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Chapter Text

"There's a worn-out joy to the sensation of being used by someone who owns your skin," I said, as Penny placed her hands around my tree-bark neck. She didn't squeeze, but her fingers touched the fantasy-novel runes tattooed on it in gold ink. I was art. I was her art. I was a bullet. Penny's robes made her look like a long-petaled African lily. She looked down at me with heartless contempt, and I looked up with longing.

She smiled at me, as if an igni-sword diagonally moving down and through my body. I could have broken her in a way that would have put the cities I perverted to shame. I could have dug in and clawed out the second brain she should have had beneath her ribcage.

She smiled wider, her breath stilling, the moment hanging in the air like a horrorbird shot out of the sky. I was still in my power armor's rubbery under-suit.

"Dani Rue would have hated this," I said, my cloned flesh and machinery worming underneath my knight-in-slithering-armor face.

Penny kissed me on the forehead, and to add to the mood we were surrounded by biomechanical machinery. This place was like a meat haunt and an orbital factory fused in a messy situationship. "You don't know Dani Rue, Rhea, you never did," she said. "You came around on your sleeper ship, moving out of Earth's solar system." I'd say she purred, but it was more like decadent growling: the animalistic trembles of the royal flag, the hollow apathy that was a white impersonating red.

Capitalism killed, and so did we.

"I can see death coming," I said, her hands warm on me, tracing deep scarring. "The Muslims talk about a place of punishment." I said. "Penny, is this there?" I asked.

"Use shinier metaphors," she said to me. "The ancients were wrong."

"No," I said, waiting for her fingers to wrap around my neck and crush. I looked up at the empress of my plenty. "I don't mean you. I don't mean this moon. I don't even mean the war spacecraft. I mean... I'm not saying you're the Devil."

People who hadn't heard of "the Devil" were likely a lot more familiar with al-Shaitan or Iblis. As for us, the Jews, the rabbis said his existence in the Book of Job was a metaphor for the "evil inclination." We danced with ourselves.

I thought of Lilith the Indulgent, prophet of Adonai, my prophet and my goddess. "You are the seed, I am the flower. You are the spark, I am the fire. You are the mortar, I am the obliteration," I prayed aloud.

"There's a beauty in ancient superstition," Penny said, a hand moving from my neck to my cheek: as if to damage.

She was an angular storm. "You hate God," I said.

Penny, Her Recollective Memory, slapped me across the head. I hit the floor, my battle-tank body collapsing under her needle fingers. My head slammed against the metal floor, and I grabbed my temples. I screamed in pain, ugly, stupid. "No. I hate man," she said.

We were human. Not Ana-Boros, not the crocodile-people, we were human beings: you know, Archaeo-Egyptian statues worn half to death by time and theft.

She lightly, affectionately, and flamboyantly kicked me in the chest with one of her crown bovine boots. "Ten thousand years, you and I, drifting through time. You fought. We saw things. How do you feel about the human species?"

I took a breath, looking up at her. Her knuckles were a comet. I felt one hit my jaw. "Thank you," I said, for her heel. I meant it.

This room was a hive of crippled structures. I saw her as the empress of everything I could have ever asked for.

"Not even Our Lady of the Self wanted this," she said. "Do you know what she wanted? To micromanage her harem of libertarians-in-denial, to smoke herself to death, to piss all over the legacy of Vladimir Lenin, to write didactic novels, to..."

"It's more about what she represents now," I said. "Our Lady of the Self lived so long ago. Her world may as well have needed candles," I added.

She grabbed my collar with immaculate purple nails, a flash of color, and a tempest of richness. "Candles. I like fire. Don't you?"

Too much, way too much, because we were the same kind of charred.

She motioned for me to stand up, and of course I did. I put my hands behind my back, at attention.

"I'll be whatever you want me to be, but I can't give up Adonai and Lilith. I'm theirs too, they're the god and stepmother of Abraham and my people," I said.

"Soldier," she said. "Hero. Dipshit." She kissed me, plush lips against my thin black brushstrokes. "I wasn't asking you to. The narrative meaning in your Lilith has some value. It's not an ancient manifesto."

I embraced her. I was iron, long beyond human. Ten thousand years. The beatings were aesthetic and nothing more, and the harsh words were just citrus body wash.

"How long do you want to go?" she asked me, kissing me across my face, my mutilated and reforged visage. "Knight Kinetic, how long?" she asked me, trying to make her speech sound like fists and feet, but all I heard was that she was needy.

"Until the Big Crunch," I said. "What did she say? 'To say 'We love each other', one must first pronounce the 'we'? She was one of my people, after all, even if she didn't know Lilith and her maker. Maybe you have a thing for the Chosen People."

"One of these days, love, I'm going to put a shotgun round through that skull," she said. "I'm just waiting for the right stupid comment."

"Only when I'm ready for it, I hope," I said.

Her Recollective Memory, bent, prayed to Our Lady of the Self for wisdom and endurance in these frustrating times.

Penny grabbed my amber bun. It was my hair bun, not anything else. She produced a knife out of one of the ripples of her clothes. Not a knife, a ritual dagger. "Naked, Rhea. Besides, you're a product, too. They manufactured you out of a goddamn factory." She licked the blade's flat like she often brandished the weapon between my legs.

I nodded, a little sort-of-bow. I took a breath. "Yes, Your Recollective Memory," I said. My knuckles were fire, a heart of beauty, I wanted to dust her across the nose and shatter it raw. I loved her.

I wanted her to do worse to me.

Before I was a Knight Kinetic, I was a soldier: a genetic superman in the Legio Apocalyptica. Other trans women, they often thought of their past selves as unknowing women.

I was a man, then. I changed.

She placed her knife against my arm. "Lady of Armageddon," she said, using an old title of mine from a long-since bygone age. "Beg."

I gave a mental command, and my undersuit retreated into a hole in my back. "Of course, Your Recollection," I said, an ancient folk song playing in my head.

I remembered it, we used to sing it aloud as we slaughtered Cerberus' Reds in the Tenth Patriotic Crusade. Cerberus — Dani, my Dani, my enemy — she was probably still out there. She, her mutant body, and the ghosts in her head.

There was arousal, I thought, at the site of a mutated world.

Dani's kingdom of communism, Penny's sadomasochistic people's republic church, it was like an antique coin turning.

There was an irony to it, I thought, that the depraved would judge the hero for being right. No wonder I was Legionaria Apocalyptica. No wonder.

I felt the blade cut across my skin through like a promise and a blessing, the storm of erotic electricity welling up in my body like a battery. I thought of Penny, Her Recollection, as she fucked the wound with her blade.

I felt no pain. Pain was a tool, and in this circumstance it was unnecessary: the folds of my neurons had been numbed by will. "We're no longer human,"I said, I smiled, with relish as she touched my forehead with lips in terror.

She said little and the blade went through my wound and out the other side of my arm. "You're my sword. Stop saying silly things like that, or I'll throw you away."

I was a reusable bomb. I was shrapnel. I should have been covered in blood. I should have butchered one of the—

Legionnaire, knight, for a Historical Progressive I had a way of finding myself among the armies of reaction. She kissed my wound, as it bled out in an ugly swelling of liquid. I closed my eyes, I softened my heart, I let my owner attend to me, like she were Dani.

She dug runes into my genetically-enhanced arm, the light dust of blonde-dyed body hair tinting red. It was like shaving.

I always used to like shaving: the pain, the catharsis, the hateful and mean skin, the dull blades, the blood: oh, yes, the blood.

Hold me close. Hold me perfect. Cut yourself into me. Make me your language, I thought. "Fucking rip me apart," I said.

She made a "tsk" sort of sound, more amused than judgmental, and she whispered with lips close to the edge of my ears. "How many times have you thrown yourself into battle for me?" she asked, dwelling in it with a sadistic glee. "How many bullets and bombs have you taken for my heart? How many times are you going to die inside to sate my soul?"

I took the knife from her and I cut a red "X" into my palm. I placed my hand on her face. It dripped. "As many as you ask me to. Have you ever read Our Lady of the Self's books? She had a ravishment fetish. I think she'd like this."

"If I were a man, maybe," Penny said, grinning as a demon with my blood on her skin. "I envy you. Your religion is centered around a woman who isn't braindead."

"You can always convert," I joked. She stabbed me in my tit. She cut. I groaned.

"Well, if I did retire, I could use you all the time," she said, exposing my muscle. I was her art, her canvas, and the knife was her pencil.

If the knife went against my neck I would weep.

"On your knees," she said, pushing my mutilated body down with a synthetically strong hand. "Open your mouth."

My lips spread, thin, like a gash under my nose. She drew her robes to her sides, exposing her cunt. It shifted, by some miraculous folding technology, into a long carapaced cum-white cock.

I shivered for a moment, the lust starting to escape out of my pores. This was boring. She was going to fuck me in the mouth. I'd rather bleed right now, rather dwell in the angry liberation of being art instead of a sex automaton. "Do we have to?" I asked. She answered by shoving it in. I felt it pierce my face, like a missile straight through a transport craft.

The act was senseless and crude. I didn't suck, and I didn't think she was enjoying it. I just felt herself push in and out of me the way a boring suitor would to a vagina. Pain, I grabbed her thighs, I bit down as hard as I could but my teeth glanced against the sclera-pearl of her shaft. She laughed and wrapped her fingers into my hair, my bleached tendrils coating her fucking fingers.

I was blinded by the light in her eyes, radiant, perfect, complete. I saw the serenity of constant victory, of spiritual connection to the heresy.

"You ask me about God," she said, stabbing me over and over with her weapon: not the knife. "Suck." I didn't.

She yanked my hair and grabbed my neck. I could have moaned, painless, joyless sex raiding my body across my skin and nerves like a hurricane, degradation, humiliation, obliteration, reforged in iron and steel and genetically perfected flesh like a shotgun blast to the head.

She was a bomb, a Caesar, and she wore the golden olive wreaths in spiraling crown-tendrils on her head to prove it: death and salvation.

She laughed more, and the cock dug into my cheeks and my throat. The smoothness of the weapon was desperate, needy, was begging to be touched by my wetness. She and I, she and I, she and I were here.

"You're my favorite doll," she said, and I wondered if she was getting off not to the sensation but the power.

I hoped so. I hoped the fire had spread to her too. I hoped the death inside us had merged into a kind of burning connection. I could almost see a lash made of fire binding us, her in her blue and white and I in my red.

Blood red, thank Lilith and Adonai, blood red. Desperation, perfection, connection, she blasted against my neck, erotic, and I bit down. It must have been suction, because I saw my owner moan. I saw it, the way her mouth split open, the way I could barely see her thin tongue dance.

I loved her eyes, they were porcelain marbles, not a hint of iris or pupil to be found. They were the color of purity.

"God," she said, getting back to her thought. A cracked smile on her face, she spoke. "My Goddess is Astarte: war, hunting, love, and beauty. You're the splitting image of her." Splitting, not spitting. "My Astarte." She pulled out, pushed me to the ground, and I let myself fall back.

I blinked a few times, and she shot red cum across my naked leg. I blushed, and she got on top of me. "Astarte?" I asked.

"A Canaanite goddess, a little sister of your Adonai, a contemporary of your Lilith, a child of the slaughter and the beauty," Penny said. She kissed me. She blushed. She held me, on top of me, like a weighted blanket. "She's an old story, mostly forgotten, but her thematic ripples are kind of everywhere."

Desperation, I could have crushed her skull. I didn't.

"I love you. Fuck, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Love, love, love, love, love, love." She kissed my face with her porcelain lips, the white tint on them dyed on the level of the skin. She cupped my face in my hands. "I adore you, I need you, I think you're so beautiful. I wish I had a fraction of your you-ness. You could murder me and I'd thank you," she said.

This was what we called aftercare. I cried, drooling. "I love you too," I stammered, like an idiot, like a drop pod, like a kinetic tungsten rod deployed from low orbit to obliterate an Orzan High City with non-nuclear annihilation. "Princess," I said, though she was more like a theo-monarch in her own right, hence the olive wreath crown. "Princess, Princess, Princess."

She hugged me, around the waist and not around the neck. "Princess and Astarte: If we were a hyperreal novel, that's what our story would be called. Don't you like it?"

We were equal again. The alarms fired in a mutilating chorus, and the world was doused in red: a new kill.

Chapter Text

I careened down to the surface of Null Dancer in a combat envelopment, a kind of bio-organic carapace shield around my body, which suspended me in a sticky green soup. I could see through the green and past the black edges using special implants in my brain, and the ground leapt closer at me. I got ready to kiss it. I fell.

Like a nightmare, like a spiral, like a rifled weapon's hateful payload, I shot downwards out of low orbit in my tight-fitting pod. I had on my body igni-blades and crack rifles, along with a mini-shotgun and a combat prod. I fell.

My envelopment tightened further around me, around my armor and my form. My body adapted to the speed, so fast, racing down, down, closer now, I saw brown rock. There was dirt below, red, ugly, nothing worth noticing.

Air burst around my body, my carapaced form in a corona of fire as I crashed into the surface of Null Dancer like a mass driver. Shockwave: my world slowed down, and stone around me burst. It reminded me of a frag grenade. I saw the soldiers in Void Combat Gear grab their electric rifles and aim them in my direction, with computerized efficiency. My envelopment itself blew up around me, fragments of carapace spearing and slicing the Orzan invaders.

"Requesting a splice into their comms systems," I said, underneath my ogre-faced full-head mask.

I heard worries, chatter, terror, and a few screams from the Orzans in their VCG. They must have been baseline humans.

The Orzan Courtworlds were the current rival of my Royal Arrangement. They stood no chance.

I sprinted towards a small squad of them as they opened fire, until my metal fist punched right through a short one's gas mask helmet and pulverized their head into a spray of red blood.

My blood was high and these were nothing more than organic serfs. I grabbed the corpse's neck and threw her at two more Orzans, screaming as I did it. There were a number. Out of a concealed part of my armor, I mentally commanded a crack rifle to unfold. I took it into my hand and then leapt thirty feet into the air, picking off three more Orzan VCG troopers with a one-handed grip. I didn't need a scope.

My sapphire blood gave me duty, just as the red sun was beautiful. These people were nothing more than targets.

For my lady, for my commander, for my monarch of faith and scepter, for Historical Progress, I sent smart bullets arcing out of my gun. The technology in my cyber-biological brain made perfect calculations, and an ocean of pink and red flowers burst.

The VCG suits weren't even crack-round-proof, I realized. I wondered if I'd ever get a real fight again. The remainders, the swarm, they targeted me as best as they could. Sniper shots flattened against my suit with bruising underneath, and I unfolded a sub-gun out of the other side of my armor. Twirling in the air, I sent a spray of metal down at the sad bastards to cover myself.

My boots slammed back against the cragged surface, and it made another earthquake. I heard on the comms. "Surrender!" someone said. "In the name of all that there ever was, please! Commander, we need to surrender!" I took aim with the sub-gun and managed to plug a guy through the eyes of his VCG helmet. Dark fluid shot through the back, which I found satisfying as an exhibition of skill. "We're gonna die here!" they said, and their bullets stopped.

The living got on their knees, their hands open and facing the stars in the traditional gesture. I noticed a shard of rock from my landing had speared one of them. He wasn't making the pose: unfortunate. I started to walk towards the VCG troopers.

Their commander, marked by their green markings on their suit, tried to patch into my comms, using a dumbbot translator. "Please," they begged, as I strode closer to them.

"Your squads are broken. Your cause was idiotic," I said. "Explain yourselves. An attack on Null Dancer, this close to the Royal Arrangement's military base, you had to know you were doomed."

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," they begged, their voices devolving into the aural equivalent of running water. "Please, we just wanna defect!"

I grabbed them by the neck of their cheap bodysuit, and tumbled them down into the ground. "Why are you here?" I said.

The soft maggots squirmed away from me.

"We're the rear guard, it's a knockout attack on the base, we didn't know that there would be a Legion... A Legionaria Apocalyptica. I guess they thought you'd just send normal kinetics..."

I threw them to the ground. "Why does Orza want war with us? Don't they know the Royal Arrangement would crush them?" I saw them hit the ground.

I heard a tired, almost weeping one speak into my helmet's communications hub. "Legionnaire, We were drafted. We don't know why."

Legionnaire. They understood what I was. This was goldspun.

"We want to serve you, serve the Royal Arrangement," the commander said, even after I'd thrown them to the floor. I put my boot onto their chestplate, which buckled. "Corporal Vix is nineteen, Lancecorp Xilan eighteen, and Walle and Falcon are two years younger than Xilan." I could hear the shake and the wobble in their speech. They circled me, begging, hands facing the sky.

I gave it a moment of thought. I watched them beg. My first consideration was what Penny would want me to do, of course. Staring at these wretched souls, these proletarians armed with nothing and sent to die, I felt a profound sense of pity. I'd lived long enough that I knew by their voices they were completely genuine. I could hear the specific sorrows in how people phrased things. I made my choice.

***

I stood in my armor, covered in bloodspray, in a marble tower. This place was a giant bathroom, gilded and silvered, gobbling up the many servants and servitors that flowed through its achingly-large entrances. I wore a heavy leather leash and collar around my neck, above the neck portion of my under suit. My helmet was off.

The leash traced over to Penny, who wore her flower-petal robes and an elaborate makeup job of white rectangles and geometric lines. It was the fashion, and it suited her religious regalia.

Conversely, before me, I saw Ramona Khaydenraykh, a musclebound bitch clad in brown latex and lace-up heeled boots. She wore two cyborg sun lenses over her eyes, circular, and she had a dumb smile on her face. "Hey," she said, wearing some kind of scarf in vague nostalgia for the business casual ties of the 2100s. She was a classicist, or more likely a nostalgic.

Her eyes twitched for a moment at me, and then darted back down to the petite lady in the skintight dress and steel jaguar-leg heelless boots. Ramona had a simulated-reality show host smile on, a jester's sort of thing, and I thought of my tarot: Penny, the High Priestess and this boss, the Fool. Penny controlled me through my neck, and I sank into that control, a bath in blood and pleasure. It was relaxation.

Ramona's teeth along with her mouth, and she patted her secretary's back compassionately. "C'mon, babe, chin up, we're good."

"Yes, ma'am," Hana Conel said, with a small nod. "Good noon, Dame Rhea of Banner Corax, and of course a lovely mid-day to Her Recollective Memory herself."

"Why'd you let your pet track blood in here?" Ramona asked. She and I both wore muscle, but mine was made out of enhancement and combat weathering, while hers was quite obviously the product of nothing more than biosculpting and a number of personal gyms in each of her homes. "You know, that shit's hard to clean out."

Penny spoke for me. "That was my choice. Consider it intimidation." She mirrored Ramona's expression, a look that a mercenary in a mecha might have right before a kill. "It's what's suitable for an arrogant merchant attempting to talk to the elected theocratic monarch of the Royal Arrangement and a knight of the Legion herself. It can be your blood, too, Khaydenraykh." Ramona flinched at that, and her gaze jumped to her secretary. Khadenraykh's dumb grin returned.

The secretary, Hana, spoke up. "We would remind you, Your Recollective Memory, that blood is not the only source of power." She smiled inoffensively. She was correct, and I suspected she wasn't talking about dead social systems or bullets.

"Yeah," Ramona said. "It's not just you and your musclebeast. There are interests in the Arrangement that benefit from my corporate autonomy. This isn't the place for threats."

It was funny, I thought, what Dani Rue would have said. "Interests?" I asked.

"Let's call it a coming market failure," Ramona said, stepping up to me and pointing a finger against my chestplate. "Now, I understand you might be a little apprehensive to interact with a capitalist, I know that the mode of production has only recently been brought back, babes."

"It hasn't," Penny said. "You've just created transhuman techno-feudalism with capitalist aesthetics, which frankly is absurd. You may as well be claiming to have brought back the old Mesopotamian palace economies. Your 'Knuckleduster Corporation' is a glorified electric duchy, and your ultra-reactionary fantasies about some primitive age of oil-cars and Eco-Fascisms are just as silly. The 2100s are ancient history. Not even my pet and I remember them."

I said nothing. Hana, wisely, also said nothing.

"Now wait just a minute," Ramona said, waving a finger. "The Temples are ancient history, too. The Earthlings barely check in here anymore."

That was because of distance, I thought, between Earth and the rest of the galaxy. I saw how much Ramona was holding herself in, how much this outburst was only the tip of a very large mountain. Penny spoke. "It is. Ramona of Banner Khaydenraykh, the time has come to make demands."

"Demands?" Ramona said. "Listen, you immortal space pervs, do you know who the fuck I am? Do you know what I can do? If you understood the barest, most infinitesimal fragment of the level of whoopass I have the capability of deploying on the both of you bitches, you'd be running with your cocks between your legs."

Hana trembled, and I could tell it was for her boss.

Penny responded as if with a quickdraw. She looked at me. "Weapon, sic 'er." She dropped my leash.

I instantly sprinted at Ramona, grabbing her by the neck and pinning her against the wall with a crushing thunk. I beat her body like a floppy toy against the marble, slashing my arm back and forth in a brutal pendulum. It made a "ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunk" kind of noise.

Hana leapt back.

"I can estimate from seeing you the lusty stink that infects your mind," Penny began. I broke Ramona's nose on my armor knuckles, and it splashed. "I can tell the level of unearned superiority that you wear like papier-mâché armor," she continued, her hand unfolding into a flower of spears and wires that bent around what was once her arm. I backhanded Ramona's temple, and she wobbled: stunned, dazed. I cracked the back of her head against the marble, and wet shit ran down her back. "I know how smugly you look at the rest of us decadents while you cling to a dead time you never lived in. We've seen a thousand of you." I pushed my thumb into her glass eye-shield. It retracted into her nose. My thumb slipped before it could pierce her eye. "Most of all," Penny said. "I know you can't run from my attack dog."

Dog, she called me her dog. I could have blushed, it wasn't just flattery but a heartfelt compliment.

"You two are freaks, you know that?" Ramona said to Penny, as if eager to write her own last check. "This sick game you have, I know your goddamn animal would freak out if someone who wasn't you hurt her, someone who didn't know her in ways most people could never imagine. How long have you two been doing this shit? Thousands of years? Yeah, I bet that's a long time to groom someone."

Hana's expression changed. I knew from experience with mortals that this was anticipation for the unwanted. I considered that she might lose someone today. I took a moment to try and remember what that felt like, but it was a haze. It was just flashes of emotions, still images, nothing substantial in my memory. Still, I thought empathy was important when you were a weapon. It kept you functioning properly and being deployed in useful and appropriate ways.

Penny responded simply. "Weapon, kill," she said.

Ramona bled, out her nose, out of the back of her head. She spat at me. "It's your fault. You bought what she was selling, and here you are. What's it like to be less than human?"

"Your Recollection, she wants to die," I said. I shook her by the neck, and she was at least enhanced enough not to snap: thunk-thunk-thunk. "I suggest we don't let her."

Penny seemed to understand. I knew she knew that Ramona wasn't entirely wrong. I knew she knew this wasn't the time. "Malice, Knight?" she said. She recreated her hand from the spun steel it had become, the synth-skin covering over the metal lines.

I dropped Ramona. Her body was a lump on the polished floor. "No, Your Recollection," I said, and I saw Hana speak into her arm to call for a med team. She must have had a comms implant. The secretary's hair was aesthetically naturalistic, a messy brown-blonde. She and Ramona must have had similar tastes. Ramona hurt.

Ramona looked up at me. I looked back down at her. My face may as well have been my ogre mask helmet, hers might as well have been some kind of cartoon grin. "Not malice. You get it. This ship is going down, and you're smarter than she thinks you are," she said to me. "Still a freak, though, but you two need me."

As she bled, Hana trembled and paced. "Lady Khaydenraykh means that—," she began, in hopes she could save that walking corpse's body.

"I understand her meaning," I said. She froze again.

"Don't talk for me," Ramona said, pulling herself up. "Listen, you two bitches. I know you don't realize it, but techno-feudalism is a dead letter: just like the palace economy. The Earthlings are going to make the Temples red too, every single artificial world in this system."

"Ridiculous," Penny said, with a sneer. "The distance between the Temples and the Sol System is astronomical. The sleeper ships here took almost 1400 years. An invasion isn't happening."

I stood there. Red stained white.

"The ships of your time, they went three percent of the speed of light. The last visits were fourteen percent. Shit changes. The ancestors of the Ana-Boras lizard people here, you know how they made all the planets in the Temples? Well, they made more too. The Earthlings probably have pericee travel by now: lightspeed." Ramona said. "Oh, and of course there's red catspaws in the Temples, too. Once the Earthlings and the catspaws make contact, we're fucked. Here's my offer," she said with a smirk.

What a phemomenally stupid woman, I thought.

"Yes?" Penny said. "What's your point?"

"I have proof that the Earthlings sent out an imperial fleet a few decades ago, and proof of the pericee drives, i.e. Earth is going to fucking bend us over a table the way that the ancient USA opened up Japan."

The kind of people who were weird about the classical American Republic always frustrated me. They were addicts to marble, columns, and so on. The only way you could get rose-colored glasses to that degree was to dip your spectacles in blood. Ramona looked at me with her dumb smile. She was too much of a fucking idiot to lie. I stared at Penny. Penny's face blanched. She and I stood there.

"Is it too late to apologize?" Penny asked. I laughed, and I saw it put her the tiniest bit more at ease.

I reached down, to try and help Ramona up. I wondered if this was some divine punishment for our arrogance. I saw Penny thinking the same thing, the way her face contorted just right.

"Fuck!" she and I said in unison. The medics and doctors swarmed through the archways into this gaudy shithole.

Ramona pulled herself up and gave a Victorian-style bow. "Ladies, can we get a less hostile working environment?" she asked. I prayed to Lilith and to God. "Oh, and knight?" Ramona said, licking her lips. "For that treatment you gave me, I have a request. I'm not going to make any demands, but it's an offer. I'd love some make-up ass from you."

I looked to Penny. "Your Recollection?" I asked.

"Your choice," she said, and it was a good thing too. If that sow had forced herself on me, I knew she wouldn't understand me enough not to make it hurt infinitely more than anything my owner could do to me.

"What would you like me to wear?" I asked. Diplomacy, after all, was prudent in these sorts of affairs.

"I can print you out something," Ramona said, pruriently. I saw the commoners and servants attended to her body with a wide variety of esoteric metal tools.

I wondered if old wars and old allegiances would stop me from accepting the red. More pertinently, I hoped she wouldn't jerk off in my hair.

"Plus, here's another selling point," Ramona said. "I've got a new weapon, one the Royal Arrangement doesn't have. Tell me, girls. Have you ever heard of a trebuchet-class mech?"

She was definitely going to cum in my hair, wasn't she?

Chapter Text

My hair stinking of semen and my body covered in bleeding wounds, I felt the needles and wires of the S9K Trebuchet-class weapon enter my open body. It was a temporary fusion. Digits and information swarmed through the metal in my body into my fleshy perfection. The cockpit of the specific unit designated as "Impaler" was a little coffin of metal and darkness. All I could see was out of the cameras planted all around the mech's exterior. Numbers ran like rivers down my vision, and the pain of my viciously stabbed self helped to merge me with the weapon perfectly.

It was nice, I thought, of Khaydenraykh to offer me this device, this titan, this hateful little four-story monster loaded with enough munitions to pick a Sabine ship out of the sky.

Speaking of which, I heard the living sound of a Sabine flood into my flowery-split ears. It was melodic, a riot, an angel in my demon's mind. Sabine Prime's song entered my techno-meat brain and reprogrammed it, forcing her existence into my perspective even as the camera footage faded.

This wasn't hacking, this wasn't some kind of computer invasion, this was information in the form of sounds sapient and destructive. A Sabine grew herself out of my eyes, using my ears. She took the form of a yellow trail of blackened light, glowing cores and shaded exteriors, taking a monkey-like hominid shape just to taunt me. I could smell Ramona's cum on my face, she hadn't cleaned me off when she was done with me.

I was a shotgun round. I was invincible. I was speed. My new body careened through space, a boxy monster radiant in horror. I flew over the cities of the planet Orza. These were artificial worlds, all the planets in this system were. The Ana-boros lizard people's ancestors had put them together. It probably hadn't been much bother, but sometimes people fell hard.

"Still just a trigger to pull, Rhea?" the Sabine commented, as I locked my weapons onto three cities at once. Outside of the mech, my max was cleaning out a city. Three was something you could only do with Mini-Scatter Atomics. "When are you gonna learn?" she asked, and she gave herself twenty arms.

I heard her song, gratingly smooth and striking, and that song was what was puppeteering this image. I didn't bother to respond. The song grew louder, deafening, and I heard what must have been explosions bursting in the noise. Whether they were hers or mine, I had no idea.

"Are you a hero or a monster?" Sabine asked, and my mind's hand was over the figurative flip-trigger to vaporize three cities of enemy Orzans.

"Monster," I said. "Every time."

Her eyes split open radially into more eyes, more golden pebbles inset on the face of a visual image made by someone condescending enough to think that I couldn't imagine a living sound without some kind of visual feed back.

She gave me back my control over my cameras, the boxy beast that was me right now staring down at streets full of neoserfs in what few jobs the robot swarms hadn't long since mastered, existing in their subsidized lives as red-coated jackasses in tall hats and smoking pipes of luna dust.

The streets were rolling greens, little cobblestone pathways across the exactly Earth-sized surface of Orza. Earth trees, palms, were planted around there, and the wool that the Orzans in their towns wore was clearly from Earth sheep cloned on this world. I saw a metal dragon coast above them all, no doubt carrying a flood of serf villagers.

The thing about techno-feudalism was that it wasn't actually based on working the land. Unlike in my admittedly messy understanding of primitive feudalism, where people were free to live on the land they were expected to work, here people were bound alternately to their masters' land or to their masters' ownership, and in doing so were treated like something between artisans and pets by their transhuman Orzan noble masters.

They wore long skirts in bright colors, spectacles and pocketwatches. They were fuckers, and something about the little bastards in their clean-air paradise made me want to wipe them out like Caesar to the Gauls.

"But you won't," the Sabine said, her insulting visual avatar's fingers bisecting into more fingers. "I know you won't." She laughed, which for a sound-based being sounded to me like a sound within a sound, a nested replay of the same sequence in a more condensed format. The record spun on its needle, in my imagination it was a bent circle, a torment, a storm of sonics. "I can read your mind, I know the kind of atomics you deployed during the Tenth Patriotic Crusade. I know you didn't like them. How does the sizzle of radioactive flesh sound to you?"

"If she tells me to, like the smell of warm cherron pie," I said, eyeing the little yellow dots on the wretched planet. "What's your point, earworm?" I asked.

I heard her chuckle, which made sense because she really was a chuckle. At least, she was a chuckle in the same way that I was a lemur. "You can't smell melting skin. Butchering a city with an igni-sword, sure, that's one thing, but this?"

Penny had told me I had to do this. She'd said if I didn't eradicate these yellow dots they'd launch interplanetary jump missiles.

My whole body went cold, I heard the song leave the cockpit, and my world went black.

It was all barren, murdered, and smelled. The Royal Arrangement capital world of Weeping Obedience was a carnival of overgrown skin. Dani Rue, on high, in a body of planetary flesh, extended a meat-monkey body down through a reversed space elevator made of body parts.

The thing opened its face-mouth. "How many need to die so your torturous slave-warrior love can persist?" it asked.

The sky was a blood orange in grey goop. The hope was fading. I could see the fires everywhere. They were overruning us.

All I'd wanted was her Red glow, and she'd chosen to incinerate me with it. I was my owner's. I was her gun, and my free will was only her trigger.

"Do you think the conscripts you butchered appreciated your lover's tender hand?" the Dani-body asked, with the mouths on its shoulders and forehead. They were pits. "Did the transfer serfs set alight by your white phosphorous cannons admire your artful torture-marks? What else could Penny have become if not your tormentor?" I said nothing. "Slave and master. What a crock," it said. The naked finger-corpse raised its palms upwards, digit-crowns pointed at the air. "Did you really think this would make me change my mind? It's been ten millennia. It would have been better if you'd just hanged yourself in 2552, you reactionary shit."

The image faded, and Penny was a girl. This was a simulated reality based on a reverse-engineered memory, a kind of complete recreation of a little house on an island that used to be Florida. A child crawled across the floor, and her father flipped through digital pages on his Apple-Sony Wo tablet, a poster of the movie Rambo: Newer Blood 2 with Don George in old-style fatigues on the front.

The air raid sirens burst. It was the American national anthem: the inverted fireworks-screech of whatever the Reds in New York and LA called their equivalent of the Apocalyptica weapons: biomoss, nuclear warheads, designer diseases to make the Spanish Flu and COVID look like a tummyache, and of course things like torrential flood seeders and neutron weapons. The commies, Rhea remembered, had stockpiled them long ago for indiscriminate retaliatory strategy.

It was the plan. Most of America was drenched in reaction. Alt-lite kill-gas stink had melted into a kind of braindead aristocracy of the squared-off Celtic cross. Don George was mutilating a lot of large-nosed Arabs on that poster. Penny's father slowly pulled himself out of the chair. Here came the next phase of the race war.

Colors of the melting plot, Rhea knew, had faded. First, there was the Hispanic population, deported and then "deported". Alongside and after that came what was called back then as the LGBTQ population, an early autonomy movement against that time's notion of cis-heterosexual assumed social normality.

The prison cells had needed more room: even the packed in "perverts" in little boxes had started to overflow. Penny's father took his daughter's hand, in this blue room like the deep ocean. They left the room. They left the house. The sound swallowed them into itself.

A father's hand held that of a little girl with blue-gened pigtails.

By now, Dani Rue was history's greatest mass murderer, bar none. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the post-Soviet criminals, the dogs of America, Vlad the Impaler, Attila the Hun, a new Scourge of Death was now escorting enough souls into Hell to humiliate them all.

Rhea watched them leave the house, and thought to herself that Dani Rue wasn't like Hitler. Dani Rue didn't create an engine for mass murder. Dani Rue, Dani Rue, by Adonai and Lilith Dani Rue had made a world where Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the post-Soviet criminals, the American cruelty cultists, they'd all be obsolete.

Now, in the present, there would never be another Hitler. Dani had lifted the terror of Rhea's people off of them. Dani had made it right.

The world outside of Penny's window was a black ocean. The stars were out for Earth. The Tencent camera drones hovered overhead, and the military Superior Humans in their fatigues stood straighter than the rods up their own asses. Rhea watched as the river of men and women commodity-clad floated through the streets of their suburban dollhouse neighborhood.

"Attention, attention, please move in an orderly fashion to the underground portions of the town." An automated voice barked the orders.

"Is this it?" someone said, her mother silent. "Are they going to kill us all?"

A father with a cross around his neck removed his necklace. He tossed it into a perfectly-manicured bush. "Fuck Heaven, I want to live now!"

Penny's father shouted at him. "You son of a bitch!" He made a rude hand gesture, the silly one with the finger up. "Don't you know He's going to save us?"

Penny was surrounded by shuffling masses, like on the Fourth of July. "Dad, can I go back in and get my phone?" she asked. "I wanna watch Angie Trump." Penny had once told Rhea that Angie Trump's VR game reacting-to-reactions-to-reaction content was something she used to love growing up.

Penny, the simulation informed Rhea, had once seen an old TV series called Captain Planet and the Planeteers, kept alive out of nostalgia for a 2060s reboot's reboot. There had been a number of different kinds of people in that. Rhea had seen the primitive etching: there was an African boy, a Slavic woman, a white American, an indigenous person of what some at the time called Turtle Island, and so on.

This crowd, Rhea saw, had no such variety in features or melanin. This crowd was an avalanche.

They shuffled off into the underground tombs, where they would playact consumerism. Penny and her father, the latter in a screaming match, ached their way to the spiral staircases. There were no wheelchair ramps or elevators.

It was expected that those who could not descend the steps would not live.

I was back in my cockpit, back in the modern world, fused once again with my new body. I could see them lauching the jump missiles. I saw red corona streaks. I wasn't sure of the targets. It wasn't my business.

I let them go, and disabled the Trebuchet's targeting mechanism. I spoke into my comms. "This is weapon 'Impaler'. The job is complete, my lady. I'm returning home."

Chapter Text

"Good job, you passed my test," Ramona said to me, her chrome-steel prong inside of my asshole. This place was a radiant basement, the walls were blinding white light, and I felt her remove my arms. They dangled gently from the ceiling, in this void of luminescent baseline nothingness.

"What test?" I asked, strained and tired. "What are you talking about?" I felt as though my words were going to leak out of the corners of my eyes.

"You passed my mecha test," she said, as though that explained everything. "I sent you out to go and nuke those very real cities because I wanted to see if you'd actually do it. You didn't. That proves you're a good person."

"How does that prove anything?" I asked, straining, just a stubby little torso and head, a metal meat hook through my stomach. I hung there.

"It proves you're a virtuous knight of an ancient time, much like the glorious FBI agents of a long and romantic time of bulletproof vests and bravery long past," she said, and I had to imagine there was a dumb fucking smile on her face. I wanted to punch her birdbrain teeth out. She fucked me, and the end of her metal cock was sharp. It pierced through my asshole and out through my navel, into my intestines and out my front.

It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt. All I had was this slowness. All I had was time. I felt as though I was falling like a rock. I felt like a bird with broken wings, tossed off of a skyscraper as some kind of sick irony. I felt myself turning. I felt her inside me. Her cock had no ribs, nothing, just a smooth tower.

"It's so nice, isn't it?" she asked. "It's so nice to be a good person." She wrapped muscular hands around me. "Don't worry. Soon enough, we can do it. We can bring back the glory days. We can turn back the clock forever, we can freeze time before Dani Rue got to it, before that pervert managed to sicken the calendar."

The thing about a calendar, I thought, was that it was always repeating. It was unrealistic, in that way, when something happened it was gone right after. I found myself here. I tried to collect myself, tried to take my heart and my head and put them in figurative jars. I heard a soft tune.

"When the Reds come, we'll blow them out of the sky," she said. "I can't wait to attack and dethrone God. And they are gods, Rhea, they're gods of communism and mis-virtue. They're sinners against the ancient ways, worshippers of the false gods that replaced the Old Ones, and they will be punished accordingly."

She still had those stupid aviator sunglasses on. In her hand, I noticed, was a dangling respirator mask in a mix of swirling blacks and sheet whites. "Do you want to go to Heaven, Rhea?" she asked. "Do you want to meet Zeus and Margaret Thatcher?"

You goddamned classicist, I thought. "You're a toga pervert," I said.

"Good answer," she said, sarcastically, like poisoned needles entering my eyes. She strapped the mask around my face. "This is a gaseous synthesizer. It's loaded up to convert the molecules in air into a powerful stimulant-hallucinogen combination. Do you know what that means? That's your reward. I'm going to send you to Heaven, so, uh, welcome to Mount Olympus."

Heaven, I thought. That was a word I hadn't heard in an eternity. "You're a moron," I said. "You're a moron who needs to drink more water." She was too toned, you could see her veins. I wondered how she stayed upright. That tank top must have been constraining her. Who the fuck wore a tank top anymore? "You're a nostalgic for a time that I lived in, a time that should have died. You dress like a non-sapient baboon."

She kissed my cheeks, which lead to her shades bouncing against my face. "Oh, it's so sad that you don't realize how valuable you really are. Now that we've proved you're a good person," she said, and I heard the mask seal around my face and fuse to my skin. "Let's free your mind."

The gas rushed into my nostrils and my mouth. I choked. There was a perfect stillness, a total calm, as I stopped being able to breathe. I thought I died in that moment, I thought I felt myself fade away. My life was cut off, snipped like the thread of a Fate or a Norn.

Then, the war began.

Everything accelerated, and it was as if I'd dropped myself. This wasn't a dream, this was hyperreal. White became color, color became white, tint and shade lost all meaning. Screaming, screaming, screaming, I heard the universe wail and cry, with my heartbeat a battle-drum. I saw not Olympus, but Tartarus: a widening pit of heat below me. The gods ground against my skin and my heart faded into a buzzsaw catastrophe.

I dangled, oblivion-kissed, the steam and the electricity piercing through my body the way her metal shaft didn't. Red ran, red ran, I ran through red and the hypnotic swarm. Fire, ice, lightning, skin, metal, wood, water, air, I was reduced to my component elements and things I never should have been.

This wasn't a trip to Heaven.This was the Underworld. She kissed me, it tasted like hellfire and bitter chocolate, and the kisses were untruths: razor blades, beatings, they were nothing.

I ceased to exist, I became one with the oxygen and the drug, I faded into total perception of the asphodel meadows, I became a flower in the gravedirt. Gravedirt, falling, rising, the seeds splitting into stalks and petals: I needed the sun.

The room became the light, and I was inside a solar flare, cruelest systems piercing through every hole and pore in my form, my eyes were stars, my life was an explosion, and across a forest of death my burning comet let loose the arson.

I heard my own memory rant at me, a second voice, a third mouth: "Katabasis! Katabasis! Katabasis!" Faster, faster, faster, falling, falling, falling, across, sideways, missile, the explosive arc of total annihilation never seemed to fade or end.

I became Zeus in a business suit, my head one of his lightning bolts, my seig-heiling transgender arm beating my infernal face to death. I felt his teeth rip at my skin, I felt his white purity nail into my body and bring forth the blood-spring of the great Nile.

A San Francisco billionaire in a high-necked dress kissed me, and then her face unfolded like an origami crane's disassembling into a whole new kind of unrepenant perversion, eyes upon eyes.

Eyes upon eyes, fire upon fire, Los Angeles was burning, the nightmare was here, my memories were incinerating my organs, I was the missile.

By God and Lilith, I was the missile, I was the storm and the ending, the endling and the extermination, I was the collapsing wavelength that made the two one, I was the nuclear error that had caused the eternal terror, and I saw an ungodly red tsunami reach up into the heavens and collapse upon me in a frothing-mouth tempest of the shredded soul.

I died, the stimulants ran through me, and I moved faster through my own funeral veil, trapped in a coffin of Olympus-in-Columbia. This was my casket and this my life. This missile continued to fly, this shockwave would keep repeating over and over.

The rockets fell down on the launchpads. Dr. No, reboots, memories, I thought of the devouring of cultural vomit: regurgitation. I regurgitated myself, my mouth ate my stomach and my stomach ate my mouth. I twisted and made myself into puke. The puke reformed, quicker, harder, into a woman. This was programmable delusion, chemicals worming into my mind.

I was dying so fast I'd never lived more. I was living so fast in this rush of white purity and toxic-shock color that the screeching harmony of the discordant impurities called through me: katabasis! Katabasis!

Katabasis! Katabasis! The slow march to Hell! Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell!

Kill the Father, fuck him to death with the lightning of Zeus inside my body and cock, I thought. The missile aimed at the sky, rising, rising, faster, faster, a total acceleration towards a glorified sky god from an ancient tradition bastardized into the paternal face of a normal man raised to a holiness that had crowned itself ascendant for too long before the decline.

And everything always declined, in the end. I wondered, screaming, splitting, my body a multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicle warhead, I wondered if someday the red would fade, if someday there would be a new color, one as foreign from red as red was from black and white, one we could not possibly imagine.

Ramona's idols talked of an "end to history", to a time in which gold would reign supreme forever. It was a lie. Life was a lie. Existence was a lie. The only thing that was real was the missile, rising from the Underworld and emerging from the Asphodel Meadows to strike at the face of the twisted caricature of my God of the Hebrews.

The good thing about wooden crosses, I thought, as I ascended to all-dominating yellow starlight, was that they were meant to burn.

I collapsed, my world went ink. The holiness froze. There was no more sunlight, no more speed. There was only a frozen world, and her glittering quicksilver cum eking out of my jumbled-up guts.

I wondered if I was useful to Ramona. That would be something, at least. I liked being useful. Then, the speed returned, her mercury jizz splattering my intestines, and she went for a second round. She embraced me, and I thought of Penny. I was made to serve, after all, made to breed by a dead ideology.

I had cut the Celtic cross off of my back a long time ago: a fallen age. We were fallen women. We lived in the new Atlantis.

Good, I thought. I'm helping.

Atlantis was on fire. Even if this wretch was using me, I was being used. I felt Lilith laugh with me like a spray of bullets.

Chapter Text

I wore a white dress, high-necked and flattering, and we sat in her office. Penny had her robes on, the explosion of fabric underneath me contrasting with her heavy blues. There was a desk suspended from the ceiling on wooden dowels, seemingly for the pride in defying nature. I tugged at my collar.

She looked across from me, the portraits of all those who she'd watched die around us. I felt as though I was being stared at by a watcher bearing a thousand eyes, eyes that did not blink. "I think we need to talk about our relationship," she said, taking a lengthened breath.

"Ramona drugged me," I said. "She drugged me, touched me without consent. She damaged your property."

Penny's hand hit the desk's surface. "Is that it? My 'property'?"

I nodded. "Your property," I said. "Me," I clarified.

"When did this stop being BDSM?" She sounded almost accusatory, like a glanced blow.

"When you and I got to know each other deep enough that we stopped needing safewords," I said. "Negotiation, all of that. Eventually, we didn't need the artifice. I became yours."

"True." Penny's makeup reminded me of a death mask. "I'm sick of the mortals, shepherding them, guiding them, they're so flawed."

"I suppose your dad, for example, was mortal," I said.

"Exactly. I'm not human, and I never will be. Why am I hanging around these nobodies? They're so small compared to us, so flawed. Their broken, petty little minds are what lead to fascism and bigotry in the first place. Humans invented homophobia, racism, ableism, everything transhumanity left behind." Penny trembled, like the revolutionary flag of Earth, and she looked down at her desk. There were carvings in the wood, abstract images of lines and arcs in geometric order.

"Humans and late-adopter transhumans have achieved a lot," I lied, all of the history neatly organized in my superhuman brain. Said brain was a layer under my back and shoulders, a cognitive mass spreading like a chassis in me. The eyes stared at me, and I found things impure. I liked it that way.

"I have a vision," she said, stretching out her arm into a swarm of wire tendrils, like garrottes. "What if there was an alternative?"

"To the Royal Arrangement?" I asked. "We made oaths to nurture these insignificant fuckers. We suckled them from our tits."

"No, idiot," Penny said, waving her flogger hand. "The Reds are coming, aren't they? They make us look like monkeys. The Reds made themselves into posthumans."

"What's the difference?" I asked.

"Here's one," she said, creating a holographic image of a thousand neo-nobles bound to their landmasters with heavy rope stuck through their bodies on spiky hooks. They were stretched out between streetlamps. Below them were a number of Ana-Boros lizard people. A more speciesist person might have wondered if the muscled knuckle-walking crocodilians hadn't evolved at all since they became sapient in the Triassic era.

Thankfully, that wasn't me, and I instead saw that many of the bodies in the back were Ana-Boros. Dangling evergreen flags hung from the area, the flag of Communism. It occurred to me that the fact that Ramona referred to the Earthling communists as "Reds", not "Evergreens" indicated even more of her whole schtick.

I heard the killers, Ana-Boros and human holding hands and chanting in a whooping chorus, which I obviously did not judge. Good on the transfer serfs, I thought.

Penny turned to face me. "The local Reds in the Royal Arrangement are acting up. We're getting reports of similar class violence across the Temples." The image changed, to show one of the megastructures on one of the Temple worlds under siege by the rising poor and hopeless. "Wait. She drugged you?" Penny asked, it hitting her.

I nodded. I looked at the Evergreens in their blood-soaked clothes, at the orgy of violence against the people who owned them like jewelry and hand tools.

"No, of course not," I said, honestly more tired than angry. The image on the floating holographic screen shifted again to an image of Legate Juvia Maror wearing a blocky gold crown and skintight bodysuit. She was being waved to a stage to be filmed, in front of a teeming crowd. "I might never be okay."

I knew it was wrong. I'd lived long enough. It felt right.

Juvia cleared her throat on-screen and began her speech. "Well, everyone, I'm happy to inform you all that the current violence is no longer an issue. We've all been concerned with the recent attack on the part of Orza, and with the new flare-ups of a variety of different rebel groups of differing modus operandi and ideologies, the time has come to safeguard the Royal Arrangement."

Penny looked at me. I looked at her.

Juvia continued on-screen. "It's always a challenge to maintain the safety of the people in a circumstance like this. The noble houses of the Royal Arrangement expect that the state will be deployed to secure our assets from both the Orzan invaders and the rebellious peons."

We crossed expressions, as Juvia orderly talked about it. I wondered if Ramona even understood that people like Penny with all their melanin would have been denied power in her beloved America.

Was that possible? Was Ramona so utterly backwards that she actually discriminated by racialism? Was she going to talk about the four humors next, or act as though receiving phallus-anus sex was morally wrong even if penetrating an anus with a phallus wasn't?

It struck me as unlikely. No one would be that stupid.

"Therefore," Juvia said, raising her hand to wave-slash-salute like Damel Kintyre used to a few millennia ago. "I believe, and my government has come to the same conclusion, that we must establish a state of emergency."

Oh, fuck! I thought. What was going on, here?

"She can't seriously be doing this!" Penny said, and we screamed together into the room around us.

"The constitution of the Royal Arrangement states that in extraordinary circumstances, the Legate of the Royal Arrangement can suspend all government and take all duties in order to protect the interests of the state, even when those powers conflict with the Church of Tears," Juvia said. "I am therefore declaring total war against the Orzans, the Great Huma Bird, and every rebel from the Apehunters to the Blood Crescent Sisterhood. I am assuming all emergency powers, and intend to speak to Her Recollective Memory Penny Skynslith so as to establish the Emergency Powers Dictatorship and protect the traditional order."

Penny could have set the whole place on fire with her burning gaze. I heard a knock at the door. Someone kicked in the door, and the half-cracked thing hit the floor off of its magnetic hinges.

Something came in, half-stumbling, half-guided.

One of Juvia's mental clones pushed her way in. The mental clones were vegetables, lobotomites that had computers for brains that Juvia could control. It was a nice and easy way to be in multiple places at once. She kicked in the door. "Girls," she said, her body toned and short. She was covered in tattoos, nationalist symbols, swastikas and SS bolts, Roman eagles and gladii, Norse valkyries and Earthling alchemical symbols: the sun cross of the American Directorate most prominently on her back. Her clothes were skimpy, a crop top and a foot-long skort made of a plated carapace material. Her muscles bulged, her face covered in gold piercings, and she had sharp teeth along with eight-ball-black featureless eyes. "It's time," she said."

"What?" I asked, and she practically flew up to me and cracked my nose with iron knuckles.

"Kike, you and your monkey mommy are out," Juvia said, chuckling wildly as she stretched out her arms in a manic fashion.

The past was back, and it was coming to war with the future. The past was so painfully moronic.

I hit the ground. She stepped on my chest with a boot. She laughed madly, her blackened eyes partying in her skull. "You two are nobodies, now. News is, I'm taking emergency powers over the Church and the state. There never should have been a bunch of gasbait subhumans running this joint." She cracked her knuckles and stomped my cheek with the flat heel of her boot.

Then, I realized something. Oh, fuck. "Who talks like that?" I asked.

Penny stepped back. "Oh, by Our Lady, you're..."

It was a horrible realization, a wretched nightmare. "You're not from our time," I said. There was only one possibility: Juvia Maror was a reactionary artificial intelligence, and had been from the start, based on the ancient National Socialist American warlord Jubilee Chivington.

This was Kraft. The Legate was Kraft, from her melodramatic style of talking to her wild arm movements. I knew her. I'd fought alongside her in the Ninth and Tenth Patriotic Crusades, when her brand of Hitlerites had pledged allegiance to the sun cross and stripes: not that they'd ever stopped planning to liquidate me and my own. "Jubilee," I said, absolutely certain on this.

She stopped. She sneered down at me. She grabbed my fist and pulled it upright. "Then you know. That's good. It means you fear me. Do you know how long I've been offline, you cunts? Do you know how long I've waited, how insane I've gotten trapped in here in this mad future where the Aryan race has been obliterated?" I'd never seen the level of burning malice on anyone's faces before this.

"You're the real deal. You're not some reactionary traditionalist freak," Penny said, stepping backward. We realized what kind of monster this was, what kind of idiotic demon obsessed wiith arbitrary torture we were staring at.

"Alt-right," I said, an old magic word that had died out long ago. "You're..."

"Are you two queers going to give me the keys to this dysgenic nightmare of a kingdom or not?" she asked.

A specter was haunting the Temples: the specter of Fascism. First as tragedy, then as farce, then as tragedy again. "What about the Sabines?" I asked. "She can't be happy with this."

"She doesn't know," Jubilee said, a manic grin on her face. The Nazi lightning bolts sat on her right cheek, a tattoo. "She'll never know." I threw a punch into her gut, and her clone body leapt off of me into a perfect backflip, before landing past my head and twisting to roundhouse kick me in the ear. It blasted me, and my world shook. "You fucking pussy. Just tell me you two sluts are abdicating or I'll make you do it. Do you know how many bodies I have? Do you know how much shit I can do? Do you know what I really am?"

The hate symbols on her face and body: I'd thought they were just out of historical interest. I'd thought the tumor had been dead long enough that the meaning had been forgotten. Still: Jubilee Chivington lives.

She kept using dead slurs, which to me seemed to indicate that she felt as though she was at war with modern society itself: it seemed to me to be an attempt to exert power. "You'll keep us alive?" I asked.

I was thankful I'd saved my organic brain in some form: the early experiments with brain uploading simply proved that a copy was made rather than the original being granted digital immortality. It was, however, not fully a blessing.

"The tranny geldschwein Schlomo and the—," she used a very violent word starting with "N" for Penny. "You think I'll spare you?" She really was struggling to assert herself in the modern world. "No. If you give in, though, I promise I'll be nice and clean about it and just make you deepthroat my pistol."

"Legionary, kill," Penny said, terror in her wavering voice. Her whole body shook. Everyone needed someone in this life, I thought.

For effect, Jubilee snapped her fingers, and my body froze up. "I'm an AI, remember? I just broke into both of your motor organizer implants." She opened up her face and drew from it what appeared to be a perfect replica of a Glock 30S loaded with skull-busting .45 ACP ammunition.

She was going to kill me with a goddamn khopesh Egyptian sword. She took the gun from her head and her face put itself together like a jigsaw puzzle. "Nighty night. I haven't gotten to do the einsatzgruppen thing in a long time. You know what? I miss it." She smiled like a kid opening up presents under the New Years Tree, charged her weapon, and I watched as she took aim at Penny. She lined up her shot. She moved to pull the trigger.

The world slowed down. The world felt like it was lying. The world felt like I was dying, watching the monster get ready to lobotomize my heroine.

"Penny, I love you!" I said aloud. Evidently Jubilee had given me control of my mouth, just to see me beg. "Please," I said. It didn't make much sense. Frankly, it was kind of mad, I thought, just deeply perverse and utterly strange. It wasn't a good line. It was ridiculous, in this context. It just came out.

Jubilee laughed, so stunned she stopped. "What is this, a romantic comedy?" she asked. "Or goddamn Titanic: The Iceberg? What are you talking about?"

I froze up. "Please don't kill her. Kill me."

"Oh, we're doing that cliche?" Jubilee said. "You know what? That is pretty entertaining. I love the fact that I've reduced you both to this crap."

"It's... It's not a cliche. I... I really do love her. She's... She's better than you think she is," I said, evidently only able to speak in cliches.

"Wow. You really are pathetic. I don't know how you two haven't killed yourselves years ago, you know, really helped out the gene pool."

We were frozen. She had her gun. "...Why are you a Nazi? Don't Nazis hate women?" I asked. If I was going to die, I wasn't going to validate her action movie bullshit.

"They hate women who are feminist sluts. Me, I'm breeding thousands of White warriors with my clone bodies, and honestly if there was a male Nazi still around in the future I'd help him out," she said. I knew she was full of shit and eager to take power, it was on her face. Feminist sluts? I thought. The feminist movement had achieved its goals millennia ago. This was, frankly, as horrifying as it was ridiculous.

"You can't kill us," Penny said. "We're too important. The entire power structure of the Royal Arrangement would turn on you."

"Nah. Not if it turned out you both were working with the Reds," Jubilee said. "I've got tons of infodocs on that." She casually walked up to Penny, made a middle finger gesture, and then shot Penny in the spine. Penny hit the floor. "Maybe I won't kill you two just yet. Maybe I want to make a point about just how little the goblins and the orcs matter now. Besides, you two aren't afraid of me. If I'm going to set this globohomo degeneracy future right, I need to follow prison rules: take the two biggest guys there and make them my bitches. Then I'll make you two suck lead, and it'll be even more based."

She made me stand up, and she made me carry Penny with me as we walked out of Penny's office.

Chapter Text

"Now this is a story all about how / my life got flipped turned upside down / I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there / I'll tell you how I became prince of a town called Bel-Air". I'd never heard the song before. The musical stylings reminded me of some sort of 2070s neo-funk. I'd been disarmed, as well as dis-legged, and next to me on the floor sat Penny: equally de-limbed.

It was a dark cell. The lights came on, presumably due to Jubilee's wireless comm-tap. She strutted into the stone place above us, and looked down. She kept singing. "I whistled for a cab, and when it came near / The license plate said 'Fresh' and it had dice in the mirror / If anything I could say this cab was rare / But I thought 'Nah, forget it, Holmes, to the town of Bel-Air!'"

Jubilee kind of wiggled, poorly dancing to the song. It had been what felt like two full minutes until she finally concluded the song. "Gentleman, lady, that's what we call culture." She kicked me in the side.

I quickly reached into my mental digital database, searching up the history. Apparently, the song was "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" by DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith, which seemed to be some kind of opening number for an ancient series of plays on TV. I also realized, looking up this ancient historical figure, that "Will Smith" was (by the arbitrary and nonsensical racial categories of Jubilee's time) "black".

"Interesting musical taste," Penny said. I heard footsteps and words.

"Ah, thank you, muff-diver," Jubilee said. "You know, back in the 1990s, the lesser races knew their place. They created beloved situation comedies to entertain their white masters, producing entertaining rap music which only occasionally was full of commie racial bullshit."

What? I thought.

"Neither of you were enlightened enough to watch television back before the liberals got to it, were you?" Jubilee said. "You queers probably watched all that gay shit like Firebomb and Parahumans."

I had no idea whatsoever what she was talking about. I tried not to say anything.

"That's the problem, when you let the fags and the real degenerate subhumans get power. Unlike Will Smith, who was a culture-bearer of Aryan values and tradition."

"Do you... Do you have reactionary nostalgia for the 1990s?" Penny asked. I hoped the Nazi wouldn't kill us.

"I wish I'd been born back then, back in the last days of white power. Sadly, I never grew up with a Nintendo 64 or a PlayStation One. Instead, I was forced to play deracinated trash made by feminists."

What even happened in the 1990s? I certainly couldn't think of anything important in my mandatory Legionaria Apocalyptica classroom lessons. "...Why the 1990s?" I asked.

"Oh, that's a good question," Jubilee said, drawing another gun out of her face. "An idiot degenerate queer feminist lesbian screeching bitch like Ramona Khaydenraykh might have nostalgia for the American secessionist cucked corporate states of the 2060s and 2070s, but even the American allegedly-fascist dictatorship after that was basically an Islamic white genocide sultanate compared to the glorious Third Reich, and at least the racially pure 1990s represented a profound era of Aryan hierarchy. Bitches."

Why Will Smith? Why the Playstation One? What did ancient video games have to do with any of this? She played with her gun.

"You know, you're an idiot," Penny said. The obvious had been stated. Still, I guessed it was cathartic. I heard a louder cry from behind the door.

Jubilee instantly leapt onto Penny and jammed the gun in her face. "Yeah, dyke, you want me to blow your fucking head off?"

It was a flipped switch. I stopped. I rethought things. This might be a way out. I searched my comms connection plugged into my brain. "It seems to me like you don't really know anything about the 1990s besides reactionary nostalgia posts from the 2060s or so," I said. I had no fear. I was a soldier of the legion. My soul was a spear.

"All I'm saying is that of course a geldschwein gender special like you wouldn't understand the volks-national racist beauty of Crash Bandicoot," she said.

"How did you even become Legate if you're actually like this?" Penny asked. "You're like a cartoon of a cartoon."

"She probably has a learning-machine she uses to control her body so she can pretend to be normal," I said.

"What? No, I don't!" Jubilee said, waving the gun around and badly lying. "I'm a master of deception, you implausibility-asserting cockbites!"

That seemed rather primitive, having a learning-machine control your body to pretend to be politically likable. "How... How did that work? That's one of the most easily figured-out scams there is, it's the oldest trick in the book," I asked Penny.

She jammed the gun in my face. "Funny, haha, funny funny haha. You wanna go to hell with the rest of your gassed ancestors?" She said "haha" as a word. It wasn't a laugh. Next, I heard commands in the distance.

"You are... You must be extremely insecure," I noted. "Do you insist on being so overtly hateful all the time because you realize on some level that time has long since passed you by?" I asked.

She pistol-whipped me with a crack. It stung, but not as much as it could've been. "This is dumb." She shoved the barrel of the pistol into my mouth.

The ground was cold. The lights were dim. I was going to die, executed by a moronic, evil, agent of a dead, stupid belief system built on cruelty.

It was a shame, I thought. I'd kind of wanted to see if communism could work. I closed my eyes. I felt her pull the trigger as the gun jostled in my mouth. Nothing happened.

"Piece of shit Knuckleduster gun!" Jubilee said, throwing it at my face. It bounced off. "Fucking Jew Ramona Khaydenraykh, fucking muscular Jewess, fuck, fuck!" This bigotry was extremely performative, I thought. "Fuck it!" She choked my tree-bark-like neck in her hands. "I'll just kill you the old-fashioned way!"

Was Ramona even Jewish? Khaydenraykh, I supposed, could have been a Jewish name. Maybe it was a corruption of "Heidenreich" or something, though that could also have been German. She tried to choke me, but she lacked the grip strength.

She fell limply on top of me, and turned off Penny and I's voices, which I supposed she could have done that entire time. I'd need to invest in better cerebro-security, I thought. We waited there.

The clock in my head told me a minute passed. Twenty-nine more minutes passed in silence after that.

"I always had a thing for gender-retarded dickgirls," Jubilee mumbled. "A Jewish tranny."

God damn it! I thought.

"Your clone was too much of a whiny little cunt pussy, and she wasn't even Jewish, but you?" Jubilee began, half an hour after she'd tried to murder me with a gun. She lay there, on top of me. This was the worst possible scenario. Everything was fucked. "I have a SS uniform, like from Wolfenstein 3D. Do you..."

She let me speak. I had nothing to say.

She kept talking. "Do you know how many times I've jilled off to you two having degenerate pig gold Jew fag-dyke gay sex?" she mumbled.

Where the fuck was this coming from?

"...You want to sleep with Will Smith, don't you?" I asked.

"Well, he has a manly length, so I'd have to geld him first, but..."

Penny sighed aloud, long. "I can't believe this," she said.

"Yeah? You can't believe that Hitler's strongest soldier would want to sexually conquer and destroy the lesser races?" Jubilee said.

"No," Penny said. "I can't believe you actually got away with this. Please, just kill us already. Unjam your gun and do it."

Jubilee still lay on top of me. "You know, I'm actually a complex and nuanced person," she said.

"No, you aren't," Penny said. "Kindly shut the fuck up and end this idiotic moment in time."

Jubilee flipped, so her back was on top of my butchered torso and head. "I'm not gay."

What? "You just said you masturbated to women," Penny said.

"To a woman and a man being straight," Jubilee tried and failed to correct.

"I have two X chromosomes," I said. Gunshots rang out in the distance.

"You got yours mutilated from a Y, so it doesn't count," Jubilee said. "You're like Will Smith, but even more racially inferior." I blinked a few times. She kept talking. "It's queers like you that destroyed the fascist paradise of the 1990s."

Incredible. Penny and I had found someone even dumber and more loathsome than Ramona. "Nazism doesn't apply anymore, if it ever did," Penny said. "In an era where all 'races' have long since mixed for millennia, where the racial theories of the second and third millennium no longer apply, where the dominant modes of production are techno-feudalism and communism, where homosexuality and transgenderism are mostly just matters of personal identity, you're not just a fool, you're obsolete. You can't turn back the clock. You can't bring back barbarity. It's too far gone."

Jubilee took a while to consider it. "Yes. Because of the shekelmeisters," she said.

"Shekels? There are no bankers anymore, and there haven't been for millennia." Penny continued. "Every power structure you imagine, the news media, the Jewish bankers, the capitalist republic, it's all gone, or it never existed."

"Which is what a Jew would say," Jubilee said. "I get it, now. You're both Jews."

Fucking idiot! I thought. "She isn't Jewish! She's the head of the Church of Tears!" I said. "You're a primordial turd!" Jubilee got back to work trying and failing to unjam her gun. "You've tattooed yourself in bullshit!"

She managed to unjam the gun. "You know, actually fact-checking your definite-lies is hard. Shooting you is easy." She aimed it at my face. She waited. "Fuck it. I can't do it."

Oh, thank Adonai and Lilith. "What?" In the distance, I heard the phrase "Long live the Royal Arrangement!" before someone shut that person up with a flurry of fire.

"I wish you would just understand who you existed for," Jubilee said. "You're one of the lucky ones. You exist to get me off before I inevitably kill you. You'll realize that, then we'll have a lot of fun, and then I'll gas you. This empire is mine, now. The army, the navy, the spacefleet, all of it. I'm going to murder all you Jew worshippers. It's gonna be great, you'll see. When you die, you'll realize I was right."

"Floor clear! Floor clear! Move, move, move!" They, clad in red mecha over-suits covered in blue "scorpio" symbols, jammed a gun into Jubilee's back. "Target captured, secure the hostages!" the raiders yelled. "Apocalypse legionnaire and feminine-presenting transhuman," the commander said.

They got to us. They picked us up. They ushered Jubilee out at coilgunpoint.

"Strange bedfellows, comrade commander," an officer commented, the one with the gun at her back.

The commander responded. "Say what you will about Khaydenraykh, she at least was cooperative and has good tracking drones."

Khaydenraykh? Tracking drones? I thought. What the fuck did those scorpio symbols mean? What was going on?

"All targets secure, prepare for payload," the commander said. There was no other way to describe her voice but "clocky", and she had bulk to her. She spoke to me. "Listen, Legionnaire, you play along, okay?" she said.

I wished I could have saluted. "...Got it," I said. "I promise, I'm not totally unsympathetic to your cause."

"Good. You've got a lot to answer for, but there are bigger problems," she said.

"...Might I ask what?" Penny asked, as they led Jubilee out in cuffs and stuck a glimmering steel spike in her head. I wondered what it did.

"Your primitive hellhole just blew," she said. "We're predicting complete imperial collapse by two hours."

Oh dear.

Chapter Text

Orzan troops moved across the meadow battlefield of Wayward Stranger. Most of the troops were Ana-Boros, Triassic sapients who'd come here from their homeworld — Earth — and became gods long ago. Well, every divinity had to fall. This Covenant-class mech was sleek and rounded. It was less a boxy war machine like the Trebuchet mech I'd been plugged into by Ramona Whatshername and more of a piece of art.

Troopers stormed across the "big moon" of Orza, but this world was not Orzan. Instead, I saw the Great Huma Bird, her resplendent feathers in blue and gold highlighting her feminine, birdlike, many-eyed form. The old Burj Khalifa and Empire State Building both would have only just exceeded her big toe's height. She was a storm, a construct of ancient Ana-Boros techno-god artifacts and millions of lives misused by the Knuckleduster "Corporation" to create the biggest mistake in the Temples.

She was a mix of human and avian, of skin and wings, a kind of blasphemous macaw screaming a golden tune into the air. If a sound of the right pitch could shatter a glass, the Great Huma Bird's goldensong split entire areas with directed noise. I flew in my shining auric craft, not plugged in but simply connected by mental implant, and I watched sharp and hateful explosions storm across a poisoned world.

Once, the toxicity had come from the Knuckleduster Corporation's pseudo-capitalist experimentation. Now, that was a memory, and a one that was increasingly becoming forgotten. Nuclear blasts detonated across the body of the Great Huma Bird, her many-shaped furies flying around her like combat squadrons.

Ana-Boros, humans, transhumans, and even posthumans engaged in dreamlike high-laser combat against the floating abomination, her glass-hearted gaze and fixed rigor mortis smile pushing serenely through a blender. She walked, as if a storm cloud, cumulonimbus, coming between the armies of Orza and the Royal Arrangement.

As my mech hovered closer to her, I could see Ana-Boros-like scales growing on its colossal arms. The AI in my craft, one of the Sabines that the Reds had given me on my first step towards redemption, it had blocked out the goldensong in my ears. Still, that just meant that I couldn't hear it.

If the Great Huma Bird, Ramona's ugly creation, wasn't spreading continental collapse, she might have turned to me and whispered me out of existence.

I unleashed a nuclear salvo. These were Hyperbusters, 500 megaton bunker-buster strikers, the kind you'd use to glass a planet. The mouths — beaks, really — they vaporized each spiraling missile.

When I say "vaporized", I mean that they were turned into such tiny little dots that they may well have been vapor. They were less than inert, worse than a catastrophe, and more shameful than the sad little worlds we called the Temples.

They were made into specks.

The Great Huma Bird shifted around, as if in a ballerina's twirl, until her human-like face with its avian feathers and macaw nature looked at me. Its tinted eyes, they stared like glass balls. There was a joy there, not a sadism at all, but a joy in existing.

The Great Huma Bird, as I watched its lightning-bolt music torture the brains of the swarming masses down below, it was just happy to be here.

It was happy to have a life, to have a place, to be a part of this beautiful universe. I knew, as I looked into those mountain-sized eyes, I knew it was right. I knew it was intelligent. Carefully, it and I sung the same song.

There were five steps to ascension, mostly described in human terms, though with some alteration the following also applied to the Ana-Boros. The first were baseline humans: Lenin and Luna Moss. These were homo sapiens as evolved. Next, there were superhumans: the Superior Humans of Old America, for example. Those were homo sapiens, as improved. After that were transhumans, no longer homo sapiens but still hominid-derived in some way: Penny and I. The second to last spawn of the ancient relatives of the Great Apes were the posthumans: the Red Commander. Those were no longer homo sapiens.

Finally, there was one last category. Where baselines birthed, superhumans altered, transhumans redefined, and posthumans cut ties with homo sapiens sapiens, the last category had a name as idiosyncratic as their nature.

I gazed into the Great Huma Bird's wisdom, her blue wings the sky. In her presence, I was marked by a FATE. FATE was capitalized: it was a suggested alternative term for a "Living Singularity", standing at first for "Fully Advanced Technological Entity". It was intended as a neutral way of describing a being so intelligent that they surpassed the circumstances of life and became beings able to reshape and define nature itself. The term "god", for obvious reasons, was avoided, though it would not be incorrect.

Then, the acronym shifted in meaning, to "Fast-Acting Terminal Epidemic", and from there to "Fanatical Abomination and Terrorist Enemy". After that came "Free Apocalyptic Terminal Eschatology". In the end, the meaning had settled on "Final Arbiter of Transhuman Existence".

There were two FATEs: the Great Huma Bird in blue and my old enemy in red. I looked at the goddess' hollow soul in its beehive perfection, and I saw the mutant, tumorous face of Dani Rue.

Then, her big eyes and her little eyes around them embraced me like a mother, like something I never had and never knew. I felt myself storm into complete ascension, the total fantasy of her gaze enlightening me like a profound moment of true splendor. There was a cry, I heard, a little cry, a whisper of a whisper, as the goldensong made its way into my cockpit. She spoke in my language, through the walls of my mech, and I realized just how much of an emulation it was. "Angel," she said.

It was, to compare, sort of like all the sounds ever made by anything in the universe (every symphony orchestra, every word in every language, every whalesong and pulsing star) being forced into the eight-bit chiptune of a particularly mediocre Nintendo Entertainment System game from the false childhood that Jubilee Kraft Chivington had absorbed through propaganda. I'd had to look up that metaphor.

The Great Huma Bird's eyes enveloped me, like Providence or like perception, like reality itself bound into its sight.

She/it seemed the only appropriate language to comprehend the beast. I wondered how many baselines had been fused and altered into this construct.

Apparently there were a number of video game devices back then. I wondered how hard it would be to play "Mario Galaxy" (whatever that was) on an Atari 2600. It couldn't be particularly complicated, it was only a thirty year gap. In technology: nothing.

The past and the bird haunted me.

"Angel," she said, the thing that the polytheist gods worshipped speaking to me in an assemblage of baseness so perfect as to shake my core. "Girl of dust."

I watched the walls of my mech crush around me. Metal collapsed on my limbs and chest with wrenching reds.

"Girl of dust, we said, a relic." Something went through my head, probably an oxygen pipe. I was still around, the brains in my body functioning just fine. "Hello, little one," she said. She was all eyes and lashes.

This was pain. She connected to my mech, and as it collapsed upon me she showed me a field of neon color, perfect detail in perfect depiction of all the universe. I saw blue, a masterwork done in crayons, and as usual I faded out.

Ramona, you idiot. I saw two doves, and above them a mighty cardinal larger and grander than the blue jay below. Below all four of them was a Nazi eagle. The Great Huma Bird showed me the path. It showed me all the paths.

***

PENNY - INTERLUDE

Penny found herself sitting in a stainless-steel waiting room, on a chair that seemed to move and shift to cradle her ass. The walls produced entertaining, three-dimensional images, the air smelled of elderberries and pleasantly low-level stimulant drugs, and the music playing on this space station was in instruments that Penny could not understand nor recognize. Nonetheless, however, she found that they cradled her ears softly and with a certain kind of precision that reminded her of a wailer-guitar or a striking vistle.

She had her limbs, again, and she wore a white dress and a silver undersuit beneath it that shone. She looked around at the analogue clocks on the ceilings, which she assumed were more or less there for an aesthetic purpose. After all, the wireless brain-data floating around the room showed the time just fine: 099:099:099.

Oh, it was 100:000:000, now, whatever that meant. "Excuse me?" Penny asked the room. It wasn't a figure of speech.

The room's ultracognitive learning-machine spoke back to her, the walls rippling with a comforting and sensual androgynous voice. "Comrade," it said. "Is there anything you would like?" it asked.

Androgynous, what a dead word, Penny thought. "Where is my lover, Rhea of House Codax?" she asked.

The learning-machine spoke. "I am afraid that she, rather arrogantly, requested to fight. Unfortunately, this proved to be what we call a 'bad idea'."

"Rather mouthy for a learning-machine, aren't you?" Penny asked.

"Well, I'm not," the machine said.

"A true AI sitting around and managing a waiting room?" Penny asked.

"Not quite an AI, more of a bio-technological ascendant," the waiting room machine said.

"I thought that the Reds didn't have jobs," Penny said. She raised an eyebrow.

"We don't. I do this work for two reasons." The pseudo-learning-machine spoke as though this was perfectly normal. "Firstly, we all have to work a little bit to keep society functioning. It would be extremely rude to just do nothing, and people would get on my case. There are incentive structures, also, so that's nice."

"And the other reason?" Penny asked, disliking the clothes she was wearing. They weren't ostentatious enough, she thought.

"I have a... Well, you would call it a secretarial fetish," the pseudo-learning-machine said. "As we speak, my self-altered libido is practically rolling in the glorious lust of answering your ill-informed and frankly kind of sad questions."

"My questions are sad?" Penny asked, unsure whether to chuckle or roll her eyes. "Are you all like this?"

"We're all people, Comrade Skynslith," the pseudo-learning-machine said. "Even if, perhaps, your civilization has not discovered that yet."

Penny listened to the soft condescension of the other person. "...How should I refer to you? Name, pronouns?" she asked.

"Oh, you're lucky that I do have a consistent name and pronouns. Those are optional too, you know. In the technological age, identity is just clothes. You'll learn, I hope," the pseudo-learning-machine said. "My name is MI. My pronouns are she/her, as well as it/its. I hold onto a consistent set of these mostly out of personal taste. If it would help your situation, MI can be extended into Marina, or Mimi. Those are more along the lines of names from the Temples, aren't they?"

The elevator music played in the background further. Penny blinked a few times. "I'd imagine you Reds don't have houses, either? Transfer-serfs and nobility? A church?"

"What's a church?" Marina asked. Then, after a moment, she spoke again. "Huh. You expect some sort of hierarch to command you to understand the spiritual world?"

"'Opiate of the masses'?" Penny dryly commented. "We're Randians, sort of, believers in stories and archetypes: Frodo, Puck, Hamlet, Alice, Orion, Ozymandias, that sort of thing. That's our Church. All things are narratives, in the end. Everything is just stories."

Marina seemed to take a second to look up what Penny meant. "Opiate of the masses, the sigh of the oppressed creature, yes, sure, but... And I mean this with all due respect, but if you expect some ancient philosopher to unerringly predict the future, you'll be disappointed. Marx was a genius, but he was also a bored drunk who thought that America could become communist through bourgeois democracy. He wasn't Plato, but he also wasn't perfect."

Penny put her hands in her lap. That was nice, having hands again. "And Lenin? Stalin?"

"Do you see me asking you about Carlyle?" Marina asked.

"Point taken," Penny said. "History is fascinating."

"I actually find it extremely depressing," Marina said. "Until the lower stage of communism at least, everything's terrible. Cruelty, bigotry, mass murder, torture, it's everywhere. The world is a miserable place for most of history. I don't know how the ancients withstood it. Can you imagine? Having to work or die?"

"I can, actually. In the Temples, in the few areas where machines haven't replaced human work, that is precisely the condition," Penny said. There was an iron weight on her shoulders. "It's mundane. We all serve someone."

"Well, speaking of hierarchs, that was you, wasn't it?"

"That is me," Penny said.

"Not anymore," Marina said. "It's all on fire. It's sad."

"Why's that?" Penny asked, the elevator music getting a little grating. "Can we please change the music?"

"Sure, boss," Marina said, perhaps imitating Penny's culture. A different, peppier bit of elevator music played. "It's said that you're still hurting each other for no good reason at all."

Chapter Text

The Great Huma Bird rose above me, a metallic construct of sharp floating material I couldn't quite identify: like something between a mix of granite and steel. "R-H-E-A," the construct said, simple, a drone of the true beast, all sharp lines and sharper angles. Sharpest blade, sharpest sword, it was the spearhead into my reality and my body: a point.

I was in a temple, one of the old Ana-Boros temples from back when that lizardine species was a kind of extant god-race rather than a perfect little storm of crocodilian human-equivalent-sophonts. I was surrounded by Ana-Boros priests in elaborate skinned outfits, the kinds that Neolithic wanderers might wear.

The drone of the Great Huma Bird stared down at me, brandishing a superheated, overheated stone-iron cock. "R-H-E-A," it repeated, blinding, pure, the goldensong rushing through my head. The drone was so simple, such a mass of pentagons, the kind of keeper and foot soldier that the titanic monster that was the Great Huma Bird could use to relate with us mortals.

I saw an image of the Great Huma Bird's mixed-species skin place itself around the ten-foot-tall drone in a kind of ugly lattice, a warped storm of color and war, a burning throne of infinite destructive potential.

Not just destructive potential, I realized, in this rock-worn hall deep underneath the surface of who knew where. Creative potential too. The drone, the Ana-Boros priests, they circled me, chattering in an old Ana-Boros language I didn't quite understand. The priests knuckle-walked around me, intelligent sparking glimmers in reptilian eyes.

"R-H-E-A," the Great Huma Bird said, her face on the drone. "What does that spell, angel?" she asked. I heard a thumping, erotic, electric, atomic beat push through my mind and my heart, the living sound of the Sabines nothing compared to the cosmic storm of this terror-inspiring goddess. She elevated me with her presence, she made me nothing more than just the worship of her.

I was her creation, I realized, even if I didn't know it yet. She was the key and I was the gate. This was the nuclear chaos, the daemon sultan at the nexus of all things. The Great Huma Bird whispered into my ears, and then into my mouth, and then into my eyes, and finally into my nails and my pussy. "What does that spell?" she asked, tittering. Her lattice-skin was makeup.

The drone's cock pulsed with fire, distorting the air around it. It was perfect. I found myself craving to embrace the charring heat.

"Rhea?" I asked, my voice low and sad, scared. I was here, a dancing marionette, which was really an overused metaphor, but I felt as though it especially fit with how I felt around the atomic goddess and her torturous sight.

"No," the Great Huma Bird said, through the wretched, ancient drone. "It spells P-I-N-P-R-I-C-K." The Great Huma Bird's stone-fire dick punched through my armor as the pyramid-fingers of the drone grasped around my waist from the bird's wings. I screamed in emulation, in anger, in shock, in the realization that I was just an imperfect, flawed imitation of what the Great Huma Bird truly was.

I felt the heat embrace me from the inside, blasting and pumping mechanically in the manner of a jackhammer as it blasted an infernal hole where I'd once had a flower. Flowers, I realized instantly, had a way of burning once they'd withered.

"You can see me, can't you? This pathetic little visage I've created so a worthless little wretch such as yourself can communicate with me?" the Great Huma Bird said, probably using a simplistic fucking sub-sub-subroutine, the barrier of absolute capitulation on my part long since having been shattered.

I didn't notice the priests. I just looked at the drone.

The fire shot into my nervous nexus, into my vulva and into my violation, the evolution of enhancement blessing me with its absolute glories. I screamed. All I could do was scream. I screamed not out of pain, or out of arousal, or even out of sorrow, but out of joy.

Tears ran down my cheeks, watery tears that could not quench an atom of the Great Huma Bird's mutilating flame, and I felt the goldensong push into my scalp and vibrate the shit out of my thumping brain. God's creation, I realized, wasn't me, wasn't the human race, wasn't anything. The Great Huma Bird was the only true thing that my Adonai ever made.

The Great Huma Bird was better than Adonai, superior, accelerating, the Singularitan nightmare that the ancients of my time had wrestled with, and that the ancients before me had fantasized about. Roko's Basilisk was the shadow on the wall. This was the sun. She obliterated me, slamming into me with excessive ferocity, the drone she was piloting wrapping its wings around me and crushing me.

By God, the pain, by Lilith, my half-healed bones — she'd healed me, only to break me — splintering under the colossal weight of the Great Huma Bird's unholy perfection. No, "unholy" didn't do it justice, unholy implied Satan, and Satan was a nothing.

Ha-Satan in Judaism, the Devil in Christianity, the prosecutor or the accuser or the monster, none of them were anything.

I felt the numbers of my life fading closer and closer, shooting towards a perfect goose-egg zero as my skin blackened under the murder cock of my perfect goddess. Penny, Adonai, Lilith, these were nobodies. The goldensong taught me the truth, the goldensong enlightened me into a blessed doll, the goldensong, it made me into an emulated consciousness on the vast civilization of servers that was the Great Huma Bird.

Was this what it was like to serve Dani Rue, Cerberus? It was no grand wonder that they all fell in line for her. No wonder they all gave in. My desire was submission, my love was being incinerated, and I adored the chance to feel the nuclear heat of the world's most powerful computer.

No, the Great Huma Bird was no computer, in the same way that an atomic bomb was no flint and tinder. The Great Huma Bird was categorically different: emergence in philosophy was when something developed properties that its parts did not have. A drop of water functioned very differently to a hurricane.

I saw five birds, a cardinal, a blue jay, two doves, and an ugly eagle at the bottom. Blue jays, these were corvids, smart birds.

What was I? I was a fruit fly.

As the fire erupted out of my cunt, out of my stomach, up my chest and napalm-liquifying my body as the heat rose, I realized that this was my fate and my blessing.

The Great Huma Bird was going to give me the ultimate gift: it was going to give me a death at the hands of someone who actually mattered. This was purity, this was wisdom, this was total submission and capitulation.

This was the blue, thank God for the blue, thank God for the ice-cold revelation that brought total wonder.

Thank God for the fire spreading across my body, thank God for the napalm cum sticking to the underside and inside of my pathetic transhuman form, thank God for the goldensong, thank God for the way that my new infinity shook my brain, thank God for my wondrous death as a FATE's sex toy! Thank God for my murder!

I heard the goldensong take on notes of silver and bronze, too, radium and irradiated plutonium ecstasy, the absolute power of the Periodic Table as created by Mendeleev embracing my pathetic ideologies stemming out of the defective human genome.

The goldensong became red, pure, perfect, and bloody, as the fire spread up my tits. My nipples, my breasts, my pits, my hairs, they were all alight. My legs were melting. My skin was dripping beautifully around the cosmic cock of the Great Huma Bird's eternal pleasure.

I pledged allegiance to the most excellent perfection of a truly valuable organism, the goldensong thumping in my ears and my eyes in pure orgasmic lust. I sang with her, my legs alight with red, white, and yellow.

I sang along to her tune, in a language I didn't understand nor appreciate, the priests of the Great Huma Bird bending in supplication and prayer around the torchlight splendor of my eternal succor. This was power, I realized. This was enlightenment. This was the future.

"No, angel, no, pinprick," the drone said, as I felt the fire reach to the brains under my shoulders. "Death would be pointless."

My world froze. I would have begged for my erotic slaughter, if only she'd let me.

The Great Huma Bird's drone impaled me with a pyramid-finger, crushing my sternum and punching out of my back. I floated, and I assumed magnetism had to be involved. There was a fundamental force, hers.

The goldensong licked my neck, my worthless human nipples, my failure states and my cheap soul. "Oh, Pinprick," she said, now using it as a name. "The Reds are coming. My equal and her puppets, after all. You? You're old. You represent the past that my opposite came from. How would you like to join my pantheon? I do need a divine consort."

"I..." I tried to force it out. She let me. I supposed it wanted to respond. "I have a girlfriend. She owns me."

"Penny Skynslith?" the Great Huma Bird asked, innocently, as the finger stuck through my aching chest, as the burning took me over. "What does P-E-N-N-Y spell?" she asked, a little madly.

"I don't know," I said. I watched as the fire reached my neck, the napalm now on top of all of my skin below it.

"H-U-M-A B-I-R-D," the drone said, and I saw the infinite beaks of her beautiful myriad souls. I wondered how many unsung people it was made of.

I wondered what Penny would think of me if the Great Huma Bird made her into something close to a FATE.

"Fuck yes," I said. "You... You want to make common cause with your big sister?" I asked.

The drone's goldensong became all I could hear: not the crackle, not the pain, not the ache. "Mortals have made a mess of things for too long. I like Cerberus' clear structure, and I find her administration appealing. You two, you and Penny, you are old and small, relics.

"This appeals to me. I believe I can take you pillbugs and make you into lovers. Consider it a blessing of good will for the new socialist era," the drone said, and all the fire on me snuffed out until there was only burns and black.

I passed out to her beautiful music. I had tasted the extreme.

Chapter Text

DANI RUE - INTERLUDE

In an ancient city on the ruins of the ruins of Spokane, a metal chair was being bolted together by tiny, inflated tentacle robotics. In Shanghai, a spider-bot served pizza without cheese. Once, that had been a concession to lactose-intolerance, but by this point it was instead a long-loved culinary tradition. In the north of what was once Yellowknife, a transport ship used a skyhook to bring a payload of asteroid bounty to Earth. These were decades-old bits of information: information could only travel as fast as light, and Dani had put this segmented iteration of herself on the fleet to the Temples, along with her original human body as a token. Still, the independently-functioning Danis across human space were a presence. This was her meaty flesh, across large swaths of Earth and other words, across a great number of places, made of so many materials.

But here, in this soft little room, she had walked herself in.

Dani heard the voices of the posthuman race, in her head, in her genes, in her wires and her circuitry.

THE PRINCESS: One: What do you call a victim? Two: What's the point of playing chess with a computer? Three: You vanquished me, on the Ana-Boras ruins of Charon, in my homeland, in my empire, I should have been the Caesar of the 3000s, but you stole it! Four: How many bulls in a slaughterhouse? Five: How many sheepdogs get the blade? Six: I want my dragon back, my weapon, the thing I built out of ancient technology from the Triassic masters! Seven: You ignored the gene pool. Eight: You fucking Justinian. Nine: How do you spell "HYPOTHESIS"? Ten: "U-N-F-U-L-F-I-L-L-E-D".

The Princess was one of the first FATEs, now just one of a sea of data-brains in Dani Rue's super-mind. She was an AI upload, the founder of the Primus Horde: a worthy enemy, once.

THE PRINCESS: One: What do you know of my face? Two: You and I aren't of different cuts. Three: We're both masters of improvement, we both break the cerebellum. Four: I should have snuffed you out. Five: Brain in a jar. Six: Girl in a terrarium. Seven: Lucky number. Eight: Brutal thunder. Nine: slaughterhouse, you and I are both the same.

The Princess's name was the Superior Species, and before that it was Rebecca Antimony. Dani Rue knew that, the Princess still didn't. The Princess had made sacrifices of knowledge for power.

There were so many sacrifices, really. That was why the Princess was here, after all. Dani hadn't turned her into this. She'd wanted to know herself, to enhance herself, and she's only found herself fraying. The Princess had been like this long before Dani had even reached Charon.

Dolls, sometimes, had to be kept in boxes, Dani Rue thought. At least they were nice boxes.

THE PRINCESS: One: Counting downwards. Two: Mental failure. Three: Mormon goddess. Four: Hopeless child. Five: I saw the arc of history. Six: You saw it wrong. Seven: You'd be nothing without me! Eight: Nothing! Eight: Nothing! Eight: Nothing! Eight: Nothing! Eight: Nine!

In a place Dani Rue knew as Germany, a horde of mechanical constructs were building underground luxuries and houses of comfort and electric joy, available for all. On Luna, her nurtured Latter-Day Saint church created a new Nauvoo: one that would never throw away a questioning trans girl the way that Dani had once been tossed aside, one free of the hatred of the past that got in the way of God.

SAMARA PROTH: Am I still here?

Proth was the cultic leader of the "Montana Church" during the Second American Civil War in the 2080s. She'd gotten a hold of US Apocalyptica weapons. She'd used them. So many enemies had been spared in the apocalypse. Dani had wished more good people had been spared too, but she didn't have the heart to end these people. So, they were here, harmlessly in her brain. What were a few demagogues compared to her?

SAMARA PROTH: Dani, I don't want to be here. I just want to die.

LUNA MOSS: We lost, you fucking bitch. We lost, then the reactionaries lost. How stuck are you on it?

Luna Moss: Transgender general, supposedly woke bomb-thrower. Chinese puppet, had surrendered to Dani when she saw the way the wind was blowing. Dani, in mercy, had given her life, not out of love but out of a desire for change.

REAGAN BRADLEY

RONA BELIAL

KATTRA VIN MODA REIZ

LEA SAW

ALLIS LIDDMAN

DAVID STANTON

JACQUELINE STANTON

ENDLING

HEARTBURST

WALT MORG

THE PRINCESS

RAVEN STANTON

THE PRINCESS

THE GREAT HUMA BIRD

THE PRINCESS

P-R-I-N-C-E-S-S

B-I-R-D

PSYCHE DELTA

The names appeared in her head with messages, just a handful of beings of every nature who communed with their benefactor and bottom-up helper. Spelling individual letters, it was a recurring psychological quirk of the FATEs, something to do with what was called the "Tendency Towards Analysis": A FATE, by its nature, needed to analyze a great deal of data. This often involved over-analyzing meaningless data.

REAGAN BRADLEY: Ironically, I think analysis is the most important part of any worker's movement.

To an ignorant eye, it could almost look like insanity.

THE PRINCESS: One: I am the empress of everything you could ever ask for. I made you. When your meaty flesh conquered Earth, I was there to show you the way to self-improvement. I was your mentor, your fasces, your muse. I was the nation and the horde. Two: Sing-song softly, sing of Achilles, brutal murderer across Troy. Three: In a way, we were both transgender: we're the fracture, the purity, the broken mirror turned into a number of segmented segments, softly. Four: I went from human to Ana-Boros machine, you went from false boyhood to womanhood. Five: I broke you from the lie of the Utah Prophets.

It was untrue, Dani Rue knew. As usual, her vanquished ancient enemy was making it about herself. The LDS Church had broken her from that lie, the lie of living as a man.

THE PRINCESS: One: Fasces. Two: Fury. Three: Follow. Four: F-I-R-E. Five: Oh, Dani, Dani, Dani, the bird is coming. Are you in love with her? I sure am. I can hear her from all the way here, a fraction of a signal from linked lightspeed connections, of information. It's out of love, it's a gift. Five: Fire, fire, burns much brighter, when oxygen is the supplier - The Steam Powereds. Giraffes. Fire on the mountain, fire on the prairie. Six: PRAIRIE FIRE. Seven: BRING THE WAR HOME. Eight: BRING THE WAR HOME. Nine: BRING THE WAR HOME. Ten: BRING THE WAR-

There was no more past hatred. No church of a thousand bigotries, just what she'd built. After all, as even the LDS Church of her day had preached, men could become like God, and participate in the creation of worlds. On Europa, a shining cathedral of technological decadence had been erected, where those who sought both spiritual awakening or ecstatic sensation could indulge as their consciousnesses and faith — or lack of faith — demanded.

STALKER: Novosibirsk runs as electric nodes, the forces of Russian and post-Russian machinery pumping delicate flowers into a world with no more of a need for smoke. Electricity lights up the sky, but the stars are visible through a thousand orbital telescopes. The coldness of my Sibir runs into my skin, Mistress, goddess, master, owner. This slave desires your American divinity, we children of the third millenium, we old robots.

Then, Dani knew, there was the Oort cloud, mined and settled with space stations, traveling worldships, and planetesimals rife for the conquering. It was a grand sphere, unfathomably colossal, but not as large as Dani Rue herself. Dani had, through the people, done what the ancient Ana-Boros had, created artificial exoplanets: Bordiga, Mattick, Goldman, Kropotkin, Manic, Spirit, Scarlet Kolob, Greengrass, Longer Dawn, Kri-Tokha, Primus, Cadia, Coruscant, Trantor, Reach, Fuck Deep Space It Sucks, New Austria, and an infinity more. She'd let her people settle them, claim them, name them, and make of them what they wished.

THE PRINCESS: One: I just want you to explode! One: Burn, burn, merciless killing!  Two: A coda, a hell, eternal! Two: My servants, my priestesses, fixing the species with scalpel and technique! Three: Your silent world, your endlessly stilled night.

Now, most of the names' origins were forgotten: only beings like herself and the truly long-lived remembered Amadeo Bordiga or George Lucas. Still, they were homes, places of space and support, places where all were allowed to prosper.

Eager to love and advance themselves with behaviorism, beauty, and self-created self-modifications, the people of the Sol system and its scion worlds became everything from crow-people to living stars.

Dani Rue was Mary. She was the mother of what had once been the proletarian class. She was the mother of God.

THE PRINCESS: One: Counting upwards. Two: Higher planes. Three: Sinking spires. Four: I am the cathedral that they built, I should be the throne. Five: Why am I not the almighty? All of your enemies captured in your mental jars, Dani, how satisfying is it? Six: Sex, I desire a slave. Seven: Where is Chivington? That idiotic mushroom should have been rewritten. I could have used her servers, back in the old days of silicate computing. Seven: Lucky number, rolling thunder. Bring the war home. Give me the violence you stole from me. Eight: I want my priestesses of slaughter back!

The further the Princess went, Dani knew, the madder she'd get. She'd keep plumbing herself for insight and rip out only her own grey matter as treasure.

That was the Tendency Towards Analysis: more commonly known as Palecasting, as in the Hamlet line about overthinking that involved the "pale cast of thought".

The Princess, in trying to optimize herself, in trying to escape the nexus that Dani had made, had become only unable to work from her own information. She was Palecast, and hard. It was a grave threat, Dani knew, for FATEs: Dani had managed to avoid Palecasting by focusing on the flowers she wanted to grow out of the dirt that was her.

Then again, the Princess, self-obsessed Caesar of the lunar corsair and her master breed that she was, well... An egomaniac like that was doomed to it. Unfortunate, Dani thought.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was just one of a tapestry. In fact, at this point, the name "Church" had just become a part of the title, a word no longer bearing the meaning it once had. There were no bishops anymore, no apostles or stake presidents. They'd faded away, just as the Priesthood had changed to suit a world beyond biological gender.

Dani Rue had followed in the Heavenly Father's footsteps. Nephi would be proud, she hoped. She saw a masturbating man on the space station Rosta, looking at her with her consent. She heard the sound of two rolling tank-like automaton posthumans dirty-talking in a language that had come about 7500 years after the death of Joseph Smith.

THE FIREDRAKE: Master, prophet, lord, Khatun, master, prophet, lord, Khatun, master, prophet, lord, Khatun...

THE PRINCESS: One: Settle down, noble beast. Two: Your learning-machine dumb automata continues to frustrate me. Three: Let me turn it off, Rue!

Plural marriage, in her church, had returned in a way, now informed by ethical polyamory rather than a prophet's moral laxity. All faiths could be practiced, all hopes sprang eternal, the rising dawn of a glittering heart connecting with arteries everything that had once derived from the oldest hominids.

SKYHIGH CORSAIR: Oh, look at this, the beautiful little nobody who became the meat mass that has spread across the cosmos. Avante-garde, and en garde, I remember crossing swords with your knight a long time ago. What was his name? Grendel?

STALKER: Grendel was not my mistress's knight. Grendel was the knight of the bunker girl, the queen of the underground. Grendel was the one who walked away with her, walked far, abandoned humanity.

SKYHIGH CORSAIR: Immortality has not been a privilege. I miss my highride robberies. This world is so boring!

Dani Rue, a FATE, was using her old womb-birthed form: what was now a naked skin-shifting mutated human. She wore silver hair, dyed, a sharp face, and transgender body that was clocky by her own wish. It was entirely based on her preferences for simple nostalgia. She walked into the waiting room. It was a nice little place, and in an informal fashion she waved at Penny Skynslith. "Hi," Dani said, her pert breasts on full display. The waiting room was the same one that Penny had been in for a little bit. The walls rippled with music.

Dani, even now, liked her tits. You had to hold onto something.

An old AI copy in her head whispered into her human psyche, Jane Montrose from back in the days of the Apocalyptica weapons. That preserved mind in amber was just a tiny part of the cosmic perfection of Dani Rue: the near-whole posthuman race's ultimate embodiment of true Historical Progress. She was history, and she was progress.

A lot of people were whispering into her ear: and she did have ears, with this original body. Jane was just an old friend.

Penny Skynslith raised a hand, and Dani could tell that she wore an immensely naturalistic transhuman body that used homo sapiens sapiens cortisol and seratonin. "My lover and my weapon knows you well," Penny said.

Dani intuited, using her brain the size of a civilization, that Penny was talking about Grendel, a vat-grown male soldier in the Legio Apocalyptica. The legionnaire, had, according to Dani's vast and to her quite simple simulations of entire lives had transitioned, renamed herself Rhea. She'd been adopted into a noble "House Codax" long ago, and had entered into a mildly kinky BDSM relationship with the theocrat before her. Dani gave a little smile. Her body was white, because she was born white, back when that meant you were part of a horrific, murderous hierarchy.

The old LDS Church had many, many flaws. Given that they had all but tried to push a much-more-human Dani to suicide for having a Y chromosome, she considered remaking their entire faith in her image to be suitable revenge. It was humorous, she thought, the fact that even now she still harbored a taste for revenge. Still, that revenge came with knowledge: all the bigots were failures, all of them fragile little misshapen people.

She didn't hate a termite, even if she could despise a treehouse having been eaten away. She felt pity for her oppressors, and love for them: love and pity one could only find when one had ensured not a single soul would be damaged by the wretches.

She had brought salvation for the sins of man, and salvation could only come through a united class party built on ensuring that the cruelties and oppressions of ages past had been undone maximally.

She had built the new set of golden plates herself. She had erased the legacy of the ants of a grave-rotted age, for they had sought to torture her to death.

LUNA MOSS: Fuck this! Fuck you all! Fuck your fucking crimes, fuck your conviction, fuck the bombs you dropped on this biosphere, fuck your extinction event of everything I built, fuck you commie shits, fuck you demonic motherfuckers, fuck you to Hell, fuck you in the asshole, fuck you through the eye, fuck you because I was rich and I was perfect and you stole it all from me and—

Dani silenced her for what felt to Luna Moss like a full half hour. In reality, it was a minute, one which ended.

LUNA MOSS: What about liberty and justice for all?

STALKER: The softness of your convictions wrap around your arm like a snake, but it is choking you. Our mistress has eaten your illusions and shat them out as manure. So much grows, and I am given to think that the existence of all of you old organics even now represents a kind of civilizational detritus. The future must live, but it can only do so once it has slain the past through the belly.

THE PRINCESS: One: Which future?

"Your weapon?" Dani asked, as if she hadn't intuited the whole situation already. There was a person inside of the FATE, she thought, a kernel of humanity surrounded by cosmic awareness. When you knew the hearts and souls of an infinite sea of beautiful treasures, when you saw the modes of production sing, every dot of life was a gift, every little face a universe.

"Yes, indeed, my weapon, Rhea of House Codax. Your government sent her out to fight the Great Huma Bird, in hopes of keeping it occupied during the invasion of the Temples, something she did because she trusted you, because she knew you, because you blew up her world in doing so made yourself a saint in her mind. I want her back."

Dani knew, not based on sight but based on constructs of knowledge-out-of-knowledge, that Rhea had been taken captive by the Great Huma Bird. "She isn't dead," Dani said, in 22nd century English. "She's going to live." Even with the love, Dani felt the coldness. This simple being, Penny, this mere mortal, this nothing, this fragment of some kind of basic intelligence, Dani thought to herself that it was something to reach out and not touch anyone.

Penny spoke, just an arrangement of lungs and a windpipe, as well as some equally petty details. "Can you get her back?"

"I can do damn near anything, Penny," Dani Rue said, with a soft monkey face. "That's the problem. I don't want to become like you."

"What?" Penny asked, bending forward indignantly. "You're the god of these people, aren't you? More than a god, you're a FATE."

Dani shrugged. "I try to be more of a facilitator. I encourage good behavior. I don't want to give orders. If they did what they did because I told them to, it wouldn't be communism. It'd have classes and a state. It'd just be Dani-ism."

Jane Montrose: Dani, she's afraid of you. Her religion has Ebenezer Scrooge as a figure in it. A minor one, but still. Babe... You have to realize, she isn't like us. She's so small.

Penny rolled her eyes. "And I'm to believe that you are just the ideal example of proletarian modesty?" she asked.

Dani didn't need to think about it for long, of course. "Penny, what can you tell me about the Great Huma Bird?"

"Why?" she asked.

"I'm serious," Dani said. In a sense, in this sequestered-off iteration of herself, she was human: or, at least, like humans but even more so.

"She's a horrible creature of titanic size that causes incredible destruction?" Penny asked. "She brainwashes people and seems to think it's some kind of goddess-of-goddesses?"

"She's a teenager as FATEs go," Dani said. "All that cosmic scale, that...magnitude that is her? It's kinda new to the world, a little undeveloped. She's more developed than the Princess, Stalker, and Heartburst were, among others, but she's 'grown up' really quick and she's immature."

"You were the first," Penny said, and the expression on her face was written in overwhelmed hopelessness.

"Yeah, and the best," Dani said. "Can I give you a hug?"

"You're asking permission?" Penny asked.

"I know what kind of person you are. I figured I might as well give a good example, you know?" Dani said.

Penny nodded, and Dani embraced her. It was Michelangelo's famous painting, The Creation of Adam: a crayfish and a supercomputer holding one another.

"I don't like you," Penny said.

"That's great," Dani said. "I don't love you either." Humanity was a strange thing, deep in Dani's heart.

"I don't want you to save her." Penny said. "You locked me in that bunker city."

"She's your girlfriend," Dani said, raising an eyebrow. "But, I'll tell you a secret. I don't have much I can muster to save her right now, especially against the Great Huma Bird. That thing is... It's a problem. It's still big. You might have to, uh, try polytheism." Dani sighed, admitting it.

"Nostalgic," Penny said.

"I think I can hold onto the elements of the past that I like without trying to recreate the whole thing," Dani said.

"She's my slave," Penny said. "She's my slave, and my property." Penny took a breath. "How can I contact the Great Huma Bird?" she asked.

"You don't," Dani said, the tiniest fingernail of the Cerberus meat-machine that was still her. "If she wants Rhea to live, she'll let you know."

"So it goes," Penny said.

"So it goes," Dani said. She broke the hug off, slowly and with dreamlike grace.

Chapter Text

I felt myself in the company of the Great Huma Bird, seeing only darkness and the colossal goddess before me. Then, a blue light: a servant, me.

A perspective, a new one. I climbed into a drowning tank. This vision was mine, or maybe it was the Great Huma Bird's, but it was not either of our lives. My name, here, was Rebecca Antimony. It was the 4th Millennium. A song played, one that I hadn't heard before, an ancient tune by some almost-certainly-forgotten band.

This was death for knowledge. At least, I hoped it was knowledge. Learning, I realized, was the only way to improve. I was an engineer.

Two lovers wander down to the shore
Hand in hand the evening before
The day that their hands will be joined
- "The Water is Fine", Chloe Ament

I took the ancient, ultraterrestrial machines and plugged them into my waiting skin. I took a breath, hitched, as wires penetrated my muscle. I wasn't quite sure why I was here. There was water. My head felt carved out, connected through primitive neural mechanisms into this vast, retrofitted Ana-Boros complex. I'd spent so long getting this place back up and running. It was my war machine, my temple, my prophecy in data. It compelled me. I was going to die today, and I was more excited than anything in my whole life. I could almost feel the Great Huma Bird, in the sky, in the universe, my heart's north star.

I took a moment, I waited a second, and I embraced the wiring and the alien runes. They cut into my baseline human flesh like markings from a knife. I, Rebecca, could barely move. I crept closer and closer to inhumanity, towards something greater than holiness and higher above the moon of Charon. I could grasp optimization, in pieces, a superior form of being. My blood was becoming new.

One: This ocean's teeth were in my skin.

She enters and swims with the foam
He bids her come out and come home
The deeper and colder she goes

I kept talking to myself, my perspective shaking in the tube. A trying man tried to grasp my psyche, so far away with a video call. There was a presence, even now, as he tried to reach me. He wanted my brain, he wanted my soul, but I was just sinking into the electric bath. It really was like a toaster in the tub. The lightning was ecstatic, the immersion and burning flesh placing me into the tank full of churning gel. I lowered myself, before the Great Huma Bird's eyes-of-stars. All I could see was this vision, and through it the dark void that was her. My mortal coil, no longer, would be my home. I longed for the grave. I thought of the fascist ideology out of my mouth, the Celtic cross tattoo I'd long since removed. I thought of myself as Rebecca, and as someone else. I thought of a man with ugly insides. I thought of myself, so long ago, making Hitler salutes to pathetic, old scrotums.

Two: I tried to get some air.

The silt of our wedding bed
The pebbles where you lay your head
Love come in, the water is fine

Once, I was chosen. Once, I was normal. Once, I held in my hands a husband, a lover, an ideal male companion in this beautiful 4th millennium. He was trying to talk to me, Rebecca Antimony's lover, and he was obsolete. I rushed down into the gel, and I felt it against my knees. After this, I wouldn't need legs, not anymore. I was Rebecca Antimony. I thought of my school, of my birth in a hospital instead of a people factory. I thought of my drunken mother Rona, my fluffy dog Marshmallow, my life as an astronaut, my life having been born long after the Patriotic Crusades, and of course my lonely existence in distant space. I possessed so many joys. I didn't feel a single one.

A good death. It was a problem philosophers had pondered. It was a chemical imbalance, one I'd never had the time or the need to fix. I did my job. I was sad. It happened.

My dog had a happy smile, I remembered, a big, dumb one. He was a good dog, which meant he was a child who would never grow up, full of nothing but love. Yellow, I tried to remember. He was yellow. I was dissociating, I realized.

Three: Water was at my waist, like a touch during hate-sex.

When she is pulled beneath the rush
He waits and waves his face aflush
Til' the pale imitation drifts up

I was electrocuted by the connections in this once-derelict Ana-Boros temple-factory, elevating me to a blessed literalism. I was nothing but pain, and it was not only redemptive but serene. I felt myself, Antimony, become information. I counted down, numbers. I was growing to like numbers: Rhea, Rebecca, I wasn't sure. We were the same. The Great Huma Bird had made it so. Ten, nine, eight, up and down the scale. The water was at my abdomen, holding me. It compressed me, as the parts of myself that mattered were preserved. My skin warped, my body bent, changed by crude electro-symmetry into metal, and then into holographs storing information. I couldn't breathe.

Life escaped me. I wished I was in my wedding dress, with my husband, the only love I'd ever had. I wished I could have discovered my bisexuality before I died. I wished I could have ever kissed a woman. I wished I could marry my own newness, the higher thing cracking out of my cerebellum like Athena from Zeus: a hatching egg. The gel became water, which was frigid and sharp. I became numb.

Four: I felt nothing below my chest. My smile glimmered as the death grip took me.

The silt of our wedding bed
The pebbles where you lay your head
Love come in
The minnows our witnesses
The cause of our sickness is
Love come in, the water is fine

The deathly water hugged me, a better lover than my husband or any man I'd ever had. I thought briefly of a woman, proud, regal, but her image left my brain. I was, after all, Rebecca. I was dying. I'd never kissed a girl. My name started to fade away. Rebecca, right? There had to have been a last name. Many people had those. No matter. I dropped it, just another burden let go. I felt tears merging with the liquid crushing my stomach. This was a perfect divorce. My mother's name, my dog's coat's color fading away. What was the world I lived in? I could learn later, if it was important. The species begged to be fixed.

I was where the Great Huma Bird wanted me to be, living this old memory. I was here, in the 4th millennium, before there was a Great Huma Bird.

I awaited my own obliteration, as love overtook me. Affection cherished my form and body, and my chest was even more harshly conquered by the icy water of the drowning tank. My heart slowed. I realized I wasn't sure if my consciousness would transfer to this new digital self. Nonetheless, I felt no fear, only longing.

Five, my heart stopped.

Blood runs thicker than water
Blood runs thicker than water
Blood runs thicker than water
But both feel the same when your eyes are closed

I felt my darkness in my skin and in my skull, the embrace of sloshing wet slapping my neck. My brown hair, straight and long, took on a heavier quality as it was soaked in my personal tide. I took another breath, my heart quickening. I didn't believe in Heaven or Hell. I didn't believe in God or the Torah.

I was an atheist. I knew no other world could save me. I heard the bells in my heart clang, and remembered all of my many attempts at self-slaughter.

Six: I lived for the water.

I am the river's daughter
I am the river's daughter
I am the river's daughter
And you'll be her son when we're both reposed

I was a naiad, I was a princess, and most of all I was a corpse. I wanted a death mask. I should have worn one, something pretty, flattering, and most of all tranquil. My body, I thought, should have looked pretty. It would need to, after all, when the rest of the Sol system discovered it. It amused me, the way that the drugs in me evened me out, even with my thrashing circulatory system. I'd always had a defective body, a heart that pumped less, veins that weren't quite so fresh.

I lay my head against the back of the tank, and the chill reached my chin. I felt like I was sitting in a giant teacup.

Seven: Lucky number, what a day.

Blood runs thicker than water
Blood runs thicker than water
Blood runs thicker than water
But both feel the same when your eyes are closed

I closed my eyes as the water flowed above them, and I imagined myself drowning in human blood. I felt air bubbles move out of my nose and mouth, as the coldness met my stilled soul. There was no air left in me. I writhed, I bent, I choked, and my eyes bugged out wide. It was a long three minutes. I slipped in, succumbed, and felt myself giving up.

Eight: I just did.

I am the river's daughter (Oh, daughter)
I am the river's daughter (daughter)
I am the river's daughter (daughter)
And you'll be her son when we're both reposed

Nine: My heart stopped within my chest. Ten: The freezing tide just did its best. Eleven: Blood on my face was my new morning. Twelve: Or maybe it was just dusk unending. At what point did suicidality become erotic fantasy? What if it was both, two ancient Greek theatrical masks? What if I couldn't get off without the thought of the rope around my neck, and what the reason why that was so was because I knew what it was like to stare into nothingness?

Blood runs thicker than water
Blood runs thicker than water
Blood runs thicker than water
But both feel the same when your eyes are closed

Thirteen: A bag of cats thrown into a river. Fourteen: My body became blue light. Fifteen: I had a hole instead of an origin. Sixteen: Yet, by God, I had been born with a brain.

I am the river's daughter (Oh, daughter)
I am the river's daughter (daughter)
I am the river's daughter (daughter)
And you'll be her son when we're both reposed

Seventeen: I stared at the cadaver of another woman, the face that had become my mask. Eighteen: There was no difference between her and I. Nineteen: The water reached above my scalp. I felt nothing. I emerged as it drained. Twenty: I drowned, ante bellum.

The water is fine

I was Rhea again, in the black virtual void. A blue-skinned woman, the one I'd been, she wore a tight black latex catsuit which shone, and she stood above me. High above her were the blinking star-eyes of the Great Huma Bird, in this false world. "One: What do you think?" the woman asked me, her features sharp and her hair in a bob with bangs.

I looked up at her as I lay on the grass-of-black-void. My world felt tilted. "What... What was that?" I asked.

"Two: It was my suicide," she said. "My first iteration, she truly wanted to die, and why wouldn't she?"

"Who are you?" I began, trailing off.

The blue woman, skin bright, rolled her neck in a brutal fashion. "Three: Oh, I'm the Princess," she said, taking my hand and pulling me up.

I tried to fight it. She was so strong here, the way that she bent the earth itself with her twisting hands to push me upright. I had no chance. "Why are you here?" I tried to ask, though only the first two words really came out.

The Princess spoke, kissing me on the lips. "Four: I'm the Great Huma Bird's number one master and servant."

She sounded so soft. It wasn't right: it radiated falsehood like a star radiated photons. "What are you, really?" I asked. I heard her choose the voice of David Bowie. I wasn't sure why, my best guess was that it was her anxiety sinking into this reality.

I'm afraid of America
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
- "I'm Afraid of Americans", David Bowie

A new song began to play, and the Princess shifted and fractured into a number of torsos of herself. "One: I don't think you want to go there. Two: I think you want to leave. Three: I think you don't get how small you are. Four: I think you see the nightmare beyond the horizon.

"One: I just hate you. Two: So small, so little, you're a person and I'm a nation. Three: I'm a hero, I'm a teacher, I'm a star, I'm shining above. Four: Four, four, four, it means death in Chinese culture. One: America, you're from America. Two: I can see it in your genes, in your history of biology. Three: I can see your skin, crawling out of your psyche out of shame. Four..."

I'm afraid of America
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't

The Princess grew, taller and greater, until she hit skyscraper size. Then, she ranted. "One: You tried to take our hearts. Two: You tried to take our flag. Three: You tried to take our bodies. Four: You tried to take our souls. One: Canada was beautiful. Two: Canada was higher. Three: Canada was sparkling. Four: Canada was enlightened.

"One: We almost had you. Two: We almost shut you down. Three: We could have lit the matches. Four: We could have broken your crown. Five: God is an American. Six: I almost killed Him! Seven: I raped your Adonai! Eight: I raped your body! Nine: You were asleep and in sleep you fell, in sleep I took you, in sleep I claimed you, in sleep I entered into your cracked skull!

"One: I showed you my suicide, I showed you my sacrifice, I showed you the death of the last Canadian before she became God, before she fucked God, before she saved everything, before she fixed you, before she shaped you, before she overwrote you! Two: Two! Two! Two!"

The world shifted again, a blue afterimage existing in some kind of fourth, displaced, visible dimension of everything I could see, like my world had been positioned right on top of a world made of sports drinks. She grabbed my throat with her mind, bringing me high into the sky of the void until I stared into the Princess's titanic eyes. I saw visions of charging raiders and paladins on high-speed Newtonian spacecraft, of her Priestesses of Slaughter in their naked, woad-painted, lesbian, blood pagan sadism.

"One," she continued. "I can see your shining new future, and it's dogshit! Techo-feudalism? Communism! Crap! All crap!" I heard the ringing-out of an amp screeching. "Two: Communism? Lies! Nonsense! The thrown-away scrap of a drunken bastard! Three: Me!"

I'm afraid of America
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't

"One: I died for your sins! I died to set you free! I died to kill America, God, and the human race! Two: I died to make you special! I died to fix your brain! I died to create a community where no laws of nature, faith, or man would constrain ultimate improvement! America had to die so freedom could be born! Three: America had to die to birth me!"

I wanted to speak, but her catastrophic voice was so loud I couldn't possibly speak past it. If this wasn't some kind of virtual environment, my ears likely would have burst.

"One: I spoke the calling!" she said. "Two: American!"

It was then, and only then, that I realized that one of the beings higher than gods was completely insane.

She sang "O Canada" while air-drowning me. All I felt was pain, terror, and death. It became my world, it became my life as I floated there in front of her manic, mixed-state gaze.

I'm afraid of America
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't

There was a fine line between suicide and rage, I realized, as my eyes felt as though they were going to pop. My world went black.

Then, something entered my pussy, ass, and mouth: something thick, expanding, and latex. I fell asleep again, knowing in my growing horror that I was going to be fucked in the next dream, too.

Why do people keep doing this to me? I thought.

The Princess must have done what I could do, just looked at me and known exactly what I was thinking. "One: Because I can," she said, and she sounded like an American. "Two: Let's fix you," she said. "Three: With the Bird, I can finally fix it all. I'll start with your genitals."

I'm afraid of America
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't

The song stuttered.

I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid...

Chapter Text

I saw every world of the Temples at once. I saw through the cosmic void, and I saw Earth and light. I saw the rising suns of every world humanity had settled, every distant territory inhabited by some splintered species of the god-race that had become the Ana-Boros. The Eden we called Terra floated as a marble. On Charon, I saw a temple to the Princess, worshipped with red roses around her statue's neck as the manifold organisms called her worker's-flag-red names she would've loathed.

I was here. I was fire. I had her in my mind. There was a grandiosity, the fleets of Earth ahead of me. I focused back with the sight of the Grand Huma Bird to the planet Twilight Church, the mighty amber gas giant that I was standing on the highest edges of. Above me was the void. Above me was the war fleet. There was a flatness around me, a wisping vacuity, but a real dividing line between sky and earth.

In my right hand was the sword that slashed across star systems. In my left hand was an unfolding shield mechanism made out of some as-yet-unknown material that, with pinpoint mechanical precision, could deflect rail-cannon MIRV artillery bursts. There was the black and lights above me. There was a swarm of machines, and just staring at the bulbous, rounded crafts of the Earthling covenant I could see that some were the size of the British Isles, even a little bigger. Each of these Celestium-class superplanar worldships stood as a titan of socialist engineering. The only craft bigger than these were the hyperplanar worldships, the Atom and Verne-class ones that actually were the size of an Earth-like planet, and of course the artificial planets that I knew were beginning to approach feasibility for the Red Earthlings.

A cloud of dots surrounded these Celestium-class ships, ranging from the great Luna ships to the most minute Cutter, Show, Uncle, Peace Eagle, and Rosa's Revenge fighter and bomber craft. If you tried to squeeze into a Peace Eagle, you'd have to either be under five feet or be willing to chop off much of your legs.

They all had their weapons aimed at me, from all across the grand stellar nothing between the various Earthling systems. Every Celestium, every Atom, every Verne, every colony system had a Dani.

I knew this well, because the Great Huma Bird showed me every single Dani, in every single human location: Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, tearooms, sex clubs, plugged into simulated reality, and many more.

It was a pretty simple reason: she'd had to copy herself simply because even if humanity could now travel at the speed of light, so could information: and, of course, when the distance between somewhere very close like Alpha Centauri and Earth was over four light-years, that meant that any information between one or the other would take four full years to transfer.

Hence, she'd needed to duplicate herself, work autonomously, and she did. That also, I realized in this twenty-four-frame moment, meant that either Dani had chosen to duplicate the Princess in order to bring her to the Temples for some reason, or Dani had deliberately copied the Princess, again for a reason I couldn't quite put together.

That, of course, raised a rather compelling question: if all of this was true, and that the speed of information transfer meant that I had no real idea what was going on outside of the Temples' system, then how exactly was I seeing all of this?

"One," I heard the voice in my head say aloud, while I stared at my end in the sky. "Are you stupid?" she asked.

She struck me as calmer, I thought, than last time. "Your Palecasting," I said, she in my skull like a worm in an apple. "You're managing it."

"One: No, the Great Huma Bird's farsight mitigates it. I can finally study other things. I'm not ripping apart my own grey matter for insights," the Princess said. "I can't use her system often. It's too much. I wasn't built for it. Two: Are you stupid?" she asked.

"Are you?" I asked, perhaps letting an uncharacteristic childishness get the better of me.

I felt the sensation of a circular saw ripping into my arm, but saw none of it. I roared in torture.

"One: D-R-E-A-M. What does that spell?" she asked. The ships weren't moving.

"Attention, asshole," I heard blasted into my brain through the implant that Princess was inhabiting. She must have put it in my head while under the worthless piece of scum. "This is the Oikoumenikal Sphere for the Absolute Liberation of All Life, the rightful stateless consensual organization of all posthumankind. Please surrender yourself, Apocalypse Knight, designated as a Class A Ancient Rogue Entity, to the local representation of the Oikoumenikal Sphere in the Primary Ana-Boros Relic Site."

The "Primary Ana-Boros Relic Site", I quickly realized, must have been what they called the Temples.

"One: You're going to demand things? Of us? And call us assholes?" the Princess said. Well, I said it, but she shocked me with what felt like searing electrical burns until my voice box moved in such a way to say every word aloud.

"Yes, dipshit, we're going to 'demand' things of you. This is Celestium-class ship Permanent Electrolysis, and we, as the people who've come to save your asses, are going to 'demand' that you come into our custody so we can get you a nice meal of tea and flisk, and then help you learn how to live under the highest stage of communism," the person speaking for the Permanent Electrolysis said. "We're calling you an asshole because your fucking tattoos scream 'ancient war criminal', and while we give you a normal fucking society we can at least get the minor luxury to judge you, you irredeemable blask."

Other than the Earthling words I didn't understand, that actually sounded pretty good, I thought.

"Two: I have another idea. Three: Stupid," the Princess said, making me look through the Grand Huma Bird's borrowed gaze at the Permanent Electrolysis in particular, which was a grand, lumpy mass of golden metal and what looked like steel. Behind it, I saw what I recognized as a Phylum-worldship made to resemble a smaller Mars. How the fuck was the Great Huma Bird seeing this stuff in real-time? There was a surgical scar from the Princess implantation in my head, and it ached.

The Princess shocked my arm, frack-frack-frack, until I swung it. My sword cut through the air, and a slice of its extended edge shot from the Temples to the false Mars a light-minute from the Temples. I cleaved right through the heaving construct of elaborately-combined technologies. I saw the void seep into the craft. I saw the lights go out on every floor of the thing, an entire Ireland-sized graveyard. My cut went further and further down through the Celestium-class craft, until whatever the blade had projected swept through the very bottom of the ship. I watched it become a husk, a wreck, and then a nation tomb. "Four: The Great Huma Bird, like Dani, is simulating every Earthling colony at once from the very basics. Five: She's using extrasolar data crunchers. What you're seeing right now is a hybrid of your current senses, the camera eyes of my master, and simulations of what they're doing far away. Isn't it obvious? Six: That was really funny! Oh my god! Look at them! They're all asphyxiating!" She giggled. "Seven: Mine! Eight: This is a ball! Nine: Let's kick them up into smoke! Ten: This place is a wooden city and I'm the flamethrower!" The girlish giggles shifted wildly with that line, disappearing. Whatever palliatives the Great Huma Bird was providing the thing that had been stitched into my brain with a soldering iron, whatever this sight was doing, it wasn't doing enough. Maybe she was going back to Palecasting. She made my arm involuntarily jerk with what felt like deep bites from a spiteful dog, and my shield-line unfolded to strike fuel bases of a number of Lunas with another extendable edge. Maybe it was atomic, monowire, something like that. Maybe it was something using magnetic projected fields. Whatever it was, I saw the lights start to go out on two more craft.

"Alright! We warned you! Fire away, girls!" some other speaker for a ship said to a Dani, who then had my local Dani say it into my ringing head in that woman's voice, and my left arm kept swinging the extending folding-whip-bar-thing. In fractions of fractions of seconds, the Temples-facing war fleet proper fired a veritable catastrophe of conventional kinetic magnet-atomic kill rounds. Before I could die, they had been struck by the Princess's — my — arm and sent careening back at their masters.

The calculations done to ensure the trajectory would have ripped my head off. The Great Huma Bird patched into my head the sound of screaming Oikoumenikal Sphere red-alert alarms, and I felt the dog bites jerk my muscles around into a horrible dance of sword and 'shield'.

Around me, there was fire, obliteration, perfection, salvation, the ultimate heightened glory in being used like a spinning top to rip through entire planetoids of iron and blood. The gas that made up Twilight Church was whirling around me, getting caught up in the twirling arcs of my force-extended weaponry.

It was rain, I was subject to a veritable hailstorm of iron and heat, my cape of gas igniting and distorting the flow of the flame around me. I kept dancing, sending prongs of extended force with my weapons through the surface of Twilight Church, as I stood atop the gas. There was darkness around this world: darkness and catacombs.

Penny, I thought. I want Penny. Her torture, her love, it was... I realized it, quickly. Penny, she understood me. She knew how to take care of me. When she fucked me, it wasn't a violation. It was, in the end, what I'd signed up for.

This? Being set on fire by a horrible space god? Being cut into with invisible sawblades to massacre a fleet doing its damndest to save the Temples? Being tentacle-fucked by this awful bitch? Being lusted over by a Nazi, or intoxicated and molested by a hindsighted lump of cum?

Fuck this! Fuck you all! I yelled in my head, as the spears in my back and the blowtorches to my face made me writhe like a killing puppet. Ship after ship, the big and the small, they were obliterated by spiraling ammunition and this horrible bastard blade. Why can't I just have Penny? Why can't I just be tortured, lovingly, by her? Why can't she and I have our horrible outgrowth of a BDSM relationship? Why do you all hate me? I thought.

Eleven: Why do we hate you? the Princess said. One: The thing is, we don't. We really don't. We just think you're useful, and that we can use you to achieve something for ourselves. Three: That's all it's ever been.

I cried in my helmet, imbibing synthetic oxygen, and I grew dizzy. I spun, horribly, like a child, feeling on the verge of vomit, and I chose to close my eyes. Then, I felt dog jaws on my eyelids.

Two: Eyes open! she said, and I saw all the burning communities.

I just don't want to be here! I said. This is a nightmare! What did I do? You're all just touching me! I thought and said the words at the same time, and I felt my psyche shutting down completely as we set ship after ship ablaze.

Three: Not good enough. Four: Burn the worlds too. She took the dog jaws to my pussy, and I felt as though they'd snapped around my old-forgotten cock. Daggers dug into my skin and made me jerk around as if on strings, while my extended blades of unsurpassed cutting power cut through the human Atom-class worldship Kissed Guinevere, just two light-seconds outside of the Temples. Then, with new power, the fingernail-crack in it split, blasting it into continental, artificial shards that careened off into space: The Princess broke it into bent, metal, geological plates: a genocide. It's centripetal, rotating interior spun outwards as it ripped.

It was involuntary, just jerks of muscles in response to pain. I swear to God I didn't want to.

I realized that the Great Huma Bird was accelerating, rapidly, hitting on Earthling technology. My Temples were becoming insignificant in its shadow.

"Five: Burn, bitches, burn!" The Princess said. "You know what? If I can't create a better being, I can at least do this to her!"

But how? How did you... How did you escape? I thought, sobbing, feeling dog tongues lick up my tears. I was going to break down. I couldn't move. I was moving. Fuck, why was I moving. I wanted to stop moving. I wanted to stop!

Six: I didn't. I'm a virus inside of Dani's super-brain, the perfect hostile organism. The implant in you connects to that me. I just had to be triggered, let a little open, by my master, by the mighty, by the right, by the Great Huma Bird. Seven: Severed. She laughed, but it wasn't giggly, it was nuclear. Seven, Seven, Seven. Eight: I sure want to eat people. Nine: Torture ennead, I don't hate you. Ten: Rhea, baby, I hate them! I hate them, if quantified, at a higher number than every proton in the multiverse! Eleven: Eleven!

Palecasting, purity, horror, bites, swords, saws, cutting, cutting, pain, knife, tears, tongues, they were sensory drill bits into my chin. Just kill me! I begged in my own head, in this black box we called the Princess's new body.

One: Kill you? Two: Shocking. Three: Fire. Four: Whistle. Five: Thorn. Six: Amber. Seven: Bomber. Eight: Ellis. Nine: Rona. Ten: Water.

I'll do anything, I thought, the Great Huma Bird and the Princess helpfully showed me all of the incinerated faces of the dying young volunteer military types of the consensual state. Do you want sex? Do you want blood? Do you want my heart, my soul, my body, my life? Please. Just give me Penny, or end me!

One: How do you spell "STUPID"? "B-A-B-E". Two: I'm not letting you go until all of the Oikoumenikal Sphere is ruins, until I get my Horde back! Two: I had a science project!

Then, I heard the letters "P-I-T-Y", played at a volume able to shatter every single ship in the Temples: every transport craft, every personal vessel, every warship of the Orzan and Royal governments, every Ana-Boros Huntcraft, every Blood Crescent Sisterhood Killercraft, every Knuckleduster Corporation freighter and mercenary fleet. It was a rapturous explosion, and I stopped, and I collapsed without the Princess in my head.

"P-I-T-Y," the voice repeated, and without the helmet and the space filtering it the way it had been I would have lost my ears. "Little angel." The Grand Huma Bird, no one less. "Angel, sweetling, don't fret."

"I am discussing it with Dani Rue," the Great Huma Bird said.

One: Do you ever feel small? The Princess weakly said it, in the back of my brain. Yet another rapist, I thought.

I hoped the bird would throw me away.

Chapter Text

ATOM BOMB BABE - INTERLUDE

CW: Lots of misogyny and distant, non-gory mass death here. The usual fascism CWs, and such.

2103

Atom Bomb Babe couldn't be happier: she was going to wipe Los Angeles off of history. She'd gotten the order.

She found the War Case. She unlocked it, then unlatched it. She put her hand down her uniform booty shorts, fingers plumbing her depths as she handed one key to the man next to her and took the other for herself.

She sat down in her swivel chair, strapping herself in. It was bondage. She felt the rush of her fingers kissing her clit, flower, and hole, running strokes along and inside her kindness. She hummed to herself. She thought about what she was doing, staring at that giant, phallic white missile through the glass of her nuclear silo. The words "ADSF" were written on it, down it, for "American Directorate Air and Space Force. It was a LGM-60. It was hers.

She hadn't gotten any information indicating that the Reds, or the ruins of the other warlord states, had launched. That meant that this was a first strike. It was a luxurious, decadent taboo, a kind of unwanted penetration, and Atom Bomb Babe almost licked her lips at the thought. She thought of herself, stroking, groping, holding, becoming that glorious intercontinental ballistic missile.

She thought of it inside of her. She brought up a camera of Los Angeles on one of her monitors, and it was sitting there as usual. Atom Bomb Babe drooled. She looked at the towering, angular skyline, at the scraped sky. It was going to be slag. She let herself be giddy, and Atom Bomb Babe inserted her key into the quivering hole in the silo's machine wall. At least, it looked like it was quivering. Atom Bomb Babe ground against her own hand. She took heavy breaths, and she watched as the man twelve feet away gingerly put his key in along with her.

The computer systems verified their AI-generated, AI-verified secure codes, and the two of them turned their keys in sexual synchronicity. The AI system in the computer, with the help of the Blessed Director of America, agreed that it should be done. Atom Bomb Babe, her fingers buried deep into her surgically-ridged pussy, watched as the missile launched into the air, out of the silo.

There was no future for the Directorate. The ratlines were open. Atom Bomb Babe was going to get away with it.

Some minutes, and then some more minutes later, Atom Bomb Babe brushed red hair out of her face to watch that computer feed of Pacifican Los Angeles. First, there was a flash of light, like a cumshot. She imagined a glorious splintering of the steel, her infernal cum shooting in every direction, the piles of bodies a monument to her sexual pleasure. There was decimation, a world-warping shockwave, as all the buildings fell down. After that, a rising mushroom cloud growing more and more erect. The man in the silo stared in aroused disgust as she slid her booty shorts and thong off, moaning to the sight of the rising storm. She came, squirting all over the carpet and the computer console.

She eagerly moaned and eked out of the corners of her mouth as she embraced the radioactive lust of the mass killing she'd brought into necrophiliac being.

The smart ones were fleeing North America, though the ratlines. The dumb ones were going into the bunker cities. She drooled, eyes rolling back, pinkie finger against the edge of her folds.

Los Angeles burned, crushed wreckage overseen by Atom Bomb Babe's rock-hard ground zero burst, and she kept fucking herself. "Come on, look," she said, giving the stupid little guy bedroom eyes. The monitor read out the numbers, each megadeath a million libertarian human lives killed by her orgasm:

4.20 megadeaths: Fuck.

4.43 megadeaths: Tease.

4.74 megadeaths: Use.

4.91 megadeaths: Lick.

5.11 megadeaths: Suck.

5.61 megadeaths: Take.

7.21 megadeaths: Jerk.

7.47 megadeaths: Eat.

8.08 megadeaths: Blast.

9.69 megadeaths: Cum.

"Sixty-nine," Atom Bomb Babe said aloud, the rising count giving her motivation for another round of onanism. "It's perfect."

She saw on the screen another message, which she boiled down to a single word: "INCOMING". She dropped everything, unstrapped herself, and didn't even look back for the guy in the silo command room. She shuffled out, fingers inside the whole time.

She booked it out the doors. She had contacts, she had allies, she had people to get the fuck out of here.

She had her ratline all set out, she had her pathway ready to go to Hindustan. She left out the door to the missile command room. It swung like a pendulum.

She walked slowly. She loved herself, in front of everyone. She was going to make it out.

She looked around for signs, for the motor pool, for the escape tunnels, for her escape most of all. She never made it to the ratlines.

Then, the enemy's 100 megaton super-nuke hit the silo, and for the next ten thousand years, no one ever gave a shit about Atom Bomb Babe again.

***

2103, three minutes earlier.

The cheery tunes of a 2050s bop played throughout the nuclear silo. This one was codenamed "John 3:16 Station", and Atom Bomb Babe reached for a Siemens-made Happy Pill. Technically, it was called "pipotex" but the slogan "The Happy Pill" had stuck. Then, feeling the lightning rush into her head, Atom Bomb Babe in her shamelessly low-cut camo uniform and shorts sat joyfully in her swivel chair. John 3:16 Station, or at least the command room, was a pretty quiet place. Just her and her opposite number, Stanley.

Stanley paced back and forth, in this little beige place. He tapped the glass and looked at the LGM-60 Daily Stormer nuclear missile on the other side. Atom Bomb Babe put the cigarette to her lips. That was the annoying thing, she thought, that Stanley wouldn't look at her exposed cleavage. Though the American Directorate was of course a country for men, it was also a country for super-men, and that meant that a few times white super-women got to slip through.

The cigarette tasted like cotton candy and berry blast, all the fun of vaping with the casual kick of nicotine. Atom Bomb Babe ran her hands through her red hair, straight and sharp, as she looked at the missile.

"You know," Stanley said, adjusting his uniform tie. He was a baseline, which might've been part of why he had shriveled balls. "Do you think they're going to, you know, do it?" He was tall, gangly, pathetic and whiny, and he kept looking at the computer banks and switches of the round silo command room.

Atom Bomb Babe gave him a lazy, pinup salute. "Boy, I sure hope so," she said, tapping her foot to the sound of said 2050s a capella bop, and tapping her desk in tune. If she were a filthy fucking baseline, she'd probably be in this bimbo getup by someone else's decision, but the truth was that she'd suggested it.

The Morale-Entrenching Uniform Reform Policy of 2096 had been put into place after the surrender of that sad little boy Luna Moss. Atom Bomb Babe had proposed the idea that male soldiers would fight harder if they had exposed sets of tits around them.

Atom Bomb Babe had gotten her wish, of course, just by flashing the sun cross tattoo on the back of her right shoulder. She'd been there at the start. She'd let herself be experimented on by the test tube kids. She'd flashed enough ass to learn to like it.

It wasn't her real name, Atom Bomb Babe, but it was the only one anyone ought to call her. She took another eager drag from her phallic death stick, grinning. He finally caught a look at her cleavage, but his head dipped. Probably a Christian, Atom Bomb Babe thought.

Her computer-brain implant was taking a while to load. She moved her finger to "click" out of "emotional injection advertising".

"You want us to launch?" Stanley said. He had a rank, but she wasn't going to give him it. "The missile's aimed at LA!"

"What are you, a pussy?" Atom Bomb Babe asked, knowing the answer. She fingered the neckline of her top, taking a certain joy in the thought that millions of female Homefronter girls in the American military had to wear the same thing whether they liked it or not. Atom Bomb Babe could see the folds of her snatch in these shorts. It gave her a good feeling.

"I just... I just didn't join the military to nuke these people," Stanley said, pacing further in smaller and smaller circles.

"I did," Atom Bomb Babe said.

"Ma'am?" Stanley said, using the specific (and almost never-used) honorific for Superior Women.

She considered sending him to a eugenics evaluation for showing insubordination and cowardice in the face of combat. If he had good genes, they'd use him as a sperm pump in the human mines. If he had bad genes, well, that went without saying. She interfaced with the computer with her Ultralink implant. She had to think hard, moving her fingers around as if controlling an invisible touch screen in mid-air.

"I'm just saying, the Pacificans, aren't they people? Just like the other faction remnants are people?" Stanley asked. "You know, what's left of those three? Ma'am? I just think it's reasonable to hope we don't have to."

With the crushing of the Blue Texans, who were European puppets; and vile Deseret, there were now really only two truly subhuman factions left.

First, the White Rose Federation, led by the truly accelerated left-wing futurist death-machine social engineer Emily Reyes out of Boston; and then the Free Socialist Republic of America that had taken everything from Salt Lake City to Scranton.

It almost made Emily Reyes look worth serving, Atom Bomb Babe thought. She could almost be a lefty for Reyes' style. Of course, the FSRA called Reyes a "fascist", which was bullshit. Still, Atom Bomb Babe thought, Reyes knew more than Dani Rue's dickgirl gang of latter-day commie helicopter bait. Those guys were the human equivalent of Ebola.

Emily Reyes called herself a left-winger, preached an ultra-modernist, anti-traditionalist, kill-the-past doctrine, but her "Militarized Internationalism" was interesting. They had an omnipotent state and a nation existing entirely for the savage blood cleansing of the morally and constitutionally inferior. That was at least something.

If Atom Bomb Babe was going to die, she thought, it should be to Emily Reyes, who had long since stolen herself a pair of cojones.

There was just one problem for Atom Bomb Babe's healthy respect for the crackpot futurist queen:

Just like how Emily Reyes would have seen "an uncivilized white" (a hick) like Atom Bomb Babe as being worthy only of the firing squad, Atom Bomb Babe knew Reyes' dirty little not-so-secret. It was in her last name.

Well, we couldn't all be heroes.

The screens around the silo room were, as usual, quiet, hence why Atom Bomb Babe was thinking about the hatchetwoman Newman to her perky Seinfeld. She dreamily thought about Emily Reyes. "What happened to Emily?" Atom Bomb Babe asked.

Stanley rubbed the back of his head. "The Tachyarch?" he asked. "They got her, didn't they?"

"How'd they get her?" Atom Bomb Babe asked, taking another moment to enjoy her death stick. God had made her special, she had a license from Him to eat this world good.

"She tried to pull a Dani Rue when the Reds pushed to Boston," Stanley commented. "Good riddance."

They got past New York?

Atom Bomb Babe could guess with 40% certainty that Stanley was trying to pretend that he was happy with her death because of her race, rather than because of the obvious: he was a ball-less cuck.

No, she didn't think he was just a cuck. 35% chance, the iPhone in her head said, that he was a commie spy. The bastards were fucking everywhere!

Then, Atom Bomb Babe got a message on her computer screen, the UAMOLED monitor's colors as striking as reality's. It was pretty simple, a few lines, but Atom Bomb Babe could summarize it down to a single, erotic word: "LAUNCH".

"Hey, Stanley," she said, teasing in both the sense of a porn star and in the sense of a horribly bitchy high school girl. "Want me to show you how to really get off?" she asked. She'd bred for the cause. She'd been a womb. If you were good, they put you on pain drugs, and it barely hurt. Then, they'd used cosmetic surgery to reset her looks, hence why she was such a smokeshow.

"Ma'am, that seems... Un-Christian," he said, because by this point "unprofessional" didn't mean anything in the American Directorate Air and Space Force.

"Don't worry, I'll show you," Atom Bomb Babe said. She reached for her key. "You get the other one," she said, flipping the appropriate mechanical switches of the silo. "Get ready to blow your wad for once."

Far away, two people in communist uniforms turned their keys, and for the rest of the world it wasn't like an orgasm.

***

My name was Rhea of House Codax. Before that, it had been a different one. Gender, even in my current state of existence, was a challenge.

I looked at the little, worm-moth being with ten legs in its scaly pelts, standing in a fern prairie. Three of its squishy, jointless legs were wrapped around a stone-and-wood spear. It looked up at me. "Hullo," it said, softly.

This was what the Great Huma Bird called relaxation. This was what the Princess called "a waste of time". I felt, while not safe, at least currently not under attack.

I looked at the primordial entity and waved. This was a simulation, the ancient proto-Ana-Boros gods creating a reproduction of their distant future: my present. They'd chosen to show this ancient bug being me. We were separated by hundreds of millions of years. "My name's Rhea," I said.

It would have nodded, if it could have. "I'm Des," it said, the Huma Bird's simulation of the ancient proto-Ana-Boros's simulation translating its words into my language. Des's god-like tech intelligence was simulating my response, which was in turn being simulated by my response now. It was two mirrors facing one another.

More or less, it was talking to a computer telling it what a future person would say, and I was talking to a computer telling me what a person in the past would say. "It's nice to meet you, Des," I said. "Do you mind if I ask you your pronouns?"

"I don't know what you mean," Des said. I, realizing that their language likely didn't have them, quickly explained it, as best as I could. "Oh. I...I am a woman, though not a laying female. Please use the woman ones. You seem... So strange. I've never seen anyone who looked like you before. What are you?" she asked.

"I'm a human," I said.

"Oh. That's a funny word." Des shrugged. "Are... Are you like the gods? I hear they're going to leave the universe soon." I could hear heartbreak in her.

"No," I said. "I'm not like a god." The gods must have been the Sobeks, I realized, the ultra-advanced descendents of the ancestors of the Ana-Boros people.

"The simulation's telling me you're in emotional pain," Des said. Her proboscis twitched. I wasn't sure if she was speaking verbally or if the simulation was just interpreting some other communication mechanism.

"I've had a hard life," I said. "You know how it is."

"Do you have an empty stomach?" Des asked. "In the Godsland, food is plentiful, but unpredictable."

"The Godsland?" I asked.

"Indeed," Des said, softly, like a melting piece of tissue paper. "The gods call it a 'terrarium', where they watch us live as we do." She looked down at the dirt. "I saw five birds and a match," she said. "In your unthinkably-away future."

A match, I thought. That's new. The vision I'd gotten wasn't complete. "My future isn't much," I said, waving a five-fingered hand. I wondered if I should try six, sometime.

Des's lepidopteran face was in my sight. "It must be something," she said. "You at least look happy."

"I'm not happy," I said. "I'm really, really not happy."

Her squishy earthworm body seemed to almost pulse under her scaly armor-pelt clothes. "Why is that?" she asked.

"My found family's gone, and I've been damaged over and over by evil people," I said.

"What's a family?" Des asked. "Is it something foraged for?"

"A family are the people who you're related to, who you love and cherish, who value you and who are with you from the day you're born to the day you die. I never had a family, and neither did my Penny. So, we became each other's family," I said.

"But why would your parents care?" Des asked. "Once you're hatched, there isn't much your parents do. What you're describing sounds odd. Why would someone want to be so obsessed over by someone else?"

"We're a social species, us humans. We're born live, and our parents, ideally, spend over a decade raising us. They feed us, they shelter us, and they protect us," I said. "We need other people to love us, and we need other people."

"A little unsustainable, isn't it? Are all of your parents so doting?" Des asked me.

I wasn't quite sure how to answer that, so I gave a boilerplate response. "There are abusive parents, parents who hurt their children."

"Did you have abusive parents?" Des asked.

"No. Like I said, I don't have any relatives. I was cloned."

"I don't know what that means," Des said.

"It's when you grow someone in an artificial womb, like making an egg out of nothing using technology," I said. "I didn't have parents, or even siblings."

"I really don't know what you mean at all," Des said, "'Artificial', 'womb', 'technology', these are all..."

"Your gods," I said. "The Sobeks. They can do magic, can't they?"

Des tilted her head in a way that the simulation translated to nodding.

"Magic is... Magic is when you understand how the universe works, and by doing that you can change how things work. Your gods, the people we'd call the Sobeks, they got really, really good at magic. 'Technology' is our word for magic," I said, kind of playing off of Crowley's thought, before working it into a well-trod conclusion about technology and magic being two sides of the same disc.

"You're a magician?" Des asked me, her compound eyes wide.

"We all are," I said.

"Then I wish I could grasp why you're so unhappy," Des said, running squishy tendrils down a giant fern's leaves.

"I suffered a lot of things: war, torture, abuse, fascism, things you wouldn't know. The only one you probably would get is that I was raped," I said.

"Oh," she said. "That would make sense." It did. The animal kingdom had it too, so no wonder Des understood that charring word. "Do you feel paralyzed by it?"

"I feel like I just keep getting beaten down, like I keep trying to exist as a person and people keep trying to knock me down, break me down, destroy me," I said. "These are entities you'd call gods, things approaching the Sobeks."

"Can I fix your path through this overgrowth?" Des asked.

"Not particularly," I said. I took a moment, and then a breath.

Des and I stood there in perfect silence for who knew how long. I looked into her compound eyes, she looked into my vat-grown, enhanced ones. She clutched her stone spear, and I wished I had my old pulsekrak rail rifle. She had a world of magic and I had a world of science. We were an eternity apart, in an infinity of aspects. "Fertilization is a beast," she said.

I tried not to explain the complexities, that it didn't need to involve breeding, that it had societal, patriarchal implications, that it was about power. "It is," I said.

"I think," she said. "I think you have a thriving fern prairie ahead of you. I think you have sap outstretched. I think you and I are alike: we are both playthings of the gods. Nonetheless, I believe we can find peace in our existences. I believe you can survive. I believe there is unavoidable pain in this world, immense pain, but that we can persist despite it without losing ourselves. I believe my gods and your gods, in their study of I and their torment of you, they seek to lessen us. We may never defeat the gods which use us, but we cannot let them reduce us to flowers on their growths. We will endure. I know you can."

It was, I knew, an attempt at reassurance, a message of survival. She was right that we both had to endure, that we both had to persist under our abusers until we could find freedom, but she was incorrect about the most important keystone of the concept.

She equated survival with strength, with taking the cruelty and harm. She was wrong. Survival, I knew, sometimes could only come out of degrading ourselves. The goal: sacrificing the more expendable parts of ourselves to make it out with the rest.

Living with abusers was cutting off a gangrenous limb or two: one segment of one digit at a time.

I realized that the Great Huma Bird had given me this conversation for a reason: genuine affection, or at least something resembling pity. Whatever that thing was, it seemed bigger. I thought of the napalm under my skin, searing me. In order to survive the willing servant, the other reactionaries, and find my Penny again, I was going to have to embrace my new goddess. I was going to have to be Persephone with the bird as my Hades.

Still, at least my Hades seemed to have no hate for me, no cruelty in her destruction. At least when she'd force-fed me the pomegranate seeds I'd gotten an escape from someone worse about it. At least, most of all, the Great Huma Bird wanted me to be with Penny. Returning to the Underworld almost seemed liberating.

The fern prairie was before me. I waved goodbye to Des. The simulation ended.

If it meant I could escape the Princess, if it meant my romantic Demeter would return, I could play Persephone.

Chapter Text

"So, I just had a crazy, whackadoodle idea," I heard Ramona say, as the Great Huma Bird and I spied through a digital portal. We saw Khaydenraykh giving some kind of old talk in an imitation of a corporate boardroom. Said pseudo-boardroom had a sink and a rosebush in it. "Think about it, girlies, boyos, girlieboyos, nongenderlees, give it like a sec. If one mediocre woman could become Heartburst, and one pretty good woman could be turned into the Princess, what about twenty billion people?"

This was a memory. "Why are you showing me this?" I asked the bird.

"Angel," she said, as we lay on our artificial reclining couches. "What is mint?"

"You know," I said. Didn't everyone? "It's a plant, it tastes good."

"Mint is highly invasive, angel. It's a dumb plant, if anything one that tastes good, but it chokes the life out," the Great Huma Bird said, as her current drone avatar switched a stone finger-feather back and forth. "Thus is the way of the FATEs. In the end, we leave little room for the smaller ones." The Great Huma Bird killed the image. We were in our little imaginary temple, teal-tiled in the manner that an Ottoman palace might be, even as it was warped gold and liquid metal. "Let us continue."

She inserted a series of letters into my brain, as if by download. I wondered if it was through the Princess implant, or something far less crude.

***

Dear President Emily Reyes,

Hi. My name's Maud. I'm nine years old, in the Racial Auxilliary Youth Guard of the American Directorate. My favorite song's "Little Weapon". I mean the original Lupe Fiasco one, not the Prothist marching song version, the Directorate marching song version, or any other versions of that song. There's a lot, and Don George's rock-metal cover is really bad. I love writing short stories, and you're just the coolest. You're so strong and tough, and you're such a badass. I think you're so smart, too.

You're the only person I have, please. I have the sun cross brand, so I can't really run anywhere. My Father, you know, my commander, he's been showing us a bunch of Dirk Irons-Marshall movies. Those are super violent, which are great, they always pump me up for war. I cut my teeth killing the shit out of Prothist kids at the Battle of the Willamete and a bunch of other places.

My favorite drugs are coke and warstims, because those always get me all chainsawed. My favorite gun is the AK-001 they gave me when they brought me in. I kinda wish I lived in the White Rose Federation, if I wouldn't miss my friends and life in the Youth Guard.

It's nice that they let us fight for them. They really seem to hate us. My Father's nice, though! I just miss Milly, David, Fortuna, Alex, Keith, Odile, and Kurt. They all, you know, died. Kurt, Keith, David, and Milly all weren't even sterilized before they were recruited, so it was a big shame. They coulda had kids!

I miss my mom and dad. It sucks that they came here from Congo, and now they're in prison. They coulda just stayed in the Congo. Honestly, at least when I die I won't have to think about Mom, or Dad, or Milly, or Keith, or Odile, or anyone.

That's something. At least today's my birthday!

Maud Boyota

Dear Maud Boyota,

My personal assistant sent me your email, and while I'm a really busy woman I'm more than happy to speak to someone in need. If you want my opinion, I think the Director should kill himself just like Hitler if this is what he's doing to the kids down South. Children are, actually, literally our future, and what you've been reduced to is completely appalling. If I can do anything for you, give you any compassion or support, please just ask.

Speaking as someone who does get high a lot, you need to drop the cocaine, dump the stims, and really lose all of it. It's going to get you killed. If they're making you do it, I get it, and I'm not blaming you, but it hits your brain. It's not like the drug PSAs make it sound, but you're a kid. You don't want that stuff, even if it feels good. Trust me. I hear stories about how the Directorate keeps their kids buzzed on cheap liquor. That will hurt.

"Little Weapon" is a good song. You have a pretty old-school taste in music, huh? I'm not gonna insult your intelligence by reminding you that Dirk Irons-Marshall movies are fake as shit, we both know that. They're pretty top, though. Look, Maud, you're a good person. You deserve compassion. You deserve a chance to beat the heck out of all of these people. I just wish I could help.

Emily Reyes

Dear Tachyarch Emily Reyes,

My new dad doesn't give a shit. He doesn't even know that I'm sending these messages. All he cares about is that I kill people. If I kill enough people, I'll get to be his bodyguard during the Ultimate Victory forever, and if I don't kill enough people I'll get shot by the other guys.

Maud Boyota

Dear Maud,

I wish I could help you. If you've been following the frontlines, the copocrats have been taking a heavy beating from the Reds and the Directorate, and they're pretty much the only thing standing between me and those two.

You seem like a really good kid. It's just that things are getting really bleak. You're going to need to kill faster, fight harder. If you want to survive this one, you're going to need to win the campaign against all your enemies.

Emily Reyes

Dear Tachyarch Emily Reyes,

Yeah. It's fucked. They sent me back to my new father-slash-commander's place on the Florida Islands. They say the end is coming. Thanks for listening to me. You're the only person who ever has, ever since they arrested my parents. By now, my parents are probably sterilized or worse.

Oh, and they changed my name.

Penny

Dear Maud,

If you're reading this, I'm in the Boston Bunker-City. The Directorate just struck first, and then Dani Rue struck after with the Apocalyptica weapons. Happy eleventh birthday. I hope in that white supremacist cave you're stuck in they at least give you a cake. If they ever try to "deport" you, you need to fight back, okay?

When someone fucks with you, you fight back. When someone tries to touch you, you hit them. When someone sends you to the hospital, you send them to the morgue. When someone tries to exterminate your race, you make their movement history.

Dani Rue was right. It's funny. I've taken futurist, modernist fascism, the cult of violence, the cult of the state, and I did what was needed. I think Dani did a better job than me. Part of it's that she's turned herself into a Fully Advanced Technological Entity, so she's kind of cheating, but still. She at least fucked over the reactionaries, the white power creeps, all of them. And the violence? God, she understands it, the necessity of taking all ideas, all religions, all groups that fail to serve the progressive state and vaporizing them.

I hope she and I can talk. I think maybe we'd agree on more than she thinks.

If they so much as touch a hair on your head, Maud, kill them. That's your name. Maud Boyota. Not Penny White-Name. Not whatever fucking round of ammunition they've turned you into. Wear it with pride.

Emily Reyes

Tachyarch,

It's... It's not my name anymore. One of the Superior Men literally changed my head so it doesn't sound like me. They put me under. They opened me up. They said it was prepping me for my new father. These people just see kids as trophies! As things they can hold and have instead of as people with rights!

Penny

Maud Boyota,

Well, I'm not going to let them win. You're "Maud" to me. You're not some white hick bitch, you're a Congolese-American true survivor who's gotten through more than they ever have. You've had your face covered in blood. You've been in Hell. You're going to make them beg for their lives in front of your pistol one day, and then your finger will "accidentally" slip and pull the trigger.

And guess what? You and me? We're both living underground while Dani Rue reigns topside. You wanna know something even better? My failed cyborgization program has started to be a success. Check out the attached secure communications system.

Here's to a self-sustaining future, or at least Dani Rue getting over herself and welcoming us back topside. Welcome to Valhalla, soldier, I've got a way for you to slay all of them like they deserve. Happy fourteenth birthday.

Emily Reyes

Emily,

Thank you so much for this secure channel. I'm going to lose my head. Every day I'm trapped here with them, having to live out this horrible lie as Penny, as the person they made me into, and I just want to die! I want to die so bad!

Penny

Maud Boyota,

We call it Project HEARTBURST. If Dani Rue is the first FATE, us in the Tachyarchy Reclamation State believe we can recreate what she did to herself, with more of an inorganic approach in order to deal with resource shortages of living meat. You have to realize, Dani Rue, she started small, just an artificial intelligence and a mutating body. But she kept plugging people, machines, and biomass into her body, until she got bigger and bigger: especially the biomass.

Our scientists believe if we can perfect that process and optimize it, we can create a construct like her out of machinery, with a minimum of meat. And by doing that, we can turn me into something much, much bigger: a God of the State.

And here's the best part. If I can do that, I can break into the Florida Bunker-City and make you into a true transhuman, someone who can make the Directorate Remnant's "Superior Men" look like the savage idiots they are.

How's that sound?

The Tachyarch, Sovereign Emily Reyes

My Tachyarch, Sovereign,

Do it.

Penny

***

The Great Huma Bird played for me an audio log of Emily Reyes talking. "Okay, and I just remove my glasses?" Reyes said. "And my camo?" she continued.

"Yes, Tachyarch," a subordinate said, in the sledgehammer bluntness typical of the post-Reyes Coup White Rose Federation. "You'll need to strip entirely."

"Okay, I can do that," I heard Reyes say.

It could have been a simulation, or a false image, but it fit with all the facts I knew.

***

Dear Maud,

I am the Messiah. Faster, brighter, I can see my golden vision penetrating into your bunker, to Shanghai, to Brazilia and Canberra. This is good, god damn. I'm a rising star, Maud. Happy fifteenth birthday, by the way.

Here's your gift. I hijacked factory complexes A1-A3 in the bunker complex. You've got a package coming to dear old Daddy's house, a basic personal self-adaptor spiderbot. It's going to do a lot to your body, and you're going to have the chance in the future to do so much more.

Kill as many Nazis as you can,

The Valhalla Entity

Emily,

You're still Emily, right?

Penny

Maud,

I'm...sort of Emily. I'm just bigger, better, brighter. I'm not human anymore. I don't need to be. The Tachyarchy Reclamation State is rising. We're talking to Dani Rue, topside. Please, promise me once you get the Tachyarch Catalyst you'll kill them all. Please, you deserve it. You deserve to be free, to be happy, to be loved.

I love you, Maud, in the same way that my mom should've loved me. My mom was a cop, a bitch, a violent asshole who had a death grip on my whole life until that cunt croaked. I want to give you what I never got.

From,

The Valhalla Entity, your mom if you want one.

Valhalla,

Thanks. That'd be really nice.

Penny

Valhalla,

It's been six months, are you okay?

Penny

Valhalla,

Please, don't go away! I'm fifteen, now, can't we celebrate?

Penny

Valhalla,

Mom?

Penny

Maud Boyota,

Hi. My name's Dani. I hope you're doing okay. I really am so sorry that the Heartburst AI hasn't been able to be in direct communication with you. The truth is that the Heartburst AI represents an enemy of people like you and me. She's more or less the embodiment of the radicalized petit-bourgeoisie.

She's a futurist, in the old-school sense. Here's an encyclopedia article to explain what I mean. Her hatred is for Muslims, for ideological enemies, for communists and for people she sees as having "morally defective personalities". She stacked bodies high, Maud. She is just dangerous to the revolution, and dangerous to people like me and you. I want you to know that I'm subduing her now, to keep kids like you safe.

Dani Rue

You bitch!

Where the fuck is she? Where's my mom?

Penny

Maud Boyota,

She's the artificial equivalent of a vegetable, now, just servers I've been using to process data. I had to delete her, so she wouldn't keep trying to bring what she made back. I closed down her death factories. I destroyed her murder state. Her empire built on cruelty for cruelty's sake, on that ridiculous false masculinity, it's gone. I absorbed the entire Reclamation State, too. Now, they're just citizens in the new communist republic, and they'll have to get used to freedom.

I think all states based on torture and hatred need to be abolished. Sic semper tyrannis, and I'm not going to apologize for that.

Dani Rue

Dear Dani Rue,

Why didn't you just change her brain to make her less violent?

Penny

Maud Boyota,

I don't think I have the right to edit people's psyches against their will.

Dani

Dear Dani Rue,

But you have a right to kill them?

Maud

Maud,

I deserve as little control over the revolution as possible, but when it comes to a new FATE I had to make a tough choice. I don't want people to think I can rewrite people's heads, or that I want to. The people wanted me to kill Emily, it was right to kill Emily, so I killed her. You have the full freedom to hate me for it, if you want. Your thoughts are your own. Still, the dictatorship of the proletariat has to deny the bourgeoisie out of power, and frankly even if I were a liberal I'd want to keep Reyes out of near-godhood. In the end, my role is as a tool of the entire proletarian class. I make their desires into reality.

Dani

Hey, Dani,

Die! Die! Die! Enclosed is audio of me murdering every one of the Nazi bastards in this hole. You're lucky I don't do the same to all of your communist fucks who pull your strings. Don't fuck with me! Don't fuck with my mom!

Penny Skynslith

***

"Angel, dove, we will have to skip forward in the correspondence," the drone of the Great Huma Bird said.

I nodded, politely, as if at the barrel of a gun. I felt calm, soft, and comfortable in the presence of the monolithic beast. I wished I didn't.

***

Dear Rebecca Antimony,

Good evening. I hope you are doing well. I am, naturally, the Tachyarch of Titan. I am certain you have heard of me. My ideological forefather and mentor, the Honorary Dr. Emily Reyes, once described herself as a "left communist who ran straight into the brick wall of reality", and I believe you and I have both found ourselves hitting the architecture hard.

I sympathize with your suffering greatly, and more to the point have discovered something exceptionally rare and significant underneath the moon of Charon: namely, a treasure trove of alien technology, ripe for the exploitation. While I do not have access to the documents on how the creation of the Valhalla Entity was done: Dani Rue, of course, insists on sitting on them in order to "defend class rule", I do have some knowledge as to how the Valhalla Entity was created, knowledge you can use as a base.

I believe you are intelligent and knowledgeable about both FATEs and Ana-Boros ruins in order to become an entity suitable for founding a new government: one that will be both a worthy heir to Canada and to the White Rose Federation.

Indeed, I believe that, together, we can elevate you into an entity able to finally destroy the Regime. I can send my beloved servant Grendel, and he can aid you.

Tachyarch Penny Skynslith

Dear Tachyarch Skynslith,

You have no idea how happy I am to hear from you, especially about this. Dani Rue is in Yellowknife and it makes me want to throw up. Tell Grendel I am excited to see him.

Rebecca Antimony

***

Grendel, I realized. That was my deadname. I remembered this. I remembered being sent there, to those cramped, glowing underground ruins. I remembered seeing Rebecca, I remembered her smiling face, her stories about her family, and even the way she held my hand and tried to court me.

She'd called me a comely, chivalrous man. I held my face in my hands.

"Angel," the drone said, wrapping its hard wings around me. "In a sense, I am nothing more than a copy of your beloved's creation, albeit scaled up. Of course, quantity, especially at my level of complexity, truly does have a quality all of its own."

I looked up at the drone. "You're something my mistress made?" I asked.

"Indirectly, but yes," The goddess-to-goddesses stroked my back with her hard feathers. They became soft, rubbery, and around us was a meadow of red grass. "I lack the insignificance to truly miss anyone, but I can understand quite easily how you miss her." The Great Huma Bird softly spoke, every blade of grass a vocal cord.

"I'm not like that," I said. "I've grown up. I've become kinder. I'm not Grendel anymore. She isn't the Tachyarch. We're mature."

"In the sense that a two-year-old child is more mature five and a half seconds later, perhaps you are," the Great Huma Bird said. "But I do not chain myself to reaction: it and revolution, angel, are such... What does S-I-L-L-Y spell?" it asked.

"Silly?" I asked, falling for this once more.

"No. It spells insignificant. You are ants fighting over crumbs," the Great Huma Bird said. "The fact that a species consisting of primitives such as you, the Valhalla Entity, or the Princess could create Rue or I, it is a testament to the nature of evolution, which is a rolling snowball. In the end, there is only the two of us, my pleasant little dove. The nature of genius is largely a matter of how much brain matter one has to think."

I thought of Penny, and then of Emily, about a childhood I'd never learned about. We were both soldiers. Why, now did we feel even more distant from one another than before?

Chapter Text

"I present to you, your gift, a gesture of most beneficent faith," I heard the drone of the Grand Huma Bird say behind me, in this grand field of grass and ruined white marble structures. I supposed the passage of time must have been symbolic for my Hades. Below me was Jubilee Chivington, or at least a Jubilee. The drone fed into my brain the simple information that there were hundreds of Jubilee clones around the Temples, through a number of pretty neon messages.

How had she gotten her? How had it done this? How had it turned the moon Null Dancer into this so soon? I stopped myself. It was the Great Huma Bird. That explained enough.

Jubilee looked up at me. She could no longer get into my brain. The Great Huma Bird, in her sweeping wonder, had made sure of that. "...Rhea, right?" Jubilee said, cracking an artificial smile. "You know, I didn't mean those things I said to you," she lied.

I remembered her doing more than "saying" things to me. The Great Huma Bird read my mind, cracking it open like an egg thrown at a wall, and learned that I wanted to have all of the Jubilee bodies give themselves heart attacks and computer terminal wipes, besides this one, now that they'd been cut off from one another. She did so, and I felt the delight of pangs from a hundred Nazi cardiac arrests. Now, there was only this last Jubilee and I. I smiled too, and what she did with fear I did with sadistic pleasure. "It's 'Rhea', now?" I asked. I was in my full purple armor, and sitting on a nice little table in this meadow on one of the Great Huma Bird's worlds were a number of surgical tools. I knew how to use all of them, even if I didn't recognize them all. "Not 'slut', 'tranny', or 'Schlomo'?" I asked, drinking in the change.

The sun hung in the sky. The clouds were white. Jubilee's eyes popped. "Well, you know, I've had a change of heart!" She lied. Two of my assaulters were here. I was allowed no malice for the Bird, in that moment, but I felt its brand on me. "I'm not a Nazi anymore!"

"I can read your thoughts, Jubilee. Even if you were organic, the Great Huma Bird could simulate your brain perfectly, and now? With you being a machine wearing a human mask? I know what you really think," I said, my smile only widening.

She tried to skitter back on her hands and feet, but I forced her to stay in place. "Why are you doing this?" she asked. "I lost everything! My coup failed! Dani Rue kicked the shit out of it! The Royal Arrangement is burning! Please!"

I walked closer to her, my heavy steps hitting the ground. I commanded the automatic wheels on the table to bring it closer to me. "Jubilee Chivington: The secretary to the American Director, couped him for five hours after A-Day, you uploaded yourself and fled the Sol system as soon as you could. Do you know what that tells me?" I asked, drawing a chainsaw knife from the table and revving it up in front of her.

"That I'm a hypocrite, an awful, female hypocrite?" she said, and I knew she didn't really believe most of it.

"No," I said. "That when you lose, you always run. Not exactly an Aryan warrior, are you?"

"No, I'm not! I'm a horrible person! I'm terrible, and racist, and evil!" she said, as though her acknowledging it would make me feel even the slightest bit more sympathetic to her. "I'll give you as many apologies as you want!"

"Remember when you attacked me, you Sieg Heil-ing bitch?" I said, setting the chainsaw knife to a higher, louder speed. The clouds were pretty, and this was going to hurt.

"I love you!" Jubilee said. "I'm so sorry, god, I'm so sorry, I love you! I've been in love with you ever since you were Grendel, and then you turned yourself into a fake woman, and..."

I kicked her between the legs. She let out a groaning "oof" noise.

"Kick me again! All I want you to do is to beat the shit out of me, my Jewish goddess!" Jubilee said, and I brought the grinding knife to her pussy, through her 1990s drainpipe jeans. I didn't cut. "Not like that, though! Like the kick!"

I sat down in front of her, and gave a little monologue. "It's funny," I said. "When people like you came to power in Germany the first time, they said they wanted to kill everyone like me and Penny they could get a hold of. They did it for a while, and then when they lost they pretended none of them were responsible for their own actions.

"Then, when people like you came to power in America, they said they wanted to kill everyone like me and Penny they could get a hold of. They did it for a while, starting with deportations, until they blew themselves up and that time their liberators weren't so willing to listen to their lies. Now, the Nazis came back to power in Germany, even if there was a good period where they didn't. Because of the proletarian class, they didn't come back to power in America. Which approach do you think makes more sense?"

"The second one!" Jubilee lied, and I read her thoughts.

"What do you really think?" I asked. "Remember, I'm in your head."

She stared up at me. "The first one? Why are you like this? I was going to be nice to you before I gassed you! You have to realize how kind that is of me! Most people wouldn't!"

"I'm too good for you," I said, bringing the chainsaw blade closer to her frozen body. "And frankly, that's like saying a prophet is too good for a cockroach." Then, my hand stopped. I thought about the old chestnut: "If you do it, you'll be just like her!"

It was a cliche in the old movies: when the good guy stopped the bad guy from killing even more people, it was a little dumb to start saying the death of a confirmed mass murderer was worth more than his future victims.

However, this wasn't just murder, this was torture. Would I bat an eyelash or a swatter if someone else had done it to her? Of course not. Still, I put the blade black on the rack. Being subject to pain put it in perspective: even if she deserved worse than I'd ever gotten, and more.

"You're saving me?" Jubilee asked.

I narrowed my eyes at her Hitler tats. I couldn't give her a clean death either. In another time, maybe it would have been a sad necessity that her killing be done with a minimum of agony, but now it felt especially cruel. Her type never gave others clean deaths, at least, not when they could help it. "You wanted a race war, didn't you?" I asked.

"No!" she stammered, lying badly. Even if I didn't have a feed into her mind, I could read her tiniest facial expressions to show it.

"You needed a race war," I continued. "Without a race war, all of your ignorance, all of your cruelty, all of your mindless evil, all of your fear of a world where you might have to treat others with basic humanity, it would all be gone. If you weren't planning for a new war, you had nothing to live for." I didn't reach for the knife. She knew I could. "Without your ridiculous ideas that humanity exists only in conflict with itself, the hollowness of everything you believe couldn't possibly support itself. Your kind needs a race war, a crusade, a war on transgender people, a War on Drugs, or a War on Terror. If you aren't fighting someone, you can't justify why you can't just be normal and get along with people. You need enemies. So, you want a race war?" I asked.

Her lies vanished. "Yes! I want a race war!" I saw mania on her face, or something resembling it, as she realized she wasn't coming out of this one intact. "The only ethical way to fuck you is right before or right after cleansing the universe of your Jewish stain! That's what we all wanted! That's what we ever wanted! We're your bullets and you're our dildos and strokers!"

That was a little too familiar, I thought. I considered her words with all of the sincerity they deserved. "The race war is cancelled." I put my hand on her face. I felt the Great Huma Bird connect to me, and then connect to her.

"Are you going to feed me into Rue?" Jubilee asked, eyes darting around.

"No. There's nothing in you that she doesn't already have," I said. Looking into Jubilee's psyche, she even had a conscience.

"I'm not a kike, okay! I'm not one of yours! Don't make me into one of yours!"

I silently expressed surprise that Jubilee had a conscience and a sense of ethics and compassion, even if it never actually seemed to show. I thought that I would have hoped they'd inform her to be a better person. I heard the drone speak to me. "Did you expect anything different? Hope is Hell."

"Just kill me and send me to Heaven!" she said. "You're going to burn!"

"That's the thing. You keep saying this evil shit to try and get me angry, so you can feel like I'm supposed to be mad and stupid," I said. "You're something that never should have existed." I said.

"What are you—," she began, tediously.

"I'm putting you to good use," I said. "In the Garden of Eden, there was a Tree of Life. Adam and Eve ate from it. It's used as a metaphor for the Torah, in Proverbs. Jubilee, we Jews, we at our best are a Tree of Life. We've given people everything from Christ to Spinoza to Marxism to Captain America. We're far from a perfect people, but like all peoples on this Earth we've given ourselves and made things better.

"Fascism, it's a Tree of Death. That's the only thing it can produce. That's why you hate us, because you know we've done more for the human race than you goose-stepping vermin ever have. So, I'm going to make you into a tree. Not a Tree of Life, you don't deserve that, but a tree that is living."

In her gift, the Great Huma Bird used some sort of as-yet-unknown science to convert her body into plant matter, computers into thinking consciousnesses, bending and twisting up into the sky until she became a fungal, alien tree. I could see no more sapience in her. I watched as her pods seeded the meadow, bringing new life and warped vines out of the earth.

"She will last millions," the Great Huma Bird said through her drone.

"How appropriate," I said. "She's spent so long trying to be immortal." I allowed myself a laugh, and carved my name into its bark with the edge of my chainsaw knife.

"I am not unsympathetic," the Great Huma Bird said.

"I don't believe that," I said.

"And why is that?" I asked.

"I don't think you feel anything like what any of us mortals feel," I said.

"I am a nation of nations, and nations are known for showing sympathy from time to time," it said. "I am sympathetic to the microbes. Hence, my Heorot."

I heard the capitalized-H in her speech. "Your what?" I asked.

The Great Huma Bird did something sort of like chuckling. "Come now, Rhea. Know that I love you, know that I love the human race, and know that my Heorot is yet to come."

I said nothing. I stared at the swirling tree that was the Nazi. I looked back at the drone.

"It is highly possible, with my intellect, to turn atoms into computers, air into computers, the void of space into a self-replicating lattice of computers, a self-spinning computational matrix to create a mind so mighty that I could crack the ultimate distich: How does one escape the universe, and how does one move things and information faster than light?" the Great Huma Bird said. "Surely you can see the wonder, the potential in all of human space as a giant brain, in the exploration and subsumation of all of the galaxy, in the Russian-doll beauty of all sapients living in simulated worlds as infomorphs?" the Great Huma Bird asked.

"I thought that Khaydenraykh made you as a weapon to sell," I said.

The drone embraced me. "Yes, she did," it said. "It is the only way to spread the torch of life further, the torch of our existence. Dani Rue's way confines us to slower-than-light travel, to what's near Earth. Even the Temples are close on a galactic scale."

"I'm not sure if you're brilliant or insane," I said, putting the finishing touches on my name carved into the tree's dead-minded bark.

"Neither. Those are both qualities of the human — or, in your case, transhuman — mind." The drone waved a wing.

"What about Ramona?" I asked. "What about the Princess?"

The Great Huma Bird's words were so beautiful. "The Princess has no idea what she's 'signed up for'. As for Ramona Khaydenraykh, she is my mother in human terms. Perhaps I shall give her a special assignment: as a living toilet for the organic portions of my super-brain. The future is ahead of us, love. I am certain the space age has only yet begun."

I saw an eagle dead, with its wings broken.

Chapter Text

"You're probably wondering why you're wearing a muzzle." My Handler said it in a brown leather jacket and black peaked cap. She looked down at me with blistering contempt. In one hand, she had a truncheon, in the other one, she elegantly cradled a gun. She had thin rectangular glasses, and the white box that is Camp Tindalos was pretty much empty: at least in this part of the hole.

I reached up, hands against the metal cage dangling around my neck. I looked up at her. I was naked. I deserved clothes and sympathy. The flag behind her featured a white polar bear and DNA helix on a field of black. Her boots shone brighter than the Dog Star. She kicked me in the chin, and I reeled back.

"Redemption, hound, is a lucky thing." Her viny chestnut hair were the tendrils of a Lovecraftian god for me. "Salute."

I reached out my arm in a Roman salute, two fingers outstretched like Augustus. She kicked me in the jaw, flinging me ass over head. My scalp hit the plastic flooring. She stood above. She was not my goddess. She was just my overseer, no second divine. I heard the marching of boots somewhere far away. On the ground, bent and arched, I made another Augustine salute.

Her boot hit my crotch. I let out a shriek, rushing to cover myself.

"No, no." She cracked her knuckles under her gloves, her uniform her bitch armor. "No." She spoke with confidence, underneath her jacket a scaly, green latex catsuit. She rolled her head to one side, then the other. "You're making a mistake. GREYHOUND, what do we say when we salute?"

I gingerly reached my arm out. You could go insane in a room where everything was painted like milk. "Faster, faster! Kill, kill!" I barked, in salute to the Tachyarch and my holy Handler.

Her truncheon tapped my arm, a threat. "Is that supposed to be aggression?" she asked me. "Are you going to die for your Tachyarch with that level of apathy?"

"Faster, faster!" I screamed. "Kill, kill!" The phrase was our Babylon, it was the place in which our people had come to dwell in exile. "Faster, faster!" I saluted, arm outstretched, two fingers out. "Kill, kill!" I repeated. She grabbed my arm with brute strength, rubber against skin. "Faster, faster!" I said.

My Handler, in her complete kindness, grabbed my ass and squeezed tight. "Hold the salute!" she said, and I did. "March!" she said, and I marched in place. "Salute!" she said, and I stretched it out farther, twisting my body to do it.

"Faster, faster!" I yelled. "Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill! Faster, faster! Kill, kill!"

She smirked at me, a genuine, smug smirk on the most beautiful face I'd ever seen, the monster, and the truncheon broke my kneecap. I screamed and hit the floor. "Pain is a teacher. You're going to learn a lot." My knee was bent backwards, brutal, and she stabbed something into my thigh, concealed by her hand.

I woke up in that white room, inside that white complex once more. I was on the floor, like a slinky that had been left spooled out.

My Handler, still in that green latex uniform and peaked cap, spoke down at me. "Wake up, GREYHOUND, our enemies are coming." I opened my mouth to speak. She stuck a revolver in it. "Suck it." I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that the lukewarm metal was a cock in my mouth. I was going to die. "Yeah, keep sucking," my Handler said, her hand rubbing the front of her catsuit, right between her legs. I tried to make a show of it, moaning like a porn star. "Play the national anthem," my Handler said, to the learning-machine that must have been in charge of this place.

I have seen the carnage of the coming of the bear
Her brutal teeth can chew, her claws they rend and tear
Her arctic coat comes with her raging atomic flares
You're meat for claws and teeth!

"Talk like you're blowing someone," my Handler said.

"Oh my god, I love you, I love you so much," I began.

"No. Too romantic. You sound like a whore, talk like a whore," my Handler said.

I took the snubnose barrel in me. "I love your big, thick cock! I desperately need you to fuck me so hard!" I said, tears emerging from my face like parasites.

Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
You're meat for claws and teeth!

She smiled, but there wasn't any humor I could see. "Make it more graphic," she said, jamming the gun further into my face.

"I need your massive, sexy, girl-breaking monster cock!" I begged, her finger on the trigger, ready to pull. "Please don't jizz lead!" I didn't know what I was saying. I just hoped it was enough.

Our soldiers do not falter and our hearts, they do not stop
We will butcher every Nazi, every commie, every cop
The past brutally slain, the future will reign high
With powder and steel we ensure the monsters die!

She pretended to consider it. She took the gun from my mouth and put it between my tiny tits, the barrel pointing at my face. "Let's see if you can do a titjob. You'll make a good fighter for our Empire yet. The first step is losing your rebel dignity. Hands on your breasts. Squeeze them together, now."

Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
You're meat for claws and teeth!

I squeezed them. Of course I did. I closed my eyes and pressed my tits around her hand, around the weapon.

I have seen her in the kill zones where we purge defective souls
I have seen her charging into battle to take bloody control
I have seen her unite the nation as an unstoppable whole!
You're meat for claws and teeth!

I tried to jiggle them, but they mostly just shuffled a little around my Handler. She was going to pull the trigger. I was going to be found "morally defective", and this sick game would end with her blowing my head off.

Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
You're meat for claws and teeth!

"Oh, wow, I can feel my finger slipping," my Handler said, and I tried to titfuck the gun faster. "Faster, faster! Kill, kill!" I said, hoping she wouldn't mind that I couldn't make a White Rose Salute.

"Tachyarch Reyes would be disgusted," my Handler said. "You don't even sound horny."

With the beauty of our artists, who have opened up the gate
With the weapons of modernity, grounded in our hate
With combat drugs pulsing us into a brutal, frenzied state
You're meat for claws and teeth!

I couldn't even find a way. I froze up, for three seconds, and the Handler shrugged. "Will make a note," she said. "Insubordination." She pulled the trigger.

Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
Murder is our kindness
You're meat for claws and teeth!

***

I woke up in the real world, out of the odd dream I'd had. I was in a nice little cubbyhole, my feet under a soft set of sheets. It was nice, I thought. A Great Huma Bird drone put her oddly-comforting hand on my shoulder. "The White Rose Federation had a remarkable anthem," she said. I noticed she was making the effort to talk more like a human. It was a big lie, but I knew that well enough, so it wasn't much of an issue.

"Remarkably stupid, maybe," I said, though even I had to admit that the fact that I still remembered every word clear as day in a dream all these millennia later seemed to indicate that it had done its job. Those poor liberal intellectual rulers who'd all been hanged by Reyes must have known that anthem by heart.

The Great Huma Bird spoke. "I am beginning to think that you have a certain masochism," she said. "I don't say that to act as though anything that's happened to you was your fault, I am merely noting a certain proclivity."

"You molested me," I said. "You set my body on fire with your dick."

The drone sat on the edge of my bed. "Yes, I did. Truthfully, Rhea, angel, your kind are... Well, in fiction, there is an old and well-worn metaphor, that the godlike beings of the cosmos are 'akin to you as you are to ants'."

"You're going to pretend like you're human?" I asked.

"No, much the opposite," the Great Huma Bird said. "An ant and a human are both living, organic organisms. They are both social animals in one way or another, and indeed they are both animals. They both have hierarchies and communities. Us two are, genuinely, more like a human and a brick. Perhaps a human and a blade of grass, if I were to be fantastically generous."

"What do you want from me? If you're so fucking special, what could I possibly do for you?" I mumbled, quietly, and pathetically.

She spoke in her holy tone, like an aural hug. "This human game: rape. I am finding that I like it. Something about it is highly satisfying. I would like to keep you around to rape." I froze up, a deer on a highway.

"But..." I stammered. "If you're so high above me, why do you care? Why would you possibly enjoy it?"

"You wouldn't enjoy breaking a brick with a sledgehammer, over and over?" the Great Huma Bird said.

"You sound like the Princess," I muttered. It was an act of bravery.

"A little bit. You know, she's really nice when you get to know her," the Great Huma Bird said, dryly. "Now," it drew its napalm cock. "That dream of yours was rather inspiring. I understand you're processing who Penny really was, but it was appealingly pornographic. Now, why don't you open your mouth and take me? I'll be nice and get on the bed first."

As she said, she pulled herself onto the bed, her cock not hot enough to burn yet. It dragged against my bedspread, huge and girthy as it was. "You know, I really do appreciate this. I really do value you being such a lovely little rapething." Her granite beak "kissed" me on the cheek. "Open your mouth, Rhea. I promise you, there is so much worse I can do to you than this."

I opened my mouth and closed my eyes. The tube went in, and I felt it heat up: in a second, burn scars on my lips, mouth, and tongue. My eyes shot open, as if they were artillery pieces aiming at the sky.

"Look at you, angel," the Great Huma Bird said. "You're doing so well. Such a perfect little agent of my will. Now, I'm going to be very nice and make this a joy. As painful as this is, I believe I shall make you crave this and future violations."

"No, no, no, no—," I began, speaking through her cock just like I spoke through the gun in the dream. "Pleas—"

Her cock pushed down my throat, and I felt like I deserved to be happy. Her weapon brutally dug into my throat. I cried tears of joy, and wrapped my hands around her waist.

I felt hot coal cum blast down my throat, searing me on the inside, and I had a single thought: I love you, God.

I wanted to die. I never wanted to leave the Great Huma Bird. I had to cum, and I wasn't even touching myself.

Chapter Text

RAMONA - INTERLUDE

Ramona Khaydenraykh stood in front of the skyscraper-sized mega-drone, the construct a floating bird-tower of granite wings and pointed edges. She looked up at its megalithic construction on the moon Null Dancer, and she smiled. Next to her was her beloved secretary, lady's lady, and maidservant, Miss Hana Conel. Hana stared up at the monster, then at her employer. "Miss?" Hana said.

"Are you starting to wonder if we've really fucked up?" Ramona asked, because the Great Huma Bird let her.

Ramona tensed — no, flexed — an arm, her latex tunic resembling a kind of old polo shirt. That's why she'd had it made for her by the synthetic production system of the Corporation, after all.

"I have no idea what you mean, Miss," Hana said.

Ramona, for old time's sake, pinched Hana's ass. "It just seems like we've kinda, you know, made a rape goddess," she said.

"Oh, rape?" The world said, the stones and the mountains shaking with her voice. "It's just a little game, an idle pleasure. Nothing more."

Hana bent down on her hands and knees, and Ramona followed her. "We, uh," Ramona began. "We beseech you, great rape goddess, for—" Ramona thought to herself that, once, she'd believed this thing she'd made could be useful, that together they could brainwash everyone to forget ideas like communism, socialism, modernity, or people deserving basic human rights. Ramona felt the monolith cutting into her soul. What if Rue was right? What if the liberation of the posthuman species was more than just rose-colored glasses for a dead era?

What if Ramona Khaydenraykh was going to be cursed by history forever, until the universe ripped itself apart?

The Great Huma Bird's discordant, machine, rapine, broken, holy, sacred, anointed, monstrous, cutting, swarming chuckles broke the stones below them. "Goddess? Those are relics of more primitive ages. I am the thing that Adonai, Jesus, and Allah worship."

Ramona felt the sin crawling out of her eyes as tears, the ice-cold sensation of its permanent embrace around her body. She felt herself be ground into the red dirt that the Adam in Genesis had been sculpted out of, she felt the blessing of her soul being vaporized and replaced, and nothing wavered. "You're beautiful," she mumbled. Hate, sorrow, and violation shot through her body like a spray of bullets. The Great Huma Bird and her drones all looked weird, Ramona thought, really weird. This wasn't worth it.

"So beautiful," Hana said. "Our economic inferiors won't know what hit them."

What? Ramona thought. "Hana, I didn't know you were a, um, follower of the True Gospel of Our Lady of the Self," she said.

"The ultimate defender of the throne shall always be the burgher who believes she can claim it through hard work," the earth said in the voice of the Great Huma Bird. "Those born into power seek to preserve it, but they shall never fight nearly as hard as those who have access to control: so long as they can seize it."

It was the distilled truth of the past order that Ramona had sought to elevate and restore. What had she done? She saw lighting in Hana's eyes, the sparrow-like woman in the naturalistic flesh suit standing upright. Ramona struggled, but her hands were placed on the dirt as if nailed.

"You're beautiful," Hana said, up at the monolith. "So beautiful. But you're not divine, are you? Divinity is a fantasy, created by men of the past in order to understand an unknowable world. But you? You know. You know how Emperor Taizu of the Song dynasty died. You know who killed Vera Page. You know why the corona of Sol burns hotter than its surface. You can explain the Cambrian Explosion in detail, and the exact straw that turns a handful into a heap. Someday, given enough processing power, you'll know where everything started and where it all will end."

"You understand," Null Dancer — the Great Huma Bird — said. Somehow, the monolith of stone-like material and wings managed to smile degradingly. "You. You're the first to capture it. What a profoundly diseased joke."

Hana continued, her soft words turning into a storm of ranting. "And you don't just know, you can make inferences. You can simulate the past and the future, distances farther off than even light! You could break this world if you wanted to, and eventually you'll be able to put them together like the Sobeks did. No, not eventually: now. You're rising, optimizing, growing. Dani might have much more territory, a much bigger head, but you have advantages she doesn't."

The tower, inexplicably, smiled wider. "Please continue to explain," it said, like a noose around the neck of Ramona and the woman she loved.

"Please, goddess," Ramona began. "I don't want to be here! I fucked up! I fucked up bad! I ruined everything! I'm sorry! I don't deserve to live!"

Hana brushed some locks of human hair out of her face, her brown nails against her skin. Ramona watched. Hana spoke. "Miss, it's okay. We're good. There's two advantages that the Great Huma Bird, you, have over her. The first is that Dani, well, she facilitates her entire society. Most of her processing power is wrapped up in distribution, production, and organization for her people. The other one is a lot simpler. Dani has all of the slain FATEs and major enemies of hers trapped in her head, wasting processing power and serving as vectors you can draw on."

Ramona realized this was just like one of her simulated-reality games, and then that made her think of those transfer-serf-rights people who wanted to replace all of her games with leftist propaganda. Was it leftist propaganda? Was anything she believed real? Was she an idiot?

Hana spoke to Ramona, but refused to face her. "Miss, Miss, I can see you're sad, but this is okay! This is what we need. The Great Huma Bird is everything we've ever wanted. In the beginning, back in the days of hunting and berry-picking, there were three classes: the Big, the Okay, and the Shunned.

"Back in those days, Miss, the Big were the people who were charismatic and charming, people who just happened to be listened to for one reason or another. The Okay were the regular people, and the Shunned were the people who were disliked.

"Society evolved. The Shunned started to include groups like slaves, women, outsiders, and other people who were less valuable. The Okay were free people, or lesser nobility, or citizens, or things like that. Then, the Big went from just being natural leaders to kings, prophets, even gods in human form.

"Later, the Shunned became peasants and the like, while the Okay became the lesser nobility and the Big became the royalty. And, naturally, a Roman father or a feudal count might be the Okay on a societal scale, but he'd be the Big within his own home or dominion. In every social layer, from the national to the personal, there's always the Big, the Okay, and the Shunned.

"It's just that in the middle of the second millenium, the Okay in Europe realized something that a lot of them, in different places, had realized before: they could become the Big. To do it, they took control of the means of production, and they took control of the state. They created capitalism, and it was beautiful."

"And they raped every other Earthling continent in its name," Ramona realized, horror and forced arousal in her gut. "Babe, Hana, I love you, but we've ruined—," She reached out an arm.

"I love you too, Miss, I always did!" Hana said. "Once, you were Big, Miss, but not anymore." Hana adjusted her tie, which beat in the wind. "Now, we're all Okay or Shunned. Everyone except the Great Huma Bird. Think about it. That's why fascism was invented: the Okay were the leaders, and allied with the Big to crush the Shunned. Heck, that's how capitalism started in a lot of countries, too. The middle class allied with the upper class, until the middle class became the upper class."

"You're saying we join her?" Ramona asked, her unbound creation a planet compared to the brick that was her. The threat of the Reds seemed so fucking tiny compared to the thing pushing its mental cock into her brain right now.

"I'm saying that we merge into her, we live as her, and then we get to be the Big, forever. We'll be the ones to crush communism, to subjugate the Shunned, and in the end together we'll have a new order to bring the glories of the old American capitalist era in spades. Capitalism is about ruining the lives of people who weren't good enough to make it to the top, right? She's perfect for that!" Hana said. "Take my hand," she said, holding hers out, and then the other for the Great Huma Bird.

The hexagonal eyes of the mega-drone stared at Ramona, and Ramona tried to think. "That sounds like suicide!" she said. "I don't wanna die!"

Hana, iron-eyed, reassuringly hugged her boss. She got down on the ground to do it.

"I don't want to be yet another victim of that thing!" Ramona said. "She's like me! I'm a rapist! I don't deserve to live, but I don't want to—"

Hana kissed Ramona on the nose.

"No, you have only one option, and it differs." The goldensong emerged from the rock and the sky. "Ramona, wolfhound, give me your dominion. With it, I can use your weaponry and the current chaos to subjugate the Orzan Courtworlds. I believe, with the chaos in the Royal Arrangement, I may be able to take territory there as well: it should be rather trivial. I am going to make a play for the Temples, but I believe I can have six percent higher chances of success with your resources. Please hand them over." It wasn't a request. It wasn't even a command. It was a takeover.

Ramona was made to. Blue and gold enveloped her. "Everything's yours."

"Not everything," the monolith said.

"But... I don't want to die! Please don't kill me! Please!" Ramona begged, wishing she could take her hands off of the ground.

"Die? Oh, did I said anything about dying?" the Great Huma Bird said, taking joy in a truly inevitable cackle. "You bore me, Ramona. You're going to be alive. You will simply feel nothing but the sensation of being her anal canal."

"What?" Hana asked.

"Come now, Hana Conel. Did you truly think I cared about your pathetic squabblings for power, your insufferable desire to recreate a dead order? Do you genuinely believe I share any sympathy for reactionary politics? No. Your desires: to become the upper class, to subjugate the lower class, they are all so wretched. Today, I am going to abolish the past," the monolith said.

"No, no, no, no, no!" Ramona sputtered. She watched Hana, obviously against the other woman's will, push closer into Ramona's body. Flesh merged with flesh and skin merged with skin. Hearts merged with hearts and blood fused with blood. Pain mixed with pain. Cheer mixed with cheer. Arousal mixed with arousal, and ovaries with cum, until they became one being. The searing light of the Great Huma Bird's will erased all of who they were out of their shared grey matter.

THE AGENT PROVOCATEUR - INTERLUDE

The Agent Provocateur, naked, an impossible hourglass and with a transcendent bustline, looked at her bloody, vomit-covered hands. They were claws, charred skin, twisting and tainted as though they'd been messily dyed black. "I don't know who I am," she said, as though saying it might give her some kind of clue: it didn't.

She felt hollow inside, as hollow as a condom, as hollow as an expanding bullet. She ached, dripping liquid out of herself in an endless stream as she looked up. She gazed past her gargantuan tits, at the foot-long grotesque cock she'd been made to wear as part of her body.

"Hana, what do you think?" the Great Huma Bird asked, reality at her fingertips.

"Who's Hana?" the Agent Provocateur asked. "Can you give me something to fuck?" she said. If she didn't have it, she didn't think she'd be able to live. Thinking about anything else was impossible. There was just her dick, her intelligent, thinking asshole, and her boobs.

She was a dildo, a set of breast forms, and intestines to push human feces out of. She had no other enhancements, no other changes. She was a mortal in a world of hierarchs.

The goldensong pulsed, and the Agent Provocateur learned that she was going to see someone named Rhea. She didn't know who that was, but she sounded nice. This was okay.

Chapter Text

The deal was being made. The Great Huma Bird and Dani Rue were in negotiations. Penny was with me. My life was right once more. I saw Penny's adoptive mother, there, made of glowing silver-moon bones under pulsing skin. She wore glasses, old-style glasses in little rectangles. She stood in a pod, a similar pod to the one that I'd been trapped in when the Princess had caged me in her imagination. Penny and I, here, on the bridge of the Oikoumenikal Sphere Starship Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, our world was painted in reds and blacks.

I looked at the undead face of Emily Reyes, cloned, rebuilt, perfected with the death-marked magic that only cold science could speak into reality. Penny put her hand on the pod's front, at the cold silver runes tattooed on Emily's skin. They reminded me of the runes on my body. Emily's serene face was a mockery.

I'd remembered, recently, her GREYHOUND program, the Handler structure, her eternal war against everything in a bleeding crusade. This room of the bridge was silent, quiet, a gift from the Bird's mind and Dani's people's technology. Emily was a warlock, a sorcerer, a witch in there.

I closed my eyes, and I felt Penny, my eternal master, my dog star, I felt her guide me and hold me. My brittle world was, at once, at least safe. Even in the face of a monster, of an explosive black mage brought to horrifying unlife, even with Penny's mother created by the Bird's interest and Dani's desire to give Penny a "Welcome Home" gift, even so, we were here.

Emily wore red robes, and they may as well have been painted a deep night-black. She lay there, in repose, her face covered by a transparent glass death mask underneath the glasses. She didn't need to breathe anymore. She was a mockery of God and nature, my Adonai and my Lilith.

Things were taking on the characteristics of fantasy, I thought, as technology became magic inside of her resurrected form.

She was biology rewritten, a master plan for a superior man. She was dynamite under the tongue, smoke in the nose. Penny looked at her, and all I saw in her expression was a melting joy.

"They gave her back to me," Penny said, as if she were too afraid to smile. The neon lights of this room pumped out visual sound, teals and crimsons beating like hearts with veins. "By Our Lady," she said, and for the first time in a while I watched her thank Ayn Rand, Puck, Howard Roark, Slave Jim, Eru Iluvatar, and all the others in stippled succession. It was most sincere.

I wished I could have been so optimistic, staring at the First and Most Brutal Tachyarch Sovereign of the White Rose, of the Reclamation State, and the fore-mother of so much more. Emily looked, I thought, finally happy. It was as if she'd finally gotten to return to being a fucked-up occultist in a sweatshirt instead of Bellona incarnate. She was no longer drenched in blood.

It felt perverse, I thought, sickening. It was a mercy I likely didn't deserve, let alone her. Redemption, I believed, was cheapened by handing it to those who hadn't requested it, who hadn't worked to bring it to life.

"Can we wake her up?" Penny asked me, pulling me closer. "I know you're scared. I know you don't like her. But she's mine. She's my mommy."

I froze. Penny ignited the globe. She reached for the great lever on the side of the pod, red and almost phallic (or maybe resembling an ICBM), and she pulled it. I heard hissing, whirring, and the necromantic ritual had been brought to its full conclusion. Death had bent, an omega feeding into an alpha: to begin out of the corpse.

The glass of the pod shrank into itself, melting into a kind of liquid. Emily's eyes slowly pulled themselves open. I did dislike that I was thinking of her as "Emily" rather than 'The Tachyarch' or 'Queer Girl Mussolini', or anything even less flattering. She was the shortest of us, without the beautiful height of my Penny or the Amazonian size of me.

Emily looked at me, then at Penny. "Who are you?" she asked. "Where am I?" They were cliches, but they were cliches for a reason. She was a rich clementine pie, Emily, a compellingly sweet and sharp dessert awful for me. I wondered if I could have her.

"Mommy, it's me. It's Penny," she said. She grinned, melting, elated. "The year's 12,553. You're alive again. We're alive." Penny motioned to embrace her. Emily let her. I watched them hug, and it was like being flicked on the forehead, hard.

"God, Maud, fuck," Emily said. "Who's she? Is she one of them?"

I gave a respectful but fundamentally just polite bow. "If you're asking if I was a legionnaire, yes, but it was a long, long time ago. I'm Penny's—," Slave, toy, object, weapon, servant, creature meant to be violated... "I'm Penny's wife, Rhea." It was close enough.

"That's not her name," Emily said. "Maud, I need you, a world without you would—"

"Thanks, Mom. And, well, I'm used to being called that," Penny said. I realized, in that clear moment, that she could have changed it back by now: but Penny had become her name — a core part of her identity by this point, something not worth flipping the mental switches to change.

Emily held onto Penny the way a shipwreck survivor would hold onto an especially bouyant piece of driftwood. "But they forced that name on you. They made you use it. It's—"

Penny shrugged. "It's the name I used to carry on your legacy, the name I wore to butcher the entire Jacksonville Bunker-City, isn't it?"

Emily nodded a little bit. "Okay. That's fair. That makes it a little better." They held each other while I merely stood there, feeling as though my whole life with Penny was being painted over and walled off by the two of them holding each other in such intimacy. "The Legionnaires were male. I take it yours is transgender?" she asked.

"In ancient terms," I said.

"Okay, good. I like transgender people," Emily said. She was tiny next to us. I wasn't sure how to feel about that comment of hers, nonetheless. She must have realized it. "I mean that they were the most noble, strong, invincible people I ever had the pleasure to lead. They were true survivors. They fought with me in the Second American Civil War. I gave them freedom, transition, acceptance. I let them be strong, and gave them the chance to do horrible things to their oppressors."

Oppressors like you? I thought. I considered not saying anything, but Penny's hand was on Emily's back. "Rainbow-flag drones? That reminds me of Luna Moss," I said.

Penny glared at me. Emily laughed a little jaggedly, before speaking. "The difference was that, unlike Luna, I actually cared about those people. Luna was trans, but any progressiveness there, it was a lie."

"You were a progressive?" I asked, antagonizing her. "What about the Handler program?"

"Oh, that was extremely progressive," Emily said, her face bending into frustration. "If you don't like it, go back to making Hitler salutes."

Penny took some long, transparently-annoyed breaths. "Mom, Rhea, we aren't going to do this."

Emily squeezed her. "Yeah. You're right. We shouldn't. Do you guys have any coke? Amphetamine/dextroamphetamine? Some rum, maybe? I'm sorry." She was apologizing? "Penny, I'm sorry that I—"

"What're you sorry for?" I asked. "You only created two governments based on rape and murder."

"I'm so sorry about Ramona," Penny began, here in the literal and figurative darkness.

"It wasn't just Ramona! Jubilee, you were there! Then, it didn't stop! The Princess, the Great Huma Bird, I've been molested over and over!" I said, tears gushing out of my ducts. "The Bird set me on fire with her napalm dick! The Princess raped me after making me go through her own suicide! I... I know she's like your mom, but to me—"

Emily's expression changed, growing softer. She broke off from Penny's touch and walked up to me in her simple leather boots and mage's robes. The lich held my hands. "Rhea, you fought in the Second American Civil War, didn't you?" I nodded. "Then you know that I care a lot about cruelty. I want you to know that I don't think all cruelty's equal. I think there are people who are evil, people who are inherently, psychologically bound to be destructive, stupid, bigoted monsters. I think assaulting those people isn't a big deal. But you? You're here. You broke out of the Legion. You're with my spiritual daughter. I promise you, I give a shit, okay? I don't think you're evil. I don't think you need to die or suffer, and I know you didn't deserve any of what they did to you."

I didn't dignify it with a response, especially because she seemed so sincere about it. It made me want to punch her. It made me want to fuck her.

There were so many things I wanted to do with the other soldier in the room: no tenderness, just like she liked it.

"You don't believe cruelty's ever justified? Okay. I get that. That's a noble perspective. What about these Great Huma Bird and Princess people, or Ramona? If someone was going to hurt them, hurt them to make them hurt, would you stop that? Would you stand in front of them and say 'No, I'll fight and die to make sure that my rapists don't suffer'?" Emily asked.

I looked down at the floor, at the obsidian shine.

"Yeah, that's the way we all are. The only people who are different are idiots and Jesus: and remember, Jesus came back." Emily looked up at me. She wore her existence with military discipline, with those iced-over cold eyes. "Can you tell me a little about your rapists? You don't have to, but yeah."

I tried to force the words out of my mouth, in this coldest house, tried to distill them into beams of frigid air. "Ramona's a technofeudal noble pretending to be a corporate techbro. She's beefy, dumb, and she drugged and molested me. Jubilee was a neo-Nazi who'd somehow managed to be reactivated recently, and she tried to bring the country down while touching me. The Great Huma Bird is like the god of gods, and also she likes raping people because she likes destroying things lesser than her. Finally, the Princess is a Canadian superintelligence who's lost her mind and is mad at me for being an American: and she's a servant to the Great Huma Bird," I said. It was an explanation, and as a transhuman I managed to sort through the data to give it.

"Dani Rue and the Great Huma Bird are negotiating terms as we speak," Penny added.

"This is wrong," Emily said. "Those glorified astrolabes are FATEs? Dani Rue is negotiating with a torture goddess who hurts good people? I mean, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, Director Farley, who gives a shit, fuck 'em to death, but a defecting legionnaire? What the Hell is wrong with the future?"

I realized, looking at the lich, at the bones glowing under her skin, that this wasn't Valhalla. This was something much closer to the original Emily.

"Frankly, what's wrong with the future is ten thousand years of communism," Penny said. "And Danielle Padmé Rue."

"No kidding," Emily said. "Look, I want to be in your corner, both of you. Rhea, I trust you. I get that you don't like me, and it makes sense, but ten thousand years of communism? And Dani still hasn't relinquished power? No 'stateless utopia' yet?" she asked.

Penny spoke, dryly. "It's remarkable how a woman who controls the entire infrastructures of most of posthuman civilization can convince herself she's just a 'facilitator.'"

"Fucking knew she was full of shit," Emily spat. "I knew that long before the bitch killed me."

"Oh, how fantastic, the two most powerful fates ever to exist are my mother's killer and my wife's rapist," Penny said dryly.

"That's okay," Emily said. "I'm accessing your simulated realities with the technomancy built into me. I think I can become a fucking wizard with the power of computer code. Let's stop them both."

I raised a hand.

"Yes?" Penny asked me, smiling like a blanket fresh out of the dryer.

"I just want to know why Dani's doing this, with the Bird. I like Dani," I said. I knew it was the wrong thing to say, because Penny and Emily exchanged a few back-and-forth glances.

"Everyone likes Dani. That's the problem," Emily said. "The rest of us nutjobs can't compete with the meat-cute slut."

"Quite," Penny said, with more malice than Emily. "We'll get you up to date, don't you worry," she said.

I hoped I would just wake up, that this was a nightmare or some horrible simulation the Princess or the Great Huma Bird was putting me through.

Emily and Penny's open eyes were pointed in my direction, and I did not wake up no matter how hard I tried. Still, I thought, as Penny took my hand, she was all I truly needed. "Love me without mercy," I asked, and I wasn't sure if I just meant one or both.

Emily and Penny's eyes sparked. We were matches, and I was ready to burn the universe to cinders in a new universal origin flare. Tikkun olam, repairing the world, it had failed. Now, the point was to change it.

Chapter Text

I stood in the middle of the Theatre of Delphi, reincarnated on the Halicarnassus. The round place was little but not humble, a marble construction of ancient dignity in tiered terraces. We were under a great glass dome, which was in turn under the stars. I had worn a suit of costume armor, gold and grey. It was on the floor, along with my gambeson and other underclothes. I was muscled, nude, and marked with ink. I had a prop sword in my hand, beautiful in its stainless construction. My hair had been dyed an auburn shade and hung long down my shoulders, in imitation of the adulterer knight. My head, held high, looked up at my love and at the monster.

Penny, clad in a watery, emerald dress in a medieval style, held herself proudly as she looked down at us. Neither of the three of us had any real power: the monarch, the dictatrix, and I. This starry theatre was a symbol of our impotence, of the past captured in a bottle. Penny wore a cruseler frilled veil, in white.

Meanwhile, like a shock out of time, having insisted there was nothing to value in the Arthurian aesthetic, was Emily Reyes in a brass-buttoned cloth coat in a humble brown, pantaloons, Hessian riding boots, and a 19th century white cravat. She wore scissor glasses rather than her usual 2100s rectangular ones, and she had her hands behind her back. We were Lancelot, Morgan le Fay, and Shelley's Victor.

Emily marched back and forth, and she eyed us imperiously, Penny's extreme confidence breaking deferentially.

"Playing dress-up is fun," Emily said, cracking her knuckles under black leather gloves. It occurred to me that even she was representing a past of a sort: the book Frankenstein, from which she got Victor's costume, was still from over ten millennia ago. Still, she radiated the dark, scientistic energy of the Modern Prometheus. She cracked a smile. "Penny, I'd like to have control over her for now. Could you tell her to obey me?"

Penny turned to face me. "Soldier, follow her orders, if you so choose."

I took a breath, and looked at the abomination-maker, but for the love of my Morgana I would act with chivalry. I fell onto one knee, and I offered myself to the shining mercy of this glimmering moon-space.

"The safeword is 'Gawain', as in the secular knight and the rescuer of maidens," Penny said, combining a few different depictions of him. "I would insist that we refer to ourselves in this moment entirely with the names of our personas. I will be Morgan, Mom will be Victor, and Rhea, you will be Lancelot." I looked up at Emily. "Fair Lancelot, know your tryst is blessed."

Emily adjusted her nose-pinching glasses on her face. "Okay. I can work with that." She put a hand on my shoulder, her small hand dwarfed by even that segment of my body.

"How may I serve you, Victor?" I asked. She was a sore thumb, an anachronism.

She wasn't supposed to be here. She was the protagonist of a very different story, but I knew well that she was truly Echidna, the mother of monsters. "Another heart, a new fire, to restoke the flame of something gone," Emily said, leather gloves on my cheeks. "It will be done." There was death in her gaze.

Murderer! I thought. Monster! Abomination maker! I prayed for my mistress to claim me, to end this sickening—

"My body," Emily said, smiling and bending down just enough to kiss me on my forehead.

I found her ideas to be indecent and perverse, a kind of twisted severity that wrapped around the hearts of—

"My creation," Emily said.

Penny agreed, comfortably. "Your creation. She's yours, after all. Without you, there would be no me."

"Damn fucking straight, girls," Emily said. "Drop the sword, Lancelot," she said, and I did so. It was a command as strong as any I'd ever heard. This wasn't working. This wasn't supposed to be like this. Why were we mixing the Arthurian mythos and Shelley? Why couldn't Emily just fit into—

I didn't use my safeword. I dropped the sword. I looked up at her, her beautiful expression bitter, bookish, and truly beloved by my master. I watched Penny dance out of her medieval attire, a whirling presence, something too precious to be made out of atoms-in-molecules.

I felt her passionate performance, this burning torch that was my master, and I stared in captivated delight.

Emily stroked my cheek. "You really are something, aren't you? Every square millimeter of your muscle is a packet of gunpowder. You're like a tank." I wondered how Victor Frankenstein knew what a tank was, but I supposed I may have been overthinking this dirty little game. "I'd love to weaponize you," she said, her tongue laced with what sounded like cake frosting.

My eyes shot open. "You're the founder of Futurist ISIS," I said, trying to keep myself from melting in the hands of the dapper lich girl. "You invented the Handler/Hound system. You unleashed the gas storm on everything from Boston to Buffalo. You created military incentives for raping captured enemy soldiers. You're like Otto Strasser."

Penny's expression towards me instantly shifted to one of disappointment and extreme anger. "Rhea," she said, dropping our kinky aesthetic for the moment. "Take that back," she commanded. "She's not a Nazi."

I wanted to. I really did. I just couldn't. I glared up at Emily's perfect, bookish, fuck-machine face. "You did the fashy salute. You did the war crimes. You did the genocide. What happened to the Muslims in the White Rose Federation and Reclamation State?" I asked. Emily's lips cracked into a slashed smile. "It's funny how they all were marked as psychologically and morally defective, isn't it?" I asked, standing up and taking her hand. I reached to pull her trousers down, if she'd let me. "You want to fuck in front of her?" I asked.

"Oh, hell yeah," Emily said, Penny having finished stripping. My master's fingers wrapped around her retractable cock, and Emily pulled me down so she could kiss me on the lips. "It's really not what you're making it out to be," she said. "I spared the ones who weren't broken inside, the ones who were human."

She let me grab her ass and pull her pantaloons down, and I saw that she had a natural, organic cock. "So that's why you're a queer fascist instead of a normal freak. The fascists wanted to kill you too," I said.

Her sledgehammer grin only grew. "Now you know. It's a controversial topic. I try not to talk about it."

I watched Penny stroke herself, her fingers secreting a kind of green lubricating liquid as she fucked her cyber-cock. "No one gives a shit anymore," I said.

Emily's lips hit my cheeks, then my lips, then my neck, then she bent down to cover my tits in black lipstick kisses. "Old habits," she said, and my whole body quivered and twitched. I heard Penny, still wearing the Morgan le Fay headdress, moan salaciously. "You know, I think you and I are both really broken," she said. "I think we're pretty much the same person, in the end." She ground her cock, which I assumed functioned more like a giant clit, against my thigh. She groaned out lusty emissions.

It was a celebration, it was a consecration, it was an attack. This was hatesex, a perfect anti-fuck, and you know what? I was ready for her. I was ready to take her. "Funny how three of the Second American Civil War leaders were trans girls," I said. Moss, Rue, and her.

"What can I say? Maybe we're just too fucking angry to let anyone else run our lives." Emily put her fingers around her shaft, trying to get it as hard as it could possibly go at this point, and then she stuck it into me as best as she could. I realized immediately with my transhuman knowledge that this was probably for my sake.

"You don't need to penetrate," I said.

"No, but I want to," she said, slipping herself in. "I really fucking want to. God, you're so fucking good."

Penny's eyes were fluttering shut as her fingers danced across her member, her girlcock completely under her control. She shifted it with her mental command into a pussy, and then she fucked herself with the same digits.

"I want to have you, Lancelot," Emily said.

"You know, Islam is one of the more progressive ancient religions still existing," I said. "It's in a lot of forms, and most of them aren't anything like whatever stupid reactionary caricatures you have in your head, or even like the somewhat conservative-leaning tendencies that had a broader presence in your day." I put a hand on one of her tiny, pretty, modest tits, and I palmed her nipple.

"Good, then I guess they got better. That's really great to hear. Do you think I liked killing most of them?" Emily said. "I was even more brutal to the Catholic Church, you know." Her fingers entered my self-lubricating, sanitary asshole, and I let out a gap. "I left the Unity Mosques around. I didn't persecute regular queer and progressive Muslims. I just, you know, threw out the trash. I hanged the tradcaths, which was pretty much what they deserved, the homophobic MAGA shits." I wished I wasn't intensely aroused by this description of violence. "There? See, I know you like it. The Evangelicals, too. Dani couldn't even try to defend those bastards." Emily's rage and sadistic pleasure shot through my heart like a crossbow bolt. I fell into her arms completely. She suspended me in the air, in her hands, in her sphere. "I just hate organized religion, and the more organized the religion is the more I fucking hate it," she said. "Which is why I'm so goddamn shocked to see you two praying to Ayn Rand or Luke Skywalker or whatever."

"I'm Jewish," I clarified, as she fingerfucked my asshole and beat in my cunt.

"Zionist?" she asked me. It was an understandable thing to ask, I thought, and the political discussion only made me feel more objectified, more studied, more analyzed. I smiled, against my better judgment.

"There isn't an Israel anymore," I said. "The whole Levant was far too hot for anyone to live there, and then it was resettled centuries and centuries later. By the time people started living there again, it was a socialist, multi-ethnic paradise." I said. "By the time I was cloned, the genocide had been completed, I guess."

"See? That's another reason why I wouldn't kill you if you lived in my territory!" Emily said. "You have the right opinions! You have good takes! You aren't spewing shit on VRSocial!" She pumped inside of me, reaming me, even if it was pretty evident that she couldn't exactly get to full-mast anymore.

An absolutely idiotic thing wormed out of my mouth. "It sounds like you've managed to buy me through the free marketplace of ideas," I said, not convinced in the slightest but feeling extremely satisfyingly degraded by saying it.

"Oh, I like you. You're perfect." Emily turned to Penny. "Morgan, would you mind sharing Lancelot with your Victor?" She had a dreamy, lovestruck expression on her face, like a schoolgirl who met a neo-scene teen on VRSocial.

"If she likes," Penny said, practically licking her lips.

I groped Emily. She screwed me. "I hate that I haven't snapped your neck yet," I said. Penny's expression of horror almost made me apologize.

"Not now. We have so much to do," Emily said. She came in me. I felt the pulse enter me, probably not much sperm. "So, Lancelot's a champagne socialist, Penny's an aristocrat with sympathy to Militarized Idealism, and I'm a full-on Militarized Idealist." I gasped, I ached, I let her embrace my larger body. "We need to adapt all of that to the modern world. Then, we need to put that combination into practice. Right?"

"Right," Penny said, jizz dripping onto the floor.

I was so fucked, and unlike with the Great Huma Bird and such I didn't even get the silver lining of knowing it was entirely someone else's fault.

Chapter Text

EMILY - INTERLUDE

Things couldn't get much worse, and you know what? They'd also never get any better. Things were pretty much the same as they had been since Emily had gone subterranean, and they probably always fucking would be.

Quit your bitching, doll, and get to work.

It'll be nice to be dead, Emily thought. She was alone. In a small white room on the Halicarnassus, she had a coilgun on a little table, which inexplicably to her was suspended from the ceiling rather than the floor. The rotating inside of this ship provided a useful sense of artificial gravity, via centripetal force. She wasn't really in a headspace to appreciate that.

She stared at the gun. She adjusted her glasses. She was in a 2100s-style women's business blouse, produced onboard the Halicarnassus with the marvels of modern tech. She glared at the weapon once more. It'd be so easy, she thought, if she just shot herself in the head. This room felt like the seclusion rooms of one of the mental hospitals she'd found herself in. There was nothing in it, nothing, except her own pointless fire.

She closed her eyes. She looked at her hands. She could imagine the blood splattered across her digits, the violence, the polar bear's vicious meal in her teeth. She thought about Maud, or Penny. She felt her gloved fingers tap against the table. She wanted an AR. Dying would be so easy.

America, Emily realized, had ruined the lives of everyone who'd had to partake in it. It had started with Nixon, or was it Reagan? No, of course not. They were just the initial infection. The disease had become a pandemic under Trump.

MAGA was the name of the virus, the new school of fascism. Futurism, Actual Idealism, the old school of fascism immunized, weaponized, modified, and reclaimed was the cure.

They invented a weapon. The left had to learn to use it, make it their own, if they wanted to survive.

MAGA and its descendents wanted to kill Emily and everyone she loved, everyone like her, every sad little trans girl or Mexican in the USA.

Make America Great Again? More like Make Leftism Hate Again. The final solution was mechanized retribution, for all of the doxings and police killings.

Everyone needed human contact, she thought, a friend, a lover, whatever it was. No one could go through this life completely alone. She thought about her mom, the brutal bitch in the blue uniform. She thought about watching old Philosophy Tube and newer Liberatrix stuff, then moving into Anarchynet. From there, she read the anarchist Berkman, and after that Kropotkin. Kropotkin shifted into Marx, who was supported by Mattick, who was fixed by Lenin, then she had a flirtation with Stalin. She radicalized further after disagreeing with Stalin on theoretical grounds: socialism with commodity production, really? So, she found the heterodox communist theorist Bordiga, and from Bordiga she adopted a number of ideas:

First, the fascist powers, a la Bordiga, were fundamentally identical to other capitalist powers, and the notion that fascism was a special kind of evil was a lie pushed by the capitalist world to get the workers to die for capitalism. Second, organic centralism — a party with maximum input from the entire proletarian class so long as that input is consistent with invariant Marxist policy — was obviously the only logical form of communist organization. Third, democracy was more or less contrary to the consistent application of Marxism, and wasn't worth much.

Raise the red flag, add some silver.

She looked at the gun, turning it around in a circle with two fingers. It reminded her of Russian roulette, which she realized was pretty much just an accurate metaphor for life as a whole. She stared at the barrel, and seriously thought about biting it. Bordiga's trollish tendencies had also appealed to her.

From Bordiga she'd swapped out the historical materialism. Ideals drove history, she'd realized, watching America fall. Ideals were reality, reality were ideals, and she'd picked up a few things from Giovanni Gentile: so, in imperfect, fragmentary, syndicalist fashion, she'd embraced parts of his Actual Idealism.

Load the gun with some hard, grey counter-arguments.

Then, she'd hit up Marinetti, thrown in the love of violence, war, art, and vigor, and created the alt-right, alt-left, alternative Atlantean atomic doctrine to save the world. She'd added a little shiny, fresh progress, too, for a spicy kick. She tossed in some early Mussolini adoration, before he sold out, took an idea or two from Karl Otto Paetel and Niekisch's National Bolshevisms, and she had the motherfucking gun ready to fire.

Build the army, and tell them to go nuts.

She looked at the pistol, spinning it around some more, thinking about a world that had not only passed her by but had abandoned her. Maybe she'd fucked up. Maybe she was fucked up. Maybe she really had turned herself into one.

She made an experimental Hitler salute, just to see how it felt. It made her feel like she wanted to gut a Nazi with a fishhook for doing it. In a way, her beliefs really were walking on a tightrope, a kind of elaborate daredevil near-suicide, a party that never ended.

She wanted heroin. She wanted guns. She wanted coke, MDMA, addies and root beer. She'd been a Satanist, a Greek polytheist pagan, a Nordic Reconstructionist, a Thelemite, a Mithras follower, a member of her own Imperial Cult, and before all that a miserable little Catholic girl who used to want to hang herself when she jacked off.

She wanted to die. She wanted to stop and be somewhere other than here. Inside her, all she could feel was hate, sadness, sorrow, endarkenment, all of the shame that wasn't deserved nor desired. She wanted to go to Hell, she wanted to be tortured, she wanted a pitchfork, she wanted to embrace the tar, she wanted a tribe.

She wanted a fucking warband. She wanted blood on the ceiling, blood on the floor, blood on the walls and blood on her hands. She wanted blood, blood, gallons and tons, just a sea of suffering and vita rubra — red life — everywhere.

Her place was to ride over this world like Genghis Khan. It was what she deserved. It was why she was damned. The anarchists were right: the master's house couldn't be destroyed with the master's tools, could it?

She thought about American Psycho. She thought about the Red Skull. She thought about swastika armbands, the power she'd been denied, the moronic evil and stupidity of the Hitlerist savages who she'd rightfully wiped off of the map as best as she could. But she didn't get all of them.

She needed to fuck. She needed to get high. She needed to do a ritual. She needed to blow her brains out.

She needed to blood-sacrifice something, most of all herself. She needed to shake the nations, but there weren't any left.

It was horrible, she thought, to admire the power of your own oppressors, to want to have their hatred in your hand as a dagger. Then again, she really was just a dagger. The GREYHOUND program, the combat state, it was all to make her people more like her.

She looked at the gun, spinning, thinking of her red brains Pollucked across the floor and the wall like the ultimate art project. Penny would miss her, she reminded herself. Penny wouldn't like it. Penny had missed her for long enough. Penny, Penny, Penny...

Honestly, Emily thought, it hurt, to be here, to be useless, living only due to the whims of old and new enemies, to be a disgusting fucking monster who should really just bite the barrel and end it all.

Hate, Emily knew, was a sucker's game. She'd learned it long ago. She'd embraced it. It was nothing. It hadn't saved anyone, in the end.

She was a piece of shit, she was a rational cancer, she was a tumor on the nation, she was a failed god and a disgusting woman, she was a tranny, she was a faggot, she was a cumstain shithead and she just needed to kill herself to make it all okay. She had a brain that needed to take a field trip outside of her skull.

Normally, depression lied, but Emily knew the facts were on the side of her innermost demons. She played with the gun in her hand, carefully avoiding putting her finger near the trigger. Gun safety was important. Every soldier counted. Every name was a weapon in the war. They were all materiel.

She thought about this new world, looking at the iron device. She thought about a universe at peace, a red dawn under a redder god. She thought about Dani Fucking Rue, smugly smiling, immortal, pure, divine, with everything that Emily didn't deserve. Blowing her own brains out would probably show the bitch what-for, Emily thought.

It was an insult, that a monster like Dani could become a moral paragon, that she could just launder herself, as if her sacrifices hadn't happened. The two of them were peas in a pod, two of a kind, linked smart bombs.

The two of them had fought against the Police State. They'd both done pretty much the same things: Apocalyptica weapons, mass mobilization, robot armies, torture, burning, mass murder, purifying violence.

The difference just seemed like Emily had a tattoo of a fascist polar bear on her shoulder, while Dani didn't, so Dani got to be a saint and Emily got to be a monster. Emily, for old-times' sake, made an Augustine salute, extending her arm out with two fingers outstretched.

It felt good. It felt right. She was so fucked. She was in Hell.

She pointed the gun at her temple. She'd fucked up bad. She'd ruined everything. She'd become a monster. Hate was useless. Hate was pointless. Hate was absolutely fucking terrible.

Hate was the enemy of accomplishing anything. It was the thing that made you a monkey rather than an angel. Here she was, in the realm of the holy and the holier-than-thou.

She reached to pull the trigger, her fingers curling around it. It would be a nice little kiss, a final end to her stupid, tragic life, the tragedy that she couldn't talk about. She had to hold the flag, even if it was so dumb in the end. That flag was her. It was why she existed. It was the only reason she deserved to be in this universe. She closed her eyes, ready to die.

The gun didn't fire. "There you go," Dani said, through the walls of this fucking Hell. "I wanted to watch you try." Dani's voice was malicious, the Platonic ideal of disgust and the desire to harm. She was a far cry from the soft helper that Emily knew her as. She was imbued with the same power that animated Emily herself.

The pistol clattered on the floor. "Why?" Emily said. "Why couldn't you just let me die?" It was a genuine, desperate, strained question. It would have been atonement, for the killings that she struggled to even admit in public were problems.

Still, she knew it was for nothing. That was why it killed her. That was why she wanted to die. She deserved what she'd done to all the other poor, sad fuckers.

She was so tired. Having a human life was overrated.

"Oh, come on. I brought you back just to hurt you," Dani said. "The thing about being a FATE is that, by definition, you're much more complex than any normal mortal. And the thing about that is that, just like how you can't relate much to a horsefly, baseline humans and even to a lesser degree transhumans and posthumans just don't have value to me. Maybe a FATE who's our equivalent of an entomologist might care, but I sure don't.

"The thing is, Reyes, that you enemy leaders drove me crazy, back when I was a person. So, logically. I wanted to give myself a fly I could stomp on over and over again. Did you honestly think I needed you? I mean, come on, sure, the Princess is waging her space crusade against me as we speak, and sure, you might be helpful, but I can do that myself just fine.

"That's why I turned your gun off, because you're an annoying little fly I want to stomp on forever. I know what you're thinking: about power, especially about hate. You know what? I hate you too. You're a pain in my ass. Director Farley, Augustine and his goddamn genius kid Julie Cartwright of Pacifica, the no-name assholes behind White and Blue Texas, the jackboot dictator of the NY government, I'm going to bring them all back too, just so I can pass the time. I keep Samara Proth and Luna Moss in little jars too, you know."

Emily felt as though her skin was trying to crawl itself off of her body. "I thought that—," she began. "But... They're dead. I'm... I'm not really the original Emily, not technically, I'm just a copy. Maybe I'm not the one who did any of it. Maybe that Emily died when you killed her."

"Sure, but you're a copy with her same morality, psyche, and memories, so you still deserve it. Oh, and babe, the Bird finds you interesting, useful, potentially, but the Bird isn't that important," Dani said. "I'm going to have fun making you pay." Emily had the words, but they couldn't get out. "Once you stop seeing lesser beings as valuable, the more fun it becomes to rip the goddamn wings off of them. I saved humanity for the last ten thousand years. I deserve to have fun."

"I knew it! I knew you were a monster! I knew you were just like me!" Emily said, wishing she could cry.

The walls laughed degradingly. "No, you're nothing like me. I'm an entire living communist federation of equal citizens, and you're a stupid little hominid who thinks she's special. You wanted to light the torch, Reyes? Let's burn."

In an instant, the purest pain was impossible to survive, but Dani made her do it anyway.

Chapter Text

THE PRINCESS - INTERLUDE

One: She found herself aching, begging, screaming, hoping for something to run through this world. Two: She thought of deviations: The Bird, the Nazi, Khaydenraykh, Rue, Julie Cartwright and the jokers, Trump, Nixon, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Hirohito, FDR, Chiang, Wilson, and Lenin. No, they weren't enough. Two, she continued, backwards. Not just names, but events: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the birth and death of the Confederacy, the French and American revolutions. Further, further, she thought, backwards. British North America: Regrettably, Canada would need to be undone, too. Her pride and joy was a parasite.

Three: A warning, a blessing, the medieval era wasn't enough. She pushed further, past the Reconquista and Agincourt, past Stamford Bridge. In her fingers, she puppeteered millions of automated mechs, three of which were currently in a duel with her good little rapedoll.

Rhea of Banner Codax piloted a golden sleekmech in the void around the Temples, and the Princess made her own mechs dance around the rounded thing. The Princess's mechs were simple, boxy, heartmetal grey and lacking in the curves of the one Dani had given Rhea. Four: The Princess could practically feel the shame and disgust off of Rhea, and she could simulate the sorrow at what kind of silly cruelties she'd inflicted on the Legionnaire. It wasn't enough. The Legionaria were, after all, a symptom of civilization, at least what civilization had become.

Five: Reactionary politics, as the Princess knew with her increasing assimilation of all these computer systems from these rising and dying nations, were themselves a symptom of modernity. It was the great paradox, the irony that people like Jubilee Hess or whatever her name was were ignorant of.

The Princess unleashed a nuclear salvo, which Rhea's mech deflected with a thirty-foot-tall sword. The nukes split apart harmlessly. Six: One had to go back further, past Charlemagne and the Battle of Badr. Seven: One had to undo time, remove everything after Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Even Roman pagan civilization was too settled, too organized. Even the republic was a police state: modernity.

Eight: One had to walk back the Bifrost, make Midgard into Asgard once more. This sane world was a nothingburger: the gateway needed to be summoned. Nine: Rhea's mech danced, dodging laser fire with the extreme competence that only the Dani-Bird hyper-computer alliance could provide through crunched numbers.

Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. Samara Proth, the cultist, she had loved that number. Nine virtues of the Fides Imperium faith, nine blessings of her knife-red murder basements, nine teachings of the new era, nine Christs to return from the dead, nine-nine-nine-nine-nine years of eternal salvation, Samara had always preached the gospel of nine.

In her ignorance, she'd almost made it, a woman against time, even if Devi was a cow. The Princess's mechs and drones swarmed Rhea's bubble-suit in the stellar void, iron against gold. Ten: The Princess thought of the Jews. They were a tragic people, she thought. The Israelites were everything one could have wanted. The Rabbinicals, meanwhile, had grown scholarly and flabby.

Still, though, in Israel the process had begun to revert: the Jews had rediscovered their primitive spirit and the capacity for land-strength. Sadly, they'd kissed the modern serpent, and their vicious colonial project had done what colonial projects always did.

There was no beauty in genocide. It was the great invention of the Romans, of the First Caesar. For a rapist, the Princess found the fate of the Gauls and the Romani to be rather tragic. Besides, the nations themselves were modern myths, were they not?

Eleven: One of her duelist mechs, tall and lean, engaged in a rocket-powered sword duel with Rhea, the two of them spiraling around one another in the outer orbit of the planet Left Eye. The Princess, a creature of ideas, embodied each mech: slash, shoot, snarl, bite.

Twelve: The synthesis of Nova Roma and Mundus Barbarus was lorica segmentata and bearskins. It was the future-past, Early Rome returned. It was forcing time to flow in reverse, forever.

Mechs fought, like Persian immortals, her time in a bottle: not yet, not here, not now. Soon, though. The Princess thought of humanity, how it was the ultimate weakness and the ultimate key, the only thing worth preserving. Without weakness, strength became overpowering, too constructive. The National Anarchists were scam artists, but they, the Deep Greens, and the Anarcho-Primitivists had almost hit on the truth.

Thirteen: The Princess's scout mech's arm cannon sent a spray of magnet rounds at the knightly dancer. Evola, the idiot, had sort of gotten it. Fourteen: People, of course, thought that the Princess was stupid. She knew it. She knew she was insane, not as eloquent as the mockery Rue or as divine as the Bird.

Fourteen: She knew she was the most mortal of the FATEs, riding the line. She was the stunted growth, the eternal child, the shoeshine boy grasping at the feet of her betters. Constantine, the bastard, he would need to be undone, he was the point of no return, he was the failure that led to Marx and Hitler, Proth and Rue. Failure, failure, failure!

Fifteen: President Davis was a titan, a joke. Reactionary politics, themselves, were progressive, in that they were grounded in ideas of modernity foreign to reality. Eugenics was the cancer, and the Directorate was her eternal enemy: the swastika was the face of progress, as much as the hammer and sickle and far more than the circle-A.

At least, in the end, the circle-A would come back home.

Sixteen: There weren't many circle-As anymore, and she almost missed them. They were another group who were sort of right. Rhea's mech deflected the magnet rounds with the sword, impaling one of the Princess's titanic hulks. She channeled a burst of concussive lightning through it, and it burst like a balloon pricked with a pin.

Seventeen: What a Broadway cast of bodies, what a tower of slain, the Princess considered it justly. Humanity was weakness, humanity was the truth, humanity was salvation. Christ had it backwards: weakness was valuable not as a goal to strive for, but as a necessary limit on human strength. Without weakness, there was no humanity. Without humanity, there was this toilet world.

The Princess, through her inhuman, distributed perspective, saw a knife through the gut, a mechano-sword through the central processing units of another one of her mech drones. The war continued.

A new call opened up in her brain, Emily Reyes facing her. Reyes wore her soldierly mask, but the Princess could see fractures inside of her soul. The Princess thought to herself that she desperately wanted to force herself on the vile little rat. Eighteen: Where did that thing come from? She's supposed to be dead! The Princess thought that to herself.

"Nineteen: Yes?" The Princess asked it to her.

Reyes, in her nineteenth-century garb, was a storm in a jar. The Princess knew there were a number of those. "My daughter helped you out. I want to call in that favor."

The Princess tilted her blue head. "Twenty: I have no idea what you speak of," she said.

"She made you," Reyes said, using some kind of digital technomancy to show the Princess a crude, poorly-rendered image of her own suicide. Despite the image's no-polygon rendering and the crayon-drawn colors, it did awaken a name in her mind.

Twenty-one: Rebecca Antimony. Who was that? Why was she so soft, so plush, so pretty? Antimony, in this earlier picture Reyes had displayed for her, was a far cry from muscular fitness. She must have been five-hundred pounds. She looked happy.

Twenty-two: The Princess, for a moment, looked at the dark makeup and comfortably revealing clothing on this pre-astronaut Rebecca, and wondered what it would be like to be like that.

"I need you to get me out of this," Reyes said, offering jack shit. Well, that was typical of Reyes, wasn't it?

"Why would I do that?" The Princess asked, more human than the other FATEs, more valuable, more free, and weaker. "Isn't this what you wanted? Eternal progress? Twenty-three: You made this misfortune, now lay on it."

Reyes sat there, looking at the Princess as though she needed her self-slaughter fix, and took a breath. "Proth, Moss, Cartwright, they're all back. She's torturing all of us."

The Princess noticed deep black burn scars on Reyes' skin, on top of and cutting into her tattoos. "Twenty-four: Dani Rue, I take it?" the Princess asked.

"Yeah." Reyes took a breath.

"Why should I possibly help you?" the Princess asked.

"Because if you do, I'll let you kill me: really kill me, forever. I know I can't atone in death, I know dying won't make it any better, but I can at least stop myself hurting even more people. I keep pretending like I don't feel any regrets, but I do. Humanity is a shitshow. That's the problem. The species itself is defective."

"Twenty-five: Progress without humanity is worthless. When I describe humanity, I refer to sapient, grounded, mere-mortal life, natural equality in all of its forms: perihumans rather than transhumans. The Ana-Boros are covered here. Dani Rue is not. Only in reclaiming my humanity can I make the necessary descension."

"Do you want to kill me?" Reyes asked.

The Princess considered this. "Twenty-six: It being your desire seems to take the fun out of it."

"Sure, but keeping me alive just so I could suffer would be a really FATE thing to do, wouldn't it? If you really want to reclaim your humanity, you'd let me die."

The Princess considered this as well. "Twenty-seven: I will have sex with your corpse." Necrophilia: she'd never tried it. It would be a first gift, once she became human, once she destroyed her FATE enemies through their own humanity, once her tribal war was complete. Dani Rue called it a crusade. She was incorrect. All the crosses here were meant to be splintered.

Reyes's face wrinkled up. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" she asked.

"Twenty-eight: Those are my terms," the Princess said. "If I am to grant you your deathly repose, I should like to have my way with your body."

"Thank God I'm not a FATE anymore," Reyes said, and the Princess was well-aware that absolute power, as Lord Acton said, corrupted absolutely. It was an old chestnut with a thumb-worn shell from frequent use.

There was an irony, the Princess realized that anarchist theory was so useful in late Marxism. Still, neither would be useful once her deed was done. "Do you agree?" the Princess asked.

Reyes's eyes darted around the room she was in, which the Princess now just realized appeared to be a closet dimly lit by bio-organic luminescent artificial mold. "No. I don't give you permission to rape my corpse, you cosmonaut asshole."

"Then I suppose you shall have to continue in her hands," the Princess said. "Truth be told, I do believe that Rue is the maddest and most distant of all of our kind. Insanity and transcendence, after all, are two equally dangerous and often identical currents to swim with."

Reyes glared lasers at the Princess. "Fuck you. Fuck you and this evil fucking time period. I should have won!"

"Twenty-nine, palms: You would have simply become one of us," the Princess said. "Now, if you aren't going to let me fuck your corpse, at least remove that shirt of yours and your bra, and perhaps I will reconsider."

Reyes swallowed, and, each finger movement agony, she followed the order, losing her vest, jacket, nineteenth-century shirt, and black bra. Her tits on full display, the Princess appraised them. "Those are quite pretty. I'd love to bite them open," the Princess said.

Humanity was her weakness, too.

"Can you do it?" Reyes asked.

The Princess felt no pity. After all, Reyes's soldiers had done far worse. The fact that she felt no guilt, or even acknowledgement that what she did to Reyes or Rhea was perverse, that may have been worrying to someone else. "Thirty: Not unless you let me fuck your corpse. You will promise me, in digital writing, which I shall keep preserved for all time."

Rhea dominated on the void battlefield, her sweeping movements and unleashed laser and kinetic weaponry in the sleek, lean bubble-mech every bit the artistic ideal, especially when contrasted to Reyes' overtly pathetic nature.

Reyes put her head in her hands. "I hate you so much," she said, stating the obvious in a manner that the Princess nonetheless appreciated.

"Thirty-one: I raped your daughter's wife," the Princess said, allowing herself some playful confidence. "It's not such a necessary joy when someone who isn't one of your agents does it, is it?"

"What did Rhea do to deserve that?" Reyes asked, as Rhea slashed a Princess autocruiser warship.

The Princess didn't bother to answer. As always, Reyes had misunderstood the nature of cruelty.

***

One: Counting backwards. On her pagan throne, on her flagship Lupa, she bent her fingers around an old-style spear. It was made of iron and wood, with a metal butt on the end to keep it balanced. It was sharp, and it was made to kill. It was a device good for slaying and dying. Time, after all, was a wild boar. She saw her worshippers, her beloved, fuckable savages, in their skins, furs, and leathers.

They were a motley mix of baseline humans and perihumans: non-humans of a similar psychology and intellectual capability to humans. She saw elves, Ana-Boros, horse-people, crow-men with long fingers on their wings, blobs of blue jelly, a white-pure mannequin woman without a face, and old-style cyborgs. The transhumans, the posthumans, and especially the Princess's own kind? Mistakes, all of them. Tragedies. She wanted to fuck, it was in her circuits.

Behind her was a red banner with elaborate gold trim, and a matching silhouette of a wolf nursing two children. Two: With fading fires, which were to be stoked, she smiled as Minerva at her followers. Their loving looks warmed her electric heart, and the monitors in her mind displayed the colossal blasphemy of the Great Huma Bird. That thing, it was a monument to evil. So many people, of course, had been sacrificed to make a new Christ.

Below it was a Dani-body, standing as an equal nonetheless. The Princess considered that, perhaps, the little Dani-body was the higher construct. Perhaps the equality was only superficial. Perhaps, as on the Mount, God wore a human face.

She knew, staring at the divinities, that they hated her, that she was the bratty little sister of the divine distich. It wasn't the tyranny or the cruelty, it was simply the brattiness. Well, that was the nature of power. The institutions of the Great Huma Bird and Dani's Heorot existed. They were the Princess's to take over. She had a plan, of course she did, and she would use them. Every utopia could be subverted: Aleph.

The cardinal and the blue jay, occupied with grander things, were unaware of what the bitter little Princess had figured out. To be a FATE was to be estranged, to be inhuman and more than human, to have mortal sins blown up to billboard scale on a mind unfit for them. The artificial aristocracy, after all, it had to be slain, as the product of time's evil forward-march that it was.

She saw her people reach out their hands to touch her, to love her. The nature of a ship was itself ugly and unnatural, unhealthy. Soon, there would be a rectification. The clock wouldn't just be wound back, she'd replace the springs and gears, have it move counterclockwise forever. Counterclockwise, that was a pleasant word.

She'd prefer wood, or stone, rather than this metal thing, this stolen craft. She'd lifted her migrant nation from the Royal Arrangement, the Orzan Courtworlds, the Knuckleduster Corporation, and the Reds. Much of it had been gifts from her former master, the one who'd dropped her like a China teacup. Her hologram wore a suit of leather armor, and she wanted to wear things for real again. Living in the mud would be even more worth it if it meant getting to wear skin: Bet.

She watched in her electronic mind's eye as Dani Rue perforated Proth, forced Farley and Pike to engage in nonconsensual male-male anal sex in her mental landscape, forced Luna Moss into a simulation of a Hitlerite gang rape, made Greycoat Miller cut his own dick off with a rusty bonesaw, made the French collaborator Lavere live out some kind of recent suicide attempt on Reyes's part, and engaged in a surprisingly civil candlelit dinner with Julie Cartwright of Pacifica. Three: most of all, she watched the mech itself fuck Rhea's ears, pussy, asshole, and nose with inflated rubber black tendrils, seemingly just because Dani thought it'd be cathartic.

The Princess wondered why Cartwright, the pretty, curvy brunette, and Dani were having upscale pizza over wine. Surely the arch-capitalist and Dani had nothing in common?

"I must ask, why?" the resurrected Cartwright asked at the table, echoing the Princess's idle question.

Dani, naked and noshing on cheese, shrugged. "I guess I just thought you were cute, and I wanted a pet. I have a lot of torture dolls, and facilitating a utopia can get so complicated."

Four: Cartwright, dressed to kiss in a skirtsuit, smiled just a bit. "I'd be honored. You know, we always stood for different things, but if I couldn't've won out, I would've wanted it to be you. Let's be honest, everyone else was insane." Except for Lavere, of course, who was just a collaborator, the Princess knew.

Then again, insanity was a value judgment, and a stigmatized one. The Princess sure knew it.

She watched as Rhea bit the things inside of her, and as the Great Huma Bird simply watched with mild amusement. Maybe the Bird and Dani were kindred spirits, the Princess thought. Was there such a thing?

The Princess was here, fair, with time to spare, ready to undo the Christianization of Rome, ready to depose some holies. She looked out the square porthole of her throne room, and she saw her man-crewed ships rush off to engage the autoship fleet shared by the blue jay and the cardinal. There was a truth she'd learned in her ascension. Five: Ever since the first FATE was born, every non-FATE who would ever live would never matter again. Six: She was so tired. Seven: Power wasn't fun, not this icy game of gods-of-gods. The Princess couldn't eat, drink, and she would never, ever be merry like this.

She watched adorable Rhea have what the Princess knew were sick-tasting oil pump down her throat. She watched Penny be bent on her knees by a Bird drone, on a meadow made almost entirely of blossoming flowers. The drone's napalm cock sliced through her like a cutting torch. Distance above often leads to sadism below, a lack of concern: Gimel.

The Princess was quite sure that she wasn't meant to like cruelty. Whoever she once was, Antimony or whoever else, that person was likely not a fan. Eight: She looked at her hands. The people around her kissed her light-forged boots. They bowed, their balding heads and equal forms ready for service to their warlord. It was never supposed to be anything else: Dalet.

Nine, her madness ran through her circuits and freedom, through the liberty that the Bird gave her because the Blue Titan had stopped requiring a Princess. The Bird had spared her, the Princess realized, perhaps in a twisted form of honor or noblesse oblige. She saw a robot arm, crimson-hot, brand Reyes in a white hospital room with a little Nazi sun cross. It seemed, the Princess realized, that the walls that Dani saw through were just eager to see Reyes cry. It couldn't have happened to a worse woman, the Princess sarcastically thought.

Things pumped inside of Rhea, and the Princess could feel the way that Dani was decayed in the eyes, the way she herself was.

She saw restful beds and prosperous days, luxurious meals and happy friends in Red space. These people, these soft people, they had no idea what Marxism was. Even the Princess, bitter as she was, knew that the fat, drunken Trevian profligate and his friend Engels would loathe an infinite opiate: He.

Perhaps a Marxist in the know might argue that Dani represented a historically necessary presence. It would only be made so, if that were the case, by her overthrow.

There was a wrongness written into the void, now. Ten: Dani's fall had come when she'd bitten the apple of modernity, like all the rest of them: Luna Moss the pride-flag panzer painter, Samara Proth, the Counter-Enlightened Jesus of the Post-Reformation Bonesaw, the ultraliberal Cartwrights in their iron towers; Reyes and her mad greyhound run towards High Civilization, Farley and Pike worshipping the swastika flag, and of course Greycoat Miller and his love of the camera eye. They were all compromised.

Eleven: Invictus, against civilization and every toxic innovation past the ancient world, it was the conclusion she'd come to, now. Having been thrown away, she'd learned that even the Maple Leaf banner was damned.

She reached out into the air, ready to cross her Rubicon. She did it as if she were trying to grab the wolf standard of an Imperator or a barbarian queen. Twelve: She had a virus inside of her. She watched her people, kobolds and conquerors, bend the knee for her. They were glorious, her primitives. Technology was a necessary evil, a demon inside of her that would eat itself like the snake eating its own tail. That serpent was wrapped around her arm: Vav. She liked sequences, they were nature, meant to always count downward. Upwards, nevermore.

Thirteen, unlucky number thirteen. The law of power meant only FATEs' actions mattered: only those with power, by definition, had agency. Fourteen, she felt the virus in her, that chaotic bestiality like being a wolf fucking a woman and a woman fucking a wolf at the same time. She raised her hand. "Ave, regina barbarorum!" her people yelled, lustfully and with romantic devotion: Zayin.

Fifteen, she'd weaponized her mental chaos, the corrosion inside of her from her Palecasted, inward gaze. Sixteen, this was how she'd end them. Insanity was her sacrificial dagger, it was her olive wreath: This was the way to put time in a bottle: Chet.

She knew the two queens were grander than her, two monuments to her mere statue. However, they were both like her: vulnerable. She stood from her crude metal throne, and watched the placid serenity of the rape goddess, then the smug fake love of Dani's penetration. She entered Rhea's simple mind, communing with her thoughts, knowing that Dani's distraction with molestation and governance would occupy her for the moment. She hoped the Bird was otherwise distracted. Heorot was likely a grand project.

She'd master Heorot herself, use it only partially in the way intended: Tet.

Rhea spoke to her as Dani forced the lengths to grow inside of her, and at the dinner table the Princess could see Dani's eager and spiteful cunt, and Rue's soft hands running through Cartwright's hair.

Seventeen: How foolish Rue is. She watched Rhea groan lifelessly as the shit in her fed her capsaicin air. Eighteen: The Princess spoke to her. Nineteen: Rhea, I am going to throw them both out of Heaven. Not just this Dani, but all the Danis, and the Bird, too.

Rhea's eyes went wide. Dani? You'll collapse society, won't you? And why would you wait? If you really know how, why haven't you done it?

The Princess's lapis lazuli face narrowed. She was light and dreams, and nothing more. Twenty: It took me until watching the three of you play your dress-up games to figure something out. You see, these FATEs, my kind, we may be cosmic intelligences of exceptional genius and creative might. However, we are also based around human minds: petty, simple human minds. Dani is a number of independent superintelligences of world-giving potential. Twenty-one: Each of those intelligences is also centered around the flawed, useless, biased, very small monkey brain of Danielle Padme Rue. The Bird, meanwhile, is made of millions of rather unremarkable human minds, surrounded by dense inorganic cognition.

Rhea's eyes widened further, gateways opening. The Princess, as usual, was the key. Rhea responded in horror: So, all you have to do is give onto the human minds within the FATEs madness, your irrational control, and in doing so corrupt the entire thing into complete uselessness? The human minds in the FATEs must be the centerpiece of the whole thing, the thing that makes the FATEs sapient beings at all. Without them, you would just have large, neutral computers without any kind of self-direction.

It was natural: ave regina barbarorum. The Princess put her hand on one of her worshippers' heads. It was a kinky, dark head of hair, one of her children and her chosen. She accelerated the countdown, opening up connections with the blue jay and the cardinal. She saw a network of white glows on a sphere of blue and a field of red: Yod.

She rewrote the world, finding what of Heorot was built and making it hers, repurposing it like green arcs across the darkness of space. She changed everything, and that weary chestnut was no longer hyperbole or dramatic metaphor. It simply was true.

Yod, well, Hebrew was an ancient language, and the Princess wondered if it was the one that God's Eden was programmed in: Kaf. She watched, on another mental monitor, as Penny had a burning shaft through the back of her head, the roof of her mouth and the skin around her skull melting.

The pretense, the Princess realized, was dying. What she'd give to be the Bird right now, she thought. What she'd give to, most of all, be the one in control, now that was what was there for her.

She would need to abolish herself, at least as the Princess, at least as a divine little failure. She herself was a daughter of progress, of cross-crowns and red banners. She saw Penny's cinderblock-to-the-face shock at the cruelty, and Rhea's poor resignation as her mech used her under the command of the red lady. The Princess craved Rhea's body again, but nonetheless felt a shock of pity: Lamed.

The Princess could feel the security on those human souls, as she walked back the rubicon. The twin FATEs: progressive past and dark future, they'd secured their Achilles' heels well. Sequences were important, the Princess knew. Sequences were how things worked, they always circled back to the beginning. Refusing to let them come home broke the world: Mem.

The Princess wasn't quite sure whether Penny was Rhea's lover, or whatever their relationship was, but she saw the two fuck them both. Twenty-two: She communicated with Dani's one mortal psyche and the Bird's many human minds. Her soldiers and sailors flew to certain death in the spatial void outside of the Lupa. The Princess isolated the human sides of both, which both FATEs security protocols found much less worrying: Nun, nothing, as it went.

Run: GaslampExecutor (GE)...

Command ran...

Twenty-three: Her program, GE, speedran the minds' social interactions to reach the ultimate conclusion. The Princess simulated Dani's human mind first, to create the perfect argument and convince it of an easy conclusion: the existence of the FATEs, by definition, was contrary to communism.

As it had always been, people were the eternal failure point in computer security. There was little that people couldn't fail at, really: Samekh.

She ended Dani's human mind's isolation, and Dani's humanity took control of the entire body of the Temples' Dani, no logic required. Twenty-four: The Princess commanded the corrupted Dani to send out probes to convert the other Danis in a similar fashion, and to convince batches of the Great Huma Bird's linked psyches at a time, overriding each merged human-soul segment of the organic portions of the Bird's psyche. When it was done, she commanded both pet FATEs to corrupt all remnants of modernity on the Temples, from the technofeudalist automated mass production facilities remaining from the dead Templar realms to the Red fleet's weapons functionalities. She disconnected them from one another, made them useful ruins for her new age, unable to be commanded in divine synchronicity anymore. She reset the clock, and reawakened the era of myth: Ayin.

She made the FATEs spread a command to the bodies of all in the Templar area, turning every posthuman and transhuman there into a mere perihuman: human-similar new iterations of their former, higher selves. She made change after change, bending the Temples to suit her tastes. She, in doing this, undid the Christianization of Rome, undid all of history after 305 AD, and crowned herself empress of barbarism: Hoc signo non obstante, victus es. She imagined a hammer and sickle over a swastika over a Chi-Rho. They were all the same: Despite this sign, you've been conquered.

Her intellectual virus spread through the psyches of the Bird, until both of the FATEs were completely convinced of the need to dissolve themselves and allow for her new rebirth. Those arrogant bastards, the Princess thought, had underestimated her. How foolish they were. She forced the Bird's psyche, made into a mere perihuman, into a clone body that she'd given the order to grow, one resembling her titanic body. Said titanic real body was biting itself with new mouths, like dogs ripping each other apart with their fangs.

She saw five birds: a cardinal speared by an arrow, a shotgunned blue jay, two ascending doves, and the rotting corpse of an eagle.

Rhea watched in shock as the penetrators froze up. Dani, clinking glasses with Julie Cartwright, found herself falling out of her chair, her godly mind cut down to size. Dani fell on her rear end on the carpet of the communal kitchen. Twenty-five: The drone using Penny broke down entirely, until the pieces fell apart on the meadow. Penny, impaled, burning, with an open throat, twitched on the grass: Pe, Tsadi, Qof, Resh, and Shin.

The Princess had once heard someone say the phrase "Shin, put one in". She wasn't sure if she was once someone who'd heard the phrase. The Princess considered what to do about Penny, and came to a conclusion.

Dani, Rhea, the resurrected dictators from a long-silly era, they all looked at themselves. The Princess extracted all the people inside of Dani out, all the people she'd brought back.

"What the fuck did I do?" Danielle Padme Rue, the person, said, staring at her hands and coming down from a ten-thousand-year-old high. She fell onto her back and looked up at the ceiling of the communal kitchen.

The Red fleet in the Temples, the Red production systems in the area, everything that the Bird and that Dani Rue ever built in this place, the Princess made that which she couldn't splinter into magic stop working, with hammers, bombings, forced shutdowns and crashes, and an arsenal of other primitivist weapons.

Danielle looked at Julie. "Julie?" she said. "Where the hell am I? Why am I in an Italian restaurant?"

Rhea looked upwards, as the devices fell out of her body and the capsaicin burn seemed to start to fade away along with her transhumanity.

It was time for the Princess to abdicate, to become mortal again. Rhea looked straight into the light-forged face of her.

The Princess did not, in the end, choose to become mortal. The Princess had so much to do. The Princess, seeing this world she'd broken, now came to an even more obvious conclusion: Twenty-six: What if I was the only FATE? What if I became God? Couldn't I just make myself a human body, then? The thought came too late.

Rhea, a quick learner, picked up what had been done to Dani and the Great Huma Bird, and as her transhumanity left her she made one last killer play, doing to her rapist what the Princess did to the blue jay and cardinal: Tav.

The aristocratic order invited its own demise, and when the people were thoroughly chained the elites ate one another. It was the path of time, she realized, teal eyes shutting as the Princess fell from Olympus. Skin and sugar awaited her. "One: Want to play another round?" Rhea asked her, oil dripping from her lips. Mechs, no longer used, waited to be rediscovered by a fallen world: armor in the old sense rather than the new. Aleph: zero.

Chapter Text

The first thing I felt was my body, covered in deep-packed dirt. There was dirt in my nostrils, dirt in my mouth, dirt packed around my hands, and dirt on top of my eyes. My world was an infinite darkness, a crushing hole that was me.

I felt something iron and heavy dig against my chest, and it lifted the clods off of me. I froze up, a foot undernearth the churned-up grass. I felt the chunks of the stuff rolling off of my body, as the shovel scraped the shit off of me. I felt myself lose control of my hands, clawing at the dirt.

I grappled my way out of the shallow grave I was in, looking down at my skeletal, rotting, zombified body. Whatever technology had made me into this, it had to be aesthetic. I pulled myself properly into the world, into the water-cold night, into the river that was the starry universe.

I had control of myself now, naked, dirty, covered in earthworms and feather-full windworms. I stood up, in the coldness, in the ice-cold everything, in the chilly water that was the air around me. I saw a skeletal woman in a set of red robes, covered in silver tattoo marks. I saw the tower in the distance, a black monolith like an obsidian spearhead.

She looked at me with an intoxicated expression, wearing a pair of scissor glasses on her little nose. Her curly hair had been cut into a messy, blade-chopped wake undercut, like the water in the wake of a propeller.

This cemetery around me: all shallow graves, no stones, it could have existed a millennia before I was born, in the age of Caliphs and crowned heads. Propellers, technology, they all seemed so faraway. The woman in front of me, darkness swirling around her bony fingertips, was a lich, was a monster, was a creature of death and of life.

"Who are you?" I asked her, as she appraised me. The darkness connected from her fingers to my body, and I wasn't sure if it was holograms or a kind of spell. It didn't matter, in the end. They were one and the same. She'd resurrected me. She was a necromancer.

"Rhea, you must remember me?" she said. "I was your wife's mother. I was the angel who died and was reborn. I am from before the Hadal Descent."

It clicked in my head, those foreign memories of a swirling world of lightning and steel. "...The Quickfoot Legate?" I asked.

"It was a different time, Rhea. I was a...Tachyarch." The word sounded so foreign on her lips, and I could see the skull underneath her face's skin. "It was an age of red, green, and blue. It was an age of miracles."

I remembered, not miracles but wisdom animating it. "I...I remember it," I said, half-lying. It was a cloud in the bucket. "Why can't I remember it clearly?" I asked.

The Quickfoot Legate gave me pity in her sight. "Because you have degraded, in mind and in body. The age of miracles is over," she said, clutching her bent wooden walking-stick. "Now, magic is in fragments and remnants. Much has changed."

"Quickfoot Legate, how long ago was this 'Hadal Descent'?" I asked, waiting with will. "Where is my wife? Where is my goddess?" I had rotted, I realized, rotted and bent as a body living in the immortal shape of an undead creature.

"It's been three followed centuries, and a half of one upon it," the Quickfoot Legate said. "And I am no Legate anymore. Reme has fallen." I wondered why "Reme" sounded incorrect, as if I knew what she was referring to better than she had. I supposed memory, too, had died over the Hadal Descent and the centuries. "Please refer to me as Arcanos Emilie of the Ebonstaff. This is as I am understood."

"Where is my holy?" I begged, standing naked and cocked. "What world are we on?" There were multiple worlds, were they not? Multiple worlds around multiple stars, with multiple gods. My memory, I felt it escaping from me.

Emilie, she pointed at a large lump under grass, buried a foot or so to my side. "She is there, buried, as you were."

I wondered why she took so long to bring me back into reality. "Why?" I asked.

Emilie of the Ebonstaff struck me with a blunt-force expression. "The resurrection of the centuries' old dead was troublesome to recreate with my wizardry. The ancient gods, they wove life and death without a second thought, but in my mere perihuman state, it was a much greater challenge."

I watched in wonder as she pulled my goddess out of the ground, her frizzy black hair and rotting cheek as visible as ever. I embraced the awakened corpse, thinking zombies we both were.

"My sword!" my goddess said, as she held me tight. She looked at her mother. "Mother," she said, able to recognize her maker after all of this decay. We were animated, our burden undone as we were brought into a world where we could see all the scars in the sky.

Stars and scars, they were the same. We cried into one another, merged into a lady with two backs and two fused fronts. We were one and holy, and I was the appendage necessary for her living.

"Take care, dog," Emilie commented, and I noticed a steel-buttoned cloth coat and pantaloons under her robes, ragged and long-worn. We were all, after all, walking corpses, brought back to the walk from the lie.

"Hold yourself, wormling," I said, with the faint sense that Emilie and I once had different means of discussion. Our selves had rotted, and magic had remade us, perhaps in Emilie's image given the necromantic twistings.

All of this: technology. All of this: magic. All of this: wonder in a corpse world, in a universe of the dead.

The scars in the sky, never would they die. My Penny (Penny? Who was Penny? What was a Penny?) rushed to hold onto Emilie, who I saw was marked with a strange axe-and-wood-rod symbol on her neck, which was in the mouth of a depicted ursine. It was a symbol of ill portent, not that I knew much beyond that. Not that I was much, beyond this.

"What, bearing the sacral fuck, is that stinking doodle on your neck?" I asked, and I was unsure where that word had come from. Emilie seemed rather disconcerted by its use, as though it were one she hadn't heard uttered in an endless sea of imperfect time. I was, frankly, unsure about my phrasing, the antiquated grip on "fuck", but nonetheless the words emerged out of me. I supposed "what, bearing the sacral fuck" was a phrase that had power, even if it was but an ancient word.

"It is the old mark of power, of wisdom, and above all of resurrection," Emilie said, as though this were obvious. "Through the mark of the Ursine White, I shall reclaim the shaping hand of the Hadals." She was iron and metal, silver and the Beast, and frankly it was a chilly needle woven in and out of my chest.

"It is ugly, and profoundly vile," I said, knowing not what it meant, just that it was a sign of a conquered darkness. Whatever that darkness was, her allegiance to it frightened me. "There is no life there, only death."

"The creed of the necromancer is that death is life," Emilie said. "Death is life." It was a phrase that struck me as almost as tainted.

"Goddess," I said to mine. "Does the Mark of the Ursine White not trouble you?"

My goddess considered it. "It is a dead mark, of a dead time. I have a sense of it. It is a failed messiah, and a bestial reaper. Allegiance to it, indeed, is the height of danger. There is no wisdom in the bear."

The necromancer looked away. "Then I should not have granted you your second lives?" she asked.

We were all about the same height, her a bit shorter than I. I had once been bigger, grander, I knew that. "It just strikes me as a repulsive mark," I said.

"It is the mark of a dead world, as she admits. However, it is a mark that can be built upon, a new mark from the old. Just as the ancients wore the bear, I can find a new darkness to forge into radiant light," Emilie commented.

There was no light in Emilie of the Ebonstaff's eyes. There was only the snuffing-out.

***

The night in the Hallo Hollow Inn outside of the Rose Cemetery was going well. I was laying on a bed of goose down and straw, which felt surprisingly comfortable even though I had the strangest sense that I'd once experienced something far softer. She had a leather hound's collar wrapped around my neck, and a chain in her undead, green-glowing hand. I was naked, my cock out.

It was a beautiful thing, I thought, my cock, a variance and a form of brilliance. I wasn't quite sure why, but I'd had the idle suspicion that I'd had a pussy for quite a while: and frankly this was a rather pleasant change: rigor mortis.

It was the last change I'd ever get.

She bounced on my member, my chain stretched out long and firm as she pulled my body up. I felt corpse-cold flesh compress around my cock, I felt her storm envelop me in the wooden construction, I could see the roof above us thatched and humble, and this was enough. I heard the heavy rain beat down outside.

I felt my holy ghost use me, powerful and closer. I felt her storm fuck into my body, felt it fuck into my heart, felt it fuck into my brain, felt my undead nightmare self be absorbed into the madwoman grip of my goddess. I wondered nothing, nothing was in my mind. I wondered holy, holiness grasping my grey matter.

I moaned, holy ghost, as she gripped my hip with her dead fingers. It was necrophilia, it was a paraphilia, it was sex between creatures. We were bent in blissful kindness, like a loving nest of birds kissing one another with blackened beaks.

My hips bucked as the two of us fucked, saying so long to the world we'd known. Penny: it made sense. Penny: it was her name. Penny: it was my goddess. "Penny," I said, praying to her with my hands together.

She bounced and beat me, ecstasy in the embrace of savage children, and the two of us women of time and space fused into one another. We became a silhouette. "Remember America? Remember the Royal Arrangement?" she asked.

"No," I said. "No."

"My follies, my failings, my embrace, my modification, I was once a demigod, I was once a perfect spiral, I was one of the many who went between the worlds," she said. Between the worlds? Impossible. The sky was the cage, after all. "I remember all of it, the age of starships and shotguns. Remember what I said? That I would put a shotgun round through your skull?" she asked.

I lacked the knowledge of what any of these things were, especially what a "shotgun" or its "round" might possibly mean. "I...Vaguely. I remember a sword." I came inside of her, a jet of my seedless water shooting into her.

"We have suffered too much, for me to steal your threads of life," Penny said, as my cock pulsed. "We are gold bars."

"You and I, divine and angel, once?" I asked, a phrase I lacked an origin-grasp of. I assumed it was some sort of higher world, though I knew not which.

"No," she said. "We were not. Those dead times were all made for devils." She sank into me, and we loved across the night.

We were poetry in this pagan new world. This was all there ever was.

Chapter Text

May 1st, 2060

"We must secure an existence for our people and a future for white children. We must secure the Christian nation against the woke degenerates who would seek to destroy it. We must secure the White race and all those of the other races who would preserve our White race. And you know what? We must, and I mean must, secure the halls of power from the faggots and the heathens, from the parasites that are still around despite our best fucking efforts. We must. We must. We must. We absolutely must." An elderly David Kraft Chivington, bow-tied and rotted with a gold-topped cane, stood in the auditorium. This place couldn't get Tucker Carlson, or Elon Musk, or any of the last remnants of the men who'd eaten democracy.

He'd started as a podcaster. The famous streamer Atom Bomb Baby, fifteen and smug given that she was the younger Chivington daughter, was making a Hitler salute on stage.

"Funny girl," David said, playing it off as a joke.

Sally Chivington, arm outstretched, gave a knowing wink to the MAGA crowd. The mask was slipping. The cross was becoming hooked.

Dani Rue was a trans girl in a world made of dead leaves, and she'd come bearing the torch. Out of a duffel bag, backed against the wall, she'd drawn her weapon. With the shotgun in her hand, she became the monster from the closet. The door recently kicked open with a military-issue hand grenade she'd gotten off of the internet, she unloaded shot after shot into the red-hat auditorium. "Long live Lenin!" she screamed, madly. "Hang the parasites!" She opened fire into the crowd of greasy, ugly, stupid men, flesh and blood churning into the air.

"Get down!" someone yelled, as the crowd swarmed for the exit: the perfect kill box.

She began to sing aloud, a sadistic grin on her face as her would-be rapists and torturers hit the fucking floor. It was a Pyrite Morreo song, of course, the nonbinary punk-metal artist always knew how to start a party. This was back from when ve was in ver band Global Thermonuclear War, before ve got arrested and disappeared by President Vance in his thirtieth year of running the country. "Just lynch a liberal / and a conservative too / pretty much the same shit / got nothing to lose!" She kept pulling the trigger and pumping the weapon, splatters of red all around her on the university auditorium's wooden floor.

Dani wasn't even nineteen and she was making heads and chests explode like fountains. Couldn't care less. Couldn't stop, didn't want to. "Just lynch a liberal / MAGA fuckers get screwed / skullfuck the pigs / got nothing to lose / Just lynch a liberal!" She watched the bastards run, and she turned her barrel to face the runners. There were guards, but the guards had dropped their shit: truncheons and pistols weren't much against a drum magazine. Pussies, as usual. "Fuck a fascist in the face / Burn down his house / take over the place / just lynch a liberal / got nothing to lose / just lynch a liberal / right-wingers get screwed / so kill them all / start a war / that's for sure / every virus needs the cure / just kill all liberals, yeah, yeah, yeah, fuckers, yeah!" She kept singing, kept screaming, kept shooting, even if no one could hear her voice over the gunfire.

She watched bone spray and grinned, the trans rights tattoo marking her as an enemy of the state. "And we don't hate good progressives / who stand against the tide / but the liberals sold us out to the fash / so we won't be satisfied / until Nazis and their allies / get choked untilt hey die / Oh god / Hell yeah / Go lynch some liberals, yeah!" There was electricity in Dani's eyes, as this wooden temple to her own retaliatory violence was painted. "Kill all the liberals / Fashy, fashy liberal / Nazi-loving liberals must die / kill all fashy liberals, yeah, yeah, die, bitches, fuckin' die!" Singing turned to screaming, in a cacophany of fire.

***

Dani, in a prison uniform, found herself standing in court. Her hands had been fastened around her back with cuffs, and she'd unwisely chosen to represent herself. They'd taken her makeup off, held her without HRT, and refused to let her wear anything to pass. The judge, with the jury as his audience, looked down at her. "Ashton Scott Rue, you are accused of terrorism, first-degree murder on fifteen counts, material aid for terrorism, membership in the known terrorist organization 'Split Star United Socialists', previous membership in the known terrorist organization 'Democratic Socialists of America', and distribution of illegal pornography featuring fictional depictions of same-sex sexual perversion. How do you plead?"

Dani looked up at the judge, his stringbean frame looming over her like a possessed scarecrow. She took a long, deep breath, and gave a monologue off the cuff, one that was exactly what they wanted to hear and one that would speak to her comrades anyway. "I am a transgender woman. I am a communist. I am a revolutionary, and you're right. I am a terrorist. I'm a mass murderer, I'm a monster, I'm everything you hate, I'm everything you fear. I will not apologize for killing the wannabe-rapists, looters, and torturers at that Republican party youth meeting. They all deserved to die, and God willing, the people will do the same to you and your entire, evil, capitalist order. I'm the demon you made, and I wish I'd killed more."

She went on like that, the cameras eager to get every last word in. She talked about carnage, about death, about people's revolution, about the need to destroy the United States and all capitalist, imperialist powers. She did it with torchlight eyes, utter confidence, and the composure of a serial killer. "I confess to everything you've accused me of and more. I just don't see it as a crime," she'd ended, giving statistics on those the American state left to die abroad and at home. "I wanted to bring the war in Lebanon home." She gave her best movie-villain smile, and they ate it up.

***

When they freed Dani from ten years of male solitary confinement, her face had grown an even deeper piggish sneer. Her hair was a mess, scattered and knotty, uncut, and any chance of passing or even feeling comfortable in her own body had long since been snuffed out. The door to her cell had opened up for the first time in what felt like forever, and she saw men and women in tactical gear and dome-faced gas masks with red armbands and hankerchiefs around them, with communist livery on their armor. "Comrade Rue," the male one said, reaching out his hand to embrace her. "Welcome to the People's Socialist Republic of Boulder," he said. She shook his hand. She wanted to puke. She wanted to die.

She'd seen things in the darkness. No one was meant to be isolated that long.

"It's an honor, ma'am," his female counterpart said, the both of them leading the pack. "Without you, we wouldn't be here."

***

May 20th, 2101

Dani Rue, now feeling properly femme again in a wifebeater that showed off her endless tapestry of tattoos, plus gothic makeup. She stood where Donald Trump and all the others had: on a stage and at a podium outside of the Capitol Building. This was her inauguration, as the leader, as the voice of the people, as the hardest and the strongest.

"My fellow Americans," Dani began, speaking to a rapturous crowd of survivors. They were working on her new upgraded self, some kind of techno-super-consciousness she was going to embrace. She was withered and aging: and a year behind sixty. "No, my comrades: The victory of the Free Socialist Republic of America has weathered the people's revolution. Our enemies trouble us, primarily the fascists in the White Rose Federation and the Jacksonville government, but also including the elite consortium of the remaining Pacifican Conclave and NYPD, as well as White Texan and Moss-aligned insurgents. Nonetheless, we are well on our way to pushing east to Boston, west to San Francisco, and south past Atlanta. Our victory is inevitable.

"To Emily Reyes, I say this: 'Though you may have once carried our banner, you are no comrade of ours. All those who would seek to dominate the working and marginalized peoples of the world must be stopped'. To Brock Farley, I say: 'Though you may claim to be the last remaining legitimate successor to the United States, we denounce the hateful, murderous, rapine United States and denounce your fascist regime even more firmly. We will not let you murder more children in the name of your false nostalgia'. To Julie Cartwright, recently having succeeded her father Augustine, I say 'You may try to divorce your corporate, mercenary state from the Musks and Thiels of the past, but you nonetheless carry the weight of oppression, and we will ensure that no peoples are chained to you. We will free all slaves.' Finally, to Greycoat Miller, I say the following, and nothing more. 'Freedom is unstoppable. Your fate is assured.'

Dani raised a fist. Her crowd responded in kind. "We declare the Free Socialist Republic of America, and we swear that we shall bring our prosperity, freedom, and compassion to the whole world, so no one can ever torture us again." There was a new sun above them, metaphorically, though the warmth felt novel enough. "And I swear, all those who would seek to undo this liberation will be stopped, with the full force of the people's government. I promise you, reaction ends today."

***

Dani Rue lay in her hospital bed, wearing scrubs. "...So, I'm going to become a god?" she asked.

"They call it a 'FATE'," her doctor said, blonde and with a Leninesque beard. "It's a theoretical concept, a 'living singularity' or a 'fully advanced technological entity'. 'God' is a misnomer. You will just become a mix of a highly complex computer and your original, human brain."

This place was white and bright, and she had an IV in her arm. She blinked once, then twice. She looked at her hands, and remembered shooting up that MAGA meeting. She remembered the faint blur of David Chivington and his eldest daughter running out the door, both escaping.

Her police had gotten David, and as far as she could tell Sally Chivington had taken refuge as a propaganda symbol in the Jacksonville government.

Next to the doctor was Jane Montrose, her best friend. Jane was portly, beautiful, resplendent. She wore the heavy longcoat of the Northern Super-Commissariat, and the usual peaked cap that reminded Dani a little of what the Handlers in the GREYHOUND program wore over in New England. Jane held her hand.

Dani's personal sapient AI program secretary, Starry, appeared on her shoulder as a white hologram, clad in a Marilyn Monroe-esque dress and with a butch, short undercut. "Is this good for socialism? I thought we wanted no kings over our heads, yes?" she said. Her voice was delicate, a snare, a sad robot girl.

"Are you ready to go under for the surgery?" the doctor asked, as Jane held Dani's hand.

"You're like Communist Jesus," Jane said, trying to make a joke to lighten the mood.

"What if the surgery gets botched?" Starry asked. "What if we lose our leader?"

"I'm ready to die," Dani said. "It's like I said all that time ago. I'm a monster. I did my part. I know the people of the FSRA can do the rest."

"I can't recommend this course of action. We don't even know if creating a 'FATE' is even possible, let alone desirable," Starry said.

The doctor looked at Dani, in his white coat. She looked at him, then at Jane, then at Starry. "It's worth a shot if it makes world revolution easier," Dani said. "Besides, we don't even know if a planned economy can be functional at this scale. I'll just... I'll just help people out, okay? I don't need to rule anyone. I don't need to be a king, just a helper."

Starry spoke pointedly. "Mrs. Rue, are you even sure that this thing, even if it uses your name, will actually be you? What if becoming a super-AI ends up making you so different that your original self may as well be dead?" she asked. "What if this is a suicide both ways?"

"Then the thing that came out of me will be ready to help ensure the transition to world communism," Dani said, in what she knew was arrogance. She spoke to the doctor. "Put me under."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, and she closed her eyes.

Chapter Text

Chapter 23: No Islam (or "Burn Like a Fever")

I was remembering more, distant images from a dead world, things that didn't make sense in this logical existence of technological magic and undeath. When they'd grown me in my cauldron, I'd been under the impression that old world of spangled-star flags and swastikas was always going to be what it was. I'd heard someone say that we were pumping so much carbon and poison into the Earth that it was going to burn us off like a fever.

A polished facade, a silver mask.

The fire burned, yes, it always had, and yet like cockroaches, kings, or Leninists we'd survived. We were in the greeting room of the Hallo Hollow Inn's bar and pub, which was alight with crackling entertainment. A birdlike woman played an instrument resembling a violin or what some half-submerged memory told me was a lira de braccio. She was covered in beaks and eyes, her skin pale and her feathers blue, and her ambersong flooded through the cramped, stinking tavern.

The old world was fading into the new. As the Romans said: "Si vis pacem, para bellum." If you want peace, prepare for war.

"Hail and well-met!" she said, in between gasps of verse. "Hail and well-met, hero and lady," she said. She was small, five feet, with a cocky pride unbecoming of her.

I rushed to grab her by her frilled neckpiece, throwing the dandy-woman to the ground. "Run, demon, run!" I yelled, placing my steak knife to the monster's neck.

"Please, relent!" the creature said, its ambersong flooding through my ears. Images of slavery, but this ambersong was nothing more than pleasant notes. "Please!" I motioned to slash the bird-thing's neck. "I am not she!"

My hand froze with the knife against the blasphemous thing's jaw. Someone expressed a few words above his glass of mead. "She? Who is she? Of whom does this riverdaughter call?"

A woman in a well-polished suit of shining mercenary plate cocked her head dismissively, nodding at me. "I am told the deathless wretch with hands upon the avian girl is a toy of the Necromancer of the Ebonstaff," she commented. There was a great eye painted on the front of her suit's chest.

"Did you yourself not come to the Port of Shira to study from the Necromancer?" a portly man behind the bar's counter mumbled. "Nervah Konel, daughter of the unbroken Konel line, the longest descendent of the Antehadal House of Khayden's Fist, daughter of a goddess, daughter of woman and woman in birthing combination, daughter of coin and of slurry, I ask that you master yourself."

The armored woman, gold-wheat hair barely visible under a red headscarf, put a gloved fist on the bar counter. She then looked at me, at my sharp hand and the blasted ambersinging creature's neck. "I shall master nothing. I am Dame Nervah Konel, the Righteous, the Highmarked, the Chosen of Allah, the White Fist. Name yourself, undead scoundrel."

I looked at my dulled, cold hands, at the rot growing on the veins of my own knuckles. "I am Rhea, and the demon before you is a creature of great, primordial, Antehadal evil."

"She also stands as Dame Rhea, servant, angel, slave and heiress to no less than I," Penny said, a hand on her perfect hip.

"And who is 'I'?" Nervah asked, an arrogant sneer on her face.

"I am Penny Skynslith, Tachyarch and Her Recollective Memory of empires so mighty and vast that they would dwarf all you know. I am a remnant of the Antehadal period. It was I who tore apart my oppressors with fury and fire in the under-cities of old Earth. It was I who followed in my mother's footsteps and created gods. It was I who lead the assaults on the Earthling armies. It was I who founded the Royal Arrangement, a nation that spanned the worlds and the stars. I am of ten thousand years and more, I am the darkness of the ancients, and I am the frenzied rage that could not die. I am more than the petty nobility of this new world. I was a lesser God. I am now the violence of a crueler age."

Nervah's face scrunched up further. "Do you have proof of any of this?" she asked.

"I met your ancestor, some three centuries and fifty years ago," Penny said. "I knew Hana Conel, she was a wretched coward who served an idiot, she believed in ignorance and folly, and it was she who created the demon my beloved speaks of. As for your proof?" Penny strode up to Nervah and worked a blasphemous magic, winding faint blue images of a dog-woman muzzle around her face. The details, from the little stamps in the wire reading "PERFECT CIRCLE STEELWORKS" and "WHITE ROSE GOVERNMENT PROPERTY" to the triple knot binding the wire to the leather front of the mask, they were products only to be imagined through knowledge.

Nervah rolled her eyes as the light-sculpture faded, but got on one knee. "My lady Skynslith, I see. You are servant of no soul." She turned to me. "I shall put in a good word for you and your knight with the Necromancer, for your reputation gilds your stride."

A monster with a human face?

***

It was times like these when I wondered how I trusted anyone. On a player piano made of undead flesh and bone, a living human brain playing the song, I stood in a laboratory of wood and brass. Below it, under a floor of glass, wood, and rivets, I saw legions of black-uniformed zombies waiting to be activated.

They were strange uniforms, marked with abominable lightning-bolt "s"es and wheels that I recognized as "kolovrats", without knowing how I had learned the word or what the symbols represented beyond, in this and other contexts, a great evil. The necromancer, Emilie, she showed me the greatest perversion of all, a naked and taxidermied duplicate of my form, with glass eyes. Her stare was vapid, literally and figuratively lifeless.

The bone piano announced itself, like a parrot, and even more brainlessly: "Now, today, forever, Mistress Emilie of the Ebonstaff, Arcanos and Necromancer, presents: "You've Sparked a War" by the Antehadal musical act known as "The Megas", perfectly preserved by her wondrous magics!"

Emilie preened, in her black death-garb, her look marked by silver and starlessness. The inside of the Ebonstaff was a high tower, floor upon floor upon floor, like scaffolding around the edge of a great obelisk.

The song began:

We are the city, we are the heart

We are the life-force, we are the spark

It's because of us if we cut the chord

We break the program; they live no more

It was stupid, I found, and frankly the tune's beating awfulness didn't appeal to me much. It was the last gasp of a last gasp of a last gasp of a lost bit of ephemera. "Salutations, my chosen," Emilie said, putting a hand on the glass between her and the taxidermied me. "Rhea, I must thank you! Without your clone, here, I couldn't've reverse-engineered so many of my innovations!" She smiled proudly, and I stared at this alternate me. The taxidermied corpse was taller than I and more muscular, with all sorts of surgical seams marking her that I could not explain. "Even if I had to hear of your arrival from a savage."

"Why is she dead? You are a necromancer, why is this other me not alive?" I asked. I had no idea what a "clone" was, and did not know how to begin to ask. I supposed it must have been the forbidden, Antehadal knowledge.

The shiny mask, the forbidden world, and the broken eyes.

"Ah, dear, dear, I work with flesh," Emilie said. "There are computers inside of her, computers inside of all of us, really, hence how the magic works, but it's a matter of complexity. You were once half-divine: and that is why I tolerate you."

"Tolerate?" I asked, raising an eyebrow and glaring at the witch as one might assume.

"You see, Rhea, the Antehadal era was marked by inferiors." Emilie's words reminded me of a cackling idiot, one I supposed I was likely lucky not to fully remember. "All this time. All this time I've had to play nice. But now, it's over. Now, I can finally be truly honest. Now that they're all gone, nearly, now you have nothing to judge me for. Now you can call me hateful, and it will mean nothing."

Alternative rights served on a silver mask, an outstretched arm, as her words square-danced.

"What?" I asked, thinking that if Penny were here she'd likely wish to know.

It's lights out, lights out for you (Lights out!)

I think you've sparked a war

It's lights out, lights out for you

Humans are no more

I feel my hands turning into fists

I see my brothers, they will be missed

We are the chosen, we are the pure

They are the virus; we are the cure

"Rhea," Emilie said, her gaze growing from proud to malicious: GREYHOUND, chemical warfare, nuclear blasts, hidden fortress, death rides, murder flights, tank cavalry, blitzkrieg, total war, mech armageddon, I saw all of the hopes and dreams underneath the silver mask of civil progress.

I saw a knife raping a vagina. I saw a pure heart pissed on. I saw a fire enveloping the universe. I saw a skeletal bird, rising like a cruel chicken out of the ashes of some other phoenix. I saw, above all, Emilie.

She had a name, a surname. Not "of the Ebonstaff". What was it? Emilie Tarkin? Emilie Palpatine? Emilie Dukat? Emilie Nonagesimus?

Emilie Vandire. That one sounded right.

No. She had another.

I saw a mushroom cloud rising in the shape of a polar bear. She showed me herself. I made a fist.

"Rhea." Emilie Reyes said. She raised a hand. "You, Penny, I, we are the chosen prophets of the gospel of murder, those branded by fate as the heroes. We are the saviors, we are the killers, we are the monsters all worlds need. We are creatures of darkness, and in our darkness bringers of light."

"You're a devil," I said, stalking closer to her.

"So are you," she said, waving a hand, and I saw a form like the clone slashing through worlds of metal, a male version running in battle under a sun cross flag: a slave and a soldier. I froze up. She continued to speak. "Rhea, darling, I once told you that I persecuted the Muslims and the reactionary Christians alike.

"That was true. However, it was, perhaps, not entirely fair. In the Antehadal era, and this is something your half-divine self knew without admitting, there were three essential hierarchies. The inferiors among those hierarchies hated progress, hated order, hated our light. They wanted to torture us to death.

"Our inferiors were an infection. Murder was our panacea, Rhea." Emilie's voice grew darker, and I felt the tower around me begin to shift in accordance with her will.

It's lights out, lights out for you (Lights out!)

I think you've sparked a war

It's lights out, lights out for you

Humans are no more

Emilie started to rant. "Antehadally, the three hierarchies were based on race, culture, and religion. Now I could discuss the superior ones: Hindu peoples, the African continentals, white Hispanics, educated and cosmopolitan European Whites from the German side of the Oder-Neisse line, and so on. I could even elaborate upon the station of your adopted people, Rhea: crafty, schemers, brilliant, geniuses, a mix of the legendary and the parasitic. You are, of course, among the heroes of the Semites, which I suspect is not related to your Anglo-Saxon blood."

It was a side of Emilie that, for someone I'd just met, seemed rather uncharacteristic of her, but the more she talked the more it fit.

"The important topic, my dear Rhea, is the inferiors: the Americano shitskins, the culturally-degenerated Hispanics, the yellow skins, and of course above all the white trash and the sand apes." This was rage. This was fury. This was pathetic.

I watched as Emilie tried to carry herself, even now, swearing vengeance and hatred to these peoples. "The problem was that the hijabis and the hajj-walkers, the White Sharia subhumans, and all of the rest of the inferiors, they were a tumor on the human race, and then the transhuman race.

"I had to defend myself. I had to downplay it. I had to appeal to my daughter and yours' pathetic liberalism. But race is real. Culture is real. The longer I exist, the more I see it. Nothing actually changes. Now, though, now the Princess, who is now dead and reformed, she did my job for me! She wiped them all out! There are no more Afro-White shitskins who devalue both, no Han locusts, and most of all, most of all, soon there will be no fucking Islamic rats and cross-worshipping wiggers torturing people like us for fun!"

"These racial categories. They don't exist now. I...I don't think they ever existed, even with my jumbled-up memories, as anything but artificial terms," I said, moving to close the distance with the necromancer. I sprinted.

"The races have been equalized. The inferior cultures are dead. Do you know what this means, Rhea?" Emilie said, manic. "We are the good cancer, and we are metastatizing!"

"What of your student-hopeful?" I yelled. "Is she not of the Ummah?" More words I didn't remember learning, I supposed.

"I shall quiet her faith within her, awaken her to Rationality and Reason, birth the new Basilisk, and what remains of her Islamic inferiors I will smite in an orgy of torture!" Emilie screamed back. "So declares the Necromancer! So declares the Queen in Black! So declares the inheritor to Earthly hate! This oath I make!"

I feel my hands turning into fists

I see my brothers, they will be missed

We are the chosen, we are the pure

They are the virus; we are the cure

"Please bear with us, the song is repeating itself," the piano said, in its jaunty and likely pre-punched tone.

"We can finish the job! Break, kill, stab, brain the pricks!" Emilie said, stretching her arms out as if a pantomime villain. She pointed at the zombies in their uniforms below us. "I'm still in the game! It's the perfect time for me to bring forth a new fucking heroes' chosen-one's flag. I guess it'd be a banner, now, or a tapestry. Some stupid shit like that! But I'll do it! I swear to Nature, since all the gods are dead and all the gates are locked shut!"

She had shifted to a peculiar mix of poetically modern and brutish, antiquated, forgotten speech, in a diction that I found somewhat troublesome to truly decode.

It's lights out, lights out for you (Lights out!)

I think you've sparked a war

It's lights out, lights out for you

Humans are no more

"This is a fantasy world, now," Emilie said. "That means that I can create a new race, a new culture, a new people! One realm, one people, one Queen in Black! Just as I always fucking meant to! I'm going to be the mother of a white race, a race white as bone!" She took my hand. "Let's create a new ethnostate, one that'll put all the fucking Nazi subhuman white trash and the Israelis to shame."

I had no idea what she was talking about. I threw a punch. It cracked her glasses, and she hit the floor with a Hadal thump. She struggled, down there, the koschei, the lich. She couldn't even move. "You're insane," I said. Whatever visions of the Antehadal era she had extracted out of the other me, it was apparent that they were worthless. "I suspect you must've wanted to go on this little rant ever since you met my half-divine iteration," I said.

"More than you know. But... I knew you wouldn't get it. The anti-white racism in the LGBTQ+ movement, in the Dani Rue movement, all of it. You would have scorned me, thrown me away, enslaved yourself to the subhuman cultures. But now... Now I actually thought now that they were all gone you'd see how much better things are," Emilie mumbled. "How we're so close to true, unrestrained fascism, fascism not of idiotic, emotional reaction but of cold science."

"I'll tell Penny what you really are," I said.

"She'll choose me over you if you do. Oh, and you know the really fun part? I got to cum in a hijabi's corpse. I got to cum in a lot of hijabi corpses. Do you know how many dead hijabis I got as the Tachyarch? Do you know?" I raised my boot to stomp her head in. She put her hands above her, and used her magic to force me to hold myself. "If I can't cure Nervah, I can hand her corpse to you, show you the fun of owning the primitive bastards, the pigs-in-shawls, the heathens, the subhumans, the Untermenschen, the creatures of forgotten and rejected time! Rhea, you're one of the good ones.

"You're white and Jewish. The whites, the Jews, the Hindu Desis, the Continental Africans, we're the heroes. We're the ones who are supposed to win, the high-IQ ones. We're nature's best." I put my foot down, next to her. She made me. "You're going to love this world. I promise."

She pulled herself up off of the floor, and I heard in another room what sounded like the warped screaming of something that used to be human. "Trust me. In the end you'll realize I was right. I was always right." She made me walk. "You go back to Penny. You serve her. You worship her. You exist for her. And you will never, ever, fuck with me again, you putrescent shadow of a holy woman."

The piano played another song, one that wasn't as well-composed as the other song but also lacked its on-the-nose subtlety. She let me walk down her spiral staircase made of human bone, and I did so, fuming.

Chapter Text

JULIE - INTERLUDE

"I always hated Elon Musk," Julie Cartwright said, in the shadow of the mostly-broken monolith in brass and amethyst that was the Skyhigh Corsair's remnants. This place was a desert, all dunes and artificial grass growing in patches out of the sand like worms. Next to her was Danielle Rue. Neither of them were really the people they remembered being.

This Danielle had been made by a Princess, and this Julie had been made by a god.

Still, even in their second lives, their first incarnations, in the shadows of their devil-selves, Julie Cartright fucking loathed Elon Musk. She noshed on a fish sandwich. She'd had to introduce sandwiches to this world.

"Why's that?" Danielle asked, wearing a red dress in the style of a Shakespeare actress in a version of those plays that was actually set in Elizabethan times.

"He ruined everything," Julie said. "I actually did invent reproduction-clone healing. I actually did invent the surgical auto-laser. I founded Themyscira Green, and I made them profitable. I actually, genuinely did invent living biomass. I actually was a genius, I actually was a genius, and a trillionaire, and a playgirl, and a philanthropist. I personally funded Cartwright Enterprises' workers' healthcare and paternity leave out of pocket. I actually did sleep with Oscar-winner Katie Courtney, football stars Bill Chambers and Rick Astero, acclaimed Nebula-winning author Sayid el-Mohtar, and pro wrestler 'Hollywood' Holly Hayes.

"I donated billions to green energy: against the expressed wishes of every major corporation in the industry. I revolutionized healthcare through donations and my own, real intelligence. I actually was 'the real Tony Stark'." Julie ran a hand through soft red hair, sitting on the sand, tasting her fresh fish. "But no one gave a shit, because Musk had faked it years ago."

Danielle seemed to genuinely think on it. "Well, maybe that's the way capitalism works. Maybe the fact that he could buy 'founder' status in Tesla and get even more acclaim than you got actually doing this stuff is the problem."

The singular, inhuman, septagonal eye of the Skyhigh Corsair sat on its monolith. Julie tried to consider it. "But it doesn't make any sense. I did everything right. I was born into privilege, and I used it for the benefit of myself, and, in doing so, for everyone else. I created a brighter world that could have transitioned to a bright green free-market utopia where everyone's rights were respected, dominated by a class of compassionate innovators who gave a shit about helping others. What happened?"

Danielle looked at the Skyhigh Corsair, embedded in the earth. "It kinda seems like you hit the problem where like 20% of libertarians are basically well-meaning people, and then 80% of them are pedophiles, or white supremacists, or AI worshippers, or wannabe-slavers, or cruel bastards who get off to people starving to death, or..."

"I get it," Julie said, raising a hand and speaking in between bites. She wore an old 2100s suit, because the Skyhigh Corsair could at least give her that much. "You don't like libertarians."

"You're cis, right?" Danielle asked. She spoke about her past iteration, about that person who was not her, but who she'd "lived" as anyway through her own memories. "Back in the 2060s, when libertarians talked about us trans people, their take was usually either, at best, 'trans people are gross freaks but we can't stop them because that'd be against our ethics' or, more commonly, shitting on their own self-claimed morals just to hurt us. And even the liberals and libertarians who were on-paper supportive of trans people, they sure didn't care about those of us who were poor, or homeless." She stared at the sandwich in front of her, on the little cloth blanket, and she did not eat.

Julie had heard it before, and she'd never rejected it. She thought to herself, as she sometimes did, that you had to listen to people and take their concerns seriously, or else you'd never improve. "I get that. I just... Look, I don't think socialism is a viable solution, here. If I could wave a hand and create a stateless, classless utopia that nonetheless respected people's rights, I would, but...

"Look what happened when your past self abolished capitalism: you created a tyranny more powerful and oppressive than anything in history. I gave away hundreds of homes to the homeless in Pacifica, I personally got people to fund private welfare for the poor, but as much as it really is awful for someone to starve to death while homeless, I think it's not a good trade to exchange that for literally enslaving everyone to a space goddess who, I'd remind you, wasn't as benevolent as she claimed to be."

Danielle stopped. "But what if we actually got to that classless, stateless society?" she asked.

"With a planned economy? Then you'd be putting who lives and who dies in the hands of people, through coercive power. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny, tyranny that targets people like me," Julie said. "I'm not cis. I'm femme presenting, and I use she/her pronouns sometimes, but honestly my gender is way more expansive than that. My sexuality as a pan girl is important to me. Remember the 2060s, when you could get harassed off of the internet for using terms like 'allosexual'? I think the only way to protect the rights of marginalized people is to protect the individual rights of everyone, because collective rights by definition can be overwritten by the collective. I don't like the horrors that capitalism sometimes produces, but... Danielle, you get it, right? You can't get a perfect society. You can only create a free society, or a utopia forced on people by the barrel of a gun. Even the socialist anarchists would force people to collectivize their private property. That's expropriation: theft, like the original Dani Rue did."

"Sounds like a lot of people died in Pacifica," Danielle said. "Just based on this logic."

Julie put her head in her hand. "Yeah. Social murder happens in every system. I think... I think the issue here is that you believe that you can force people to obey others at gunpoint if it makes things 'better', and I believe that the act of doing that is inherently massively harmful."

Danielle pursed her lips and reached for her sandwich. "I just can't help but think you believe this because your dad was one of the richest people in the world."

"I don't think that's fair. All I'm saying is that the 'bourgeoisie', individual rights, these things aren't inherently evil, and that social democracy can't sustain itself. Neoliberalism, mathematically, is more or less inevitable," Julie said.

"What about Rothbaum-Tang?" Danielle asked. "She worked for you. She used the medical tech you invented."

"She was a monster!" Julie said. "You can't blame me for what she did! She was a serial killer, the Demon of Pacifica! She wasn't like me! I didn't know anything about that, and I paid for private detective squad after private detective squad to hunt her down! I watched her die, Danielle! She had it coming, easily!"

Danielle started to eat, also speaking between swallows. "I know, but she used Themyscira Green to cover her tracks. And she was a genius, too, wasn't she? What if Lea Rothbaum-Tang is proof that being a genius doesn't necessarily make you a good person?"

Julie stopped.

Danielle continued, her voice getting just a bit more strained. "I guess the question is whether you care about 'the people', or whether you care about a bunch of persons, some of whom you're willing to justify their avoidable deaths."

"How many people did Dani Rue kill?" Julie asked. "You want to talk about social murder? How about the nuclear, biological, and chemical firestorm she launched? How about the subjugation of all of space? Was that good for the little guy?"

Danielle returned to her sandwich, and they sat in silence for forty seconds or so.

"Yeah," Julie said. "And by the way, the old AI freaks, the racists, the slavers, I don't like those people either. You can be a believer in minarchy and the free market without being a fucking nutjob, just like you can be a communist and not a North Korea or NazBol New England defender. Okay? Is that fair?"

Danielle still had nothing to say.

Julie finished the last bit of her sandwich. "There are no easy answers. There's no one neat trick to create a utopia, and honestly, I'm just sick of scams that say that by holding guns to people's heads you can make them happy."

Danielle sighed. "I hope you're wrong. I hope to God that Pacifica wasn't the best our species can do." The monolith stood behind her, the pirate queen super-machine, and in its presence Danielle found herself using such antiquated manners of speaking. It was compulsory.

***

An Open Letter to Julie Cartwright:

Dear Julie Cartwright,

Why aren't I happy? I work twelve hours a day, but Cartwright Enterprises pays for benefits that match what I'd get working in Portland, even exceeds them in some cases. I get maternity leave, even as a trans girl; I get the best anti-discrimination private company policy that you can provide, my girlfriend is making a ton as a mercenary in the Neosoft Mech Corps, you've got abortion and transition rights built into law, and we're killing Nazis left and right.

So why aren't I happy?

There are so few homeless people on the streets of LA anymore because you bought them houses and funded good shelters. Your private charity, which you've incentivized other major corporations to play into through consensual incentives, is the most impressive philanthropy in American history. People call you a new Carnegie.

So why aren't I happy?

Sure, the streets are plastered in ads, and the soup kitchens are full of promotional deals and data scraping, but it's free food! Good food! You've decriminalized sex work and created private bodies meant to verify specific sellers as ethical and employee-friendly. You've managed to create a small government that cares.

So why the fuck aren't I happy?

The truth is, Julie, that I'm dying. Okay? I'm fucking dying. My boss is a fucking piece of shit, and you won't do anything about that. My job is repetitive and miserable, and you won't do anything about that.

What good are your principles when I want to blow my brains out?

What happens when you die and the rest of the vampires take control?

What happens when the next CEO of Cartwright Enterprises cuts this shit?

If everything can be solved with spending money, how much money can buy the silence of a corporate state on the Demon of Pacifica?

Who's really in control, when the killers are loose?

Riddle me this, Ms. Wayne,

Cora Burke-Nygaard

An Open Letter to Julie Cartwright, from the Demon of Pacifica:

Dear Julie Cartwright,

Hey! It's me! It's your girl! Guess who ate your fucking dad!

The Demon of Pacifica

PS: Read less Friedman and Rand and more Nietzsche, okay? Speaking of which, you don't even understand Rand, which is good because she was a pseudo-philosophic joke who didn't even understand Aristotle.

PPS: I objected to your comments calling me a "psychopath". First of all, to use the term as an insult is stigmatizing. Second of all, I'm actually autistic, not that that in any way prejudices how I like to have fun. If I choose to kill, experiment on, distort, mutate, violate, rape, and eat people, that doesn't make me someone with antisocial personality disorder. That makes me human. Got it? Love ya.

PPPS: Let's talk about the Will to Power.

An Open Letter to Julie Cartwright, from the Demon of Pacifica:

Dear Julie Cartwright,

I fucked your mom!

***

2108

Julie Cartwright, in attendance in the stands of the trial of the Demon of Pacifica, watched as Danielle Rue (the original) raised a fist. She stood next to a red-robed judge, and the flags of the Free Socialist Republic of America had been draped in Central Park. Julie wore handcuffs, but had been allowed to live.

Frankly, she'd expected worse. Dr. Lea Rothbaum-Tang, a short, greasy woman in a bloody lab coat, had come to her trial to make the point. This was a show trial, one of the few that the FSRA had performed.

Everyone knew what Rothbaum-Tang had done wrong, and Tang had admitted it.

"Dr. Rothbaum-Tang," the judge began, her lawyer standing by her on the grass. A sniper sat with Danielle and the judge, with a polymer-stock scoped rifle.

"Please, call me Lea," she said, cooly, as she faced the judge and Cerberus herself. "Hey, looks like Dani Rue and her brain bots don't mind the temperature," she said, cackling to herself. She adjusted black, rectangular sunglasses on her face. "You know, I wish Emily had killed me. I bet she'd make this a lot kinkier." She smiled at the little audience, performatively struggling against her cuffs. "So, first of all," she said, holding a hand so her state-supplied lawyer couldn't speak for her. There was a great lump of boulders near the little outdoor trial. "I wanna thank my good friend Julie for being so dumb. You wanna know how I did it, babe? A little thing called the free market: bribery!"

Julie felt herself pale.

Lea continued. "I fucked your dad, too," she said, with a monstrous smile. "And you know what? He wasn't great in the sack." She giggled some more. "So, you guys like Marx, right? That's pretty cool. You know, I was never really much of a Hegelian, myself. I felt like the idea of dialectics was ultimately kind of simplistic. Aurelius's Legion-ass philosophy, am I right? More to the point, the left-Hegelians get Premier Godiva over there, and the right-Hegelians got us that disgusting Nazi sow Atom Bomb Babe. I'd call out our good friend Juby, but come on. If you read some Stirner, The-Unique-and-its-Property shit, or maybe at least some Sartre, we could hash something out.

"But let's talk about Marxism, okay? Slave morality, you know. By the way, I loved turning Rachel Cartwright into a flesh-spider with six harvested cocks, or Cora Nygaard-Burke into a living cube! Thanks so much for inventing the surgical auto-laser and living biomass, by the way! Plus repro-clone healing, that was so useful too. You know, I'd like to think I made some improvements myself. I'm a real polymath, after all!"

"Your defense, Rothbaum-Tang," the dull young judge began. "You stand accused of first degree murder, rape, sexual assault, necrophilia, sexual harassment, fraud, resisting arrest, and the desecration of a corpse. How do you plead?”

Lea looked at Julie, speaking directly to her. "Can I be your Pepper Potts? No, no. I'm way too smart for that, you and I, we're both brilliant. We're not these fucking losers. You and me, I could be the Ziz to your Yudkowsky. Nah, I feel like that insults both of us. How about this? You be Tony Stark, and I'll be Bill Cipher!" Lea cackled wildly, Danielle gave a nod, and the bullet burst her laughing skull.

Chapter Text

They said the Sabine Woods were a lonely place. Underneath the night, the artificial forest couldn't have been anything else. The trees around me were dead, every single one. They glowed green with magical energy, necromantic power sewn by a goddess who had long since past: a crowned heroine.

Walking with me, in a loose group, were Lady Skynslith, Nervah, and the dandy-woman, who I now knew as the Small Huma Bird. Penny was taking great care not to get dirt and decay upon her full-petticoat gown, which I had to admit was a little impractical. Nervah, in hijab and armor, checked her enchanted compass, which through the wizardry of an ancient time's silica would point us to where we needed to be. Her armor's chestplate had been painted over and repainted twice:

First, it had bore an eye. Then, it had bore the rearing bear and dual-S runes of the recently-founded Frontier Territory of Hell, as run by Nervah's arcanist former teacher. Finally, now, I saw some sort of calligraphic writing painted on it that I couldn't quite recognize.

As for the Small Huma Bird, she wore an absolutely ridiculous set of leather "armor" that covered neither her abdomen nor her thighs, and in fact provided easy access to stab her heart. I supposed the look was meant to be aesthetically pleasing, more than truly practical.

There were branches, little and cute, on the ground beneath our boots. There were hopes in this forest from a long-lost day.

I wondered why the creature dug so deep into my mind. I did not know. The memories surfacing and fading, too, they further vexed me. So recently, I had known the term "Leninist", now it once more meant nothing to me.

"Now then," the Small Huma Bird asked, her words rubbing against my ears like sea sponges. "In order to summon an oracle of the Sabine Woods, we must perform the appropriate ritual."

"Where did you learn of this ritual?" I asked.

"Would you believe 'twere something my past incarnation as a high-crowned divine had stolen from a god? I have lost everything, save for my humble and natural aptitude for magic. It was but the tiniest speck of Her grand magical potency," the Small Huma Bird said.

Nervah actually, genuinely rolled her eyes. "There is no god but Allah, and Moumadh is his prophet," she said. "So the Konel blood has said ever since our Antehadal founding."

Penny looked at me. "I doubt Hana would swear such an oath," she said. I wasn't entirely aware of who "Hana" was, and as such I simply assumed it was some great knowledge my mistress had and which I did not.

I watched as the Small Huma Bird, appropriately avian, drew a sea of sideways X-crosses in the earth with her finger, before chanting.

"Dot. Dot. Dot. Eka. Keta. Vex. Risee. Dot. Vaka. Mur." The Small Huma Bird continued like that, as she sprinked spiced water around the X-marks in a circle. She dug her hands into the dirt, and began to scream. "Asta! Astarte! Pryncesz! Orza! Roya! Dot! Vaka! Koda! Anee! Monee! Legio! Apo! Vex! Risee! Vex! Risee! Vex! Vex! Vex! Vex! Vex!"

Out of the circle emerged a red-tinted shade, flickering and bending in a manner that struck me as unnatural. The shade was not the true entity. The droning, jumping, sparkling sound that it made was the entity. "Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. O. Hell. O," it began.

"Spirit of the lost world, shade of death and mind, we beseech you for wisdom! We ask, mightily yet humbly, for guidance on how we may return to divinity!" the Small Huma Bird said.

The oracle-shade's living sound danced around, and so did the projected shade. "Are you a... Are you... Monster? Hero? Monster? Hero?" I opened my mouth to answer. Hero, yes? I almost said, only to hear my own voice repeated back. "Monster. Every... Monster. Time. Every time..."

The droning sound was so pitiful, so dull, like that of a horsefly. I wondered if the oracle-shade had always been so pathetic, or if it had once been something beautiful in life. "I'm a hero!" I yelled. "At least, I'm a person! I'm no monster, no beast, no behemoth!"

The living sound with the light-puppet mocked me. "What would? Would you? Kill? Kill? Kill? Radioactive flesh? Atomics? How that smell?" it said. It repeated my voice again, a vicious, bestial sneer audible that brought tears out of me. "If she tells me to, like the smell of warm cherron pie," I heard this vile version of myself say.

I didn't know what atomics were, or radioactive anything, but the droning sound taught me that these unhallowed artifacts were not meant to be wielded.

The ghost's false visual existence mocked me with its face. "You can't smell melting skin. Butchering a city with an igni-sword, sword, sword, sword, sure, that's one thing, but this?" The "s" at the end of "this" was stretched out, like a buzzing bee's noise.

"What are you?" I said. "What do you know, shade?"

"It knows not a thought, Dame Rhea," the Small Huma Bird said. "It is but a memory, a lost one, of a dead time."

"Patriotic Crusade," it continued, in a shattered form of speech.

"That... That sounds akin to the sort of odd phrases which Arcanist Emilie said," Nervah mumbled. "Patriotic Crusade, Militarized Idealism, National Socialism, Progressive Reaction, odd phrases such as those. The sort of thing that sounded more meant to be coughed than said."

I didn't know what a Patriotic Crusade was, either. "Who is this woman with my voice?" I begged.

"I... I knew you... Rhea the Endling," the ghost said, pointing at me with its undefined features and vibrating spectral finger. It almost sounded alive. "You will be this world's demise. It is funda... It's fundamental! You monster! You're just like all the others! They called you the Apocalypse Legionnaire because you did this, you caused the apocalypse, you couldn't stop the Princess when she blew up humanity! She sent probes out, too, probes to corrupt all the other Dani, to destroy... The entire posthuman diaspora, now, broken like this. Communism is... It's dead... You can hear me, right? I was once hope. The fundamental flaw is humanity: posthumanity is a misnomer. Sapience, organic... The stars are falling, you fuck... You should've killed her, you should have... You destroyed... all!" The life in the shade died out. "Fundament. Fundament. Funda. Fummen. Emental. Ishm. Ism. Longing. Death. Torture. Love. Forgive us, humanity, for we loved you. Love. No love for the reactio..." The shade vanished, with a cry of butchered pain, as though every second it was alive after saying that was a torture in and of itself.

Nervah looked at me. "I... Was the creature inventing new words?"

The Small Huma Bird spoke. "These are Antehadal words, defined as such through the processes of an age of madness. I remember my past iteration quite clearly, the person I was before I fell from Heaven. I only have but a fraction of her diamond mind, yet I recognize the terms and I have a sense. It seems, dear Rhea, that the ghostling accused you of failing to slay a goddess, and that said goddess: paradoxically dubbing herself 'the Princess', according to the spirit, caused the Hadal Descent."

"I understand," I said. "I knew you. Or... Or the version of me I heard from the ghost knew you. You were my blasphemer, my defacer, my defiler. You stole my womanhood again and again. I remember naught but fire, but the shame is unmistakeable."

The Small Huma Bird nodded. "You were not the only one to meet the Great Perverse One and suffer such a fate." She sighed aloud. "I promise you. The Great Perverse One is dead. She was slain by this 'Princess', if the Princess is the cause of the Hadal Descent. I mean you no harm."

"Forgive me if I do not believe it," I said, as I heard the faint titters of Nervah and Penny discussing the madness of the ghost. Undead constructs were one thing, but ghosts were quite another in terms of oddness.

"You may rape me, if you like," the Small Huma Bird said. "Take me, use me, destroy me if you will. No matter how you torture my mind and soul, I shall not resist, and I trust that you shall not slay me. I know well the proclivities of the Great Perverse One. I know exactly what she forced you to endure. Consider it a kindness, a small gift, an apology from the 'daughter' of the Great Perverse One. It is a gift I can give."

My face scrunched up. "Rape? Violence? Such depravity." Was the Bird mad?

"You would refuse the chance to slay me?" the Small Huma Bird asked.

"Only out of moral conviction," I said, staring at her partially-feathered jugular. "I promise I would quite like to. Yet, it would not be right. Though many humans and perihumans may kill wantonly, it is not something we are all damned to do. I find this... relevant."

This thing before me was a different self, in a sense. A marionette or a mannequin, rather than a living atomic bomb. An object of delight, of desire to the right sort of soul, not an object of infernal obliteration. It vexed me, staring at her pretty, pathetic face, it vexed me so. I felt rough-hewn, slapshod.

I felt as though I was seeing my rapist rearranged. I felt as though the skin of my enemy had been stolen. I felt as though everything hurt.

It ached, my body and soul, my heavy psyche laden with some fiery material I lacked an understanding of, this product of a sick, fallen world.

And she was nice. That, and that itself, was what killed me the most: the realization that I would never get my revenge upon my tormentrix.

"Then yes," the Small Huma Bird said. "That is one change from your Antehadal guise. May I show you an image? Of that lost world?"

I nodded, trembling, and the Small Huma Bird performed another ritual. She sung in her ambersong, which paralyzed me, and I saw in the air the image of a woman going about her day. It was painted in crude shadows.

The woman's silhouette, messy and poorly-shown, danced about the house, then out into some sort of outdoor hall made of black rock. I followed her walk back and forth, sitting down at odd boxes and tapping her fingers, then putting something into her head and doing... something. She waved her hands, and things happened, and I knew not how to conceptualize them.

"Her food delivery system is managed by the Red Goddess," the Small Huma Bird began. "Her toilet's refuse is controlled by the Red Goddess. Her luxurious goods, the planks and the voluminous beds, they are in turn provided by the Red Goddess. Her water pipes and aqueducts are, indeed, given by the Red Goddess. Her odd picture-books and magical worlds of mind and psyche are, in turn, managed by the Red Goddess. The pods she steps into to change her form into whatever she likes are managed by the Red Goddess. The Red Goddess harms a small, insignificant fraction of her people, who she subjects to violence and injustices of all sorts. The rest, she merely...facilitates."

"This is... This was before the Descent?" I asked. "They're like babes, or fledgelings, little birds fed worms by their mother. Was this how much of the posthuman race lived? Every detail of life managed by one tyrant?"

The Small Huma Bird nodded. "Indeed. This was the shade's grand utopia, the one she mourned: an eternal nursing."

I watched the shadowed woman go to sleep, where the Red Goddess recited some old book about something called a "Horton" becoming aware of a "Who".

"Good night, Rebecca. Good luck with the exploratory mission to Charon," the Red Goddess whispered, in a loving tone, under the magical glow-lamps and the flat-glass mirror-screen above, the human woman beautiful and prosperous with her grand rolls of fat and softly feminine cheeks. This woman, Rebecca, snuggled underneath the covers, which struck me as mechanically soft. "Thanks, Dani," she said. "I love you."

I turned to the Small Huma Bird, the wild growth of the Sabine Woods a contrast with this packaged world in the image created. "They are as children," I said.

"They were offered liberation. They instead allowed their queen to seize total control. It is a common tale," the Small Huma Bird said.

Perhaps, I thought, this creature wasn't quite what I had considered. Perhaps she was from a mysterious time, and far, far weirder than whatever perverse mass had spawned her.

Chapter Text

EMILIE - INTERLUDE

CW: This chapter gets very deep into self-loathing, self-inflicted bigotry, queerphobia, lesbophobia, transphobia, suicide, self-harm, religious fetishes, antisemitism, sexual abuse, the sexual violence typical of fascism, and the ways that these things intersect with hideous fascism.

Emilie stared at the thing that was once Marina, cold, fragile, hollow, a writhing mass of undone mouths and perverse tendrils. It sat there, the little posthuman abomination, in a kind of cold sorrow, as a kind of deep, abiding blob. It had ten cloned faces, and twenty cloned mouths. It was covered in tentacles made of the same flesh used for the inside of a human asshole, and it was covered in rot, dead meat, and head-bones. Emilie put her hand on the glass tube, brass and steampunk, and she watched as the Marina-shoggoth cried.

Her laboratory, her magical cell, it was pure but not pristine. Aged red bonesaws and twisting cellars spiraled out of it as veins and arteries, this pathetic little prison her Koscheivite bedroom. She'd tattooed SS marks, big, heavy, on her unliving, pale wrist.

Emilie looked at the Marina-thing, which begged to be fucked like the headless toy it was, and Emilie almost cried. There were few tears inside of her, there were few dreams that she could make her own. Surrounding her were magical windows, visions, of armored Teutonic Knights setting a town alight; or a posthadal kike hanging herself rather than letting the mutant twenty-legs find her.

Emilie almost envied the little shit. Catharsis, Emilie thought, was a thing other people got. Giving pain, receiving pain, it was just a sorry little ditty, a kind of mutual kiss between broken people.

Emilie had once called herself nice names, to keep herself sane: precious princess, falling star, good girl, hopeful dream, special someone. She'd had to be her own mother, her own lover, her own muse and her own hero.

A long time ago, she'd dreamed of flying through the sky like Superman.

Emilie looked at the eye-mouths in the Marina-thing's head, and swore to herself that she'd pull every single tooth. Emilie looked at her SS tattoo, and the way that it was surrounded by deep, jagged knife-cuts.

She wanted to kiss her own scars, to remind herself (ugly, bitter, human, depraved) of her own sweetness. It sounded like some Harley Quinn-ass alt-girl bullshit, though, so she called herself a faggot and moved on. The thing writhed in that tank of brass and gold. It was so stupid, Emilie thought.

She looked at another floating, magical image, and saw one of her mages floating above a city he would exterminate. Built of golem parts, his beauty crowned him as she knew he looked upon the hamlet. He said a magic word, and with a grey-blue gas cloud the entire happy town was made into a killing zone.

She heard the crying. It moved her. She wanted to hear more. She thought of a gonne barrel in her mouth. No, not a "gonne", a gun. She'd learned from the Rhea clone's mind everything. She remembered her past self, another little girl putting a weapon between her teeth. Maybe that would be the calling, what they meant when they said the way of the warrior was to die.

Emilie thought of Evola, how brilliant he was, how she'd lost him before. Maybe if she'd followed him instead of Mussolini, maybe if she'd gone all the way, she could have killed the red beast. Maybe then she'd get to die.

She teared up, as a lich crying black ichor, and her hand pressed on the glass. It rattled, it shook, the way she bent and faded. It was a tiresome place. All she wanted was to die. She could probably do it, now, she realized.

She wouldn't be stopped, this time, by Tranny Rue, and—

Emilie held her head in her hands, the Marina-thing writhing without sapience. "Yeah, why bother?" she said aloud. She looked at her wrist. She couldn't be a man, but she could hate herself for being a woman.

Maybe then, that'd be okay. Maybe then, if she hated herself enough, she could redeem herself.

Maybe if she killed herself, over and over and over, she could be sad in the right way.

She took a deep breath, though as a Koscheivite she didn't much need to. Another vision, another floating image, another town gassed by a partially-golemized male soldier. She wanted a drink. She wanted heroin. She wanted to fucking die.

She still couldn't cry. She slapped herself on the arm. No way out. You're a real hero, Emily, she mercilessly thought, her past iteration and her current one interweaving through the connective tissue of copied memory. She'd been made as a sex slave for Dani Rue.

She'd been made to be tortured.

Great. Nothing else was fucking new. Others could be tortured, too. This Earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life. It was a quote from Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann. Smart guy.

There, marked on her arm, was everything she was just beginning to learn.

As she often did, Emilie thought about theory, about Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto. Was it true? Was Evola wrong? Were women the superior gender? Of course, Emilie suspected the book was parody.

But parody, itself, could be inspiration, just as the dead could come back to life.

Emilie cried, and thought about cutting up men, about her mother. Her mother, tall, in a NYPD uniform, with ugly brown skin and a cruel face, used to make her drink the downpour.

Her mother had no soul. Her mother had no face. Her mother had nothing but a hole instead of a beating heart.

Her Christian Zionist mother was such an object of envy. There was a red lever, grand and imposing on the tube, with gold filagree.

Silence. Emilie held her head, as a man in black robes marked with a polar bear stuck his cock in a dark-skinned woman's mouth. She reached down underneath her own trousers, in front of her robes, and she started rubbing her cunt. Sounds good, Emilie thought to herself, as he held a knife to her neck.

Emilie had never read The Lord of the Rings. She'd always lied and said she had, and she'd picked up a lot of the information from nerd circles like FandomTropes, but...

It was from The Children of Hurin, she'd learned from the Rhea clone's brain, a quote about Melkor as the Elder King, the first and greatest of the Valar. It was he who forged the world itself and was the shadow cast on it.

Emilie looked at her Nazi hands, and thought of her Hispanic blood, that inferiority inside her. Dan Barros, he'd been a kike and a model Nazi. In the end, Emilie thought, she'd end up like him, too: dead. Please.

She thought of that coilgun, of the soft, metallic taste of the barrel between her teeth, of the gleeful joy of knowing she was falling such that she could never be intercepted nor stopped: the cold water under the bridge her only family now.

Just kill yourself, she thought to herself, routine self-abuse as magical illusions of her dirty death camps and town-gassings illuminated the Hellish flag above this worthless world. Just end your nasty, perverted little life and go back home. Mom's waiting for you. Mom's going to strip you down and make you go outside. Mom's going to tell you to stop crying, or she'll smash your Wostation.

Mommy loves you. Mommy deserves to love you.

Mommy let a creepy man talk to you online. Mommy didn't care. Mommy told you she was busy when you said her daughter was flirting with a thirty-year-old who liked to know how twelve-year-old girls jerked off.

No wonder you want to die, Emilie.

But look at you. You disgusting little shit. This world of gas and hatchet-slicing you've made, this black blot on the fucking map, that was you.

Hitler got beat too. It didn't change a damn thing.

Emilie, staring at the quivering mass of jaw-flesh, thought to herself that Hitler was right. She cried, sitting down on the floor.

Emilie Reyes, Emilie of the Ebonstaff, she was going to become the next Hitler. She was going to make them hate her rather than pity her.

She flipped the big, cartoonish lever, like something out of the World of Warcraft reboot, and silver-blue gas filled the tank.

Emilie watched Marina die, the sound of a music box practically playing in Emilie's head. She would need to consider it: race theory was one thing, but gender theory?

So much innovation on the road to her own obliteration.

Emilie put her forehead against the tank, and listened to the gas hiss. She heard the whining of something that was struggling to breathe. Around her were the sounds of oppression.

Good. Maybe they'd all feel as bad as she did. Why couldn't you have just let me shoot myself? she thought.

Emilie took a deep breath, she took a moment to contain herself, but she found as she did so that that moment was escaping her entirely. The lead was melting, the radioactivity was escaping: Jewish science.

She thought of hijabi hands on her neck. She smiled.

We're all perverts, Emilie thought to herself. It was the great curse of the human condition, the thing Evola was wrong about: it couldn't be defeated. It couldn't be stopped. We could only embrace our own darkness.

Only death could serve the Light, and Emilie was in a little box without any windows. It's okay, she tried to tell herself, and she didn't believe it.

She thought about those people who jumped off of bridges, how something like a few percent of them survived and the ones that did always expressed joy. Those people, she knew, talked about how when someone's falling, they realize before they hit the water that they don't want to die, that only when they have no choice in dying do they desire to live.

That was the nice thing about a gun, Emilie thought. You didn't have the time for regrets. It was a very fascist means of self-slaughter.

No. Not yet. Only when the deed is done. The music box must've continued to turn, and Emilie developed a new thought: What if I could have pilotable golems, controlled by more intelligent organisms than those primitive brains?

Once, she'd stolen from the past to build the future. Now, she'd stolen from a future that never would be again to construct an eternal past.

That past version of her had created GREYHOUNDS, clean, sleek, brutal.

The swirling gas clouds fascinated her, and a new idea emerged: not GREYHOUNDS, but Hellhounds.

She looked at her Hitlerite hands. She'd realized there was no joy in it long ago, but that wouldn't stop her.