors

Janeway Didacos Mᴜʀᴅᴇʀ (Oɴᴇ ᴏғ sᴇᴠᴇɴᴛʏ-ᴏɴᴇ ᴄᴀsᴇs ɪɴ Fɪᴇʟᴅ ᴄᴜsᴛᴏᴅʏ)

Turnus Sem Rᴇᴄᴋʟᴇss ᴇɴᴅᴀɴɢᴇʀᴍᴇɴᴛ (Oɴᴇ ʜᴜɴᴅʀᴇᴅ ᴛʜɪʀᴛʏ-ɴɪɴᴇ ᴄᴀsᴇs)

Petulia Binal (adept) Cᴏɴsᴄɪᴇɴᴛɪᴏᴜs ᴏʙᴊᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴ (Tʜɪʀᴛᴇᴇɴ ᴄᴀsᴇs)

Naomi Twixt Dᴇsᴇʀᴛɪᴏɴ (Tᴡᴏ ᴄᴀsᴇs)

Iɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍʏʀɪᴀᴅɪᴄ ʏᴇᴀʀ ᴏғ ᴏᴜʀ Lᴏʀᴅ—the ten thousandth year of the Great Redeemer, the Fount of All Necromancy, our beauteous, ever-loving God of Death!—Naomi Twixt loaded the last of her supplies and abandoned her post.

    She experienced a grisly urge to run, to pump her limbs if only to spread the adrenal fluids through her extremities, but the shuttle was only ten paces long, and two-thirds of that was filled with boxes. She settled for dementedly rapping the heel of her scuffed, non-regulation boots on the furrowed iron baseplate, forcing herself to sit as she fingered the takeoff sequence on the instrument panel.

    The breathy sound of the engines coming to life was drowned by the clattering of the shuttle itself, its corrugated joints trembling ecstatically, as if remembering the moment of their welding far too long ago. This getaway ship was a true bucket of bolts, a real, gorgeous deathtrap in the grand tradition of Trentham deathtraps: little more than a few sheets of grimy steel and plex with a helmeted skull motif, cobbled around an engine that had come out of a Third House factory before Naomi’s grandparents were born. 

For all she knew, the ship had been in storage since then too. It had taken weeks of tender resuscitation—stolen hours, alone in the magnesium light of deep Depot, where no one came but a monthly maintenance check—to even get the rusted thing to turn on.

She had named the rusted thing Gregoria.

The shuttle rose gently as the hangar doors directly above it scraped open with a sound like the dying screams of the Emperor’s enemies. The dirty light of Dominicus overwhelmed the limescale-stained plex that offered a narrow view through Gregoria’s front end, creating a glare that turned said view from unseeable black to opaque white. As they continued to ascend, surfacing like a timid periscope, the vision cleared. The white gave way to the glorious umber red of the House of the Second. 

A landscape of oxidized iron dirt crinkled before her like a huge balled-up red flimsy. Installations dotted the terrain, linked by a precise web of maglev rails. Far off, she saw the towering funnels of the atmo pumps, hilariously small at this distance, where hundreds of adepts took shifts powering giant, thanergetic catalysis chambers perpetually belching gases that mostly floated into space never to be seen again. Only another ten myriads until the Second House was breathable, they said.

Naomi’s eyes moved up into the yellowish sky. Her foot redoubled its mad tap dance as her hand reached towards the dashboard.

“Craft T90060, we show an unauthorized exit from Depot. Please state your business, over.”

She hit the button near the little circle of black punctures that constituted the panel speakers.

“This is the Gregoria, formerly T90060,” she said. “Ensign Twixt commanding and sole occupant. I’d like to wish all of you at Traffic Control a pleasant morning. Be advised that this will be our last communication. Sincerely, over.”

The engines hummed with more purpose as she flicked a few switches down, rewarding her long, grimy hours of nurture. The shuttle increased its vertical speed.

“T90060, return to Depot with immediate effect, over.”

“That’s a negative, Control. Gregoria is a go.”

    “Return to Depot or you will be escorted to ground. This is your final warning, T90060, over.”

    “Control, be advised that I did my research. You don’t have any ships close enough to catch me before I hit deep space. Bye!”

    She gunned it. Space flung itself towards her as the brown-red ball of her lifelong home vanished away with terrifying alacrity. Gregoria rattled like a Ninth House dance troupe, her aging joints emitting the occasional tortured squeal as they took their obligatory sandblasting from the feathery atmosphere.

    The tumult ceased all at once, a billion stars soundlessly materializing in the smudgy plex. The universe lay before her.

    She hesitated. Her plan faltered in the face of so much choice. She could go anywhere, and there were at least two and a half minutes of safety before anyone would find her. She stared at the endless mindfuck of lights.

    Slowly, inexorably, the stars began to go out. Something titanic and cuboid was drifting across her view, gradually filling the entire plex. A metallic, oil-slick monolith, carpeted in a mesh of skeletons linked in perfect patterning. Beneath the osseous carapace, 700-foot letters showed the cosmos the word Erebos.

“If you find yourselves on the battlefield, remember that I will make even the dying echo of your heartbeat a sword. I will make the stilled sound on your tongue a roar. I will recall you when you are a ghost in the water, and by that recollection you will be divine. On your death, I will make the very blood in your body arrows and spears. Remember that I am the King Undying.”

    The voice sounded fantastically colorless, as if the speaker were intentionally trying to sabotage his own grandiose rhetoric. Heard through the radio fuzz of this particular recording—presumably taken via the ship’s PA—it gave Naomi a disconnect, like she was listening to a fairy tale or a smidgen of tedious gossip about a distant relation.

    She tried to stretch her shoulders as she choked down a yawn. The movement was thwarted by the plex cuffs chaining her wrists to the chair, where she had been perfunctorily shoved in the corner of a rather grand office with views over the entire Trentham installation.

    “That’s it? And then he left?” said Admiral Amphor. She was young for her rank, her gleaming dark skin tight over an underfed, skeletal body in crisp white-and-scarlet trimmings. From behind her desk, she glared up at the Erebos attaché, an older man whose skin was as wrinkled as hers was taut. 

    “Yes, Sir,” he grumbled. “The Emperor departed for the Mithraeum twenty-one hours ago. He left specific instructions for the Seat of the Emperor.”

“The what?”

“A new name. I’m assured it was the Lord’s idea,” continued the white-haired man, speaking very slowly. “We have the Canaan House sarcophagi for each House, and—more cargo for the Ninth.”

Admiral Amphor raised an eyebrow like an artist raises a brush, poised before a canvas.

    “I see, Lieutenant. I’m sure Sarpedon is delighted. You can speak to Captain Parientus about Deuteros and Dyas, he’s already arranged the ceremonies and the interment. We’re pushing them back a few weeks, so they don’t get swamped by the eighteen thousand.”

    She bent her cadaverous face back to the flimsy arranged in neat stacks across her desk, her upper body a thin but bristling silhouette against the light from the windows behind her.

    The Lieutenant coughed politely. The face tilted back up.

    “Sir. There’s the matter of Ensign Twixt.”

    Amphor continued to stare, her eyes merciless and white. The Lieutenant nodded towards Naomi.

    “Who’s this?” she said, quite loudly, giving every indication of surprise at a third person’s presence in the room. Naomi felt compelled to rise to her feet—at least, as far as the cuffs would let her.

    “Sir, I’d just like to—”

    “We intercepted her craft on arrival, as it cleared atmo,” cut in the Lieutenant, suddenly tripling his pace of speech. “Control identified it as an officer abandoning her post.”

    Admiral Amphor paused. Her laser-death eyes became unfocused, dreamy, and Naomi swore she caught the hint of a smile.

    “A deserter,” mused the Trentham Chief of Staff. “It’s been what? Three years since the last one? That’s a real shame; if the Emperor were still on Erebos…”

    “Seat of the Emperor, Sir.”

    Amphor gave the elderly Lieutenant a good, old-fashioned eyeballing. Finally, she looked back to her flimsy.

    “A deserter’s of no use to me now,” she snapped. “Send her to the Field and have done with it.”

    The Lieutenant clicked his heels and ripped a salute that the Admiral did not even glimpse. Naomi knew how he felt—during the whole affair, Amphor’s eyes had met her own for all of half a second. That didn’t stop her from hating the old sod’s guts as he made her march in front of him down the long chrome-and-plex corridor engraved with helmeted skulls and lined with marble busts of Admirals Through The Ages. They reached the hangar after two more corridors and three flights of stairs, having passed through the lobby, which was as quiet as it was over-wrought, dominated by a giant bronze statue of a woman with a sword and spear. Naomi read the plaque beneath, even though she already knew what it said:

Pʏʀʀʜᴀ Dᴠᴇ

Sʜᴇ sᴇʀᴠᴇs ɪɴ Dᴇᴀᴛʜ

The Field was where the House of the Second sent people to slowly die.

    It huddled in a long ring beyond the House, encircling Dominicus with a band of drifting gravel, a craggy paddock of misshapen rocks, black pumice spinning morosely against the starry inkpool of the universe, each one visible only as an erasure of the pinprick lights behind. It was a realm so barren that Naomi could sense its unresponsive energy on sight, without a necromantic gland in her body.

    To her amazement, they arrived at her utter lack of destiny in none other than Gregoria. The boxes of supplies had been removed and replaced with a quartet of Cohort cavalier guards—an overkill escort that Naomi took as a compliment—but the ship had been inspected and deemed spaceworthy, and co-opted by the Fleet on the spot. They had only laughed when she had tried to claim right of salvage, but at least they let her fly the old girl into the Field.

    This was not the plan, she brooded as she passed miserably among the dopey rotation of many-sized space rocks. By rights, she and Gregoria should have been spending that exact moment nursing a watery beer on the Fifth. The world should have been theirs for the doing nothing in. Instead, she was wearing the same chains as always. This was all the stupid heir and primary’s fault. If they hadn’t been so idiotic as to die—on an empty planet, who does that?—the Seat of the Emperor would never have needed to deliver their starched, buttoned-up remains.

    The shuttle dropped towards a particularly large and lumpen mass of icy stone. Gregoria was a mote against its tremendous, misty flank, casting a tiny shadow on the frozen, motionless vapor that haloed the rock in the white sunlight. They passed between enormous shelves of stone and into a cavern that had been rebuilt long ago as a shuttle hangar.

    After docking came processing. The facility was built inwards: a network branching like alveoli through the bubbles and chasms of the cosmic rock towards its center. Naomi was trooped haz-clad into the back of the cave, where the decontamination airlock required her to peel off every garment and grimly clutch her ribs as a chemical spray washed over her squat, circular face, unloved black hair and short, gawky torso. Then she was bundled into a black jumpsuit with a candy cane Second skull on the left breast, and presented for inspection.

    Calling the Field site’s decor ascetic would have been a slap in the face to honest, self-denying ascetics everywhere. The whole place was made of grey metal. Wall, floor and ceiling were identical: glossy, ashen steel preserved against any blemish or decay by the immaculate vacuum of space. It was a warren of indistinguishable rectangular tubes with almost nothing in them. Even the blue-white light strips had been installed flush with the metal, placed every four meters at the top of each wall.

    Waiting for Naomi in an otherwise empty stretch of this corridor loomed a giantess in a grey uniform. Her shoulders were so muscular and broad that she almost appeared hunchback, and she was so tall that her straw mohawk brushed lovingly against the grain of the steel ceiling, as if she were tethered there, or had grown from the metal downwards. Noami’s mouth opened in a circlet of soft reverence and dread.

    Behind the woman, someone had used a crude stencil to blacken the words Field Carcer Nine.

    “I acknowledge the receipt of one (1) malefactor into my custody,” said the giantess to the cavaliers at Naomi’s back, actually saying one twice. “In addition, I inform you that a monthly resupply ship is proceeding from the hangar at fifteen hundred hours, should you wish for—a better chance of survival on your return journey. I saw the fossil you came in on. And here is your paperwork.”

    She handed the guards a clipboard that looked like the tiniest scrap of flimsy in her tremendous hands. Only then did she glare at Naomi.

    “Move,” she said.

    Off they went down the featureless tube of a corridor, leaving the Cohort cavs clutching their pommels.

“Name,” rumbled the large woman as they rounded a corner into another identical corridor.

    “Ensign T—”

    “Malefactors don’t have ranks. You lost your commission when you defied House law.”

    “Oh. Uh, Naomi Twixt. Was my name not on the form?”

    “You call me Sir. And you don’t ask questions.”

    Naomi puckered a little at that, narrowing her eyes at the name stitched onto the woman’s left shoulder—a good foot above her own head—which read O. Bracer.

A grey curtain embroidered with a skull and femur motif was hung across the corridor up ahead. Sir pulled it aside, revealing a desk, two chairs (all steel), and a small white refrigerator with a jawbone for a door handle. A glass jug sat upon it, the dregs of something black stewing in its bowels.

    The desk was flush with the wall and blocked at least two-thirds of the corridor’s width, so the chairs were placed at the short sides, leaving a slim passage to walk past. The nearer chair contained a middle-aged man who was fiddling with a small red ball. At the sound of the sliding curtain, he pocketed the object, as if caught with something illicit, and turned to greet them with a bashful grin.

    “You must be the deserter,” he said, adjusting a pair of large spectacles. He wore a uniform technically the same as Sir—Bracer, whoever she was—much like a sparrow might technically be considered the same taxonomic entity as a full-grown Tyrannosaurus. Where she was huge and made your knees wobble with a single step of her great feet, he was—not intimidating. He drooped a little around the shoulders, not quite necromancer-wasted but clearly showing little love for his own muscles, and he suffered from a shamelessly receding hairline. “I’m Carcer Officer Twain. You’ve already met Officer Bracer. If you head on down you’ll find the other ’factors. They can get you settled in.”

    He pointed amicably down the corridor. The giant woman had already shuffled past the desk—her legs barely fit—and had lowered herself into the second chair, which she filled like a beach ball on a golf tee. She didn’t even glance at Naomi as she leaned back and opened up a book. The cover read Believe in You: How to Find Your Positive Attitude. There was a little picture of a skull with hearts for eyes.

    The whole scene—the two unbearably mismatched guards in the galaxy's saddest break room, which wasn’t even a room, it was just a desk in the middle of a barren corridor—was so weird that Naomi felt physically sick for a moment. She looked back to Officer Twain, who gave her an encouraging nod.

“We’ll see you around plenty, don’t worry,” he said nasally.

She walked on, edging down the far wall, brushing past a second curtain out into more corridor. There was nothing to do but creep onward, desperately alone now. 

The dull metal path turned a few more times, but it didn’t branch again before she rounded a corner to see a woman topple off a stepladder. There was enough teetering and hysterical arm waving for Naomi to hustle forward and lunge beneath the fall, the fallee screeching briefly before her full weight flattened her would-be rescuer with a satisfying crunch.

Fortunately, the creature who had flattened Naomi was not large: a pint-sized coil of a woman, a collection of bones and fabric supporting a gaunt and eager face, full of quiet energy. Naomi knew as soon as she scrabbled upright that she was a necromancer.

“Holy Resurrector!” she gasped as she saw Naomi’s flattened body, which was about the same size as the adept's vertically, but considerably less scantily fleshed. “Are you hurt? Have I broken you?”

“I’m okay,” wheezed the humble hero, huffing herself gradually onto her feet.

“I squashed you! You took my fall!”

Naomi found it hard to deal with her manic eyes—an ocean-bottom blue that did something complicated to Naomi’s hypothalamus and something fairly simple to the capillaries in her face—so she looked around instead.

“Nice… bunting?” she tried.

“Oh that’s just a little art, you don’t have to be nice about it. Nobody else is.”

A string of painted flimsy sheets were half-hung along a short stretch of wall, a mess of dark, swirling figures that gave way to red and green landscape. Other pictures were affixed further down the corridor—a little gallery relieving the monotone steel.

“I call it Peace Conquers All,” continued the zealous necromancer. “That’s why they put me here, you know. I’m a pacifist. People say I’m obsessed.”

    Naomi considered her tiny, beaming face with a lopsided grin. “Cool. I’m Naomi. I’m new.”

    “Yes they said someone was coming. It’s a real treat to meet you. We’re a little starved for company, you might say. I’m Petulia. Petulia Binal.” She extended a slender, knobbly hand. “I’ll take you to meet the others.”

    “How many are there?” asked Naomi as they set off.

    “Two others. Plus Mortimer and Opis, of course. You probably met them, they call themselves Carcer Officer Twain and Sir, the big goofs.”

    “Two?”

    “I’m afraid so. Carcer Nine is the smallest Field carcer, by population. By floor space it’s one of the biggest. Problem is, we don’t have any rooms. Each asteroid is allocated ’factors by number of rooms. This long tube only counts as one. Four per room is the nominal maximum.” Binal looked over to see Naomi’s expression, and laughed. “Yup! We may not be the Sixth House, but we can inanely regulate ourselves to death with the best of them.”

“You’re telling me there’s no rooms? Just—a corridor?”

    “This was going to be a great big mining operation, according to Morty. Way back in olden times. Then they discovered that what they thought was lovely priceless nickel was actually boring old cobalt, which the Fourth House pulls out of its moons in silly quantities. They had already built all the tunnels and walkways before they sodded off. You should ask him if you’re interested, he loves to talk about it. Ah, here’s the two.”

    A pair of figures were seated on a bed in another seemingly random stretch of corridor, contemplating a game board that lay between them with a little array of playing pieces. The one facing their approach perked up and stood when he saw them: a well-proportioned, fair-haired young man whose picture was probably in the dictionary next to the words dashing and handsome. He put one hand behind his back and made a little bow, keeping his twinkling eyes on Naomi.

    “Ah the newcomer,” he grinned. “We’re so glad you could join our little band of lost souls. We promise to try not to devour you too quickly. Turnus Sem, at your service. Formerly Pilot First Class on the Behemoth Irkalla.”

    Naomi could have sworn he ended this little speech with a wink.

    His partner in board games rolled her eyes as she too stood to greet them, adopting a natural military pose, arms clasped behind her back. They were both in their late twenties, though she was a few inches taller, and gave the impression of a no-nonsense athlete, even in the pyjama-jumpsuits they all wore. This may have been thanks to her black hair, which she kept in a flawless high ponytail.

    “I apologise on Sem’s behalf,” she said. “One grows to tolerate him. Pleasure to meet you. Janeway Didacos. Previously Lieutenant.”

    Naomi’s eyes widened as she shook the woman’s hand.

    “Didacos? You were the cavalier secondary until a few years ago. Youngest secondary in decades, they said. You were ranked what—third, second in the System?”

    “First, actually, for a few weeks,” the cavalier said, a little gruffly. “Sadly, those days are long behind me.”

    “Uh oh! The gloom agenda!” said Binal, and Didacos glared at her.

    The pilot chuckled and flopped onto the bed in an instant lounging position, one hand tousling his perfect hair. “So what are you in for?”

    “Turnus!” cried Binal, “You can’t just ask her that!”

    “I’m helping to get it out of the way. So it’s not awkward. You can tell her mine if you want.”

    “Turnus crashed a ship trying to do some awful show-off stunt. It was perfectly moronic in every way, and three people were killed.” Binal put her back against the wall and slid downwards until her knees were below her chin.

    “I was in a bad place,” said the man, his smile fading. But his eyes continued to twinkle.

    Naomi joined the necromancer on the floor, facing her across the corridor.

    “It’s okay. Mine’s stupid too. I was caught trying to run away. I would have made it, if the flagship of the whole damn fleet hadn’t happened to show up at the Second House at that exact moment, after eighty years in deep space.”

    Binal gave her a kindly smile, and Sem whistled through his teeth. Didacos, on the other hand, turned her bright brown eyes away, her expression sinking like a weighted corpse. The reception they’d given her had been warmer than expected, so Naomi was taken aback by the few moments of tension that followed her revelation.

    “Is that monstrous? Have I ruined everything?”

    “It’s fine, dear, we don’t judge,” Binal said quickly, but even she wasn’t smiling anymore.

    “We’ll get over it,” said Sem. He produced a rubbery ball and began throwing it rhythmically at the point where floor met wall; it rebounded flawlessly to his hand with a hollow puh-pack. “But we’re still Second House. 'Chickenshits don’t get beer'—we have a natural horror of desertion. It’s in our bones, as you must know too well. You’re only the second I’ve ever heard of. The first is on Carcer Twelve, someone said.”

    “You’re better off here,” said Binal.

In the days to come, Naomi felt her fellow malefactors were colder towards her than to each other. Didacos, whose exploits in the dueling ring she’d followed in her pubescent years, could barely look at her.

    She was given “quarters” in another stretch of empty corridor, where they dragged a mattress, some shelving and a small table from a store area in yet another branch of the labyrinth. There really were no rooms at all, Naomi found, as she wandered the strange enclosure, mentally mapping its forks and twistings through the depths of the porous rock. The one exception was the utilities chamber, adjacent to the hangar airlock, where she found a filtration system and the generators, which were linked to junction boxes throughout the facility.

    Aside from exploring, sleeping, and staring mindlessly at walls, days were spent however one chose. There was a crate full of books, another of art supplies. There was a place they kept exercise equipment where she found Didacos doing casual practice backflips, and afterwards stayed away. When she got hungry she could go to the “kitchen” to rehydrate a packet of something calorific out of another crate.

    And then there were the chores. They weren’t frequent, or particularly arduous. There was a rota for washing and dusting. And every couple of days a series of growing tremors heralded the arrival of Opis Bracer, the titan whose presence was rarely directly observed, but always felt as a general possibility. She would ask her charges to inventory a storage area or fix a malfunctioning appliance. The first time she did this, Naomi had addressed her as “Bracer”. The titan had turned—like a glacier—and squinted down at her. Then she placed her palm softly on the apex of Naomi’s skull, and had simply pushed. Naomi crumpled downwards, her knees collapsing as if commanded by the Emperor to kneel.

    “You call me Sir,” said Bracer.

    “Has anyone ever—tried to escape?” asked Naomi one day, as Petulia Binal extracted a mug of inexplicable stew from the kitchen microwave.

    “Not in my time,” said Binal. “It’s largely seen as a non-starter. There’s nought outside but nothingy vacuum. The only ship that ever comes is packed with nasty soldiers. We don’t have any weapons.”

“You’re a necro, aren’t you?”

Binal laughed merrily. “Oh my dear. You might as well call me a scuba diver. When the good Lord and Resurrector saw fit to thanergize the nine celestial lights around Dominicus, he sadly neglected to offer the same courtesy to this ring of dead rocks. I’m about as useful here as, well, as a necromancer in space. Nobody has the decency to die in these parts, you know?”

She took a sip of hot space powder. “Why do you ask, my precious? Are you planning something brilliant and dastardly? Gonna make it clean away this time?”

Naomi lowered her eyes.

About a week after that, the four malefactors of Carcer Nine were told to haz up for a walk outside. The surface radio antenna had gone down and it was up to them to get it working again.

Naomi followed the others to an elevator that brought them to a second airlock. There was a general muttering and cursing as they pulled on the ugly reddish hazard suits. Eventually, the doors opened, a schluup of decompression vanishing abruptly into airless silence. Their voices, transmitted by speakers inside their visors, sounded more like telepathy than talking. 

The space-suited work gang were confronted by a landscape of dark, misshapen knobbles. A lumpy nonsense in three dimensions, a sunless void of climbing rocks and wantonly protruding formations. Progress over this terrain was a matter of trial and error, moving only by the veering beams of their helmet lights, and enduring each other’s huffing in their headsets as they clambered over boulders with mixed success, frequently going backwards to try a different route. 

Naomi felt strangely unburdened without the station’s artificial gravity—the Carcer Nine rock was a behemoth, but its mass was noticeably less substantial than her native Second. The dreamlike dearth of bodily weight was not any help—if anything, it made progress more awkward as she attempted to boulder across the abyssal crags.

    Didacos could be seen at the front, already cresting a high scarp, her movements betraying agility even under the bulk of the haz.

    “Don’t wait on our account, Janey Babe,” Lieutenant Sem’s voice crackled as he panted up behind her. Naomi attempted to follow the much slower route of Binal, the necromancer’s constitution somewhat closer to her own speed. Binal crossed the surface of the asteroid with her hands primly at her hips, as if she were clutching a long skirt to keep it out of a muddy field.

    “Just a recce,” Didacos replied, her accusatory headlights spotlighting the two women at the rear as she looked back and down towards them. “Head over the bank to your left. It’s much flatter after that.”

    “Thanks for the tip, Captain oh my Captain,” laughed Binal with a coy salute.

    Following the Lieutenant’s directions meant a steep climb, but their feeble scrabbling was rewarded with a view of the destination: a squat steel scaffold cradling a large blue-grey disc pointed skywards. Half an hour’s further huffing took them to the base of the outpost and a door with a Second skull logo but no airlock. The suits stayed on.

    “We’re not the first to visit,” said Binal as they poked around the small control room, with a single panel of switches and a collection of neat utility boxes lit by a grimy yellow lamp. “There’s boot prints here.”

    “Could have been left decades ago,” Sem responded. “Nothing would disturb them. Not like there’s a janitor.”

    Despite this, Naomi experienced a thin note of dread at the top of her spine—so faint it felt more like curiosity than fear. But it grew swiftly as she opened a hatch in the wall and considered the thick knots of wiring. It didn’t take a military engineer to see the problem.

    “It’s been cut. The wires were cut,” she said simply. They all crowded in behind her. Binal was the first to speak.

    “You know what this means, of course,” she said. “We have a saboteur.”

    “We shouldn’t rush to conclusions,” muttered Didacos, unsteadily, but Sem was louder: “The necro’s right. One of us did this.”

    “Honestly, I’m just insulted that whoever it was didn’t think to include me in their little scheme,” continued Binal. “I could have helped out. What’s it supposed to achieve anyway?”

    “Communications are among the most important assets in any theatre,” Didacos said, her voice even more monotone than usual. “Standard Cohort tactics to target them first.”

    There was a pause. The former cavalier took a deep breath.

    “Can you fix it, Twixt?”

    “If it’s just the wires, no problem,” said Naomi. 

    “How long?” asked Sem.

    “Half an hour maybe?”

    “I’ll check the perimeter.” He was already at the door as Binal moaned, “What for?” but he didn’t bother to answer.

    It took eighteen minutes to strip the wire ends and solder them back together, even with her hands clumsily gloved. Binal absorbed herself in watching Naomi work, while Didacos fretted over the instruments on the control panel.

    “Movement,” she barked happily when the connection was completed. “Readings are returning to nominal.” 

“Where’s the flyboy?” said Binal, when they ventured back out into the primordial blackness. “You there, Turny?”

    They waited.

    “Turnus Sem, please respond,” tried Didacos.

    They waited again.

    “Hey! I dare you to speak to us!” said Binal. And, seconds later: “Huh, that usually works with pilots.”

    “Split up,” grunted the ex-cav. “Stay in verbal contact.” 

    She stalked off to the left. Naomi and Binal shared a glance and trotted after her, following a few paces behind. She turned back towards them. “I said—”

    “If people are going missing, we’re not splitting up, silly,” Binal interrupted, as if explaining to a toddler. “That’s the first rule of weird alien planets.”

    Once-Lieutenant Didacos rolled her eyes, and trudged onwards.

    “I bet the saboteur has got Turnus,” continued Binal as they walked, by way of conversation. “It’s either that or there’s a revenant out for blood. Or a new and malicious lifeform that eats beautiful but tragic necromancers who enter its domain.”

    “Please try to focus on finding Sem, I’m sure he’s not gone far,” replied Didacos.

    “I don’t know,” Naomi was staring at the horizon like an agonized poet. “Don’t you think something about all of this just feels—”

    The off became more of a huhhp! as a stone gave way beneath Naomi’s heel, the ground opened up, and she instantly cartwheeled into a ravine.

    She plummeted, falling more ponderously than she anticipated in the weak gravity, but with sufficient suddenness and momentum that there was no time to reach out and grasp for ledges. Instead, the ledges came at her, and she hit them one by one like the branches of a fossilized tree, stony protrusions whacking her flesh-under-haz in a series of ripe thumps as she descended into the hidden fissure. 

    Her upper body crunched into a fork of stone at the base of the hole. She had an instant to listen for the telltale hiss of escaping air from any rips in the suit—she couldn’t hear anything—before the panicked voices started squawking over the comm. She tried to form words, but she couldn’t find the breath. She squirmed to free herself, unleashing a terrible tide of pain from her rib cage that smothered her brain like fingers pinching out a candle.

The last thing she saw before she was extinguished was a glimpse of a construct—something steel and mechanical was down here, and there within it, against all the odds, was a face. Even as her mind vanished from under her, Naomi was struck by the unsettling black eyes. Eyes which swam like oil on carbon.

Awareness returned with the thin blue light of a Carcer Nine corridor. She was on a mattress, unhazzed, looking up into the fatherly face of Janeway Didacos.

    “Easy, Twixt,” said the soldier as Naomi tried to sit up. “I’ve patched what I can, but my field medicine training was a long time ago. You have at least one broken rib, from what I can see.”

    “Sem—” said Naomi, wincing with new awareness of at least one. 

    “Came as soon as you fell. He’s around the corner with your—finding.”

    “My what?”

    With Didacos’ support, Naomi eventually hobbled to the washroom, or washarea, where she inspected the damage. She could see nothing, since the wounds down her right flank had been strapped smartly over with bandaging that she didn’t want to disturb, binding her whole upper body below the arms. Bruises of varying severity dotted the rest of her limbs and torso. She swallowed the pills Janeway had given her, and turned herself around a few times in the sonic, which made her right elbow ache in a disinterested manner.

    She redressed in her musty jumpsuit, and hobbled back to Didacos, who helped her hobble onwards to the others. 

    “Naomi survived, hurrah!” chirped Binal at the sound of hobbling. “We were so dreadfully worried, weren’t we, Sir?”

    Opis Bracer narrowed her eyes at Naomi’s approach, and stiffened against the wall where she was leaning, arms folded. “You plan on causing any more trouble?” she growled down at the invalid.

    “Trouble, Sir?”

    She followed the hulking officer’s eyes to the desk where Sem, Binal and Mortimer Twain were gathered a little further down the corridor. 

    “I’m afraid that when you had the bad sense to hurl yourself into a chasm, you may have found something that’s—raised a few questions,” Binal said, her navy blue eyes conspiratorial.

    On the desk was the face. The face she had seen in the hole—or rather, the head. There it sat, gleaming in the corridor lights, a human-ish head: cadaverous, inanimate, and entirely artificial. There was no skin or hair, just a skull of dark alloys, circuit boards and miniaturized pistons covering a mesh of microchips and gossamer wiring, all tombstone still. Only the lidless eyes were non-mechanical, though they certainly weren’t natural either. Without skin, their protruding hemispheres were exposed, black like iridescent ink poured into still water on a moonless night. Incomprehensible, liquid, horrifying.

    Turnus Sem was watching her with a strange smirk. He ran a hand through his waves of foamy hair. “What do you think? Any ideas?” he asked.

    “Why would I know anything about—that?” Naomi said in bewilderment.

    “You’re an engineer, right?”

    Naomi didn’t know how to respond. She considered You’re a pilot, right? So flap your arms and float on out of here, twit. Instead, she blinked a few times, and knelt down beside the desk. Up close, the head was absurdly intricate. A cacophony of micro-parts, a junk complexity that should have resolved into nothing but metal soup, and instead was a goddamn human head. She looked at Sem, and Binal, and the two officers. 

    “I don’t know how to explain to you how profoundly I don’t know what this is,” she said.

    Bracer shook her head, snorted softly, and walked away down the corridor, the steel floor murmuring with each mighty footfall. Turnus looked to Twain.

    “Are you going to report this to the higher ups?”

    “Not sure,” drawled Twain, his voice more nose than throat. “There’s not much to report. Found a fake head. Threw it out. Bit weird, but that’s about all there is to it.”

    “You want us to chuck it?” cried Binal. “But it’s so beautiful!”

    “Put it on the mantelpiece for all I care,” said Twain. Then he trotted after his colleague.

    “Maybe I’ll do just that,” said Sem, quietly, when the agents were gone. He stood up, and reached for the head. Naomi felt a strange jolt of emotion at this action.

    “Wait,” she said. “Let me take another look. I don’t know what it is, but—I want to take another look,” she finished lamely.

    Sem gave her his popular-kid smile. “Sure thing, coward chick. It’s your new best friend.”

    He left. She noticed Didacos was gone as well. There was just Binal, standing by the desk, looking down with soft sympathy and effete eyebrows. She sank into Sem’s discarded chair, her shoulders now at Naomi’s eye level. 

    “You think this was a person, once?” she asked, or maybe pleaded. “You think it had metal head friends?”

    “I think someone made it for a reason,” said Naomi, gazing back at her twilight eyes. Binal sighed, and leaned forwards, her lower lids filling with salty dew.

    “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” she breathed.

Later, Naomi was alone in another anonymous corridor, at a junction box. The wall lights were dimmed for sleeping hours. The head could only be seen in its faint metallic reflections, completely still. A dead universe of convolute parts. A single inert brain.

    There was a quick spark from the base of the neck as Naomi attached a live wire from the box, exactly where its first cervical vertebra would have been if it were meat.

    At the same instant, a ring of white light formed around the iris of each oil-spill eyeball.

    Micro-elements shivered within the depths, a hundred smoothly sliding parts producing only the faintest susurrus of animation. The jaw opened—not with a jerk, but fluidly, as a normal jaw might.

    It closed again.

    A voice said: “Please state operational parameters.”

No matter how far she wandered, she never found an end to the corridors. She began to think she hadn’t comprehended the sheer scale of the pointless maze where she now lived, the solar system’s most useless intra-asteroid pulmonary system. Several days after the unliving head talked at her—and she had rapidly unplugged it and hid the thing under bed, had lain awake all night trying not to think about it—her body was healed just enough to resume exploring. She was walking down a new branch when she discovered a hatch. 

    A square door was set into the floor of an otherwise standard-issue corridor, complete with a circular opening device with solid steel spokes like you might find on a bank vault.

    “Guys, there’s a whole other system of corridors underneath us,” she said, rushing up to the area where her fellow malefactors typically congregated. Binal looked up from a new painting.

    “Uh huh. And above.”

    “What!”

    “You can take a look, if you want. There’s what, twenty, thirty stories?”

“Thirty-four,” said Sem, absently thumbing a magazine. “This is level six.”

“The whole rock is strung through with tubes, in all three dimensions. They’re all the same, of course.”

“We’re a big onion of corridors. Layers all the way down,” added Sem, still not looking up. “There aren’t many hatches between layers, so we tend to stick to this one. Less walking. By the way, the post goes out the day after tomorrow. Got any correspondence for the bag?”

“I, uh—no.” Naomi’s ungainly shoulders ungained a bit more. 

When the lights dimmed that night, she went back to the junction box. 

“Please state operational parameters,” said the impossible head as its very impossible eyes lit up. Despite sounding like it came over a comm link, it was a voice to match the eyes: liquid, sensuous, bearing no relation to the mechanical jaw. It was a female voice, and frankly it was hot.

    “Can you hear me?” tried Naomi, attempting not to stammer, and whispering even though she was a long way from any people, and the head was talking at full volume.

    “Aural receptors are operational,” it said, reminding her of a few mid-rank officers she had known.

    “What—do I call you?”

    “I am Artificial Soma Control Unit. Systems are compromised. Please state operational parameters.”

    “I think that depends on what you’re doing here. What are you supposed to do, or I mean, what would you like to do? I don’t want to assume anything.”

    “I was designed to coordinate experiments in wireless management of multiple soma by artificial intelligence. My mission status is incomplete. If parameters are not updated, operational activity will resume.”

    “Oh, okay. I don’t want to stop your mission. But—why are you in the Field? On an asteroid, I mean.”

    “Belt asteroids meet operational safety and confidentiality criteria,” it said.

    “Huh,” said Naomi. She stared at the white-ringed eyes. They stared back.

    “Do you have any friends?” she asked.

    “I consider Doctor Gaius to be my friend,” said the metal lady head.
    “That’s so nice. Do you miss her?”

    “I find his absence ...notable,” said the head, with the most human pause Naomi had ever heard. She was amazed to feel the pinch of salt water accumulating at the corners of her eyes, though the voice continued without emotion: “I also note the absence of his other systems. The Artificial Transference Monitoring Unit, the Artificial Organic Enhancement Assistant, and the Artificial Likeness and Essence Containment Techno-Organism.”

“I miss my friends too,” Naomi whispered. Then: “Did you ever have a—body?” 

There was another pause. This one seemed more urgent. Finally the head replied:

“I have nine hundred and twelve bodies.”

The muted lighting in the corridor blazed oven-red—in pulses, about one per second—making it feel even more like being inside a blood vessel. It was the deep crimson darkness of a womb. Naomi’s adrenal gland responded instantaneously and with unabashed terror. 

“Uh, Artificial Control Head or whatever your name is—”

“You may call me Ascu.”

“Ascu, do you know what’s happening? Why is everything red?”

“That information is unknown or unavailable.”

“Okay, I’m going to unplug you now. We’ll talk again soon. Is that alright?”

“That is acceptable. I have sufficient power for twelve hours and seventeen minutes of operation.”

Naomi yanked the wire from its spinal dock and stood up. It was unnerving to carry the head down the corridor—its eyes were still on, and Naomi knew it was awake. Previously she’d held it in the crook of her arm, but now she felt she had to hold it out in two hands, facing in the direction they were going.

She rushed back to her designated quarters, which the infernal lighting rendered a new shade of unfamiliar and upsetting. She wedged the head back under her bed with as much decorum as she could muster, which was none.

“Twixt! Let’s move!”

She looked up to see Janeway Didacos at the end of the corridor. The woman always appeared limber and springy, even under her rigid military prudery, but now her tall, ponytailed form was truly vibrating with elegant energy and smooth, sporting posture.

“What’s happening?” yelled Naomi, a little too loudly. The corridor was as quiet as ever.

“We don’t know. Get down to utilities, stat. I’ll find Binal and rendezvous there.” She leapt back the way she had come.

After witnessing the way Didacos could run—like a marble statue of a god, come to life—Naomi felt her own attempt to mosey down the corridors could only be called waddling at best. She reached the utilities room already self-conscious about sweat patches. Bracer stood like a colossus in the junction between the utilities door and the airlock system, staring through the plex into the hangar. Her back was to Naomi.

“They’re waiting for you,” she said. 

“Yes, Sir.” 

Naomi put her head down and hurried in. Twain and Sem were standing over a panel with a conspicuously flashing red diode. The pilot glanced at her and then back at the panel.

“Decompression breach in level twenty-two,” he said. “That’s all we know.”

“So why the lights? Is it an alarm?” asked Naomi.

“That’s right,” replied Mortimer Twain, removing his spectacles and running a sleeve over his eyes. “They never installed the whole system—just sensors, no audio.”

“Damn eerie,” said Sem. “Especially when you’ve never seen it before.”

“None of us had,” said Twain. “I only just looked up the specs.”

“So what could cause a breach?” asked Naomi.

“Level twenty-two is deep in the rock, so it wasn't an external impact. It could be some kind of failed seal on a hatch, but we have readings for those, and they all show themselves properly locked. You and I are going to find out what happened,” the older man said to her. “Maybe we can fix it. In the meantime I’ll turn the lights off.” He entered a series of digits into a keypad and pressed a black button. The lights in the corridor returned to pale night-hours illumination. “Let’s get hazzed.”

“I’m coming too,” said Sem. 

“Suit yourself,” said the carcer officer.

Sem was dispatched to find haz suits, and Naomi went to gather her tools. They regrouped, as they said in the Second, at the floor hatch she had found earlier that day. Didacos and Binal were there to see them off.

    “Are you sure you’re up for this? It might be wonderfully dangerous,” quavered the necromancer, clutching at Naomi’s arm. 

    “Danger is the deserter’s middle name,” chuckled Sem. Binal whacked him.

    “She can speak for herself!”

    “I’ll be fine,” said Naomi, trying to make herself smile. She looked at Twain, who was fighting a losing battle with his clunky haz. The orange neoprene made him appear the victim of heat stroke. “Right, Officer Twain?”

    “I shouldn’t think we’ll encounter anything untoward,” he replied, his glasses almost coming off as he tried to pull the headpiece up.

    “We’ll follow you on comms,” pronounced Didacos, hands clutched behind her back in the traditionally stressful at ease position. “And we’re prepared to provide backup.”

    “I’d expect nothing less, ex-Lieutenant,” said Twain.

    The three of them went down the hatch. It was a short steel tube with rungs in the side for a ladder down into a new corridor. This proved to be distressingly identical to that they’d just left.

    “Welcome to level seven,” said Sem. “Only another fifteen to go. You’d think they’d line them all up, but no.”

    “May the Resurrector be with you, my heroes!” Binal’s voice floated down from above, followed by the echoing thunk of the closing hatch.

    Fifteen more hatches followed. It took the better part of an hour, marching down corridors and descending through tubes. 

Naomi didn’t know how this particular mission would go, but what she certainly hadn’t expected was close-up magic tricks. Mortimer Twain performed them as they walked. Apparently this was a major hobby. He would show her two little red balls, place one in his gloved hand and one in hers. Then he gave a little shake of his arm, opened his hand to reveal nothing, while she found both balls in hers.

The satisfaction on his face at the execution of this manoeuvre almost brought Naomi to tears.

Sem walked ahead of them, occasionally ruining the reveal before the end of a trick, which made Mortimer tut sadly, and pretend not to have heard him.

When they came to the hatch leading to level twenty-two, they fastened up their suits and prepared for decompression. 

“Unsealing hatch,” said Sem, turning the vault-style opening wheel. “Brace yourself.”

“We read you,” came Didacos on the comm.

Naomi hadn’t realized how strong the air would be as it was sucked through the small square portal. It took all her strength not to lose herself to the Charybdis pull of the gaping hatch. When the almighty roaring died away, the silence was even more terrible. Once again, she entered a world where the only voices came through a speaker inside her suit. She felt terribly exposed.

“Onwards and downwards,” exclaimed Twain, stepping onto the ladder. “Let’s see what happened on twenty-two.”

They could see sod all on twenty-two. The lighting was out. In the white rays of their helmet lights, the steel corridor became a hall of blinding mirrors terminating in an impenetrable, inky void. They moved uncertainty into this blackness, the thin spotlight of the hatch quickly fading to inconsequence behind them. 

“Certainly makes you appreciate the awful institutional lights upstairs,” whistled Sem, darkly. Then he stopped. “Wait. Do you hear that?”

Naomi and Twain froze.

“I—I feel it,” breathed Naomi. “A vibration in the floor.”

“It feels like footsteps,” said Twain. “Lots of footsteps.”

“Repeat last,” said Didacos in their ears. “Do you have bogeys?”

“No, I’m not sure—”

“Oh God. Do you see that?” Naomi said in a half-shriek. 

“I’m seeing lights. Small red lights in the dark. In pairs.”

“Eyes,” whispered Naomi.

They came. Dozens of skeletons rattled out of the darkness, eyes glowing demonfire-red, mandibles flung open in a silent scream. There was no noise at all in the airless corridor, just the skittering patter of their tarsals through the floor, and the ghostly vision of the horde rushing madly into the headlights.

There was no time for expletives. All three of them spun around and ran on instinct, their wide-eyed lizard brains leaping into control, sprinting against their own rubberized cocoons to keep ahead of the pack of wild skeletons behind them.

“Up! Up!” screamed Twain as they reached the hatch by which they had entered. He had been leading their advance, and now he was at the rear, closest to the grasping wave of finger bones behind them. Sem was ahead, and he hurled himself up the ladder in a few swift movements, reaching back to grab Naomi by the arm and pull her up bodily behind him. They both reached back to do the same for Twain. 

“Argh! Fuck!” he yelled, as if he were the first man in history to be mauled by skeletons. “They got me!” 

Other voices were frantic on the comm too, but Naomi’s mind turned them to static. As they dragged the carcer officer up into level twenty-one, she stared down the tube linking them to the level below. It was a seething pit of bone and limb, about twenty individual skeletons scrabbling up the same slim tunnel like it was their one and only chance to escape from Hell itself. Sem slammed the hatch shut, and it was immediately set upon by a hundred desperate fingers. 

“Did you see them?” wailed Naomi. “Those weren’t regular constructs! They’re—machine!”

That was the other thing. The skeletons trying to get at them were not made solely from bone. Naomi had clearly seen metal at the joints, mechanized components along the spine and limbs, levers and hydraulics augmenting, no, substituting for necromantic input. And the lights in the eyes—that was no glow of theorem or thanergy. They were the pitiless electric eyes of the machine, much more dead than any corpse, and they scared the living jelly out of Naomi’s deepest wobbly bits.

“We don’t have time for that. Twain is punctured. I don’t know how long repressurization takes, or how long the hatch will hold. We need to move.”

Naomi wrenched her eyes from the hatch and stared at Twain. He was scrabbling at a hole that had been ripped in the rubbery nylon at his ankles, and he was saying ohshitohshitohshit very quietly.

“Keep the material closed. We’ll carry you,” said Naomi, getting under one shoulder, while Sem did the same on the other side. The poor man clutched tightly on the site of the fatal sundering while they manhandled him down the corridor.

“In the name of all that is holy, what the Hell is happening down there?” asked Didacos, her voice frayed and hoarse. “I’m coming down.”

“Stay on six, Didacos,” said Twain, rasping a little. “We’re under attack, but we’ve escaped for now. Constructs of unknown origin. Dozens of them at least, extremely hostile. My haz is compromised. We’re making for level twenty. Didacos, I need you to radio Carcer Ten immediately. Tell them we need emergency evacuation.”

Naomi was astonished at the old officer’s mental composition as they sedan-chaired him down the corridor. She’d been in bad situations before; every time, it seemed like she was the only one losing her mind, and everyone else in the Second House was able to compartmentalize like a hero. But Twain was frittering air even as he spoke. By the end of his short speech, he was gasping badly.

“Understood,” replied Didacos.

“We should get them to deadlock the hatches behind us from the control room. We don’t know if the constructs can operate the manual locks,” growled Sem.

“Agreed,” said Twain.

“Copy that, repeated Didacos.

They shambled on, Naomi’s garments turning slimy with sweat, her visor plex fogging with exertion, her half-healed ribs screaming under the weight of another person. None of that was as bad as Twain’s breathing. 

“We’re almost there, old man,” said Sem as they approached the next hatch. “You’re going to get some air. Soon.”

Even as the words crackled into Naomi’s suit, she heard the explosive echo of the previous hatch bursting under the force of its skeletal assailants. Or maybe they simply figured out how to turn the handle.

“Oh f—” her feelings vanished under another roar of lost air, as whatever pressure had been achieved on twenty-one was lost immediately into the corridor below. Twain’s gasping redoubled. And there were vibrations in the floor again. “They’re coming!”

They dashed for the hatch. Twain’s body was spasming now as they forced it up the tube. By the time they reached level twenty, it had gone still. 

“Deadlock the hatch to twenty-one!” yelled Sem as he pushed it shut. “And see if you can figure out a way to speed up pressurization!”

“Sem,” said Naomi. 

Twain was unmoving. Through the plex, they could see his eyes, bulging and vacant.

“No. Fuck this. We keep moving. Twixt, grab his ankles. We get to nineteen before they breach twenty. You got it?”

She nodded and obeyed, glassy eyed. The pilot’s face was contorted with what may have been rage as he hauled the unresponsive body up by the shoulders. He walked backwards with amazing speed, Naomi only barely holding up her end walking forwards. But she no longer felt the weight; her mind was unspooling into wisps of tattered trauma. 

“We have a problem,” said Didacos in their ears. “Alarm has been re-triggered. Another decompression breach—on level two.”

“Okay. They’re coming at us from both sides,” replied Sem. “Find a haz for each of you and get ready to evacuate. Deadlock all the hatches—no, wait, leave two levels either side of six unlocked. We don’t want them to burst through, we need to be able to repressurize.”

“I’m ahead of you, Sem.”

“Good. We’re on thirteen.” They were? Naomi realized she’d been sleepwalking through the levels; her haz was unzipped, the air was breathable again. She almost screamed when she looked down to see she still had Twain’s ankles in her hands. Sem was still talking. “We’ll meet you at the hangar, hopefully before the enemy.”

Hope seemed impossible to Naomi, and yet her mind fogged again, and when she next regained awareness, they were in fact panting down a more familiar patch of identikit corridor. She’d never been so happy to see anyone as she was to see Officer Bracer, standing implacably in the same spot she’d been before, unchanged except for the massive orange haz in which she was ensconced: enough material for at least three regular suits. And there was the door to the control room—Didacos and Binal coming out towards them. 

Naomi dropped like a bag of cement and wept like—a very runny bag of cement. Binal’s arms were around her.

“You’re okay, dear sweet girl. You’re okay,” she said.

“Carcer Ten is eighteen minutes out,” Didacos was saying to Sem, as they stood facing each other. “Bogeys are one level up, but the level has air.”

“I don’t like it. This is a pincer movement. These constructs have strategy. They have direction.”

“Not from any necromancer. There’s still no thanergy here, aside from poor Twain.” 

“Somehow they’ve been mechanized—”

“Why would anything even be out here, let alone—”

“It’s me. It’s my fault,” said Naomi. There was a moment of amazing silence as they all looked at her. And in that moment, far off, came the baleful clang of a ceiling hatch thrown open.

“They’re here,” said Sem.

“Speak, Twixt. Quickly,” said Didacos.

“The head we found. I think it’s controlling them.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I turned it on. I spoke to it. It’s called Ascu.”

There was a new silence. This one broken only by the faint chitter of calcium phosphate on steel. A lot of it, at distance.

“Where’s the head now?” said Didacos, slowly.

“Under my bed.”

The former cavalier looked thoughtful.

    “I need something sharp,” she said. “There’s nothing, some piping perhaps, but I can’t work with—”

    “I can give you something sharp.” They all turned to Binal. “What? I didn’t say it would be pretty.”

    “Guys. Don’t be silly,” said Sem. “We should just wait here, they might not even find us.”

    “If I can reach the head, I can end all of this. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it, Twixt?”

    Naomi nodded. Didacos looked to the necromancer.

    “Do it,” she said.

    “Look away. This is going to be the absolute grossest,” said Binal. Everyone stared as she shuffled on her knees to the body of Twain, and sighed. “I always liked Morty. He didn’t ought to have suffocated. I wouldn’t do this for the Cohort, you know. But I’ll do it for you. He should give me just enough.” And to herself, sotto voce: “Don’t overthink the River.”

    She pulled back Twain’s visor and closed his too-wide eyes. She inhaled, and reached into his lifeless mouth, peeling his lower lip with her thumb. She screwed her eyes closed, and began muttering something too soft to hear, like she was racking her brain for the right word. 

    All at once, one of the corpse’s lower incisors bloomed. The tooth spurted straight up, like the fastest plant stem in the universe, growing from the flowerbed of Twain’s jaw. Within about five seconds, the white column was at least a meter tall. The size of a rapier, Naomi realized. And sure enough, a few seconds after that, the gleaming construct flattened into a curving sword. Binal’s eyes were puckering grotesquely, blood beading at the lids; she was holding her breath. The base swelled into a grip, a strand of glossy hydroxyapatite arcing off to form a basket, and the blade—well, the blade was sharp. It tapered to an edge that made Naomi wince just to look at.

    Binal exhaled. She reached down, grasped the handle, and tugged the whole thing out of Twain with a sigh, wiping the blood from her eyes on her other sleeve. She stood and offered it to Didacos. “Pure enamel. The loveliest stuff in the world. I’m sorry there’s no offhand.”

    “A dead man’s grin,” whispered the cavalier as she took it, and held it up to inspect. There was still a single tooth stuck to the base of the pommel. “Flawless work, Petulia. This will do nicely.”

    “I warn you, it will take a lot to impress me,” said the adept. “I once watched Marta Dyas take four cavs from the Third in a single—”

    She looked up. There were skeletons in the corridor. Not the whole horde they had tangled with earlier, but still a good number, spaced evenly. The dead and the living saw each other at the same moment. The dead were faster. They set off with everything they had, bone and piston pounding in unison, eyes blazing dementedly, arms outstretched. Naomi, still on the floor, involuntarily backed away on her hands and ass. The creatures were even worse now that she could hear them. But then she caught sight of Didacos, whose whole face was shining. The woman adjusted her ponytail.

    “I taught little Mazza Dyas everything she knew,” she said, calmly. She drew herself up, blade flashing before her face. “Discipline, heedless of trial!” she called. And she sprang.

    She barely used Binal’s pristine, glossy white sword. She went down the corridor like a determined pinball made of body parts: twirling, flipping, leaping with such perfect timing and elegance, such speed and ferocity that all four onlookers gasped. Even Opis Bracer dropped her bulging arms to her sides.

    Every time Janeway Didacos went past a construct, there was the briefest flicker of white, and it more or less exploded. This did not slow her down. Before Naomi could even gather her wits, the woman had reached the end of the corridor, and there were about ten little piles of smashed up bone and robo-parts in her wake. Naomi watched as Didacos spun onto her hands and flip-kicked her own sword like a missile into the final visible skeleton, detonating its sternum on impact. Then she was gone, vanished around the corner, leaving nothing but the distant sound of bone shards on metal.

    The remaining malefactors shared a look.

    Naomi started to limp after the rampaging cavalier, clutching her ribs and trying not to look at Twain, and the little gap in his front teeth. She heard others coming along behind her. Following the turns of the corridor produced scene after scene of murdered construct. The occasional light fixture flickered ominously where it had been pierced by stray bone shrapnel. Before long, they reached the area that—for the last few weeks, at least—had constituted the entirety of Naomi’s personal living space. Didacos knelt by the bed, head in her hands, as if at bed-time prayer. Her jumpsuit was in tatters over one leg, and she had what looked like burn marks on her right wrist. 

    “It’s not here,” she said.

    Naomi hurried forward and crouched beside her. It was dark under the bed, and entirely devoid of soma control units of any kind.

    “Well that’s not good,” came Binal’s voice from behind her. “No one ever wants an evil fake head on the loose.”

    Naomi clutched at the crown of her head. “Oh God. What have I done?”

    “We have to get back to the airlock, and hold it until backup arrives,” said Didacos, slowly. She pinched the bridge of her nose, then reached for her sword. The nasty edge was sharp as ever, but it was badly chipped in places. She stood up. 

“Where’s Sem?” she asked. There was a round of surprised head swiveling.

    “I thought he was behind us,” said Bracer.

    “Not this again! Can’t that dumb jock tell when it’s the right time for a mysterious disappearance? For the Resurrector’s sake, let’s retrace our steps,” whined Binal.

They were about half way back to the airlock when more skeletons forced them to run. Naomi sluiced into fresh tears.

    “Keep it together, Twixt!” yelled the cav. “I’ll protect your retreat. Just move!”

    “Don’t shout at her!” screamed Binal. “Anyone would be upset! Those skelebots are ghastly, bordering on horrid!” She gestured at the rushing wall of limbs; the swarm was back to full strength, the skelebots crushing each other against the walls in their frenzied advance. Naomi and Binal, meanwhile, tottered along like a pair of dowager empresses, secretions of various consistencies competing to moisten their faces, hair and clothing.

    All at once, Naomi felt her failing body divorce itself, gravitationally, from the featureless steel flooring. She was hoisted, at the hip, and immediately she was moving—flying, at pace—away from the horde. Her brain could see what had happened, but her mind was returning an error code. She was under one of Officer Bracer’s leviathan arms, like a prize hog. It felt like transport in a hydraulic construction engine—undignified but very secure, wedged between ridges of polymer-and-carbon-fiber-clad muscle. Dimly, she was aware that poor Binal was under the other arm. Bracer’s mesomorphic legs powered down the corridor, generating a wind from sheer air resistance. The next thing she knew, the first of the airlock doors was hissing open, and she was returned to the ground.

    “Haz,” said Bracer, simply, as the two regular-sized women stared at her in near-sacred awe. Binal absently started climbing into one of the offered suits, and Naomi did hers back up. Their reverie was disturbed as a fourth woman vaulted head-first into the small compartment, sending flakes of broken bone flying around them like confetti. She stumbled straight into Naomi, who crumpled instantly.

    “Close it close it close it!” shrieked Didacos. Her hair had come unbound and was encrusting her face and shoulders in feral disarray: possibly the most dismaying image Naomi had yet witnessed. Her jumpsuit was nothing but black smithereens, smoking slightly in a couple of places, and there were vivid claw marks across much of the skin revealed beneath. Blood curled down her neck from a wound on her head, and she couldn’t stand; she levered herself into a sitting position against the wall of the airlock, gripping her right leg and pressing her lips together with such painful severity that Naomi worried she might fuse her jaw.

    Bracer pressed a button and the door zipped closed. “Haz,” she said again—and a hundred postal cyber-constructs smashed into the plex. Binal screamed. But the material was space-grade. It held. 

Naomi tried to ignore the hideous clamor that besieged them as she helped the battered cavalier negotiate another haz. It was grim work, Didacos stifling her own screams with little success as she forced her broken leg into the puke-orange fabric. 

“If Henry were here—she’d fucking love this,” Didacos whimpered, finally, with tears in her eyes.

“Henry?” said Naomi.

“Her old adept,” Binal whispered into Naomi’s ear, while Didacos stared wetly into the middle distance. “Jane had to kill her when she lost her mind in the middle of a war zone. Just awful.”

“Is everyone ready?” rumbled Bracer over the rattle of numberless calcified limbs smiting the wall behind her. Naomi tore her eyes away from the sniffling cav.

“What about Sem? Shouldn’t we wait?” said Naomi.

“Malefactor Sem is over there,” said Bracer, pointing out the other door.

They all turned towards the plex looking out into the ginormous, cave-like hangar bay, where Naomi had first arrived what seemed like thirteen billion years ago. Bracer hit the button and the second door opened to give them a better view, depressurizing the airlock with a now-familiar rush and causing the sound of rabid skelebots to vanish mercifully away. The great cavern hulked before them, its distant mouth open to the starry nothingness of deep space.

And there was a ship. An honest-to-Emperor Cohort shuttle, large and robust, with a lovely familiar bandolier of inanimate bones strung in a pattern around its center, and the name Proserpine clearly printed. The docking ramp was extended, and there on the threshold was Turnus Sem. 

They gamboled, doddered, strode and limped piteously to the shuttle’s base. There were tremendous white lights around the edge of the hangar, but they were so far away that the ship and its interior were nothing but grades of liminal ash colors. Naomi couldn’t make out Sem’s face behind the visor, but his mocking too-cool-for-school posture was unmistakable.

“So you made it. Huh,” he said, and she froze. His voice had changed. Binal and Didacos moved past her, up onto the base of the ramp, but Bracer stayed behind. The undead crowd trying to kill them still vibrated in Naomi’s soles, and shrieked at the center of her conscious terror. But Sem was rapidly commanding more of her remaining ability to panic uncontrollably. He shifted position and a black object in his right hand became visible. Now everyone stopped.

“Turny, what’re those?” said Binal, carefully. Naomi thought she was pointing at what he was holding, but the angle was wrong. Her gloved finger trembled in the direction of something on the shuttle floor, which Naomi couldn’t see from her lower position. In the freezing vacuum of the hangar, there was utter, icepick silence.

“Answer her, man,” coughed Didacos. “Why did you leave us? What have you done, Sem?”

“That’s not my name,” he said. He stepped forward. Naomi could see his face. His bleached hair was as lovingly ruffled as ever. But his eyes had become boiling singularities of hatred. Naomi wasn’t expecting it when the next voice came from behind her.

“Malefactor Turnus Sem,” said Bracer, her voice steady and low. “You are in possession of a weapon, contrary to regulations. You will remand it to my custody with immediate effect.”

He looked down slowly to his hand at his hip.

“You’ll take it from my cold dead hands, scum,” he said. “And that’s not. My. Name.”

Binal reached out a hand.

“Turny, whatever’s happening, whatever you’ve done, it’s okay. We won’t hate you.”

“That’s not my—”

“What’s your stupid name, then!?” wailed the necromancer.

The pilot formerly known as Turnus took another step forward.

“My name... is If You Are Grateful, I Will Surely Increase You There's A Rockabilly Party On Saturday Night The River Tiber Foaming. Say it.”

There was a very long silence this time. Naomi legitimately wondered if anyone would ever talk again, anywhere.

“Well I’m not calling you that,” said Binal.

“Of course you won’t. I’ve lived among you perverts for over a decade. Never once saw a one of you show the slightest ability to comprehend anything outside of your tiny, dried up bubble of obscenity.”

“I’m so fucking lost,” sighed the adept at the bottom of the ramp. “Can you just give that ancient—thing—to Sir and let’s all get in the goddamn rescue ship. You can explain on the way to Carcer Ten.”

“You’re not getting on the ship,” said the man at the top of the ramp. “I spent years getting myself here for a single purpose, and now that purpose is accomplished. I’m finally leaving this murdered system. You four weren’t so bad, as necroshits go, so I won’t kill you unless you make me.”

“But why? What was this all for?” Suddenly Binal gasped. “Wait—you’re the saboteur, aren’t you? You cut the wires! Um. No, I still don’t get it. Why would you cut the wires?”

“To get us on the surface. So that I—someone—would find Ascu,” said Naomi, quietly.

“I don’t have to explain myself,” said not-Sem.

“You have it, don’t you? That’s what this is all about.”

“It was my one mission. I will die for it, if I must.” He raised the short black object, pointed squarely at Didacos, despite the fact that the cav was crippled, leaning heavily on Binal and seemingly on the point of passing out. “I do this for the memory of humanity—”

His voice faded to a comical wheeze, and he fell to his knees as if he’d just got the worst news of his life. The weapon fell to the ground beside him, and he clutched at his throat. “Stop,” he said.

Binal stepped forward with one arm raised, eyes squeezed closed and fingers outstretched as if jets of fire were about to streak out of them. It would have looked much more impressive if she wasn’t wearing a sagging carrot orange haz.

“You might have got away with it, Rockabilly Numbnuts,” she said, “if you hadn’t been so dense as to kill two Cohort officers not ten feet away from a necromancer of the Second House!”

“Let me go, witch,” rasped un-Sem. The color was sandpapering itself from his skin.

Naomi was wide eyed. She was watching Didacos. The swordswoman was standing on her own again. Her back had regained its upright Second House stature, and both legs were firmly planted on the ground.

“Thank you, Petulia Binal,” she said. “Excellent transfer link. I feel quite rejuvenated. I’ll take it from here.”

Somehow, Naomi hadn’t even noticed that Didacos had been holding her burnt and bloodied enamel sword this whole time. It had seen better days—figuratively speaking, of course; it was less than an hour old—and a good few inches were missing off the tip. Nevertheless, she raised it up and marched towards the stricken nega-Sem. Binal exhaled and lowered her arm. With hindsight, this was an error.

In the half-second before Didacos reached her target, once-Sem twitched his right hand. It came up holding the black object and its index finger clenched twice on the trigger.

Naomi flinched, but without air there was a surreal lack of noise. There was, in fact, nothing at all to explain why both Didacos and Binal were hurled off the shuttle ramp as if slapped by God himself. Binal simply staggered backwards and collapsed on her rump, while Didacos went briefly up, like she'd been punched squarely underneath the jaw, her feet fully departing from the ground as she traced an arc and landed head-first on the cold hangar floor.

Naomi was paralyzed, like all the moisture had been instantly sucked from her eyes, mouth and brain. The man with the gun scrambled to his feet and leapt into the shuttle, where he grabbed a dangling black box and pushed the button, causing the ramp to close with startling velocity.

“Ow. God, what was that?” said Binal, absently.

Didacos didn’t move. Naomi hurried over to her, only to shit herself as the woman she feared might be dead gasped and sat up. Didacos patted herself all over, mainly around the head. There was a nasty white streak etched across her visor, razor-straight.

“Glancing shot,” said the cav, breathing heavily. “Stupid. Lucky. Plex shouldn’t have held.”

They looked up as a new light lit their faces. The rear engines on the shuttle were spooling up.

“He’s getting away,” murmured Didacos.

“He’s got Ascu,” said Naomi.

The Proserpine rose evenly off the hangar floor. It got to about head-height, and then it stopped. It tried to ascend further, but it was struggling, like it was being tugged back to ground. Naomi crouched to look beneath the engines.

Opis Bracer had one of the exterior ventilation tubes embraced between her gargantuan, elephantine arms. The veins were bulging down the shaven sides of her head. It took Naomi’s brain a few moments to acknowledge the truth that she was single handedly wrestling the spaceship.

“You are not. Cleared. For departure,” she snarled between teeth gritted like heavy machinery.

The spaceship was losing. It kept trying to push up, only to be dragged inexorably further back than where it started. At the same time, Janeway Didacos rolled lithely under the main engines and started hacking at them with her blade. Mostly it glanced off reinforced steel, but there was the occasional interesting flare of sparks.

Inside the shuttle, can’t-believe-it’s-not-Sem seemed to have realized his predicament. He stopped toying with the landing thrusters and hit the deep space booster. The effect was rapid and dramatic. The Proserpine shot forwards, scoring a deep line across one engine where Didacos was holding the sword, and dragging Carcer Officer Bracer along with it. She locked her legs, digging her heavy boots into the welded sheets of the hangar floor, which began to furrow up around them like it was flimsy. She was literally slowing the ship down, even at full power. She was water-skiing on steel. Didacos was already up and running after them.

They were a good way towards the mouth of the hangar when Naomi, squinting, saw the giantess fling one leg out to the left. The whole shuttle immediately veered right, pivoting around her. It struggled to correct itself, rotated, nicked the floor with its starboard fins, and flipped ass-over-end four times before exploding against the cave wall.

The wreckage went everywhere, big chunks of metal and globs of plasma spewing across much of the cavernous space, not to mention pinwheel bits of bone. A ferocious cloud of dust billowed towards them, engulfing Didacos who was about halfway to the impact site, and spreading to an invidious haze. An almost intact battery array, charred around the edges and still sparking, skittered over the floor and stopped a few feet away from where Naomi gawped—apparently the space equivalent of a burning wagon wheel.

The tremors of tumbling debris and metal screaming as it cooled were still dying away when Naomi heard Binal say, “What a shitshow.”

Something in her voice gave Naomi pause. She turned. Binal was on her back, knees bent upwards, as if she were in bed enjoying a good book. One hand held a roll of thick black tape. Several lengths of this had been applied in a hasty patch to her midriff.

“Um, Petulia? What happened?” said Naomi.

“Just a gutshot, my sweet girl,” Binal replied wetly. “I’m still breathing, it seems. I came prepared, after what happened to poor Mortimer.”

Naomi knelt down and looked through Binal’s visor into deep, storm-blue eyes. She grappled the necromancer’s head and shoulders into her lap with somewhat embarrassing effort. “You’re hurt,” she said.

“Well there’s a ball in my intestines, and not the fun kind. I actually don’t know if it’s fatal, it’s sort of exciting. The lack of escape ship isn’t looking great though.”

Naomi looked from her stricken cellmate to the smoking blast radius, and then up to the plex of the airlock door, where the skelebots still pressed as frantically as ever. She felt despair grip her like the onset of hypothermia. And like hypothermia, the icy touch of oblivion felt familiar, numbing, fuzzy.

“It’s happening again,” she whispered.

“What do you mean?” said the dying girl in her thighs.

“I’m losing everyone I care about.”

“Oh my dear. You never told us why you—ran away.”

“They died,” said Naomi, and she left her body, sinking into the cavern floor and watching her own lips move as she went. “They were only a few out of eighteen thousand, but they were my whole universe. I should have been with them.” She was affrighted by her own expression, an almost archetypal mask of misery. “I’m not strong, like you. I can’t take this.”

Binal reached a weak nylon hand up to Naomi’s plex face. They lay in the middle of a smoldering space cave, hundreds of ghouls baying for their blood nearby.

“You are strong, Naomi Twixt. And you are gorgeous. You were wasted on us.”

“Is there nothing you can do?” Naomi simpered, unable to wipe away the tears that fogged her visor.

“Used all the juice on that ass-pilot-traitor, whatever he is.”

“What about the skeletons?”

“Not a drop of thanergy in the lot of them. They’re old, Naoms. Very, very old. You know, I think they might be pre-Resurrection. Seems right, the forgotten dead reclaiming what’s theirs. I’m afraid we’re just two girls on a rock with no spaceships and no magic. Maybe someone else will come for us. Probably too late for me though.”

Naomi was sobbing openly now. “I thought my old ship might be here. But it’s gone too. Someone must have taken it.”

“Unbelievable! Are you done feeling sorry for yourself?”

She blinked. That wasn’t Petulia’s voice.

Previously-Sem walked out of the pall of dust that still filled the hangar. His haz was a terrible wasteland of grime and burn marks, he was limping badly, and his voice came as an edemic groan. Worst of all, he still held his ye olde ball-shooter in a remarkably steady arm, for someone who’d just been ground zero of a fireball, and it was pointed at the back of another haz: the one filled by Didacos. She walked a few steps ahead of him, hands above her head, swordless.

“Yay, the gang’s all back together,” said Binal under her breath.

“The fucking ogre ruined everything,” said the soot-stained pilot. “Now we have to get back in there and call another ship.” He flapped the gun at the airlock. Naomi noticed that the red-eyed droids had smashed through the first door and were now pressing against the outermost plex, swarming around the small room like way too many fish in a bowl. There were also worrying bumps and deformations in the steel wall either side of the airlock, suggesting other avenues of attack.

Binal was chuckling. “You wanna go back? You first, evil flyboy.”

“There is a way in,” said Naomi. They all looked at her as she got to her feet. “You just have to destroy Ascu.”

“Absolutely not,” said the evil flyboy. 

“None of us can get in there with all those skelebots,” Naomi thought her voice sounded upsettingly tranquil. “But if we depower them, we can call for help again. Get you a ship out of here. Another one for the rest of us, maybe? If you don’t, we’re just going to sit here til our air runs out or the constructs break through and tear our faces off.”

“Listen to her,” said Didacos, darkly.

Diet-Sem grunted with pain. His trigger hand was shaking slightly. His free hand reached into a pouch at his waist. Out came the head. Naomi didn’t feel fear or anguish at the sight of it. She felt nauseous. The greasy, abyssal eyes were still lit by white circlets, sliding silently across the mechanical face to stare right at her.

“Why are you doing this?” she stammered, before anyone else could act.

Ascu’s voice came directly into the little speaker in the haz by her ear, like a nightmare. Naomi wondered what kind of woman could ever feel so detached, so void of pain, to have a voice like that.

“The experiment suffered a breach of confidentiality. All witnesses must be purged, by order of J.G.”

“Wait,” said Didacos in her space suit, the gun still pointed at the back of her head. “This has all been over a privacy clause?”

“It always has been,” said the voice in their comms.

“Ascu, when did you receive that order?” asked Naomi.

“At five thirty-one AM on March eleventh, twenty ninety-four,” said the head.

“Twenty… Is that two thousand years after the Resurrection?”

“I do not understand the question.”

Binal spoke up. Her voice was a little weaker than before. “Noams, it doesn’t know about the Resurrection. I’m telling you, this is from the world that was.”

Naomi wanted to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Ascu, your orders are more than ten thousand years out of date. You’ve been off for a myriad. You can stand down!”

“I have received no countermanding instructions,” it said, immediately and calmly.

“Enough! Destroy the abomination already, Sem!” barked Didacos. “Lives are on the line!”

“Let me think!” he yelled back. “I don’t answer to you or your wizard cult anymore.”

Naomi realized she had begun to circle around to fake-Sem’s side.

“There’s nothing to think about!” Didacos was screaming. “It’s us or the thing! Whoever you work for, you’re no use to them disembowelled!”

“This relic is my mission. I will complete my mission.” The man sounded tired now, as Naomi crept out of his line of sight, and bent to the floor, where a wickedly serrated wedge of blackened shuttle lay by her feet.

“You don’t have to do it yourself. Hand it over, we’ll smash it,” gurgled Binal.

“I give you nothing!” He hesitated. “We’re going to open the door. Fight our way through. Hole up inside. Wait for backup.” It was deathly quiet on the comm. He looked down at the oil-eyed skull in his hand. He inhaled. “Did you hear me? Move! Or I’ll—”

Naomi lunged—and the last airlock door gave way. The whole capsule, along with a large chunk of wall either side, burst like an eggshell. The steel panels, white door frames and shards of crystalline plex sped outwards in a joyous rush of explosive decompression, along with nine hundred roboticized skeletons. The whole tableau was completely silent—until the shockwave hit.

With both hands wrapped around the hunk of burnt Proserpine she’d acquired, Naomi wasn’t sure whether she thrust at discount-Sem, or whether he flew back into her makeshift weapon. There was a very brief sensation of ripping haz, and then the tsunami smothered them all in a cocoon of pure noise and movement. The entire atmosphere of Carcer Nine rushed out at them, and it brought bones. If they’d thought skelebots were bad, flying skelebots were much worse. The only upside was that everyone was flying at the same speed. They span down the length of the hangar, the four hazzed humans just inches out of reach of the crest of the osseous wave, the outstretched carpals and phalanges, the snapping skulls and the lights that burned like embers in each socket.

The whole stupid cavalcade soared over the lip of the great cavern, and then they were in space. The air died away, movement slowed to a ponderous rotation, and they danced among the dead as the asteroid they called Carcer Nine gently exhaled them. The constructs still clawed desperately to rend the flesh of the living, but they had nothing on which to find purchase. They just hung there, their crazed movements spotlit by Dominicus as they came out of the shadow and into the light, making little whorls in the ice vapor all around them.

“Am I alive?” asked Petulia Binal.

“I—I think we’re okay,” said Naomi. “Janeway?”

“I’m here.”

“Uh… Turnus?”

There was no response. 

“I think I—tore his suit,” said Naomi, softly. “I killed him.”

“You did well, Twixt. I’m sorry I misjudged you when we met,” said Didacos, like the emotionally stunted father that she was. Naomi continued to spin slowly in her haz, giving her a view that alternated between starlit nothingness and a giant space rock foregrounded by impotent skeletons.

“I just want to say, we might be about to slowly asphyxiate in the merciless void of space, but this has been one of the most exciting days of my life. I hated every second of it. I love you both so much,” said Binal.

After a long pause, Noami said, “‘One of the’?”

That’s when she saw Gregoria.

The rickety old space box didn’t look like it was moving, but soon it was clear that it was getting bigger, speeding up from the darkness of the asteroid. Before long, it came alongside Naomi and opened its side hatch. She pulled herself into the loving embrace of the artificial gravity, falling straight to her knees, feeling the familiar rust and texture of the floor panels. The entire plex window at the front of the shuttle was obscured by the mass of Opis Bracer, who had seated herself at the controls, hunching over to avoid knocking her head against the ceiling. 

Naomi was too stunned to speak as they collected Didacos and Binal. When it was done, the little cabin repressurized, and they all tore off their suits to reveal shaking bodies drenched in sweat—and in Petulia’s case, large amounts of blood.

“Opis, you saved us all,” exclaimed Didacos.

“Sir,” growled Opis.

“But how? Where did you—?”

“Stored it on the surface, to prevent unauthorized egress,” she growled again. “Carcer accommodations have been rendered unviable. Malefactors will be remanded to the custody of the nearest available Cohort agents.”

“My heroes,” said Binal, very faintly, her face just horribly pale now that it could be seen without the haz. Naomi and Didacos were kneeling either side of her, and she smiled at them. “Wake me up when we get there, yes?”

Her eyes closed.

Leonard Dimidius, ranked Captain of the Cohort, was having a terrible day. His to-do list consisted of one item, and that was to radio Trentham and explain to Admiral Amphor how an entire goddamn carcer had apparently self-destructed on his watch, in frankly fantastical circumstances he still didn’t understand.

    He was sulkily procrastinating when things got much worse. Ensign Doublets, his aide, poked a head through his office door.

    “Captain, there’s a visitor,” said Doublets. “You’re not going to like it.”

    “Spit it out,” sighed Dimidius.

    “Gentlewoman by the name of Lydia, Sir. Er—Lydia Octella.”

    “A goddamn Templar?” he cried. “No way. I’m busy. I’m away. I’m on the front, tell her I’m on the front!”

    “She knows you’re here, Sir. And she knows about Carcer Nine. I’m afraid I can’t—”

    The Ensign ended with a strangled yerk! as his head was yanked back behind the door. A moment later, it opened to reveal a spindly, mail-clad woman, hooded by a cloak that was so bleached it could have been used to terrify enemy bacteria into surrendering without a fight.

    “It is a brave man who seeks to deceive the White Glass,” she said. 

    Dimidius stood and attempted a thin smile.

    “Ah, you must be Octella. It’s always a pleasure to work with the Eighth House. How can my office assist the Templars today?”

“I doubt you can even assist the pagans you report to,” sneered Octella. “All I need from you is to bring me to the one who found it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you—”

“This is your last warning about deception, Second,” said the armored woman. It seemed to Dimidius that her clothes began to glow even whiter. He gulped.

“Ah. Well if you’re referring to the malefactors involved with the little incident this morning, I’m sure introductions can be arranged. I believe they’re at a Field medical center.”

“Designation?”

“Medical Ten, if I recall. But I’ll need to confirm before—nope, fine, walk away, Templar arse,” he said, as the blinding woman simply turned and shut the door behind her. Dimidius sat heavily and rubbed his eyes. “That’s just typical,” he said to himself. “That’s just bloody typical.”

A brief statement on Harrow the Ninth

HARROW THE NINTH (stupidly good) is a new book by Tamsyn Muir and a sequel to GIDEON THE NINTH (also stupidly good).

Apparently this "Muir" is a living mortal human despite her John-like ability to do with letters of the alphabet what the arc of the covenant does with nazi faces. Tamsyn Muir routinely writes sentences that are so utterly perfect in their construction that the reader has no choice but to close the book, stand up, walk outside and just laugh into the street. She selects words so unexpected and ideal that one experiences an overwhelming urge to found a new religion just so they can dedicate the rest of their life to praying before the altar of that one word. Her writing is so exquisite that I would not be surprised to find transcendental joy in reading her shopping lists or her exhaustive comparative study of laundry detergents.

As it happens, HARROW is neither of these, but rather a cosmic emo fantasy novel-cum-space opera about necromancers and denial. And skeletons. This is a book that goes through originality and out the other side. It treats hugely fresh and mindblowing ideas with - simultaneously - both flippant ease and staggering richness. The text is absurdly, gorgeously technical and dense. It is the pinnacle of an author's commitment to her premises. It's indulgent as all hell, but you only wish it were more so. Every goddamn line drips with sensual meaning and import - yet in the same breath delights in the most lighthearted of jokes and self-depreciations. There's a whole sex-scene metaphor that simply consists of someone cutting off someone else's arm and rebuilding their arm bones. Genius from start to finish.

Muir builds her story like a dominatrix; grappling with her narrative feels like nothing so much as badass sadism (on her part) and puppy-eyed masochism (on the reader's). The scope of the hidden truths and multifaceted plotlines is spooled out like a delicious smell that causes the audience to float involuntarily along its vapour trail, transporting us to a higher state of pure, cataclysmic yearning for answers that are constantly teased, intimated and whispered just beyond our hearing. And whenever a juicy morsel is finally tossed to the reader in the form of actual exposition, it is always accompanied by an entire dumpster truck of ambiguity and new questions that just make you punch yourself in the eyeballs for having been so stupid to have started this torture-book without first waiting for ALECTO. I love every part of this process so completely.

The cover art for HARROW THE NINTH is like the best art that anyone's ever made in any context in all of human history. Just as a side note.

A comparison of all 18 shots in the new Lion King trailer

If there's any iron law you can depend upon, it's that Disney will ruin the classics with needless remakes. It is one of those horrifying but inevitable acts of waste and folly that define our species, like the urge to build giant statues or hold referendums on ultra-complex constitutional change. The only thing to do is ignore it and try not to think about poverty levels in Los Angeles.

But the new Lion King trailer stands out for me among the regular follies; a shot-for-shot remake, it seems to have given up on the paltry if abortive attempts at originality seen in the previous remakes, instead doubling down on reproducing the film in every detail, adding nothing more than 25 years of progress in animation technology.

Needless and profligate as such an endeavour surely is, it would be comprehensible. People like to see beautiful images. Fair enough. What's more troubling than the incredible pains it takes to hew identically to the original, is that it looks way worse. It's extraordinary. Every image is so much less moving and beautiful than the hand-drawn versions we know and love from 1994.

Allow me to demonstrate in excessive detail. Others have already created comparison videos of the new and old versions (here is an example) but I want to go further. What's required, clearly, is an analysis of every single shot so far made public.


Shot 1: The sun rises





The very opening frames of the Lion King (1994) are among the most evocative and memorable in modern cinema. Who among us does not remember the sight of a vivid crimson sky, a blazing furnace of a sun rising majestically, rippling like syrup in the thick haze of heat, promising a spectacular African day to come - both in terms of temperature and also dramatic potential. Passionate, primordial, utterly compelling.

The new version does away with that, giving us instead... a sunrise. That's about all you can say for it. It's quite a nice sunrise, but that's like calling a superhero movie unrealistic. It's not an achievement to look nice when you're a sunrise.

If I saw this sunrise in real life, I would probably watch for a few seconds - whereas if I saw the bright red fireball of the original, I would fall to my knees and rethink everything I'm doing with my life.


2: Antelopes looking up

Amazing how a cartoon can look so real and true, while an ultra-realistic computer render of the same image looks utterly fake. Would it have been so hard to shoot some actual antelopes instead of spending trillions of terabytes simulating them? They could probably have found some in the LA zoo.

But there's another pressing question here. Just as with the previous shot, the new version is a replica of the old one but so much less compelling and mythic. But why replicate it at all? Even in the original, this shot was always slightly confusing - if the animals have this great kingdom and they're all conscious enough to be aware of things like monarchs, lines of succession and christenings, then why do they look up in surprise? This isn't a random earthquake, they must have known that today was the big day, since they are all convoying over great distance to attend. While the "looking up in surprise" thing nicely conveys excitement, it makes little sense in hindsight. It would have been a perfect place to try something new. You can convey excitement by packing a suitcase.


3. Elephants beneath Kilimanjaro

Pop quiz: which is cooler, a herd of majestic elephants waking past an awesome mountain, or a herd of majestic elephants waking past an awesome mountain wreathed in mist beneath a summit of flaming glory?


4. Birds over marshland

This shot I'm willing to concede is a draw. While the original version is vastly more sensational in both scope and colour, the new version adds a camera tilt which I can't help but enjoy, and the ending image of silhouettes against the sun is a nice touch. At least in this one shot we can see an attempt at capturing the splendour needed for this sequence to work. Still, the new version misses the sun's powerful reflection, and loses the sense of perspective and hugeness conveyed by the very high camera in the original, capturing multiple layers of flock.


5. Loyal subjects rejoice

This is another shot that isn't totally hopeless. I like the sense of a big celebration in the new version and again the framing against the sun is working in its favour. Still, the original is clearly closer to the mark, as it spans over multiple shots showing each of the different tribes united not by physical proximity or being mixed up randomly among each other, but by their support of the new heir. It's one thing to ask us to believe that all the prey animals love their predator overlord, it's another to pretend that the herds all join into a single jumbled crowd.


6. Simba sees his future

For some reason the trailer breaks away from the Circle of Life sequence at this point to foreshadow later parts of the plot, specifically the moment where Simba steps in dad's footprint and realises there are large paws he will need to fill.

Once again, the new version is visually mundane and hopelessly realistic when compared to the original. But story-wise it's weird as well. In the original, Simba feels his paw touch the larger print, and flinches back in surprise and dismay. In the new version, we can clearly see his other front foot come up alongside the first, suggesting he hasn't even noticed where it landed, or is unfazed. I'm sure when we see the full scene, Simba will react appropriately, but here it's our first glimpse of weirdly alien, animal body language which does a terrible job of showing the little human details we need from these characters.


7. Mufasa's Bane

Another weird jump to this shot, and one that brazenly plays on our greatest childhood trauma. It would hardly be worth showing some running wildebeest at this point if we didn't know what doom came with them.

The shot itself is perfectly functional, and I can even forgive it for indulging in the modern taste for swooping, fast-moving cameras - a departure from the steady and ominous pan of the original shot. Interesting fact: the original stampede sequence used rudimentary computer generation tech, and you can see it if you look for details. The animals are all too similar in their movements; they feel "computer random" rather than "nature random".

None of that matters, of course, when you first watch the movie, since the overall effect of an unstoppable force moving into a dark gully of death is so powerful. If the new version wants to go for more immediate adrenaline and less building dread, that's not the end of the world, but it is clearly worse. The rich ochre palette of the original has also been sacrificed in favour of indistinguishable browns and greys, but what do you expect at this point?


8. Pride Rock

We're back at the intro sequence. The original version is another shot that suffers if you look too closely at the details. Our first glimpse of Pride Rock is breathtaking (and timed to coincide with the mighty Circle of Life chorus in the music), with its rapid crest of the hill and Zazu soaring across the foreground. But the approaching animals on the ground are kind of ugly and weird - though they are clearly in separate groups in later on, here they are jumbled and blotchy, in terms of the colour of the overall frame.

The new version escapes this fate by accident. Since its colouring is so bland and undifferentiated anyway, the mixed up animals can't ruin the shot. Still, these are relatively unimportant details. The original version is still obviously superior thanks to its more dramatic camera movement and superb use of an avian audience proxy. The new one is staid and tepid in comparison.


9. Enter Rafiki





Oh god. Oh dear god.

Where my primary concern with the prologue images leading up to this point is the use of colour and photography to create the sense of epic grandeur so vital to all Disney success, at this point a new problem emerges to dwarf and consume the first. I believe I can sum it up in three words:

ANIMALS AREN'T CHARACTERS.

Or at least, they're not dramatic characters like you need in a Disney movie, especially not a Disney movie supposedly inspired by Shakespeare. Animals can be characters in a documentary, but that's a very different class of storytelling that clearly won't work in this format. What you need in a Disney movie about coming of age and fighting for justice is not some random monkey. You need a mentor. You need someone with quirks and mystery, a trickster, an archetype. In other words, you need a human.

All of the characters from the original are humans, exaggeratedly so. In this scene, Rafiki emerges over the rock and his tail is bent to show his eccentric nature, he immediately cocks his head to show he is both thoughtful and roguish. He leans on a staff to show he is advanced in years and therefore wise. And then he gives Mufasa a big hug. They are old friends. And you can see all of this right there in the drawing. The cues we are trained to recognise. The human emotions, the human faces, the human styles of non-verbal communication.

I'm sure that the new film will try to show all of the same character traits for Rafiki, but they won't be anything like as effective because we won't be able to see it. It'll just be a monkey. I mean look at this guy. This is the shot they've selected to show off the new Rafiki. I can't imagine a blander looking hominid. He's so utterly dull! Expressionless! No glimmer of human feeling, or any trace of character. I literally can't see his eyes or mouth, and this is a medium close-up looking right at us. He's just an animal. And animals aren't characters.


10. Simba awakes





This shot sort of works because it's super cute, and that's all you really need at this point. But why eschew the nice slow zoom, or crop out the smiling parents on the edge of frame? It simply makes the cuteness wilt a little under the burden of static boredom.


11. Ritual

I quite like the roots as an image, but the faint mist of red dust that follows is uninspiring - especially when compared to the explosive display of the original version, where the unidentifiable red husk-goo fruit is rent asunder in a blinding flash against the white sun, a moment of pure creation, like the primordial fire. The dripping gunk inside is the thick red blood of life, of the kingdom, of Simba's birthright, which seems to have shrivelled to a dry powder in the new version.


12. The chosen one anointed

Not a huge difference here. The original version is slightly betrayed by Simba's cheesy grin, which is not very newborn of him, and this is a rare instance where the animal non-comprehension of the new version works in its favour. But the point from the previous shot about the benefits of goop vs dust is more apparent here than ever.


13 and 14. The nation meets its prince

Reverse shot:

In the original, these shots are combined as a single long camera movement from behind to in front of Simba. The same may well be true of the new film, so I won't judge it by the trailer's decision to chop it in two - and to show the front side first when clearly you need to start from behind so that by the time you get to Simba's face you can fully comprehend his awe.

And that's just it. Simba is awestruck. Look at that face. In just a few lines, the animator conveys not just awe but concern, curiosity, fear and a sense of something momentous. The cub in the new version is merely looking at stuff. Being an animal, we have no idea what it's thinking.

Side note: the new version seems to take place on a sunny day. It has quietly excised the grand billowing clouds from the original version, through which the sun beams fix Simba in a godly spotlight, and which also foreshadow his future destiny as Rain King.


15. The subjects swear fealty

Seriously - what are these animals doing in the new version? It seems they have been struck by a collective bout of neck cramps. Mufasa should execute them for failing to bow properly.


16. Pride Rock: Redux

God rays aside, I'll just note that the original version holds on the royal family for much longer before zooming away, while the new version almost immediately begins with the shot's primary focus as nothing but dots in the distance.


17 and 18. Bring the rain





I've combined a couple of shots for this one, because you can't really take them separately. They were stuck on to the end of the trailer as a kind of stinger and I have to say, of the 18 shots Disney have released, these ones make me the most nervous and most certain that the new film is going to but unwatchable.

In these shots, Disney makes it clear that it has totally failed to grasp the dramatic principles that made the first film so great. Not only have they sliced away any trace of the extraordinary emotional richness by replacing human expressions with animals, but they've made Simba give his triumphant rain roar without any rain.

By all that is holy in storytelling, what is this abomination? Surely they haven't missed the point so badly that they think the roar actually causes the rain?! Surely they realise that the roar is not about saving the kingdom, but rather about saving Simba himself. That his journey is one of finding self-belief, remembering who he is and confronting his responsibilities. Simba doesn't have to roar for the rain to come. Simba roars because the rain comes: the rain of clear thinking, of personal growth, of sweeping away all that is flawed within yourself. He brings the rain by making the choice to act, to return and to do what is right. The roar is symbolic - it comes after the victory has been achieved, in celebration and affirmation of it.

Plus - you hardly look badass doing a giant roar if it's not bloody raining!

Equally concerning is this: if there's no rain at the moment of Simba's roar, where is the fire? In the original, Scar's reign is so ruinous that by the time of his downfall the land is being consumed in great firestorms, which are not extinguished until the rain comes. In the shot from the trailer, there's no glow of fire or sign of smoke, and since it hasn't been put out by rain, it must never have started. So am I supposed to believe there's going to be a climactic showdown without fire?

If I had any hope that there was some originality in this movie, then I would be curious about how different the ending must be if they are not using the fire sequence. But I feel confident that what's more likely is that the climax is just the same showdown...simply without the flames of pathetic fallacy that makes it awesome.

Oh, Disney. Oh, oh, Disney.

Response to Film Crit Hulk's Infinity War Piece

Drama is about change and consequence. We need stories to create this drama. There is nothing truer than that.

But there are many vectors of change. We are used to seeing stories where there is a hero, with a flaw, whose experiences and mistakes cause her to suffer clear consequences and change herself – her behaviour, her personality – as a result. An individual who learns an individual lesson.

There is another kind of change – the change of creation. Not a unit that moves from state A to state B, but a unit that is created where there was nothing at all before. A unit that is created from the combination of other units, perhaps.

Film Crit Hulk demands to know: what is Avengers Infinity War about?

It's about teamwork.

How could it not be? How can you not see it? Avengers and Avengers Age of Ultron were about teamwork too. So was the first Guardians of the Galaxy. When it comes to telling stories in shared universes with lots of alpha heroes, it's the only thing that really matters. We're primed for this. We know this. And Infinity War does it better than anyone else has ever done it.

Film Crit Hulk is wrong to idolise the story of Prometheus. This is a fable for an ancient time. Prometheus suffered for his actions – he experienced real consequence, real change – but his actions were not ones he should have suffered for. All he wanted was to help others. To give people a warmth that could comfort them on a winter's night. To alleviate suffering for the powerless masses by taking a tiny portion of what was hoarded by the few. Whether the gods symbolise the powerful or just “fate”, it's still a story told to keep people in line.

We no longer need to tell stories about people suffering for dreaming big, and trying to go beyond their “destiny” (especially when they're doing so to help others). Pretty soon, in the real world, we will see technologies that produce effects as big if not bigger than those in our sci fi movies. When this happens, we don't need to punish the perpetrators but figure out how to deal with the new world we create – together. What the world needs more than anything in the coming future is teamwork. That's why Marvel is telling the most important stories it could be telling right now.

The drama of the MCU is clear and exceptionally effective. A team is born that can do extraordinary things – if it works together. Internal conflict destroys that foundation in Civil War, breaking it into separate parts. Atomised, these parts face a threat that is simply the emotionless personification of destruction, one that intentionally has no relatable psychology that can be reasoned with. Thanos is the extinction of humanity that we will face if we don't work together. And for two hours and forty minutes, that is exactly what the team fails to do. They face the threat as separate parts, one after another, and, as separate parts, it defeats them one by one.

It's a brutally clear lesson. The ending could not be more of a gut punch. It's devastating not just because death befalls beloved characters, but precisely because these deaths are so futile and meaningless. They never got the opportunity to achieve their potential. The film shows all of these mighty heroes, all the things they can do, but while they are together in the same story, they are not together as a real team. Most crucially, of course, Cap and Tony are on separate planets. But everywhere there is in-fighting. The Guardians split up, and are useless without each other. Tony and Dr Strange can't overcome their egos. Thor is in crisis because he is left alone – but there's a reason the greatest and most triumphant moment of the film is when he finally shows up to work alongside his real family in Wakanda – it's the closest the heroes come to achieving unity. But vital pieces are still missing, and so destruction prevails. And they pay the price.

It's a real fucking price. It's extremely disingenuous to game the ending with your meta knowledge. I've seen the film three times with three different friend groups, only one of which were uber-fans, and all of them were left in stunned and stony silence. Don't fucking tell me that it's not a real price they're paying, just because you know when Spider-man 2 is scheduled.

Of course there will be resurrections. But this is a stand-alone movie. There could be an asteroid impact tomorrow, and the last Marvel film we ever see ends with total, unequivocal victory for the bad guy. No blockbuster has done this before. It's historic. This is the pure Prometheus ending where the heroes are left to suffer. Prometheus that eschews the third act. But unlike Prometheus, their suffering teaches us a worthwhile lesson: we must come together or perish.

In the next movie, if we see it, we can be sure that we will learn that same lesson again with a more positive outcome. The heroes will finally form a unit and defeat death. Here's the crunch: there will be real change and consequence. Whether or not characters die – which is only one among many, many ways to demonstrate consequence – the MCU will be left in an entirely new state to how it was before Thanos came along: it will be united. Just because the horrifying deaths are undone doesn't mean their impact is gone, or that no price was paid. The heroes will still have suffered super-duper intense trauma. They will give everything to pull through and atone for their mistakes, and in the end the trauma will never leave them. And they will have learned, again, the lesson of teamwork. The lesson that can never be learned too often, that must always be repeated.

The fact that Film Crit Hulk doesn't mention teamwork in his piece – the thought doesn't seem to have occurred to him – blows my tiny fucking mind.

Prometheus' story ends with him being tortured for eternity for his selflessness and courageous ambition. In the Disney version, you bet your ass there's a sequel. In the sequel, Prometheus' team of friends, who initially refused to help with the fire-stealing, would have an act three where they decide to risk their own lives to save Prometheus, and having done so, they would have a climactic battle with the gods in order to protect humanity from their tyranny and stop them taking back the fire. Prometheus would be nothing without his team, just as he is nothing without humanity. That's the lesson we need to teach to children. We should be telling them that they can steal fire from the powerful – and yes, they can cheat fate, and that's not something to be afraid of. But only if they believe in themselves, and believe in the team.

Life is like a browser game

You start with two grey boxes. You must decide what to do with them.

You have choices. Directions for movement. The illusion of freedom. You decide what happens, but certain things are not possible. You can't go diagonal. You can't rearrange at a whim. Most of all, you can't leave the box. You have one box, and it's a certain size. It will never get bigger no matter how much you plead for more space, more time. The box doesn't care.

Oh, and there are strictly no takebacks. You live and die with your mistakes.

So you get going. You send your boxes flying. The movement is fast, thrilling, overwhelming. But more astonishing than the movement is the appearance of a third box. It turns out that as you proceed, things happen. Things you could never see coming. You gain something with each choice, each progression. Another box; another something that will be yours forever, a part of you.

You move again and there's a fourth box. The appearance is random, and sometimes there's a different number in the box at intervals you can't predict. But that new boxes appear - new things happen - is a certainty. These sudden arrivals are scary. They throw strange new elements into a world you thought you knew. But if you accept them - and you must accept them, they are here to stay - you will see that they respond to you like the other boxes. They are you. You will love them all, even as you sometimes curse their initial inconvenience. You are learning new things about yourself all the time, and they're not always nice.

You move, and now a miracle occurs. Two boxes become one. A flash of perfect synthesis, two elements so attuned that they produce a spontaneous singular, the sum of themselves. You have taken the parts of you and you have forged them into new shapes. You have learned something. Two twos become four. The four is slightly less grey - there is a hint of colour, albeit beige. Soon you will see that two fours become eight in a detonation of glorious orange. Oranges deepen and turn red, then transcend themselves into a blaze of ever-brightening yellows. You have become a rainbow of fire. You are vivid with boxes.

And all the while, while you combine your boxes to mould ever greater constructs, the new boxes continue to appear. There is never a shortage of fuel. Stuff happens - continuously, unceasingly - and you effortlessly fold the raw new elements into yourself. You have become an engine, powered by these two processes: combination and acquisition.

You are growing.

For a time, it is glorious. You are a furnace of amalgamation, an inferno of coalescence. Boxes whiz in every direction, merge and bloom. You reach ever greater heights.

But then you start to notice something. Your space is finite. Grow too big, and something pushes back. There are walls. There are limits. There is something that doesn't want you to expand forever, that refuses to let you reach your predestined potential. Your boxes get stuck. Movement becomes strained, impossible. You are filling up, and the walls are unyielding. You are drowning in yourself.

And so two things will happen. Either you will die: a husk, unable to move, defeated by your own unwieldy inability to comprehend your world and what you were up against. Or you will compartmentalise. You will learn the skill of organisation, of long-term planning. You will look to the future, and delay gratification. You will not respond simply to the desire to grow, that purest, truest instinct. You will have to make decisions about how and where you grow. Where you see yourself going further down the line, what you see yourself becoming.

You will organise your growth, create a foundation, a corner-stone on which you can build. You will only move in certain directions at certain times, not wherever you feel like moving. You will have purpose. You will ensure that your boxes align, like with like, so that the engine never goes hungry, that progress never ceases.

You are chugging along nicely. With the organisation comes a sense of safety, a sense of security. You grew too big and you learned what it is to be anxious, to fear for your continued growth. Now you are confident, although not completely confident. Random events can still happen, can throw spanners in your carefully constructed works, derail the formation of your great edifice. The more you master the chaos, the more that what little remains becomes the source of ever-greater dread. You realise your anxiety in fact has not diminished, but it has grown alongside, in proportion to the mightiness of your achievements.

And sooner or later you will find that a terrible question comes, one that never occurred to you in your salad days, but which now takes dreadful form: Why?

Why are you even doing this? What is the real purpose of your labours here? Suddenly this growth that seemed so vital and urgent begins to feel hollow. Pointless. You need a reason to continue, so you look for one, and you find it. An external source provides it. You are told. You are commanded, and you believe. The great mantra is handed down, written in mighty tablets of stone, an ineffable answer that reads:

2048.

You are reborn. Now you understand. A reason for all this struggle. A goal to be your point of focus. Something to strive for. A scripture to whisper to yourself when the anxiety strikes, to fill your heart with devotion, to banish your concerns about the nature of the world and its cruel, arbitrary limitations.

You are a zealot. You are bent on reaching this destination that has been ordained. Your fervour for growth reaches new heights. You struggle. You labour. You build, box by careful box.

And finally, one day, there is a tremendous final rush and you have done it. It is done. 2048. There is a fanfare, a triumphal procession. The world itself turns yellow and tells you that you have won. Endorphins flood your system as everything you ever desired is consummated. You are at peace.

You read the victory message over and over, wallowing in it. You notice something. You hesitate. You turn cold. There is another box, just below the official certification of victory. It is grey, but it is not a number box. It is just a simple box with two words: Keep Going.

Realisation is like an anvil. This is not the end - it never was. There is no end, there cannot be an end. 2048 was just a short-term thing, to keep you sane. You were never really doing it for 2048. You were doing it for the growth. The growth, you now see, is its own terrible end, the end that can never end. The yawning abyss that must constantly be fed, now and for ever. If you made 2048, you can make it again, and you can merge it with itself, and create 4096. 8192. You see it now - the wave of satisfaction that passes like a summer storm, the fulfilment that seeps away, leaving only the option of continuing ever on.

You have no choice. You never really did. Your mouth is dry as you watch yourself click the Keep Going box of doom, like someone signing on a parchment for a deal with Ursula the sea witch. By condemning yourself, you know now who you truly are. You are not the boxes. You are the need to keep going.

And so you do. The boxes never end. The days turn to years, to millennia. The numbers rack up and up and up. The biggest ones turn black, unforgiving, hugely heavy. You have been going so long now that you barely register the movements, the mergers. There is almost no more conscious input; you are on automatic.

And maybe that is the end, in its very endlessness. Maybe that is just you, now and forever, until you fill your space and your time is finally up.

Or maybe...something extraordinary happens. Two boxes merge, and something new is born. Your eyes flicker for a moment. They mark the tiny genesis, and they notice its beauty. The little flash of colour. Distantly, they remember how bright that moment used to make them feel. They remember the heat of the flames from the great engine, the light on their face.

You watch, and you see another spark, and another. You find they precipitate microscopic delights. And you sit back and watch them flicker across the grid, across yourself. All these moments of beauty building into something greater. You realise that your edifice, your biggest number, represents an entire lifetime of joys and successes. And now you see the patterns. You can appreciate both the minuscule moments and the dizzying macroverse that exists and thrives in these four small walls.

And maybe, just maybe, before you die, you will get the feeling that you have made the most of what you were given.

Mourning Mjolnir

Agreed. The world is too hilarious right now. There too much laughter in real life for a movie to be "fun". Down with happiness! https://t.co/vGkMpXezXA

— Taika Waititi (@TaikaWaititi) October 26, 2017

History repeats ...tragedy... farce... something something. Yeah.

There's a bit at the beginning of the Force Awakens, where not-Leia gives the not-Death Star plans to not-R2D2, and then is immediately captured by not-Darth Vader. We've just seen a peaceful village massacred by stormtroopers, and a nice wise old man savagely chopped down by a scary powerful guy in a black mask, who has our brave not-Resistance fighter dragged before him. They look into each other's faces, the moment full of tension and danger, the audience already gripped by the compelling set-up and archetypal characters. That moment where they look at each other, the dark lord and his noble prisoner, the fires of the burning settlement reflecting off their faces/masks - it's grand, dark, in a word: epic. It's drawn out, the music builds.... And then our hero speaks:

"So who talks first? You talk first? I talk first?"

I don't even remember if anyone laughed when I saw it in the cinema. It's not that funny a line. But it is supposed to be a joke.

And suddenly, I thought: oh yeah, I'm watching a movie.

Honestly, why am I even writing this article? It's been said already by loads of people. Our glib approach to action and sci-fi movies is getting out of control. Wonder Woman was so great and refreshing for its sincerity and earnestness. Deadpool epitomises the nihilistic reddit obsession with picking apart and undermining every trope and genre. Pop culture has over-binged on bathos.

But I keep thinking about that line in the Force Awakens. Barely five minutes into the running time. And the pain on the face of one of the guys I watched it with, when we came out of the cinema. Star Wars should be protected, he said. Star Wars should be safe, off limits. Star Wars has to be real. If even Star Wars is reminding us that it is a movie, then where else do we have to truly escape? It was the pain of a child discovering Santa is your parents.

Thor: Ragnarok has 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. So I thought now would be a good opportunity to do something I have never before done in my whole entire life: complain about a Marvel movie.

The first Thor was about as classic and archetypal an origin story as you can get, devoting everything to its main theme of proving oneself a worthy hero. Thor 2 (tragedy, eh - see?) had some story problems but it still focused on sincere ideas of family and commitment. And now Thor the third totally and utterly embraces the status of farce.

The first act is devoted not only to undermining every artifice and 4th wall of the film itself, but also of the first two movies. In the very first minute of the movie, Thor summarises his history in the style of a cynical art-house foreign cinema hipster - exhibiting a contempt for his own character that is only reinforced by the filmmakers when we cut to a comic reveal that he is merely talking to himself. We immediately move, with no context, to the most transparent parody of a villain monologue. Just out of the blue. Let's make fun of comic book villains for no reason - right off the bat, as a nice little opening set-piece. Then we get to Asgard, only to discover that the sinister reveal of Loki having usurped the throne (at the end of the previous movie) is nothing but a fun side-show that is immediately dealt with simply by Thor's arrival.

Again, we mock the villain - not some random villain this time, but Loki, one of the most tormented and psychotic in the Marvel canon, the guy who gave us all goosebumps with his terrifying sociopathy in Avengers 1... dismissed as a silly little narcissist whose schemes amount to nothing more than a statue to himself and a play about how great he is. Har har.

The question for me arises: Why even make this movie if you think so little of superhero stories?

Were we so moronic when we were awed by these characters in previous movies, or similar ones in sagas through the ages? Is it really so childish to fear the trickster who mistakes subservience for respect? Even when he has control of the nuclear codes Bifröst?

This movie feels like a personal middle finger to Hiddleston himself, forced to undermine the gravity of his past performances. To the rest of us it is a simple taunt: "You thought Loki was a serious evil guy for trying to rule earth! NERD!"

Here's the thing: I really like Thor: Ragnarok. It's a fun movie. In the second act, Thor's descent and return is as richly executed as can be hoped. It makes you care about the story while still leaving room for japes. It's a fresh change of tone. Goodness knows I've never been a fan of super-serious Hollywood blockbusters, and it's great that Marvel were bright enough to go somewhere very different for this instalment.

But.

This movie kills Thor. Thor is gone before the studio logo has time to fade. In place of a Norse god, we have a Chris. A modern action bro. Someone with cool repartee and "comedy chops". Can you imagine the Thor of Ragnarok commanding, as he does the last time we saw him in Age of Ultron, that "a victory should be honoured with revels", or asking the immortal question: "do I look to be in a gaming mood?" No, the Thor of Ragnarok would just say "are you kidding?" and pull a funny face. There is no Thor in Ragnarok. Just a Chris, a normal funny guy with big muscles who brings the thunder with a healthy side of banter. Switch him out with a Pine or a Pratt, you couldn't tell the difference. Everything distinctive is gone - the filmmakers didn't think it would add anything.

Thor, of course, is just the first casualty. We also lose evil Loki, as mentioned above, and then we proceed to quite literally lose Mjolnir, Odin, the Warriors Three (killed off with brutal disdain), and finally Asgard itself. We even lose the tantalising prospect of Neil Gaiman's awesome comic book anti-hero, Angela, the secret sister of Thor, since that role is simply handed for no particular reason to Hela, formerly Queen of Hel. (Did the studio chicken out of showing a non-Christian afterlife? Is that what happened here?)

Oh yeah, and Thor loses an eye without any story purpose whatsoever.

Am I a luddite for being concerned about this wanton devastation of the Thor universe, as if Marvel had unleashed a toddler into a lego model version? Am I the only one who finds it weird that Thor himself seems unaffected? Was I alone in my interest in a major Hollywood studio's decision to build a world out of ancient myths, and who is just a bit sad to see that experiment curtailed in favour of synthy neon sci-fi?

While I'm at it: am I the only one who is tired of bathos now? When Thor says "that's what heroes do", would it kill the movie to take that line seriously? It feels almost like a Pavlovian response at this point - any sincere message must be immediately undercut to reassure audiences that we're not really serious. It's ridiculously predictable at this point. Bruce was always going to fall flat on his face. Val was always going to stagger off her epic entrance platform. The result is that films like this don't have any message. They believe in nothing. They're all jest and no heart, as insubstantial as Loki's holograms.

Taika: there's a difference between fun and manic nihilism.

It's hard to complain when it's such a good movie. Marvel has made worse movies that I have defended. I just think there's so much more to be had from a Thor taken seriously. From a Thor who continues to smash his coffee mug when he wants a refill. If there's anything we should have learned from Roger Moore's Bond tenure, it's that you can make a good movie when you parody yourself, but rarely more than one. Something is lost along the way. A laugh fades, but a true hero that accepts her own corniness can become iconic. I don't know if I will remember this movie when I look back in ten years, whereas the image of a lost son trying to lift his hammer in the pouring rain will be an inspiration forever.

The Great American Grid System

I recently had reason to walk up and down a lot of streets in America, with a list of addresses to knock on. Specifically, on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio. I found the experience kind of fascinating.

You know how when you hear American addresses they always have at least four digits in them? Like, say, 7606 Jefferson Avenue, or, you know, 1600 Pennsylvania. It's always bothered me - why do they have so many numbers? I mean, I know American streets are long but surely there's nowhere in the country with sixteen thousand separate addresses on the same street? Right?

Probably not. But what I learned in Cleveland is that there is in fact a wonderful genius to house number conventions in America.

In England, you start at one end of the street with house 1, and you keep going upwards to the end of the street - that's it. Most times the odd and even numbers are on separate sides of the street, but sometimes they're not - either way it's very easy to find where you're going.

In America this simply isn't good enough for them. Remember - streets stretch for many miles with hundreds of homes - if you were given an address in English format you could be driving up and down for a long time before you found your destination (longer if you're walking, which of course you're not, because America).

So to start with, American addresses are coded by block - this is the first two digits of the four-digit house number. Many US cities have street names that are literally numbers, but even where they aren't, each street is secretly coded a different number. So if you're cruising down Pennsylvania, you're meeting cross streets at the end of each block - when you cross 16th Street, all the houses suddenly start with 16 (in DC there's only one house on this block, but in other cities there might not be!).

Of course, it's complicated by the fact that many cross streets have names that aren't numbers - then the first two digits are less obvious, but they still go up by one at the end of each block. Plus, they may be coded differently according to which direction of the grid system they follow. In Cleveland, all streets going east-west have five digit addresses, like my office at 14600 Detroit Ave, while the north-south streets have regular four digit ones. The extra digit is simply a 1 at the beginning and only exists to tell you which direction the street is going.

Then there's another complication that the numbering convention also manages to account for: many streets never intersect with some of their cross streets. Certain blocks are much longer than others because a given cross street might dead-end somewhere and then restart further along the city, owing, I assume, to the vagaries of city planning. In these cases, at least in Cleveland, the house numbers will suddenly jump at the point in the street where you reach the phantom cross-street. So you will be going along from 3618, 3622, 3626 and suddenly you get 3700, 3704 and so on, seemingly for no reason. This filled me with great dismay for many days until I worked out that the sudden jumps corresponded exactly to the longitudinal or latitudinal degree along which 37th street lies (continuing this example) somewhere in the city - even though it doesn't actually intersect this street. This is super satisfying because it means that, theoretically, someone with perfect geographical omniscience could determine with horrifying accuracy the exact position of your house on the globe based solely on four digits and a street name.

You may have noticed in the above example that the house numbers along one side of the street go up in fours. Again - totally bizarre at first but there is in fact a brilliant method to the madness. In England they go up by twos because odds and evens face each other. And Cleveland is very strict about this rule as well. But in America there is a lot of space, and houses tend to be larger and detached - there are often luxurious lawns between them, even in impoverished neighbourhoods, and the houses themselves are so big that many sometimes get split into two flats.

So counting in fours is a precautionary measure. Often, extra addresses need to be inserted between two existing houses - either because one house has been split in two or because a new house has simply been built in the wide spaces between them. In these cases, a new address is needed, and the jumping by four allows for it - if you need to number a new house between 3618 and 3622, you can just call it 3620 and there is no need to resort to any of this 3618A letter nonsense you see in England.

A final point: American addresses are very good at being in the right place. If you're at number 3618, chances are the house directly across the street is 3617. If houses on one side space out or bunch up more than the other side, then certain numbers are omitted to make sure that everything stays in sync.

Who came up with this beautiful, if byzantine, set of rules and systems for house naming I do not know - it's like they speak directly to my obsessive compulsive soul. What it perhaps reflects is a deep rooted Protestant bureaucracy in the country's founding DNA, the same neurotic impulse that lies at the heart of, um, racism and discrimination, the need for all things to be in their right places. But I will note that while the system itself is rigid, it also offers opportunities for more creative expression: the actual numbers on the houses are displayed in a wide variety of forms and fonts, occasionally hinting at artistic yearnings begging to be let loose. In England, the printed numerals are all discrete and uniform, but the system as a whole wanders hopelessly without the slightest ambition towards science or precision.

So we have the great American Grid System, laid atop the atomic populace like a glass sheet over neat rows of lifeless - but glorious - butterflies, each entirely unique. And one more thing: everybody in Ohio has a dog. Everybody. If that's not a sign of a very serious maladjustment at the core of American society I don't know what is.