Mirror Image

Arsenal sat down. The tissue sample cartridge poked out of the pocket of his lab coat and clattered to the floor.

"What's that?" Jinx sat cross-legged on the thinly carpeted floor. She was about to tell a story, but the noise distracted her.

"Oh!" He felt irritated with himself for forgetting. "It's a tissue sample from the space trike. I wanted you to see if it was like the samples from the crew."

"You'd better get that into the refrigerator. I'll run it up later."

Arsenal got to his feet, retrieving the cartridge from the floor as he stood up. "Where--?"

"It's the huge thing in the corner of the room."

The refrigerator was a large model, intended for the kitchen of a well-to-do family, vastly over-sized for a collection of tissue samples. Arsenal opened the door and deposited the sample next to the other ones. "Yeah. Nice and roomy."

Jinx shifted on the ground, making herself comfortable. "Yeah. Like some sort of really, really obvious product placement. Now, come here -- I have a story to tell you."

They sat on the thin carpet. Jinx began talking.

"It wasn't all that long ago that our ancestors were nomadic hunters. Three, four millenia ago?"

"What, on the homeworld?"

"Yes. Before we had all this." Jinx gestured around the room. "Before technology, back when symbols were only used for magic, not for keeping records. But not before history."

She paused for a moment.

"Oral records -- poems and songs -- survive from the archaic era. Back then, social organization was hardly more developed than a hunting pack, often led by individuals with remarkable abilities."

"Super-powered warlords."

"Yes. One of the longer story cycles was about the struggle between the great hunter Darneth and Nyqll, the river king. Nyqll built a walled city, and kept his meat in pens. He would send his soldiers out to burn the forest, and grow grain to feed his livestock. Over time, the grasp of Nyqll's burning hand reached Darneth's hunting grounds, and the two warlords began to fight."

"It sounds like Nyqll was ahead of his time."

"He was. Agriculture, slavery, docile livestock, and books of account -- all of this seemed like a perversion of nature to the ancients. Forcing flesh to submit to one man's will. For them, Nyqll was a monster, an enemy of freedom and righteousness."

"And they wrote the poems."

"Precisely. Their vision of the river valley king."

Arsenal tried rubbing the back of his neck, but stopped -- his left thumb was pointing the wrong way. "So that monster is a projection of some long-dead culture's rejection of the modern world."

"Not just any culture. The distant ancestors of the Reyll. They preserved the nomadic values of Darneth in their own moral code. He's not just some archaic political cartoon, he's a fundamental part of our sense of reality." She looked at Arsenal's ruined hand. "Give me your hand."

Arsenal hesitated a moment, then gave Jinx his left hand. She spoke.

"I can't shape your flesh, but you can."

He looked at her for a moment. "All right. All right."

She smiled and lifted up his forearm. "No use starting an operation without a plan. You need a mirror image of your left hand. How do you want to do that?"

"Turn it inside out."

"Kind of. You'll need to keep the nerves and the blood vessels attached. How do things look in there?"

He concentrated, probing his hand and wrist. "Twisted around. One half-turn to the left."

"And the tendons?"

"Straight ahead."

"Brace your arm. I'll talk you through it."

He lay on the floor, and braced his elbow on the floor. She lay down facing him, and looked at him. "Do you know what you have to do?"

He hesitated. "Yeah."

"I'll hold your arm steady. This is gonna hurt."

He swallowed. "Let's do it."

The flesh of his land became pliable like clay. His fingers became shorter.

He gritted his teeth, trying no to scream.

"Keep going."

He shuddered as he came to the long bones of his palm. Jinx held his forearm still.

A mirror image of his ruined hand now hung limply from the end of his forearm. Jinx took a breath. "You're going to need to sever the tendons, twist your hand back into position, and reattach them."

Arsenal was pale and breathing shallowly. "All right."

"Don't tense up."

"Let's get it over with."

She grabbed his wrist to help keep the tendons in place. "Now."

The pain was indescribable. His hand twisted around, and slowly rose back into position. "Hold on."

"Do it. Do it now."

Tendons reattached. Peter took a deep breath, and wiggled his fingers.

He smiled.

"It worked!"

The Burning Hand

Arsenal pulled on a white lab coat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets.

An attentive viewer might have noticed him relax and smile as he pulled on the utilitarian garment. It reminded him of what he was before the industrial accident that revealed his powers -- another mass-produced clone worker, trained as an engineer, type 350, lot 125, requisitioned for the development of plasma soliton weapons. Peter Cat, one of many.

Thresher -- a cyborg, and no stranger to violent dismemberment -- poked his head out of the cargo hold into the hallway.

"Hey, Arsenal! Can you give me a hand?"

Arsenal waited a half-second too long to pull his hands from his pockets and quipped flatly, "Yeah, I think I can spare one."

A recent mishap had resulted in him having two right hands.

The humor was marginal enough, but Arsenal fluffing his cue utterly ruined the joke. Most of the audience didn't think he had a sense of humor anyway, and this scene would do little to change their minds.

Thresher attempted to save the exchange with a forced chuckle, and they proceeded to the partially disassembled open-frame space-craft in the middle of the room.

"So, what do you make of it?" Arsenal stuck his hands back in his lab coat.

"It's got a power plant -- fairly conventional fission job -- but nothing that would explain the acceleration we saw when we were chasing it down." Thresher took a few steps around the ship, and pointed out one of the rear modules. "That looks like a thruster, but it isn't; it's some kind of resonant amplifier."

Arsenal looked under the ship, where some clear liquid was dripping on the floor. "Interesting. This looks like a closed-cycle life support system."

"Oh. Whoops. I sorta unplugged it from the power plant about an hour ago."

Arsenal followed a bus of pipes to a spherical module in the middle of the vessel, just below where the saddle was mounted. "The bus runs up to here." He paused for a moment, and stretched his subtle fields through the container. "There's about a kilo of organic matter inside the sphere."

Thresher extended a small circular saw from his cybernetic left forearm. "Should I open it up?"

Arsenal nodded. "Go for it. We need a tissue sample for ID."

Sparks flew with a grinding noise as Thresher opened up the spherical module. A sector of metal fell to the floor.

"Dude. That is nasty."

Arsenal swallowed. "A vat-grown brain. Probably telekinetic. I think we've found the thruster."

On the bridge, Jolt and the Eye watched a progress bar slowly extend from left to right on the main view-screen. It was very nearly full.

Jolt drummed her fingers on the armrest of the command chair. "Well, this is exciting."

"A broad sweep of all hyperspace jump activity in sensor range takes a while." The Eye was apologetic. "I'm sure it will be done soon."

"You think?"

"Yeah."

"Is that your professional opinion as a registered precognitive?"

"Sure."

The progress bar filled in another step. Now only a tiny sliver remained.

The Eye turned and smiled at Jolt. "See?"

Arsenal entered his quarters, holding a small cartridge with a tissue sample from the strange star-ship's dead brain.

Jinx had set up an effective improvised laboratory in his stateroom. She looked up from the screen of her workstation, which was connected to a humming box by a broad, rainbow-colored ribbon cable. "Hey. I think I have canonical sequences for Lowrider and Apostrophe Girl. Check this out."

Arsenal looked over her shoulder at the screen. "What am I seeing here?"

"It's a set of genes from a chromosomal insertion in both bodies. The sequences look almost like genes inserted in a force-growing process, but they don't match up with anything used in mainstream Corporate clone production."

"Is this from the tumor monsters?"

"Nope. The tumors show no signs of mutation or degradation from rapid mitosis, and match up perfectly with the samples from the corpses."

"That's crazy."

"That monster's got one funky cancerbeam." She looked into Arsenal's eyes. "How are you holding up, Peter?"

"It's my hand. I can't stand it any more."

"I understand. I wish I could help you." Jinx looked sad. "I used to be able to heal people. Shaping flesh is easy." She broke eye contact with him and looked down at the floor. "I'm so sorry."

"Listen, I'm going to try something crazy. If I blow myself up, I can patch my state and fix myself up."

"You're going to blow up?"

"Yeah."

"Do me a favor and do it in the shower, OK?"

"OK." Peter walked towards the sealed bathing compartment and opened the door. "Wish me luck."

Jinx smiled weakly. "Good luck."

He closed the translucent door.

Jinx could not look away.

A moment later, there was a soft wet pop, and the inside of the door was covered in gore.

Jinx heaved, but could not vomit. She curled up into a ball and began sobbing uncontrollably.

She rolled on the floor for a few moments, and her spasms changed slowly from retching to simple sobbing.

Peter emerged from the shower compartment, and showed Jinx his palms.

"What the hell?"

She looked at his hands -- two copies of a right hand.

Her face moved from shock to calm.

"It's god power. Ontology control. Nyqll's corrupted your state equation."

"Who?"

"The burning hand." Jinx grasped Peter's hand. "Sit with me. I have a story to tell."

Hot Rods of the Gods

Across Corporate space, subscribers to the "Plan Nine" media feed sat down to watch the new episode of "Honor Guard", the continuing adventures of a super-powered space patrol.

A phrase from the theme music played, and the pre-title scene began.

Arsenal stood on the observation deck of the Nightstalker, looking out into space. His white-furred hands were clasped behind his back.

His captain, Jolt, approached him. Arsenal turned a little to face her. His eyes looked sad.

"Nice job on Leviathan back there." Jolt smiled a little. Arsenal looked like he could use some encouragement.

"Pity about the asteroid."

"Don't feel too bad. The explosion exposed the core, which should make it easier for the miners to get to the high-density goodies." Jolt examined Arsenal's face, but his expression was indecipherable to her. "How's Jinx doing?"

Arsenal frowned. "She won't leave our quarters. She's--"

Jolt rushed on to the important question. "What's her story?"

Arsenal looked at Jolt. "She claims that she had an OptCond practitioner perform an exorcism. Her powers and a good chunk of her memories are gone."

Jolt pinched her mouth together. "Why do you say 'claims'? I hope you didn't talk like that with her -- she needs your love and support right now."

"I understand, Captain. You're right. I need to take what she says at face value if she's going to get better."

Jolt laughed a little. "I said 'love and support', not a bunch of Optimizing Conditioning clap-trap."

Arsenal smiled. "You're a skeptic, too? That's reassuring. Jinx is a true believer -- she's convinced that the exercises help keep her hallucinations under control, but..."

Arsenal couldn't finish the sentence. He looked sad. He started to speak again. "...she's changed. She used to be fearless, and now she's terrified all the time. It's so sad."

Jolt looked down at the floor for a moment, hiding her face. Her mouth moved to say something, but she changed her mind. She looked up again, directly into Arsenal's eyes.

"She's done a lot of terrible things. She has a damned good reason to be afraid. You should accept that she needed to change."

Arsenal nodded. "Thank you, Captain."

Jolt tilted her head. "Uh-huh." She turned to Arsenal. "Get a move on, We've found the bogey."

"I'll see you on the bridge, ma'am."

The title credits rolled. These were the adventures of Honor Guard, a super-powered police unit responsible for keeping the peace in Corporate space. Short scenes depicted the core cast -- Jolt, the Captain, whose body generated vast amounts of static electricity, harness by her skin-tight cat-suit. Thresher, the living satellite, a fearsome space warrior cyborg. The Eye, precognitive acrobat and expert fighter with diamond knives, possessor of a magical amulet that grants her super-vision. Arsenal, unkillable energy manipulator only beginning to tap his vast abilities. Finally, their vessel, the Nightstalker, fastest corvette in the Corporate fleet.

Jolt entered the bridge of the Nightstalker, followed closely by Arsenal. A tiny dot was highlighted by a tracking reticule on the main view-screen. The Eye, sitting at helm, turned her head to talk to Jolt as she took her place in the captain's chair.

"We're on an intercept vector." The Eye made a small course correction as she talked to Jolt -- The Eye had a 360 degree field of vision, and looked at people more out of courtesy than necessity. "It's a small craft, under 2 tons displacement --"

Jolt interrupted the Eye. "Can we get an interrocitor fix? I want to see what we're dealing with."

"Working on it." Thresher was plugged in to the sensor console with thin cable running from the chest of his robot body. "Here we go."

The entire crew looked at the view-screen for a few moments in silence. The Eye finally broke the silence. "Now, that's something you don't see every day."

Jolt nodded. "Yes. Analysis?"

The view-screen displayed what appeared to be a motorized tricycle crudely adapted to space travel -- the wheels had been replaced with similarly sized thruster pods. The pilot, a scruffy-looking male, sat on the saddle of the space trike, grasping a pair of handle-bars. A single passenger, female, sat behind the pilot on the elongated saddle with her arms wrapped around the pilot's waist.

Arsenal spoke up. "Captain -- I think we can safely assume the crew is vacuum-proof. It is likely that one or both of them have powers."

Thresher looked up from the sensor read-outs. "The vessel doesn't have a transponder mounted, and its configuration doesn't match any known space-craft."

Jolt narrowed her eyes. "No transponder, eh? Like a pirate or a smuggler. I think we have probable cause for an inspection. Prepare for intercept!"

Hyper-thrusters engaged, and the Nightstalker skipped through hyperspace to a position a few hundred meters behind the strange vessel, emerging on a parallel course. The heads of the trike passengers pointed to the lower right quadrant of the view-screen. "Match their orientation and lock weapons!" Jolt commanded. "On my mark--"

There was a short moment of tense anticipation on the bridge.

"Do a barrel roll!"

The Nightstalker took a corkscrew trajectory around the space trike's vector. On the view-screen, the vessel rotated as the Nightstalker closed in.

"Still no response..."

"Activate the dome lights."

The space trike was illuminated by flashes of red and blue light from the Nightstalker's sirens. The female turned and tapped the pilot of the strange vessel on his shoulder. He then twisted the handlebars and turned away from the pursuit vector, accelerating rapidly.

"After them!"

"Wait a minute... their vector takes them into the gravity well of a nearby planet." The Eye brought up data on the planet on the main view-screen. "The vessel is decelerating. I think they're going to land."

"Pursue and land nearby."

The Eye proved to be right. The space trike landed at a point near the equator of a small, blue-green world with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, close to a automated filling station the Corporation had constructed on the world's surface. The planet's lack of a strong magnetic field and the periodic high-energy solar flares released by its sun had precluded further colonization. Frequent sterilization events had prevented native life from developing past algae, lichens and simple plants.

The Nightstalker set down on a field of fuzzy rocks behind the space trike landing site. A few simple flowers -- hardly more than colorful fronds -- poked up from the bed of lichen.

In the fore ready room, Jolt attached a grounding cable to a metal stud on her costume. Safely grounded, she peeled off her usual gloves, and replaced them with a pair studded with flat, shiny electrodes on the fingertips and knuckles. "All right, I'll start the questioning. I want the rest of you to cover me. Got it?"

The crew assented, and Jolt pulled a side-handle baton from an equipment locker. It was sheathed in insulating plastic and had a metal core and contacts on each end. She pointed one end of the baton at the grounding stud, and touched her thumb to the contact on the side handle. An arc of electricity jumped to the stud.

"Let's roll."

The pilot of the unknown vessel was busy picking almost-flowers. He was a rugged-looking type with a long black mane, dressed in leathers. His companion was a graceful female with golden fur, dressed in a simple white tunic. She smiled as she watched him put together his bouquet.

Arsenal and the Eye held back and took a position with a clear line of fire to the pair. Thresher continued a few steps, closing in to the range of his tether launchers, and moved out of Arsenal's kill zone.

Jolt closed in on the landing site. The pilot and his passenger smiled. He extended the bouquet of colorful fronds towards Jolt, and opened his mouth to speak.

Jolt interrupted him. "ID. NOW!"

The pilot smiled. "I am called Lowrider. Please accept--"

He looked into Jolt's eyes and stopped. His face looked crestfallen. Jolt repeated her demand.

"I want to see some identification. For both of you."

"As I said, I am called Lowrider."

The young woman in the white tunic also spoke. "And I am S'mb'lah. We come in peace to your mortal realm on a mission from the Most High--"

Jolt gave her a hard look. "Most High, huh? And how high are you two?"

S'mb'lah looked hurt and shocked. "Why so hostile? We--"

Jolt interrupted her. "You were about to fly into the Reyll blockade zone, with no transponder and no way to communicate with you. We're impounding your ship and taking you in."

Lowrider looked concerned, and took a step towards Jolt. "But you must let us complete our missARRGH!"

A shock from Jolt's baton interrupted his sentence. "ON THE GROUND, BOTH OF YOU! HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEADS!"

Lowrider writhed on the ground, and Jolt struck him again with her baton.

"Arsenal -- the girl -- now!" The Eye jabbed Arsenal with her elbow.

Arsenal complied. As the young woman brought her hands to her temples, a concussion bolt struck her in the face. The impact knocked her off her feet and bloodied her nose.

"BACKUP!" Jolt paced around the curled-up form of Lowrider. Thresher, Arsenal, and the Eye closed in.

She turned to face Arsenal. "Give their vessel a quick once-over. I don't want them smuggling weapons on the Nightstalker."

"Understood." He began examining the open-frame spacecraft, starting with the right rear pannier.

Thresher restrained the pilot and the passenger with his tethers while Arsenal worked. Arsenal examined two seemingly ordinary flight bags, one containing tolietries and a few neatly-folded white tunics, the other a fresh pair of leathers. An additional bag contained an inflatable tent.

"Find anything?" Jolt demanded impatiently.

"Not yet."

Arsenal walked to the other side of the space trike, and opened the left pannier. It was empty, except for a single, ornate box. "Wait a minute."

He extracted the heavy box from the cargo container. "It's a hammerspace box."

Jolt looked at him. "What?"

"A hyperspatial container. The inside is bigger than the outside. There could be anything in here."

Lowrider began to panic, and screamed, "You MUST NOT open it!"

"It's filled with EVIL!" the young woman piped in.

"I think you mean DRUGS," snarled Jolt. "Now SHUT UP!"

"I'm going to open it now." Arsenal took a few steps away from the landing site.

He held the box in his right hand, and flipped the latch holding the box closed with his left thumb.

His team-mates each took a step backwards.

The lid flipped open.

"Guys?" Arsenal was a little nervous. "I'm going to look inside now."

"You do that." Jolt took another step back.

"Oh NO!" The Eye screamed.

The opening began to vibrate, forming a sound like a word. "NNNNN...."

An instant later, a dark mass hurled itself out of the box, mantled in cold flame. Arsenal reflexively put his free hand up to shield himself.

Normally, Arsenal was invulnerable -- but this fire burned. He fell and screamed, "ARR!"

The dark mass stuck the ground and assumed the form of a five meter tall blue-furred monstrosity. Instead of a head, it had what looked like an old-fashioned animal trap. The vibrations became louder, and deepened. "MMMMMMM!"

The girl with too many apostrophes in her name writhed on the ground, yelling, "Now you've done it! NYQUIL IS FREE!"

Arsenal looked up at the blue-furred monstrosity. It was naked, and had no genitals. It took a step towards him.

The jaws of the trap opened, and a burning hand holding a gigantic eye rose from the torso of the dick-less abomination.

"ALL-WORLD-ALL-ONE-ALL-MINE!" The words echoed like a great brass gong. The burning eye-hand fixed its gaze on Lowrider, cowering before the evil god. Mystic flame burst from the eye-hand, and Lowrider writhed as his rib cage began to swell.

"EXCEPTIONS--"

Lowrider exploded as a vast tumorous mass consumed his chest.

"--NONE!"

Arsenal looked at his ruined hand. His fur and flesh had not burned -- instead, a tentacled thing was growing inside him. His forearm split open, and a deformed eye stared back at him through the gash in his corrupted flesh.

"ETERNALLY--"

He grit his teeth, and blasted off his left fore-arm. Behind him, the monstrous meat god turned its burning hand to the girl with too many apostrophes in her name.

"--NONE!"

Her skull exploded, and a tentacled thing skittered from the shattered remains into the underbrush. Arsenal cradled his amputated arm and activated his comms implant. "Captain -- get everybody clear, I'll try to keep him busy."

"ALL-ONE-FAITH-NEW-FLESH-ONE-MIND-ONE-HEART!"

Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye retreated into the Nightstalker as Arsenal stood up slowly. The monster stared at the ruined bodies of his captors.

Arsenal concentrated for a moment as the Nightstalker'e engines spun up. The monster seemed oblivious. In a moment, Arsenal would restore his body's previous thermodynamic state -- good as new.

At least, that was how it was supposed to work. He looked down at the back of his hands, and both of his thumbs pointed left.

The burning hand turned towards him.

The Nightstalker, now hovering, brought its forward batteries to bear on the monster.

Arsenal took off as a beam of fire struck the ground.

The batteries discharged, striking the monster in its chest.

It absorbed the blasts, turning black as night.

No obvious effect. Not even the collateral damage one would expect from a point-blank main battery blast inside a planet's atmosphere. The monster had seemingly eaten the blasts.

Arsenal set down behind the monster. His mind raced. How could he--

The monster arched its back, and began to scream. Its body collapsed in upon itself, and it disappeared in an instant.

Arsenal set down and tried to get his bearings. He heard a skittering noise near the space trike.

A tentacled lump of pink-gray flesh shuddered as another lump of brick-red muscle thrust what was once an aorta between its hemispheres. Arsenal watched the two tumor-masses moved against each other rhythmically.

The pace of the copulating tumors quickened, and a ventricle spasmed in the thing that was once a heart.

Arsenal realized what he was looking at.

Stepping back, he did the only thing that seemed to make sense.

Kill it with fire.

Fourth Wall Banger

James Brown examined the decision tree for the next "Honor Guard" story arc one more time. He did not like what he saw.

It was produced by the program SIMPLOT, an application used for a huge number of tasks -- managing risky investments, planning complex projects with potential contingencies, preparing threat analysis trees for distributed systems, or scripting interactive fiction with semi-autonomous actors. The program presented complex processes as a directed acyclic graph, and suggested new branches and nodes based on inferences from a domain-specific knowledge base using a simple, sub-sapient breadth-first autonomous cutting inference engine*.

His collaborator, Judas Montclair, had a bad habit of pruning interesting nodes from his decision trees. Not long ago, Judas had failed to account for the possibility that the Reyll heretic Demonslayer and her team of miscreants, M-Seven, would be able to mount an attack on the Corporate HQ, Sedgewick Station.

That mistake cost Judas two weeks of interrogation at the hands of Corporate intelligence.

He returned a shadow of his usual hedonistic self, a distracted nervous wreck who seemed to lose himself in terrible daydreams. James had done his best to cover for Judas, but James' work was itself time-consuming and exhausting -- he had to choose from and mix together streams from a plethora of recording devices into a visual narrative that would make sense to and hold the attention of a distracted, not terribly sober audience.

James had been doing his best to pick up the slack as Judas recovered. The decision trees Montclair was producing had become dangerously sparse, and James would sometimes go through them and add nodes to represent other possible chains of cause and effect, possibilities that Judas had precluded in the plans and projections that would influence the next several months of "Honor Guard" vids.

Some of this was a question of style. Judas liked letting the characters drive the story, and that often meant leaving them a great deal of autonomy. The result of these scripts were broad trees with few nodes and many branches. The fans seemed to like these free-wheeling plots, and giving the talent more freedom made "Honor Guard" feel relatively authentic.

The coming story was completely different. It was a graph like a map to a rail line, a straight path from plot point to plot point. Worse still, a number of the nodes were encrypted, and Jack couldn't even open them to suggest alternative story-lines. Poking through the meta-data for the nodes, Jack saw that they were asymmetrically encrypted with a public key used by the Grays, Corporate military intelligence.

The parts he could read worried him. Judas was making a dangerous series of assumptions, and the involvement with the Grays made Jack nervous. Jack had tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with his colleague, but Judas had always put him off.

Jack's communicator beeped. It was Judas. Jack was finally getting his chance to share his misgivings with Judas.

Judas' voice was slurred, and Jack could hear blaring pop music in the background. They arranged to meet at a nearby bar.

Jack took public transportation to the run down drinking establishment. Judas had obviously been drinking heavily, and sitting in a semi-private booth off to the side of the dark bar.

Jack sat down next to him with a tablet computer. "Judas, are you sure you're up to this?"

"Oh yes. Hell yes."

"I can't evaluate a lot of the nodes on this next script--"

"Not your concern, my boy. It's out of our hands."

"Judas, listen to me -- if you miss a possibility like last time, they'll take you in again. I need you in good shape if we're going to stay on schedule."

Judas did not listen to Jack. He thought about being taken in again, the woman doctor in her tight leather suit -- her huge quartet of breasts (surely implants) heaving as she applied the neural stimulator and Judas arched his back in pain -- and he had a sudden, adolescent flush of shame as he wondered if his colleague could see his erection.

"Judas? You've been spacing out like that a lot recently."

"Sorry." Judas pushed away from Jack and crossed his legs, resting his left foot on his right knee.

"I need you to look at this." Jack gestured towards the tablet with its stylus. "If I add a branch here, the graph won't terminate where we planned--"

Judas blinked his eyes, and slowly read the branch in tree. "Oh, no. She'll never do that. Being a super-heroine is much too important to her. She'd never risk it."

"Are you sure? If they talk, there's a non-zero probability that they'll never reach the nodes down here." Jack gestured at the encrypted nodes. "If they use a genetic screening to identify--"

"Don't be silly, Jack."

"Judas, I know what her mother was. If she goes after her father, the whole project is in danger--"

"Please, Jack. She likes being in charge too much. She'd never risk it."

Jack shook his head in exasperation. He wasn't getting through to Judas, and it frustrated him. "This script is a lot more linear than what I'm used to from you. What's going to happen?"

Judas smiled. "We're going to win, Jack. It's that simple."

Jack was annoyed enough that he left Judas behind to the throbbing music and went home.

Jack wished that he had felt like drinking with his colleague. He was going to have trouble getting to sleep tonight.

* Imagine a "mind mapping" package melded with a slightly cleverer version of Prolog. SIMPLOT is about as ubiquitous in the Corporation as Microsoft Excel in a modern computerized office on Earth.

Elsewhere

The mining town was in ruins. Fires burned on both sides of the main drag of the prefabricated shopping mall perched in a crater of a larger than average asteroid. Above them, the net-like satellite in synchronous orbit that confined the town's artificial gravity field glinted in the faint sun-light.

A massive figure grinned and cracked his knuckles as he bore down on Thresher. The cyborg stood his ground.

With a well-practiced movement, Thresher fired a tether at Leviathan.

On board the Nightstalker, the Eye was startled by a premonition. "Jolt? I'm gonna throttle up the engines. Now!"

"Everybody to stations! Here we go!" Jolt gripped the arms of the command chair.

Leviathan's arms were bound to his sides. He grabbed the trailing end of the tether daintily, looked at it, and began to laugh. Thresher fired the other end of the tether at a cable lying on the ground behind him.

Leviathan advanced -- and the cable suddenly pulled taut as the Nightstalker streaked overhead. His vast bulk was jerked off the surface of the asteroid into the vacuum of space.

Thresher waved as Leviathan disappeared in the black distance. He triggered his comm implants. "Any chance you can take me with you? I wanna see this."

A fraction of a second later, the cyborg hero dematerialized. Townspeople crawled from the rubble and set to work putting out the fires consuming precious oxygen.

The Nightstalker keel-hauled Leviathan far away from the mining colony.

Thresher entered the bridge, and say Leviathan's scowling face on the main monitors. "Reporting for duty, Captain."

"Take your station, Thresher." Jolt leaned back into the command chair. "We're about to release the tow line and throw him into the sun."

Victor looked up from the sensor console. "Captain? Asteroid 423 has just left its orbit. It's approaching our position at relativistic speed-"

Jolt smiled. "I'm picking up Arsenal's implants on the comms board. Looks like he remembered them this time."

The Eye looked up from her navigation console. "You're kidding me! Leviathan punched his head clean off!"

Jolt looked tense. "Come on guys. Enough distractions -- let's get turned around and send Lynnie on a vector into the sun."

The Eye laid in the new course, and the Nightstalker swung around on a course approaching the sun. On the big screen, Leviathan grimaced, and spat out two silent words into the vacuum of space.

Jolt thought for a moment. "What did he say? 'SCREW PHYSICS?'"

The Eye remarked, "I don't think that was 'screw'..."

Lights flickered as Leviathan relaxed the screen that protected normal space from his enormous gravitational field. The bridge of the star-ship shook.

Victor looked up from the engineering console. "Ma'am... hyperdrive is down. We're stuck on a course into the sun."

Jolt gritted her teeth. "Cut the damned tether. Try to get us some distance--"

"But that won't help us--" Victor stopped talking as Asteroid 423 loomed into the field of view. "Whoa."

The kilometer-wide rock slammed into Leviathan. The Nightstalker shuddered as his gravitational field fluctuated.

"Get that on screen!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Victor's fingers raced over his engineering console. "I think I have it--"

Leviathan lay face down in an impact crater on the surface of the asteroid. He picked himself up and dusted himself off.

A streak appeared over the truncated horizon, and set down just outside the crater. Two beams struck Leviathan in the chest, and the massive Fe Arran reeled as the two bolts lit up finger-tip sized patches on his invulnerable chest.

Arsenal's voice came in on the comms. "What's my output?"

Victor examined the sensor readouts. "You're at 2 megatons yield apiece. That won't--"

"Get ready for an emergency jump. I'm gonna tighten the focus and cross beams."

Victor's jaw dropped. He recovered in less than a second. "On it."

Leviathan bore down on Arsenal's position as the beams narrowed and slowly approached each other.

"What's he--"

"No time."

The beams touched. The energy flux in at the intersection point exceeded the Planck energy by several orders of magnitude, and space and time began to violently expand from the impact point.

As the Nightstalker dematerialized, a violent gravity wave disintegrated Asteroid 423.

The star-ship rematerialized not far from where it tried to escape the destruction.

"What just happened--"

"Just a minute, Ma'am."

"Did he just--"

"I have his signal."

"What!?"

Arsenal appeared on the screen, towing Leviathan's unconscious form from the turmoil of boulders converging on the former center of mass of Asteroid 423.

"He exceeded the maximum energy flux for a unit of space. Space-time exploded in Leviathan's face."

"Open the cargo bay doors." Jolt rubbed her forehead as she watched Arsenal drag the unconscious Leviathan towards the Nightstalker.

A moment later, Honor Guard gathered to watch as Arsenal dragged Leviathan into the hold.

"You- you did it. You knocked him out."

"Ma'am." Arsenal addressed Jolt. "I need to go back to the colony."

Jolt nodded. "I understand."

A few moments later, Arsenal touched down just outside the perimeter of a field hospital hastily erected to deal with the casualties of Leviathan's mindless rampage. He pushed through doctors and nurses, and headed towards a tent that had been turned into a field hospital.

Soon he found the one he was looking for.

"Come with me. You're not safe here."

Jinx looked up at him, holding a bundle of sterilizing gauze in her arms. "Give me a minute. These people need my help."

He smiled and nodded. "All right. What can I do?"

Jack In The Box

The planet was the fourth rock from a large orange sun. The blue seas surrounding the single continent spawned feathery white clouds that rushed over the yellow, brown, and purple terrain of the solitary land mass.

In the middle of the continent, on its highland plains, a ragged green dot marked the site of the ancient alien colony. There, transplanted flora from another world displaced the native, purple colored plant life.

Beneath the vast grassy knoll, gravimetric sensors detected a distinctive pattern of mass anomalies indicating a vast, spiderweb like structure of tunnels and chambers beneath the surface. Jack Graves looked thoughtfully at the display of the structure.

"Yes, that's just right."

"What is it?" Jinx asked.

Jack examined the floating holographic map closely, and began to explain what he saw.

"The best theory I've heard claims it was a transit system. The precursor to the black oil is white mist, which can form space-like paths through higher dimensions. The exotics would link the chambers here with destinations scattered all across the galaxy using bridges made of artificial reality. The black oil was a waste product, produced by the mist's reaction to untrained minds and the physical world. It drained into the underground reservoirs on the lower levels."

"So people would walk in to the chambers, enter something like a hyperspace shunt, and come out on another planet... fantastic." Jinx meant it, too. It was intergalactic space travel without the need to carry fuel or food or air, without star-ships forcing their way through the vastness of space.

"That's the theory. So, shall we get started?"

Jinx sat down at the command console and began the process of deploying and landing modules on the surface, near the center of the green spot on the planet. She sent down landing modules with with laboratories, drilling equipment, a field hospital, water storage, and a power plant around a grassy knoll near the entrance to the catacombs.

The process took a few hours. Jinx supervised the automated spacecraft and watched Jack Graves pack piles of hand-written notes, clothing, and a carefully sorted collection of ancient statues into travel containers inside his habitation module. He saluted the surveillance camera curtly and sat down in a comfortable chair.

Jinx instructed the computers in Jack's hab to set him down gently in the field of alien grass just outside the impromptu city she had just built. She saw the old man grin as the thrusters jerked his module away from the Apocalypse.

She reviewed the sensor feeds from the last cycle again. There was a signal there, a tiny speck of incredible mass that had been following them since they left the home cluster. It was too small to be a starship, and too massive to be natural.

She had some ideas who it might be, and had taken precautions. In a corner of each container, she hid supplies -- a miniature jump drive here, a thruster pack there, a solid-state fission reactor over there. It was her "Plan B", in case things got as ugly as she feared. She had a way off this far-away rock.

With some reluctance, she left the bridge and entered her own habitation module. Soon she was on her way to the middle of the great green spot of vegetation on the surface of tthe planet.

The next weeks were busy. The first step was to carefully coat the interiour surface of the drilling pipes they would use to harvest black oil from the underground chambers. Since black oil wasn't matter in any normal sense of the word, but rather solidified thought, the pipes had to be coated with a paint containing a miniscule amout of the oil, which would prevent the psychoactive "liquid" from escaping the apparatus. Parallel to this, Jack prepared his reaction vessel, a sphere with an interior coated with the same paint, which would serve as an artificial world for the reconstituted god-forms.

The next step was to prepare the first bore-holes and connect the coated pipes to the reaction vessel. Shortly after work began, a sinkhole appeared in the ground. Jinx sent Jack back to his habitation module and carefully examined the deep hole in the ground. The ceiling of an underground hall had collapsed, distrubed by the vibrations on the surface.

The underground chamber had been turned into an ossurary. In one corner Jinx saw a pile of vaguely spherical objects. She approached the pile carefully, and determined that they were colonist skulls -- flat-faced and round-headed. A tiny spur between the eyes suggested a pointed nose.

No black oil had leaked to the surface. As she went topside to give the all clear, she saw Jack's reaction vessel glint in the setting sun. The round vessel and the rectangular pump in front of the reaction chamber reminded her of the colonists' skulls.

Work continued. The sinkhole was surrounded with a fence of luminous tape, and the ground was soon covered with a maze of pipe leading to the three drilling stations. The derricks cast long shadows over the grassy knoll.

After several hours of work, Jinx and Jack decided that the network of pipes would be able to carry black oil to the reactor. They retreated to a sealed control center and sent the commands to activate the drilling stations.

The first borehole failed. Alams sounded as the black oil sublimated into mist as the drill approached the storage chamber. The second and third boreholes, however, drew the liquified reality from its reservoir and fed it to the pumps and pipes that would take it to the reactor.

Jinx and Jack remained inside the sealed control room until the last traces of the leak had dissipated. Both had gained a healthy respect for the dangerous properties of the black oil since the mission began, and neither wanted to risk a second exposure to the psychically toxic substance.

Jack arranged his catalog of long-forgotten idols and recordings of epic poetry while they waited. Jinx considered their situation, and decided to tell him what she had learned.

"Jack?"

"Yes, Jinx?"

"We're being watched."

"I know."

"Does the name Leviathan mean anything to you?"

"Leviathan? Lynnie Chelm? That's an odd choice for an agent..." Jack seemed worried.

"That's what I thought. You remember my vision, right?"

"Yes. The Corporation decided to turn the god-forms into weapons and send them against the Reyll. What's that have to do with anything?"

"Lynnie has always had contacts with the Grays. He's been working for the military intelligence since he started working as a super-villain. I don't want what I saw to become an accurate prediction of the future-"

Jack interrupted Jinx. "I'm sorry, but this experiment is too important to sabotage. The Corporation needs to discover what direction our spirituality would have developed without Reyll influence. Without this information, we won't know how to rebuild our culture once the Theocracy has been defeated. We won't have a plan for the future."

Jinx considered for a moment. "I understand. I just want you to know something - if Lynnie comes down here and tries to hijack your work, I won't be able to stop him. He's a walking black hole."

Jack looked at Jinx. "I see." He seemed disappointed, and Jinx wondered if Jack believed that she was unwilling to fight Leviathan.

They waited in silence until the all clear alarm sounded.

The work continued as the orange sun rose. Jack stayed inside the control room, relaying images of statues and artworks and recordings of poetry and epic stories to the receiving area of the reaction chamber. As Jinx teleported around the work area, checking the integrity of the pumps and seals, she felt the receiving area filling with information.

After exposure to Jack's data, the receiving chamber formed a negative image of the gods, monsters and heroes of the distant past. The next step was to expose this negative image to a large quantity of black oil, forming a positive echo of Fe Arran mythology inside the sealed reaction vessel.

Jinx was a sensitive mystic, and could feel the presences inside the chamber. As the sun set, she could sense the songs of the world she and Jack had created, and the whole work area was illuminated with a strange sort of ghostly light. Jack was exhausted and exalted by the work, and Jinx accompanied him through the radiant, pulsing darkness to his habitation module for a well-deserved nights' sleep. Jack turned and smiled at her as he stepped into the threshold of his hab.

"It's alive, Ms. Bubastis."

"I know, Jack. It's beautiful."

She made her way to her own habitation module, listening to the songs of their reconstituted world. The music had taken on a brassy edge; she had to struggle to not remain and listen to the driving strains of the reactor. As she undressed and sat down on her bed to rest, she felt a thrill as the war-drums began to pound.

Sleep came reluctantly. She awoke at sun-rise.

Their new world was no longer singing. There was only a dull psychic pounding coming from the reaction vessel. Jinx dressed hurriedly and rushed to wake Jack. They proceeded to the control room. He looked his age, and was visibly disappointed by the results of his experiment. They sat down at the control panels in silence, and Jack broke the anguished silence.

"What happened?"

"I'm not sure, Jack. Can we see inside the chamber?"

"Do you really want to look?"

"No." Jinx felt the thumping rhythm from the chamber in the back of her mind. "But we need to see what happened."

"Yes." Jack activated the psychogram that had recorded the life inside the chamber. They saw the world inside the chamber for the first time - a gray plain of rotten flesh. Structures like rib cages dotted the surface, and rivers of partially clotted blood flowed into a scab-sea filled with offal and corruption.

Jack's almost hairless ears looked a little green as he regarded the scene with horror. "What happened?"

Jinx took the controls, and sent the point of view searching for the source of the relentless thumping she heard in her head. From a mountain of tumor-like meat, a tower shaped like a spinal column rose into the heavens. At the top of the headless spine, a tiny figure pounded at the vaults of heaven - the outside of the reaction vessel. Jack recovered a little as he examined the figure pounding its tiny fists against the walls of its prison.

"Nyqll?"

"What? Didn't I-"

"Yes. Yes, you saw him in your vision. He was a minor monstrosity from the pre-Reyll mythology of the B'Tonghwa-"

"The Hunters? He's a figure from Hunter mythology?"

"Yes. An evil king, who kept prey imprisoned inside his city. The hero Mathlld followed the rivers of blood from his fortress and called upon the spirit of Darneth to grant him the wisdom to stop Nyqll in his evil ways. Nyqll was a representation of the very first attempts at animal husbandry by our species. In ancient times, the hero led an army to destroy Nyqll's fortress and free his subjects and his prey into the welcoming forest, beyond the reach of his burning hand. Slash and burn agriculture, batteries of meat animals, slavery, fear and hate..."

Jack stopped talking. His lower lip trembled as the horror of what had happened became clearer to him. "...the bad guys won. We made a world where evil won."

Jinx watched the tiny, deformed figure pound against the thin coating isolating the inside of the reaction chamber from the outside world. The thing stopped, and turned to face the point of view displayed on the view-screen. Thinking quickly, Jinx pounded the button to cut the feed before she had to look into the depraved creature's eyes. She turned to face Jack.

"We can flush this, right? We can start over?"

"I... of course-"

Jack was interrupted by a sudden sharp seismic shock. Jinx spoke. "Leviathan. Lynnie just make planetfall."

Jack looked at her, eyes filled with fear. "You have to stop him. It wasn't meant to turn out like this."

Jinx fetched a large container from the corner of the room, and pulled out an ion driver. She slotted a power cell into the unwieldy gun. "I'll do what I can, Jack. I told you I can't stop him." She looked around for a moment for the gun's gas bottle. "You have any extra black oil lying around? This gun's not gonna do much to him, but the oil might."

Jack didn't hesitate, and pulled a small sealed flask from beneath his desk. "Can't you use you mental powers against him?"

Jinx carefully dispensed a small amount of the substance into the chamber of the ion driver. "Not really. He has gravity-based senses and his mind has collapsed into a monad hidden behind an event horizon. If we're lucky, some of the black oil will get through to his naked singularity, and we'll be able to get the hell out of here."

The ground began to shake. "Get some cover, Jack. He's gonna be on top of us in a minute."

Jinx teleported outside and turned to face the column of smoke that rose from an impact crater on the horizon. A green and brown cloud of dirt and shredded vegetation was barreling towards the grassy knoll.

Her mind began the Marksman's Mantra as pulled a lead on the dark figure rushing towards the site. She pressed the trigger, and a dirty bruise-colored fireball of plasma struck Leviathan in the chest.

His massive form stopped for a second. Jinx began to teleport to Jack, but felt a sudden, wrenching shock.

She rematerialized in front of Leviathan. He grinned broadly. "That was trippy."

Her world turned incandescent white an instant later as Leviathan struck her, sending her skipping along the ground. She skidded to a stop and lay in a crumpled, bloody heap, unable to move her legs. Leviathan closed in on the control room.

"Hello, Doctor Graves. Don't bother hiding. I need something from you."

She heard sheet metal tear like paper. "Oh! Bad idea, there, little buddy. Lemme help ya with that." Bones snapped, and Jack Graves screamed. "Hey, stop yelling! We're gonna have a little drink of that moonshine you two were brewing. Right this way, man." Jack moaned as Lynnie dragged him to the reaction vessel.

"OK, lemme get my shot glass."

Jinx felt a wave of terror as the reaction vessel opened. Jack tried to reason with Leviathan. "Don't do this. The experiment failed. We-"

"Naah. The experiment worked just fine, little guy. Here, bottoms up!"

Jinx's body was healing, but her legs were still numb and immobile. She heard a moment of struggle and felt a terrible panicked fear. Jack screamed and gurgled, fell to the ground and began to thrash.

There was a growling noise, a sub-bass throb, as a series of wet pops replaced Jack's struggling.

"Huh. That was some messed up-- WHOA! Down boy!"

A noise like fire. Lynnie screamed in pain. "OW! Get in the box! Get in the--"

There was an electric hum and a sucking noise. Jinx felt Lynnie's footfalls as he approached her position. She was still paralyzed.

Lynnie held a hammerspace box in one hand. Jinx could feel the malignant presence of Nyqll imprisoned inside the container. Lynnie looked down at Jinx.

"Hey, listen up. I could have pasted you back there, but I just gave ya a love tap. You'll get better. Plan for me is a mind-wipe and a nice cathartic rampage. You just lie there and heal, OK? See ya back in the cluster."

"...Lynnie? Destroy the box, Lynnie. You can't let that thing out..."

"Not my job. Be seeing ya!"

With a single leap, Lynnie propelled himself into orbit. The ground liquefied and collapsed, and Jinx was swallowed up, taken down into the ground where the dead things go.

Flight of the Apocalypse

The huge scout ship coalesced into empty space some hundred light-years outside the cluster whence it came. Relative to an observer in this section of barren vacuum, the flash of light from its de-materialization would arrive three weeks shy of one hundred years later.

The reactionless thrusters lit up, radiating waste heat into space, as the elongated star-ship began a series of adjustments from its departure vector, moving away from a heavily guarded intelligence outpost, to its arrival vector, which would insert the bulky vessel into orbit around a still distant terrestrial planet.

Jinx sat at the bridge and monitored the programmed series of thruster burns. Once in a while, she would glance at the displays for the sensor arrays. She hoped someone was watching, because her navigational choices were carefully chosen to reassure a worried observer.

Her passenger, Magus Jack Graves, had picked a call-sign for the ship's transponder: "The Apocalypse". That was the ship's name, encoded in a packet of identification data periodically sent to anyone in this frame of reference, or anyone observing through an interrociter. The packet did not just contain this name, but also the purpose of the voyage -- a terse bit-field, rarely used, signifying "scientific exploration" -- and its sponsoring organization -- in this case, the Entertainment Division of the all-encompassing Corporation.

She relished the oddness of this juxtaposition. Entertainment Division was all about selling known quantities at a low enough price to excuse the crappiness of much of its product. Scientific research was about finding the border between the known and the unknown. Then there were the uniforms.

The Corporate intelligence services had two official uniform colors -- gray and black. There was a well-established convention regarding the use of the two colors: mostly black uniforms represented organizations that regulated criminal activity, the black market, and counter-insurgency operations, while gray uniforms represented orgs that dealt with providing information for military strategy and diplomatic operations. Mixed colors were liaison officers, responsible for controlling the flow of information between the two factions, called the Grays and the Blacks.

The uniform they provided her was gray. The uniforms of the staff that helped prepare the Apocalypse were gray. Only a few officers observing the proceedings had black jackets. Presumably, they were the ones pressured into taking responsibility for the mission, under the aegis of Entertainment Division.

Jinx looked at the sensors again. She was certain they were being observed, possibly from quite close by. If only--

Her thoughts were interrupted by an alarm. She turned to the internal communications console, and saw Jack's panicked face. He screamed "Please, help me!".

"Jack, I'm here. What happened?" Jinx tried to look as relaxed and professional as she could, and it seemed to help Jack regain his composure.

"Some -- material -- I've been working with has escaped its containment field. Were you briefed about the black oil? Do you know anything about it?"

"No." Since all Jinx knew of "black oil" were half-truths, this was only half a lie. "We were carrying black oil?"

"In the laboratories. Fully compartmentalized. If I cannot escape under my own power, I want you to jettison Lab 15 and return to Corporate space. Do you understand?"

Something twisted in her gut. A part of her mind and heart had changed recently, and she did not want to change back.

"Don't be stupid, old man. I'll save you."

"You don't need to do this."

"And you wouldn't ask for help unless you needed it. Find somewhere safe, I'm on my way."

"Be careful."

Jinx took a moment to look at the ship's internal security console. The computer was set up to automatically record the subjective impressions of anyone entering Lab 15 with a psychogram. Reviewing the data stream for Magus Jack Graves, she discovered that he had a brief hallucination a few minutes ago, but was currently stable, if terrified.

She made telepathic contact with Graves. His mind was strong, and she was able to locate him in a corner of the laboratory. She picked a spot in front of him and teleported to his location.

"Hold still, Magus. I'll get us--"

"Behind you."

Jinx turned her head and saw thin black tendrils coalesce from the corners of the room. She took a step back and raised her arms, and the murky ectoplasm engulfed her.

Everything went white. She heard only her heartbeat. She--

She was somewhere else, levitating beside a monstrous armored creature as it climbed down a deep shaft. The Reyll had taken the God-forms and pithed them, creating robot-like slaves controlled by a pilot injected into the wound site. She had made the God-form whole again, whole enough to fight beside her as she descended into the core of the underground base.

(What the hell where am I why does this make sense what's going on my mind)

They descended into the final chamber, where the God-forms were born. Dark oil writhed over the lunar landscape of the underground cavern. One by one, the Corporation had turned their heroes into God-forms and sent them to destroy this underground womb. All had failed, even the monstrous thing Arsenal became. Jinx was the final gambit. She had infiltrated the base, made contact with the pilots and turned them against the operation. Now her target loomed before her.

(oh man I'm tripping balls this black oil is a hallucinogen this is so real it's inside my head)

Loud footsteps echoed through the underground cavern. Jinx looked behind her, and saw a second God-form charging towards her. With a gesture, she sent her pet cyborg deity to intercept the intruder.

She wondered if Nomi was inside. Poor, lost, sad little Nomi. Her God-form grappled with Jinx's.

(it's taking stuff from my head and completing it continuing closure keep it out don't get confused)

"What are you doing? Why!?" Nomi's voice echoed through the cavern.

"What I have to do. What I was sent to do. I'm going to free the captive God."

"How could you!? I-- trusted you!" The pain in Nomi's voice cut Jinx to the core. Nomi's God-form twisted her enemy's head around, and began to twist it. Jinx's God-form went limp as a series of soft pops came from its neck.

"How could you betray us? How could you betray me? I thought you--" Nomi's voice trailed off.

"I do, Nomi. But only one of our civilizations can survive--"

(oh hell she ATE Peter I saw her saw her eat his heart poor Peter keep it out maintain it's just part of the story ride it out)

Jinx approached the bound God-form, and she looked into its face. It wasn't the one she was expecting to see.

"What? Who -- it's not Darneth? It's... Nyqll?"

She began to laugh. She did not know the proper words of power to free the deity. Nomi's God-form closed in on her, and its armored fist snatched her from the air.

"Nomi -- you did it. Your people did it. Your kind will triumph. I'm so sorry."

"Jnnqae -- WHY? WHY DID YOU DO THIS?" Nomi was histrionic. Jinx felt the world fall away from her.

"Kill me, Nomi. Do it. It's the only freedom I'll ever know." Jinx felt the armored fist of the God-form close in on her, crushing her--

(it's over it's over Jinx this is Jack you're almost out of there follow me follow me it's Jack come on, come on)

Everything went white again, but then Jinx looked away from the light fixture and blinked her eyes. She drew a deep breath as she felt the crushing grip disappear.

"Jinx? Are you OK?"

"Jack? Is that you?"

"Can you teleport us to the bridge? It's important. There's more residue in this compartment--"

"Yeah, give me a second." Jinx touched the old man's shoulder and remembered the bridge. "Here we go."

They rematerialized in the bridge. Jack rushed to the console and jettisoned Lab 15. "Good riddance. I'll get a robot to do the assembly next time."

Jinx still felt a little disoriented. She checked her stream on the psychogram. "It got everything."

Jack rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "That's good. Listen, I want to give you the chance to vet the stream before we forward it to my handlers. If there's anything in there you don't want them to see."

Jinx thought for a moment. "That's decent of you, Jack. I'll think about it." She had more pressing concerns. "What did that stuff do to me? What was that?"

"The black oil. It's hard to explain. It's like liquid reality -- it took what it could find in your head and filled in the gaps, just like the real world would."

Jinx looked at Jack. "What the hell are we doing?"

The old man smiled. "Meddling with things no one was meant to know. Get some sleep, Jinx."