CW: war crimes, stalking, surveillance, discussion of rape, Evangelical ideology, homo/transphobia, guns, gun violence, police, cults, organ harvesting, radical feminism, gendered violence (female-on-male)

‘The Beek Doctrine’: Creating generalized conditions of anonymous terror in order to increase the likelihood of rifts and friendly fire among the enemy.

“Why did you start wearing girl clothes? Like, what did you think you were doing when you started?”

“It wasn’t… that central for me. The clothes. I never like… thought being a girl was that.”

“Oh I don’t mean as some like universal step. Even if you only started after the Coven you could tell me.”

“Oh. No, my first time was when Malia and Emma and Tina would each let me try on something of theirs. That was when they said… they wished I could be a girl like them. I expected it to feel weird, but looking at myself with them felt… normal. Like that was the real world. And then nothing else did.”

“Awww.” Mai clutched my arm and squished her cheek into my shoulder. “Do you still talk to any of them?”

“Not since high school. Barely even then. As a kid I could be one of them, but then… obviously, not. And I couldn’t really be a boy to them either… What about you? Did you talk to girls when you were a kid? I think I kind of assumed that would be a lot more people’s origin than it turned out to be.”

“Hmmm. When I was really young I didn’t really talk to the girls but I liked watching them. The way they dressed made me think of… pretty aliens. I think I said that to my mom once. With rings, frills, little tiny studs, tails hanging off their heads. I didn’t think of it like a role or even a way of being perceived - at least, by other people. I wasn’t saying this yet, but I already only cared about being perceived by the sky. I wanted the eyes above the clouds to look down at me like a pretty alien too.”

Awakening in the sickbay, I knew in an instant what I looked like. Those scenes in Evangelion had always been the most affecting to me, whether it was Shinji or Rei or Asuka on the hospital bed. I knew what I had become, and that it was the opposite of what I had intended to become when I made my agreement. And I knew how I had got there - by chasing the frontline, chasing thrills and the edge of death, chasing justification for my place here even while risking it. All this fell into place like it was the memory I had needed to cut off to build the false context of a dream. Caroline Bennett-Fog was sitting on a swivel chair at the foot of my bed, tapping idly at her Azoth Smaragdina tablet, and I hoped she was wearing the mask of my ally.

“How long have I been… what’s happened.”

“Six days. Your body was reconstituted from 46% of its tissue. The medical technology here is… well it makes wars of attrition a bitch, and that’s what it looks like we’re in now. At best.”

Christ. And Halation? 54% of her tissue wouldn’t be just like, limbs to be replaced like machines, she’d have memories stored in there, habits, desires… I’m here. I’m OK. I retreated to your brain, and your Asymmetry Field prioritized protecting that. I also helped repair damage in real time. You’re welcome. Don’t go banging it on things because you feel guilty now, OK?

“You did good. You captured us a new Asymmetry Field.”

“Do they… can we even switch their sides if they’re captured? They’re interoperable, right?”

“This one was an ecological tourist vessel. It didn’t even realize it was in a war until you attacked it. It still barely understands what that means and doesn’t really care beyond its own survival.”

“That’s still…” feels weird on a consent level? Never mind, I can’t let her look at me like this. Like a parody of myself. “OK, so do we want to make another ship or use that here.”

“I have a proposal I want you to read when you’re fully lucid about operating it as a turret stationed above the mesa that could periodically emit sub-fields - something you never told me they could do - to capture enemy units. Besides, we already have another ship.”

My eyes widened.

“Our second from Earth - a week ahead of schedule, meaning Azoth or someone else has already improved on the Drives.” I couldn’t contain a sigh of relief, even as I knew it didn’t make sense. Why did I need more weirdos to wrangle? But it would check the power of some of the ones I was already dealing with. The Expedition Force would get bigger, more impersonal. “Beek’s idiotic airstrike cost us all the goodwill we would have earned by taking down the bombers, so as soon as you’re actually available to discipline him, I highly recommend installing the second ship’s captain as commanding officer.”

My relief faded as quickly. “…airstrike?”

“Our missiles are a lot more powerful than theirs. It’s been called an Unreciprocable Crime - their equivalent of a war crime. As in, they can’t do that thing where the offender injures themselves in equivalence with the injury done, even if a treaty was reached and they wanted to. But the Rusty Moons defended it because they were already going to be subject to one. So a bunch more Ferrous Masks are coming to support us, and that basically puts us with them against everyone else.”

“The Ribbons didn’t count?” They must have done more damage overall, even if we did more damage in one hit. Unless… it had been almost a week… how much damage could Beek have done in a week -

“We lost the Internexus, since half of it got crushed in a rockslide. That gave Entangleweed a huge edge in recruitment underground, including virtually the whole Polyp Massif, which would have overwhelmed us. Beek levelled it.”

“Motherfucker! He knows I’ll… hand him over to them for something like that, doesn’t he?”

“He knew that as soon as he hit the – sorry, I’m not sure you even know what a Mob is yet.” Her voice was withering in a way I hadn’t heard it since the early weeks of training. “He’s been trying to make it impossible for you to do that, both in terms of what the locals will accept, and what your troops will. He let that guy out too.”

“Oh no. Oh for fuck.” I started seriously hoping this was a nightmare. I lay down, sat up, lay down, sat up, trying to get a sense of how much my head hurt, my diaphragm, how much I could move around and do.

“The good thing about having done so much damage is that even about serious events like the destruction of a massif - there’s a reason the Entangleweed thought they could get away with this one - information, without the Network, moves very slowly now.” I had been wondering why trying to blow up this place hadn’t been a huge taboo either, although evidently the Sunbites had to be tricked into it. “My strategy, which I know you won’t like, is to establish a three-dimensional information perimeter. We’ve contained most of the first strike witnesses already, and posted troops in the Polyp Massif wreckage. From hereon in nothing around this Plug for sixteenth-exponent units gets out, if that means eradicating any sign of life so be it. Insofar as something inevitably does, we counteract it with deliberate misinformation. Have a version of the story everyone who wants to ally with us can believe, and no way of knowing otherwise. Attempting any sort of public reconciliation would undermine that.”

I blinked. “You think it’s easier to blockade information, on this planet, as non-natives, than to reconcile with anyone? To punish someone for war crimes?” So much of the time I’d come to treat her as a sort of… divergent but closely kindred path to who I’d been – in middle school, at least. Then there were moments like this when I tried to stare through her glasses and only saw a void.

“If it wasn’t clear, Unreciprocable means there is no appropriate punishment, in their normal system of reciprocation. The alternative is extermination.”

Halation’s feelings twinged within me. She was barely familiar with the concept, but what had happened to her home, the vengeance she had half-knowingly wreaked, were something like this.

“And how far is the responsibility distributed?” “Normally, over a Waltz.”

“What do they count as that for us? A troop, maybe? Surely not a species?”

“See, this kind of thing was rare enough that it’s basically all casuistry. Which was stored in the Network. But the Network is gone. Some Towers probably have the files backed up. Different Towers have different files. No way to verify them.”

My mouth went dry.

“Bring Beek to the brig where I was keeping Hadak,” I managed to spit.

She shrugged. “We’ll send someone. I warned him. But the troops won’t like it if you make an example of him. He was defending himself, some of that footage is – viscerally horrifying from a human evolutionary standpoint. They’ve gotten really riled up now.” She extricated a thumb drive from the port on the end of her tablet. “I figured before you get too deep in that, you’d want to see this. All the data and news and briefings from Earth are in the main system already, but this drive has the private messages from your friends and family.”

There was new music from Mai - including a music video for an old song, more professional than I ever thought I’d see her in, spinning around on a rooftop in San Francisco while coloured rays and whorls rained down from the Sun, slowly filling up more and more of the screen until she only showed up in negative on a psychedelic soup like Halation – short form video slop from Alasdair, an effusive WWII-style letter from my mom, a terse .rtf paragraph from my dad.

“You deserve to see the world you’re changing for the better, before you worry too much about whether you’re changing this one for the worse.” She hovered as I thumbed idly through the files, chin bobbing in her throat. “If I might even go so far as to suggest an exercise. If you’re not already doing this. Consider what you would permit yourself to do if you were fighting your ideal revolution on Earth. If you did not conceive of yourself as the primary object of ethical suspicion.”

I tried, for just a moment. It felt like looking out over the surface of a gas giant three times the size of Contemplation.

Contemplation. I didn’t put myself in this situation for Earth, did I? For the United States, like so many people I’ve looked down on? For the people precious to me. Not even for Mai. No - I did for Contemplation. For you.

Yes, you gave them all up for me, and I will not let you down by letting you turn into a monster.

I really didn’t believe it at that moment, but I wanted to. Wanted to believe she was still wiser than me.

As soon as she was gone, I opened the CLAMP autodecoder on the thumb drive. Information readable as regular files reconfigured itself into the secret, CLAMP-readable ones.

“I really wish I could thank you. I can. I do. This is ‘objectively’ the best I’ve ever lived, including when I was with you. Not even just objectively. I have a support network. Sophie visits, Alasdair’s always around - he’s surprisingly sweet, I channeled him a persona from my universe - which I officially have to call something, now, I guess, because the real universe is out there. Your universe. The transmissions just tell me they’ve split - they’re both equidistant to my subjective world, but there’s a gate I can go through materially to yours, if I want to. Which I still don’t. Maybe someday, maybe when there’s peace. I should want to. I’m almost afraid I’ll get cut off if I go out there, even though they don’t say I will. I’m already treating it more like a fictional universe than I used to. Alasdair called it the ‘Lightverse’ and made a bunch of explainer videos that have tripled the sales of my albums. I’m sure you’ll hear more about this from our mutual friend, but even though he’s not in on any more than he has to be, he’s ‘our’ closest thing to a public face. He’s become the first and last source on anything to do with you or Halation for a ton of young people and casual conspiracy types, he’s been on Joe Rogan like ten times, including to debate some of the new opposition. That’s less degrees of separation from Joe Rogan than I ever thought I’d be. I made a 4-song EP for him - Alasdair, not Joe Rogan lol - for his “Lightverse” persona, a yellow-green-orange serpent-ring called Chiwellen. That’s not to make you jealous, I’m still gay.

It’s really slow coming up with music when the connection to the universe – my universe – feels this distant, but I have the time and money to do just that and nothing else. I don’t mind it this way. It’s more deliberate. I remember some young version of me looking up to real musicians, even great improvisers like Sun Ra, thinking that must be how they did it, they understood everything they were doing, they had architectures and mind palaces they could walk you around, but I’d never be able to work like that because I was stuck cramming ideas in when the teacher wasn’t watching the computers. Before I rationalized it all with… a story about how I made it, which was also a way to make it? I guess you could say ‘irrationalized’? My next album might be called ‘Living In A Rational Universe’ but I can’t tell if that’s just… wallowing in it. Music journalists have come around to interview me, I was invited on a Tiny Desk show. I won’t do that shit. I don’t mind if more people listen but I don’t want to be ‘important’ for reasons that have nothing to do with the music. That’s unfair to them, and I never even thought the music was ‘just about the music’ either. I don’t want to be a story. Plus I’m pretty sure Ogier’s pulling at least some of those strings. If it’s some streamer in white sneakers and hentai merch who says ‘bruh’ every other word, it’s Alasdair; if it’s some Gen X white lady with funky shaped glasses, it has to be Ogier.

He owns the security cameras and the TV and the damn thermostat in this apartment. Doing shit on your network feels like using the Death Note. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen drones hovering from my balcony, even out of the city. One time I went to a club and someone cornered me in the bathroom, started pretending they knew me from somewhere then trying to grab me and take pictures and lick my face. This woman in white latex like something from the Matrix popped out of a stall and grabbed them by the back of the neck in a way that made them start puking on the floor, then said something about me being “under real protection now” and disappeared, I think I caught a glimpse of her once the rest of the night. It felt more violating than the original harassment tbh. She also had… it looked like a TV actor trying to imitate your haircut? Ogier comes around sometimes like a 70s landlord, brings meals from the kitchens on Plastic Beach or random things he thinks I’d like - one time he gave me a 3D printed NFT ripped off something I drew when I was 20! I don’t think it’s romantic, but it still makes me sick that I can’t exactly ignore him. I’m up on Point Reyes National Seashore now, completely exposed to satellites (62 miles of dark blue one-way glass), I’ve got a giant sunhat and a mask on so they can’t see my mouth move, I talk to myself and say crazy bullshit as if you were here all the time in case they’re recording. The wind is nice and loud today. I’ve walked so many beaches, trying to get away or feel a connection or both. I know trying to get away will make it more obvious, but I really do love the coastline… I can’t believe how little I got out in nature before… Again, best I’ve ever lived, objectively. Even though you can’t really call it ‘nature’ when you can see that white tumour on the South horizon. Hiram’s so mad he couldn’t get this place.”

Round quails bob around, metaphysically complete, picking at anything and everything. If there is food for them everywhere, if the universe is complete for them, why do they move, not at all and then so fast, so sudden, after each other? The patterns of shade and sunlight on the ground, the movements of ants in file, fascinate and lead them on from one place to the next - Vectors are arbitrary within bounds - equal formulae produce arbitrary results - yet equally within the formulae of self-sustenance - “the formula of happiness is randomness within self-preservation with the possibility of randomized reproduction” (randomness at randomized scale - this is the pattern, the outcome, not the target)*

*(Halation please confirm/correct!)

“It’s crazy to think of myself as the Earth girl now. It’s not that I think there’s anything special or peaceful about the animals or the plants, I never paid attention when people told me I had to think that, it’s just like watching people. That’s what Meteorology teaches, right? I really hope you send me more… ‘texts’ sure I can say that you always said a text was anything, you’d call an oral tradition a text, although there’s a word in my head from Halation I still haven’t found a translation for and maybe you have. When I don’t know how to translate a word I sit with it until I have a musical phrase and type it into midi and save it to a folder so I can remember it that way, I wonder if that’s how the Ahasurunu come up with their words, although this is a Weir word and there is an Ahasurunu word for it and I wonder how close mine is. I want to see Ahasurunu in person sometime. But I’ll keep looking at the Earth until you come back, I’m not bored or anything. I’m looking at it like an alien planet, there’s so much of it I haven’t seen. You took the sky from me and gave me the Earth - well that one’s so obvious I had to use it. Hiram listened to it and said I should say ‘you took the sky off my shoulders’. What a weird thing for him to have an opinion on! I stayed up all night thinking about it. I make it sound like he’s coming on to me, but it’s not that, it’s creepier. I think he ships us. Whenever journalists who are obviously in his pocket try to interview me they make sure to get tabloidy about our relationship even if it’s a serious interview. To align me with you. And it makes me feel like you’re not letting go of me, even if you are. But you’re not! You’re making me write your… I chose to write your Meteorological scriptures, which aren’t yours but now I have to feel like they are. I chose to share Halation with you, but not like that, not at the same time, but they’ll try and make it sound like that, like we have some special bond that will outlast the end of our relationship and my fucking consent, and it’s fucked up because we do. I chose it, but not like this, not like he wants to make it sound, either because he gets off to it or because he has some kind of keikaku and I dunno what’s worse.

But I do like the writing. Objectively, best time of my life. Writing is a great way to waste time when you’re a zoo animal, like walking around staring at the glass and wondering what’s on the other side. It really lets me hold space for being confused. I’m not being sarcastic of passive aggressive. I always thought I was good at it, when I was doing liner notes and worldbuilding docs and stuff, and I still am, tons of people on the internet tell me I still am, people who would never have listened to my music, but I never know if I’m getting the right things across. Socrates, Jesus - OK those guys never wrote anything down, but Marx, Paul, Nietzsche - aren’t they all famous for getting misinterpreted over and over? Or maybe we remember them because they were bad at it, if you were good at it you would be transparent and silent, people would be transformed by what you said but not remember you said it. I like to think you’d be better at this, since you were paid to do it at least for a bit, but it’s obvious why you left it to me, you’d just be more willing to misinterpret, to shovel lives into your misinterpretation, like I know you’re already doing out there. Sorry. How did the Meteorologists keep it straight for millennia? Did they? Again, please send more - Azoth AI wants me to say “chronotopes” which is from Bakhtin apparently and I wanna say “heartstanzas”!”

Under the boughs of live oak trailing fishnet lichen - a form so recognizably universal it seems alien anywhere, like the loops of Weirs - in fields of mulch sprout what look like creatures from deep sea vents: straight red stalks with buds on their surface split into white and gold petaled lips. Metis says these are coralroot orchids, parasites on mycorrhizal fungi symbiotic with plants. A double symbiosis - by Meteorological standards they do not count as parasites, unless the fungus either shows some sign of wanting to be rid of them or was interoperable to a point of communicating Will* (suggestion: use tropism? current?). The fungus grows regardless of them, of what must feel to it only like a gentle sucking mouth, a phantom kiss.

“But so, I’m doing the basic ecological and metaphysical stuff publicly, like we agreed, and the stuff with political implications on the CLAMPnet. So far most of what I’ve got is the latter because I keep trying to wrap my head around things and only want to say bits and pieces where I trust people not to evilly misinterpret it. I’m sorry I’m so behind - the only public thing I’ve managed is a video essay that turned into a regular essay (I still can’t handle being on camera that long), and went to like 40 pages (when I’m really trying to explain something I go back into ultra dense, Sun Ra composition mode). I’m attaching it so Halation can check if I’m getting everything right and if not I can correct it… [attached file: Interoperability: Species-Ethics in the New Universe.docx] In the CLAMP network I just write like how I did liner notes. It’s getting big, controversial but big, in the climate movement, which is good, the name makes it obviously relevant there, and gives people a new idea to organize around. Ogier asked me one of those times he came around about like, ways to Meteorologywash the geoengineering he wants to do, putting nanotech everywhere in the atmosphere, monitoring indicators, absorbing carbon and releasing counterbalancing elements, which apparently some planets you’ve heard of do? He says his timeline based on your tech release schedule is two years to be able to start working on this? Please confirm if that’s true because that would put a scaaary close deadline over my head for organizing anything here, they’re obviously gonna be loaded with surveillance and weapons. I mean if they can release arbitrary chemicals into the air they can just poison people from a distance. Are you saying the rest of the universe can do that to each other and they don't? Or is that what you’re walking into out there? Never mind, if it’s not it will be once you get settled in. (giggle, a bit like a sob) Of course there’s gonna be opposition if he tries to roll it out here but one the opposition has to be capable of doing anything, and two insofar as it exists it’s mostly opposed to you and aliens and Meteorology. The information war is crazy man you have no idea. You’re either the Antichrist or the False Prophet - or Alasdair’s the False Prophet, or Hiram Ogier is the Antichrist which, frankly, scans. Some people are saying I’m the False Prophet and that’s gonna happen more if I say more about Meteorology that frames it like a religion. It was obvious the Christians - my dad’s kind of Christians - were going to assume that, but what’s surprising even to me is the conversions or not-quite-conversions but people who aren’t Christians, working Revelation and bits of Biblical apocrypha into their worldviews directly in response to Contact. Alasdair says this has always been there in Ancient Aliens world, but also most of the old guard were humiliated overnight by the fact that aliens existed and looked nothing like what they had been telling people. So a lot of the new people who just got into those spaces hoping to find out anything they don’t already know have been swept up by this new wave that says everything you’ve told them is a lie, that you’re being mind-controlled by a weaponized psychic parasite, that this parasite was already present on Earth and being developed by the elites in coordination with Operation Blue Beam, which they’re now calling Operation Childhood’s End. There’s different variations in which more or less things are fake - sometimes the Clamp was a Watchmen alien type thing, made in a studio somewhere, and sometimes every other alien that shows up is gonna be real but the Weirs, specifically, are a kind of cosmic parasite that are also Bible demons. That meth dealer you apparently had a run-in with (what is with you and dealers?) has been all over talk shows, claiming a fragment of it is still inside him giving him messages. He gives bits of real information, things he’d have to be getting from someone in the know, mixed in with bullshit that only holds up as long as no one else can talk to aliens regularly. He also says the parasites are what make people gay or trans, and gay sex transmits the parasites. I think there was a version of that one when Delilah was on 4chan.

And there are versions that have basically every element of the narrative except the Bible parts. A lot of people on the left… including back in Seattle… believe basically the same thing as these people… The Weirs obviously can’t be good, because they’re involving humanity in a proxy war before even talking to us, speak through our governments instead of to us directly, chose a LARPy leftist collaborator on purpose… You know about half of the old organizers you know won’t even ‘platform’ any collaboration with any kind of alien, collaboration with American military imperialism by default, although the dumbest campists are gung-ho because China is. On the other hand, regular people who just want healthcare and hate Hiram Ogier and President Paul love making memes of asking aliens to invade. That’s most of who ******’s reaching out to if Alasdair thinks they aren’t sus - she’s become super active in the network, I tried to stop her, doing the political stuff I can’t because I’m being surveilled, sent links to virtually everyone she had on the DIY Directory and that’s grown things a lot, even though she has to hide that it’s her because half of them hate her. She’ll send you a message too - it’s encrypted even within the network but she’s certain you’ll guess the password. Funniest thing one of her hackers found is Human Domestication Guide searches have outpaced Omegaverse. Straight people are reading it now. Anyway, Alasdair says a lot of the people she’s contacting are already being targeted by feds, and even if we avoid the most obvious cases, that speeds up the timeline in which they’re gonna figure out that we’re active, if not how. One good thing about the Bible conspiracies is we’ve been planting our own about what the “Mark of the Beast” is, to create false positives for our actual communication network.

Oh, and there’s a whole contingent of weird racists who want the aliens to tell us whether humans are one species or not, who literally think the government isn’t letting us talk to them because they’ll say race is real, and are trying to make species law a thing? There’s like crossover between them and the people who want them to make the aliens tell us dolphins are people. That one engaged me enough because what I remember of interoperability from Halation seems like a really useful idea for dealing with this better than humans have done so far…”

I saw the dolphins from which our torpedos are crudely copied once from the edge of Plastic Beach. Their speed is beautiful in the same sense, but they also jump and spin. Their fins cut through the water, collapsing wave-forms in pillars of salt; they eat other fish; they rape each other; they were painted on the plaster murals of beautiful queens with soft breasts and long dicks and ochre makeup and olive-oiled hair. Exercise: where does interoperation occur, and where interference?

“I think Hiram already thinks of me as the resistance, or at least as the biggest influence on you he can reach. So maybe he wants me to tell you about this, if I have a way of telling you, even though he said not to tell anybody. But I have to tell you about this the same way you’d have to tell me about the existence of aliens. He sent someone to the apartment - they have ways to make it very unpleasant for me here without voiding our contract, I told you this would happen but it probably doesn’t matter for the same reason as before - and took me to dinner. Didn’t let me take my phone or any electronics. He brought his laptop to the empty restaurant on Plastic Beach - he can make all the employees disappear, of course. And he showed me this document. It’s called the PEWS - Parallel Economic World Simulation. Somewhere between sixteen to thirty people have it - they don’t all know who all the others are, but they were all called in when Edison Lens made contact, they all know what you negotiated. It’s something Edison Lens helped create, with a bunch of Soviet cyberneticists and American wargame developers. It’s a year-long model of a world, based on all available data from the past year, with maximum economic equality under maximum democratic participation. It iterates simulated populations from those basic presets kind of like a giant Dwarf Fortress session. They extrapolate the annual findings decades out into the future on five-year cycles, and he says it always collapses or creates a slave class - he explains it as something to do with having too little necessary labour, so people who do and don’t do the work form factions against each other. I’m pretty good at math and there’s no way I could check all the data, so this whole thing could just be made up to fuck with my head, or he could be lying about it, or he could be reading it wrong about it or it might just be designed to produce their results the same way as regular economics. But it also sounds a lot like something Halation talked about Contemplation doing, with their crystal quantum computers, so I’m wondering if we can make a better one, and maybe try and get our hands on the one they already have because it’s got all kinds of information they don’t release to the public.

If it’s real, they probably want the same as us. What you need to worry about isn’t contact with Weirs but computational life, and that gives them all kinds of reason to get in touch with your enemies. My understanding is, Ogier is only able to do the things he does because he has access to this document. The economy is already basically planned to maintain his class as an essential part of it. Not just his, he says, everyone’s, I don’t know why I’m repeating all this crazy bullshit but like, it’s worth knowing what he thinks. What he thinks is, if the aliens are worried about pacifying the dangerous predator Man, they should talk to the people who have done it before - “the only ways that have ever worked: with sacrifice and inertia”.

hellooo Space Barbarian Leonaaa~ I am truely sorry my headcanon about u and our mutual Space Princess had to become so literal ~

Mai has entrusted everyday operations of what I will call, at risk of vulgarity, “the Revolution” to me, because being a shadowy patron of The Revolution has been my calling since I first started operating the DIY Directory and I don’t mind the literalism at all. I am still a slightly too obvious person of interest and likely under surveillance, but I have developed a code for use in the CLAMP network, a series of alias applications that can make its alienness less obvious, and only use it in bathrooms where they’ve never caught me yet.

Despite meeting so many organizers, Leona, you were the first person who recognized the Carbonari flag over my desktop. Ahh, the long nights of “Blanquist Girls Chat”, how strangely they return - I am operating all communications in your spirit, since you were always the smart one in those conversations, and so I can blame it on you if it all goes wrong. That’s why you went to space right? To run away into responsibility, as it were? That’s what my therapist tells me I do, so I will join you. I am writing in my serious voice, all typos corrected.

Any ideological argument is to be rephrased immediately in terms of “what will we do”. With the technology, that is, which we will hopefully receive from you. Right now this is a battle over technology. I refer to the enemy as The Powers and Principalities. I use ‘Powers’ to refer to anyone who was at the table when your agreement was negotiated. An important branch of our investigations into determining who exactly that was. It’s not necessarily the same as the list of corporations the IEEF has granted license to, which keeps growing - that’s the Principalities. Our immediate goal is to establish a channel of egalitarian distribution and collective control of any alien technology reaching Earth, especially including its military applications. Once we can do it with that, we can do it with any other technology or infrastructure we like.

The Principalities are moving to establish a common patent scheme copyright through the IEEF, though as I understand, you retain strict copyright over any alien technology transmitted. Meaning the simplest option for us would be to establish ourselves as acting on your behalf, rather than the IEEF, but then we would have to expose your channel of communication, and you would have no avenue to retaliate if they shut us down and deny our claim publicly, outside of a long journey to Earth. Also, you are still unpopular - only 35% approval globally - we expect you will begin to overcome this when the technology starts rolling in, but that of course depends on what they do with it. One of our primary objectives has been to establish a network of correct, reliable information on the rest of the universe outside of government and corporate sources; but so far we are running with the story that anything we hear from you is a leak from a whistleblower at IEEF ground control. We have a real one, “Major Tom”, a transmasc who is like, into whistleblowers the way school shooters are into other school shooters. As in, he runs a whistleblower fanpage, which is how I reached out to him - we caught him before he did anything stupid! - and concealed this from both NSA SIGINT and IEEF recruiters. One thing you will certainly want to know from him is that Hiram Ogier is building a personal flagship. The news just treats it as an ego stunt the IEEF’s permitting because they’re so dependent on his technology.

There was a meeting on alien technology last week in GAZA supercity. Most negotiations that aren’t directly taking place on Plastic Beach - and there are a lot of corporations that want to get out from under Ogier’s shadow - are happening there, because it has the best security on Earth. About 70% of permitted distributors, as well as an interesting list of other figures (attendance chart.xlsx). We have contacts on the inside, which was not easy. A migrant labour union from the Philippines has been fighting for their right to communicate with the outside world - they aren’t allowed phones in there. They sent their people in to work with materials for a meshnet they assembled on site. They gave us a clearer idea of their rollout plan, the kinds of flashpoints they’re expecting around medical care - safe viral binding sites, allergy suppressants, apoptotics. They’re trying to scale up production before the tech is officially announced, since the core patents on medical technologies are all public domain and they can only dominate through the supply chain and economies of scale, but for that they have to keep everything they’re building under wraps with tight non-disclosure contracts and an archipelago of non-state sites. We caught a good list of them and are looking to get connects inside. Operating by striking against the production of stuff like this, of course, will make us look like heels, so we’re trying to work out a kind of takeover plan where a site could be reorganized on Meteorological grounds in real time - meaning we’d first have to get an exhaustive model of how it works (vector charts are really helpful, although they took a while to get the hang of) and redesign it without the owners at the top. We could publicize both charts so the public could understand what we’re doing, although we need people breaking that down in simpler terms for everyone who doesn’t know or care how a vector chart works.

Meanwhile, as I’m sure you’re aware, intra-operable organics are the one they’re really excited about, because of the potential military applications. They’re planning on just not telling the public at all. Of course I’m sure we’ll get them directly from you, but the questions are where to produce, where to use and when to reveal. We have a lot of people in the refugee camps outside the supercity, including one nutcase who’s actually made runs over the wall. She wants first dibs and I’m inclined to give them to her. She literally can’t feel pain. You’d fall in love at first sight.

Do you remember how the nights of Blanquist Girls Chat used to end? You waxing granular about horrible worse/worse dilemmas, I indulging in edgelord scenarios, Mai coming up with implausible ways everything could work out, Delilah pulling everyone back to basics, introducing criteria of who we could trust that none of us could meet based on how we’d been going about the problem. We stopped because it got too painful, being reminded how much better we could be by a girl who didn’t even want to herself, until she decided out of nowhere to die over it. Even without her, I’ve learned to live a pretty happy apolitical life, the way all of us could except for you. But I’m doing this for Delilah, not for you or even Mai. She’s mine, and so her revolution will be mine. And you know what, I’ve been finding a surprising amount of people who meet all her criteria. There really are people like that in the world. Except for us, at the top, the thread between Earth and the stars – we’re the weak links.

Have fun out there. I hope I get to see it in a documentary someday.

baiiiii~~~

The whole place was vibrating periodically while I talked to Beek. The hum went up through my bones and made my clenched jaw feel like I was at the dentist. The vibrations were being diffused and stabilized through the Lung so as not to damage anything, but Tumor Plug was under attack again. “At some point we’ll need to either artificially reinforce the rock or move the Lung, maybe to the crater we made –”

“You made.”

“For the moment, though, we have the other ship parked there.”

“What? Why?”

“Using the Asymmetry Field to control the perimeter.”

OK, that wasn’t a bad idea. That also made Bennett-Fog’s idea of an information perimeter less obviously impossible.

“I thought you’d built your whole strategy around taking over the Internexus, and then you go and cave in the roof on it. Why?”

“Look, I really did not think the airstrike would go down that far. Fucking pumice planet.” He looked dejected. “Damaged a lot of the line we’d set up too, we had to rebuild a whole new route around the former Internexus. But so? Shit happens, you’re gonna learn that up here. Strategically, we’ve turned it to our advantage already. It killed a lot of the old Entangleweed partisans who were going to launch a counterattack while our forces were divided. We’ve put the blame on them on their own networks. Does anyone believe it? Beats me – what else do they have to believe? They can’t even see the crater for themselves. You wanna see what the Mob looked after when we hit it? I’m assuming you’ve seen it before. Like a huge burnt marshmallow slopped all over the rocks! Bugs trying to pull themselves out with half their limbs – of course, sucks for the people who had already gotten pulled into it. I’m not sure God takes you if you die like that.” He grinned and wiped it away before he could grimace at whatever was on my face. “Sorry, I forget you really are like a woman sometimes.” His braying one-man laugh-track.

“Why’d you send out Hadak?”

“We’re trying to control communication, organization, information in very flexible structures. That means hunting down individuals and small groups, very fast and very surgically. That freak is good at one thing and that’s manhunting. Or bugchasing.” Another bobblehead guffaw. “Even in a place like this - although frankly, if he gets lost that’s good for us too. Win-win.” He sucked one side of a smile. “The way he told it, you liked him more than me. But then, I guess that’s the way he’d tell it.”

I nodded. What was I going to ask? Could I take over his operations? I had enough on my plate.

“Look, I get it, you know?” His face softened, sinking gelatinous. “I know it’ll be hard for you to believe, but I went into this job idealistic too. It’s easier when it’s just you and your gun, and you making the decision whether to shoot or not. That’s why you’ve been taking those kinds of missions, even though you’re a commander, right? But from where you’re sitting, tons of innocent people are gonna die no matter what, you just get to pick which ones.” Opened his mouth as if trying to laugh and nothing. “By the way, one of Hadak’s units got wiped out by friendly fire in the Polyp Tunnels. Guys from the new ship. Their captain is named Sieh.”

“Tell me more.”

“That ship is less my guys, so I don’t know them as well. He leads a spec ops team, and his background is actually in policing. Royal Hong Kong Special Duties Unit - the ‘Flying Tigers’ - he brought his whole crew from when he was on the force up with him. They work like a machine together. He worked both before and after the switchover to mainland control, so he has trust with both Anglo-American and Chinese backers. He’s seen as a neutral enforcer of authority. So something like this seems… out of character for what I know of him. Might be something more going on. You’re smart, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Duly noted.”

“Oh, by the way. Have you looked at the list of bombing targets from the Ferrous Masks yet?”

Fuck you. “They want us to do more?”

“Lots more. They have some of the best communication networks left, and a long list of places their enemies have been attacking them from over 400 square km. Bombing is our only real advantage in a place like this. I knew it would be as soon as I saw them freaking out about those goofy little sticky-bombs the Ribbons drop, and you did too. Otherwise this is the worst planet we could have possibly started on – Tora Bora times a million!” His eyes sparkled somewhere in the brain-folds of his face. “Your men respect you a lot, you know. More than I expected. More than I got myself when I was this wet under the ears, probably!” He barked his self-deprecation as if to expel it. “But it’s only gonna last as long as you keep winning. Not just your big stage fights, but like, the objectives we’ve got here. Playing straight like you – or even not – you can spend years fighting over a single mountain. We’re treating a planet as a single battlefield. You gotta think big. From the sky. Next time you’re up there, look down.”

Halation stayed behind attached to a computing cube with three other Weirs while I went to talk to the captive who hated her more than me. Their fronds loosened in their knots and stretched out in the breeze, a behaviour I almost never saw in our atmosphere tanks, and kind of adorable to watch, but painful to think of. What I had been keeping her from, what she had been keeping from me. I walked down a sort of spiral leaf-jetty that gently unrolled and descended through the Lung’s gravity with my steps, to land on the rounded plug, like the crown of a berry, on top of the bubble inside of which Holdfast twisted.

I sat cross-legged next to an oversized, long-keyed Ahasurunu melody-wheel that reminded me of some sort of Mayan calendar. Holdfast’s body was missing half of its shells; the naked parts looked almost like one of those nervous system homunculi, tentacles and little pulsing sacks hanging from smaller chained fleshy vertebrae. Where my whole body had been reconstituted, I realized, parts of theirs had been left out on purpose, reducing the risk - maybe even survivability - if they somehow managed to escape.

Up there, were you guarding the wreckage of the Network? Is it repairable? Do your people know?

You think that matters now? Even if you restart it, it will have taken a side. The other side will not trust it. It chose destruction rather than drag this planet deeper - yet here you have gone and dragged it deeper anyway.

Didn’t you too? I didn’t have so much guilt I couldn’t see the hypocrisy here. I think we’re here for similar things.

I suppose I had been deceiving myself about that too. But that’s why I joined the side I did. They weren’t speaking in Ahasurunu themselves: the bubble was translating, but I could catch snips of the high, windy intervals and sliding tones between harsh hisses. As an ecologist, of course the Adipose frightens me. But to fight it is to fight the inertia of life - to prevent it from filling a new niche that has opened up for it. Installing the Adipose across the galaxy is a fight that can be ended, a homeostasis that can be reached. Preventing it cannot achieve homeostasis, only an eternal, zero-sum conflict. “Anti-Adipose” is trying to effect an impossibility.

But Meteorology has anathematized technologies before. Like Strong Asymmetry Fields, and super-reproducers.

Those were too universally dangerous relative to their use-cases, the niches themselves weren’t stable. They squirmed below me in a way that suggested rhetorical squirming. But I didn’t understand those cases without Halation, let alone the ecological metaphors, so I didn’t press them.

…would you say the same about humans? About any invasive species?

Invasive species cross thresholds because of incentives. Incentives can be reversed.

It seemed there were some ways these two could imply an anti-Adipose win condition they were eliding – opposed governments across the galaxy, limited individual or criminal use under the radar but nowhere integrated into the core infrastructure of civilization?

You are strangely calm. About being an anathema species.

It didn’t surprise me.

Was it because Halation was gone that the sadness, the weirdness of saying that hit me all at once? I noticed and tried to impose a quick compartmentalization barrier (think about it later) since it would give me a bargaining disadvantage (not thinking about it will also give you a bargaining disadvantage).

Do you think yourself different?

A basic paradox of growing up human was that liking people – especially liking people I wasn’t supposed to like – made you hate them. Hating people, could probably make you like them, too – that had to be some part of someone like Beek or Hadak’s charisma. The Coven of Domnu had pressed that impulse in me as far as possible, and at some point, when I walked through the halls looking at half of the student body trying to picture them as walking corpses, listened for the subliminal rape-optimization in the cracking voice of another small-town boy asking about last week’s homework, it stopped being fun or cathartic and became a chore, something that erased every hint of why I had wanted to believe something like that so badly.

Mai was the first person I ever met who loved people because she loved more-than-people. She loved people not only as individuals within humanity, but humanity within something else.

I think… we are all different. Not an abstraction. There are many peoples… victims of what Algal Bloom became, of the process that made it that way. They are still human, they still exist, I changed my body to be like them, I want to change the Earth for them. I want us to define the Earth for you. It will take time.

So you are not only fighting for the Meteorological optimum of your species as it is now, but for a ghost. You and your symbiote are both fanatics obsessed with your ghosts over the universe. And if freed from their own crude equilibrium traps, they – yes, even the children of your endangered subgroups – decide to flood the universe, without any need for you? What will you do then?

They were right. This should have been simple. By the rules of my old self, this should have been simple. But I mattered now. Potential futures I still had some control over mattered now. They screamed at me in my head in the same voice as the ghosts of the present. Other lives had become small to me – and yet Hadak or Beek’s cruel laughter still made no sense at all. I don’t want… to leave Earth behind either. Seven billion people. How many had died here – how many died of poverty or war or gendered violence on Earth on an average day? How many in the rest of the galaxy?

If I lose my leverage over the IEEF through the command bottleneck, I will do everything in my power to regain it by force.

So will you become a dictator? And who will you have to appease, to do that?

(Of course not, I don't think I'm special. But now, now that I mattered the way other people mattered, that seemed to cut both ways.) That is… a recurring question among those who have tried to make Earth better. One I never picked an answer to. As a student of human theories of sovereignty, I’m not sure I believe it’s coherent. Everyone can choose to exercise their sovereignty – the maximum of their power, the maximum of their efforts – in a particular cause, or not.

If you would exercise the maximum of your powers, go to the monastery on Tumour. They can offer a more serious understanding of the peace process, and the Adipose, than the one-sided research here – and they are in more serious danger. But do not bring any of these specialist predators. If you can avoid it, do not bring the Orator of Death. There is one way, if you choose, to go quickly from here to there, alone...

A temporary “road” made from concrete hastily laid in a Geoplaque frame (with struts sometimes extending dozens of metres into the Earth) ran from an exit at the bottom of Tuber Plug to the pit created by the airstrike. As we approached in the Corpuscle, its scale crept up on us like seasickness. It was the size of a mesa inverted, except that where the mesas stood tall and unitary, the pit branched and twisted where different chain reactions had collapsed the fragile mesh of rock in different directions. Gaps in its wall dozens of metres from top to bottom extended into bottomless darkness. Towers climbed up and around and across them, like ants in a hole chunked in a field, mostly Ferrous Masks but a few with clothing and decorations we recognized from the Internexus (the latter less enthusiastic, disarmed, dangling feet and fishing ropes into empty space, throwing pebbles at the ship and watching them dissolve in midair). Between them the second ship sat on a dish or shield of more solid rock and sand than I had seen anywhere here so far, where the debris had built up into a kind of plug of gravel. Chunks of every-coloured rock - including the recognizable fluorescent veins of the Internexus - were suspended in a white-grey dust like tarmac. These would normally be removed piece by piece as materials for other construction or engineering projects. All of this we saw through the blue-green, chlorine distortion of the ship’s Asymmetry Field, which had expanded through the whole pit and into the surrounding rock.

(“If we’re the Lung, that must be the Stomach,” Jax had said, pointing it out from a ledge where we briefly met to smoke a joint and check in. The name had already stuck among the troops.)

Incredible blooms of those disc-petal things - what if I call them Cherrypads - stuck to the sides of the pit, painting the mouths of some house-sized holes completely white.

Halation stuck in my throat. She had lost a home too, and these weren’t people whose loss she could even faintly conceive of as restitution for hers. I have entered, through my pain, into something where my pain is small – but then what made my pain a valid entrance? She kept probing for things we could do for them, say for them. (We were already providing food to those who would take it.) I didn’t think there was anything that would be welcome. We were here to talk to someone who had, according to the briefing, helped at least a little, taken matters into his own hands.

The new ship - called Kupe, a legendary Polynesian navigator, it was fine once but I wondered if they were going to keep looting indigenous cultures as a "neutral ground" between the big powers - looked exactly like ours, outside and inside. My real anticipation was for Sieh’s chambers; how exactly this man would have modified them, as Hadak had with pseudo-Pictish and Polynesian patterns in blue Sharpie on every wall, as Beek had with glossy photos of mid-century California surfers and anonymous Missouri grain elevator skylines and autographed mint condition Les Pauls, as Carolyn had with a homage to the Bayeux tapestry featuring rugged werewolf men stretched across three walls, as I had with printouts from Mai’s Tumblr and the herbal pillows Sophie sewed.

I placed my hand on a square of the wall of the hallway. As he recognized her, he gave an eased nod.

"It’s a pleasure to see you, Ms. Lillywhite,” he said, extending his arm forward. Light melted off the circular surface of an hourglass table, dripping off the curves of the crescent chairs. Nothing else there. Not even pictures of family, which were usually the sole decoration of ornament-averse soldiers. This was someone who could - who preferred to - live in a warehouse. Like a vehicle in a garage, a weapon in an armoury.

I noticed his eyes move once - to the Roland special in my holster - and let my own scan the Glock 17 at his side, an amorphous drop of ink half-covered by his fingers, before I began.

“I’ve been briefed on your… exchange of fire with your subordinates. But I want to hear your description firsthand. There’s a lot of detail that’s always left out in the chain of reporting, and I always try to make decisions informed by as much of that detail as possible.” My voice dropped into a register I hoped would sound conspiratorial and not just incongruous. “Off the record, I’m not unsympathetic, but… well, what do you expect to follow from this, exactly?”

“You’re very diplomatic, Ms. Lillywhite. It is good to have that when you are managing so many different sides in a conflict. My only concern is whether there are parties that might mistake your willingness to negotiate as a weakness. Infantry are not so flexible in these matters,” he said cautiously. “Right. Including, presumably, you.” Too much ambiguity, too much ambiguity, I know this, I know this, I reached for Halation’s steel and found it already inside myself. “You outrank your subordinates, but I outrank you, as does Beek and a number of others on this mission who have brought the incident to my attention. And aside from this, there are procedures in the exercise of rank, besides right of life and death.”

‘I do not have anything to gain other than it was rather unfortunate to lose some men in this service. What happened at the ruins of the Towers was exactly as my unit wrote down in the after action report. The Irons unit went with us through the chambers and we split off, communicating our way until we could reach a nexus where we could regroup. In doing so, we realized that the Irons unit had grown splinters. Malin reported that two of the Irons team tried to take each other out, and that she barely got away after neutralizing them both. Guo, and Enfield had already secured them, outnumbering the Irons contact 2 to 1. I acted in self defense for following them any longer would cause jeopardy to the mission. Letting a group such as them use this mission to further their own agendas would cause harm not only to us but to the rest of the extraterrestrial contacts. Something, I imagine, you’re already aware of.”

“Did you learn anything about the nature, or the motives of the ‘splinters’?” Irons had been described as ‘one of Hadak’s’ but I had made sure all the units were mixed, so Sacred Band/non Sacred Band should have been the obvious fault line, but if there were others within the Sacred Band I could use to undermine them… “This is one of the points that was unclear to me even in the briefings and I had hoped you could be more granular on.”

“Didn’t seem necessary. Not every unit follows your mission directives strictly. Surely, even you are aware of that. Bashtaev was only an example of such, but he made the mistake of endangering, even killing one of the Weirs. Why else would any of the accounts you’ve heard, particularly those of the Irons unit, make claims against my unit. And if we are to talk practically, I don’t imagine you would throw the project’s aims to solve a few ideological disagreements. Then again, some of those might wind up getting someone killed. The Irons unit already had shaky leadership. Beek didn’t exactly discriminate much on who to bring in as infantry…But when you’re the ones getting sent to the front, anyone’s good as any, isn’t it?’

I breathed out, projecting the energy that had built up in me as I listened. “This has been honestly my exact concern since I came here. My concern with you is that you don’t simply become another one. Bashtaev didn’t even belong to a recognizable faction when he got here, at least to command’s monitoring lists. Part of this is simply the nature of the mission, and part, I’ll admit, is the nature of my own position as commander, neither beholden nor belonging to any of these factions. So again, if we are to talk practically” - I hardened on this point into something like the tone I’d taken in the Edison Lens truck, where somehow we’d emerged with our goals intact with everyone against us - “what do you want to do about this, other than draw attention to yourself?”

“Another one…That’s interesting wording isn’t it,” he surmised. “And drawing attention? We have only been operating in the bounds of the mission, that is, investigating the whereabouts of these spaces, and protecting those around us, and ourselves. Putting it as merely drawing attention wouldn’t bode well for anyone would it. The way I see it, everyone is vying for attention. You must be rather popular, aren’t you, Ms. Lillywhite? I guess all that means is that they want you to kill someone for them.”

On this, his hand hovered close to his holster but made no movement towards me as I pretended to ignore him and he merely placed his fingers on the leather side.

Mind games, mind games - it’s one thing to think I’m weak because I’m diplomatic, another to think I’m stupid. “And you’ve got mine, I already said I might be sympathetic, but I want to hear the story clearly. I know the bounds of the mission, because in the last instance it comes from me, and at the very least there were irregularities. What deviation from mission parameters, exactly, led to the deaths of those men. Did you first attempt to apprehend them?”

“As I’ve said, they were going to kill us, hence why they suggested to split up in the different tunnels. I’ve monitored that unit since we got here, and some of them even spoke about potentially taking us out of the picture because we wouldn’t let them act with impunity. My unit is not very popular because of that. It was at that opportunity that they acted, shooting at us first.” “I thought you said they shot at each other.”

“Knowing my unit was in danger, we spared no expense in immediately taking them out. Any irregularity in stories from other units might suggest they might have been affiliated with the Irons team or they want to see that we’ve been dealt with. Like it or not, ultimately your decision will be what decides this…”

“I would like to believe you, and am already speaking with you outside the formal procedures for a friendly fire incident. But reducing my role to belief or disbelief would essentially concede the state of internal war you’re trying to avert. Worse, it would be an act of loyalty on the part of command to an emergent faction, rather than vice versa. Even Hadak didn’t demand as much as brazenly.” I steadied my hands on the screen in front of me. “So keep going: what was your unit unpopular with them for. What did they want, or try, to do with ‘impunity’, and how did you confront them. And when they fired, what procedures did you follow to ascertain that this wasn’t an ordinary friendly fire incident.”

“Belief is only an accessory to those men. What they are more swayed by is order, or force. Both things that could subjugate them. If you don’t have that at bay, they’re merely going to take advantage of you…” I knew this. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Why had I become so willing to ignore this, to trust in ‘rules of war’?... because I only had my own gun, and a bare handful in Rho Aias. The other guns remained pointed away from, rather than towards me on the strength of those rules. But how many more guns could he bring?... “Irregardless, I appreciate that you’re willing to be this detailed. My unit’s unpopularity is due to cultural difference. The lack of professionalism in some of these units has become, I think… a bonding experience, sharing the same pains they inflict on others… and each other. Some of them still use the branding iron method to bond.” This I hadn’t heard of even in the Sacred Band. “We do not act as such. Because of this, we become outsiders to them. But being in military and intelligentsia, we would have to be aware of what they’re planning even if it might not be ethical towards privacy. This was…a security concern. They had spoken about cutting off supply lines, wagering to cut off certain infrastructure already set up should they want to demand more support from you directly, trying to establish colonies that would do more harm than good. We had not intended to get involved until the incident. Had we not acted, you would not be speaking to me right now. I assure you that my unit is at least competent in documenting these incidents when they occur.”

“Well, I can assure you I’m not burdened by any undue concerns about privacy, and would be happy to… no, I can just order you to share this information. Your own terms. Is there a reason you haven’t reported any of this through official channels? I can guess suspicion that they’re corrupted, which would mean that your network at least doesn’t extend to determining the trustworthiness of superiors.”

“We try to be protective of what information circulates between all of us. I’m sure even you suspect that my unit has been watching us the whole time we are here. Why, I merely withheld it because I wanted to meet you directly. The only communication I’ve had regarding this was Beek’s and Bennett-Fog’s recommendation…” he smiled, glancing again at the Roland special on my waist. “I’m surprised you haven’t had your hand on your service weapon the whole time we’ve spoken…”

“I don’t think you realize how much harder you’re making this than you need to.” I sighed, and let my hand slide down to it anyway, just in case he was signalling things would develop in that direction. “What would you say if I told you there was a channel almost certainly more secure, and more exclusive, than yours?”

“Trying to win me over, Ms Lillywhite? I’m flattered…but I wish you did not make these attempts so obvious. That might work with the Weirs but these appearances of who you affiliate with and your public face will become a hindrance once the people who act against your interest realize where you stand…” He kept staring me down but removed his hand. “Besides, you reached for your holster too late anyway. Anyone else could have killed you at this point.”

I didn’t flinch at the possibility of miscalculation I’d already factored in. “I didn’t say you could join it, if it existed. But win me over to what? You’ve been saying, all this time, that your only concern has been operating within the bounds of the mission. Then you’ve reported serious breaches of discipline, including on your own part for concealing them, and implied that the reason you did so was your distrust of official channels. So I proposed a thought experiment, and your response is… confusing. Where do you believe I ‘stand’ - other than my official position, over you - that I would need to to make such an offer?”

“Well, let me pose this, if you wanted to… my unit and I could get rid of Hadak, Irons unit and everyone there in less than an hour. Cut off oxygen supply, suffocate them before going in to finish the job. Would that be a possibility you would consider? Even experimentally? A warzone is confusing as much as a life is…including a life such as yours. Where you stand is irrelevant to me. I only adhere to the sustenance of the lives of those in my unit and in my command, that you happen to be a part of. Claiming allegiance is only a political move that does not concern me. If I need to act, I will make sure that it is within the spaces of protocols. We will act within your silence but nonetheless, we will follow your orders. However, I hope you consider the efficacy of them, because if anyone is put in unnecessary danger, you too will feel the same harm.”

Now that was the kind of proposal that would become a hindrance once the people who act against my interest realize… The kind that seemed too good to be true; he didn’t have any connections here but I had less on him than anyone here too, and Earth had had more than a month to figure out what to do about me. “If I did, that’s the kind of thing I’d talk about on the kind of channel I was describing.” And the seeming incoherence of his position… was that a sign of authenticity or the reverse? I watched his expression for change, for trepidation or excitement. Bennett-Fog said cowardice was a type of overcorrection. “But the kind of men who openly call themselves a ‘Sacred Band of Sol’ are a liability who would be discharged normally in any normal war” - or rather, they weren’t, I had known this even before I came here, but the people you had to talk to to research something like this would insist they were, I could pretend to believe them - “and who without this procedural option, might end up costing a lot more lives than that on both sides. So of course, I’ve considered it - I consider a lot more than you may realize.”

“If you were to speak to me, I would suggest making any of that communication in public modes. That way, at least we have a witness to such. Anything more private may be more compromising by association. But I do appreciate the gesture. And besides, this is no normal war, and I doubt someone such as yourself would want such a thing… In my eyes, when have our lives had a cost?… That is the kind of rhetoric people would say to claim an inherent allegiance to life… ” He stood up and moved his hand to a console near his desk, where he lifted two VR headsets over to the hourglass table. “I’ve used these in training demonstrations with my unit, in CQB, or other applications. If you can really stand behind what you say, I would like you to show me on the battlefield. You and your friend. Then, we’ll see where this goes.”

The better part of three months I’d spent in the Azoth Sanctum VR environment; I knew them almost as well as the ship. Of course, there was only so much it was possible to know. Edison Lens had coded the actual settings, with Azoth’s AI resources at their disposal; their idea was to prepare us for an inconceivable variety of alien landscapes by procedurally generating areas based on a set of geological and ecological parameters, including a highly simplified evolution algorithm spitting out novel creatures that looked like something out of a medieval bestiary crossed with Spore. It had never generated anything quite as crazy as Towers, but often did make environments that were pretty much impossible to survive or do anything useful in - sliding down the side of a frozen whirlpool 50 km deep, trying to aim at effortlessly drifting tadpole things with two clawed legs. The most balanced generations for standard training we saved, either in our individual systems or the shared library. But this was another ship, I remembered as a white flare ringed the featureless predawn blue tingle of the startup screen, manifesting a menu full of saves I had never seen before.

Since the environments, which could generate from an acre to a hectare around us as we moved (although hectare simulations could get us stuck in loading for half an hour if anyone else was using the system at the same time, or frozen midstride with a spiny dinosaur’s jaws clipping through our shoulder), were sometimes too big to move around in real space, even in the football field-sized gymnasium bay (let alone if you were training solo while anyone else used it), our custom version of the Sanctum had a brainwave-based setting. This had obvious disadvantages as a form of physical training; it was easier to focus on commanding your avatar if you weren’t using the rest of your body, and the helmet would emit a calming transmission that could almost paralyze it if you turned it up high enough. On the other hand, the brainwave commands had to be simple, restricting our avatars to a simpler set of movements than we could afford in real life, albeit efficient, optimal ones designed by military movement analysts, which the avatars helped train our mental and muscle memory for. The clunky, virtual feeling of movement fit well among the imposingly low poly, crystalline surfaces and vague, twisting knots of AI noise that made up the worlds; even Azoth AI running on a primitive-by-galactic-standards quantum computer couldn’t generate creatures and features over that distance at photorealistic quality. It was a strange feeling, like dreaming you were in a video game, heady and weightless.

Featureless corridors rose out of the white space as did the floor pushing at my feet until my mind could register it as solid metal ground, ringing under my steps. Dawn-light hardens into a spinning cylindrical surface and soon, the twitch of my fingers moved to my palm and I swing my arm to my thigh holster, finding the texture grip of the Roland Special veered into my hand.

“So you’re still getting accustomed to a virtual environment?” Sieh’s voice came in on the communications channel, formal and machinic like the environment around us.

“I was just looking forward to seeing another crew’s crazy pulp sci-fi worlds. This looks like a regular old FPS,” I sighed.

“You would be surprised. Many video games now focus on smaller details in order to enhance realism. I suppose that has become a more…ineffable quality. I’ve had this system modified for that purpose. Shrapnel, particle effects have much more potent effects on the user’s psyche. Fire your sidearm into the target in front of you and you’ll see what I mean. Take as many shots as you can.”

A target rose up on a flat surface, human shaped silhouette with rings around the head and center of mass. Bringing up the Roland Special, the target dyed in the lens of the red dot sight before I pull the trigger, thick smoke spewed from the ejection port while warmth left from each detonation of gunpowder left my hands clammy, trying to recenter the target. Each 9mm round shredded the target, small white rips of paper stuck onto the ground.

“In the battlefield, you know that stamina and minor qualities accumulate into deciding factors…Let’s make this interesting. My squad, Guo, Malin, and Enfield will be with us. For the record, they will merely be my support unit. They will not inflict the deciding blow. Pick your weapons. We’ll start when you’re ready.”

The Scar-L would be the most effective if I was going to be fighting multiple people, but the Roland Special still felt more comfortable, more familiar… I held onto it for my pistol slot, added the Scar-L as my rifle and the Karambit knife which I’d kept on me as a token of victory since taking down Bashtaev. The troops liked it when they saw me bring it out, and I could feel the surge of vicarious morale in my chest when I tested drawing and holstering it in Sieh’s unfamiliar settings. (The movements for this were lifelike and weighty even in our simulations; it was a core exercise, and if I drilled them for twenty minutes without moving a limb I would still take off the helmet to look down at my shoulders aching and sweat-slick.)

I noticed the “ENTER STADIUM” alert hovering over me. I let the weight of my virtual muscles settle, and stared at it until the world blinked.

White panes lined up in front of me, until it cooled into a blue pulse and I noticed a white police car just outside of a window.

“Let’s start this off with a High Risk Warrant Service. You’re familiar with the Coven of Domnu, correct? There was a barricade hostage situation I was the entry team for. Despite what they subscribed to, they were neutralized like any other hostile contact.” Right. I had heard about this two years ago - the last time they were in normie news (South China Morning Post), although you wouldn’t have heard about it in Seattle unless you had a Google alert for them. It was some kind of splinter that had taken root in Korean radfem circles, they had been pulling off real life castration attacks in club bathrooms, there was discourse in the server for days about whether they had been retaliating against a real trafficking operation as they claimed in their last communique. “I’ll even the playing field. You can hear our comm chatter. But let’s see if that will really make a difference.”

I turned 360 degrees, the deep wet cracks in the ceiling spidering through my peripheral vision. Scattered soft drink cans rolled under toppled plywood shelves in a convenience store.

There was a closet full of pickled members and, for some reason, traditional medicines from rare animals worth upwards of 300,000 HKD. My last two years of undergrad might have been much cooler if I’d joined one of these Asian spinoffs but there was only one tgirl in the apartment anyway – a casualty. No windows behind me or to either side (though to one side, a small kitchen separated by a counter, to the other windowless closet-sized bedrooms); only a door open on a hallway which I glanced up and down. Down the narrow concrete stairway would be – I remembered this from the articles, there was a convenience store below them. On the other side – the stairway twisted up was it two? three? flights to other apartments until it hit the roof – one of them had gone up, tried to jump and go out shooting on the way down. (She didn’t hit anything and was caught in a canvas.)

I turned toward the back of the stairwell. Better to at least map the space; find out if I could retreat into any other apartments, whether the roof had cover.

There were only two silver-scratched metal doors identical to the other side of mine; they didn’t look like I could even shoot through them easily. And then the rusted rungs up to a square grate permanently slightly ajar. However, darkness fell on the corridor, the lights above snapped off and I realized that the power’s been shut off.

“Let’s do this by the books, you are to capture the subject. Neutralize only if necessary. Golf, set claymores on the stairs towards the exits and in the corridors. Box them in”

“Copy.”

“Echo, On me. Mike, cover Golf planting the claymores.”

“Roger that, Sierra.”

“They’d be stupid to blow themselves up.”

“Don’t underestimate her. She might have some tricks up her sleeve.”

I stretched Halation over my hands as I wrested aside the grate, making sure she was in the setting and could interact with it fully. Sieh’s high resolution environment lent itself to working with her; her brainwaves could command interactions the space or the avatar wasn’t designed for, and it would usually try to iterate fine details around the request, but these could cause glitches or just bounce off if the AI got especially confused. Without more than lifting my eye level above, I could see the roof was covered in gravel and surrounded by a raised barrier about three feet high, with a squat stucco cube exhaling air conditioning clouds. Halation gave me an obvious option here that would not have been obvious to the apartment’s original inhabitants, but the wall I knew had windows was high visibility, and the wall whose visibility I didn’t know had none. Meanwhile, I knew at least two people were already inside. One had to be just a couple of floors below me.

I pulled myself back down and placed my hand to the wall, extending Halation as far as I could without an organic connection like Bashtaev had used, or an interface like the Corpuscle, down the stairs and along the floor. On the tight stairway, this amounted to one turn further than my line of sight - assuming her line of slick hit an organic surface by itself. (A Weir’s restricted senses at that range were only built to detect, let alone interact with, topology and organic matter - though a Claymore would be a detectable topographic anomaly.)

I descended quickly, in double steps, my boots settling flat and quiet on the concrete, one sensory-enhanced hand on the wall.

By the time I was one away from the floor where I’d started - Halation still detecting nothing - I pulled the Scar-L and aimed, from around a corner, at the next corner, sending a volley ricocheting like a downpour at whoever might be below.

“Gunfire, upper level!”

“Approach slowly but do not shoot to neutralize. Ballistic shields should provide adequate cover for an advance. We’re on our way.”

Beams of light lit up below, shadows stretched out bending on the corners of the walls pulling back until the silhouette returned to one of Sieh’s squad members walking up the stairs holding a heavy shield with two caged lights flashed my way, a 9mm pistol at their side, firing. Behind them, the other squad member brandished a semi-auto shotgun, thundering through the stairwell but each shot would only fly past, despite my being within their effective range.

“Herding the target, Sierra.”

“Good. We’re at the floor with the target on the other side. Bring them in.”

Shields. Well, that gave me a good excuse to be unorthodox. If I was close enough to see them… I turned into the same flight they were approaching, with my hands up, the Scar-L pointed to the ceiling… took a step down… and “missed” the step, falling flat onto my back, under their sightline. I pulled Halation back under me into a sliding cushion along my back as my boots slammed into the first man’s shins, under the edge shield; while behind my back I slid the Scar-L back in its strap and drew the Roland Special for close combat. Halation unrolled from my back and legs and extended over the assailant’s vulnerable surfaces, emitting paralyzing nerve signals, as my feet approached the flight. Despite the initial shock, the second squad member backed up immediately bringing up the shotgun but at this close range, the long barrels posed a nuisance and could increase the chance of friendly fire. Unable to acquire the target, they brought out their sidearm, fishing into their chest holsters for a smoke grenade, already taking out the pin.

I pointed the Roland Special at an angle of ankle beneath the edge of the shield, my eyes scanning the crackling bare light for any sign of claymores. Fired and turned back around the corner while I waited to see if he would drop the smoke grenade, placing a hand on one of my own flashbangs. (Dragging the first man back up with me, placing the Roland Special under his neck as he twitched and firing point blank.)

Throwing smoke down, the second placed a hand down on the railing, a carabiner attached to it as they jumped over, clouds spewed from the grenade, obscuring them with only muzzle flashes from some machine pistol.

“Golf is down. She’s good.”

“Roger, we got an idea but you’ll have to be at a safe distance.”

“Roger, Sierra.”

“Americans don’t know anything about this, it’s like a natural disaster is about to happen. Planting C4. We’re just above you.” Sieh’s other squad member, Echo/Enfield, piped up.

Once the squad member lands on the area below me, they draw out a knife just under the machine pistol but holds their position, flitting past the railings.

C4, Claymores… but the one just below me couldn’t be higher than where I’d started, so all the bad news would be clustered near the bottom. Two out of three were in the stairwell with me, and I had no idea where Sieh himself was. I tossed a flashbang over the rail, without descending.

“Perfect, I still have visual up to the target’s level,” the squad member with the machine pistol said as she leaned out from the doorway, firing a volley above.

“Keep her there."

I pulled my head back around the corner as soon as I heard the comm, bullets ricocheting around me – equipping the Scar-L again and launching my own ricochet in retaliation as I started doubling sideways up the stair.

“Got a flashbang here. Dropping back.”

“It’s alright. C4’s coming in.” Echo rang in and a blast shook the stairwell, the upper landing of the floor above crumbling, rocks with rebar coming down with plumes of dust. “Can’t find them directly? Just retrofit the battlefield to your liking.”

I grabbed the shield off Guo’s body and used it to push through the rubble falling in front of me, while switching to the Roland Special again in case I had to move and fire fast. The psychedelic tingle of Halation’s surface over mine by now could feel the digital grain of the assets churning around me, which was distracting in a whole different way than the noise and acrid sting would be for a human - feeling the ripples of structured data shockwaves at dozens of irrelevant points, the stabs of human-relevant content winnowed down to pixels.

“Hmph, you’re lucky that we don’t have to worry about property damage, Echo.” Mike/Malin responded.

“Shake and Bake time. They better serve themselves up on a platter for us. Look away!” Enfield radioed as I heard pins being undone – two canisters of flashbangs spit out of the clouds.

“Moving -” Sieh cut in.

“How’d she move that fast?” Guo asked from the lobby room.

“Yes. It seems that her friend is here. But whether they are here or not is irrelevant. I won’t give her enough time to move again.”

I hit what I could only assume from the wreckage above me was the last intact flight, my feet leaving traces in a centimeter of white powder, and leaned against the door with my shield covering me - only for it to swing loose. I grabbed it and pulled myself into the apartment - the one I’d started in, a stained futon at an angle across the floor, a plastic desk towards the kitchen island covered in bits of chemistry equipment that reminded me of Jax’s lab, where this crumbling, ruined stairwell of events began.

Darkness flitted in the light and turning to meet it, the figure disappeared leaving only a single flashbang rolling on the ground, and I threw my head to the side leaping for cover behind a counter, barely managing to avoid its blinding light, muzzle flashes throbbing on the other doorway, 5.56mm rounds shaving the edges of the counter top while also planting themselves at the side as if the ghost of a golden cage. Footsteps approached the entrance of the door I smashed through, Malin and Enfield stacked up to it outside but did not engage.

I took advantage of my own fragmentation grenade, and used the momentum of throwing to launch myself backwards across the room, turning on my heel to the window I’d spawned looking down from. My plan in the first place had been to use Halation to cling to the walls and climb down, which would be easier here, closer to the ground. All four of his operators were now accounted for, so if anyone was in the cop car it could only be NPCs at worst -

Before the window came in reach, a blast of heated air lifted my feet midair and threw me down roughly on the floor, head just missing the rail, shield stabilizing me on the floor. Another frag rolled on the floor under my wincing gaze, and I barely had time to pull the shield up against the burning smoke, splinters, broken glass, chips of concrete and plaster and jiprock. I supported it against my shoulder on one knee and was bowled over on my back like a cockroach, in the middle of hitting a roll when tense, rough hands in padded fingerless leather gloves grabbed the flaps and straps around my collar.

The point of a muzzle in the back of my neck. I knew it was Sieh and I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to do to me what I’d done to Guo. I grabbed for sleeve where I felt from his grip his arms should be, and rolled myself forward. The attempted throw didn’t work but shifted his barrel slightly off-course as I slipped out from under him. Halation extended between us as we grappled, but Malin and Enfield had already run in from behind, getting beads on me. The Scar-L had fallen on the floor, Enfield directly between me and the window, sidestepping gingerly around splintered planks. As I scanned them, I doubled over on a stab of pain-as-numbness disrupting even Halation’s nervous control. Sieh had stuck a taser in my side. And, before I could react, a knee in my face, flinging me toward the wall.

Next the Glock racing in, even to Halation’s slow-motion, decompressed senses like the train arriving in Ciotat. The colours of her surface near where the taser had hit had dissociated into polygonal surfaces layered and vectored on my skin and the air between us. The new simulation layers their consciousness generated were losing coherence from the pain, trying to fold themselves back together. Even part of Sieh’s taser hand itself - my free hand shot out and grabbed the barrel of the pistol, even as it fired, glitch-numb with Halation. The muzzle blast froze in a crystal of colour gradients. The bullet clipped through the back of my hand.

My other hand reached for the Karambit, as Sieh extricated his own from the frozen gunfire and stranded, midair Glock, grabbing my wrist and forcing it back at a tortuous angle. Mesh under our feet rose into spires with the aches, subsiding until I threw myself toward him, trying to kick his side. Even if I couldn’t hit him, it destabilized our balances enough for me to get some distance where both of us drew our sidearms, pulling the trigger on mine somehow pushed me back into a stumble, feeling three distinct thuds against my plate carrier only hearing the three shots from Sieh’s glock. hands searching the floor, scurrying behind something while Sieh knelt down, leaning slightly to avoid the shots from my Roland Special.

The entire area changed, now a dark atrium of a large building’s lobby. Malin and Enfield nowhere to be found, the cold smooth veneer of the marble tile tickled my fingertips. As I leaned to the sides of the platform I crouched behind, several thunders of 9mm rounds chipped off the corner, leaving rocks to the side. Blood beaded onto my cheek.

“Hey ****** you g**** go?” Their voices from the intercom clipped and flanged.

“Log into Financial District: Ground Floor and use the passcode AX745JY6. Oh, and stop sharing comms.” Sieh’s voice rolled through my mind smooth as an answering machine, his avatar mouth not moving. “We clearly don’t need a handicap anymore.”

I saw them out of the corners of my darting eyes, loading in between columns behind glass doorways, on low and turning staircases.

One more shot shattered a vase above me, fragments of it hovered in mid-air not falling, a piece as if a continent fell to my right. I put my arm outward blindfiring over the platform, metal rolling beside me, another flashbang.

Halation’s throbbing perception covered every surface of my senses as the light and noise of the flashbang overwhelmed them and I closed my eyes to visualize - or they simply stopped existing - as they reshaped the environment again. Concrete and grey brick so rough it could have passed for raw-hewn stone - for tunnels here on Towers, somewhere they were neither maintained by travellers nor patterns of erosion. Black soot and white spray paint (pentagrams, peace signs, arrows, the word BISEXUAL) smeared them, especially around the recesses near the bottoms of the walls. Two short arches, just high enough to crawl through on all fours, and a rounded concrete pipe, each leading into chambers piled with chalky white dust and debris. Over each, a hooked claw was painted in layers of oilstains. A shaky metal staircase coiled around the space up to a floor too dark to see (or for Halation to generate).

The space itself being so much smaller than the atrium - though more detailed, a direct tradeoff in processing power - had pulled Sieh in range. I lashed out with the Karambit.

“You think you know about the Coven of Domnu?”

They would have loved to drag someone like this in here, where I lay down, where I dreamed of laying down, night after night, naked on the concrete dust, waiting for that same black crescent in my hand to flash down. Something I could only experience once, and therefore experienced never, and therefore experienced countless times.

“Whether I know of them is irrelevant. They are little more than a band of charlatans. And their beliefs, whatever they might be, make them just one step away from being a murderer.”

Silhouettes emerged out of the darkness surrounding us. Trying to escape, Sieh held my arm, each wrangle seeming more futile but my eyes darted around seeing my arms dim in the encroaching shadows. Sieh drew first, his Glock 17 disappeared in several mute flashes of light, the pistol slide the only trace of darkness until molten white overflowed into a city crosswalk in black and white and I drew my Roland Special realizing Sieh had disappeared, his figure flitting between the monochrome pedestrians. One of them stumbled and Sieh had already brought his weapon up on me behind them. Losing all feeling in my leg, I was forced to kneel by the next successive shots, the next pierced my arm and completed its overture, immobilizing me as he danced between barely rendered figures. How many shots was it? Four? Yet it felt instantaneous that I had been cut down. Turning my head now, the black and white city melted into blue darkness, a single fluorescent light where around me lay several bodies, all shot. In the distance, a single corpse hung from the ceiling. It almost seemed like the revelry of punishment, a sort of inverse of everyday that we lived knowing people around us were dying and no one would say anything about it. I saw Sieh walk over, this time with his M4A1 assault rifle trained on me. He merely grimaced.

“A combat situation is much like sand… It dries up any sort of moisture until there is only the flesh that remains. The flesh that can be destroyed. Until you can be reduced to nothing, your world cannot touch mine.”

I couldn’t move. The 5.56mm round entered but even in the searing contact of its hollowpoint mushrooming into my body, I thought of what he said about our worlds, those people that passed us by and I remembered how badly I wanted to change that world. Someone like Sieh was not like Hadak or Beek or even my parents in the way their forces on me were justified or necessary, but to Sieh, it was somehow objective. Something that we succumb to. I wanted to destroy that world and in that instance, before Sieh could confirm the kill, I’d already arisen behind him, Karambit raised, but looking down on myself from its point, riding Halation’s abyss of focus - why were they so insistent that I win this anyway? Was there a reason I had shifted out of gender even as she rose up along my arm and over my Karambit, a skin of oil moving fast and narrow enough to be a blade, the black crescent apocalypse I’d feared and desired for so long – Halation fully submerged in a pit of my fantasy I’d never allowed myself to enjoy, letting me ride it with her –

A blue screen flickered around my eyes. A loading wheel floating on a scrap of discoloured pixels.

Sieh was still playing with buttons on the side of the helmet, trying to reset it, when I lifted the visor.

“We will have to continue this with clearer rules around gamebreaks. That does not mean no gamebreaks, to be clear. They are also a measure of skill, resourcefulness.”

“How were you doing that?”

“What, interfering with a procedurally generated AI simulation?” With no sign of humour: “Same way I always know when I’m in a dream.”