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You’re eighteen. Your fairy godmother just fired you, because after three balls, the prince has grown bored with you. Tonight you stepped on his foot during a gavotte. “If you’d been cleverer,” the fairy godmother says—her words silver chimes girded with steel—“you’d have pretended your clumsiness was really punishment: a reminder to focus on you, not that floozy in scarlet silk across the room.”
I wasn’t even two blocks into the Tumbledown when the walker’s nav crystal started fuzzing out. She veered left like a scavver drunk on coolant, and I knew I was in trouble. I tried sweet-talking her back on route, but she wasn’t listening. I was used to that. Nobody listens to a twelve-year-old—especially not a scrap pile with legs.
“God” is not the word I’d use. But it is the only one that suffices. There are all kinds of gods: the old and the new; the useful, the useless; the capricious and the dependable; the wrathful and the meek. They all had one thing in common—whether they were created at the dawn of time when hunter-gatherers huddled in caves and cowered at the crack of thunder, or they were engineered by men in frocks, or worse, born of minds harvested by modern technology—all gods were born starving.
“What do you mean the nanobots formed a union??” I asked the lawyer, biting my thumbnail.
It’s an old habit, kept up well after I got the “Pro Nano Blitz Package,” as the ad called it. A muscular man in tight clothing explained: a quick, painless injection, then a couple days sick as a dog, then another month for the nanobots to multiply, specialize, and spread out through the body. Then: easy street.
Lise’s personas have no warning when the XexlCo Construct appears at the gate of her memory garden, smiling cheerfully at each of her personas in turn like a neighborhood milkman making his daily rounds. They watch the newcomer saunter by with open curiosity, moving aside to let him pass as though he’s a regular guest in Lise’s subconscious. There’s nothing threatening about him. He might’ve popped in a million times, the way he behaves.
This is our struggle. We scuttle on the sand before the softly breathing salt-burdened sea with the lichen on the rocks a bright poison green and great white butterflies screaming under a red sky while we dream of justice and watch the ghost of a long-extinct rat ancestor, an ancestrat if you please, you know the ones we mean, the toothy ones who built dams to block the rivers, the handsy ones who built towers to block the skies, and choked on their own leavings.
Rachel sat at the edge of the sparkling pond in the secluded glen that had taken her five years to find. The air smelled of roses and lavender and pine. Tiny white sparks, like fireflies, floated upward, almost as if they were watching her.
He called her Legs. “Legs for days,” he’d say, his voice thick with wonder. When he spoke to her, she was filled with a warm, heady feeling that made her purr and rub against him. She had to be careful when she did, because she was still growing into her spikes and she’d already drawn blood more than once. His skin was so flimsy, so tearable. She marveled he didn’t end up a shredded mess just from going about his days.
The magician raises his wand.
Initially, this commission seemed simple. One large country invading a much smaller one, a clear case of aggressor and victim—but nothing is ever so straightforward.
Green Plumed Orbital Line A; viridis metamorphos A
Common sighting; Flies along the forty-fifth latitude every 12 minutes
Traveler’s addendum: Last functional line along a northern latitude; southern latitudes TBD
My crawler runs out of energy as I reach the platform summit. I’m two minutes early.
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