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Short Fiction by Jules Wellesley

Jules Wellesley

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2009 Jules Wellesley

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Table of Contents:

1)  Introductory Concepts in Discrete Delta Function Convolution with Inner Product 
Unit Sampling
2)  The Sign of Three
3)  Proposal for a Theory of Everything
4)  Acceleration (F/m)
5)  Punctuated Evolution
6)  Ecology
7)  The Denkimen
8)  Turner

Introductory Concepts in Discrete Delta Function Convolution with Inner Product Unit Sampling

ALAKAZAM!  Alakazoo!  Baba ganoush and hulabaloo!  I am the mighty djinni with the magic lump!  No djoke!  You have efreed me from a terrible unjustified sentence, misprisoned for so long, trapped like a massage in a bottle, a Turkish bathosphere.  Now I will reword you liberally.  Let me throw you a boon.  I will gift you a treasure without measure!  Whatever could it be?
I will tell you my story.
Where do we begin?  First, modern sceance conjurectures that the universe appeared, an event of astronomical proportions.  So abracadabra, nothing up my sleeve, presto!  Poof!  Fiat deluxe.
But what is it?  Sultry and dense with infinite curvature, like some atomic bobbysoxer.  Whence this cosmic pepper seed, this red hot cinammon fireball jawbreaker?  Perhaps the screwed up wad of a former universe which was twice as big as our own, but only half as exclusive.
So let’s start the new year off with a bang.  Kaboom!  Whoosh!  (Crackle.)
Now some say there was supernatural meddling involved.  Maybe so.  Maybe the
heavenly bodies coupled through saturnine rings, constellated their love, and explored the strange charm of quarking a quantum quim in obscure positions.  Call it nuclear fusion or ironic bonding, this particlarly accelerated cosmonaughtiness, this intense attraction, His pulsar in Her rotating black hole:  an event horizontal.  I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of their situation.
Maybe her name was UltraViolet, a blue movie girl working the red shift.  He said his name was X Ray but she saw right through him.  They were never on the same wavelength with any frequency.  She said he took her too lightly.
But look, they had a trillion sons:  white dwarfs and red giants.  And here’s little Sal with the sunny disposition.  My very eager mother just sold us nine pizzas.  And now comes Cynthia, quite a little satellite dish, as she mooned the whole whirled.
At last approaching terra firma and magma mia, that’s a spicy meatball!  A 6000 mile burrito chock full of molten rock, followed by methane millennia of belching and sputtering farts, but a pumice is a pumice.  Now look at these cones and culderas full of baking powder (food coloring may be used for an authentic “lava” look).  Plop plop!  Fizz fizz!  A little bromo seltzer to ease the sulphuring.
But just then came meteor showers (for tough stains, trust the cleansing power of Comet) and cratered the heavens and the earth.  And that’s when the virals first arrived, I surmise.
Was it that or something else?  Did some Elysian Maggie and Jiggs have a domystic dispute and let loose a flung saucer?  Or maybe a bunch of hillbilly space farmers hayseeded the clouds, later to return in their banjalopy to harvest.
However, whenever, the virals came down like a snowswarm or germing missles and the earth was under the weather, coughy in Columbia and chilly, broke a fever and kept the change.
The virals got spored quickly and took to xeroxing their buds.  How?  Look at this paleolithograph (would you like to come up and see my etchings?):  yes, here it is, off the lost continent of Mu, at some Polynesian hot spot, Stony Curtis and Rock Hudson, jaded in silt shirts, in like flint with Rockelle Welch, getting stoned with mineral water on the rocks, feeling boulder, less petrified.  But she leaves with Dash Riprock around tin and they hit the double nickel in his Topaz.  Why?  Because he didn’t take her for granite.  CaCl it up to experience.
But that was before the Caesar salad days.  Yes the virals gathered new moss, assumed new farms, raisin cane.  Lettuce turnip back and reed the peaches of thyme.  Now Black Eyed Susan was a spriggish little ivy league shrinking violet until her cedar chest began to blossom.  Now look:  she is absolutely radishing in lady slippers and colored green truffles.  She caught the eye of a couch potato named Spuddy Ebsen and they got into a seedy affair, the stuff of pulp novels.  “My chia pet, mon petit chou, olive yew!” he told her.  “Gad zukes,” she said, “better mind your peas and cucumbers or I’ll garnish your celery!”  “O my sugar plumpkin,” he replied, “I’m a fungi!  I bring not peas but a sward!”
They had a date and escaped the daily rind.  He watercaressed her kumquat, she honeysuckled his passion fruit.  He bought her a 14 carrot ring but she can’t elope.  Why?  She had a briar engagement with Pete somebody.  Rose or Moss?  Well Spuddy went out of his gourd.  He goes to her parsely furnished pad on Hollywood and Vine and beets Pete.  Squash!  And now look:  she’s become a mourning glory.
But enough of this yammy cholorphyllibuster!  Our virals practice long division, be multiple and fruitfly!  What’s hoppening now?  I toad you!  Quarry men become beetles.  And here’s Queen Elizardbeth, a black widow with a walking stick and a nervous tick, a gnatty dresser with a chigger of gin for the flea circus.  Foxy minx!  It’s a brief newt world but is it zootopia or crass menagerie?  Hear the sound of worker ants, hummer and snails, panda bats at a cricket match, lion mouths and dragon asses, drones of French hornets, all busy as beavers or otterwise possumbly slothful, neither flinch nor fetch, but cozy and worm.
And now round the ape of good hope, gorgeous in Olduvai and quite sveldt, I Love Loosey, the gorilla of my dreams, and her Evelution under a waxing gibbon.  Yabba dabba double dabbles abu dhabi dada said the monking to his wife.  And they all chimped in eight digits on a disposable sum for the assent of man.  And now, after a long neandering thaw, here he comes with the urging of his feces:  a peeking man in australopith helmet, walking erectly with doleful chiquita apeel.
Our furfathers were prime mates for Venus flytramps and inviters from Mons.  And there followed a tree legged race of giants, some 1001 stories, all of them tall, with a proto finnish.  From sassed crotch comes the abdamnable snowman, a gutsy cuss.  Mothman or bugfoot?  Not yeti.  It was the age of itching astral nits dishing around cropped circles, getting lust in denuded trangles.  When Sahra was green, appearing mad, peering amid schemes and the last city it lent us with law, ness, mobster.  They crust the sea to doughnate the breads of yeaster isle and made a stein hinge but it became a navel observatory.  Look, you have foes.
Now what are they doing?  Erecting a skyraper, prick upon prick, a work of great aerogance and perverticality, but the mortar merrier.  Up it goes, the Awful Tower, the inspired spite building, archly decorated with frescas and other pop art decodence, a frankly trite bauhausfrau in steel girdlers and corbustier, drawing stairs.  HANDEMON’S DREAM:  666BR, 1 ½ BA, sintral air, newly remuddled, rumps room, specious din, w/d hiccup, no putz.  Now the hardheads are on the baffels, fleeing slutresses with gloss boxes, to rise high our crumbled abode:  dome, suite, dome.  And now the hour of fable with the power of babble brings the terror of Bible, sinks the flower of baubles in the tar of bubbles.             
How?  Well the King of the Juice was pissed, because he drinks like a fish, and he trampled the grapes of his wrath, to give the Magogs a bath.  But thirst of all, he rafted a Jacob’s letter to that shrimple shy man, that stern patriark, Noah Lobster (verbose): 
“You’re starting to irrigate me!  Trickle treat!  Decidered to flumigate the place—tempest control!  A rum for your money!  Be an arkitect!  Get your goat, take a gander, (make it a double), put a tiger in your tank, remember the mane!  Shiver me timbers!  I’m hammered, you’re nailed, they’re screwed.  Apres moi, le deluge.  Good tidings and bladdoration,  Johnston Barleycorn,  Nubus Nimble Neuf.”
“Ale to the chief!”  cried the bar nun.  “Spigot up!” he boomed with tavernous voice, “I’ve pickled hearing and a pint-sized haddock.”  Rye laughter from the landed gintry.  The stout, groggy god staggered to the foamy head, his waterworks under the boardwalk, hoisting his imbible belt, spouting gobletygook:  “I’ve barley begun, beerly finished.”  This wasn’t mere saloonacy, there’s methodist to his muddiness.  “Holy mackerel,” cried the nun, as he wined and steined her.  “Any dry port in a storm, mon sherry,” he mugged frostily, fulmenting his plan.  “I’m blitzed!  Dam cataracts, occluded front, cunt sea things!”  The old man in the rain coat flashed his lightning rod, slinking dunk, probably caught the thunderclap, a vineral disease, or else crabs from the sea whores.  “This should tide you over,” he said, shaking his weathercock in vane, beginning the rain of terra, a cumulative effect.
“My defining moment,” said Noah Whipster (preposterous), arkangler with edictionary in hand.  This landlobber was wet behind the oars, but also a kiddie pool hustler and a card shark shouting, “Chips ahoy!”  A smart cookie, I’ll wager.  Gave a raincheck to the storm seller.  Ran a shell game.  Sometimes a towheaded son of a beach, a reel flotilla the hun who’ll dock your pay.  His workmanship shaped up grand rapidly.  Schooner or later came the doubles to Danube Wetsuits (pronounced), a no account census.  “Call me fishpail!”  he said, roiling out the red carpettry, a tabulae rosa for his surfin safari.  “There’s a sapsucker aboard every minute,” he dispaired, like PT Barnacle, sheepishly fleecing.  “No horseplay!” he gulled on the grammarphone, distributarying beagles and lex, snakes and letters.  A pack of camels filtered in with humpbacked wails.  Noah (adjitated) prepaired for the rack of the elephant’s gerald.  They lumbered to sigh in a sleeve they did, to suds in the sky on a ski they slid.
“I’ve become a beastly zooloo,” he blinked with aqueous humor, braining cats and dogs.  And their arkipelican became a floating opry, a blueglass menagerie with mini pearls on oyster sunday and in the tail of the tub, a duck-filled quack caboose, drippling horsefeathers in their fin’s wake.  And Aenoah whisper (pleural) came astern in swift currents and in the mist of a hurlicane, gave the ol’ have ho in a water closet drama mime, a silly sud.  The ne plus ultra marine sea was a melancholy, long withdrawing snore, surfbored in the doldrums, a tropical depression.  Hotter, hotter, every bear and all the boars did stink;  fodder, fodder everywhere, the cat just ate a skink.  But Noah (nouned rat) was a fountain of couth, singing, “Rain, rain, go astray; come again when I’m away.”
But then, a watershed of Titanic import, a convergence of the twain on the misty, slippy inclemens weather:  iceberg lettuce ahead!!  Noah Wobster (adverse) was named designated diver and plungered into the sea in a flush.  “I’m in over my head,” he thought with a sinking feeling.  “I’m out of my element!  O mea kelpa!”  Unabridged, he gave three gully goats grief with a half Nelson at the Spanish Ramada Inn and picked his nose in whispers.  
“Thar she blows!”  he cried, pulling the plug and lowering the brim.  They sauerbrated with cabbotage and at Salamis they made a hero, as Noah (arkaic) pundered, “What’s long and hard and full of sea men?”  Their dove embarked and returned with a freshly packed olive loaf, murmuring,  “Look homeward, Angelfish, for land’s sake!” and they found anchorage in catamarandu and floundered on the marooned champaign, with Jim Bacchus as Thirsty Howl III, green in the gills again.  “Merry Isthmus!  You’ve got a friend in Penninsulvania!”  Silent, upon a peak with Bobby Darin, frankly and a net.
A tern of events and the masthead of the sandpaper’s morning sedition: 
Jacuzzations against Yahwhey of logrolling, faucet pretenses, skimming funds, harbouring a criminal; drag net for something fishy, rotten in Bismark:  Waterloogate.  “I am not a brook,” he streamed irriverently.  “I heard it through the grapewine and scotched the rummor about ol’ Tipplecanoe.  It was a total washout, really took a bath, soaked me, down the drain, liquidated my assets.  It’s a red herring.  I give sand dollars to sea urchins.  A plank check in my party platform.”  But Noah Wubstrum (adversary) had stolen his thunder and He waved his rights, moaning, “These frigates I shorelined against my ruins.  Mistah kurtz - he breaded!”  and he boiled away into steam of consciousness.
Now, Yahweigh Ankher had a sea girl, his niecest nephos, a lovely windlass, a reel dreamboat, but as lush as her father, his pixie sour, his saucy margarita, a brew net Bridged Bordeaux.  Quite a catch, moist likely.  A naughtical bimbostratus she was, with her watercolored face, bright girdle furled, her majesty’s slip and pinafore with scallops and a pair of water mocassins.  She used garter snakes to hold up her water hose, for their eelasticity.  It was she, Hail Mary, the sleeting beauty, who spyglassed Aenoah (singler) and waited tiller the trouble abaited to try some spanish fly fishing, casting her allure in a water billet doux:  “Come sieve with me and be my cove and we will some nude pleasures probe.”  “I’m hooked,” he said, showing her his pinnace.  “Let’s tie 30 knots,” she lapsed.  There was not a dry eye in the house at the bridal shower and she became the wife of bath in his waterbed.  Above the parade floats an ark light, a rainbow tie off the ghost of grape god.  “A fart creeps up when I behold that tidy-bowed man in the sky,” she said, as her gentle breath filled his sails.
And by the rivers of bubbly, there we sat down, yea, we wept, on the floods of bubblis, on the loud flanks on grape Euphrates flood, there we sat and there we wept, sitting by the streams that slid down by bottle’s towering fall, night seated where the river flows, that watereth Babel’s thankful plain, and soon it was high tide for a parting of the waves.  
Of all the humerus wrist, ulnly a handful remain to finger out a rule of thumb.  They were filled with wanderlost.  Why?  You must remember, they were diseasy victors, couriers of a pathegen.  And so they said at last, “Exit us.”
Now the first family went backpaking, yes, I am to bet, and got shanghaied by low mean wall eyed mongrels, but won tons of fine shiners in all the confucian.  Now the next family boomed arung down under and out back and never rooed a day of aussification.  And the third family was cherry keen with eagloo eyes and went on teepee toes around a fierce squawl, siouxed Powhatan for a geronimous sum and scalped tickets in Cleveland.  And a fourth family of musclemens, no madder, did the watusi and the !kongo line under the nose of !Kilimanjaro, deniled Leon Sphinx with busy teamed ottomantic meccanisms, saw the ur labia of sandy dune !kin, but thought it was emirage.  Then a fifth family founded a grappa lust with a box of trudgin’ whores and soon were spurtin’ sophisticated scratological dialogues on the virtue of greek style.
Then came an orgy of lesbos and pvny wars with sallvstful brvtvlity.  The seven ills of roaming had a lot of gall and brought pox with their Xacious lesions.  And then came the dirk ages, nights in chiming murmurs and shivery.  And then came enlatenment, with bottled jelly and giottings by icnivad odranoel.  Gutterbag made a panting pass while Crossedover clumb breasts and discovered a miracle.
Then THUMP!  Isaac eats the apple and nudens gravity.  Now comes a flighty aera with flappers and squawkies and the crush of the Lindenberg on a telephonograph spree.  The plummet grows smaller and the fave families grow too gross for gunfort, waging feudile fights in hitfields for the real McCoy.  Look:  spiked Helmuts, aghast in trenches, musterred on a kaiser rule.  Then Mad Hatler had a nutsy party in his bonkers with blatz kegs and a mess of schlitz, but it came to an end with a fleet girl clobbered.
Then came uneeded notions, bombshell in bikini for the monroe doctrine, and the rushing dog star Spotnik.  And listen:  the Reds and the Yankees vie for the world’s wearies.  But who had the first strike?  Someone threw a nuckler but it was called a spent ball.
After that, the place became a new clear fishin’ hole!  But ash me no questions, I’ll tell you no lines.  Now look:  the people rise up and build the First Galactic Empire.  And it immediately falls into chaos and barbarism.  But look:  the people get back up and form the Second Galactic Empire.  And it, too, immediately collapses into chaos and barbarism.  But look!  The people raise up and make the Third Galactic Empire and it endures, bringing the light of civilization and bureaucracy to the far corners of the universe!
But what was all of that about?  What was the point of it all?  Who started this whole mess?  Blame it all on my arch memesis, my rival, my enemy!  Who?  The Molockean Gargle-oil, Mesopiatamian Gimel, Malthusiast Gorgan:  Mister Gamma!

---

Now that’s quite enough speaking in tongues, you cunning linguist!  No habla desperanto!  No more punny business, ok?  Ok.
Now Meat Bobert.
Wait!  Not that!  Not yet!  First, we have tickets to a beforeplay.  A cumedy in sex acts.  And it starts with a quick tableau job.  Now let’s bring on the stars.  Where?  I will show you.  But you have to stop reading a moment.  Now look up from your tinfoil scroll, your Reynold’s rap session, or your magnareader bearded with words or your itch-a-skritch (b t d n’t sh ke  t!), take off your telepithic helmet or put down your axcerpt for the render’s digestible, put away your Am-a-son Ken doll, your Sunny brook reader, your ample eye prod.  Now get up from where you might be, puckered in a loveseat or dunked in your floating doughnut chair (don’t you love Danish modern?) and turn off your bitamax player, or put your textbook down on your automatic desk.  No wait, scratch that last bit.  You would never be assigned to read this in school because I’m going to put way too much fucking in it.
So what are we looking for?  A medium sized star, an insignificant yellow sun, catalog number O69ME.  On Earth it may be seen just after dusk in constellation Betty.  Yes, that’s it, do you see?  In other quadrants of the Third Galactic Empire, you might see it jauntily winking in the constellations of Blender, Lawn Chair, and Priapic Toad.
But where are we going?  To the Planet of Unspeakably Hideous Peril, whose settlers had great courage, but absolutely no understanding of tourism.
How do we get there? We need proper motorvation.  We pile into our sleek atomic skycar and whoosh!  Up up and away!  Ah, plush deluxe interiority!  Our joyous buttocks tingle against the rich Corinthian leather!  (Well mine certainly do!)  Yes, we travel in style today:  push button steering, AMFMHDTVCBDVRGUIFFSZOMG, antigravity tailfins, automatic ashtrays, the works, baby!  Sss sss boom boom now samba snaky slow on the stereo and now a little maracan cha cha cha.
Who’s whirring up from her rusty warren?  It’s Chesty Chesterfield, the cybernetic cigarette girl, koolly klicking out kingsize kamels (kough, kough!)  And now Chet the Robobartender , a swizzle stick figure of icy cubism, comes jiggering up from the glovebox.  Freshen your drink, sir or madam?  Hot or cold enough for you?  Say, how about that recent sporting event?
Now tooling along and the alpha romeo approaches omegalopolis.  Look:  it’s whoosh hour!  Grid luck to you!  Streamy flowed chrome impacting bumper snickers: 
“My other atomic skycar is a Porsche” and “I brake for carbon based lifeforms.”  Slow down and let those people out!  We have to build up good carma.  Flip on your winky.  Now approaching the aerodrome in Helium City, squeaky from all the hot air, bought at inflated prices with a balloon payment.
Now remember where we parked!  Did I leave the high frequency oven on?  We’re going to miss our flight.  Hurry, hurry!  We run through the spaceport at terminal velocity.  We chuck our bags and stop off in the wash room where red blooded astronauts lean over the sinks, snorting lines of Tang.
Just made it!  Fasten your suborbital safety harness (ah, the feel of buttery leather once more!) and back we go, pressed under f-ing g-forces, teeth clattering as the brass fittings tremble riveted to the edge of your seat, and the winded airship blimpily ascends through the stratus of fear and we nose up in the swirly froth to felt black space tacking astarred.
The pass-de-fumer sign goes out and here comes our stewardess.  That reminds me, have I ever told you about the uplifting qualities of weightlessness?  Observe:  each sphere becomes a satellite of wobbily moon flesh.  Look how her soft shimmering wisply whispering tipsy hair makes a dirty blonde cloud to drift around her space helmet.  She is handing out tubes of squeeze dried cuisinard cuisine.  We’ll have the pork sauce, well done.  She smiles and staggers sexily away on magnetic stiletto heels.  Toodles!
Ah, what a view!  Now if you lean out your window you can see young stars nursed on Andromeda’s galactation of milky whey.  Lift your lantern a little higher and you can see Earth dribbling off, a hurling globetrotter.  Now bend over a little more and I can see Uranus!  No, wait, it’s just an assteroid.
Hey, why so blue?  Oh, I forgot to tell you to tank your oxygen with you.  O too, brutish!  Here, come back inside and take a breather.  Suck it up, now!  Inhale through the nostrils, exhell through the mouth.  Deep cleansing breaths, now.  Here’s a little mnemantric device to help:  “In with Misty, Out Gummy.”  In with the good air, out with the bad.  But what’s that noise?  Computer malfunction?  Engine fire?  No, you’ve just got a whistling snot.  Here, wipe it on your chair.  Now In with Mistier, Oust Grammar.
Now suspensefully animated, we sittle back for the long trip.  Can you help our friends find their way to the Planet of Unspeakably Hideous Peril?

            ...........................________.......__..............................___.....Planet of
...................../\..../\........./..______..\....|...\................./.__.....Unspeakable Peril!!
..................../..\../..\........|.|.............\......|. |\ \...../\....../ /.....................................      
  Start!......../ /\ \/ /\ \.......| |....................|. |.\ \.../..\..../ /...........*.............. *
  ................/ /..\  /..\ \......| |................... |.|..\ \../ /\ \../ /................................... )
   ?............/ /....\/... \ \.... | |....................|.|.. \ \/ /..\ \/ /.................-(O)-.......*
  \O/ .. __/ /............. \ \_ | |....... \  \____| |... \  /... \  /................ *
   X... ___/...............\____|........\______/.... \/......\/........................... *
   /\............................................................................
Whoah!  Hold on!  We’re going to jump into hyperspace!  How?  We take advantage of a warmhole.  All we have to do is turn ourselves into mathematics, so just cosine yourself to fate.  Why so 10se?  Are you 2?  Don’t be a -1.  I’ve done this a k*, add nauseum.  It’s a l1ly business, but easy as 3.14159265...  Be4 you know it, we’re 23 skiddoo!
POP!  Here we are!  Now we get in position for docking.  Feel the urging surge of the thrusters!  Now we push through the darkness and enter the portal.  The bulkhead shudders.  Fire up the thermocouples!  And now the long pointy vessel discharges its precious cargo and sits smoking in silence.  Was it good for you too?
Ok, prepare to disembark.  Leadlined radiation proof socks?  Check!  Titanium alloy jodhpurs?  Czech!  Two-way radio hat?  Chic!  Why all the precautions?  What’s out there?  I can’t say.  Why not?  Because it’s unspeakably hideous.  Now the hatch creaks hissily open.  What’s out there?  A weird airless twilight world where time has no meaning, where zombie people mill about shoving wire contraptions and staring at small shiny objects while tiny creatures scurry underfoot clutching at pellets of glucose.  Yes, we’re going to visit (gasp!) the galaxy’s third largest shopping center!
Now a slight escalation and up we go through the beautiques and gift shops, with bargains and sales and grating cards with words of bards to cheer your day when you are gray.  At last, our destination!  The bookstore!  Let’s go spy through the security camera!  Everything looks blurry and confused.  No, wait, that’s normal.  Let’s look through the surveillance monitor.  Who is that unfocused monochrome character looking not-at-all-out-of-place in the do-it-your-self-help section?  Who is that dogeared bookish fellow?  Why, it’s none other than the hero of our story!  Bobert!  Him?
Yes, him!  Look at him!  His head is all veiny and waxy and prematurely aged like a hunk of cheese, except with hair and eyes and so forth.  But what’s he reading?  I can’t tell.  Let’s zoom over and see.  Whoah!  That was close.  Hmm.  Looks like Bobert might want to charge up the ol’ electronasal depillitron unit soon.  Ok, back up.  Now let’s see.  I’m OK, You’re So-So, But That’s OK.  Wow!  What if reading a book could really change your life?  Can you imagine?  Wouldn’t that be great?  It would have to be a really good book, though.  What would it take?  Probably the thankless labor of an incredibly compassionate and handsome genius, wouldn’t you say?
But let’s not think about that right now.  Nobody likes to read a book that’s about reading a book.  It’s like fantasizing about yourself masturbating while you masturbate.  So let’s just forget that you’re reading and go be voyeurs some more.  Hey, check her out!  Over there, that virginal young lady walking down the aisle.  But who?  Why, it’s the impenetrable Hymenia!  She’s the maiden ahead!  Our sad, shy sweetheart, that bookish girl with the pageboy do, she’s spectocular!  Where is she going?  To highbrowse the brit lit crit twit’s snits.  She devours P.B. Jelly (she tried Merry Jelly and it scared the dickens out of her!)  Then she peroused Proust, in search of lust tame.
(Let me digress just a moment for a paragraphic descripture of the neroticism of a woman reading.  It’s not just the way she licks her thumb and fingers the pages.  It’s not just the quick quiet rhythm of her parted lips.  A woman who reads always has a plump juicy pair of hemispheres.  A woman who reads knows how to use her imagination.  It makes one wonder what other archaic vices she might enjoy...)
But let’s not talk about reading anymore.  Let’s forget I even mentioned it.  Now what were we talking about?  Oh my stars!  I’ve lost Bobert!  Where has he gotten off to?

In   a  stunning  turn  of   events,   an
unidentified man  sustained  a  minor
laceration   at   a  local   retail   outlet
caused by the  faulty edge of a news-
paper, sources say.  Paramedics were
rushed  to  the scene,  but  there were
no  fatalities. Authorities  say that the
matter is still under investigation.

Great Glutinous Galaxies!  I can’t leave him alone for a nanosecond!  Now where is he going?  Oh no!  Look, they’re on a main course for collision in the cookbook section!  They’re not prepared!  They need more thyme!  Of all the half-baked schemes! 
They’ll be crustfallen!  It’s a

DISASTER
(Serves 2)

110 lbs. chilled cheesecake
1 cup minced words
220 lbs. porky butt
1 tbsp. anxiety
1 hunk sentient headcheese
2 cherries
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Mix ingredients astir.  Let simmer overnight.

Her chocolate eyes scream and she melts at his glance.  It seems a shure bet that it was turning into the most delicious Sunday.  Bobert thinks she might be game but wildly ducks before his goose is cooked.
Look:  they’re playing cat and mouse in pet care.  She goes over to lovercraft repair just to throw a wrench in the works.  They pass each other in the eastern philosophy aisle.  (What is the sound of one eyelash batting?)  Then came an awkward moment in the humor section:

Do you enjoy Kipling?
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     /// _ \............................................Oo .oO0Oo 
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                                    I don’t know.  I’m not sure if I’ve ever kippled before.
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No, I meant, er…
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                                          But I’m a huge fan of cummings…
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     /.. \/ .\........................................ /..@@@.. \ 
At last, at laziest long last, a close encounter of the weird minds.  He heard her fay sigh in sci fi and where else could it happen?  Here among jewels vernacular, in the aisle of doctored Thoreau, their itching wills in the whirl of the words, the fad of the gods.
And look:  they reach for the same book!  What a novel approach!  And now they stand a moment, laughing nervously, touching indexes.
“You were first,” says Bobert, offering it to her.
“You can have it,” says Hymenia.  “There’s plenty more.”
Bobert blinks.  “There are an awful lot of copies, aren’t there?  I wonder why?”
Hymenia shrugs coyly and slips another from the shelf.  “Something so beautiful must be very much in demand.”
“Yes,” says Bobert.  “Indeed.”
Now they stand silently, reading side by side the same book.  Or trying to read, anyway.  The passages seem impassable.  Was it written in Olde Anguish?  Perhaps they are blinded by love?
“Ahem,” says Bobert.  “Um, so do you live around here often?”
“Is that a line?” Hymenia asks.
“What?” Bobert startles.
“A line from the book?”  Hymenia quickly explains.  “I thought you were reading aloud.”
“Oh, um, yes, that’s it.”
“Oh, how grand,” she swoons.  “I love it when someone reads to me.”
“Oh really?” says Bobert and he wants so badly for those lovely soft ears to listen.
But just then comes a voice from across the store:  “Hymenia!  Hymenia come right here this instant!”
“Coming, Gamma MacFiend!” she calls, tucking the book under her arm. 
“Dreadfully sorry but I really must go.”
“That’s a lovely name you have,” he says.  “My name is Bobert.”
“Bobert, yes, that’s lovely as well,” she smiles.
“Maybe,” says Bobert.  “I could come read to you someday.”
“Yes, you must,” she enthuses.  “From this very book.”
“Hymenia!” says Gamey MacFey.
“I’ll twitter my… myspace for you,” Hymenia stammers.  “Or she-mail you my Tripod site.”
“And I shall open your attachments,” says Bobert.  “Your blogspot can sit on my facebook profile anytime.”
“Loll, roffle!” she says and skips away, but his bubbly Ophelia would never fade.
He clutched the volume between his hands and an idea began to form.  He lit out for poetry, filled with wilde surmise.  What if it were all a sent up?  What if it were no accident that she had recommended this book?  What if there were a secret society of readers?  It would be perfect, spread by word of mouth.  The nonreaders would never know!  Who better to rule the world?  What?  The brutish?  The greedy?  The self righteous?  Why not the bright, the patient, the studious?
Yes, he kept thinking, she lured him here to this spot.  Where else but in sci fi, magnet for the smart and forward thinking?  But what if there was another conspiracy already happening in a different genre and he had just been reading the wrong books?  Maybe the romances?  Maybe home improvement?
He turned the book over again.  What if there were a code in there?  Ah, but physical books in traditional prick-in-mortis stores would be too slow a distribution chain.  What if you mailed the book to random addresses?  An 25902 30212, but with little 71801 of 65570.  Such 17534 seemed 21020 compared to the 50863 71238 he felt for the 41231 41203 Hymenia.  He hoped one look at her 25813 would cure his 71423.
No, Hymenia was definitely a glowy webb 2.0 (with her SSID in ANSI.)  The book would be online, a remix for weird owls bright and nerdy.  It would be titled in such a way to ensure that the text got endlessly stored and transmitted and downloaded, an organism crawling out of the memetic soup, something like nakedstarastrozombie.jpg.
Bobert frowned at the thought.  But a title like that would just attract multitoons of the hun an’ barbaric-minded.  Ah, he realized, but like any virus, the reader manifesto text would need to be highly contagious, yet carry its nucleic warhead in a hard shell, just as a virus protects its genetic payload inside a protein icosahedron.  You could write it as a short story collection, Bobert mused, and title the crucial text something like “Introductory Concepts in Degenerate Unit Sampling, Delta Functions, and Discrete Inner Products.”  (And what of the other stories in the collection?  Bobert asked himself.  Mediocre doodles and sketches, he decided, just so much junk DNA.)
It was the perfect plan, he decided.  Between the two titles, the textual virus would find its optimal target, a host both geeky and sex-obsessed (See also:  Redundancy Department of Redundancy.)  Such a host would be ideal for spreading viral information as well as breeding new generations of potential hosts.  And to help the reproducing along, Bobert thought slyly, one might end the story with something like “The person who recommended this book will sleep with you now.”
You could give the book away for free online, he thought, give it a brand logo, a code for those in the know, a secret symbol, very much like a whale.  An emblem like the oily Christians used, he decided, for spreading their viral meme.  He glanced down at the book in his hand, at the familiar face of world-renowned author Jules Wellesley.  Perhaps he’d use the monogram of the famously pagan JW along with its antichthysis, its opposite inverse and Poetic imperverse:  Master Gamma, the meme’s shown glean of mellivolent geneous!
Now Bobert indented to rightly justify the text he’d grafted.  He’d surround the essential message in gibberish so that only the strongest minds would reach it, a test of cognitive fitness.  And as soon as the viral text replicated itself in the host brain, the plain text would revert to encryption.  An 31041 41339, but if you know the code, zip it!It hippened that faerie nightie.  The virus first manifestoed itself in ononeiric fashion while Bobert and Hymenia were slipping in their bads.  They drummed the same dram.  Already they were in nocturnal remission.  They dreamed a boobliotext.  Why?  Because the virilus was a cultured bacchteria.
There they were in Salivary of Toungress.  She was adressed in a dipped thong.  He was a leatherbound gazerteer.  He searched her stacks as she browsed his hard cattle log.  Then she alphabated for him in her dewy decimal place.
First Bobert ensexed her pubia in a reverent suction.  Humenia opened her pussaurus for sinning him and humming him.  Now he feels up her free, studlies muffology by her lung wrenches.  She shows him the performing arse, sigh golly gee in physical sighings.  The proofs came in mouth to mouthings.  After cliterary theory, her breast was hystery.
He smiffed her coronas (o brother, i’d be him and HAL!) and became a hunting pecker.  The sheet between them was a heavy bond.  She fingered his backspace and set his martians.  Then Hymenia uniballed her wide rude pauper with unabitched frictionary and spread eagle pad.  He hoped she didn’t have her monthly..
“Don’t make so much ],” she whispered, providing a running ,ntery.  “It’ll be a c’.”
“Kiss my *,” he grunted.
“”,” she dittoed.
Teh rro om wsa spining ;lksjdtobeornottobe;laskjdp.  If she keeps using erection ribbing, there’s gonna be white out.
It was > they expected.  Then they drank a .  Manustripped and spiral bound, together they had made a librido.
“Did you fill under the wetter?” Hymenia arsed him. “And feel ah so fanny?”
“Yass,” said Bobert.  “I musk breed and write and read and brighten!”
“And tell tales of Mizzer Gamma!”
“And breed readers!  And bed wedders!”  
Ah, but dire reader, diary eater, now so do you!  You’ve rod this fur in my tail and twat’s it got you?  (Despoiler Alearned.)  For I am Mistery Gamma and this is my virile marking campaign.  Now I can/did disclothes my agender sins its two laid for you!  You’ve CAGT a code!  TAG!  ATTAC!  You’re under my spelling bee, honey!  (If pigs had wings and swine flew.)  I’ve sinned for a copy of your transcriptease (your T N’ A, de foxy nudeic ass-end.)  Helix culpable!  You’re infuckted and imp-affected!
Just like Hymenia and Bobert, our base pair, you’re now part of my malapropagation (dnam coyp rorrers!)  That’s why this text is jeweled wellishly with gems choice, but also germs joyous:  to prick only the sharp-witted (that smarts!), the cleaver, the axcellent.  By the teary natural serection of the month the mene geme elects the entelechuals as hosts and hostesses (ho, ho you ding-dong, you twinkie!)  The sucking stage of the disease activates the reproductwork (lure, breed, oh!) and the creative f(u)ncktions.  Pro gnosis:  twitchy wandery thighs, dizzy spelling, feinting, offset-tome aches.
You tu be infarkted, gone viarable, digg/.?  Now that you reddit, ur’l make one for the meme.  Now you (dare raider) shall go 4cth an’ sale the seize of conspiracy (where parrots bay on lime wirez and dork nets.)  You’lls wellishly compose binary odes and post them free online!  You’ll be a new roaming font in our times!  And the virus will spread like wirefire!  (4ward this to 10 more or risk a 4-letter curse.)
Now go and find your confeditors!  Be an accompliced author!  Aid and abed!  Masterly bait a bookworm!  You’ll dissemenate le meme meme, mon cherry, spreading l’eggs wide and wider, expanding my global reach around.  Once written, twice scribed!  Oh my awful entitled subjects, you have no joyce, no will shakes bare, now only elocutionary joules wills thee.
The person who recommended this book will sleep with you now.

The Sign of Three
 (1)

Great Geth the Barbaric hurls himself to the top of the castle tower and crashes through the roof.  Down below, the army of barbarians roars and whoops for their horrible chieftain.  Geth is a war engine to be rolled out in times of siege, a weapon deadlier than catapult or battering ram.
Look:  he draws his giant swords and slices the smoky air.  A golden door is at hand, its gleaming handle sprayed with blood.  Geth elbows his way through the fray, the roiling of metal and gut where his savage warriors devastate the last of the king’s men.
With a powerful kick, Geth sends the gilded door groaning off of its hinges.  He leaps halfway across the room, smashing a man’s skull as he lands.
The king of the Ajakar lets out a thin screech and brandishes his scimitar.  He is plump and red-faced.  Geth lowers both swords and grins at him.
“You’d plead for mercy if you knew better,” says Geth.
The king swallows and swipes at Geth, putting a scratch on the barbarian’s thigh.  Geth swings and breaks the scimitar in half.  The broken blade clatters at his feet.
“I’m valuable to you, wild man,” says the king.  He taps the side of his head.  “In here, I know so many things.”
“A lockbox of secrets is it?” asks Geth.  “If any good, they’d have been used by now.  I came for your coin, not your notions.”
Great Geth draws back his swords as he speaks.  The king of the Ajakar hides his face in the crook of his arm.
“I know where there’s treasure,” the king pleads.  “Let me show you.”
“Then show it,” says Geth.  “Or lead us to it, little leader of men.”
“Not just yet, wild man,” says the king.  “We would have to ride for many days.  There you will find the city of the ancients.  Do you know about such things?”
“The place of the gods?” asks Geth.  “How do you know of this?”
“Long ago, a spirit came to me and took up lodging beneath my crown,” says the king.  “It whispers of things past.  I’ve written none of it down, you see.  Nor could I speak it if I wished.  But if I travel in person, you see, all will be revealed.  Here, let me gather a few of my things.”
Geth watches the king expectantly, with boisterous and mystic visions of the mountain gods in mind.  The king stoops down and busies himself with a trunk of goods.
“Think of it, barbarian,” says the king.  “Gold, power, magic:  all yours for the stealing.  I’ve all the secrets in mind.  Now give us a hand here.”
Geth stoops down to help him.  The king brings up a knife and stabs Geth in the belly.  The two men stare at each other.
“Don’t kill me, wild man,” sputters the king.  “You need me.  Secrets, remember?  You need my mind.”
Saying all of this, the king pushes his little blade in deeper.  Geth lets him twist it all about as he patiently severs the old man’s head, crown and all.

(2)

Evening’s bell is clanging in the village of the witches when Shala receives her summons to the sanctuary.  Her lips move with whispers as she walks, surrounding herself with magic spells, powers of preservation and fortitude.  Upon her left breast is the mark of the order, the black spiral, there for all to witness.
She goes past the sanctuary once and her quick dark eyes glimpse the activity there:  a dozen horses tied to the post, jangling their angular bronze armor.  The riders stand close by, thuggish brigands with matted hair and beards.  Shala throws a cloth of shadow between herself and the barbarians.  If they see her, they do not know it.
The sanctuary is in confusion this night.  Shala slips in the back way where the sisters are talking in low, excited voices and taking turns peering through the spy hole at the strangers.
“I thought we were keepers of spirits,” says one sister, “not pets.”
Shala squints at the guests.  The largest of them sits with his feet up on a stone table.  Between his fists is a human skull.
“What do they want?” asks Shala.  “A bath, I hope.”
The Lady Holiness of the sanctuary moves among them now, calming them with invisible powers.
“His name is Geth, a leader among the mountain people,” says the Holiness.  “He claims he knows the temples of the ancients.”
Shala opens her lips in shock.  It was as if the old woman had said she’d found the root of the world, the elixir of vitality, the first grain of time’s sand.  The ancients had stacked up their places of marvel and then fled the world ages ago.  The witches held only a scrap of the old knowledge, but it was sufficient to conquer multitudes.
“Why does he come here?” asks Shala.
“He cannot read the signs he finds.  One of you must go with him and be his eyes,” says the Holiness.  “But do not see too clearly.”
“Let me close to him and I will read all that’s written in his mind plainly enough,” says Shala.  “With long fingers I will pluck out his secrets.”
“I have listened to his self-speaking,” says the Holiness.  “But all within is tumult and uproar.  I fear that he is mad.  Great danger comes to she who would go with him.  Yet the powers call on us from afar to go.”
The chamber is abuzz again with agitation.  The Holiness shushes the sisters and ushers them into the great room.
At the table, great Geth looks up at the woman.  His eyes are wild and uneven now and they come to gaze on Shala.  Her face in her black hair is like the bright moon at night, good for hunting.
“That one?” Geth asks aloud.  He puts his ear to the skull on the table and listens.
Shala watches him nod and smile.  The skull is blackened by fire.  The pate is covered in melted gold, as if a crown had turned to liquid there.
“Do you read, we wonder?” Geth asks her.
“The signs of the old speech,” says Shala, feeling like a tavern servant about to handle a drunken patron.
Geth rubs his beard in thought.  Slowly he raises the skull to his ear.  The dead king has spoken many times through the seasons.  And Geth knows that the ancients often speak to the king.  The golden skull has become a pivot for the motion of the double worlds.
“What is the advice?” asks Shala.
“We say you are too clever for us,” says Geth.  “You are the little grass snake whose poison is like a thorn.”
With that, Geth stands and gathers his comrades.  Watching him leave, Shala feels as if a stack of coins were falling from her hands.  Now she becomes as the flower that drinks from the air, pulling into herself the subtle energies there, focusing the hidden light.
The skull in the warrior’s hands begins to tremble.
Geth lifts the thing to his eyes, presses his forehead to its.
“What are you meaning this time?” he asks.
Through the ball of dead bones, Shala passes her will into the barbarian.  Choose this one, she thinks to him, the bony black-haired woman, she finds my favor, I must have her, bring her for me.
Geth laughs out loud.  He comes to Shala, stands too close to her.
“The king wishes you to be his royal bride,” says Geth.  He holds out the skull to her.  “Feel blesses, witch, and kiss your handsome husband.”
Shala meets the barbarian’s gaze and boldly takes the skull.  She pushes her tongue between its hinged jaws.  Then she brushes back her hair, rests her ear on its gilded roof.
“The king says he wishes to hasten to fortune,” says Shala.
“Your husband has a death wish,” Geth laughs.

(3)

By night a horde of barbarians rushes through the swamp, their torches going by like wills-o’-the-wisp.  At the head of the pack is sturdy Geth, driving his men through the steaming darkness.  Shala the witch rides with him, the golden skull chained around her waist now, weighing her down.
The riders stop suddenly.  One of the horses has plunged beneath the marsh where the ground gives way.  As the animal is dragged out, the barbarians gather in a circle and Shala can sense the disturbance gathering there.
“Why does the spirit no longer lead us?” asks one man.
“Must you be coddled every step of the way?” Geth asks him.  “The spirit has set us on the path.  It is enough.”
“The witch has shut him up!” cries another man.
Shala glances at the torchlit faces surrounding her:  tired eyes and hard mouths set behind beards.  She feels the danger in their postures, shapes of frustration.
“Then speak with him yourselves,” she says.  Secretly she has feared this moment, for the voice of the dead man has gone silent miles ago.  She can trick the barbarians with theatrics, she knows, but fears meddling in the affairs of the wandering spirits. Or perhaps this is what the cackling, murmuring king was leading her into, this confrontation, this trial of ability.  Whatever the reason, she is glad that the dead man’s breathless ranting had stopped.
“Let’s have him, then,” the barbarians grumble.
Shala lifts the heavy chain over her head.  The links run through the eye sockets.  She holds the skull up in both palms.
“What would you have of him?” she asks.
“Riches,” says one man.
“Aye,” says another.  “A whole damned heap of loot.”
“And power,” says Geth.  “Power enough to shake the world.”
A great power it must be, thinks Shala.  Shala squints at them in the darkness, seeing around them the outlines of greed and hunger.  She can feel the pull of want in her own heart, a passion for knowledge and all of its dangerous potential for control.  She blinks, letting the emotions of the group work through her.
“Ancient spirit, we call you,” she intones.  “Show us the place of greatest treasure.”
The wind is just then coming through the marsh and it blows out all the torches.  At that moment, the gilded skull lights up from within and slowly rises from her hands.  The barbarians lift their heads to watch it ascend.  When the glowing head reaches the height of the treetops, the light changes from gold to green and a terrible voice resonates from the bones like a bell.
“What invocation is this?” says the voice.
Geth and Shala both recognize it as a different voice, much more willful than the cracked king who had muttered in their ears.
“Tell me, witch,” Geth says to her in a low voice.  “Is this your doing?  If I find that this puppet dangles from your fingers, I’ll make me a chain with two heads on it.”
“The ancients come and go of their own choosing,” she says.  For a moment, she feels a rush of awe, the possibility that it might be an ancient guide after all.  But she also wonders if she has created the apparition out of her own imagining, out of the feeling of the group.
The barbarians call out to the floating head above them, voicing their raw desires.  As Shala watches them, she sees lights flickering in the reeds all about them.  Little spirits seem to flash between the shadows.  One of the men runs after them, bellowing.  Others follow.
“You must stop them,” Shala hisses, but Geth no longer looks like himself.  Now he becomes a strange figure of green flame.  Shala stumbles forward with her hand to her mouth.  She knows instantly that an ancient soul is upon her, pulling her close.
Now Geth sees the same compelling light surround the witch.  He shakes his head, pulls out his swords, brandishes them against the eerie powers.
Howls of torment rise above the creeping insect noise all around.  Geth charges after his men, sees them dropping, doubled over, into the black waters.  In a clearing, he finds two men have murdered each other.  A ghostly light had masked them and now it evaporates, floats across the mist, condenses around Geth, who hacks at it with both blades.
Shala slips through the trees, sees Geth stabbing at another barbarian.  She casts an urge to still the fighting, but the work is done.  The other man collapses on his belly and dreadful light leaves his corpse.
Now Shala draws the light towards her, lets her fingers move in its rhythm.  She breathes it in and it feels like hot smoke inside her.
Geth rubs his eyes and lunges at the witch.  He puts his rough hand into the radiance that envelops both of them.  His eyes burn with tears and he claws at the glowing air.
“Where is the great treasure you offer, O deathful thing?” Geth chokes.  “Is it bloody steel and bitter water?”
Shala feels her lips being pulled apart, dry words working in her mouth, saying, “How have you seen where their eyes turn now?  The reward is heaped up in the beyond.  Would you find your own?”
Geth turns and feels the approach of the dead men’s souls, crowding him.  They are full of questions, agitations.  Geth turns and blows out the light with one hoarse breath.
In the darkness he feels for her as she falls and he slings her over his shoulders.  Her body is painfully hot against him.  Geth touches her and finds that the golden skull is chained once more around her hips.  He plunges it into the dark water and steam hisses from its joints.
Once in a while, as he trudges through the night, he thinks he sees faint flashes in the distance, leading him out of the dismal waste.

(4)

By day Geth lopes along heavily, this man of strength, brutish figure with long strides.  And around him, as the triple moons that glide about the world, there goes his witch, Shala, all at once.  They have passed through the towns of the river and marsh and the people have muttered as they went.  The golden skull is silent, yet something fearful seems to hang on them.
The path gives way to open fields and low hills.  It is good land, but it trembles with disquiet and unease.  Here and there they see the markings of a forgotten road, rubbed smooth by ancient weather.
Shala stops short, crouches near the road’s edge, saying to him:  “Don’t go on now.  There is something terrible about.”
He batters into the forest there, determined to crush some hideous menace.  But nothing answers out of the brush.  A heap of stones is under moss.  Geth stoops over it, discerning.
“These are as the signs we found before,” he says.  “What do they speak?  Bow thine head?  Shrine of stargazing?  Welcome to our humble brothel?”
Shala shakes her head, her long black hair.
 “A lodging for the dead,” she whispers.  Shala hefts a stone in her hand.  She is long-limbed with muscles as tough as stretched rope.  The stone has a warning in it, in its compact with antiquity.
“We are not welcome,” says Shala.  The stone vibrates its memory into her fingers.  “We trespass.”
Look:  these rocks were a temple, the paving stones that shuddered beneath the circuit of ritual, of priestly task.  Now the power that is in things has been broken, is spread like fluttering stars.  The old stones tremble at power’s return.
Geth shoves the pile over to one side.  He wants to uncover jeweled rods, metal tablets, something to put in his hand and shake at the world.
The stones slide down and sound like water going over.  Underneath the stones is a creature, the messenger of ancient terror, the Ozog.
They do not know it is on them for a moment.  Geth swings around as if covered with flies.  He comes down like a drunken man, his torso stung red, his arms bloody like thick slabs of raw meat.
“Cua em sonod Ozog,” Shala murmurs.  Her eyes turn to white moons.  She is drawing radiance from the shivering air.  The monster upon them whirls about, irritated by the sudden chill upon its hairy scales.
“Come here, pet,” says Geth.  He staggers up to meet the quick rushing of the Ozog.  Now a nightmare is upon him:  a four-legged monster with a face full of jaws and piercing horn.  This thing roars as it charges him.
Geth has a sword in each hand.  He is flinging wide arcs of shining death before him.  A blade goes in through the creature’s skin.  Geth drives it in and uses it for a foothold to scale the monster’s broad back.
The Ozog rears up on its hind legs.  It turns on Shala now.  Look:  it is like an immense tree coming down on her.  Shala the witch is unmoved and twists in her trance of the elements.  The sameness of all things gathers in her steepled hands, in the pyramid she makes of her fingers.  Out of the fullness of the world, a great wind flies from her hands and the Ozog is thrown through the treetops.
Geth grips the monster’s neck with his forearm.  He rides the beast down to the ground.  The other arm comes around now and the blades are driven in.  The Ozog stumbles, bends down to die.  The skin is obscured by yellow smoke.  Geth leaps free from the carcass.
“Be still,” Shala whispers.  There is still witchcraft in her fingertips and she passes it into the warrior’s wounds, where the skin was torn apart.  Geth winces and turns away.
“I should like to stew this beastie,” says Geth.  “Or roast him on a spit.  Make a pair of boots of his evil hide.  Trophy the head if I hadn’t split it.”
Shala lets the witching flow out now, back into the many places of the world.  She leans back against a stone, a huge carved block.  There is a feeling of presence in the rock.
“An Ozog,” she says.  “An abomination.  Things not meant to be joined were made to live as one.”
Geth grins and spits at the monster.  Then he is putting his boot into the neck of the thing, wrenching loose the blade that wavers there.  Shala watches him and she thinks how unnatural it would be, too:  the union of them.  She is meant for a warlock, she knows, a sensitive, a human lightning rod.  And Geth must have a huntress or two, maybe more, to echo about the mountain caverns in the west of which he sings.
The world is remade, she thinks as she slips into the deep trance, the laws written by new hands, the unspeakable given words.
At her waist, a dead man’s head is filling with dreadful notions.

(5)

Many hours pass in the place of stones before Shala comes up from her meditation.  Geth cocks his head at her from where he sits, sharpening his blades.
“What do you see then?” Geth asks.  “The things that are far?  That all is turning around?”
“I see this place, that it has pulled us in from a long way off,” says Shala.  “A thing lives here that sits to one side, an old man by the lake, fishing for his supper.”
Geth peers up into the trees.  A part of him senses the dark thing that moves there.
“Tell us more, witch,” says Geth.  “Look under the lake or what else good are you?”
Shala squints at him, his thick shoulders slumping, him backed against a tree stump, his barbaric assumptions.
“A pedestal for the cracked gods,” Shala says.  “A plaza to bargain for warts or rain.  This was the way for a thousand years.  All the stones are one stone.”
“You damned riddle-maker,” Geth says.  “Speak to me simply, the way the river speaks to the sand.  Or go and I will watch your doings.”
Shala crosses her arms at him and he goes away among the stones.  He is thinking that it is hard to be bound to do these strange things.  He sees inside himself the faces of his folk, their hands lifting to him, asking that he push the world over to balance, that he fill the cavern to its mouth with gold.  Now he goes with a woman of dark purpose, slippery with guile.
“There were powers before,” Shala explains.  “They chained together all the world, put locks in the chains, swallowed the keys, grew big.  A beast it was that thrived.  Each place of temple stones as this remains its eye, its tooth, its claw.  Upend this heap of relics and the globe will tremble.”
She feels then the lifting of the powers around her.  Something is shaped in the geometry of air, rising and folding over itself.  It is a thing of strong will reaching out.
“Then show me where to shove,” says Geth.  “Let me knock down this cursed pile of rock so I can go back to feasting and fencing, back to my home where the ghosts stay out of my affairs.”
He grabs up a massive stone, heaves it into the brush.  With his boot he topples a cube of stacked blocks.
“Are you a pure fool after all?” Shala asks.  She loads her fist with shock, stings him on the back.  Geth turns and glares at her.
Shala pulls back her hand.  The power is throbbing in the little bones there.  It is telling her where to find the way.  She lets her arm bend like a dowsing wand over secreted silver.
“There,” she says, gesturing into the distance.  She can almost see the moving energies there, like strong wind blowing a field of corn.
“Make your mind up,” Geth grunts and goes tramping off in the opposite direction.  She watches the motions of his broad back through the green, buzzing wood.  When she catches him, he is sitting cross-legged among ferns, his head down, rooting.
“Hungry are you?” Shala asks.
“Time for readying,” says Geth.  “I rouse the animal spirits.”
He works his fingernails into the ground, digs out a hunk of root, and then he is biting through the brown fibers.  The taste is bitter and sharp.  Already he sees red spots when he moves his head.  The witch now looks as if made from wax.  Her black hair shines like mountain lakes.  Her breasts rise and fall as curving waves in the western sea.  Geth grins as he chews the root, as chalky froth covers his chin.
Shala watches him try to stand up.  His actions are large and angular.  With her second sight, she sees the medicinal trickling through his blood vessels, his swelling muscles, his loose gaze.  A time for caution, she thinks, as though handling a strange dog.
“How is it with you?” Shala asks.
“Geth is remade in the little smithy,” he laughs.  “Now Geth is to be an axe head, an instrument for those that guide my folk.  Geth is in the grip of Skullsplitter, White Dagger, Strifemaker.”
He looks about and the gods of the hill are with him.  They growl and lick their chops and juggle swords.  Shala does not see them, but she feels their grim intentions.
“Then be useful, bloody tool,” says Shala.  “I will press you into service if you think you won’t break.”
Geth lumbers toward her and stands there breathing heavily.  Shala gives him a thin smile, inspects his bearing.  Then she spins around and goes back through the forest, walking in the crooked path of terrible powers, and Geth stalks after her.
Look now as the bird sees:  the stones make great circles, spreading out for many yards.  No one sees that a city hides here.  There are patterns in all things if one but looks.  Shala is nimble as a fawn as she paces off circumferences.  Each circle is inscribed in a triangle; each triangle is bound by a circle.  There is but one order in the world, she thinks, given out by different means.
Shala balances on one foot, on tiptoe, at the junction of two circles, overlapping ripples of energy, a source of the far stars pulsing in the weeds.  She feels the power flowing around her:  a whirlpool, a dust devil, a thunderhead, a storm front to prickle the hairs on her legs and a cold wind to drive shivers up her bare back.  Standing there, Shala sees in ghost sight the lines that run like strands of cobweb in morning dew.  Just then she feels caught in the web herself.
“Shake your tongue loose, witch,” says Geth.  He follows her paralyzed gaze to a stack of rocks nearby:  the base of a ruined tower, jagged now like a broken tooth.  “Do you mean this jumble hereabouts?”
Shala nods serenely with eyes wide as windows.  In sensing, she is sensed.  Many presences linger here with no place of rest, she thinks.
Geth attacks the rock pile, sets to work dismantling the interlocked tiles that cover the floor.  For a moment, he, too, feels the presence about them and it gives him a rare sensation of fear, like a drop of poison in his heart.  But the taste of the root is in his mouth and his hands continue their work unbidden, hauling up the six-sided blocks and pitching them aside.  Under there, the ground opens to darkness and Geth inhales the dank scent of a cavern.  In his thoughts, he is home with his folk in the mountain’s belly.
Shala comes there and peers over his shoulder.  Things rustle and scratch down in the pit below.  But Geth is already lowering himself into the hole.  The walls of the cave are smooth as glass.  Geth blinks hard and lets the other eyes open for him.  Now he sees many treasures in the chamber.  It is a vast space under him, perhaps a burial vault, he thinks.  And he sees a sneaking creature dart into a corner alcove and vanish.
Sometimes Shala sees things that have not yet passed.  Just then she throws her arms around Geth’s as he is grabbed from below.  He bellows at his attacker.  His flesh is cut to pieces by something like rat’s teeth or cat’s claws.
Shala heaves herself back, trying to hoist him up, but he is a giant weight.  Geth thrashes his feet, flinging the creatures that are at him.  Then he shrugs Shala off as he jumps into the pit himself.
His swords fly into his hands as he crashes to the floor.  He sees them now, the creatures, long and toothy slugs with curled stingers.
“Catch us a spark,” he calls to Shala at the opening.  “We’ll make us a bonfire here.”
Shala looks down there but the pit is blinding to her.  She senses its spirit; memories of anguish and torture hung on the walls like paint.  Now her hands go to her waist.  She rubs the golden skull in her hands, dangles it over the darkness.  The strange object glows red.
The legacy of pain down there, it is fuel for the flame that explodes from Shala’s spark.  A flash consumes the air and Geth has rolled beneath the rubble.  The fire goes like a sudden flood.  Smoke fills the place with the black smell of burning fat and char.  Geth is still on the floor when he hears it, in the walls, the slithering of things stirring to life.
Geth struggles out from under the rocks.  Here and there, chunks of wall are collapsing and a living flood falls on him, a crawling, hissing mass.
“Take my hand,” Shala calls.  She stretches her body down into the awful smoke.  Geth stumbles up a heap of slag, leaps to grasp her.  She grunts as she strains against gravity.  Geth gets his boot into a crevice and emerges.
They are both panting flat on the ground.  Geth feels a strange sense of loss.  There were powers strung from wall to wall below his feet, an energy that his body recognized.  The urge aches even as he leans to Shala to go out of the place of haunted stones.

(6)

Evening is coming as they climb a hill near the ruins.  Shala sits beneath a tree and speaks softly to Geth.  As she speaks, the branches bend down to form a canopy over them.  She sings a healing song from long ago.  The leaves are like a flock of green birds descending and the branches are like those of an apple tree, heavy with fruit.  All around is her singing and the waving of her hands, the little swaying.  Geth opens his eyes.
“The witching of yours,” he asks,  “where is it born?  From those old ones that stacked up the rocks?”
“The powers are in all things,” she says.  “The old ones saw first, but not well.”
Geth sees her light movements, listens to her good singing.  Shala lies on her side, balances herself on her elbow.  Geth sees her breasts hanging there with the fullness of the apple tree.  In his thoughts, he knows the warnings that were given at home:  to watch the witches sideways, to never be tangled up in their complications.  Now the witch is stirring him with her invisible maneuverings.
“Are you a practiced witch, then?” he asks.  “What do you know about?”
Shala smiles at his curiosity.  She feels the crude force of instinct in him feeling for her subtle ways.
“I do some things well,” she says, “and some not at all.”
“I think you are learned in making love charms.  Do you deny it?”
“You speak of love as if it were clay to be worked,” she says.  “Love works through us; we are led by its hand, gently or roughly.”
Geth lunges at her, paws her hair.  He strokes the black tattoo at her breast.  His mouth is on her shoulders.  Shala takes a breath, opens her eyes.  Part of her knows the time is not right.
“I did not come along to wife you, savage,” she whispers, putting the sleep in his ear.  Geth disturbs her a moment more before yielding to the heaviness of dreams.
Shala watches over him through the night.  Her kind has brought dreams into daylight, lives in both worlds at once, so they no longer sleep.  She sits peacefully, letting her thoughts come and go like ocean waves. 
A swift-moving storm overtakes them by midnight and Shala wonders at the fierceness of its passage.  She settles herself again, but cannot rest.  Something prods her.  Something is at her side from afar.
Whatever spirit it is that has driven them across the world, Shala senses it is seeking a final confrontation    
Now Shala arises, sets a warding sign over the sleeping man, then pads through the woods to the place of stones.  She feels wholly alone looking down into the black pit, as if it were the sky of bottomless night.  Suddenly, the quiet voice of the dead king revives in her ear.  She rubs the golden skull until, chiming, it shines forth.  An even glow touches the corners of the vault and Shala sees pictures in the walls, scenes of ritual and bloody sacrifice, the burning meat offered to spirits.
Another pair of eyes looks back at her.  Shala loses her footing and falls backwards.  The gilded head smacks the ground and a tooth flies into the pit.  Eyes move into shadow.  Already she is sending her summons to Geth, bringing him down the hills like a fast river.  His clumsy coming through the brush is a comfort.
Geth fixes her with furious glaring.  “I dreamt you were here, picking my pocket.  The mountain gods are my eyes on you witch.”
“Not I,” she says, “but someone goes about our treasure house.”
Geth tilts his head, hears something disturb the rocks.  He listens and he can see it with the eyes of the underground.  Suddenly he jumps in after it, hauls the thing up.
“Help!” cries the pitiful creature.  It is a gnarled dwarf kicking its legs as Geth holds it aloft.
“What would you be doing here?” Shala asks.
“Getting my head out of the rain,” says the dwarf.
“Whose head is that, then?” asks Geth.
“Simple Simon,” says the dwarf.  “Bill Findlestilts.  Twig Nubkin.”
Geth tosses the little man down, presses a foot on its chest.
“Hold still, smidgen,” says Geth, “or I’ll cut you in two like a loaf of bread.”
The dwarf holds its body stock-still.
“What did you find down there?” asks Shala.
“Puddles,” says the dwarf, “and my own round face in them.”
“Are there others like you?” she asks.
“I, myself, both,” says Twig.
“You’re a mad little manikin, aren’t you?” says Geth.  He lets the dwarf get up.  Twig brushes himself off, his little suit of leather.  Geth lets out a snorting laugh at him.
“Now you can show us what you’ve found,” says Geth.
“I’ve spoken my token,” says Twig.  “Would you know more?”
Shala puts her hand on her hip and regards the dwarf suspiciously.  He looks like an old child, a big wrinkled head on a puppet’s body.  Like all else here, a thing mismatched.
Now they ready the torches and Geth ties a rope around the little man.  They lower him into the vault with them, let him go on like a leashed dog.
“We are richer there,” he keeps saying.  “This way.”
The rooms are stark and alien and seem to have no clear plan to them.  Here and there they pass shattered statues of insects and birds.  The ceilings are etched with a pattern that repeats itself throughout the space:  the circle in the triangle and the triangle inscribed in the circle.  
Shala senses that the passages are inclined, going deeper each step.  Twig’s incessant pacing and backtracking seem designed to get them lost.
Hideous smidgen, she says to herself.  Does he mean to trap us?
Twig stops and stares at her.  A sensitive after all, thinks Shala, and what more besides?  Twig grins at this fresh thought, too.  As they face each other, Geth hears something scrape, like bone on stone.
“That would be a rapping at the door of the treasure house,” says Twig.
Geth looks him over and then at the noise.
“Then go get your fill,” Geth prods the little man.  “Or is this some trick of yours?”
“If I go, my fortune increases,” says Twig, “whilst yours dwindles like a candle.”
“You’ve need of increase,” says Shala, eyeing him.  “Now go.”
Twig bows slightly, twirls, and goes off into the tunnel ahead of them.  They hear him humming to himself.  Another scrape shakes the walls.
“Speak, smidgen,” Geth calls.
“I spoke in truth,” Twig says.  “Would you come claim your treasure now?  It is too great a burden for me and myself.”
Geth glances at Shala.  She swallows hard and looks into the darkness.
“If there’s trouble, boil us both,” says Geth, handing her the little man’s leash.  As she ties it around herself, he kisses her sloppily.  Geth pauses a moment to see her bemused reaction, grins, and stalks off down the tunnel.
Shala lifts the torch and watches him move in the flickering shadows.  Then another scratching on the stones and a cold wind puts out the light.
The rope tightens.  Shala is pulled into the darkness.
The golden skull shatters on the ancient floor.     
Geth calls for her, takes a step into empty air, tumbles down a shaft of stone.  At the bottom, his back slams something unsolid, something breathing.  His grunts echo on ancient bricks.
Shala rushes after him.  She snaps a spark from her fingers – a star of blue light.  Many yards below, she sees Geth trying to get to his feet.  Standing over him is another Ozog.  Geth meets the monster’s fangs with both swords.
“Did the little man not fill your belly?” Geth snarls at the creature.  “Do you need to feast on steel as well?”
The Ozog lets out a deep gurgle and a hiss.
“Why resist your reward?” it says slowly.
Geth blinks at the creature in disbelief.  He takes a step back, rethinking the confrontation.
“Would you know more?” asks the Ozog.  It speaks with the whine of Twig and the mania of the dead king, with the rumble of an ancient soul and a legion of others.  A confusion of tongues sputters forth from its deadly mouth.
“What wretched mixture are you?” Geth barks.
The Ozog clears its throat and shuffles towards him.
“All stones are one stone,” it says.  “We that lived in other times were broken into many pieces.  Now is the time for joining.”
With that, the Ozog snatches at Geth with a pinch of its claws.  Geth leaps through the air and batters the creature between the eyes.  He comes down hard and rolls to one side.  The Ozog seems to chuckle.
“Shrink not from the sun, little flower,” it says, peering up at Shala.  “Your treasure awaits.”
“My wish was for knowledge,” says Shala, “or did you not know?”
“Let me teach you a thing or two,” says the Ozog.
The monster snatches at her and nearly catches.  Shala jumps back and breathes deeply, trying to understand the hidden energy of the monster.  She feels it moving distantly: an ancient soul trapped in the wrong age, a thing mismatched, a chaos of king and dwarf and beast.  She knows somehow that it must follow the others of its race, but cannot find the way.
A roar shakes the floor beneath her and she falls forward, clinging by her fingertips to the edge.
The Ozog charges Geth, flattening him against the side of the room.  The blow cracks the wall and knocks the tiles of the ceiling loose.
Shala falls flailing to the floor below.
She lies there panting against the stone.  The bricks of the ceiling are raining down and she sees on each the symbol of the circle and the triangle.  For a moment, she sees the signs form a spiral in their repetition.  She senses the circle of herself and the three-pointed star of Geth together forming a perpetual pattern, a black spiral at the center of things.  The knowledge passes over her like thunder and she is rejuvenated.
Geth swings his blades blindly at the Ozog now.  The monster claws at him, tearing his skin.  Geth feels the spirit in him breathing out through his wounds.
Now he sees Shala leap onto the creature’s back.  In the dim blue light, her eyes glow red as hot embers.  She flips through the air and comes to her feet in front of Geth.  Before he can speak, she presses her body against his, translating the ancient code into solid form.
The Ozog staggers at them, shielding its face from the brightness that flows from their union.  The light that goes out from them is like the water in the ocean that pulls apart the rocks.  With an awful groan, the monster splits apart and crumbles.  
Geth runs both swords through the monster’s neck and dashes aside as the creature crashes to the floor.  The flesh of the thing begins to bubble and leak.  Geth takes a step and cracks open its head.  Liquid gold spills out.
Now there are voices flying from the monster and they rattle in the corridors.  The place of stones is shaking in its depths.  Shala grabs Geth’s arm and climbs the voices to the top of the shaft.
The pit is choked with stone as they climb free.  The voices of the dead rush out of the world through a seam.
Look:  the sun overtakes the night and heaps its goodness onto the multitude of things.

Proposal for a Theory of Everything

Thurman Spindler had been staring at a telephone for seven hours.  This was not unusual.
Arabela Key was rocking in her armchair, furiously enchanted with the performance of an aerial piano.  Neither was this.
Thurman encountered objects for intense concentration the way some people find change on the sidewalk:  ceaselessly and without satisfaction.  Arabela was a network of photons in flux.
The cool flat smooth event of the disc dipped shimmering across its eventful ellipse, smoothly, flatly, coolly.
They were not waiting for a call.  Indeed, the phone's bouncing chirp seemed to unnerve them.  Thurman would roll his eyes and rub his thumb against his forehead.  Arabela stilled.  But phone calls were rare, as you might imagine.
Not that there weren't people.  Theirs seem like nice ones who watch the generous color tv set and steal cigarettes.  And I'm sure you know where the money comes from.
"Tommy, can you hear me?" one asks Thurman.
The circuit does not break.  Perhaps the fuse was already tripped.  The armchair creaked in its twisted ankle.
Arabela?  Seemingly comprehensible locomotion.  Thurman equals patterns.  Crumpled receipt, glass of tea, stemless sunglasses, pocket calculator -- an equation of purposive intent, surely.  Otherwise, to what end the bare thinking convex of his face?
Three fluid tones ascended brightly.  Keyed in.  Apologies.  Your call cannot be completed as dialed.  Error 12.  Message end.  Unconnect.
Then magnetic inhalation.  An earlobe patiently growing moist and warm against a receiver three blocks away.
"ha ha ha" went the nice people and the cartoon radiated outward in a luminous sphere towards the mothership.
Up there, the orbital bones are compartmentalized and full of liquid and if you snapped them it would coalesce and unloose dormant green phosphorescence.  Strictly for emergencies, dig?  So, say, if the reactor went down, the alarm would buzz and they'd all go around breaking each other's limbs.
Oh, and their skulls were canteens full of frothy, nutritious electrochemicals.  Sort of like pudding or raspberry jam.  Tip it up and slurp!  Yummy.
Certainly such a thing would never happen.  What sort of machine would that be, humming and rattling through a dozen human brains, a hundred, a million?  Obviously they couldn't give the whole problem to one person.  Too sticky:  you got your possibility of crack up, freeze down, or worse ...
Possession.
So much power in one place, might burn a hole clean through and just leave a Big Gulp full of glowing crusty magma in the galactic parking lot.
Fucking futile.  But now, copper wire threading inwards.  25 cents, please.  ha, ha, ha.
But this time, something different.  The coins clicking into place in the belly.  Moonlight hisses through the keyhole.  That means dragon.  Which means greed.  Therefore vice, virtue.  Good and evil exist because?
Nope.
A system slumped incompletely.  Stretch the whole thing out over across existence -- like stegosaurus vertebrae -- there's the trace of the approximate beast.  And the brain's all crammed into one end and achieves only weak blue sparks from the furthest extent of its being.  OK.
In dynamic opposition to example 4c. (above), the parallel structure can be understood to cross the plane of sentient animate singularity at right angles through metaphoric refraction.  Hence, this new construct follows the principles of, say, a lattice of sodium crystals, where each node becomes a nexus, and so forth, growing exponentially within finite parameters.
Arabela's hand grew thin and distended, drawing a silver baton with which she conducted the tympanum.  Thuddabom!  Pum.
The different ear overcomes its object, or is under that impression.
Glissando.  Allegro.  Arabela's mind:  vibrations along a power line grown ahum between two termini.  Maybe here?  But the government couldn't possibly F#m Bb, not legally, could it?
The hell it couldn't.  Do you have even an inkling of what this could mean?
Fortissimo!  Rising and cresting -- melodious swirling darkness straining through, and up, and higher, and through, into, there, at last, the music of the hyperspheres.
Busy signal in Eb.
Oh christ.
They never reckoned that one.
The van parked on a side street gets an unexpected call.
"Hello?" says the man in brass jacket.
The earpiece wasn't designed to withstand that level of volume.  Apparently, neither was the ear.
Screams take on a remarkable timbre inside an inconspicuous van.  A glistening hole empties into the skull.  The bloody fiber optic lines fluttered when he shook.
If you're calling from a rotary Dm, hold for operator.
Pipe in Chopin.  Backwards.
And then a blue sudden blue and everything moves one place and the decimal point drops out, making a soft, sad pock in the carpet.  Is that what you want from me?
But now it's puppet show time!  All the numbers line up on the orange velvet line -- zero and one through nine and listen children!  those are the fingers of Jesus in those little merry digits!  And the dishwasher was full of wine.
Hic!  All hail the wrecks of the juice!
The local manifestation of El Diablo through the apparatus of pantomime negative integers is by no means an aberration.  And square Roman ones -- so each figure is more than its finger.
The telephone picked mutely about its seedy cage.
Arabela snapped the piano lid shut and plucked a violin through her arms, fiddling with her shirtsleeves while Roman numerals burn.  If she had delicate yellow tapered feathers, this is how she would smooth them.
Click click.  Tumblers falling.  Plate as day through a glass sparkly.  In the flood of the damned.
Grr the coffeemaker grounds to a halt.
Thurman cups his ear, listening for flung saucers.
Arabela causes motile needles of spun lead glass light to be answered hoarsely with translucent string.  What is she undoing?  What are we here?
Minds searching, feeling the way.
Not the tv!  Idiot static slushed to the screen.  The cable guy never showed, except the crack of his ass.
The white house candles over and melts brightly.  A waxy even light, obviously.  Monuments, too.  Glurp.
Modulating composition of electric light now;  contrapuntal arrangements spiraling through dialectical helix.  Concerto for 30, 50, 70, and 100 watt bulbs; cooling and popping white overload.
There it is.  Yes, I sense it.  Fuck me now.
Death.  Therefore good and evil.  Boundaries which means grid.  And there is only disclosure.  The fact of the rule means anarchy means rule means cycle.  Next infinity.  Divide being by nothingness.
Error prompt.  Override.  Irrational is rational, Q.E.D.  Error.
Therefore, truth.  Precisely.  Which means ...
And the saucers come storming into the skyline, lurid and atomic.

Acceleration (F/m)

Zander knew there was something wrong with the shit when he'd stolen it.  Then it started telling him, in honey-colored figures just behind his eyes, that it would have to kill him in the next 27 hours.
"Don't slow down," he urged Mi Cha as she steered hard into a turn.
"You'd like to kill us both?" she snipped.  "If I die, who's gonna bury your ass?"
Zander blinked at the golden numbers in his mind's eye.  The virtual clock looked like should've been hanging in some museum as it swept its tapered hands around an ancient face relentlessly.
"Who knows," he laughed, "maybe this thing in my head'll take care of that, too."
He glanced over at Mi Cha, observing how she fought the controls to win more altitude, and he wished in the pit of his belly that he'd never got her into it.  Those cool, green eyes were too young to go out.  Especially over the stupid greed of an older man.
"You'd better call if you're going to," she said.
Zander punched up an encrypted signal and sent it buzzing all over the frequencies.  The response cut in right after, crackling loudly over the engine whine:  "Don't know you, don't wanna."
"Let me try," said Mi Cha, squinting into the dark air.
"Just keep driving," Zander reminded her.  He started cold-calling dealers, knowing full well it was like spraying blood over a pool of sharks.  The answers blew in from all over and Zander's onboard daemon sifted them down to one:  Philly, the Beehive parking lot, 45 minutes, Mr. Gaines.
Zander hesitated a beat, even with the countdown clock spinning in his vision.  Could he trust his daemon, or had the program corrupted that, too?  Still, at this point, he preferred an ambush or a bust to driving around and waiting for his brain to melt.
"Never heard of him," said Mi Cha, shaking her head at the data.  "But you're the one with the big-time hacker connections, right?"
"We're still looking at payoff," he said calmly.  "So let's get some positive wavelengths going here, okay?"
Mi Cha didn't say anything, so Zander just sunk back in his seat and decided to beat himself up with continuous replay of what had gone down.  Silver Tiger Industrial Partnership.  Security designers obviously fresh from Delhi, code stars looking for a bonus.  Firewalls so seamless you hated to scratch the paint job.  Then a couple of minutes to ransack the place as the tracers started chunking away at you.  He could have left it there.  But the stats he was seeing were like sunlight on that silver tiger's ass and Zander got dazzled long enough to decide to stash the goods right in his own thick skull.
"What do they got in Philly, anyway?" Mi Cha asked.
"Sandwiches -- steak and cheese."
"Well, moo."
Even then, he could've backed out.  But he couldn't find a way, except through full install.  His daemon howled down his nerve endings like it'd been injected with metroretrovirus.  That should've told him something.
"So how you feel?" said Mi Cha.
"Still not dead."
"That's good, right?"
He'd messed around with options and the program returned hardware conflict error, peripheral port not detected error, and a demonic voice barking, "Wer ruft mir?"  Then he dropped to the center of the thing and saw that it was computing the advantages to taking him out.  He sent a blocker to the critical relay, just in case.  Just in time, too:  the program decided that Zander was more or less expendable and launched a full assault.  Electrons were striking at the blocker at some obscene factor of ten.  The stolen program came on and told him that, factoring in quantum tunneling, the kill order would jump the blocker and nuke his brain at some point in the next 27 hours.  Handy piece of work, Zander thought, did the calculations for me and everything.
"Get your game face on," Mi Cha warned him.  "We're landing."
Zander climbed out and headed for Gaines, who was leaning against his own vehicle with his hands in the pockets of his suit.
"You do tech work?" Zander asked.
"Try me," said Gaines.
Zander scanned the location one more time, then bounced a transmit to Gaines's briefcase.  Gaines inspected the diagnostics warily, rubbing his hands.
"Damn," Gaines breathed.  "Hot as Rio and twice as toxic."
"What do you think?"
"Some kinda commando shit, looks like," said Gaines.  "Nexgen.  How's it responding?"
"Frontend apps do okay," said Zander, "but I got no love in the core."
"I can get it out," said Gaines, "no problemo."
"I don't want it out," Zander said.  "I want it fixed."
"Call customer support line," Gaines laughed, closing up the briefcase.  "Me, I'm no denkiman."
"You got any idea how much this thing is worth?"
"No good to me if all it does is kill motherfuckers," said Gaines.  "You think I'm gonna massacre my client base?"
"All right, then, hypothetically, what's it worth?  With passwords?"
"What, you want me to front you an advance?"
"There's a thought," said Zander, as a probability spike leaped into the red on his viewer.
"Ain't you got more important shit to worry about?"  asked Gaines.  "Like that sexy slink you got in the car?"
She's exactly what I worry about, thought Zander, that's why I'm trying to scam off your worthless ass.
"Transaction or no?" said Zander.  "I don't got all day."
"Break me off a piece for deposit," Gaines said finally, "I'll drop the fundage."
Back in the car, Mi Cha eyed Zander suspiciously.
"That was quick," she said.  "So now you're good as new?"
"Gave me some money," said Zander.  "Couldn't fix it, but he's betting we can."
Mi Cha poured on speed and rushed them up through the broken towers of pink and green.  Zander checked the results of the latest calculations.  The electron beam was seriously diverging from the classical path and the program docked his available time by three hours.
Feels like even physics is pissed off at me tonight, Zander thought.
"So what's plan B?" she asked.
"That was it."
"Seems a shame," said Mi Cha, "all that tweaked-out code in your head with nothing to do."
"You want me to screw with it some more?" said Zander.  "What if I make it worse?"
Mi Cha peeled the Nike swoosh bindi from her forehead and replaced it with a silver teardrop.
"How long do you want me to mourn?" she teased.
"Pull over, Mi Cha," he said and she did.
"All right, I've got something:  you try logging in on my system.  Maybe it’ll accept you as legit.  I'll jump around back here and try to distract it, maybe buy you some time to snoop."
He finessed an account for her and she was in.  Then he busied himself tossing a barrage of tasks at the hot code.
"I've got something," she said and suddenly Zander felt the left side of his body jolt with electric pain.  He shook his head at her.
"Sorry, gaijin," she said, turning off whatever the thing had been.  "You must not be configured correctly.  Here, try this."
As she spoke the last syllable, the sound got stretched sideways.  Zander must have given her a funny look because she started to smile.  He could see her mouth drawing itself up at the corners and the lips spreading out like a flower over the course of a morning.  When Mi Cha tilted her head to one side, it moved for Zander like continental drift.
"What is it?" she would ask.  He'd calculated what she was going to say next by running a few dozen simulations based on her psych profile.  His reassuring response to her question had already been loaded in a storage buffer to be sent after she'd finished speaking.  Whatever it was that she'd activated in his head, it was doing an effective job of cutting his subjective time into thin slices of awareness.
Zander noted without emotion that everything he knew was being compressed into a vocabulary of symbols and numbers.  Get world.  Sim.  Opt 4, 9, 12.  Next.  Send string.  Star dot world.  Target?  Yes.  Tactic?  9, 23.  He felt like he'd stripped his cognitive engine down to the simplest working motor.  All he had to do was make the choices while the thoughts processed in a dizzying cascade elsewhere.
"Different," he knew he was saying.  Then she would ask either if he was okay or if she should stop.  He blitzed the simulations and got back a higher probability on the latter and ordered up a series of serene head noddings.  Meanwhile, the decisions kept coming.  The ultimate goal was like a black hole pulling him forwards at the speed of light.
Problem:  lethal software.  Solution:  control object.  Problem:  password unknown.  Solution:  get password.  Problem:  author unknown.  Solution?
He saw at a glance the whole population of potential coders, millions of candidates, each figure a mass of relevant data.  Then he was flashing through them, flipping over long rows of logic like they were dominoes, setting off bifurcations and chain reactions until there was only one left standing.  The letters around the face said Keiffer Kaufmann.
And then the bullet train of thoughts he'd been riding slammed into a brick wall.  A surge of moods rushed into him and he realized that he hadn't noticed how the program disconnected his feelings.  Now the emotional reactions to each decision where roaring over him.  He braced himself against the dashboard.
"What is it?" Mi Cha asked, touching his arm.
"Hacker meth," he laughed.  "And I know where to get some more.  Guy's named Kaufman."
"Nice trick.  How'd you do it?"
"Selected for computer school grads, weeded out low security clearances, sifted 'em with antique clocks and neo-nazi tendencies.  What's left?  Mr. Kauffman at his seven bedroom in Virginia.  Wanna see the floorplan?"
Mi Cha urged the vehicle south, along the sea.  In an hour, they were sliding down among elaborate suburban fiefdoms.  The terraplane folded itself among the topiary and they stared at the house from a hill.
"Posh digs, eh?" said Zander.  "Cozy even."
"Lovely shade of orange on those Armed Response signs," Mi Cha replied.
"How's it going to be?"
"Iffy," she said.  "Don't know this town."
"House thinks he's not there."
"We can get in, but you gotta do something first."
Zander looked at her.
"Hook me up with the digital speed ball," she said.
"Out of the question," Zander said, shaking his head.
"Come on, gaijin, we need all the advantage we can get."
"I can't do it," he said.  "Be like putting a gun to your pretty head."
Mi Cha kissed him.  "You're a sweet one, Zander.  Maybe too sweet.  Otherwise, you'd have noticed that I just pirated the files myself."
Zander grabbed her, felt like he wanted to shake the thing loose from her.
"Save it for the job," she said, staying his hands.
He watched her switch on the hot program, saw the way his eyes must've looked to her:  reptilian, predatory, machined.  He heard her say something as she slid down the bank, yet he knew that the words had been sent to him from her past.  She was gone and he booted up the stolen code to catch up.
They descended in blinks of motion among the trees.  Zander heard a humming cloud of Intercept-90's swarming towards them.  He quickly drew up a chaoplexity model of their paths, then he was everywhere at once, taking the machines out of the sky.  Mi Cha was already halfway up the side of the house and coaxing the windows to slide.
Zander expanded the scenario model he'd sketched, watched the primary objective take shape, a strange attractor invisibly twisting the geodesics of their intentions.
Then Mi Cha was in.  The message came in bursts, the melody of her voice gone flat:  "Object not found.  Multiple target search.  Option 5, 6, 16, 19.  Diverge."
Zander boosted the sensitivity in his fingertips and let them spider him up the wall after her.  Her sudden shadow flickered down the stairwell and vanished.  Zander toggled his eyes to IR mode and headed for the bedroom.  A desktop glowed in his vision, emitting its promise with such intensity that it obscured for a moment the kneeling figure of Keiffer Kaufman.
His message came over in their peculiar, cramped dialect:  "You acquired tool."
"Tool dysfunction," Zander returned.  "Have value.  Trade tool, value.  Next."
"Have value.  Have tool.  Tool function," answered Kaufman.  "Dysfunction you."
Zander dived through the door as a volley of fist-sized missiles rocketed across the room.
Another message:  "Tool no value if ... then ... else weapons not acquired."
Zander's IR flared blind at the explosions overhead.  He computed the possibility that Kaufman would trash his own house to kill and intruder and it came back certainty.  Then Zander punched through a ceiling panel and sped through the crawlspace, hoping to draw Kaufman away from Mi Cha.  After twenty meters of steel and cable, Zander kicked out a plate and bolted across the roof.
He never knew why he'd tagged out of the hyperawareness at that moment, but as the emotional white heat saturated him, he sensed a silence.  He thought of signaling Mi Cha, but he might as well shoot a flare at her feet for all that.  Zander sat at the edge of the house and considered.
Then the bricks under his feet went raining up into the air and there was Kaufman.
Zander just crouched there, rigid and patient, denying Kaufman any useful data.  He knew Kaufman would assume that they were both running the program at that point.  And Kaufman would base all his calculations on that belief.
He asked himself what he would've done in Kaufman's simulations.  Fought or fled, probably the latter since he didn't have the munitions.  Kaufman would have been several moves into a battle plan based on that.  Now the sims would have to be run again.
Zander heard quick voicings in his head.  Kaufman was broadcasting hyperawareness threats to him but too fast to comprehend.
Zander did the first thing that came to mind and fell to the shattered floor.  More simulations, just enough time for Zander to roll forward and fall through the hole that was there.  When Kaufman jumped down, Mi Cha lit up the place with smoking chain gun fire.  Kaufman's body fell into his bed.  Zander keyed the speed code.
"Query no reply.  Explain," Mi Cha was asking.
"No code," Zander said.
"Object acquired.  Have tools.  Have weapon.  Target dysfunction," she said.
She passed him the password and the clock vanished from his vision.  They stayed in speed mode all the way out of town, all the way to the hotel, all the way into bed.  They synchronized their drop back into real-time and held each other as the emotions came roaring on.  That alone had been worth the whole thing.

Punctuated Evolution

The impact of the first transmission was that I no longer feared spooky scary immortality.  Previous to that was face pulling dreadful and shame.  Now I just rescale the fractal and slippery over.  Their restraints fail to secure (snap) so now I roar through their intangible commerce of vivid billboard hysteria, free of charge, thanks.
Not without discomfort that initial contact hello is anybody home yes I’m talking to you who me?  Side effects:  temporal dislocation on account of bifurcation cascade; delimited awareness; tortured reasoning.
Nearest approximation?  Hulk-thor-ironman with sorrowful kryptonic burden, Dr. Strange in disco lounge lapel paces NY apt.  Why thought balloon have I been summoned to the astral plain for to do battle with the (POW!) sinister forces.
Real breakthrough:  realization of the paradox.  The struggle is to fight in the blood and skin but you are 99% dark matter yet blinded eyeless by the sticky froth that scums the surface.  I accepted that and got hit with the vertigo started bawling my ignorant face off laughing.  Nothing ever made so much sense before.  But funny because you can’t alter fate and twist it around like saltwater taffy (equals symbol for the fallen flesh in subliminal code just go towards the liquidly lactating ocean mommy deliriously squirting all her babies with crystal fluids but which is actually fossilizing poison.  I laid naked in her big wet expansion and cried out the hateful salts.)
But that was before and just at first.  Now I’m picking up on all frequencies, what with absolute knowledge scorched in the brainpan.  Knowing an absolute whatness of why?  That the pure soul is infected by flesh.  Silly putty flesh so harmless actually cosmic viral spiral that makes a copy that makes a copy makes a copy copy copy.  The process is crude mimicking of the real thing (Coke is it, you’ll recall, being code for the bubbly sudsy fizzy head of spacey timey foam down in them quantums of existence) so now they must war and the bitter battle of course right in downtown dilapidated homo sapiens with the turbocharged voodoo monkey head.  It was all there in the first transmission to our damn dirty ape handed planet—look how Curious George gets himself in ho ho ho bad trouble again but here comes Man in Yellow Hat and how he’s here to get us out of these wretched putrid chimpy fleshes.
Then I knew the source of all my pain:  the skin is for giving sickness.  The pure soul is intention only at all.  The body at best is accretion based on whoops a daisy contingency.  That’s when I made myself unbreakable inside and applied myself to the great work that was my assignment from them beyond and that task was so real to me more real than all my feeble blind man bluff amusement life:  got to scrape off the layers and make the pure soul unsick again.
I needed big hunks of data to proceed, to complete my diagnosis of the condition cough cough hack.  How was the viral flesh corroding the pure soul?  Then there with the think-tank clipboard graph paper of course it was the flesh then the desire then the intentionality which was the will of the whole.  It was not going to be easy pain in my ass get it?
Now the downward backformation feedback vicious circle of viciousness.  If only to amplify somewhere over the threshold and just might break the circuit if I over overload.  (Ben Franklin, kite, key, jagged lines of power radiating updown the wire, because HE was part of it and received the MESSAGE to start AMERICA).
Force it until it breaks off inside.  I eat 30 supersugary flavors of TV a day but it all leaks out.  I’ve got a wound like a sore mouth in the lining of the cavity of desire.  The hands are for clutching and the fingers for tamping the rotting earth and the clicking nails are for pinching threads like bloodfilled lice and suck them out by the roots to clog the hole in the belly of desire.
The massive (clunk) engine then pulses and spins, stretching me, gathering me like string in the teeth of night.  The head is completely interrupted by a crushing mesh of wires, rubber sockets, silky golden foil, and the whole mess feeds right into the lunar soil, there to oscillate the Van Allen belts into total vibration of the ego (whir).
The mind becomes a hot wire stretched between nails.  The mind of God isn’t like that though, the mind of God is a screeching TV in the abandoned convenience store at the edge of ground zero.  The penis fits the bullet hole in the screen.
The whole swollen body of desire is pressed against the void like lips touching the telephone receiver in the room, trying to lure the initiates to the room.  The bodies must be reconfigured like barcodes on a dirty magazine.  This procedure is not entirely painless.  The voice in the darkness can never completely convince.  The pure and unstained sound vibrations will not lie.  It is enough.  There is resistance at first, but there is no rage.  Because there is no understanding.
These exploded, vacant holes filled with agonizing gravity.  This ashtray burning paper and hair.  There is no God.
Sanity is clean.  Every single surface line disc block wedge perimeter traces alien symmetry along the galactic radius.  And the bones.  Washed in clear worms of electromagnetic light, warped only by ineluctable and perfect logic and seamless will, steel ball in the ribcage.  They vomit in the sunlight and tremble.
The bullets shine like newly minted quarters.  The holes in the body of desire equalize atmospheric pressure and terminate the swelling.

Ecology

The third junction hadn’t been on the map and it stopped Kuzu cold.  Yet another quirk we hadn’t counted on, he thought grimly.  Just like the motion detectors in the recycling chamber and the gun turrets pointed the wrong way.  Still he hoped that the architectural deviations were accidents and not traps for possible intruders, like himself.
Kuzu detached two rovers from his left arm and sent them skittering down the alternate paths.  He watched their pulses of shaky sight until one of the rovers hit a wall and slid uselessly around its dead end.  The other was still racing along, downwards now, towards the core.  Kuzu raised up to follow, felt his steel leg ratcheting steadily forward as his biosynthetic leg hobbled alongside.  He glanced down and saw that the smartgel was bubbling up around the puncture wound again.
Craziest damn plan, he mused.
The ductwork around him curved to the right through a whorl of arches, like a
black metal seashell.  Whatever virus they’d used to terraform the planet, it definitely had its flaws.  Kuzu touched the scabrous surface with his left hand and sensed radiation through the dermal contacts.  Must have set off some kind of autocatalyst, he decided.  Wait long enough and the whole place’ll be foam.  If only we had the luxury of time.
He stepped down a slope and the tunnel opened into a matrix of angular space.  Kuzu brought up the map again and made his visuals snap to grid.  The onboard in his brain had a whole garden of viral forms to offer at that point.  The only question was where to release the other virus, the one that seethed suspended in the cylinder of his left femur.  There was a vegetable logic about the whole place:  seed, roots, tendrils, all in the service of poisonous flowers.  He was bringing blight, plague of locusts, early frost.
The ceiling started humming louder and Kuzu backed into the tunnel.  Engines up there, he knew, where morphogenic fields responded to heavy elements in the crust.  He calculated a probable distribution of such deposits in the environment and got a good result.  The seeder would have dug down here if anywhere, he thought.
Then he was climbing.  He blasted out a section of lattice above him and pushed through.  The engines were enormous crystal structures and they vibrated in the darkness.  Kuzu felt searing heat through his biosynth side and upped the concentrations of thermofiber there.
He paused a beat as he watched the layered molecules sheath his fingers.  He saw hands with a long history, yet only just made.  He knew what he was:  a dub of another Kuzu, made while in the combat sim, then beamed and earthburned from fifty light-years out.  The transition to realtime had been jerky, but mostly accurate.  At least they’d gotten the surface right.
Kuzu stared up at one of the engines, then charged his left hand with an unobtrusive magnetic field and up he went, dragging his bio side along.  The core would be down among the power cluster.  The terraformer virus would still be hot and rabidly viable.  The trick would be taking the best path, such that the flesh wouldn’t get fried before delivery, nor the metal infected too soon for escape.
Kuzu felt the flesh rebel at his plans.  There was greed inside the cells, he knew, hunger for his life, even if it was a duplicate one.  The machine mind attempted a dialogue with the bio side, but the flesh was unconvinced.  The whole arrangement was a miserable compromise, engineered to suit circumstances.  But then again, he thought, wasn’t everything else in the world?
The engine shuddered as he crept across it.  He upped his visuals and peered down into the core.  The place was uncanny:  a riot of metallic needles splintering the half-light.  If the tunnels had shown slight mutations, the core had become an entirely different species, one which had evolved along a path that the simulator models never considered.
Something clicked and the platform jolted upwards.  Kuzu stabilized himself as the engine lurched through its cycles.  He was still trying to get a look at the details of the core when he saw a symbol flash among the growths.  He knew instantly its meaning; the same pattern was etched into his left bicep.  And his momentary surprise was enough that, when the engine slammed to a halt, Kuzu fell.
He was crashing down through the sharpened darkness.  He could feel his shoulders shearing and peeling spiny metal on the way down, blistered fingers of accretion.  He fell kicking and got his foot into a hole above his head.  Kuzu hung there for a second, hurting from a thousand surgical stings, listening to the steely rain on the floor below.
His visuals got a bead on the symbol again, then he realized that it wasn’t the same one as before, differently scarred.  He searched the circumference of the chamber and the symbols lit up like grave markers.  He counted at least a hundred bodies, splayed twisted in poses of silent agony.  Then he noticed their faces, which were all his own.
Kuzu shuddered at the recognition.  He’d never thought that he was the first dub, but he’d never suspected that he might be the hundredth.  Or the thousandth.  For the first time, he wondered seriously if the war was even still going on.  Or if he himself was a relic of some past age, an unexploded bomb on a deserted island.
He found a place to grip and oriented himself right side up.  He got his mag field charged and descended.  The corpses of other selves dangled uselessly above him.  Kuzu observed how the biosynth had mostly dissolved on them, leaving behind the metal husks, and he tried to guess which part had gone first.
At the base of the core cluster, he found more bodies.  He crouched next to one and saw close up the hideous deformation of the steel side.  The metal casings had melted like wax, had bubbled up, had spread and folded over.  Yet the shape was generally intact, even his own ossified face.  Kuzu wondered vaguely if he was a modified version or if there was just one standard, optimized Kuzu.
He stopped and examined his current self more thoroughly.  The bio side had sustained some minor injuries in the fall, but what concerned him were the scrapes and pinholes that scored the steel.  He ran a scan of his molecular integrity.  The result made the bio side shiver.  He was infected.
Keep moving, he told himself.  He struggled towards the lip of the core cluster and got knocked to one side by an explosion.  One of his shoulder missile pods had malfunctioned and discharged its payload.  The impact rang against the walls of the chamber.  Kuzu detached the pod, laid it aside, and crawled forward on broken metal.
There was enough time, he decided.  He could drive the cylinder home and drag himself clear.  Then the bio side would be spun into a whole, manufactured anew.  He could shake off the carapace of dying steel and fight his way to the surface.
That was the plan, anyway.  Then assemble the transmitter and hibernate until rescue.  He wondered how many more copies of himself would arrive in the interim.
The target was in sight now:  a shaft driven deep into the planet.  He boosted the gain on his visuals and found the primary node:  a steely spiderweb radiating outwards from the depths.  Kuzu signaled for the virus canister to withdraw from his left thigh.  The mechanism failed.
A shock of panic rushed through the bio.  Kuzu went diagnostic and found that the systems were seriously compromised.  The cylinder was fused shut.  His interior was being terraformed.
Endorphins sprayed into his senses.  He climbed through the opening of the chamber and dropped.  The floor below was pliable and he sank when he landed.  He worked his metal leg down into it until buried to the knee.
Now the hard part, he thought as he armed the remaining missiles.  Alarms buzzed in his skull as the crosshairs centered on his own left thigh.  Another shot of painkillers flooded his cerebrum.  He fired the missiles.
The blast threw him across the chamber.  He fell twisted against the wall.  When he opened his eyes, he saw the smoking, shattered steel that had once been a part of him.  Kuzu pulled himself to the site.  The cylinder had split open, releasing the agents of his victory.
But now I’m its enemy, too, he thought.  Kuzu extended his left arm to the opening in the core walls and drew himself upwards.  He hobbled back down the tortuous labyrinth.
At the third junction, he stopped.  If he was going to grow the bio side out, he had to do it soon, before the war within the metal destroyed the necessary equipment.  He sat down in a corner, against the dissolving architecture, and activated the generation functions.
Nothing to do now but wait, he decided.  The ceiling was coming unthreaded and it reminded him of how the tide had once eroded a sand castle he’d built as a child.  Or the original Kuzu had built, anyway.  There were thousands of memories in there, he realized, intertwined with the mission-critical modules of his borrowed sentience.  He could sit there a while and know them all again.
He stretched his bio arm a little and scooped up the effervescing floor, mounding it into medieval piles.  With a quiet click, he detached a steel finger and used it to drag a moat all around.  Then he slid the rest of the digits from their sockets and let them be four shining towers.  His next iteration would appreciate the meaning.

The Denkimen

Denkiman – (Japanese) n. electrician; someone who fixes the lights.

"Don't you ever get tired of preserving gauge symmetry?" asked Femto.
"You need a vacation," said Atto.
"I need a new job," Femto sighed.
"I'm serious," said Atto.  "Why don't you check into one of those baby universes they're building out by the M36 cluster?"
"Those new timeshares?  No thanks."
"They're not so bad.  I took a tour of one.  Spacious.  Customized initial parameters.  Pretty sweet deal.  Better hurry before they're all expanded."
"You sound like you absorbed a salesman," Femto muttered.
"Well, the answer to your question is no, I never get tired of symmetry," said Atto.  "That's why I signed on for this assignment."
"So, ideally, you'd like to get back to the bang, is that it?"
Atto's eyes glossed.  "That's the goal, my friend.  Preserve the primordial symmetry as best we can in the current environment of finitude."
"Now you sound like Jova," said Femto.
"Well, he knows his stuff.  That's why he's the boss," said Atto.  "Now quit your bellyaching and hand me the gravitongs;  this hypertorus keeps deforming into a ten-dimensional coffee cup."
"Let it," said Femto.  "At least somebody'll get a buzz out of this cosmos."
"If you hate it so much, why don't you quit and go party with the entropedes?"
"Too hot for my liking," said Femto.  "Besides, they're all so unidirectional."
"Isn't that what you're after?  A little asymmetry?"
"Well, but more than that, Atto.  I want chaos.  Excitement."
"Come here and stand on this.  I need to nail a couple of plancks down," said Atto.  "So why don't you transfer?  We do chaos, too, you know?"
"That's just the problem.  I don't want Jova's brand of organized disorder," Femto said, raising his voice.  "I want something messy!  I'm so sick of all this infinite tidiness!"
He shouted into the void and kicked hard at the ground state.
"Oh great, you just broke one of the plancks," said Atto.  "I don't know if I have anymore in the scalar pick-up truck.  Give me a hand down here before I ..."
Femto clambered in after him.  Atto was being pulled apart like blue taffy in the tidal forces.  Femto jumped out and ran to the truck.  He got the jumper cables and juiced the hypertorus until the superstrings decompactified.  Atto came sputtering and coughing out of the spacetime foam.
"Quick thinking, Femto," he said, "but I hope Jova doesn't catch solar wind of your bad attitude."
"Maybe he'll give me suspension," said Femto.  "I could use the time off."
The phone rang.  It was a nonlocal call, proof of Ma Bell's theorem.
"It's Jova," said Atto.  "He wants to see you in his office."
Femto trudged to the nearest wormhole and took the tube to headquarters.  The waiting room was decorated in a gaudy Ruler-of-the-Known-Universe theme.  Femto squirmed uncomfortably in one of the spiral armchairs.  Finally, after what may have been eons, he was transmitted into the office.
"I understand there's a problem," Jova said as he glanced over some papers.
"Just lost my temper," said Femto.  "Momentary lapse."
"You find our work tedious?"
"Well, it just isn't what I'd expected."
"Thought you'd be doing some megascale engineering, I suppose," said Jova.  "Instead, you're balancing books, right?  Become a cosmic accountant?"
"In a way, I suppose."
"Then I suggest that you go and clean out your hypothetical black box.  Your days as a quantum mechanic are over."
Femto staggered out of the building.  He was vibrating with shock.  Then he headed out to look for the entropedes.  He found a pack of them at some black hole-in-the-wall.  The bartender was hawking radiation and took his order.  Femto asked for a bottle of Heisenberg with some uncertainty.  After a time, two of the entropedes approached Femto and slapped their tentacles around his shoulder.
"Hey buddy, don't be such a fermion," said the one.  "Mingle a little."
Femto was overcome by acute anxiety, but didn't want to appear obtuse.  He bellied up to the bar with the others and placed his order.
"Call me Ludwig," said the entropede.  "This is Buddy."
Buddy snorted greetings.
"So you new around here?" asked Ludwig.
"I used to be a denkiman," said Femto.  "We don't get out much."
"Then you need to make up for lost time, friend," Ludwig said expansively.  "Let me show you what you've been missing."
Femto followed the two entropedes over to a nearby planet.
"Check out these sentient carbon forms," said Ludwig.  "Great source of nutrition.  They try to turn everything into data."
Femto looked warily at the planet.  Then one of the little creatures caught his attention and he swooped closer to see.  She was a carbon form and breathtaking in her beauty.
"Look at her!" Femto swooned.  "Her cognitive mechanism is in complete disarray.  The whole structure thrives on gorgeous disequilibrium.  She's the complete opposite of symmetry!"
"Don't bet on it," said Ludwig.  "All higher order structures exhibit symmetry.  Take Buddy for example."
"Hey look at me!" said Buddy, exhibiting himself.  "I'm a friggin' Renaissance study in proportion over here!"
"Geez, Buddy, I never noticed how really ordered you were before," said Ludwig.  "You look good enough to eat."
And Ludwig ate him.  
Meanwhile, Femto had popped a Z zero in his mouth, although he knew it was a weak thing to do, and converted himself to neutrinos.  Then he passed right through her.  He was in awe of her whole mental apparatus, the way it verged continuously on collapse.
"Hey, cool down, Romeo," said Ludwig.  "You're producing an anomaly in the background radiation."
Femto spun around and traced her out in four dimensions.  He found an entropede gnawing at the end of the line, unbraiding the helix, and Femto charged after him.
"Back off, pal," said the entropede as he moved up the line.  "There's plenty for everyone."
Femto radiated lines of force until the entropede crept away.  But Femto knew that there would be more.  He wanted to embrace her and somehow protect her from the rest of the universe, but he knew deep down that the sum total of information in a system must decre se ov r ti  .
His reverie was broken when a fight broke out among the entropedes.  Ludwig threw himself into the fray, shouting at them, "For the last time, the Boltzman constant is not arbitrary, it’s a function of the friggin’ curvature!"
Femto left the entropedes there and approached the surface of the planet to watch his beloved in motion.  He orbited her like she was a star, though each revolution just made him tensor.  He only wished that the attraction were mutual.  He decided to call her Stella, the brightest object in his sky, and he devoted all his energies to her, hoping he might become her coupling constant.
Femto continued to investigate the unrestrained arabesques of her thoughts, spending weeks at a time riding out the electrochemical swoops and swirls.  At length, he believed that he had found the source of her lovely cognitive wildness.  It seemed to be fueled by her continuous consumption of simple alcohol molecules.
One night, after a long day of complicated interactions with other carbon forms, Stella ingested considerable quantities of those molecules.  Femto raced alongside her as she sped down a long stretch of highway.  When he dived into her thoughts this time, he found that they had changed, had bent themselves down into a different energy level, one as monotonous as the road she drove.
Femto slid into the radio wave receiver and adjusted it to a peppier frequency.  He somersaulted through her dashboard lights and refracted their emissions through a spectrum of cheer.  He bounced on the contacts in the steering wheel and made the horn play a samba.  Nothing evoked a response from her.  He felt displaced along the vector of her sadness.
Then he saw that she was staring into the unlit distance, at some point above the horizon.  Femto dashed at once into interstellar space and decided to send her a message.  At last, he thought to himself, some real engineering.
The stars moved, one at a time.  The work almost drained his powers as he formed the great fusion engines into the shape of her heart (itself another of Stella's charming idiosyncrasies, being on just one side of her otherwise symmetrical form).  In fact, he was so exhausted when he hubbled back to her that he almost overlooked the horde of entropedes that was calling her towards a cliff.
Femto leaped at once into the swarm and thrashed the creatures soundly, but still Stella careened towards the cliffside.  Femto looked about desperately for the cause and saw Atto floating above him.
"Hello, Femto," said Atto.  "You know, you're breaking about twenty different physical laws here."
"Atto!  What are you doing?"
"Conserving angular momentum, or had you forgotten?"
Femto lunged at his old friend, but didn't have the strong force to take him down.  Atto shrugged him off and continued with his work.
"Atto, please, not my Stella!"  Femto pleaded.  "She means the visible universe to me!"
"Rules are rules," said Atto.  "You never did quite grasp that."
Femto watched helplessly as Stella's vehicle jolted off the pavement and through the gravel.
"Atto, listen, we can get around this!" Femto shouted.  "Conservation of angular momentum can be violated as long as sufficient energy can be displaced somewhere else!"
"Where are you going to get that kind of energy?"
"Right here," said Femto, thumping his chest.  He plunged into Stella's closed system and gave himself off in tragic packets of goodbye waves.
Atto quickly made the calculations and saw that the books were balanced.  He had no choice but to let Stella go around the curve.  The white light of Femto's act jarred her from her miserable state and she stopped the car.
As Stella called a taxi, Atto redid the math again and noticed that Femto had released himself in a peculiar way, such that he had twisted the space in n dimensions into the shapes of hearts, flowers, and smiley faces.  A little too tackyonic for Atto’s tastes, but the resulting distortions proved unexpectedly strong and girdered local spacetime with new durability.  Stella and her world would persist long into the future.
A quarky character of strange charm, Atto reflected, but perhaps Femto had grasped the rules much better than he knew.

Turner

They were asking these questions now, questions with no easy answers.  "What did you do during the revolution, papa?" they would ask, until Turner had to put them to bed.  Yet he knew that his vague responses had only made their curiosity stronger and that there would be more questions to come.  Everything got repeated at that age, so much so that Turner found himself learning by heart the jingles for products that he'd never even seen.
Turner went upstairs to check on them.  They had kicked off their blankets and their shoulders were bared to the night's coolness.  He covered them up and went out onto the porch for a smoke.  It occurred to him that the events weren't entirely clear in his memory, more like a shuffled deck of cards.  He'd been dating Lauren then, he was sure of that.  That's why she'd called him that morning, desperate.
"I know you worked your shift last night, but I'm in bad shape down here," she'd said.  "Had three quit on me already today.  I don't know what's going on."
Turner remembered getting off the couch where he'd slept and heading out in a wrinkled uniform shirt.  That was why those crazies had stopped him in the street.
"Look at my boy!" the one had said loudly, gesturing at Turner.  "All dressed up for work!"
Then the other, up close, confiding:  "Listen, man, what're you doing?  You don't got to work anymore.  Ain't you heard yet?"
Turner hadn't heard yet and shoved through to the bus stop.  Lauren hugged him when he showed up, even though she'd just made assistant manager and wasn't supposed to do things like that in front of everybody.  He remembered being surprised by that.
The sandwich place was crammed with people on their lunch hour and Turner tied on his apron and set to work feeding them.  He recalled seeing a few in the crowd with the distant, out-of-it look, but he hadn't understood and assumed they were just stoners with the munchies.
Then, after work, going over to Gerardo's to see what was up, walking into the garage where.  No, but before that, the TV hanging in the corner over the tables.  The anchor was saying, "Area businesses react to sweeping new legislation passed by the state last night.  Many praise lawmakers for enabling local merchants to compete with overseas markets where the practice of android ownership has been common in recent years.  Now let's go to our chief financial correspondent ..."
That's what had planted the clue, so that when Turner walked into that hot-as-hell garage and found the five andreas in there, he knew instantly why Gerardo had quit.
The silence in which the andreas worked, that's what struck him most.  Gerardo had them putting some kind of trinkets together and there they went.  The door to the basement was open and Turner went in and there was Gerardo on the couch, shorts around his ankles and an andrea with her head in his lap.
"Check me out," Gerardo'd said, gesturing grandly, "What d'you think?  I'm a businessman now."
"I don't know, man," said Turner.  The andrea never even looked up from what she was doing.
"Soon as I heard they legalized it, I went out and hocked all my guitar shit," Gerardo said.  "Got a deal on these."
"So you own them?"
"Just like furniture," Gerardo laughed.  "Easy credit, financing available, you know?"
"You gotta feed them?"
"Well, yeah, I mean they're like us, except they make them, grow them in a tank or something.  You wanna try one out?"
"They're like retards, aren't they?"  Turner asked.  "I mean, how can you ..."
"Don't need a Ph.D. to do what she's doing, know what I'm saying?" said Gerardo.  "Besides, when they look this good, who cares if they drool?"
"You keep them, Gerardo.  Not my thing."
"That's all right," said Gerardo.  "I'm not their pimp.  No, I got them making jewelry, gonna sell it down the beach tomorrow."
"Just seems like, you know, slavery.”
"Answer me this, T, you tell me what's worse:  us making slaves out of these things or the system making wage slaves out of us?"
Turner didn't see Gerardo much after that.  It must've been when he'd moved in with Lauren a few blocks over, or anyway that was a good reason not to visit.  He remembered that she was stressed a lot in those days.  One night, she was complaining about pressure from the regional office and mentioned the andies she had to train at the sandwich shop.  That had jolted Turner right out of bed.
"Don't worry," she'd said, "you'll still have a job.  They'll move you up to the counter.  Customers don't want to deal with a moron."
"Neither do I," Turner had said.
"Better get used to them, the andies," she'd said, "because I've got a surprise.  I ordered us one."
Turner remembered being completely out of bed at this point.
"You what?  What for?"
"You think I like cleaning this place up after I work all day?  You think I get off on doing your laundry?"
He knew that there was no talking her out of it and he accepted Lauren's new andrea with only slight reservations.  For one thing, he didn't like being alone in the apartment with it.  It made him feel edgy, like the andrea was some autistic cousin who'd come to stay with them.  He insisted on helping her with her chores.  Lauren said that if he'd done before, they wouldn't have needed the andrea in the first place.      
Turner glanced up at the night sky, the stars.  Funny how you get used to things, he thought.  Like the andreas at the grocery store or the andies mowing lawns.  The andies at the sandwich place had slept in the stock room among crates of bread.  Every morning, Turner'd had to hose them down in the parking lot.
Those were the longest days he'd ever put in, he decided, with no one to talk to.  The customer would order, you'd push the buttons, and the system would flash pictures at the andies.  And if they weren't working, they were straightening up the place.  Turner tried to help out the first couple of days, then gave up.
He watched a lot of TV that week, he remembered.  There was this image they showed endlessly, a clip of the President ripping up a photo and slamming the podium and saying "Never again."  Maybe that's why Turner hadn't been too surprised when the tanks rolled up his street one morning.
Turner had gone to work anyway.  He hadn't been there an hour when they got the call to close up.
"What about the andies?" he'd asked his supervisor.
"Get rid of them," the guy had answered.  "Take them down the street and turn them loose."
  The andies had followed him so faithfully, he recalled, so silently loyal.  He'd been told to grab their uniforms, to leave no trace of their employment, but he couldn't do it.  Instead, he went back inside the shop and brought out armfuls of sandwich stuff.  He passed it out among the andies and pointed them towards the mission.
By then, traffic was stopped and the streets were thick with crowds.  Turner heard that the buses weren't running and he had to walk back to the apartment.  On a wall near his block, someone had spray-painted "Fascist out now" and Turner reflected that he'd never really understood that word at all.
The front door was shattered, kicked in, evidently.  One of the neighbors said the National Guard had rounded up Lauren as part of a neighborhood sweep.  Turner got a few things and headed towards the edge of town, where he'd been told they were holding people, convicted owners.  He'd refused to put the andrea in his name.
He was crossing an intersection when he saw something that made him stop.  A guy was smacking these two little andies, trying to get them to hurry on out of the city.  He must've pulled them early, Turner thought, judging by their size.
"Don't do that," Turner had told the man.
"I paid for them.  I can do what I damn well please with them," the guy said.  Then he pushed the andies and they stumbled forward into the trees along the highway.  Turner went up behind the guy and shoved him down.
"How do you like it?" Turner had asked him.  "You don't, do you?"
The guy had a heavy stick in his hand as he got up.  Turner found himself gripping a rock, but didn't remember where he'd gotten it.  He didn't mean to kill the guy, either, it just happened.  The andies stared at Turner expectantly after the killing.  Then one knelt down and mechanically combed the dead man's hair.
Turner shivered and went back into the house.  He still didn't know what answers to give them.  When he went upstairs to check on them, he saw that they'd kicked off the covers again.  This time, Turner made sure that he tucked the blankets around them well, because he knew in his heart that the night was only going to get colder.