Case No. 23N-55671, Year 49

Defendant Ernine activated a trans-dimensional device to swap his body with a version of himself from a recently diverged parallel universe. Defendant, or an alternate version of Defendant, was then caught on holovideo surveillance stalking and stabbing a victim ten times on planet Jarandis. Two hours after the victim succumbed to her injuries, Defendant activated the device again, allegedly to restore the original version of himself.

The moment you set foot on Hades IV, you’re lost. The part of your brain that knows where you are in space—which way is left or right or up or down—gets all scrambled. Take just ten steps across the bruised purple soil from the shuttle ramp and good luck finding your way back. Not even our fancy tech can figure it out. The scientists tried.

The hum of the generation ship Vikram Sarabhai was a constant, deep-boned heartbeat. After forty years aboard, Dr. Nasima Choudhury barely noticed the vibration. In her small workshop adjacent to the Mass-Lite Drive control room, the only sound she heard was the gentle hiss of her kettle. It was the one place where the ship’s sterile, recycled air was cut with the spicy, earthy scent of home.

I. The Oracle at the Ministry of Truth

Ayinla could not say when he first heard of the Oracle. Perhaps at the barbershop, where he had settled himself into a rotting and dangerously unstable barber’s chair, robe too tight around his throat, silently cursing the barber who stopped every now and then to argue with “hangers.” (There were always hangers at barbershops; jobless, often shirtless men who were as much a fixture of the shop as the harsh fluorescent lights that exposed Ayinla’s pores).

Ingredients: one part fury.

First, take the finest, softest leather and bleach it purest white. This is the skin-shroud, and you need to fool the cowardly officials who oversee the sacrifice as well as the dragon itself. What better than lamb-white, innocent flesh untouched by greedy hands?

One morning, everyone in the world—everyone except you—woke from where they had lain sleeping to find ineffaceable stains of blood at their wrists and ankles, with weeping wounds in their sides.

This took a bit of play with time on the part of the motive, but time was the first thing the motive breathed out. It will be the last thing the motive breathes in, some other distant dawn. The word “play” is an approximation. Play can be exultant. Play can be perverse.