Able approaches the map table and sees that there are three large rings that run along its edge. He reaches out and takes hold of the top ring to see if he can push it. It gives and as it turns along the circumference of the table, the image of the world above him begins to rotate away from him, turning the world over. He turns the middle ring and the whole world rotates away from him in the same direction as the ring. Finally, he tries the bottom ring and everything on the sphere increases in size as though coming closer. Like looking down from the mesa near his father’s fields, Able can make out all manner of things in the landscape. And much to his shock, some of the things are moving.

An idea pops into Able’s head and he turns the middle ring, hand over hand, until the world turns and he can see the Moon’s run. From there, he turns the world end over end, traversing the Moon’s Run until he comes to a part of the desert where he can see a small camp of traders, their pedes as small as fingers, resting in the desert. Able steps back from the table and puts his hand on his forehead. He looks to the The Dustfish, currently swimming directly through the world, and says, “What is this? What is this place? This isn’t just a map; it’s the world.” The Dustfish flips over on its back and swims around behind him. “How is this possible?” He reaches out again to the middle ring and turns the world west, away from the Moon’s Run, until he can see his Mesa. He brings the world closer with the third ring again, all the way into his father’s tiny cabin, where he can see his father treading amongst the tablets of dead ideas. “Father!” he yells at the tiny golden light version of his father, but nothing happens. Able twists his lips to one side in frustration. Perhaps it was only a map after all–just a very good one.

And if it is a very good map thinks Able, then where is the Ultracircus? He looks above him, high above the table, where the twelve buzzings float in the air, projecting the image of the world. He tries to decipher which one is his buzzing, but they are all so bright, that it is hard to see any difference. Finally, unable to decide, he just shouts, “Can you show me the Ultracircus?” One of the buzzings chirps gleefully in reply and the world turns and shrinks and rolls, the image coming to rest on dunes at the base of a craggy line of dark mountains. The buzzing shines out a single purple spotlight that comes to rest on a jagged tower crawling over a massive hill of sand. “Oh,” says Able, with awe. The tower is nearly as large as his mesa and covered in flags that are whipping in the desert wind. It is neatly perched on the back of a giant tortoise who patiently and slowly pushes his body through the sand. “Wow.”

Just then, something shimmers into existence in the desert, much smaller than the tortoise, and black, and giving off smoke. Able turns the third ring to look closer and recognizes the ugly black creature immediately–the ones that chased him into the stone letters. The creatures runs at the Ultracircus–it’s much faster–and bares down on one of the tortoises legs. The poor tortoise rears back and though there is no sound coming from the map it is clear that the desert animal is howling in pain. As Able watches helpless to do anything, his mouth agape, something comes off from the tower: a light? A projectile? It’s hard to tell, but the black creature shivers and then bursts into a hundred tiny pieces. But just as soon as it does, another black creature appears behind the Ultracircus and attacks. This time, the tortoise gives the creature a heavy kick with its back foot and the black creature rolls through the sand and lands on its back where it struggles to right itself. Again, something launches itself from the tower and the black creature bursts into pieces.

Able turns to the buzzings above him, “Where am I?” Again, the world turns, panning slowly across a massive sea of dunes until Able can see again, the scruff forest, and then, the stone letters at the edge of the dune that mark the spot where he came to the underground glade. His heart sinks. “How am I ever going to get across all that desert?” He looks to the dustfish by his side. “And how could we ever get past those monsters?” The dustfish hovers and stares. “We’ll have to think of something.”

Read the whole story so far: Brother Dustfish

Characters and Places: Able Sum, The Dustfish

Able walks along the burbling stream and climbs the piles of moss covered rocks up past small waterfalls. As he goes, the chamber does appear to him to be growing in brightness, though he cannot see yet the source of the light. The air is moist and the rock walls of the chamber shine in the low light. Some of the light comes from strange plants in the chamber that glow of their own accord. And dotted here and there are sprinklings of motes of light that appear in the air only to disappear just as quick as he sees them. But none of those things seem to be the cause of most of the light in the chamber, am almost white light shining down from beyond the waterfalls and the stream.

And then, just like that, as he climbs and climbs the rocks by waterfalls that get taller and taller one after the next, the chamber’s ceiling gets closer and closer, and Able pulls himself up over one last rock to see a massive pair of doors on the other side of glade. The doors are not the source of the light, but are surrounded on all sides by white lights embedded in the wall that turn and rotate, sending out beams that search all around the chamber. The pair of doors are three times as tall as Able is, look like they are made of metal, and shiny. As Able approaches the doors, he sees that they are covered in more runes like the ones on the tablets in his father’s fields, and the ones that appeared on the stone guardians at the edge of the dunes. The glade in which the doors sits is very bright and very quiet. Even the stream, which empties out from beneath the glade is quiet. Able cannot explain it, but the place has a majesty. And the white lights in the walls? They’re familiar too. They are spinning crystals of light set within rotating gyroscopes, just like the buzzing.

In fact, before Able can come close enough to one of the lights, all of the beams of light searching across the cavern walls and ceiling and floor begin to align and converge. This single mesh of beams searches the room and the quiet is disturbed by a light humming. The beams pass over Able and then the dustfish, making lightbeam copies of them in the air in the process, before moving on. Finally, they come to land on the buzzing, hovering near Able’s head. A copy of the buzzing is traced out in the air right in front of the little device before a loud chime sounds out through the chamber. The buzzing turns white and hovers over near the doors. Then the buzzing turns purple and a second chime, ascending in tone as it rings out, fills the glade, followed by a dull boom from behind the doors, which now begin to grind open outward into the glade.

The buzzing comes back to Able, green again, and makes a chirping that sounds to Able as if it knows where to go. Then, it hovers off through the now open doorway. Able looks to the Dustfish and shrugs. “Ok.” They both proceed to follow the buzzing into the door. On the other side, they come into a room with walls and ceiling made into a dome. At the center of the circular floor, twenty feet away from them, sits a giant, metallic circular table. All along its rounded edges, there are levers, buttons and switches. As Able approaches the table, the buzzing comes over to him and chirps and beeps, blinks and flashes. “I–I–don’t know what you’re trying to say!” Undeterred, the buzzing hovers over the center of the table and lets out a kind of electric squeel, like the piercing sound of a sword being pulled from a scabbard.

Suddenly, from outside the chamber, the eleven other buzzings that had been set in the wall around the doors, release themselves from their guard posts and enter the chamber, immediately filling the room with light. As they position themselves around the table they are on fire with activity, changing colors, beeping and chirping to one another, and tracing out all manor of runes and shapes on the wall of the chamber. Before Able realizes it, he can not tell any of the new buzzings from his own. They entirely circle the table and, all in unison, shine gold so brightly that Able has to cover his eyes and turn away for a moment. In a dance, they shine beams of light all across the walls and ceiling of the domed room, forming a geometric mesh of light that blinks and dances with activity.

A ghostly sphere rises up from the surface of the table, shifting in and out of existence, dancing with static, and gradually solidifying itself into a single image. The sphere is covered in tiny patterns that at once seem foreign and yet familiar. These patterns are not like the runes Able had seen before. Instead, in the way that the runes were abstract and symbolic of real things, this sphere was covered in real things that were just… small. Trees, paths, sands and mesas. As the sphere grows in size and begins to turn and fill the chamber, now many times larger in size that the table, Able sees that there is a second smaller sphere rolling across the surface of the first, like a marble on a track. Able stares and some sense of familiarity fills him, the way this small sphere rolls along a crack in the large sphere, the way it bounces, its speed. And then it occurs to him: the small sphere is the moon, the rest, his world.

Read the whole story so far: Brother Dustfish

Characters and Places: Able Summary, The Dustfish

The trances were what bothered him most; long moments of undefined time. That morning, the day had started off beautiful: the sky an invigorating, if brisk, blue, and the woods behind his home a natural aviary. Nuno had noticed, in particular, a species of woodpecker that he had not seen before. Where most of the woodpeckers he saw had darker, maroon hoods, this one bird had a crimson hood. It stood out brightly amongst the naked gray branches of winter. It’s pecking had enticed him. But then his gaze had just drifted and settled on a pair of branches that had been trimmed short so that they formed a tuning fork against the sky. He “awoke” from staring at them with the same disorienting feeling that he had been having for several days now, having absolutely no sense of how long he had been absorbed in the little scene. Had it been seconds, fractions of seconds? He didn’t know anymore and it was discomforting. The pace of even empty thinking—of quantified meditation—was gone. An eerie amorphous quiet had taken its place.

He’d known quiet before the beeping had stopped, even though he had a hard time convincing his friends that it was so. They would say things to him like, “Really quiet, Nuno, like silence, no noise—you don’t know what that’s like.” He would explain that, yes he did, as much as they did anyway, in the sense that they didn’t know true silence either. Surely they could hear the air move in a breeze, or their own breathing or their heart beat. Did anyone really perceive silence? The beeping had never been a sound outside his head, it was in his mind. So to him, he knew what quiet was; it was just a demarcated quiet, a quiet built out of patches of quiet, discretely bundled quiet that was nicely packaged in time. When he used to stare at things, there was always a comforting knowledge of the length of time. There was a cycle: 6 beeps. 1 then 2 then 3 then 4 then 5 then 6 then it started over. It was six seconds to most people he knew, but he felt something different. When he began to discover that others didn’t have a pace in their head, he would watch clocks. But six seconds on a clock felt rigid. A cycle, to him, in his mind, was a kind of music. There were ten cycles in a minute. A shower was almost always 120 cycles. A meal was 180 cycles and he almost never finished before anyone else and spoke very little while eating. He had always wondered why his friends and family would at times seem frantic and rushed and gush about things like, “Where did the time go?” He always knew where it had gone and exactly how much of it had gone, since even when there was nothing to measure, even when sitting and staring in silence, the moments still came and went like a song. Now, as of six days ago, Nuno’s universe had become messy, or at least less discrete.

Nuno was known to people as a very precise man. He wasn’t type-A or particularly clean. Just precise. Cleaning itself could be quite a droll activity, because when one has an innate sense of time slipping by there is an inherent need to make actions count for something. But when things got messy enough and he needed to clean, he wasn’t particular about it like others, it was just another kind of dance. Cleaning the desk off? 100 cycles. Doing the dishes? 200 cycles. He never stopped to wonder why, regardless of the state of the desk or how many dirty dishes there were, the dance remained the same. It just did. And in that sense, he always caught buses, was never late, or might interject a helpful point when a friend was droning on about something for a little too long—in that sense, he had come to be known as “precise.” He spoke with a very measured tone and chose his words carefully. Others he had conversations with always seemed to be bumbling about in their own heads, searching for words, or losing track of what they were saying, or losing the thread of the topic. Words tended to line up in his head and be released through a gate in an orderly fashion. He had a repertoire of small, rehearsed speeches. When he met someone new who wanted to know who he was and what he did, it took 30 cycles for him to tell them, and that particular speech ended with, “and I have a neural implant that beeps once a second.” The last sentence was two cycles, and he often wondered why he didn’t just say that, because once it was spoken it was like nothing else had been said at all.

Neural implants come with a shelf-life though. His first implant had lasted until he was 16; 502,654,824 seconds or as he preferred, 83,775,804 cycles (give or take). When it had began to fade, he got clumsy. His mother had blamed the clumsiness on his growth spurts but when he cut himself with a knife while carving, she’d taken him to the hospital and it was the doctors who reckoned that the implant needed to be replaced. He was in surgery the next day and within a day after that his coordination returned completely intact. Now, having lost the signal form the implant entirely, he wished he’d had the wherewithal as a sixteen-year-old to pay attention to what the pace had been doing. He didn’t think it was ever gone entirely, but truth be told, he simply couldn’t remember now, at least in part because he hadn’t paid much attention, didn’t know to pay attention. He knew, at sixteen, that he had the implant, he knew why. But even then, it was ethereal, as obvious as your hand. He paid it no mind.

The next implant, with improvements in materials and all, would likely last until his death, but this time he told the doctors, “Let it fail.” The doctors weren’t sure if the implant had actually done its job anyway. The supposed genetic neuronal aberration that it was meant stave off had not seemingly occurred. The doctors didn’t like the idea—they were a risk-averse bunch—but what harm could a few days do? He told them, “Let it fail. I want to see—hear—what it’s like.” That was 14,400 cycles ago, except that there were no cycles at all. In place of cycles were six odd, off-putting, sluggish and then super fast days filled with restlessness and nights of poor sleep. Each day brought a new sense of time lost and pressed and smashed and pulled apart and the disorientation of being lost staring at some branches that looked like a tuning fork. So far, the experiment was unpleasant, and he already felt it likely that he would get the upgrade.

Read the whole story so far: Incunabula

Able tumbles and rolls for several minutes down the small tunnel until finally he falls out of it only to land on soft ground in the dark. The air is very cool and moist and there are soft noises all about, rustling and burbling. At first he can see nothing, but as his eyes adjust to the dark, he begins to make out small motes of light everywhere around him. He gets to his knees and hands and feels around on the floor for his rucksack or any of his mistakes and though he cannot find them at first he realizes that the floor is more than a floor. It’s fuzzy and soft and squishy. He looks down to his his hands but it is still to dark to see. Just then, an orange glow, the Buzzing, appears near his head. “There you are.” he says. “Find the others.” the Buzzing dutifully begins to hover about here and there seeking out their companions and Able is very surprised by what he can see in its light; leaves. Wherever the buzzing floats Able can see branches and leaves surrounding them.

It’s not long before the Buzzing has located his rucksack and the Flamehat and Able crawls several feet over to where they lay and after a moment ignites the Flamehat. What he sees next is amazing and nothing like he has ever seen: a forest glade inside a cavern, the ground covered in a rich green and emerald moss, the trees covered in massive, wet celadon green leaves, and everywhere a ghostly cyan blue light. Behind him he can see the hole that he tumbled out of—too high up the cavern wall for him to reach—so he gathers his other mistakes and sets out away from where he came. With every step he takes, the thick mossy ground beneath him seems to sigh and tiny particles are released into the air from beneath his feet. “Sorry,” he says to the ground, but he has to move on.

It is only a another ten yards or so before he comes to another amazing sight, a burbling creek. He’s never seen anything like it; doesn’t even know what to call it. To him it is just a miraculous line of crystalline water pouring across the ground. He comes to his knees at the side of the creek and sets the Flamehat down nearby. Reaching out, he gingerly places his hand into the water and is shocked. The water is very cold. He puts his fingers to his lips and tastes it and the taste is pure with no hint of salt or metal. He cups his hands and drinks a big gulp from the creek; it is totally refreshing and he sits back on his haunches to stare around the cavern in awe. Cal had told him about pumps that pull the water up from the ground. That must be where he is; wherever the water goes.

A splash sound out from the creek and Able turns and lifts the Flamehat to spot the disturbance. There, across the creek, the Dustfish is rolling about in a shallow pool, flipping its tail and then lying on its belly. “Come here,” he says. “I’ll take that helmet off and you can really enjoy this. The Dustfish rises up out of the creek and floats over to Able who removes the helmet, catching the Dustfish as it falls when the helmet comes off. “Enjoy!” Able says and sets the Dustfish down in the water. The Dustfish seems ecstatic and splashes and jumps and dives from pool to pool. From away behind him, Able here’s the scream of the beast from the dunes. The cry is muted and far away, but resonates down the tunnel until it exits like a hissing wind. He turns and can still just make out the hole in the cavern wall. “I’m not going back that way,” he says to no one in particular.

After the cry of the beast resides, the quiet of the cavern and the trickling sounds of water return, and Able sits back on the mossy ground and contemplates the cavern. He wonders if there are more places like this elsewhere in the world. How silly would that be that people living on the harsh desert surface of the world might all this time be standing right on top of a beautiful, cool, and colorful place such as this? He walks down in the direction that the creek flows and sees it disappear into darkness, but turning around upstream, he can see are a series of hills and small waterfalls and the cavern appears to grow brighter in that direction. He turns to the now approving green Buzzing and says, “I think we should head towards the light.” The Buzzing beeps three times in agreement. As Able begins to get up and gather his things, the Dustfish comes to the edge of the creek and flings half of its body up on the land, waiting. “You want to comes with us? Are you sure?” The Dustfish sits and stares. “Okay.” Able takes up the Dustfish’s helmet, refilling it in the creek and then attaches it to the Dustfish who proceeds to take to the air again and swim in quick circles around Able. “Okay! Okay! I’m glad you want to come too.”

Read the whole story so far: Brother Dustfish

Characters and Places: Able Summary, The Dustfish

By the time the news had spread, the wait was estimated to be something close to a year, and Jackie, Anglican priest, had already been there, in the middle-of-nowhere, China, for four months. When the news came, she did what most everyone else around her did and began crying, her one question, written on a crumpled piece of paper in her pocket, there to remain unanswered for all time now. And then, after the weeping ended, she took to moving around to her “neighbors” in the camp of the last few months and tried to comfort them, and even though many of them did not speak English, there was no need for language, for everyone was united in knowing just what the world had lost that day. Within a day, the whole of the world sat in crowds and held hands, put their heads down and shed tears. At one moment, the world, the Internet itself, was quiet.

He, with a capital ‘H’, had appeared in the Bijie, China, and for a very long time no one knew that He was here. An old man, walking from out of the hills, He traveled about, asking people for room and board and food and in exchange, told them that He was God, and that He had come to answer as many questions as he could in the order that he was asked the questions. People asked parlor trick questions at first like, “When is my mother’s birthday?” or “What did I have for breakfast last Monday?” and He patiently answered any and all of them; correctly. It wasn’t long before the Internet got wind of the story and it began to rapidly spread, at first through stories and tweets, and then photographs and footage. Here was an ancient-looking asian man claiming that he was God come to Earth. He began to gather attendants who would retrieve questions from forums and email and twitter and ask him and then relay the answers to the world. A hundred thousand web sites bloomed, some well-intentioned, some claiming the ability to get to the top of the question queue for a hundred bucks. And for a time too, the Chinese government did what it could to quash the story, but that didn’t last long either. Word spread by mouth too, and people began migrating to China in droves. The world’s flight traffic re-focused itself on China, slowly jamming infrastructure, and bringing some businesses to a crippling halt. News teams from every country in the world descended. And when visas and papers and the like were denied, people just walked. People walked from Nepal, from Myanmar, from Laos.The whole affair had an immensely destabilizing effect on North Korea as the world arrived on the country’s doorstep just to get in to China, stories of God arriving with them and infecting the whole of the population like a virus.

Jackie was an early believer, having caught whispers of the arrival through some friends she’d met at a conference, and who were missionaries in Myanmar. They had told her stories that were too unbelievable to not warrant investigation. By then, by April of 2013, she discovered evidence revealing that an international consulting firm had been hired to build a massive database to store and order all the questions for God as well catalog the answers. The existence of such a massive investment was enough evidence for her to pack up and go. She took a nearly eighteen hour flight to Beijing from London. And that was nothing compared to getting to Bijie without speaking any Mandarin. But she persevered and there was lots of help. All along the way, she continually met up with fellow travelers from all over the world, and they made happy chatting traveling bands, doing what they could to translate one another’s thoughts into loose conversations, bumping along in buses and cars, going to see God. She thought often about “The Canterbury Tales” and how they were never finished.

The man calling himself God, had stated that He was simply there to answer any and all the questions He could in the order that He received them. Presidents, pontiffs, dictators and billionaires were told to get in line. The Chinese government weighed in heavily on God’s consulting firm in order to insure that every question’s number was quadruply verified, but also that various contacts and monied sources could make sure that any verification included showing that certain people had lower numbers. One day in early June, God asked his attendants for a brief hour-long respite from seeing people and also to get him a laptop. After that, the database’s programmers were left scratching their heads as the program rumbled along without them and without anyone any longer having security access to the system. In a press release, the chief consultant for the database project declared that the database had been massively re-distributed to the entire Internet through a virtually infinite sequence of IP addresses, the program existing on millions of machines worldwide simultaneously and that now, there was no longer any way to reasonably write to it. Wired magazine declared, “God is hax0r!”

And millions of questions, so many of them trivial, asked before anyone knew that God was going to answer them, were all answered and only in the order that they arrived, virtually or personally. The world grew impatient as God answered questions like “Where are my keys?” and “Will I win in the match this Sunday?” And when the occasional child arrived to see Him, he could not be bothered with anything else, sitting the child His lap and listening to them for seemingly forever while the United Nations waited for some answer to a border dispute. The questions eventually became more complex, of course. The inevitable, “Why are you Chinese?” came up and he said, “China is a country and I am not a citizen of any country.” And when asked the follow-up, “Why do you look Chinese?” he said, “Statistical likelihood.” Many questions revolved around why there was “evil” in the world. Again and again, He admonished humanity that the nature of Life in the Universe was a complicated affair and that since the Universe had to be entropic in Nature, and that things had to fall apart for the laws of Physics to operate in such a way that the DNA molecule could come about, a certain amount of churn was to be expected, etc. etc. He calmed us and said that much of what humanity thought was evil was just par for the course. When asked about War, He largely explained that that was our fault, not His. Are we alone? “No. Never in any sense of the word.” And when asked about Terrorism in his name, he only cried. When one physicist asked what, exactly Dark Energy was, and received an answer that was not only plausible but demonstrated and verified several weeks later at the CERN particle collider, the matter was largely settled for the scientific community. God was here. After that, things spiraled out of control as humanity traveled to China.

The weeks that Jackie spent there in the countryside, waiting to see God, were filled with amazing conversations and an enormous amount of love and very little preaching. What was there to preach? God was here. He was going to answer our questions—all of them! The nights were filled with drinking and singing and fires, the collection of which could be seen from space. The answers started to matter less and less, because, maybe fifteen miles from where she slept, He was there, in some room, seeing us, day and night (he didn’t sleep) and she was on his list. She felt warm and loved and safe, even with nothing in her possession and her home a hundred thousand miles away.

Then it happened. God asked everyone in his chambers to to leave His presence, but for one young child, a girl named Sukie, arrived from Australia. He told the child, in English and in a comforting Australian accent, “You must tell everyone that everything is fine and that what is about to happen is natural. It’s all fine. Ok?” Sukie said “Okay.” And God, with Sukie in his lap, sat back in his chair, a simple wooden thing that he had been sitting in since before anyone believed who He was, and He closed his eyes and died. After sitting quietly with Him for a while, Sukie got up and went to tell everyone, and everyone, the world over, heard the news. God had died, but everything was fine.

After hugging and holding and crying with a hundred strangers, Jackie sat on the ground by a campfire with her new close friends and fellow travelers, and for the first time since that hour that He left us, she opened the piece of paper in her pocket and looked at her own handwriting.

“Do you love me?”

And she knew the question was selfish, and she didn’t care, and she knew the answer, too. Surely she did. But as beautiful as it was surely true, the little question crushed her heart.

Read the whole story so far: Incunabula

As the horrifying calls come rolling over the dunes towards him, Able notices that the light from his drawing in the air has reached out and is tracing over one of the monuments nearest him, tracing out new runes on its surface and making them glow a yellow-orange color. The buzzing has come to him, aflame with red, spinning around him, warning him of danger, but despite the warning, Able, hypnotized, approaches the giant stone monolith and puts his hands to the surface to trace the runes. In the distance he hears a howling, which is now joined by another, somewhat farther away. He looks to the buzzing, which is in a panic now, and then back to the stone, at the meaningless, bright runes. When he traces one with a finger, the rune brightens in intensity, and then, after tracing a circle shape, the stone seems to give way and fold into itself, scraping loudly, and a small entrance appears in the midst of what once seemed completely solid.

“Quickly,” Able says to his little companions. “We can hid in here.” He runs back to where he was sitting and folds up his writing disc mistakes, throwing them into his rucksack. Strangely, the small holographic block that he had created remains floating in the air. He tries to grab it as well, but his hand passes through it. Without another thought, he leaves it behind and heads back to the new entrance in the block in the sand, the Dustfish and the Buzzing following close behind. He ushers them in to the block and then stands and peers out across the dunes, looking for the source of the howling.

Over the rise appears something black and crawling, jagged like a bundle of sticks, but moving like an insect. The thing, whatever it is, seems to sniff the air and then lets out another howl, only this time the sound is not dampened by the sand and the call takes on a quality of metallic scratching. No sooner has Able spotted the creature than it turns its jagged head—its “nose” a giant obsidian horn—in his direction and then begins running. Able cannot help but look at the black beast bounds at him for he’s never seen anything like it. It moves like an animal but is covered in a kind of armor of shell and its insides seem to leak behind it as it runs, colors making shapes and then fading away into nothing. The beast is fast, and as it disappears behind the closer dune hill, Able takes one last glance at his little holographic block and then ducks inside the stone monument with the buzzing and the Dustfish.

The space inside the stone block is cramped and Able struggles to position himself facing the door and then begins to rifle through his rucksack looking for the Flamehat. Upon finding it, he quickly rearranges it and lights it and looks around the inside of the door for runes, hoping to find one that will close the entrance behind him, but there do not appear to be any. He runs his hands along the stone’s interior hoping even to just feel a rune, but nothing. Only ten feet away, he can still see his orange holographic block floating in the air, just a foot above the sand. Without warning, the beast comes crashing down near the block. From where he is sitting, he can only see a portion of the beast, it’s so large. Now that it’s close he can hear all manner of sounds coming from the beast itself, from inside it; whirring and clicking, Able realizes, that sound like one of his rollys. The beast approaches the orange block and sniffs it, hot steam floating up from its nostrils. And then, in one giant tooth-filled bite, the beast eats the block!

Able keeps running his hands along the interior of the stone, looking for a lever or latch or anything, but a feeling comes over him, a feeling like when the moon was barreling down on he and Cal, a feeling of freezing. As the beast sits quietly ticking where it consumed his letter, Able begins to shake and can’t catch his breath, except that he doesn’t want to breathe at all. Slowly, quietly, he pushes himself back further into the recess of the monument, the Flamehat’s light revealing the cramped tunnel as scoots himself. Suddenly the beast sniffs the air again and brings its head around toward the entrance to the tunnel. Able scoots himself backwards more quickly, now five feet or so from the entrance as the beast shifts and slides its bulk over to the little portal of daylight. The beast can fit only its nose and mouth in the portal, and this time when it sniffs, it sucks the air around Able out of the tunnel and even the little Flamehat shudders and almost goes out. Then the beast roars, the sound a deafening and terrifying mix of animal and machine, screaming like a lion while clacking like chains. Able, holding the Flamehat tight, scoots back some more and then falls into the dark.

Read the whole story so far: Brother Dustfish

Characters and Places: Able Summary, The Buzzing, The Dustfish

When he comes to the bottom of the hill, where the giant structures sit, Able puzzles over them. They are four or five times taller than he is, made entirely of solid sand-pocked stone, and somehow menacing. Staring at them and speaking to the Dustfish, Able says, “They do look like letters.” He turns the the dustfish, “Letters are things that people write down in order to save sounds for later.” He looks back to the objects. They are like letters in that they are square and have angles and many parts and lines that intersect, but then they are not like letters in that they have no curves and letters are flat whereas these things were not.

Letters came in all different kinds. Sometimes, when his father was far away in the fields, Able would gather some tablets from the fields and lay them out side by side. It was always risky because his father strictly forebid Able and his brother to ever try to learn to read them—reading them meant making the sounds that the letters were. And Able always wondered what would happen if he made the sounds. He always looked at the tablets in silence, going from one shape to the next, always too frightened to utter a sound while looking at them, because he did not know what kind of magicks would occur if he made the right sound while looking at the right symbol.

What he did notice when he was looking at them was that many of the tablets had many different kinds of letters on them. There might be one kind of tablet that had letters that would swoop a lot and all the letters might meet together at the bottom, but then many of the tablets had letters that were very distinct from one another, like a line of neighboring fortresses. Sometimes letters were little more than a box or a circle, but then sometimes the letters were complicated enough to appear to be a picture of a tree or a flower or person.

Lost in memories, Able stares at the giant blocks before him that are like letters but not like letters, like boxes that have melted together to make broken useless furniture. He daydreams about being able to write, and then about being able to write in boxes! He turns to the dustfish, who has floated up to near the top of one of the geometric golems, “Wouldn’t that be something?” He puts his finger out in the air and traces imaginary shapes. Suddenly, he seats himself in the shadow of one of the structures and reaches down into his rucksack and pulls out two of the rollys. He beings re-arranging them, pulling them and makes them in to two discs with one flat edge so that can sit on the ground and face one another. He pulls a small branch-like piece off of one of the rollys, which trills in shock. “Don’t worry, I’m going to give it back.” Then he presses and pushes on the a few times and for a brief moment a light shines between them, which slowly fades away to nothing.

Splitting the branch part in to two pieces connected at one end like tweezers, he reaches in between the two mistakes and he pulls a small sliver of light into existence. “Look at that!” His other mistakes and the dustfish have all now gathered around him to watch. After a few more minutes of pulling and teasing, a small transparent replica of one of the giant structures sits hovering in the air between the two disk mistakes. Able turns to the Dustfish, very pleased with himself. “I can write letters that aren’t flat!” He pauses though and looks at the ground where he sits. “I wish I knew what any of them meant.”

But just then, sound comes up from out of the dunes, a sound that sounds chills straight down Able’s back to his toes. He had never heard anything like it, but it frightened him to its core. Almost blending with the wind running over the dunes comes a low, low call. It starts in short bursts like an alarm of some kind and then ends with a long howl like a giant animal crying out for its mother.

Read the whole story so far: Brother Dustfish

Characters and Places: Able Summary, The Dustfish

Able is woken early in the morning by the rising sun. The black of night gives way to the gray of day. He lies on his side on his bedroll and looks around the small encampment. The fire he made the previous night, thanks to the new mistake, the flamehat, is burned out and in its place is a small circle of black ashes in the sand. The morning is still cold, but Able is grateful to know that in a few hours, the desert will be warm again. He digs through his rucksack to get out some rations that he still has, crunchy wheat stuff mashed together with a bland molasses of some kind. He sits on his bedroll and eats while the his mistakes circle about on the desert ground, one of them investigating the circle of black ash.

Curiously, he does not see the flamehat. He digs through his rucksack again and finds a rolly that is now covered in yellow and orange patterns with a single light near one of its eyes that is blinking intermittently with red and orange. It’s warm to the touch. “Are you Flamehat?” he asks it. The little rolly sounds out three trill beeps.

“Oh.” He turns the rolly over and over in his hands and sees a switch. “Why did you go back to being a rolly?” He presses the switch, and the top half of the rolly pops open and the small smokestacks he remembers from the night before pop out. Able presses a button that appears now next to the switch and the bottom half of the rolly turns and then compresses into itself, giving the appearance of the flamehat again. “Huh. I guess you can go back and forth then. That’s new.” He examines the little flamehat a bit more and sees a square orange button, which he presses. The bottom of the rolly pops back out, the smokestacks fold inside, and the little mistake is once again a rolly covered in orange and yellow patches. “Neat!”

Able looks to the buzzing which had been hovering behind his shoulder, “Can you do that?” The buzzing, now green, flashes brightly, chimes, and then folds in on itself and drops to the ground, once again a spherical little rolly mistake with crisscrossing green and red stripes. “Cool!” He picks up both rollys and holds them in front of him. “I didn’t know you all could do that. I wonder if that will come in handy?” Setting them down in the sand, he says, “Well, be whatever way you want, I guess.” The flamehat rolly boops but stays the same while the buzzing rolly immediately changes back into a hovering plate with a light shape and hovers around Able’s head. Able puzzles over this as he gathers up his things and rolls up his bedroll for carrying.

Finally, with all of his things packed up, he sits and contemplates what direction to go. If he knew anything at all about the Ultracircus, he would just make a rolly to lead him there, but as it is, he doesn’t know the first thing about what an ultracircus looks like, or frankly, even what it is. Before he and Cal met up with Gef, it seemed like they were mostly heading away form the Sun, though, so Able figures it couldn’t hurt to keep going in that direction, though he doesn’t want to cross their path. And this thought makes him glum, because truth be told he wouldn’t mind seeing Cal again. He gets up to go, most of the rollys in his rucksack, his bedroll tied and slung over his shoulder, the buzzing, now green, hovering around him. The Dustfish, until now, had been swimming on the far side of camp and Able whistles for it and it dutifully swims to him. When it approaches him, he says, “We’re going to need water, huh?”

Able wanders through the scruff, away from the Sun as best he can. There are no paths now, and so the walking is difficult. In many places he has to push his way through thick brambles and branches, but after a few hours, he steps out of the bushes into what appears to be a sandy path. Looking up and down the path, which looks more like a hallway because of the thick, tall scruff on either side, he can see that the path neither heads away from or toward the sun. He turns to the Dustfish, “What do you think?”

The Dustfish swims up the path a little ways and then turns and swims back along the path to Able, then past him and a little ways up the path the other direction. Finally, the Dustfish turns to Able and waits until he is looking. It swims in a circle three times and then points down the path. “Ok,” Able says. “It looks like we go that way.” They begin heading down the path, and now that some sort of direction is easily discernible, the buzzing zips off ahead on the path, perhaps to scout things out.

The path winds on for some time and at one point Able wishes that he had something like a pede or a giant lizard to ride on. Given his lame leg, the walking is very hard. He concentrates and tries to think about what an Ultracircus might looks like. His first thought is that it might be a giant house of some sort. “Ultra” sounded to him like something that might have lights or stars. And, of course, the old crone had told him that there would be lots of color, so he tried to imagine that, too: a whole building covered in colors. It was hard to imagine that much color. Then again, maybe Ultracircus was just a name for something, something like the Dustfish; a giant animal of some kind. He pictures a centipede that was big enough to have a village on it. That would be very strange and very ultra-y. And if it was covered in colors to boot—that would be amazing!

For some time now the walking had been getting harder as the dry, solid ground of the scruff gave way to loose sand. The scruff had become shorter and the path was leading upwards. The uphill climb with the loose sand was making moving forward tough and Able decides that once he gets to the top of the next hill, that will be a good place to take a break. He looks up and sees that the sun has risen and is now past him. Thinking about the Ultracircus must have really distracted him, because it seems as though a lot of time had passed, but he hasn’t been paying too much attention to the walking.

Up ahead, a hundred yards or so, both the buzzing and the dustfish had already crested the hill and are hovering and waiting for Able. Relieved, Able trudges on, the sand getting thicker, knowing that there is not much further to go before he can rest for a bit. As he also comes to the crest of the hill, the scruff gets much shorter, so short now, that in places he can see over it. Facing the direction the path is heading, he can turn to his left and see that there are huge hills of gray sand (and huge valleys) sitting down below him. The scruff is mostly to his right and at one point, when he turns around on the path, he can see a great deal of the scruff forest stretching out back the way he had come. The two wildernesses, the dunes and the scruffs, looks so different from one another, and yet both of them are hiding many things from Able.

When he reaches the top of the hill, breathing heavy now, he sets his things down and looks around. “Wow.” The path ahead of them continues downhill, with the scruff forest on the right and on the left, the giant hills and valleys of sand, and… something else. He cocks his head to one side and squints. Down the hill a ways, maybe ten feet from the path are what appear to be giant letters sitting upright in the sands. They are boxy, but there appear to be many different kinds of them, maybe fifty or so in all, standing in a line that runs along the edge of the sands and the path.

Able seats himself on the hilltop and spends some time looking. From the top of the little hill he can even see past the big sea of sand to what look like giant mountains of charcoal, the same color as the remnants from his fire that morning. He can see far in every direction, but then it strikes him that he cannot see anyone. The view is beautiful, with sea sands and scruff forest and charcoal mountains, but for the first time, it settles on Able that he is very alone. Well (he look at the dustfish) not alone. But yes, he is very alone, and the world feels like a very unwelcome place.

Read the whole story so far: Brother Dustfish

Characters and Places: Able Summary

The Colt .45 sat in his lap, looking more the part of an antique than it ever did when he’d used it to defend himself against random jackers and jettrash. Wielding their pathetic plastic contraptions, they’d laugh at the old man’s gun until the first blast sent one of them flying back a few paces. Then the little shits’d turn tail and run more often than not. Now what? He’d have to go back to using crossbows is what. He looked up from the gun to the squat guardian robot in front of him, the campfire glinting off its non-descript face-plate. He hated it when the peace of his wilderness—a nice little slice of New Jersey—was disturbed by these obtuse drones. Hell, he’d have shot it already if he didn’t mostly believe that the new provision was already in effect. “I don’t get it, then. What about the campfire?”

“Slow combustion reactions of limited scope will continue to be allowed under the new provision.”

“So, it’s combustion you’re out to get, not weapons? You guys don’t give a shit about tasers or vapors or any of those. It’s just guns you’re after?”

“The guns to which you refer are most easily defined as propulsion weaponry that is primarily powered by a rapidly expanding combustion reaction. Combustion reactions that occur beyond determined parameters will be reversed.”

“So combustion-driven propulsion weapons are against the law now.”

“Incorrect, agent. There are no laws in the free zones.”

“Aw, shove it, droid. You know it’s a law.”

“There are no laws in the free zones. Humans located in free zones are allowed to generate societal rules as they do or do not see fit. This new provision is merely a necessary upgrade of the nanosphere.”

“Well, if it’s an upgrade, then can I beta test it?”

The robot takes a moment longer than usual to answer and Addison smiles. It was looking up instances of “beta test.” He, Addison, a hundred twenty years old by his own count, was old enough to remember the phrase, but this dumb little hunk of circuits didn’t get the reference. Then, “Beta testing of the kind I believe you subscribe is not necessary. Modifications by 01 to the nanosphere’s code will not contain errors.”

“Can I try it anyway, you stupid touchlamp?”

“Affirmative.”

That was the other thing that got under his skin about droids—you could call them droids, a word that all humans intended as a derogatory slur and they didn’t care. You could call them anything and they never took it personally. What good was being able to talk to something if you couldn’t piss it off? He picks the Colt up off his lap and wipes it down a few times with a lambskin cloth. He lines the back end of the barrel up with left eye, right eye closed, and checks the chambers; bullets present. Lifting the heavy weapon in the air with his right hand, he brings it down slowly, pointing at the guardian droid’s faceplate, dead center. He pulls the trigger without hesitation, like shooting a bean can on a fence post. The hammer clicks loudly and the gun makes a sound like a bottle rocket at the end of its flight, a kind of crackling that crescendos in volume, dissipating into silence. There is a slow scraping sound, and then the bullet drops out of the end of the barrel barely faster than a turtle. It thumps heavily on the ground by his foot. Addison turns the gun to his face and peers in the barrel. Shit he thinks. They really did it. “Guess you didn’t stop the reaction entirely,” he says, bending at the waist to pick up the errant lump of metal that couldn’t in all good conscience be called a bullet anymore.

The robot takes a moment to answer again. First calculating that by “you” Addison intends to refer to all robot agencies and in particular the nanosphere, which is responsible for reversing the combustion reaction. Then the robot says, “The second law of thermodynamics—”

“Shut up.” Addison spins the gun and sets it back in his lap and puts his head in hands. He didn’t really care all that much that he couldn’t shoot people; he’d just assume avoid most folks. It was just the sound and the kick of the gun. It was symbolic of something—symbolic of power, of human power. Now it was just one more relic that was evidence of our own status as relics. He looked back to the campfire and then to the droid again and chuckled as the pair of things suddenly appeared to him as the bookends of human history, the alpha and omega. Fire propelled us as a species into the great unknown future, and then we invented these stupid hunks of talking, thinking, metal that were now in the process of stopping all human progress, including fire, and all in the name of our own good. He looks at the robot. “This is about the terrorists, isn’t it?”

“How do you mean, agent Addison Logan?”

“I mean that you guys are outlawing these combustion reactions to stop the independents from bombing your complexes. And it’s just Addison, dummy.”

“Again, we are not outlawing combustion. If you are able to create a combustion reaction possessing the parameters you wish without triggering an inverse reaction in the nanosphere, there would be no penalty for such an action. This is why I do not concur with your usage of the term law. Laws, within the purview of—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Terrorists.”

“Multiple human groups have devised offensive tactics both dangerous to AIL agents as well as human citizens of AIL complexes. Many of these tactics utilize rapid combustion reactions. Given alternative resources and technologies now available, we have deemed said reactions obsolete.”

“Stupid kids. They got the free zones. Why do they have to ruin everyone else’s fun?” Addison closes one eye and looks to the droid silently hovering. This one must know what a rhetorical question is. He roles his head back and looks up at the night sky, more beautiful that he could ever remember it being in his childhood. At least they’d done a nice job cleaning up the real atmosphere. He squints. He can even see the Milky Way. He sighs. “Ah shit. Maybe’s it time for me to get citizenship.” He slumps back over and puts his head in his hand, looking at the robot.

“I will gladly get you the requisite software for download to your—”

“No, no, no! You’re not gettin’ me that easily, screwdriver. You’d love it if you could lock me up in one of those stupid virtual reality machines. No. As much as the nanosphere is a pain in my butt, I still like it better out here.” He pounds his thighs with his fists. “This is the real stuff.” He breathes in deep and thinks about all the thousand miniature nanocytes in the nanosphere washing into his lungs. He frowns and says, dejectedly, “This is real air.”

“You could always move to Mars, agent Addison Logan.”

Mars. What a dump. No, there wasn’t room enough on any world for someone like him—someone who just wanted things the ways they used to be. Regulated combustion was just one more thing added to the pile of recollections in his head. Now he could say he remembered the days when guns worked. He was just as a much a relic as the useless gun in his lap. Just for fun, or maybe to make a point, he picks the gun up again and puts the cold barrel to his temple. He stares at the floating automaton in front of him with a heavy heart and pulls the trigger.

Read the whole story so far: Incunabula

Able sits huddled on his bedroll, fiddling with one of his mistakes by the light of the green buzzing. He had known, instinctively, that going off on his own without Cal would mean feeling lonely and even a little frightened. He knew it would be dark and uncomfortable, but what he had not counted on was it being so cold. The desert was so warm during the day and at night, Cal always built a fire. Now Able understood why. Even with Cal’s fires, Able knew the desert was cold, but he had never realized just how much warmth the fires had provided. The desert at night was very cold. Even the dustfish had snuggled up under his arm while he worked.

He folds and presses one of the new rollys, searching for that light inside that he could use to give the rolly a new purpose. As he does, some coyotes in the distance howl, and the little rolly lets out an unsure sound. “It’ll be fine,” Able says to his companions. “The buzzing is watching.” He smiles at the buzzing, which is, at this moment, making small circles around their encampment, still green. “We’ll know something’s wrong, just as soon as he changes color. That’s what he does.” In response, the buzzing chirps proudly.

It’s very hard to do, think of warmth, when Able’s hands are shaking from the cold, but even with every breath making him shudder, he tries to focus on the warm things he has known in his world. He thinks about hugging his mother tight; how warm she always was. He thinks about fires and dinner. He even thinks about the hot stinky breath from Gef’s velociraptor, Sam. Even the thought of that frightening beast staring him down was a comfort in the numbing cold. And then, with his eyes shut tight, Able hears a sound—woomf!—and when he opens his eyes, the rolly is covered in small prongs, like smokestacks, each one billowing flames of yellow and orange. “Ah ha!” Able shouts, and then immediately regrets making so much noise.

Able sets to clearing a circular space in front of the bed roll and then gathers brush from the surrounding scruff. He piles bits of twigs and dried husks of seed pods haphazardly and then on top of that pile makes a bigger pile with dry sticks, like he had watched Cal do many times. Already, he’s warmer because of the new mistake, and he uses it to light the pile of kindling he’s made. It lights quickly and in minutes, there’s a warm fire going. This time when the coyotes howl, it doesn’t bother him at all.

He turns to the new mistake and watches it as it sits and spews its four little flames. “I’m glad you can do that, but it doesn’t look like it’s very easy for you to get around like that. In fact, you look more like hat than anything else. I’ll call you Flame Hat.” The mistake puffs out two big fireballs in excitement. “Woah! Careful there, Flame Hat.” He picks it up gingerly and says, “I bet I could actually wear you as a hat. Then you wouldn’t need to worry about getting around.” He adjusts the bottom of Flame Hat until it’s hollow on the bottom and then plops it on his head. Looking at the green buzzing and the dustfish, he asks, “How do I look?” The dustfish just peers blankly, the green buzzing vibrates with stripes of yellow and green. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Able says.

Read the whole story so far: Brother Dustfish

Characters and Places: Able Summary, Dustfish