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The reign of King Musa III had no place for things of the fantastical. He, unlike the previous kings, frowned against the thought of people who wielded the ability to veer situations with their hands. These types of people were wizards; grizzled and old, with vast years of experience at their disposal. King Musa III considered them dangerous, and that their primeval deeds would stain his reign.
Never look down. Same rule as mountain climbing, high wire acts, or trapeze artistry. Once you lock eyes with the gravitational monster beneath you, it’s all-but-impossible to look away. You’ll see particles flowing down into the abyss that is the black hole—and whole suns unspinning themselves as their plasma and raw essence is sucked away into nothingness.
“You can’t bid more than we agreed on. Please don’t get swept into it,” Jules said as we exited the BART on Market Street, the sun beating down at us. He shed a denim jacket while I suffered in my hoodie, which had made sense in Oakland, less so here. “You can’t believe what I saw when I temped at one of these divine auctions. I’m talking golden cattle, firstborn children, the smell of their grandma’s cookies.”
February 4, 2034: AI Compendium—Classified documents stolen from Congo last year were released this morning. These indicate morally, ethically, and legally dubious research on their own workforce as they seek more productive employees.
For the seventh dusk in a row, the human girl comes to our tree with an offering. She approaches on all fours, moving almost as clumsily as I do when I crawl from the knothole and amble out along my favorite branch. Her face is hidden by a ceremonial mask. It’s a simple wooden thing, not half so ornate as the ones I know humans fashioned in the time of our ancestors.
The body opened too easily, like paper wrapping on room temperature butter. “This isn’t right,” Lattner said, at first to himself, then louder, for the trauma nurse and anesthesiologist to hear. The patient, a John Doe, had arrived at the ER reporting pain in his right side and copious bloody vomit.
We called it the monster because we could, though none of us found the label to be particularly satisfying. After a certain point, Yerim started calling it the Logos Pilgrim. Which was understandable, seeing as how she was the most mystically inclined among us, as well as the most compassionate towards things we didn’t understand. And there were many things we didn’t understand. For one, where did it come from? And why was it here?
Spotnik knows the humans haven’t forgotten him, because kibble still clatters into Spotnik’s bowl at six a.m. sharp. They’ve been gone long enough for all the vegetables in Hydroponics to shrivel up, limp and dead. Spotnik eats his kibble and licks up the crumbs, because he is a Good Boy, and Good Boys eat their rations. Even when the kibble goes soft and develops a white coat of mold and begins to stink so bad that he has to struggle to choke it down.
Once upon a time, there was a king who married a witch. Together, they had four sons and one daughter, and they were very happy as long as the king lived. When my father the king died and my oldest brother was crowned king, life went sideways for me, my sister, and our mother. The new king, our oldest brother, decided to use our sister as coin to buy our country’s safety. He planned to marry her to the king across a perilous border to our south.
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