CW: eusocial roles, insectoid biology, military ideology, anti-Asian racism, forceful drugging, death, violence, gore, isolationism, colonialism



As soon as it was clear there would be no more wrinkles to the story of Vakha Bashtaev, an anonymous petition started circling to let Waldo Beek, or someone other than me, pick the crew for the expedition to the Internexus.

I couldn’t even blame them. In the organizing spaces I had come up in, fiascos like this were less forgiven than in the military (as I knew from the perverse pride with which Beek told stories of men he’d lost, the mild professional setbacks he’d taken as “total ownership”). Unless you were the kind of fucker who could wrap a cult of personality around yourself and force everyone you knew to choose between you and the counter-revolutionary wreckers, you’d step down and go back to the suburbs and never be heard from again.

The success of the petition was mostly limited to the upper brass Americans and NATO allies, however. They still had the illusion of an assumed hierarchy of legitimacy and expertise including them; everybody else was reluctant to get back to the national jockeying, light years away from their actual national governments to rein it in or the IIEF to fall back on.

What’s more, the ulterior reason I’d insisted on going in myself was paying off. The drone footage had “leaked” through the intranet and the sentiment analysis was some of the most positive of the mission so far. It made me look - and admittedly feel - like a bit of a badass, or at least someone who could lead from the front and actually knew how to fight in conditions that even to experienced soldiers felt (more so, according to some comments, after watching the footage than just going through Caroline’s weird exercises) like starting over from absolute zero.

The accompanying rise in pressure to expand symbiotic operations was being held in check by the first unlicensed symbiosis immediately going rogue and putting the whole mission in jeopardy. I didn’t have to defend the misanthropy of my own distrust of humans; most of the humans already mistrusted the aliens.

Maybe it would be better if, sooner rather than later, I expanded contact on my own terms. It didn’t bode well for our relations with the people we would be fighting both alongside and against that there was already an edit of the footage going around set to the stupid Dragonforce 40K song - “We’re Space Marines of the infantry corps, we take no shit & destroy the dark hordes…”

“Does this mean we should onboard Zach Flagg,” Jax asked through the Clamp net as we played Starcraft, a less nakedly offensive but still instructively horrifying example for Halation of how humans imagined aliens. The ‘purity of form’ and ‘purity of essence’, see, are good examples of how the dominant societies for the last few hundred years, and in some places a lot longer, imagined their ruling and subordinated groups. Of course, since most humans aren’t at the very top or the bottom, have resentments in both directions and also recognize both tendencies in our own personalities and history, we imagine ourselves as the flexible bundles of potential in the middle, while everything else really is as bound to a pure form or essence as our ideologies try to tell us we are.

Zach Flagg was one of those guys I used to see online who were exactly like someone I would meet at a Seattle queerdo party except they were a by all indications fanatically loyal officer of the US Armed Forces. Not an actual combat veteran, but obviously nobody was in the Space Force, and they still wanted in on this because what were they even for if they didn’t. I think he got into his furry and femboy shit at West Point, where he was now a research partner on the theory of exotic weapons. He hadn’t participated in the ship’s sexual underground at all, or as far as I knew even acknowledged its existence. “Not yet,” I mused. “He is a good pick, which is I don’t wanna risk losing him first. Let me bring him on, see how much leverage I can get out of him for containing just this mission, and if he’s reliable we can make it official.”

Jax laughed. “You deserve someone who can actually command troops in this thing.” “I don’t even know if he can do that! Serrao has some experience too.” “I talked to him about it and he doesn’t really want to be leading anything right now. It’s also probably better if we don’t make it too conspicuous who’s close to you when he’s already on video.”

Jax was surprisingly smart when it came to stuff like this. Maybe it was scheming with Alastair all the time or maybe we just grew up on the same lore wikis.

Instead I played the different factions against each other. In a show of pragmatism agreed to split the crew between Beek’s and Bennett-Fog’s suggestions (and leave anyone even vaguely associated with Hadak). I couldn’t really tell if she had a faction or was just very opinionated - I was starting to think the latter. The more I observed her up close, the more it looked like she was deeply isolated even within Edison Lens, and had seized her biggest shot at getting her ideas to matter ever just by acting like she mattered at me. Admittedly, she seemed like the kind of schemer that if she was good at it I absolutely wouldn’t know about it. But if she needed me, I might have some redeemable informal sway over her, even though I wasn’t going to give her any idea I was thinking that.

Waldo Beek’s picks included himself. The nature of the terrain was such that we couldn’t send very large groups anywhere, at least not yet. The Towers bivouacked single file, along with somewhat larger, semi-autonomous palanquins for transporting goods - and us, since we would slow them down too much trying to climb. We settled on an initial expeditionary force of ten, with two groups of reinforcements of the same size. Each group, like the groups of Towers, would have to travel more or less single file. We sat along with our supplies on the But really, if my entire strategy hinged on being the only person who could command, did I need to lead from the front like this? I had to admit I was motivated as much by curiosity as by distrust of the officers I wouldn’t even be able to command directly at this distance from our communications; it was also my best bet at gaining popularity with the troops. I had made myself a MVP combat asset in a couple of ways; my competitors in legitimacy were monsters like Beek and Hadak. And above all, any knowledge I could gain firsthand secured my strategic authority.

And Halation’s. Halation, I reassured myself, is really our general here. I am their-

I was about to say something like “mobile battle station” but then remembered the venerable human traditions of military symbiosis. Bucephalus. Rocinante. Shadowfax.

It matters that the humans will follow you. They wouldn’t follow me. Except in the sense of a local guide. A…

Malinche. I winced. Which is exactly why it’s important that I’m following you more as much as the other way around, that they don’t -

We’ve already been over this. You’re just letting the questions get to you. I can’t afford that. You need to focus.

Their anger felt like an unintended glimpse into something. To understand what we did and didn’t share with each other, even after all those weeks of attempting to synthesize our wills so that we could act without hesitation - and yes, I was the one breaking that synthesis first by hesitating - you have to be aware of the distinction between conscious awareness of thought or internal monologue and the vast reservoirs of memory and context once tendentiously referred to as the unconscious. What we chose to make conscious to ourselves, as a rule, we made conscious to each other, but our unconscious “RAM” (as Bennett-Fog preferred to call it) was effectively “partitioned” although we could access it more or less with each other’s permission, and spent long hours on the journey just lying there diving through each other, vaguely aware of each other’s shadows on opposite sides of the pool.

Not that Halation wasn’t completely changing my relation to my own attention. I found myself able to pay attention to maybe double as many things at once just from getting the hang of following all the different points Halation could map. One of the major constraints on their maximally fluid form was simply information transmission; they couldn’t map and control everywhere on their surface at once without significant tradeoffs in higher-order cognition. In that puddle on the field they had been practically an amoeba; only once they had found a sufficiently complex nervous system to latch onto, like mine, had their mind “woken back up”. This was similar to the tradeoffs in complexity and flexibility that applied to Asymmetry Fields, why despite having such total computational control over their own surfaces that the laws of physics didn’t apply to them, they could only do and think limited things. I still haven’t quite figured out how to translate the Meteorological terms (a proud innovation of the Weirs) for this spectrum of internal-versus-external-based cognition.

I thought about this more when I met the Sunbites’ Fabber.

All the Towers we’d seen so far, as it turned out, belonged to a single morph, which I at first wanted to call “Scouts” until I learned there was an even more specialized morph for that (the Sunbite group was small and didn’t have any), smaller and even more flexible with stronger wings. (These were, somehow, originally a separate species.) I didn’t want to say warriors, although they were the only ones who fought - there was a reason unlike so much other tech, their weapons weren’t built into their bodies. At the end of the day they were primarily Gatherers, and they were the majority of Towers, the closest to the original body plan from before the planetary expansion (which had converged, over the course of a long social and biotechnical struggle, from a number of other eusocial roles that were hardly remembered).

A Fabber, like a queen but I don’t want to make the gendered analogy too overt (even Halation, growing into it for reasons I’m still struggling with), was the most vital part of a group and had to be hidden and protected as long as possible from untrustworthy aliens - though they weren’t immobile or defenseless, which would be absurdly impractical on a planet like this. The Fabber was a modified reproducing form - the lower third of their body, which on Gatherers ended in that goofy looking extra hand, functioned as a biological 3D printer. The swollen organ was two thirds the size of the rest of their body, curled like a millipede’s carapace, and in place of the seventh hand a dozen fingers fanned out directly from its edges, manipulating and weaving the threads it spun. It produced, among other things, the implants that had supported the Network, and Fabber capabilities themselves. Its exoskeletal scaffolding wasn’t the pale keratin of the rest of their bodies but the hard shiny semi-translucent black of an early 2000s gaming computer - the material of their implants was a kind of plastic - lit from within by pools and veins of superconductive fluid. It was supported by a pair of back legs twice the size of anyone else’s, but with simpler endings, two-pronged hooks.

I shared the rearmost palanquin with them alone. Their name was Aqueduct.

This large kind was normally reserved for fixed supplies - fortunately they were running low so their three could share the weight of a troop of humans - and the Fabber themself. Waldo Beek insisted on climbing himself - he kept up for a full twenty minutes before I noticed the leading transports stopping too much. It gave me at least some rough mental calculations of how fast a skilled climber - and he was, Aqueduct seemed particularly fascinated to watch - could traverse these caves unaided. But for all our pursuit predator skills, even without any real vehicle of the speed I was used to on Earth - all of which, I had been told, would be too hard to steer without the Network - we were slower on the crumbling ground than the Towers, who transited by planned dashes and jumps - crescent-shaped Scouts with a second pair of scissorlike wings flying ahead through nooks and crannies, echolocating and mapping what tunnels and gaps were large enough for the rest of the group to move through; Gatherers docking together in a sort of conga line, a Runner at each end identical except with the same powerful legs and simplified arms as the Fabber, biomechanically enhanced and capable of pushing off at (we still used human measures in military calculations) 50 km/h, with the wings of the de facto centipede between them outspread, allowing them to glide on momentum. (These legs were alarming for close combat - essentially a Rider Kick.) The transport itself had a four tentacles on each corner that split into curling stalks for feet.

Our caravan was lit by glowing balloons that also gave us a consistent sense of up and down by floating in the opposite direction of Towers’ gravity; one also pulled in the direction of the closer magnetic pole. The strongest sense I had was of its silence; as much as the Towers looked like grasshoppers, there was none of the spasmic party blower snapping I remembered from summers in the dry fields. The curtains themselves were moderately sound dampening, and within them the Fabber spoke in an entirely different set of vocalizations from the other Towers, like a singing bowl.

“I wove these myself just a few STU^12 ago.” They stroked the curtains surrounding us, kaleidoscopic patterns of light playing across them from a rotating lantern, as they popped an oval of soapstone idly in and out of their mouth. Thanks to biomechanics, unlike a queen, they didn’t need that much more food than everyone else - with several redundant power sources, their Fabber organ operated largely in parallel with the rest of their body and could break down just about anything. The major reason it was integrated at all, besides ease of transport, was direct neural control.

I’d be better at telling you these things through dialogue like in a normal science fiction story if I wasn’t a sociologist. I’d assume that it would simply be taken for granted that, as the Fabber, they would make all the materials and the tech for the commune - you know what, I am going to call it that, I’ve been here long enough, although at that point I was still only registering a nervous hope at the possibility, as in my first observations of the kind of group living where you were more than roommates, more than (as I worded it in my proposal) contractually dividing the labour of maintaining a space, but less than partners - and probably little else. But like, I wasn’t stupid. I knew we were heading for what was essentially, in human terms, a trading post. I knew that because of the difficulty of maintaining consistent supply chains, especially now, most of the Towers’ technology would be what they could make in one commune - answering Beek’s incessant question, as we wound through vault after sedimented vault, the largest almost inevitably with some natural light filtering down through some series of gaps above, pale waterfall shafts where light moved as a visible substance but never revealed its infinite source, of why this tedious hang-gliding instead of just flying some kind of plane.

“There are things like that. Wind-powered wing enhancements, like jump-jets,” Aqueduct told me. “I’ve always wanted to make one but never gotten my hooks in the designs, let alone the resources… Maybe someone will have them at the Internexus.”

You could collapse entire sectors using something like that.

“And you guys planting fungus bombs everywhere wouldn’t?”

We will remake our apologies at will, but we did assume that was supposed to happen. People do it on purpose sometimes, not even for war reasons. Sometimes just to reorganize a trade route or something. Also a lot of tunnels change size and shape too much for any kind of vehicle to be convenient.)

The question that floored me was one that should have taken me even less by surprise given its proximity to myself. From what I knew of life cycles, Aqueduct seemed at least a couple of fifteenth-exponent units older than the disaster. You never downloaded anything from the Network?

Nobody thought we needed to download anything when we had it. We- the Sunbites, at least, I can’t speak for anyone else. The group we split off from - and the word for split off, according to the extra information the vocalizer primed in my mind with subliminal Ahasurunu overtones, had connotations of an asymmetrical rift in a group that had escalated to a point of abuse - stored everything in the cloud for seven generations. (Which wasn’t that long here.) But besides, I- wasn’t even a Fabber when it happened.

“You mean…” If they had said when they were a nymph, they would have said that. My understanding - the understanding at the Lung, but for obvious reasons no-one there really got out much - was that children went to Fabbers, after a period of decision that could take as long as it needed within reason and involved several forms of divination, to pick their final morph.

A group of just Gatherers is called a Waltz, and there are plenty of them, or used to be - probably less now. They usually just follow bigger caravans until they can find other morphs to join them - like I said, we’d just split off and were looking to start our own, then… we couldn’t rely on trade any more. And Sunbite, in the separation agreement, had gotten one Fabber spore…They would have taken it themself, to take responsibility for leading us all away. But they’d never… thought about it before the way I had.

“Thought about it…. But you didn’t take the role at first? Was there pressure?”

The old group had three Fabbers, and they were very insistent that was enough. I didn’t mind at the time, these are practical decisions, though I realized the way they were made was weird later on, and the number - it was a big group, too big for three Fabbers, not enough other morphs - was also part of how they manipulated scarcity, coordinated…

“That’s sort of how… it all is, on Earth.” I sheepishly explained my own situation.

Ohhh wow! Changing reproductive capabilities is much rarer than productive roles - and 6 out of 7 us don’t use it anyway - but you can do it with a gamete packet.

Gamete packets??? It felt actually embarrassing to explain that all we knew how to change was hormones and rearranging features from outside.

Yes, once we study the expression-matrices of the genome you sent us, there should be Fabbers at the Internexus with the micro-scale add-on who can figure out how to make one for you.

I barely knew any trans women who were that fixated on “the surgery”, let alone the longing for a working womb. Half of us were lesbians anyway - although that might not matter the same way with gamete packets. The Coven of Black Domnu venerated the empty womb of the Eschaton, the inverted grail, and insofar as I had any interest in childrearing it was as a communal social form. But then I had gone from compulsively tucking stuffed animals under my shirt to reading all those Mpreg doujins in Grade 9…

“So what do you do while you sit back here making stuff?”

It’s not all just like… eating or digesting. (Although most of the waste product of what we eat does go into it, and everyone else’s too.) I was proud of myself for not even giving a hint of how embarrassing that would be for humans. There’s too much complexity and variability in a lot of tech - not even to mention decoration, which is one of the best parts of being a Fabber - to encode it all genetically, even with graft packets. So a certain amount we have to pay attention. Like I was doing for the first while - several hours in which they had sat seemingly perfectly still, humming nonverbal overtones up and down several overlapping scales.

“I don’t think humans have… any internal organs we can sense or control the way we do our outer organs.” I tried to imagine it. How utterly different a relation would that entail between… inside and outside? How could we, tubes like virtually every other multicellular lifeform on Earth, simultaneously perceive ourselves as outsides with no insides, like Mobius strips?

“Can I… sh… share, with Halation? I’m sorry if that’s weird I just want to know what that feels like.

I don’t think it’ll feel that different from making something with your hands. A wave of flexion rolled around the ring of fingers. The best part is just closing my eyes and diving in Phantasies every time. That’s the word I guess I’m using now for something like the story of Yayaraya Halation showed me back on Earth. Much of the galaxy uses the Weir word since they had millennia to develop it without any techno-neurological interface, but the artform isn’t unique to their biology; Towers experienced the same thing through their implants, and there are other technical options available - I hope they have cartridges at the Internexus. Maybe one of the first things we’ll trade to Earth, honestly. Even when I was a nymph I spent all the time I could afford diving them in the cloud, whereas since I took this morph I’ve had so much more time and gotten so much better at focusing with just three cartridges - a 34198 Banquet of Embers, a 66110 Star-Green Bow, and 49703 Zero’s Orbit - all of which are double or single-sense. All classics, of course, and all with eighteenth-temporal-exponents of lucid content, but it’s not exactly easy to get lucid off Zero’s Orbit! I hope they make cartridges compatible with your neurology so you can experience them…

The curtain opened. We need something to clear this opening. There’s Geoplaque all across it and it’s thick.

I straightened my back and crossed my legs as if meditating - the palanquin didn’t really have seats, as the Towers had more efficient ways of folding up their bodies than us - and the hum changed to a higher pitch with more overtones, like throat-singing. I was content to let the shivers roll up and down my skin like a scanner, but with a free hand they clasped my wrist and Halation verified the meaning of the gesture. Closing my eyes I was first startled by the awareness of the points and lines of extreme heat in the Fabber cavity, heat that in my own body I would have registered as terrifying pain but which was safely enclosed in a cool green space of hermetically sealed outsiderness. A reversal of the relation between body and world, I was now the surface of the world in which I reached and felt fine calculations, in standard units down to low exponents that as a human would have required specialized terminology, running like basic sense-perceptions down the two dozen millipede legs, ending in tubes like pipettes, with which Aqueduct manipulated as many sacs of raw materials. It seemed almost unimaginable to be aware of the outside world and this one at the same time - the humming was a magic circle, a border - though I could imagine a movie or a memory projected distantly across it like an aurora, preferably simple as a silent silver screen. At the end of little more than thirty seconds we spat out six rubbery golden eggs around a phosphorescent white substance.

We were close enough for me to jump down and land where the ground was flat (my boots splashed in a few inches of a liquid we’d been advised to chemically treat all our gear for before heading out), the cavity continuing for about a dozen feet (sorry I know I should be practicing my standard units) at barely over our head height (the Towers moving easily on all six). The “Geoplaque” was a sulphurous yellow mineral that seemed to be made up of thin flat sheets like mica, except one sheet was still almost an inch thick, and translucent like horn or amber. The otherwise similarly tinted limbs of the Towers stood out against it in their own faint light like shadow-puppets.

The Towers delicately carried the packets and squeezed the small opening at one end of one, then another onto the Geoplaque where it crept along the crevices between the layers then started to smoke profusely like dry ice, spitting firework sparks as the Towers backed away and pulled their own wraps over their faces, before two plates snapped off and fell forward. After applying a couple more, one poured the rest of one sack into another and added the remainder to their utility belt.

“Don’t you have any bigger tunnels for freight?” Beek still sounded unimpressed. “How the hell are we gonna get rations through here?”

There should be a few at the Internexus, but not from this direction. The explosions above have been making cave-ins worse.

“Can you stop complaining about everything? We’re guests here,” I finally snapped at him.

He tilted his head. “Guests? That’s a funny way to describe what we’re doing here.” I knew he was right, and he knew that I knew it. “But I’ll stop if you make it an order, commander.”

“I order you not to play that game with me again, lieutenant,” I growled.

We were planning to get off one “stop” before the Internexus, which was (according to the map-cartridge, about the size and shape of an acid tab which the Towers placed on a sensitive ridge on their crests, from which it would project a semi-navigable mind-palace of the standard unit of extension sixteenth exponent radius surrounding it) at the centre of a basin of highly regular porosity, above a large ground-liquid current. The pumicey catacombs around were used by regular visitors to stockpile their goods outside the site of trade itself.

Informally, it’s considered part of the pact, and specifically groups will take efforts to keep out of each other’s way and not observe each other there, so as not to compromise exchange in the Internexus. But there’s no saying if that will apply to an unknown alien species.

“Let alone an armed one.”

I wouldn’t particularly worry about that unless you get into any fights. Nobody can tell you’re armed. Those things you’re carrying… if we hadn’t seen you use them, we would assume they were some sort of sensing tool, like my staff, or a kind of radio telescope, the Sunbites’ leader (Sunbite, they shared their name with the group) explained calmly.

“Uh-huh. How many other kinds of alien weapons you not recognize?” Beek huffed.

Is that an idiom, they leaned over my shoulder, apparently confused by Beek’s asking a negative.

“Are there any you would recognize?”

I doubt there will be aliens at the Internexus in general. Map cartridges are harder to come by than they used to be, and most of them don’t even work for alien neurology… (as they didn’t, unfortunately, for ours).

“But someone most likely working with aliens gave you this one.” Beek was unmoved, folding his arms and blocking the tunnel entrance as he paced. “And you’re now telling me they have essentially a mandated place to hide and stockpile arms. How has nobody done what you almost did and just fungus’d the whole place to kingdom come already?”

Why would they do that.

Beek paused for a moment. “Cut off the supply centre anybody can use, set up one only they can use.”

That would make everyone turn against them.

“How would anyone know it was them? The way your mission was supposed to go, our base coulda gone boom and nobody would have even known it was you. They could blame it on the other side, which is presumably us. The moment we get in there, Leona,” his eyes turned to me now, “we need a recon plan. Scout around as much of the terrain as we can before we set up positions.” The strata of his forehead compressed. “God damn, this whole anthill being 3D makes everything take three times longer than it should.”

“If they’re telling us there’s some sort of taboo against this, we could undermine our whole first impression here by poking around.” Zach Flagg, unprompted, spoke as the voice of… I wasn’t even sure if reason. I couldn’t even tell if it was Halation’s or my own thinking but Beek sounded kind of right here. The trust and slack of the local social fabric was clearly already being exploited by somebody. What I was grateful to have him speaking as, I realized, so I could chart my own path, was something like Obama-era dispassionate caution: a doctrine that corrected for the adventurism of its predecessors by stacking up intelligence and reputation until it could act “surgically” with as-good-as-guaranteed results. “It’s too big to just do a sweep anyway - let’s go in where we can talk to people, at least get a clue of who we’re most likely to be looking for.”

We knew a few things by now about the Towers who had given our new allies their instructions. They were geoengineering with the goal of establishing some kind of new communication network, and they wore elaborate figures of golden rope fibre (something like a cross between shibari and a full-body cat’s cradle). “Can’t you just use the staff?” I remembered.

The leader bobbed their head and joggled their feet in a gesture of approval. The stone around the Internexus is muffled to limit direct eavesdropping on trade or personal secrets, but they are an integral part of how we know where others are and where we should be free to set up camp. They also make snooping difficult - not impossible, but we don’t have anyone with those skills, let alone you.

Star-Green Bow is actually about trained Silent Scouts, Aqueduct tapped.

“The word for that in the human language of an island that produces a lot of our best media means one-who-steals-in,” Zach carefully constructed through the vocalizer.

“And in the language of the ruling world empire, it just means to Look,” I added. “Although the cultures of that empire are kind of obsessed with looking in a lot of different senses.”

“I’d need to watch this Star-Green bow thing, but I think the Ones Who Steal In are closer to what you mean Silent Scouts sound like than the Ones Who Look. Ones Who Look can do a lot of things from just deciphering codes to getting information out of people by sleeping with them, but the ones I’ve encountered mostly just sit in offices.”

“Don’t you look at your sims too? Or was that not meant to be the wording you used just now?”

Now I was starting to get embarrassed. “Like I said, humans do a lot of different kinds of looking, especially in my culture. We say we look at Phantasies, even though we also listen to and imagine them...”

The Internexus seemed, if not as big as the Lung itself, at least as big as one of its lobes. Yet as an actual geological formation, it was far more deliberate than the haphazard cavity encasing the Lung, with a distinctive onion shape, nearly its entire surface a honeycomb of gaps of interlocking shapes, like Islamic sacred geometry except every coloured tile was a yawning void. A decent number of these gaps had pipes emerging from them, ending in faucets of liquid we were glad to have molecular filters to turn into water. It was filled with semi-inflated-looking, glowing pastel tents that unzipped from the top like flower bulbs. Black light bathed everything, both from fixtures in the voids of the walls and the luminescent rods many of the Towers seemed to be carrying like cyalume sticks at an idol show, lighting the pale chitin of their bodies and their garments in a garden of neons that made up only a slice of the spectrum they could see.

Innumerable voices rose up like an orchestra of soft foghorns. The vocalizers were mostly going on the fritz but would occasionally pick something out of the waves like “natural tingle balm” or “blind licking game”. At the same time it was nice not to think about what any of it meant and just let the sound roll over my skin. How convenient that we’d already encountered two species that communicated using sound in some way, rather than something I couldn’t even sense like radar. Halation was surprised at how worried I was that this way of relating represented some unprocessed human chauvinism on my part; first guests and first hosts commonly appreciated physiological dimensions of novel communication.

We entered covered in a semi-translucent tarp (we could see out, they couldn’t see in), quilted with an elaborate pattern the group had insisted on making before bringing us here. Normally this would take weeks, but I had agreed to supply material and printing capabilities from the Lung so it could be done in the one night I spent with them planning it. Everyone had participated in the design, each member conceiving of one shape that iterated into it in a fractal. As with (Halation told me) many first guest customs on other planets, as with the Recorder and its Song, it was meant to suggest something of the species in forms sufficiently abstract that others would have to speculate infinitely as to their interpretation. (There were at least hundreds, probably thousands of such customs on this planet alone. Sunbite had needed to dig out a generations old cartridge from an inherited sticker-album to remember this one.) They hadn’t met enough humans, I thought, to attempt any such representation; another reason, under normal circumstances, to stay longer. Another reason I might have pushed if I had credibility to spend in the ranks. I had paired each of their contributors with one of our crew. The figures were separated not by colour but by the texture of the different fibres, which various Towers reached out close to our shoulders or faces to touch with those long eerie fingers even I was still getting used to, as if to stroke the outer membrane of our perception. The logic by which they translated whatever each of us struggled to explain into seemingly non-representational figures was entirely lost on me (and Halation). But it lent itself to the problem we were going to face as soon as word of our presence reached enough of the Internexus for a public unveiling. (The logic of all this, Sunbite assured, was not to make us a spectacle but diminish competition among different groups for access, which didn’t necessarily feel more comfortable.) The problem of reassuring a peaceful assembly of multiple sides about our presence.

We wound our way through the crowds to a concave spiralling elevation of stacked stones (reminiscent in structure of the Giants’ Causeway, uneven and difficult to climb for feet that didn’t wrap around surfaces) surmounted by a folded structure of stiff black material that projected sound out from under it. The only natural light in the Internexus - and the only one we’d been able to see all the way through to its source. From the height of the podium we could see commerce (or simply conversation and relaxation) continuing at the far edges of the Internexus, groups in garments of completely different shapes from the Sunbites’ (abstract diagonals cutting across their bodies, covering as little as swimsuits, or billowing sleeves and even hoods like windsocks covering their crests), but the surrounding four or five tents deep had more or less emptied. And children, bodies bullet-round and fingers floppy but wings almost always out, leaping and fluttering around large stone cairns, where they weren’t settling on their guardians’ shoulders to watch. They looked similar to the Scouts I’d seen in Aqueduct’s Phantasies, and tended to have a close relation with them, although I wasn’t sure I could tell the difference at a glance.

I couldn’t hold everything in my eyes or mind or memory at once - it was a 360-degree Where’s Waldo - but we could see almost the whole Internexus from here, and I realized the Sunbites, encircling the stones just below us and tapping code on each other’s shoulders, might not have much trouble spotting whoever had tricked them. Maybe they would even call them out from up here, in front of everyone - there had been mention on the journey of some offenses against the rules of the Internexus being handled this way.

The problem, at least as far as I could tell, was that Waldo’s striped shirt - the rope garment, at least as far as they had described it - was everywhere. On the way they hadn’t given me the impression that it was a common thing - at least, none of the Sunbites had ever seen it before - but from here I could see dozens of Towers wearing it, mingling with all different groups. Each seemed to be wearing a slightly different pattern of loops and knots, so maybe they would recognize the specific pattern. But maybe it was simply some new trend bartered at this Internexus - maybe it wasn’t a useful lead at all.

In the same spirit of egalitarian tesselation, after I began with a brief history of humankind as I knew it, everyone else launched into some kind of expression of their own.

My voice had already lost some of the sane human hesitation at this kind of speech I could hear everywhere now when Bennett-Fog made me listen back for the millionth time to my first contact announcement from Earth. All the more disturbing as this speech felt so much more cruelly dishonest than the first. We were speaking directly in our own language - we had an algorithmic translator into Ahasurunu by now, which according to Sunbite was being fed into a network of vocalizers around the Internexus that I still wasn’t sure exactly how were connected. “We came here because we had good reason to believe a planetwide war was about to go hot, and because on our home planet, we don’t have places like this. Places that everyone agrees don’t belong to any side and don’t have to worry about being taken or targeted by any of them. And it’s places like these that if the war threatens to spill into, we want to do everything you’ll allow us to defend. If necessary, we’ll do that in exchange for the resources we need to stay here. That’s not an uncommon exchange on Earth, although we’d rather this not become a place where it is. It’s not that - there’s a trope in our contact fiction” (most species, Halation told me, derived some sort of genre dealing with the hypothetical inhabitants of other worlds either before or after contact, but humans were unusual in conflating it with science fiction, which she understood as simply Speculative Meteorology, a research branch comprising almost a third of the synod, most of whom would spend a lifetime extrapolating the material and social effects of a single abstruse hypothesis or a change of a few percentage points to the laws of physics) “of the Warrior Race, a species where everyone not only is good at fighting but likes to, or at least finds meaning and value in it. I’ve never thought that was possible, at least beyond a certain level of intra-operability, although I could be wrong and extremely racist or something. Or if it was people would just agree to and it wouldn’t be like Earth. A thing about war on Earth that isn’t true everywhere else, I think, is that most people who participate it don’t want to. Enough do to keep it going, but enough just know, or have convinced themselves, that everyone they know might get killed if they don’t, because they live in a certain place or have certain genes, that a set of fighters have decided are at war with another place or gene group. And those fighters aren’t like, a different morph themselves. Sometimes it feels like they are, but they’re mostly just humans doing what other humans tell them to do, and/or given permission to do things they aren’t allowed to do the rest of the time….” I covered a lot of the basics of human society in much the same way I’d explained it to Halation, except with an emphasis on the eusocial analogy - we spent so much time going over and over it in my head on the trip it makes me fantasize about a first contact where we just wrote a book of first contact anthropology before doing anything else, which has apparently happened on a few planets. Beek swaggered up next. I’d approved the basic concept of everyone’s performance - he had pitched his as a basic recap of his “Internal Command” and “Learning From Kids Who Grew Up With War” speeches, both of which I’d heard. But I knew he was going to improvise. “My commander makes our home sound pretty bad, and I mean, I get it, I had to leave too. But I’m going to explain what makes me - and her, when you get her guard down around the bivouac with a few drinks - there’s a lot of stuff that ferments and becomes psychoactive, it’s great - love Earth and love humans too. First of all, like she said, we don’t have different morphs or castes or anything. We’re all equal, and in the country we’re from, that’s the law. That’s the principle the law derives its legitimacy from. But it doesn’t mean we’re all equal in real life. Lots of us can do things others can and will never do. Which is also the beauty of it, because we had to work for them, and fight for them! The fighting - and that’s probably why we do it so much - the fighting is as important as the working.

I’ve been told the tragedy of war has come to your planet. I’ve been to lots of places where war hasn’t visited for fifty, a hundred years. I can only begin to imagine what it’s like for a peace as long as yours. In those places, everyone’s wounded. Even if they haven’t lost anyone. That peace was a part of them. You could get up in the morning, think about something ten, fifteen years from now and it would get you through the day. Even if you didn’t do anything in the day to get you any closer to it, you just sat on your couch and watched TV. You had all the time in the world. Now where’d it all go? Like Leona said, on Earth there’s almost nowhere that’s not at war, and it’s been that way pretty much since we climbed down out of the trees. And before that we were running from predators, and that never ended. We had to invent war to invent peace. I’m from a place that’s very good at it, so it mostly fights in other places. So people can pretend they’re still at peace, even though they know they’re not. But that’s just like walking around with a wound untreated and festering. Dragging a twisted ankle in the sand and it’s so numb you pretend you just fell asleep on it. That’s why I made it my mission, when I came home to my own peace, to tell civilians: you’re still at war. Whether you like it or not. War comes first, you have to earn peace. When I came home, that was peace like I’d never felt it before. Like a limb that’s phantom first. War wounds you, but it can also heal you. It’s the only thing that can heal the wounds it inflicts.

And I wanted to teach people how to earn their peace, even if they never get out in the field directly. Not everyone’s cut out to do that! At least half the world isn’t, biologically, I don’t think we’re that unspecialized to be honest, and I’d say psychologically, at most 1% have what it takes. Until you’ve really sat with war you have no idea. Talk to war. Ask what it wants from you. Why it came to you. What you really wanted. Don’t say you wanted peace, because you weren’t paying attention to peace in the first place. War didn’t bring you death, you could have walked out on the street and gotten hit by a piano falling from a fifth storey balcony like a Looney Tune. It’s not just that war makes you think about the important things - it makes you think about them all the time. It doesn’t matter if on paper the war is about something stupid, it’s really about the most important things. Winning and losing, living and dying. The same things the world inside your head is about. When you’re in a unit, even if you’re Private Peckerwood at the bottom of the food chain who cleans the lunch trays, you are the commanding officer of your own mind. You clean that lunch tray like you’re clearing the perimeter of insurgents!

Like we’ve been talking about, you have all these different drives, all these different functions. All these different possibilities. All these different ‘you’s. But you gotta keep em in order, like a troop. Or like one of your little… colonies. There’s another guy with us you might run into at some point who’s a real fighting junkie, with drawings all over his skin, and his problem is he never understood this, so don’t take anything he says too seriously. The thing is, the way our companions have told us the war is going here, it sounds like your problem here - hell, in the rest of the galaxy - might be not knowing how to do that. When a society that’s been at peace for too long goes to war, it can’t control it. Nobody knows how to demand of themselves what war demands of them. And everyone goes nuts! The worst battlefield I ever saw on Earth - I can tell you all about it - was a place like that. It was a place that wasn’t very good at it, because they’d been living under one government, protected by another more powerful government, for a long time. If war is already the worst thing you can imagine, there’s no difference between being a warrior and a spree killer. The only people who could think properly about it were the kids who grew up there. And I know Leona makes it sound like that’s everyone on Earth - I mean, I think she’s probably right, compared to a place like this. But there are differences there too. If you take war as your starting point - your ground of reality - like you guys, how you’ve learned to live on this planet where the ground itself crumbled thousands of years ago, and still crumbles all the time, that’s really impressive if I do say so myself - tells me you’re good people, people who can adapt to war the same way we did.” (I was afraid these ways his sentences were chopped up into spontaneous units of thought came across better than mine through the vocalizers, with which we basically had to just string together words with only the barest bones of syntax and no tone - I’d probably get these sentences across closer to the way they heard them if I wrote them all caps with no punctuation.) “We may not be a warrior race, but we have one thing we write them having - we can make war honourably, fairly, with pride and without fear, without killing those who don’t need or deserve to.”

I fumed at the thought of Waldo Beek saying this - of him saying it in spite of what he had done, and what Harpers had pulled but its authors, and their sources, a Bosnian family (the ones we were supposed to be protecting) you could still talk to on social media, they still had a 2003 looking website up with photos from Operation Snakebite, I’d interviewed them for a feature on student radio that also got pulled at the last minute -

I had hoped Zach Flagg would deliver an impassioned speech on the relations between humans and other animals embodied in cross-species costuming, but he just sheepishly bust out his guitar and played Wonderwall, referring to it as a “human gathering custom” (“often accompanied by those fermented psychoactives he mentioned”). Jax did a rap he had been composing the whole way here that interpolated sections from Public Enemy, Biggie, Three Six Mafia (our endless teenage porch nights together…), Ye and Lil Peep. Aqueduct had spent five minutes before we entered producing something like a thumper from Dune to accompany it as a beat box. We didn’t even attempt to translate it, let alone contextualize it - like the sounds of the crowd, it justified itself as an exposure to our native sensorium.

Then there were questions from the crowd. This part, we had been warned, could last up to half a day.

“Back in your speech, you said intra-operability. That’s a Meteorological term; specifically, a Weir Meteorological term.”

“Yes, we were briefly captured by the anti-Adipose camp in Tuber Plug, that’s why the vocalizers are translating us through Ahasurunu. But I’m not sure what that term has to do with weather.”

Was it dealing with my parents the way I had for so many years that let me lie this effortlessly?

“We just assumed it had caught on everywhere,” Zach Flagg took over, “it seems so useful for thinking about how different kinds of brains and languages and morphs can all fit together…”

“Everyone in my commune uses it, and we’re not Meteorologists at all,” someone else backed me up. The crowd began to overlap into cacophony.

“You should become Meteorologists,” said the representative of another group, wearing billowing sheets that bloomed clean ultraviolet in the blacklight around all their limbs - “It is foreign but a great comfort to all who have lost precious things to war.”

“Kick them out! They’re breaking the neutrality pact!” someone yelled.

“We are unaligned Meteorologists!” they objected, and a crowd of strangers rallied around them.

Sixteen to eighteen different groups invited us to participate in activities, about a third of which the vocalizers couldn’t translate. (And this Internexus almost entirely served, the Weirs back at the Lung had briefed us, one of the sparser of 334 cultural-geological regions of Towers. Of course, in the time of the Network, these regions hadn’t meant as much as they did now. The Sunbites themselves had been travelling from an adjacent region when the Network had gone down.) The gathered hosts then voted on their own offers - it seemed strange not to let us pick, but fair as we didn’t know what any of the activities were. The winner was something that translated surprisingly simply as “fishing”. But there seemed to be a vocal minority opposition to this activity too. At last, after the show of hands was repeated at roughly the same ratio three times, one scuttled up the first layer of the platform to pass a message to Sunbite and on to us. If you are conscientious objectors to your people’s wars, are you also to your people’s predation?”

I had tried for a while, after I left the Coven of Domnu, where strips of raw bloody meat were consumed in ceremonies, though men were barred from it and given bland plates of rice and oatmeal, “the fruit of their own cursed agriculture”. Though I had also heard interpretations - my advisor had been secretly partial to an outmoded one - where women were the inventors of agriculture. I had never had the willpower to make it an absolute condition, a stance, but eating less meat had become a factor, to the point that in the city where it wasn’t hard to find them, a majority of my meals in any given week were vegetarian; I ate meat socially, but also when my favourite fast food places were around and I was lazy. Besides, as I learned more anthropology I realized more how many indigenous peoples lived forms of life inseparable from their customs around meat.

This ambivalence wasn’t far from the Meteorological position on it - because predatory relationships were understood as part of the accord between wills on most planets, but also an imperfect accord formed by beings incapable of communicating with each other or the rest of the material world. It was possible to intervene in these relationships without violating the will and accord of the beings involved, but only with extreme care and close study. The abolition of predation on Contemplation had taken most of a millennium to stabilize, and that was after Orchid had already proven it in concept.

Beek, for his part, was overjoyed. “Oh, we do that on Earth! If I’d known we’d have it in space I should have brought my hat! I haven’t seen anyone with a hat here, are they a thing people Don’t Wear for some reason or have you just never thought of them?”

I had seen a few, including where we were going - Beek hadn’t been paying attention. I thought of how, as a child, it took years just to think of all the questions like this to ask to even have a basic working model of the world. And I was likely to go out shooting strangers in this one within at most weeks.

The well formed in the texture of the living space by this activity had been visible from above as a circular opening large enough for ten Towers to sit, stand or pace in relative silence and isolation surrounded by onlookers. The circle’s iris and pupil were a ring of activated carbon laden with pale thin strips. The Towers in the mid-circle dangled some kind of rope into the gaps in the floor, and those on the edges sucked down the white things in single gulps, reaching in to spear them with long pokers.

I was sure there was some taxonomic catch to the things they were casting into the darkness for - were they even animals? - but it was probably the most straightforward translation I’d gotten so far.

At one side of the circle, Fabbers wearing the clothing and markings of different communes sat together, taking the “fish” (of varying sizes and proportions, but most roughly conical, with a ring-shaped maw at the wide end and a small cluster of tentacles at the other) in the Fabber organ input and “cooking” them. At the other a cluster of Gatherers cooked them more or less the way we did on Earth, with combinations of lichens and cave anemones, juggling and doing tricks with pans that held the heated embers directly under the cooking surface. The first platter (an unfolding series of slats that could be carried as easily as anything else here) brought out to Sunbite for appraisal had Fabbed on one side, glazed in a thin pink glitter, and cooked on the other, narrow strips chopped alongside reedy translucent strands.

Zach Flagg unshouldered his backpack, where he’d been carrying the molecular converter, staring at it hypnotically. The xenophilia was a good sign - I wasn’t sure I’d seen anyone this excited on the mission so far besides, well. Hadak.

You don’t have to get that out, Aqueduct tapped on me suddenly, pointing at a bloated-looking Fabber - organ twice the size of ours’, covered in sharp orange stripes. The Fabbed side is coated in an autoadaptive substance - like our healing one, but more complex, I didn’t think anyone would still have this one. It also has recording properties, so if you... excrete it…. it’ll provide a full readout of your biochemical preferences.

Does like… spitting it out count as excreting?

I… just a fifth exponent, they’re communicating with me on a local transmitter, I didn’t think anyone would still have that either. It’s… they say it’s best if it goes through your whole digestive system first.

Sweat dripped into the corners of my stretched red smile. “We… we have our own. Thank you.” Sunbite hastened to translate: They have some strong taboos around excretion. They wouldn’t even do it around us.

Had they done it around us? I hadn’t even noticed… how did it work?

Zach Flagg thrust his hand into the air with an expression of solemn duty out of a Waldo Beek opening montage. “Sir, I volunteer to share our biometrics through the scat drugs, sir.” OK, maybe more than a good sign.

They’d want to have everybody do it anyway, they don’t have a sample size to estimate human variability.

“We want to share our biometrics?” Beek scoffed. “God knows what kind of poisons they could cook up with it. One thing with our allies but… look over there.” He gestured lightly with his thumb towards the centre of the cooking ring.

A shining silver stem wound around the ring, spiralling into the stand supporting a large vocalizer that projected announcements like “12 standard units of mass 10th exponent at 34 standard units of extension 13th exponent and a beautiful opal lichen coat for 3 aesthetic marbles at Well 803!” Handling and appraising the “fish” in one pair of hands, a tall Gatherer tapped their fingers along the wire with another - presumably in a code but not the one I was just learning at a glance - wearing the golden ropes we had been looking for.

“What is that person doing?” I asked the pair that had approached us.

“They’re setting up the Ashirunalapilolahala,” the vocalizer spat out the Ahasurunu species name (the entire ten-note bank of Ahasurunu names was dedicated to their database of trillions of offworld species), which had no established Weir conceptual match, though the concept was clear enough as soon as Halation internalized it. “It’s a conductive plant that ancient undergrounders used for communications before the Network. These guys - they call themselves the Ashirunalapilolahala Fishers - have dug it out of the seed banks and started spreading it around here. There’s three of these fishing circles in just this Internexus, and a few more along some nearby gathering stations, and they all use this to compete and communicate. It’s sort of a demonstration.”

“It’s nice, but Ashirunalapilohala is just too messy, too much work,” the representative of another commune complained, jostling between us. “Somebody needs to send some real delving teams, there’s supposed to be another computational lifeform down here somewhere, people have matched repeating signals in pyrite veins on opposite sides of the Great Vault. We needed to get away from the acid-thunder anyway, but searching for Fools’ Bell is why we came down here.”

The Fisher overheard us and flickered a long tongue out like a frog, snapping in the air almost all the way to the while tugging lightly at their ropes (I tried not to let my interpretation of totally alien body language be coloured by the image of a Southern politician pulling his lapels). “Fools’ Bell is a legend. And if it was real and not a Solipsist and you figured out how to communicate with it there’s no reason to believe it would make a pact with us and not try to destroy us like half the computational life in the universe now. Anyone who ever searched for Fools’ Bell would have used Ashirunalapilohala, anyway. Undergrounders never stopped using it in the places Network access couldn’t reach.”

Other Towers were jumping in to interrogate them now, not even paying attention to us.

“But what’s the largest a network could get?”

“Wouldn’t you need everyone to stay still?”

“And become sitting ducks for all these aliens while they’re at it? Present company excepted.”

“Forget aliens, how would it survive cave-ins?”

“Back when we had the Network up,” our guide addressed me directly, “everyone could have just looked this up. Maybe if they’d relied on it less, a few could even remember. [This shit we really needed a shorter name for] evolved its conductive capability in the first place to react to cave-ins. When it can no longer send signals along a length, it triggers that section to drop off and regrow in new directions. With more sophisticated code, of course, we can improve this process. But there are even naturally occurring networks spanning whole plugs, from deep groundwater veins to the open air.”

“Didn’t the Tuber Plug just have a huge cave-in? Like the entire middle just dropped out. I don’t see that being enough to deal with something like that.”

I looked around startled - Tuber Plug was the local “name” (a three-to-four-gap translation) for the one the Lung was located in. The lie - it was a lie, right? hadn’t come from one of ours. Sunbite explained on my arm: they had already, negotiating their way through while we were under the tarp, talked a handful of drama-loving bystanders into asking leading questions and creating a cover where the Sunbites had carried out their mission.

“Of - of course there will be catastrophes. A system vulnerable to limited catastrophes is better than one that can only collapse in one extreme event. We undergrounders have always known this, but everyone else surely understands now.” They returned their attention to me. “We’re recruiting, see, to find people to plant it.”

“How much have you laid already?”

As more voices joined the argument (diminishing my ability to parse any of them), I was already debating in hushed tones, between myself, Halation, Zach and Jax how best to translate the word.

“Is ‘Entangleweed’ too twee? I feel like it sounds like something from a slice of life YA fantasy.”

“Dude weed lmao.”

“I’m more worried about it sounding similar to Janjaweed,” Zach considered. “Though depending on these guys’ deal that may end up being appropriate.”

“Did I tell you about the time Alastair and I almost got cancelled by Sudanese Tik Tok for calling a mixtape Ganjaweed Militias.”

“Dude, there’s people who fought those on our ship and they will kick your ass.”

The Fisher was glancing at me, and I glanced back. I slid my backpack back on. “I think I’m good for food for now. I want to try catching some myself first. Can I?”

“Sure! I don’t know how good your species’ vibratory sense is, but the difference between skill and chance is only a little under half on average. Not that that deters the people who practice for skill - the top percentile can get a lot better than that.” I noticed the more practiced playing with their lines like single-stringed harps.

“Allllright,” Beek rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s see how you keep up with an old hand.”

“How much of what you do on Earth is even gonna apply here?” I shot back. “You can’t ‘read the water’, and casting is just dropping the line straight down.” I grew up in a hick family too, I knew this stuff.

“A true fisher can feel…” he put on a decades old fake Asian accent “...the ripples in the water… like ripples in the dao.” He paused as if waiting for a reaction - I could see where the ‘Jester’ codename came from, regardless of being funny. “That’s what these guys are talking about, right? And none of my buddies believe me when I say I do that back home - wait till I tell them the aliens do it all the time!”

“Why don’t you ask them. I think they mean a real thing.” And why was I coming up with these boring straight-man answers? Because my mind wasn’t in it, mainly.

“Of course, in a place like this I feel more like I’m trying to fish a ball out of the hole at mini-golf. “Where… are these fish exactly?”

“In the deep groundwater flows.” What I’m translating as ‘water’ wasn’t exactly, let’s just leave it at that, I’ll do some appendices for chemical stuff at some point, I do enough of that in the paperwork already. Maybe I can just relax on this a bit, tell a fairytale. The underground ryugu palace. “Here, take this, it’ll help.” They handed me what looked like the upper layer of skin from a mushroom cap, curled around its edges in shapes similar to the sound projecting array from the platform. A hat, after all. The most focused fishers - curled up into almost motionless pillars - were also wearing them.

The hat was soundproofed like the tent on the back of the palanquin, blocking out every sound from the sides and above, so if I listened closely I could hear, for the first time, the hush of groundwater below. I didn’t know the real colour of anything in the Internexus - under the black light, even through the tent’s translucence everything was marbled in pointillist clouds of toxic rainbow - but the sound rising from the holes in the floor was grey, or a layer of silver leaf, polished by its echoes. I thought of the single-sense focus of Aqueduct’s favourite Phantasies - was this a cultural aesthetic? The phenomenology of feeling and manipulating your own insides, at least to me seemed related to this game of sensing in an imagined space through the faintest of signals, ones I had never developed the patience to appreciate. There were Fabbers fishing, as well as processing fish, here - a higher ratio to Gatherers, at a glance, than the rest of the crowds. There was also what had looked at first like the row of connected Towers was a single organism with maybe twenty, thirty pairs of legs. About six were idly fishing, while another dozen Towers (mostly on the other side) lined up to recline against this supertransport morph, which also had up to five joints in its fingers. Zach Flagg had also noticed - I caught him glancing and drifting over as inconspicuously as he could in its direction, while alternating furtive glances back at me; I waited for a disgusted-looking Beek to be distracted to give him a nod. Jax conveniently fell between them as another Tower’s fingers curled around his shoulder and pulled him into line, and two more fell on him.

The “Entangleweed Fisher” stepped over the ring to give me a line, pulling it from a pile of loops around the bottom of the central, along with a grooved wristband from which to spool and unspool it. At the end they looped it through what looked like a rubber hole ball dog toy; along with it they handed out long pale seedpods, but I could see other visitors slipped items of their own in, crystal baubles, urchinlike spores, compressed food packets.

I squinted - the textures of the two kinds of shining thread were slightly different, but… Are they related to the ropes we’re using?

Yes, these are Entangleweed after a line reaches a dead end, breaks off and dies, if you put it through the gilding procedure. No one’s used it for communication in generations, but it’s been gilded as fishing line. Not to mention the fishing and the line-laying are a very similar process. We were using it for this before we discovered its conductive properties - probably, no one really knows. Before the Network most of our history was transmitted within individual groups by cartridges, and so many of those are lost - biodegradable, of course, like everything else…

One of the things I’m hearing all the time about the Network here… I’d feel silly if I’d missed this while we were arguing about the word, but it couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t just real-time communication, like some early electrical wire-based technologies on our planet. It stored data - the Fabber I’m travelling with is always talking about files they wanted to download from the cloud. Can Entangleweed store information?

Much less, and our capacity will improve as we can store data for improvements. But to coordinate all those signals it always had a kind of rudimentary brain in a bulb, a modified fruiting body-

Was it… interoperable?

Again that word. Interoperable for what? We’re operating with it. If you mean conscious, not more than a plant that coordinates movements of sap instead of electricity, and we haven’t made it more so, we’re using a deliberately crude storage architecture because of the risks of machine consciousness, which is one of the things that slows our development.

Beek’s voice peaked over my ability to follow the conversation, echoes this time by the vocalizer: “So you guys don’t need a license or anything? No Fish & Wildlife Service breathing down your neck?”

“The network monitored populations. It’s hard to say now but we’re still only estimating 10% of the population along this stream it would take to start destabilizing populations.”

“We don’t know where half of our planetary population is. But they don’t seem to be here.”

Beek’s grin like beach-polished wood, angled with his shoulders straight down the hole beneath him, didn’t move at all from my angle, but no one here was familiar enough with human body language to care.

I nodded and decided to make at least a token effort at fishing before interrogating them further. Of course I could just use Halation. I didn’t want to cheat, but I did want to know what these rocks felt like as a lightweight carbon ball careening down them into the invisible waters - not that I hadn’t careened through more than enough of them the past few days, not that they were that different at any scale. I almost wanted to see one of the “fish” up close but - I let them roll down the line for the first few seconds as it fell, then got bored with the blurry flashes of space and momentum. I tried to remember fishing at home - had I liked it, or just not liked the people who invited me? Had I ever had a Huckleberry Finn moment in that blue checkered dress I hid from the Salvation Army bags from a farmhouse my dad foreclosed? It was one of those things that people said taught you about patience, and I didn’t like “learning about patience” because it was usually a veiled threat to stop fidgeting or reading when the family was doing something else, even though I didn’t mind patience when I came to it on my own. Fishing was about focusing on something you couldn’t possibly be aware of - not even faintly the way the Towers were, or I was if I let Halation enhance my senses enough. Feeling the line, or even feeling its weight shift - which was easier if I didn’t feel the line - reoriented me in space so I felt smaller, more precarious, like a balloon floating at the end of a line.

You don’t know how much we appreciate your offer to help us defend this Internexus, they reached over and tapped as I focused. You’re right about the risk of war taking root. Offworlders have already made large swathes of the surface uninhabitable. And yet their sympathizers are still among the refugees they force down here. Half of these people don’t even know how an Internexus works, and they no longer have a Network to look up procedures. The system here is already facing stressors it never has or was meant to. Underground has always been sparse, but that doesn’t mean we can’t accommodate and live here, that we have to start repelling people like you did on Earth. It just means we have to start taking the situation seriously.

Their fingers drew close around my neck as they tapped. How seriously would you be willing to take, for instance: not just defending this Internexus, or the existing neutral spaces. But making all of it - all the territory we connect by driving the warring offworlders out of our territory altogether.

On Earth, I might have automatically sympathized with this position. Or I might have recoiled at its cold overtones of isolationism. I would have decided at least partly based on where I was situated in relation to it. And I would have corrected, to some extent, against my own situation. I couldn’t tell, because here my situation was articulated so differently. Aren’t there sympathizers among the Towers as well. Everyone who has a stake in the Adipose one way or another - if not now, then when it comes here… Halation guided my fingers - I still hadn’t gotten the hang of the code myself.

Were they tapping on Beek’s shoulders the same? He was rambling on again, drawing a small coterie even though he wasn’t bothering to use the vocalizer, just listening: “They all these skinny little frickers? No big fat bastards like a largemouth bass?”

What were they imagining, I wondered, from his body language, from the sound of his voice? Even the long transport and the various Gatherers, including Zach, entangled in its now virtuosically tapping fingers were rapt. But I had to pay attention. We will prevent that. We don’t need the Adipose any more than we need a new living Network to bind with, or the Meteorological Synod - we’ve learned from that mistake. With Entangleweed, we will connect this planet on its own terms.

This was turning into a nightmare version of my own - Halation’s own - preferences. Then wouldn’t you be effectively joining the anti-Adipose side on your own terms? Which doesn’t lack for peace-seekers or provisions to establish neutral zones.

You do know more than you’re letting on, don’t you. We were just such a ‘neutral zone’. Our only connection was the private alignment of our guardian Network, and still we were attacked. We want no part in seeking peace among the stars. We will offer them nothing, and if they demand we will repel them. These will be our only terms, and they will be ours.

Is this why you tried to trick the Sunbite plug into destroying the alien camp in the Tuber Plug.

Did… did they do it? Is that where they found you?

We were captives there. They found us after we escaped the destruction you manipulated them into.

While we spoke, Halation had extended along the Entangleweed line, finding the nearest bulb in a demonstration tent where it was being used to print files onto what Aqueduct had called cartridges. Since it was an organic interface, they could symbiose with it slightly, although they didn’t know the coding language being used to store data on what appeared to be an enormous manifold of benzene sheets. But all they had to do was piggyback on a regular transmission of fishing numbers; our conversation was “encoded” in the same simple language of taps. From there they blocked it from its normal movement outwards to the other speakers and sent it solely to the storage bulb for someone to find (or not, depending on the course of action we decided). I was so absorbed in Halation’s single sense of data that my eyes rolled back in my head for a moment, but not understanding the significance, my interlocutor didn’t notice.

The bulb (which had a mirror hanging from the ceiling near the skylight) contained most of the obscure programs Aqueduct wanted, as well as the documents charting the way to the launch point. It transferred via a long strip that unfolded from out of the dense thatchwork that as far as we could make out made up its surface, velcro’d at the tip with tiny conductive hairs, that connected to the same direct port on a Tower’s crest as a cartridge (which it could also “print”, gridded sigil inscribing itself in capillaries of colour and flaking off). It reminded me a bit uncomfortably of the Weirs’ own symbiosis.

Aqueduct wanted to go anyway, and Sunbite was impatient to expose them, but we waited at least a little for the first reinforcements to arrive. Sunbite estimated at least six dozen Entangleweed Fishers were here, not counting any who weren’t wearing the regalia. (It was customary, especially in keeping with the principle of neutrality, for Towers to swap clothes or wear new costumes acquired at the Internexus, unless they specifically needed to be recognized, for instance meeting someone; the Fishers, however, seemed to want to make their presence visible.) But more than another unit would be suspicious. One of the Sunbites who’d stayed behind had to come out to tell me, and attempt to describe their movements - radio wasn’t working here.

Aqueduct disappeared with two others under the folds of a lilac tent with a curling peak like something out of a Tim Burton movie I couldn’t figure out how held up, while Jax, Beek and I tried to make sense of trade offers from almost everyone waiting with us.

“Who here thinks attempting to recruit at the Internexus and using it as a hub for an expansionary offence itself violate its neutrality?”

About sixty percent of hands went up in the near radius of the matte-black Fabber leading the protest, although a few less went up in an expanding one - the demographic being sampled wasn’t clear. I could only imagine how much things like this were easier with the Network - I could hear arguments and sounds of confusion around the edges, and a small rock clipped worryingly past Zach’s ear.

“We never saved any such conversation. It must have been injected into our database somehow.” One of Fishers objected. “The whole thing must be compromised, which means they’d

“So is Entangleweed that easy to penetrate? You’ve been telling us all this time that no one from outside Towers understands it! It seems more likely that it was just your mistake - you left it in the fishing data instead of wherever you meant to save it!”

“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been penetrated - if it’s simple organic chemistry, there are inherent security vulnerabilities!”

“This is exactly why the security of the Entangleweed network depends on not allowing offworlders underground! The offworlders and their Sunbite group sympathizers have breached the neutrality of the Internexus! Why are we waiting to drive them out?”

“The safest option,” another interjected, “would be to drive both out. The humans haven’t declared anything, but seem to know the inner workings of the anti-Adipose faction and came from one of their labs - we can’t assume they’re telling the truth about being refugees.”

“And if they come back with the rest of the faction, or some of the scary weapons they were offering to use for us, who’s going to defend you?

Even after spending several days with them, even after confirming the plan overnight, I had been unsure of how Sunbite themself would take this attention, but I was starting to understand Tower body language (partly through the Phantasy I had spent half the night sharing with Aqueduct on a new cartridge), the expansive tension that signalled excitement and a kind of triumphant embrace of hardship, the kind they must have felt when their parent group had forced them to strike out on their own instead of preventing it. They stepped up to the entrance of the tent, leaning in as they pushed its flaps open.

“If it’s false, you wouldn’t mind holding a referendum to commit the Entangleweed network, if it’s going to be hosted here, to the same standards of neutrality as the Internexus. If you intend to use this Internexus as a hub for a wider network of coordinated stations.”

A leader - or someone acting as one; staves and roles were exchanged as well as costumes here - stepped in front of me, splaying their hands over my shoulders. “Is all of this true? Would you be prepared to swear”-

My head bent back as another pair of hands meshed across my face, covering it with a fabric, stinging, sparks of all colours popping against my eyes, tendrils of tingling reaching up my nostrils and around the back of my mouth and into my brain, my brain was resisting them, resisting the simultaneous sleep/pain/nausea but not Halation, Halation was spilling out from every surface of my body, their instincts telling them they had just crash-landed on an alien planet whose atmosphere they couldn’t breathe and needed to find the nearest body that could -

“A Weir! We told you! They’re working with the anti-Adipose faction!”

The cloth fell away as Sunbite drove their staff through the chest of the Fisher holding it down, then just as Halation began to retract into my orifices Sunbite’s blood sprayed across my face as two rotating, grooved cylinders punched through their chest. “It’s now or never! Begin the deconsecration!” The voice of the unfamiliar morph, two of its arms ending in what I guess it’s safe to call drills (though I should note they weren’t tapered) was almost immediately swallowed up in the tremblings of riot. Its drills crashed into the ground and collapsed bridges over depressions in the rock on either side of me. Its face leaned close, eyes leering pink slits in the blacklight, and a bullet splashed through its neck.

Several more had already ganged up on Waldo Beek, avoiding his gun until one grasped the principle of line of fire and immediately threw themself forward and covered it, another going for his legs like a wrestler. Meanwhile, shaking off a nearby dogpile, a massive figure rose above the crowd - seven Towers docked together, hooked hands clamping on at the transport morph’s load-bearing shoulders, hopper legs lashing out at the end of arms, a second head swivelling at the end of the centre’s tail-arm, wielding two Entangleweed cat’s cradle slings in four hands. A volley of acid packets flew at it from the crowd and was beaten back with the fabric of the tent which it picked up from its tip and stretched out like a giant fan. Spinning it several more times (along with practically the whole compressed body of the Tower whose outstretched fingers were hooked into its framework) in a dancelike pattern raised enough wind to lift several lightweight nearby Towers off the ground.

How does that symbiosis communicate, I asked Sunbite through Halation’s retracted strand, as I tried to focus a bead through the colossus’ spinning limbs on its central body. If I take out, say, the head, does it all go down, or is there a window it needs to reorganize? Are they specially bonded, or can it just pull somebody out of the crowd?

The colossus formation uses direct neural communication between implants. You need access permissions to dock like that, but in a cult like this probably everyone has them. As if to confirm, I saw more colossi rising up around the edges of the Internexus. Three, four, five, and I still couldn’t see everywhere from this low. Assume any brain could be doing the processing - what you need to look for is structural weak points.

As I attempted that - yelling the same order to Zach who probably knew how better than me - two packets came flying at me from its tail arm. Diving out of the way, I realized belatedly that they weren’t just acid like the Sunbites had used, they were explosives. A steel-wool paw of burning air threw me back on top of one of the Gatherers who had tackled Waldo Beek, and even with just one good arm I was strong enough to wrestle them off, shove aside the large rock they had dropped on Beek’s diaphragm and let him deal with the remainder as he sat up and unfolded himself above me.

A projecting voice Dopplered around the edges of the cavern: The humans have attacked the Internexus on behalf of the anti-Adipose faction. They are allied with the Weirs, aliens that can invade bodies. They have unknown weapons. Our intelligence suggests a coordinated attack planned between multiple groups of offworlder collaborators. In order to respond, the Entangleweed alliance will temporarily deconsecrate the Internexus on behalf of the collective interest of all Towers in order to expel all offworlders and their allies.

Beek grinned, hefting his rifle on his shoulder, and all my homicidal thoughts about him since I’d met him slammed into me like lightning in a lightning rod, my muscles seizing, not moving as he was covering me (and Halation holding me steady). “Well, isn’t that perfect. They’re doing all our work for us.”

Just as one of its hopper hooks swept down towards us another commune leader, mostly naked and covered in vortical brushstrokes that glowed cold crimson under the blacklight, landed on the central shoulders of the nearest colossus in a long gliding leap, knocking it off balance. “You can’t deconsecrate the Internexus without a majority, you arrogant egg-eaters! How will you even know who to drive out? No one knows who’s on what side since the Network fell, this is the only place that’s a good thing!”

“And is that the best you dare to hope for? Sooner or later it’ll go the way of everything else. We’ve passed through three Internexes that have fallen already.” Three sets of hands at the end of one arm picked them up from behind and began to stretch them backwards as they flailed behind them with their staff’s bladed base.

Then the colossus tipped backwards, barely even moving for the first 30 degrees, like an asset being rotated in an editing program. The palanquin, our original getaway plan, had crashed into its legs from behind, with three of our men aiming guns out all other sides. “Get on!” threw what I now recognized as an Entangleweed fishing line down - Beek grabbed it and, to my eternal humiliation, me under his other arm. One of the tentacles, peeling aside the tent, scooped up Aqueduct, who was curled up like a millipede around the bulb, still connected. The other leader had landed somehow on its side.

“You’ll need to defend the consecrating cairns,” our hitchhiker told me and I thought for a sinking second they meant the cairns the children had been playing in - the children were safe in the air anyway, flying in agitated knots like murmurations of starlings, Scouts trying to calm them down and corral them. Gobs of spit or excrement occasionally rained down and hit the canopy above us. But there were different kinds of cairns here. “If they are unmade, the pact is no longer binding.” The children’s cairns were massive honeycombs of black basalt, maybe broken off from the same pillars as the central platform, whereas the giant silhouettes around the edges of the cavern bent protectively over their comrades picking away one piece at a time at heaps of gifts not unlike the ones I had seen in the fishing baubles, azurite eggs, flat fossil-stones and petrified lobes of fungus. Throwing as many as they could back to their original owners (I saw one thrown back at them, one caught proudly and then the hand disappearing under its neighbours), sorting others into different sacks.

Beek lowered his rifle and aimed as we approached. The bullet sheared straight through the blurring butterfly wing of a fabric shield painted harmlessly with the impacts of dozens of acid-packets. Not that they even noticed us coming when it passed through. A stick figure with a deflated head slid off the side of the pile.

The colossus charged at it. The two soldiers on the sides of the palanquin pivoted and shot out both of its shoulders, which swung at its sides from twisted hands or feet crawling around to find new purchase on each other. One gave up and dropped straight off as the other released and reattached to the end of another limb, an extra-long whip of an arm ending in a pair of spring-loaded legs slicing at us like an axe. Aqueduct told me to grab onto something as the palanquin rolled on its side and caught the arm in two of its tentacles, twisted. This time we got off a whole Tower who jumped at us, Rider kicking the vehicle ten metres through the crowd. As I fell, I reached into my pocket and pulled out an opalescent tube - the Corpuscle decompressed in midair.

Aqueduct joined me in one of the bubbles, which left me the choice - someone I trusted, or someone I didn’t. Someone I wanted to keep close, or someone I wanted to keep closer.

The Towers who had been clinging with us grabbed Zach and Jax and glid to a safe landing. “Stick together in groups of two!” I yelled through a Bulbul speaker - walkie-talkies still not working - as I accelerated ahead and rammed the colossus’ legs while the thicket of anonymous limbs covered them in my hindsights.

If other communes had vehicles even like this, I thought as we flipped the Corpuscle up and hit the reeling giant again with Beek’s spinning bubble, spraying as it fell back, it wouldn’t be hard to take down a few of these even without guns - but behind the cairns, Geoplaque was already climbing up the largest gaps in the walls, keeping everyone from the encampment catacombs out and the Internexus itself in. At the same time more Towers were starting to climb the cairns - some clambering and throwing items away, others trying to pull them down, the wave rising and falling with their efforts.

“Stop pulling shit down or we shoot!” I yelled, forgetting to use the vocalizer, but getting enough across for the waveform to freeze.

Beek wheeled his ball of the Corpuscle around ahead of mine, reconfiguring the mechanism and dragging my gun off target. I wasn’t so much shocked by his insubordination as that Halation - who still relayed all our mental commands and communications through the Corpuscle - was permitting it. Officer Beek, what are you doing.

Let them take it down. We’re going to need this as a forward operating base.

I told you we wouldn’t be doing that before we even came. My bubble rose up over and ahead of his, swiping two Fishers off the cairn before being caught by two hands of a colossus.

That was on the assumption that we could at least secure free movement in and around here. At this point they’re as likely to kick us out even if we help them. Even just seeing this thing - isn’t this enemy tech?

As if on cue three of the drills Sunbite’s killer had used, in one hand, drove into my bubble’s surface. Within seconds I could sense the material was strong enough to break through head on; I let the bubble slip alongside it and spin, grinding both to a halt. Then Aqueduct rotated over both of us, climbing on the colossus’ shoulder and dumping several glowing green ovoids that exploded in narrow pillars of fireworks that kept burning for thirty seconds, sucking in spirals of air.

Spear-fishing - I didn’t have the mental space to absorb the context, as much as I wanted to disappear into it, except that it was an old undergrounder tech from the same era as Entangleweed itself - I saw this in 66100 Star-Green Bow, but they really have it in here.

The towering flames twinkled and vanished down the gaps in the Internexus floor, leaving molten indentations in the shoulder, torso, crest, eye of four Towers who dropped away from their megamorph, regrouping to heal themselves - and in the materials in the cairn. As we fell back on top of it, scattering them further, I saw the crowd climbing into a geodesic dome over us.

How many more weapons do they have in these things? Can you tell where the other ones are?

In response they only rotated themself to the front of the Corpuscle again - I was getting used to this kind of synchronization, feeling more like the symbiote myself - and sped off up the wall behind us, winding between the growing number of Towers that had taken to climbing them en masse, showering projectiles down on… mostly the Fishers, who were picking up their tents and moving under them. Over the heads of the crowd I could see Zach Flagg riding the huge transport morph rearing up, firing on vulnerable points in a colossus along with two of Beek’s men until it stopped rearranging itself and fell into individuals to heal.

Right - they could do that. How long would we have until any of these things reconfigured themselves? Fifteen minutes?

Halation - am I in the wrong here? Am I hesitating where I can’t?

Don’t make me think right now. I’m in too many places to think. Make up your own minds.

The metallic coldness of her desperation scraped a layer off my brain.

Aqueduct, fab as much of that Geoplaque clearing stuff as you can. We’re going to use it at - I’m not even gonna try and translate it, but I’m glad the Towers had a three-dimensional coordinate system for different geological features in everyday speech, so I could indicate the positions I was pretty sure our reinforcements were at without any confusion.

The waves up and down the sides of the central platform exceeded anywhere else in frequency, but no one seemed to have risen above the lower levels, or even seized on an innovative strategy to guard it. The high ground probably held less advantage for them than for us since their weapons had less range and precision - you could see the cairns from up there, but you couldn’t necessarily shoot them. Even our range wasn’t ideal - our actual snipers were outside.

The Tower leader whose name I still didn’t know came crashing back through the crowd toward us on our palanquin, with two more of our men - that gave us three units. We strafed the edge of the cavern and shot packets of remover at the Geoplaque targets in passing while staying out of the way of the colossi, trying to shoot them from a distance as much as possible while staying high to avoid collateral damage. Not that there weren’t other possible collaterals at height. I didn’t see the children any more - I think they had gone back inside their cairns - but there were Scouts zipping all around them, wielding little handheld weapons like tasers. Zach’s unit was holding colossi away from two cairns with covering fire until another - one of the ones we had collapsed already? a new assemblage? - pulled itself up from the crowd and threw itself on top of the transport morph, trying to tear them apart with huge specialized claws made from paired legs.

Moments before the writhing serpentine body that had been caressing its countless lovers the night before went the way of Eva 03, sniper rounds slammed into the colossus one joint at a time.

Down in the crowd, a Tower lifted another one of the bulbs, torn loose from its stem, like a victim’s heart in a Mesoamerican sacrifice.

As our reinforcements crawled cautiously out of the walls, hooking and rappelling where the Towers could climb as freely as kids on a jungle gym - a vulnerable position they were resolving effectively by proceeding one at a time under arcs of suppressive fire - one was knocked out of the air by what looked at first like an arc of black liquid, but sliced across his face and neck like a blade, from the upside-down gazebo where our target, the last bulb, hung, now tied into the ropes of a thin green-and-white Fabber.

It liquefied again and swung back towards us, slicing to my amazement through the surface of the Corpuscle and Halation’s barely conscious pain as we swerved around it.

That’s a… the Corpuscle’s increasingly overloaded connection blocked out Aqueduct’s enthusiastic identification. It was like if Halation could control their liquid form in real time without a medium, I got it. Beek and I, symmetrically rotated forward, opened fire.

All this time I had imagined - hoped - real war, at least, would be less like a game. But the adrenaline drummed out every quality of my surroundings except the rising and falling of towers of data. And I - or what was no longer I - flowed between them the way I had thought I could only flow between words.

Waldo Beek, next to me, was a black hole in Halation’s mental field.

The persona I had found so grotesque, I realized, was both a reprieve from and a parody of this.

They jumped off as we fired, wings opening, and shot toward us faster than I had seen any Tower move in the air - faster, I realized, because they were using the aerial enhancements Aqueduct had told me about.

Their weapon splashed down, even in liquid form staying contiguous across its gapped spread, sharpening into a bladed net shredding the surface of the Corpuscle to bits.

Halation suspended in the air between and around it, rainbow and black intertwined.

Liquid again. A bullet had, within a third exponent or some shit, passed through its user’s head from the ground.

A tiny face between tessellated voids, Jax smiled up at me, for another split second before a moving tarp fell over him. My mouth open and dry and silent, I grasped the bulb as I fell past the corpse. Without time to disentangle it from the netting of the Fisher’s uniform, I clutched it to the surface of the bubble while its enhanced wings - not just the wings, spread out in slats of lightweight featherlike tubules, but the body, which up close I could see had a jet suction tube built in through its thorax - spun out of control.

Halation could connect us - but not do much else. I couldn’t hear her at all any more. She had reduced herself to a conduit, every point of her body transmitting signals from one part of the Corpuscle to another. Aqueduct could send the signals to control it, but… my own consciousness was getting overwhelmed trying to even keep track of it. Maybe if we jettisoned one. Fuck Waldo Beek. Maybe this would actually be my fantasy all along, or maybe I would die first. When I opened my eyes I was being suspended among sounds somewhere between by my clothes by a swarm of children.

We sailed effortlessly across to the other troop position, bombarding it with what remained of the Geoplaque remover. Our second unit began its descent - only for the entire wall to collapse behind - on top of - them through the fizzing hiss of explosive fungus. Guts, limbs, gear, brains - not just human but Towers - rolled down the side of the Internexus, crashing into the cairn and sending items rolling into the void. Below, I could see almost everyone who had been hunkering down, ambivalent rise up and fall on the Fishers in one massive wave.

On the other side of the Internexus, four out of five of our reinforcements had now surrounded the remaining cairn, barking through a vocalizer to back away or they’d shoot. I glided around to the top of the platform, head pounding, recuperating. (Halation recuperating more than me. Me being a body for Halation to recuperate in.) And sitting there like Lucifer in Cabanel’s painting, I heard Beek’s voice rise from all the vocalizers of the Entangleweed network at once. He must have seized the last bulb at some point, I thought.

“The Weir user has been captured and isolated, and will be banished from the Internexus in accordance with its neutrality pact. The rest of the human delegation promises to abide by and defend the neutrality pact, and will freely submit to the same testing the Fishers used to identify her. We are happy to prove that none of us have had any contact with a Weir, or claim any affiliation with them.”

I looked down. Zach’s unit had surrounded the base of the platform, five pointed up at me.

A Bulbul looped around my head. Jax’s voice, recorded, crackled out of it. Don’t worry, it’s not a mutiny, we’ll keep you in the loop. Just go on ahead to the launch point. I was too tired to think about it.

I travelled through the magnetic tunnel in the fetal position, though it felt somewhat good to know the Towers had a different name for it, without its human connotations of infantile regression, something like “capsule”. Back to back with Aqueduct, Halation sharing a single Phantasy between us from the bulb. I felt her presence, recovering, like a head on my shoulder.

The Phantasy enclosed us in an entirely black, soundless, featureless space, without any interference from our surroundings except a very faint awareness of the movement of the basket around our bodies, enough to be alerted if anything went wrong. Only a single beeping, chiming sound, almost like a note struck out of a bird’s song like a bead fallen from a necklace, repeating at mathematically regular intervals.

I had been in a relationship with an electronic musician with a religious devotion to craftsmanship for three years. I had never heard a sound so perfect in itself, so inexhaustible to detailed attention without giving away the slightest hint of a distinct detail. (She wouldn’t object to my saying this, only to being unable to hear it.) Only when I had sunk so deep into the sound that I thought I was imagining the colour synesthetically did I realize the Phantasy had in fact, added another sense, a blue-green light pulsing at the centre of what could no longer be called my field of vision.

The pulses changed in number, in interval, though the intervals were still made up of regular units, multiplied or divided, seemingly at random, and as I tried to make out whether they were following any pattern, or saying anything, if I could hover over all of them in the total emptiness of the Phantasy, as if outside of time, I realized, or thought, that I was determining the patterns myself by thinking about them. I would anticipate one thing, and it would happen; but this didn’t give me a sense of control, it created a strange nervous tension, as the patterns seemed to be anticipating my own anticipation. My anticipation as I experienced it wanted to not know, which created more than one possibility, but my anticipation as externalized in the pattern knew ahead of me, resolving my anticipation while deferring anything so external that it would have been an answer. And no matter how closely I examined this dynamic I got no closer to pinning it down, as it was already absolutely simple, yet infinitely detailed, like the sound and the light.

The light, however, was getting brighter without my thinking about it, as I didn’t think about it, filling up more and more of the darkness of my inattention. And when I opened my eyes it seemed like a seamless transition, as if all along it had simply been the dusty turquoise jade of an everyday Towers sky I had been shot into. (When had we been plugged into the shuttle? Aqueduct informed me that it was mostly automatic, but that they had facilitated a bit through their own experience of the Phantasy - once you got the hang of it, “lucid” as they said, you could even use the patterns to encode interactions with the outside world.) The original point from which the colour leached into everything, even the grey grubby suds of cloud, was Towers’ sun, which was white - how could it be anything else, at this distance, at this brightness? Even an eclipse didn’t change the whiteness of our own sun’s rays.

And this sun was half-eclipsed - by a massive slate-blue sphere, recessed with concentric rings, serpentine silhouettes flying around it.

Three times the height of the Tuber plug in the air, I sighted for the first time the enemy.