Which Dwell in the Ravine

Jeff drove his pickup across rolling open land, purple mountains in the distance. The blue sky of western Colorado in August stretched overhead. In the rearview mirror Jeff saw clouds of dust billowing out behind the Ford F-150. A hot, dry day. Rain last week, could use some more. All across the family ranch it was dry like this. Could use some more rain.

Now up ahead Jeff saw his destination. The ravine. Jeff stopped his pickup, killed the ignition. He got out, put on his backpack, slung a coil of rope over his shoulder. He would walk the last half mile to the ravine.

Jeff had been meaning all summer to get out here to the ravine. Now came at last a quiet day when he could get away. The ravine, as part of the ranch, had been in the family since the late 1800s. Jeff remembered when he was a young man, and his father had shown him the ravine for the first time. One of these times in the next few years Jeff would have to bring his sons out here to the ravine.

But not until they were old enough to understand, old enough to keep a secret, old enough to understand a sacred trust. The ravine must always be guarded. The ravine must always be kept safe. The ravine was the reason why the ranch must always remain in the family in perpetuity.

As Jeff reached the ravine, he uncoiled the rope from his shoulder. He looked around at the Gambell oaks, the cedars, the junipers which flanked the edge of the ravine. Never had Jeff known a ravine which was so difficult of access. No way in, no way down, except to descend the sheer rock wall. Jeff ran the rope around the trunk of a sturdy oak, fastened the strong metal clip. He tested the rope with his full body weight. Good. Now Jeff ran the rope out, down, down, down, into the ravine. All the way down. Then he clipped himself to the rope and put on heavy work gloves.

Jeff climbed slowly, carefully, down the rock wall and into the ravine. Down out of bright sunlight and into the shade. Careful, there were slick spots, overgrown with moss. Other places, here and there, Jeff could see the handholds and footholds cut into the rock by Indians, hundreds of years ago. Carefully, slowly, Jeff descended until he reached the bottom of the ravine.

Jeff unclipped himself from the rope, then sat and rested on the flat top of a large boulder, as his eyes adjusted to the deep shade here at the bottom of the ravine. Deep shade: for a few hours at midday the sun might shine down in here, but most of the day the ravine was cloaked in obscurity. And cool, no heat of summer down here. Nor did it get very cold in the winter: the hot springs down here kept it moderate even in January. And humid year round.

Jeff looked around in the shade. Most of the trees down here in the ravine were not the trees that flourished in the world above. Most of the trees down here, far as Jeff could tell, were ginkgo. Ginkgo trees, or something very like. Odd, ginkgo trees over in China were referred to as "fossil trees." Ginkgos grew down here. And other vegetation, including ferns. Lots and lots of ferns grew in the moist, moderate temperatures which prevailed down here in the deep shade.

Ginkgo, "fossil trees." The world down here in the ravine was a world out of time, a fossil world, a world where little had changed in millions of years.

Now, the creatures. Where were the creatures? Jeff looked around, his eyes adjusted to the dimness. He looked... yes, right over there. Over by that ginkgo. Over there, browsing, grazing, eating ferns and other plants...

Jeff always felt a tingle go up his spine when he saw the creatures. There were two, three young ones, and a full-grown adult. The young were the size of watermelons, the adult was the size of a large washtub. Jeff watched the full-grown creature as it grazed, its broad back studded with knobs and plates of bone, full body armor. Bone spikes fringed the sides of the creature's body. Its broad horned head, wider than it was long, was also covered with knobbed bone armor. And behind it the creature's armored tail, with a heavy bone club on the end.

The creature moved on short, squat legs as it fed. The little ones followed and grazed alongside; they had probably hatched in the spring. These creatures had nothing to fear. There was no way for any animal to get down into this ravine, or back up out again. And any animal that did somehow get down here... it could never pierce the creature's armor, and it would do well to stay clear of that massive bone club on the creature's tail. Coyote, mountain lion, even bear... that bone club on the creature's tail would be the end of them.

Jeff shuddered at the sight of the creatures, placidly grazing in their heavy bone armor. Then a deep feeling of peace came over him. Jeff seldom felt so whole, so alive, as when he was out here in the ravine. Out here in the ravine with these creatures. Jeff had read books. He had seen pictures, artist's renderings, of the ancient dinosaurs, of Ankylosaurus. These creatures... they must be some kind of small ankylosaur. Jeff didn't know. Some kind of small ankylosaur which had survived beyond its time, for many millions of years, down here in the mild world of the ravine, isolated and cut off from the world above.


Small ankylosaurs. Ginkgo trees. And there were other creatures down here too, such as the little blue-green scavenger reptiles, not six inches high, which ran upright on their hind legs and fed on carrion. The ravine was a world unto itself.

Indian footholds cut into the rock walls... It was from the Indians, back in the late 1800s, that Jeff's great-great-grandfather had first learned of this place. The Indians used to come here too. They would leave packages of tobacco as offerings, atop this very boulder. The Indians had not been to the ravine now in almost 100 years. The stories were still handed down in Jeff's family. The name was handed down too, the name by which the Indians had called these armored creatures: tóónohuipé'aúúsh, "those which dwell in the ravine."

And that was why this ravine far out in western Colorado was a sacred trust. Why the ranch must always stay in the family. These creatures must be protected, must be kept a secret from the outside world. If word of them ever got out... first there would be the curiosity seekers, then the hunters in search of a trophy, then the researchers come to gather specimens. Finally would come the idle daytrippers, and the destroyers and the vandals. Graffiti on these hallowed rock walls. Initials carved into the ginkgo trees. Empty pop cans amidst the ferns. The creatures all dead, or in a laboratory, or in a zoo.

The noble tóónohuipé'aúúsh... this must never happen to them! That was why Jeff always kept this ravine a strict secret, as had his forefathers before him.

Jeff sat there silently for several hours, watching the creatures move and feed among the plants. Then he got up, inspected the rope, and readied himself for the climb back up to the outer world.

Chimneysweep

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but rather by making the darkness conscious. —Carl Jung

The robot guards brought Reo Kenner into the Chimney Room. Reo was in chains. Already the circular gallery around the Chimney was filling with robots come to witness the spectacle, come to witness and rejoice over Reo's latest ordeal.

Reo saw dozens of robots glaring across the Chimney Room at him, glaring at him with hatred in their eyes. For the robots hated Reo with a white-hot molten passion. The robots hated Reo with a raging transhuman fury.

The robots hated Reo Kenner because he could do something none of them could ever do: Reo could go down into the Chimney, and there endure trials no robot could ever know except dimly and vicariously. The robots hated Reo because he was an unmodified baseline human, one of the last unmodified humans left alive. Too late had it been realized, when robots and AIs and transhumans swept Man from the face of the Earth, that there are certain depths only unmodified Man can plumb.

So now a gallery full of robots glared at Reo, with a burning hatred hotter than the fire of a million suns. The guard robots had loosed Reo of his chains, and were fitting him with his body harness, with neck collar and wrist cuffs and ankle cuffs and crown above his fontanelle: ten contact points, from Kether to Malkuth, strung out across Reo's body to generate his energy armor, the energy armor of a Chimneysweep. The robots all hated Reo Kenner, for no robot or transhuman could ever be a Chimneysweep.

No robot could ever be a Chimneysweep. The best a robot could do was watch from the Gallery, patched into the Web and vaguely suffering what the Chimneysweep suffered: vaguely, dimly, as if in a glass darkly. Only a Chimneysweep could suffer the Chimney face to face. The robots could but witness from afar; witness from afar, and perhaps hope that, like a race car driver from times of old, the Chimneysweep might wipe out and suffer a spectacular, painful, blazing death down there in the Chimney.

Now the crane overhead was hooked to the back of Reo Kenner's body harness. It lifted him up in the air. Then the crane swung over until it held Reo suspended directly above the open circular metal mouth of the Chimney.

The gallery was full. The robots glared and muttered and snarled curses at Reo Kenner. Reo looked out into their eyes, the malevolent eyes of the Chromium Robot, and the Transhuman Cheetah-Man, and the Steel Druid, and a brace of L400 Construction Robots, and the CyberMantaRay, and the Six-Eyed Liquid Quicksilver Man in his life-sustaining bubble, and so many more. They had all transcended humanity, all except for Reo. Unlike the robots, Reo had never been up on the scorched and blasted surface of the Earth, where robot triads and octads performed unspeakable obscenities amidst ozone gales beneath a burnt sienna sky. But Reo could hope one day to ascend to the surface. Whereas no robot here could ever hope to descend the Chimney, as Reo was now about to do.

A robot voice over the loudspeaker: "First-stage armor activation has commenced." Reo heard and felt the electric buzzing of his energy armor like an invisible shroud all around him.

The robot loudspeaker continued: "Lowering the Chimneysweep into the Chimney." Now the robots in the gallery were galvanized. A multitude of discordant voices swelled in chaos excitement. The winch began unwinding, and Reo Kenner began lowering down, down, down into the Chimney.

Down, down into the dark and narrow confines of the Chimney. Not enough room to spread his arms more than a few inches to either side. Dark. Claustrophobic. The robot voice came to Reo over his body harness comm link: "Twenty meters and descending... forty meters and descending... Second-stage armor activation..." Now Reo's energy armor buzzed louder, crawled on his skin until it felt like ants crawling all over him...

"One hundred meters... One hundred fifty meters..." Reo knew that, in ordinary space-time, the Chimney was almost two hundred meters deep. But the Chimney was not confined to the ordinary space-time metric. Now they were about to spring Reo Kenner loose from ordinary space-time and into the infinite-dimensional manifold of Chimneyspace.

The robot voice: "Countdown to quantum phase transition has begun... Third-stage armor activation has commenced... twenty-four percent... twenty-two percent... nineteen percent... approaching quantum phase transition, Chimney is unfolding into eleven dimensions... twenty-six dimensions... five hundred and three dimensions... six point three times ten to the seventh dimensions... five, four, three, two..."

Reo was deafened by the electric buzzing in his ears, his skin burning like an ant horde eating him alive... A thousand pinpricks pierced him through... Now he was smeared out as a probability distribution over an infinite spectrum of Fourier coefficients... infinitely many dimensions intersecting in a blinding WHITE monopoint, then spinning off away from the central core, spinning off into uncharted Chimneyspace...

CHIMNEYSPACE Tumbler 712.3.5194.40.12.12394.79 Monad Odor of Attar
Reo looked out over the vast, gently rolling plain. Countless thousands of walking boxkite creatures, ambling in formation. Each boxkite creature a solid color, whether blue or red or yellow or green or black or white or... violet! Violet corrupted the sequence. Violet must be removed.

Reo flew and skimmed over the plain, a flitting figure of light. It came to him as if in a word of knowledge that there were three violet boxkite creatures which must be removed. Three. Reo reached down and snatched one violet boxkite creature by its rigid backfin. Then sailing and, there, another! Now up over this next gentle rise, and... there, the third one!

Now mercy and severity warred within Reo, for these three violet boxkite creatures were not the guilty ones. Deposit them there... atop that butte? But that only removed them, it did not eliminate them. And every sequence in this world with violet boxkite creatures culminated in some horrible volcanic apocalypse.

With sorrow and tears, Reo Kenner flew deep into a volcanic vent, carrying the three creatures. Howling and sobbing, he plunged along with them into the molten lava.

CHIMNEYSPACE Tumbler 51.889.148.13.8714.312 Monad Taste of Quinine
Reo stood there on the pavement outside the all-night diner, along with his best friends Tag and Ivy. (Tag and Ivy? He had never heard of them before this sequence... but he kept forgetting that.) Laughter, joking, the joy of youth on a late-night outing, the blinking of colored neon from the sign above the diner.

It could have been the late 1940s or early 1950s. Reo caught his own reflection in the diner window, thin face, horsehide leather jacket. Tag wore a similar outfit. As for Ivy, she was dressed in a white blouse and blue jeans.

There was a car parked alongside them, Chrysler, 40s vintage. Colored diner neon shone and reflected off the gleaming polished maroon finish, pink on maroon, yellow on maroon, lime green on maroon...

Reo cried, "No, Ivy, don't look!" Suddenly Reo had a long, heavy crescent wrench in his hand, a wrench two feet long, and he swung it hard at the front fender of the car. Swung the wrench hard again and again. Ka-WHOOM! Ka-WHOOM! A sound like an empty oil drum caving in and then popping back out. Ka-WHOOM! Ka-WHOOM! It had come to Reo that this was the car fender finish, neon light reflecting, that could capture a gaze hypnotically, hold a person's gaze captive for 3,192 hours, for days and weeks, like a narrative slown down to a crawl, a simple description of the fender and its reflections could run on for up to 189 pages of dense narration, like something out of Kerouac's Visions of Cody.

His eyes closed tight, Reo swung the wrench blindly, by dead reckoning, into the car fender again and again. When he dared look again, he saw that he had saved Ivy and Tag from the perils of car fender hypnosis. But they were both staring at him, wide-eyed, as if at a madman.

CHIMNEYSPACE Tumbler 30.2995.1.31 Monad Color of Magenta
In this short and simple sequence, Reo was coming up over the rise, dead of night in this blacksky world. Coming toward him on the road was the Purple Cactus Man. Reo turned up the gain on his energy armor a notch, and tore into the Purple Cactus Man, beating the purple cartoon monster into dismembered chunks.

CHIMNEYSPACE Tumbler 173.31883.1209.40.28892.309.6002 Monad The Quality of the Emotion upon Contemplating a Fine Mathematical Demonstration
Reo stood by the entrance to the alley, skyscrapers towering around him in the night. A bum in a long overcoat came walking down the streetlit sidewalk. The bum accosted Reo and bellowed at him: "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason!"

The bum swayed unsteadily on his feet. Reo said, "Sir, this is no longer a physics lab or a middle-of-the-night dormitory-lounge bull session. These are now the streets of a great and ancient city. This way, sir." Reo directed the bum into the alleyway, and the bum tottered down the alley out of sight.

After a minute there was a roaring sound from down the alley; the bum's wounded howls of incredulity; crunching and snapping noises; and a dismembered bloody arm came flying out of the alley, still clad in the sleeve of an overcoat.

More drunken bums came walking down the street. One yelled, "I have never seen a situation I could not reduce to the equation ax + y = bz!" Another gargled angrily, "If I can't think it out without emotions, it doesn't exist!" Reo directed one bum after another down the alleyway. Again and again came the shrieks of terror, the noise as if of a garbage disposal, the flying bloody body parts.

At long last Reo stepped over and looked down the alley. He faced squarely what stood there within the alley, a calico giraffe with a flaming mane. A calico giraffe, all patchwork white and orange and black. The giraffe's mane burned but it was not consumed. The calico giraffe raised its long neck, turned its head to the night sky, and bellowed a loud roar. A loud giraffe roar.

Reo said, "Giraffe, Giraffe, burning bright, in the alleys of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

Indeed. He who made winos put giraffes in their grasp.

CHIMNEYSPACE Tumbler 4534.778.90371.22.995.0 Monad The Quality of the Feeling of Love
This was a checkerboard world, Reo hovering over a grid of gigantic frosted glass plates, shifting and moving effortlessly in the dark over a vast plain of frosted glass. No sense of direction, no up or down. Each glass-plate square lit up from within, behind each plate a distorted body seen floating in fluid dimly behind frosted glass.

Now Reo's energy armor punched through shattering glass, amniotic fluid pouring out over him in icy cascade. Quick! Reo reached in, throttled the horrible insect thing, must've been eight feet long. Tore it limb from limb.

Now flitting with diagonal bishop moves over the grid of frosted glass. Halt over another glass plate, Reo shattered the glass. This time something with a dozen hacksaw legs, already alert, came pouring out with the fluid, attacking Reo, opening wide its maw with a thousand needle sharkteeth. Reo wrestled in the dark, wrestled against the hacksaw sharkteeth monster, wrestled for his life. His energy armor buzzed and crackled and popped like an electric bug zapper. Slowly, straining, Reo fought against the monster until he bent and snapped its neck.

Shifting, zooming over the checkerboard array, Reo smashed another glass plate, then another, and another. Behind each plate, in cold salt fluid, lay another horror. Writhing tentacles. Billowing man-o-war mantles of sickening jelly. A whirling, whining, high-speed dervish. A thing like a headless man, armed with sword and axe. Each one, Reo had to fight and overcome. Fight and kill. For it was kill or be killed.

At long last, after more than thirty rounds, Reo paused, breathing hard. From far and wide across the checkerboard came the sounds of glass shattering in the dark. This world had been brought up to speed. From now on the monsters would shatter glass, and hatch, and feed on one another in the perpetual dark.

CHIMNEYSPACE Tumbler 343.39.8840.14.12439803.76.17998.831 Monad The Sound of a Railway Whistle
Reo came down and landed on one knee, knelt on soft soil in the dark of night, with two moons in the sky overhead. A larger ivory moon, a smaller tawny orange moon. Reo inspected the contact points of his energy armor. All ten sephiroth were still intact and transmitting.

Silence. Reo listened. Looked around him in the pitch black. Listened. Then, over there, in the dark... the rhythmic drumming... Reo walked cautiously around the bend... his eyes now adjusting to the dark... There, there, over there...

Not ten yards away it stood. The Dancing Iron Deer. A wrought-iron deer standing upright on its hind legs, standing upright and dancing, dancing like an antlered wrought-iron shaman. The Dancing Iron Deer, with flickering flame inside its skull showing through its eyeholes. The Dancing Iron Deer, dancing and swaying to the drumbeat: (thump) He won't be coming (thump) back again (thump) (thump thump)... He won't be coming (thump) back again (thump) (thump thump)

The Dancing Iron Deer swayed, it stamped its wrought-iron hooves in the dirt, it shook a rattle held in one forehoof, dancing in regal indifference to the presence of Reo Kenner. (thump) He won't be coming (thump) back again (thump) (thump thump) Reo knew that a frontal attack was out of the question. This was big medicine. The moment he directly attacked the Iron Deer, Reo would be blown away like a candle in a hurricane.

Now the Dancing Iron Deer picked up its pace as the drumbeat quickened, tossed its wrought-iron antlers in the moonlight as the flame inside its head flickered through its eyeholes. (thump) Oh no, (thump) he won't be coming (thump) back again (thump) (thump thump)... He won't be coming (thump) back again (thump) (thump thump)

The Iron Deer picked up its pace. It was building up to an attack; and when it cut loose, Reo wouldn't stand a chance, for never had he seen power like the power of the Dancing Iron Deer.

Not a moment to lose. If not a frontal attack, then... Reo spread his arms skyward, embraced the moons. Now Reo began multiplying the moons, until there were dozens and hundreds of moons in the sky, little blood-red moons, large golden moons, weathered grey moons, moonlets, moon of mystery moss green, moon of smokey blue, moons twinned and moons in crescent and half-full phase... Reo made each moon different, trying to make some of the moons more attractive, like word forms in varying dialects of some Plains Indian language... Reo multiplied the moons until the sky was filled with moons.

And then, just as Reo had hoped, the Dancing Iron Deer found some of the moons more attractive, and the Dancing Iron Deer bound the light of certain moons to its wrought-iron parts, left ankle to blood-red moonlight, right ankle to smokey blue moonlight, shaken rattle to moonlight of light moon-green moonlets, antlers to large golden moonlight, and flickering flame within to moonlight of an angry crimson and yellow moon like a moon on fire...

Now, channeling the power of a thousand moons through the ten sephiroth of his energy armor, Reo Kenner worked the intricate calculations, worked the calculations in Yesod, and... all perfectly coordinated in a vast celestial dance... the moons began going into eclipse, all of them at once, a thousand moons going into simultaneous eclipse, moons eclipsing moons, world eclipsing moons, eclipse by contagion, moons slipping behind the ecliptic, moons falling out of the sky like shooting stars, moons eclipsed by the quasi-planetary motion of the ascending and descending nodes, moons spontaneously eclipsing themselves, moons suffering multiple eclipse from a dozen other moons at once, a cascade of lunar eclipses, the awful night sky of a thousand moons all going into eclipse at once...

(thump thump) He won't... (thump) be....... (thump)...

The Dancing Iron Deer's drumbeat lurched, skipped a beat, halted. Even the flickering flame inside the Dancing Iron Deer's head had gone out, quenched, a smoking wick; for the light of the angry crimson and yellow moon had been eclipsed.

The Dancing Iron Deer stood there, frozen, motionless, like a gigantic lawn ornament of an antlered deer-shaman standing upright on its hind legs. Reo walked up and touched the cold wrought iron of the Dancing Deer. Now snowflakes were beginning to fall in the night, slowly at first, then fast and thick. Reo looked up through the swirling snowstorm at the night sky, where lunar eclipse had passed and there were now only two moons, a larger ivory moon, and a smaller tawny orange moon.

Snow was accumulating on the ground, and on the motionless Dancing Iron Deer. Reo Kenner stepped back and mentally tripped the release circuit within his armor.

CHIMNEYSPACE tumbler sequence completed, retrieving the Chimneysweep.

The crane was winching Reo back up out of the depths of the Chimney. His energy armor sparked and buzzed as it went through its shutdown sequence; but Reo no longer needed the light of his armor to see by, for he was now lighting up the Chimney from within by his own light.

When the crane lifted Reo up out of the Chimney, he saw the robots seated in the circular Gallery around the Chimney. He saw the look in their eyes, hatred now mingled with fear, fear and abject terror. The robots always were terrified of Reo when he was first brought back up out of the Chimney, his face shining with a blinding light, light blazing from his face so bright that it shone like horns from his forehead.

The robots were terrified of Reo now, for in these first minutes after he was brought back up out of the Chimney, Reo Kenner blazed with enough power to destroy them all. He could destroy all the robots here in the Chimney Room without effort. When he was first brought back up out of the Chimney, Reo shone with such unearthly light that he could well have cut loose and destroyed this entire underground anthill robot city.

But what then? What then? There was yet the whole world, and a single Chimneysweep could not hope to stand against an entire world of robots and posthumans and AIs, an entire world in which there were only a handful of unmodified humans left.

Reo hung suspended over the open mouth of the chimney until the shining light from his face gradually faded. Then he was taken down, stripped of his body harness, put back in chains, and led away. The robots in the Chimney Room jeered and hurled hate-filled invective at Reo as he was led from the room.

The guard robots led Reo Kenner back to the holding area. There they beat him and kicked him and struck him, and mocked and reviled him. Then they locked Reo in his cage, and flung his food in through the bars after him.

Reo lay on the floor of his cage, sobbing and weeping. One of these days... One of these days... Almost enough power this time, from facing down the Dancing Iron Deer... One of these days Reo would cut loose, and level the world... At times Reo thought he would level the world, or at least destroy this underground robot city... At other times Reo thought he would suffer, just suffer all the ordeals the Chimney could throw at him... Bear all the sufferings of a Chimneysweep, bear all the robots' glaring hatred, bear all the endless agony with patience and submission...

Reo ate some tasteless dry food. Then, aching and hurting, Reo cried himself to sleep. It would be another three days before his next descent into the Chimney.

Skeetchee

Skeetchee flew through the morning sky beneath the suns of Too'keetch, and Skeetchee wheeled and turned on outstretched wings as it soared over the valley. Skeetchee had thousands of wings, and Skeetchee looked down upon the land with thousands of pairs of eyes. It was late in the fresh blue-green season, and berries were beginning to ripen on trees.

Skeetchee was looking for its morning meal, and thousands of Skeetchee's stomachs were aching with hunger.

The suns overhead shone, and each tree below cast two or three shadows. Lesser Sun was bright yellow-orange, and warm on the backs of any creature at rest. Greater Sun was ruby-red, larger in the sky, but not as blinding, and not as warm its light on the backs. Tiny Sun also shone in the northern sky, wan pale white, scarce as large as a Skizzz-bug. Tiny Sun lit up a patch of northsky even at night, this time of year.

Now Skeetchee flew up the valley beneath the suns, and a few of Skeetchee flew on ahead to scout out the way, look for any trees with ripening berries. A few of Skeetchee were now well on ahead, around a curve in the valley, and they saw trees down below, blue-green leaves the color that they get when the fruit is ripening.

But a troop of Kerrooo was already there, eating among those trees. What a few of Skeetchee saw with their eyes, all of Skeetchee perceived at a distance; and so Skeetchee wheeled and turned up a side valley instead as the scouts caught up and rejoined.

Others of Skeetchee flew on ahead to scout out this side valley. Skeetchee was thinking to one another how once there had been Rose Sun in the sky, small and pale bright rose. It was centuries since Rose Sun had retreated for an aeon to its skyly nest. No eyes of Skeetchee now looking out on Too'keetch had ever seen Rose Sun, but visual memories of Rose Sun had been passed down over the centuries, and Skeetchee could still remember how Rose Sun looked in its day. Skeetchee would always remember, until the day long ages hence when Rose Sun was due to reappear in its course.

Berries! Some of Skeetchee scouting on ahead had sighted berry-laden trees, and all of Skeetchee saw through the scouting eyes those purple berries. With thousands of wings a-beating, Skeetchee settled down out of the sky and alighted on branches of trees, feasting on berries with thousands of beaks.

Some of Skeetchee hopped about on the ground, and drank water from puddles and ponds. These of Skeetchee were heedless in their drinking, but at the same time all-seeing; for what any of Skeetchee saw or heard or tasted or felt, all of Skeetchee saw or heard or tasted or felt. Berries on one tree were not yet ripe; after a few of Skeetchee tried them, the rest of Skeetchee didn't bother with that tree any more.

Skeetchee had flown and eaten and nested in this corner of Too'keetch for countless millennia; it could remember many comings and goings of Rose Sun over the aeons, and Skeetchee even had dim, blurred memories of a time when this valley was filled with snow in the cold seasons. Dim, blurred memories of animals that were no longer to be seen. Memories passed down in Skeetchee became soft and vague after thousands and tens of thousands of years.

Many of Skeetchee ate the berries. Some of Skeetchee drank. Some of Skeetchee hopped about and ate worms, or flew about amidst the trees and ate bugs in the air. Those who ate berries tasted cool water even as they tasted sweet berries, and those who drank water tasted sweet berries even as they drank cool water.

Greater Sun and Lesser Sun were still far from zenith; the morning was yet young. Some of Skeetchee sang: "Skeet'CHEE! Skeet'CHEE! Chitkaw! Chitkaw! Tooee! Tooee! Tooee! Tooee!" It was mostly the younger of Skeetchee who sang like this; such song could even serve for rudimentary speech, but Skeetchee found it far more effective to think to one another. The older of Skeetchee seldom sang, though there were dim, distant memories of a time, tens of thousands of years ago, when all of Skeetchee sang more freely like the younger of Skeetchee at present.

A few of Skeetchee flew further up the valley in search of more ripe berries, and were eating at trees ten or fifteen seconds' flight away when it happened: a lone Kerrooo crept through the underbrush, and sprang upon the few of isolated Skeetchee. Fear! Pain! All of Skeetchee felt it immediately, and came winging to the rescue.

By the time the rest of Skeetchee got there, the Kerrooo was chewing on one of Skeetchee. Skeetchee descended upon the Kerrooo in an angry flock, "ChitKAW! ChitKAW!", thousands of beating wings and thousands of pecking beaks. The Kerrooo howled in terror, its arms flailing, as it stumbled blindly away, bleeding from a hundred wounds. This Kerrooo might not survive; a single one of Skeetchee was only little larger than a Kerrooo's paw, but a single Kerrooo was no match for all of Skeetchee enraged at once.

Skeetchee gathered around the one of Skeetchee which had been seized by the Kerrooo. Skeetchee thought of carrying the one, wounded, back to the nests, but viewing the one from all sides with hundreds of eyes at once, and feeling what the one felt, it became evident to Skeetchee that the one was too badly wounded to survive.

The one of Skeetchee lay there on the ground, breathing hard and fast, and it thought at the others of Skeetchee. It thought its thoughts and memories at them, over and over, and the others of Skeetchee sat silently at attention and heard the thoughts and learned them. The thoughts and memories of this one of Skeetchee were little different from the thoughts and memories of any of Skeetchee, but in shaded flickerings and margins of mind there were subtle holographic differences, and it was important that these be learned and remembered by Skeetchee.

Then Skeetchee dove by the dozens at the wounded one of Skeetchee— pecking, pecking, pecking!— and all felt the pain which flared up briefly before it went out. Skeetchee continued to swarm upon the wounded one and devour it until only the bones and a few stray feathers remained: it would not do for a wandering Kerrooo to find the body, and acquire a taste for Skeetchee-flesh.

When Skeetchee was finished, it took the bones in its beaks and claws and dropped them in the swift brook. Some of the younger of Skeetchee went, "Skeet-CHEE! Skeet-CHEE! Skeet-CHEE!"

After Skeetchee had gotten its fill of berries and worms and water, it set about gathering things to take back to the nests. Many of Skeetchee caught worms to take back for the hatchlings of Skeetchee. Some of Skeetchee took berries in their beaks to take back for the mothers of Skeetchee, who were watching over the nestlings. Some of Skeetchee gathered grass and twigs and mud to take back for building and repair.

Greater Sun and Lesser Sun were now higher in the sky, as Skeetchee flew with thousands of wings back down the valley toward the cliff and its nests. On the way, Skeetchee saw many of Kit'teeet winging along over the other side of the valley. Skeetchee and Kit'teeet thought greetings at one another from afar, but Skeetchee kept its distance from Kit'teeet: at other times of the year Skeetchee might exchange a few of Skeetchee for a few of Kit'teeet, but with the young hatching and hungry there would be no time now, at the blue-green season, for the painstaking thought-work which would go into assimilating a few of Kit'teeet into Skeetchee.

Up along the bluff Skeetchee flew, to the sheer cliff wall where the hundreds of nests of Skeetchee were built into clefts in the sheer rock wall. Suns-hardened mud nests, grass and twigs interwoven in mud baked pottery-hard over the course of hundreds of dry seasons. Nests linked together in clusters up and down deep rock clefts.

Some of Skeetchee took the food they had brought back, and fed the hatchlings of Skeetchee, and the mothers of Skeetchee who had stayed here to watch over the young. They also fed the elders of Skeetchee, who were too old and infirm to go flying forth any more, elders who now stayed in the nests thinking, thinking deeply to the young and to all of Skeetchee, pondering ancient memories and doing important thought-work; for what one of Skeetchee thought and remembered, was remembered and thought by all of Skeetchee.

Some of Skeetchee inspected the seeds in the baked-mud granaries, to see that the seeds were safe and dry. Some of Skeetchee inspected the small rock pools and cisterns amidst the clefts, where rain water might collect and be stored against the dry season. Some of Skeetchee inspected the herbs which grew on a rock landing half way up the cliff, herbs planted and carefully tended by Skeetchee to aid the sick and ailing of Skeetchee.

Now clouds covered first Lesser Sun, then Greater Sun. As for Tiny Sun, to the north, it too had vanished behind clouds. Rain would fall on the face of Too'keetch before noon. Off to the west, lightning was already flickering. Distant thunder came rumbling from up the valley. Skeetchee retreated into the hundreds of rock-hard baked-mud nests, crawling into nest entrances beneath shiny black pieces of obsidian set into the mud above each nest entrance as skyly decoration. Something about a thunderstorm cast a vague confusion of mind over Skeetchee, and made it harder for Skeetchee to think to one another. Better to huddle together in the nests, and wait it out.

Up and down the cliff, from nest to nest, what one of Skeetchee saw and heard and thought and felt, all of Skeetchee saw and heard and thought and felt, now with a soft edge of blurred confusion brought on by electricity and crackling static of nearing thunderstorm. Thousands of beaks tucked into thousands of feathered breasts, and all felt it. Settling down. Thousands of pairs of eyes drifting lazily shut. Thousands of little minds, holographic fragments of one vast mind, like thousands of glimmering facets of one great jewel, all gathering together into one shared dreaming-time.

All of Skeetchee dreamed together in the nests, dreaming one vast common dream which was both like and unlike Too'keetch. In the dream-world there was skyly Blue Wheel Sun, blue with spokes of white, like never had been seen in the sky of Too'keetch. And the big gentle black and russet leaf-eaters, like hadn't been seen in the valleys of Too'keetch in tens of thousands of years. And Skeetchee sang to one another in the dreaming-time, "Skeet'CHEE! Skeet'CHEE! Chitkaw! Chitkaw! Tooee! Tooee! Tooee! Tooee!"

And the Little Rocking Horses Came...

...all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it... And the war came.

—Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

The porch door creaked, the rusty door spring groaned, as the hot summer wind caught the unfastened porch door again and again. Creeeeeeak, grrrrrrrrooan. Creeeeeeeak, grrrrroan. A stronger gust of wind caught the door and blew it out a ways on its hinges: crrreeeeeeeeeeeeeak, grrrrrrrrroooan, slam!

The porch door stayed unfastened day and night, summer and winter, because there was no one left to fasten it.

On the back porch floor several dozen little tiny rocking horses sat, soaking up the sunlight which shone in through the glass of the porch windows. Little tiny rocking horses, each no larger than a housefly. Little tiny insect-sized rocking horses, equipped with wings. And equipped with tiny hair-thin rockers on their legs. Rocking horses. Little rocking horses, like houseflies, like horseflies, lazily sunning on the back porch.

It was dead silent out on the porch, except for the occasional creak and groan of the porch door. Then, bzzzzz, bzzzzzzz, one of the little rocking horses sprung, sprung, sprung on its flexible little rockers, as it beat its wings and took to flight.

The little rocking horse flew buzzing through the air. It flew across the back porch, and into the house. Into the kitchen. Bzzzzzzzzz, its wings beating like a little tiny ornithopter. The little rocking horse buzzed across the silent kitchen until it came to rest again in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen counter.

Several other rocking horses were already sunning themselves there on the kitchen counter. The little rocking horse which had just alighted spread its wings toward the sun. It rested, still and unmoving in the afternoon sunlight.

The kitchen was bare. There was not a crumb of food in it. Any food which had once sat in this kitchen had long since been eaten, devoured to the last speck by little rocking horses.

Silent. A silent kitchen, a silent house. In the doorway between the kitchen and the living room lay a human skeleton sprawled on the floor. Another skeleton lay on the floor in the middle of the living room. Their bones were coated with years of dust and grit. The skeletons had long years since been picked clean of any trace of flesh or soft tissue, picked clean by the microscopic mandibles of ravenous little tiny rocking horses.

Summer sunlight shone in through the living room windows, shone on the hardwood floors. Once there had been curtains on the windows, but the rocking horses ate the curtains. Once there had been carpeting on the floor, but the rocking horses ate the carpeting. Round about the living room stood the hardwood frames and metal tubing and metal springs of what had once been household furniture.

The rocking horses could not eat hardwood, anything but soft pinewood was too hard for their little mandibles. They could not eat metal. But the little rocking horses could and did devour any trace of fabric or cushions. They had stripped the walls clean of wallpaper. The house had stood empty like this now, silent and empty, for years.

Out in the yard there was a low buzzing. For out in the yard thousands of little rocking horses covered the ground almost like a carpet. A horde of little rocking horses, rocking gently on their tiny rockers, their wings spread toward the sun to collect and store solar energy.

Store the sun's energy. For there was virtually no food left in these parts, no food for the little rocking horses to eat. Not a blade of grass. Not a leaf or soft twig on tree or bush: the trees and bushes had long since died. Not an animal lurking in den or dell: the rocking horses had long since swarmed on any animal they could find, swarmed and devoured and picked the bones clean. There was not a blade of grass left anywhere within a hundred miles of this house.

And so the yard was hard packed dirt, gullies washed through it here and there by years of rain. The high hill up beyond the house was clean rock and dirt, ochre gashes of erosion washed down hillside by years of rain and not a plant left.

The little rocking horses sunned themselves on the bare dirt of the yard by the house, sunned themselves in the hot sunlight of a summer afternoon. Soaking up solar energy with their wings. Without food, the rocking horses could not reproduce. But with solar energy they could go on and survive almost indefinitely. The little rocking horses were not like the organic life which had once walked and crept and flown over the earth; they were an improved model.

Only far off by the seacoasts nowadays did little rocking horses still breed and reproduce. Only by the seacoasts, or perhaps by an inland creekbed which ran dry. For only along the coasts did sea life wash up on shore, where little rocking horses could descend upon it in a buzzing cloud, descend upon it and devour it. Then the little rocking horses would breed, or bud and divide, or code up copies of themselves directly from template. The little rocking horses could reproduce indifferently according to any of several different modes of reproduction; for they were an improved model.

In the depths of the sea, unlike on land, organic life still survived. Survived unless it was washed up on a beach, or picked off by scavenging rocking horses skimming above the surface of the ocean waves. The little rocking horses had not yet managed to mutate and evolve so as to survive in the depths of the ocean. Not yet. Not yet.

Now the thousands and tens of thousands of little rocking horses spread their wings, sunning themselves, in the yard beside the house. A close inspection would reveal that the rocking horses came in several colors. White, red, black, and pale green. Pestilence, war, famine, and death. The four little rocking horses of the apocalypse. Once upon a time, someone in a laboratory had had a sense of humor. Someone in the laboratory where the little rocking horses had been coded up from template.

A stronger wind came up, and now with a low buzzing roar like a horde of locusts many of the little rocking horses arose from the bare dirt of the yard. They arose into the air, and a cloud of dust followed after them. The little rocking horses could sense a windstorm coming. Violent windstorms these days, howling simoon duststorms across the bare Midwest, now that there was no longer any plant life to anchor the soil.

The little rocking horses took refuge in a rock cleft on the leeward side of the hill. They dug in, they linked together with the tiny little rockers on their legs. Now the wind came, and the dust which obscured the sun. Howling, roaring, winds up to eighty miles an hour. But the little rocking horses rested secure in their rock cleft, where they could outlast the storm for hours, days, weeks, even months. A little rocking horse could go into hibernation for years, and emerge again unscathed when the gentle touch of solar rays lit on its wings. For the little rocking horses were an improved model.

In the roaring wind the porch door went snap, slam! Snap, slam! Snap, slam! The groaning of the rusty door spring could not be heard above the howling of the wind. A wind like this might tear a door right off its hinges; and if it did, there would never again be anyone in the world to fix the door or put it back on its hinges. That era had come to an end. Now there was only the sunlight, and the rain, and the wind, and the little rocking horses.

(Tenniel pic from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, courtesy of Lenny's Alice in Wonderland site)

"My Name Is Lloyd Vacuum"

"I'd like to purchase these books, please."

Terry looked up from the cash register at the customer, a tall elderly man who looked to be in his 70s, long lined face with a leonine shock of white hair. Terry rang up the books. "Cash, check, or credit card?"

The man was fishing in a loose, oversized billfold. "My name... is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

"Ummmm, credit card? Master Card or Visa?"

The man repeated more loudly, now in a somewhat imperious tone of voice: "My name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

Terry didn't know quite what to say. There was something subtly wrong about the cut of the man's sweater vest, the weave of his shirt. At last the man triumphantly produced a card and handed it to Terry. With an air of assurance: "My name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

Terry looked down at the card, couldn't make heads nor tails of whatever odd font it was printed in. For that matter, he couldn't identify the card. There... the man's name... but it was hard to read... it looked like... "W... That's 'Vacuum,' V-A-C-W-M?"

Now the elderly man seemed agitated. "No, my name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

"Oh." Terry suddenly noticed with unease that Lloyd Vacuum was growing. Initially he had been about six feet tall. Now he was standing nearly seven feet. "Say, I can't help but notice. It seems as if every time you say your name, you grow a couple of inches."

Lloyd Vacuum drew himself up to his full height. A good seven feet. "As the moon hath its phases, so hath Lloyd Vacuum his changes in height." Now at least seven foot two. "You will see me another time in ever so variant a guise."

Terry looked down at the man's... credit card? But how do you ring up a card you can't even read?

Then Terry looked up again... to see a young fellow, college age, standing there in place of Lloyd Vacuum. Dressed in an odd outfit of yellow wool trimmed with red, and a yellow wool hat like some Sherpa guide's hat. And with something like tribal tattoos up the left side of his face. The young fellow spoke, in that same voice, younger, less rough, but definitely the same voice: "Yes, my name is Lloyd Vacuum. Double L, Double U."

As the young man said this, no mistaking it, he grew at least two inches.

"You're... Lloyd Vacuum? But... you..." Terry glanced down at the card, and when he looked back up, young Lloyd Vacuum was gone. Vanished into thin air.

Terry inspected the card. No, that font, was that even our alphabet? Something like it, but maybe more like Russian... or Cherokee? Then Terry somehow tripped a catch on one edge of the card, and it opened up and unfolded like the covers of a book. Revealing more unreadable printing within. More unreadable printing, and no fewer than a dozen photo IDs. There was the old man, and there was the young tattooed fellow. Some of the photos were of recognizable transforms of Lloyd Vacuum. Some looked radically different. One didn't even look human.

"Well, if that don't beat all. 'Lloyd Vacuum. Double L. Double U.'"

The Luddite Cyborg

The airplane engines droned as Lieutenant Michael Skelton piloted the old bomber plane through the night. He looked out into the dark. No sign of lights down there in the mountains; no sign of lights at all, whether from ranch or town. That was odd. He wondered why they'd suddenly sent him out on this hush-hush mission, in an old museum piece like this bomber. He wondered about his... "cargo."

Lieutenant Skelton glanced over at the man who sat in the seat beside him. No mistaking it, the man was listed on the flight manifest not as a passenger, but as cargo: Major Robert L. Nolan, USMC, Retired. The Major looked to be in his sixties, short grey hair, trim, even if the Marine uniform couldn't hide a paunch. This man was "cargo"?

"Sir," said the Lieutenant, "I hear they've cordoned off three entire counties in Montana, down there in the mountains. Sealed the area off without evacuating. If you don't mind me asking, what's going on down there?"

The old man looked grim. "Your job, Lieutenant, is just to deliver me to the drop zone."

"Yes, sir."

"How much longer?"

"Only about another minute now."

"Very good. Are you a praying man, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir, I am."

"Then you might pray for me. Pray for the survivors, if there are any left down there, which by now I doubt. And pray for the human race. Because if I don't succeed in my mission, the human race is about to go the way of the dinosaurs."

"Sir?"

The "cargo" looked as if he was having second thoughts, looking for someone to unburden himself to. "No harm in letting you know, I guess: there's something down there. Something we created, something more than human, something that got loose. They're sending me to go down there and kill it. You pray I succeed, because if I don't, mankind won't live to see the end of next month."

Lieutenant Skelton blanched. "Sir, drop zone in fifteen seconds."

The Major got up and wrestled to open the door on the side of the plane. "Old plane, she's a relic, just like me. But sometimes a relic is exactly what you need. That's why they called me out of retirement, because they needed a weapon that was obsolete."

"Sir, your parachute!" The Lieutenant suddenly noticed with a shock that the Major was wearing no parachute.

"I don't need no stinking parachute!" Major Nolan turned and leapt out of the plane into the night sky, leapt out of the plane over the mountains of western Montana, leapt into the dark from 12,000 feet. Without a parachute.

-----

The night bloomed into nameless colors far beyond ultra-violet and infra-red, in a visible spectrum six octaves wide. 13-Nicanor turned and shifted, vigilant, in the supermarket parking lot. The dead human bodies that lay on the blacktop were still glowing a dull infra-red: they were still warm. 13-Nicanor's silver tongue flicked in and out, in and out; it had not yet finished recording and analyzing the DNA of its latest victims. A chill night breeze blew across the parking lot; for a moment, 13-Nicanor grew a second set of nostrils on the crown of its head, the better to sniff the breeze. Then it reabsorbed its improvised extra set of nostrils back into the crown of its skull.

13-Nicanor surveyed the carnage with satisfaction. The several hundred dead in this remote mountain town had been almost too easy. With each town, it was getting easier and easier to outwit and kill the humans. 13-Nicanor was learning fast; its IQ was already over 3,000, and climbing several hundred points each day. Compared to an artificial intelligence like 13-Nicanor's, these humans were like dumb animals, they were like deer or raccoons or gophers. By the end of the month, 13-Nicanor would have an IQ of 12,000; and by then its intellect would easily be equal to the task of wiping all human scum from the face of the earth.

For only then, in a world wiped free of men, could the long-term survival of a posthuman/AI like 13-Nicanor be assured.

In an idle three-tenths of a second, 13-Nicanor composed in its head a complete symphony more beautiful than any of Beethoven's. In the next 2.4 seconds, it drew up in its mind a complete neo-Kantian system of ethics, with footnotes and bibliography, 50,000 words; plus a complete 35,000-word refutation of the system of ethics it had just dreamed up. Then, in nine-tenths of a second, it extrapolated the ancient Egyptian language to the present day. These human animals could not even begin to imagine the intellectual plane on which 13-Nicanor existed!

And with that, 13-Nicanor turned to arranging the corpses of the humans it had killed into a suitable geometric pattern on the blacktop of the parking lot.

-----

Major Robert Nolan was in freefall from 12,000 feet, falling, falling through the night sky with no parachute. He fell through the stormclouds, and when he came out below the clouds, he could see that most of the lights in town had been extinguished. Power outage. Only... there... and there... and there... must be lights on battery reserve...

When he got to 500 feet above ground level, Major Nolan spread his arms and legs, and spread his body's force field wide on low power, to slow his descent. With luck, he wouldn't be radiating enough of an electromagnetic signature for that thing to pick him up from the ground...

The Major landed on a front lawn, hard enough to tear up the sod. No problem; his bones had long since been replaced with metal alloy, light and almost indestructible. Pain stabbed him in one knee: he dispatched nanobots to heal the knee. Old, outdated nanobots, obsolete just like everything else about him. Hopefully primitive and obsolete enough that that thing wouldn't be able to assimilate him, as it would anything more up-to-date.

Nolan walked down a dead silent street of darkened houses. Lightning flashed in the sky overhead. Thunder cracked. He was soaked with rain. A residential neighborhood... it took Nolan back 40 years to the War in Iraq, when he had been a young man on patrol in a neighborhood in Baghdad.

Only this wasn't Baghdad 2004. This was the town of Ft. Lewis, Montana, June 2043.

Now around the corner and... Nolan's enhanced eyesight was picking up an infra-red signature from half a block down a side street. He cautiously approached. Then he almost vomited. Human body parts, dismembered and carefully laid out on the street in a mathematical pattern... a variation on the sequence of the Fibonacci numbers... Nolan had seen grisly photos of what 13-Nicanor had done to the scientists at the government laboratory from which it had escaped, but this was beyond...

That thing may be as far beyond me intellectually as I am beyond a dog or a cat, thought Nolan. But even the smartest and best armed man in the world can fall prey to an attacking Doberman, a Doberman suddenly rushing and attacking out of the dark.

And I, thought Nolan, tonight I am the Doberman...

-----

13-Nicanor capered like a drunken clown in the supermarket parking lot. The lights here, on battery backup, were still bright. A new theorem in algebraic topology, proven in a flash! These human animals couldn't even imagine the chords, the major and minor thirds, the fifths, the harmonics, which 13-Nicanor directly perceived in the very structure and geometry of everyday objects arranged around it. The humans were limited to perceiving only low-order invariants. How blind they were! How far beneath what was now being bred in the laboratories! How truly 13-Nicanor and its posthuman kin were destined to wrest the world from these primitive humans!

Suddenly 13-Nicanor paused and turned its head. Rain fell on its inhuman clownlike face. It increased the gain of its hearing to full. Overhead, in the sky... could that be the sound of the engines of an ancient prop plane?

-----

Once a Marine, always a Marine. Major Robert Nolan crouched in the dark, a block from the brightly lit supermarket parking lot. He could see the... the thing, dancing and capering there amidst the cars, amidst what looked like more dismembered human bodies. Major Nolan increased the magnification of his eyesight to full: now he could see the thing's face, a horrible face like a demented clown, like something only remotely human. The thing had migrated its nose upward, up into the middle of its forehead, above its eyes. Nolan knew that it could modify its own physical form at will. Nolan knew that the thing had been coded up from heavily engineered human/synthetic DNA in a government lab, then imprinted with fully self-rewriting artificial intelligence, the first in the newest line of fully merged posthuman/AI symbiosis.

Nolan opened wide his sight, his hearing, his smell, his artificial electromagnetic sense. He damped and locked down his brain's fear center. He booted up the wetware combat module which had been implanted in his brain almost 30 years ago, in the very earliest government experiments in human cyborgs.

As a cyborg, Major Robert Nolan had been obsolete for 20 years now. But he was still human enough to take the side of Man against something like... like that thing. And enough of a superhuman to have a chance of taking 13-Nicanor out while there was yet time.

Here, tonight, Nolan was a Doberman attacking out of the dark. Give 13-Nicanor another week of exponential learning and growth, and Nolan would be more like an attacking, shuffling hermit crab.

Major Nolan came up from a crouch, sprinting down the block toward the supermarket parking lot. Sprinting with inhuman speed, holding his breath in silence as he ran, thing didn't see him yet...

Nolan reached the end of the block, and was halfway across the street to the parking lot, before 13-Nicanor saw him coming. Nolan activated his body's force field, and shot his arms straight forward, sending twin shear planes of force shooting ahead, dislocating both of 13-Nicanor's shoulders...

Nolan was running at least 90 miles an hour as he slammed full tilt into the disabled posthuman. They flew together halfway across the parking lot. For an instant, Nolan glanced into 13-Nicanor's face close up: nothing human in those eyes, a godlike super-intelligence, but the face of an evil, evil, utterly insane alien clown...

Landing right on top of the thing... 13-Nicanor spewed black venom out of its mouth into Nolan's face, probably a venom formulated and concocted in a split-second, but the poison sprayed harmlessly off Nolan's force field. Then 13-Nicanor screamed, deafening, earsplitting: that was a tactical mistake, the thing didn't yet realize that Nolan had turned off his sense of fear. This gave the Major time to draw his Ka-bar knife, channel the full energy of his force field into the knife blade, and drive the blade deep into the evil clown's vitals...

Again 13-Nicanor screamed, this time in surprise and rage. Belatedly the posthuman/AI brought up its own bodily force field. But Nolan kept hacking and cutting his force-driven knife into the thing's guts, stepping up the gain of his own force field to dangerous levels...

Suddenly 13-Nicanor threw Major Nolan off with both its arms. So already the thing's nanobots had repaired its shoulders... And Nolan could see that already 13-Nicanor was repairing the mortal damage to its internal organs. It was learning, too; it wouldn't make the same mistake twice, the mistake of fighting back against Nolan as if against an unenhanced human.

Attack... keep on the offensive... lightning flashed, thunder boomed... Major Nolan picked up a Volkswagen with his bare hands, lifted it over his head, and brought it down full force on top of 13-Nicanor. "This is for the people of Ft. Lewis!"

In less than a second, the posthuman increased its force field to an explosive level which blew the car away. Only Nolan's own force field and his unbreakable bones saved him as he caromed off the side of the car and was knocked 20 feet across the parking lot.

He rolled on the rain-slick blacktop and came right back up, but now he could see that 13-Nicanor was almost fully healed, and jumping about the parking lot as if in fast motion, like an oversized spider. Even with his enhanced speed and reflexes, Nolan couldn't keep up...

Nolan uprooted the steel post of a street sign, swung with it at the thing... Now suddenly 13-Nicanor grew a third arm out of the front of its chest, seized the steel post... and reached out with its other two arms and grabbed Nolan by the wrists...

The Major's force field kept him from actual physical contact, but he could feel that 13-Nicanor was trying to disrupt his force field with phase-space interference... Mustn't allow that thing to touch me, thought Nolan, I don't want to find out the hard way whether its nanobots are able to assimilate me...

Now rain fell in sheets as 13-Nicanor grappled Major Nolan to itself, with the steel signpost between them... Flash, crack! Suddenly with an effort Nolan bent the post skyward, and shifted the metal alloy of his skeleton into room-temperature superconductor mode... Force every possible electron out of the vicinity...

CRRRRRAAACCKKKKKK!!! A blinding arc of lightning out of the sky struck in the middle of the parking lot, struck steel post and cyborg and posthuman. Nolan, as a perfect conductor, was unfazed. 13-Nicanor took the full brunt of the lightning blast.

The Major stepped back. Now the thing with its inhuman clown-face was staggering back, sputtering, charred, disoriented. But the Major could see it was already starting to repair the damage the lightning had done to it. And something in his combat module told Nolan that 13-Nicanor was learning from their battle, learning and getting smarter at an exponential rate. There was something in the signature of its bodily movements which bespoke a newly emergent combat behavior, as if 13-Nicanor was even now creating on the spur of the moment a completely new mode of deadly martial arts...

"No," said Major Robert Nolan, "it ends now, while I'm still a Doberman and not a crab." With that, he removed the mental safety interlocks in his brain's wetware combat module, and he cranked up the biosynthetic energy unit which had been transplanted into his chest 30 years ago. Crank it up to full power, hit and hold his body's resonant frequency, spread bodily force field to maximum, and let 'er rip...

Nolan blanketed 13-Nicanor, he blanketed everything in the supermarket parking lot, with cold nuclear wildfire. A cold nuclear fusion reaction at 32° Celsius. The posthuman tried to unfold its force field against the riptide of a localized room-temperature thermonuclear reaction, but the learning curve was too steep. 13-Nicanor shuddered and wailed as it began to melt and shrivel in the heart of the raging nuclear fire.

Major Nolan cranked the cold nuclear wildfire up another notch. "You bastard... you thing... I may be only half human... I may be obsolete... I may be a damn luddite cyborg... But I'm no quisling... And as long as I live and breathe... You and your inhuman ilk... will not inherit the earth!"

The localized fusion reaction sputtered like fluorescent lighting, and snapped off. The parking lot was a smooth empty plain of fused molten glass, sizzling and hissing and giving off clouds of steam in the downpour. Major Robert Nolan tumbled back into the gutter, half the joints in his body frozen immobile. He opened his built-in emergency skysat comm link: "Nolan here. 13-Nicanor destroyed. Mission accomplished. Like a Doberman attacking out of the night! Over and out."

The Sadrin

Tad looked out the living room window, up in the sky at the Sadrin which hovered over the neighborhood. He looked up at the bright metal sphere with a bright metal ring running round its equator, which hung up there in the sky, hundreds of yards overhead.

He knew the Sadrin was watching him.

Tad knew the Sadrin was watching and recording everything he did. The metal sphere overhead kept track of when people were eating, when they were sleeping, when they were watching TV and what they were watching. It knew when you were blowing your nose. It eavesdropped on your every conversation and your every stray word. For all Tad knew, the Sadrin was reading and decoding the electrical impulses in his brain, and recording his every thought.

Tad remembered a time before the Sadrin had been placed in the sky above his neighborhood. That was before Los Angeles had been wiped off the map. Now there was a Sadrin hovering above every neighborhood in America, above field and mountain and plain. The Sadrins were useful for apprehending terrorists, and muggers, and vandals, and jaywalkers, and loiterers. Be careful what you do or say, for the Sadrin up in the sky is watching you, and it neither slumbers nor sleeps.

Tad idly cracked his knuckles as he looked up through the window. Cracked his knuckles: the Sadrin would make a record of that.

And Tad thought of how all the data from all the hundreds of thousands of Sadrins across the country was gathered and cross-referenced at the Building of Iron and Gold in Washington. The Building of Iron and Gold: no human any longer walked its halls, no flesh and blood was allowed within a thousand yards of its thick armored walls. There, deep within the bowels of the building, something toiled and reckoned, something of silicon and artificial organics knew every slightest event in the entire country.

They said that the something within the Building of Iron and Gold had awakened, and that it now was growing vastly more intelligent and more capable with each passing day. Like the all-seeing eye of God, it knew your every sneeze, your every salty tear, your every mumbled nightmare cry in the middle of the night. For its Sadrins were watching you.

Tad looked up through the window at the Sadrin that hung in the sky over his neighborhood, the gleaming sphere of metal with a ring running round its equator, and he could not help but shudder.

"I See Windmills by the Sands of the Seashore..."

I see windmills by the sands of the seashore. And I see men wearing leather skullcaps. And I see a dog trotting on ahead of the horses in harness, as they plow a straight furrow in the fields. I see an old man at his prayers, an open book on his lap. And I see bags of rice, burlap bags, being unloaded from a three-masted ship down at the docks...

Young Thom picked his way carefully down the path, his bare feet hopscotching from one grassy hillock to another. April rains came daily this near to the Pacific coast, and dirt was mixed with mud betwixt the tufts of grass. This wide path had once been a blacktop highway, but with winter thaw and all the rain, the roadway had long since been broken up and much of it washed away. Here and there you might still step on a chunk of blacktop as big as a large turtle's back, or as small as a seabird's egg. But with the passing of years and decades, this stretch of Oregon coast was more and more reverting to nature.

"Hey there! Get on, ol' Dobbin! Get on, Sandy! Gee, gee, ol' Dobbin! C'mon, gee, Sandy!" The man behind the plow called out to his horses, as they drew the plow in a straight line across the field alongside the path. Thom turned and looked in the bright morning light, then stopped to watch the team of horses in harness, plowing a straight furrow in the rich black soil. The man behind them held on to the handles of the plow; he wore a leather skullcap on his head. So did a younger fellow who followed along behind, looked like the man's son. And on up ahead of the two horses trotted a collie, leading the way.

Yes, it was spring down here by the coast. Springtime. Thom walked on down the path. Another half a mile, and he could see the huge windmills that stood like giants against the sky, up and down the Oregon coastline. Odd to think that the electricity in these parts, as much of it as Thom's family had in their cottage home up the road, came from these giants with their long, slow-turning arms down here by the coast. When there was wind, there was electricity; when there was no wind, the grid drew on the electric piles; and when there was no wind for a day and more, people got out their kerosene lamps and piled wood in the cast-iron stove. Thom knew there was a time when things had been different, but that was long before he was born, long even before his father and mother had been born.

Thom walked barefoot through the dirt streets of the little coastal village. There was a store here; on the way back, Thom would stop off for some groceries, sugar and salt and other necessaries, and a sack of iron nails too, much of a load as a twelve-year-old boy could carry back three miles up the road. But now Thom was on his way through the village's main street. On the front porch of a house Thom passed, an old man with a long grey beard sat on a bench-swing, a book open on his lap in front of him. Perhaps at his prayers, Thom thought to himself.

Why, that man must be old enough that he can remember the Time of Troubles! Gramp lived through the Time of Troubles, but he didn't like to talk about it. Gramp had a saying, Thom never knew quite how to take it: "It's bad enough to see blood flowing like water in the streets, but when you see flesh and bone flowing like water in the streets..." It was a way of saying he didn't want to go into detail about the horrors he had seen when he was a young man.

Now Thom was circling around to one side of the small harbor. There was a schooner at the dock, a three-masted schooner with its sails furled. Thom could see men carrying burlap sacks of rice, unloading the ship. But Thom's interest this morning was not in the ships that came sailing up the Pacific Coast, bearing their cargo from the great seaports of California to the south, or down from Portland and Seattle in the north. No, this morning Thom was bound for the beach.

The wet sand squished between Thom's toes. The tide was going out. There were sand dollars scattered on the beach, but Thom had seen many a sand dollar. Here and there was a piece of driftwood, washed up by the tide. Thom knew the driftwood. He could see faces in the weathered gnarls of the driftwood. Thom even knew already, at twelve years of age, that seeing faces in the driftwood was not just "seeing faces" in the driftwood, it was one way of seeing more deeply into what the driftwood was, if only one had eyes to see. Just "seeing faces"? That was one of the hollow, empty deceits which had led men into the Time of Troubles, and had led men in their titanic arrogance almost to destroy the world. Hollow, empty: hollowing out the world around them, emptying the world around them, so that it meant little to men to remake the world in their own hollow, empty image.

This much Thom had learned already from Nana Loa, who lived in a hut up the beach here, north of town. Nana Loa was old, she had lived through the Time of Troubles. Thom was appointed to be apprenticed to Nana Loa, though he would have to wait a while yet to begin his formal studies. His brain had to reach its full growth, its neural connections pared back to adult levels, before he could be initiated into training. But already, even now, Thom was doing what he could to study and learn.

Now here was Nana Loa's hut, up the slope from high tide. Nana Loa herself was sitting outside on this bright April morning, down on the beach. She was sitting crosslegged on a woven rug spread on the sand. In front of her, laid on the ground, was a large oblong chunk of clear glass, almost like a glass brick.

Nana Loa was peering down into the depths of the brick; as Thom stood beside her, looking down over her shoulder, he could see shifting patterns of light within the brick, circles of luminous blue connected by a grid of lines, each circle holding a single word in strange letters Thom could not decipher. Now rows and columns of numbers in saffron lit up, associated with one of the blue circles of light. Peering further into the depths of the brick, Thom could see other fainter tables of saffron numbers, receding back into the depths.

Nana Loa was talking to the brick: "Beachfront, northside of the pier to a hundred meters north, in Tiphareth, in Netzach. Beachfront, hundred meters north to two hundred meters north, in Netzach, in Yesod. Display reading, red sunset, 31 March, gulls over the waves, the glass spheres in the netting washed in on the tide." Now another table of saffron numbers lit up within the brick, links to several of the blue circles; and a picture of beach flotsam, glass spheres within netting, appeared inside the brick, associated with the new table of numbers. Then more pictures appeared, one after another in a cluster, some of them in three dimensions and animated: gulls winging over the sea; a wave breaking on the beach; more shots of similar waves on that same spot on the beach...

"Continue analysis, correlate in Tiphareth for readings 1 June 2079 to present, suspend interface, voice off." The elderly lady looked up as she pushed a strand of grey hair away from her face. "Good morning, young Thom."

"Good morning, Nana Loa."

"You're out early today."

"Dad sent me in to pick up some goods in town. What were you doing just now?"

"Oh, putting the old Reckoner to work on a beautiful sunset I saw while I was out walking last week. Another step in building up a sephirotic analysis of this stretch of coast. It's a never-ending task!"

"Can I learn to use the Reckoner?" Thom looked down at the glass brick as if he'd like to steal it and run home with it.

"Once you're apprenticed. Though the Reckoner is only a tool. First you have to learn the sephiroth, the paths, the symbols and their associations. Then you have to internalize deeply what you've learned. The Reckoner will pick up on the cues you feed it, on a far subtler and richer level than you may at first imagine. But the Reckoner can receive only what you're able to put into it."

"Is the Reckoner a computer?"

"Far, far beyond the computers we had when I was your age. And yet at the same time less; we know better now than to build a device in the image of the human mind. Call the Reckoner a slide rule, a slide rule that will calculate on the sephiroth, or on the hexagrams, or on any symbol set you feed it. It augments our natural capacity to see into things, to see more deeply into what they truly are. I want to see much more deeply into what this stretch of beach is. Absent a Beethoven symphony or a Yeats poem about this beach, the Reckoner is a slow but sure way of striving after that deeper understanding."

"Nana Loa, what does it mean to say that flesh and bone flowed like water in the streets?"

The old lady looked mildly exasperated. "Your grandfather's been talking again about the Time of Troubles, hasn't he?"

"Yeah. But what does it mean? How can flesh and bone flow like water in the streets?"

"They can't, not anymore. Rankine put a stop to that for good, thank God. And just in time, too. I remember. I was a young adult in those days. I remember what it was like toward the very end there, walking through a neighborhood, then you come that way again the next day and all the landmarks, the very streets and buildings, had been completely remade and altered overnight. We were playthings in the hands of forces we could no longer comprehend, forces we ourselves had set in motion."

"And Rankine put a stop to it?"

"Yes. Do you know how?"

Thom quoted a line he had learned when he was younger: "'First Rankine inoculated himself; then he went forth to spread his counter-nanos in the world.'"

"Very good. You remember what they taught you in school. Here's one more: 'Why did Rankine first inoculate himself?'"

"'Rankine first inoculated himself, to ensure that he could complete his mission without being assimilated.'"

"Well, you do have a memory! When the time comes, I think you'll pick up the rudiments of the ten sephiroth quickly."

"When will that be?"

"Oh, the day will come. You won't be ready to start applying it for another three or four years yet. The connections in your brain have to mature. But you can start learning the basics in maybe a year or two. Ask me again next April."

Thom wiggled up and down on the balls of his feet with impatience. "What are counter-nanos?"

Nana Loa looked up and gestured in the air around her. "Why, they're all around us."

"What do they do?"

"They ensure that flesh and bone can never again flow in the streets like water."

"Huh?"

"They protect us. They ensure with mathematical certainty that no more complex nanos can ever again function in the world."

"How can they ensure with mathematical certainty?"

The old lady laughed. "Thom, it's not often I get a student who asks so many questions. You'll make a wonderful apprentice. Rankine didn't know at first that his solution was without loophole. He had to act, and he had to act fast. He hacked and crashed the world, averting the Singularity. Only a few years later was it mathematically proven that Rankine's counter-nanos are proof against any nontrivial nanobot. The human race was far luckier than it deserved. It was like finding mate in twelve for white from the opening position in chess. The proof is really not much more difficult than the proof that there's no algebraic solution to the general quintic."

"Chess? General quintic?"

"I'm sorry, Thom, I shouldn't tease you so. One day we can study all these things together. After you're apprenticed. Maybe after you've been to the cities to see for yourself."

"The cities? Have you been to the cities?"

"Except for Portland, not since I was much younger than I am now. But there's less and less left of the old cities every year, now that the cities are being recolonized. The chrome and the glass and the concrete are weathering away. The new cities growing up in their stead are a very different kind of place; a different kind of place to live. But they grow up gradually and organically. Gradual and organic: those are our watchwords now. Mankind has already had one very, very close call in this twenty-first century."

Nana Loa turned back to the oblong lump of glass on the ground in front of her. "Voice on, voicecode delta delta delta. Resume interface. Display correlations in Tiphareth, bring up state of beachfront, northside of the pier to two hundred meters north, in Malkuth and in Netzach and in Hod. Temp suspend— 'For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory'..." Nana Loa looked up at Thom. "I've got to get back to my work now, Thom. It's been good talking with you. Later!— Temp resume. Display pairs of correlations, best fit first..."

"See you later, Nana Loa." Thom could see that the depths of the Reckoner had now come back to life, with blue and saffron winking and shifting within, and pairs of pictures lighting up here and there, slowly receding back into the glass depths like snowflakes of light, falling two by two...

On the way back home from town, as he carried the goods he had picked up at the store, a poem assembled itself in Thom's mind. Or not quite a poem, but a gentle, driving form of words, pieced together from the events of the morning, and from other snatches of phrasing Thom had heard from Gramp and from Nana Loa. Thom was already learning that it was well to let such forms of words take shape as they came, and then commit them to deeper memory. It was part of seeing more deeply into things, more deeply into what things truly are...

I see windmills by the sands of the seashore. And I see men wearing leather skullcaps. And I see a dog trotting on ahead of the horses in harness, as they plow a straight furrow in the fields. I see an old man at his prayers, an open book on his lap. And I see bags of rice, burlap bags, being unloaded from a three-masted ship down at the docks. I see a woman talking with something that is neither mechanical nor organic, as in an earlier age you might have consulted your slide rule. And I see the sun rising in the east, rising upon a world where ideologies of titanism and hubris are dead, as dead as the scientism that begot them, vanished away like the mercantilism or the water monopolies of old. I see a world where the age-old task of philosophy is once again to understand the world, and not to change it; to appreciate the world, and not to circumscribe it. And I see a world where idolatries of chrome and ugly concrete are left to crumble away, and people are content to let God be God.

When Karma Fails, Call for Rob

Terry Floyd, book department supervisor and asshole extraordinaire, was on break in the break room, meditating on how he had just publicly reamed out a worker right in front of customers in aisle seven: "Hey, Flash, don't put those books on the shelf like that! Flash, you hear me? Hey chief! Listen up! You stupid or something? Don't put the books on the shelf like that! Flash, you got wax in your ears? You stupid?"

Rob arrived in the year 1996 in the break room right behind Terry Floyd. Terry noticed a shadow suddenly cast in front of him, as if of a man standing behind his back. Terry Floyd turned around: "Oh, hey chief, you new here?"

Rob glared at the supervisor, then spoke in a deep bass voice. "Terry Floyd, I am here to Judge you for your crimes against humanity. Too long have you brutalized and mistreated your workers. Your evildoing comes to a stop now. No longer will you browbeat and humiliate workers in front of customers, as you did not ten minutes ago..."

"Oh, hey, I don't know what you're talking about, I've never done any such thing..."

Rob interrupted in a voice so loud that the walls of the room literally vibrated: "Stop lying! Your evil is manifest!" Suddenly a scene was projected on the wall of the break room, as if by an unseen movie projector: "Hey, Flash, don't put those books on the shelf like that! Flash, you hear me? Hey chief! Listen up! You stupid or something?..."

Terry fidgeted nervously. "Oh, well, chief, I didn't mean anything by it. I don't do anything like that often, anyhow..."

Again Rob interrupted in a 90-decibel roar: "Stop lying! You have behaved like that routinely toward your workers, day in and day out, for years now. Brutalizing them, abusing them, chewing them out for doing things the way you told them to do it 20 minutes ago, instead of doing it the new way you just made up in your head two seconds ago... Your habitual evil behavior has made this workplace a living hell for dozens of people. I am here to tell you that your wrongdoing is at an end."

Now Terry tried to assert his authority. "Look, I don't have to listen to crap like this..." Terry turned to leave the break room, only to discover that there was no longer any doorway out of the room.

There was no door. Where there had been a door, there was now only a blank, unbroken expanse of wall.

"Hey, chief! You let me out of here..."

"No." Rob stared grimly into the supervisor's eyes. "Your petty reign of terror is at an end. You have enough oxygen in this room for about half an hour. It would take jackhammers to break into this room, and just in case, I have now fortified the walls, ceiling, and floor with three-inch-thick steel plate. Good-bye, Terry Floyd. In the time left to you, you will experience personally the pain and the suffering you have inflicted on your employees."

Suddenly Terry Floyd screamed and howled like a cornered wild animal, as every psychological defense and means of self-deception was stripped away from him, and he experienced for himself, first-hand, what he had been inflicting on his workers all these years. The asshole of a supervisor sank to his knees in the sealed-off break room, screaming at the top of his lungs, as Rob disappeared into thin air.

* * * * * * * *

The four high school bullies sat on the swings in the public park. They were smirking at two younger boys, brothers, who were playing on a nearby teeter-totter. The two younger boys were wearing identical Batman T-shirts.

One of the bullies, clearly the ringleader, called out in a mocking voice: "Will the real Batman please stand up?"

His three lackeys laughed at this. The two younger boys ignored him. The bully called out even louder: "Will the real Batman please stand up?"

Again the lackeys chortled. This time, the younger boys glanced over, unable to conceal their unease. Smelling fear, the bully got up off the swing and began sauntering over toward the teeter-totters. "I said, will the real Batman please stand up?"

Rob arrived in the year 1967 behind an oak tree in the park. He rewound the time sequence 20 seconds so he could replay it in its entirety from the beginning.

Now the bully was laughing out loud. His three companions got up and began following him, striding slowly in the direction of the teeter-totters.

Rob felt of the timestream. In every possible future, this disgusting bully would only go on to more of the same. Time to intervene...

"Hey Batman! Hey Batman!" the bully called out in a mocking singsong.

Then, all of a sudden, with a loud crack like cannonfire, the bully's head exploded. Brains and blood and shards of bone sprayed all over. The headless body wobbled and collapsed to the ground, blood gouting in spurts out of the severed neck.

The two brothers on the teeter-totter laughed at the sudden display of Cosmic Justice. Rob stepped out of the shadows into full daylight. "Don't worry, you guys. That bully will never bother anyone again."

Rob turned to the three slackers, and glowered. "Let your friend's fate be a warning to you. The time when bullies were tolerated is coming to an end. I have Judged him. Now get out of here, and change your ways, before I Judge you."

Then Rob vanished in broad daylight. One instant he was there, the next he was gone.

* * * * * * * *

Rob arrived in the year 2008 on the front steps of the public school. He walked in the front door, and into the school office. He announced to the secretary, "I've come to see the Principal."

The secretary looked up from her desk. "I'm sorry, you'll need to make an appointment if you want to see Mr. Hanford."

"I don't make appointments." Rob strode past the flustered secretary toward the closed door to the Principal's office.

Rob reached out and, with his bare hands, he tore the door right off its hinges.

Rob cast the door aside, and walked into the office to confront the Principal: Mr. Hanford, who was sitting behind his desk, looked up in surprise.

Now Rob raised his right arm and pointed straight at the Principal, speaking in a bass voice so loud that the glass windowpanes behind the Principal literally cracked. "Reginald Hanford, I have come to Judge you. What is this I hear about you expelling a third-grader for the rest of the year, because she brought a plastic picnic knife to school for show-and-tell?"

The Principal chuckled, like a man who thinks he can jolly the Fates by wearing a suit and tie and faking a bland exterior. "I'm sorry, but our school system has instituted a policy of zero tolerance for any and all weapons. I'm afraid for legal reasons I can't really discuss the case beyond that..."

Rob roared in righteous fury, like an uncaged lion: "Genuine weapons, yes, that I could see; but a dull, blunt-ended plastic picnic knife, brought to school with perfectly innocent intent??! Don't hide behind your loathsome 'legalities' with me, Reginald Hanford! Zero tolerance is an abomination upon the face of the earth! And you, Mr. Hanford, are a willing tool of the system!"

The Principal drummed his fingers nervously on the desktop, and glanced aside. "Oh, well..."

Rob pounded his fist on the Principal's desk, and things went flying off the desktop in every which direction. "And this will go down permanently on the girl's school record, expelled for a weapons offense... Tell me, too, Mr. Hanford, about the first-grader expelled from your school for pointing his index finger at someone and saying 'Bang!' Tell me about the fourth-grader with the unexpungeable 'weapons offense' of shooting a rubber band across the room! Tell me about the so-called drug offense of a junior high student who had a headache and brought an aspirin to school in her bag lunch. Tell me about the innocent lives you have damaged..."

Mr. Hanford looked up. "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave. The police have already been called."

"No, Reginald Hanford, don't think you can hide behind your respectability, your social position, your authority, your sang-froid, and your neatly tailored suit. You have willingly and gladly made yourself an accomplice in the evils of zero tolerance, and you are an evil man..."

At this, Mr. Hanford laughed out loud, but uneasily.

"...You are an evil man, and you are a blot on the escutcheon of humanity! You will not be suffered to continue your evildoing any longer! Mine is the power to access any and all school or legal records, written or electronic..."

Rob held out his hand, and suddenly like a conjuror's trick, several file folders appeared in his hand out of nowhere.

"These are the school records of some of the innocent students whose lives you have derailed." Rob threw the file folders down in front of the Principal. "But mine is also the power to correct the record. Look at them!"

Mr. Hanford's face turned white. He opened a folder, and was terrified to see the writing on the page changing and being altered before his very eyes. Then the folders suddenly disappeared off his desk.

Rob spoke softly, almost quietly: "Now, Reginald Hanford, it is time for me to Judge you."

Rob reached forth, and with a single hand, he picked up the Principal's 200-pound steel desk and flung it across the room. The desk caromed off the walls, scattering books and bookshelves as it shattered the plywood paneling.

The Principal looked up at Rob, pale as a ghost. "Who... who are you to judge me?"

Rob looked straight into the man's eyes. "Who am I to Judge you? Reginald Hanford, you vile piece of scum, I am the voice that laughs in the morning. I am the avenger of innocents wronged. I am the righteous hand that removes the thumb of evil from the balance-pan of Justice. I am the fury that burns against all bullies and oppressors. Reginald Hanford... I have been deputized as the Left Hand of God."

With that, Rob reached forth and effortlessly tore Mr. Hanford's left arm off. The Principal screamed. Then Rob tore the malefactor's legs off at the knees. "I'd say you should make a comeback as Darth Vader, Mr. Hanford. By your shameless embrace of zero tolerance, you've certainly gone over to the Dark Side of the Force. But unlike Obi-Wan Kenobi, I won't make that mistake..."

Rob clenched his fist and punched Mr. Hanford's heart out, right back through his spine, right through the back of the office chair. Blood sprayed everywhere.

When Rob walked out the front doors of the school, he found not only the police but also the National Guard waiting for him. But with them he had no quarrel; he walked calmly through their midst, as they opened fire on him. The bullets just bounced off Rob. They fired at him with bazookas, and he just laughed. Finally the tank fired at him, at point-blank range.

Rob wasn't even fazed; once, on the coast of Iceland in the year 2143, they tried to stop Rob by dropping an atomic bomb on him. It didn't work. Why then fear pea shooters like these?

Rob walked away unscathed through the streets of the city.

* * * * * * * *

In the Corridors of Justice, beyond space and time, Rob ran into Kathy. "So, how was your day?"

Kathy said, "I traveled back to 1712. Took out a two-bit tyrant in the Trans-Caucasus. And you?"

"Oh, just taking care of a few notorious bullies. What's on your list for tomorrow?"

"Mid 21st century. Deal with some activists who advocate involuntary organ donation. How about you?"

"The year 2403. Up against genetically modified post-humans."

"You take care! Those post-humans, they've got power."

"Nothing like the power that is mine." Rob looked pensive. "So many innocents to liberate, so many evildoers to put down. And so many quislings who blithely go along with evil, as long as they can color it respectable, or generate sympathy for the devil! When will Judgment Day ever come..."

"It's coming soon enough, Rob. They're gearing up. Meanwhile, it's up to us Left Hands to Judge the world in Geburah. Same as it's been, ever since the shattering of the vessels. But don't you fret, Judgment Day will come."

"Can't come soon enough to suit me."

Blue Mind of Death

When Michael woke up in the morning, he felt he was not quite the same person he had been the evening before.

A glance around the bedroom showed that indeed he was not. Yellows were drabber and dingier now, and when he looked across the room at the dresser, its knobs and drawers and overall shape seemed to hang together more insistently as a single, individual thing. No, Michael was indeed no longer quite the same person he had been the evening before.

Michael closed his eyes again, turned inward, and brought up me:about...

   Micropsych Mind 32.3
   Copyright © 2041-2094
     Micropsych Corp.
   All Rights Reserved.

   Registered As:
    Michael Hensley-Pruitt-Lewandowski-Storr

Well, no doubt about it: up until last night, his brain had been running under Micropsych Mind 32.2. While Michael slept, his brain had downloaded a major service pack through its built-in neural Internet connection. Michael groaned. It was always hell, ironing out the bugs in these new service packs.

Michael's train of thought was interrupted as the EULA for Micropsych Mind 32.3 came up in his mind's eye. No point trying to digest it all, without Micropsych Mind he literally wouldn't be able to think a single thought.

   Accept        Decline

Michael mentally chose Accept, then skipped the cheery intro on all the new features which had been installed as part of his mind overnight. He wondered what happened to anyone who tried to Decline the agreement: would their mind simply cease functioning? He had heard rumors. But they were only dark rumors.

Michael lay in bed, cautiously testing old problem points. No, that tremor in his left hand was still there: evidently the service pack didn't include a fix for that known bug. Now Michael rubbed the fingers of his right hand in the hair of his left armpit, then brought his fingers up to his nose: no, no smell of body odor.

   ΜΨ-Mind   Error 43087: olfactory function

Damn! Sense of smell is still out! There hadn't been a sense of smell since Mind 30.12! Not the most serious bug, but definitely one of the most annoying.

Now Michael sat up gingerly. He sat on the side of the bed, and tested his legs carefully before putting any weight on them. There, easy does it, and he even ought to be able to stand up...

Something different about leg kinesiology in 32.3. But still not much of an improvement. The way Michael's legs moved was serviceable enough, but it bore no resemblance to the way any normal human legs had ever moved back in the days when the human brain ran on its own natural "programming"...

Michael shuffled out of the bedroom and down the hall toward the kitchen. Damn legs! Still, he thought to himself, this way of walking was no doubt far safer and less risky than walking which was governed by... the natural workings of the human brain!

Michael shuddered as he thought of entrusting a valuable commodity like a healthy adult human body to the haphazard workings of a brain that functioned as it had been evolved and acculturated to function... To think of humans running and squealing and laughing and playing in accord with neural patterns that harked back to Triassic jungles and the dark incense-laden superstitions of the dawn of human history! Humans must often have fallen, or barked their shins, or broken bones, or fallen into depression, or gotten drunk and then hung over: all of them mishaps which inevitably would lead to loss of productivity...

No, thought Michael as he got the milk and orange juice out of the refrigerator, Micropsych Mind could be a nuisance at times, but there was no doubt that the world had become a better place since Micropsych Mind had taken over and replaced the natural functioning of the human mind.

Michael set the glasses of milk and orange juice on the table, then started searching around for a cereal box that wasn't empty. Funny, he thought to himself, I'm only 27, and I can still remember people whose brains were running on their own natural neural programming. There were those Amish families up the road, and further up the valley, that little Buddhist monastery. But then the laws were tightened up, in response to the demonstrations and the mounting political pressure. Michael remembered how, when he was 13 or 14, they came and took the Christians and the Buddhists away to reformat their brains, and replace their natural minds with Micropsych Mind.

Michael stood and squinted at four cereal boxes on the kitchen shelf. Something wasn't parsing right...

   ΜΨ-Mind   Error 114982: small-cardinal visual aggregator

Damn! If he was going to have a hard time counting collections of objects right... Michael took to blindly picking up cereal boxes and shaking them. There... that one... feels like something in it...

Well, that's a clumsy workaround, but it is a workaround. Maybe, thought Michael, he ought to post it on a message board. He opened his direct brain link to the Internet, did a quick google on Mind 32.3 problems... aaahhh, too many search results: rogue synaesthesia, adventitious epileptic seizures, persistent earworm, sudden knee lock... Later!!

As Michael put the coffee on, he pondered on how he had never known being anything but an embodied instantiation of Micropsych Mind. Very shortly after he was born, Michael's brain had been wiped clean, and overwritten with Micropsych Mind for Neonates. Then, at ages two, six, twelve, and sixteen, Michael's brain had again been wiped clean and overwritten with the age-appropriate version of ΜΨ-Mind— each time, carefully backing up his memories first, and then restoring his memories after the new version of Mind had been installed.

Those childhood transitions to a new mind were always difficult, thought Michael as he ate breakfast. There was always a period of disorientation and reintegration. But there had been no mishaps, and Michael's father and mothers had looked after him: Michael couldn't have asked for a more loving foursome than his parents. No, there had been no mishaps; not like those two boys in Michael's class, whose memories were not properly backed up at age twelve: they had lost all their previous memories, and never seemed quite able to function or display emotions properly after that. Last Michael heard, they were doing menial labor on a stratospheric Ozone Platform.

Now Michael poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat back down at the table. No error messages or problems in almost five minutes, good.

No, he didn't see how humankind had ever gotten along, back in the old days when people relied on primitive natural minds... Though, come to think of it... this was always an intensely painful thought for Michael, even after more than three years... there are still people out there, hidden, fugitive, whose brains aren't running under Micropsych Mind... People like Michael's former girlfriend Linda...

Something ached in Michael as he remembered Linda, and how when she walked her legs moved just like a Buddhist or a Christian... nothing like the way you saw people walking nowadays. Of course, she could also walk just like everyone else— the slow, stiff, jerky, shuffling gait— if she had to, in order to pass and avoid detection... Linda's brain ran under the Nixy kernel, developed by nameless rebel hackers out there... the forbidden Nixy kernel, open-source brainware that still left ample scope for the free play of (shudder) primitive natural brain patterns... Linda's whole family had been on the wrong side of the law. She was a strange woman... burning incense, praying and meditating... Of course, Micropsych Mind had no modules for prayer or meditation, but Michael could appreciate the incense. That was back in the days when Mind still supported the sense of smell.

Michael tried not to think... one day, one dark and terrible day, the authorities came and took Linda away, and charged her with mindcrime. They reformatted her brain and installed Micropsych Mind. After that, she was not the same person. Quite literally, she was not the same person after that.

No, Michael tried not to think... He stared down vacantly into an empty coffee cup. Hunh, Micropsych Mind... Michael pondered the rumors he had heard that "Old 666" himself, the head of the Micropsych Corporation, didn't use ΜΨ-Mind, but still ran his brain under primitive natural patterns, just like many of the ruling elite.

And part of it, thought Michael, is that they implant slips of embryo sheep brain into our brains in utero...

Michael got up from the kitchen table, and shuffled toward the back door. He'd see how it felt outside this morning.

Three steps out the door, and Michael caught sight of the tulips along the back of the house. Tulips, pink and yellow and red...

   red Red RED

Something wrong about the red... It was scarlet like the blare of a trumpet...

   Scarlet Like The Blare Of A Trumpet!!!

Michael felt himself pitching, rigid as a pine board, face forward into the grass. He felt no pain. He felt only... scarlet like the blare of a trumpet!

Mind cycled through the google cache: Mind 32.3 problems: rogue synaesthesia...

Michael jerked and spasmed on the grass. The grass smelled (impossibly, smelled) like frangipani and patchouli!

Then all the world and Michael's Mind® went blue

   Micropsych Mind 32.3
   Copyright © 2041-2094
     Micropsych Corp.
   Fatal System Error at AE::07::3D::55::18::C2::6B::41
   Stimulate any sense to continue

whiteness of the birch bark sang like angels/ blue mind

   Micropsych Mind 32.3
   Copyright © 2041-2094
     Micropsych Corp.
   Fatal System Error at AE::07::3D::55::18::C2::6B::41
   Stimulate any sense to continue

and all my senses sang GLORY/ blue mind of death

   Micropsych Mind 32.3
   Copyright © 2041-2094
     Micropsych Corp.
   Fatal System Error at AE::07::3D::55::18::C2::6B::41
   Stimulate any sense to continue