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[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

the phantom tollbooth semi-review

my second grade teacher read her class this book. i adored it. a while back, i bought a copy, intending to reread it, but hadn't gotten around to it... you know how these things are, right? but recently i had cause to sit down and reread it, which i'll describe below.

i was putting together my website, and got it to a point where i was largely happy with it; however, i realized i needed a cover image for the reviews section. i hit upon the idea of making a collage with pages torn out of books. it's an obvious way to go about it, but i had a problem. what book could i bear mulching for such a project? i was considering my (still unread) copy of atlas shrugged, but the print was too small, and i wasn't sure how i felt about memorializing a book i despise like that.

once i remembered my copy of the phantom tollbooth, the solution was obvious. it is such a playful work. it treats words like toys, treats language like a game; it is so obviously didactic and immensely charming despite (or because of) that. it's like if alice in wonderland was a 90s edutainment game. it's a delight.

however, i can't come at this with the simple adoration i felt for it as a child. its writing style is perhaps too heavy on adverbs and said-bookisms. the various encounters and setbacks are generally brief, and while that keeps them from overstaying their welcome, it also results in everything feeling kind of like a theme park ride. i can forgive these minor sins; it's just so earnest that i find it hard not to. it's a bedtime story picaresque.

of course, there's the more pernicious undercurrent. naturally, the fantasy world is monarchical, and the hero's quest is to rescue some princesses. looking past this feels like the price of admission for engaging with 99% of the fantasy genre. there's more to pick at, though. the founding myth of the world it depicts involves a prince conquering a land filled with the demons of ignorance, settling a vile wilderness. this --- of course --- rings alarm bells. to some extent, this can be chalked up to standard usa background radiation. it's an american children's book from the 1960s. of course the Charming Fanciful Backstory is a settler-colonial retread. of course the humbug brags that he had ancestors traveling with columbus.

these flies in the ointment are small in size if not in impact --- the aforementioned Charming Fanciful Backstory is the most egregious one, and it only consists of a couple pages --- but they're there, and it feels wrong not to mention them. still, though, i enjoyed my time with the book.

as i read, i ripped particularly resonant pages out to collage with. this went against everything i've been taught for handling books, but... it feels right. it feels fitting to have one of my first literary loves enshrined in art. a tribute to treating words as toys and language as a game, and a tribute to having a critical eye for everything.

...

it's tempting to say this book gave me a playful relationship with writing that i've carried forward until now.

those sorts of after-the-fact narratives are so often inaccurate... but it's a nice story, isn't it?

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

darwin's radio semi-review

for context: i've read three of greg bear's novels previously. i liked blood music a lot, and i adored the forge of god and anvil of stars. he was a very prolific author, and i decided after finishing anvil of stars that i'd try and read all his original fiction.

so, sometimes when i'm reading something, i start thinking about how i'll structure my (semi) review, and what i'll say in it. halfway through darwin's radio, i expected to have nothing but praise. "this is electrifying sci-fi, real crackerjack stuff."

suffice it to say i can no longer describe the book in those terms, lmao. don't get me wrong: there's compelling stuff in there. bear has once again nailed depicting an ongoing crisis from multiple perspectives.

however, the book gets politically... weird. some of this is to be expected, based on the premise. it's a book about a virus that causes miscarriages and deformed fetuses, potentially as an attempt to advance humanity to the next evolutionary stage. from that alone, it's already on thin ice in multiple realms.

for example: the fetuses are supposed to be humanity's next stage, aborting is presented as ignorant, regressive, biological luddism. it creates a world in which anti-abortion argument is basically correct. plus, the idea of humanity even having a next evolutionary stage is fraught in a bunch of ways.

still, though, even if it wasn't able to thread these needles, it could've been better than what it was. there's a lot of racialization as analogy for government oppression and social ostracism in a way that's deeply uncomfortable. i'm white, so i don't have any direct experience with racism, but it strikes me as really crass. it's even crasser when one of the characters making these comparisons is a white guy who became persona non grata in the scientific community for stealing a mummified corpse from native peoples for Science Purposes.

my overall verdict: there's still some compelling stuff here, and i'm still going to read the sequel. i'd stop well short of actually recommending it to anyone, though.

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

triple helix pitching forward | chapter four: entanglement depth

word count: 5.3k

content warnings: violence, sexual allusion, psychological distress

The sun has crept far enough down the horizon that it no longer provides any light. Seen through the window, Elysium-4 is shrouded in near total darkness, lit only by the last embers of the sunset, the dim bulbs of its rocky moons, and the pinpoint lights of the stars.

The uniformity of the view makes it the perfect backdrop for Selene's work. Sitting in the living room for a change of pace, she's reading through laboratory correspondence. Augments project text onto her retina. Piecemeal decryption has its advantages, but the major downside is that the information is disgorged at random. Even if you know what you're looking for, you need luck on your side to find anything quickly.

When it comes up in her search, she almost doesn't recognize what she's found. She pages past it, skims a few more messages, then has to go back once the significance has worked its way through her mind. Its formal title and stilted scientific language don't fully disguise Minerva Verrine's initial report of THRONE's discovery. Included are the coordinates and an orbital photograph of the entrance to the cave THRONE was found in.

"That's not too far from us, is it?" Selene asks.

"It is an hour's flight away," Brutus says into her ear.

"What?" Asphodel looks up from her tablet. "Oh, you're talking to him, aren't you." Brow furrowed, she goes back to her reading --- writing unanswered letters can only occupy so much time. Selene's apologetic look goes unnoticed.

"Let's head over," she says, voice lowered.

"Do you expect THRONE will be there?" Brutus asks as the ship begins its subtle acceleration.

"It could be." She stands and stretches, making a mental note to do more flexibility exercises --- she aches from sitting. "If we're lucky."

"If it is, are you confident you will be able to eliminate it?" The question is pointed in a direction she can't quite determine.

"Nothing's managed to kill me yet, right?" She half-smiles. He doesn't respond. The dull pressure of his cameras on her is unyielding. Her awareness of his gaze -- so frequently a comforting background hum -- settles over her like snow.

"...I don't have to go if you don't want me to."

"It is one of our best leads as to THRONE's location, assuming it has not found another home."

"If it hasn't found another home..." She trails off, tapping her foot, looking at Asphodel. "Your hair's all tangled."

"What?" Asphodel looks up again. Selene can barely make out the cover of some mass-market romance novel on her tablet, the sort of committee-written commodity that served as the hardtack of her mental diet when she was younger and lonelier. "It's fine. See?" Asphodel attempts to run her fingers through her hair and winces when they get stuck.

"Hang on, I'll go get the hairbrush."

"You don't have to--"

It's not long before she's holding the hairbrush out to Asphodel, who tentatively accepts it. She spends a moment picking hairs out from between the bristles, letting them fall to the floor to get lost in the carpet's fibers, before she starts brushing her own hair. 'Tangled' had been generous; Asphodel meets harsh resistance. She threads her fingers into a particularly stubborn knot, attempting to tease it apart, before giving up and applying brute force. Hair rips, and Selene reaches out briefly as if to take the brush from her. Their eyes meet. Selene's hand retracts, and she tries to disguise the gesture as idle tapping. Asphodel doesn't acknowledge it.

"Thanks," she says when her hair's been tamed, avoiding Selene's gaze. The brush goes back in its drawer with auburn hairs contrasting Selene's sable.

The view from the window barely changes even as the ship moves; Selene's almost startled when a blue light appears over the horizon, dimly illuminating the rim of a crater a few kilometers away from the cavern entrance. Whatever subterranean reaction sustains the blue flame has yet to exhaust itself.

"What do you think happened here?" Selene asks.

"Meteor impact, maybe?" Asphodel says. She stands up, cups her hands and presses her face against the window to block out the glare of the interior lights.

"You did not see it when you flew in?" Brutus asks.

She pauses a moment. "No, I didn't. Minerva didn't mention it, either."

"Must've been recent, then." Selene tries to reconstruct his line of attack here. This is their first time seeing the crater, too. It's not inherently suspicious to be unaware of a particular location on some random planet. She knows he knows this -- no, more accurately, she knows he knows she wouldn't consider it persuasive evidence. So then...

Her train of thought is interrupted by him speaking into her ear. "We are ten minutes away from the cave."

Her armor slips on over her clothes like a holster fits a gun. She tests the flashlight on her helmet; it flickers a moment, blinking away sleep, before brightening. She turns it back off, satisfied. She holds out her hand for Legion before remembering it's still at the Biological Research Bureau facility. The final piece of her ensemble is a length of self-drilling cable she wears like a bandolier.

As the ship descends, Asphodel asks, "So where are you going, exactly?"

"The cave THRONE was found in," Selene says. "It might've gone back there."

"So you're following it home to kill it."

The blunt language is like a strike to the skull. "That's what you do when an animal kills people." When it eats people. "Isn't it?"

Asphodel's face twists. Selene can't decode her expression -- disgust or sadness, perhaps. It's a few moments before Asphodel responds, "Minerva wouldn't like it."

"Would you?" Selene doesn't ask if she's still alive to approve or disapprove.

"My opinion doesn't matter here. It's your job, not mine." She returns to her reading, eyes narrowed.

Selene steps through the airlock. The interstitial room is redundant in a breathable atmosphere. A pressure suit hangs from a hook, and she briefly shudders as she thinks about having to use it. A ladder descends just far enough for her to safely drop the rest of the way to the ground. The impact forces a cloud of spores out of subterranean fungal meshes. The air reeks of mildew.

In the absence of leaf litter or grass, the dirt is covered in sun-starved fungal whelps, braided mycelial patches, and slow-roving slime molds. Everything is damp, glistening in the beam of her flashlight. She looks up at the ship, then glances around. Orienting herself against the setting sun, she starts walking. Each step turns up more wheezing exhalations of spores. The canopy overhead starts to thin out as she comes up to the hungry mouth of the cave. Dull, sunset red on her right and unearthly blue to her left, she steps into the darkness.

Entering the cave is like wading into a lake; Elysium-4 rotates so slowly that air circulation is virtually non-existent. Cold, stagnant air meets her. The temperature doesn't bother her the way it would have in her youth. She's sure she's long since burned out the synapses governing goosebumps, shivering, chattering teeth, the way one can go blind from staring at the sun, but her chest still constricts as cold air fills her lungs. It's not the physical discomfort of childhood winters spent breathing recycled air at needling temperatures; breathing should be easy at temperatures far colder than this. Why, then, is this so difficult? Why--

"Breathe, Selene." Brutus's voice is like solid ground.

She breathes out, then in.

"Your oxygen levels are fine," he says. A hint of kind concern has crept into his voice, and she's momentarily embarrassed he thinks she needs it. She's even more embarrassed that he's right. "I will be monitoring them as you descend. If you even begin to approach suffocation, I will warn you."

His reassurance throws her emotions into sharp relief. So that's what this is. Childhood fears of asphyxiation digested and regurgitated. She's a professional. She should be better than this.

"Thanks, Brutus."

Steps almost mechanical, she begins her descent.

The cave walls gleam as though wet. Soil has slid down the throat of the cave, bereft of mycelial networks to hold it in place. It's like going from the lobby to an uncarpeted service corridor. She has to stoop to avoid hitting her head.

"We haven't gone this deep into the wilderness in a while," she whispers, voice conversational. "When was the last time? Two years ago?"

"You recovered the body of that missing executive from a forest nine months ago."

She frowns. "It was a park. That doesn't count."

"I believe it qualifies. If it were merely a park, the wildlife would have been much less of an issue."

The bite on her leg still itches occasionally. "Arcology parks are all like that."

The cavern grows livelier each meter she descends. Carapaces glint on the cave walls as insects feed on what Selene assumes is some form of bacterial deposit. Flies joined at the hip, fused together in all-consuming procreation, flit insensate through the beam of her lamp.

It's inaccurate to say Brutus exists anywhere, except perhaps the motherboard wired into the Slumbering Fury. He is intangible, he is omnipresent, he is data; his hands reach across networks, unbound by any physical concerns. Still, Selene imagines him existing inside her, circuits enmeshed with her veins. It's preferable to imagine that, when the alternative is her body as extended peripheral to him, an array of network endpoints he can run his hands over, paging through her like a book. The thought has its appeal -- she remembers the gentle hypoxia of his hand on her throat and sighs -- but most of the time it merely unsettles her.

A centipede about the size of her finger is crawling across the rock, eating lichen off the cave walls. It's ghostly, translucent in the light. It doesn't respond to the sound of Selene drawing close, kneeling down, preoccupied with its meal.

"Surprisingly fearless."

"Perhaps it is toxic, and everything has evolved to instinctively avoid eating it."

"Too good at defending itself to have to pay attention to anything?"

"It is a likely explanation. Complex sense organs are quite the investment. Once they become vestigial, I do not doubt evolution would do away with them quickly."

She nods, stands, and continues down the cave, wondering if this has happened to her. Physical strength and a partner seeing through her eyes obviate the need to bother with details the way she used to. She hopes the centipede eats well.

Ice catches her light, refracts it, scatters it into a million radiant shards. Psychosomatic chills grip her. She blinks -- quartz, not ice. Quartz juts out from the walls like the quills of a porcupine turned inside out. The path is clear despite the intrusions. Ducking under a crystalline spike, she presses onward. Mineral shards, knocked loose by some past traveler, crunch underfoot.

She hasn't seen snow in ages, not since the day she became Selene Morningstar. Arcologies tend toward the temperate, occasionally the tropical. Snow is reserved for resorts for the wealthy, the rare arctic park, and frigid planets used as computational hubs; none of them are places Selene has cause to visit. Suits her just fine. After she emerged from her icy chrysalis, winter lost its appeal. She's survived hypothermia, survived weeks in a ship running cold to avoid detection, survived living with minimal life support in a ship leaching heat to the void. Enough cold for a lifetime.

Even her previous iteration hated the cold. It still surprises her that nobody chalked the murder at Cocytus up to snow madness or some similarly overblown superstition. Sometimes she comes closer to believing that's what it was than she'd like to admit. Despite the several parsecs and years between her and Cocytus, despite being alone with only her beloved co-conspirator for company, it's difficult to imagine herself as the person who pulled the trigger.

A warning tone pings in her ears. "Selene." Brutus's voice is mangled by interference. She scrambles backward instinctively.

"That is sufficient." She stops, crouched down.

"What was that?"

"The layers of rock above you are causing interference. You are almost too deep for me to be able to communicate with you."

The words trickle through her like water through sand. "Oh."

"I recommend you turn back. We can formulate another plan to find THRONE."

"No," she says reflexively. "No, I can't turn back. It could still be here."

"Are you sure it is prudent to face it alone?"

"It's the best lead we have. I'll be fine, I promise."

Brutus is silent for a moment. "I trust you. Please return safely."

"I will." She adjusts her headlamp. "Love you."

"I love you too."

She resumes her descent. Eventually she's left alone with an inkling of something growing in her, taking root in her, and the hypothermic corpse embedded in her brain stem. She breathes in, holds, breathes out. Her helmet's visor fogs up with condensation, and for a single nauseating moment, she thinks she sees spores on her breath.

The cave walls are blue-gray, shining with accumulated bacterial glaze and the water that carved this cavern. The path twists, never steep enough to trip her. The inert stone of the walls constricts under her gaze, peristaltic action forcing her down the pipe. She's still in the esophagus. She wonders what will be waiting to digest her.

She's sure she feels mycelial networks snake through her lungs. Infiltrators and advance force of the fungal infection must be coursing through her. Oxygen saturation readings blink in her peripheral vision. They seem fine. Good, even. Her canary cells have not begun hypoxic die-off; they aren't screaming distress calls into implanted nerve tissue.

Deep breaths. The air still smells like mildew. Selene isn't sure what system drives fungal air deeper into the cave. It's been more than a decade since her last physics class; more than a decade since any education focused on anything more general than specific neurotransmitters, psychological fault lines, and techniques for memory analysis.

She hears a splash and looks down to see she's stepped in a puddle. A fissure in the wall disgorges a small stream of water. She begins her calculus, weighing up how much further she'll have to go, her level of thirst, likelihood of contamination. She stoops for a moment, about to take off her helmet, before she reconsiders and stands back up.

"You'd never let me live it down if I did that," she says. Brutus doesn't hear her.

Insects flit through her lamp's beam. It's been years since she's been alone -- Brutus has been constant, her heartbeat since they met. In the frigid isolation of the laboratory dorms, he was her only company worth having, the only conversationalist that wasn't her boss.

Layers of petrified lichen hang down from the high ceiling like stalactites; she's exited a tunnel and entered some kind of natural dome. Knowledge from her past life returns to her, and for a moment she imagines utilitarian metal flooring, endless rows of computers, the incessant drone of the array of fans; the perfect environment for gestating intelligences. Brutus's upbringing, back when he was called Dominion, was atypical. So was hers, back when she was called LC.

There's a light in her periphery, the glint of a gun barrel --- no, too iridescent, it's biological, a pair of shining eyes --- her gun's out of its holster before she notices somebody's beaten her to it. The creature, pale and spindly, is slumped backward over the stump of a stalagmite. Its jaw hangs open, and yellow-green blood runs down its face. The bullet hole is professionally placed, right between the eyes. Six forelimbs splay out like the fingers of a discarded glove.

Two pieces of information jockey for her attention. The first: this creature is likely a juvenile of whatever species THRONE is. She imagines picking it up off the stony floor, standing it up; it'd be a head or so shorter than her. Nowhere near THRONE's estimated three-meter height. Second: the ejecta of the exit wound is still pooling under its head. Scavengers have yet to reincorporate it into the food chain; it has not yet rotted into undifferentiated biological slurry. This thing died recently; whoever shot it is still here. Hand on her holster, she dims her lamp and leaves the dead behind.

She supposes it's lucky she met Brutus. Lucky she killed her past self to break him out. Otherwise, she'd have had no future but academia, and her success would have remained tied to him --- Latimer -- Dr. Hallow. Inventor of flash-etching. Responsible for the suffering of untold thousands. Her first boss, and the first man she ever loved. Better for everyone that he's gone.

Asphodel is probably still reading up in the Slumbering Fury. Is she worried? She'd have no reason to be; what is Selene to her but a captor? Half-forgotten physics lectures flit through her head --- the unknown variable in superposition, the observer's action that resolves it --- and she blinks as another fused mating pair of insects flies through the beam of her light. No, not a mating pair --- a mating trio, fused in strange trefoil shape. Biology was never her strong suit, much less xenobiology. She has no idea if the three are viable. She's not optimistic.

The high roof of the cave closes in; she's in another tunnel that twists in on itself and spirals downward. Bunched inward to avoid scraping the walls, she follows the winding path. Several meters in, she realizes she can't hear her footsteps. She looks down; the cavern floor is covered in moss. It's gotten warmer and more humid without her realizing it. She imagines it as the breath of some massive beast before dismissing the idea. Heat from whatever reaction sustains the blue flame high above, perhaps. She slows, draws her handgun, creeps downward --- combat in tight spaces was never her specialty; if she runs into THRONE...

They fly out of the beam almost as quickly as they flew into it. She rounds a corner, gun raised, and stops. Her arm goes slack. Rusted steel blocks her path; there's a large door built into the wall of the tunnel. She blinks, briefly convinced the fungal infection is terminal, that this is some form of dying hallucination--- but no, she raises a hand to touch it. She can't feel it through the gauntlet, but it's solid. Smooth, aside from the patches of rust and the seam down the middle where it opens. There's a scratched-up card reader built into the door frame, and for a moment she wishes she had brought Legion with her before dismissing the idea. Brutus's signals can't reach down here. She's only seen it off its leash once; if she had brought it out of his range, she's not sure she'd survive long enough to get to the door.

She clenches her hand into a fist, about to knock, but pauses. Whoever -- or whatever -- is on the other side of the door, she's not sure she wants them knowing about her. They could be a threat. She turns around, begins her re-ascent, unknowns diffusing across her mind. Potential views through the doorway fill her mind, each hazier than the last. A warehouse for storing unknown commodities. Another laboratory filled with yet more dead scientists. A barracks of soldiers for some unknown war. Each image flickers and fades when confronted with the ultimate question: why build that here?

She contemplates steel and how long it takes to rust. Even accounting for the ravages of humidity, that door's been around for decades, maybe longer than she's been alive. It could be abandoned --- but no, it couldn't be. Once again she comes to the corpse oozing pus-yellow brain matter. It's trivial for her to reconstruct the bullet's path, the way it must have toppled backward when shot. Whoever pulled the trigger was going further into the cave, not exiting it. They killed a creature in their way and continued through the door, she's grimly certain. The body's dead eyes stare upward, and she can't bear to meet their gaze as she walks past.

She's jolted out of her thoughts by a splash -- the water again. She watches the harsh glare of her lamp refract through it, play off its surface. She swallows. Her mouth is dry. She kneels, takes off her helmet, and drinks deep. It's bitter and earthy, chitin and petrichor. The mildew aftertaste lingers, and she stands, thirst slaked, fungal invaders in her bloodstream receiving reinforcements.

The fungal threat seethes within her, livid like an open wound, raw like reminders of every misstep she's ever made. Her involvement with Hallow, despite his crimes, the etching interfaces she wired into his AI progeny, her hand in constructing the perfect tactician... all the way back to her original sin, her rejection of the doctrines she was incubated in since birth. It all connects, traced backward by a long strand from the present moment. The lunar priesthood had sentenced LC Michaels to ritual airlock asphyxiation for some long-forgotten youthful crime, a baptismal trial he would not have survived; now, in the dark, she almost wonders if it would be better for everyone if his mother hadn't smuggled him out, if he hadn't survived long enough to become her.

"--ene? Can you hear me, Selene? Can you hear me, Selene?" Brutus's voice cuts in, repeating the same message.

"Anti-fungals." She says it louder than intended. A couple insects skitter away, startled.

"Pardon?"

"Hi." She swallows. "I love you. I'm sorry." Back to whispering. "Can you start the medisynth on some antifungals?"

"Has something happened?" There's a concerned edge to his voice. It rankles her, him putting in the effort to sound concerned.

"I think something here's infected me. I can feel it." Growing in her lungs, insinuating itself into her bloodstream, mycorrhizae tangling with circuitry---

"Your vitals are fine," he says, voice modulated in a gesture toward being comforting that Selene can only read as pitying. A moments silence, then "I cannot detect any anomalous bodies in your bloodstream. I do not believe anything here would be capable of infecting you."

"Please," she says, scared child tone to her voice. "Please, I---"

"I have already started the medisynth." Of course he has. "It should be finished by the time you return."

Of course he took her seriously. "Thank you."

"It is no trouble at all." His presence is steadying. "Please return soon."

"I'm trying my best to."

It's not long before she's pulling herself up the ladder three rungs at a time. She stumbles going through the airlock, catches herself on the wall with one hand, starts unclasping her armor with the other. Both halves of her breastplate hanging off her loosely, self-drilling cable dangling like a discarded sash, she kneels next to the medical arm. Brutus kneels beside her, the fabric of his dress bunched up --- even now, she's dimly aware of how difficult that is to simulate --- intangible hand rubbing circles on her back. Eyes closed, breathing deep, she steadies herself. She is calm enough to avoid panicking as he remotely stills her muscles, moves the arm into place, and injects broad spectrum anti-fungals into her neck.

There's a rush of chemical heat, almost a burning. The fluid --- viscous and, in Selene's mind, a livid red --- goes in slowly. The pain recedes, replaced with numbness and the awareness of his hands pinching nerve endings shut.

A trickle of blood leaks out of her neck, pooling at her collarbone. She stands, legs trembling in her greaves. "How long before it kicks in?"

"Any fungus in your system should be eradicated within five minutes."

Sitting against the wall, unbuckling and sliding off her remaining armor, Selene stares at the clock. Her hands work automatically as the seconds tick down. Plated steel formed to the shape of her body sits in a neat pile, and the five minutes expire. She breathes in. Even unconstricted by armor, the feeling hasn't passed; something is growing in her lungs, is taking root in her.

"You sure it should work?"

"I have absolute certainty."

Unknown afflictions sit in another superposition. Augmentation rejection syndrome, perhaps, or some allergy. The consequences of a lax exercise regimen, or breathing recycled air, or a life of---

There's footsteps on the carpet. Selene turns her head, blinking as she gets to her feet.

Asphodel's staring at her neck. "What happened?" Her eyes trace the flow of the blood from the injection site to where it stains her collar. A glance back up at her face. "Did you get hurt?"

Selene looks away, waves off the concern. "No, no, I'm fine. See?" She wipes the blood away; it isn't replaced. "I'm not bleeding anymore."

"Good, good." She's not making eye contact --- she seems preoccupied.

Selene has begun to ask if she's okay when she closes the distance.

"What are--?" Combat scenarios and escape routes snake their way through her mind, plans for move and countermove, the future unknown until observed---

Asphodel gets up on the tips of her toes.

"I missed you."

The wave function collapses. Asphodel runs her hands up and down Selene's back. The kiss doesn't last long. She blinks as it ends.

"Why--?"

"I just said. I missed you," she says. "Your mouth is cold."

She turns to leave. Selene reaches out a hand, retracts it. The door to the guest room closes with a soft hiss. The moment lingers like the taste. Earthy. Strangely bitter. She wipes her lip with her thumb absentmindedly. The anti-fungals are finally working.

"Interesting," Brutus says behind her.

"Is it?" She turns to look at him. "Are you jealous?"

"I would prefer if you were not smiling while asking that question."

"Am I?" She is; she blanks her face appropriately. "I'm sorry."

"I appreciate the apology," he says, hands clasped behind his back, head at a feline tilt, "and no, I am not."

Later, sitting at her desk, she asks, "What was so interesting?" Polygonal maps of the cavern, sketched out over an hour's worth of arcane key commands, extend across her screen.

He ignores the question. "There was a door at the back of the cave?"

"Oh," she says, zooming in on it. "I forgot to mention it. I was..." The tightness in her chest returns for a moment. "...distracted." The taste still lingers. "No text or symbols on it. Rusted steel, but sturdy. Couldn't get it open."

"Do you believe it is related to the facility we have been investigating?"

"The facility was only built a couple months ago, right? The door looked too old to have been built then."

Brutus is silent, projected eyes unblinking. Then, "That facility is the first known construction on this planet."

"It's tricky, right?" Selene sighs, leaning back in her chair. "I can't figure it out. The tangle leads nowhere." No, that's not quite correct -- it leads somewhere just out of her grasp. There are fuzzy outlines in her periphery, but the full shape eludes her.

"Strictly speaking, we do not need to know the purpose of the door," he says. "It would be satisfying to know, but we were not sent here to answer every question about this planet."

"Mm." She closes her eyes. "Maybe it'd get us closer to finding THRONE if we knew, though."

"You did not find it in the cave, correct?"

"No, it wasn't there. Found a dead juvenile of its species, but no sign of THRONE itself."

"It was dead?"

"Yeah, it was shot." Repeating that fact reminds her just how much she doesn't know. She feels very small. "Probably by whoever's behind that door."

Again he's silent for a moment. "Are you certain that is what happened?"

She opens one eye, looks at his impassive projection. "I know what a bullet to the brain looks like, Brutus."

"My apologies for doubting you." Sincerity creeps into his voice. "I do not intend to insult your intelligence."

"It's fine." She idly pans over the map. The facts rot away into undifferentiated mush in her mind. She sighs and powers off her terminal. "Are you sure you aren't jealous?"

"I have encouraged you to explore outside companionship several times, Selene. I can recite the conversations we had, if you require proof." The level monotone has returned. "It is simply concerning to see you so infatuated over a kiss from our prime and only suspect."

She stares at him. "I am not infatuated with her."

"I have lived with you for a decade, and your body language is unsubtle. You do not have to lie for my sake."

"I'm not lying." The words come automatically, and she pauses after saying it, unsure if it's true. Results: inconclusive. "I wouldn't lie to you."

Brutus is silent. She's not the only one who's transparent --- she can tell when he's weighing his options. Then, "If you had to make a bet for your life, would you bet that THRONE is or is not Asphodel Verrine?"

"What?"

His voice is firmer as he repeats. "If you had to make a bet for your life, would you bet that THRONE is or is not Asphodel Verrine?" She opens her mouth to protest, but he preempts her. "Please. I would appreciate an answer."

Breathe in, breathe out. "I'd bet on it being her."

"You do not sound certain."

"I'm not going to kill her on circumstantial evidence," she says, getting to her feet. "And I'm not convinced I want THRONE dead, either."

"Why? Selene, it is responsible for the deaths of at least five people, possibly six. What is the root of this hesitation?"

"You saw that cage. You saw that enclosure. I think of it in there, and..."

If he recognizes how that sentence ends, he doesn't show it. "I see."

Selene leans against the wall, arms crossed. "So maybe they had it coming."

"Selene," he says, voice lowered, tone filled with artificial matrix-product kindness. "I believe your sympathy is letting THRONE take advantage of you. What other reason would Asphodel have to kiss you, given that you are essentially her captor?"

She doesn't respond; she stares at the hologram in silence.

"Did you believe that kiss was genuine? It was transparent manipulation, an attempt to either convince you it is human or earn a stay of execution. Either way, it was an attempt to break free to somewhere it could wreak further havoc."

"Of course you'd say that." The words are out before she can think about it; once she realizes what she's said, she blanches as much as her cyanotic skin can. "I'm sorry."

"What do you mean by that?" he asks, head tilted, eyes alight, voice pointedly monotone.

She can't answer; the words would come out covered in ice, the crystals would lacerate her throat, she'd drown in her own blood. "I'm sorry."

"I am not an unfeeling automaton, Selene. You know this, or have professed to have known it. You have a symbol on that knowledge on your finger."

She rubs the scar coiled around her left ring finger with her thumb. "That wasn't..." She closes her eyes. Misgivings on the nature of inorganic emotion could maybe be forgiven. To admit to her true meaning --- of course you'd say that, you're military hardware --- would be something else entirely. "I'm sorry," she says, weakly.

His avatar stands, motionless. "You should sleep," he says, and the softness in his tone gives her the creeping awareness that he figured it out, can see right through her. "You have had a difficult day."

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I should."

A few minutes later, when the lights are off and she's lying in bed, she says, "I'm sorry."

"I appreciate the apology." She can't tell if he's forgiven her. "We can discuss THRONE and our mission tomorrow. I have ideas I would like to suggest. For now, you need sleep more than anything."

She doesn't sleep well that night.

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

serious weakness semi-review

i'd seen reactions before i had started reading serious weakness. people called it cathartic, revelatory. one of the itch reviews calls it extremely hot. they baffled me as i got further into the book. after finishing it and letting things percolate / scab over, i understand completely.

there's a lot i could say about my reaction to it, but most of it veers far too personal, the sort of thing i'd only share with therapists and partners. suffice it to say that i wouldn't recommend this casually. it depicts almost every form of cruelty you'd care to name, and then some. it was such a difficult read that i took a month-long break in the middle of it.

if that doesn't put you off — if you're the sort of person who'd enjoy a book so upfront in its depictions of violence — it's definitely worth reading. let it all wash over you and check for interesting bruises in the morning.

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

cockatiel x chameleon semi-review

i adore modern cannibals. after i read it, i went to check out the author's other work and saw a very intimidating slate of ao3 tags. it sat in the back of my mind until i read low kill shelter, which left me in the mood for similarly messy works. i was still a little hesitant; the knowledge that most of the tags apply to in-universe fiction / roleplays / etc. helped me work up the necessary courage.

i ended up enjoying it, though i have some issues. my immediate comparison is classical music. it's all theme and variation. a motif is established and recurs later. the first half or so is rock solid. it's very good at capturing certain kinds of guy, i really enjoy all the characters. it makes some real interesting decisions (i'm skeptical of including the real world BLM movement in a story like this), but it sticks the landing. the extreme sexual content mostly didn't feel gratuitous, which was my main worry going into it. i'd recommend modern cannibals before i'd recommend cockatiel x chameleon, but if you've read mc, can handle cxc's content, and want more bavitz writing in your life, i'd say it's worth your time.

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

low kill shelter semi-review

i don't even know how to begin this one. there's a new champion on my list of books i adore that are incredibly difficult to recommend. have you ever felt like a book cracked something open inside you, and put a piece of itself in there? yeah.

i bought this book a while ago but took a couple months to get around to reading it. fittingly given the subject matter, i devoured it in a single night. i bought copies for three of my friends. it's difficult to articulate exactly why i adore it so much, but i adore it all the same.

i could prattle on along these lines for ages, but that wouldn't be as edifying as just telling you to read it. go read it. it's well worth the price of admission.

tl;dr go buy low kill shelter. woof woof lol

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

triple helix pitching forward | chapter three: altered present moments

word count: 3.7k

content warnings: sexual allusion

Routines flex easily to accommodate an additional person. It’s the last day before the tunnel strands them — the last day before they’re stuck on Elysium-4 for the next forty days, the last day Selene can reconsider her plan to keep the prime suspect confined with her. Asphodel and Brutus are sitting at the table as Selene puts the dishes and cutlery away. Scrubbing brushes kick on inside the cubbyholes, removing melted cheese and other evidence of today’s breakfast.

“I don’t really have any suggestions.” Asphodel shrugs. “Maybe it was a bit too salty?”

“Hey, there we go, Brutus! Some feedback,” Selene says, sitting back down. She can’t tell if it’s a trick of the light — if the algae are simply fluorescing more today — but Asphodel looks a little less sickly, a little more radiant, like a flower that’s finally getting rain.

Brutus simply nods. “Thank you, Asphodel.” Selene isn’t sure why he’s continuing to ask for feedback like this. Whatever purpose it initially served, she suspects that he’s continuing it just to have someone compliment his cooking. She winces slightly.

It’s not long before they’re sitting in front of the window again. The sunset functions like a fireplace would centuries prior: it’s something to look at other than your interlocutors. Today its flame is low on the horizon, a low ember burning the tops of the arboreal fungi.

“How do you occupy your time, stuck on uninhabited planets like these?” Asphodel’s adjusting her seating position, brows furrowed slightly. She’s wearing more of Selene’s dress clothes; they fit her just as poorly as the previous ones. “It seems mind-numbing.”

“Sometimes there’s enough work to keep me busy,” Selene says. There is this time; she’s not relishing the thought of searching through all that mail. “Otherwise, we find ways.”

“I have accumulated a cache of papers and novels and other such materials,” Brutus says. “If I titrate my attention. A dozen books keep enough segments of my awareness occupied for a day or so.”

Asphodel’s face scrunches up further. “Okay, but what do you expect me to do here? Do you expect me to help you find THRONE?”

Selene opens her mouth, but Brutus jumps in first. “That will not be necessary. You are a guest here, after all. You are welcome to any of the materials in my library. I believe Selene has a reading tablet in her desk.”

In her room, rummaging through drawers for something she forgot she had, Selene says, “It could’ve been useful to have her help.”

“That is an unacceptably risky idea.”

“If she isn’t THRONE, we get another perspective,” she says, pulling a tablet out from underneath a pile of miscellaneous devices — a toxin analysis probe, a steno board, a two-way earpiece — the majority of which she intends to repair at some point. “If she is THRONE, she might say something useful.”

“In the unlikely event she is not THRONE, you are enlisting a civilian to do your job for you,” Brutus says. His avatar is standing in front of the door. He’s gone to the effort of lowering his eyebrows, crossing his arms over his chest. “If she is, she will almost immediately realize you suspect her, and she will cut your throat in your sleep.”

Standing with Brutus between her and the exit is intimidating despite the fact he’s a dozen centimeters shorter and his visible form is just triangles etched into the air. “I lock my door.” She realizes the obvious objection — ‘so did the scientists’ — after she says it.

“I am uncomfortable with you putting yourself in danger for such little gain.” His voice is lowered, tinged with emotion — he’s devoted a not insignificant amount of computing power to modulating it effectively. It hits Selene that he really means this.

She can’t look him in the eye. It’s a couple moments before she can bring herself to respond. “Okay. I won’t.”

Back out in the living room, Selene hands her the tablet. “It should still work. It can send mail, too, so you don’t have to use my terminal.” And she doesn’t have to keep turning the brightness back up every time they switch off.

Asphodel experimentally presses a couple keys. The display turns on, and she turns away as though blinded. It takes a couple seconds of squinting sideways at the screen for her to dim the lights to something she can bear to look at. She turns to Selene, still blinking. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” She looks out the window before glancing up at Brutus, who’s taken his normal immobile station behind her seat. There’s no evidence of any previous conflict on his face. “She can still send mail without the tunnel, right?”

He nods. “There is a data relay in orbit around this planet. Your messages will be stored until the relay can connect to the recipient.” It’s been years and she’s still not used to the way the Coalition leaves infrastructure strewn around so casually. If she worked in resource allocation, she’s sure the thought of putting an orbital relay around some distant planet with a population of less than a dozen researchers would make her queasy.

Her train of thought is interrupted by Asphodel typing, keystrokes like the simultaneous footfalls of a quartet of dancers. She’s curled up in the chair, tablet perched on her lap, staring at the screen she’s tilted backward. She doesn’t say anything when Selene leaves.

Skimming through the newly-decrypted user registry, Selene notices humans are outnumbered three to one by combat drones. From the photographs she recognizes the one from the stairwell, already in disrepair.

“I believe they made profiles for the drones due to a quirk of the networking architecture,” Brutus says, preempting the question she had just opened her mouth to ask.

“Do you think they were intelligent?”

“I cannot be certain now that they have been disassembled,” he says, the word sounding like a euphemism even in his monotone, “but judging from their construction they cannot have been higher than Canid-class.”

The sapience of artificial intelligences is ranked on a scale from Thread-class, roughly equivalent to a flatworm, to Upright-class, roughly equivalent to a human. The handful of news feeds she still follows will, on uneventful days, frequently report on talks held to rename Upright-class to something that doesn’t assume bipedalism. These talks stretch back decades to a few years after first contact; they have yet to bear any fruit.

“And they still took pictures of them? That’s almost cute,” she says, paging through the users’ details, coming to a stop when she sees a familiar name: Minerva Verrine. “Huh. Guess she’s real.”

“This changes the calculus.”

The woman in the photograph is drawn, austere. She’s not smiling. Nobody in these pictures has been, but it seems most natural for her. This effect is amplified by her dark glasses, worn despite her clearly being indoors. The only resemblance between her and her younger sister is the auburn color of her hair.

“You’d think that if THRONE was lying about being her sister, it’d choose a form that looks more like her.” She leans back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Perhaps it had not settled on a cover story when it chose its human disguise,” he says. “It is also possible it anticipated that too much of a resemblance would be suspicious.”

Selene shoots him a look. He doesn’t react. “I don’t think it was on that level of metacognition, Brutus.”

“The dossier specified that it is extremely intelligent. It may very well be planning that far ahead.”

“I know it’s intelligent, I just don’t think that much subterfuge would’ve felt necessary to it.”

“That mindset is why you so often lose when we play chess.” Once again she opens her mouth to speak; once again she is preempted. “Directness is valuable, but it is entirely plausible THRONE thought its cover would be made more believable by imperfections. Given your assessment of Asphodel’s story and her resemblance to her supposed sister, it would have been correct to do so.”

She leans forward again. “I guess you have a point.”

Ignoring the drones, there are six users total: Halifax Stephenson, Daniel Young, Ivan Burroughs, Fletcher Hayward, Eugene Newman, and Minerva Verrine. She recognizes Young and Newman. Even if the body on the stairs wasn’t really Stephenson, it was a dead ringer for the photograph on file. The partially devoured body was wearing a gas mask, but looking at Burroughs’ picture she recognizes the corpse’s eyes. The other two — Hayward and Verrine — she’s never seen before.

There’s a knock at the door, and her train of thought derails. It’s Asphodel.

“Sorry, did I interrupt something?”

Selene waves her off. “It’s fine. What’d you need?”

As soon as she moves to let her in, Asphodel goes to Selene’s dresser and starts searching through it. “Clothes that fit.”

“I do not think you will find anything more suitable during your second search,” Brutus says.

“It’s worth a shot.” She pulls a shirt out of the drawer and holds it up to her torso. After a moment’s contemplation she folds it and puts it back. “Maybe not.” She sighs, hand on her chin, brow furrowed. “You don’t have guest clothes? No exes or flings that left stuff behind?”

“No, neither. Don’t really have any exes.”

Asphodel’s eyes flit between the person and the hologram in the room. “That tracks.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” A moment’s pause. “I hate to be a bother about this, but—”

Selene waves off the apologetic preface. “You can order some clothes. I’ll pay for it.”

“Thank you, I’m sorry for the trouble—”

“No need for the apologies. It’s the least we can do.”

“You should be able to make purchases from your tablet,” Brutus says. “If you order quickly, it should arrive before we are isolated.”

She does, and it’s less than four hours before the tablet lights up with a request to open the airlock, accompanied by a stylized depiction of a delivery drone with cameras its closed in an imitation of smiling eyes. “It says to open the airlock.”

Brutus nods in response — Selene knows he’ll have triple-checked the message’s signature for legitimacy — and the airlock opens. An automated courier drone floats in, only moderately less cute than its portrait, accompanied by a halo of cameras. The drone’s front unfolds, grotesque like a cat yawning, and out slides a series of packages barely recognizable as clothing, compressed and trussed up with twine. The bundles land ambivalently on the carpet. Asphodel looks at the drone with an expression Selene can’t read, hand outstretched like she’s either going to give the drone a pat on the head-analogue or grab it and smash it against the wall.

She does neither. The airlock closes behind it with a quiet hiss. She takes the clothes and goes to the guest room. It’s not long before Selene hears her voice again. “They don’t fit.”

She looks up at her guest, takes a moment to register what she’s seeing, and averts her gaze. Asphodel’s in her underwear, practical garments that still evoke the flesh. The curve of her hips is burned into her eyes like an unbidden daydream, like having stared into the sun. “Do you mind?” The levelness of her voice briefly surprises her. Training herself into professionalism has its uses.

“What are you—?” Asphodel sighs. “Fine, whatever.”

It’s not long before she’s back in Selene’s formalwear, holding a dress up to her torso. She wasn’t lying; it’d be a tight fit under the best of circumstances. It’s the sort of fit associated with fancy clothing for extremely formal functions of the sort Selene does her best not to attend. As casual wear, it’s not fit for purpose.

Asphodel says as much. “I’m sorry for the trouble, but do you think I could order a replacement?”

Brutus shakes his head, an uncommon gesture for him when he has to use up cycles rendering the motion of his hair. “We have less than two hours before we lose contact. That is not enough time for a second delivery.” Selene doesn’t let her relief show; a single delivery is fine, but two would eat into her scrip budget more than she would be comfortable with.

Dress still held up to her torso, Asphodel frowns, looking down at it, then up at Selene. “You have to have one of those medical robot arms, right? Can it do stitches?”

Selene looks at Brutus, who says, “Yes, I should be able to re-tailor your clothes for you.”

It’s slow work. The machine folds down from the wall, a blockage in the arterial space of the hallway. A scalpel performs adequately at a task it was never meant for, and a needle threads surgical-grade stitches through seams. He must be researching the principles of garment tailoring as he goes, extrapolating Asphodel’s measurements from the camera feeds. He’s stopped rendering his avatar or responding to questions. Whatever his method is, it’s demanding.

Selene exits her room after a brief report to her superiors and colleagues in the Blades — no survivors found, no sign of THRONE, will continue to search — to find Asphodel sitting on the floor, watching a triumph of medical science alter a dress. Selene sits down next to her.

They watch the cutting and stitching heads engage in their careful dance for a couple minutes before Asphodel breaks the silence. “Thanks again for the clothes.” A brief pause. ”The delivery was probably expensive.”

It was. “You don’t have to thank me.”

Silence overtakes them again. The carpet is soft, and the quiet rustle of fabric is soothing. Selene can tell she’d be in danger of dozing off if she was still capable of getting drowsy. Still, it’s nice.

“Why did that delivery robot look like that?” Once again Asphodel interrupts the quiet. “All the cameras were off-putting.”

“They need good peripheral vision so they don’t run into stuff.”

“That makes sense.” Then, “Wait, how do you know that?”

“Brutus used to pilot one.” It was years ago, back when they were first getting started together, back when they needed the scrip and would cut to the bone to save it. “They’re all piloted by AI. The delivery company avoids liability in a crash and the AI gets paid.”

“What would a robot need money for?”

“Computing time is expensive.”

Conversation is interrupted when the dress is finished and Asphodel has to put another garment on the table. After she sits back down, she asks, “Does Brutus earn his keep?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Computing time is expensive, right?”

“He’s not my employee. We’re partners.”

There’s a look on her face Selene doesn’t know what to do with — a half-suppressed grimace, maybe — but she doesn’t say anything else.

After an indeterminate while longer of watching a robot tailor at work, Selene stands. “I’ve got more work to do.” Maybe she’ll find Minerva’s original report on THRONE. Hopefully it’ll have that cave’s coordinates in it. “Let me know when you want dinner.”

“Yeah, sure.”

***

It’s three days after their isolation began, and Selene is once again at her desk. Reading through the decrypted mail is less enlightening than she had hoped. For every useful piece of information, there’s a couple dozen bits of office gossip, complaints about the food printer quality, denied requests for vacation time. She sighs, stretches, rubs her eyes. The information’s turning to mush in her head. She’s about to call it a night when she looks back at the screen, realizes what it’s about, pages back to read from the start.

It’s between Minerva and Stephenson. The start of the correspondence hasn’t been decrypted yet. The first link in the chain she has access to is Minerva suggesting numerous methods for keeping THRONE in line even if they let it out of the enclosure. It’s a thorough list; half of them are technologies Selene’s never heard of. It ends with her asserting it’s inhumane to keep something so large confined to such a small space and a signature, “MPV.”

The response fits on a single screen. “Absolutely not. You’re talking like one of those Telly cultists.” She can feel the bile rising in her throat. She imagines THRONE, three meters tall, stuck in that tiny enclosure. She thinks back to Stephenson lying dead on the stairs. It’s a satisfying image.

The bile stays with her. She’s still wide awake and resentful when it’s time to sleep and her consciousness is flipped off like a light.

***

It’s dinner, five nights after their isolation began. The steaks on their plates ooze red just like the real thing. Brutus is explaining the process by which he modulates the steak’s recipe file to make it rarer or more well done. Most of it goes over Selene’s head — this wasn’t her department even when she was more academically minded — but Asphodel seems to be enjoying the conversation, nodding along. Selene isn’t paying much attention to the words, just watching the conversation, the clipped head tilts Brutus makes, the way Asphodel’s mouth moves, other such things. It’s comfortable, like the sound of crickets or rain outside.

Asphodel gestures, knife in hand. “I’m surprised you thought to try that. I guess you have a lot of time to iterate, confined to the ship together so often.”

Selene’s about to ask how she got into culinary engineering when she fumbles. The knife slips from Asphodel’s grip, and she contorts herself to try and catch it. Her reflexes are impressive, but her accuracy is not; she catches it by the blade, which digs in. She drops it on reflex, and the knife clatters to the floor. She flinches at the noise but regards her bleeding hand with a blank expression Selene can only read as boredom, or perhaps confusion.

She’s off to the bathroom before she fully realizes it, grabs a roll of bandages and disinfectant after a moment’s hasty searching, returns to find Asphodel continuing to examine her hand with that same look on her face. She looks up when Selene takes a hold of her hand.

“What? It’s nothing, you don’t have to—”

She waves her off. It’s not that bad a cut, but still needs bandaging. Asphodel doesn’t pull back as Selene sprays the cut with stinging antiseptic and begins to wind the bandage around her palm. The blood stains the green-blue fabric crimson. When her work is done, Selene steps back; Asphodel flexes her hand.

“Thanks,” she says, then, “It’s sticky.”

“Yeah, it’s got some kind of salve on it. It promotes healing.” She stoops down to pick up the knife, wipes blood off the tile. “Make sure you don’t use that hand too much while it heals.” The knife goes into its slot easily; the cleaning system can handle blood just as well as food residue.

“Yeah, okay,” she replies, reaching over the table to take Selene’s knife. She’s not meeting her eyes. She resumes eating, knife and fork having swapped hands.

The rest of dinner is uneventful, and it’s now past the point in the ship’s circadian processes when the lights dim in artificial dusk. Selene sits at her terminal, paging through the user registry again. The glare of her screen the only light in the room. She cycles through names and photographs on repeat. Stephenson. Young. Burroughs. Hayward. Newman. Verrine.

“Young’s body was in the server room. Newman’s was in the security room. Stephenson was on the stairs to the kitchen. I’m pretty sure Burroughs was the one who got partially devoured.” She’s muttering under her breath, counting on her fingers as she goes, voice building up to normal speaking tone. “That leaves two bodies we can’t identify: whoever got their head slammed into the wall, and whoever was in the elevator. One could be Minerva and the other could be Hayward. Then we’d have six people here and six corpses, and everything would line up.” She turns to Brutus. “That’s the obvious thing to think, right?”

“I was under the impression you agreed that Stephenson’s body was THRONE in disguise.”

“Right, exactly, so we have one person unaccounted for. Maybe the real Stephenson’s body is in the enclosure. Maybe somebody got out.”

“You are forgetting something.” She can’t help but read his blank expression as disappointment. “It is possible there were two people in the elevator.”

A deep exhale. “That’s true.”

There’s quiet for a few seconds before he says, “I apologize.”

“No, you’re right.” She stands up and stretches; her back pops, and a brief ripple of numbness radiates out from her spinal implant. “It’s definitely possible.” She spends a few seconds mentally repairing the elevator, unfolding it like origami to see if two people could fit, before dismissing that line of inquiry. She takes her nightly slate of pills and climbs the ladder up to her bed.

Blankets weighing down on her, staring up at the ceiling, she asks, “Brutus?”

“Yes, Selene?”

“Thanks for all the work you do around here. I really appreciate it.”

It’s a moment before he responds. “You are welcome.” He sounds like he means it.

And then she’s asleep.

It’s not long before half-lucid awareness reemerges. The sky outside the front window is black, dotted with stars, the galaxy’s arm smeared over it with insulting beauty. The vehicle’s headlights and scattered lamps are the only exterior illumination; they cast harsh shadows on the dusty gray terrain. A crater-pockmarked childhood home, for some definition of home. The air is stale and stinks of violence, the gunpowder reek of a vacuum baptism. The seat’s fabric is coarse, decades worth of dust ground into it. Overdue for a cleaning.

There’s someone in the passenger seat. The rover never had a passenger seat. This is somewhere else. Imitation leather seats, imitation blue sky, imitation asphalt under the tires. The sun catches hair dyed gray; his roots are white. Two people sitting in the backseat of an imitation relic. The electric engine rumbles, baritone like his voice, artificial like his sentiments. Goosebumps, cologne that smells like a bad idea, stifled moans like an unfulfilled fantasy. His hand — bandaged around the palm — tangles in loose hair. His mouth tastes like shrapnel, ashes, someone else’s restaurant order. The carpeted floor is rough against exposed skin. Overdue for a cleaning.

The clock-forced awakening is a mercy. She blinks.

She’s talking before she’s fully pieced herself together. “Does the medisynth have anything that’ll keep me from dreaming?”

“I can add anti-oneirics to your medication regimen,” Brutus says. “Did you have a nightmare? I noticed your vitals were elevated for most of the night.”

“Something like that.”

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

triple helix pitching forward | chapter two: sunset morning substrate

word count: 3.0k

content warnings: mentioned animal cruelty

Relative morning comes, and Selene is awake to see the lights gradually brighten. Light seeps into the decor as if the Slumbering Fury is slowly waking up, but she doesn’t, hasn’t in years. Dreams are cut short each morning at round-numbered times, as if consciousness is clocking in for the day’s shift, and she finds herself staring up at the ceiling. The railings on her bed provide just enough clearance for her frame; she’s considered buying a larger bed, but there have always been more pressing uses for her scrip.

She drops down from her lofted bed, ignoring the ladder entirely. Leaning down at her desk, she hits some keys on her terminal, pulls up the security feed for the guest room. Asphodel is sleeping curled inward, entangled in blankets.

The carpet muffles Selene’s footsteps as she goes about her morning routine. The sun is still setting outside: Elysium 4’s days are sixty times longer than Earth’s. It will be thirteen more relative mornings until nightfall, and thirty more after that before the sun rises. She could move back and forth across the planet, straddling the day-night terminator line to keep her schedule in sync with the time she perceives out the window, but the thought of wasting electricity on something so trivial is embarrassing. She’s long since gotten used to mismatched exterior and interior time.

Honing her razor on a canvas strop, hands operating on practiced autopilot, Selene wonders how she must look to her new guest. She stares at her reflection. Gray eyes catch and reflect the light oddly, a cosmetic side effect of her ocular augments that leaves her eyes somewhere between human, animal, and corpse. The razor glides across nearly cyanotic skin, over high cheekbones and well-worn laugh lines from what Brutus calls her “perpetual smile.”

She wonders why Asphodel would come with someone like her so willingly — naivety? The blind trust Selene is who she says she is? Desperation? She worries her guest secretly views her as a threat. Of course, if Brutus is correct, she is and should and vice-versa. No amount of respectful hospitality can change that.

A splash of cold water to the face breaks her train of thought, and she starts brushing out her sable hair, pulling against tangles with audible tearing.

“I do not know how you manage it,” Brutus says. “You brush your hair every morning and yet it is always tangled by the next. Is it something about the way you sleep?”

“I mess it up right before bed while you’re not looking.” Her tangles are sufficiently subdued that the ripping has stopped; it’s not much longer before she sets the brush down. Her hair frames her face like wings.

“I would notice if you did that,” Brutus says. If Brutus was human, she’s sure she’d hear laughter in his voice. “You know this. You connected me to the Slumbering Fury’s camera systems yourself.”

“And that’s how I know its blind spots.” The conversation continues; they slip into an easy back and forth like two gears on an assembly line locking into place. Selene heads into the kitchen. Brutus projects his avatar sitting at the table, ankles crossed in his mournful black dress, looking nowhere in particular as he speaks. She turns on the food printer, punching in the day’s breakfast with one hand while inserting fresh ingredient canisters — yeast, rendered soy proteins, salt, oil, milled carbohydrates — with the other. The extrusion head whirs into action, laying down a spongy lattice of what will eventually be pancakes.

The stack is nearly complete when Asphodel walks in with a bright wakefulness belied by messy hair, loose pajamas — she’s rolled up the cuffs to compensate for the height difference — and a faint sickly air Selene hadn’t noticed under the fluorescent lights of the facility. Conversation stops; Selene, leaning against the wall, gives her a wave. Brutus nods politely.

“Hello Selene! Hello Brutus,” she says, sitting down across from him.

Brutus nods again. “I did not expect you to be so wakeful, given the events of yesterday.”

She shrugs airily, opening her mouth to say something and stopping herself when Selene sets a plate of freshly-printed pancakes in front of her, complete with syrup and cutlery.

“You get first stack,” she says, turning back to the printer, fingers hitting keys as she talks. “You were asleep before I could get you dinner last night.” Instructions entered, she sits at the table between Brutus, whose unseeing eyes track her movements, and Asphodel, who is beginning to cut up her breakfast. The printer whirs back to life behind her; culinary implements emerge like indecisive groundhogs from cavities they had just receded into.

The stack doesn’t last long. Asphodel’s table manners are of a caliber she’s never seen before, nearly surgical; when the pancakes are done her hands are free of syrup, a feat Selene’s never managed. “Thank you,” she says, pushing her plate away, looking a little warmer and more content.

“You want seconds?”

She demurs politely, but Selene knows hunger when she sees it. She ends up taking the finished fourth stack, leaning through Brutus’s avatar so she doesn’t have to get up, coming away with breakfast and hair standing on end from static cling.

“Have you ever examined the inside of a food printer, Asphodel?” he asks, unfazed. She shakes her head after a nearly imperceptible delay, and he continues. “They are interesting devices. The basic principle is simple to explain. All printed meals are constructed of the same base materials. The extrusion head, however, has superhuman finesse. Through careful variation of texture and usage of trace chemicals generated through similar processes to medicine synthesis, it exploits edge cases in human flavor perception and create a simulacrum of almost any dish.”

“The only good application of PsiEng,” Selene mutters through a mouthful of pancake.

“The barest attempt at deception succeeds due to the consumer’s willingness to believe it. It is incredible what you are capable of believing when given sufficient excuse.” He’s not looking at her, but Selene feels his eyes drilling into her all the same.

“Huh,” Asphodel says, and then, “Ah, sorry, why’re you telling me this?”

“I have been attempting to refine this recipe file over time, but I cannot taste test the results, and Selene does not have a very discerning palette. I would appreciate your thoughts.”

He hasn’t done this routine with a guest in years. Asphodel looks up, tapping her chin with the end of her fork before shrugging. “I can’t think of anything. It was pretty good.” An apologetic look. “Sorry, I know that’s not helpful.”

He gives an eyes-only smile that’d extend behind his scarf if there was anything behind his scarf, any flesh to him at all. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

Selene waves Asphodel off from helping her put the dishes away; plates, forks, and knives slide into compartments in the walls, and once the little doors close behind them, steam brushes kick into life with a sound like snow on a plate glass window.

They sit in front of the window, Brutus taking his customary position behind Selene’s chair. Reds and yellows drip down the sky like paint from splayed fingers; the purple of the night creeps upward like flame. Squinting against the disc of the sun, Selene can almost make out a few of the planet’s rocky moons.

“Hell of a view,” Selene says, and Asphodel nods.

“I haven’t seen anything like it.” She shifts in her seat, trying to get comfortable, legs tucked under her, rubbing her socks against the upholstery.

“You don’t get to watch the sunset after work?” Selene pivots her chair to face Asphodel rather than the window.

Another infinitesimal hesitation. She shakes her head. “I don’t work in that lab, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“What brought you there, then?” It’s conversational legerdemain: reaching for information without letting on why you want it. She’s out of practice but the principles should hold.

“I wanted to see my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“My older sister, Minerva. She said I needed to come see her immediately, and that she’d say why in person.” Selene notices a glint in her eyes behind the cracked glasses. It’s tears. “Do you think she’s okay?”

Selene runs through the bodies. Three with names: Stephenson, Newman, Young. Three without: the two in the viewing room and the one in the elevator. The dormitory could house six. Everybody’s accounted for, unless...

“I very much doubt she is telling the truth,” Brutus says into her ear, his avatar immobile. “In the unlikely event it is, it is unlikely Minerva Verrine still lives.”

“I can’t say for sure,” she says. “You’re the only living person I ran into in there, but she might’ve found some way to escape.”

The look on her face makes Selene wish she had more concrete good news. “Do you have a terminal I can use? She’s probably wondering where I am.” Selene doesn’t voice the question’s unspoken qualifier.

She points behind her, toward the hall. “It’s on the desk in my bedroom. Feel free to set up a guest session.”

Asphodel nods and hurries off. Before she’s even left the room, Brutus is speaking through Selene’s cochlear link. “I think it prudent to surveil her communication.”

Selene knows that if she doesn’t directly tell him not to, he will. “What’s the status on the server image?”

“It is entirely copied over; Legion is ready to retrieve at your leisure.” A tangle of lines — something between brain stem and root system, strangely familiar — unfurls itself in stark neon in front of Selene. Her augments etch the data directly into her eyes, complex patterns making her retinas itch. “In addition, I have been able to decrypt the directory mapping. I cannot yet read the files themselves, but I have some idea of the overarching structure.”

She lets her mind focus and unfocus, trying to resolve the tangle into something intelligible. After a couple of moments she realizes what it reminds her of; everything falls into place. “It’s a document mesh,” she says. Linkages between pieces of information like axons under a microscope, revisions clinging to nodes like dust.

“That is a reasonable hypothesis,” he says, pointing to isolated gnarls of data with claw-ringed fingers. “These files are far larger than the rest. I assume they are some sort of high-density video encoding, which implies they are surveillance footage. They will be slower to decrypt, but once I am able to, they are likely to provide conclusive proof of what happened and where THRONE currently resides.”

She crosses her arms. “How long do you think it will take?”

“I would estimate somewhere between twenty and thirty days.”

She shakes her head. “No, that won’t work.” She does her best to point at a central portion, trying to ignore the way the projection appears in front of her finger — it’s been years and she’s still not used to that. “This looks like a central hub of sorts, maybe some kind of index. Focusing on that will get us more info faster.”

“Are you certain? If the information we find is not useful—”

“Then we can try the video. I still think we try this first.” She leans back in her chair. “Know your enemy and all that.”

“Very well. I will keep you informed on my findings.”

She blinks and the data display is gone. “Thanks, Brutus.” She closes her eyes, imagines herself at the center of some web, spider and fly at once. She opens them again when she can hear muffled footsteps on the carpet behind her, sees Asphodel’s reflection faintly in the window. She turns around, chair swiveling on its stand. She’s wearing some of what passes for Selene’s formalwear. The button-up shirt fits her poorly, tailored for someone with broader shoulders, a flatter chest, two dozen centimeters’ extra height. The sleeves — meant for someone more sinewy — bunch up around the upper arms. Selene can see the rise and fall of her chest, the soft curve of the neck, the hint of the collarbone, and... Asphodel follows her eyeline. Her gaze snaps up.

“Sorry, I helped myself to some of your clothes,” Asphodel says, rubbing the back of her head. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t want to wear pajamas all day.”

Selene waves it off; she forgets sometimes that not everyone dresses like her. “It’s fine. I should’ve figured.”

She gives a sheepish little smile and takes her seat again, swiveling around to look back out the window for a moment before saying, “How long do you plan on staying here?”

“Well, that depends. Brutus, you mind putting the tunnel map up?”

He nods, makes a gesture like spreading his hands — more for their guest’s benefit than anything else — and a star map paints itself over the window, obscuring the sunset completely. Tunnels, invisible strands thousands of light-years long and the width of planets, wind their ways between stars. They’re the arteries of interstellar communication and travel. A tunneling drive can take a spacecraft from one end of a tunnel to the other in less than a second. A journey that would take a thousand years to accomplish at humanly achievable speeds could be finished in a few seconds — as long as the tunnels are currently in the right positions for your route. They have a nasty habit of skipping out of one gravity well and into another, leaving travelers stranded and communities isolated.

The tunnels around Earth vacated the area centuries ago; they’re not predicted to return for millennia more.

“We are here,” he says, snapping Selene out of thoughts of an unknown home. He’s pointing to an isolated portion of the map, connected to the rest by a single strand. “The only tunnel in the area connects to the Persepolis Interchange.” He runs a finger up the line connected to their current position, up to a crossroads. “It will remain in the area for three days; it will not return for forty after that.”

“So we’re leaving in the next two days?” Asphodel asks, examining the map.

“I can’t. I’m still copying data over from the facility’s servers.” Selene looks over at Asphodel, arms folded. “You should be able to leave on your own, right? How’d you get here?”

She looks away, flushing slightly. “I called in a favor with a pilot I know. I don’t have a craft of my own. I’d hate to impose, but if you don’t mind—”

“You can stay here until we leave, obviously. It’s not safe to leave you in the facility.”

She blinks before a grateful smile overtakes her. “Thank you.”

Another dismissive wave. “Don’t worry about it.”

Asphodel leans forward in her chair, twisting it back and forth slightly, chewing on her thumbnail. “What’s so important here, anyway? Are you looking for that thing Minerva was studying?”

A nod. “Did she tell you anything about it?”

“A little. She said she found it in a cave not far from here while scouting. It started hanging around her camp long enough to pick up language through osmosis.”

“It learned to speak without having been taught?” Brutus asks.

“They were having conversations within weeks. You can see why they wanted to study it, right? She called it in, and they were able to send over construction drones and recruit researchers on short enough notice to make sure it was still around to trap.”

“They kidnapped it?” Selene asks.

Asphodel doesn’t respond for a moment, just gives her a look she can’t quite place, somewhere between confusion and pity. “That’s what you do when studying an animal.”

“Most animals can’t be asked questions.”

“You and Minerva would get along well. She said she couldn’t stand to watch the guards use their shock batons.” Selene doesn’t like this new air to her, this discomfiting change in tone of voice. “An animal tries to escape. You shock it.”

She imagines THRONE trying to extend itself through the bars of that pitiful little cage, malleable body tensing then falling limp at the application of excessive voltage. She feels queasy. “Can we talk about something else?”

She can’t tell if Asphodel’s smirking or if that expression’s something else entirely. “Fine.”

That night, when conversation’s stalled out and her guest’s gone to bed, Selene sits at the kitchen table, head resting on one hand, idly rubbing the scar coiled serpentine around her finger.

“The message Asphodel sent contained nothing out of the ordinary,” Brutus says. ”She told her apparent sister that she was staying with an investigator named Selene Morningstar, that she was safe, and that she wanted a response as soon as possible.”

Selene responds with her eyes closed. “How’s the decryption work going?”

“Full documents will be available on your terminal, but I do not imagine you will find most of them useful unless you are curious as to THRONE’s diet.”

“Most of them?”

“A pair of edits in a document about THRONE’s psychology piqued my interest. It was a short paragraph added by one user, then deleted by another within fifteen minutes.”

This buildup can’t lead anywhere good. “What did it say?”

Brutus reads it aloud. “Responses to standard psychometric stimulus batteries are consistent with Michaels-Hallow syndrome, which would present the first case of a non-human intelligence being thus afflicted since the syndrome’s discovery fourteen years ago. It is unknown if this is the baseline state for THRONE’s species, or if it has been flash-etched at some point before recovery.”

Her chair scoots backward slightly as she sits up, eyes flying open. It’s as if a specter drove some ancient blade deep into her back. “You’re sure that decryption’s correct?”

“I am absolutely positive.” If he resents the obvious question, it doesn’t come through in his voice. Nothing ever does.

“Alright,” she says, leaning back, staring up at the ceiling. “Change of plans. Focus on user registry, then what looks most like internal mail.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” She stands up, heads for a shower before bed, a single question running through her mind: if the flash-etching theory is correct, why would someone brainwash an alien?

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

nevada semi-review

been putting off writing this one because i'm not sure what to say. it's a damn good book. very rough. not what i was expecting, given what i'd heard about it. but a damn good book. i understand why people were so dead-set on making sure it was preserved. i'm not sure i can comfortably recommend it without caveats, but if you can handle the subject matter it's really worth your time.

the description on the back of my copy was comically bad, though. it's like the blurb writer thought this was a ya novel or a coming-of-age story. gotta sell it somehow, i guess.

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

gideon the ninth semi-review

finished reading gideon the ninth a couple days ago. i enjoyed it! i have minor quibbles with it but i'm sure some of them are consequences of reading the back half while dead tired. given who recommended it to me it's quippier than expected, but i'd recommend it basically without reservation to anyone who can handle the preoccupation with death inherent in a story about a bunch of necromancers.

also it's very funny that the book has a pronunciation guide and name explanation in the back for all the characters. i didn't know you could do that!

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

triple helix pitching forward | chapter one: solo dive

word count: 3.9k

content warnings: violence & dead bodies

description: selene morningstar, seraph-class investigator, has been sent to a distant planet to terminate an escaped specimen. in the ruined facility she's investigating, she finds one more survivor than expected.

It is quiet aboard the Slumbering Fury. Its captain, Selene Chalcedony Morningstar, sits in front of a window, watching the acidic rain come down in sheets on the mushroom forests below. Behind them, the ship’s ionic exhaust sparkles and winks out in the downpour, brief flashes of light drowned out by the blazing alien sunset. Her AI assistant and companion, Brutus, is guiding the ship to their destination, a research facility high above the treeline. He projects a holographic avatar of sorts standing next to her seat, hands clasped in mute professionalism, sepulchral face turned to gaze out the same window she looks out of. It’s a gesture for his human companion — his holographic eyes do not see. It is unrequested but appreciated.

Brutus’s avatar turns to face her, and a synthetic voice speaks into her ear. “Twenty minutes until expected arrival.” She nods and stands as his avatar dissipates.

“Let’s go over the assignment again,” she says, walking to her equipment locker. They’ve already read and reread the provided dossier multiple times, but it’s good to keep things fresh.

His voice is professional, level — flat but not monotone — as he reads. “Distress signal received on Coalition public channels from the fourth planet in the Elysium system, previously believed uninhabited. Signal details the escape of a specimen from containment. Designated THRONE, specimen is of unknown species and was recovered by planetary surface scout. No requests for status have received replies. Staff presumed deceased.”

Selene’s armor is a set of burnished silver pieces that snap together over her normal attire: loose shirts and pants in plain colors and comfortable fabrics. She prepares herself silently while Brutus continues speaking. “No images have been provided. Following description contains all known information, given in distress signal: THRONE possesses ocher fur, eight limbs, and eight eyes. It presents bipedal locomotion, though it has been observed moving octopedally. Limited studies have shown empathic and shapeshifting abilities. Intelligence believed high. Specimen is to be terminated.”

Her armor resembles its wearer once fully assembled: broad shoulders, strong arms, the sense of professionalism forged from raw metal. Its only adornments are her crest on the back and the tightly coiled ram horns on the helmet. Her metal carapace fits her far better than the suits and ties of her previous life, a layer of protection she finds more than natural. She’s engineered herself to be a sufficient weapon, but as always, she puts on her holster and places her handgun in it.

“They really didn’t give us much to work with, huh,” she sighs.

“Yes, a map of the facility would have been appreciated,” Brutus replies. “It is to be expected, I suppose.” They both know they’re lucky to get this much. The Coalition is so broad, containing so many disparate branches and organizations, that three entities nominally under the same banner can have no idea what the others are doing.

The final piece of her equipment slithers out of the locker and onto her arm, wreathing it in slime. It gives the impression that she had just been elbow-deep in something with black, oil-slick blood. It is a swarm of colloidal nanomachines — a recent acquisition Selene never could have afforded, an experiment of some rogue laboratory she had been hired to contain. Formerly autonomous, it is now an extension of Brutus, something between a limb and a well-trained dog. Its inventors called it Principality. He calls it Legion.

There was a time when the Fury’s deceleration would have jostled its interior. With Brutus at the controls, however, Selene does not even notice they’ve stopped. “Ready to disembark, captain,” he says. A brief exhale to center herself and she heads out.

From the outside, the facility is a standard Coalition outpost. Treated carbon fiber stilts support a landing platform. Above there’s a sloped roof to protect personnel from the caustic rain. Even from the ship, it’s impossible to see how far below the landing platform the facility extends.

The Coalition must have believed the harsh environs to be security enough. Legion disables the facility’s keycard lock with ease, and Selene steps into the sterile foyer. Fluorescent lights hum overhead, unnecessarily nourishing synthetic greenery. It is, like the outside, the sort of cookie-cutter design a network of construction drones could assemble in a handful of minutes: chairs, table, staircase access, elevator. Even the fake plants come standard; they are merely a part of the tables they sit on.

The elevator doesn’t come when called, so she pries apart the doors, cheap aluminum construction bending like plastic, and looks inside. The cable is missing; looking down, she sees it bunched up uselessly on top of the crumpled elevator at the bottom of the shaft.

“What do you suppose happened here?” Brutus asks.

Selene steps back from the elevator doors, and they slide closed, oblivious to how they’ve been mangled. She heads for the stairs and says, “Someone got desperate.”

Below the foyer is what Selene assumes to be the office floor, a small room filled with the chemically sweet smell of carpet cleaner. She brushes past an obsolete security drone as she enters. Off-the-shelf workstations sit in neat rows, inactive computer screens embedded into desks, blinking red lights accompanying each of them. She steps over a toppled chair and taps on the nearest screen, which lights up with DATASERVER LINK SEVERED. She presses her left hand against the screen. Legion briefly extends itself, slithering into the crack between it and the desk, before retracting as the display goes dark.

“The error is real,” Brutus says. “This is merely a screen connected to a centralized server. Without access to said server it is useless.”

Selene sighs and turns away from the workstation, looking at the rest of the room. There’s no smell of blood in the air, the carpet is clean, and no bodies lie splayed out on the floor. Whatever happened here didn’t happen in this room.

Selene heads to the stairwell down. It’s bare concrete with no handrail, clearly something built out of obligation, a construction just barely human-usable. She’s almost to the next floor when she notices something out of the corner of her eye and turns around.

There’s somebody lying prone on the stairs, a trail of bloodied handprints on the wall behind them. She crouches down next to the body, turns them over, and puts a hand against their neck, checking for a pulse. Her eyes wander to the name tag pinned neatly to their lab coat. Doctor Halifax Stephenson, Head Researcher. There’s no pulse. Selene stands, letting him fall limp. “Must’ve bled out trying to get up here.”

The emblem next to his name at least give her an idea of who runs this facility. The fractal pattern of multiple eyes indicates that he’s Coalition. The single-strand RNA helix indicates he’s with the Biological Research Bureau. The magnifying glass and grasping hand are new, though she has guesses.

The next floor down turns out to be the kitchen, a small linoleum-floored room filled with the smell of yeast, cooking oil, rendered soy and bean proteins. A couple of grimy domestic food-printers — the sort of appliance you’d expect in a student’s apartment — sit on a counter in the center of the room. There’s a chest freezer against the wall. Selene opens it up, solidified condensation cracking as she does, and looks inside, Legion slithering in to investigate. To her eyes it’s all frozen-over mush, crystallized past the point of being recognizable. Legion chews through layers of ice like a worm, insinuates some feelers into the substances, pulling back once sated.

“These seem to be samples of the local flora,” Brutus says. “It has all been frozen too long to discern fully, but chemical analysis shows similarities to various native fungi.”

“Maybe it’s what they were feeding THRONE,” Selene says, closing the freezer.

“Unlikely, unless THRONE eats very rarely. The ice suggests it was left frozen for at least ten days, possibly more.”

She nods, mulling it over as she heads out of the kitchen. No bodies here either, save for the late Dr. Stephenson in the staircase leading back up. Onward.

Next is a small room Selene can immediately tell is some kind of dormitory. Cots against the wall, a sleeping bag in the corner, a few hammocks. The sort of accommodations found on a long haul freight journey. Perhaps that’s precisely what they were. Imagining the scientists working here lugging their beds off the transport that brought them here brings her some joy, but she shakes her head. Can’t waste too much time on frivolous matters. The room could house six people, assuming nobody shared beds. Good to know.

Down to the floor below. She doesn’t initially notice the walls lined with screens, each labeled with a different floor of the facility — Kitchen, Enclosure, etc. The first thing she notices is the smell of blood in the air and the body slumped over a desk, a shotgun loosely supported by limp, lifeless arms. She pulls the corpse up by their hair. The gaping hole in their trachea seeps yet more blood onto their uniform shirt. The name on their badge is still plainly visible. Eugene Newman, Security & Specimen Compliance. She lets go and the body falls backward, shotgun clattering to the floor. The door to the stairs leading down is pockmarked with scattershot bullet holes. There are claw marks on the elevator door. The screens all show static.

Legion slithers off her arm, dripping onto the floor and crawling toward the monitors, infiltrating then exfiltrating their circuitry.

“It appears camera feeds are routed through the central data server,” Brutus says. “The monitors here cannot establish a connection either.”

Next floor down is data storage, where the air once again reeks of blood. A small rack of servers sits near the middle of the room, humming quietly. A guard, stomach split open, leans slumped against the wall, leaking bile and blood. Selene, more for formality than anything else, stoops down to check their name tag. Daniel Young, Security & Specimen Monitoring. She stands and places her hand against the server tower.

“Mind imaging this, Brutus?” she asks. Legion slithers off of her hand in mute acknowledgment, insinuating itself into the server.

After a moment, he speaks up. “Server encryption is non-trivial. It will take several hours to copy over, and several days to decrypt piecemeal. I would prefer we wait until you return to the ship.”

“No, this is important,” she says, lifting her hand back up. “I don’t think I’ll need Legion. Just keep it here copying over the server, I’ll come back for it later.”

“If you insist,” Brutus says. Legion remains in the server, whisper-quiet as it works.

She heads deeper, going down the stairs and opening the door to the sharp smell of ozone. A dozen security drone charging stations line the walls. The ruined bodies of several of said drones lie on the floor, occasionally twitching and sparking. They’re sufficiently mangled that a precise count is difficult; Selene estimates there are three to six of them. She stoops down to pick up a severed mechanical arm that ends in a blade. Its matte gray surface is stained red, slick with blood. She drops it; it lands elbow-first on a bipedal security drone’s torso, causing it to jerk spasmodically, speaker-grille mouth coughing up sparks.

The next floor’s antiseptic reek hits her before she enters the room, a reminder of a dozen surgeries in a dozen circumstances. A pair of lab coats hang from hooks on the wall. Dented lockers, rusted and painted over, sit on the floor by the wall, hand-me-downs from some other department. Plastic curtains cut the room in half. Someone has written “DECON” on them in messy handwriting. There’s a small gap between the curtains where a small chemical shower sits. Selene pushes past it, ignoring a lone protective suit hanging on the wall. Whatever biological agent the scientists here were worried about, she’s rebuilt herself to be immune. She’s not sure a poison exists that could kill her.

She expects a large, security-locked door to be blocking the entrance to THRONE’s enclosure. There is such a door. It’s been blown off its hinges. Plasma-tempered glass shattered outward from the viewing chamber, shards of it crunching underfoot. A messily bisected security drone sparking quietly in the corner. Ozone and iron hang in the air. Right under the observation window, a gas-masked face stares up, terror evident in dead, blank eyes. It’s a body wearing a sterile green-blue protective suit, stained red with blood. The suit’s scratched away near their hands. Their abdomen’s been sliced opened, like something out of an abattoir. Selene probes the wound with a gloved hand. It’s unmistakable. Bite marks, viscera torn to shreds, flesh pulled and torn out. Marrow sucked out of rib bones.

“A creature that’d leave bite marks this size...” Selene pulls back her hand.

“If THRONE left these impressions, it would have to be roughly three meters tall,” Brutus says.

Selene steps over the dividing wall, through the now-shattered observation window, moving from glass-covered concrete to straw-covered dirt. There’s a large metal pan on the floor, caked with layers of myoglobin. She stoops down to look at it, then up at the ceiling. A chute empties out right above the pan; she guesses it’s THRONE’s food dish. A rusted cage in the corner, sized perhaps for a large dog, not for anything three meters tall. A slot in the wall to allow objects to be passed back and forth.

Selene turns back toward the door and notices blood splattering the walls. She steps back into the observation chamber, crushing a stray syringe underfoot. Someone’s had their head slammed into the back wall; blood and brain matter radiate out from the central point of impact. She nudges the body onto its back with her foot. Facial reconstruction algorithms activate, lines flickering over the body’s face for a few moments before fizzling out.

“Reconstruction is impossible, given the amount of damage,” Brutus says. “We would need to find another method to identify them.”

“It’s not my first priority,” Selene says, turning to leave. Cleanup isn’t her department; in this case, she doubts anyone will come back to bury the bodies and bleach the carpets. “But if we know what happened here, we can probably find THRONE.”

She’s nearly out of the door when Brutus says, “It appears as though the enclosure is the lowest floor. We would have the best access to the elevator from here.”

She turns on her heel, faster than her armor should allow. “Good catch. Thanks.”

The elevator doors in the observation room yield quickly. Selene’s hands find easy purchase in extant gouges, and she pulls it apart effortlessly. She’s face to face with the elevator, crumpled inward. Blood is the only sign there was someone inside.

“Whoever’s in here, we can’t identify them,” Selene sighs. “Even if we pry this apart, the person inside will be mangled.”

“It is curious,” Brutus says as Selene exits. “In so many aspects, this is standard Mutichiral Coalition construction.”

“Go on.” She enters the locker room, gives her armor a wash in the chemical shower. Even if it’s security theater, she doesn’t want to track anything into the Slumbering Fury.

“It would be suitable for a research outpost,” he continues, Selene listening intently as she steps over a decapitated drone. “If this were an outpost for chemists, mathematicians, field biologists, or simulation engineers, it would be suitable.”

“What are you getting at?” she asks, glancing over at the server tower as she walks. It’s still humming away, and Legion is still working inside it.

“This is a facility intended to contain a dangerous animal. The dossier said it is intelligent and capable of changing form.” The screens are still filled with static, the body is still slumped over the console. “We can assume it is roughly three meters tall, and that it is responsible for all the dead bodies we have encountered thus far.”

Selene doesn’t respond. She can tell from his cadence — the slight modulations calculated for effect, because everything an artificial intelligence does is calculated for effect and nothing is ever involuntary — that he’s building up to something. She almost wants to sit on one of the beds and listen fully, but she needs to get back to the ship. Onward.

“Everything we have seen so far is woefully inadequate for this purpose. It should not have been able to break the viewing glass; even if it had been able to, it should not have been able to breach the security door.” As Brutus speaks, Selene imagines some large explanatory feline, stalking its point through the underbrush before pouncing, sealing the argument with a bloody QED.

She’s entering the office workspace floor when he says, “This facility was under-engineered for the task at hand to an extent I cannot explain. It strikes me as—” He interrupts himself, a clicking sound as his audio levels briefly jump to zero. “There is someone else here.” His synthetic voice is lowered, as if the stranger could overhear him when he’s speaking directly into Selene’s cochlear nerve.

Selene had noticed before he said it. It’s a stranger with long auburn hair and thick, square-rimmed glasses — so cracked it’s hard to tell how she could ever see through them. Her sweater’s bloodied. She’s leaning in front of a terminal, eyebrows knitted together. Selene can just barely make out the words DATASERVER LINK SEVERED in her glasses, the red of the error screen reflected in her sweat and grime. The stranger’s tapping at the screen with increasing frequency and force. She glances up, then back down at the screen.

The stranger looks back up with a jolt, falling backward against the workstation behind her. “Who—” she begins, before Selene cuts her off, approaching with a hand outstretched.

“Captain Selene Morningstar, Seraph-class investigator with the MCC Nightfall Blades branch,” she says, titles and organizations coming out of her mouth as if they don’t taste acrid. “I’ve been sent here to see what happened with a specimen that escaped.” She pauses. “Are you hurt?”

“Asphodel Verrine,” the stranger says, taking Selene’s hand and pulling herself up.”And, ah, no, I’m fine. Please don’t trouble yourself.” She glances away sheepishly, looking down at her sweater. Selene notices how poorly it fits, too large for someone so gaunt. “It bled worse than it hurt.”

“Still, I have bandages on my ship, if you need them,” Selene says. “I doubt it’s safe to stay here, anyway. For all we know the specimen’s still here.”

Asphodel nods. “Lead the way, Captain.”

Selene turns toward the door, waving her hand. “Just Selene is fine.” Asphodel follows her out.

They’re halfway up the staircase when Selene hears something behind them. Whipping around, she sees it — the obsolete security drone getting to its feet, unlubricated joints creaking with the whine of metal on metal. Brutus says something she doesn’t hear as she rushes toward it, moving past Asphodel so quickly she almost shoves her into the wall. Asphodel looks back, affronted, when she sees the bipedal figure leveling a gun-hand at her. She takes off running up the stairs as Selene grabs the drone’s wrist. Servos whine under the stress, and —

It fires. The first bullet hits concrete. It doesn’t get a second. Selene wrenches the hand off the arm in a shower of sparks and kicks hard at a metal torso, which crunches against the wall. A knee to a head and the drone’s incapacitated, its aluminum skull crumpled inward. She tosses the hand to the side like trash.

When she gets to the top of the stairs, Asphodel’s looking through the tiny window in the door at her. She opens the door and Asphodel says, “I’m glad you weren’t hurt, I’m sorry I ran, I—”

Selene cuts her off. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got armor, you don’t. It was the right move.”

Asphodel doesn’t protest further. They board the ship without further incident.

“Selene, we must discuss—” Brutus begins to say into Selene’s ear as she’s removing her armor and putting it away, but Selene cuts him off with a whispered, “Later.” She glances over at Asphodel, who’s looking at the various fixtures of the ship with interest.

“How do these lights work?” she asks, staring with a hand on her chin at one of the ship’s wall-mounted lights, a cloudy, slowly-shifting turquoise Selene doesn’t pay much attention to anymore. “They don’t seem like they’re LED or fluorescent...”

Selene opens her mouth to respond, but Brutus is faster. His holographic avatar appears behind Asphodel, and his voice comes out over the ship’s speakers when he says, “Engineered bioluminescent algae. They provide both illumination and oxygen production.” Asphodel turns, looking for the source of the voice until she sees him. He tilts his head and gives what might be a smile, if his scarf didn’t cover his mouth. He bows, intangibly projected forehead a couple centimeters from clipping into her torso. “Brutus-Athena. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

She glances between Brutus and Selene before saying, “It’s nice to meet you too.” Selene thinks she sees a hint of some instinctive fight-or-flight response in Asphodel’s eyes, but it’s quickly gone, and she can’t tell if it was a trick of the light or really there.

Or simple projection. Asphodel turns to her. “May I use your shower? I don’t want to intrude, but—”

Selene interrupts. “Of course. It’s right over there. I’ll grab you some spare clothes.” She pauses before getting them out of the wardrobe, turning back to look at Asphodel. “You sure you don’t need to be bandaged up before then?”

“Oh, no, really, it’s fine. See?” Asphodel pulls down the collar of her sweater revealing a recent wound, a slash right under a bony shoulder. It isn’t healed over yet, but it’s not bleeding. Judging by how Asphodel carries her arm Selene figures there’s no nerve damage. It’s a shallow wound; it might leave a scar but that’s the worst she’d expect.

Selene looks away, turning back to the wardrobe. “Just make sure you wash it out.” She hands Asphodel a set of her extra pajamas.

Once she can hear the shower head’s hiss through the walls, Selene leans against the wall and says, “What’s on your mind, Brutus?”

“When you returned to the kitchen after examining the enclosure, Doctor Stephenson’s body had been moved from the stairwell outside. You noticed it as well, correct?”

Selene nods. “Yeah, I did.”

“This implies that either THRONE was in hiding and came out to move the body, or—”

“—THRONE disguised itself as the body, and moved to the office once I passed.” Selene finishes Brutus’s theory for him, kicking her foot against the wall.

“It is the most plausible explanation.”

She sighs, closes her eyes, and rests her head against the wall. “I had considered it as soon as I saw her, but... It’s not airtight.”

“Am I correct in assuming you are aware of the risks in allowing her to stay here?”

“Of course. If there’s a chance she’s not THRONE, though, I don’t want to leave her out there.”

“And if she is?”

Selene crosses her arms. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’m not making any moves until we know for sure.”

“I respect that and will not act preemptively. Please be careful, Selene.”

“I will, love.”

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

triple helix pitching forward | about

first chapter of my current wip, triple helix pitching forward, is scheduled to post later today. it's a sci-fi story about an investigator trying to get to the bottom of a specimen escape on a remote planet.

future chapters will be posted every so often, as i complete them. i'd like to post at least one a month, but we'll see if that holds, given life obligations.

i've been thinking about this story a lot the past couple weeks, and i'm excited to get deeper into it. please enjoy.

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

faq / about

last updated sep. 16, 2022

who are you? magnesium oxide, nice to meet you.

is that actually your name? no :) but that'd be sick.

what's your deal? i'm a twentysomething transfem. i wanted to get into writing, so here i am.

why writing? i read modern cannibals by bavitz and thought "i wonder if i could do that?"

why magnesium oxide? i started taking it before bed a couple months ago. it's supposed to help with headaches, but it also causes this unpleasant floaty-fluffy feeling. i figure that's a good direction to head in artistically.

why tumblr? better than ao3.

why don't you tag your stuff? between the ungoogleable pseudonym and untagged works, i hope to sit here in pleasant obscurity. warnings and such will be above the cut for each story.

do you have an update schedule? nah.

why do you write like that? 99% of my past writing experience is roleplaying. i've probably picked up some bad habits. sorry about that.

this thing contradicts something in a previous chapter. one of the downsides of writing serialized fiction is that you might get to a point where your current plans contradict your previous statements. i do try to go back and edit the past chapters slightly whenever i have to make a retcon, for the sake of the archival readers, but that doesn't really help when reading serially. hopefully i won't have to do this with anything too major.