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The halls move in on him like sharks, crowding, coming in from obscure angles. The whole house is a predator. Up on the moor, it swallows what it can, and spits out the broken remains. The villagers find the victims, sometimes, before they die of exposure. Knocked down by the wind and cradled by heather.

The doors opened up before him, locked behind, and now there are long spars of woodwork beneath his nails. He can feel it. The terror that pours into him and pushes everything else aside, out into the clouds of dust that creep like fog. All the light has turned sepia in reflection from woodwork and brass. All he can smell is rot, and murk, and the corpses of long dead flies. He was scared that his heart would fail, or that he would starve, or maybe drop from exhaustion, but now he realises that he won't be here that long. The house has already taken his name and made it just another echo.

Up on the moor, the heather sings to itself, and waits.

They make me to look this way, but it’s just an after-effect. It’s been forever since colonists birthed natural young. The patterntwitching prevents culture shock, for our neighbours, and ourselves. It holds back multiplicity… nothing is mine, everything is someone elses. All my identity is statistical error. My ankles come from the 23rd century, a thousand runners between my toes and my calves… and mostly they’re Kenyan. Eyes took longer, they’re 24th: a Nordic bluegreen that holds focus through age.

No one here is fat. No one is thin. There is no such thing as colour or creed beyond random chance, we simply vary within tolerance- the Chimera 100. Even genetic diversity is programmed to prevent plague. I’m technically perfect. The most perfect human there can be. We all are. I can run a mile in a minute holding my breath. Out here, lightyears from our species, we will never catch cold. All we have to fear is cancer and eventual old age. Age, and a cold wave in my gut that rises unprogrammed. When our neighbours look at us like monsters, and our parents look at us like marvels.

“Clouds are slipping out of the oil bright sky, but where the planes soar, they all stutter in flight. Buildings ripple in the wind. The barefoot Lady Of Pale stalks across the tarmac with a storm in her eyes and graceless cats left in her wake.”

Fiona has always had vivid dreams,

“Here she comes, lips stolen out from under kisses.”

But this is from the waking world, her expression blank, gaze vacant.

“Distant jet engines give up and go mute.”

Suddenly Fiona is blonde, the warmth goes out from her cheeks.

“Her whispers fill the sky.”

Her voice is at once hushed and howling.

McCarron, the preacher, spits in his palm and brings it down on the girl’s forehead fast enough to level oxen. There is a flash of light, and the girl we know is left untouched, brunette, sat upright and blinking. That moment, that echoing exhalation of alien breath, that’s when we know for sure that something is deeply, deeply, wrong. That a thousand miles away, the Lady of Pale comes stalking, stealing light for her skin, and flame for her hair.

Underground there's a swell of sound eighty years old and rich with a velvet tongue. Double bass slinks a rhythm that breathes in the hips of waiters and waitresses. Among them it's a wailing trumpet that fills every crease of every smile, every sash and suit with life. As for me, my heart is rotting in my chest. Every time the maggots twist i can feel them, and it brings on the memory of fishing as a child. I can smell them, taste them under my tongue, and it's just sun on the water. Maggots coloured blue, and green, and bronze...

Alexandra is swaying in the middle of the stage but she doesn't sing just yet. Crazy Louisianan half breed, she's feeling each note tangled to the tips of her flaming hair. Pursed lips and spit pressed to her, trumpet whispering and spilling out everything in turns. Her eyes are the same shade as the green in the brass. Her perfect nails the exact same gleam as her dress. I stare sidelong and it's hard, sometimes, remembering to blink. Paper thin and dry the motion just provides a metronome to the numbing itch, sliding in and out of time with the hush-skip of the drums. Right now I keep them mostly closed as one less thing to think of. Sometimes I look out on the crowd, but most-times I gaze at her.

Crow feathers lace his flesh, they have done ever since the Succession. Not that it had a name back then. At the time there was only chaos as the houses returned and laid claim to their heirs. He had been blind for a week after his eyes had rolled black, had cut himself to ribbons on his own talons. Instinct had made him claw together his every belonging and huddle in the ruin until the screams had faded away, until his sight had come back- teeth long fused into a pair of overlapping blades. Out in the street the forest had been growing up through the paving, like the feathers through his flesh. Every one of his changes a glass-sharp reflection of the shifting city. In its branches and among its roots the new ecology had taken hold. Sprawl had become haunted by once-human hunting songs. In barely a month the Succession had broken or brutalised every trace of man.

Those of a type banded together, past tribes nigh irrelevant. It became clear with time that neither intellect nor dexterity had been lost, amongst the crow-kin at least. Some semblance of humanity resurfaced, translated through coarsened throats and sung from spire and spruce. The new natural kingdom settled on its haunches in waiting, taught and poised in readiness for Them.

When They came they rode in fom nowhere, on horses with chests like rumbling church organs, hooves like ancient pistons. They dismounted, all angles, flowing limbs and burning brightness, to walk within the wood. Of their number she had come to him then, with her ebony eyes. Not a word had passed her thin lips, parted only once to barely reveal an onyx overlap of perfect bone. He had fallen to his knees with her gaze, with the weight of his new name, thundering into his altered flesh and obliterating the old.

Winter comes late this year. The ground ices beneath her, the twilight stars twinkle clear. She hates these sordid affairs, hates Hammerfest town, and hates the heat more. She breathes on the windows near naked and draws patterns in rime. Wanders the streets and kills flowers as she goes. Sits herself down on the harbour's edge, and stares at Summer where Autumn used to be. Once a time was, she could freeze the blood of man with her glare, now his can burn the flesh to ash. His face is full of flickering grin and madness beyond control, become like them, like Hammerfest, outside of time and weakness. Summer, murderer of kin, shaded by a chemical halo. For a while the world stumbles back and forth between them, caught like an awkward child. Men and women shivering and sweating in their shadows.

Eventually he shrugs, and fades to steam as if as a favour. Summer grows whisper thin but reaches out as he goes, brushing a single searing stroke down Winter's cheek. It blisters in an instant, it shatters her beauty, it is the only time they have ever touched. His eyes burn black, and Winter takes the pain unflinching.

Tears freeze in her eyes, but only with him gone does she choke out a single curse before she chills the northern wind toward bitterness.

It's the end of an era, and the sun is plummeting. The birds fly away from the horizon as if it were on fire, yellows and reds licking at the early stars. They flicker, fading in from far away. Taking our place as we flicker out, a little like falling asleep.

Everything that comes after this will be a dream.

Among the crowds we're only one beneath the sky. Standing in alleys, sitting on fire escapes with our heels swinging. All limp cigarettes and vacant stares. The thrushes pass by overhead and we shiver, just a little further out of phase with the world of mice and men. My fingertips are buried in my palm, trying to hold on, animal instinct trapped and whimpering out around a lazy monumental will. Between lost moments our shadows wax and wane. The blood never comes. It's already left us, and the moon is taking its place.

Trembling without something to keep it tethered my silhouette flows like water, like falling leaves, like fable, guttering and fluid, alien and cold, open and vast. We are all folding away into each other and the night unfurling: oblivious as the dark builds a personal pressure. It doesn't matter, we're burning each other out, broken and empty. We leave our shadows scarred into brickwork tattoos and tales. We're becoming just another dead language, a series of small walls, dolmen. Fading from the present to the past we echo like nightingale song, we tremble with change, and we're gone.

The sun rises as an eastern phoenix, searing blue into the black and eating stars. Leaving their blood across the sky. The dawn of a new day to stir us all from slumber. We come like fury out of corners, crossroads, and kisses.

The world is dead. Long live the world.

Long live the king, and the dream.

From here I can see the whole galaxy revolve.

My flesh is irrelevant, I am tied in place by steel and charge. I bypass the imprecision of blood and bone.

I can never close my eyes, but if I look inward, I can dimly sense the boundary. The place where I stop and my shell begins.

//

To a thousand three hundred and ninety four people I am the closest thing to god. Without me they would be entombed. Helpless in the cold beyond my embrace. Shivering to a sudden death. I am every tool ever made and their dependence is like worship.

Like love.

//

There are a million applicants to every position: who would not want to feel like this? My breath is ionised hydrogen. I can see in every wavelength known to man. When I anger, the heavens tremble.

//

Arcing, between the asteroids I pick off like gnats, are my children. They are beautiful, sleek, sharp. Leaving plasma trails that burn out to oblivion.

We touch each other across the ether; radio kisses. I command and they respond, moving together in shoals. Silicon and carbon intertwined, indistinct. Like their mothership, like me.

//

Leviathan.

//

Somewhere inside is a human frame. Frail but armoured beyond belief. Suspended by wire, all hair suppressed. Fluids replaced and cooled far below zero. It must twitch with the current, muscles atrophied, bones bird thin.

I've forgotten what it looks like.

And I don't care.

Somewhere inside is a few pounds of cortex... Delegating a hundred parallel thoughts a second.

Electric cat's frame ripples with voltage. Coated with ultra-black fur it boils with nannites. Electric cat uncoils and leaps exactly like greased lightning, servos purring their pleasure. Multiband, telefocus eyes glint from neon: reflected back and forth forever. Everything it sees, I see.

Electric cat purrs, leaps, purrs, and microgyros whir along its spine. Four axis stabilised, in ninety nine out of a hundred tests electric cat lands on its feet running. Its tail switches to mewl out encrypted radio in frequencies only I can hear. Dogs oblivious to its dampened footfall or its telecommunication.

Electric cat is better than the real thing. Electric cat responds to my will only slighter slower than the speed of thought. It war-drives through the sleeping city. Through network after poorly protected network. Returning home each morning to download its prey at my doorstep, to flex and charge at my stroking touch. Summoned from the Orient, a demon... my familiar, housed in flesh that pounds with howling current.

Time has stretched, light too. They flex, and contract, and stretch. The sun flickers, and I can't be sure. Does it flicker? Has it? Will it?

We can't speak to each other. Sound swoops in and out of our range, through my bowels, up into my eyes. Everything is painful. We can not adapt to this.

I think it might be slowing down, but I don't know, maybe it's just time warping.

The waves roll by, and parts of our brains try to fit patterns- it's hopeless. Too many variables are changing, too quickly, A stroboscopic Rubick's cube, pyramid, sphere...we can't solve it. And all our tools are useless.

I can see my limbs lengthen and contract, and I don't know... Is it my arms, is it my eyes, is it light, or space... My God. What have we done? The buildings arch upwards overhead, billowing like flame.

I think I'm dying.

I don't know how long it will take... maybe forever.

Maybe no time at all.