Machine leans on his remaining chainsaw and shudders. His servos are dying. The Maiden appears before him, holding her simple sword.
“I destroyed your home,” he grinds. “I slaughtered innocents to draw you out, but you I cannot touch. Now I decay, and I cannot stop hunting you! Why not end this? Why do you only watch?”
“Observation changes the thing observed,” she says.
“But I can’t change you!” His dorsal flamethrowers belch frustration.
“Then I must be nothing,” she says.
Machine understands, then. “I wish,” he groans, “to destroy nothing.”
She nods. Machine’s cameras flicker, and go dark at last.
Barrister only exhales when they rematerialize in the darkened Louvre. “Made it,” he sighs. “And got rid of the Extinctioners at last!”
“They won’t be slipstreaming again,” agrees Verla, checking around for guards. “I just hope we didn’t alter the timeline much.”
Barrister shrugs and sits down to undo the latches on his jet boots. “It wasn’t a designated Flux Period,” he says. “Surely Chronastromy HQ would have informed us–”
“We have to go back,” says Mario hoarsely. “We have to go back now.”
“What?” says Verla.
But Mario just points one trembling finger at Mona Lisa’s bloody, sharp-fanged grin.
Betty and Idaho mingle into each other at a cocktail party. A fish cocktail party. Because they’re fish.
(Fishes?)
(Fish.)
“I’m working on a new fiction,” Betty says casually. “Kind of a metaphysical adventure.”
Idaho blinks, which is how fish nod. “Yeah? What’s the premise?”
Betty needs little prodding. “Well, you know the Ick? Its scientific name actually depends on the use of ours. Ichthyophthirius. Ichthyo. See? It’s like–our worst fear is only an extension of ourselves.”
Idaho blinks again, impressed.
“Just something I came up with a while back.” Betty sips her fish-margarita. “Fresh, huh?”
“Way fresh,” says Idaho.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Grumpy Tim Coe finds a Platonic form on his porch. It’s The Circle. It’s glassy white. Its edge is sharp as nothing.
Grumpy Tim Coe shows The Circle to some scientists. “Harrumph,” they say. “Mere philosophy.”
He shows it to some philosophers. “Oh,” they say, “the concrete is for artists.”
He shows it to some artists. “A meaningless exercise in form,” they say. “Go away.”
Grumpy Tim Coe goes home. He takes The Circle out to his back yard. He sets it on a stump.
“Am I not justified?” he asks the world, grumpily, and then smashes it with a bat.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Austin lets the hot water beat her neck like she’s supposed to, only it doesn’t really relax anything. It just beats.
She grimaces, then tastes copper again. Stupid. Has to keep her face still. She spits the blood on the floor of the shower, where it momentarily has some substance: a coagulant swirl, like a jellyfish, like the eggs Rocky used to down–a bit of life. Then it’s gone.
It’s already clotting. Will it ever stop, she wonders. Will they ever give up? She imagines tired little gnomes, grumbling and shoring, healing forever in the endless onionskin of her lips.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
When Luck wakes up, Blot’s standing outside the bars of the wagon.
“Are you,” he shakes his head. “What are you doing here?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t have any more bread.”
“You pushed me away,” she says. Luck notices that she’s trembling; she looks exhausted. Her boots are too big, stolen. She must have been following the caravan for days. “With one finger and now I burn, I can’t rest until I’m near you. What did you do?”
“I didn’t,” he says. “I…” He stops, because he sees it now: on her forehead, his fingerprint, worked in new pink scar.
The spilled nerve agent induced acute apotemnophilia in ninety-four percent of those exposed. It was nonlethal. It wasn’t supposed to exist.
In Grosse Pointe, a woman helped her daughter remove six fingers with a knife and pliers. A Bloomfield grandfather sawed off his leg. Few died, surprisingly–the agent accelerated the clotting process. The only populations spared were prisoners and mental patients, without access to sharp enough objects.
Loren’s unsurprised when the bill comes across his desk. They’re only twenty percent, in Detroit, but each could yield four healthy transplants.
He leans on his remaining hand, hates himself, and considers it.
The Horde spills across the downtown bridges, ravening and howling.
“Mister Mayor?” says an aide, in the command post atop Fifth Third Tower. “We need to evacuate.”
But Abramson just watches them pour in. “No, Schneider. Today we fight back.”
“Sir?”
Abramson fishes inside his shirt and pulls out a plain white medallion. He holds it high.
“Now, damn you,” he whispers. “Now!”
The medallion flickers, then begins to glow. Outside there’s a great creaking and splintering, and then the Gallapaloozae surge into view: a hundred horses, every color and design, a fiberglass army that crashes head-on into the undead tide.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
“Look!” says Senji. “Pegasi!” He points eagerly to where the creatures are swooping and soaring around one end of a rainbow.
Hawthorne snorts. “Crude creatures,” he says. “Ungainly air-wallowers! Nothing like my helicorns!”
“But those, ah,” says Senji, “didn’t those tend to–”
“So they decapitated a few test riders,” snaps Hawthorne. “So what? Grist for the fodder! There are risks to any great invention, and now I know them. My new hanging-basket contrivance solves all that–just you wait and see!”
Senji is watching, later, as Hawthorne–in that very basket–learns the hard way that helicorns don’t come house-trained.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
“No way is Cardinal Vanzetti going to lose to this clown!” Sacco’s teeth are blinding. “Haha it’s impossible! Come on guys am I right?”
Valentina only glares, and watches.
“The Papacy Orb will be mine,” screams Cardinal Katzmann, down in the Sacristy Pit, “when I unleash this attack! Level Eight! Mega Catachuuu–”
Valentina and Sacco gasp.
“–uuuuuuu–”
Vanzetti’s face is impassive in Katzmann’s flickering light.
“–uuuUUU–”
“Counterstrike!” snaps Vanzetti, at last. “Charism Level Ten! Crozier–BLAST!”
“–UUUMEN RITE!”
Their attacks collide, great torrents, throwing off light and thunder like the sweat flying from Sacco’s head.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005