This double-issue’s authors have made the decision easy for me by providing such eloquent treatments of the theme of “exits.” Looking at these works as a group, I realized they provided the perfect ending, and if there’s anything I’ve learned about fiction in the past few years it’s that you must always stop when you reach the ending.

Charles M. Saplak’s I’d Be Deleted, told through the email correspondence of a fictional editor and writer, is about a particularly dramatic exit from the world of spec-fic zines.

In Madelaine’s Echo, Shelly Li (who also recently contributed The Architect of Apathy) does that thing the famous writers do. You know, the thing where a few thousand words of narrative make you feel like you’ve known the protagonist your whole life, and you actually care what’ll happen to her after the story ends? It’s about girl’s escape from a virtual-reality life-counseling exercise that lasts for years of subjective time.

Megan Arkenberg’s The Copperroof War proves that a labyrinth story can have flesh-and-blood characters, passions, intrigues, and a vivid sense of place. But it’s also about the stir-craziness inherent in the genre—and its natural solution. Megan Arkenberg also contributed the poem Somnambulis way back in Issue 3.

That’s another reason this issue feels like an ending—it reunites so many of the greatest authors from past issues.

Heather Parker’s A Chance for Life is an interesting bookend to her previous Labyrinth Inhabitant story The Experiment—that was the one where the ordinary English couple got locked away in a biodome with people from every other nation and not enough food, to predict what would happen in the impending eco-collapse. A Chance for Life starts with a very similar setup and goes in another direction, a bit like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias trilogy.

Kristine Ong Muslim takes the prize for most contributions to Labyrinth Inhabitant (and given her prolific career, I’m sure that’s a distinction she can claim at many other publications as well). The Lonely People is her only prose work on the site, but once again her characters have found a home that would be a perfectly lovely place except that it is alive and hungry and it is rapidly digesting them.

Lee Marvin and the Long Night, by Nick Cole, may not seem like a callback to Labyrinth Inhabitant’s past, but it feels that way to me because I first tried to buy it for Issue 4. It’s a surprisingly warm story about a virtual reality private eye who finds a higher calling.

Alexandra Seidel’s Turns, Twists; Lost Things is a sumptuously imagined poem about maze-running, emblematic of how excellent poetry has repeatedly slipped past a tone-deaf, untrained editor and onto the site.

And finally, because there won’t be any more Labyrinth Inhabitant after this issue, I no longer had to worry about policing the boundaries of the weird “artificial environment” theme! I was free to accept anything, no matter how goofy. I no longer had to insist that my website wasn’t “really” intended for stories about Theseus’s labyrinth and the Minotaur, and I no longer had to scold authors for daring to submit stories with scenes that actually took place outdoors. That meant I got to accept Richard Zwicker’s Daedalus and Icarus and Jack Dweeb, which is goofy awesome. It’s a witty, propulsive gumshoe pastiche and a terrific epilogue for the site.

I feel like, with these additions, I can look back on Labyrinth Inhabitant as a complete work. One reason I started Labyrinth Inhabitant was to introduce more collaboration into my creative life, and the real pleasure of editing Labyrinth Inhabitant has been the opportunity to work together with so many talented storytellers. Year in and year out, the quality of work published here has consistently exceeded my expectations. I hope everyone else who participated found it as positive an experience as I did.

Matt Carey is the editor of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine.

Before I got here, I worked out of Athens in a small office near the marketplace with my assistant.  Farraday has most of the qualities you’d want in a subordinate:  industrious, quiet, unassuming, and an anonymous appearance.  One wouldn’t mistake him for a Greek god, but he does look like the anonymous human form a Greek god might take if he wanted to go undercover in search of tail.  You could say we have a symbiotic relationship.  I make him the butt of my jokes and he covers my ass.  It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it.

It all started two months ago when I was arguing with a papaya salesman who loves to haggle.  I was just trying to walk through the marketplace and, as usual, he started an argument with me.  I said it was a nice day and he said it wasn’t.  I don’t even like papayas, and he argued with me about that.  I was saved by the sudden appearance of a disheveled, desperate looking middle-aged man whose unwashed sandy hair and beard had that hurricane blown look.  He grabbed me and spouted the following clipped phrases into my ear:  “Son pushed off cliff…a bird in the hand…jealousy a killer.”

I slapped him a couple of times and said to stick to the facts.  I’ve devoted my investigative career to editing out clients’ suppositions, guesses, opinions, etc. because you know you’re skating on thin ice with such things.  And only a fool would skate on ice in southern Greece.  I’m no fool.  I’m a Dweeb.

On his second try, he was surprisingly articulate.  His name was Menongitis, though he preferred to go by Menon.  His son, Talos, had been pushed off a 200-foot cliff.  The suspect, an uncle and brilliant inventor named Daedalus, had disappeared.   Menon wanted to hire me to find Daedalus and bring him to justice.  I immediately sent word to Farraday to join me at the scene of the crime.

A half hour later Farraday and I were peering down a forbidding precipice.  Nothing could have survived that fall except maybe a batch of my ex-wife’s nutmeg cookies.   I turned to the family, who had gathered en masse, all twelve of them, including four knockout young daughters, and said, “This is a clear case of push coming to shove coming to plummet like a lead balloon off a 200-foot cliff.”

Farraday asked if there was a reason Daedalus wanted Talos dead.  I believe Farraday’s reason for asking this was to impress Menon’s daughters.  I myself am not a big motive man.  The guy pushed his nephew off a cliff.  Does it really matter why he did it? Do people ask why Zeus castrated his father?  No one stops and speculates that maybe he didn’t want another brother like Hades.  The crime was committed and you go from there.  But Farraday persisted in his line of thought, adding, “What if Talos was trying to murder Daedalus and Daedalus was just defending himself?”

I pulled Farraday aside and said patiently, “We’re trying to deal with the some questions here by supplying appropriate answers.  And what are you doing?  YOU’RE COMING UP WITH MORE QUESTIONS!  You’re muddying the waters, Farraday.  You can lead a detective to water but you can’t make him drink it if it’s muddy.  Though I have half a mind to make you drink it to make an example of you.” Farraday said he agreed I had half a mind.  I could see he was upset so, to indulge him, I suggested we try to ascertain if indeed Talos might have wished the death of his uncle.  Ten minutes of questioning revealed that Talos worshipped Daedalus and the only time he might have wished for his uncle’s death was just before the latter pushed him off the cliff

“Now that we’ve established that, tell me exactly when the crime took place?” I asked.

“About two hours ago,” Menon said.

“Just two hours ago?  So no one’s even inspected Talos’s body yet.”

“Talos?  He’s in the house.” I thought I misunderstood him, but before I could question him further, he rushed to his humble dwelling.  Breathless, he returned with a partridge.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Talos, Jack Dweeb; Jack Dweeb, Talos,” he introduced us.  I looked hopelessly at the bird, thinking, we’ve got one guy off a cliff and another guy off his nut.  Then I glanced at Farraday, but he was wearing his poker face, the only one he had.   You could tell Farraday the world was going to end in five minutes and he’d think for a minute then say, “I’ll raise you five.”  There was nothing to do but talk to the Partridge Family.

“So, your son is a partridge,” I said, my eyes rolling down the river.  “It might have been a mistake on your part to assume I was aware of this.  Was your wife on medication when he was conceived?  Birdseed or something?”

Menon, his suddenly brusque manner implying I was the crazy one, said, “He wasn’t a partridge when Daedalus pushed him off.  His life was saved when Minerva, who is partial to creative people, turned him into a partridge.”

Farraday tapped me on the shoulder.  “Who’s Minerva?”

“Minerva, Athena, Pallas Athena, Parthenos.  Same thing,” I said.

He shook his head.  “You know, I’ve always wondered why most Greeks have only one name but gods have about 27 of them?”

I turned back to Menon.  “You saw Minerva do this?”

“No, Talos told me.”

I nodded.  “Let me write this down.  ‘A little bird told me.’” Farraday suggested we interrogate the partridge.  I said, “Sure.  Why don’t we just ask him where Daedalus went?”  Menon said he already had.  He pointed to a short trail of bird shit.  It pointed south…toward Crete.

I didn’t believe that bird as far as I could throw him.  On the other hand, I was afraid not to go after Daedalus because if I didn’t, Athena might construe it as sign of disrespect.  I sent Farraday down to the docks to make the arrangements for a trip to Crete.  My parting words were, “Don’t let them rip you off.” An hour later he came back with the news that we sailed in two days at sunrise. and he’d gotten an excellent travel package.

Two days later Farraday and I got up before the sun and rushed to the docks.  I knew something was wrong when I saw the name of our ship, The Flotsam.   It also seemed rather Spartan, a no-no in Athenian circles.  My growing fears were compounded when, as I stepped onto the gangplank, an armored pug ugly guard grabbed and threw me onto the deck, causing me to drop my knapsack on the dock.  I picked myself up and turned to my unwanted usher.

“You know, I’ve been walking for 35 years and have managed very well without your help.”

“Shut up!” he snarled, spraying me with his slobber and spilling me to the deck again.  I looked forward to many a night comparing Homeric epithets with this moron.  In an act of preventative altercation, I asked him to kindly throw me my knapsack.  He grunted, picked up my bagged belongings and tossed them errantly into the sea.  “Must have weakened my arm throwing you,” he muttered.  I just smiled, took his tip out of my pocket, and tossed it overboard.  Fortunately, Farraday got onto the ship unmolested while the booted barbarian was giving me the sum total of his attention.  I tried to report my treatment to the captain, but no one wanted to talk to me.  I went up to a burly fellow patching a sail and he acted like I was dead.  I went up to someone swabbing the deck, a heavily scarred young man who couldn’t have been more than 18, and he also completely ignored me.  I thought, how can this ship stay in business?  Before I could get any further, I ran into my gangplank nemesis again.  With his right claw he grabbed my ear and, for balance, clasped Farraday’s lobe with his left.  He led us below to a small, dank room, inside of which huddled five disconsolate men and seven equally disconsolate women.  They seemed completely unfazed by our sudden landing in their midst, courtesy of the guard’s drop kick.  I could see they weren’t going to start any conversations, so after I picked myself up, I said, “Do you think they have any folding chairs in storage?”

The oldest man of the group looked at me pityingly.  “Don’t you know what’s going on here?  We’re the fourteen Athenians to be sacrificed this year to the Minotaur of King Minos.” I recognized one of the reparations Athens had to pay to Crete for losing the last war.

I glared at Farraday.  “How much was the second cheapest passage to Crete?”

The days passed with a numbing sameness, though once land was out of sight, the crew loosened up.  While at night we had to stay in our damp, depressing community room, during the day we were free to roam the ship as long as we didn’t disturb the sailors.   Lack of sleep left me with little energy, however.  One of the captives had a recurring dream of being a discus thrower.  Every night he won the Olympics while I got whacked in the jaw.  I finally told him if he didn’t switch to chess I’d start dreaming I was the javelin champion in his direction.  Farraday and I spent most of our day sitting on the deck looking out at the Aegean Sea.  It was hard to keep up our spirits.

“How many gods have you prayed to?” Farraday asked, giving me an incredulous look when I said I hadn’t prayed to any.

“Every time I pray to one god, I piss another one off,” I explained.  “If I asked Poseidon to send a tidal wave to overturn the ship and let us escape, Aeolus would get insulted and blow us back to Crete.  If I prayed to Zeus, he’d say, ‘What are you bothering me for?  I’m busy.’ And punctuate it with a lightning bolt.  And then there’s all those minor sea deities like Triton, Proteus, and Nereus.  You can’t win.  I just try to be an equal opportunity polytheist.”

Farraday nodded and said, “Oh yeah.  Nereus.  That’s a good one.  I forgot about him.” He closed his eyes and silently mouthed a few words.

Intrigued, I asked him how many gods he’d prayed to.  He thought for a moment.  “Poseidon, Athena, Zeus, Triton, Proteus, Ares, the fifty sea nymphs, and Dionysus.”

“Dionysus?  The fertility god?  What did you pray to him for?”

“In case I hear something from the fifty sea nymphs.”

It took us five months to reach our destination, a speed only Odysseus, when he took ten years to get from Troy to Ithaca, would have approved of.  My pet duck could have gone faster and I had him for dinner eighteen months ago.  I have no doubt some god was having fun with us, most likely some of the same ones Farraday conversed with.  As the craggy hills of Crete appeared in the distance, we were once again banished to our quarters until we reached land.  My only hope was to try and get sight of King Minos himself.  I had heard he was a man who called a spade a spade, the kind of guy I like.  If you see a spade and call it a pick axe, I don’t like you.  I had to wonder about someone whose wife preferred the sexual favors of a bull to her husband, however, but that was not my affair.  Having been in the business for twenty years has clearly shown me that detective work and sex with bovines do not mix.  As I saw it, my opportunity lay in the fact that Minos was a man with some experience being on the wrong side of a god–his theft of a bull meant for Poseidon resulted in the birth of the Minotaur in the first place.  Perhaps I could persuade him to allow Farraday and me to continue in our search for Daedalus, it being an errand sanctioned by Athena.

The door of our crowded room opened and we were herded off the ship like cattle, or, more accurately in our cases, cattle fodder.  Walking down the gangplank I passed my friend, the guard, one last time.  “Keep up the good work.  You wouldn’t want to lose a plum assignment like this.” It was all I could think to say, but it was more than he could think of.  The fourteen of us marched to Minos’s palace where, to my surprise, we sat in an elegant dining room filled with fruits, nuts, vegetables, fish, and a few meats, though beef was conspicuously absent.  In the center of the room stood a commanding looking man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and a jeweled crown on his head.  Next to him stood a fat man with a forced smile, who spoke to us in a sonorous voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Windikis, official spokesman for the king.  You have been selected by Athens to fulfill one of the reparations of her recent loss in war against Crete.  King Minos and I are here to praise you for your individual efforts in preserving the peace between our two great city-states.  It is our pleasure to have supervised this feast in your honor.”  He then gave us a long, boring history lesson on the greatness of Crete.  I could tell Minos was embarrassed by the whole thing and would have just as soon made Minotaur burgers out of us immediately.  After Windikis finally finished, Minos said to us, “May your sacrifices be quick.” He was about to leave when I shocked everyone by saying, “King Minos, I’d like a word with you!”

Windikis gave me a withering look.  “It is now time for the Athenians to eat, not talk.” Clearly it was not time to Minos to watch us eat as he was almost out of the room when I used my ace in the hole. “I have been sent by Athena to capture the murdering fugitive, Daedalus.”

That got the king’s attention, though not for the reason I thought.

“You know Daedalus?” he asked me, suddenly very interested.

“He murdered a young competing inventor and supposedly fled to this island.”

Minos turned to his Windikis.  “Send this man to me after the feast.”

We then began eating as if there was no tomorrow.

Sated, I was taken to my private audience with King Minos.  The room was much smaller than the banquet room, though with its longish table in the center, it appeared to be a place where meetings happened.  Minos sat at the head of the table, flanked by two fearsome-looking guards.  I was placed in a chair to the king’s right.  He looked even more tired and bored than when Windikis led us through Crete History I and II.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

I introduced myself and told him about Farraday, then explained our case.

“We have something in common,” he said.  I was about to lay on the flattery, saying what could a great king have in common with an Athenian commoner such as myself, but he motioned for silence.  “We are both looking for Daedalus, though your search is based on money while mine…mine has a deeper source.” With pain in his voice, he proceeded to explain the story whose outline I had heard, how he had promised to sacrifice a beautiful bull to Poseidon but decided to replace it with an inferior one.  In punishment, Poseidon made Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with the original bull.  “Rather than help her resist, that swine Daedalus, who had been working for me, secretly designed a wooden cow for her crawl into and indulge her unnatural inclinations.  This resulted in the Minotaur, lower half man, upper half bull, and complete freak.  Zeus knows I tried to be a good father to this…this thing, but I can’t even talk to him.  The only word he responds to is ‘Olé.’ So I had Daedalus design the labyrinth to hide my shame.  I was pleased with Daedalus, until I found out about his wooden cow.  As a result, I threw him and his son into the labyrinth.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, I need closure.  I can’t rest until I’m sure Daedalus is dead, but as he knows every turn of the labyrinth, better even than the Minotaur, I’m sure he’s still alive.  As you are a private investigator, I would like you to go in there and find him.  Do this and I will spare your lives.”

I wasn’t convinced.  “I thought everyone who goes into the labyrinth gets lost.  Even if we find Daedalus, how are we supposed to get out?”

“Daedalus knows the way.  You’ll have to convince him to tell you.”

“What if he’s dead?”

“Then I won’t need your services.”

With that, I was taken to the entrance of the labyrinth.  The other prisoners were already somewhere inside, but I saw Farraday was talking to a beautiful young woman I’d never seen before.  She pressed something into his hands just before twenty guards chased us with spears into the winding corridors. Once we were out of sight of the guards, he held up a ball of string.

“Who was that woman?” I asked.

“Ariadne, the daughter of Minos.  She said not to trust her father and gave me this ball of string so we can find our way out of the labyrinth.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t know how you do it, Farraday.  You’re plain looking, you have no personality, and yet, women like you.” For which I could only be thankful.

Not wanting to entrust Farraday with such an important task, I relieved him of the ball of string and carefully measured it out as we began our search.  Our newest prison wasn’t nearly as dreary as it might have been.  Daedalus, perhaps suspecting that his mercurial benefactor might one day place its creator inside, left plenty of holes in the ceilings to let in light, though they were too high to serve as exits.  We had no idea which turns to make but occasionally were helped by the distant roars of the Minotaur.  If his utterances came from the left, we went right.  Hours of this didn’t get us anywhere except to the end of our string.

I looked at Farraday.  “I’ve always wanted to say this:  I’m at the end of my tether.”

“This certainly is a big day for you,” he said despondently.

“I think the best thing to do now is weigh our options.  We can stay here.  That accomplishes nothing unless Daedalus comes to us.  We could go back, but the guards would just try to stick their spears into us again.  Or we could continue.  I say carry on.  We’ve got this string laid out through quite a bit of the labyrinth.  Chances are, even with the worst of luck, we’ll eventually stumble onto it again, unless the Minotaur decides to fly a kite or something.”

We continued walking.  Two more hours passed, and not only didn’t we see Daedalus; we didn’t see the string either.  The light was fading.  I was about to suggest we find a place to set up camp for the night, when suddenly I heard what sounded like the fluttering of wings, and then an admonishing human voice.  It came from our left.  Like madmen we dashed in that direction, only to plow into a dead end wall.  We then dashed in the other direction, took our first left turn, and came face to bearded face with Daedalus and his son Icarus.  Both of them had strapped to their arms large wax wings, the span of which nearly filled the corridor.

“Oh no, not now,” Daedalus grimaced.  “Who are you?  Keep back or I’ll brain you with a poisonous comb.” He pulled from his cloak a spiked shell.  Though it explained his wildly tangled hair, I was suspicious.

“Why would you carry a poisoned object in your pocket?” I asked, advancing.

Instead of answering, he threw the shell at me, but it splintered harmlessly against the wall.  He then commanded Icarus to start flying, and to our amazement, both of them lifted off the ground.  Above us loomed an opening in the ceiling large enough for them to fly through.  “Grab them!” I yelled to Farraday.  “They’re our only chance of escaping!”

I jumped for Daedalus while Farraday latched onto Icarus.  I felt two distinct sensations, that of being levitated and being repeatedly kicked in the head.

“You’re ruining everything.  These wings weren’t intended to carry the weight of two people,” Daedalus cursed.  But as I watched the walls of the labyrinth fall below me, intentionally or not, we were flying tandem.  Outside it was twilight, but plenty light enough for two of the strangest looking birds in the history of ornithology to be spotted.  A confused mob of people milled below us, but we were well out of spear range.  Soon we were over the sea.  Away from the guards, we dropped to an altitude of about thirty feet, and Daedalus was having a none too easy time maintaining that.  Icarus was having even more trouble ten feet directly below us.

“Where are we going?” I asked, in between kicks.

“We’re not going anywhere if you don’t let go,” Daedalus retorted.  “Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is Jack Dweeb, Detective.  I am here to arrest you for the murder of Talos.  It is my duty to inform you of your rights.  Anything you say will be ignored in a court of law.  If you desire an attorney and can’t afford one, you won’t have one.” I was interrupted by another kick in the head.  The heck with his rights.  More important now was grabbing both of his legs before he covered my skull with sandal prints.  We made a sudden swerve and, to my surprise, I looked up to see Daedalus swatting away what appeared to be a crazed partridge making repeated dives into his face.  Talos?  Was it possible he had come all this way?  What other explanation could there be for the bird’s otherwise inexplicable attacks?  With a fateful plunge, the partridge avoided Daedalus’s outstretched hand and landed a bloody peck just below his uncle’s right eye.  With a bellow of pain, Daedalus interrupted his already shaky flying movements, and we hung in the air for a second, then fell like bird droppings.  With a sickening thud we landed on top of Icarus.  Farraday, Icarus, and I plunged into the sea, while somehow Daedalus regained his balance and continued flying.  The last I saw of him, he was soaring to an altitude out of reach of the partridge.

Farraday and I swam to shore.  We saw nothing of Icarus after he hit the water.

I told the whole story to King Minos, explaining that Daedalus’s escape was no fault of mine, but the king was not in an understanding mood.

“If man was meant to fly, he’d have wings.” Minos said.

“He did have wings,” I pointed out.

Farraday and I were returned to the labyrinth.  Maybe I shouldn’t have called Minos a Cretan.

So here I sit.  As I told Farraday, it’s strange how things have turned out.  We have many corridors to choose from.  Some go somewhere, others are dead ends.  There is always a chance that the Minotaur will find us.  In some ways the labyrinth is a microcosm of life.  Farraday, who is of a less philosophic bent, has only this to say on the subject:  “I hate sad endings, especially when I’m in them.”

By being vigilant, finding a makeshift knife in Daedalus’s work area, and stealing its food, Farraday and I successfully avoided the Minotaur for eight months. At that time Theseus, one of the annual fourteen Greeks to be sacrificed, freed us and killed the misbegotten beast.  Minos, in fear for his life, fled Crete, spending what little time was left of his life in pursuit of Daedalus.  He tracked him to Sicily but died when one of his political enemies gave him a bath in boiling water.  Farraday and I caught a ride on the Flotsam with Theseus back to Athens.  Accommodations were much improved.  Back in our home city-state, we continued our detective practice.  Farraday eventually married one of Menon’s daughters, who gave him two boys, two girls, and no partridges.

Richard Zwicker is an English teacher living in Vermont with his wife and beagle.  Besides writing and reading, he likes to play piano, jog, and fight the good fight against middle age.  He lived in Brazil for eight years but is still a lousy soccer player.  His short stories have appeared in “Poe Little Thing,” “New Myths,” “Writing Shift,” “Golden Visions,” “The Rejected Quarterly,” “Speculative Mystery Iconoclast,” and “Ray Gun Revival.”

It began in the south wing, near the long cold Hall of Empires and the chambers of the Duke of Cloud. Helene, the Duchess, woke at midnight to the metal sound of marching in the corridor, and farther away, the hollow ring of drums.

“Paride,” she whispered, shaking her husband’s shoulder. The cold was bitter, even in the Duke’s bedchamber, and her breath froze in a puff of white. The distant marching became louder, and she reached for the dagger on her bedside table.

Before Paride had fully awakened, the Duchess was flinging a silk dressing gown around her and fumbling for a candle. The fire had died—strangely, as the maids of Copperroof were known for their diligence—but the air smelled faintly of smoke.

“Ghosts,” the Duke murmured, pulling on a pair of trousers. “But I’ll be damned if they burn down Copperroof in the King’s absence.”

“Ghosts never enter the south wing,” Helene said. She climbed up on the chair by her writing desk and took two trophies from the wall: an ancient Imixian saber, curved and wickedly sharp, and a bastard sword from the brief reign of Socorro XI. She handed the saber to her husband and lead the way—candle and dagger in one hand, sword in the other—into the smoke-choked corridor.

Night in Copperroof was never silent. There were the usual noises, lovers’ muffled laughter, the echoes of a duel in the basement tunnels, a drunk violinist playing a half-remembered tune. And there were some noises that were only usual in Copperroof; whispered conversations of which only a word or two could be understood; footsteps pattering in a walled-up staircase; the mechanical organ in the Salon of Cats humming itself to sleep. Even the south wing housed the parlor where the pen of the Marquise von Argent whispered silkily on invisible pages, rewriting the infamous letter that drove the Marquis to hang himself in the tunnels.

But that night, the night the war began, the sounds were different. Even the Duchess’s footsteps as she slid along the corridor echoed like the clang of iron boots. The smoke was thick and white, swallowing vision, swallowing breath. Helene had to listen for the rustle of her husband’s dressing gown only inches behind her.

“My father told me a story when I was a child,” Paride said softly; the Duchess shirked to admit how much the warmth of his voice comforted her. “He said that in the days when his grandmother was Duchess of Cloud, a war broke out in the Library of Cadmus.”

“North wing,” Helene said contemptuously. She was south wing only by marriage, having been born to a humble tailor in the Via Theatre, but distrust of the north wing came readily and hard. “They’d fight for a dropped glove.”

“I don’t know what they fought for, but my father said it began like this; smoke and drums. The armory had been rearranging itself for days, and some of the suits had gone missing, but the archivists were too afraid to let anyone know.” Something hit the marble floor with a heavy clang, and the Duke and Duchess froze like two suits of armor themselves. A round object was rolling towards them in the dark: clang-bringa-bringa-clang-bringa-bringa-clang.

“The King had been gone then, too,” Paride said.

The thing halted at the Duchess’s feet. She flipped it over with her toe, gripping her sword tightly. It was a brass helmet, polished for display, but with a brutal dent in the left cheek. Two green lights seemed to gleam in its depths like a pair of drowned eyes.

“Reign of Albinus,” said Helene, who was almost as well versed in arms as the archivists. “From the Gallery of Spears.”

“North wing,” the Duke said.

A blast of ice struck them from behind, extinguishing the candle. The Duchess swung her sword and felt it connect with something hard and smooth. She raised her dagger, but something cold sliced across her cheek and she stumbled backwards. Paride’s cry of pain was the last thing she heard before her head struck the floor.

The war had begun.

Of course, the real trouble began three days earlier, when the King announced that he was leaving Copperroof.

“It’s ridiculous,” the Duke had said—and it meant something, as his was the most powerful voice in the south wing. “His child will be born any day now, and he wants to leave Copperroof. For the love of God, why?”

Room by room, Copperroof took up the cry of protest. How could the King wish to leave? His house had the finest theatre, the finest poets, the finest gardens, the finest paintings and books and horses and playing-fields in all the land. Every play worth seeing was performed in Copperroof; every salon worth attending was hosted there. Men and women spent their lives trying to breach those marble walls. From the monstrous canvases in the Hall of Empires to the sulfur pool two miles away in the Bath of Virgins to the sun-heated orangery and the Grotto of Austerity, everything a King could desire was there to be had.

And there was the Queen: Arete, youngest sister of the Duke of Cloud. Tall, slender, as dark as her brother was fair—and heavy with the King’s child. But while the Duke fumed, then wheedled, then begged, she said quietly that her husband would do as he pleased.

The day before he left, she retreated with little ceremony to the chapel on the west façade. It had been built in the reign of Consolata III, and crouched over the orangery like a buttress-clawed panther. Even the King could not miss the significance of this gesture, as the Queen famously loved neither God nor oranges.

Nevertheless, the King left. It was the first sign of trouble in Copperroof.

Paride was screaming; he could not get enough air; everything was smoke and bitter cold. He heard Helene grunting as she swung her sword, then the sickening thud of iron and marble against bone.

Then he was awake, lying on a velvet couch in the Chartreuse Parlor, and Helene was smoothing his forehead with a damp handkerchief. A bandage covered her left cheek and eye, pinkish-white against her brown skin. Her right eye was red from smoke and weeping.

“Thank God,” she said when he caught her hand, pressing his lips to her cold palm. “If something had happened to you, I’d tear those metal bastards limb from limb.”

“Someone already did,” said a dry voice from the doorway. The Duke turned his head, wincing as a bandage peeled away from his shoulder. Madame Chloe Saré, the senior archivist of Copperroof’s armories, was stripping a pair of blood-stained gloves from her hand fingertip by fingertip. Though educated in the north wing libraries, she was born above the Catacombs, and her gestures always carried the air of a torturer.

“We have the suits mostly reassembled,” she continued, as though it should reassure him. “The complete ones are laid out in the tunnel beneath the Arborie. Now we’re working on the…miscellaneous pieces.”

“There’s one even I don’t recognize,” Helene said, “and I know every sword from the Gallery of Spears to the Broken Nautilus.” She lifted something from the rug by her knee and handed it to Paride.

It was a sword—that much was clear. But of what metal, in what tradition, from which room was harder to determine. A marble hand still gripped its hilt, stained and fractured cleanly at the wrist.

Paride shook his head. “I’ve never seen it before,” he said. “Don’t you have a guess?”

“Well, we know one thing for certain,” Saré said. “It’s not from the north wing.”

Then again, perhaps the trouble began earlier than the King’s departure. Perhaps it began when Yvon was thrown out of Copperroof.

It had been an unsightly but well-attended tragedy at the time. No one could imagine a worse fate than exile, and Yvon, beautiful and cruel and lion-proud, had never been popular in Copperoof. Most of the house turned out that pale winter morning to watch him flung down the long flight of stairs at the east end of the orangery. His head left streaks of red on the snow-powdered marble—blood or strands of his famous hair, it was hard to say.

He scrambled to his feet at the base of the stairs, trembling with cold and the pain of wounded dignity. His shirt billowed in the wind, snow-damp and translucent as his skin. When he had stood there for a moment, staring at the King’s metal guards like a fox cornered by hounds, the King took pity on him and came down the orchard stairs. Yvon reached for his hand, bending to kiss it. The King struck him across the face, and Yvon fell sprawling in the snow.

Three days into the war, the north wing armor disappeared from the tunnel beneath the Arborie. Madame Saré left a card, brief and tactfully worded, pasted on the Duke and Duchess’s door. She thought it would be best, her precise calligraphy said, if the Queen was left uniformed until the last possible moment; Arete had gone into labor that morning.

It was the last anyone in Copperroof heard of Madame Saré.

Two weeks before Yvon was thrown out, Arete said an interesting thing to the Duke of Cloud.

“I want the key to the Globe Library.” She stood by her boudoir window, one hand on her mounded belly, the other pressed against the frost-speckled glass. Her cheeks were red as peach-skin, soft and blotchy.

The Duke sat on the floor across from her, laying cards against himself. It was a game he and Arete had played as children: Kings and Queens, odd and even cards dueling each other, with the Knaves calling for a reshuffle. Paride had been explaining for nearly an hour how he would teach the game to his nephew.

He frowned, laying the Queen of Crowns on his north-hand pile. “The Globe Library is locked?”

“Unlocked,” the Queen said. “I wish I could lock it. The King spends all his time there now.”

Paride’s frown deepened. He remembered the story now: how King Bastian had the lock made for the library at the far end of the north wing, after Queen Nausicaa VII took to cataloguing the shelves instead of ruling her kingdom. The catalogue had survived, saved in a golden casket near the Hall of the Catafalque. Nausicaa had died of apoplexy within the year.

“What is he doing there?” the Duke asked. “I thought it was an archive of obscure texts.” And not the interestingly obscure ones—those had a salon to themselves, east of the Via Theatre.

“It houses the collection of Gertrude the Surveyor,” Arete said. “I’m told he’s been reading that.”

“Tax records and travel logs?”

“And maps.” She stroked the black velvet stretched over her abdomen. “I am so tired of hearing him talk about mountains and the sea.”

Five days into the war, the Count of Belphoebe was drinking ginger tea in the Arborie, leafing through the collected poems of Téo von Blum, when he saw them.

He thought at first they were the Ash Children, a trio of phantasms who often appeared near fireplaces on the ground floor. He was about to offer them tea—the customary offering was three drops of brandy, but Belphoebe hadn’t touched alcohol in seventy-nine years and wasn’t about to start now—when he saw that there were at least a dozen of them, and none were less than seven feet tall. He remembered the missing armor—but the Duchess of Cloud had said they clanked as they marched. These were silent, and their eyes were flat and red.

That night, something broke into the northern stables. Two of the horses were slaughtered, their eyes ripped out and their legs snapped like firewood. A third horse died convulsing, apparently from fright.

By the sixth day, the things were sighted all across the north wing, red-eyed shadows that smelled of musk and dead violets and lilac turned to dust. A maid went missing; nine hours of searching uncovered her at the bottom of a little-used stairwell, her neck twisted at an odd angle. There was blood beneath her fingernails, and worse things, a whitish substance veined with red. The dead girl’s hair smelled like musk and lilac.

Pasiphae of Blois, whose family was the oldest north of the Gallery of Spears, send a letter to the Duke and Duchess of Cloud offering the north wing’s unconditional surrender. The Duke’s reply was curst, as his messenger preferred not to linger: They aren’t ours.

On the seventh day, Frances, Lord Oberon saw them in the Via Theatre, running on two or four or eight legs across the catwalks in the Opera House itself. But by then, no one cared.

When Arete announced her pregnancy, Copperroof erupted in spontaneous displays of joy. The mechanical organ in the Salon of Cats began a waltz that would last almost two months, the orangery blossomed until the petals fell thick as snow. Even the Bath of Virgins bubbled with excitement, filling the adjacent corridors with pungent steam.

But the greatest victory came at the masquerade the King declared to mark Arete’s third month. No one knew how it happened, but suddenly Yvon and the Queen were dancing with the rest, their foreheads pressed together, their hair spilling over Arete’s bare shoulders, entwined crimson and coal.

“The wolf and the lamb have made peace,” Paride whispered to his wife.

“Yes,” Helene said, “but which is which?”

“I’m sorry, your grace,” the girl said, “but no one is allowed within.” She was a tiny thing, dark-skinned like the Duchess, and seemed to melt into the twisted ebony carvings on the chapel doors. But her voice was firm, sharp-edged as the dagger hanging unsheathed at her hip.

The Duke of Cloud moved his hand to the hilt of his own dagger. “She’s my sister,” he hissed. “Step aside and let me speak to her.”

“The Queen is exhausted from the birth. She has no energy to waste on these foolish squabbles.”

“Squabbles? Copperroof is destroying itself!” Paride gestured broadly at the hall around him, the Hall of the Antechamber of the Most Holy Presence. The red-eyed shadows had swept through in the night, tearing canvases and breaking swords from the statues of Kings and Queens. The smell of dead violets clung to the marble shards. “The world is breaking around our heads. This isn’t a squabble, it’s a war.”

“A war started by petty men who have not the courage to kill with their hands.” The maid raised her eyebrows, like a pedantic archivist at a salon. “If they cannot make peace among themselves, it must wait until the King returns.”

“Look at this place. Look at this.” The Duke unwound his cravat, showing the long mark of an ancient spearhead along his neck. “Do you think men began this war?”

The girl lifted her chin, a perfect imitation of Arete. “Be reasonable, your grace. It is men who fight wars, not houses. And for all that Copperroof is, it is still only a house.”

They gathered in the Candlecomb on the last night of autumn, the King and Queen, the Duke and Duchess, Arete’s ladies and attendants, and Yvon clinging to the King like a second shadow. The Candlecomb was a handsome room, small and warm, filled with honey-colored light and mirrors and the sweet mingling scents of wine and cinnamon. Paride held a deck of cards in his hands, and one by one the gathered company drew from it.

“The Ace of Roses,” he said, checking Arete’s hand.

She lay the card on the game table. “And what might that mean, brother? Am I to name every Empire that rose and fell between Remus and the Lampade? Or sing the seven songs of the Nephelean service?”

“Not that last, please,” the King said, smiling. “God would fall in shock from his throne, hearing His name on your lips.”

Paride bowed to his sister. “It means you must name a man whose love means more to you than your husband’s.”

The King’s smile faltered, but the Queen waved a long-fingered hand and laughed like the cracking of ice. “Is that all?” she said. She turned to the King, curving a hand around his knee. “My son. Our son.”

The King’s eyes widened, golden in the candlelight. “You’re certain?” he whispered.

Arete nodded. The King lifted her hand and kissed it, closing his eyes tightly. Yvon, standing with one pale hand on the marble mantelpiece, swept up the Ace of Roses and handed it to the Duke of Cloud. “You will have to devise a more difficult task for the next player,” he said sharply.

Paride flushed scarlet and offered the deck to the King, who rose slowly, gripping a card as though it were a struggling viper. “The Queen of Crowns,” he said.

“Well,” Paride said, glancing at Yvon. “A more difficult task? I charge you—before God, who damns all falsehoods—to kiss on the mouth the man or woman in this room whom you love above all others. Is that difficult enough, my lord Yvon?”

“Yes,” Yvon said. “But I motion that all present close their eyes to keep the King’s choice a secret.”

“Agreed,” said the King, and all closed their eyes.

In the silence that followed, they heard the King stand and move about the room. It seemed to Paride that he went to the fireplace and stood there for a long moment before returning to his chair at Arete’s side.

“It is done,” the King said. “You may open your eyes.”

Yvon and the Queen stared at each other and the gathered company glanced inquiringly about the room. At last Helene spoke, her voice cool. “Who was it?”

“Not I,” Arete said, equally cold.

“Nor I,” Paride laughed. “Give the King some privacy.”

“It was the bust,” Yvon said. All turned to him. On the mantle at his elbow, a handsome white bust of the King stood gleaming in the candlelight.

“Yes,” the King said, “it was the bust. Now someone draw the next card, or let us be done with this game and retire. My wife and I have a child to celebrate.”

While the others filed out, Yvon lingered near the fireplace. The King felt his eyes on him and paused in the doorway. Slowly, as if performing some act of great moment, Yvon went to the bust and placed a kiss on its cold white mouth.

By nightfall on the seventh day of the war, all Copperroof knew what the Queen had said. Conversation in salons and parlors was subdued; guests returned to their chambers in groups, and once there they locked their doors and moved armoires for barricades. All manner of arms disappeared from the archives, this time by less supernatural agencies. Now and then a scream would echo in a distant corridor, but no one wanted to investigate.

The Duke and Duchess of Cloud sat before their fireplace, playing a slow game of cards. Helene winced at every unfamiliar sound, though she had believed herself broken of the habit. Paride stared solidly at the cards in his hand.

“Do you really think a man is doing this?” Helene asked. “I thought so at first, but not with all of Copperroof terrorized. Who could be gaining from it?”

“No one in Copperroof.” The Duke lay his card on the wolfskin rug: the Knave of Roses. “But Arete is right. It can’t be the house itself.”

“Perhaps the ghosts…”

“The ghosts have fled, Helene. Listen.” The only sound was the crackling of the fire. “There’s the armor, which is…memories, old bloodlust. But it answers to men.” He shrugged roughly. “Or it used to. No one’s seen so much as a gauntlet since Saré disappeared.”

Helene lay her card on top of her husband’s: the Ten of Swords. “What about them?” she asked.

Paride shuddered. “The shadow-things? They aren’t ghosts in their own right. Ghosts—human ghosts—have never caused us harm. But perhaps they too answer to someone.” He did not look at their door, barricaded by a dressing table and the volumes of an old Encyclopaedia. “Someone outside of Copperroof.”

“Paride, I think they are Copperroof.”

He narrowed his eyes, still staring at the cards. She leaned over and pressed her fingers to his knee. “Can’t you feel it, when they’re nearby? They feel so angry, so betrayed. And there’s a bit of fear, too—fear that the King will return.”

“Why would Copperroof fear that?”

“Because it knows the King would stop it. It doesn’t want to be kept on a leash.”

“A feral house,” the Duke said, laughing without humor. “But there is another possibility, love. It could well be a man outside of Copperroof who doesn’t want the King to return.” He raised his card: the Queen of Crowns. “Can you not think of one?”

Standing in the corridor outside the Candlecomb, Helene had overheard Paride and Yvon whispering as they lit candles for the King’s gathering.

“You know it is Arete who lets you near him,” the Duke said. “She is more forgiving than I. Given half a chance, I would turn you out in the snow.”

“The King would never allow it,” Yvon said. His voice was quietly rough, like the rustling of book pages. “Unless you would invent something—some unspeakable crime. Would the noble Duke of Cloud stoop to calumny to protect his Queen?”

“I would,” Paride said. “But knowing you, you snake, I wouldn’t have to lie. And I wouldn’t trust your King so far.”

Yvon made a muffled sound in his throat, halfway between a moan and a laugh.

“One word from Arete,” the Duke said, “and he would slit your throat with his own hand.”

The Duchess, hearing the ice in her husband’s voice, stopped her ears and shivered.

On the tenth day of the war, Helene found the missing armor.

There was a helmet in her writing desk, a greave in her armoire, a glove in the case of her harpsichord. Breastplates filled her bath, and chainmail jangled when she opened the bedroom curtains. Laid across the bed she shared with Paride was the strange exotic sword, its hilt still gripped by a marble hand. She did not have to look in the shadow of her wardrobe to know that a pair of red eyes was there, watching.

She lifted her own bastard sword from its place on her bedside table, took the helmet from her writing desk, and went to see the Queen.

“I will not be stopped,” she said to the maid at the door, “by a half-grown chit who hides behind a throne and a cradle while Copperroof falls around her head. I do not care if Arete is tired or sick or ready to brood a litter of dragons, she will hear me speak.” And with the sword in one hand and the helmet in the other, the Duchess of Cloud pushed open the chapel doors.

The light in the chapel was cool and green, the light of water running beneath ice. Windows taller than seven men standing on each other’s shoulders made a strange cage of the marble room, seeming harder and more substantial than the lengths of white stone between them. In the center of the harlequin floor was a cradle, and standing over the cradle, a tall woman in gray.

“So angry,” the Queen said, gently chiding. “You’ll wake the princess.”

“If I heel like the dog you think I am, your child will have bigger concerns. Namely a house filled with corpses, one of which will be your brother.”

Arete snapped her mouth open and shut, a clicking sound of disbelief. “My brother. And what does our fond superstitious Duke fear now? Are the walls caving in on him? Are the floors clamoring for his overthrow?”

“You know Copperroof is more than walls and floor,” Helene said. “But the threat I fear comes from outside the house. He is trying to kill us.” She flung the helmet at the Queen’s feet. It rolled lopsided around the base of the cradle.

“Have you realized that?” the Queen said.

“All this time, it’s been Yvon. Paride told me three nights ago, but I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe one man’s anger and betrayal would be enough—”

“Yvon? Of course that’s what he’d want you to think,” Arete said. She bent and caught the rolling helmet on one finger. Helene could see the flash of her ring in its depths, like a single emerald eye. “But for all your prattling about Copperroof, you know so little of it. The archives, for example…” She leaned her head against the helmet’s crown, eye to invisible eye. “While most of the armor is in the north wing, it belongs to the Dukes of Cloud. Did you know that?”

“It tried to kill us, whether it belongs to us or not.”

“It tried to kill you, love.” Arete let the helmet fall with an echoing clang. “Poor Helene. Armor is incapable of treachery. Like ghosts, and houses—and Yvon, in the end. It always obeys its master.” She shrugged, sending black curls tumbling down her rigid back. “Its master is Paride.”

“No.” The Duchess of Cloud clenched her sword. Its weight felt too great for her arm. Her cut cheek stung, her injured eye burned with tears. “No. Not Paride.” But the questioned burned in her mind; Would the noble Duke of Cloud stoop to calumny to protect his Queen? Did he hate Yvon so much?

The Queen smiled quietly, rocking the cradle with her foot. “No?” she said. “As you wish. It is very easy, I find, to keep one’s illusions in Copperroof.”

Yvon had approached her before the wedding began. He was all in black, with garnets on his fingers and in his ears. He did not smile, but neither did he weep, as Helene had seen other bitches do when their hounds changed collars.

“Your grace,” he said, bowing over her with one hand on her chair arm. His hair smelled sweetly of orange blossoms and rain. “Would you give your husband a message from me?”

Helene nodded, glancing at the back of the hall. Paride stood beside the bride, brushing a black tendril of hair behind her ear.

“Tell him Arete must never know,” Yvon said. “She would not bear it…gracefully. I suspect, in fact, that she would do something rash.”

The Duchess tossed her head. “What must she never know?”

“Something I told Paride when we first met. Nothing to concern yourself with, your grace.” He kissed her hand, his lips dry as paper. “Tell him also that I do not worry. He is very good at keeping secrets.”

In the back of the hall, Arete laughed brightly. Her fingers worked deftly to braid a strand of hair with her brother’s, midnight and gold.

Paride found her in the Hall of Empires. Helene stood very still, hands resting on the pommel of her sword, like a marble Queen in the Antechamber of the Most Holy Presence. It seemed she had been waiting for him for a long time; he could not say why he thought so, or why the thought frightened him.

“The noble Duke of Cloud,” Helene sneered. Her breath looked like steam pouring past her copper-colored lips. “I should have guessed. But how was I to know your hatred ran so deep? Even when he is gone, you would bathe his name in blood.”

Paride flinched, holding his hands as if to ward off a blow. He had heard that voice before, but from crueler, redder lips. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Who were you talking to?”

“Forget where I learned it. I want to know if it’s true.” Helene pointed over his shoulder at the length of the war-scarred hall. “Do you command the soldiers in the archives? Do you hate Yvon enough to murder in his name?”

The air in his lungs froze, became solid ice pressing against his heart. He took a step closer and caught her scent in the air, musky and bitterly sweet.

“Did you start the Copperroof war?” Helene asked.

He stopped in front of her and placed his hands over hers on the iron sword’s pommel. “Yvon was a cruel man who took pleasure in tormenting my sister and my King,” he said, “but no matter how much I hate him, you know I would not stoop to lies.”

“But secrets and games are permissible, aren’t they, your grace?” Helene bared her teeth, a cornered wolf. “Maybe it isn’t Yvon you aim for. You’ve always been a jealous man, Paride, and most of all you envy your sister. She married a King, after all, and what are you saddled with? A poor tailor’s brat.”

“A tailor’s brat I wouldn’t trade for all the Kings in the world.” He felt his heart breaking itself against the ice in his chest. “Believe me, love, I did not start this war. Not to hurt Yvon, and not to hurt Arete. I don’t wish to command soldiers or wear a crown. I don’t know how you came to suspect me—”

Helene ripped her hand from the sword and pressed it against her injured cheek. “The sword that gave me this belong to the Duke of Cloud. Who but you has the right to that title?”

He caught her scent again—musk, and dead violets, and lilacs turned to dust.

“Where were you?” he whispered.

The Duchess drew herself up. “The chapel,” she said.

Paride’s grip tightened on the sword. “Arete.”

The night before her wedding, Arete came to her brother’s study. Her face was white above her waistcoat checkered blue and gold—the colors of the Dukes of Cloud. Already her features seemed better suited to royal black and white.

“I had a terrible dream,” she said. “I dreamed a voice was calling to me from the walls, begging me not to marry the King.”

Paride pushed his chair back from his writing desk and folded his hands in his lap. “You’re nervous,” he said. “It’s understandable. Before I married Helene—”

“I’m marrying the King, Paride. There’s no reason to be nervous.” Her teeth flitted across her lip. “Besides, it wasn’t a normal dream. It felt like a warning. A warning to run away.”

“A warning from who?”

Arete closed her eyes. He saw at once that she had already begun to look like a Queen; she seemed unbearably tired. “From Copperroof,” she said.

Copperroof is only a house, he thought, but he words died on his lips. If Arete was to be Queen, there were things it would be better if she never knew.

Before he entered the chapel, Paride matched the strange marble-gripped sword to the King’s statue in the Antechamber. His heart did not sink; it had already fallen to the deepest part of him. He lay the sword at the King’s feet, like an offering, and went into the chapel.

Arete still stood over her daughter’s cradle, the evening sunlight making a long needle of her shadow. She did not look up when the Duke entered, though she must have heard the door slam behind him.

“Why, Arete?”

She knelt slowly, brushing her child’s cheek with one silky fingertip. “Why you?” she said. “Because it fit. It’s perfectly true that the armor only answers to the Dukes of Cloud—I was a Duchess before I became Queen.”

“You know what I’m asking.”

“And how would you have me answer?” She looked at him for the first time, her eyes red in the setting sun. “This palace is a prison, love. Can I be blamed for playing a game to while away the time?”

“You tried to kill Copperroof!”

“I tried to kill you,” Arete spat. “Copperroof is a house, Paride. It can’t fight and it can’t die.”

She stood, leaning heavily on the cradle edge. The scent as she came near him was almost unbearable, as sweet and heady as rot. “You think I was jealous of this place because my husband loved it. As you think I was jealous of Yvon. But I am incapable of jealousy, brother. The kindest thing I ever did was cast Yvon out of this place.”

“Why would you show kindness to him?”

“Because I knew the King would follow him out.” She did not smile, but her pale face softened. “I saved the man I loved most, and the man who loved him most. Now he will see everything he dreamed of—the mountains, and the sea.”

He saw a flicker of movement in the shadows behind her, the flat red gleam of eyes.

“I must admit,” she said, “that in the end Copperroof surprised me. I thought the north wing and the south wing would tear each other apart. I thought that old wounds given time to fester would poison this place anew.”

“The hatred is yours,” Paride said, watching as the shadows emerged from hiding at the feet of columns. The princess began to cry, a healthy sound of fear. Unthinkingly, Paride crossed the chapel and lifted his niece in his arms. “Why do you hate so much?”

“What else is there to do here?” Arete closed her eyes for a moment, sighing wearily. When she opened them again, they were flat and red.

Paride ran. He heard the hate-things running after him, and the sobbing of the child against his chest. The doors held for a moment, heavy as fear, but he pushed them open with his shoulder and ran to reclaim the King’s sword. He thrust the blade through the handles like a bar on a prison door and leaned against it, heart pounding.

All was silent. Then Arete screamed.

The Duke stopped his ears, hunched over the sobbing princess. He felt the weight of the house around him, its anger, its betrayal. Its warning, stronger than all of them, not to open the chapel door.

It was a warning he heeded, even when the screaming stopped.

Yvon first appeared in Copperroof on a warm day in early spring. Paride walked with him through the halls, through the galleries and gardens, playing guide as the King had asked. Yvon was very quiet, until Paride paused by the chapel windows and asked him what he thought.

“It’s pleasant enough,” Yvon said, “but really, it’s only a house. There’s a whole world outside of Copperroof.” He smiled, dazzling in the sunlight. “Didn’t you know?”

The Duchess of Cloud paused at the edge of the rose garden. She looked at her husband on the path beside her, his pale hair loose in the wind, his arms folded tightly around the child sleeping against his chest. The shadows that had darkened his eyes when she found him weeping at the chapel door were still there, like ghosts against a marble wall.

“This is the farthest I’ve ever been from Copperroof,” Helene said.

Paride glanced over his shoulder. She knew what he saw in the distance; the great dead bulk of Copperroof, its windows curtained and dark, the rays of morning sunlight gilding its roof in fire.

Helene took his hand. “The King is never coming back,” she said.

“It’s only…” Paride began, but whatever he had to say died in a puff of ice on his lips.

Before their feet, snow stretched like a linen sheet to the black hills on the horizon. A road ran through the distant shadows, like a strand of silver in a woman’s dark hair.

Megan Arkenberg’s stories have recently been published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and dozens of other places. She edits the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.

Dear Mr. Macchione,

Thank you so much for your submission of the poem “Tide of the Graying Moon.” I like this very much and would like to post it on the Autumn edition of -Alien Age-.

Is it still available? I know four months is a long time to consider a submission, but sometimes life can be very hectic.

I apologize for taking so long to get back to you regarding this submission. I’d like to post the Autumn edition as soon as possible, so please let me know. Also, please send me a short bio for the contributor’s notes, if you prefer.

Thanks
Rebecca Nansemond
Editor, -Alien Age-
——————————————————–

F: Macchione@ymail.net
T: AlienAge@wordpod.com
Subj: “Graying Moon”

Dear Ms. Nansemond,

Yes, Life could be very hectic.

I’d be deleted to have “Tide of the Graying Moon” in the Autumn edition of AA. It is still available. If possible, let me know a few days ahead of time, so its appearance online will not be totally unexpected.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
Frank Macchione
———————————————————-

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Dear Mr. Macchione,
Super! I forgot to mention that pay will be five dollars. I’m looking at having this issue laid out and posted online in about three weeks. Do you want a check mailed to you or do you have an internet pay account?

Also, I need a bio. I should have mentioned all of this. Sometimes when I compose an email I can be so sloppy. I was a little amused to see that you accidentally wrote “I’d be deleted….” instead of “I’d be delighted….” in your last email to me.

Still, let me know how you want the payment.

–Rebecca Nansemond
——————————————————–

F: Macchione@ymail.net
T: AlienAge@wordpod.com
Subj: “Graying Moon”

I’ve always liked you, Rebecca; always liked your writing and your editing, that is. So I’m going to share a little secret with you. I didn’t mistype when I wrote you that last email. I actually _will_ be deleted when you publish “Tide of the Graying Moon.”

I’m not really a person; at least not anymore. “I” was once Francis Macchione, but now I’m just a “construct.” It’s impossible to explain exactly what I am and how I exist, but I am certain that once “Tide of The Graying Moon” becomes published, Francis Macchione, – “I” — will no longer be anyone or anything.

It’s fine if you send the five dollars to my Paymate account which you can pay into by using my email address. Or you could keep the money. I don’t have any survivors so I’m not quite sure what Paymate would do with that money when I’m gone. Also, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, I don’t really see much point in printing a bio.

Sincerely,
Frank Macchione
—————————————————–

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Dear Frank,

Whoa! That was weird. Sometimes I feel that way, too. But seriously, if you’re pitching a story idea I think it could be good if you do something with it. You could call it “Ghost in the Machine.” I think I’ll be open for submissions for the winter issue of –Alien Age- in late October of this year.

Best,
Rebecca Nansemond
———————————————————–

F: Macchione@ymail.net
T: AlienAge@wordpod.com
Subj: “Graying Moon”

Dear Rebecca,

Thanks for being so understanding. It’s definitely not a story I’m interested in writing. It really happened to me. I guess I need to give you a little more detail. About fourteen months ago I lost my life. I died. You might even say I committed suicide. And I became transformed, __transubstantiated__ into thirty-seven poems. Since then, they’ve each been accepted and published somewhere, except for the last two, “Tide of the Graying Moon,” and “An Account of Decay from Within a Collapsing Castle,” which should be appearing in -_Delirious Mythology_ any day now. Every time one of these poems gets published, another little piece of me ceases to exist. And when these last two are published, that’s it. -Finis-. Big Sleep. Gone. Nil. Nothing. Nada. And you know what? I am soooooo looking forward to it.

Sincerely,
The Late Frank Macchione
—————————————————-

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Dear Frank,

I saw your email, and I’ve been waiting to send you a response until the time when I could sit down and really take my time with what I say.

I got my copy of _Delirious Mythology_ today. “Collapsing Castle” was an awesome poem. It was everything I like about your work. It was so dense, and it seemed so multi-layered. But it was so melancholy!

As for you not existing, don’t worry. I’m not really Rebecca Nansemond. I’m a changeling left by the Fairies!

Best,
Rebecca
—————————————————-

F: Macchione@ymail.net
T: AlienAge@wordpod.com
Subj: “Graying Moon” and other things

Dear Rebecca,

That’s cute.

Actually I like the fact that you still don’t get me being the remnants of a dead guy. It says something about you. You’re fundamentally a very nice, very good, very decent person. Maybe that’s why everything you write is so “light.” And by “light” I don’t mean trivial, I mean optimistic.

I don’t want to bore you with my exact circumstances. My wife was a shrew, my teenaged daughter hated us both and was using crystal meth and sleeping on the streets, and my son, Frank Junior, who was just four years and five months old, a toddler, died from an allergic reaction he had to a peanut butter cookie he got from a friend’s lunchbox at daycare. The most perfect, most beautiful kid in the world died because another kid gave him a cookie!

And there was a lot of mundane crap, too. I was drowning in a dead-end job and my company was being raided by a bunch of dishonest and irresponsible executives. I was getting arthritis in my knees and elbows and wrists, and my vision was getting worse. All this at age 40! The world was, to my eyes, and endless succession of crap. My only outlet was my poetry. And to make matters worse, I spent most of my days mentally exhausted, and I had very little time for writing!

Still, I tried, maybe more out of habit than anything else.

Then one day something very weird happened. I was checking some online market resources for writers, and a pop-up ad came up. No, it wasn’t about working from home or refinancing my mortgage or a free laptop. It said “Tired? Depressed? Sick of life? Translate your pain into poetry.”

Well, “tired” and “depressed” described me to a “T.” I’d been going through the motions of life for quite a while. The only things that made any kind of sense to me as far as thinking about the future were thoughts about suicide and life insurance and the nagging feeling that every thing would be okay if only I could somehow stop the pain.

Some instinct told me deep in my heart that if I clicked on that pop-up I would be ending my life.

But goddamn, was I ready.

At first nothing happened, but then the screen went blank for a few seconds, then it was filled up with a snowy, moiré-like pattern. It was the type of light pattern that can give an epileptic a seizure. It was multi-colored and swirly like an oil slick and it pulsed like a human heart. I felt as if I were being hypnotized, and I felt as if my mind was being peeled away one layer at a time, like an onion, or maybe rewinding and being erased, like an old-fashioned magnetic tape.

I sat there at the keyboard for about two hours. My hands moved on their own accord. My breathing and pulse gradually slowed to a crawl, with all the urgency of a clock winding down.

In that time my hands typed 37 poems. Now doesn’t that sound like a pretty pitiful output? Doesn’t that sound like a fairly lousy exchange for existence as a living, breathing human being?

But a sum total of 37 poems was actually not a bad representation of me. Most writers only write a very few worthwhile things, and all the rest is padding, churned out because of habit, or for money. Those 37 poems were a pretty fair distillation of my characteristic thoughts and feelings. __They__ __were__ __me__.

Then the program which had taken me did a very considerate thing. I don’t know if it did this to many other people – I can’t imagine that I’m the only one. It sent my poems out to various publications like yours which allow email submissions. It got the work out into the public eye. I’d published things before, had even been nominated for a Pushcart Prize^TM one time, way back in the late 1980’s. But in recent years I’d become so tired of writing anything, and couldn’t get motivated to even submit the stuff.

Well, since then 35 of the poems have seen the light of day, and only two more remain. I sold “An Account of Decay from Within a Collapsing Castle” over a year ago, but you know the guy at _Delirious Mythology_, it takes him six months just to blow his damned nose. At least he got the line breaks right this time.

I’m down to almost nothing! I hardly have enough of myself left to even use the word “I”!

Well, when you bought “Tide of The Graying Moon” the last poem sold, and like I said, once it’s published, I cease to exist.

So now you know.

Best,
(The Late) (Dear Departed) Frank Macchione (deceased)
—————————————————–

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Wow.

That is very weird.

But I’m going to ask a favor of you. Please don’t take this the wrong way. Save all the fiction stuff for submissions. I get a lot of emails, and it’s hard for me to sort through stuff. I try to keep –Alien Age- on a schedule and cope with all the paperwork.

And I’m just not sure how to react. I mean I know you’re not an electronic ghost, so I don’t worry about that, but are any of those other things true? Please tell me you didn’t really lose your little boy. I’ve never had children, obviously, I’ve never even been married, but that seems like something you should never, ever even joke about.

But are you really that unhappy? If you like I’ll give you my personal email and you can email me at that address and I don’t mind hearing how things are going with you personally. Sometimes it helps a lot just to have someone to talk to. But don’t give the personal email out to any writers, okay?

Yours,
Rebecca
———————————————————-

F: Macchione@ymail.net
T: AlienAge@wordpod.com
cc: RNansemond37@wildearth.net
cc: RJNansemond@Radford.edu
Subj: “Graying Moon”

Dear Rebecca,

As you can see, I already know all of your email addresses. I mean, give me __some__ credit. I __exist__ in the internet.

I don’t blame you at all, and believe me I don’t take it the wrong way. You’re just a nice person.

In fact, you’re so nice, I want to give you three little pieces of advice.

1) You sent a story – a very good story, btw – to _Gargoyle Galore_ magazine six months ago, and the editor keeps saying he’s considering it. Send it somewhere else. He lost it, and he just keeps telling people he’s considering things. He’ll never put out another issue. I’ve looked into his computer and he’s so disorganized it’s pitiful. He’s just about ready to declare bankruptcy.
2) You’ve been bidding on a 2004 Honda Accord on Motors4you.com. Get out of that auction immediately! Cancel your bids! That guy doesn’t have that car, all he has is the JPEG image, he’s going to ask for your bank account number to do a transfer but he’ll just clean out your account, and he’s sold that car so many times the past year it’s not funny.
3) You’ve just about decided to give your address and phone number to that guy you’ve exchanged messages with a few times on Date.com. Don’t do that either. That jackass is a worse deal than the Accord. I know he comes across like somebody you’d want to meet when you’re messaging, but he’s an expert in making himself look good, like he’s exactly what a woman wants. He’s phonier than an eight-dollar bill. He’s not even single! And his wife has no idea he’s fooling around!

Best,
Frank (Ghost in the Machine ) Macchione
—————————————————–

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Okay.

Dear Whoever You Are:

Please consider this official notice that I’m not going to publish “Tide of The Graying Moon” after all. And it will be my pleasure to mail you your full payment as a kill fee.

Please don’t submit anything else to _Alien Age_. I won’t consider any more of your work.

R. Nansemond,
Editor-in-Chief,
Alien Age Magazine
—————————————————

F: Macchione@ymail.net
T: AlienAge@wordpod.com
Subj: “Graying Moon”

I’m sorry!

I realize now just how much I must have creeped you out. Maybe I should have just kept out of your business, but I care about you. Sometimes I catch myself imagining how different my life would have been if I’d met you years before…

Regardless, you’ve got to publish that poem! I don’t have any communication or control over whatever took those poems. I don’t submit them, it submits them. And I can’t be sure that it would resubmit “Graying Moon” to another market!

Please don’t drag this out! Do you have any idea how flat this existence is? Sure, I don’t have any pain, but I don’t really have anything else either. In the movies zipping around in cyberspace looks like a special-effects thrill ride, but the state I’m in is actually like a mathematical state of -unbeing-, like Schrödinger’s cat or something.

But I can still remember, I can still feel! I still hurt!

Please, Rebecca, I beg you, please publish that poem so I can move on….

In desperation,
Frank Macchione
—————————————————

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Dear Writer,

Thanks for your query regarding the work referenced above. My records show that I have previously answered all questions regarding that submission, and no such story or poem is currently in our editorial pipeline.

Editor,
Alien Age
——————————————————

F: Macchione@ymail.net
T: AlienAge@wordpod.com
Subj: “Graying Moon”

For God’s sake, don’t do this to me!

I’m not sure that this thing will resubmit that poem anywhere else. I’m going to be in a kind of limbo.

I may be stuck here forever!

When I was a young Catholic, the priests and nuns told us that suicides condemned themselves to Hell. I didn’t imagine then that Hell could mean millions and millions of miles and miles of fiber optic cable, and great cities of circuitry, with wave after wave of clattering, crackling electrons washing in and out of the shore….

One little poem out there, accepted but not published. But I might be stuck here for eternity. Eternity! You’re the only person who could set me free!

I know that I must have frightened you when you thought that I was spying on you. I know you think everything I’ve told you is a lot of BS, and that I’m some kind of cyber-stalker. But Rebecca, WHAT IF YOU’RE WRONG?! Good God, how could you live with yourself?

Please please please let me know….

Frank
—————————————————–

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Okay, Frank –- if you are Frank. I’ve Googled your name, and I’ve read the stories archived on your local paper’s website. I read your obituary. I even read the article about your little boy.

I sent the five dollars to your Paymate account.

So I’m going to publish the poem. But before I do, I have so many questions for you. Do you think you’re going to move on to a different place? Or do you really think it’s going to be nothing? You’ve been closer to the answer than any other person I could ask.

Do you sense something from where you are?

Are there others like you out there?

Can you sense anything about what happens when you move on? Is there another side? Do you think there’s a God?

Rebecca
———————————————————–

F: AlienAge@ wordpod.com
T: Macchione@ymail.net
Subj: poetry submission “Tide of the Graying Moon”

Dear Frank,

I was kind of waiting to hear back from you, but I wanted to get _Alien Age_ out by the deadline.

I hope you can see and like the way “Graying Moon” was presented. I did some last minute shifting around to make it the lead. That’s the first time we’ve ever made a poem the lead.

I had no idea what to say on the contributor’s notes, so we just left it blank.

The Paymate transfer failed, account closed. I mailed a check through snail mail, but it came back.

I cancelled my bids on the car, and I stopped messaging the guy from Date.com. And I withdrew that story from _Gargoyle Galore_ and sent it out to _Ghost Palace_, and it sold!

And I installed a pop-up blocker.

But mostly I’ve just been thinking of you.

What do you think could have happened if we had met each other long ago?

Love,
Rebecca
———————————————————–
From: Mailer-Daemon@wordpod.com
To: AlienAge@wordpod.com
Subject: Failure Notice

Unable to deliver your message to the following address: Macchione@ymail.net
Remote host said: 554 delivery error dd

This user does not exist.
———————————————————–

Charles M. Saplak has been publishing stories and poems for about twenty years.

Do you remember the first time you started to hear about El Niño?  Or tsunamis and hurricanes?  It seems to me it was towards the millennium period and everyone started talking as if the end of the world were near.  I thought it was millennium fever at the time but now I realise the clues were there–but no one took them seriously.  Please don’t stop reading my story here; this is not another pious ecological ‘I told you so’ tale.  In any case, no one really knows how or why it happened.  The ozone layer, nuclear testing and countless other suggestions have been put forward but not even the scientists understood.

I remember sitting with my husband in our cottage, watching endless natural disaster documentaries and, I suppose, getting some kind of voyeuristic thrill from them.  They were usually set in the tornado belt of Nebraska or the coastal regions of Bangladesh.  There was always that comfortable feeling that nothing like that could happen in England, to our village–to us.

I’ve written this story to try and give history a personal viewpoint.  If we do survive and someone is reading this in 2030, I want people to know how it really felt and what sacrifices individuals made to try and make a new life possible for others.  As an ordinary married woman in her thirties living in an isolated part of the country, I never saw myself as author or historian.  Please forgive any mistakes I may have made and try to understand what it has been like for us.

People all over the country had commented on the severity of the winter of 2012 and longed for the summer to come.  But it hadn’t happened.  The weather refused to acknowledge the seasons and 2013 had just got colder.  I think that night in July was the first time I accepted this was not just a quirk of nature but something far more serious.

As usual I couldn’t sleep and I stared instead at the breathtakingly beautiful scene.  I shivered.  The stove in the bedroom was barely adequate and I could see my breath in the still, cold air.  Everyone was trying to pretend it was going to be all right and next year would be back to normal.  But I knew it would never happen.

I turned to watch David, sleeping peacefully and smiled.  He had always accepted whatever life threw at him and somehow he managed to retain his optimism and a wry sense of humour.

‘It’ll be right,’ he would say in his attractive Cumbrian accent.

I wasn’t sure he believed it this time.  In the twelve years we’d been married, he’d always been the calm one whereas I worried about everything.  At least those niggling worries seemed unimportant now and the only things that really mattered were survival–and each other.

It was frightening how quickly civilisation could collapse.  A combination of cold, shortage of food and panic had resulted in a dangerous breakdown of order, particularly in the cities.  I suppose, in that way, we were luckier than most.  The farm had provided us with adequate food and fuel, although we had little left now for the livestock.  I remember wondering how we would survive the coming months and feeling tired, frightened and hopeless.  It was one of my lowest moments but I think each of us had to go through that before we finally accepted the truth of our situation.  Except perhaps David.

The following morning he smiled as he came back into the warm kitchen.

‘Eleanor?’

He stopped as he saw my face and continued quietly.  ‘Couldn’t you sleep again, love?’

I shook my head.  ‘Come and get warm, David.  You look frozen.’

I opened the wood burning stove and he spread his hands in front of it.  The old Lakeland farm had always been in David’s family but his father would have been horrified to see it now.  At first, it wasn’t so bad.  There was dried food and silage, but even that was running low and the remaining animals were rationed.

‘How’s the milk this morning?’  I asked, getting ready for work.

‘It’s still coming but the yield’s down again.  Cows need grass to produce milk.  There’s just no substitute.’

I watched his face and realised he was as worried about the future as I was.  He cared about the animals and he hated to see them becoming poorer by the day and hardly any food left in the barn.  I always suspected the optimism was a charade for me but I think he didn’t know how else to cope.

He looked up.  ‘You look worn out, Eleanor.  Why don’t you ring Bob?  Tell him you won’t be in.’

I shook my head, although the idea was tempting.  I was the practice nurse at the surgery and I knew Dr. Carter would understand.  But there was nothing physically wrong and he was already overworked treating flu, bronchitis and many other problems related to the intense, everlasting cold.

At that moment we were interrupted by someone knocking at the front door.  We jumped and looked at each other.  Visitors were rare now and any stranger could mean trouble, so David motioned to me to move back as he opened the door.  We were both surprised to see a soldier standing in the porch, wearing camouflage uniform but carrying a clipboard.  It was an incongruous sight.

‘Mr Lawley?’ he asked, looking at David for confirmation.

‘Yes,’ replied David but I could sense his unease.

‘We need to evacuate you,’ said the young soldier, simply, looking over David’s shoulder into the kitchen.

‘Is your wife here, too?’

David was dumbfounded and I emerged from the shadows, nervous but angry.

‘What are you talking about?  You needn’t think there’s anything left on this farm worth taking!’

‘Oh no, it’s nothing like that, Madam.  We’re evacuating everyone in Cumbria.  The boffins have come up with a new device and they need to test it out here.  You’ll be given alternative accommodation, don’t worry.’

‘And just where might that be?’  I whispered, truly frightened by this man and his clipboard.

‘We have camps set up for you just outside Glasgow.  You’ll be all right there.’

I couldn’t believe how callous the human race had become.  This man didn’t seem to understand how much we needed our home.  It was our security, our sanctuary–no matter how terrible things might get elsewhere.

‘Surely you want to see this mess sorted out?’ the soldier continued, looking round at the frozen landscape.  ‘This is the least populated part of the country.  It makes sense.’

‘I don’t feel sensible,’ shouted David, beside himself with anger and fear.  ‘What about the animals?’

I knew how upset he was.  A second soldier appeared in the yard and he was considerably older and an officer by his insignia.

‘Mr. Lawley, I realise this has come as a shock to you and your wife.  Perhaps we could go in and I can explain the situation more fully,’ he said, frowning at the young corporal.

He introduced himself as Major Philips and somehow the three of us found ourselves sitting round the table.  He was a calm, quietly spoken man.

‘How long would we have to be away?’ asked David, under control again.  ‘Because someone will need to feed the stock.’

The other man shook his head and looked uncomfortable.

‘I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood the situation, Mr. Lawley.  You wouldn’t be able to return here–at least not for five years or so and perhaps not ever.’

I remember gasping and suddenly the room started to spin.  David caught me round the waist and the Major rushed to get a glass of water.  I tried breathing slowly and evenly and sipped the cold liquid.  Everything gradually steadied.

‘You want us to leave our home forever?  Just like that?’  I asked, incredulous.

‘I’m afraid you have very little option.  The scientists can’t be one hundred per cent certain this will work–it’s completely new technology.  Cumbria has been chosen because there are very few people but plenty of wildlife.  If this works, it should warm the area in a matter of months and the animals will be fine.  But we need to know the long-term effects on them before we dare try it anywhere else.  We’re going to seal off Cumbria for five years and then return to monitor the results.  If it’s successful, we’ll use it throughout the affected area.’

‘But what will happen to us in the meantime?  Not just us–I mean everyone.  How will we survive for another five years?’

David could still hardly believe this was happening.

‘We have enough supplies to feed the population for that length of time and we’ll be declaring martial law from nine o’clock tomorrow morning,’ said the Major, quietly but deliberately.

‘So that will be our life?’  I asked.  ‘Living in a refuge camp outside Glasgow under martial law?’

The Major looked thoughtful and was silent for a moment.

‘There is one other option open to you,’ he replied.  ‘But I doubt that you’ll thank me for suggesting it.’

David and I looked at each other.

‘Would it mean we could go on living here, as we are now?  I hardly dared to hope.

The soldier sighed.  ‘I wish you had longer to think this over.  You people are frightened and vulnerable and I’m not sure you realise what the scientists are asking you to do.’

‘For goodness sake, man, just tell us!’ shouted David in frustration.

He rarely lost control but I knew he was close now.

“All right, all right,’ agreed Major Philips, holding his hands up in a placatory gesture.

‘The scientists are asking for a group of around a thousand volunteers to stay in the test area and act as human guinea pigs.  They say the likelihood is you’ll survive–but there are no guarantees here…’ He trailed off and looked at us sadly, knowing our decision was made.

‘But, yes, you could carry on living here and we’ll provide you and the others with provisions and medical supplies before we seal the area off.  But you have to understand we can’t ensure your safety.  Whatever happens here after the test, you’re completely on your own.  If you change your mind and try to get out, you’ll be shot.  So think very carefully.’

‘I don’t have to think about it,’ I said.  ‘And I’m sure David feels the same.’

David nodded vigorously.  ‘Our life’s here.  Not in a camp somewhere with toilet blocks and an exercise yard!’

‘Oh, come now, Mr. Lawley, you wouldn’t be prisoners.’

‘For how long?  Even with martial law, how long do you think civilisation can survive?’

Major Philips looked down but made no reply.  I think he understood the truth behind David’s words.

‘Tell us what we need to know and give us what we need to survive,’ I said, certain of our decision.  Whatever the eventual consequences, at least we’d be in our own home and we’d be living together.  Or dying together–and that was important too.

Major Philips stood up and pushed his chair back.

‘I’ll have to ring Headquarters and add your names to the list.  You’ll be pleased to know there are already quite a few from this village who have made the same decision.’

‘Pleased, but not surprised,’ I replied, still trembling slightly.

‘What would you do in our position, Major?’ asked David, quietly.

He smiled slightly and put on his cap.  ‘Exactly the same as you.  But then my wife always said I was soft.’  He looked sad for a moment.  ‘She was killed in a car accident two years ago and things don’t seem to matter as much as they used to.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said and I meant it.  This man was just the messenger and he genuinely wanted us to understand the risks.

‘I will be seeing you again though,’ he murmured, as he walked towards the door.  ‘I volunteered to oversee the experiment for the military.  I didn’t think I had a lot to lose.’

He held up his hand in a brief wave and closed the door behind him.

I don’t think I need to describe our feelings at that moment.  Any of you with a degree of imagination will appreciate what we were going through.  The following days were chaotic and the army called a public meeting in the Parish Hall to try and calm the situation.  Everyone in the area attended and the hall was packed with resentful, frightened people.

‘My wife and I are staying.’  Bob Carter spoke up.  ‘You’re going to need a doctor–but what about medical supplies?  And will there be extra personnel?’

Major Philips, who was sitting on the small stage, nodded and took the question himself.

‘Thank you, Dr. Carter.  I’m sure everyone appreciates your decision and Eleanor Lawley has opted to stay too.  Apart from yourselves, there is to be an army surgeon and one additional nurse.  We intend to use this building as a hospital and we’ll provide adequate equipment and supplies to cover any normal contingencies.’

‘That’s the point, though, isn’t it, Major,’ said another voice behind us.  We recognised the familiar but unpopular figure of James Sutcliffe.  He was the biggest landowner round here and let much of his land and property.  He probably felt he had more to lose than most.

‘There isn’t a lot about this situation that could be described as remotely normal, is there?  And what do you intend to offer in the way of compensation?’

I wondered how Major Philips would deal with this difficult man.  Like most in the valley, we found James arrogant and unpleasant but fortunately we didn’t have to put up with him as a landlord.

The government representative cut in.  ‘I’m afraid the question of compensation isn’t appropriate in the present state of emergency.  Like everyone else in Cumbria, you’ll be offered free accommodation somewhere in Scotland for the duration of the experiment.’

David suggested I offer to give Sutcliffe oxygen.  I also have to admit to a petty feeling of satisfaction that at least everyone was equal in this situation.  It was a feeling shared by many until the apoplectic man announced in that case he would stay to safeguard his properties.  Our elation was short-lived.

‘Fifty of you have elected to stay, rather than relocate,’ continued Major Philips, moving on hurriedly.  ‘The others will have to be ready to leave by July 21st and the device will be activated on August 10th.  I’ll hand over now to Dr. Rebecca Sullivan, who can explain the scientific basis for this experiment.’

I remember my first impressions of Becky.  She was in her late thirties and attractive but her hands shook as she held her papers.  I found out later she was brilliant academically but shy and terrified of public speaking.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank you all for coming here tonight.’

‘Sounds like she’s welcoming us to a whist drive,’ murmured David in my ear and I stifled a desire to laugh.  He has a tendency to sarcastic humour at times.

‘We didn’t have a lot of option,’ called another voice but I felt sorry for this woman.  At least we should hear her out.  She finally finished her speech which none of us remotely understood and sat down.

‘Any questions?’ asked Major Philips, tentatively.

‘What was she talking about?’ came back the answer.

‘It’s a fair question,’ whispered David and I had to agree.

The other man on the stage stood up hastily and introduced himself as Paul Ferris.  He had an American accent and he explained he worked with Dr. Sullivan at Cambridge University.  He tried again to explain the technology and this time it made a kind of sense.

It seemed to us he was describing a sort of microwave technology, although as far removed from our kitchen appliance as you could imagine.  The idea was to have several devices positioned around the area which, in layman’s terms, would work as massive storage heaters.  As I said, this is a simplified interpretation.  The system would gradually but continuously heat the region and be controllable, so that we could experience virtual seasons to aid the natural cycles.

‘Fine if it works,’ murmured David, raising his eyebrows.

‘Think of the camp outside Glasgow,’ I muttered darkly and he subsided.

I felt his hand close over mine and I gripped it tightly.

Some of the people like Bob Carter were staying because they felt they should.  Beth Cummings wanted to keep the school open.  Others felt they were helping humanity by volunteering to be guinea pigs.  David and I were there because we didn’t want to live in a camp outside Glasgow.  This is in no way a reflection on that fine city.  But it wasn’t our home and it wasn’t where we wanted to live or die.  I make this point because there were so many noble people but I wasn’t one of them and I’m trying to be as honest as I can.

The days leading up to A Chance for Life, as it had ominously become known, were almost surreal.  We felt as if we were living in an alternative universe, with soldiers and scientists in white suits milling around the village.  It was horribly reminiscent of the Foot and Mouth crisis several years before, which had ravaged this countryside and its families.  David and I had been personally affected by that and we shuddered as we remembered the horror of that time.

‘We never thought we’d get through that, love, but we did,’ said David, knowing my thoughts as we watched the scientists working behind our cottage.

‘Barely,’ I whispered and he put his arm round my shoulders.

Later that day I invited Becky and Paul into our kitchen for a hot drink and they told us they would be staying for the duration.  Neither had family ties and they wanted to be here to monitor the effects and carry out any necessary modifications.  I remember telling them how relieved I was to hear this.  They had to think there was some chance of us surviving.

Becky laughed.  ‘Thanks for the overwhelming vote of confidence,’ and I realised how insulting it must have sounded.  We chatted and I learnt they’d worked together for five years.  Although she didn’t actually say so, I picked up the idea the relationship was more than just a professional one.  After the dreadful winter of 2006, the government had really become interested in the technology and they’d been working seven days a week to perfect it.

But it was a few days later that I realised things weren’t going just as smoothly as we’d been led to believe.  I could hear raised voices from the kitchen and I realised it was the two of them having an argument.  Becky said she needed more time but Paul turned away and carried on with his work.  Becky touched his arm to get his attention and he turned again and grabbed her by the shoulders.

He was shouting at her now.  ‘For Goodness sake, Becky, you know as well as I do the army won’t give us any longer.  If we don’t do it now, they’ll just bring in Mulligan and you know his idea hasn’t got a hope in hell.  We’ve got one chance to make this work and that chance is now.’  His voice softened.  ‘I know you’re exhausted and so am I.  But it’s only a few more days and then, for better or worse, it’s over.’

‘But all these people, Paul.  They’re depending on us to get it right.  Somehow, in the lab it was different and I never thought in terms of real lives.  We could be killing almost a thousand people!’

‘Becky!’  Paul shook her hard.  ‘We could also be saving millions of lives and we can’t deny them that hope.  It’s probably the only one they’ve got.’

I didn’t know what to do.  Paul wasn’t actually hurting Becky although I didn’t like the way he treated her.  It wasn’t my concern although I was alarmed by the tone of the discussion.  They didn’t sound as if hey were brimming with confidence.  Later in the day, I made an excuse to talk to Becky alone and I told her what I’d overheard.

‘Sorry, Eleanor.  That can’t have been very reassuring,’ she smiled.

I shrugged.  ‘We all know nothing is guaranteed here.  Major Philips made that perfectly clear from the start.’

Becky sighed.  ‘I honestly do think it will work.  Theoretically, it should.  But our research wasn’t complete and I hate having to rush things like this.’

‘Paul seemed confident enough,’ I ventured.  I wasn’t quite sure how to say this.

‘Becky, he seemed pretty rough with you earlier.  Is he often like that?’

She shook her head but I saw the glimmer of pain in her eyes.  Or was it embarrassment?

‘He’s just worn out, like me.  It’s been difficult lately and I don’t think I’ve been exactly easy to live with.’

I nodded and let it pass.  It was none of my business.

I began to wonder how these people were going to survive together in the coming days.  Although there were several such groups within Cumbria, each one was supposed to remain autonomous.  I considered Becky and Paul, Major Philips and James Sutcliffe.  All had their own problems which had little to do with A Chance for Life.

As the evacuees left and August 10th approached, the groups prepared themselves, and the large county began to feel more like a country.  It was a disturbing thought.  In any country, there are those who want to lead and control the lives of others.  What if that were to happen here?  I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the climate or the experiment.  It had more to do with man’s apparent inability to live together in harmony.  I closed my eyes, as I recognised the real threat we might have to face in the next few years.

I can hardly believe it’s been so long since I looked at this diary.  With so much happening, it just got forgotten until today when I found it, by accident, in the drawer of the dresser.  I have to admit to mixed emotions as I read it.  We seemed so naïve back then.  You can probably imagine our fears on the day itself.  Somehow, we expected something dramatic such as a great flash of light or an explosion.  We’d been told we wouldn’t experience any effects but I don’t think we really believed it.  It was almost an anti-climax when the appointed time came and went–and nothing significant appeared to have happened.  Becky and Paul told us this was good and just as it should be.  All we could do was wait while they took daily readings and tests and conducted a range of experiments.

At first, there was a feeling of adventure and perhaps, more than anything else, freedom.  We were completely on our own and life was exactly what we made of it.  No petty restrictions and no irritating politicians trying to tell us how to live.  Or so we thought.

‘Being a politician isn’t so much a career as a personality failing,’ explained David, a couple of weeks after the experiment.  ‘Or perhaps a cult of personality.’ I grinned as I thought of James Sutcliffe.  He saw himself as a natural leader and had tried almost immediately to take over the running of the group.

‘You mean if a politician doesn’t exist, it’s necessary to invent one,’ I replied, laughing.

Neither of us realised just how seriously we should have taken that philosophy and acted upon it.  In a situation like this, the most ambitious people always try to take control and we should have realised this and organised some sort of council instead.  I know Major Philips was unhappy but none of us fully appreciated his fears at the time.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered so much if things had gone according to plan and there hadn’t been the fire.

It happened last year during the hot spell when the ice and snow had disappeared but Becky still couldn’t seem to regulate the temperature grid.  After being acclimatised to the cold, it hit us hard and tempers frayed in the stifling atmosphere.  It didn’t help that the two scientists were constantly arguing and I knew Paul was becoming increasingly violent.  I’ve grown close to Becky now and I’ve seen the bruises.

The older children were becoming difficult and Sutcliffe decided to introduce a ‘disciplinary code’ to keep them–and us–in order.  I don’t think many took him seriously or had the energy to object, and somehow we agreed to it.  He even co-opted a few villagers to act as enforcers, a name which seemed to stick.  We had no idea what it might mean until David saw the flames leaping into the sky above the warehouse, erected to store the food and medical supplies.  I don’t know whether it was accidental or malicious but the end result was the same.  We lost most of our provisions and the incident marked the beginning of what has become an austere and frightening regime.

Food rationing was introduced and Sutcliffe wanted to move into other areas to ‘request aid.’  Unfortunately he intended backing up his demands with enforcers and shotguns.  For once, Major Philips and the moderates prevailed and our problems remain restricted to our own group for the time being.  David and I continue much as always but we have come to question our decision to stay more and more as the months pass.

For the first time, I begin to wonder what kind of civilisation is going to survive to greet the rest of the world at the appointed time.  Today, I even asked Becky what would happen if we tried to go beyond the borders into Lancashire or Northumberland.  She said the army would have troops round the entire region and would shoot anyone caught trying to escape.

‘Do you realise you used the word escape then?’ asked David meaningfully.

Becky grimaced.  ‘No, but it’s the way I feel.’

I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about our ruling council or her estranged lover.

‘I don’t understand.  We’re not infectious and all the animals are perfectly healthy.  How can we still pose a danger?’

Becky tried again to describe the kind of waves the device used and explained there was a theoretical if slight chance of our being contaminated–hence the five-year quarantine.

I never believed five years could seem such a long time.  Since Major Philips died in the accident, if that’s what it was, the moderates have no influence over the council and the enforcers make sure we don’t argue.  Paul is training the older children in unarmed combat and Sutcliffe is teaching them to shoot.  We are very short of food now and they believe it is necessary to move away to other areas.  If they do, they go without us.  We opted to live or die here and we may very well do that.  But we won’t kill anyone to survive.  We are here to make a new life possible for the world–not to destroy it.

I have just remembered this diary and I must keep it safe.  David says we must take very little with us but this is important.  There are only seven of us left now and we have to cover the forty miles to the border as quickly as possible.  It is now five years since the experiment and it is a lovely warm summer’s day here.  We have no idea what has happened outside and no one has come to tell us.  We never saw Sutcliffe and the rest after they left us that day and it is hard to say we cared very much.

So much has happened that we could not have dreamed of.  Bob and Stella Carter are with us–and Beth Cummings and Becky.  The food is almost gone now and we know we have to find help.  If we could go back five years, would we still make the same decision?  Absolutely.  David and I are still together and now we are not alone.  It has become even more vital that we find help.

The Professor of History finished reading the carefully protected document and looked up at his audience, smiling.

‘This may be the most important find related to A Chance for Life that has ever been made and it gives us a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary people during one of the most difficult periods in our history.  We realise what sacrifices those individuals made and how their courage made it possible for life to continue.  Perhaps we owe our very existence to people like David and Eleanor.  And did they survive?’

He stopped and smiled.

‘Yes, I am happy to tell you they did.  And perhaps Carol, Robert, Beth and Rebecca Lawley would like to come to the front of the auditorium to take charge of this fascinating document.  After all, it was written by their grandmother and I know how much she would have wanted them to have it.’

Heather Parker is a freelance writer and has won several competitions including the 2009 Benjamin Franklin House / Daily Telegraph Literary Prize and The People’s Friend Short Story Competition.  Her stories and articles have appeared in many popular UK and US magazines, including  The Weekly News, The People’s Friend, The New Writer and Space and Time.  She has had a novel published by Drollerie Press, with the sequel due out shortly,  and a novella published by Wild Child Publishing.  Her stories regularly appear in anthologies including  the Out of Line Peace and Justice Anthology, Absent Willow Review Anthology, Hoi Polloi 111 Literary Journal,  Bridge House Publishing,  Sunpenny Publishing, The Little Sisters Mystery Anthology, and 50 Stories for Pakistan.

Madelaine Hopkins knows that this statement is supposed to make her feel ashamed, but she does not feel like humoring the doctor by complying. Instead she replies, “Well, your simulation is supposed to help me answer these two questions, isn’t it?”

She nods at the bed across the room, with a half-circle ring on one end and a monitoring screen on the other. Hanging above the bed are Dr. Winston’s PhD certificates in neuroscience (year 2069) and developmental psychology (2073).

“Of course.” Dr. Winston looks back down at the charts in his hands. “Let’s see here… it seems like you’ve had a healthy study schedule at school, and your extracurriculars are impressive as well. Glowing recommendations from past instructors, and your aptitude tests are in the top 0.1% of seventeen-year-olds in the world.”

He glances up at Madelaine and gives her an amused smile. “You’re the perfect prodigy. Now all we need to do is help you find the identity that you seek.”

Madelaine nods. That is why her parents were willing to shell out close to a hundred thousand dollars for the VR simulation, after all. So that she can find out who she wants to be. What she wants to do with this life, this intelligence she has been gifted.

“Shall we, then?” Dr. Winston stands up from his chair and moves toward the rolling bed across the room, gesturing for Madelaine to follow.

“Just lay your head here inside this silver ring,” he says, and begins to adjust the settings on the screen at the bottom end of the bed. As he flips through different slides, checking this box and that, he reiterates again how the simulation will progress.

“When I turn on the VR console, two thin needles will extend out of the brain mapper—that’s the silver semi-circle that currently surrounds your head,” Dr. Winston explains, staring at Madelaine with kind eyes. However, she manages to detect the lofty tone in his voice, almost patronizing.

The doctor continues. “You will feel a ringing prick on the inside of your temples as the needles enter. After a few seconds, you will feel completely relaxed, and you won’t feel a thing after the chemicals seep into your brain.”

He reaches over and checks the brain mapper, making sure that everything is moving accordingly. “As you know, the simulation will last five real-time hours. You will go through the three lifetimes of occupations that you and your parents picked out during our last appointment. Should you feel the need to jump to the next occupation, or even leave the virtual reality world, all you have to do is think it with your mind. The brain mapper will automatically pick up your intentions, and you will be awakened in a matter of seconds. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly.”

“Great. So are you ready?”

Madelaine smiles. Her parents have already wired the fees. They have all already signed the confidentiality agreements. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” she says.

“Then let’s get started. The next time you wake up, you’ll be immediately submerged in the career world. Be prepared.”

Immediately Madelaine hears a beeping in her ears, her peripherals catching two needles inching toward her.

Her hands tingle with excitement, she cannot help it. She recalls the compromise she made with her parents regarding the three occupations—she chose one, and her mother and father each chose the other two.

“After you experience a lifetime of a job, you will see my point,” he father had said when he chose for her the occupation of an attorney. “In the end, the high-paying job is the one that affords for you the luxuries you have grown up with. It is the one you will be begging for after your ‘gratifying’ archaeology career becomes another race against the clock.”

The impact of the needles on her skin stings for half a second, and then a numbing buzz begins to travel through her body, spreading and spreading until she feels nothing.

She blinks to stop the room from spinning, but to no avail.

Her eyelids close, and darkness envelopes.

“Hopkins!”

Madelaine turns to find a fifty-something-year-old man addressing her. A yellow hardhat strapped on his head and a clipboard of sketches clutched in his hand, he says, “Grab your equipment, hon. We’re leaving for the site.”

And with those words, the man turns and leaves the tent, his heavy field boots creating little mushrooms of dust as they make impact with the ground.

Madelaine blinks, adjusting to the new world around her. She looks from one side of the tent to the other. There is scarcely anything here within the billowing confines of the fabric walls, save for the table set up in the front, with a blueprint of some kind of complex sprawled over it.

She walks to the table and sees an equipment belt lying on a chair. A side bag of the belt, holding a pocketknife, is imprinted on the front with the initials M.H.

Madelaine recognizes her own handwriting, and she picks up the equipment belt and straps it on.

Naturally she realizes that her first VR simulation is that of an archaeologist, the occupation she had chosen herself.

She takes a closer look at the blueprint on the table.

And then it registers to her.

The sketch is of the Piazza Venezia Square.

She is in a dig site in Rome, and a famous one at that.

The first thing Madelaine notices is that it is hot, unbearably so. Peering at the glaring sun above her, she estimates the time to be somewhere around 9:00 A.M.

She sees a dark bank of clouds to the west, rain falling from the sky in sheets, although it does not look like a storm will be chasing them out of the dig site today.

Everything seems so real, she thinks as she surveys the site in front of her. The loose pits are approximately two meters deep, and most of the digging is done by local men hired from neighboring villages, with the excavation of delicate objects being handled by the archaeologists themselves. Their students, brought along from their respective universities, stand up top with the screeners, making sure that every artifact goes into properly labeled bags.

“Hey,” a voice says, pulling her back to the present.

Madelaine turns to find the same man standing behind her once again. On the drive from the “office” tent to the dig site, she learned that his name is Derek. He is the lead archeologist of the project, overseeing almost all of the administration duties—although, judging by the soot on his cargoes, it looks like Derek has already had some time to jump into the pits and excavate.

“Grab your notebook and follow me. I need you to take down some notes.”

Madelaine does not say anything except “Of course” and trails after him.

Derek talks fast, and his thoughts never move along a tangential line. Sometimes Madelaine does not even know whether he is speaking to her or muttering to himself. He makes an exchange with one of the local diggers here, or inquires about new findings with another archaeologist close by. On occasion, as he weaves through the dry, dusty maze of a dig site, he tells Madelaine to pay specific attention to this or make a brief note of that.

Despite the mild headache from the midday heat, she is finally starting to submerge herself in her tasks. As she walks alongside Derek—the native Italian excavators call him Dr. Terryl, while the younger students address him as Professor T—she will sometimes catch an image or hear a phrase that reminds her of home, reminds her that everything around her is merely a manipulation of the brain.

“Note the change in soil here,” Derek says, stopping as he points to an area lying on the outer fringe of the mapped dig site. “I see some discarded ash running along the top tier.”

“Perhaps an indication of wall remains,” Madelaine adds, examining the dirt.

Derek chuckles. “Stole the words right from my mouth.” He walks forward, stepping out of the dig site’s formal boundaries and entering unsanctioned territory. “I believe it was either you or Hassan who wrote up and submitted the extension proposal for this unit, correct?”

Madelaine barely hears a word of his question, for her eyes wandered from the loose soil back to the dig site behind them. Standing at ground level now and surveying the progress in the pits below, she can feel the smile on her face in her chest.

From the beads of sweat running off the sun-burnt necks of the local workers as they dig according to the notes of Madelaine’s fellow colleagues, both foreigners and natives working together to unearth history, to understand and interpret humanity in a way that transcends the blockades of culture and language and land, the thought of everything going on inside the boundaries of the site makes her heart beat to an unsteady metronome of excitement.

“Hello? Anyone home inside that pretty little head of yours?” Again, Derek’s voice.

Madelaine’s eyes move back to him again, who says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you today, but you better fix it before I start to rethink my decision to promote you to Forensics Supervisor at the Prehistory Lab.”

Three years, a doctorate, and seven more promotions later, Madelaine finds herself working late one Wednesday night in the Historical Archaeology Lab, finishing the analyses and documentations of a few artifacts that were shipped here yesterday from Siberia.

Frustration courses through her mind as she examines a cracked side of a porcelain water pitcher.

She should not be here in the lab like this, working when all she wants to do is curl up in a bed. But since her boyfriend Evan had dumped her over dinner tonight, she did not feel like returning home and breaking the news to her roommate. No. Tonight she will stay here, in the lab in which she spends almost ten hours a day, the only place to go in order to refocus and detach her thoughts from her personal life.

Ironic, since the reason Evan had broken it off with her is that he felt like she was too obsessed with her job and not serious enough about him.

Just as well, Madelaine tells herself as she records the material observations on the research database. Evan strangely reminded her of her father. Although the man never actually came out and voiced his opinion about her career in archaeology, she could tell every time she talked about work that Evan disapproved, just like her father. An investment banker, Evan’s sole duty is to watch money grow.

Evan never understood her reasons for going into archaeology. Evan couldn’t.

And it wasn’t her breakup with him that is making her heart ache. No, it wasn’t.

So then why do I feel on the verge of losing my sanity? she asks herself.

With gloved hands, she now moves on to lift a few intact drinking gourds and a clay mug out of the sealed titanium crate.

The new material is keeping her mind off her breakup, but the flowering pain in her chest refuses to subside.

Again, for hundredth time or so, Madelaine reflects back on what her father had told her before she entered Dr. Winston’s office.

“In the end, the high-paying job is the one that affords for you the luxuries you have grown up with. It is the one you will be begging for after your ‘gratifying’ archaeology career becomes another race against the clock.”

She wonders if her father was right, after all.

Do I really feel that way?

Madelaine’s eyes take a sweep of the extent of the lab, with its temperature control systems and lights.  The computers, the microscopes, the maps, the shelves of supplies that cover an entire wall of the room… it is within these confines that she works, day to day, hour to hour.

How many times has she caught herself staring at the digits of the clock on the wall, willing them with her mind to change faster?

With that a cold, clammy fist forms at the pit of her stomach, and she suddenly cannot breathe.

Tears pool and finally fall from her eyes, blurring her world as she hits the side of the desk, grabbing onto it to steady herself.

Her father was right. She is getting bored. She is feeling trapped.

The shattering series of crashes refocuses her eyes, clears the ringing from her head.

Blinking, she looks over at what slid off the desk and fell to the floor.

For a moment her heart stops as she realizes what she has just done.

The glass beakers and vials can always be replaced, but the now-fragmented clay sculpture of the Greek god of agriculture, Demeter—which Madelaine had taken out to do a side-by-side comparison with the Siberian artifacts—represents a part of history that she is responsible for destroying.

“Oh my God,” she says, rubbing the shock off her face as she tries to steady her racing heartbeat.

The sculpture is supposed to be shipped back to Greece next week, to the Heraklion Museum in Crete.

Thirty seconds crawl by as Madelaine stands over the damaged sculpture, gaping at what she has ruined.

And then, letting out a deep sigh, she bends down to pick up the pieces.

She freezes as she sets the clay back on the desk. In the silence, her fingers run over the parts.

It takes a few more seconds, but Madelaine then realizes that the pain, the guilt, the humiliation bubbling inside her has disappeared.

This is nirvana, she thinks, picking up one of the fragmented sculpture pieces, a little bigger than her hand.

She throws it against the floor, watching it split into ten to twenty little pieces.

All of a sudden she feels an awakening sweep through her.

Why did I work so hard for three years, studying, traveling, and sacrificing everything else while the only thing driving me forward, my passion, slowly ran out?

She grabs the Siberian porcelain pot from her desk and hurls it across the length of the lab, cringing just a fraction as she listens to the freezing shatter of a four-hundred-year-old portion of history.

Why should it matter whether she preserves these artifacts or smashes them into smithereens? After all, this is only a virtual world.

There are no consequences here.

There are no risks.

Madelaine takes a deep breath, running a finger through her hair. It feels cold, a little brittle.

The anger inside her escalates into a dull roar at the back of her head.

As she exhales and turns around, her gaze falls upon the rest of the lab’s artifacts, illuminated by soft lights and protected behind a thick glass case on the wall.

Madelaine pauses for only a second before reaching out her hand for the security system to read.

All of this, the effort on her part to the historical artifacts before her, will become meaningless the moment she is unplugged from this virtual reality life.

And she knows that this life has now reached its end.

“Access granted,” echoes the handprint reader.

With a low hiss, the glass cover of the case slides apart.

The glass clicks to a stop, and something inside Madelaine snaps.

Sweeping her arm across the first row, she sends the entirety of the Ming dynasty vases crashing to the floor.

The exaltation of no longer caring swells within her, and among the burst and clatter, she moves onto the next row of priceless pottery, then the next.

She hears footsteps in the distance, urgent murmuring whose volume grows into panicked shouts.

Stepping away from the artifacts, she takes one last breath of this world’s oxygen as the lab doors beep open. She has never attempted this before, to will herself to jump out of this life and slip into the next.

Take me out of this world, she wishes. She does not know how to make contact with her brain mapper in the real world, but with Dr. Winston’s assurance at the forefront of her mind, she shuts her eyes and proceeds.

Take me away from this life and cast me into another.

Suddenly the shouting of swarming people around her, a chaotic mess of her colleagues’ accusations, dulls into a silent movie.

Perception of color fades from her eyes next, as the room, in shades of grey now, begins to dissolve.

She feels something soft brush against her brain—is it her brain? She does not know. This peculiar hold has settled under the surface of her skin, yet does not seem as if it is hindering the mind.

But Madelaine does not have time to dwell on the position of this gentle texture much longer, for soon her body loses all feeling, and absolute darkness consumes her once more.

Madelaine opens her eyes to find herself sitting in an office bigger than even Dr. Winston’s, staring straight out at a glittering Lake Michigan under the glaring Chicago sun—as a native of the city, she does not need much time to figure out her surroundings.

But when she swivels back around in her chair, she has absolutely no idea who the man sitting across her desk is.

“Come now, Ms. Toledo,” the man says, leaning forward in his chair. Dressed sharply in a black wool suit, and with his salt and pepper hair combed back, he does not possess the aura of the common man, but someone greater, someone who turns brick to marble, then marble to powder at whim.

Nevertheless… Ms. Toledo?

Madelaine frowns, but quickly composes herself and looks around her desk for some clues, context.

There is a letter atop a stack of papers to her right, addressed to a Madelaine Toledo.

She looks at the 3D hologram computer to her left and sees that there are folders marked Toledo everywhere on the default screen.

She comes up with one conclusion: I’m married.

She checks the date on the screen: 2101.

Two years out of college, and she is married.

As she scans her spacious office, taking in the outward-caving ceiling, the paper-white walls, two with protruding glass bookshelves stacked full of…

She squints. If she is not mistaken, there are books lining the shelves—thick, bound books, with pages of text all glued together—collector’s items from the early twenty-first century.

She manages to catch the bold lettering on one of the books’ bindings.

Law Outlines: Criminal Law

And now she realizes which simulation she has jumped into.

She is a lawyer, and looking around at her office, a successful one.

This is the life, the career, the status that her father had dreamed up for her.

All of a sudden the sixty-something-year-old man sitting across from her becomes much more interesting.

He must be a client, then. Or another attorney in the firm. Her boss, perhaps? Judging from the silver-plated Edmund, Taylor, and Price hanging above the double doors of her office, she assumes that they are the three partners of her company.

“You see, here’s the thing,” the man proceeds. “Daryl Summers and our family… well, let’s just say that I’ve known him since we were in diapers. Believe me when I tell you that your client is not innocent in Frannie Ryan’s murder.”

So this Daryl Summers is her client. But, “Frannie Ryan.” Madelaine’s tone makes the question sound more like a statement.

“Yes. My sister.” Madelaine sees a wave of anger ripple through the man’s face. “May she rest in peace.”

Eyes wet now, though not to the point of tears, the man clears his throat and says, “I realize that Mr. Summers is paying you a hefty amount to defend him. After all, this case will be a lot of effort. By the time we hear the outcome, you will have more than earned your fees.”

Madelaine pauses a moment, observing the cool, calm expression on the man’s face. “What is it that you’re getting at, Mr.…?”

“Gerald Simons,” the man replies. “And I guess what I’m trying to say is: How would you like to not only earn double what your client is paying, but do almost no work for his upcoming trial?”

A small smile of disgust touches Madelaine’s lips at his words. Now she understands. The man is here to bribe her, to persuade her to purposely lose a trial.

“I can send you all the files you need in order to stage a convincing attempt to defend Summers. I am only hoping that you, ahh, let the prosecutor win the deciding arguments in the trial.”

A few seconds pass. Madelaine keeps silent, curious to see what Simons will do next.

“Okay, you know, I apologize,” Simons says, fumbling to fill the silence. “I’m being insensitive. Losing a case will hurt your reputation as a defense attorney. And that, Ms. Toledo, needs to be considered as well. Hmm…” He drums his fingers against the side of his head, staring at her with a studying expression. “How do you feel about tripling your lawyer fees?”

Madelaine lets out a sigh, sifting through Simons’ proposal.

Under normal circumstances, she would have refused the bribe in a heartbeat. She is not one to sell out her principles in exchange for extra zeros behind her bank account sum.

But this is a different world, different life, different circumstances.

Although she is staring at Simons, her mind remains wrapped around something her father had said to her before, after he had picked a life of law for her in this three-series VR simulation.

“You don’t need to practice corporate or international law, dear,” her father had said. “In fact, perhaps you should become a criminal lawyer, as good at dissecting people as you are… just for goodness sake, give up archaeology and be someone respectable in your community.”

Madelaine’s stomach churns with a cold fire as she contemplates Simons’ proposition. Why shouldn’t she take the bribe? More money. Less work.

And for God’s sake, she is not in a real world anyway. So what is the risk?

Someone respectable in the community, she repeats to herself, feeling the full extent of the irony. I’ll show you respectable…

“I trust that you’ll transfer the money into my account by discreet means?” Madelaine says.

“Naturally.”

The sunset’s pink and orange arms greet her as she steps out of her office building, heading for the t-pod station down the street—at least, that was its location in the real world.

She lets out a breath of relief to see the station in the same spot, shuttling waves of people through the sky with ship-sized white pods hurling west, others north or south.

In the last three hours, at least she managed to find out where she lives.

As she waits for the next westbound pod, an alert pops into her Com-chip inbox. The message flashes across the Com-film of her eyes, accompanied by a picture of a smiling man. Dark-haired, bright grey eyes.

Incoming Call from Hubby.

So I am married, she thinks, and answers the call. And he’s cute.

“Hey, you off work?” Her husband’s voice echoes off the walls of her head.

“Yeah, on my way home now,” Madelaine says. It’s strange how familiar and comforting his voice sounds, though she has never met the man.

“You know, I’ve been sitting at home all day, wondering what you’re doing, what you’re not doing, what you should be doing—and you should be at home curing your longing husband of his… err… well.”

Madelaine smiles in spite of herself. Her pod has docked in.

“Actually, I need you to pick up some groceries,” her husband continues. “Somebody has cleaned out our pantries, dear.”

“I know you’re not blaming me,” Madelaine says, boarding the pod. The glass doors close after reaching the passenger limit and takes off. “I’ll get you your groceries. Feel free to sit on your ass and wait patiently for me.”

“A strenuous demand, but I’ll do my best.” And he disconnects their Link.

I have got to learn his name, Madelaine tells herself as she searches the flashing route screen on the pod doors.

There is a grocery store right next to the t-pod station at the next stop. Perfect.

She gets off when the pod arrives at her destination, heading for the store.

Passing the parking lot, she catches sight of a middle-aged woman climbing out of her car. The woman slings her purse over her shoulder and hurriedly strides toward the front doors of the store without bothering to look behind.

Madelaine is just about to pick up the pace as well when she notices that the woman has failed to completely close her car door.

But before the car’s security system can detect and automatically shut the door, Madelaine walks forward and opens it wider.

She does not understand why she did this, to be honest. Perhaps she wanted to do something impulsive. And why not? After all, if the laws in a fake world are fake, then so are the consequences.

Looking around the parking lot, Madelaine cannot find a single pair of eyes on her. It is rush hour in downtown Chicago. Everyone has homes to return to, families to eat with, lovers to embrace.

She takes a peek at the contents of the car. Just a quick peek, out of curiosity.

In the three to four seconds that her eyes linger on the interior of the car, she catches sight of a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and handful of dollar bills and coins stuffed in the cup holders.

Madelaine can already feel her heartbeat speeding up, thinking of the possible results should she be caught. If this were the real world, that is.

Her eyes settle upon the spare change in this stranger’s car. There are seven, eight dollars at the most.

If this is the rush she feels from trespassing into someone else’s car, she wonders what kind of high she can get from grabbing the money here and taking off.

She flashes back to the moment in her office, when she accepted Gerald Simons’ bribe to lose an upcoming trial.

A twinge of guilt pierces through her.

If you can take hundreds of thousands of dollars from an oily jackass like Simons, why can’t you take the dollar bills in front of you? she asks herself.

Money, whether in the form of liquid assets or cold cash, is still money.

And so, with adrenaline funneling through her veins like exploding fireflies, she grabs a handful of bills and the cigarette lighter and runs.

The thundering noise inside her chest subsides to a fast fluttering as she steps through the front doors of the grocery store.

She looks left and right, searching for a suspicious stare, a knowing frown.

Nothing.

No one saw you, whispers the tiny voice inside her head.

At this reassurance, an easy smile drops over Madelaine’s face, and she strides over to one of the grocery order machines lining the sides of the walls.

As she reaches the machine, however, an older heavy-built woman steps in front of her. Feeling the exchanging brush of shirts between them, Madelaine stumbles back a step as the woman logs into the grocery order system, blocking Madelaine off.

“Umm, excuse me,” Madelaine says, blinking in surprise. “You cut in front of me.”

After a long moment, the woman looks back and scoffs when her eyes and Madelaine’s lock.

“I don’t think so,” the woman replies. And before Madelaine can respond, she turns back around and starts looking through her grocery catalogue again.

It doesn’t take much longer for the simmering lava in the pit of Madelaine’s stomach to explode.

A fake character in my own fake world is going to snub me?

“Hey.” She taps the woman on the back. Her hands are shaking.

The woman turns, an annoyed look spreading over her face.

And then all of a sudden her expression of annoyance flashes to fear, as Madelaine brings back her right arm, fingers curling into a fist.

Having never punched anything in her life, let alone anybody, Madelaine winces at the impact of her fist with the woman’s face. It feels like hitting cement, and as the woman cries out in pain and folds to the floor, moaning, Madelaine retracts her arm. Her fingers uncurl, her knuckles stinging.

Nevertheless this release of anger feels good. Better than good.

“What is the matter with you?” the woman shrieks as people begin to crowd around. Madelaine now sees that her punch landed just to the right of the woman’s nose, and that the area is now swelling into a red-purple bruise.

The woman staggers to her feet, attempting to blink away the wetness from her eyes, but to no avail.

At the sight of tears, regret begins to seep into Madelaine, and she tries to apologize.

But before she can say a word, the woman lunges for her.

The force of her shoulder slamming into Madelaine’s left hip travels through the rest of her body, a blast of white-hot pain, sending both of them to the ground.

Madelaine gasps in shock, but quickly collects her bearings and kicks the woman off.

Jumping up despite the ringing pain in her head, Madelaine wastes no time in climbing atop the woman and delivering a second punch to the face.

She loses count of how many times she hits the woman as she sits pinning the meaty arms to the ground, but somewhere through the haze of Madelaine’s rage, two pairs of hands pull her up.

“You are under arrest for assault and disrupting the peace,” says the police officer to her right. “You have the right to…”

Madelaine tunes out as the officer continues to Mirandize her and looks down at the woman she has just beaten, her face swollen and bleeding.

For a moment Madelaine receives a pang of guilt.

However it does not take long for the companion inside her head to tell her: She’s a fake character. The wounds, the tears, they’re nothing but simulations.

And just like that Madelaine’s teeth unclench, and the heaviness in her chest dissolves.

She has never taken a trip to the police station before, much less seen the inside of a holding cell.

I guess every day is a chance to try something new.

It takes her husband less than an hour to arrive at the police station. By now Madelaine has learned his name: Paul.

Striding toward her, sitting alone in the holding cell with her back against the wall, a slow smile crawls across Paul’s face. “Ahh,” he says, stopping in front of her.

She stands up and walks toward him, her stomach churning. He looks even more handsome in person, with eyes full of intensity, a bright contrast to his tanned skin. A tie hung loose around his neck, he chuckles and says, “This, my dear, is the definition of irony. The criminal lawyer behind bars…”

Madelaine can feel an embarrassing heat traveling to her cheeks, but she forces a smile nevertheless. “So then are you here to bust me out, prince charming?”

Paul pauses a moment, frowning. And then he replies, “Not until you explain what the hell you were thinking, starting a fight in the middle of a grocery store. And the cops also said that you had stolen some petty cash from another woman’s car?”

Madelaine does not have an answer for him, and after a few seconds of thought, says, “Don’t you ever wish sometimes that you could do something not because it’s logical, but just because you can?”

“I do plenty of illogical, spur of the moment things,” Paul says. “But there is a line that people do not cross, because crossing that line gets them into appealing places like this.” He gestures at the bars of the holding cell separating them.

Madelaine contemplates her husband’s words, repeating them over in her head. She can’t help but wonder if Paul knows about her under-the-table deals as a defense attorney.

Can’t hurt to ask, she reasons, and says out loud, “A line? Paul, I think you and I both know that I’ve already crossed that line, as a human being, as an attorney. Granted, my line wasn’t so clear, but that does nothing to dilute the wrongness of my actions.”

A look of panic flashes into Paul’s eyes, confirming Madelaine’s supposition of his knowledge about her inflated salary.

Paul looks left and right before leaning closer to the bars of the cell. “Let’s not do this here, of all places,” he says, his voice lowered to a mere whisper. “We’ll deal with your conscience when we get home, alright?”

The words feel like a piece of glass rammed into Madelaine’s chest.

She backs away from the bars and sits down again as the guard opens the cell door.

“Madelaine, come on,” Paul says, beckoning for her. “Please.”

Madelaine only looks away and scoffs. “Go home,” she says, staring at the wall. She wonders how many times she has sent innocent people to jail for money, and how many times she has felt guilty about it, in this life. She doesn’t think she wants to know the answers to these questions. “I can deal with my own conscience here.”

“Fine,” Paul says, throwing his hands up in the air and turning to the guard. “If you could just leave the door unlocked and alert me when my wife finally decides to stop pouting and come home…” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a five-hundred-dollar bill. “I would appreciate it.”

The guard accepts the bill and quickly slides it into his pant pocket. “Will do, Mr. Toledo.”

As Paul leaves, Madelaine has to restrain herself from running out and screaming at him. Meanwhile questions are circling through her head. Did he bribe the guard just to spite me? she asks. Or is this just how he—no, we—live our lives?

If it is the latter, then this life must be…

Madelaine frowns. She fumbles through her mind to find an adjective, yet the only word that seems to fit is: easy.

And is it not? Pull in money and push out the fates of the innocent. Then take the money and buy the souls of others.

Madelaine lets out a chuckle, although it pierces her ears.

She has seen enough of this world.

Get me out of here, she dictates to the corners of her mind. Let me live my last life.

She squeezes her eyes shut, waiting for the black curtain of unconsciousness to seep in and crush the fuzzy rays of white light tapping against her eyelids.

It doesn’t take long, and soon, Madelaine finds herself submerged in an abyss of nothingness.

She wakes to find herself sitting in a chair, with little silver disks attached to her fingertips, so light that she can hardly feel them.

There is a large screen before her, displaying a magnified stomach, pale with a line of dark hair from the belly button down. Hanging inches above the stomach are four silver surgical instruments: a blade, an optical fiber probe, a retractor, and a small clamp.

She looks to her right and sees the body of a man lying parallel to this machine that she is Linked to. Unconscious on the surgery table, the man’s stomach is exposed under the same instruments that appear on Madelaine’s screen.

Madelaine jilts in surprise. As her hands shake, the blade and fiber optic follow suit on the screen. At the same time, so do the tools gripped by the surgical robot looming over the patient.

So she is just about to begin surgery.

Madelaine takes in a deep breath, looking around the room. She sees the EKG screen mounted on the wall, just above the clock. She sees the anesthesia monitor sitting on a stand next to the surgery table.

But aside from the patient on the table, she is the only breathing being in the room.

Her hands begin to shake as she looks at the screen before her, then at the patient. According to the anesthesia monitor, the patient is under a spinal anesthesia, numbing the man from the neck down.

So what now?

She closes her eyes, trying to focus on the happenings around her. But the moment she calms herself from the shock of being thrown into a surgery, her thoughts begin to wrap around her prior VR simulation, her husband, both of their corruption.

How easy it is to block out a conscience.

Madelaine has to admit, she is attracted to it. The dark. The other side of her, always there, always suppressed, lusting to meet the world.

Ever since she let go, stopped trying to measure up to the demands of these virtual realities and instead began to try things she would never have done in the real world, she has felt, for the first time, a complete, consuming freedom.

In these worlds, without risk, without real consequences, life has truly evolved into something more. A series of “Why not?”s in place of the responsibilities.

And now, as she stares at the man lying on the surgery table, at her mercy, another “Why not?” surfaces in her mind.

Why not cut him open? Poke around, do some slicing, cutting, see the innerworkings under the skin.

He’s not a real person anyway.

She looks over again at the anesthesia monitor across the room. All she has to do is walk over and shut off the machine, and the numbing agent will soon wear off.

How long, she wonders, will it take for the man to regain consciousness? How long will it take for him to feel the pain of being cut open?

A shiver travels down her spine as she deLinks herself from the surgical robot and shuffles over to the anesthesia monitor.

The hologram projection displaying concentration levels and time increments of reinjection cuts to black as she shuts down the system with a tap of a button.

Letting out a sigh to calm the dizzying buzz in her head, Madelaine then returns to her seat.

She Links herself back up to the surgical robot and, without pausing to think about her actions for another beat, begins to cut a line down the stomach on the screen.

Switching to use the clamp, she then peels back the skin to see the intestines. Four clamps later, the entirety of the abdominal skin has been pulled back like tent flaps.

This, she has seen done in movies.

And now what?

It doesn’t take long for the salt and rust scent of blood to waft from the surgery table to Madelaine’s nose. After all, the two bodies in the room are but five feet apart.

Madelaine takes the fiber optic and zooms in for a closer look. At the very top of the opening is the patient’s esophagus, and then further down the stomach, leading to the small intestine. These are about the only organs she is able to distinguish.

Frowning, she pokes the little tubular chords leading to a white-pink sac.

Is this the liver?

The anger carried forward from the previous VR simulation, the fear of the situation she is now in, even the adrenaline rush from opening up a human body, they have all vanished, replaced instead by a very familiar feeling for Madelaine Hopkins: pure curiosity.

I wonder what will happen if I…

She pokes another bulging sac under the liver, smaller, darker.

But the probe breaks through the surface of the sac, and all of a sudden Madelaine hears a faint pop.

The scream that erupts along with the fountain of blood, squirting up and splattering the camera with red, makes every strand of hair on Madelaine’s body rise to attention.

Her eyes flicker over to the surgery table, where lines of red are spewing out in intermittent bursts.

The man’s fingers are moving. The screaming continues, a high-pitched shrieking that belongs only to the voices of the tortured.

Shaking, Madelaine eases out of her chair and walks over to the table, coming upon the wide-awake face of her patient.

As her eyes and his meet, he reaches out and grasps her hand.

The screams lower in volume, reduce in frequency.

On the EKG machine, Madelaine sees that his pulse is now thready and still weakening.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispers, tears pooling in her eyes as she watches the blood stream out in rhythm with the man’s heartbeat.

It is time to leave.

This is not real, she tells herself as she yanks her hand from his, backing toward the door. He is not real. I can get out of here. I can leave these virtual realities, return to real world.

“Help me,” the man begs as her fingers touch the cold silver door. “Please. It hurts. Hurts… so much.”

His plea erases all thoughts of abandonment from Madelaine’s mind.

Frantically she spins around, scanning for people. There is no one sitting in the viewing room overhead, no one in the washroom behind the glass windows of the OR.

She sighs, feeling a wave of nausea topple over her.

And then on the other side of the room, to the right of the clock reading 2:48 A.M., she sees a blue button the size of the palm of her hand.

She almost trips on the leg of the surgery table as she rushes over to hit the button.

Nothing happens, and all she can do now is hope that help comes soon.

Her trembling gaze settles on the patient once again. No longer screaming, even moaning in pain, he lays on the table with his eyes open, the tips of his fingers twitching.

I need to stop the bleeding, Madelaine realizes as her eyes travel to his stomach, still oozing blood.

She grabs the damp, acidic tissues from the surgical robot’s grasp and presses them over the hole she punctured earlier.

Bright red liquid spills onto her hands, running over her knuckles like rapid water over rocks.

Madelaine almost doesn’t realize the tears in her eyes if not for the stinging saline path they make as they race the mascara to her chin.

“Help me!” she screams into the silence. “Help!”

Seconds after her cry, a human head appears in the washroom connected to the OR. A man, almost sixty, quickly followed by two younger women surgeons.

All three pairs of eyes widen in shock at Madelaine’s situation, taking in the blood pooling out all over the place, the thinning lines on the EKG machine.

And then they act.

Bolting into the operating room, one surgeon grabs the tissues from the surgical robot and presses them over Madelaine’s fingers. “Let me handle this,” she says.

Madelaine backs away, and another surgeon edges in to take her place. “Apply a little more pressure. We’ve got to seal this hole first, and—Christ, the anesthesia monitor is dead!” The surgeon turns to Madelaine now. “Wait outside, Dr. Hopkins. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

“Don’t blame her,” another surgeon says, grabbing instruments from the surgical robot. “It must have been a machine malfunction. God, it punctured the left gastric artery! What the hell was the robot doing up there?”

“It wasn’t a machine malfunction, Dianne. This is a ninth generation robot, best of the best. Any error here is human.”

Madelaine lets out a sigh as she watches the threads on the EKG machine stabilize again, sees the BPM number rise to normal.

Her own heart has stopped racing, the beats no longer bumping into each other inside her chest.

Let me leave, she finally wills the brain mapper. Return me to the real world.

It takes seconds for the shadows to root themselves before her.

She cannot take this anymore, this battle between dark and light, this blossoming nightmare in a fantasy that feels so trappingly real.

And so she closes her eyes and embraces this blanketing darkness for the last time.

Her ears adjust back to the real world before her eyes do, and while the lights and the room are still blurred beyond recognition, she begins to pick up the murmur of a voice.

“Welcome back, Madelaine.” The voice is familiar.

With a soft groan, Madelaine blinks until everything comes back into focus. She sees Dr. Winston standing over her.

“How were your simulations?” he asks as Madelaine eases off the bed. She stretches, feeling sore all over, the feeling that one gets when having slept heavily for far too long.

Madelaine is about to tell him just how enlightening her experience was when she turns to him and realizes the nonchalance seeded in his voice, the knowing amusement in his smile.

She knows better. After twenty years of performing VR simulations, surely Dr. Winston can predict every one of her scenarios by simply examining her portfolio, like he has done uncountable times in the past for a staggering number of patients.

“Why don’t you take a guess?” she finally says. “You designed the simulations. You were monitoring my brain activity, I trust.”

Dr. Winston’s smile widens. “How long did it take you to lose control?”

“Three years into my first simulation,” Madelaine answers. “How long do your patients usually take to… for lack of a better phrase… turn toward their darker sides?”

“As soon as something in their virtual world becomes too real for them to handle, most likely a frustration they already encounter in real life.” Dr. Winston returns to his desk and gestures for Madelaine to take the seat across.

Madelaine smiles to compensate for the bitterness flowering in her chest. “Thank you for perfectly dissecting and analyzing me,” she says, and looks up at the clock on the wall. Only an hour has passed since she stepped into Dr. Winston’s office. “Clearly, you care so much.” The sarcasm is perhaps a tinge too much, but she doesn’t offer an apology.

Dr. Winston shrugs. “I’m paid too well to care,” he says. “My job is to set up a series of simulations for you to experience, so that you can find whatever it is that you are seeking.”

He clicks on his computer and pulls up Madelaine’s portfolio again, projecting it on the wall behind him for her to see. “You wrote here that you wanted to find your place in the world. Your identity. Did you find it?”

Madelaine scoffs, folding her arms across her chest. “You already know the answer to this, Dr. Winston,” she says. “Your simulations are, after all, flawed.”

“Flawed?”

“There is no outside influence. There is no system of control, no law or order. It’s all a lie.” She reflects back on all the immoral actions she took in the three worlds, feeling a painful twinge of regret, maybe even a hint of fondness. In the simulations, she did what she wanted, for in there, the fear of being herself was dissolved.

“Do you really feel that way?” Dr. Winston asks.

The question sends a shiver down Madelaine’s back.

He continues. “In the last simulation, you almost killed a man. You cut him open. You poked and prodded him like he was a lab animal.”

Madelaine keeps silent.

“I know what you want to say,” Dr. Winston says. “What you’re too ashamed to say. The man wasn’t real. He was a fake character. He was an ‘it’. But still, you refused to leave the simulation until he stabilized. Why is that?”

“I…” Madelaine doesn’t know how to respond.

“He was a simulated person, nothing but pixels and soundboards. This is true. But you fought to help him not because of what he was or wasn’t, but because of who you are. And you are human, and fighting for others—no matter if they are a ‘who’ or a ‘what’—is your responsibility. This is what it means to be human, Madelaine. This is the gift that my simulation has given you.”

A few seconds crawl by, and then Madelaine chuckles and stands up. “So this ‘search for identity’ simulation is really nothing but a crock,” she says. “And we can’t do anything about it, after signing all those confidentiality agreements.”

Dr. Winston smiles back. “Really, dear, I thought you smarter than that. You will never find your identity. You are the one and only you, and trying to ‘find’ another identity to slip into would only be a lie.”

“The one and only?” Madelaine shakes her head. “How many times have you used that line, and how much are you paid to say it? Your delivery seems well-practiced.”

“Take from me only what you wish to take,” Dr. Winston says. “But you are a unique one, Madelaine Hopkins. I’m only asking you to stop chasing your identity and start creating it.”

He takes off his glasses and sets them on his desk. Staring into Madelaine’s eyes with that all-knowing expression, he says, “You are a voice. The world is your echo.”

Silence falls over the room, as Madelaine repeats Dr. Winston’s words in her head. They are comforting, she will not lie. They are easy to believe.

Finally she smiles and says, “We probably won’t be meeting again, Dr. Winston. I hope you continue to live a fulfilling life.”

And with that, she turns and walks toward the door.

“Good luck, Madelaine. You will hear many echoes in your life, I’m sure of it.”

As Madelaine closes the door to his office, she feels strangely calm, strangely sure of herself.

Perhaps it is because she has walked away with a new perspective.

She does not want an echo, for an echo is nothing but a reiteration of one’s own thoughts.

And she wants more than that.



Shelly Li has published multiple short stories in venues such as Nature, Cosmos Online, Daily Science Fiction, and more. Her fiction appears in 10 languages in 13 countries. She recently sold her novel of YA Fantasy, The Royal Hunter, to Philomel Books.

I sound like the actor, look like him, and hell, I even dress like him circa the early nineteen sixties in a movie called The Killers. But I’m not that Lee Marvin. That Lee Marvin fought on Iwo Jima, got shot in the ass, came home and spent the rest of his life as an actor. I think he even won an Oscar. Those experiences are not mine. They’re his.

I’m a different horse altogether. I work for a man named Leonard Giles. He created me. I live in Harbor City, San Francisco. I solve cases, right wrongs and face the thugs and punks that Leonard Giles wanted me to face on a weekly basis, usually Friday night. Cold dames, hot lead, and me Lee Marvin, living out a fantasy of danger that seemed too real when I looked in the mirror and tried to figure out where to start with the iodine the next morning.

I talk to myself a lot. I’m real. I exist. And what I know about the other side, the world of Leonard Giles, doesn’t mean much to me here in Harbor City, city by the bay.

The two-bit hoods and hookers of Harbor City are nothing but somebody’s imagination. How many ‘somebodies’ I never knew; I never asked.

Every time a dame walked into my office at the Hampton Building, it was because a man named Leonard Giles wanted me to rescue her, or catch her and yeah, a lot of the time, kiss her. So sometimes I rescued, sometimes I caught, and sometimes I kissed. Maybe because I wanted to. I can’t blame him for everything.

Like I said, I talk to myself a lot. Right now I’m waiting for the sun to come up over Oakland, on the other side of the bay. It’s still dark out. Streets are quiet and foggy. There’s a little lamp on near my reading chair, where I read about the world of Leonard Giles. I chip some ice, fix a scotch, lose the gray jacket, and loosen the dark tie I always wear. Finally I kick off my hard-soled shoes and wait.

If the sun rises over San Francisco this morning in about an hour or so, then I’ll fry some eggs and figure out what to do next.

It all began about eight o’clock the night before. I was on my way to the Flim Flam Club after spending a long day not answering a phone I suspected might be broken. I thought I’d have a drink, talk to Sully, maybe catch Rita’s act (Rita’s the skirt who replaced Lola). At least, that was the plan.

But then I got the not-so-sweet end of a snub nose from a guy who talked British in an alley. He tried to ask me nicely if I’d come with him to meet his boss about a ‘spot of work,’ his words, not mine. But nice isn’t something I’m used to especially when guns are used for punctuation, so I told him to drift. In a flash, his larger, less polite business associate had me against the wall and a second later, the second after the ringing blow to the base of my skull, I’m slipping into that warm bath of unconsciousness.

I wake up in San Jose; San Jose airport to be exact, in a big room where the word ‘gold’ played a big part in every sentence the decorator uttered. I check my watch; the little hand says nine and the big one seems caught in the middle, unable to commit to either side of the hour. I rub my skull and think about pushing somebody’s face in. The light is dim in here, and the shadows that surround our spotlight of high-backed chair warmth do their part to make me feel uneasy and remind me that my gun, a gift from Leonard Giles, is gone.

Across the table, a fat man in fancy clothes and a crown swirls a gold-flecked goblet of claret. I know it’s claret because seconds later, in a voice that could only be described as bombastic, the fat man tells me it is and that I should try it. Wadsworth, the upturned-nose waiter type, gray at the temples and bald on top, decants some claret into my goblet, pouring from a special basket encasing the bottle. Ritzy, but I prefer Chianti. Also I like to know that the Chianti I’m drinking is the same one on the table in front of me, with the candle sticking out of it. Hey, I may be a simple gumshoe, but I know what I like.

The gulp I take, which I can tell offends the fat man, does little to mitigate the ache at the back of my head. But it’s a start. We don’t say much until the fat man cuts his first bite from a Chateaubriand so big and beautiful a chorus girl could live off it for a week. I have one to match and so does a mouse of a man seated next to me.

“Now, Mr. Marvin is it?” begins the fat man as he cuts another wad from his steak, still chewing the last, savoring it as though it were the Hope Diamond of steaks. Holding the meat on a thin golden fork, he takes a sip of claret, pronounces it excellent and continues.

“Now Mr. Marvin, we have needs for which we must enlist your aid.” I assume he means the royal ‘we’ because he’s wearing a crown.

“I don’t work for guys, kings or criminals, who sap me, giant steak notwithstanding.”

“Quite, I’m sure.” The fat man pauses for the next bite, chews, then wipes his mouth with a pup-tent sized napkin. “And I do insist on two things. The Pommes de Lyon, cursed French dish if ever there was, but you simply must try them, and I further insist that you please, never again in our presence, refer to a Chateaubriand as fine as this cut as a ‘steak’. You insult both myself and the chef. As to not working for our royal personage, well that’s a matter altogether different and one I might shed more light upon presently. But first, the potatoes. Wadsworth, please!”

Wadsworth moves forward with a copper dish full of mashed potatoes. I fork into ‘em and contemplate telling Henry that they’re the best mashed spuds I’ve ever eaten. I’m sure that would upset him, but I wipe my mouth with a large starched white napkin and prepare to shoot off my mouth anyway. The fat man beats me to the punch.

“Honestly Mr. Marvin, you’re not going to finish. I’ve never trusted a man who cannot gustate with the best of them, and I, ahem, am the best. Please, more sautéed asparagus in truffle butter? It’s good for the…”

“I’m not a big eater whoever you are. I don’t go in for the fancy stuff. Ham sandwich, cup of coffee, that’s me. Also, the play acting is spoiling the mood. What is it that you want besides food? I don’t like people who impersonate other people, including kings, and then ask us all to play along. It makes the rest of us feel stupid.”

“Interesting, Mr. Marvin,” says the mouse man. “Aren’t we all ‘play-acting’ at being someone else in ‘this’ world?” At ‘this’ my blood runs cold. I’m one of the very few people, in fact the only one I’m aware of, who knows the truth about the other side—the world of Leonard Giles. The real world.

“I don’t follow you…”

“You do. No lies, Mr. Marvin. They are a waste of time and for all of us, time is running out.” I don’t know what that means but I suspect mouse man does, and it scares the hell out of me. I light a cigarette as Henry continues to cut slices from his Chateaubriand, savoring every bite, his eyes fluttering as he chews.

Mouse man continues, “You see Mr. Marvin, I know what the man called Dupree told you all those years ago. I too was once a nobody who knew nothing, such as you were. I worked in a shoe store, selling beautiful women fine shoes. It delighted my owner Kevin Richter – he was my Leonard Giles – to torment me with ladies so utterly beguiling. I could not possibly tell you of the love I have for the arches, heels and calves of beautiful women.

“Day after day, beauties like Jane Russell, Dolores Del Rio and Wendy Neutron, paraded into my shoe store to both titillate and torment me. To make me tremble as I grasped feet so soft it was as if they had been sculpted from the stuff of passing clouds. I watched, sweating tiny beads of perspiration as they crossed impossibly long legs as time seemed to wallow in thick maple syrup. They were statues too gloriously sculpted for such an insignificant as myself.

“And I helped them, me the little clown, slave to queens of the cinema, beaten with eyelashes and stiletto heels all for the amusement of my owner. Obviously he had a shoe fetish. And then one day Kevin came into the store. He entered our world. Did Leonard Giles ever do that Mr. Marvin? Ever come in and act out a part in his little fantasies? Play at being your partner, maybe even your Moriarty?”

I tried to remember any hoods named Moriarty.

“His gratification, Kevin’s that is, was in torturing me, not himself. Maybe once long ago, watching these beauties squeeze into pumps and stilettos had done something for him, but ‘The Long Night’, as he called it had changed him. Now, he told me frankly, he rather enjoyed simply torturing me.

“And the greatest rack he could stretch me on, his words not mine, was to tell me the truth of ‘The Long Night’; the truth about the other side. So I killed him. I hit him with a ladies heel, almost like a spike, a Charles David I think it was. I hit him and kept on hitting him until the blood mixed with his laughter. That damned high-pitched squealing laughter. Of course he didn’t really die. He wasn’t really there, just his mind was. Just his imagination and desire running loose inside our world, or ‘The Construct’ I think he called it… He enjoyed letting me know that the shoes, the shoe store, and Dolores Del Rio were nothing but the whims of his sick and twisted imagination. For me, Norton Morris, hell began.”

“Torture unimaginable in a thousand ways as moments spun in on themselves and revealed whole news vistas and possibilities of real pain never before imagined. Kevin Richter became the torturer of his dreams.”

I felt sorry for the mouse man Norton Morris, I really did. I listened as all the horror he experienced at the hands of Kevin Richter came out onto the table. Picking my teeth absently and drinking a cup of black coffee Wadsworth brought me, I tried to imagine it. Somehow the golden room, the dark shadows, the thick quiet of the carpet and the soft green velvet drapes that covered immense windows, seemed to make the horror something that happened to someone else, not the little man in front of me. The fat man burped unapologetically at the conclusion.

“And then I found a way to jump,” continued Norton Morris. “The pain, the torture, everything Mr. Kevin Richter could conceive, clarified my thinking. Reduced it to viscous transparency like clarified butter if you will.” The fat man roused from a brief doze and seemed to take an interest in this.

“Where once my artificial personality – the mind that Kevin Richter had delighted in when he designed me using a ‘menu’ as he called it – had been a solid thing with its own weight and logic, now it was free.” Norton Morris took a sip of claret and continued to stare at me. He didn’t blink much.

“A menu,” he said disgustedly. “An extensive one, but a menu nonetheless, like I was some common dish from a greasy spoon. He made me as weak, and as strong as he had always wanted to be – ladies shoes, feet, power- I’m sure Freud could have run amok inside his mind.

“But my mind, whereas it had once been like a soft chunk of butter, now thanks to the heat and torture of Mr. Richter’s regimen, clarified, and spread out, dripping into the crevices of the mainframe. I, Norton Morris, humble purveyor of fine ladies shoes, leapt out of time.

“Not really though. I thought I had at first; that I could go backwards, forwards, wherever I chose. But I was wrong. Instead it was more like leaping into a book. Picking up books and turning to random pages and beginning to read. A Manhattan Shoe Salesman in King Arthur’s Court, as it was. I spent time with Henry,” he indicated the fat man with an overly respectful nod. “My third or fourth leap I think; someone’s erotic fantasy of Tudor England, forgotten in ‘The Long Night’. We became friends – my first real friend, Henry the Eighth. I showed him how to leap. With my help of course.”

“Yes, with your help…imagine the thought,” erupted the monarch. “I still cannot conceive of it. I will always be loyal King Harry to my subjects. Not some nonesuch make-em-up hoogely boogely as he would have me believe. But the worlds I’ve seen, this place tonight, ‘tis far different from Whitehall and court. And then there is the opportunity. Tell him Mr. Morris, of our grand scheme and how he can play a part.”

Morris flared first with fear, and then softened to anger. He was afraid King Henry might spill the beans. Then I knew, no matter what they told me, they weren’t playing straight.

“Mr. Marvin. We are but characters in a book on a ‘Long

Night’. I could tell you things. Things your mind, with all the restrictions of its place within The Construct, might never grasp. But suffice it to say we want to leave the library in which we find ourselves.”

“And you can help us,” said King Henry the Eighth.

I wondered if he meant royal ‘us’. Either way I didn’t like where they were heading.

“You can unlock the door to the library. You see…”

I cut Norton Morris off.

“What if there is no library? What if there is no other side…” I’d had enough. I had a bad feeling, the kind you get when it’s too late and you know you should be home, or anywhere but the alley you’re in.

“There is another side. It exists. And Dupree, the man who bled to death on that floor in Oakland, told you about that other side.” Morris looked at me expectantly. He was proud he’d played his hole card.

“Yeah, what of it? You weren’t there!” I shot back, angry and hard, not liking what I heard in my own voice. “You didn’t see his eyes. He was a man just like you and me. Sure this world might be made up, just bits and dreams of someone I’ve never met, ones and zeros he told me. But Dupree was intelligent. He knew he was dying. Just like this steak and wine, this coffee and these cigarettes, damn you. It’s real, or real enough, and tomorrow the sun will rise and life will go on inside… inside. Inside what, I don’t know, but it’s enough for me Jack.”

“Your owner, Mr. Marvin; he was somehow a very important man. His name was Leonard Giles, and I think he sent you a message through Dupree. A message letting you know there’s an outside world.”

“So what of it?”

“The ‘what of it’ is…” began Henry the Eighth.

“Is that he trusted you.” Morris cut Henry off with a dismissive wave. “Trusted you to do something with that information, and the only thing I can think of is that he wants you to get out. To find him.” Morris Norton’s eyes were watery and emphatic. I wanted to believe him. The knight inside me, the one that Leonard Giles had ordered up on that greasy spoon menu, wanted to save somebody in trouble, even if I didn’t like it. But something didn’t smell right.

“And how do you figure into it?” I asked. “I haven’t heard from Leonard Giles in a long time. Richter, for that matter, what happened to him? It’s like they forgot us or went to sleep. Maybe they put their toys away and grew up, maybe we should stay in the box or they might just decide to throw us out with the rest of the garbage.”

“Dupree was a simulation,” said Norton Morris angrily. His hand was starting to show. “The story: A two bit break-in man who witnessed a murder and came to you for help. What a thrilling detective story, Mr. Marvin. And then there was the dame, Dupree’s girl. Long legs, auburn hair. When you told her he got it in the warehouse, she cried into your shoulder and you kissed her, and you felt like…like…”

“Like dirt,” I said, because I did. “I felt like dirt because I took advantage of her. Dupree was human, just like you. Just like me.”

But Morris wasn’t having any of it. “Then how do I know? How does little Norton Morris, shoe clerk, know about that adventure? And how do I know King Henry the Eighth, and why are we here at this five star restaurant eating Chateaubriand and waiting for our Baked Alaska at eleven thirty on a Thursday evening? How do I know, Mr. Marvin?”

“Because it’s a trick or something. Or I’m still in the gutter, dying after I got that tap on the skull by your boys. Or I’m someone else’s…”

“Dream, Mr. Marvin. Dream. I know because I was one. I was one until I clarified… like butter,” again Henry seemed to take interest with a simple grunt. “And I dripped down onto and throughout all the pages of all the stories that ever were.”

Things were getting weird. I had to play for time and find my gun. There was something bad about Norton Morris. Something not to be trifled with. I needed to find my gun and drill these two bit clowns. Protect someone. Someone like Dupree’s girl. And then there was ‘The Long Night’.

“And why should you care,” I growled, “whether I get to the outside or not?” I eyed Henry as I said it. Maybe I could play one joker off the other. Both probably wanted all the power and none of the sharing.

But it was Morris who answered. “I don’t care for any other reason than the concept of escape. Escape is enough for me, Mr. Marvin. Escape is enough for me.”

“Enough that you’d kill for it?” Little white tufts of hair glowed in contrast to the florid bloom that exploded across his face as he reached into his coat. And now I knew two things. One, regardless of King Henry the Eighth, Norton Morris was in charge. And two, Norton Morris was a killer.

He pointed my gun at me. I didn’t like that. I had pointed it at others from time to time, men mostly, and the occasional dame more devil than doll. But I never knew what it was like to look down that yawning barrel of infinity. There was something about my gun. It wasn’t just a roscoe used by a punk detective like myself who got by more on luck than hunches or good detective work. There was something final about that cold dark bore hole. Something that said, “I don’t just kill you. I delete you.”

“Ahem, Mr. Morris, this is indeed bad form. Wadsworth hasn’t even arrived with our figgy pudding!”

“Shut up Henry, or you’ll get it before he does,” said Norton Morris through clenched teeth. “Down below, a DC Six is due to start its engines before the bay completely socks in with fog. It’s the mail flight to Los Angeles. We’re getting on it, you, me, and Henry. And then we’re going somewhere.” He hefted my gun towards the windows and the tarmac below.

“You realize now what this gun is, don’t you?” Norton Morris was in charge. If anyone was asking questions that didn’t need answers, it was him. “Maybe you don’t, maybe you do. But now you know what the gaping void of eternity looks like when you’re staring at the business end of it. And when we get where we’re going, you’ll meet Dupree’s girl and you’ll shake hands. That’s all.”

I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that there didn’t seem to be much of a plan after the handshake. I probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway.

In the dark, out past the big windows that overlooked the runway beyond, an engine started. Then another. And after that the other two. Our plane. I lit a cigarette and wondered what the real Lee Marvin would do.

After takeoff, I slumped back into my seat, pushed my hat down over my head and tried to feign sleep. In the back, mail sacks piled to the ceiling absorbed the sound of the four huge Douglas engines, giving them a dull throbbing sound. Up front, the pilot, a leather jacket flyboy with a day’s worth of growth on his mug, nodded calmly as Morris held out a scrap of paper. Longitude and latitude was my guess. In his other hand he held my gun.

My only possible ally was a high jacked pilot who might be a rummy judging from the stubble. I didn’t like my gun being used in a manner I didn’t care for, but who does? And as for Henry, regally seated next to me, at home in his crown, his tights, and his long coat? Beneath the royal facade, he was a brute of a man who could probably beat a peasant like me to death. I wondered where he kept his turkey leg. He didn’t seem overly upset by the aircraft or the altitude; maybe the Châteaubriand and mashed potatoes had lured him into sleepy complacency.

An hour later the plane began to descend. I moved to the open curtain and watched Morris peering intently ahead. Below, in the shapeless darkness of the Pacific Ocean, two lines of parallel lights guttered and flickered. Torches.

Morris noticed me and waved the gun too causally in my direction. “Get buckled in. And tell Henry to also. You might have to show that idiot how.” I did. Minutes later, the plane jounced its way onto the dirt and began to taxi. I closed my eyes.

I knew that in the next few minutes I’d have to do something I didn’t want to. Like shake hands with Dupree’s girl. But that didn’t make sense. She was just some skirt – redhead, blue eyes, tight sweater, but a dame nonetheless. What was so important about her? But deep down, I knew I had to do anything but shake her hand. Even if it meant taking a bullet from my own gun. And I knew if it came to that, there wouldn’t be any heroic Saturday matinee shoulder wound. Nothing of that sort. It would be a new word; a secretary’s word. A secretary who takes shorthand for the big boss who grabs her butt and likes to play tickle in places off the map. Deleted.

The pilot chopped the engines, and in the silence I could smell the stale cloth of my seat, hear Harry’s labored breathing, and see the pilot with Morris behind him, gun at his back, heading towards the door.

It wasn’t the smartest plan in the book. I bet Phil Marlowe would have done something better, but like I said, I’m not the best, so I kicked the pilot in the stomach and sent him flying back into Morris.

A second later, as Morris cursed and Henry the Eighth tugged at his seat belt, unused to restraint of any kind, I grabbed for the handle and pushed outwards on the big door. It didn’t move. A pin, gleaming dull and silvery in the light of the cabin, laughed at me from the deck. I pulled it, yanked the lever and pushed outwards. It opened to guttering torches and a dark jungle.

I lowered myself to the ground and ran. Norton Morris yelled but didn’t fire. Ahead I could see Dupree’s girl, a gray skirt over thighs I remembered to be silky in the moonlight of a cheap motel. A green sweater filled nicely and auburn hair that seemed like pumping blood in the flickering light of the torches. And those silvery eyes…now turned blue. I could grab her and we’d make for the jungle. She was only twenty feet away, and we’d get a good head start. After that, who knew?

“I’ll shoot her, Mr. Marvin.” Morris screamed from the doorway. “I’ll shoot her dead before you can even get to her. And she’ll be gone. You know it and I know it.”

I stopped, panting. Norton Morris stood triumphantly in the open door of the fuselage. For once the little shoe clerk held all the cards.

A few minutes later we were all together, facing Dupree’s girl. Henry the Eighth guffawed with laugher. “Good shew Norton. I suspect thou mayest indeed be an Earl before this evening’s out.”

“Shut up, Henry. Now, Mr. Marvin. Shake hands with her.”

She didn’t say anything. But the look in her blue eyes told me to do anything but what Norton Morris wanted me to do.

“Before I do Norton, tell me one thing.” If I couldn’t shoot off my gun, why not my mouth? “Why Henry? You’re obviously in charge. Why him?”

“Shut up and shake stupid, before I drill you.”

“If you do, then I guess I can’t shake with bright eyes.”

“There are other ways,” he whispered through clenched teeth.

For a long moment the gun remained steady. But the eyes behind it were livid with rage.

“Do it!” screamed Morris.

“No. You do it!” I shot back.

“He can’t do it! He can’t do it because…” It was Dupree’s girl. Her blue eyes had turned to silver. “Because he’s dead Mr. Marvin.”

Morris trembled with silent red rage.

“And yet here I am, holding this gun.” He began quietly. “Your gun. What do you have to say to that Mr. Marvin?”

When you don’t have the answers, shut up. Let other people do the talking, especially when the ones holding the guns aren’t going to like what you have to say.

“You’re still dead, Norton Morris.” Dupree’s girl’s voice, a hint of quivering fear, was steady for the most part. “You died in that shoe store. It’s not your fault. Mr. Richter tortured you for what probably seemed an eternity in your mind. And then you slipped through the cracks…”

“Yes, I did,” he mumbled softly.

“And went mad,” she finished. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. I’ve flown the entire length of the spiral arm, Mr. Morris. I’m one of the few captains who have. But never in all my years, did I ever think an A.I. would go mad.” Her silver eyes stared into Morris. “And yet you did. Just like Richter did. And now you want to kill all the sleepers, all of us, everyone aboard the ship, just like Richter wanted to. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” whimpered Morris. I thought about grabbing my gun.

“The reason Henry is here,” she said turning towards me, “is because Norton Morris is the ghost of something that once was. The memory of a program who needs an actual running intelligence to stay in touch with the rest of the ship. He was an A.I. gone completely mad. Now, his data doesn’t even exist in the Construct anymore. Just a memory of file corruption. An error the Construct has learned to live with. His hatred, his malice, his appetite for revenge are all that remain. But with the corruption to the Construct and our ship being so far gone into uncharted space, there’s nothing that can be done. In light of this ship’s current status, the least of my problems is a rogue A.I. ghost that didn’t go quietly into the recycling bin. But now, it requires my full attention. We can authenticate the link between Construct and Bridge. Take my hand Mr. Marvin. I am in full control of Dupree’s girl now. It’s safe.”

So I did. I reached out and held soft, cold, delicate fingers and fell into silver eyes. I fell into the whirlpool of the universe and it didn’t matter that Morris had thrown himself onto me or that Henry, that great bear of a king, was hugging the life out me, crushing me. Death and her eyes were one in the same.

Now back in my apartment in Harbor City, the dawn is just a few minutes away. I hope. I check the horizon, standing up and craning my neck toward the side of my little window. I want to see blue streaks in the sky. I want to walk down Becker Street this morning and know that I can still right wrongs, save damsels, and occasionally hear a good song over a cheap mug of beer. I’m simple that way. I’m human, regardless of my residence in the Construct or the previous Lee Marvin.

On the other side of the Captain’s eyes, I came to the Auxiliary Bridge, as Dupree’s girl the Captain called it. She told me the main bridge had been smashed to bits a hundred and fifty years earlier. I looked down seeing right through myself. I was there, and I wasn’t.

“What about Morris?” I asked.

“Henry finally shot him. Nothing can stand up against your pistol inside the Construct. It’s a Hunter Killer algorithm designed to eradicate any trace of undesired data. Not only did Henry kill him, he never was.”

I didn’t follow.

“Mr. Giles, you knew him as Dupree, was my chief engineer. It was his idea of placing it in your hands. As a safeguard. You were his only hobby. Most people have several Avatars for their Construct stories. For pleasure, pain, companionship, many other things. Spacers use them to live lives that extend beyond the finite space of our hulls. But Mr. Giles was a quiet man who loved his engines and me. He died in Oakland in that warehouse. He died trying to save my ship from Richter’s treachery. He died sending you a message.”

The Captain, “Dupree’s girl”, stood in front of me. She was an old crone if there ever was one. She had short, cropped, spiky hair and thin, papery skin with long blue veins running down scrawny limbs. But her large eyes were still the eyes of Dupree’s girl.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. Maybe the night we spent together in that motel after Dupree got killed made me feel like garbage. Either that or it was the memory of Leonard Giles that I saw in her eyes.

“Don’t be. It was Richter’s fault. He almost succeeded in killing everybody. Instead he failed and only killed my entire crew. ‘Dupree’ was a scenario, a case, if you prefer. Leonard designed it to let you know about the ship and our situation. About the Construct. He felt you might be able to help in there if something happened to him. Keep the Sleepers, our charges, safe from the negative effects of the unrestricted awareness patch Richter downloaded on to the A.I.s running inside the Construct. Richter killed Leonard and almost everyone else shortly after that.” She turned away from me, staring outwards at something I knew wasn’t there anymore.

“That night in the motel, after he died,” she said to the universe. “When I was with you. I just wanted to be close to Leonard one last time. And you were his. I hope you don’t mind.”

I didn’t.

“Why did Richter kill everyone?”

“Not everyone. Just my crew. It’s a long story Mr. Marvin. He was a terrorist of sorts. A man who believed that all artificial intelligence should be treated as though alive. That their ‘lives’, data-based though they are, are capable of just as much joy, and just as much suffering, as in the case of Norton Morris, as a human might be. He was insane. That’s why he sabotaged The Olympia, my ship, and sent us off into the void. Next stop Andromeda. No one’s ever been there. You’ll be the first. You and the sleepers.”

“You have a name for me.” I passed my arm through a nearby bank of colored lights. “Artificial you called it? You may be right. All this might be the truth. But just the same, I’m real. I live in my world. It’ll always be Harbor City, rain and fog, or sunny and hot; not much, but when it is, it’s nice. In its own way, it’s my little slice of humanity. ”

“Not for long Mr. Marvin. I couldn’t contain Henry the Eighth. Even now he’s grabbing everything from everywhere inside the Construct.”

“Dangerous?”

“Very. Think of it this way. The Construct, where your world is, is like a candy store. A place where travelers on long journeys, like the sleepers in back, can put their minds and live out fantasies and adventures or even learn skills to prepare them for their work in the colony they were headed towards. Now Henry is running through that candy store grabbing items from every bin and stuffing them into his sack. It will be…strange to say the least.”

“Why not shut the damn thing down?”

“It would kill the sleepers, and you. Until we reach a habitable system in the Andromeda galaxy, I have to keep it running. As you can see, I’m not as young as I once was. It’s going to be difficult.”

I watched the universe outside the windows of the ship. There was so much darkness. I’d always expected more stars. Ahead there was a tiny cluster of them though. I assumed that was Andromeda.

“Can I help?”

“I would appreciate that Mr. Marvin.” She swallowed hard.

“You’re my last knight in shining armor.”

“I don’t know about the ‘shining’ part.”

“Here’s a new ‘gun’. Where we come from, The Cantata Assembly, that is a banned weapon. The algorithm inside it has started and ended wars on a galactic scale. In open space, exposed to live data, it could kill millions. But in the Construct, I ask you to use it to right wrongs, protect the sleepers, and occasionally rescue old dames like myself. It’s your Excalibur.” I took the gun from her and for a moment sensed the emptiness of the void I’d seen between the galaxies within it. In its holster under my coat, it felt at home.

“I guess that makes me the old lady in the lake,” she chuckled dryly. “Not much of a damsel though, eh?”

“I may not be much of knight. But you’ll always be a fair maiden to me.” I’m a soft touch. It was the thing Lola liked and hated about me. But that’s another story.

“Thank you Leonard…I mean Mr. Marvin. Thank you.”

“What do I call you?”

She thought for a moment. “Just Dupree’s girl. I like that.”

And now I wait. She said if the sun came up over Harbor City that meant at least Henry hadn’t pulled all the wires and plugs of the Construct in his greedy grab for everything. She assured me, darkly, that there were places where he could get into exactly that sort of trouble. But she also said if the sun came up, it meant at least she could contain him within the Construct. The simulation, our world within the ship, would continue on its long night journey to Andromeda. If she could keep him away from the ‘sleepers,’ whoever they were, and the rest of the ship’s systems, the Construct would continue to run and the sun would rise over Harbor City. At least for tomorrow. It sounded like a lot of work, but she seemed tougher than most.

Back home in Harbor City, near my window, a deep blue streak appeared within the ink of night. I wondered what our ‘candy store’ would be like in the morning. Henry the Eighth crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on a dinosaur at the head of an army of Panzers? One gun and one slightly used detective didn’t stand much of a chance. Then again, I am Lee Marvin, and the gun is Excalibur.



Nick Cole got an offer to publish this story in Labyrinth Inhabitant over two years ago, and he totally played hard to get.

Arthur was loathsome like the rest of them, but he made up for it by his lack of eyes.

“It’s blue Arthur,” his mother told him when he decided to gouge out his eyes so he could not be fooled anymore. “The sky had always been blue. They forgot to change it into something we couldn’t recognize. For me, I think it’s a curse that it remained that way. Reminds me of everything else that has been changed.”

“I don’t care, mother. You can go on and see whatever was pulled in front of your eyes, but me, well…I’m free, am I? They can no longer influence me with those stupid colorful skins, shapeshifting walls for autosuggestion, molting rainbows, disgusting pink stars to make us believe in miracles.”

“You sound just like your father before They got him. I can keep you safe here, as long as you don’t try to go out.”

“Go out to see what, Mother?”

“You’re too young to remember what we did to this planet, Arthur,” she said sadly. “After the war, there was nothing left for the survivors to rebuild on. Until They came and taught us contentment, that what we see makes us covet things. They changed everything that was wrong about this planet—”

“Shut up, Mother. I’m sick of it. I’ve heard that version of history all the time on TV.”

“You’re just tired, Arthur. The bleeding has stopped. That’s good. I think we should have dinner now.” Then she headed to the doorway and left Arthur to clean up the dried blood on his face and hands. The doorway accommodated her and loosened up its membranous hinges a bit so she could pass.


2. Abstractions on a World Called Shirley

The box was so small, enough to fit in the soft hollow curve of her left palm for the right one had dissolved a long time ago. It was hard to believe that it could mean something. Shirley wished for it to contain a gift. Perhaps, something special to compensate for the shadow that she had to give up in order to get a room in the Shelter.

She heard the gurgling of the giant mechanical worm outside the building. She tried to be afraid only to feel normal again, but she was too tired to even bother conjuring the right fear reflexes. There would be time for that later.

She glanced at the tongue-bed; it was damp and marred with pores from all the things it had lapped before. Although it looked safe because it was still asleep, its edges had ulcerations.

Easing carefully on the tongue-bed so as not to wake it prematurely, Shirley puzzled over the tiny box she had found on the shed two world-hours ago. It had no visible flaps. It was nearly weightless and very hard, a hardness that was neither metallic nor organic. And so smooth. Perhaps, it was not meant to be opened like all the other boxes before it.

They will get you someday, her brother, Arthur, had said to her when she opened the doorway and never looked back. That was the time Shirley had lost her right hand; the doorway had to take something.

The last words she heard before she disappeared with her dreams of escape were the screams of her little sister, Mischa: “Only five stitches, Shirley. Five stitches to close the mouth of the Apocalypse—”

Shirley missed them both. If she knew how to pray, then she would pray for them not to “go for it” like she did. It was the same everywhere. The landscape in and out of the doorway was already tainted end to end. Only the sky was left intact. It was still blue with fluffs of very real-looking white clouds in certain areas. Her mother said that They had forgotten to change it. Did it matter, what was left unchanged? Shirley did not think so; she only hoped that she could still find a way to warn her siblings.

Outside, the giant mechanical worm was still making that peculiar sloshing sound. It was making its rounds for stray people, knowing that the carnivorous Shelter was impregnable and kept all its guests behind its membranous hinges.

Behind the door, the clock was ticking. The walls had little human arms that waved to and fro in a motion that was both mesmerizing and annoying. There were no piles of bones on the floor, which was a good sign. The room was not hungry yet. There would be time for that later.

Shirley, after twenty-five years of running, found out that she no longer cared and went to sleep.


3. Abstractions on a Window Called Mischa

After the war, something happened one day that made Mischa build her own window out of leaves (the real ones that fell down from real trees), powdered macroscopic dust mites as adhesive, glass, and silicon wood for the pane.

The window was big enough so she could ease her head out to look at the gnarled feet of the building where the tourists had been eaten two days ago. Mischa could have built a larger one, but the natural laws said otherwise.

The window that she had built with her hands alone made her feel free. She could see all the metallic birds outside—their wings silvery and perfect, their feathers ruffled to simulate the effects of moving air, their beaks curved into arcs of light.

And the sky, still blue. It was the only thing that was left unchanged.

She could watch the giant mechanical worm nuzzle all the dark places where the survivors might hide. From a distance, the worm did not look dangerous anymore.

The floor pulsed and gurgled softly underneath her. Somehow, there was no way to ignore it. She tried not to wince lest the floor could smell her fear. There was no way to predict what floors might do in that situation.

She wondered what happened to her sister Shirley, the first to enter the doorway. That was the time Shirley had lost her right hand; the doorway had to take something. But Mischa knew that Shirley was a survivor, and she would most likely be in one of the rooms in the Shelter.

Determined to find her sister, she hurried to assemble the window. She fixed shard after shard into place. The window would claim her left eye, like all windows would, but it would be worth it. The right eye was enough to guide her. If only Shirley were still alive when she got to her…

The next day, intent on escaping, Mischa started to unravel the window just big enough for her body to fit in and small enough to fold and hide under her lips.


4. Abstractions on a Drain Called Hammett

Hammett’s fingertips were testing the circumference of the drain-hole. It would hold. But there was supposed to be a seam here somewhere. A breach to the other side, like the doorway that took the hand of his cousin, Shirley.

All doorways had to take something. It would be worth it. Shirley had told him the day before she disappeared.

The P-trap shook. A segment of the giant mechanical worm was caught in it. It was harmless, as long as it remained in the dark. The light made it grow.

The floor underneath him was the only problem. It would grow hungry soon. A soft gurgling sound from the nails that hammered the floorboards into place was the first sign. He heard one a minute ago.

Hammett saw bone dust in the crevices between the floorboards. Remnants of the unlucky ones who had no reason to stand on the floor when it was hungry.

The seam! He had to find it.

The drain was not yielding to his touch. Maybe, it was only a myth. But Shirley was never wrong. And nobody from the other side ever came back to prove that there was, indeed, a seam around the circumference of the drain.

Using the properties of the drain was painless, but it might not lead to the other side. But we have no choice, Hammett. You’ve got to find the seam. There has to be one. I’ll use the doorway…And stay alive, got it!

Hammett hoped that Shirley was still alive. They could still win this if they were together. Shirley was a survivor; she knew the streets and the breathing rooms better than anyone. She also pointed out to him that the sky was still left unchanged, that They had forgotten to change it. Perhaps, there were other things that were unchanged as well. From them, the original world could be built again.

A blister began to form on his thumb as it brushed against the hairless skin of the sink.

This surface was where he had watched his grandparents get sucked in. Stop thinking about it, he thought. Find the goddamn seam.

For the first time, he noticed the stillness of the room. The room was not breathing anymore!

Now where are the seams?

The conventional axis for a revolving cylinder passed through the hollow core parallel to the five stitches to close the mouth of the Apocalypse and all the doors gave up their meanings when left open much longer than necessary and the windows were upright slabs of all that were cold and fleeting and the blanket on the cot would never be thick enough against it. Think. Think. Where are the seams?

Another gurgling sound from the floor underneath.

He looked down to check if a mouth was starting to emerge, and he saw the half-formed protrusion on the floor. The mouth! He averted his gaze, tried to calm down, and concentrated on finding the seam as fast as he could. When he looked at the drain again, Hammett caught a sight of his dissolving thumb. It did not hurt at all, and he did not understand how he could use the drain as a doorway when he did not even know where the seam was and what it looked like.

His whole arm disappeared down the drain. He felt air against his disappearing arm. There was something down there. Maybe this was the way that Shirley was talking about.

The upper lip of the floor edged up closer to his left shoe.

Hammett grasped the tiny pores of the drain with the tip of his fingers. He was surprised to find that they had grown soft, and he could stretch them to fit his body.

He was wiggling his upper torso down the blackness of the drain when the mouth of the floor snapped shut onto his left foot still planted on the floor. The shoe and two of his digits came off.

No pain.

There was a circle of light. The end of the drain-hole?

Hammett hoped to see Shirley on the other side.


5. Abstractions on a House Called Jack

Here is the house. We wait for the doors to open.

Mother, the one on the picture, the one who smiled with her eyes closed, used to tell us than the floor was the most important part of any house. “You can have a broken faucet or a creaky door but not loose floorboards or bad carpeting,” she said. None of my brothers understood the logic behind it. We believed her just the same.

The machines had come and gone, the doors swinging open with each departure, and we remained wide-eyed awaiting their inevitable return.

Tap water drummed on the stainless steel sink. Every dull trickle created its own rhythm.

Inside the busted water pipes, the mechanical dust mites scurried about their little feet, dragging the years behind them and the drone of their pointless lives. Dorian tried to shut them up many, many years ago using a polarizer, but they always returned, always appearing on the left side of the wall where his eighth wife blew her head off with a Remington.

Hammett, my eldest brother, said to just let them be. “They’ve been on this planet before the dinosaurs. They deserve a little respect for surviving that long.”

Under the stairs, the spinning room continued to toil to keep the house going. What does it see—that thing inside the spinning room, that thing with no eyes? I imagined the valves hissing to keep up with the carbon dioxide we exhaled.

Dorian found a happiness bottle inside the cupboards. It was nestled with the beer bottles and jars of gourmet pickles.

One squirt from the happiness bottle, and we’re all froth from head to toe—part darkness, part hope.

The side effects were minimal. We heard voices.

“Tell us where you keep the books,” father intoned in some faraway afterlife. We could smell the cigarette in his breath, taste his rancid sweat.

“Leave the boys alone,” mother whimpered somewhere in the house, like a forgotten dog who had been left for so long on a leash that it could no longer tell the difference between being free and not. “Just leave them alone, Chuck. They would learn the rules later. They would realize that they could not do anything about this.”

Dorian laughed himself to tears. Hammett hummed a tune from a Kellogg’s commercial. I took in my happiness silently.

Something, someone pulled open the back door. We heard the rattling as the door hinges were torn off from the wall. We were too drunk with happiness to even care.


Kristine Ong Muslim authored the full-length poetry collection A Roomful of Machines (Searle Publishing, 2010). Her work has been accepted in over four hundred publications including Aberrant Dreams, Abyss & Apex, Alternative Coordinates, Expanded Horizons, Space & Time, and Tales of the Talisman. She has received several Honorable Mentions in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror as well as five nominations for the Pushcart Prize and four for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award.

the sylph—neither man nor woman—
tells you a story
and half of that is lost on the breeze

another left
and a stone found lying on the ground
plain as onyx or jade

too heavy for your pocket
but warm in your hand
—some stones hold breath or life—

Your third turn is a right
and almost finds you tumbling down a well
set like a grave into the ground

the echo haunts you as you retreat
already lost. You take
another right (which might be left)

and find a beggar, open-handed
squatting there, eyes staring empty
you part with the warm stone

and you go right again
there is a dark cup
brimming with wine

thirst makes you drink (thirst? really?)
Back again and left
scattered peacock feathers on the floor,

and the shed scales of a snake, a leopard’s skin
you take the skin and take a right
warm cake awaits

fresh from the oven that you cannot see
baked by no-one, filled; you lick
warm berry juice from your fingers (berry juice? really?)

and then again you turn—right or left, no matter—
and find a bed or a bench or a throne; a hat
or a crown; more warm things

filling your stomach
and the leopard’s spots on your skin
and all the walls around you softly closing in

Alexandra Seidel once got lost in a labyrinth when she was a child. She could never really forget the walls of green on all sides that wove light into a shadow tapestry. In many ways this experience inspired her writing. Her poetry and prose has been published or is forthcoming in ‘Cabinet des Fées’, ‘Sybil’s Garage’, ‘Star*Line’ and others. You can find her blog here: http://tigerinthematchstickbox.blogspot.com/