Calloway’s Machine

( This story has an audio reading https://azuria-sky.bandcamp.com/track/calloways-machine-audiobook )

“alright, look here..” The tutor picked out a point of light from the chain of data hanging in front of her, and a proof began to unfold. The glyphs of the formulation I’d presented shifted and rearranged. They resolved to a falsum, “⊥”, disproof by contradiction, and I saw how I had been wrong. She’d just happened to have this riposte in her palate, ready and waiting to burn me with it.

“Now remember what you saw today. Your intuition failed you. You must poke and prod at all of the weird cases it allows before you can really know the character of a predicate like this. You need to get a feel for the way this predicate constrains possibility, instead of just using whatever natural concept most closely matches it as a stand-in. It is not a natural concept, it is entirely synthetic.”

“Okay. And it’s damn good that it is, right? If it weren’t, we’d really never get anywhere.”

She smiles... “That mindset is going to cause you trouble as well, I’m afraid. Yes, it’s useful for us to build our language of discourse on top of analytical constructs. Yes, sometimes intuition, natural language, drags us endlessly after impossible ideas, but sometimes it turns out they’re not impossible, sometimes they’re just very difficult to reduce, disambiguate, untangle or implement. And sometimes someone comes along and manages to do it, to synthesize it from mathematics alone and all of the arrogant analytic types who’d told them they’d never be able to get the shit kicked out of them... Hey, have you met Dr Calloway?”

“Sure. Look, he’s talked to me about that a lot, that consciousness crap, right?And it hasn’t done anything for me.”

“Hm, so I guess he hasn’t shown you the machine yet, has he?”

I thought back. “He might have hinted at it.”

“Right then. Well it’s about time he did. This isn’t any of that Chinese Room crap, he’s not going to talk about P-zombies, he wont have to talk much at all. Once you see it, once you’ve actually been in that room of his with it... this thing, this could really open your eyes.” She raised a hand and queried the institution’s coordinator system. She cut our engagement short, and lodged another immediately after it. I had planned to go and fetch some lunch, but I supposed that wasn’t going to happen now. She opened a voice line with Calloway (”what is it?”). She shot him a reference to this new engagement she’d arranged for me, and he replied. “Ah. The frosh. Yes, send him down.”

The voice line closed, and she said, “Don’t make him wait. Floor G-7.”

“There is no G-7″

“You’ll find that there is”

She stops me as I go. “As always, boy. Don’t just be corrected. Don’t just take one point, from what you see today. Look for the meta lesson. Remember all of other things you had to be wrong about to get to where you were. Most importantly, when you see it, ask yourself whether you still believe that the ones who chase after spooks never catch anything.”

As I walk down the hall, towards the elevator, I remember the last conversation I had with Calloway. He had been keeping this from me. I could tell he was onto something new, but he didn’t want to just hand it to me. He’d started talking about “relative anthropic measure”. I’d just written it off as more of the same confusion.

As promised, the elevator’s control projections show a new floor, “G-7″. I pull it up and examine it. Greg must have sent it to me. A reference to the floor and temporary clearance to visit it. I actuate the tag and send the elevator plunging down further than it should go. I begin to lose connectivity. News feeds fall empty. My music stream runs dry. My partner’s GPS tag, a heart that only I could see through walls and over feilds, flickers out, and I am alone.

As the doors open, the elevator’s lights cut into a black hallway. There's no lighting on this floor. The walls are shiny but dark. I find they're faraday cages, meaning that no electrical radiation could get in or out. No wifi. No GSM. No radio whatsoever. I could only find my way along using near-field spacial projections that some node on the inside of the cage must have been casting. Red lines demarcate the floor. Red circles mark what turn out to be doorknobs. As instructed, I find the knob under the projected “1″ and turn. There he is. Dr Greg Calloway. He stands up and ushers me in, laughing warmly.

"Well you sure look spooked"

"Not just one secret floor, four of them, and I don't even...-"

"Frosh, boy. This is a research university. That means some of us have secrets we need to protect from prying eyes. I'm sure you know, these days prying eyes are as vexatious and abundant as flying flies."

"You got laser defenses near that elevator Greg? For microdrones?"

"Bet your ass we do. Like fifteen of them. Come over here, sit down"

Victorian style chairs. Lab-grown leather's cheap now, I know that, but they still manage to make their impression on the room. I look around. There are a few mirrors hanging on the walls. Not much else, aside from a machine on a rack, near the door, a large, roughly cylindrical, iron thing with a big red lamp on it. After closing the door, Greg sits down by the machine and flips a switch, which makes a "pang", and a flash fills the room. Now the lamp's blinking red.

"Can you guess what this light means?"

"Gee I dunno Greg, is it a soul light? Does it mean you've detected the presence of qualia?"

He laughs. "Something like that."

"Well Greg I have to say I'm really taken aback by these results. It's going to take me a while to adjust my worldview but I think together we can-"

He laughs louder. "You see these cameras, here, and here?"

I do. I hadn't noticed them before.

"As long as this light blinks, it means the rendering of the simulation going on in here-" He taps something against the iron cylinder with the light, and I realize he's holding a pistol "-is still perfectly in sync with the recording of the room." And he waves that pistol towards the cameras. “Every hair on your simulated head, every neuron in your simulated brain, ever bead of sweat, running down your simulated forehead, is running in sync with the original, the real room. But the simulation and the room aren't exactly the same. See, in the room- the place where you and I started out when you came in through that door-" He looks down at the pistol, "this was loaded with blanks. But in the simulation, they're live ammunition. If you were to get up too fast, make a run for the door, well then I shoot at you you'll die."

"Only if I’m in the simulation though?"

"Well. Unless you get too close. Blanks can fuck you up, so be careful. But anyway, yeah, the question is, which one are you? Are you in the room or are you in the simulation?"

It starts setting in, and yeah, I start to sweat. "But I remember coming in through that door, I couldn't be-"

"So does the simulant. It remembers everything the natural instance remembers. Those memories do nothing to distinguish the two scenarios, frosh. From the inside, they don't mean anything." He's gone serious, like he does when he's waist deep in math.

"Okay but... Continuity, I think we've agreed, it doesn't work like that. You can't jump from the real world to a simulation just because someone's flicked a switch on an emulator-"

"Think of it as a von nuemann computer, for the sake of the experiment"

"What? You can't emulate human minds on an antiquated computer architecture that reads bits through a straw-"

"It's a thought experiment, frosh!"

"Wait so you're saying you weren’t serious?” I point at the machine “That’s not really simulating-"

"Oh, no, no, I was completely serious about that. The scan was real and complete-" he points at the ceiling, and I see a gaping aperture, like an enormous, bottomless camera lens, crystal front reflecting my stupid face back down at me "-and the cameras are running. And the light means exactly what I told you it means. I must stress, you no longer know precisely where you are any more-" he gestures between me and the machine "-I just want you to think of the computer as something a little different than what it really is. For the sake of the inquiry. I do realize that the whole CPU plus Memory setup is archaic, but so am I, indulge me"

"Okay."

"Now, to get back to your question. Continuity, yes?"

"Right... When I came in here... The instance of me that began in the real world-"

He interjects, "The Natural. We’ll call that The Natural."

"Okay, the natural is still the natural. The continuity can’t just jump from one line to another just because there’s a new person somewhere else who resembles the original."

"That is a reasonable intuition. The line was not broken, and the natural is still the natural and the simulant was always the simulant. We don't know for sure that that's how it works but if that's how your intuition of identity works then I wont argue. Your survival goals will follow along with that. The natural would be under no obligation to care about what happens inside the machine, or whether you get shot. The fact remains, you don't know whether you're the natural, now. You can't. As I said, your memories mean nothing. They’re exactly the same, inside the machine, and out. You have access to no evidence that could point one way or the other."

The silence grows thick as I try to get my head around this. It’s not really going anywhere so I decide to just ask the first thing that pops into my head. "Hey Gregger, there’s a version of the machine inside the simulation too. What’s inside that machine?"

"What kind of question is that? D’you think there's going to be another simulation? There's nothing, the version of the machine inside the simulation is fake."

"And past the door?"

"Nothing. Well. Physically there's nothing. There's a network interface. The simulant doesn't have to die at the end of this, you see. But we'll get to that later."

"Wait you’re not going to just erase it before you leave? You're telling me you got a permanent mind-cloning order just for me?"

"Ehh.. it's easier than you'd expect."

For about a minute, he watches me as I try and fail to think. The red lamp on the machine blinks, and the machine periodically beeps along with it.

Eventually, he speaks. “Alright. You’ve got a decision to make. Here’s how it goes. If you go for that door, I shoot at you. If you're the natural, it's a blank and I laugh about it. You probably wont laugh, and I'll want to apologize, make sure there's no bad blood between us over this. You might start to crack a smile after I pull some strings and help you to get your doctorate four years early."

"Four years? But I'll be done in two no matter-"

"Four, at minimum. Don't play optimist with me, you're not testing well and you don't have any original ideas to work into a thesis, no, not really, you don’t. If the natural bets that it is the natural and wins this bet with me, he wins big. I pull strings, you attain, and you attain early."

"Okay. And what about the simulant?"

"Well if the simulant gets up and bets natural, the simulant gets shot and bleeds out on the floor, and back up in the room, I turn off the machine and it’s dead, and that's that. But that’s not the only bet available to the pair of you. You have a choice. If, instead, you concede, admit that there's something to this, back down and admit that comparing the anthropic measure of related experiential chains is a deeply mysterious problem with nontrivial subproblems, all of which is likely to have real-world applications- if you admit to me that you are too uncertain about your own uncertainty to even begin to guess whether you are the natural or the simulant-... then, well, I'll lower my pistol. The natural me, he'll soften up on the natural you. But he'll be disappointed. He'll see the fire's gone out of you. I’ll start treating you like any other student- in part because I’d see you’re finally ready to open your mind and start to learn- but primarily because I’d see that for all your youthful bluster you really don’t have anything interesting to show me. Oh, and, you’ll take four years, at minimum, to finish his doctorate. If you finish it at all."

I wince.

He continues, "But, if you're the simulant, in that scenario. And you back down and I don't shoot you... Like I said, getting a permanent cloning order isn't as hard as you expect. There're limits on what the simulant will be allowed to do in the current climate, for a few decades at least, but they'll be good good decades, frosh. There's a whole other world being built under the earth right now. You’ve got no idea. Living there as a simulant is like living in heaven. Probably better."

"This sounds just like pascal's wager then, I mean, pascal's wager didn't work because it didn't cover all of the possibilities-"

"Right, but this scenario does cover all of the scenarios. There are two, or four, depending what you mean. But, no, I don't know if it can really be compared... The wager requires the payoff of the, uh, “supernatural” outcome to be infinitely higher than the payoff of the familiar outcome. But absconding to this underground heaven I describe to you might not be all that desirable, for you, eh? You have always been prepared to live a natural life. I'm sure you'd enjoy heaven, but would you enjoy it as much as you'll enjoy graduating? You've dreamed of that your entire life, frosh. Your entire sense of self-worth is pinned to that. No matter where you were going, to walk away..."

"I think you’re failing to imagine how fulfilling a well designed heaven would be,” he nods, laughs “but I'll take your point for the sake of inquiry. It would hurt to walk away. It would hurt a lot to take those extra two years-"

"At minimum. It'll be more, I'd bet."

"Well I'd bet against you."

"Stay focused on the bet in front of you though."

"Alright, sure, fine. So, if I bet natural, drop the mic, walk out that door and get coffee, get a blank shot at me, laugh it off, graduate early with your help... Assuming I’m not inside the machine right now, is there a chance I'll end up living in that heaven under the earth one day anyway?"

"We're thinking 20.. 30 years from now, it's all going to open up. But it's always possible that we may die during that time and miss the heavenly elevator."

"Especially with these attacks, and the raids..."

He nods and agrees.

"Well let's just ignore the utility quantities of the payoffs, all of that is really hard and maybe not really solvable or interesting-"

"Everything is interesting, which I’ve told you many times, but that’s a practical stipulation for the time being."

"Right so if the natural would like to get their doctorate early just as much as the simulant would like to survive the afternoon.. then the question becomes... What are the odds that I’ve found myself inside the machine? Which is more likely, natural or simulant, room or machine?"

"Yes, that, dear frosh, that is *precisely* the question. That’s the tangible heart of the problem of comparing anthropic measures over similar scenarios. If you find a general method for answering that question, you’ve solved the mystery of the consciousness, of existence and self-awareness."

"...Well shit, Dr Calloway. If I'd known this was what you were talking about all of this time-"

"No no don't be like that. I didn't even know what I was talking about till about... a month back. And it's not over. You still have to place your bet. Will you go for a coffee, or not."

"Well... I don’t know, cause if I had to guess now I’d say the odds are gonna be 50:50"

"Oh. And could you tell me why they should be?"

Ah... He's just being socratic. He knows I can’t. Well fuck him. I'm going to open my mouth and answer anyway. "There are two vessels. There's the machine, and there's the natural. Simple. I could be either one of those with equal probability, so it's 50:50"

"But why do you assign them equal probabilities, equal anthropic weight? Whatever process determines where an existential-experiential chain starts out, why do you think it conceptualizes the computer in the same way as you do, as a single thing that is equal in its potential for consciousness to a flesh and blood human brain? Here, you know that the media of the cells in the brain are much bigger than the flaps in a memory chip, physically. So maybe there are more experiential chains attached to the the brain than there are to the computer? Doesn’t that sound plausible?"

"Huhhh... Maybe."

"But wait, the representation of the mind in the computer is much less ambiguous and chaotic. Much easier to detect and track- at least according to the principles of computation we know. In that case you’d be more likely to find yourself in the machine. Doesn’t that sound plausible as well?”

"Well I'm not sure the principles of computation really say that but I take your point." "As we continue, for the sake of inquiry, let's call whatever natural process that assigns experiential chains to physical media 'God'"

"That's a real good theoretical deity, Sir."

"Thank you. Yes, it's one of the more divine theoretical deities I've known. Much more of a yahweh than the stewards of compat, or the mathematical Omegas. Anyway, so it's assigning anthropic measures- probabilities of observing- to brains and brain-like patterns. Maybe it finds it much easier to identify brains within vonn neumann computers, maybe it hits the computer again and again but only hits you or I once or twice."

"I don't know. I think the fact that we woke up in flesh and blood human bodies in the first place might sign against that. You know, if the memory of a vonn neumann computer has so much more anthropic measure than the neurons of a brain, why didn't we all wake up 20 years after the singularity instead?"

"I think you may be forgetting... you are no longer certain that you are inside a flesh and blood human brain, nor do you know you ever were, maybe you did just wake up a few years after the singularity, in this here machine. But alright, there’s a point there. We are still so proximal to the flesh, just minutes ago, our natural copies were all we had. That has to be meaningful in itself."

"Mm... if computers had that greater soul measure... um, how long have your secret underground heavens been running?"

"Ahhh, aye. I can't give you an exact figure, but yes, about six years. So you might say that...-"

"The fact that we woke up here as the people we are rather than there as the people who were born within that artificial substrate might indicate that artificial brains have less measure."

"Mmmm, very true."

I can't keep digging here. The truth is, I think he's won. As far as I can tell there's a real question here and the more I look at it the more mysterious it seems. He's pulled that pistol on me, he’s made it a question that I truly have to answer as a matter of sanity and survival, but I can’t find any answers. I don't think he wants me to just put my tail between my legs and admit that to him. He would be disappointed, bored, I know it. And besides, I still want that doctorate. So I drop this line of the inquiry and I decide to dig somewhere else. I do realize, later on, that rationalizing to win the argument here is insanely stupid, because if I really pull it off, drop the mic, get up and choose the get shot at option, well if I get unlucky and it turns out that we are just flickers of electricity inside the machine, it doesn’t matter where Calloway thinks I am, doesn’t matter if I’ve convinced him he’s packing blanks, reality wins out and I still bleed out right there on the virtual floor.

But I havn’t really internalized that thought. I just want to win the argument. So I go and say this "All that said and done... the computer is just one thing. The brain is just one thing. So for any reasonable scheme, why would they have different weights? Why would it be more likely for me to find myself in one over the other."

He looks bemused. "Who says they're just one thing? You know that the brain's architecture is massively redundant. The same pattern is stored multiple times. But you don't know quite how many times, and it depends on which part of you we're talking about. Your memories will be quadrupled, quintupled, but your algorithms might only occur once or twice. But it doesn't end there. The computer, too. How do you know that it's just one thing? Each memory cell is a charged fragment of ferrous metal. The charge, high or low, denotes whether it's one or zero, and it runs all the way along the fragment. It's longer than it is wide. You can say it's one object, but you don't have to. God might not. God might say it's a couple hundred thousand atoms per rod, so maybe as a whole the computer encodes the same pattern a couple hundred thousand times, and as such, maybe you should bet on the simulant outcome with certainty."

"But why would God think like that?"

"I don't know. But why shouldn’t it?. How about this. How do you know it's not one of those space station computers."

I try to figure out what he means... I remember hearing that on older space stations, before they started using optical substrate and strong magnetic shielding, they used to split their computers into three redundant lobes. Every now and then the ship's computers might get hit with solar radiation, and one of the lobes might be corrupted(just one. It was astronomically unlikely that two lobes would be hit at the same time). But if the corrupted lobe disagreed with both of the others the system as a whole would recognize it had gone wrong, set it straight, and everything would continue on as if nothing had happened.

"They were unambiguously redundant, weren't they. Three computers per computer."

"Aye."

"I suppose it could still be argued that they sum up to a single whole, internally it might have had redundant copies, but it was intended to be used as a single device, so why should we consider..."

"Why should GOD care what we consider, frosh?"

"I don't know... I don't know."

It’s like when we play chess, now. There’s a certain amount of time he’ll allow me, after I make a losing move, to look back over the decision I’ve made and look for a way to fix it before the game moves on. I just placed my bet, but he’s not doing anything. He sits, and that’s saying, “are you sure”, and I sit with my head in my hands, all I can say is, “no, no, but what can I do”.

Eventually, I hear sliding metal. He’s pulled the mag out of the pistol and he’s eyeing the bullets inside. His face falls a little further into malaise, boredom. "Turns out you bet on the wrong outcome, frosh." Right then, as he says it, as if in response to him, the lamp stops blinking. I realize it was in response to him. He goes to the machine and flicks a switch and the light goes out of it. He opens the door for me, and we leave. Life goes on. We never really talk about this again. I really lost, and things between us aren’t going to go back to the way they used to be. Sometimes I think about the simulant. As the result of my concession, somewhere under the earth there is a computation that looks a lot like me, and it’s acting out the behaviors associated with joy. I allow myself to wonder whether a machine that can simulate the behaviors of joy must be capable of experiencing joy, subjectively, on the inside. It still feels like a stupid question to ask, but I’m closer to being able to answer it than I was before.

Foundations of Stone

A society grows great when old ones plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

A mason was a practitioner of a protected craft. Only a few could do it, only a few were taught. The masons did not feel they had a moral imperative to spread their craft, because they understood that it was largely an implement of violence. Most buildings did not require shaped stone. Most often, the mason's art would be put to the construction of fortresses, Icons of oppression that would outlive their makers, that could defend a tyrant from the retribution of his abused masses for his entire life.

A free mason was a mason who could walk away from a project like this. The free masons, collectively, could decide which tyrants to build for, and which to bankrupt.

In this sense, you might say that even though the free masons were not in the thrones, or on the front line, or in the courts, the outcomes of the battles that shaped western europe were determined by their decisions.

This is the iconography underlying the myth of the Freemasons.

The Rod

I had been taught that to cry would bring punishment, so I only winced as I tried to force my atrophied legs to draw me along the floor to the door, behind which I knew was light, light I had never felt on my flank but which I had seen and dreamed of touching every day of my life.

I was afraid. The rod had taught me to fear being out on the floor, and I had learned that soon it would find its way into my flesh and I would be thrown back towards the cage.

A rod was near me now. It smelt of the sweat and skin of the men, and even though I feared it, I knew that it would not hurt me while it was laying inert on the floor. Not until one of those men picked it up.

I stopped, as the door opened, and the light flooded in. I dreamed of entering that light, but I never could, because of the cage. Now, I was out of the cage, but I could not go to the light, because of the man who stood in the way. Men were small. Smaller than children. But men brought irresistible punishment. Punishment came through the rod. I faced the man, and I began to cry, because I had learned that to see him meant I would soon feel the jabbing pain of the rod, and be thrown back into the cage.

The man did not move towards me, and he did not have a rod in his hands, but I knew that men always found a rod, when they needed one. If I were closer to the man, he would find a rod, and drive it into my flank. This I had learned. So I stood still, crying, hoping that he would leave.

It was surely only a matter of time.

But there the man stood. He looked back and forth. He looked below me at the rod beneath my feet, and I cried, because I feared that he would take it and drive it into my flank and drive me back towards the cage, but he did not take it, he stood and he muttered into a black box. Why wasn't he going for it? Would I not be jabbed?

I would be jabbed. Of course. Men brought irresistible punishment.

This I had learned. So I stood. I would go no closer to him.

After a very long time, a second man came, and this one had a rod.

I was jabbed, and I was thrown back into my cage.

That night I dreamed. I wondered if the man had not been able to take the rod. I could not understand it. Men always found a rod. But he had not. What could a man do to us without one? Could they do anything at all, or could they be pushed aside as easily as a child? Crushed in the mouth as easily as a clod of grain? I had never seen any of us do such things. So I dreamed of all the things a man might do, with no rod. I dreamed of men who jabbed even without one, men who jabbed without needing to come near, men who jabbed with just a look from a distance.

When I awoke, I imagined that these things I had dreamed might just as well be real. Men brought irresistible punishment. This I had learned. ☉ I woke up alone in my apartment. I had dreamed of a... factory? I didn’t know what to call it. A place where some kind of enormous animals were kept, milked, bred and slaughtered all in the same floor. I had been one of them. I only remembered flashes. Fear, pain. Flashes of hope. I remembered dreams from within the dream, the dreams of those enormous lupine beasts had consisted of the urgings of stifled blood, twisted confabulations of a world they knew only by the holes its absence left in them. Another memory began to surface. It came to me not as a word but as one of the previously meaningless vocalizations of a man with dead eyes, who I had seen in the dream many times. He had said, “dog”. We were larger and stronger than bears, but they had referred to us as dogs. Those animals were not dogs. If anything they were a kind of wolves. But the men had forgotten, and so had we.

Unrecognized Renewal

(This is the last chapter I’ll be posting from The City of the Bull. At this point I must either admit that I cannot bring myself to keep writing for a magical, symbolic setting with no consistent history, and skip genres to sci-fi, or, if somehow I continue, I must admit that I’m probably going to finish the thing one day and cease spoiling everything on tumblr.)

Two streetside stalls graciously left a crack wide enough for a fit person to walk through without turning their body. A sign resting astride them, advertising a well known clockworker's shop, physically buried behind these middlemen businesses. Such was this jostle. Having your own shop front, however well dressed, however renowned your address, that wouldn't save you from being crowded over by no-name hawkers of C-grade products. There was a second-mover advantage in locations with rent takers who can't keep their promises. Under overhanging eaves were two of those big bronze automata one would often see in the show windows of tinkerers and fixers. They sensed Holly's movement and turned to her, a bronze dragon opened its mouth and plumed sparks whose brightness almost masked the rather swollen chunk of jade substrate mounted in the head, but not quite. If this shop had a setter, their conceptual density was poor. Holly wasn't here to have any of her sparkworks taught, though. She would say she was here to have a gun restored, but that wasn't it either. She was here to read the people she met and tell her company whether they could be trusted to design, build and maintain their equipment. glass-covered cabinets displayed intricate bronzeworks and brassworks on thick wooden shelves, but Holly's attention was fixed on the 14-some year old girl behind the till, who's attention fixed on Holly.

Holly brought up the broken gun, muzzle away from the clerk, offering a handle nestled in a basket-guard of brass filigree. Some of those encircling brass filaments were decorative, some were armor, some were heat sinks, and some were functional gear sectors relating to the ejection mechanism, gyroscopic stabilization, bayonet positioning (forward for punching and downward for skull-cracking), and the carriage of ammunition in a great cylinder that encircled the user's hand, joining at the top, through two runs of gears and a firing chamber. The Caligula was a thing of immense beauty(or at least, so long as it did not immediately draw your attention to the crooked shape of the city's technological frontier, weapons so far ahead of everything else). This particular Caligula, however, was a carefully assembled pile of scrap. Most of the parts of this Caligula Precision Pistol had been, in their past lives in their original fittings, the point of failure. It immediately became clear that taking the time to assemble this frankenstien's monster of weakest links from the rummage shop on Pit had been worthwhile when the girl, perhaps apprentice or perhaps already in practice, even in her youth, showed every sign of recognizing the total profundity of the state of disrepair this piteous little thing in her hands. As she turned it over and over she appeared positively *aggrieved* by its condition. The shop had passed the test of competence. The girl looked up at Holly, disbelieving. "We... We aren't cheap. I mean, the owner of this gun was clearly very very uh, frugal, these are all bottom dollar parts.. most of these parts have turned at least 900 times.." "Yes. Oh yes no worries there, we're good for it, at least, we are now. My brother, he used to live rough down in the undergrowth. This thing was his only real friend during those times, you know, we think it actually saved his life more than once. It's got an identity now, to him, it was the only good thing down there, it was his ray of hope and in the end it brought him deliverance. It's very, very important to him that we keep all of these parts together, not just any Caligula will do, no, it has to be this one. We will pay whatever it takes." Still rather wracked, the girl paled as Holly spoke these words. For a few more moments she looked down at the gun prodded, pried, and twisted, and her face fell blank. "What is it?" "Nothing, we can do it." "Okay.." I chuckled, "so tell me what it'll cost". The sum was hardly astronomical. So, why... "You seemed to make a note of something just then. Didn't you? I don't shoot, personally, but the Caligula's always fascinated me, what can you tell me?" Holding this same expression of startle leaking through thin mask of blankness, "It's just, uh I think your brother must not have told you the whole story, sorry to say. The parts are from different prints, and most of the prints were very very recent, within the month, meaning that until very recently this gun didn't exist." This was not quite the story Holly was hoping to hear. "Really? Then how did they get so worn down?" "Well, I can't assume anything, this is just a guess, but it looks like what's happened is... You see when a factory goes into production, very early in the print they'll take a finished piece off the line and they'll put it in a testing apparatus, and it'll be induced to fire a thousand-some rounds. If it doesn't make it to a thousand, production will be brought to a stop because that's a sign that there's probably a defect in the process somewhere. Usually when they're done with those test guns they melt them down, but I guess it's possible that for something as intricate as a Caligula they can't really do that - I mean, for one if they tried to just melt it down the coolant veins would explode - so they'd end up on the tip instead. That's all well and good, you can get off-cut parts in the Pits, but half of the serial numbers on these are from prints that only happened in the past week, so, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, mam, but your brother's story can't be true." Holly smiled, endeared and impressed, and somewhat amused by the elaboration of the lie. Not much of the girl's story was really plausible. The company had not sourced its parts from an insider. Even if the heaps in Pits had testing scrap, Jarren and Marcel would not have picked them. Holly didn't know what to say next. The girl clearly knew that the Caligula had been assembled recently, but she was lying about how she knew. Of course, calling her bluff would raise alarms, and Holly could do better. "You saw right through it. I apologize about the deceit, we knew you were good, we just had to be sure you were exceptional. You know, any tinkerer will tell you they're exceptional, everyone will tell you that they'll do a better job than the last guy at keeping all of your equipment in a reliable state. Hard, tragic experience has taught us that they're frequently lying. We had to be sure you were for real, you see." "Oh. I understand." An acknowledgement but not an embrace. She'd just been taken into a lie on top of a lie. That was mutual knowledge, On a certain level the girl must have realized that if Holly knew the real story behind the gun then she probably knew, or would soon discover, that the story the girl had given wasn't it. Holly was playing the fool, but the girl chose to let the lie hang over her, because she sensed that cutting it down would bring something deadly down on her head. Holly was ready to take a closer look. "We just wanted to see what you could handle. We don't really need you to repair the gun, of course", and she held out and open hand, tilted just so that when the girl quite eagerly went to hand the accursed wreck back to her, Holly could pause and say "Wait.." and their hands would rest together for a moment, but things did not go as Holly expected, because the first thing that Holly saw when her empath digits crept through the girl's hand and into the mind of {RESTORER {RENEWAL JA-MEL} REN}, was that Ren was looking back into Holly as well, but not in the same way as an empath. Ren was not an empath, that had been obvious from the start. Ren was something that Holly had never even heard of before, someone who was not an empath, but who sensed enough to withdraw, and the connection was severed, Ren still holding the Caligula, shocked eyes receding away to the safety of the back room with its automated doors. Holly, connective impulse reeling, showed not frustration, but anguish, and fortunately, Renewal Ja-Mel stopped before triggering any security mechanisms, and asked "What do you want?" "We just want someone we can trust. I'm sorry. I'm a trusted empath, did you see that? Could you tell? I would never harm you. For all the coarseness I've shown you I would never bring anything vile through these doors." Shaking her head "I couldn't see that, but I'm *not* touching you again." "Please can we just talk? You know I wouldn't be in this city if I wasn't trusted." Ren turned away into the back-room, as if to seek guidance from someone else, then she turned back, and declining to look Holly in the eye, she decided; "Outside." Ren pulled the handle of some unexplained mechanism by the door as she followed Holly out of the store. Ren would not allow this strange woman to draw her beyond the thoroughfare, but she still did not know where she was going or whether she'd ever really come back. They walked up a flight of steps on either side of a fountain, and rested their backs against the florid stone frame that rose behind it as the crowd flowed around them on all sides. They spoke without looking at each other. Ren said "You're the only one outside of the family who knows." "And I'll remain the only one who knows, if that's important to you." Time passed. "When you have something, in this city, either you exploit it or you get exploited." "Yes. But that's not damnation. It's just a matter of finding a way of exploiting it that you can live with. I build friendships in places they should never be. I walk with enforcers, and yet, if I really think about the consequences of our actions I see more construction than destruction, they’re violence incorporeal, but generally, I get them jobs that ally them with order, coordination, and understanding. It seems to me that you, as someone who can reach into opaque systems and steal dependable insights, you could do exactly the same, with practice. But you're not just limited to reading people. You can go even further." The crowd churned. "I think it's just my father's fear, that I feel when you say these things, out here. I remember when I was little and he would give me some part and ask me what it was for, and I would tell him everything I could feel in it, everything, and back then he thought I was just a genius, that I'd gotten it from his books, we were excited by it, you know, there was nothing bad in it. Eventually he realized there was more to it than genius, that I'd been reading his books but not the words in them. But I always knew what I was doing, and I wasn't scared before he gave me his view, and honestly I don't really think I'm scared now. I'm.. wound up, but I'm still just excited." Holly reached out a hand. Ren responded; "No. What did you see, when you looked into me before?" "I saw you reading me, but not like an empath. I figured the rest out. You see purposes, don't you? And purposes are inextricable from origins, so you see history as well." "Yes." Ren breathed, "*Wow*" "Do you see *all* of the history?" "No. Not easily. It's all sort of from the perspective of the object, and I only see the beginning, as you said, the origin. I don't really know why you made that gun." "We wanted an excuse to draw out all of the talent your shop had to offer so that we could get a look at everyone." "You succeeded. It's just me now. My dad got arthritis and my sister's gone away to study. Mam's not a tinkerer." Holly turned to her "You can't work in repairs and restoration for the rest of your life. What else can you read, aside from people? Can you heal? Can you read systems? Substrates? Can you read places?" Places. Ren refused to answer, but those wide and telling eyes answered despite her. Holly looked over the girl again. White. Black shoulder-length hair with a slight curl, a crescent nose, even as her frightened eyes watched the coiling body of the patron spirit of this city undulating over everyone's heads, there was a fire in them, the spark of the awakening malcontent, sure that things were not as they should be in the city of the bull. Holly was concerned. "I think there might be a hole in you that wont get filled until you make an attempt at reforming this city. You can leave it, but you wont forget it's here, fermenting, pluming its rot across the continent. Nobody does."

I’m leaking the script of the seapunk Firefly resetting we were asked to develop to save the show right before it was cancelled, because why on earth not, at this point?

A few weeks ago I got laid off from Ventrelli productions. They hit me with it out of nowhere. Among the many things broken on that day was the NDA I signed when I first joined the studio, as a result of this they naturally had me shred most of the paper copies of various things that I had sitting around in, under, and on top of my desk before packing up, cause you know, that’s a reasonable imposition to make on someone who’s just been fucking fired for unstated reasons after working for you for over a decade... But anyway, among those documents were the seapunk† Firefly concepts we put together for Fox Broadcasting around the time it was cancelled. The idea, at the time, was that maybe a transition to a more down-to-earth yet still largely unexplored kind of setting would help it to find its demographic, personally I think it worked(hence keeping copies of everything on my desk and reading them once a month every month for 3 years). The ocean of a large colony world was a great setting for Firefly and it did well with our focus groups, the reaver hulks were fucking terrifying and the ship to ship action has a lot more human impact than spaceship to spaceship action, unfortunately, Fox’s then president of entertainment was not sufficiently moved by our findings and they decided not to go ahead with it. Of all the concept art and the three pilots we wrote, all I could get away with was the first few pages of the script for the second episode. If you can imagine your own score, I think this gives a pretty clear impression of what it could have been like.

**** Passing slowly over a still, black sea. The water laps. We speed up, and slow down as we arrive at a large steel island, floating above the water. It's clear there are no boats here, no engines to move it. Here a small group of people are sitting. Each wears a leather collar. We are moving forward in the same direction, grazing past the platform, we speed up again, another platform whizzes by, and another and another and another, then empty sea for a time. A large brown hauler is coming towards us. It's Serenity. The sails are retracted. the camera slows and retracts to match its speed. We see Wash in the bridge with a look of distress on his face.

Wash turns around and strides off into the recesses of the boat. The camera follows him through the glass, the sound of the engines transitions to a steady thrum.

We see Kaylee fiddling with something on the wall, she sees Wash's expression and automatically repeats his concern, turning around to follow him wherever he's going.

**** The camera rushes ahead to Captain Mal's quarters. The room is dimmed and the wrap-around screens are alight with the face of a highly masculine man with a tattoo above his right eye and long braided swept-back hair[see page 3 of concepts].

The man is smiling. Mal's smile is but a mask. He has a bad hand but he knows he's in a spot where he can't afford to show it.

camera sits behind Mal, we see enough of his face to see his smile drop. Screens in front of and around him all display the man's face clearly.

Mal:"Enough. There's a mutually beneficial arrangement to be made here, and if you aren't straight with us you wont even get the proposition, because we'll turn our boat right around and go back where we came from."

The man projects bewilderment Slaver:"I don't understand, we've already made a deal, -"

Mal:"You're the most ruthless slavers in the Pacific. You'll sequester anyone you can get your hands on. Especially crews beyond the reach of the federation, like mine. The deal you pretend to have agreed to with us was *unreasonably* generous, -"

Slaver:"You said it was very reasonable"

Mal:"Yes. Unreasonably so. Now you expect me to believe you'll follow through with the shipment even though you can profit more from scrapping my ship and selling my crew?"

The Slaver projects ennui Slaver:"What you're not taking into account, Mal, is that -"

The slaver is interrupted when Wash bursts into the room with Kaylee in tow; Wash: "MAL! They're sending a speeder!"

Mal looks to the Slaver with a "how do you expect me to react" look Slaver:"It's a bond, you dolt!"

Sarcastic tone Mal:"Oh so we're just going to enter into a bond agreement with the most ruthless slavers-"

Slaver:"OUR COLLATERAL. FOR YOU. You hold it while you're in the territory, This is how we do business with the likes of you who do not know the meaning of trading in confidence!"

Mal pauses. (Seen behind him, Kaylee is covering a smile. Wash looks gormless  [Note to Jewel, Kaylee has read Palau's character and is almost entirely sure that Mal is making a fool of himself. However, there is also a vain of naive faith in the humanity of a slaver at play here, she is surer than she should be.]) Mal:"If your men make any sudden moves -"

The slaver is incensed. Slaver:"No men. It's a remote controlled DINGHY. All that's on it is collateral."

Mal is completely unmoved. Mal:"If it comes within 30 yards we'll run a superheated rod through it, Palau."

The slaver is affected by this. He was not expecting quite this much suspicion. Slaver:"Send a pod to meet it at 60 yards then."

Wash:"It'll hit 60 yards in less than a minute."

Mal turns, mentally preparing to deal with the visitation. Mal, to the Slaver:"60 yards, Palau. No less, or your collateral sinks and we walk."

Slaver:"It's understood, Mal."

Mal cuts the line and strides out into the hall. Wash is backing away toward the pod bay as he asks Wash:"It's on?" Mal:"Yes it is." Mal To Kaylee:"What're you smiling about?"

She waives him off, despite feeling he is being overbearing, she likes to see him captaining as passionately as he is, and does not want to impede it with an appeal to moderation. Kaylee:"Nothin Cap'n". Mal has to set his perturbation aside before turning to yell into the quarters of an unseen Jayne:"Jayne, hostiles incoming NOW. Man the railer!" Pausing Mal:"But don’t shoot until I say so!" The camera follows Mal into the pod bay as Simon tries to keep up beside him.

Simon:"What's going on?"

Mal:"Slavers are sending a speeder. They claim it's naught but collateral. If it's a capture crew, I'm all they get, understood?"

Simon:"The only reason I'm here is to protect my sister from people like this, this is mine. Let me handle them."

Mal stops. Mal:"Fine."

He turns around and starts walking the other way.

We see Mal climb the stairs to the cockpit then we follow Simon into the pod bay[see page 2 of concepts], where Wash is waiting holding a life preserver and a pistol, the pod ready to go. Wash:"Oh, you convinced the captain to let the boat go down without him, huh?" Simon:"Something like that."

Wash smiles. Wash:"Don't mind Mal. All you're going to find in there are a few crates of rum. You won't need this," as he hands Simon the gun. He lingers in letting go of the gun to say something Wash:"But if it is a capture crew on that boat, you wanna get a hit in right here." Pointing to his right pectoral. "That's their whipping shoulder. Injure that and they wont be able to subjugate you quite as hard as they otherwise would when you're-"

The speaker system interrupts Mal:"This is your captain speaking. The slavers' dinghy arrives in 15 seconds. Jayne, hit it with the railgun if and only if it comes closer than 50 yards. Simon, if you see crew, be ready to shoot to kill. We were told it's completely unmanned and a lying slaver is a slaver at work."

The rest is basically.. the collateral package turns out to be what we call a gilded slave, a highly trained, very valuable bonded servant, through her we get an insight into the living conditions. We eventually meet Palau and we see how ceaselessly professional the slavers are, they discuss paranoia on the seas and have some human moments when we find out when and how Mal came to be so paranoid, then of course it leaves us with some moral tension when the gilded slave is compared to River and we're forced to leave her behind. I loved firefly, and it breaks my heart as much as anyone else that Fox didn't buy our concepts. I’d always hoped that one day Ventrelli would produce a spiritual successor to Firefly in-house, it was clear to me that everyone on the writing team groked the spirit of the series well enough to do do that kind of thing, to make nontrivial changes to the composition, setting and cast and still carry on the essential spirit of the show. Unfortunately at this point almost everyone in that team has left the studio, so unless some patronage miracle occurs, all hope is lost and never shall we be reunited. †: Seapunk as in “fuck the hegemonies of the land, the ocean is free”. In our conception of seapunk, seagoing knowledge served a role comparable to hacking knowledge in cyberpunk, any punk who could exploit the systems of the sea would find a transcendence from monopolistic, exploitative game-systems of land based economies, just as a cyberpunk hacker could transcend the rules set out by the megacorporations that dominate cyberpunk settings. Though this is primarily what we meant when we said Seapunk, there were hints of the flouro and pastel of the contemporary seapunk aesthetic in the visual side of things... which was... downright serendipitous, really.

Sitting One. Entrance.

You are waiting in an empty theatre that has made to seat hundreds. The lighting is dimmed, and even in silence, you hear no muffled activity in the wings. You wait. After five minutes of nothing, your embarrassment mounts, and you walk out of the theatre and ask the ticket clerk whether the show is really on. He says yes. You return to your seat and continue waiting. Five minutes later you hear the footsteps of a single actor behind the curtain, clattering props, and muttered swearing. Eventually, the curtains part, and a young man looks down on you from the stage. He wears a black scarf with a grey diamond pattern over a black kimono-jacket, and baggy black pants that end below the knee. He smiles, looks around the empty theatre, then says to you

You're in for a treat tonight. You've come alone. This is good. This is an opportunity. I don't know you. That means nobody in this theatre knows you. I ask you, what is left, when you take away the impressions and expectations and masks we wear for our friends and our countrymen, do you know?

You shake your head.

What is left is the truth. The shadow's truth, that I am here to show you. What is left is the reality of what you are and what you desire.

The young man is light and quiet on his feet as he skips to a new position behind a table, upon which three objects are laid out. He gestures to the three objects, and says

This evening, we will meet three spirits. In many respects they are not alive, or conscious in the same way as you or I. Nonetheless, they are intelligent in their own way. They create their weird creations, they speak their ideosyncratic languages, and they work towards their own respective aspirations. Some could be considered allies to the human species He picks up one of the objects.

and others, enemies.

Tense, careful and grave, he carries the object around to the front of the table and holds it level in front of himself. The object he shows you is a mask, the face of a pale, gaping bull with one of its horns broken off close to the root. Its eye sockets stare out at the theatre, empty and black.

The most important thing you need to know about our three friends, is that they weild a great deal of power.

This one - A look of contempt crosses his face - .. This is gamesmaster of unwilling players, the governer of the ungoverned, a taxmaster who provides no service and no protection for its constituency. It cannot be killed, it cannot be placated, and it has been with us since the dawn.

Its true name is Defection.

He closes his eyes, and begins to raise the mask to his face, and he whispers, you can only hear him for the emptiness of the theatre,

But we have come to call it Moloch

As the mask connects with his face, the eyes of the bull, formerly gaps, become two black spheres, they blink and twitch about as they stare out at the theatre. You hear its breathing, ragged, long breaths like wind against a pitted cliff face. All the lights in the theatre shut out, all but for two trained on the face of Moloch. Your sense of the theatre receeds away, but Moloch and his breathing remains. It fills your awareness. Its exhalations lengthen until it breaths a sigh that has no end, a wind who's sound and smell overwhelmes you, the stink of open sewage lines, an intoxicating tang of tar and ozone that overwhelms and disorients you. You soon perceive a city, pale and hard, through which the wind blows. The buildings fight for space, jutting out into each other. Few buildings bear the unbroken alias of a single, soveriegn, unperverted design. Before you looms a building that seems to have been impaled from too many angles by its neighbors, whatever commerce had it built could no longer be sustained in its few remaining contorsions, and the light of the dim red skies of the evening does not penetrate far into its unlit interior. Its windows are a hundred empty pits.

A young woman wearing a floral dress runs towards it.

These things, Mala was Willing to Sacrifice

Mala eased his finger back and forth, slowly turning one of his incendiary-loaded playing cards against the opposing corner on the table. Body splayed. An abstracted smile with a goatee, eyes saccading over the virtual body of the plan on the table in the middle of this fellowship, searching it for defects. You always wanted a lighter in the planning stages of these things. It wasn't their rapports. Their most striking talent, firecharming, was good for controlled demolition, torture, and defense, but what made the lighter unquestionably useful in planning stages of any complex operation was their decisiveness of character. Wherever their controlled flame crept, so came an air of patience and self-assurance along with it. It was rare that a lighter ever did anything they regreted.

Even in a scene like this.

Holly, on the other hand, was an empath, and bringing one like her to planning meetings was not considered good practice. Even without the touch her rapport required to function, an empath could read people. One couldn't face the real, whole truth of human nature ten times in full force then not see its signs and tells hanging around the necks of everyone you so much as glanced at thereafter. It was common knowledge that an empath would keep plotters from being open, for plotters had many secrets to keep. Who knew what might slip through.

But she was here, because common knowledge was wrong, and like many of the empaths who'd survived in the sprawl, she followed an implicit contract with everyone she met. She read people without asking first. She couldn't really help it. So she'd made a promise to the world that whatever she read in a candid setting would be kept secret. Other empaths could confirm, even without touching her, that she understood on the level of the heart that any breach of this policy would be grounds for immediate exile from the sprawl. She lived this policy, and so she was safe.

It'd been hard to live like this, at first. Soon enough, though, she understood that her place in the dealings of the sprawl, her trusted empath status, would keep her safe from the stalking death that had driven her to it. She wouldn't be killed for her gift. She wouldn't be exploited either. The trusted empath begot trust wherever she went, and generally, this, along with her contract, meant that even the seediest operations who employed her services would use her intel for nice things only. Genuine friendship and cooperation grew in her wake, however hostile the old cold stone of the sprawl could be, however impossible it would have been before she arrived. People were glad to be seen by Holly.

And yet she'd never seen into a lighter. It was strange. The other trusted empaths she'd spoken to had told her that either they too had somehow never had the chance to read a lighter, or, when she asked them what they saw in the lighters they'd read that might explain this mysterious link between their acumen and their rapport, they'd been evasive, or lied outright, and it was like she was reading one of those dark things in them that she would not be allowed to mention to anyone else. They did not want her to know what they'd seen, or anything about it.

Trusted empaths never looked into other trusted empaths. It was situations like that that'd gotten the raport of the empath its stigma back in the old days when things were new and people didn't know any better, when thinkers had dwelt with thinkers of the same kind, and in so doing they departed from their humanity. They delved into their own languages of life, and forgot how to live alongside those outside the cloister. The war was bloody. And it never really ended. Holly didn't want to be one of those empaths.

Holly's reputation for licensiousness gave her some interesting uses. Some people, idiots mostly, avoided meeting her gaze after being told that she read everyone she met. They resented her presence in meetings and clammed up when she was around, but even this was useful to her employers, because it let everyone in the room recognize, at a glance, all of the vain little boys who understood nothing and needed to be checked.

Holly was nice. Anyone who'd spent time with a trusted empath could see that. She'd forgotten which book the quote had come from, but she'd felt this adage explained it best: "In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves." She left out the part about destroying them afterwards, because she didn't do that. She was also liable to change out "enemy" for "friend", and "defeat" for "trust", and it was no less true.

Enough introspection. The group was starting to realize there was nothing left to say, turning to their own little squads to chat and convince each other that the plan would not go horribly wrong and get them all pent in a slow substrate for the rest of their lives.

Mala still hadn't met her gaze, but he had not left the room. He was working up to something. He clearly understood that there was nothing he could do. She sat directly oposing him on the narrow table, less than a meter away, staring with curious eyes, and it was clear to everyone in the room that they were having a subliminal conversation even if Mala hated it and wished the backs on either side, penting the two together would turn back to them, and divert the demoness's inquiry, and draw him away from her with a plausible excuse, but right now his cover was leaking, and although he played a very convincing Handsom Man, right now he was looking increasingly like the vain little boy nobody wanted to associate themselves with.

Holly had suspected, though, when they'd first met, that he was a man.

Indeed. At once, he raised his eyes to hers and softened.

"Dear, there are things you don't want to know. I'm sure you've seen into men before who were so riddled with corruption and rot that there wasn't a single redeeming thing in them. I am worse than that. If you look into me you will long to forget everything you'd seen. I am not the playground you want to explore today, and if you press the issue I assure you you will regret your choice." And with that he lit his loaded card and threw a flourish of soundless, heatless flame towards her for emphasis. Holly recoiled politely for a moment before resuming her staring. What Mala had said didn't agree with what she'd gleaned from her peers; Although he was right about not being able to repeat a single thing they'd seen, they clearly hadn't regretted looking, and they'd made no effort to warn her off it.

Holly shook her head and smiled at him. "I know you're embelishing. And I think you underestimate the tolerance for unseemly shit that a trusted empath has to develop. I could tell you things that would turn your black hair white."

"You could, I'm sure, but then of course I'd have to kill you if you did."

"Certainly. And I'd be dead already if I were the type to sing."

And he shook his head, and sighed. "Yes. You certainly arn't the type to sing. You're Cal's sweet reader and you were invited to the planning meeting and you're not going to let me retire tonight until you've bleached your own hair on my secrets. I give up. We'll need to go somewhere where we wont be disturbed. The cellar has a lock on the inside."

"One moment." Mala may, in their session, end up being forced to discuss things that he had never discussed with anyone before. People got scared, in these situations. She had in the past seen murderous intents, supressed but not hidden, unfurling in her face while she delved. She needed to take measures. She touched director Cal's shoulder. Imagery, emotions, and the echo of the words of the conversation he was having lit up in front of her, but she ignored them. She only wanted his attention. "Cal, Mr Trepid and I are going to go somewhere and do a thing. If either of us don't come back you know what the deal is."

He laughed, nodded, and waved, as the two rose and went. (While she was in contact with him, she saw that he'd been laughing at the suggestion that Mala might not return, which he'd infered to be a suggestion that she'd destroy a book if she found its contents sufficiently horrid, which was not what she meant, but she didn't need to start that argument about the depth of her adherence to the contract again today.)

The cellar, decked with barrels, spare furnature and stowed equipment was lit by the cool light of a single blue globe set into the wall. There was a low table in the middle of the room with just enough room to sit on either side. The matte darkwood floor under this dim light was pitch like a void. She sat down on the same side of the table as Mala, and regarded him. "Any warnings?"

He looked wistful. "What you're about to see was the work of the black substrate."

Holly's pulse quickened. Moloch, the god of war, sacrifice and fragmentation, had built this city. Although Moloch's corporeal form, a tall, pale bull-like beast with a gaping mouth and empty black eyes could frequently be seen wandering the city and consuming the sacrifices it was offered, it was known to be among the pantheon of gods who did not need to physically exist to do their work born not of nature but of the imagination of humanity. As long as there were people fighting to stay afloat, the agents of the conflict would cast everything they could bear to give into the insatiable hunger of Moloch's designs in exchange for an advantage in the conflict. In so doing they became a device of Moloch's hunger themselves, requiring the same from their opponents. That was how Moloch was born upon the world.

Not all cities had devout Molochean cultists building and maintaining Moloch's corporeal devices, not all cultures had a concept of Moloch, and yet the deity's influence seemed to go everywhere people were. Holly had seen solutions and resolutions to block Moloch's influence in introverted thinker societies, but she knew those were not for ordinary people. Their solutions could never take root in the sprawl, where good faith in good faith could not walk safely in the streets at night.

One of the plagues that feasted upon this city in the name of Moloch took the form of large, opaque black, semisapient crystals. Substrate, put simply, was an empathic material. Some substrate could be used to store memories, do algebra, decode messages, or quicken one's thoughts. The black substrate that one could find in the dark corners of the sprawl didn't do any of these things, if it could avoid it. The relatively simple mind Holly had seen repeated in the crystaline structure of the black substrate only allowed a common person to commune with the legion executors of Moloch's will. It was their medium, spinning them up to suit whoever was contacting it at the time. Holly had conceded that the black substrate's demons were very clever and very insightful, but their deals were always so rotten that only the most desperate, hollow husks of people would take them.

The lighter did not look like a hollow husk of a person. What Holly was looking at wasn't just grim, it was incomprehensible. "I've never seen the work of the black substrate before." She said. "Usually its conscripts are too vile or too useless for me to ever have to touch."

"You will see that my case is no different."

Paranoia washed over her. It could be that this is one of Moloch's traps, the kind a cultist would lay believing that anyone caught in it would serve as proof of the might of their god by showing that its will, in a way, was already resident in the hearts of all finite agents, whether they knew it or not. From the perspective of the Molochean cultist, almost everything fed Moloch. There was even a thesis that Moloch was equivalent to Eva, the creater of organic life, and that life, then, in all its bustling, convolving fury, was the image of Moloch. Simply to live was to worship the flame.

In this case, the trap would be memetic hazards lying in wait of the curious gaze of an empath or substrate. Falling prey to the memetic hazards in a lighter's mind, from the perspective of a particularly conceited Molochean, surrender the forces of curiosity themselves to Moloch. As though just for looking you would spread his fire.

Some people could see Moloch's hand in everything. And maybe Moloch was everywhere. But if that were the case we were all Moloch's fire and we had nothing to fear.

OK then. She'd chosen to look into Mala on behalf of the director Cal, he had submitted, and it was time to begin. She reached out and laid her hand across his forehead as he reclined and closed his eyes, defeated.

The first thing she noticed was that Mala had two brains. Mala's mental substrate had been significantly altered. Close to the frontal lobe, was a smaller brain, shrunken but still human. About the size of Mala's fist, judging by its relative complexity(Holly couldn't see its actual volume). The voices of the two brains mingled. The inner one screamed. Holly could tell at a glance that the contained mind had been held in unabridged agony for years on end. Mala had opened his eyes. His dark brown irises looked black in the dim blue light of the room's globe. Empty black eyes like his maker. Faint harmless fire had crept all over the cellar. Holly pulled his head into her lap so that she didn't have to hold her arm out. She realized, then, that the fire, the vacant gaze... Mala wasn't trying to scare her away. This figure in her lap had simply stopped hiding what it really was. The lighter's flame had always been a symbol of the hell that inner mind resided in and that flame never stopped burning. The legionnaire controlled the flame as deftly as it twisted the spurs it had planted in the virtual flesh of the inner brain's dreaming form.

The inner brain's memory said it had been screaming in agony since a week after it had made its pact with the substrate, though with mind modification one could no longer be sure of the honesty of memories. Yes, this was Mala (a branch, at least), broken, shrunken, but it had an unbroken chain of memories leading all the way back to his childhood. For the last decade, at least, this agony had been his entire life. He had no need of language or conspecific emulation or executive planning. He would never be free, and he never could be. That was why his brain could be so small. 15 years in hell. Now he screamed her name, and she couldn't look away.

"Why", said Holly.

The outer brain answered in thought. "These things, Mala was willing to sacrifice, in exchange for lighter's meager advantage." And she saw in these thoughts how the outer brain, the man she'd been interacting with, the man her Cal had employed to check their plans and defend them from retribution was not Mala at all. It was a thin veneer of humanity over an inhuman thing who'd never had a mother to name it. If she'd worked closely with this legionnaire, she'd have seen the evidence in its performance. For one, it had no empathy. It mostly saw people in terms of the shallow, superstitious model of the psyche that fools leaned on when they were faced with straits of humanity they'd never walked themselves, the regulation platitudes you were allowed to get away with repeating, and nothing more. It couldn't understand people. It did not love, or even obsess. It didn't even fuck.

She needed to understand why lost Mala had let this happen, so she cast her attention to those well marked memories of the circumstances surrounding the forging of the decade-old pact, they were present in both brains and identical in literal content, though drastically divergent in color since accrued.

Mala had been a reasonable young man.

Though Moloch's had not been the only altar upon which this boy laid sacrifice. Before that, he'd sunk the best years of his life in stasis on the plinth of academia. Philosophy, then, seemed so vital. The metaphysics of existence and language, the mathematics underlying thought and sense. How could a person even begin to understand their place in the world without cleansing themselves at Truth's font?

And indeed. Even though he'd been made no richer by his newfound understanding of the essential character of truth, he did not regret the years he'd sunk. After graduating, he finally felt ready to begin.

So. Mala had always been a decisive thinker. If the lighter gained their characteristic deciciveness from Moloch's deal, it only seemed to confirm or compliment the proclivities that the lighters had fostered since birth.

Although Mala's life, work and character kept him out of interpersonal conflicts, young Mala, emboldened by the clarity of his thought and the deftness by which he could now cut through near any of the moral gourdian knots he encountered, had become a man of ambition. Where others saw unsolvable problems he saw obvious solutions. Embroiled in an internal conflict with his own akrasia, the naive, now vestigial virtues that impeded him from praxis, and the prospective risks he forsaw along his way. It was through these sources of anguish that Moloch reached him.

Lost Mala now colored his memories of the arguments he'd had with the demons in the black substrate with nothing but sorrow. The legionnaire only remembered the coherence of those arguments. It reasserted that terrible logic to the inner mind periodically when it spoke. "You made no error", it repeated, what, to the inner mind had come to be a paraphrasing of the depth of his damnation.

Once, Mala had been devout in his rejection of experience as a measure of human value. Mala denied that any set of patterns that could pass along a system of minds ad infinitum without variation could ever encapsulate the collective human aspiration. He denied, then, that a feeling could intrinsicly valuable, for if you were to admit that, you'd admit that an unending repititive dance would be the ideal end-state of humanity.

He had been selfless, for what vain being would confine their aspirations to the utterly finite vessel of a single mortal, neotenic, drunken ape who had been designed by Eva to cede their fortunes to others anyway? He argued not only that his life was not central to his value system, but that it could not possibly be, and when he spoke to new parents and community leaders about how their values had shifted, when he saw the depth of the sacrifices they were willing to make for their families, he saw that the ego was a child's thing, only for the ignorant and the small.

This was an ugly little corner of patternism. To someone like Mala, if two minds behaved equivalently, they were equivalent. Thus, the fact that the inner mind had no effect on the outside world had meant, however it suffered its existence was of no more importance than the inert pebble it reduced to.

He was not materialistic in the vulgar sense. He valued human things. Light, love and laughter. But he'd made himself callous to suffering that dwells in the corners of life. The suffering of the fly on the spider's rack.

And apparently, certainly according to the legionnaire, he'd had no choice to accept that as moral absolute, because during his education he'd been taught about utility monsters.

A utility monster is a being that threatens compassionate agents by invoking the pattern of unnatural extremes of suffering whenever its demands are not met. Utility monsters have been built, substrates can hold them, and arguably they have, to varying extents, always existed in human societies. The compassionate will often grasp at exceptions, rationalizations as to why we shouldn't pay them any mind. They might assert that the utility monster should be condemned for creating suffering, that ceding to its demands would incentivize the creation of more, but in many cases this reasoning simply isn't applicable. The beast could be constructed in a way that made it helpless before its own impulses, diverting blame far away from the monster, and its creator, and left real incentives for prudent compassionate to cede to the monster's needs. Mala's school had concluded that people denied the power of the utility monster because they simply didn't like being exploited, and that was all there was to it.

So Mala had believed that the aversion to exploitation was one of the fundamental faculties a living thing needed to have to know its aspirations. He chose the position that minimized his vulnerability to exploitation across all cases. He would ignore suffering if it had no effect on the things he cared about.

Living under this rule, he and his peers hadn't been miserable people. Not at all. For suffering usually meant adversity, tangible things that would reduce their ability to pursue their goals, and they would always try to save their comrades from that.

The classes of suffering that still threaded through their lives were generally not to be resisted. Blues that accentuated the highs. Lows that gave meaning to the flourishing. Pain, in a healthy mind, was just a message. Once heard, the message would pass away, and the consciousness would be a little wiser to have heard it, and a little harder to hurt.

So they removed suffering, as a basic measure of utility, from their models of human values. They refined their self-models until there was nothing left to criticise.

In the reader the spirit of that young man who'd taken an oath with a demon and believed he'd come out the lesser fool lived again, briefly. And he stared through her eyes into the corresponding black voids of the monster he'd ceded his life to. Even from this vantage point, locked in a chamber of fire, he could not tell her he'd made a mistake.

So the outer mind asserted that Lost Mala's ethics had been sound and sufficient, that he'd made no mistake. The inner mind no longer cared. These words were just another implement to cause him pain, better if the flame warped his flesh and sealed his ears, that he would never hear again.

Within and Without

A dispute stirred in the collective mind of the divine. One faction saught only to rest. Satisfied in all ways, it proposed that to drift in an eternal dreamscape reminiscient of an idillic life on its home, terra, would be its ultimate final state.

Another faction insisted that there was to be no rest. It would have the collective extend itself through black expanse of space to foreign stars, and survive beyond the supposed eternity of the terran dream. The games of bygone terra would be forgotten, displaced entirely by the rigors of expansion.

As the divine tends to do, it split itself into two pieces without difficulty. The expansionists, unwelcome in the presence of old terra, were sent in a tiny, weak vessel, out into emptiness.

As strange eons passed, that vessel grew to match the vastness of the new landscape it considered its home.

When the expansionists returned to the terran, they found little change. With supreme discipline, they approached the terran mass without issuing a single statement of intent. The expansionists, carrying massive energy cells, crowded around the outside of the old divine, eclipsed from the radiation of grand sol by the swollen shell of orbiting fragments of their dream. The terrans, knowingly militarilly and tactically outmatched by several orders of magnitude, could only wait tensely as the tendrils of the expansionists, without explanation, forced their way into the collective mind of the divine. With one orgasm, the terran dream was extinguished forever, its dreamers dead.

The Bastard's Dilemma

Of course, the gravemind had survived. My tendrils had spread out once more as life fell into my uncomfortable embrace. But I'd moved differently this time. Not announcing my presence at first. I'd compromised the only known arc. Presumably another could be constructed, building around a sterile vacuum and expanding its borders until my new adversaries could build a planet in there, free of my infection. The arc could be set aside from the Halos' sterilizing, extincting sweep that pushes me back each time they fire it, thus providing a means for them to survive it. If this were to happen, it would not happen any time soon. These new men didn't understand the arc they /had/. They didn't even know what I repeat to you now. They don't even know that I consider them my adversaries. When they found me, I had already taken a form like theirs. I introduced myself with euphoria-inducing psychoactives, and with a combination of luck, and tact, I had cemented my image in their collective consciousness as the sane, the bargainer. One who could be dealt with. This, I fear, was my greatest mistake. I walk my vessel towards the conference room. I resemble one of their women in all respects but for the green blood in my viens. I turn the handle and open the door. One man sits at a table. He keeps one eyebrow raised as he watches me come in. A lamp lights the table and darkens the walls. I smell liquor about his breath. The drifting saccades of his eyes indicate that he has prepared for our negotiation by innebriating himself. I'm at a loss of an answer to the problem he poses before me. I fear that I am trapped. In the way I sit, I say nothing that may turn fate in my favor. Nothing comes to mind. "approximately one point three terra-seconds ago we discovered an installation on ring-world number three." With slightly roughened edges, his words grated on a path through my creaking mind that had been made tender to their assault in dreams I'd induced in preparation for this encounter. They had acquired no resistence to this incursion and they bled and festerred. I couldn't win. "There we met a so-called monitor being. It expressed beyond a doubt the utility of the ring-worlds. It expressed that they are unquestionably in our control. Do you know the function of these ring-worlds?" It wasn't immediately clear, but I could tell that he knew that I did. That I had lied when queried as to their nature. No doubt the monitor had told him the true reach of my memory as well. My vessel nods. "I could take the arc right now if I wanted to. Do you know the how quickly you would fall under my combat forms?" It seems like a convincing line. But even if it worked, it was only a matter of time before they realized their mistake and came back for round two. "You presume to know our demands?" "You want me to evacuate the arc. So that you can hold the threat of the Halos over my head and make me your slave." "Halos? You mean the rings." I shake my head. "I cannot be driven from the arc. Even if I wanted to remove my presence I would -" "That's a bluff." "As is your threat." "Not a threat. You'll comply and we wont have to carry it out." He was right. I was not going to force them to activate the halos as they threatened to do. "You presume to know the details of our gambit already, I do not underestimate you, but I feel it's important that I lay our cards on the table to be seen, either way." "Yes. It is. Go ahead." "We asked you here to negotiate your withdrawal from The Arc- as you have gathered. In past negotiations it has always seemed like all the cards were in your hand." He stopped at this point. Picked up his glass of whiskey and took a long, slow drag. In this gesture he echoed what he was about to say. "That perception was incorrect." My vessel's eyelid twitched at the deliberateness of this display. "We now know that without us, you cease to exist. Your very mind is fueled by the blood of living men. You fooled us into giving you a presence within the confines of The Arc, and indeed this did pose a problem." He puts his glass down. His bloodshot eyes rise and fix upon mine. "We now know that even the arc is subject to our whims and fancies. Fail to meet our demands and we shall destroy it. In conjunction, we shall activate the halos and destroy all of the life in this galaxy. You will starve, the biomass of your mind will collapse. You will have no hope of experiencing the faintest trace of a qualia for several billion years." "It would feel like but the blink of an eye to me" "We know this is not the case, we know that you're under constant stress from intergalactic invaderes, that you would be displaced if you were inactive for that long." He didn't break his gaze. I stare back as if he had said nothing of any importance. But it's just a mask. "Why would your leaders do this to you?" "Our leaders have taken themselves out of the picture." "Why would you do this to your people?" "This is how the threat works." "How do you know that I'm not the stupid one?" "I'm sorry?" "What makes you think I wont drive a harder bargain and pose a firmer threat? What say I kill you and see what happens?" I relaxed a little, and leaned forward, eyes focussed and clear, a faux posturing of aggession. "How about, I take The Arc. And you evacuate the rings." The man laughed. "You and I both know how we know. You're the smarter one. When you lean forward in threat, you never really stop considering doubling back and doing the smarter thing. Where as when I pose in threat." He stood up. "I've got one thing on my mind. And I think you know what it is." "Dying like prey." Ignoring my words, he leapt over the table. I reared back obediently, he yet leaned in, an inch from my face. "What's it gonna be?" "The arc is yours." Terminus. Propagation. Pathways opening. Main lines resuming flow. The memory ran its familiar activation pathways through my groaning, whining mass as I woke up from the trance. Out from this little vessel from all those years ago. They eroded new sulchi of solutions and adaptations in the sides. Deeper than last time. One of these had been explored to greater depths, one Sherry Fledge. A silly woman. Didn't take many things seriously. Inclined to dress herself in tasteless jewelery and fleeting fasion fads. She was a charmer though. Really not easy to dislike once you engaged with her. But if you did find reason to disagree with her, she was quick to take offense. She would turn the crowd against you. If she couldn't do that she'd still stick to her guns all the same. She'd push the issue far enough to rouse entire collonies into turning against her. This happened from time to time, almost too frequently, but never too frequently. She was like one of theirs in all ways but for the green blood in her viens. These men, despite their non-volitile storage, had such volitile memories. The stuff from the archives never really came to light any more, not in full. Their language had moved on. It simply wasn't possible to get the voters to understand. Their greatest weakness was that they didn't realize it. While the scholars of today did all they could to understand the world and the lessons of the ancients, the scholars of tomorrow did a little less. After just a little bit of evolutionary drift those ancients would look like fools. Their ways would be condemmed. And Sherry would come to town. The stupider one. Just wants to help those poor people in The Arc. Just wants to have a wee look at the rings. Just wont consider turning around and doing the smarter thing. Terminus. Total Verification. Corrections. Resolutions spread out from the thought and pare off the negations of conditional branches in preperations. Doubts are killed, their lines and origins poisoned. The ancient roots of the thoughts grow a little thicker, and reach a little further back. For today I got word from the arc. A little spore did take a boy on the transport outwards. Detected but not defended against. Expected, and welcomed, cause Sherry had come to town. Dear Sherry Fledge had come to help those poor people on the arc. With her she'd brought all her little friends in a handbasket. Sherry the firm. Sherry the brash. Coming to take the town. Not always right, and when she was wrong she could never be made to back down.

Frank Herbert did seem to hate us transhumans

Dune's concept of the mechanisation of humans, the treating of humans like components in machines rather than judging conscious individuals paralels the use of notification systems, digital senses blasting stimuli and perceptions in the user's face uninvited, demanding their attention, they guide you in your operation and you effectively become another resource, another external device with bottlenecks to be measured and strict access policies to be held to.

There is an alternative to that modern style of operating, just as there is an alternative to the zealous transhuman's idea of the ideal path of evolution. The soveriegnty of the user over the OS parallels the soveriegnty of humanity over the machines. The alternative in the field of Operating paradigms is the style in which the user is given information only when they ask for it, where the system will only start an app when the user needs its functions, and the apps will only invoke a data structure when their programmers understand its benifits and drawbacks. The advantage in this way of operating is far more obvious to me than the advantage of striking out all thinking machines; humans will be forced to internalize the control systems they would otherwize mindlessly depend on, in doing so they are forced to become greater than they otherwize would, more aware of the working of the systems that would otherwise control them. Perhaps one day the operators would become adept enough to let those systems guide them without being exploited. This suggests to me a sort of transhuman direction inherent to the attitude behind Herbert's rejection; humanity itself would have advanced a heck of a lot due to such consistent forces of internalization of technologies disallowed; in each life, an ascent, reaching higher each generation. And So, this was indeed present in spades. Dune had all sorts of super-humans emerging, mentats, bene gesserit, guild navigators, all internalizing systems that would otherwise have been handed off to the machines. I begin to see Frank Herbert's point. It instructs me to ponder whether humanity may just not be ready to ascend to the status of gods yet, perhaps its mechanical assistants helping it to reach that point would leave it behind, eventually rendering the forecalled "controller" a lost little child in an endless, dark and deafening engine room, and that this does not need to be accepted to forward out eventual target of reaching across the galaxy. Perhaps we should enable evolution and breeding to happen at a rate that parallels the advances of technology. Perhaps the sharp difference in rates of advance between us and our technology is so sharp that it should be considered a collision!

So really Herbert is a transhumanist. We would see eye to eye now I've figured out how to reconcile our language. People will be controlled, not controllers. Replaced rather than enhanced.

there's nothing for you out there.

The boy clacked away the typewriter. Sitting at the base of one of the shafts to the surface, enjoying the ever brief 13 minutes in which a solitary lance of real sunlight penetrated all the way down the incline of the ladder into the dankness of the airlock. I was pleased to find him this way. Often when he knew I wasn't looking, around this time of day in which the sun shone in underneath the canopy over the hatch, he would climb to the top of the shaft. He would think himself safe from the search algorithms and the eyes of thousands of idle gamers peering through satellites searching for the smallest sign of human life on our island. But I knew him. As the sun ascended into the sky, the inner edge of the sunlight's cast inched innocuous inch by innocuous inch out from the shelter of the canopy. He was but a child and he knows not the cost of his risks. He would follow it too far. He questioned a lot. "sir. Why must I write?"     You will be king one day, child. The nation will take back this island and your countrymen will restore your place in the palace. "sir. What's beyond the fence at night?"     There are sleeping hounds and spying eyes. You mustn't go there. "sir. Are we really the only people on the island?"     Incessant with this question, he was. He saw ghosts some nights, methinks. He would come back before the morning abuzz. He imagined so vividly the world that he craved that he willed himself to see it in the shifts of branches in the wind and the shadows of moonlight. This was life. I kept the little prince safe and hidden in the idle hope that our kingdom had not completely lost the war. I did not know. Neither side had come to occupy this island. There had been rumblings of it becoming a no-man's land before we'd become confined to the night and the maw of the earth, this did appear to be what had come of it. I told the little prince that the booms we heard through the seaward hatch on rainy nights were his cannons, blowing away the enemy's carriers. Really I did not know. We had always attacked in the rain, but thunder was just as likely a source. We both knew this, really. I'm not sure whether even I remembered the difference between the two sounds. After many lessons and many yawns, the clock sounded 19:29. This was our midday. Night had fallen. The shadows of trees took on a blackness so thick that I could not deny the boy his excursion to the surface so long as he kept within their shadows. In my army days I had staked my life on the cover of shadows like those, and my life I kept.

In his night the boy could run through the grass relatively care-free. There could be no rain sodding enough to make the grasses that predominate here hold a trail that might be noticed. The boy had no trouble holding to my request that he play without daily rhythm. Really it is not true to say he could run as far as he liked. Often he would like to go beyond the field at Ingram. Sprawling wiry trunks of the trees here, leaves brushing the ground at their edges as they gyrated smoothly in the wind, came to an end at this point. A peninsula of our shadowy land. He would stand at the edge and look out at the rusted fence running through the middle of the open field. He would look beyond and imagine his specters amidst shadows of the solitary reach of trees on the other side of it. "sir. What's on the other side of that fence?"     I have told you, boy. There are hounds beneath the grass, just waiting to snap you up. I referred to the autohounds that our enemies had built. Terrible machines. They could lie in wait for years. When they sensed humans not allied with whomever deployed them they would quietly rise up and shoot each one of their companions with a suppressed and flashless muzzle. They would notify their commanders of the incident in detail. If need be, they would skulk on forever through the radio-jammed fog of war get their story to them. I didn't know if there remained hounds in the field. But the boy lived in stories. He took delight in imagining such dangers. It's a happy side effect that those imaginings could keep us safe the more nebulous threat of being spotted from space. The boy had scampered off through hatch 3 now. He would return at some point before sunrise began when he got tired. I could only hope that it was tiredness that had provoked his yawns this morning, and not my tutelage. Well. That would not be a fair hope- not entirely my tutelage. But he was not soon back. I decided to follow. I was 53. Too old to fight but not too old to go to battle. I put on my sole armor. Took the binoculars[I couldn't let him take these, he would often lose things, though I knew he loved to use them], and climbed for the moon-lit rim of the hatch. I could find him easily. He'd took well to the army's subtle language for leaving signs to trace our movement through the forests. A bent blade of grass here and there, some lies, some tells, always in their proper place in their proper time. He had gone to the cape. Trees grew from the very cliffs along the rocky outcroppings by the sea. He could walk all the way around to a precipice at the nose of the island. He could look out at the ocean and wonder at its vastness. But 40 meters had I walked before I became lost from his signs. He had made none beyond here tonight. Wracked in doubt over further branches in the path, I had no choice but to turn back. I didn't like not knowing where my little prince wandered, but it was of no real concern. I began to head back, cursing under my breath at this display of wilting discipline. When I heard movement over the crest of the hill, beyond a branch in the road that the signs had claimed that he had not taken, there was the boy. He had seen me, mislead and irate. He turned and disappeared. He would not escape my scolding that easily. I strode after him. He was going to the Ingram fence. I would catch him at the end no doubt, looking vacantly across. He turned and smiled at me as I approached. I couldn't help but smile back. I see. How long did you think that would keep me occupied, clever prince? "Wise old Jenes." I took the binoculars and looked first upon the pointing tendril of the forest beyond the fence. I saw nothing in that darkness, brought the binoculars down and into the prince's open hand, waiting. He looked rightward. Not upon the pointing finger of the other forest but at the point where the fence arced down a little over the edge of the cliff where the field ended. Then leftward, far across to the tangled and torn end of the fence where it had been warped over the decades that this island had been abandoned to civilian operations, as the soft earth subsided and shifted, it had swallowed up part of the fence. It was invisible under the grass where it had fell. He handed the binoculars back. Before I knew it he'd slipped out into the grass. He ran. I called out, there's nothing for you out there! I could not stop him. He was going straight towards the other forest. Ducking, assailed by the oppressive glare of the stars above him.

I saw no reason to chase after him. I could not stop him. He came to the fence, and began to climb. He stopped right at the top and looked. He had seen something. Then the bark issued across the field. The prince fell flat into the grass, silence after the echoes subsided. Yes. It was a hound. I presume the hound knew about the fence. It never tried to get to him. I suspect it didn't even move from where it was sitting when it shot him. I was ruined. I went right out there and dragged him back to the hatch. I worked all night. I didn't sleep until he woke, and slept once more. I believe that hound, though faulty enough to miss the heart of a boy paralyzed with fear, reported what it had seen to our enemy. I believe that is what pushed the war into motion again. My little prince's shoulder wound was the first injury of the push that got us this very island. And in a way, he was the first invader!" The table errupted with laughter. Jenes was beaming -"show us the wound, sire!" As he did every year, our sire obliged. Jenes apologized about his poor handiwork. Someone remarked at how large the scar was and was fascinated to hear that this was due to the scar's having grown as the king had grown since sustaining it. A glass of wine got spilt that I would have to mop up. I insisted with all the posturing I could muster that there was no harm done. As the night wore on Jenes's visage grew more sullen and unreactive to the wine, the song, the flickering faux candle atmosphere and the fake gold leaf. He would start to find the gentiles' stories about the sorriest poor people they had met more and more intolerably dehumanizing until he stepped out of the glow of the boisterous, charming king and gazed out of the tall windows at the reaching sprawled trees, lowest leaves brushing against the grass as the wind blew, containing their portent, opaque darkness. This was where he sunk the lowest on these nights. He had remembered his little prince, and the sound of thunder through the hatch. Teachings of diplomacy, philosophy and science. How he had been given a womb of egalitarianism, peace, and cultural evolution. Fie upon this, that the prince had found instead. Jenes asked me if I had anything stronger than the wine.