Masked protestors charge down an inner city street, police in riot gear retreat. A few shops without steel shutters have their windows smashed. A car is on fire. A man wearing a Native American war bonnet manoeuvres his wheelchair around a sputtering teargas cannister. A sign mounted across his rear handles reads, “No More Lies, Mayor Kolchak”.

Ishak flopped his long lithe body into bed and lay there quietly for a moment while Jessica read.

He sighed.

Jessica turned, “Hey.”

He smiled in that way he did, with only half his mouth, letting his hooded eyes do the talking.

She put her book aside and lay on his flatly muscled chest. He stroked her hair.

He breathed, “It’s-”

“-Date Night, yes, I didn’t forget.”

Ishak tugged the waistband of his boxers down to release his waiting erection. He twisted her long black hair around his fist and nudged her head downwards.

Within two minutes he came in her mouth.

She rushed to the bathroom to spit. She gargled, stripped, and washed herself in the bidet. But when Jessica returned to their bedroom, she was greeted only with snores.

“Date Night,” she muttered, “right.”

The guestroom bed was still rumpled from three nights ago. Buried at the back of the drawer, her vibrator.

***

Her phone buzzed and hopped on the bedside table. Jessica sat bolt upright and blinked hard to bring the screen into focus—her father-in-law. She drew the sheets around her naked body before answering.

“I’m sorry to call so late, Jessica. Jess—it’s your mother—Kailin has... collapsed.”

“W-what are you talking about? Mum’s at the resort, right?”

“That meteorite, that’s all over the news—it crashed there. Right behind her villa. The resort nurse said her condition’s stable, but she’s unconscious.”

“A meteorite hurt her?”

“You haven’t heard? A meteorite knocked down the back wall of your family unit. But Kailin was in the front veranda, having tea. She was not hit by anything… but she collapsed. There’s... there’s some kind of disturbance… in the air.” Jamal swallowed audibly. “The reports are patchy. Everyone’s gone to the end of the golf course. They, they described some kind of waves of heat and, and vibrations radiating from the crash site...”

“Where’s my mum now?”

“A medevac’s been called. Kailin’s on a stretcher with pulse and BP monitor attached—her vitals are fine—we, we’ll know more when they get her to the mainland.”

All of Jess’s social feeds were boiling over with chatter about X-2604 which had been predicted to make a near-Earth pass in April 2026.

The information was mind-numbing—collision with “an unknown stellar object” had deflected its trajectory… it entered the atmosphere at a “grazing” angle over Yunnan, passed Luang Prabang, Bangkok... Ablation trail of cosmic dust... multicoloured plume of gases sighted... Cosmogenic radionuclides—she let the jargon wash over her.

Then the first videos from out of Langkawi began streaming.

***

Jess pulled over to a screeching halt in front of the Gleneagles admissions entrance just as the hospital’s private helicopter whoop-whoop-whooped down onto its rooftop landing pad.

Jess found the emergency ward cordoned with “Do Not Cross” tape. The private medical centre’s security team were in full force, wielding tasers. She tried to explain her mother had been in the helicopter, that Kailin Wang-Horton chaired the Gleneagles Board of Trustees, but the guards wouldn’t let her through.

A tense thirty minutes later, an officer—“Siti” on her name-tag—strode up to Jess with a small plastic bag. “The distancing protocol was triggered. The doctors have your mother in a Hazmat sealed room, doing tests.”

“D-distancing? Hazmat—my mother’s been irradiated? What’s her condition?”

Siti handed Jess the bag—containing an N95-mask, a transparent visor, and plastic gloves. “Awake, and stable... I’m told that only the hippocampus of her brain is showing... non-threatening levels of radiation. Something... unknown.”

“Unknown?”

Siti glanced around and lowered her voice even though they were alone in the waiting area. “Never seen on Earth.”

Jess donned the protective gear and followed Siti through a transition room with double-acrylic airlocks.

Kailin lay dwarfed in the high-tech bed with a heavy blanket drawn up to her chin—pale and drawn but with a laser-focussed stare and tightly pressed lips.

She pulled her hands out to weakly clasp Jess’s gloved ones. “Girl, listen—you need to go to the office. I’ve set up protocols.”

“Oh, Ma, don’t talk about work now!”

“Shush—listen. We don’t know what will happen to me—the doctors have never seen anything like this. The protocols we came up with, Jamal and me, after Covid. Make sure he triggers them if I'm indisposed for five days. You are my proxy. You take my seat on the Board, not Jamal. This is important, Girl. Are you listening?”

“Ma, you look fine and you sound exactly like normal. You’ll be out of here in no time.” Jess looked at the taller of the two doctors hovering bedside. “Right?”

“Doctor Balbir, Ms Horton. Your mother’s vitals are indeed stable but, in the past half-hour, she’s slipped in and out of consciousness a few times. We’re monitoring closely...” Like a sales rep at a biomed expo, Balbir absurdly waved both hands at the devices beeping and flashing away. “…but until we know the exact nature of the radiation she’s been exposed to—some kind of ‘dark’ isotope—your mother will be warded with us, uhh, indefinitely.”

“What are you—’dark’ isotope? What’s that?”

“As I said, we don’t know—it may be some kind of ‘strangelet’... I’m sorry I’m not making this any clearer...”

“No.” Jess stomped down. “You’re not.” Stomp. “At all.”

An alarm chimed and the patient’s head lolled to one side.

Balbir gave Siti a look and the security head took Jess’s arm to gently steer her out.

The doctors turned to their instruments and barked instructions.

***

Six days later, Dr Balbir phoned.

“Your mother is coughing, her body temperature is too low, and her bloodwork shows a viral anomaly we’ve been unable to sequence. Investigators over at the Langkawi impact zone found a matching radiation signature alongside microscopic traces of a radiotrophic fungus. That’s, uhh, an extraterrestrial organism—very space-hardy—that feeds off radiation. The CDC has flown in a full team, and we’ve sent everything to their BSL-4 facility down in Singapore—the best outside Atlanta. We still don’t know how an aerosolized spore can behave like a contagious virus. One working theory is, a viral payload nested inside the fungal cell walls. But the anomalous energy fields are degrading the samples faster than we can analyze them. As instructed by your mother herself, we will keep you closely posted, with no censorship of our unfolding discoveries but—I cannot stress this enough—you must keep all this strictly confidential, Ms Horton. We don’t want to start any unnecessary, uhh, panic.”

Jess scoffed, “Too late, Doc—aren’t you following social media? All the international guests at the Feiyue? They flew home to every corner of the globe—after being given clean bills of health by our Kesihatan doctors—but now nearly every one of them has been admitted into their hospitals, coughing and fainting.”

Balbir grunted, “Of course we’re… aware, Ms Horton, and sharing data with those medical centres. I’ve been brought into the WHO X-2604 committee. At the moment we cannot confirm if the cases are linked.”

“How many?”

“96 resort guests, 72 staff members. Together with their immediate family members and declared close contacts who may have potentially been exposed, the WHO has over 700 individuals under round-the-clock observation in quarantine wards in 15 countries. No fatalities. We are not declaring a pandemic.”

“Yet.”

“Yet. There is a media lockdown. That is true. We will keep you informed up to the minute, Ms Horton.”

“I’m coming to see my mum today.”

“That... would be highly inadvisable.”

“I wasn’t seeking your advice.”

Jess stabbed End Call.

***

The boardroom was very cold and very bright. When Jess arrived half an hour early for the directors’ meeting, Jamal was already in the chairman’s seat.

A stockier, older, balder version of her husband, Jamal had known Jess since she was born, was in fact her de facto godfather. A flash of memory—with Kailin now in the ICU—to Daddy’s funeral.

Robert Horton, founder of Feiyue Expeditions, 1962-2006. It was Jamal who had held her hand. Jess recalled that Kailin just sat on the folding chair, not responding to the people who’d come to pay their respects. She even ignored the Minister of Tourism. Ishak was there too, and Zhenni of course. Zhenni who was always there, until she wasn’t. The three mouseketeers, Daddy used to call them. All of them nine years old.

“That hundred-yard stare,” Jamal said, breaking her trance. “Where are you?”

“Huh,” Jess shook her head. “Nowhere.”

He coughed softly into a handkerchief. “We should... be clear about your position... before the other board members arrive.”

She took a thin folder from her briefcase and slid it across the long Tapang tabletop. “Legal emailed me yesterday. I’ve printed and signed all the papers—I’m formally taking over Mum’s board seat, right? And her voting rights.”

“Yes, yes just so. At the board meeting we need to make some decisions on how to handle this PR fiasco. Then there will be an EGM on the 20th to report to our shareholders.” Jamal’s brows furrowed. “Jess. This continuity protocol—it was set up by Bob and me, right at the start, just after Feiyue was injected into my company and we took it public. After he had his, uhh, accident, your mum took over his positions...”

“And now you need me to authorise the next person who will take over my directorship, and be the voting proxy on those shares, right? If anything happens to me.” Jess folded her arms across her chest. “Continuity.”

“Continuity. You’re absolutely right, Girl.”

“Don’t—only Mum and Dad call me that.”

“Oh. Oh, I do apologise, Jessica. So... it would be natural to name-”

“Zhenni.”

“Wh... I’m sorry?”

“Zhenni,” Jess repeated. “Ishak will surely be your alternate and proxy. Zhenni will be mine. She’s my oldest friend.”

“I- I remember Zhenni well. But she’s not even in the country, and she knows nothing about Feiyue’s operations... or the resorts.”

“She’s a lawyer—a damned good one. She’s quick on the uptake. Zhen’s on her way home from Melbourne right now. Her flight lands in Singapore in a few hours.”

“I... I see you’ve thought about this, but please, before you sign anything, let’s discuss all the ramifications again once Zhenni’s back in town, alright? The other directors and the institutional stakeholders—especially the Nomura trustees—will, uhh, not be expecting a stranger to be nominated.”

“We can meet again with Zhen, sure, but I’ve made up my mind. I’m sure the third parties will see that Ishak’s entry would make this a monoculture.”

Jamal absently mopped his forehead with the same handkerchief. “Monoculture... really? Are... is everything okay...?”

“Oh please, Jamal. It’s nothing like what you seem to be thinking. This ‘twist’ is all Mum’s idea, and I agreed. Zhen took a bit of convincing, but the bottom line was, she wanted to come home anyway. She was scared of getting stuck in Australia again, in case the governments lock down air travel.”

“Alright, Jess.” Jamal sighed, having faced this obstinacy before. “Alright—I didn’t know you had visited Kailin again. Isn’t she in strict quarantine? I tried to see her two days ago, but they wouldn’t let me in. Not even phone calls.”

“Direct family only—Mum sends her love.”

Jessica Horton smiled and congratulated herself on lying so smoothly. Mum had been unconscious the whole time she had visited this morning. Unconscious since last Friday.

When the doctors weren’t looking, Jess had pulled her N95 down and kissed Kailin on the forehead. It was as cold as ice.

***

The Arrivals Hall at Penang International was unseasonably packed. The number of masks worn around Jess was disconcertingly like the bad times.

Then Zhen was upon her, with the dreaded bear hug. After Jess had been set back down on the ground and caught her breath, Zhen drew her head back and puckered up, waiting. Jess leaned in and kissed Zhen at the edge of her lips, close enough to taste her lipstick.

“God I’ve missed you.” Zhen looped her arm through Jess’s as they walked to the pickup lane.

“How long’s your leave?” Jess slowed and turned to look into Zhen’s eyes.

“Yeah that—we gotta talk.”

“Hunh—I have something big to ask you too.”

“Aite, I’ll go first—I quit my job. I told them I might stay back home for a while. The partners offered remote—even the courts are hearing cases by Zoom, in anticipation of new movement control orders—but I said yeah nah.” Zhen guffawed. “That’s ‘Strine’ for ‘No’.”

Jess shook her head, “Nah yeah, I know.” Then seriously, “My bombshell is, I’m nominating you as my alternate director on the Feiyue board, and proxy for my voting rights at any GM—in case anything happens to me.”

“...what?”

“I’m not kidding. And no, I’m not choosing Ishak.”

“...alright.”

“Alright? Just like that?”

“Yeah—just like that!” Zhen flashed her broad Julia-Roberts grin, “Anyway, nothing’ll happen to you, babe. This space virus thing is just a Soros-Gates hoax, right?”

Jess rolled her eyes and punched Zhen on the shoulder. “And Big Pharma are standing by with trillion dollar vaccines that don’t work?”

“‘Xactly! And the viral videos of mass admissions in China, Laos and Thailand—all AI-generated fakes.”

“Wait- what? I haven’t been following the conspiracy theories.”

“All the countries in the flight path of X-2604 after it entered the atmosphere? Before Earthfall in Langkawi. You must’ve heard—have you been under a rock or something?”

“Uh no, but mostly in the hospital, and the boardroom...”

“Oh... but you know what? Malaysian airports have upped their game—so now, instead of scanning for high temperatures, they’re catching low. That means you, babe, who’s always frozen in planes and airports, will be detained for sure.”

Jess just stared at Zhen with mock-horror.

“Yeah... but the Oz Public Health guys I’ve chatted with in the past coupla days?” Zhen’s smile faded. “They’re actually nervous.”

The two friends said nothing else as they waited on the bench for the Feiyue limo.

***

Jess came home to Ishak seated at the dining table with three bottles of beer—one in hand, the other two empty.

“Hey,” Jess arched an eyebrow and held up the plastic-wrapped char kuay teow, “did I keep you waiting for your supper?”

Ishak took a swig. “Dad told me about Zhenni. Did you think maybe—just maybe—to discuss that with me first?”

Jess slowly sat opposite him. “I had—have—good reasons. I’ve explained them to Dad.”

He set the bottle down with a bang. Ishak had always had a problem with depth perception. Jess assumed it was that. He said, “It’s still her. After she left, I thought...”

“Thought, what.”

“I thought, now she’s moved to Austrolia...” He had this quirky way of saying Australia, “…she wouldn’t be coming between us anymore.”

“Ish... Zhen is not “between us”. She never was—where’s this coming from? Is it because she came out a few years ago?”

“Came out a few years ago... Yeah right. To the world, and to me. But you... you were always in on it, right?”

“I don’t like what you’re suggesting...”

“I’m not suggesting, sweetheart—I’m saying you two have always had the hots for each other.”

“Two and a half beers in and you’re talking like this? What else have you been drinking?”

“Sweetie, I’m not drunk—and if I was, it wouldn’t change a thing.” Ishak roughly wiped beer from the side of his mouth with the back of his hand. “Zhenni never got over the fact that you chose me instead of her. And it looks like you never got over her either.”

“Christ—this is only business. What’s wrong with you? It’s not like I’ve named her in my will! You’re my husband.”

“Well! Now that you’ve brought it up... What does your will say? Did Little Jenny prepare your ‘last testament’? I’ve never seen it actually.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning—” Jess sharply stood up, the legs of her chair barking across the tiled floor, “—when you’re sober.”

As she stormed to the guestroom, Ishak threw the packet of noodles across the kitchen with a splat. Jess thought, yeah beer’s too precious to waste on a melodramatic gesture—plus, Ishak would be scared of getting broken glass in his precious soles.

***

The room was cold, as if the air-conditioning had just been turned off.

Jess shuddered and opened the window to let fresh air in. Still in her blouse and jeans, she climbed into bed and drew the quilt over her face, obliterating the night.

In that cocoon, what Zhen had told her over dinner in the Kopitiam replayed.

Jess had said there was pushback from the Nomura director on their proposals to spin the narrative.

“One of Freehills’ big clients is from Kyoto. She told me once that the Japanese have these cultural concepts: tatemae meaning public behaviour, versus honne for their true feelings.” Zhen had leaned forward and cupped her chin. “Sounds like your director was showing his First Face in asking for full public disclosure about the number of contacts from Langkawi.”

“The First Face is what we expect to see?” Jess tilted her head, “So that would make his Second Face...”

“I mean, I wasn’t there, but I imagine his true feelings would be… to cover that shit up.” Zhen grinned, “He was counting on you all to read his mind.”

“That’s some Art of War shit.”

“The Book of Five Rings by Musashi, actually—that’d be the Japanese equivalent of Sun Tzu.”

“So, Japanese corporate warriors have to learn that everyone has two faces.”

“Mmm, some say three.”

“A Third Face? If your First Face is what you show the public, and your Second Face is the private one you show—presumably—your loved ones or your confessor... Who do you show your Third Face to?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody—not even yourself.”

Jess opened her eyes to find herself in a Ryokan. When she slid the Shoji screen aside, she found a woman in an electric blue kimono standing with her back to Jess.

She turned and her untied kimono flashed dark nipples, a shaved pubis. She wore split-toe cloth socks, and a thin wooden theatre mask.

Jess kicked off her shoes and stepped up onto the tatami mat without hesitation. The kimono fell, followed by the Noh mask. It was Zhenni, of course.

But when Jess reached out to embrace her, the Zhenni face began to slide off.

Jess cried “No!” into the blanket over her head.

A coughing fit tore through her chest. She was drenched in a cold sweat, her teeth chattering. Her watch glowed 03:33.

What the hell... Jess thought. And then remembered pulling down the N95 mask to kiss her mother on the forehead yesterday.

She shook her head, Nonononono. Where’s our thermometer? Pulling the sheets around her shoulders, Jess limped into the landing on aching joints.

The TV was on. Ishak sat on the sofa facing it.

Jess padded up silently. He was softly snoring. An uncapped, nearly empty bottle of Macallan 15 stood near his feet. A shawl had slipped to his knees. Jess felt a pang of tenderness suddenly at her husband’s helplessness. She drew the shawl up to cover his shoulders...

And shrieked when he suddenly grabbed her.

Ishak’s eyes were bloodshot and glazed from the booze but they smouldered with an ancient resentment. The hand wrapped around her wrist scorched, but Jess realised it was her own skin that was ice-cold. Black curtains were drawn over her eyes and removed, twice, three times. Did she pass out? No, nothing had changed. Her husband’s whisky breath on her face, his manicured fingernails digging into the skin over her hammering pulse... and through that incendiary contact-

Images.

Memories, but not hers.

His.

She was looking through his eyes.

Herself, Jess, in a sky blue smock in Kindergarten, bob-haircut, gap-toothed smile. Ishak's little heart thumping.

Time jumps forward.

She’s now in a green and gold Malay wedding outfit, a jewelled tiara pinned in her hair, face so serious, reciting her wedding vows, hand on the Quran, stumbling over the Arabic.

Splayed out before his face, her cunt unfurling to his tongue, her fingers in his hair. She’s fascinated—turned on and shocked at the same time—she’s never seen her own sex up close like this.

She feels her fingers digging into his scalp, feels his erection painfully caught in a downward position in his tight tuxedo pants.

Her face flushes, they are in one of the Hilton toilets, outside the wedding reception hall.

His idea, to fuck just before the ceremony, and she goes along with it. She always goes along with it.

Jess is Ishak, throbbing with lust.

Throbbing now with jealousy.

First year of High School, Zhen in her dorky glasses with the black plastic frame and thick lenses that make her squinty eyes even squintier.

The three mouseketeers. Walking home from school, Zhen entwines her fingers around hers, Jess’s, while Ishak trails behind.

He spins in front of a mirror and a barre. Demi-pointe, fouetté. These are terms she doesn’t know. Again and again, forcing his leg to whip faster and faster, until in anguish he falls, spraining his ankle.

His sweat drips from his bare chest, drips onto the polished parquet of the studio.

Seething, in his grandma’s kampung house now, roosters crowing outside the shuttered full-height doors, a ceiling fan wobbling overhead.

Rose syrup, delicious, but this was Ishak’s favourite. It turns Jess’s stomach with its cloying sweetness and two-ringgit perfume smell.

Pak is there—Ishak’s father. And Nenek—nearly blind but crafty. This must have been their eighteenth year, just before his grandmother died.

Pak says, It’s arranged. He’s pulled strings, got that dyke a scholarship to do law in Austrolia. Six years for a Master’s. Zhenni’s single mother wouldn’t let her pass that up.

Nenek’s chewing betel nut, expertly sends a powerful jet the colour of bruise-blood into the tin spittoon between them.

You have our blessing, boy, she says. Even though she’s not of the Faith.

Pak nods. It will keep the company in our family... in case anything happens to Jess.

Pak is suddenly old. The boardroom is exactly as Jess saw it earlier today—same whiteboard bullet points, same carafes of lemon water. The last director has left, and Ishak has been waiting in the adjoining office.

Pak is shouting, spittle flying. That dyke is back.

Deal with her.

“Deal with her.” Jess cried and came back to Earth with a thud.

She looked around wildly, to find herself on the living room floor. Ishak kneeling over her, sober now, concerned. He pressed a hot, wet towel against her forehead. Jess recoiled—it felt like an iron.

“What- what did you say?” Ishak, lost. “Y-you blacked out, and fell... did you hit your head?”

“What did your father mean, ‘deal with her’?”

***

Jess powered down the pre-dawn streets of Georgetown at nearly a hundred, to Zhenni’s family condo in Ferringhi. Palm Court used to be a fashionable address but now stood dwarfed by the glass-fronted beachfront towers with rooftop infinity pools.

Their unit was on the 14th floor—marked 13A for the superstitious residents—facing the carpark. Jess could pick Zhen’s bedroom out in the dark, having waited several nights below—bicycle at her feet—for the signal: three flicks of the light meant the coast was clear for a midnight visit.

The balcony doors slid violently apart. A body came hurtling through the moonless night and landed with a sickening crunch on the poured concrete floor.

It had plummeted in what seemed like slow-motion. Thanking a god she did not believe in, Jess had seen it was a man. He had fallen in complete silence.

Forcing herself to look into the bulging eyes—in a skull smashed like a melon—it was no one she knew. He wore leather gloves.

***

“Don’t touch me!” Zhen shouted when Jess burst through the front door. She was sitting on the floor, wearing only a Pikachu t-shirt, knees drawn to her chest, hugging herself. “I have the virus.”

Zhen quickly pulled her t-shirt up as a makeshift mask over her nose and mouth. Jess lowered onto her knees as if calming a skittish animal. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine!” Zhen allowed herself finally to cry. Through wracking sobs, she said, “I mean... I’m alive.”

“That man, who fell from here...” Jess looked at the open balcony doors, “...he came to… hurt you, right?”

“He came to kill me!” Zhen shouted. “I woke up to his hands around my throat.”

“How... how did you-”

“He was too strong. I couldn’t kick him. I grabbed at his hands—they were gloved. I dug up along his arms and then...”

“Then... what?”

“I don’t know. I thought I blacked out, but when I could see again, he was still strangling me. His skin was...”

“Burning hot?”

“Yes! Yes, how did you- it felt like I'd touched a hot plate. He felt it too, and let go, then slapped at his wrist. He said, sejuk.”

“Cold...”

“He pulled out a knife from behind his back,” Zhen looked towards the corner of her bedroom. Jess’s eyes followed, to the glint there. “I shouted Maznah, and he froze.”

“You... you saw that name. In his head.”

“It was insane but, as he was trying to kill me, he was begging forgiveness, except he wasn’t speaking to me, he wasn’t saying a word but, through his eyes, I saw an old woman—heartbroken.”

“His mother.”

“That’s what he said, shocked. ‘My mother—how? No one knows who I am!’.”

“You saw an opening.”

“Yes, and god help me.” Zhen’s face crumpled. “I took it. I told him, if he hurts me, Maznah will die. I said that twice.”

“And then...”

“...and then he ran to the balcony. And jumped.”

They remained in silence for awhile.

Zhen dropped the handful of t-shirt she’d bunched over her face—showing thumb-shaped bruises on her throat. “You have it too.”

Jess could not meet her eyes. “I have it too.”

“That’s how you knew I could read the killer’s mind.”

“I think you were seeing his memories.”

“I caught it off you.”

“Yes. I, I kissed my mum. In the hospital. I don’t know how to say… how sorry I am.”

“‘Sokay.” Zhen hesitated. “I… remembered something else, when I touched him… This is important, the killer was, was…”

“…hired by Ishak.” Jess finished what Zhen struggled to say.

“You know? Fuck, I’m sorry, babe.”

“It’s… it’s over. Between us. Ish… he never loved me.”

“Everything’s insane! I made contact for two seconds. Three, tops. But scattered snapshots of his whole life… poured through. I’m… remembering them now, as him. It’s like, fragments of the killer live on in me.” Her eyes bugged.

“Jess… there’s half a million Ringgit worth of Bitcoin in a portable drive in a locker at Komtar Bus Terminal.” Zhen found her phone lying on the floor next to her bed and thumbed a string of characters.

“I’m looking through his eyes, Jess, at his phone, right now. This is the unlock code for the crypto-wallet.” Tap-tap-tap. “And this is the locker number.” Tap-tap. “And this is the combination to open it. I'm sending the text to you.” Tap. “This is evidence… isn’t it?”

Jess just leaned in and said, “No more lies.”

The tears welled up again in Zhen’s eyes, “What… what are you saying?”

Jess offered her hands, “No more lies, for either of us.”

Zhen took her hands. Neither found the other burning hot, or freezing cold.

Ishak flops into bed, nudges Jess’s head down to his crotch.

Hot semen squirts against the back of her throat.

Jess reaches for her vibrator in the guestroom.

As wave upon wave of shattering orgasm ripple through, it’s Zhen in her mind.

It was always Zhen.

They fell asleep in each other’s arms.

***

A banner unfurls across a muted screen, “CNN News Highlights”.

Masked protestors charge down an inner city street, police in riot gear retreat. A few shops without steel shutters have their windows smashed. A car is on fire. A man wearing a Native American war bonnet manoeuvres his wheelchair around a sputtering teargas cannister. A sign mounted across his rear handles reads, “No More Lies, Mayor Kolchak”.

Cut to a montage of one-second clips from TikTok, of people from around the world shilling bottles of pills and syrups to cure X-2604.

Cut to a media scrum around a swarthy man being led into a French courthouse by armed police. His hands are cuffed in oven mitts: “X-2604 Blackmailer First Prosecution Under Code Pénal—Violation du Consentement”.

Cut to a split-screen—one side a photo carousel (Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, and others); the other side a text box:

Prominent physicists posit that Blocktime is the Natural State of the Universe—that everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is happening in a state of Perpetual Present—and all the Virus has done was to open our minds to see Time in its Simultaneity. That the next Phase in Mutation might lead to our ability to Remember the Future.

Cut to an ad from Grab Malaysia: “World-first drone only inner-city food delivery—initial rollout Penang and Kuala Lumpur”.

Cut to a title card: “Amanpour—a CNN Exclusive Interview—with X-2604 Patient Zero Jessica Horton”.

We open with a bird’s eye view of a paradisiacal island: “Malaysia”.

Zoom-in fly-by over a luxurious resort: “The Feiyue Alpha, Langkawi”. A multilevel pool with its own massive artificial beach, a series of connected party tents, and a sprawling golf course—all deserted.

As we reach the back of the grounds, the superimposed text now reads: “Ground Zero—Earthfall of X-2604”. A long queue to approach, then walk around a cordoned crater against the back of a partly-demolished chalet. The people are all masked. A handful of them wear full hazmat suits. Three wear reflective hardhats.

Cut to Amanpour. The TV is unmuted.

“A warm welcome to our special guest, the new CEO of Feiyue Expeditions, Jessica Horton.”

Cut to Jessica, unmasked, ungloved—behind her, full-height bay window views of the Andaman Sea. “Thanks for inviting me, Christiane.”

“Viewers, do stay tuned because, right after this interview, Jessica will join host Fareed Zakaria in a global roundtable with our other exclusive guests Elon Musk, Wang Chuanfu and Mukesh Ambani, the CEOs of xAI, BYD and India’s Reliance Industries.

“Jessica, we’ll be hearing more from you in that CNN Business Special on how corporations around the world are pivoting during this new crisis. It has of course hit Feiyue’s Asia-Pacific tourism business even harder than Covid-19 did.

“But, forgive me, I just had to lead with that startling footage... of tourists—pilgrims, even—visiting the Earthfall site.” Amanpour lifts an eyebrow, “What’s going on there?”

Jessica laughs softly, “Just supply and demand, Christiane.”

“Sure, sure—that’s part of the business pivot, which you’ll be going over in detail later, but... I see hazmat suits and... tinfoil hats? Is it safe?”

“The WHO and NASA have verified, half a dozen times, that the meteorite vapourised on impact, and all residual “dark” or “strange” radiation has completely decayed. The site has been declared 100% decontaminated, but many visitors have requested hazmat suits and, umm, lead-lined headgear... so, we’ve provided them.”

“Supply and demand.”

“Just so.”

“At the end of our interview, I’ll read a few selected questions sent in by our viewers. But there’s one from James Luo—a fellow Malaysian—that I found too good not to ask first.”

“Shoot.”

“The truth, it turns out, did not set us free—where do you run to when you’ve reached the end of secrets?”

Jessica turns her head and holds out her hand.

“You stop running.”

Off-screen, Zhenni takes it.

“And you surrender.”

THE END

Exciting announcement—this tale begins the Third Face shared universe—stay tuned for short stories about this Pandemic of Truth, coming from some of your favourite writers soon!

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.

Now she screamed, and I heard pounding steps behind. I turned back, and the corridor was suddenly dark—it wasn’t just dark, it was pitch black—blacker than if I had closed my eyes tight. But I heard the monster’s breath, snorting like a bull, and it smelt like one too—just like at my uncle’s farm, that exact barnyard smell.

Back to Chapter 2

Back on the N18 and before the Uber reached Shannon International, I received Shaaki’s text: “Once Athens sent sacrifices to Crete, now the extradimensional predator is coming to her.”

***

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, or as the locals called it, the Herodeon, was stunning—I had only ever seen photos and a layout map before this. A semicircular amphitheatre dating back to 161 AD, with the Acropolis looming above, it had been built as a memorial to a lost love.

Tomorrow, a weekend festival of soundless disco would begin, with revellers gyrating to electronic dance music over their active noise-cancelling headphones—sold on the promise that it would cause no sonic damage to the ancient stones. Tomorrow would also mark the ninth anniversary of the last sighting of the Minotaur.

I flashed the QR pass identifying me as part of the AV crew and went backstage in search of the NWHR Productions site office. A roadie was already waiting for me, with the reinforced case Shaaki had sent ahead. The distracted kid asked me to sign an inventory list which bore various Greek Customs and Immigration stamps.

I checked inside: a high-tech lamp mounted on a drone, a fog machine with two cannisters, a heavily padded jacket with reflector strips down the arms, AR goggles with built-in headphones, and a device logged as a “soundcheck sensor”.

Based on Shaaki’s coordinates, I prowled around the main stage area with the sensor—in reality, a gravitational anomaly detector. The spacetime curvature made the headphones crackle, too loud, and I quickly slid the volume bar all the way down. On the AR goggles, a flickering shape appeared and disappeared. Although invisible and intangible for now, this thing had real mass and volume in hyperspace. Soon I beheld a huge structure with a rounded exterior, straddling one end of the main stage and passing through the VIP seating booth.

I walked up to the Labyrinth and, knowing I would feel nothing, resisted the urge to reach out and touch it. I kept walking, through the phase-shifted wall, and the density of the architecture within overwhelmed my gravimetric sensor. Shaaki’s suggestion, that I might be able to chart and solve the maze beforehand, while it was out of sync with the world, proved impossible—I would have to wait until the Minotaur chose to show its hand.

I turned off the sensor and packed everything up. I had to seek out another contact—in the narrow alleys of Psyrii. I would need more serious gear to kill the beast.

***

Later—I clicked ‘play’ on the audio file named “2017 Punta Arenas Chile” and heard, for the third time, that slightly trembling voice:

I was at the Costanera del Estrecho promenade with my daughter. Maria was seated in the front row of a puppet show, with her cousin. I stood behind, holding the stuffed giraffe we had won in a game, and quietly smoking—after promising her I had quit—when I heard, no, felt something shift in the air behind me. I remember turning, expecting to see guardrails, and the Strait behind, but I saw... something else.

A, a doorway of rough stone construction, thin, just a rectangular outline, really—but through that opening, it wasn’t the Strait anymore, nor the black night beyond. It was... I don’t know how to describe it... a corridor. The same rough stones as the doorway, all dark, with what looked like flickering torchlight at the end.

She stood there. A woman with blonde hair and a... winter coat? Her hand lifted, and was tugged—it was then I saw a golden thread of some kind tied around her wrist. She said something to me—I could not understand it, I think she spoke in another language. That was when... something pulled her around the bend—and I realised the corridor was not a dead end. My mind had sort of emptied. The next thing I knew, I was stepping through the doorway.

Inside, there was no wind, but the air was colder than on the boardwalk. The sky was... completely different. I couldn’t understand anything, but when I heard the woman cry out in pain, I found myself running after her. That was when my daughter shouted. I froze and turned. Maria stood at the doorway, calling “Papa”. I came to my senses, and ran back towards her.

Now she screamed, and I heard pounding steps behind. I turned back, and the corridor was suddenly dark—it wasn’t just dark, it was pitch black—blacker than if I had closed my eyes tight. But I heard the monster’s breath, snorting like a bull, and it smelt like one too—just like at my uncle’s farm, that exact barnyard smell.

I jumped through the door and knocked Maria over. I covered her head with my arm, but nothing came. When I turned around, the doorway had vanished. I saw only the guardrail and the Strait beyond.

This is why I have made this police report, and I confirm I have not taken any alcohol or drugs in the past 24 hours.

My Spanish was clunky but the witness had spoken simply enough. I tossed my phone on the hotel bed next to the scabbarded blade—my contact could not procure a gun—this Bowie knife would have to do.

***

The queue for the Silent EDM Festival snaked down the street. I went in through the Crew entrance—which had no metal detector, since technicians were lugging in all sorts of equipment. I slowed to take detailed scans of the jackets of the Greek Tourism police force with my AR goggles, and remotely triggered the adaptive nanoskin of Shaaki’s Kevlar jacket inside the padded case to reconfigure its design to precisely match the ‘Ellinikí Astynomía’ uniforms.

I had no specific government identification, but the jacket alone was enough to get me into the VIP booth. With the gravimetric sensor, I reconfirmed where to expect the Labyrinth entrance to manifest tonight. Then I waited in front of that spot.

The rich and famous poured in and were handed gold-trimmed headphones and glasses of Champagne. They mostly ignored me while I regularly checked the detector.

When the clock struck eight, the group around me stood up from their seats as one, and gasped. A dancer had flown in on a jet-pack—in reality, she was lowered on a zip-line from a crane arm hidden by smoke and sparkles—and the festivities started soundlessly. I flicked my headphone channel to the main concert frequency briefly and was struck by a throbbing techno-beat, building to a crescendo.

I tuned out before the drop, and shook my head at the sight of a few thousand people jumping around like in a movie scene with the volume muted.

It was curiously peaceful.

I strapped the fog machine behind me, and the scabbard of the Bowie knife around my right thigh. Everyone in the VIP booth was focussed on the view through its full-height bulletproof windows.

I lowered myself into the lotus position, making sure the knife was concealed under my leg, and meditated.

***

At almost midnight, the air vibrated—which I registered as something like a change in barometric pressure—and the portal materialised. Just as the survivor had described it in Patagonia—a rectangular stone doorway standing in the middle of the room, through which the view was... altered.

Not the other side of the VIP booth and the long tables topped with lobster and caviar, but a rough torchlit passage.

Then the bait appeared. I quickly dictated for Shaaki’s record:

The woman is medium height, middle-aged, with mousy blonde hair and a distraught appearance. Wearing a calf-length beige winter coat. Under it, a mint blouse, a yellow scarf, and a knee-length tweed skirt. Sensible brown shoes. Other than the out-of-season, old-fashioned clothing—and the glowing thread tied around her right wrist—she is quite unremarkable. A surprising look for a damsel-in-distress lure.

Right on cue, the thread drew taut, and she was dragged out of sight.

I was unsure if my reaction was an entirely human response to a person in jeopardy, or whether some sorcery was at work, but I felt an irresistible urge to race to her rescue.

Making sure none of the revellers had noticed the appearance of the Labyrinth’s entrance, I draped a long tablecloth over the doorway to create the illusion of an innocuous curtained object, then slipped through it.

I was grateful for the insulated and reinforced jacket—the temperature within was several degrees colder.

I turned on the fog machine. It was set to slowly release a heavy perfluorocarbon tracer gas—used in atmospheric research—its compound detectable at very low concentrations with sensors tuned to its spectral signature. Shaaki assured me this would point the way back to my exit.

I activated the drone. The Patagonian survivor had seen the sky, which meant the Labyrinth had walls but no roof. Now I looked up, and the breath caught in my throat. The VIP booth had a tent ceiling. This was now gone, and in its place, no constellation I could recognise. I was somewhere devoid of light pollution—the vault of the sky was awash with stars.

But this was no time for amateur astronomy—I sent the drone up. Its sensors immediately fed back a stunning image of a circular maze with tight, impossibly intricate turns. The AI easily found the running woman, and mapped the path to her within seconds. Through the AR overlay, an illuminated line marked my route. It resembled both the golden thread by which the lure was being pulled, and the one of legend by which Ariadne and Theseus had outwitted Asterion.

Was this the original Minotaur, I pondered briefly, or an obscene recreation of the myth by some higher evil power? Over how many nine-year cycles had this devil bull been luring victims into its maze?

The path was precisely mapped and I was about to catch up with the woman. As I reached the final corner, I had to weigh the possibility that the woman’s form was merely a disguise of the monster. I drew the Bowie knife and summoned the drone to hover closer.

The woman shrieked when she saw me, and stopped in her tracks. I could see the golden thread taut—the monster remained on the other end.

Panting with exertion or terror, I could not tell which, she gasped, “ποιος είσαι?” Then again, “Who are you?”

—I’m here to help. Are you a prisoner?

“Yes! Oh, oh my god, yes—but, but the monster in the dark... it, it has killed so many, it has a sword! Y-you need to defend yourself... or save yourself—you must go back!”

—Shhh... I’m prepared for it.

The darkness—beyond darkness—the absolute absence of light at the end of the corridor gathered, and approached. The woman whimpered and shrank towards me. I put my hands gently over her shoulders and manoeuvred her behind me in the narrow passage, the golden thread now tight and twanging between us.

The bestial stench hit me first, and then I could hear its grunting, snorting breaths. Everything about the monster was tuned up to create maximum terror, to incapacitate its victims. I knew all this, but my heart still thudded and my hands shook as I toggled the drone controls.

—Close your eyes as tightly as possible.

I switched my goggles to near-opacity. With a PAKHH!!, an artificial sun ignited above our heads—xenon plasma, driven by focused laser arrays, produced one billion candela per square metre—this would be sustainable for only ten seconds. I tightened my grip on the Bowie, and prepared to lunge.

Through polarized lenses, I now saw the full form of the Minotaur, frozen in the glare: bull head with matted hair, grotesquely muscular and deformed human body, a blood-caked sword now held limply in its right hand, golden thread wound around its left wrist.

But before I could rush forward, I realised with shock and awe that the monster was... disintegrating. Or, rather, it was being taken apart by the light, almost pixel by pixel, as if its ontological stability depended on being hidden in pure blackness.

As if truth itself was dismantling the unreal.

That was how I had planned to report the resolution of tonight’s incident to Shaaki.

Soon there was nothing left but the tattered rags it had been dressed in, the heavy sword, and the empty looped end of the golden thread. Ten seconds must have passed, because the sun went out. The drone descended into my hands. I depolarized my goggles to see the Labyrinth walls once again by the flickering torches, and by the light which spilled from a million stars overhead.

—You can open your eyes now. It’s gone.

I had the sense she had held back her tears for a long time—she now let them flow. “I... I’m free?”

—You’re free.

She lifted her wrist. I took the thin thread between my fists and, ignoring how it vibrated and warmed immediately in my grip, I yanked hard. It did not break. It did not even yield at all. I stepped down on part of the thread and brought the Bowie knife down as hard as I could.

The blade shattered like glass. I sighed, and picked up the opposite end of the thread from the ashy remains of the Minotaur. I dusted it off against my jacket, and handed it to the woman.

—My colleague will find a way to cut this, ma’am.

“Grace.” She said. “Thank you.”

—Junggar. Let’s talk later, we need to get out of here while the chemtrail remains.

We wound our way through the maze and reached the curtained exit.

I stepped through and was back in the close warmth of the VIP booth—the partygoers continued writhing noiselessly and no one noticed my sudden reappearance. I turned and beckoned to Grace. She cautiously stepped through after me but—as I had quietly feared—the golden thread would not allow her bound wrist to pass. She whimpered, and pulled at her own arm like a mime pretending to have her hand caught in an invisible trap. Then she threw me a panicked look.

I shook my head, held Grace around both elbows, and pulled her back into the Labyrinth with me.

“What are you...” But before she could complete her question, I had slipped my left hand into the large loop vacated by the Minotaur. Before our eyes, the loop pulled itself tight until the thread bit lightly into my flesh, then it stopped.

To her confused gaze, I merely shrugged. I then took Grace’s hand, her loop and mine lightly touching—and we stepped through the doorway together.

When we turned around, the portal was gone.

Finally safe, Grace stared blankly at me, “We... that was the Minotaur of legend, wasn’t it? It had said a few words to me—in Greek.”

I nodded.

She went on, “It, it didn’t harm me. We appeared only at night, with one sunrise and sunset between each... each victim—I’ve counted eleven days which have passed.”

I tried to keep my face expressionless, but the calculation which tore through my head had shaken me—eleven repetitions… each nine years apart.

Grace turned her eyes from mine—to the dozens of half-naked female ravers prancing around in complete silence under a bank of spinning LED tubes, to the wall-sized flat screens on which humanoid robots did continuous backflips on stage, to the mini-drones forming the image of a dragon writhing in the sky—and she said, “It’s not 1927, is it.”

***

TO BE CONTINUED

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We practically tripped all the way down the stairs. The only way to not face-plant was to run full-tilt—not even registering individual steps, taking them two, three at a time—trusting the gods of gravity and inertia to take pity on almost-innocents. Holding hands, we tasted freedom in those few seconds of flight.

Back to Part 1 of 2

(Tales from the Dreaming is an irregular series of half-asleep catches trawled up from Ideaspace and dictated into my phone in the middle of the night, then filled out in the cold light of dawn, and baked for your enjoyment this evening)

***

Record scratch.

Freeze frame.

A guy on a bicycle. A wet road. A girl’s on the rear rack. The extra weight pops the front wheel up. He’s fighting the involuntary wheelie. They’re both wearing nothing but bright white bathrobes heavy with rain. The girl manages to hold hers demurely together with one hand. She sits side-saddle, barefeet, legs crossed at the ankles. Her other arm’s wrapped around the guy’s stomach. He’s given up on his robe. It whips behind him like a superhero cape. A black bar—THE PRICE OF LOVE in white—cuts across his midriff, strategically placed to keep the shot publicity-safe. Twin headlights hold the riders of the storm in their crosshairs, lens flare slicing across the screen. Since it’s a freeze frame, we can’t tell if the car is speeding, or parked—if our heroes are about to die, or just providing comic relief with a pratfall. Beads of coloured light in the foreground—the lens artfully sprayed—and a white-hot streak of lightning behind them complete the portrait.

Voice-over.

I bet you’re wondering how Mitzi and I got here.

Honestly? So was I.

At the end of Part 1, we were all dragged upstairs to be slaughtered with Fatty. Yeah, that’s what the floor team called Chef Batty. Juvenile, but accurate. Any goodwill he had with me had evaporated after he played Mitzi and me out, leaving us to be eaten by the wolves while he made off with the meth lords’ cash.

He had it coming, yes, but I didn’t want us to die.

This was it.

DiRosario had unlocked every gate on the way up, and we were walking cautiously to the final door. Savic in front, cleaver in one hand, a fistful of DiRosario’s shirt in the other. Me and Mitzi herded along the middle, with Mrs D and Mr J bringing up the rear. The autolock keypad was right ahead now, with Chef Fatty cringing inside, probably trying to hide his quaking bulk behind a million Ringgit in cash. They had better be in small notes.

We had one chance. I squeezed Mitzi’s hand with my sweaty paw to send a telepathic message to pick up my cues. My conscience whined for a second, like a mosquito in my ear—or maybe it was an actual mosquito flying past—but all I had to do was remember DiRosario smacking his chops while devouring Mitzi’s naked body with his eyes. None of us were saints, but Mitzi’s and my sins wouldn’t even move the scales against everything that old lizard couple had done—and would yet do—to barely-legal kids.

I cleared my throat and said, “Mr J?”

That great head of his slowly swivelled around, “Who’re you again?”

“Ralph,” Mitzi said softly, “I’m going to marry him.”

You could hear a pin drop.

Jozsef Zsigmondy—drug kingpin, former Chem teacher, the Heisenberg that Kuching never asked for—softened. A little. The coiled menace in his upper body gave way to… something—not compassion exactly, maybe a distant cousin.

I seized the opening.

“Mr Zsigmondy,” one eyebrow rose in acknowledgement that I had pronounced his name correctly, “Mitzi and I, we’re not supposed to be here. It’s all a terrible mistake.”

“Christ,” DiRosario spat, “they are the fucking reason we’re here. The fucking thief locked in my office—Savic, you know Batty?—yeah him, he’s this girl’s uncle or something. They cooked this-”

Zsigmondy had shot a look at Savic, who slapped the cleaver lightly against his thigh, and drawled, “Let the boy talk.”

DiRosario gulped.

I rambled quickly, too quickly.

“Mitzi works here. Mr DiRosario forgot his keys and we had to come to get them before the bartenders did the closing. We got caught in the rain and soaked. So Mr DiRosario offered to bring us back to his place—to dry off, and have supper. Wh-when we got there, and had taken off our clothes, they...”

I covered my mouth dramatically.

Mitzi took the cue, and started crying—the whole waterworks. Great fat teardrops rolled down her cheeks, dripped off her chin. I didn’t know where she got that from—I’d never seen her act—she was totally torn up. Maybe thinking about the arranged marriage in June, now that we blew the heist? Me, I couldn’t see how we would make it out of tonight.

“Don’t believe that bitch-” Mrs DiRosario started to shout, but Savic dug his steel fingers into her deltoids, cutting off any further plea of innocence.

“They were about to rape us!” Mitzi almost screamed. “If-if the alarm hadn’t rung, he-he-he-he-he-” she pointed a shaking finger at DiRosario.

The old lizard realised his last chance to convince the goons had gone up in a puff of smoke. He took a big step backwards, and yanked out the gun.

Savic instinctively pulled Mrs D in front of him as a shield. His other hand whipped out the cleaver and waved it over her neck.

DiRosario ticced and, in that sliver of time, Zsigmondy leapt behind Mitzi, then wrapped his arm across her throat. Everyone ignored me.

A fucking Mexican standoff in a “Bib-Gourmand” restaurant was not on my Bingo card tonight.

Savic swore, presumably in Montenegrin, “Kopile! Gut her like fish, man! Drop you piece!”

DiRosario swung his revolver—now shaking like a leaf—over to Zsigmondy, his bulk hidden inadequately by my slim love.

“Wait!” shouted Zsigmondy.

“Let’s all calm down. Alex. Alex, my friend, be cool. Be cool. Something doesn’t add up.” Fuck, here we go. “The kids came back here for your keys. They gave them back to you?”

DiRosario’s voice rose in relief, “That’s what I been trying to tell you! Look—there are eight keys to get from down there, to up here. When this little bitch hid my keys, and then came back for them, she swapped the whole bunch on me, gave the real ones to her uncle, that fat sack of shit locked in the room! She does my fucking accounts, man—she knew how much cash we’d stockpiled since Christmas.”

I had to admit it was compelling. The old fucker managed to figure out the whole plan while being threatened by squatting Slavs. His brain was actually impressive.

“One way to find out.” Zsigmondy marched Mitzi forwards. DiRosario, confused, took a step back, knocking over a lamp from Mitzi’s desk. “Back. More.” the Hungarian snarled. Now DiRosario tripped over a box of folded and stapled bills and receipts, its contents spilling out like one of those New Year’s party favours.

Zsigmondy had reached the door, body rotated ‘round to keep Mitzi between him and the gun. In that hyper-clarity, I saw him step—with a little Krakk!—on a phone which lay in front of the door. It had a moronic TikTok case.

Chef Batty’s phone.

He must have dropped it, then got locked in the room.

He didn’t play us out. He couldn’t call the cops to save his niece.

Zsigmondy roared, “Code!”

DiRosario sputtered, “2-3-0-4-8-9”.

The door swung open. Zsigmondy whispered to Mitzi, “Say ‘Uncle’.”

The Chef wasn’t cowering. He didn’t even look that fat.

He stood defiantly, holding a Slazenger sports bag up in one arm. It was dripping with something. Then the smell of lighter fluid hit us. In the Chef’s other hand, a Zippo, already lit.

He had cojones the size of bowling balls, Batty. The scorched earth gambit. Literally. The stand-off was three-way now. No one spoke. The flame wavered.

Suddenly Mr J chuckled. “Do it.”

Savic called out, “Jozsef—you crazy? That’s-”

“That’s... what? Look at the bag, Vuko.”

“Wait, what? That… doesn’t make sense...”

From behind Mitzi’s head, Mr J leaned out a little, to level his gaze at DiRosario. “We see it, Alex.”

I couldn’t take it anymore, “See what?” I shouted.

He ignored me, continued in that circling shark voice at DiRosario, “I would guess that’s... Valentine’s Day cash sales?” He cocked his head back to look into the office. “Chef? You counted the loot? What’s in the bag—twenty K?”

Batty grunted.

DiRosario was at his breaking point, “What the fuck are youse playing at? The rest of the money must be in the safe!”

Batty stepped aside slightly to show the open safe. Empty. The office had grilled windows. Security glass. No way out. Classic locked room mystery.

Zsigmondy snapped. “I hate it when people think I’m STUPID!” Everyone, including Savic, jumped. “Di! Ro! Sario! Wherrrrrre did you hide my FUCKING money?”

The cleaver tapped a thin line of blood from Serena’s throat. The pistol was tremoring, harder than ever. No one was looking at me. I sized up the distance. Could I push his arm off-target before he put a bullet in Mitzi’s face?

Batty decided for all of us.

He dropped the Zippo into the bag.

It went up with a ridiculously loud Whoomph!

At my feet there was another box filled with paper. I kicked it upwards. A cloud like autumn leaves exploded into the air as DiRosario’s gun went wildly off. Serena let out a blood-curdling scream. Batty pulled out a pair of carving knives from behind his back. Mr J locked eyes with me for exactly one second, and pushed Mitzi into my arms. Then, he tackled DiRosario.

The gun went off again. The cleaver directed arterial spray over the ceiling. The fire raging in the Slazenger bag set off the smoke detector—and the sprinklers. Batty didn’t know who to stab. The bookkeeping records were still falling—like snow—in slow motion. The alarm system blared back to life. The water gushing down my neck shockingly cold.

My brain refused to decode the chaos.

It had one imperative.

Get Mitzi out.

We practically tripped all the way down the stairs. The only way to not face-plant was to run full-tilt—not even registering individual steps, taking them two, three at a time—trusting the gods of gravity and inertia to take pity on almost-innocents. Holding hands, we tasted freedom in those seconds of flight.

No one followed.

Punching through the re-awakened claxon, another shot rang out from above.

Then a man hollered. It sounded like Savic. I hoped Chef stuck him good.

My bike waited between the raw-food dumpster and the recycling bins. I had chained it to the paper-and-cardboard bin. Some fucker had put a few boxes in front, blocking my way. How could a 60-seat restaurant produce so much fucking waste? I dialed the combination wrong three times. Finally swung the bike out.

The last thing we heard was DiRosario crying out “Nooo” over and over.

Mitzi hopped on the back tray of my bike and I powered off. Her weight made us pop a wheelie, and we fell on our asses. Then I made her sit in front of me on the crossbar. It was hell to pedal with my knees splayed out like a frog. And I started to get a hard-on again. We had to stop for a minute to have a good laugh.

As thunder clapped and a white-hot streak of lightning divided the sky, she lifted her head and kissed me. It was a beautiful, long kiss. Broken only when a car flashed its high-beams at us, and sounded its horn. Whether in annoyance or in celebration, we knew not.

We trundled towards my place under Kuching’s haphazardly placed streetlamps. It was a heinous ride—but I wished it would last forever.

As we wobbled along, I told Mitzi how time would slow if we approached the event horizon of a black hole. If we were headed to a singularity, physics would perform its magic on spacetime—and we would never arrive.

“Nice,” she breathed.

Later, I would look back and wish I was still there, still pedalling, caught in a time-loop, my nose in her hair. That sashaying jet-black curtain. That smell of Lux.

I would have ridden until my muscles tore and shredded and the stars slowed to dust.

I would have given—would still give—both my legs for her, my hummin’bird.

She placed her hands softly on my straining forearms.

The touch I would never feel in Kuching again after this night was over.

***

One hour after the promised bloodbath:

Mitzi hid in the heliconia bushes outside my bedroom while I braved the Father On Nightwatch. Any light of hope or relief went out in Dad’s eyes at the sight of my soiled nightrobe—which paradoxically helped. He opened his mouth to say something twice but words failed. Eventually Dad just hung his head in despair. He stood up from the sofa just as I turned the corner to my room. We nearly brushed past each other. I slowed, looking at Dad, but he would not meet my eyes, lips set so tight they were white.

Anyway. Then I let Mitzi in the window and she fucked my brains out. Really.

The sex was the most incredible experience of my life thus far, overshadowing the escape from Epstein’s Bungalow—and the John Woo firefight—just now. Lying on the still-wet robes we’d spread on the parquet floor to do the deed, I craned my neck up to gaze in disbelief at the evidence of our consummation—the flag of Japan we’d painted on her side of the sex rug. Two cherries popped: mine shut the door on nineteen years of blue balls; but hers—hers opened the mother of Pandora’s Boxes.

“Mitzi... what are we, what’re you gonna do now?”

She just placed a finger over my lips. “Will you promise you’ll find me?”

“What…? YES. Yes, I promise.”

“Then I promise I’ll find you.”

And she just snuggled her head up against my pointy shoulder, and closed her eyes peacefully. I looked down at her, and started humming without realising it.

“That’s so cheesy,” she said softly. Then she picked up the tune and sang along, “...don’t wanna fall asleep ‘cause I’ll miss you, baby...”

We harmonised the chorus together, “...and I don’t wanna miss a thing...”

“Did I ever tell you you look like Liv Tyler?” I sighed. “She’s an actor. Played-”

“-Princess Arwen, duhh. Of Rivendell.”

Oh god I love her.

“And she’s like six foot tall, while I’m five-four.”

Oh god please don’t let me lose her.

But I’d pissed god off, apparently.

Because I did fall asleep then.

And when Mum rapped on the door to call me for breakfast, Mitzi was already gone.

A beanie, a Bujang Senang t-shirt, and a pair of basketball shorts were missing from my closet—I smiled at the image of Mitzi walking to the bus stop dressed in that oversized outfit. The ache to call her was physical, but of course our phones—with our clothes from last night—were still at the DiRosario’s. I stuffed the destroyed bathrobes in a garbage bag—would the cops need them as evidence, I wondered briefly.

I must have been a Mutant, because I had this superpower—every bad luck thing I imagined would manifest—like a reverse-Longshot. Halfway through my eggs—soft-boiled eggs for a hard-boiled guy, I fantasised—Dad walked into the kitchen with two of his buddies from work. Yeah, that work.

Inspectors Wong and Ibrahim stood differently while on a case. Wong with a notebook and pencil ready. Ibrahim holding his own wrist casually. I was needed at Central—to record my witness statement. But Dad’s pals were letting him hear it from me first.

Alexander DiRosario was in the ICU, being treated for serious knife wounds. Bartholomew Lungan and Jozsef Zsigmondy were in lockup. And Vuko Savic and Serena DiRozario? They were deceased. Deceased.

I was on the CCTV playback of course, with a girl they believed to be an employee of the restaurant.

Dad asked Wong softly, “Robbery?”

Wong muttered, “Biggest case in Sarawak. Nine mill, according to the vic.”

I sputtered, “You mean one million?”

Wong narrowed his eyes, “No, I mean nine... and what do you know about that?”

I quickly said ‘one mill’ had been mentioned by one of the crooks in passing. Then gave them the cover story Mitzi and I had cooked up. They seemed to buy it. I told them I had no idea where the girl was.

That was not a lie.

When I went back to the crime scene after leaving the police station, some of the staff were milling around in the outdoor patio. Rubbernecking. I asked each of them if they had seen Mitzi. When Polly the cleaner said ‘yes’, my heart jumped into my throat.

Polly had a room in the employees’ quarters, next to Mitzi’s. She’d awoken at dawn to the sound of Mitzi packing. All she could recount was that Mitzi had had “enough of this bad shit” and was going “away—far away”. Mitzi had a Grab car waiting. Polly helped her carry some of the boxes of papers.

“Wait—boxes? Mitzi didn’t have boxes in her room.”

“Not from her room. Boxes from the recycling area. I helped her carry two of them. Filled with office rubbish they were, like bills and receipts. I asked why she was taking them—the papers in there wouldn’t fetch much from the recycling centre.”

“Yeah, that’s... crazy. Wh-what did she say?”

“She said this was her retirement fund.”

I sat down heavily on the garden bench.

A montage flashed.

Mitzi, eyes wide at the ‘laundry records’. Flipping through the accounts, faster, faster. Pattern recognition flickering. DiRosario spinning the combination wheel on his safe in sight of the invisible bookkeeper. Memorising. Plotting. Uncle Batty and the vacuum-packed roast thrown in the bin—prime beef hiding in rubbish. Having a sex predator for a boss must have been like striking the lottery. But, even with the swapped keys, any burglary would be captured, freeze-frozen, on CCTV. Even if not live, subsequently. Inescapable. The money could not be taken that night. Mitzi plotting, recognising patterns, methodically cutting out pieces for a jigsaw puzzle of The Perfect Crime. Working late one evening, she cracks it—slips a dirty Hundred Ringgit note between an outdated receipt, folds it, stuffs it into an envelope, crams it into a box due for recycling. Repeats this every day for a week. Deposit of the loot scheduled on 1st March. Recycling pickup 19th Feb. V-Day was D-Day. Nine Million Reasons to brave lizard-rapists.

I shot to my feet, “OH FUCK—she built the perfect locked room mystery!”

The staff stared. I sat back down. My feet drummed a tattoo on the belian floorboards.

I paced my room all day waiting for contact from Mitzi.

And the next day.

And the day after that.

She never called.

***

Two months after I lost everything:

I had somehow aced the STPM exams, and then been accepted to Monash University. Aerospace engineering, I’d decided. I wanted to remember how it felt like to fly.

But first I had to ask her why she promised to find me.

Told my parents I needed to take a trip across the state before going to Australia. Mum asked, when she got me alone, if I was going to look for that girl. I didn’t reply. I couldn’t speak even if I’d wanted to. She would have to settle for my haunted look as an answer.

Express bus to Bintulu. Speedboat up the muddy river. Hitched a ride at the sawmill on a logging truck. A bone-rattling hour in the open back.

When I reached Mitzi’s longhouse, I was covered in orange dust that left white circles around my eyes when I took my glasses off to wash them.

The longhouse was bigger, more modern, than I’d expected. Satellite dishes over every other window, but the whole place looked mostly deserted. Siesta, I guessed. Was she asleep?

Was she alone?

June was still a couple of months away but the village committee had already strung up decorations for Gawai.

A frilly white-foil banner stretched across the entrance arch: CONGRATULATIONS. With birds and hearts and wedding bells.

Churning with conflicting emotions, I climbed the steps hewn from a tree trunk to the communal ruai.

The first kid I came across said, sure, he knew Pietro. They boarded at Bintulu Primary together. But Pietro had moved out.

All this way I had come.

Pietro’s sister picked him up last Monday. They left with their Mak.

I was seven days too late.

Did the boy have Pietro’s number?

Yes.

Yes, he had. But the line was no longer in service when he tried calling last week.

All this way.

I asked him when the next logging truck was due.

***

The guard opened the door and told me to take any seat. Too many fluorescent lights chased away every shadow except the squares beneath the half-dozen Formica tables that were bolted to the linoleum floor. Each table had a pair of pale blue plastic chairs. Two tables were occupied.

I defocused on the other couples—their voices echoing softly against the high-gloss pastel-green walls—and let my gaze wander. Windows on one wall looked onto nothing. Along the facing wall, a table with a tray of weathered pink cups and clouded jugs behind handwritten signs—‘kopi’ and ‘teh’—though both held the same-looking burnt-ochre liquid.

The usual portraits hung above: King and Queen in the centre, flanked by the Premier and Governor. Beneath them, stencilled in black:

‘DILARANG MEMBERI ATAU MENERIMA BARANG TANPA KEBENARAN’
No giving or receiving items without permission.

And below that:

‘MASA DEPAN ANDA MASIH ADA’
Your future still exists.

I had to laugh.

A buzzer over the door into the prison section rang, and another guard escorted Uncle Batty in. I was expecting him to be cuffed but the chef’s hands swung freely. The guard looked at me and said sternly “ten minutes,” then gave a light pat on the prisoner’s shoulder before turning away.

“Chef.”

“Ruff.”

“Are they treating you ok? You lost a lot of weight.”

“Prison food lah.”

“They should let you cook.”

“Hah. Good to see you. Any... news?”

I looked around nervously. “Can we talk ah?”

He shrugged, “Yah, they don’t care.”

Nevertheless, I leaned in, “Mitzi left. I went to Long Bawan. Even her Mak and Pietro, they moved out. Have... have you heard anything?”

Now Batty leaned in—we must have looked seriously conspiratorial, but as the chef had said, no one seemed to care. “I think Mitzi need to bring them far away. Maybe Boss have other... partner. You also—go somewhere.”

“I am—Australia. Study engineering. The degree is four years, plus two for Aerospace Masters. I... I’ll be gone for awhile, Chef.”

“Hah—I’m not going anywhere. Ruff... that night, I drop my phone. I couldn’t-”

“It’s alright Chef. We were alright. You triggered the alarm just in time.”

“Hoo—that’s good. That’s good. I was... I thought the worst... Lucky I was dumbass twice—drop phone and trigger alarm.”

My bark bounced against the walls.

“Listen...” Batty hissed.

If I leaned any closer our heads would be touching. “Did you get some message?” I asked.

Batty whispered, “Not from Mitzi, but my wife came last week. Our bank account... got three million in it!”

I looked up sharply into the fluorescents, letting them blind me as I blinked away tears. Oh Mitzi. Oh my love.

Neither of us had any words after that. I got us two cups of the kopi but they might have been the teh. It had about ten sugars in it. Batty glanced at the clock on the wall and sighed.

“You a good boy, Ruff.”

“I’ll come back to visit you when I have holidays, Chef.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he repeated.

***

I was going to close the door on Valentine’s Day—no matter how hard.

The Maximum Security Visitors Area was more like in the movies.

A barrier of tempered glass, with old-school phone handsets on curly wires. Downlights over each chair—metal framed with torn cushions this time—and the rest of the room steeped in darkness. I wondered if the visitors in the neighbouring booths could hear my heart thumping.

A similar buzz, the same stern instruction, “ten minutes”. This time the guard did not give the prisoner a gentle pat.

Jozsef Zsigmondy sat poker-faced, oversized mitts folded on the small table, tectonic muscles shifting slightly under the prison fatigues. I realised with disgust that the hand cradling the handset to my ear was trembling slightly.

After what seemed like a whole minute, one corner of his mouth crinkled and he languidly picked up his side of the phone. Relief, when the overhead lighting dropped his shark-eyes in the deep shadows under his bushy eyebrows.

“…Ralph.”

“Mr J.”

“I was trying to remember your name.”

I knew he was lying and he knew I knew he was lying. I was suddenly Clarice Starling.

On cue, he asked, “How is my favourite student?”

“Mitzi? She... went away. I don’t know where. I guess we broke up. Or she broke up.” Stop rambling, Ralph. “She... she wasn’t your favourite student right. You’re... just messing with me.”

“Yeah, I hated Mitzi. She was bottom of my class.”

A beat, to let the audience chuckle.

“Her chemistry with you was better.”

Flattery, I was not expecting.

“I guess she could see that you would die for her.”

Fuck—don’t, Ralph, fucking don’t.

“We could all see that.” That rub on one cauliflower ear. “Killing is easy, you know. There are many people, and things, I would kill for. But dying? For love? That’s special, young man. That’s true love. The kind they write about in poems.”

I angrily swabbed under my left eye. “Cut the crap Mr J. Get the fuck out of my head.”

He nodded respectfully. “I can guess why you came.”

I tilted my head back so he could see my eyes, the steel in them. (Thank fuck for tempered glass.)

“You want to know if there will be trouble from me... and my friends.” In turn, Zsigmondy tilted his great square skull back. His eyes, softening, finished the sentence—he did not blame us.

“Mr J.” I had the answer I came for… but now a new question bubbled up. “That night... You had Mitzi—as a shield. Why... why did you push her to me?”

“Looks like you caught me at another lie, Ralph.”

He started to pull the phone away from his cauliflower ear to terminate the interview—then decided to say it after all.

“Mitzi was terrible at Chem... but she was my favourite student.”

Then he replaced the handset in its cradle and stood up.

***

The hospital was my last stop. I dreaded this visit even more than to the druglord.

The guard at the door to the special ward was staring intently at his phone. I walked up just as a girl’s voice pleaded ‘Yamete kudasai!’. The guard hit the Back button—a flash of tentacle—then glared at me.

“I... I have an appointment to visit Mr DiRosario.”

“IC.”

I handed him my identity card.

“Relative, or friend?”

“Uhh... friend?”

He swapped my IC for a visitor’s card on a lanyard. “Phone here. Empty your pockets.”

I was almost disappointed not to be frisked—the guard didn’t seem to worry that I might stage a daring jailbreak. When I entered the room, I saw why.

The old man appeared more lizard-like than ever, lying in an iron lung. His expression was as anxious as mine must have been when I went to visit Mr J. He darted a worried look at the back of the guard who was quickly returning to Abysmal Cravings.

“R-Ralph?”

“Mr D.”

“Wh-what brings you here?”

His helplessness defanged me. “I guess… I came to say goodbye. I’m going overseas.”

“Oh. Oh... that’s good. Ralph... I’m glad you came, actually.”

I pulled up a seat—another plastic chair, this one white. I tried not to think about the yellow stains on the seat. I placed it where he could look at me without craning his neck. He nodded with gratitude.

“Look, I don’t want to know what happened, or how you three did it. Or, I think, Batty wasn’t in on Mitzi’s plan? He looked so lost… but—forget about all that. Nothing matters now. I just...”

Shockingly, he started to cry—chest hitching in the iron lung—which made him cough until an alarm went off. I jumped out of the way when a nurse rushed in to adjust some settings.

It looked excruciating.

Good.

“I have to go, Mr D.”

“Wait,” he pulled a wizened hand out from under the hood of the machine and reached for mine.

I took a step back.

“Ralph. I also don’t have long. Before... before I join my Serena, I wanted to tell you, and Mitzi... tell Mitzi—I’m sorry.”

I scoffed.

“She didn’t know... but she was in no danger from me.”

“Fuck you,” I snarled, “I was fucking there, remember?”

“That’s what I needed you to know. The whole swingers thing—that was just for my Sere.”

I waited for his phone to say “Uh huh?” but no sound came, other than the hiss-husss of the iron lung.

“Two years ago, I had a... problem with another gang—the Green Hill Triad. Before the Slavs stepped in with their... protection. The other gang—their head, Fat Samo—didn’t, uh, agree with my sales reports and they abducted me. In a filthy warehouse in Bintawa, they, uh, emasculated me, Ralph.”

This made no sense. Emasculated? Since when did Mr D talk with such polite words?

“Too much information, I can tell by your face... but necessary. I was… no longer a man after Bintawa, Ralph.” He took another long hitching breath, “I’ll get to the point—after Jozsef and Vuko took over the, uh, distribution, life kind of went back to normal, except... you saw my beautiful wife... my Serena was still in her prime, and I couldn’t perform my husbandly duties anymore.”

I needed him so badly to shut up about husbandly duties, but I guess I also needed to hear him confirm where this was heading.

“I didn’t want her taking a boyfriend or fucking the gardener, so I came up with this idea. We would find young couples who were game to do some swinging—with great tips, and an open tab at Jinx for the year—and... well, Serena’s needs would be taken care of.”

He seemed embarrassed on her behalf. “Me, I was as, uh, as desperate as ever, but I could do nothing to the girls who came. So, yeah. This is what I needed you to understand. Mitzi—your beautiful Mitzi—she was in no real danger. All I could do was scare her badly. And for that, I really am so sorry. To you too, I guess—though Sere seemed to be taking good care of you until we were interrupted?”

I fought back a smile. The old lizard. He really did love her.

“Ralph?”

If he expected absolution from me, he was more crazy than I thought.

I slapped the visitor’s card on the table and took my things. The guard didn’t look up. “Iku!” his phone gasped.

***

Thursday, 11th June, 2026

Mitzi is unbearably sad.

She faces me but her body is in three-quarters profile, her pert breasts bared.

Her skirt is being eased off her hips. It’s difficult because it’s soaked with rain, and sticking to her thighs. Mr DiRosario is stripping her.

Oh no.

I look down at a head of wavy permed and dyed hair—grey roots showing from my bird’s eye view—bobbing in front of my belt. Mrs D expertly unbuckles it, then eases my zipper down. I appreciate her care to avoid any accident with my straining hard-on.

The look of betrayal on Mitzi’s face at my arousal, and at the non-appearance of Inspectors Wong and Ibrahim.

Not even my Dad comes to the rescue.

And Uncle Batty doesn’t trip the alarm, not this time. We are not saved by Siri’s bell.

DiRosario had been disrobing Mitzi very slowly up ‘til now, so when he tugs her panties down so hard and fast they tear, she gasps in shock.

The old lizard on his knees gazes up. My beloved forces a smile. This is the price of love, I imagine she tells herself.

It’s what I tell myself, as I reach down and pull my engorged penis out of Mrs D’s mouth with a Popp.

DiRosario spins Mitzi around. But... what’s he doing—it’s impossible—he’s been impotent since that attack in Bintawa when Fat Samo and the Green Hill Triad smashed his balls. Why does it look like he’s about to fuck her? This can’t be happening—nothing really bad was going to happen to her, not this night.

NOT THIS NIGHT!

Mitzi is smooshed up against the full-height mirror in the living room. She continues looking at me through it, her face now a mask.

And it’s even worse than the tears.

Somehow Mrs D is no longer in the room but I’m still rooted to the spot. I’ve been turned into a statue, every muscle in my body as hard as the cock still in my hand. As DiRosario spreads Mitzi’s ass cheeks and spits on one of his hands, I look down and the gluey blind eye gazes back into me. I start tugging on the throbbing erection. I cannot bear to look up again at Mitzi’s mask-face. My fist accelerates to a blur.

***

Friday, 12th June, 2026

I started awake with a strangled cry.

Strings of semen criss-crossed my stomach.

I stumbled to the bathroom to wash myself.

When I saw my own reflection, I threw up.

***

Registrations for classes completed, I wandered into the Small Caf looking for food.

Everything was so expensive converted back to Ringgit—the Malaysian currency was ass internationally.

I got a sausage roll and something called a dimsim. Without my asking, the canteen server smothered both in something a bit too bright red to be tomato sauce.

The sausage roll was basically mystery meat in flaky pastry. The dimsim was meant to sound like ‘dim sum’ and, in approximate shape and form, meant to resemble a shu mai. The compact, deep-fried and tasteless lump—same mystery meat—was nothing like home.

Cutting through my culinary despair, a voice cried out my name.

It was Timah.

I was surprised/ not surprised—half of Sarawak were in Melbourne. Apparently the other half were in Perth. She was at a long table with other Malaysians. I abandoned my feast and walked towards her. She got to me first. Midway, she nearly bowled me over. I was only kept standing by her bear hug.

Timah was nearly as tall as me. And weirdly strong? It felt like having an alien in my arms for a few seconds. I realised I’d never held a female body other than Mitzi’s.

Timah was talking too fast. But I caught that she was Treasurer of the BSA. I didn’t tell her that my idea of joining a Borneo Students’ Association sounded exactly like being sent to hell. She asked for my number—to send the membership link, she said.

The other committee members stood up altogether and headed to the door. A few paused to introduce themselves. I forgot every one of their names three seconds later. Timah had to go too—they were setting up a table for Orientation Week.

Later, when I raised my arms to wear my bike helmet, I realised I was still covered in her perfume. Something with jasmine.

I didn’t hate it.

As I was opening the ‘airlock’ to my apartment block, the phone buzzed.

Timah? Yup. Not an brilliant guess. She was one of three people in Melbourne with my number.

BSA dinner in Chinatown. Join us for drinks at a club after. Section 8, Tattersalls Lane. 9PM.

Followed by five heart emojis.

Sigh—was I gonna do this?

***

It was nearly midnight.

The music was fine, beer was cold. I was standing with my back to the container bar looking blankly into the graffiti-covered lane when Hurricane Timah swept back in.

She grabbed fistfuls of my jacket—the smell of wine heavy in the air. Bowieee, she shouted as a remixed version of Let’s Dance pummeled me in the ribs. Let’s gooo.

The longer we danced, the closer she got. Her arms flung over my neck felt as wrong as they felt nice.

A movement just outside the club caught my eye.

Mitzi? It was true that I’d been seeing her pretty much everywhere since arriving in Oz, but this...

I only caught the exiting figure for a split-second but... the way her hip turned... the way her elbow lifted slightly...

I pulled Timah’s arms off my neck as gently as possible, and ran to the door.

But the lane was empty.

Without saying goodbye to Timah, I went to unchain my bike.

Tucked under the brake lever was a card. I crumpled it instinctively, then realised it wasn’t one of those spam offers of cheap loans. It was blank, with only some random numbers printed on. I decided to figure it the next day, and tossed the card into my bike basket.

I thumbed a despicable one-word text to Timah: Sorry.

***

Bathed in the perfume of Timah, I plugged my phone in to charge and laid it face down on the side table without checking for messages.

I closed my eyes and tried to manifest another dream of Mitzi, please god, a good one this time. Yes I was praying. It was true I’d said many times that I didn’t believe in god. But I feared him.

I was so tired I didn’t even remember falling asleep.

***

Saturday, 13th June 2026:

Raining again.

First, coffee.

The doorbell buzzes.

I rush to the airlock.

No one.

Something yellow and black on the pavement—an ATM card?

I pick it up—flip it around to see who dropped this.

Westpac Bank. The account holder’s name... is mine.

The card on my bike last night was also yellow. I try to recall the number.

Was it 230489? Same as the code to DiRosario’s office?

My heart sings. No, it doesn’t sing—it screams her name.

I don’t have to use that PIN to check the balance to know there’s over a million Australian dollars in that account—I just know.

I’ve been frozen here like a moron for five seconds. Move, MOVE!

I leap outside, look left, right.

Right—down the block, bottom of the hill. A slim figure in a beanie, a Bujang Senang t-shirt, and basketball shorts, walking quickly.

She’s almost at the tram stopped at the lights. Its doors open.

I drop the card. Drop my coffee.

I bolt down the rain-slicked sidewalk.

Barefoot—nothing bad will happen if I pick up more speed.

My knees pump—not looking where my feet fall now.

Flying, just like old times—my hummin’bird.

I throw myself into the hands of the gods of gravity and inertia.

***

THE PRICE OF LOVE

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If you enjoyed this, please consider restacking or sharing it with your friends. If quoting, please be mindful not to give away any spoilers—much love and appreciation, James.

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“Szerena,” Mr J said wistfully, “I knew a Szerena, in Budapest. A beautiful name, it means ‘tranquil’ in Hungarian. Same like ‘peaceful’—which we are, Mr Savic and me, peaceful gentlemen and scholars—aren’t we, Vuko?”

(Tales from the Dreaming is an irregular series of half-asleep catches trawled up from Ideaspace and dictated into my phone in the middle of the night, then filled out in the cold light of dawn, and baked for your enjoyment this evening)

***

“This is Serena,” said Mr DiRosario to Mitzi and me. Then he waved his hand towards us and said to her, “And these… are Mitzi and Ralph.”

“They’re adooorable.” Mrs DiRosario squealed to Mr DiRosario, then to us, “Awww you babies are soaked. Let’s get you out of those wet clothes.”

We were soaked. The storm had come out of nowhere—Kuching weather do be like that, winds from zero to a hundred in two seconds flat.

Mr DiRosario had brought a couple of the thickest white bathrobes I’d ever seen. “You read my message right, Sere?” he pronounced it ‘Siri’. Sure enough, his iPhone, which sat on the dining table, woke up, “Uh huh?”. Siri was fighting for her life.

“Yeaaah, you made poor Mitzi and Ralph run through that crazy storm to get the keys you left in the bar.” Then to us, “Alex would forget his head if it wasn’t screwed on.” She kind of stressed the ‘x’, like ‘Alexx’. I glanced around but didn’t see any Amazon home system for her to confuse. Then her fingers were undoing the buttons of my shirt.

“Sweetie, that storm came outta nowhere. Am I right, Ralph?” Mr DiRosario was pulling off Mitzi’s wet cardigan.

“Uhh yeah, Mr DiRosario. Kuching weather, am I right? Zero to a hundred in two seconds flat.”

“You already said about the storm in your message, dear.” Mrs DiRosario laughed like a kid, and took my shirt off. “You also saiiid... that these little babies would like to play with us tonight.”

Mr DiRosario removed Mitzi’s skirt, “That’s right, Sere. And they’re not babies... Mitzi here is, what are you, honey, twenty?”

“Nineteen,” Mitzi said with a sly smile. Oh, she was locked in.

Mrs DiRosario unbuckled my belt and purred, “You do want to play, don’t you, Ralphie?”

I glanced at the wall clock, “Yeah sure we’re down, Mrs DiRosario.”

“Serena,” she cried, as she dropped to her knees and tugged my pants off.

***

I’d been in love with Mitzi since Form 3, when she transferred into St Teresa’s from Bintulu High. Me and every other blue-balled NPC in my class. But guys were background noise to Mitzi. Only hung out with the girls. And even then, she never friended any of them in particular. Bak Siew heard she had a situation back east.

In Form 4, I was seated right behind Mitzi. No one in the logs of PornHub has ever thirsted over just a curtain of jet black hair, but I was built different. I only had to replay Mitzi’s swish of mane a half dozen times to retire to my emotional support sock. But all that year, I just sat and watched her back. I never dared ask her number.

Not till Form 5. Puan Rabiah warned Mitzi that she would flunk Math if someone didn’t help her swot for the SPM exams. I stood up to volunteer so fast I nearly flipped the desk over with my erection. Lucky I had the Calculus text in my hand and could use it as a fig leaf. Goddamn, the tuition sessions in the library during Recess were hard… I will not elaborate.

I tried to accidentally-on-purpose touch her hand whenever we leafed through the folders, but she would have none of that. She smelled of Lux soap. I made mum switch our soap from Palmolive that year. Mum switched back, the next. She said I went through the Lux way too fast. I recalled that my dick never smelled so good though. No notes.

Anyway. Form 5. I finally got her number—to send practice papers and check her homework. I’d text her goodnight and sweet dreams and all that, but she gave react-only energy, every time. From the friendzone, I was relieved to learn she’d scraped through Math. End of year, my own grade crashed from A to C though. You’d think all those revision sessions would’ve helped my own prep. You’d be wrong.

The ‘rents grounded me for most of Form 6. I needed to ace the STPMs—the pre-U papers would be a whole other level of Hades. There was a girl, Timah, in my class. Everyone said she liked me, but I was emotionally deceased.

Mitzi had dropped out after Form 5 and got a job in a city restaurant as an accounts clerk. Looked like I really did improve her Math. Like I said, I was under house arrest, and anyway I couldn’t think about Timah seriously. Mitzi had a penthouse in my frontal lobe.

I saw her literally everywhere, like that bad Spider-Man meme. And, like Peter Parker, I shot my web across the bedroom every night, to Mitzi’s sashaying black silk playing on the backs of my trembling eyelids.

Now that we weren’t in school together anymore, Mitzi loosened up and agreed to see me. We lowkey dated? I would ride my bike down to the city almost every Saturday to see her after work—around 4.

Mitzi had to work every day except Mondays when Jinx was closed. That was F&B bookkeeping for you. Bookkeeping’s a weird word, with three pairs of letters in a row like that. I pointed that out to Mitzi on one of our first ‘dates’. She gave me that look.

Because we were both broke, we ate our dinners in the kitchen. Chef Batty loved her—she even called him Uncle—and he would always set aside double portions of the staff meal for Mitzi and me. Customer dinners at Jinx were Michelin-coded, but staff meals remained aggressively mid. Back-of-house slop.

I learned loads of other things that year, on my weekends at Jinx. I learned, for example, that Chef Batty filched an entire roast beef for Mitzi once, to bring back to visit her Mak over the Harvest Festival holidays. Vacuum-packed the whole pillow of a thing and put it in the bin when no one was looking. End of night, I circled back the alley behind the toilets and went dumpster diving for the first time in my life. Thank fuck I didn’t have to actually dive. The garbage bag was near the top, and the vacuum-packing kept the Black Angus joint pristine AF… virgin.

Like me, still. Yeah… Mitzi and I hadn’t done it. I was going blind from wanking, though. ‘Round October, she took pity on me. Her boss Mr DiRosario owned the shophouse next to the resto and provided staff housing in apartments he’d partitioned up on the first floor. Her room was tiny. No window but it was clean and had AC that mostly worked.

So Mitzi started sneaking me upstairs. There was a CCTV in the landing, so management definitely knew—but I guessed they chose peace. We kissed for literal hours on that tiny bed, and I staggered out of there on legs of jelly too many times. When I finally played the card that I was sure I would flunk my STPM next month—and I wasn’t lying, because I was finding it all too difficult reading with one hand—Mitzi finally told me the truth.

I wished she hadn’t. We were cooked, big-time.

Mitzi was native Sarawakian, Orang Ulu—literally, the People of the Interior. She came from a tribe with a Class System, for real. Her family were worker-bees, but for some whack reason, she’d been promised to the eldest son of the aristocrat who was the headman of her longhouse.

Yes, this was legit insane. 2025 and her tribe still practised arranged marriages. It was giving GoT, I said. Well next Gawai’s the wedding, so mark the date, she replied. Seven months away. And of course she would still have to be pure on her big day.

The groom could fuck around, and he apparently did, but her hymen would have to be found at the village clinic before the ceremony. Yeah, peak romance. My heart was broken into pieces and I didn’t dare speak because there was 0% chance I would not burst into tears if I’d tried to protest.

But Mitzi kissed me then, on my forehead, the tenderest kiss in the history of kisses, and she said she loved me. She said she wanted to save herself for me… me! And she said she had a plan.

The whole ‘sold to the prince’ thing was an anachronism, she said. People kinda accepted that. She would not be hunted down in Kuching if she simply refused to return to the longhouse. But the catch was, Mak was alone there, and Mitzi had a kid-brother still in Primary School. Life would be intolerable for them if she broke off the engagement. Her big plan was to get enough money to set up Mak and Pietro in a small kampung house in Sibu. Plus enough savings to last them ten years, at least until her brother—who was apparently brilliant—could finish college. It was wholesome for sure. Delusional, but wholesome. ‘Cause it would take, what, a hundred thousand Ringgit? She could work ‘til 50 and not save that. “Why even talk about this,” I sighed, reaching out to pack my books and go home.

Mitzi put a finger on my lips. With her other hand, she released my cock from its busting shorts. “Listen,” she whispered.

I wasn’t going anywhere.

I was gonna come soon though.

Slow it the fuck down, I screamed in my head. I tried to think about teachers, about guys who bullied me through High School, the rats scurrying from the dumpster I dug the roast beef out of, my overdue Trig paper, my Bottom 10 movies and the hours of my life I would never get back from watching those.

And all through this, Mitzi was slowly jerking me off while whispering in my ear her plan to rob her boss. I prolly caught every second word but it went something like this.

Jinx was a cash cow. In a month’s time, there were huge bookings lined up: office Christmas parties, New Year’s Eve gala, then in February the magic combo of the Lunar New Year family reunions, and the biggest night in any restaurant’s calendar... V-Day. And on top of that, Mr DiRosario was running some shady AF thing with meth dealers—money laundering.

All of which meant, for some closing-of-financial-year reason, he could only deposit that mountain of cash on 1st March next year. The combined takings of that quarter—real sales and drug money—would be at least a cool mill.

This stockpile was in a safe, in a locked cupboard in the boss’s office, which was in the second floor behind gates at the top of each staircase, and of course the main doors of the restaurant themselves, which were behind double grilles.

Eight keys in a bunch, on a chain with a disco globe, in DiRosario’s permanently bulging trouser pockets. 14th Feb was the date Mitzi had marked for the heist.

I had to stop her there. Tears in my eyes, I regretfully stilled her stroking hand, because I could not fucking believe what she was saying. She was serious, she said. She’d worked out which key opened which lock. She’d opened five bank accounts to deposit the cash, for fuck’s sake. And how the fuck could she get the keys off DiRosario?

This was where it went from batshit crazy to the next level. The boss and his wife had a Sex Thing going. Amanda and Chow—server and bartender at Jinx—were the couple invited to play most recently. The DiRosarios were safely vanilla, apparently, and tipped fantastically. Believe it or not, my cock shrank while still in Mitzi’s hand on hearing the next bit. This was where I came in—so to speak.

For awhile now, the boss had been suggesting a mixed-doubles swinging session to Mitzi—with me and his wife! Mitzi said she’d been playing hard to get. If I agreed to help, she would give him the Ok—for Valentine’s Day, right after the huge night of sales. It would appeal to the romantic in DiRosario, she said.

This whole story had got so absurd I could only play along now and try to follow all the twists. Even if she could get the keys off the boss, I asked, how would we be grabbing the cash while being groped by the gross old couple?

Ah... this was where Batty came in. When she called him Uncle, it was for real. The Chef was her Mak’s brother—it was him who’d recommended Mitzi to DiRosario for the bookkeeping job. At this point, Mitzi tucked my shrivelled member back into my shorts and went to prise up a loose floorboard under her bed. She showed me a bunch of eight keys with a disco globe for a key chain. How had she managed to duplicate them?

Here was the genius of it—these were just keys that looked like DiRosario’s, for a bait-and-switch. So the plan was, to make a hundred percent sure the boss would be... occupied. And—in that window—Batty would go in with the real keys—which would be left for him in the dumpster behind the toilets—to steal the money.

I had to admit, Mitzi and Batty had worked out every detail of this heist pretty carefully. Except for the inconvenient result of both of us losing the virginity we were saving for each other to the DiRosarios? Ah, that was where my dad came into the picture—brilliant. We absolutely needed to add Dad to the heist crew.

Did I mention? Dad was a cop. Well, he was head of the accounts department of the PDRM—why’m I surrounded by numbers-crunchers?—but yeah he was technically Police.

So, in between the sleazy couple getting us back to their place, and before we got banged, Batty was gonna call my dad to report that I’d been kidnapped by pedos. The cops would not ignore a report from one of their own.

“No.” I put my foot down. “Absolutely fucking NO.” She fished my cock out again. “No, dammit. It’s too dangerous, Mitzi.” Dammit, two strokes and I was hard again. “No. You’ll get raped, or killed.” Her tongue swirled around its tip. “Nnnn...” I was in her mouth... “Yyyy...” ...the first time, and it was even better than I had imagined... “Yesss... YES!”

***

And that was how I ended up getting the second blowjob in my life from Mrs DiRosario.

But it had gone to shit.

The cops should have kicked the door in at least ten minutes ago.

Batty hadn’t called my dad, or anyone.

Maybe he played us out.

DiRosario had just peeled Mitzi’s panties off. He was literally smacking his chops.

I’d have to go to Plan B and punch him out. We’d have to make a run for it. Except we were driven here. I had five seconds to act. Plus, I was about to cum.

Right then, Siri rattled against the glass tabletop, “Call from Work. Answer it?”

DiRosario froze. It was midnight. The restaurant was closed. The only way ‘Work’ could be ringing his phone was...

He stabbed Reply. A different robot voice came through the iPhone’s speakers, “Alarm, Zone 1. Door opened. Autolock triggered.”

We all crowded around—Mitzi and I naked, the DiRosarios clothed—to look at the screen as it flipped to infrared video. My boner hovered uncomfortably between us.

Batty hadn’t played us out—he’d gotten his dumb ass locked in DiRosario’s office.

We watched, stunned, as the chef—jiggling body flaring red in the heatmap video—desperately tried every key to get out. He didn’t understand that the autolock would be magnetic, and only DiRosario could disable it. We could hear the claxon ringing through the phone speakers.

Somewhere amid that tinny noise and miniaturised chaos captured over CCTV, something clicked in the old creep’s brain. He picked up the bunch of keys and stared hard at the disco globe. It was too shiny. In fact, all the keys were slightly wrong.

He turned his glare to Mitzi, and pulled out a small snub-nosed revolver from his pants.

Turned out it was a gun in his pocket after all—he wasn’t just pleased to see her.

“Sere,” DiRosario barked at his wife, “get our passports, and the diamonds.”

Siri replied, “Hmm, I didn’t find that contact. Who do you want to call?”

“NOT YOU!” the four of us shouted at his phone, united for one brief moment by technostress.

His beady eyes took one last long and regretful drink from the naked form of my fiancee—there, I said it—fiancee! In that moment, I knew I’d grow old with Mitzi. Then DiRosario waved his gun at the thick white bathrobes laid on the sofa.

“Put them on—we’re all going to the shop.”

Smith and Wesson brooked no argument and the four of us piled into his Tesla Model 3. Mrs D was made to drive, I sat in the front passenger seat, while Mr D sat directly behind me with the barrel of his gun nudged against my neck. Mitzi, I guess, he did not consider a threat.

I kept looking back to check on her but her face was a frozen mask. I wondered if she hated me because the cops hadn’t come, and it was only the alarm saved her from being raped. Or maybe she couldn’t scrub the image of Mrs D’s mouth wrapped around my cock.

I got a bit pissed off myself—the plan was completely hers, and no way her fucking dumbass Uncle Batty called my dad, or the cops, at all. They wouldn’t have ignored that report. Anyway what kind of hare-brained plan would use a four-way swingers’ session to distract the mark—when half that orgy were actual virgins?

Earlier, the storm had more or less stopped by the time we got to the DiRosario’s in Kenny Heights, but now it resumed with a vengeance. The wipers on high barely made any difference—we were practically navigating by lidar alone. Mrs D crawled while Mr D cursed, over and over, that he should have driven.

When we got to Jinx twenty minutes later, its parking lot was empty except for a battered Toyota pickup truck. “Fuuuuck.” Mr D muttered. Through the pelting rain we could hear the alarm wailing still.

“Are those the Russians?” Mrs D asked in a small voice.

My dick tried to shrink up into my body when I saw the massive guy step out of the Hilux and approach us through the slashing sheets of water. He held a cleaver just inside his open parka, close to his hip. I braced myself for DiRosario taking a shot at the big ape, but he just put the pistol back in his pocket, wound the window down, and said in a resigned voice, “Savic. It’s not what you think.”

“Let’s get in out of the rain eh, my friend? Turn off that alarm, and we have our chat.” Strong Eastern European accent, not Russian though? His face in shadows under the hood of his coat. Glasses beaded and reflecting with raindrops. “All of youse. These kids come from the swimming pool or what?”

The DiRosarios lead, under their sole umbrella, while Mitzi and I ran, cinching our robes closed in the wind, barefoot through the puddles. We were soaked all over again after covering the short distance from the car to the side entrance.

The gorilla called Savic joined us, shook himself like a big dog. Another bruiser, shorter but wider, pressed into the crowded space under the awning. This one wore no rain coat, and ignored the rivers running down his muscled torso. Adidas rash-guard. Ten o’clock shadow. Hooded eyes. His sharklike calm was scarier.

I’d started thinking in short sentences. A nervous tic when my brain overheated.

Hard-boiled dream logic.

“Alex,” the blockheaded predator said, gravel in his throat.

“Joszef,” Mr D replied sadly, hunting in his spare bunch for the unfamiliar key.

‘Joszef’ scanned the gathered. His gaze froze. “Mitzi??”

I blurted, faster than thought, “You know this guy??”

“Yeah,” Mitzi, in a small voice, “Mr J was my Chem teacher in Bintulu.”

The roller shutter flew up with a screech, nails against chalkboard. “Let’s move this High School reunion indoor, shall we?” DiRosario grumbled.

Savic grabbed his shirt collar, reminding him who’s the boss. Shoved him towards the control panel. “Hurry, shut damn alarm up before cops come.”

On cue, a blade of blue from the parking lot cut across the dark interior.

“Too late,” Mr J sighed. He reached out, wrapped a freakishly large hand around Mrs D’s bicep, gently pulled her near, then tilted his cubist skull at Mr D, “Maybe tell them false alarm, huh?”

The DiRosarios darted frightened glances at each other. Mr D punched in the disarm code and dashed out, back into the teeth of the gale.

Savic adjusted his coat over the cleaver, which winked once at me. Mr J said something into Mrs D’s ear. She whimpered. I reached out to take Mitzi’s hand. She did not pull away. Even gave me a squeeze back. My heart fluttered.

DiRosario back now, out of breath. “Okay, no problem. I know his Captain. He’s just logging the visit—something wrong with his iPad—should be gone soon.”

The blue light continued to strobe in as we stood without talking in the shadows. After a little while, the Eastern Europeans unstacked chairs for everyone. We dutifully sat, Mr J still gripping Mrs D’s bicep, Mitzi and I still holding hands, no sign of Smith and Wesson.

“Mrs DiRosario,” Mr J broke the silence, “We haven’t been introduced. My name is Joszef Zsigmondy and my colleague here is Mr Vuko Savic. We’ve been your husband’s business associates for the past three years.”

“Oh,” her voice fluttered, almost coquettish, “please call me Serena.”

“Szerena,” Mr J said wistfully, “I knew a Szerena, in Budapest. A beautiful name, it means ‘tranquil’ in Hungarian. Same like ‘peaceful’—which we are, Mr Savic and me, peaceful gentlemen and scholars—is that not so, Vuko?”

The taller ape grunted.

“Are you also Hungarian, Mr Savic?” Mrs D asked, like we were at an afternoon tea, with fucking cucumber sandwiches.

“Montenegrin. I’m not teacher, like Joszef. I’m butcher,” and patted the blade under his parka. “Used to work in kitchen right here—before Alex bought the business and fired me.”

DiRosario paled, “Haha—now, come on Vuko, that’s not what happened. Anyway you, you bounced back, with this wonderful new, uh, enterprise.”

“Enterprise!” Mr J barked. We flinched. “Very polite word, children.” He rubbed one of his cauliflower ears, then pinched his many-times-broken nose. “We cook meth, eh.” Palms up. Again, that head tilt. It was almost endearing. “Let’s call a lab a lab.”

The police cruiser pulled away.

Charades was over.

Savic said softly, “Lock the door, Alex.”

“Now let’s go upstairs,” Mr J said, “and gut someone.”

***

TO BE CONCLUDED

Part 2 of 2

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“Stay down,” says a calm voice.

The man turns his head slightly and blinks blood away, “Who... are you? Where... am I?”

“If I’m not mistaken, you have just died three times and come back to life--each time, a little bit stronger. So, stay down—wait this out—patience is truly a virtue.”

NOW—Apokolips

The Justice League have surrounded Darkseid and are attacking him with all they’ve got.

The villain sends Omega Beams zigzagging from his eyes after their strongest champion, Superman, sends him spinning out of the sulfur-filled air.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Booster Gold drops his cloaking shield and rushes Darkseid from behind with a Time Bomb—calibrated to send the Dark God to the End of Time, in the hope that Entropy itself would put a stop to his rampage.

A flash of light blinds the assembled heroes—and Darkseid... WAS.

Wonder Woman, helping Superman to his feet, is the first to congratulate Booster—but he’s confused.

In his hands, the undetonated Time Bomb. “I- I hadn’t set it off. Something else took Darkseid...”

Flash zips into the scene, “I’ve searched the whole planet--he’s... nowhere. Escaped by teleportation to another sector of space?”

Batman shakes his head, “I saw his face. Darkseid was as surprised as us.”

Green Lantern projects a scanner from his power ring, “The energy traces show that he was transported to another dimension, somewhere multiversal... familiar...”

Skeets, the robot sidekick of Booster from the 25th Century, chimes in, “There’s also a chronal signature--he was moved in time as well... Uh oh.”

“What?” asks Booster.

“The only one who can give chase right now is someone whose cellular structure can take a quantum leap across both space and time… and Superman is still winded...”

“That leaves me?” sighs the Hero from the Future.

Green Lantern interjects, “You have to decide now—I can open the portal by copying the matter displacement trail, but not for long—it’s fading by the second.”

“Going Mano-a-Mano against Darkseid in a land lost in time and space?” Booster asks no one in particular, then grins, “Sounds like another Tuesday to me.”

“Press these together to follow Darkseid’s chronal-trail, then press again to come home,” Green Lantern creates two buttons to add to each of Booster’s gauntlets. “It will only last about 24 hours.”

The hero looks around at his friends, then knocks his wrist bands together over his head, and vanishes in a green flash.

***

1974—Elsewhere

Booster appears in mid-air. His Legion flight ring instantly powers up. But Skeets sounds a shrill alarm—ducking by instinct, he manages to pull out of the way of an approaching aeroplane.

Passengers along the side of the plane wave at him through their porthole windows.

“Okay, good--this is a version of Metropolis where they recognise superheroes—I’ve got that going for me. When are we, Skeets, and where can I find Big Blue?”

“Mid-seventies, Booster, and we’re not in Metropolis—this is New York, but Superman does not exist in this universe. The Justice Society has traditionally been based in Manhattan, but I can find no record of them either.”

“Crap.”

“Darkseid fell from the sky here—” Skeet aims a laser pointer straight down to a landscaped garden, “—and landed in Central Park.”

“Wait, fell? But Darkseid can fly... was he unconscious?”

“I’m unable to tell—” Skeets says, as they reach the crater on the ground, which is slightly smoking and very empty, “—but he’s walked away from the fall.”

Booster doesn’t need the augmented vision provided by his future-tech goggles to see the deep footprints left by the Lord of Apokolips in the soft earth.

“Skeets, look. Is he—”

The robot confirms, “—weaving, as if traumatized by the translocation, or the fall.”

Booster punches the air in triumph. “How is our forcefield rated against Omega Beams?”

“I have even better news,” Skeets chirps, “this dimension is totally cut-off from the Source Wall that powers Darkseid’s Omega Effect. I predict that he is powerless here.”

Booster does a little jig.

“Of course he is Apokolips-born, so he is still very strong and durable... but you actually have a chance to kick his rocky butt—quickly, follow those staggering footprints!”

But before they can take off, a loud crash comes from behind them--beyond the eastern side of the park. A column of smoke and dust rises.

“Skeets, is this connected?”

“No way of telling—but it is in the opposite direction of where Darkseid headed.”

Sirens wail.

Booster shakes his head and clenches his fists. “We have to see if anyone needs help.”

Then, to Skeets’ protests, he takes flight.

***

NOW—Madripoor

Logan sits in the Princess Bar wearing a white tuxedo jacket over black trousers. He nurses a Bourbon on the rocks in one hand and holds an unlit cigar in the other. He’s waiting.

The saloon doors burst open and Kang the Conqueror strides in, with chrono-cannon raised.

Half a dozen local enforcers draw pistols and swords on him, then turn to their boss for the command to attack. “Patch” motions for them to stand down. He shows open palms to his visitor and nods his head at a facing chair.

Pensively, Kang lowers his weapon and sits.

“You were expecting me—do you have chronal sensors in this backwater?” Kang asks.

Logan shook his head, “No need—an incoming time-traveller smells like a typhoon and burnt rubber,” and offers to pour Kang a bourbon.

Kang turns his nose up and says, “No time for pleasantries—come with me if you want to live.”

Logan chuckles, and slowly re-lights his cigar. “What infinite crisis is it now?”

“Much as it pains me to say this, you are an Anchor Being of this universe. A spacetime wave is rippling your way, and it seeks to translocate you to another reality and another time. Your absence here—and presence there—will disrupt both dimensions. If this wave takes an Anchor Being from that other universe and sends them here, both realities could unravel.”

“Such emergency calls usually from Stark or Richards—I’m supposed to believe none of the good guys caught wind of this?”

“They do not monitor the timestream as I do! Now stop prattling and let me get you to my lab, and into a Tempus Chamber—we have only about a minute left before the wave breaks.”

Logan’s answer is to kick the table over and unsheathe his adamantium claws.

Kang’s chair falls over and, on his back, he fires his weapon—a burst of chronal energy traps Logan like a fly in amber.

But then the Wolverine starts to move, pushing forward inch by agonising inch.

“That’s... impossible!” Kang cries, as Logan’s tuxedo tears off his upper body.

Right then, Jubilee comes out from a back room and tosses a pyrotechnic sphere of light from her fingertips into the stream of temporal energy blasting Logan—it short-circuits the effect in a blinding flash which seems to ripple throughout the room.

However, when her vision returns, both Logan and Kang are gone.

***

1951

A mild-mannered man in his fifties is packing his meagre belongings into a cardboard box--journal, toothbrush, comb, bible. A guard stands at the door of his cell, attention focussed on another prisoner in the cell opposite, who sits in the shadows, watching.

“This is it—I’m no longer dangerous enough to deserve a place on the Rock—I hear Leavenworth is nice?”

The guard ignores the prisoner, but the man in the cell opposite stands and walks into the light falling from a dim bulb in the corridor. He is huge, with long hair tied in a ponytail, and a neat beard.

“I’ve never been to Kansas... and I will miss your stories of daring kidnappings, and of midnight standoffs against G-Men.”

The older man blushes, “Just tall tales, my friend. Made most of them up in the early years so that the other inmates would respect me.” He pulls half a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and passes them through the bars of his soon-to-be-ex-neighbour’s cell.

The big man acknowledges the gesture by taking one cigarette, places it on his desk, and hands the rest of the pack back. “Be well, ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly. Your name will be remembered.”

The older man scoffs and, with a smile, turns and walks down the echoing corridor, followed closely by the guard.

The big man is about to retreat into the shadows but then he suddenly leans closer to the bars and turns his ear to the now vacant cell. His nostrils flare and the hackles on the back of his neck raise.

A flash of light.

A figure materialises six feet up, then falls—with a metallic crunch—to the raw concrete floor.

He is half-naked and covered in burns. He groans, rolls over onto his front and throws up. For a few seconds, the outline of his body flickers, then re-composes itself.

The creature, now growling, tries to push up on his hands and knees, but falls face-first, again with a sound like a steel bar hitting stone.

“This is new.” says the big man, and sits back down in the shadows.

THREE HOURS LATER

The feral man lying in the cell vacated by Kelly rolls onto his back, coughs up a geyser of blood, sputters, and tries to sit up. But he crashes back down to the ground.

“Stay down,” says a calm voice.

The man turns his head slightly and blinks blood away, “Who... are you? Where... am I?”

“If I’m not mistaken, you have just died three times and come back to life--each time, a little bit stronger. So, stay down—wait this out—patience is truly a virtue.”

The big man steps into the light. “You are in Alcatraz. And I am Vandal Savage.”

***

1974—Avengers Mansion

A two-storey wing has collapsed. Skeets the Robot scans. “There’s a man trapped under. Unconscious, but life signs are all stable.”

“Meta-human?” asks Booster Gold, superhero from the 25th Century.

“No, baseline. But he’s wearing some extraterrestrial artifacts—some kind of antimatter, no, negative-matter, bands—on his wrists.”

“Other occupants?”

“In the unaffected sections, three other men. One in full-body armour. All in the same state, unconscious but stable. Signs of a pitched battle.”

“Who’s at risk?”

“This trapped one—if the structure further collapses. At the moment, there’s an I-beam pinning him to the ground, but it’s what’s keeping the rest of the rubble from crushing him.”

Booster glances back at the trail of Darkseid, growing cold. “One stranger’s safety against a race to save two universes?”

“You’re right.” Skeets replies, “We dig.”

Cranking his strength enhancers to max, Booster begins pulling aside chunks of concrete and massive timber beams.

“He’s awake now, and knocking those... Nega-bands together… to no effect. Speaking to himself.”

Skeets patches the audio through to Booster’s cowl:

“Nothing’s happening! It’s like the switching do-hickey’s been--short-circuited! The Avengers are clobbered! Thanos has the Cosmic Cube! The Controller’s loose! We may all be doomed in less’n an eyeblink! Where’d Mar-vell go--just when he’s needed most?”

Booster groans, “Looks like we’ve stepped into some kind of Cosmic War in this universe...”

Skeets shines his laser pointer on one corner of masonry and says, “Prise that up—he’s just behind it.”

The pitch blackness is broken by the sound of digging, then by a chink of light. The opening becomes wider, to reveal the heroic figure of the rescuer, with a halo of wavy hair, backlit against the afternoon sun.

“C-Cap? How’s it possible that you’re here—with me? I clanked the bands but nothing happ-” the trapped youth stammers. The star on the warrior’s chest gleams. But- the star is blue? “You... you’re not Mar-Vell.”

The saviour pulls more rubble aside and the young man can see the full costume now—same design with shoulder-and-chest panel, star in the middle, and he has golden bands on his wrists—but the colours are wrong. And the man’s hair is blond, not silver.

“Just hang in there, kid. Try not to move—Skeets here is monitoring the structure in case of any further cave-in.”

The small robot hovers, the red beam of its scanner flickering over the tons of wood and stone.

“Who are you?? Why do you dress like Captain Marvel?”

Booster stops in his tracks, “Captain Marvel? Uhh, I look nothing like Shazam? Wait… those bands you’re wearing. You said just now—something about the switching mechanism not working? Kid, you don’t happen to swap places with your Captain Marvel?”

“You do know him!”

Skeets interrupts, “There’s a gas pipe that just came off—I can reach it. Don’t move—the whole place might go up if your digging sparks against some metal.”

Then the robot flies deeper into the collapsed section.

“So... which bad guy beat up your Captain, err, Billy?”

“Who’s Billy, Daddy-o? I’m Rick—Rick Jones. Sidekick to all the heroes.”

“All of them, huh? Your versions of Superman? Batman?”

“Nah man—who’re those suckers? I mean Captain America, and the Hulk. And now Captain Marvel... who’s gone AWOL at the worst possible time!”

“So those are the Avengers? They all got their butts kicked just now? By... did you say, Thanos?”

“Sadly—it wasn’t even the Big Bad himself! Captains America and Marvel, and the other Avengers, all taken out by the Controller. Bulky guy in a blue and grey suit. Craggy chin.”

“Wait- that’s Darkseid. My villain, the one I’m chasing. His face looks like it’s carved from rock? From an alien planet.”

“Nope—the Controller’s a man, who’s been transformed by Thanos’s space-gizmo.”

Skeets flies back, to the sound of digging coming from inside the building. “I’ve shut off the gas main—his friends are awake, and coming to his rescue from within.”

Booster leans in, “Listen, Rick Jones—I really need to go after my guy, before he triggers a Crisis Event on both our worlds. The Avengers are coming to dig you out—just… don’t say anything about me, okay? Green Lantern told me to leave zero footprint if possible.”

Rick scoffs, “Thanks for coming to my rescue, but… in those golden duds? Good luck keeping a low profile, cat.”

Skeets interjects, “This youth did mistake you for his world’s Captain Marvel...”

***

1951—FBI Academy, Quantico.

A man knocks urgently on a door. The brass plate reads, “J Edgar Hoover, Director.”

“Enter.”

“Sir, an emergency in Alcatraz!”

“Who broke out?”

“No one broke out, sir—an unidentified man has been found in one of the vacant cells!”

“A break-in? That’s insane—who is it, a Soviet supervillain? One of those teleporters?”

“W-we don’t know. He’s very sick—the medic said he d-died! And came back to life—a couple of times! We dare not move him...”

Hoover steeples his fingers—this could fit into O’Fallon’s plans. “We have to proceed carefully. Leave him where he was found—lock the cell door—and station armed guards around, 24 hours. No medical intervention. If he dies, he dies. Which cell block?”

“Omega—opposite Savage.”

Hoover hisses—what has Savage cooked up this time?

***

Alcatraz, Cell Block Omega.

The man coughs and sits up in a pool of his own blood. Flesh is sloughing off him, and regenerating. He ignores the armed guards and calls out to the prisoner in the opposite cell, “Savage. What kinda name’s that?”

“An old one.” The big man flashes a tiger smile, “You smell old too, and I don’t mean the present death-stink.”

Logan scoffs, “Old enough, but this feels like the end. I’m not... from around here.”

Savage nods, “I can tell. Rest. Whatever ails you has not managed to kill you... at least not permanently.”

“I gotta go... home. This is all wrong—Kang said my presence here, and absence there, could bring both realities down.”

Savage tilts his head. “I have heard legends of a coming cataclysm—worlds colliding—but it is not due for decades. Such portents, however, are not to be trifled with. Who is this Kang—can he send you home?”

Logan spasms, and dies again.

Savage sighs.

***

Opal City, Maryland

A figure dressed in red cuts across the sunset, holding a glowing golden rod.

Another figure steps out of the shadows in an alley—Kang the Conqueror, Chrono-cannon armed and pulsating.

He studies a holographic capture of the Golden Age science hero as streams of information flicker before his eyes. He mutters to himself, “That... cosmic rod... will have to do.” A low battery indicator floats into view, making him growl. “Two Jumps left—I’ve to make this one count!”

SEVEN SECONDS BEFORE—Opal City, Maryland

A figure dressed in red cuts across the sunset, holding a glowing golden rod.

Kang materialises directly in front of his flight path, shields raised. From the ground, Kang fires his Chrono-cannon. Perfectly ambushed, Ted Knight is frozen in temporal stasis. Kang catches, then lowers him carefully down to the alley—in which Kang awaits.

Time having caught up, the two Kangs merge back into one, and he proceeds to strip the green cape off the vanquished hero’s back. He re-checks his battery, “One last Jump.” He nods grimly.

Now he snaps his own face mask over Knight’s finned cowl, picks up the purloined rod, and takes to the sky.

“Hang in there, Wolverine,” Kang chuckles to himself, “Starman is coming to break you out of Alcatraz!”

***

1974—a four-storey building in New York

Darkseid is blasted through the brick wall.

He arrests his fall, but he is woozy, ill from the relocation through the multiverse and through time.

Booster—not an Anchor Being—has not been affected, and flies out through the hole in the wall, the gold in his costume changed at nanoscale to red for minimal footprint, now that their battle has taken to the streets.

Booster keeps the pressure on, smashing Darkseid back into the wall of the building at the second floor.

Darkseid lands a blow, nearly taking Booster’s head off.

His next blow misses, but hits the ledge and crumbles two floors of building to the ground—Booster falls, manages to land on his feet.

Darkseid jumps through the air, but he is too slow. Booster winds up...

...and moves like a rocket, catching his foe before he reaches the ground, with enough force to wreck a truck.

Darkseid is out-cold.

A cop yells to another, “Captain Marvel’s taken out the Controller!”

Booster allows himself to breathe again, clangs Green Lantern’s return triggers on his wrist bands, and the two foes vanish in a flash.

***

1951—Alcatraz

The walls around both men’s cells are glitching, warping with the multiversal disturbance caused by Logan. Savage sighs, “This will not do.”

He stands and rips the bars of his door apart without effort. The guards draw their guns but he plows through them like a tornado. They don’t even get a shot off.

The Wolverine drags himself up and plants his back to the wall to meet death on his feet. He tries to pop his claws but nothing happens. “Y-you could have broken out... any time?”

“I’m 50,000 years old,” Savage says, “my plans are on a different timescale than even you can imagine—but your appearance has forced my hand.”

Wolverine throws himself at the bigger man, who catches him in a bear hug.

“This is not personal—one forever man to another,” Savage looks down at the disintegrating mutant, “but your Kang is not coming—and I’ve to kill you before my universe is torn apart.”

SNIKT!

The claws finally come out, deep into Savage’s sides.

The immortal man roars and claps his hands around Logan’s head like a melon, lifts him off the ground. He smashes Logan back against the wall of the cell. Then, again. Again—the bricks crack against adamantium skeleton, crumble.

With one huge push, the wall gives way and both men tumble out into the dark, into the rain.

They fall two storeys and land in the prison yard, Logan beneath, his failing body spraying viscera. Still he slashes back at Savage, both of them now lost in their own berserker hazes.

Suddenly a bright light shines on them. They stop fighting and look up. Starman descends, backlit by the moon.

He blasts Savage with the cosmic rod—weakened by Logan, the immortal man finally passes out.

Logan looks up at Kang. “Took... your... time...”

“Time is all we’ve got.” The man from the 31st century says, and holds the Wolverine up by his shoulders. He slams the Jump button on his glove control, and they disappear in a flash.

***

The Capitol Building, Washington DC

In a hearing room, the Justice Society—Wonder Woman, Hawkman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Black Canary, Atom and Doctor Midnite—face the Joint Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities.

The Sandman is speaking. “...as we’ve shown you, the Alcatraz jailbreak was carried out by a supervillain masquerading as Starman.”

A roar of disagreement from the politicians. Senator O’Fallon bangs his gavel for silence, then delivers his prepared speech to the assembled heroes:

“We know nothing about you except the few facts you’ve given reporters. That is not enough. This is a closed session of a congressional committee—and by that authority I ask you—if you are good Americans, you will show your faces, and then we may begin the process of clearing you.”

The Green Lantern declines for the group, and raises his ring. The Justice Society vanishes in a flash of green—not to be seen again in public for another decade.

***

NOW—Apokolips

Darkseid is still half-dead from the exile to the Marvel universe. Orion ties him up in Omega Force nullifying chains.

Blue Beetle comes up and hugs Booster, “I’ve never been so scared for you, buddy.”

Booster winces—he hurts all over, “This is what I came from the 25th Century to do—kick Darkseid’s butt all by myself.”

“Nice costume re-design, by the way! Red and blue looks even better on you than...” Beetle says, and sneaks a look at Superman—who frowns.

Booster and Beetle clap their hands on each other’s shoulders, “Bwah-hahaha!”

***

NOW—Madripoor

Jubilee is tending Logan’s wounds. “Your healing factor’s never been through this much before—if you could survive that, I reckon you can live forever.”

A vision of the immortal Vandal Savage swims into the Wolverine’s mind.

He grunts, “Let’s hope I never do.”

***

THE END

+++

POSTSCRIPT/ Director’s DVD Commentary

1951, Alcatraz: ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly—a gangster armed with, indeed, a big machine gun, and infamous for kidnapping and racketeering—was in his fifties and deemed no longer dangerous enough to be incarcerated on The Rock. He was transferred to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.

Vandal Savage was created in 1943 for DC Comics by Alfred Bester (yes, that Alfred Bester) who went on to win the first Hugo Award (yes, the first Hugo Award ever) in 1953 for The Demolished Man.

The prison break of Logan by Kang was also an homage to Watchmen #8 in which Nite Owl (modelled on the Golden Age Blue Beetle) broke Rorschach out of prison.

There's a deeper-cut reference to Superman #168 (1964) in which Lex Luthor made a time-machine mistake and landed himself in an Alcatraz cell.

As I had Booster say to Rick, he had been warned to leave zero footprint so as not to disturb the Marvel Universe, and he cleverly managed this by switching his usual blue-and-gold costume to red-and-blue, leading onlookers to mistake him for Captain Marvel. By coincidence, his opponent Darkseid—stripped of his Omega Beams—was dressed in colours and brawled in a manner not unlike the Marvel Universe Controller. This was my excuse to re-enact (and partly re-draw) the classic battle from Captain Marvel #30, a comic I read to pieces as a kid in 1974.

By contrast, Wolverine’s and Kang’s foray into the DC Universe in 1951 had precisely the opposite effect. Kang’s method of springing Wolverine from Alcatraz was to impersonate Starman, a Justice Society of America member. This “secret history” scandal gave the Joint Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities the final grounds needed to demand that all superheroes reveal their identities or be outlawed. The JSA chose to go underground instead, remaining out of the public eye for more than a decade. This is what DC Comics calls a retcon—shorthand for “retroactive continuity”—to explain why no superhero adventures were published between 1951 and 1963 (in reality, a consequence of dwindling sales).

In the epilogue (NOW—Apokolips), the way Booster Gold and his best buddy Blue Beetle (the same Golden Age hero on which Watchmen’s Nite Owl was based) made a lame joke about Superman’s costume colours is typical of their juvenile humour. This is actually a running theme of these two clowns >

(Tales from the Dreaming is an irregular series of half-asleep catches trawled up from Ideaspace and dictated into my phone in the middle of the night, then filled out in the cold light of dawn, and baked for your enjoyment this evening)

Previous Nocturnal Transmission (not part of this story)

You awaken, refreshed, born anew. Shafts of sunlight slant through curtains.

A perfect string of birdsong, so perfect the proud whistler repeats it, over and over, “Wit-chi-chew, wit-chi-CHEW.” You know the bird is Pachycephala hypoxantha.

But who are you?

***

Once upon a time there was a brave boy named Jimmy. Why yes—yes, same as your name. Imagine that!

Like you, Jimmy attended Chung Hua No. 1—Primary One, so that would have made him, hmm, what…

Yes! Seven—you’re right, Jimmy was seven.

Jimmy’s best friend was Maddy. She was a tough little girl. She took no nonsense from anyone, that Maddy, especially not from The Bully Shane. Because Shane was actually eight—he didn’t start school until a year after everyone else—Shane was bigger than all the other kids in their year. He was also always hungry to feed that awful big stomach of his, and would steal the lunch money from littler kids.

Jimmy was short even among the other kids in Primary One, but he was fast. Oh boy, was he fast. Oh brother, could that kid run. And he would slide under railings and swing over bannisters. Just like—hahaha, exactly like Jackie Chan.

But one day, Jimmy’s luck ran out. He was, as usual, zipping away from Shane, when he slid down the drainpipe from the balcony of his classroom—to a blocked path because the school had started repair works to the toilets.

To be fair, the repairs were long overdue—ewww—but the timing kinda sucked.

The barricade was too high for Jimmy to scamper over, and he could only stand with his back to the metal roofing sheet wall, and watch Shane come down the stairs, cracking his knuckles.

Yes, it was strange that an eight year-old could crack his knuckles. Actually, Shane was such a giant, maaaybe he was really ten?

Anyway, lunch money would not have been enough toll this time—everyone had been laughing at Shane, huffing and puffing after Jimmy, never managing to catch up, all week, and payback was gonna have to be a real beating. Jimmy wasn’t scared. He stood as tall as he could and balled up his fists, small as walnuts. They only trembled a little because he was squeezing them so tight, not because he was scared.

That’s when Maddy swooped in. She had seen Jimmy was trapped, all the way from the tuckshop which was up the hill, and came pelting to the rescue.

Puffing and panting, she shoved in between the boys and shouted at Shane as if she was their English teacher Missus Voon, “Shane Li—have you no shame? Picking on a boy half your size?”

Maddy was no bigger than Jimmy, but she had a voice loud enough for all three of them. “And are you going to be such a big man that you’ll beat up a girl now?”

A small crowd of school kids had gathered, and were murmuring their disapproval at this stand-off. Shane glared at Maddy and the only thing he could resort to was name-calling, “shitty little girl with big mouth!”

“Sticks and stones, ya overgrown bully!” Maddy yelled to his back as Shane staged a retreat. In fact Maddy liked that handle, and would proudly use it herself a few times in future, “shitty little girl with big mouth”.

She turned back and said to Jimmy, “This is how you do it. Fight the bullies with your brains, not your fists.”

Jimmy gazed at Maddy with admiration, but he remained sad.

“Why the long face?”

“When I tried to climb this,” Jimmy pointed at the high barricade—it wasn’t that high, but he was really quite short, “my lunch money fell in the drain.”

“Aww, don’t worry about it. Here, we can share my kolomi.”

Maddy produced the noodles wrapped in plastic which she had just bought at the canteen, and they sat, side by side, on the kerb in front of the toilet repair works, taking turns with the wooden chopsticks provided, laughing at the useless bendy spoon.

Soon the bell rang and they trudged together up to class. Happily it was English, with Maddy’s favourite teacher. To top off a brilliant afternoon, Shane must have started a commotion with one of his cronies, because he’d been banished by Missus Voon out into the corridor, where he had to squat there for the whole lesson with crossed arms, each hand pinching an opposing earlobe.

That was the Thursday Jimmy and Maddy became best friends forever.

They only find the magic egg and gain their superpowers on Friday.

Alright, it’s late. I need to get up for work in a few hours. I’ll continue tomorrow.

Sleep now, sweet dreams. I love you. Goodnight.

Goodnight.

***

Hey there, sorry I missed dinner.

Do you remember where we were at in storytime?

No? It doesn’t matter—neither do I. Let’s just pick it up with Jimmy and Maddy in school—Primary 1, it was, when they found the magic egg.

There was a news report one night of a meteor shower—that is… ah you know what a meteor shower is—great, that’s great.

So, next morning—it was a gloomy, rainy day—Jimmy told Maddy he saw something glowing in the Reservoir Park next door. He saw that from the tuckshop which was… yes, that’s right, the canteen—it was high up. The students had to climb a little hill to get their food, and to buy school supplies too.

So at lunch break, the two friends snuck out the gap in the fence between Chung Hua No. 1 and the Reservoir Park to see what the glow was.

There was a big hole in the ground, and an egg in the middle of it.

It was smoking here and there, but not that hot. Maddy stepped carefully over the dug up earth and burnt bits of branches and roots to pick up the egg that sat in the middle as if it was a charred nest. Its shell was dark purple, almost black, and it had white streaks all over. The streaks weren’t exactly white, they were almost glowing yellow.

Yes, you’re right—like Grigri’s yellow eyes!

I miss that old cat—he was the goodest boy, wasn’t he?

So, Maddy and Jimmy, excited with their find, rushed back to school just as the end of recess bell was sounding.

But, at the gap in the fence between the Eugenia bushes, stood a shadow.

It was The Bully Shane.

Jimmy turned to run, knowing Shane could never catch him—because Jimmy was fast, wasn’t he? He was the Flash. He was Quicksilver.

Alright. Okay, nerd. Quicksilver’s nowhere as fast as the Flash—I knew that!

But Jimmy couldn’t run away, because Shane had grabbed one of Maddy’s arms in his big paw, and she was crying out in pain because he was so rough. He really was big for Primary One—maybe he was actually twelve years old.

Jimmy stopped and turned and braced for a beating.

But all Shane wanted was the egg they’d found. He had also seen the glow, and followed to see what meteorite we- what the two friends, had recovered.

Jimmy gladly exchanged the meteorite for Maddy.

“You should have run with it!” She scolded him, after she was thrown back at Jimmy.

He just grinned at her with one missing tooth.

But when Shane turned the egg around in his hands, transfixed by the way the yellow streaks zipped around its inky surface like land lightning, the whole thing suddenly flared red-hot, making the bully cry out in pain and drop the egg.

It hit the hard-packed earth with a loud crack.

Overcome with curiosity, Maddy and Jimmy crowded around with Shane to look at what was inside.

Can you guess?

Nope, not a dinosaur.

It was… an eggplant. One of those small round purple eggplants, inside a dark purple space egg.

Look, don’t tell me that’s silly—I’m not writing this story—this is just what the two BFFs and the giant saw.

Shane brushed off the broken bits of shell, picked up the baby brinjal which was no longer hot, and had a good sniff.

Boring—it was only a dwarf aubergine!

Shane hated vegetables generally, and he especially hated eggplant. That and slimy ladies fingers—urgh he hated those two vegetables the most.

He threw the eggplant in a muddy puddle and stormed off, rubbing his hands on the back of his dark blue school shorts too short for his trunklike legs.

Maddy cried, “We’re late for Math!”

Jimmy rolled his eyes—Mr Moh would cane them for sure.

He looked sadly at the broken shell and the eggplant sitting in its puddle of mud, then took Maddy’s hand and they ran back to school.

Their hands stuck a bit—not sappy-sticky like fruit, but clicky-sticky like magnets. It felt super weird, but kinda nice.

Maddy looked back and saw that a squirrel had come to check out the space aubergine.

As they jogged back onto the school grounds, past the basketball courts, Jimmy said, “Isn’t it strange that the Hokkien word for eggplant is purple?”

Maddy asked, “Why is that strange? In English the word for orange is orange.”

Jimmy pushed back, “Yeah, but in Hokkien, an orange is called sour.”

They bickered on like this until they reached the classroom and found Shane squatting out in the corridor with one hand pinching each opposing ear, and Mr Moh standing at the door with a rattan in his hand.

The weirdest thing of all was, when that flexible rod came whipping down over Maddy’s hand—the standard capital punishment for coming back late from lunch—it didn’t hurt like usual. In fact it didn’t hurt at all.

Maddy had volunteered to be caned first, and she didn’t react at all. But when it was Jimmy’s turn to be caned and he felt nothing, he was so happily surprised that he laughed out loud.

This made Moh monstrously mad.

He cocked his ‘right arm of god’ up to full height, and the entire class sucked in their breath collectively—in unison, two dozen butts rose out of their seats to witness this Super Saiyan blow that will obliterate Jimmy’s palm, maybe even chop it clean off—except Maddy, who covered her eyes with both hands.

Peeking through the gap in her faintly glowing fingers, Maddy saw the cane come down in a brown blur—and break in two over Jimmy’s outstretched hand.

The whole class roared louder than when Malaysia had scored our one goal at the ASEAN Games Football last month.

The Principal whose office was next door came running to see who had died.

Everyone in 1C must’ve felt the epic detention session coming would be worth it, because they all cheered again—louder, if that was possible—when Jimmy raised his Iron Fist in triumph.

Before Mr Moh could complete having his heart attack, a great tearing sound came from the Reservoir Park, as loud as the world.

Everyone panicked—it sounded like the whole forest there was being uprooted at once.

They rushed out of the classroom to witness the impossible.

A squirrel—three storeys tall—was indeed pulling out tree after tree, taking a bite off the top branches like it was a tasty broccoli—okay, maybe not the best example—then flinging the broken trunks at their school.

Everyone bolted and ran out to the carpark, except Jimmy. He dashed back into the classroom to help Vinod. Vinod had had polio as a baby, and could only walk slowly with one crooked leg. Jimmy and Vinod linked arms and shoulders in their practised way, and exited the classroom swiftly with coordinated strides.

Maddy also stayed back, to clear chairs out of their way, and hold the classroom door which had the habit of swinging shut by itself.

Just as Jimmy and Vinod were stepping down the kerb, Maddy shrieked. The giant squirrel had just bit into a boulder the size and shape of their stationery cupboard, found it inedible, and tossed it back over his shoulder. This boulder now plummeted through the air directly at the friends.

Jimmy tried to shield Vinod as they both prepared to die.

But Maddy had decided to leap at the boulder—and she kept going, up and out, higher, faster—Maddy was flying… actually flying!

And as the little girl blazed through the air, energy crackled around her—like the way land lightning had skittered around the space egg—and she transformed…

Into a huge orange pumpkin, with arms and legs.

Fists together, Pumpkin Maddy met the boulder, and pulverized it.

She slowed her ascent, then stopped. Hovering mid-air, she turned to face the gawping pair on the ground, 40 feet below. Her eyes had become huge, spaced out over the front of her indestructible orange body.

Her famously big mouth had never been bigger, and she called down to Jimmy like through a megaphone, “Come help me catch the squirrel before he hurts anyone!”

In the same way that Maddy just knew what to do, Jimmy powered up. The same energy waves surrounded him, as he grew several times taller—into a huge green bittergourd—with swole arms and legs.

“What the hecking heck!” He shouted in dismay, “Bittergourd? It’s… bitter!”

Maddy cocked her arms, with fists on those round hips and frowned, “So what—we’re not gonna eat you? Now get up here—Squirelly is heading to town!”

Jimmy scoffed, “Really? That’s what you’re calling our first nemesis—Squirelly.”

Instinctively Captain Bittergourd went down on one knee and pressed his fist to the ground like he had seen all the superheroes do. He had always thought that was just for show, but now realised that this builds up some kind of an invisible catapult.

The air wobbled and gravity waves rippled in concentric circles out from his planted right fist and left foot. The concrete apron began to crackle and loosed bits started hopping around.

Willing the Earth itself to repel him, Jimmy exploded upwards after Maddy, leaving a fractured crater on the ground.

Thrown onto his butt by the displaced air, Vinod’s whoop of joy was swallowed by the sonic boom of the alpha flight of Captain Bittergourd and Pumpkin.

***

Jimmy yelled to Maddy, “Great Gourd, with my X-Ray Vision, I can see what caused this embiggening! Stuck deep in this massive marmot’s mouth is our alien aubergine!”

She called back, “Say no more, Cap—my cucurbit canniness has concocted a cunning plan!”

With that, Pumpkin flew right in front of the giant squirrel and flaunted her delicious curves.

In a flash, she was snapped up. Her diamond-hard shell proved uncrackable. Presently, Maddy found herself mooshed into the monstrous mammal’s maw, where she could easily extract the extraterrestrial eggplant.

In sync, Captain Bittergourd said “You’ll live!” and power-punched Squirrely’s solar plexus, causing it to cough Pumpkin out.

As soon as the Betelgeusian brinjal was brought back up, the squirrel reverted to its normal size... and the day was saved by our dynamic duo!

They flew back to the park at a leisurely pace—Jimmy carrying the squirming rodent and Maddy with a firm grip on the space eggplant.

But their adventure was not over—as our super friends approached their primary school, a weird dome awaited.

It glowed faintly, the air rippled at its margins. Within, time had stopped.

Teachers and students were frozen mid-stride as they had tried to escape its effects. Homework and other rubbish floated like flies in amber.

In the middle of this maelstrom, a strange silhouette stood—gorging on glowing hexagons hoovered from his hapless captives’ heads.

Of course—who else could it be but the Bully Shane! He too had been transformed—into a supervillain!

He now looked like a Big Mac—with jacked arms and legs.

“Cower before the might of…” Shane paused to munch on another cluster of illuminated tiles, “...The Eater of Days!”

Jimmy and Maddy, outside the prevent horizon, observed two things.

One, the dome was growing—fast.

Two, the flowing shapes resembled TV screens, and they showed moving pictures—Shane was gobbling up the memories of his victims.

The vegetal vigilantes looked at each other and understood without speaking what had to be done—force-feeding the space eggplant to Shane would overload and short-circuit his powers.

As a bonus, it would gross him out since he hated vegetables—especially eggplant.

Maddy gripped the space brinjal in both hands like a football and bent forward to spring into the field of unremembering...

...only to be tripped and pushed over by Jimmy.

“This is me paying you back, punkin’,” said the Captain, and he prised the cause of all their problems out of Maddy’s grasp.

As she wailed her complaint, he blasted into the dome with a crack as loud as uncreation.

Glowing hexagons torrented out of Jimmy’s head into the insatiable gob of the bully Shane—who cackled in triumph.

The rarebit fiend’s time-dilating singularity tried to freeze our hero but—inch by agonising inch—Captain Bittergourd fought, and clawed, and roared, and dragged his way forward in slow-motion.

Blood, sweat and tears beaded and floated off Jimmy.

In that herculean push, fifty-eight years of memories—past and future—were swallowed by the Eater of Days.

“Maddy—I can save everyone!”

Those were Jimmy’s last coherent words as he stuffed the alien aubergine in between Shane’s sesame seed-dotted buns.

***

She kisses you on the forehead and squeezes your hand—gently, mindful of your arthritic knuckles.

You squeeze back with the last of your strength and muster the voice that you’ve used more often tonight than you have in weeks.

You croak, “Goodnight… Xianyi.”

Her face dissolves in tears—you remember her name. You remember her.

She chokes on a word that cannot escape her throat, but you know was “Daddy”.

You are all out of tears—the best you can manage is to crinkle your cheeks into a smile.

“My punkin’.”

Madeleine gives you a hug. She holds it, and holds it, as if it’s the last you’ll share.

You understand, somewhere deep inside, that it’s the last you’ll remember.

The last bedtime story either of you would tell the other when the night seems too big for sleep.

You feel no grief for the disintegration of the man you were—you feel only gratitude, to have had this chance to make the last stand against the Eater of Days.

Captain Bittergourd and Pumpkin, together again for the final time.

It’s not a fairytale ending.

But it’s good enough.

***

—END TRANSMISSION—

+++

She dropped the money to the floor and undid the sash around her dressing gown. Let it fall open. She was naked under it.

I stepped forward, swiftly closing the gap between us. She drew in a sharp breath as my hands went to her lapels.

Back to Chapter 1

I looked out the window at Shannon International as the plane nosed to the gate—the low scrub of County Clare flat and grey in every direction. This wasn’t the gleaming hub of Pudong I’d just left. This wasn’t Doha.

After I crossed the skybridge into the terminal, I found myself hunching—the low ceilings and tired carpeting belonged to a different century. At Immigration, the windows in their steel frames shuddered against the Atlantic gales.

No luggage this time, not even a carry-on. I would acquire the pistol later.

***

The 25-minute drive down the N18 to Limerick was a transition from the wild to the industrial. The faded wall-sized poster in the Arrivals Hall, “Forty Shades of Green”, was a false promise. Near Bunratty Castle, I glimpsed the Shannon Estuary—a flat, grey stripe, more pipeline than river.

The sun was rising over the estates in Moyross—rows and rows of identical concrete-block terraced houses, peeling pebble-dash walls, satellite dishes bolted to crumbly brick, communal “greens” that were mostly mud.

A woman with short brown hair stood at her front door, arms crossed over a faded dressing gown, eyes so sick from crying they struggled to stay open.

“You came,” she said. It was almost a question.

***

Siobhan pushed laundry aside on a line hung across her kitchen, apologising as she relit the gas ring on a chipped enamel cooker.

In the humid air, she placed before me a cup of very dark tea, and a dog-eared, damp photo of two handsome boys.

“This here is Liam. He’s autistic... on the spectrum, as the doctors say. All this… trouble, was because he’d heard the moor witch sing, that one time last Christmas. He played it back to me on his phone, but there were the Callahan dogs barking. And heavy rain. And that old chair he liked to sit on in their room, creaking, creaking because he rocked himself, did our Liam.”

—Please, Mrs... Murphy?

“Kelly. Murphy was my husband. He... left. The boys carry his surname... carried...”

—Mrs Kelly. Did I hear correctly, your son Liam, he had a phone recording of the Banshee’s song?

“A horrible keening wail, it was. Started low, then went higher and higher... He didn’t get half of it though. Said the moor witch started walking away, got too far. I remember that night. It must have been that same night. Our Liam, he woke me up. I was all in a fright and he said he needed to go outside. Of course I refused to open the door. I... Oh Mother of God, if I had gone out with him to get that phone recording-”

She buried her face in one hand while the other snatched blindly along the vinyl-covered table for the photo. I lifted my cup out of her way. She held it to her cheek like a handkerchief.

—Mrs Kelly... Siobhan. I need that recording.

She choked, “They never found his phone.”

—I’m sorry, Siobhan. I know you’ve told me what happened next, when we spoke last week, but I need to hear every detail now.

“W-well, that morning. It must have been six—the sun did not rise for an hour or two after—I... I was awakened by that... that singing. Again. How sad, it was. How sad.” Her voice was flat now. Beyond grief. “I went to check on the boys, and... I saw the front door stood open. Liam must have found my keys—I hadn’t try to hide them, they were just in my handbag. I never thought, never thought he would...”

I placed my hand over hers to stop it drumming on the tabletop.

“Both their beds were empty. Paddy only five, and he would follow Liam to the end of the world. I screamed. Dom came rushing out.”

—Dominic O’Brien? The Deputy.

“Y-yes, he’s with the Guards. Dom and I... I was so lonely, you understand. His wife doesn’t know. You, you don’t need to...?”

—No, ma’am. I only need to borrow his weapon. Did you...

Siobhan nodded, took from the bread bin something wrapped in a tea towel. It was laid down with a deadly weight on the kitchen table between us.

—I’ll return it safely. Thank you.

“We ran straight to the woods. Curraghchase. It’s half an hour’s hike from round the back of the estates.” Eyes fixed on the swaddled firearm, Siobhan’s voice had taken on its metallic cadence.

“We find my boys, half in a stream. Torn. Torn! The Banshee kneeling beside the wee one. Beside… Paddy. She was... crying. Looked like she’d been crying the whole night. When Dom pulled her to her feet and screamed what happened what happened, her voice was raw. The hounds, she said, over and over. The hounds.”

—There are feral dogs in the woods?

“That’s what the prosecutors said. When they released the bog keener. They said the cause of death was them animals. There was no... ‘DNA’ from... her.”

I picked up the gun and put it in my pocket.

—These monsters. They don’t need to touch to kill.

Siobhan’s eyes grew bright again, shining stones set in her skull. “It was her song, wasn’t it? The Banshee’s song—it killed my beautiful boys, didn’t it??”

—My... associate and I... believe so. We’ve been unable to find any recording to determine what sort of frequencies can take a life. But the Banshee’s role in history has been long established.

“You... believe me, then? You actually believe these monsters exist?”

—Monsters are all too real, Siobhan. I will see every last one of them out.

I stood.

“W-wait,” Siobhan said, “You- you haven’t taken the payment.” From a coffee can, she produced a roll of cash tied with a rubber band. “But... I didn’t...” A hot tear rolled down her cheek. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I don’t have all of it. I’ll, I’ll get you the rest as soon as...”

I closed both my hands over hers, and pushed the money gently back.

—Keep it. It’s not about payment. It never was.

Siobhan held the roll to her chest, confused. “W-what is it then? What can I...”

She dropped the money to the floor and undid the sash around her dressing gown. Let it fall open. She was naked underneath.

I stepped forward, swiftly closing the gap between us. She drew in a sharp breath as my hands went to her lapels.

I drew the gown closed, tilted my head—I towered over her—and kissed her lightly on top of her head.

—Your beautiful boys will be avenged.

Then I turned and walked out of her kitchen.

***

Underfoot the ground shifted, from cracked pavement to scrub and broken limestone, then to peat bog. The ground sucked at my heavy laced boots, which were impervious to the thorny gorse.

I stepped quietly towards the abandoned camper van. A 1978 Volkswagen, rusted to the colour of dried blood, half-sunk into the soft earth. A tarp over it flapped in the dying wind.

No sound came from within.

I pulled on thin leather gloves, unwrapped the service revolver from Siobhan’s tea towel, and checked the cylinder. Two-handed grip, held low, I prodded the thin laminated door open.

The Banshee sat on a half-collapsed bunk—she was expecting me.

The smell of wet cardboard, sour milk, and the sweet rot of the surrounding bog hung in the cramped interior. Lit by a single lantern.

She pointed at a rusted bench seat in between half a dozen plastic bags filled with round pebbles. Her rheumy eyes were calm, but fixed on my weapon.

Her long silver hair stood wild, face parched like a riverbed in drought. She opened a mouth with cracked and yellowed teeth, many missing, to speak.

“You came.” The same words Siobhan had greeted me with.

This did not surprise me. I was ready for anything. I rested my gun hand on my knee, but kept its muzzle leveled at the Banshee.

“Gráinne,” she said, as if reading my mind.

I nodded, but did not offer my own name.

“I didn’t lead those boys to the dark,” she whispered, her words skittering out like dead leaves. “I heard them screaming from the ridge. The baying of the hounds. By the time I reached the ditch, the older one was cold. The little one... he was looking at his own life spilling onto the night-black grass. He was... so scared... I sang to him—Paddy—sang to ease his passage.”

—What... are you? Tell me. Tell me how you came about. Before this van. Before these bags of stones.

Gráinne gasped. “You... you want to know? To know... me?”

I nodded.

Her eyes drifted away from the gun, from her murder, and fixed on a point somewhere behind my left ear. When she spoke again, her voice had become that of a maiden.

***

The Great Famine, they called it. Nearly two hundred years ago now. We also had... The Great Frost.

It wasn’t a failure of the crops alone. The rivers froze solid. Birds dropped from the sky. The potatoes, stored in pits, turned to black mush as the earth became a tomb.

Our village was just over yonder hills. It was the winter of my fourteenth birthday—the village elders had exhausted their prayers to a silent God. They turned back to the Older Spirit that lived in the limestone caves. That year, I became the Tithe to the Cailleach.

I was chosen as the First-Born of the Spring, solely because my father had once been prosperous. I was the village’s best gift—to return to the earth.

They performed a Marriage to the Land. I was dressed in a gown of unbleached linen and led to a hollowed-out oak at the edge of the Curraghchase. They made my mother bind my hands with briars—and my father kissed me once, then left me in the tree.

I was the living bribe to make hag of winter release the sun.

The Veiled One soon came—blue-skinned, I recall, clear as yesterday—she had a single eye. In her fist, a long staff—the Slachdan. Pleased with the soul planted by my people, she claimed the debt with the last of my warmth.

I froze then. I froze until I was glass, and when I shattered, it was with the sound of a song. I sang for myself, and then I found myself singing for all the others who had died that winter. There were thousands of them.

The Cailleach struck the ground a final time, the Slachdan broke in two, and this brought the thaw.

You asked how I came to be? A Bean Sídhe, a Woman of the Fairie Mounds? Because I was sacrificed to the land my soul was never released—I became a psychopomp, a conductor of souls, a Herald to the Otherworld.

You think my keening ends lives? It does not—my lamenting is that which thins the veil between the living world and the afterlife. I'm not a predator. I have only ever been a guide—to ensure souls don’t get lost in the liminal space between worlds.

I sense your question—was I always in this broken state? No. Over two centuries, as belief in the gods faded, my own being atrophied. I have always been nothing but a vehicle—a machine—that has been forgotten by the Cailleach, and by my own folk, all these years.

I am tired, Hunter.

I am weary beyond measure.

***

My grip on the pistol relaxed, and I let it point to the mouldy floor of the camper van.

—You... seek release?

Gráinne squeezed her eyes shut, as tears spilled out. They are soaked by her cheeks. “More than anything.” Then she turned to me. “But I cannot sing the Last Song, unless asked.”

—I will gladly request you to do so.

“No,” she looked back down, “you don’t understand. This... would also be the last song that you will ever hear.”

—I insist.

Startled, Gráinne lifted her eyes to me again. “Do… do you understand what you are asking?”

I nodded firmly, and slipped the gun back into my coat pocket.

She stood up, walked tentatively to me. “Will... will you... hold me?”

I stepped forward without hesitation and took the Banshee in my arms. Her wet coat and layers of skirts stank. She was ice cold. Light as a feather.

Gráinne rested her head on a human shoulder for the first time in two hundred years. She began to speak in a low register, which grew into a chant.

“By the Ancient Compact, and on the prayer of this mortal, I sing to thee, Lord. I offer this, my Last Song. The Song of-”

***

In the end she collapsed. I lowered her gently to the floor, then removed Shaaki’s noise-cancelling earbuds, relieved they had worked. I looked at my phone, satisfied, then thumbed the last number dialled.

Siobhan answered on the first ring.

—It’s done.

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***

Featuring (in Order of Appearance) the Voice Talents of as the Narrator and as the Amnesiac Friend, and , , and as Themselves.

You walk hesitantly up to the bar and take a high-stool. Three men are there, drinking beer. A woman pours wine. You draw back your hoodie and clear your throat. All four of them start as one to see you—your forehead wrapped round several times in bandages.

“H-hello,” says , “I-I’m told that we’re all friends? I’ve been in the hospital... hit-and-run last week. I-I’m sorry but… I don’t remember you.”

After they all shout and sympathise and—carefully—clap your back, you explain, “The doctors said my memory should come back once the b-brain swelling goes down, but they said it would help i-if I could get friends to tell me something meaningful o-or… secret… about myself.”

James leans in close and says, “Your wife’s name is Clara. She’s already up. This is normal. You find a card under your glasses on the nightstand—Dr Hilda Ngu, Somnologist. You have no idea who this is, and brace yourself for another fight.”

continues, “It starts low in your gut, a funeral dirge that blackens the sky and brings sheets of rain. As it continues a higher tenor emerges, which speaks of hearth, home, and half-remembered days. Still higher you sing, reaching for a soprano speaking of rebirth, of the wonders that come from legacy, from story.”

Then chimes in, “I’m going to tell you a story about a building and the people inside it. About what October did to them and what they did back. But right now, while you still have breath that belongs to you, I need you to feel your feet. Feel the ground. Feel the fault holding and the rivers meeting and the old pressure underneath everything. Good. Now you’re listening.”

After a pregnant pause, looks up with glowing eyes and chants, “You poor soul, you poor dear, come down, come down, and be loved by us, be cherished by us, be with us. And one day, when the stars are just right, when their blue turns into a brilliant crimson, the depths will rise, and you will rise with it.”

And you do rise—with a little help from your friends.

***

POSTSCRIPT

This idea for this Post occurred to me because four of us had by cosmic happenstance last month each written a story using the second person narrative—which is uncommon—so I came up with a little framing sequence by which selected lines from our individual tales would be told to a mutual friend. The resulting mix was, as you would expect, a bit surreal but hopefully intriguing enough for you to click through on each of the stories linked.

As for the recording, the five of us met over Zoom for a “table read” today—nailed it on the second take—and had an absolute blast. We had all communicated with each other over Notes and Comments before this, but today we chatted live for the first time—it was fantastic to put faces to voices and the hour we spent catching up on each other’s stories literally flew past.

Gentle readers, I can confirm that each and every one of the cast was incredibly handsome and beautiful!

We would have considered a Substack Live session—inviting y’all to the party—but, alas, that’s limited to three participants. #DearSubstack please expand the number of Live participants to, say, six.

Please like/ restack/ drop a comment with your bouquets and brickbats—we would love to do more audio dramas if there’s an audience!

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+++

As if on cue, his phone Dings! with a notification from Xtrology, “Happy Birthday, Cancer! The Moon, your ruling planet, suggests a coming shift in perspective—a long journey beckons? Wear comfortable shoes, you may be on your feet longer than you expect.” He half-regrets buying and enshittifying the horoscope app last quarter.

He snaps a photo of the card nestled in the velvet. Then he voice-dictates a post, “Disrupting the fourth dimension next. Let that sink in.”

I

4:20:00 P.M.—28 June 2031

What does the man who has everything give himself on his 60th birthday?

The answer arrives in a case carved from the horn of an extinct Siberian Unicorn. Within, Model Zero—the 100-year-old prototype of the first Rolex Oyster Perpetual ever built, quietly bartered with its previous owner—a private collector—for two seats on a private Crew Dragon round-trip to the ISS.

The watch is significantly more battered and worn—full of nicks and scratches—than its new owner had expected, but he supposes that adds to its character. The elegant letters “EM”, etched into the back of the priceless object, catch the light. The initials are widely believed to stand for Emile’s Movement—after the inventor of its revolutionary 360-degree rotor—but the richest man in the world knows better. It could be nothing less than a sly whisper across the century-long gulf—from the gods of time and space themselves—intended for his ears alone.

He digs his toes into the coarse hair of his rug of woolly mammoth hide, liberated last summer from the Alaskan permafrost by the same global warming he claims to have defeated. He repeats his mantra for today, “60 is the new 30.”

As if on cue, his phone Dings! with a notification from Xtrology, “Happy Birthday, Cancer! The Moon, your ruling planet, suggests a coming shift in perspective—a long journey beckons? Wear comfortable shoes, you may be on your feet longer than you expect.” He half-regrets buying and enshittifying the horoscope app last quarter.

He snaps a photo of the card nestled in the velvet. Then he voice-dictates a post, “Disrupting the fourth dimension next. Let that sink in.”

Before he can command Post, a portal opens in the air, as if spacetime itself had been collapsed by the black hole of his ego mass. He drops his phone, and is sucked in.

The portal snaps shut. It is 4:21:38 PM.

II

1931

Hermann Aegler walked excitedly into the Head Designer’s Studio and clapped his nephew on the back. “You did it!”

Emile Borer looked up and beamed, almost in tears. “Finally, Uncle. The Oyster Perpetual.” He offered two timepieces cupped in slightly trembling hands.

Aegler turned them both around and around, minutely comparing one to the other. “My God. You’ve exactly replicated this artifact with perfect fidelity. This is nothing short of a work of art. And you’ve tested the 360-degree rotor?”

Borer could barely contain himself, “One full week—it didn’t lose a second!”

Apart from the fact that one bore signs of heavy wear and tear, and the inscription “EM” on its back, the watches were identical. Aegler paused over the etched letters, “Did you ever find out what these initials stand for?”

Borer shook his head. “I do hope this will be a top-seller for Rolex, Uncle.”

“Indubitably!” The older man waved to an assistant hovering by. When the youth approached, Aegler handed him first the new creation, “This goes into production nine AM tomorrow.” He then passed over the old and battered sample. “This goes into the Vault—label it Model Zero. Quickly now.”

Borer watched with pride as the assistant jogged off. Then he said to his uncle with a shy smile, “And now... I must remind you of your promise.”

Aegler shifted in his suit slightly, “My promise?”

Borer patted the watchmaker’s stool next to his along the workbench—a small metal plate bore the uncle’s name. “You remember—you said, once I reverse-engineered the sample, you would tell me how you acquired it.”

Aegler sighed and drew a keychain from his pocket. Among the keys, he selected one which unlocked the flat drawer at his old workspace. From within that, he removed an aged-looking sheaf of paper and an old journal. He gazed at them for a long breath. “Very well... very well.”

Aegler took his traditional seat and continued in a sombre tone, “You have earned the right to know, and... I suppose I have earned the right to unburden my shoulders of this incredible tale. It has been thirty years.”

“You mean ten years?”

“Ten since I handed the sample to you to solve the engineering conundrum... which I myself puzzled twenty years over.”

“I, I don’t comprehend...”

III

Hermann Aegler speaks:

Listen, all shall be explained in due course—although I am unable to warrant that you will accept the veracity, or indeed the sanity, of every word I next utter.

1900

It was the ninth day of January. I’ll never forget the date. I had just turned 25 the previous month. Picture if you will my joyous surprise to receive a telegram from England—from one of my favourite Authors, Mr. H. G. Wells—requesting my most urgent expert attention, with all disbursements provided. Apparently my modest achievements on horological innovations had attained a small measure of notoriety abroad. Honoured, I swiftly undertook the multi-staged journey as required then at the Turn of the Century—Bienne to Calais via Paris by train; then the Channel crossing to Dover on paddle steamer; and steam engine into Victoria Station; finished with a ride—dramatic under pelting rain and bone-shaking thunderclaps in a hansom cab drawn by a wild-eyed steed—to Pall Mall, where the celebrated wordsmith anxiously awaited my arrival by a crackling fire in the Smoking Room of the Reform Club.

Formal introductions aside, and with profuse apologies in consideration of how fatigued I must have been from the long passage, but as “Time was of the Essence”, Wells dived straight to the point. He glanced around the lightning-punctuated shadows warily, then drew from his waistcoat a large, classic fob on a fine, burnished chain. The shock lay within the case, once he had sprung it open: a watch unlike anything I had ever seen before. There was no other way to phrase it—this was an artifact from the future. When Wells confided, leaning in close and in a hushed tone, that he had worn this, hidden in an old fob case for over five years now, and never wound it, yet it has kept perfect time, I could not help but blurt out that ‘twould likely be fifty, nay, a hundred, years before our finest clockmakers, my humble self included, could produce a perpetual-motion engine as perfect as this. Since Wells was notoriously the author of The Time Machine, I was forced to discreetly enquire if his titular contraption was real, whether the ‘chrono-travel’ described in his Romance was possible, and had he obtained this evidence of technological magic from the year 2000?

The venerable gentleman sighed deeply, re-lit his pipe, and ordered another round of Brandy before he spoke. The following is, as closely as I can recall and without any intentional embellishments, the Secret History of Spring Heeled Jack as conjured by an Oriental Wizard from the Fourth Dimension and as told to me on that dark and stormy night.

IV

H. G. Wells speaks:

1893

One fine autumnal evening, as I was quitting this very Club, two gentlemen came briskly towards me and, without so much as a “How do you do?”, each laid hold of an arm in a fashion that admitted of no resistance. I was informed, in tones meant to allay anxiety, that I had nothing whatever to fear; yet the presence of a pearl-handled revolver, very plainly visible in the other gentleman’s shoulder holster, rendered this statement less persuasive than it might otherwise have been. I should add, at this juncture, my observation that both gentlemen were uniformly clad entirely in black in a manner that suggested either excessive sobriety or deliberate effect.

Once we were enclosed within the narrow privacy of a hansom, the man with the pearl-handled revolver introduced himself as Mr. J—— and his companion as Mr. K——. My Particular Expertise, it appeared, was required in connection with a matter engaging the attention of Her Majesty’s Secret Service—a threat, I was given to understand, not merely to the Empire but, if their hints were to be credited, to the Civilised World itself. Beyond this they would say nothing; and during the remainder of our journey to the Tower I was left to such conjectures as an uneasy imagination might supply.

As my Particular Expertise lies in the fabrication of what are called Scientific Romances, the only explanation that suggested itself to me, in my confusion, was that these gentlemen had somehow come into possession of certain private memoranda of mine—preliminary sketches for a fanciful narrative concerning an invasion from the Red Planet. It even crossed my mind—though I blush to record it—that I might possess some obscure prophetic faculty, and that my Martians were not inventions but anticipations. Had I, without knowing it, divined that some communication with extraterrestrial beings had in fact been effected, and that proof of their existence lay even now concealed somewhere in the neighbourhood of Great Tower Hill, where our hansom had just drawn up?

I was conveyed, not into the Tower of London as I had anticipated, but to a modest circular structure which I immediately recognised as the entrance kiosk to the Tower Subway. If memory serves me correctly, this was the earliest of the deep tubular railways—constructed some twenty years ago—an iron cylinder driven through the London clay by means of Greathead’s celebrated shield. In its original form the line employed a small wooden carriage accommodating a dozen passengers, drawn to and fro through the tunnel by a cable worked from stationary steam engines. I have a dim recollection of riding in it as a very small boy.

The enterprise, however, proved financially unsound and was discontinued after only a brief period of operation. The tunnel thereafter was adapted for foot traffic and has since served as a pedestrian thoroughfare beneath the Thames. As recently as last year I passed this way, paying the customary halfpenny toll to traverse the quarter-mile passage. On remarking upon the queue, I was informed by the attendant that the Subway had at one time conveyed upwards of a million persons annually, though its future prospects were thought likely to diminish upon the completion of Tower Bridge.

Mr. J—— having paid our toll, and I remaining firmly in the custody of Mr. K——, all descended by a narrow wooden spiral stair—some ninety-six steps in all, the original lifts having long since been removed—and came at length into the tunnel itself: a cylindrical iron bore of approximately seven feet in diameter, dimly illuminated by a single row of gas jets. The atmosphere was close and faintly misted; moisture stood upon the riveted plates; our footfalls returned to us with a hollow reverberation. Through the intervening clay—some thirty feet—there came at intervals the muted tremor of churning river traffic.

Not halfway along the tunnel, one of my guides halted to permit the only other pedestrians—a couple of advanced years—to slowly pass. When we were again alone he produced from his waistcoat a heavy iron key, the bow of which was fashioned in the form of a five-petaled cinquefoil and attached to a substantial chain. This he inserted into a narrow aperture set beneath the word “FIVE” stencilled in moss-green upon the iron lining of the tunnel—a marking which, to the ordinary traveller, would have conveyed no particular significance.

To my surprise a section of the cylindrical wall yielded inward with scarcely a sound, revealing a passage altogether unlike the damp bore we had just traversed. The atmosphere was dry; the ironwork newly painted; and the space illuminated by electric arc lamps whose bluish radiance lent the chamber a severity almost surgical in character.

Here I was requested, with punctilious courtesy, to empty my pockets and place their contents within a mahogany coffer, which was secured and restored to its recess. Thereafter we proceeded through a further door into a chamber of considerable extent, where I was presented to the officer in command, one Mr. M——.

It was then explained to me—with a composure that I found disquieting—that the authorities had not detained me on account of Martians. They had, instead, secured the person of a certain scientific malefactor whose peculiar condition I had once imagined in fiction:

The Invisible Man.

Not a man given to circumlocution, Mr. M—— proceeded at once to the substance of the matter. He described himself as an Intelligence Consultant retained by Her Majesty’s Government in connection with problems of an unusual or scientific character, and lately seconded to Special Branch to assist in the apprehension of a singular offender.

For nearly ten years, it appeared, a figure of uncertain description had been reported in various districts of London—appropriating articles of clothing, assaulting isolated pedestrians, and eluding capture in a manner so extraordinary that the populace had revived for him the appellation Spring-Heeled Jack, in reference to his alleged prodigious leaps across roofs and alleyways.

A communication from Spitalfields had at last brought the constabulary to a narrow court where the suspect was discovered in a state of collapse.

The appellation proved insufficient. The man—if man he was—though clad piecemeal in pilfered garments, was observed by several constables to fluctuate in visibility, presenting at one instant a coherent outline and at the next dissolving, as it were, into partial transparency.

During his conveyance to these clandestine quarters, he was reported to have passed intermittently beyond the confines of the cot and even, for moments together, to have intersected the solid panels of the carriage itself—like a phantom imperfectly superimposed upon our world. Among the officers he soon acquired another nickname: the Invisible Man, borrowed, I was informed with some embarrassment, from a certain romance of my own.

Lord Kelvin had, of course, been consulted. His Lordship, after personal observation, remarked upon what he termed irregular “phase displacements,” accompanied by static manifestations and disturbances in neighbouring telegraph apparatus. The prisoner—by then in an alarming condition from exposure and neglect—exhibited a marked diminution of these phenomena when in proximity to substantial ironwork connected to earth, or when enclosed within conducting lattices.

Acting upon Lord Kelvin’s advice, an electrically screened chamber was therefore constructed, following in principle the experiments of Faraday. The copper-mesh enclosure, though imperfect, succeeded in limiting the subject’s excursions; radiant or etheric disturbances persisted, yet he no longer vanished from custody.

I was then provided with a heavy coat of the sort one associates with polar expeditions. Mr. M—— explained that the temperature in the immediate vicinity of the prisoner was appreciably depressed. Lord Kelvin had ventured the hypothesis that the individual functioned as a species of entropic engine, abstracting energy from his surroundings.

I recalled, not without unease, his Lordship’s earlier lectures upon the dissipation of energy and the eventual thermal exhaustion of the universe, and also the researches of Clausius, who, in 1860, introduced the term entropy in expounding the Second Law. Only recently I had revisited those very notes while contemplating a speculative narrative upon the ultimate fate of matter.

Mr. M—— admitted that, after the distinguished President of the Royal Society had exhausted his own considerable resources in the matter, Lord Kelvin suggested that the author of certain Scientific Romances—who had ventured to treat time as a Fourth Dimension—might profitably be consulted: namely, myself. The conjecture advanced, though without formal endorsement, was that the prisoner did not achieve invisibility by optical contrivance, but by some distortion of spatial relation; that each particle of his substance was displaced along a dimension not ordinarily accessible to us, and thereby rendered intermittent in our own.

I confess I was rendered nearly speechless by this recital; yet my astonishment did not arise solely from its scientific audacity. In the mahogany coffer containing the effects removed from my person lay a letter received that very day from Samoa, bearing the hand of my old friend Mr. R. L. Stevenson—a letter recounting how he had, with his own eyes, witnessed an Oriental conjurer summon into visible manifestation the very figure popularly styled Spring-Heeled Jack.

V

1931

At this point Hermann Aegler produced one of the folded sheets he had kept under lock and key for more than three decades.

His nephew, Emile Borer—the watchmaker who had lately perfected a perpetual self-winding mechanism for their firm, Rolex—drew in his breath.
“Is that-”

The uncle inclined his head, and began to read.

From the desk of Robert Louis Stevenson, Esq.

19th October, 1893

My dear Mr. Wells,

My illness worsens, and I fear I do not have long. I have kept a troubling secret for many years, and I must impose upon our friendship to unburden myself before my time is up.

In the winter of 1885, at my house in Bournemouth, I was visited one late afternoon by an Oriental gentleman in a state of agitation. He introduced himself as Takashi Fuyuki.

Fuyuki San’s patent application, having been rejected by the newly constituted Tokyo Patent Bureau—recorded, I am told, in a separate volume under the melancholy heading “Rejected Patent No. 1 (Fuyuki, T.)”—had, but a week prior, likewise been refused by the London Patent Office. He implored me to intercede on his behalf.

As he appeared rational and well-spoken, I invited him to take tea and explain the nature of his invention. Once seated in my drawing room, he withdrew from his case a single sheet of thick, yellowed paper of the sort employed in Oriental calligraphy. It was traversed by innumerable scored lines, each marked with a minute Japanese character, written in a hand almost microscopic.

I inquired whether the entirety of his design was contained within that single page.

“On the contrary,” he replied. “this is the invention.”

It was, he declared, a time machine.

At this, I confess I began to question my judgment in admitting him; yet before I could frame an excuse, he commenced folding the sheet along its prescribed lines, the minute inscriptions marking the succession of folds—a practice he termed origami.

“I shall demonstrate,” he said, “what both patent offices refused to witness.”

As he worked, he explained that the device was no invention of his own, but an ancestral relic entrusted to him only upon his father’s death the year previous. Like his father before him, he had been sworn to secrecy, lest the machine be misused. Yet both his father and mother had lately succumbed to tuberculosis, which was widespread in Japan. Having studied the illness, Fuyuki was convinced that a cure lay within reach of the coming century. Had the machine been used—had a remedy been obtained from the future—they might yet have lived.

The folded form began slowly to assume a shape which I cannot adequately describe. Branch-like structures curved inward upon themselves, suggesting a cone whose surfaces had been reversed, as if the geometry itself had suffered inversion—as if a tree were drawing back into its own trunk; planes inverted; volumes appeared to exist where no material seemed present. It offended one’s instinct for three dimensions.

It was entirely eerie and I was casting about for some polite pretext to conclude the interview when the atmosphere of the room altered abruptly.

The temperature fell. A sound—like a piercing whistle, like a mistral wind confined within the skull—assailed me, though it was apprehended by no ordinary faculty of hearing.

“There,” Fuyuki said.

Above the strange sculpture, the air itself seemed to rupture.

It was real, Herbert—time was indeed the Fourth Dimension, as you had yourself proposed, and my Oriental guest had breached it with nothing more than a sheet of folded parchment.

The rupture gathered into form: a trembling distortion in the atmosphere, as though space were being drawn thin. From that aperture there fell upon my carpet the figure of a man.

Fuyuki stared no less aghast than I.

He later confided that on two prior occasions—once under his father’s supervision and once alone—his “origami time machine” (I record the phrase faithfully, though in setting it down I feel the cold beckoning hand of lunacy) had yielded no more than transient apertures: mere glimpses of scenes yet to come—never before had aught living crossed the threshold.

The moaning being upon my floor flickered. His outline wavered as though imperfectly anchored to our reality. We endeavoured to ask his name, yet though he struggled to speak through what seemed agony and disorientation, he could not articulate so much as a single word in full.

When we attempted to raise him and convey him to a bed, he recoiled in panic and fled. Without opening the door, he passed through it as through mist.

We gave pursuit into the street. Under the gaslight, I saw him trample over a child—leaving the girl screaming on the cobbles—and then the figure shimmered forward, reappearing several yards distant at each interval, until he vanished around a corner.

We followed for two streets only, and then lost him entirely.

My report to the police the following morning was received with ill-concealed amusement.

Mr. Fuyuki departed from me ashen and resolved. He declared he must locate the traveller and restore him to his proper time. Soon thereafter there arose in the city rumours of a leaping phantom—Spring-Heeled Jack reborn—capable of traversing walls and roofs, leaving theft and injury in his wake.

The episode impressed itself upon me as a species of waking nightmare. I sought to exorcise it by composing a cautionary tale of scientific ambition unrestrained. You will know the work to which I refer.

My dear Herbert, I entreat you: take this confession in earnest. If I have erred in silence, do not compound that error. Seek, if not the Fourth Dimensional Man, then the custodian of the folded machine—Mr. Takashi Fuyuki.

I remain,
Your faithful friend,
R. L. Stevenson

VI

1931

Night had fallen. All the other staff and management of the Rolex workshop had retired for the day. The uncle and nephew remained on their watchmakers’ stools—now lit under single overhead pendant lamps over each of them—and having forgotten about their evening repast entirely.

Once again Hermann Aegler opened the locked drawer at his workspace. This time he withdrew a thin hardbacked notebook held together with an elasticated band. He opened it at a bookmarked page, and glanced up once at Emil Borer.

“The holder of the time machine made an effort to write this part of his journal in English—it’s... less than perfect.” The older man reads. “This succeeds an earlier entry indicated as 1894.”

From the Journal of Takashi Fuyuki

To be safe I use only his initials. RLS has passed away. I read this in the newspaper today. Now I know nobody in this country. I do not know if he ever told anyone what we have done. What I have done.

I write this entry in English now, in case something happens to myself.

I am custodian of a time machine. It works by folding paper. Ori-gami.

I do not know how to explain better than this.

RLS is dead. Tonight I must fold the machine again. I must attempt to repair my error.

The accident—a man fell through from the future.

If I open the portal again, will he appear suddenly in my room and fall back inside? I think not. I do not believe the machine can call back a traveller who is lost in time.

But I must attempt this. Otherwise I will never forgive myself.

***

It is later.

I folded the machine and a window appeared. Nobody fell through and—of course—I am still here.

The portal this time was only like a window. I did not feel the breath of the future as before. It did not open to the same moment in time that I saw when the man first arrived.

It was another time entirely.

I saw the Earth. It was burned, broken. The sun in the sky was a vast fire, perhaps ten times or one hundred times larger than the sun we know.

I have read of this prediction before. Lord Kelvin and other honourable scientists describe it as the heat death of the universe.

I unfolded the ori-gami very quickly and the window closed, but I saw enough.

I saw, not only the far future, when every atom slows and stops forever.

No.

Not through the portal, but in my mind’s eye, I saw a nearer future in which imperial governments—England, or even Japan—might seize my machine and turn the entropy of the end of time into a weapon.

If I had waited longer, that window would widen. The “absolute zero vacuum,” as Lord Kelvin described it, would drain every form of energy from this room.

The warmongers would not stop with a room.

A simple funnel placed at the mouth of the portal would become an entropy cannon. I can see its design very clearly in my mind, though I am no engineer of weapons.

If aimed at an approaching army—or even at an entire city, for there may be no limit of scale—it would siphon every particle of energy into the end-time.

What remains would be frozen atoms.

A fuyu-ki. A winter wood.

That is my family name.

Now I understand.

Fuyuki is our name, and our curse.

This machine must never fall into the wrong hands.

I would destroy it immediately, but it has one final task. An innocent man has been stranded in our time. I must complete my duty and return him to his proper age.

Only then can the cursed paper be destroyed.

***

It has been one week since the last entry, when I opened a window and gazed upon the end of all life.

I have made progress in my quest.

By daring to inquire at the office of a halfpenny newspaper I attracted the attention of another writer, HGW. RLS once mentioned this man to me and said he could be trusted.

Through a contact at the Daily Mail I now wait beneath the Watts Memorial in Postman’s Park for HGW.

Two men approach. One wears a carnation in his lapel, as described to me.

This must be HGW.

***

We now drink tea at a café on Fleet Street. A hansom is already on its way to collect us.

HGW, together with a specialist friend who has come from abroad, has given me the good news.

The Time Traveller has been captured and is being held in a secret place.

***

It is the next day. I have already lost track of dates.

Yesterday everything became chaos.

When the three of us were brought to see the Time Traveller he was exactly as I remembered from the night he arrived years ago. His body continued to flicker every few seconds, but the bars of the strange cage they had constructed prevented him from escaping.

When the prisoner saw us, he became far more agitated than ever before. He sprang to his feet and began shouting, “T—T—T—” but could not form even a single word. I imagined he must have recognised me, and was trying to say my name “Takashi”. Perhaps I had introduced myself when he first fell from the future.

The Time Traveller then snatched at his own wrist and, shifting in and out of existence, managed to unbuckle a small device. He tossed it through the bars of the cage towards our foreign visitor. The throw fell short, but HGW reached forward and caught it.

“Stop,” I screamed.

I could wait no longer. I insisted they allow me inside the cage with the prisoner. That was my only condition if they wished me to demonstrate the machine—that my first task was to send this unfortunate time-lost creature home.

The man called M—after some argument with HGW that I could not fully understand—finally agreed.

The Time Traveller retreated from me in terror. I could not blame him. He stopped only when his back struck the bars of the cage. The metal crackled with sparks, yet he could not pass through.

Quickly—without concern for my own safety, for no one could say what might happen if the Time Traveller attacked—I began folding the ori-gami.

I thanked my ancestors when the folds opened the portal to the correct time.

I saw again the same future chamber, with the strange ragged carpet and the enormous window looking out upon shining silver towers. The Time Traveller cried out once more in his stuttering, chopped language, and hurled himself through the portal.

When I saw him collapse upon the floor of his own apartment I immediately unfolded the machine and the time tunnel vanished.

M must have intuited my next intention at once. He shouted for his men to unlock the Far-a-day cage and seize me.

But they were too slow.

It required only seconds, once the final crease was undone, to tear the paper apart.

The ori-gami time machine fell in pieces through the mesh floor of the electrical cage.

For certainty, I placed the remaining fragments in my mouth and swallowed them.

No man will ever again be lost in time.

No weapon of entropy will ever be built.

The world is safe from dishonourable men who seek only power and death.

VII

From the Journal of Takashi Fuyuki (cont’d)

1895

I have taken out this journal for the first time since being deported from England last year. It seems proper that I continue recording this final portion in English, after which I shall send it to my new friend HGW, should he wish to write a sequel.

But I run in front of myself (forgive my English if that is not the correct expression).

I opened this journal again today because I have just received the book HGW has written about our adventures, and read it in a single sitting. There were many words I did not understand, yet it was perfectly clear that The Time Machine had been written as—if I translate directly my thought from Japanese—a disinformation campaign.

Whereas the true machine was folded ori-gami, HGW has most cleverly described it as a large and elaborate mechanical vehicle—constructed of “ivory, and nickel, and rock crystal.” I understand his intention very well. In the minds of his innumerable readers, a machine capable of breaching the Fourth Dimension must naturally possess a cage, a saddle, dials, and levers. It could never be imagined as a mere sheet of paper folded into impossible geometries.

Thus my family secret—and my family shame—remains safe.

I was amused to discover that the name of the Time Traveller which I recorded during our first encounter—Elo Moks—has been slyly concealed within his book as the names of the distant future peoples, the Eloi and the Morlocks.

At the end of the volume I found a brief handwritten note from the author, composed in very simple English so that I might have no difficulty understanding it.

***

My dear Mr. Fuyuki,

Our friend has informed me that upon his return to New York he destroyed the designs for the death-ray device of which he spoke when we took tea together. Indeed, to make certain of it, he burned down his entire laboratory.

May mankind never again be tempted by any machine capable of destroying the world. The end of time will arrive soon enough of its own accord—as you yourself have witnessed.

I often think of you and the extraordinary adventure we shared. Be well and safe.

I remain,

Your loyal friend,
HGW

VIII

1931

“That was the last entry in the journal,” Aegler said.

Borer stared at him wide-eyed. “The American scientist,” the nephew asked slowly, “whose laboratory burned to the ground… was that—”

“Yes,” the uncle replied. “Tesla.”

IX

1900

Hermann Aegler speaks:

One final thread remains to be tied, back at the Club with Mr. H. G. Wells.

He informed me, in some agitation, that his house had recently been burgled. Yet the theft had been peculiar. Only trifling objects were taken, while other valuables—items that would not have escaped the notice of ordinary thieves—remained untouched.

Wells was convinced that Mr. M—— and his agents had been searching for the only artifact left behind by the Time Traveller: the wrist chronometer snatched from the traveller’s own wrist and thrown into Wells’s hand during the confusion of that night—an act so sudden that even the meticulous Mr. M—— had failed to observe it.

“They will return,” Wells said grimly. “Of that I am quite certain.”

Thus he entrusted the watch to me—to us—so that a fragment of the future might survive in these soot-darkened and unimaginative times, when men confronted with wonders such as the Fourth Dimension can conceive only of new engines for the destruction of life, rather than its preservation and improvement.

1931

“And that, my nephew,” Aegler concluded, “is how I came into possession of the timepiece engraved with the initials E.M.—presumably those of the Time Traveller—together with Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s letter and Mr. Takashi Fuyuki’s journal.”

X

4:21:39 P.M.—28 June 2031

A portal opens.

The richest man in the world is hurled back through it. He lands upon his woolly mammoth rug dressed in Victorian rags. His hair hangs grey and wild halfway down his back. A pale band circles his wrist where a watch was once worn. His eyes bulge in astonishment at the sight of a phone again, for the first time in ten years.

He tries to scream, but has forgotten how.

On the phone screen is the photograph he uploaded exactly one second before his very long journey—the note that accompanied the 100-year-old Rolex Oyster:

For the man in perpetual motion, time is your toy.

THE END

POSTSCRIPT/ BTS AUTHOR’S PROCESS/ DIRECTOR’S DVD COMMENTARY/ DISCLAIMER

Hermann Aegler and Emile Borer were the real-life uncle and nephew team who created the Oyster Perpetual—although the original prototype which still sits in Rolex’s vault does not bear the etching ‘EM’.

The London Subway and all its details are real, although the British Special Branch—precursor of MI5—never had secret facilities behind a hidden door under the Thames, opened by a key topped with a cinquefoil—which appears in the present day emblem of MI5, as shown below.

Mr. H. G. Wells, author of, among other great works, The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds—which imagined an attack by Mars—was never abducted by the British Special Branch, and had never met its alleged officer-in-charge, M——. To the best of our knowledge.

Agents J and K were, technically, men in black.

• Spring-Heeled Jack, as described, was a real London urban legend of the period;

• Spitalfields was one of the areas in which Jack the Ripper had preyed;

• Lord Kelvin—who developed the concept of an absolute temperature scale based on thermodynamic principles and absolute zero (-273.15°C)—was Her Majesty’s most brilliant scientific mind;

• A Faraday cage is a conductive enclosure (invented by Michael Faraday in 1836) used to block external static/non-static electric fields and electromagnetic radiation;

• Lord Kelvin did give lectures upon the dissipation of energy and the eventual thermal exhaustion (what we would today call ‘heat death’) of the universe;

• Rudolf Clausius, a German physicist, laid the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics in 1850 and 1854, and in a 1865 paper coined the term “entropy” (from the Greek ‘trope’, meaning “transformation”) to define a quantity that describes the inevitable increase of disorder in a closed system;

• H. G. Wells did posit time as the Fourth Dimension and, in The Time Machine (1895), describes a chilling, entropic end to the world, characterized by a dying blood-red sun, extreme cold, and profound desolation;

• R. L. Stevenson died of illness in Samoa in 1894—no record of any correspondence he had exchanged with H. G. Wells exists;

• In 1885, Stevenson resided in Bournemouth;

• The Tokyo Patent Bureau was established in 1885—there is no record of any Rejected Patent No. 1 submitted by Fuyuki, T., or anyone;

• The London Patent Office was established in 1883—they would not have entertained a demonstration of Fuyuki San’s “origami time machine”;

• Tuberculosis was indeed a major epidemic in Japan at the time, dubbed “the nation-destroying illness”—Streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic for TB, was discovered by Waksman and Schatz in 1943;

• The branch-line structures described by Stevenson bear some resemblance to engineered fractal geometries—recursively self-similar forms capable, in certain speculative quantum-gravitational models, of inducing localized curvature and even transient topology change to permit a higher-dimensional incursion;

• The sudden temperature drop and internally perceived “whistling” described by Stevenson are consistent with rapid metric fluctuation being able to induce both endothermic atmospheric effects and electromagnetic interference sufficient to stimulate the auditory cortex directly, producing the sensation of sound absent any acoustic source;

• The flickering of the “Fourth Dimensional Man” suggests incomplete metric coupling between the subject’s baryonic matter and the local spacetime manifold, resulting in intermittent decoherence. In addition thereto, temporal shear across the subject’s neural processing cycles might also prevent coherent phonemic production, yielding fragmentary articulation and motor instability;

• If the subject’s electron probability density were displaced along a compactified higher-dimensional axis, electromagnetic repulsion between atomic lattices could intermittently fail, permitting macroscopic interpenetration of matter;

• The observed discontinuous displacement suggests the subject was collapsing into successive locally stable minima within the spacetime metric, effectively “re-materializing” at quantized intervals along his worldline;

• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which opens with a trampling of a street urchin, was published by R. L. Stevenson in 1886;

• The chapter headings from I to X reveal a palindromic (mirrored) structure made up of nesting time pockets and changing narrators (inspired by the “Fearful Symmetry” of Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons)—this would be easier to discern in hard copy.

• The Daily Mail, a popular halfpenny newspaper, had its office around 1894 on Fleet Street, not far from Postman’s Park; and

• Nicola Tesla’s laboratory in New York did burn to the ground in 1895—destroying all his designs, including allegedly a “death ray device”—no cause for the fire was ever conclusively determined.

***

My penultimate draft had Takashi appear to swallow all the torn pieces of the Origami Time Machine in his hands, but he kept one fragment. By coincidence it had a tiny marking on it, one of the many folding directions, for Jū—Japanese for the number “ten”. Written in Kanji, it looks like “+”. Turned at 45 degrees, it would like “x”.

In that draft, when Takashi sent his Journal to Wells, he included that last remaining scrap of the time machine. In 1900, Wells would pass it to Aegler with the Time Traveller’s watch, then in 1931—after Borer succeeded in replicating the Oyster Perpetual self-winding rotor, he slipped the tiny scrap of paper marked “x” into the back case of the “EM” inscribed original, “to complete the loop”.

The Time Traveller’s watch was bought by the world’s richest man in 2031 as a 60th birthday present for himself. This gives a pseudo-scientific (albeit “Bootstrap Paradox”) reason why the portal which was opened in Mr. R. L. Stevenson’s drawing room in 1885 had specifically snared Mr. “Elo Moks” (name as inaccurately transcribed by Takashi). The machine was “hailed” to the salvaged scrap—where Jū (or “x”) in fact marked the spot.

So, “EM” wasn’t a random catch. But that would have taken too long to explain in the narrative as it would have to pass through too many hands. So I scrapped the scrap.

And now you know—there was no plothole, I don’t do plotholes—there was a homing signal all along.

This is canon, by the way. Take it as scenes on the cutting room floor restored to the Director’s Cut.

***

BONUS FEATURE: NOT A SEQUEL BUT A SIDEQUEL—H.G. WELLS REIMAGINED AS A HARDBOILED P.I. FOR NO BETTER REASON THAN I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO WRITE A NOIR

DIRECTORIAL NOTE—to be read in a lispy drawl—take your time, it’s yer toy.

My friends call me H.G. The bad mugs know me as Herb “Gaslight” Wells.

Autumn, 1893. I’m stepping out of the Club, minding my own tab, when two torpedoes breeze up like I skipped town with their bankroll. No tip of the lid. No how-d’ye-do. Just hands on my arms, clamped neat and professional. Not muscle for hire—too tidy for that. The kind of grip that says you can holler if you like, but you won’t like what answers.

One of them feeds me the usual syrup: nothing to be afraid of. That line’s older than the best Scotch in my drawer. The other ape’s got a pearl-handled revolver riding high in a shoulder sling, flashing like a theatre prop. Both of them in black from stovepipe to spats. Like undertakers.

They stuff me into a hansom like laundry into a hamper. Door snaps shut. Horse hoofs start their clatter. Hardware introduces himself as Mr. J——. His pal answers to Mr. K——. They tell me my “particular expertise” has caught the eye of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. There’s a situation. They leave it at that, like a bad review. The rest of the ride I get London’s cobbles and my own thoughts for company, and my thoughts don’t pay rent.

My particular expertise is, I peddle scientific romances to the breakfast crowd and work private inquiries after dusk. Ink on my cuffs by day. Other stains by night. The civil servants don’t know about my other gig. So I figure this is about the fairy tales I write, with equations. Maybe some dame leaked my private scribbles. Wait—the Red Planet job... For a hot second I wonder if I’ve been playing prophet without knowing it. Maybe I didn’t invent anything. Maybe I just overheard tomorrow clearing its throat. Maybe Whitehall thinks I’ve got inside dope on little green customers. The cab pulls up near Great Tower Hill and I’m still turning that over like a suspect with a weak alibi.

They don’t march me into the Tower. Too obvious. Instead we head for the Subway—the old iron worm under the Thames. First deep tube in London, shoved through clay by Greathead’s fancy shield. I rode it once as a nipper: a wooden box yanked along a cable by steam engines sweating in some unseen boiler room. Twelve at a time, packed in like cartridges in a brace of six-shooters. The outfit went broke. Nobody ever found the missing gravy. Now it’s just a pedestrian rat-run. Halfpenny toll. Quarter mile of echo and damp boots. I walked it last year. The attendant bragged it once hauled a million punters annually. But Tower Bridge will steal its thunder soon. Progress is a mugger with a top hat.

We spiral down a skinny wooden stair, ninety-six steps if you’re counting, and I always count. The lifts are long gone. At the bottom sits the tube itself: iron cylinder, seven feet across, rivets sweating under gas jets burning low and jaundiced. The air’s close enough to chew. Our footsteps bounce back hollow. Above us, thirty feet of clay and the Thames grinding along, sending a dull shiver through the plates like a far-off barrage.

Halfway through, K—— checks his fob and fishes a key from his waistcoat. Heavy iron. Bow cut like a five-petaled flower. Cute detail for an ugly business. He slots it into a seam under the word FIVE, stencilled moss green on the wall. What’s with all this “five” motif? Military Intelligence, maybe?

The wall swings in smooth as a bribe. Different climate on the other side. Dry air. Fresh enamel. Electric arc lamps throwing a hard blue light that could shave you. No river stink. No gas haze. Clean and clinical, like a surgeon’s conscience.

They frisk me polite but thorough. I turn out my pockets—coins, notebook, pencil stub. Everything goes into a neat wooden box that disappears into the brickwork. No chit. Not even a cute hatcheck girl. Through another door we go and into a chamber big enough for a firing squad and the stenographer.

Waiting in the middle of it stands Mr. M——. Cool dome. Icebox eyes. The sort who could appraise you for a handshake or a hearse with the same glance. He wastes no breath. They didn’t snatch me over Martians. No flying cylinders. What they’ve got is a live specimen—a scientific screwball whose condition I once cooked up for the circulating libraries. A technical problem with legs.

They’ve got the Invisible Man in custody.

(REALLY) THE END

+++

It ends when I say it ends.

On black

A crack of light appears, then widens.

A brilliant blue sky becomes visible, slowly filling the screen. Earth flies up and out of this expanding hole—the film is running backwards.

Hold on the blue sky. Then fade.

***

3 HOURS AGO

Close-up on EVE, her face serene—so pale it’s almost blue.

Camera pulls back to reveal she’s in a casket.

A wreath of flowers is deeply saturated in colour.

Bereft, flanking the casket: husband XAVIER, children YVES & ZOE, mother ALICE.

Guests arrive and the funeral director asks their names. We meet Eve’s shellshocked friends (GORDON & FELICITY), students (CHARLES & SERENA), and colleagues (ALLAN & JANE).

***

3 DAYS AGO

Eve makes a cup of tea using loose leaves from a hexagonal, deep-purple metal tin. Drinks it. Cup falls, shatters on the tiled kitchen floor. Eve slowly crumples.

A moment later, Zoe walks towards the kitchen. She sees Eve’s feet through the doorway. Zoe runs in, cradles her mother’s head, shakes her shoulders. Nothing.

ZOE

Dad! Dad! There’s something wrong with mum! Daaaad!

Xavier runs in from outside, takes her pulse, puts his face to her nose to detect any breathing. Still nothing.

XAVIER

Eve! Cherie, no, oh god, please no!

ZOE

Mum! Wake up! Muuum!

***

4 DAYS AGO

Eve cooks Christmas lunch for the family. They open presents before lunch. Loud Christmas music. Yves passes a present to Eve. The wrapping paper is black, with small yellow stars.

YVES

This was outside the door when I came home.

Eve unwraps it excitedly. It’s a hexagonal, deep-purple metal tin. She opens it and breathes in the wonderful aroma.

EVE

Mmm. Jasmine.

YVES

Is there a card?

Eve puts the lid back on, looks more closely in the wrapping paper, turns the tin over.

Nothing.

***

5 DAYS AGO

Eve looks up to the sound of the doorbell. She opens the front door to Charles.

EVE

Why hello! What brings you here?

CHARLES

A surprise! If you’re free to come for a drive?

EVE

A Christmas mystery? Will it take long?

CHARLES

An hour, max.

EVE

Hmm. Okay—lead on, MacDuff!

Eve pulls on her coat, locks the front door. They walk to Charles’s car in the driveway.

CHARLES

Did you know that Shakespeare had written Macbeth as saying, “Lay on, Macduff”? As a bait to start a fight. “Lead on, Macduff” is a misquote, now wrongly taken to mean, “After you”... Just sayin’.

EVE

I’m glad I taught you Biology, and not English...

Their banter fades as the car drives off.

Realisation dawns on Eve’s face as Charles makes a turn.

EVE

Charley... We’re going to Felicity’s?

CHARLES

Yes! Cat’s out of the bag – speaking of, there’s one behind you!

Eve reaches to the backseat and picks up a plastic bag – it contains a stack of academic journals.

EVE

Oh! Oh, they were printed early?

Eve starts flipping through one of the journals. Charles beams as they pull up on the street in front of a neat little house.

Felicity comes out the front door, an O of surprise in her mouth at the sight of Charles and Eve walking up.

Gordon comes from around back, pushing a wheelbarrow full of leaves. He registers Charles and Eve, sets the wheelbarrow down on the lawn, and turns to his car in the open garage.

CHARLES

Hi guys! Look what came hot off the press!

Felicity tilts her head, smiles.

GORDON

Just going to pick something up at the garden centre!

Charles waves as Gordon drives off.

***

6 DAYS AGO

Eve is in her office at the college, putting the last of her things into a cardboard box. Then she heads to the lunchroom. A dozen colleagues are gathered. There are plates of finger food, paper cups, a few jugs of soda, and a couple of cheeky bottles of wine. They all call out as Eve enters, their well-wishes and cries of “Happy Retirement” merge incoherently.

We fade back in as Eve walks to Jane and Allan, who are in conversation with two other men. She pours more wine for Jane. Allan, taking a bite from a croissant, declines Eve’s offer of a top-up.

EVE

What we talked about... an article’s going to be published. In the Chronicle of Higher Education. Coming out in a week’s time.

JANE

You did it… you really went ahead.

ALLAN

A week? You... move fast.

Eve beams and walks off, to offer wine to another colleague.

***

10 DAYS AGO

Eve gets out of bed, pulling the top sheet around her naked body, then picks up her clothes on the way to the bathroom. A few moments later, she comes back into the room, dressed, and goes to the sleeping man in bed. She dumps the top sheet on him.

EVE

Gordon. Wake up.

Gordon turns sleepily, smiles and reaches for Eve’s hand. She draws away.

EVE

It’s over. This was the last time.

Gordon sits upright, rubs the sleep out of his eyes.

GORDON

No.

EVE

I’m leaving. Don’t call me.

Eve turns to the door and Gordon springs out of bed. He grabs her by the shoulders, spins her around and pushes her, hard, against the wall.

GORDON

I, said, no.

He leans in tight, presses his naked body to hers.

EVE

Gordon! Stop! This must end!

GORDON

It ends when I say it ends.

Eve rams her knee into Gordon’s crotch. He inhales sharply and drops to his knees, cradling his manhood.

EVE

It’s over! Touch me again and I’ll tell Felicity.

In between pants of pain, Gordon huffs laughter.

GORDON

Too late, babe. Feli found my burner phone—she read all your messages this morning.

***

12 DAYS AGO

Felicity puts her phone down on the dining table, looks gravely up at Eve.

FELICITY

I’ve read all the messages. I say, go ahead.

EVE

Allan’s lying through his teeth when he said the modified p53 were uploaded by me, but... what if he digs his heels in, and takes me to the Disciplinary Board, like he threatened to?

FELICITY

If what the kids have can convince the experts, it’ll be Allan’s head that’s gonna roll.

Eve turns to Charles and Serena, who are also sitting around Felicity’s dining table.

EVE

How sure are you guys? I had a look at your pen-drive, but the lines and lines of metadata on raw server images are Greek to me. I see 17833 highlighted in the last column, but how do you know it’s Jane’s User ID? That info is confidential.

SERENA

I told you. I snuck into her office and saw the ID on her screen. Once this is blown apart, Jane’ll have to prove that’s not her ID, and she can’t, because it fucking is!

EVE (softly)

Language.

SERENA (under her breath)

I knew you’d be too soft.

EVE

Wait, what’s that supposed to mean? It’s my reputation on the line here. You say the exposé will blow the case apart, but what if Allan’s believed, and I’m the one who ends up in pieces?

CHARLES

Guys, guys. Don’t snipe at each other. Remember why we’re here—what the Chronicle can do—to reveal the truth.

FELICITY

Actually I think you do need to remind me why I’m here. I thought you had ironclad evidence that Jane falsified data to cheat a $20 million fund for your university. And that the Dean said he’d pin the photoshopped images on Eve as the project lead, if she blows the whistle. That’s where my Journal comes in. As sub-editor, you’ve to understand, I’m less interested in the p52 photos-

EVE

-p53.

FELICITY

Yeah. Exactly my point. It could be p500 for all I care. The breach of trust I want to highlight is on Dean Powell’s part. He wants to pretend some research holds the promise to cure throat cancer and, now that Eve has told him that Jane made it all up-

EVE

Well… she didn’t “make it all up”. The molecular key I theorised is real. I’ve just never managed to stabilise the reaction to capture p53. Jane’s bastardised my work with, with… photoshop!

FELICITY

Eve. You’re not helping convince me, with your interruptions. In fact you’re making the story murkier by the minute. I’m hearing, what, that the images are all on a shared university database?

CHARLES

Password protected. So we can see who uploaded the falsified p53’s.

FELICITY

But all you’ve got right now is a User ID, which Nancy Drew here glimpsed, while breaking into a lecturer’s private office... Christ!

SERENA

Who’s Nancy Drew? Fuuck... Eve, you gotta stay the course here. I know I’m just the student and it’s your name in the crosshairs, but... once we take those fuckers down, you’ll be next in line for the Dean’s seat. That's what we want, as students.

EVE

Hold up one second! Who said anything about me becoming Dean? Don’t you understand? I don’t want to shoot the p53 theory down. It’s my baby, and my team, over five years, have proven 90 percent of it. It’s the last 10 percent faked by Jane that tears me up. But, but if we go all the way, the university will have to pay back the 20 million, and our name and ranking will be mud. It’s... it’s a serious thing... if we go ahead.

SERENA

IF?

EVE

And, and Serena... I am not going for the Dean role, whatever happens next. I... in fact, I wanted to let you all know—I’ve put in my resignation. This will be my final year.

SERENA (hisses)

I. Hate. You.

Serena’s face drains of colour. She staggers to her feet and slams the pen-drive on the dining table so hard the plastic casing cracks. Charles tries to take her hand, but she wrenches out of his grasp. Then she screams, gutturally, and runs out of the house. Charles goes after her.

FELICITY

Well, that escalated quickly.

EVE

I... I don’t know what to say. I’ve never seen Serena like this.

FELICITY

How well do you know her?

EVE

Oh. Really well. She’s my best student… maybe ever. I give her… private tuition in the evenings.

FELICITY

Hmm. Maybe she has a crush on teacher.

EVE

...don’t be ridiculous.

She picks up the pen-drive and studies the crack.

EVE (CONT’D)

It looks okay. I’ll check it later. The data should still be there.

(beat)

Are we really going ahead with this?

FELICITY

As far as my publishers are concerned, the investigative report establishes fraud. What happens next is in the donors’ hands.

(beat)

Door’s in front of you. Walk through? Or turn around?

***

14 DAYS AGO

Carrying a folded stack of laundry, Eve leans her back against Yves’s bedroom door, which is not closed.

YVES

MUM!

EVE

Oh my god, I’m sorry. I thought you were out. The door was-

Eve is dumbstruck to see her son sweeping a few bottles of pills into his desk drawer.

EVE (CONT’D)

Stop. Stop, what’s that? What’re you-

She drops the laundry, wrestles with Yves for the handle. In the struggle, the whole drawer pulls out of the desk, spilling its contents.

EVE (CONT’D)

OH. Oh my god. You, you swore you had kicked. Y-you brought urine tests, to show that you were clean. And I trusted… Oh I trusted. I’m so stupid. Just a stupid, old, useless...

Eve dissolves into tears, crumples to her knees. She picks up and drops the bottles of pills listlessly.

After a moment, she wipes her cheeks roughly and looks up, stares fiercely into Yves’s eyes.

EVE (CONT’D)

Christmas. You have until Christmas, to quit, forever. 26th, I’m driving you to Dr Chan. If the results show any drugs, you’re out. For good this time. Do you hear me?!

YVES (in a monotone)

Just like that huh. Throw me on the street. Like a fucking dog. Nice. Nice, mum.

EVE (spits)

Listen to you. You’re high right now.

YVES

Kick your only son into the gutter. I believe you’d do it. You’re cold. So cold. Like what you did, Zoe’s boyfriend.

EVE

Y-you don’t know what you’re talking about.

YVES

Ha! That’s what you think. I know things I’ve never told anyone, not you, not dad, not Zoe.

The bedroom door creaks open wider. Eve and Yves turn their heads in unison. Zoe is standing there, arms hugged around herself. Tears stand in her eyes.

ZOE (numbly)

Tell me what.

EVE

ZOE. Don’t listen to your brother. He’s back on drugs and he’s high right now. Don’t-

YVES

Marc. You think he got expelled for stealing from one of the teachers?

EVE

ZOE! Go to your room!

ZOE

SHUT UP MUM!

YVES

Don’t you remember? It was right after mum caught you two, fucking right there in your room. Huh, she never did care for closed doors in this house… It was mum who put Principal Estevez up to it. Framed Marc up so good, even he himself prolly thought he stole that wallet. Hahahaha!

EVE

ZOE! That’s not true! Yves’s lying.

Yves is cackling now. Zoe’s face is set like a mask. She turns to her mother.

ZOE

Which Eve?

***

17 DAYS AGO

Alice sits in her room in the retirement village, staring blankly into space, phone in hand resting on the small breakfast table. Eve taps on the door and looks in.

ALICE

Eve?

EVE (smiling)

Were you expecting someone else to visit?

ALICE

Oh. Oh no, dear. I just got off the phone with the lawyer.

EVE (loses her smile)

Oh, not that again.

ALICE

He agreed, Eve. This new man, Mr Sandeep. He said he’ll sue them, on a contingency. That’s like, he’ll get a share, if we win, or if the hospital-

EVE

I know what a contingency fee is, Ma. The lawyers will tell you anything they think you want to hear. They just want the upfront retainer, and then they’ll leave the case hanging there, for the next ten years, until you...

(beat)

To exhaust you.

ALICE

No, dear. Mr Sandeep says he doesn’t need a retainer. He says he’s never heard of such a clear case. He says the hospital will settle as soon as they receive his letter of demand.

EVE

MA. I’ve explained to you a hundred times. Dad’s throat cancer was so bad, so far gone, it was a mercy, Ma, to put him out of his misery. He was comatose, and-

ALICE

STOP! You stop that, Evey. I have heard you. A hundred times. And Mr Sandeep could not be clearer. There is no way they could have pulled the plug on Dad, not without my signature on the Withdrawal of Care forms. I was his, his whatsit... Healthcare Proxy.

EVE (in a whisper)

So was I, Ma.

Alice is stunned. She looks at the tears running down Eve’s face. She picks up her phone, puts it down.

ALICE

...you? YOU signed it? YOU KILLED DAD?

Eve reaches out, tries to take Alice’s hands.

Alice throws her phone wildly.

It flies into her dresser mirror, shattering it.

She starts screaming unintelligibly as the nurses come running in.

***

19 DAYS AGO

Lecture hall, about a dozen students. Eve is teaching.

EVE

-as you can see on page 85, Professor Maynard says-

The door behind her bangs open. Eve turns to see Jane striding up.

EVE (to Jane, lowered voice)

I’m sorry, is there some emergency? I’m in the middle-

Jane comes right up to Eve’s ear.

JANE (hissed whisper)

I’m deleting your email. I suggest you do the same with your copy.

EVE

Now is not the time. We can discuss this in detail after my class.

JANE

Oh, now is perfectly the time, because there’s nothing more to say. If you breathe another word about faked data in the joint-paper we published, I’ll make sure Allan remembers who the lead writer was.

EVE

Y-you can’t be serious! How can you pin that on me? You were the one who collated the images and, and-

JANE

You’re in class, Professor. Smile.

Then she walked out.

Eve turned to the class and forced a smile.

EVE

S-sorry for the interruption, class—it’s, it’s almost time, why don’t we wrap up a bit early today. It’s the weekend. Uhh, remember—read chapter 13, quiz n-next Tuesday!

The students gratefully pack up and leave, except for Serena, who comes down to the front. Eve is pulling together her own papers, flustered. She’s startled to look up and find Serena standing quietly in front of her.

SERENA

Was it about the paper you co-published?

EVE

W-what...? How did- I mean, what made you think...?

SERENA

Your paper, on the molecular key—with the breakthrough on p53—that’s what everyone’s talking about. Isn’t that why Jane came to see you? It must be some other big breakthrough, to catch you during class like this.

Eve starts to cry. Serena looks around, the lecture theatre’s empty. She puts her bag down and pats Eve kindly on the shoulders. Eve struggles to talk through her tears.

EVE

I-I’m so sorry, Serena. I never meant to... I musn’t trouble you with-

Serena startles Eve by pulling her in for a hug.

Eve collapses into the embrace for a minute—then slowly pushes back.

SERENA

Tell me. Everything.

They sit on the raised step of the stage.

In a low voice, Eve tells Serena everything.

***

21 DAYS AGO

Scant moonbeams through slitted blinds fall on a bundled figure. Off-screen, an angry woman’s voice.

Yves raises himself up on his elbows, turns on a bedside lamp. His watch reads 02:20.

He swings his legs over and sits, pulling the duvet around his shoulders. Mother’s ire rises. Yves shuffles to the door, presses an ear.

EVE (off-screen)

... I’M coloured! Your CHILDREN are coloured!

YVES (breathes)

The fuck.

He walks onto the landing, sits at the top step. He sees father—back to the stairs, stock-still, arms akimbo. Mother is out of sight.

XAVIER: You know I’m against illegal immigration.

EVE: So you’re not just Islamophobic, but actually racist too.

X: You’ve never lived in France. There are many, many moderate, French-born, Muslim immigrants—second-, third-generation—who are totally against the extremists. They’re leading the call to expulse the trouble makers, who seek to tear down the home that welcomed, and fed, and clothed them.

E: You would let an asylum seeker—like from Syria, or Iran—die, would you? Just starve on the pavement right outside your office?

X: I just thank God that this country wouldn’t have let that asylum seeker in, in the first place.

E: This country you’ve so happily adopted, outlawed homosexuality.

X: Mnn... sodomy. You have the only Prime Minister who’s gay, so that’s progressive, non?

E: He never came out—he’s maintained his innocence from the charge ‘til today. It was a political attack to take him out... not, not that he’d be a worse leader if he was gay.

X: The judgment of the highest court in this land is actually an irrefutable finding of fact.

E: He was released from prison—and he’s PM now, so what’re you-

X: He was pardoned—but the original finding stands.

E: So now this country has good and correct laws?

X: Heh—not quite. That sodomy law applies not just to same-sex. Even oral sex between man and woman is illegal. C’est terrible.

E: Islamophobe, check. Racist. Homophobe. So what are they saying in your right-wing chat groups about transexuals?

X: Don’t go there...

E: Oh we’re there, honey.

X: At least in this country you don’t have teachers—the whole school system—hiding a kid’s gender confusion from his own parents.

E: Their own parents—and it’s called gender dysphoria—and it’s a clinically-recognised condition of extreme distress.

X: In France they’re letting children unilaterally decide to mutilate themselves.

E: Oh don’t exaggerate—below a certain age, they only prescribe puberty blockers—and only after careful diagnosis.

X: You talk of such blockers as if they’re aspirin—those drugs have permanent effects, and some of these kids, after growing up, regretted their ill-considered younger decisions. Some take their own lives, Eve, because they can’t reverse the sex change.

E: Don’t fling anecdotes at me like a baboon with his shit in a zoo, Xavier. In research terms, that’s building a thesis on outliers.

X: Fine. So you agree for trans-male boxers to break women’s faces. That’s very... what, Woke? Feminist? Equal opportunist?

E: They are trans-female boxers, and studies have shown that after transitioning, their testosterone levels are often even lower than the women athletes they’re competing against.

X: Gymnasts, maybe—you’re the one pulling selective statistics out of a hat now—would you go one round with a trans... shemale boxer? Be honest—for once.

E: (beat) Your Bible doesn’t prohibit sex-transition.

X: My Bible now? Anyway, transexuals didn’t exist when the Bible was written—what a silly argument!

E: Married a quarter-century and I didn’t realise you were so homophobic.

X: Eve... your witnesses at our registry wedding were lesbians. I was fine with that!

E: My witn-? Cel and Muiyin are also your friends! But you guys are famously alright with girl-on-girl action, right? I now wonder what you would have said if I’d asked gay men.

X: Well, since you bring it up, my Bible does say it’s unnatural to-

E: I know your Bible too, alright—it’s also a sin to spill your seed on the ground... but that doesn’t stop you, does it?

X: Wait-

E: Darling, I had to pick up, not only your hair, but your semen from the shower floor-trap this morning—again.

X: (beat) It’s funny, you know?

E: What.

X: How you can say such a hurtful thing, as if you have no part to play in this farce.

E: Me? You’re the one who moved into Zoe’s room one month after she left for college!

X: That’s- that’s so wrong. It was to let you have better nights’ sleep. After the hip ‘scope, you couldn’t-

E: Don’t you mix symptom with cause—don’t you dare. You haven’t touched me in a year. You’re having an affair with that new paralegal, aren’t you—the one with the short skirts and nose-ring.

X: Don’t be absurd—I’ve been faithful since we took our vows.

E: Yeah, ‘cause God can see if you cheat, right? The Divine Peeping Tom.

X: You... you’re the one who slept with that professor of yours from Penang—the Sikh guy with the huge penis.

E: (beat) Yup. Here we go. Dredge up what happened 25 years ago-

X: We were engaged!

E: And I got scared alright? Fuck, never have I regretted telling you something SO much.

X: (beat) Anyway... there’s a troubling pattern in your argument.

E: Oh fuck off with your legal theatrics—we’re not in court!

X: What you do, sometimes, is to accuse me of the very thing you’re guilty of.

E: I do not have to put up with this abuse.

X: So... the question is, when did your affair begin?

E: FUCK YOU!

X: Ahh... but you’re not. Fucking me. Are you?

E: (strangled voice) You have no right.

X: (angry for the first time) FUCKKK!

(stunned silence from Eve)

X: FUCK—I’m your husband and the father of your children—I have no right?

E: Y-you’ve isolated me, all of you. First you enrol Zoe in that expensive uni, all the way in London. Then you hang out with Yves and bring him to those ridiculous concerts—I mean, thousand-buck tickets to U2 in Singapore? Fuck’s sake—what stupid teenager finds Bono in a walking frame cool? And you boys talking in French—laughing at me—behind my back. And, and, and separate bedrooms—oh god, you HAVE no right! NO right!

X: (beat) Wow... what a speech—I think that’s the most words you’ve said to me in the past year. (beat) So now... will the witness kindly inform the Court when she started having an affair?

E: TWO MONTHS!

X: Fuuuck...

E: (whispers) You have no right.

X: W-who is it? Not the Dean?

E: Allan? (bursts out laughing) Don’t be ridiculous—he’s like a dead-ringer for you. If I’d wanted a lite-version of the “X-Man” I married, I would’ve just stayed at home with mini-you.

X: Oh that’s ugly—even from you.

E: EVEN from- it’s Gordon OKAY. HAPPY now?

X: (stunned silence) ...Felicity’s Gordon? He, he’s a neanderthal. Isn’t he a-a council gardener?

E: Fuck you—you know Gordon’s Head of Landscaping for City South.

X: But... he’s, he’s sunburnt all the time. He wears sleeveless shirts, rain or shine. I’d always said Felicity married beneath her station but...

E: But. What.

XAVIER: I expected better taste from you.

EVE: Oh he tastes good, darling.

Xavier screams loud, and long.

Then he screams more.

He breaks everything breakable in the kitchen.

Yves slinks, shaking, back to his room.

The front door slams, a car starts, then screeches off into the night.

Still out of sight, Eve wails.

***

19 DAYS AGO

Lecture hall, empty now except for Eve and Serena. They sit on the raised step of the low stage.

Their heads are held low, close together. Eve has just told Serena everything.

SERENA

Fuck that. Fuck Jane. Fuck Allan.

(beat)

We blow the lid, blow them up.

EVE

H-how? I told you... The doctored images are on the shared university database. They’ll say I did it. I’m the lead-

SERENA

There are User IDs, right? We’ll find what is Jane’s.

EVE

That’s... yes, that might prove she uploaded it, but how will we find out her ID?

SERENA

Leave that to me!

Serena’s eyes flare, so close to Eve’s. The student closes the distance of inches, and kisses the teacher. Eve’s body jolts like she’s touched a live wire, like she’s having a shattering orgasm. Serena’s tongue pushes, and Eve’s lips part. Only then does Eve pull back, a thin string of saliva connecting their mouths for a second.

Eve staggers to her feet, nearly falls, catches the edge of the lectern, steadies herself. She starts to say something, but only manages to stammer “Se- Se-”. Serena looks at Eve, smouldering, unashamed. Eve grabs her papers, and runs out of the lecture hall.

***

12 DAYS AGO

Felicity’s dining room.

Serena’s face loses all colour. She staggers to her feet and slams the pen-drive on the dining table so hard the plastic casing cracks. Charles tries to take her hand, but she wrenches it out of his grasp. Then she screams, gutturally, and runs out. Charles runs after her.

FELICITY

Well, that escalated quickly.

EVE

I... I don’t know what to say. I’ve never seen Serena like this.

FELICITY

How well do you know her?

EVE

Oh. Really well. She’s my best student… maybe ever. I give her… private tuition in the evenings.

FELICITY

Hmm. Maybe she has a crush on teacher.

EVE

...don’t be ridiculous.

She picks up the pen-drive and studies the crack.

EVE (CONT’D)

It looks okay. I’ll check it later. The data should still be there.

(beat)

Are we really going ahead with this?

FELICITY

As far as my publishers are concerned, the investigative report establishes fraud. What happens next is in the donors’ hands.

(beat)

Door’s in front of you. Walk through? Or turn around?

EVE

We go ahead.

FELICITY

And if Serena’s wrong about the User ID, or if the Uni doesn’t connect it with Jane?

EVE

Then I burn in hell.

***

6 DAYS AGO

University lunchroom. Staff gathering for Eve’s farewell.

Eve pours wine for Jane. Allan declines. Two other colleagues stand silently by.

EVE

What we talked about... an article’s going to be published. In the Chronicle of Higher Education. Coming out in a week’s time.

JANE

You did it… you really went ahead.

ALLAN

A week? You... move fast.

Eve beams and walks off, to offer wine to another colleague. Allan follows.

He leans in, mouth close to her ear.

ALLAN

I need a word.

Eve keeps walking, to a quiet corner. Then turns, fixes Allan with a steely gaze.

EVE

I wrote the exposé, Allan. Serena found the User ID receipts. Felicity has shown her editorial team and Legal at the Chronicle has approved it. There’s no calling that back now.

ALLAN

There must be. I wanted to tell you... about the User ID.

Beat, as the colour drains from Eve’s face.

ALLAN (CONT’D)

Jane thought of that. We... fixed it.

EVE

Y-you mean-

ALLAN

Back-office system. That ID is yours now. It’s been yours all along.

(Beat)

ALLAN (CONT’D)

We also found something... compromising on the lecture hall CCTV. Your... dalliance with a student would be, uh, bad enough, but if said student helped write your, so-called, exposé...?

EVE (out-of-body)

I see...

ALLAN

Kill it.

***

5 DAYS AGO

Charles is in the driver’s seat of his car.

A copy of the journal which Eve had been looking at earlier is on the passenger seat. Charles picks it up just as Eve opens the door to get in. He flips it open to admire their work again, and shows a page to Eve. She smiles tightly.

CHARLES

Look at that. They did the metadata page Serena extracted in a sidebox and everything... User ID 17833. Have you ever seen such a beautiful combination of numbers? It’s like, I dunno, a remote detonation code.

EVE (silently mouths)

boom

Charles drives Eve home. Night has fallen.

After his car leaves, she stands still on her front porch.

The sounds of life weave through the door. She looks in through the frosted glass panelling on each side. The light is warm on her face. Eve sighs deeply.

Then she takes from her bag a present in black wrapping paper, with small yellow stars, and leaves it on the welcome mat.

She enters the house.

***

4 DAYS AGO

Eve cooks Christmas lunch for the family. The conversation cannot be heard over the music.

This time the camera pans more slowly over the faces of Xavier, Yves, and Zoe. Now we see the concealed pain behind their eyes.

The camera stops on Eve. She’s at peace with her decision.

They go to the tree to open presents. Yves passes a present to Eve. The wrapping paper is black, with small yellow stars.

YVES

This was outside the door when I came home.

Eve unwraps it excitedly. It’s a hexagonal, deep-purple metal tin. She opens it and breathes in the wonderful aroma.

EVE

Mmm. Jasmine.

YVES

Is there a card?

Eve puts the lid back on, looks more closely in the wrapping paper, turns the tin over.

Nothing.

Eve smiles.

***

3 DAYS AGO

Eve’s kitchen.

She’s alone.

She picks up the hexagonal, deep-purple metal tin, scoops loose leaves into a tea strainer. After she pours boiling water into the cup, she pauses. Looks afraid for a moment.

Then she closes her eyes, and holds the cup close to her face to inhale the aroma of Jasmine. The ghosts march past behind her eyelids—Xavier, Felicity, Yves, Zoe. Her living mother. Her dead father.

EVE (to herself)

Forgive me.

She opens her eyes, resolved. Drinks the tea. Cup falls, shatters on the tiled kitchen floor.

Eve slowly crumples.

***

3 HOURS AGO

Close-up on Eve’s serene face, she’s in a casket, a wreath of flowers is deeply saturated in colour.

***

10 SECONDS AGO

We’re looking up at a brilliant blue sky.

Earth rains down, slowly obliterating this view.

The last spadeful of earth leaves us cut to black.

THE MURDEREE

.

.

.

Postscript/ Author’s Note

In response to a comment, I wrote:

I was indeed concerned about the thematic density due to the word limit constraint I had set myself to maintain a thriller movie pace.

In my defence, the perfect storm which sweeps Eve—in which every single person in her circle of family and friends breaks with her over a three-week period—is one of those things that would sometimes happen in fact, but be deemed too incredible for fiction.

As for the “thriller movie pace”, explicitly, an influence is Memento—not just through the temporal Big Bang to Big Crunch loop, but through Nolan’s framing of visual decay. I’ve always seen The Murderee through a slow-burn cinematic lens.

I wrote (and chose for bookend posters the same photo) of a funeral wreath bursting in colour.

My note to the DP would have been to slowly desaturate colour, scene by scene as the tension ratchets up, until Eve’s fight with Xavier (in which she is conspicuously off-screen, and we only see his back—ever still and controlled, until the last moment when he explodes with extreme violence—from Yves’s vantage point on top of the stairs) is in black-and-white.

The colours only bleed back as we slide back towards the present.

+++

If only they had told her about diving—she would have said she’d drowned as a child, and was only brought back to life after ten minutes.

Back to Part 4

New to the serial, back to Part 1

Ishun stood shivering in a glass cylinder suspended in the abyss. She was naked, save for a white hood covering her head and neck, and a clear visor that sat against her face like a fencing mask.

​“Please lower your arms—and stand with your feet apart.”

​For the third time, Ishun demanded to know what was happening. For the third time, the voice ignored her.

​Outside the glass, a blue-tinged couple swam into view. Like her, they were nude. The woman glided towards a console, her fingers dancing across a glowing touchscreen. The man floated directly in front of Ishun’s tank, and coolly studied her.

​Ishun refused to be cowed. She planted her feet and stared back. The only thing he wore were two silver buttons on his temples—matching the pair which the robot had pressed onto her own head a minute ago.

​His skin wasn’t truly blue; rather, a web of fine subdermal veins ran with indigo ink beneath the pale surface never touched by direct sunlight. His blond hair, long and high-contrast, swayed in the currents like the wakame kelp Ishun harvested at the edge of the Drowned Town.

​She glanced at his partner. The woman’s hair was a dark, frizzy halo, defying the drag of the water.

​The man was handsome, perhaps in his late twenties, but his eyes were wrong. They were hooded by translucent internal lids that gave his pupils an unnerving, jaundiced tint.

​Sensing her curiosity, he pressed a hand to the glass. His fingers were joined by thin, translucent webbing.

​Since nudity appeared to be the local protocol, Ishun allowed her gaze to drift lower. His large penis swayed gently. She jerked her eyes back up, only to find him appraising her own body. Under his gaze, her nipples stiffened and a hot, traitorous flush crept across her chest.

​“Did the bots tell you what they’re doing?”

​Ishun jumped. The voice didn’t come from the air; it vibrated inside her skull. The merman’s lips moved in sync with the words.

​“Can you hear me?” she asked aloud, her voice muffled and thin inside the mask.

​“Of course,” he replied, his mouth forming the words with exaggerated clarity. “You only need to shape the sounds. The sensors pick up the vibrations in your jaw and conduct the signal into my inner ear. Get used to it. As you might have guessed, you can’t exactly speak underwater.”

​“Oh.” She tried to speak without vocalising. He nodded. “The bots told me nothing. What is this?”

​“Part of your tour. Since your lungs haven’t been primed with PFCs to breathe underwa—”

​“Wait, what?”

​“Relax—we aren’t doing that to you. That’s why my chest doesn’t cave in at this depth; liquid Perfluorocarbon isn’t compressible. Look, forget I said that. You’re spiraling.”

​“Yes! I’m freaking out right now! What are you doing to me?”

​“It’s a dry-suit. The nozzles will coat you in an insulating, pressurised polymer. It’s the only way you can survive the cold, and the depth.”

​“And you? Is that why your blood is blue?”

​He grinned, revealing teeth that had been filed into sharp points. “Antifreeze in the veins.”

​“Did it... hurt?”

​“The transfusion?” He noticed her staring at his mouth. “Or the dental work?”

​Before she could answer, a red light bathed the tube. A ring of nozzles rose from the floor, spraying a fine mist over her skin. She squeezed her eyes shut instinctively under the mask. It was warm—her body temperature—but it congealed instantly into a transparent, latex-like second skin. It felt like being shrink-wrapped. To her dismay, the coating was transparent; she remained utterly exposed.

​The tube began to hiss. Water surged in at her feet. Icy, despite the insulating skin.

​“Wait! Wait! I don’t have a tank!”

​“The striations on your hood,” he said calmly, gesturing to the ribbed fabric at her neck. “Hydrophobic membranes. Artificial gills. They extract dissolved oxygen directly from the water. Just breathe.”

​As the water quickly rose past her chin, Ishun began to hyperventilate. “St-stop—you don’t understa—”

​“Look in my eyes,” he commanded. “My name is Gregor. Deep breaths—in, out. Slow it down.”

She was losing it. If only they had told her about diving—she would have said she’d drowned as a child, and was only brought back to life after ten minutes.

Now Ishun couldn’t stop herself from panting frantically—huhooh huhooh huhooh HUHOO HUHOOH HUHOOH!

​Black spots blossomed in her vision. Exhaled air bubbles boiled from the edges of her mask.

The glass tube retracted and suddenly she was in his arms.

Gregor pulled Ishun tightly to his chest. She beat against forearms like steel cables.

“Look at me.” He commanded. “Breathe with me.”

​She clawed, fingernails digging into his back. She could feel his heart—a slow, powerful thudding—acting as an anchor for her own racing pulse. Slowly, she began to match his rhythm. His powerful legs finned back and forth between hers, and their joined bodies swayed in the dark blue void.

​Eventually, the panic receded. She slumped against him, the air bubbles slowing to an even flow.

“I’m so sorry,” she mouthed.

“It’s our fault. We failed to brief you.” His yellow eyes searched hers. “We’ve never had any visitor from the land. I’m third-generation Atlantean. Our infants are in the current at four weeks. About half of us have converted to full-time ocean-dwellers.”

“Converted…”

“We... we couldn’t conceive of… people who would be afraid of water.”

The mermaid hovered nearby, her expression cold and unreadable.

“This is Sumi.”

Sumi nodded curtly.

“I- I’m Ishun.”

“We know.” Sumi’s voice rang in her skull. “This way.”

With a languid flick of her whole body, legs joined, Sumi dived. Ishun paddled behind, arms and legs flailing. Gregor drifted silently behind, a shadow in the deep.

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***

TO BE CONTINUED

+++

From the den came the sounds of a cosmic battle, and from the kitchen wafted the comforting smell of Tare Yakitori.

Underneath the soy and ginger, John was struck by the odour of wet earth. It passed quickly.

Back to Part 4

If new to this serial, back to Part 1

“Good evening, Mister Hughes, and family,” the blinking red eye intoned in a British accent as John walked up the front steps bearing his overnight bag.

“Hello, Alfred, I tried-” The magnetic lock of the front door released with a pressurised Pnkk! to admit the small family.

The foyer was ​a cavern of polished basalt and floor-to-ceiling glass, overlooking a mountain range now swallowed by the dark.

“I need to pee,” said Xianyi and headed down the hall. Kevin also knew where he wanted to go—the den, for its wall-sized TV.

An identical red eye blinked on the interior pillar, to which John completed his sentence, “I tried calling ahead but Koizumi-san hasn’t been picking up his phone, or replying my texts and emails.”

Alfred replied, “I’m afraid I don’t know where Master and Madame are, sir.”

​John froze, his hand hovering over the strap of his bag. “Wh- really? How? You practically run their lives, Alfred.”

“My internal clock tells me it is late evening on Saturday. The last prompt logged from Master Koizumi was two days ago, at noon. They had planned to hike to the waterfall and I had confirmed that weather reports were positive.”

“Two days! My god, Alfred—they, they didn’t come home?”

“They did, sir. I should have been clearer. The last prompt and interaction I had with Master Koizumi was in preparation for their hike to the waterfall. Master and Madame did return after about three hours, as the security logs indicate—both of them, identified by retinal scans, entered through the front door.”

“A-and they haven’t asked you for anything since? Did you not route calls and messages to the Master?”

“They did not ask me for anything since, sir, and I did route all calls and messages, including yours, but they have not been opened until now.”

“No distress call, or fall detected?”

“I am indeed programmed to pick up distress calls and detect falls, but there have been no alerts these past two days.”

“A-and CCTV surveillance of the house?”

“I am programmed to respect the homeowners’ privacy, sir. All I can report is, there has been no intruder or any visitor other than yourself and your family tonight.”

John looked around, confused.

“I beg your pardon, sir. Master Kevin is in the den, asking for a series called Invincible—will that be alright?”

“Huh? Y-yes, sure. Sure.” John wiped a bead of sweat from his upper lip, “Where’s my wife?”

“Madame Xianyi is in the kitchen, sir, heating up leftovers for your supper. I suggested the Miso soup—it’s a cold night.”

“Oh. Oh good, it sure is. We- we haven’t eaten since late morning. The drive up was…” John let his thoughts trail off.

“I’m accessing the weather services, sir. The mountain pass was declared closed an hour ago by the Department of Transportation—a D1 avalanche.”

“Avalanche? W-we just drove through there…”

“D1 is considered minor, sir, but the bank slide has made the road unpassable until the authorities can plow it. I suggest you make yourselves comfortable, sir. We are quite off the beaten track and normally low-priority for clearance works, especially over the busy weekend. Your family will be my guests until, I expect, Monday.”

“But- we have the presentation on Tuesday. The clients expected Koizumi-Shacho—as CEO—to bring the models down and… oh god, where are they?”

“I cannot say, sir, but given the lateness of the hour, I suggest your family have a light supper and turn in for the night. I’m sure your questions will be answered by morning.”

John nodded and picked up the two bags discarded by his wife and son at the door. From the den came the sounds of a cosmic battle, and from the kitchen wafted the comforting smell of Tare Yakitori.

Underneath the soy and ginger, John was struck by the odour of wet earth. It passed quickly.

Before entering the guest room, John paused at the foot of the grand staircase, praying the Koizumis would apologetically emerge from the master bedroom to greet him.

Nothing.

His eyes drifted to the lift. It was a sleek, brushed-steel box, installed when Koizumi-Okusan’s bones began to fail her.

​The basement housed a state-of-the-art lab, purpose-built to fine-tune her clinical intervention. The indicator for that underground level glowed a steady yellow.

​John remembered the briefing last summer on the new R&D for a more aggressive disease modification—”myco-biomaterials.” Fungal scaffolds, the doctors had called them, to regrow the patient’s bones.

As he watched, the yellow light blinked. Twice. The lift cable groaned.

Then the ground floor indicator blinked.

​​DINGG!

​The chime echoed through the hollow house.

The doors slid apart with a hiss.

***

TO BE CONTINUED

+++

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Fish swirled in hypnotic clouds. A school of translucent needles, organs visible, beat like a dispersed heart. Mouths like trapdoors, fins like torn silk. Something big as a bedsheet drifted across the sandy bottom.

Back to Part 3

New to the serial, back to Part 1

The Governor observed that Ishun was tiring, and should rest for the day. The interview terminated, the single door of the bright white room hissed open and she was dismissed back to her cell.

One wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, revealing an underwater realm she’d glimpsed only in forgotten illustrated tomes in the Drowned Town’s libraries.

Coral she could not name—gnarled brains or walnuts, calcified branches or frozen lightning, bleached hands raised in congregation, treebark fungus the size of trees, bulbous organs turned inside-out, ruffled collars and pleated skirts, stone flowers and shed antlers—riotously competed for attention.

Fish swirled in hypnotic clouds. A school of translucent needles, organs visible, beat like a dispersed heart. Mouths like trapdoors, fins like torn silk. Something big as a bedsheet drifted across the sandy bottom.

A flicker of motion drew Ishun’s attention. The ocean life—frozen coral and animated fish—was painted in all the colours of creation save one: the pure white of the polymer skins in which the humanoid agents of the AGI Governors were clad.

One such agent walked the forest, selecting and trimming pieces with unhurried precision, and stowing its collection in a mesh bag secured to its back. It collapsed her sense of scale: loitering near the robot harvester, a pair of bump-headed fishes with eyelids at half-mast and mouths slack with boredom—that Ishun had earlier taken to be the size of bikes—were in fact as big as buses.

Her reverie was broken by one such humanoid assistant padding silently into her prison bearing her supper on a tray, which it then set down on a oval-shaped white table. The white chair subtly moulded to Ishun’s contours—a feature apparently intended to optimise her physical comfort, but felt like an invasion.

The food however was delicious. Some kind of crustacean—its steamed bright-red shell cracked in half to give up succulent chunks of white-pink flesh—with a kelp salad of varying degrees of crunch and brine and colour.

A glass of water and another one half-filled with a ruby liquid which Ishun imagined was wine. She left the latter untouched, but mopped her plate clean with the soft warm bread.

As she stood to go to the washroom, the circular outer door irised open and the same server droid—or an identical other one—padded in to clear the tray, reminding Ishun she was closely monitored.

Self-consciously crossing her arms to cover breasts and pubis, she stepped into the shower’s ring of nozzles which sprayed her with powerful jets of water set to her temperature.

A fresh set of overalls—now cerulean blue—lay on her bunk.

The alcove above her pillows yielded three books: Moby Dick, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, and The Abyss. Ishun smirked at the heavy-handed curation. She had read the two classics, long ago, but was unfamiliar with the third book offered, by Michael Crichton.

She picked that up, adjusted the pillows, and settled down to read.

The prose drew her in, but fatigue dragged Ishun under before the second chapter.

As sleep claimed her, she realised the glowing view outside her wall-window gave no hint if it was still day or already night.

The lights in her room dimmed by themselves and the sounds of the ocean—barely audible crackles and pops—drifted in over speakers concealed in the seamless walls.

Ishun’s last conscious image was of L’il Rem sitting cross-legged on the shore, picking shrimp out of an oft-repaired net.

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Forward to Part 5

After half an hour splashing through the swamp, the Captain received a telepathic alarm—

INCOMING

—and spun around, only in time to see a slithering column, a hundred times his size, strike.

Back to Part 3

If new to this serial, back to Part 1

The Captain, the Pilot and the Engineer each shouldered a Commandeer pack and descended in single file down the chute. The Navigator operated the hatch, evacuating the sludgy water which flooded the airlock with each exit.

None of the others had blamed her for their craft getting lost—the charts of this alien world being obviously incomplete—but nevertheless the Navigator felt invisible to have been left off the Away team.

It was however true that an officer had to stay behind to monitor the radar, and she remained the most qualified for the task.

The lower third of their ship sat submerged at the edge of a great lake, where the Pilot had been forced to make an emergency landing in the dark. The three explorers had to swim to shore. They did not need to breathe.

After activating the compasses on their wrist computers and igniting their bioluminescent torches, they spread out—equidistant from each other—on foot.

After half an hour splashing through the swamp, the Captain received a telepathic alarm—

INCOMING

—and spun around, only in time to see a slithering column, a hundred times his size, strike.

***

“Kevin! Why are you so slow? You need to finish packing now.”

“I… dunno? Where we going? I’m gonna miss Invincible.”

“What, urgh, I’m sure there’s Prime up there! Anyway, isn’t the series done?”

“No, Ma—a new season just dropped!”

“Kevin Hughes! You are almost ten. I am not going to pack for you. Pa’ll be home soon. You’ll get a spanking if you’re not ready to go immediately!”

“But wherrrre are we going??”

“I told you already! Why don’t you listen… we have to go to his boss’s house to get a scale model for Monday.”

“Why can’t the boss bring it himself?”

“Because he’s not answering his—urgh, this is ridiculous—just pack, okay?”

“But why do you and me have to go with Pa?”

“Kevin! You love the mountains. You know Mrs. Koizumi wants us all to stay overnight every time Pa goes up. You yourself said their house is like a giant hotel… and the garden maze? It took Pa and me an hour to find you when we played hide-and-seek!”

“Ma. I solved that last year. It’s boring now. The house is just empty and spooky.”

“Don’t be silly. It’ll be good to get away from all those doctors and tests.”

“Does Agent K know we’re going away?”

“No, honey—we don’t have to tell the agents everything. I won’t live like that.”

“K is funny. She can make her eyes go in different directions.”

“I like her too, Kevin—but you really have to pack now. I’ll be back in five minutes!”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Kevin!”

***

The Captain was swallowed by the alien in one gulp.

Through their mindlink, the team cheered as one.

The monster’s mouth was so cavernous, the Captain totally missed its curved, jagged pillars of fangs, and was halfway down the gulping red throat when he fired the Commandeer unit. A plume of spores exploded from his backpack and was instantly absorbed into the mucous membranes of the glistening gullet.

Within seconds, the mycelium agents reached the giant serpent’s brain, outracing their Jonah to the belly of the whale.

In an instant, the Captain’s new vehicle came online. As expected, its mind—which flared briefly in panic—was primordial, and offered no resistance.

The first order of business was to regurgitate the Captain. Once vomited onto the mud and reeds, he took a moment to wipe the slime off his pressure-sealed suit, then clambered onto the zombie steed’s scaly head.

As the massive creature weaved through the tall trees—covering the distance back to the ship in a minute—more good news flashed over their mindlink from the Pilot. His own behemoth, a wet and green sentience, joined the chat.

With precise coordinates from the Navigator identifying which parts of the ragged edge of the great lake were most solid, in the stark glow of the artificial sun from the belly of the firefly flown by the Engineer, the Captain directed his viper to coil around the exposed hull of their rocket, then allow its tail to be clasped in the mouth of the bullfrog which, with one powerful tug commanded by the Pilot, extricated the craft from the mud.

Rescue operation completed, the Micronauts released their monsters and reunited on the control deck. The Captain, per custom, laid his hand on the wheel. The Pilot clapped down on it, followed by the Engineer. They looked up at the Navigator who had held back. She smiled, as they nodded, and softly placed her hand on top of theirs.

As the ship blasted off to the stratosphere, The Four combined their telepathic might to broadcast a message to Home Base:

We return.

Our four-year mission—to seed this hostile planet’s waters with viral, self-replicating, microplastic drones—has been a complete success.

Be patient.

Upon reaching critical mass, invasion will be launched.

***

The drive up was slow and treacherous, a few sections of the road unexpectedly covered in snowdrifts.

When the Hughes arrived, it was almost night. All the lights in the Koizumi mountain chalet were blazing, but no one came out to greet them.

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I’ll set up a fucking writer’s room. You already have, what, two dozen starving writer friends, right? Don’t worry about the future man!

NEW—audio drama added on 1st April 2026

The Narrator and Zhongyuan voiced by me

The Author voiced by — who also did the arrangement and editing — please send bouquets his way

PRELUDE

Picture a man. Not a devil or a god. Not a sinner or a saint. Just a man.

Picture him coming home one moonless night, carrying four bags of groceries clipped into a large carabiner with a padded grip in his right hand, and a five-litre water bottle in his left. It’s another cruel winter in Alashankou, Inner Mongolia. To save on heating, the man sheds only his greatcoat once he’s stepped in out of the biting wind.

Living alone means living in the dark—he turns one light on in any room he enters and turns it off as he leaves. Living alone means eating his rice directly from the pot, and sucking his Baijiu from the bottle. When the weak, pale sun rises tomorrow, the man will not register it through thick drapes, drawn for three months of the year to trap his every last warm breath.

Your breath. You are this man.

***
WeChat Log

> ZHONGYUAN: Did you receive the contract

> ZHONGYUAN: Hello

> ZHONGYUAN: I see blue ticks

> YOU: YES. Yes, I got it. I’ve read it

> ZHONGYUAN: And??

> YOU: I don’t know. They want a franchise. Minimum a trilogy

> ZHONGYUAN: Yes?? Give them what they want! Easy for you. Just get the first book locked in, worry about the rest later

> YOU: The story I’ve outlined ends in one book. I can write different books for them. I have other ideas

> ZHONGYUAN: No, man. They want something with legs. It’s hard enough to get one idea approved

> YOU: So I have to keep churning out the same idea—from the first book, to the second, and on and on?

> ZHONGYUAN: You saw they’ve locked in the adaptation rights? That’s all any publisher wants now man. The money’s in the IP

> YOU: I said I don’t know. Too much pressure. What did the other pubs say?

> ZHONGYUAN: The agent said only Jiangsu replied, but they’re the biggest publisher in China, by a mile. Come on, man!

> YOU: SFW published Three Body Problem. Did they respond to the query?

> ZHONGYUAN: No and we can’t wait. Don’t play hard to get with Jiangsu man they will withdraw and then you got nothing!

> YOU: Just give me another day man. I need to think about it. Maybe go with self-pub on Qidian or something…

> ZHONGYUAN: If you weren’t up in fucking Mongol land I would go over and kick the shit out of you man

> YOU: What? Many self-uploaded stories have broken big. Lord of the Mysteries went global. What was it, 50 million views outside China?

> ZHONGYUAN: Fuck you man don’t give me stats like how many views Lord got. Wait ah. Wait

> ZHONGYUAN: I give you stats

* Daily New Works: 2,000 to 3,000 new novels started every day.

* Monthly New Authors: 130,000 to 160,000 new authors per month.

* Total Catalogue: Over 36 million works.

> YOU: Ok ok

> ZHONGYUAN: Don’t okok me! Jiang-fucking-su offers you a three-book deal, with a decent upfront, and you want the FREEDOM to self-pub?

> YOU: Give me till tomorrow

> ZHONGYUAN: Noon. If you don’t send the esigned contract back to the agent by NOON, we’re not friends anymore

> YOU: You don’t mean that

> ZHONGYUAN: Brother, I have beta-read every fucking thing you have ever written and Junggar is the best one, by far. It’s like I’m watching Dune in my head. Fucking Denis whatsisname is gonna be dry humping your door, man. You pass this up, I dunno. If Jiangsu withdraws, so do I. I mean it, I’m outta your sorry fucking life.

> ZHONGYUAN: Give them the fucking trilogy. Once the TV money comes in, we’ll be mapping out seven seasons. You don’t even have to write the rest. I’ll ghostwrite book 2 onwards, ok? I’ll set up a fucking writer’s room. You already have, what, two dozen starving writer friends, right? Don’t worry about the future man!

> YOU: Ok brother, noon tomorrow. I won’t sleep a wink tonight

> ZHONGYUAN: Fuck you, I love you man!

> YOU: I love you brother. Talk tomorrow

***

You have reached the voicemail of 0909 868 0077. Please leave a message after the tone.

Hey. It’s me again. Sorry. I wasn’t going to call.

Sorry. Zhongyuan’s been after me to sign the contract. I told you the publisher wants an ongoing franchise, right? But, you know, the story I’ve been telling you over the phone… sh-she dies, you know that—in the book, her story ends—and then there’s that final chapter where he…

I’m sorry, I said I wouldn’t call you again. I just don’t know how Junggar can keep going after that.

How I can keep going.

You can guess what Zhongyuan said, right? Give them the book and take their money. Figure it out later. That little bastard. He said—come up with a ‘resurrection engine,’ no one would question that. They just want the love interest.

There’s no resurrection engine.

Sorry. Sorry. Good night. Good night.

Call terminated. Message recorded.

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Continue to Chapter 1

Parkhouse and Rasheed beamed with genuine warmth to see Kevin again. The nine-year-old did not appear to recognise his surgeons. Armed guards stood at every corner; that section of the hospital had been vacated, as before.

The boy and his mother were herded to the X-Ray/ MRI lab. There Xianyi was introduced to a black woman-in-black with cornrowed hair, and a bearded polar bear of a man in a lab coat.

Agent Kay—or was it Agent K—held up something like a shoebox, “Ma’am—strictly procedure—I need you to place your handbag, and empty your pockets, in here. And Kevin’s phone too, please.” Xianyi was almost disappointed not to have been patted down.

Doctor Ellish meanwhile had hurried forward and was vigorously pumping Kevin’s hand. “Here’s our special young man. I’m so very pleased to finally make your acquaintance.” Xianyi couldn’t help but smile—special yong man, foinally—just like her uncle in Northampton.

A nurse was summoned to help Kevin into a hospital gown and slide him into the MRI tube. Rasheed took a stool alongside to hold the boy’s hand and give reassurances, while Parkhouse twirled knobs and pressed switches on the clanking machine.

Ellish sat Xianyi at a cluttered desk while K stood vigilant, hands clasped behind her back. On top of the pile, the X-Ray of the nail—the rocketship—in her son’s head.

The now-infamous X-Ray—leaked from the Specialist Centre and splashed on every front page around the world—of the most viewed skull in history.

From a folder marked Hughes, K (M—2016/07/10), Ellish withdrew two sets of an document headed Non-Disclosure & Confidentiality Agreement.

Xianyi glanced up at K, “Strictly procedure, right?”

The corner of K’s mouth lifted, “You know the drill, sis.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t matter if I sign this NDA or not—if I talk about any of this...”

K’s grin widened and she drew a finger across her throat.

Xianyi wanted this woman at her back in an alien invasion.

Ellish sputtered, “Come now, come now—ladies, I-I’m sorry, people...”

“Ladies is fine, Ellie.”

“Agent K, please—the information we’re dealing with,” he lowered his voice even though no one was within earshot, “First Contact. It’s- it’s unprecedented.”

Xianyi patted the polar bear’s arm, “If Agent K is clowning with me, that’s only because she can see I’m about to run screaming out of here.”

She glanced over at Kevin in the MRI—still too small for these procedure tables—and blinked back tears.

She excavated a Bic from the table and signed the NDAs.

“I-I’m to highlight certain key-”

Xianyi handed the papers back to Ellish, “I’m a lawyer, remember? My children go barefeet.”

He blushed and countersigned the documents before putting them back in the folder.

“Now. We need to talk about Kevin.”

Xianyi and K exchanged looks.

Ellish sighed, started again. “About Kevin.”

He swiped awake an OpenAI military-issue tablet. “Have you observed anything unusual, Mrs Chen?”

“Nothing much,” she shrugged, “my son has now got an invisible friend named Hogarth who’s into groove metal.”

“W-wait, slow down—Hogarth, like the painter?”

K interjected, “Wasn’t that the name of the kid in The Iron Giant?”

“Agent K, please!” then to Xianyi, “Hogarth, right. A-and what’s... groove metal?”

“I phoned Dr Parkhouse and told him all this two days ago—isn’t that in the notes?”

Ellish opened a tab and nodded, “Y-yes, but I needed to clarify. I-is this the same voice Kevin had reported... broadcasting in his head before removal of the, uhh, foreign body?”

Xianyi scoffed, “I don’t know. Kevin couldn’t say. Dr Rasheed thinks all these voices are aural hallucinations, right? The... the... thing taken out—it was mummified, they said.”

“Right, right,” Ellish zoomed in on a photo, keeping the tablet angled out of Xianyi’s field of view. “Quite. There’s no way it could be coming from the, uhh, we’re calling it the pilot.”

“Pilot.” Xianyi rolled the word in her mouth—an unfamiliar pebble. “Micronaut?”

“I-I’m sorry- micronaut?” Ellish jabbed at the tablet. “D-did Hogarth say-”

“No, Doc. I’m sorry—that came from me. It was my favourite comicbook, growing up. The Micronauts—there was a toy line?”

Ellish deleted the entry. “Can we please stick to what Kevin said?”

Xianyi nodded, chastened. K touched her shoulder lightly.

“Is this what the MRI’s for? To compare with previous images, to see if there’s anything... left behind?”

“Yes, Mrs Chen.” Ellish put the tablet down and fished glasses from his lab coat pocket.

On cue, Parkhouse came to the table and brought the images onto the tri-panel screen of the desktop. Ellish put on his glasses.

“Nothing. Only the expected lesions left by the object, and its extraction.” He pulled up a different report. “Bloodwork however still shows elevated mycelium markers, so you’ll have to pick up an extra script of anti-fungals on the way home, Mrs Chen.”

“Fungus?”

“Quite normal—every human body’s teeming with it. Kevin’s levels are still harmless, just... unexpected. Normally post full-spectrum—following brain surgery—we expect near-zero. A-and there’s also the pathology-” Parkhouse caught himself and darted a look at Ellish, who nodded assent.

“So, the, uh, pilot. Spectral analysis came back a week ago. It’s not carbon-based. Not like us. Its building blocks are mycelium—like a...” He paused. “The pilot was fungal.”

Xianyi sat up straight, “Are you saying the alien left bits of mushroom in my son’s brain—and it’s now getting him to play Slipknot?”

Forward to Part 4

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Three weeks ago I realised I’d saved the wrong Father and Son. Or the right one — by the wrong Yusuf and Cat.

Three days ago I received a thoughtful DM on Part 2 of my serialised story Foreign Body. They dug the narrative dissonance in the opening — the sweet nine-year-old they expected to enjoy bubblegum pop rather than Psychosocial. I could swear I heard a gum-bubble pop in my head with the lightbulb that flared on.

Three hours ago a Pulitzer Prize-winning author gave a thumbs-up when I said that, synchronously, I’d been planning to write about ‘39. This, in response to his Note that called it the loveliest song ever written about the time-dilation experienced at near-c.

Why yes: in three scant paragraphs, I’ve managed to lose the attention of all but three of my most patient followers. And I’ve performed my trademark burial of the lede.

Here it is: all three songs are once-in-a-lifetime phenomena.

To temper my insufferable obscurity, I shall do a 180 and condescendingly assume you know nothing about these songs.

***

The artist formerly known as Cat Stevens had had a great many hits in the seventies — among them, a melodious ballad whose lyrics contained a direct conversation between its titular father and son.

For the 50th anniversary re-release of Tea for the Tillerman in 2020, that artist now known as Yusuf ingeniously recorded a new version, mixing his now-worn and grizzled voice with a live take of himself in his twenties.

FATHER AND SON

Free of charge, I will now go on a side-rant against Spotify. There are two songs named Father and Son, both credited to Yusuf/ Cat Stevens. You would need to listen closely to distinguish the recent duet version from the original single-voiced one. The refusal to display any song’s year of release must be driven by commerce, since it cannot be for technical expedience — I imagine Spotify believes they may lose plays of older songs. If so, it is a deplorable policy.

Back to the song under examination — the very cool device of performing a duet with one’s younger self has of course been done before. Céline Dion, for one, performed a similar act of temporal ventriloquism on select recordings.

But never has the device landed so poignantly as in the present study, because the entire raison d’être of Father and Son is to spotlight occasions of misunderstanding — or refusal to understand — across a generational gap.

That Cat had converted to Yusuf, aged gracefully, was still performing when the anniversary of the original album swung around, and was presented the opportunity to inhabit the older character’s role in a conversation about experience, across decades, with his younger self — these perfect-storm ingredients emerge but once in a lifetime.

As a bonus, Father and Son is — on any reasonable metric — one of the best ballads ever written, and both ages of the singer commanded stirring voices.

A cinematic comparable would be Boyhood — on which I await the lecture by mon frère Français .

***

And now, for a far wackier mashup.

In 2008, Slipknot — one of the most famous heavy metal bands of the era — released Psychosocial, which did remarkably well on mainstream charts.

PSYCHOSOCIAL

Flash-forward two years and Justin Bieber shook the world — or at least its teenaged population — with Baby, a song that hit #1 in Canada and dominated charts across a dozen countries.

BABY

Baby and Bieber were as polar-opposed to Psychosocial and Slipknot as imaginable. Or were they? In 2011, Isosine dropped a remix: Psychosocial Baby.

It’s insane. It’s fantastic.

PSYCHOSOCIAL BABY

Unless you’re a musician, you would — like the rest of us — be baffled how such different-sounding songs could blend so seamlessly.

The explanation lies in why Music used to be considered one of the Quadrivium — the analytical branch of medieval university education, alongside Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy — rather than the Trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic. Music can be broken down into analyzable components.

Here’s the science: both Psychosocial and Baby hover around 130 BPM, share a 4/4 time signature, and — crucially — are in the same key of B minor. Their choruses are also, syllabically, identical:

And-the-rain-will-kill-us-all

Ba-by-ba-by-ba-by-ohh

Whichever song we know better, the cut to chorus perfectly fills the anticipation slot in our brains.

It’s mathematical magic. It’s a psychological sleight.

What could have been a frivolous recording studio exercise winds up being stunning proof — to heavy metal and bubblegum pop fans alike — of just how similar we can be at heart.

Would that world peace were so easily alchemised.

As with the previous exhibit, Psychosocial Baby qualifies as a once-in-a-lifetime artefact in the annals of popular music. I cannot imagine another moment when chart-topping songs with antipodal fanbases, released within a couple of years of each other, would coincidentally share the identical building blocks that allow a seamless mashup — without any of the usual DJ tricks to match BPM or tempo.

***

Last but not least, in a wonderful illustration of how Ideaspace bleeds, Mr. posted a link to ‘39.

Upon discovery of the magic of Queen, I dived into their discography — and cursorily dismissed ‘39. This was because, to my distracted sampling, it sounded like any typical folk song, a genre of which I was not an aficionado.

‘39

It would be decades before I realised — reading an essay on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar — that the narrator in ‘39 was a deep-space explorer who, owing to the effect of near-lightspeed travel on time dilation, came home after one subjective year to find his little girl grown to a woman, and the earth old and grey.

Brian May — a literal astrophysicist, holding a PhD from Imperial College London — had stealthily weaved this profoundly melancholy tale into a jaunty folk song.

Pity the literary sci-fi fans who might have gone insane for it — had they not assumed the title referred to 1539, rather than a thousand years in the future.

Brian f*cking May.

***

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APPENDIX — SELECTED LYRICS

FATHER

I was once like you are now and I know that it’s not easy
To be calm when you’ve found something going on
But take your time, think a lot
Think of everything you’ve got
For you will still be here tomorrow but your dreams may not

SON

All the times that I’ve cried
Keepin’ all the things I knew inside
It’s hard but it’s harder to ignore it
If they were right I’d agree
But it’s them they know, not me
Now there’s a way and I know that I have to go away

‘39

In the year of ‘39 came a ship in from the blue
The volunteers came home that day
And they bring good news of a world so newly born
Though their hearts so heavily weigh
For the Earth is old and grey, little darling, we’ll away
But my love, this cannot be
Oh, so many years have gone though I’m older but a year
Your mother’s eyes, from your eyes, cry to me

Don’t you hear my call though you’re many years away?
Don’t you hear me calling you?
All your letters in the sand cannot heal me like your hand
For my life
Still ahead
Pity me

Note: this is posted out of sequence—back to Prelude.

“Junggar.”

Mother’s voice.

Just a waking dream—she had been dead nine years.

Not yet sunrise. My reflection hung in the dark window, framed against the abyss beyond: shoulder-length hair, moustache and goatee slightly unkempt, circles around my eyes like bruises.

This beaten-down look—unplanned—would do. I imagined many clients of the Smokeless must have come to him looking just as dishevelled, just as desperate.

The plane banked and Doha swam into view—a scatter of gold dust floating on velvet.

I removed my earbuds, custom-built for me by Shaaki—active noise-cancelling tech beyond anything the U.S. military had bothered to develop. The sound of the aircraft within the cabin returned at once, like a roaring, sputtering gas flame.

Qatar Airways flight QR893 from Beijing touched down smoothly at 5:15.

The plane taxied along runways lit like surgery tables.

The terminal itself was quiet. A few passengers drifted toward immigration counters beneath high white arches. At this hour, the air-conditioning was set absurdly low—condensation had turned the three-storey high windows opaque.

The woman at the immigration desk looked up, and smiled. She took my passport, flipped it open, and studied the page. Her tattooed eyebrows lifted with curiosity.

“One word name, Junggar.” she said, pronouncing the J as in the philosopher’s name, Jung. “Did I get that right, sir?”

—It’s Junggar, with a soft ‘Ch’ sound.

“Oh.” Her eyes went back to the passport, “That’s... not common.”

—The name itself, or the lack of a second one?

She smiled faintly. “Both. It must be difficult filling forms... signing papers.” She continued talking as she typed into her terminal, “Where does the name come from?”

—Where I do. As it says in the passport.

I realised that may have sounded curt.

—A mountain pass, near where I was born.

She waited.

—The Dzungarian Gate, Inner Mongolia.

The smile widened, “For business… or pleasure?”

—Here for a contract.

I met her gaze.

—And then… we see.

She took a card from her drawer, flipped it around and wrote on it. “This is a recommended hotel for short-stay business travellers.”

She slipped it under the cover of my passport, and slid it under the glass. “Enjoy Doha, sir.”

I thanked her and walked on. The card was for The Maysan Doha. On the other side, she had written her name, and a phone number.

The carousel had malfunctioned, but I had no luggage.

Skyscrapers rose from the desert like surgical instruments. The roads clean and still traffic-free. Construction cranes turned slowly everywhere. The city looked like an unfinished painting to which the artist kept taping new canvases.

It was, in its way, beautiful.

Alive.

We drove for thirty minutes before the taxi driver left the main road and entered a district where the glass towers gave way to lower buildings. The streets narrowed. The air filled with the smell of spices and burning coal.

The market was already awake.

Vendors arranged fruit beneath hanging lamps. Fabric stalls displayed bolts of coloured cloth. The muezzin’s call to prayer drifted through the alleys and gave me pause. I’d heard it often, but this time there was an undertone—almost a lament—then that odd layer washed away, and I wondered if I’d dreamt it.

The stall I was looking for did not advertise itself. It sold antique lamps, brass trays, and small carved boxes. The man behind the counter wore a white robe and a dark waistcoat. His beard was trimmed carefully. His face completely unremarkable. He was expecting me.

—As-salamu alaykum.

“Wa-alaikum salaam, Junggar Xiansheng.” He returned the greeting with a local Arabic accent, but pronounced my name the way a Xinjiang native would.

He lifted aside a curtain behind the counter and led me through a narrow corridor.

The room beyond it was suddenly—ostentatiously—luxurious.

Persian carpets covered the floor. The walls were lined with bookshelves and polished cabinets. A low table stood in the center of the room beside two chairs.

“Please have a seat, I hope your journey was comfortable.” He spoke in my tribe’s Oirat dialect, in tones that reminded me of my primary school headmaster.

I replied in English.

—It was adequate.

He took a brazier from a gas ring, poured smoking hot tea into two small glasses, and set one in front of me.

“Please be careful—let the tea cool.” He said, following my switch to English. “We do not rush these things.”

—A clear mind to read important contracts.

“Most assuredly.” He said, and took a set of documents from a leather folder, slid it across the table.

The script re-arranged themselves from Han characters to Roman letters.

The opening lines described an agreement between the undersigned mortal party and the party of the Smokeless Flame.

Dense paragraphs ran across the pages. Sections were arranged with precision. Clauses branched into sub-clauses. The structure resembled legal language. The subject matter did not.

Three wishes would be granted.

The wishes could not directly violate certain boundaries.

The mortal party could not wish:

· for additional wishes,

· for transformation into a divine being,

· for the destruction of the granting entity.

Other restrictions followed, running to two full pages.

The wishes were limited to material outcomes. Wealth. Power within human limits. Influence. Pleasure—so many forms of pleasure. Longevity without attracting undesired attention.

A separate section addressed what the granting party would receive in return.

I read that section more slowly. It expressed the transfer of metaphysical custody of the mortal party’s soul upon the conclusion of the mortal lifespan.

I turned the page.

“Take your time,” the man said soothingly.

The contract anticipated cleverness. It anticipated deception. Each loophole seemed already closed. Each ambiguity had been clarified in advance.

I reached the last page, and looked up.

“You have questions?” the man asked.

I shook my head.

“You find the terms acceptable?”

I nodded.

The man leaned back in his chair. “You may ask for kingdoms. Pleasures no human has known.” He spread his hands. “All you have to do-” He left the sentence uncompleted, and withdrew a one-of-a-kind Montblanc pen from an inner pocket of his waistcoat.

I took the proffered instrument. It was warmer than human temperature.

The Smokeless Flame watched me carefully. “You have considered your desires?”

I set the pen down and picked up the contract.

The papers tore easily, with a thin, keening sound.

The Djinn’s smile disappeared.

The air in the room began to change.

He had limitless power, speed, a thousand times mine. His hand could have lashed out like a cobra, like a sirocco, like desert lightning—to stop me, to tear my head off before I could injure his precious agreement.

I counted on him not being permitted to, by the compact under which a creature like him existed.

The edges of his figure blurred slightly. He stood abruptly.

“No.”

The distortion around him intensified. His form flickered like a reflection in disturbed water. Fear crept into his expression.

“You can still repair this,” he said quickly. He reached towards the torn pieces on the table. “Put them back together, now.”

He could not even do that himself. As the one who tore the contract, only I could revoke my action. I allowed myself to breathe again.

“I will waive my conditions.” He swallowed hard. “Your soul—keep it. Wish for all the material wealth and pleasures you want, I will grant them all to you—no conditions.”

I picked up one scrap of the contract and put it in my pocket. Just in case.

“Please.” His eyes searched mine.

Found nothing. “Please, what do you want?”

I waited until he stopped flickering.

—I want the earth cleansed of things like you.

The Smokeless Flame had burned out. Only the mortal remained.

He knew then that it was too late to bargain further. The moratorium had expired.

He wiped a hand over his open mouth. Sweat beaded his forehead for the first time in millennia.

I picked up my cup of tea—it was still scalding—and took a careful sip.

It tasted like a new day.

When the man opposite me lifted his right hand, it was shaking so hard he had to use his other one to steady it.

Then he gave a sick, defeated smirk, and picked up his cup with the left hand.

He twitchily brought the steaming drink to his lips—and cried out in shock and pain.

The cup slipped from his fingers and struck the table.

The ink of the sundered covenant ran immediately.

He held up his hand and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else.

I stood, turned, and left.

The taxi was still waiting at the mouth of the alley. On the way back to the airport, I booked the next return flight to China.

I did not dream of Mother on the return flight.

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***

An Autogenous1 Autodidact’s2 Autotelic3 Autointerview4 Autobiography5 as Autofiction6 about Autoeroticism,7 actually.

Are we clear that you are never to believe anything an author tells you about himself? Good.

WHERE DO YOU LIVE?

The above photo does not show my home in Borneo (Joseph Conrad’s notorious ‘Heart of Darkness’—it’s very sunny here all the time so I don’t know what that dyspeptic old scribbler was going on about).

WHAT TIME DOES YOUR DAY START?

I do not awake, “in a glorious state of excitement, full o’ beans and benevolence”,8 at precisely 3:33 AM every day—

(yes, yes, I screenshot that on 28/2 and it would have been 33 times better had I done it on 3/3, but I’m not gonna break out the Origami Time Machine9 just to re-do that photo, am I? It takes an hour to fold and unfold that thing, sheesh!).

—with such an epic erection as to rival Ralph’s,10 that I’m forced to straddle the porcelain throne like a motorbike to avoid peeing in my face.

CHRIST… TODAY, DID YOU HAVE BREAKFAST BEFORE WRITING?

I did not, after a repast of only espresso and mayonnaise11, sit to write this ‘day in the life of a legend’ mosaic tile at the beseeching of my clamorous fans >cough Vonnie Clemens cough<.

LOOK, FOR THE REST OF THIS INTERVIEW, CAN YOU JUST BOAST ABOUT YOUR TOTALLY AMAZING AND TOTALLY TRUE DAY?

Only because I’m totally in love with the sound of me own voice…

Having not knocked out the best—or at least the most footnoted entry in ’s ingenious writers’ mosaic project—in four minutes12 flat, I did not trade witty asides with Pulitzer-prize winners13—

—or proceed to cook a delicious lunch of sweet-and-sour fish—

—which did not give rise to a throwaway comment by me about native Sarawak culture14 that’s more awesome than all your trite notes put together—

—and no, that bit of bombast was not a sly attempt to algowhore15 Substack and gain me another 1,000 subscribers16—

—and, after lunch, I did not pop out to the local crag and send a 33 metre tall route graded 7b17 after having only picked up rock climbing18 five years ago, aged 53—a feat I have not been assured is physically impossible by my penpal (by penpal, I mean my bro writes incessantly to me for longevity tips, and I keep ghosting him (no pun intended, Mr. ‘Don’t-Die’))—

—which was not followed by a night-dive to the Japanese warship Katori Maru sunk off the coast at Mount Santubong—

—and before some pedantic cineaste pipes up to say that that photo looks like it was screenshot off someone else’s IG—duhhh! It was a night-dive so obviously I couldn’t get a long distance shot of me and the wreck?—

—and not capped off with a five-star dinner (but no drinks, since I swore off Satan’s Syrup after epically defeating half a carton of Tsingtao beer some years ago—no mean feat since I’m a literal lightweight at 54kg) at the restaurant19 I founded a dozen years ago and sold at its height last November—

—then finally to hit the sack for my strict four hours of sleep.20

OMFGGG—CAN WE END WITH SOME TRUTHS?

Sigh, what do you people want, really? Haven’t you heard of ‘Death of the Author’?

I’ve been a practising barrister in the High Court of Sabah and Sarawak for the past 33 years—

—and I’m goddam proud of my three kids who are mildly celebrated. No cap.

Oh, and I love comics21 and movies—here’s a fifteen-minute sketch I did of Matt Murdock (Marvel’s Daredevil) in the pose of Mikhail Baryshnikov (White Nights)22—

D’oh!

Forgot this was Substack—so yeah, I’m chipping away at a novel I’ve been thinking about for around four decades, about:

a man who remembers the future-death of his daughter, and plans the most audacious heist ever to claw her from Time’s clutches.

All my posted stories23 are just practice for this magnum opus.

Going off now to put this big head on ice to get the swelling down—and, no, that was totally not a masturbation innuendo to bookend this Ulyssean-rant, Alan Moore style, with a palindrome-in-spirit.24

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(Trev, did that come in under 500?)

4

no definition needed—but wait. it appears i’ve taught Merriam-Webster a new word

ESSAYS

***

STORIES

AUDIO DRAMAS—with multiple voice actors

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COMPLETED

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SERIALS

(for brevity, only the first and most recent parts are listed)

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THE 1900 SUITE

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TALES FROM THE DREAMING

***

If you find this List/ Table of Contents useful, or have any suggestions for improvement, please do spare me a few minutes to comment below or DM me!

tells me y’all like charts?

I started posting on 8th January—thanks to all who have subscribed and followed!

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