The Blue Hand

The voyage began successfully. A run of good luck seemed to sustain us as soon as we pulled out of the harbour. There were fair winds, few storms, and the beautiful sun shone down on us as we sailed down the coast of the continent.

Our luck held for the entire crossing, even on the approach to the giant ice sheets, bergs towered above the mast like white skyscrapers. Even as we climbed down rope ladders into the light, manoeuvrable skiffs, everything seemed to be going our way.

A pod of dolphins, a hundred strong, gambolled and played ahead of us, leaping out of the dark water like our very own landing party. Little did we know they led us to our doom. We cautiously approached the ice face, two men per skiff. 

Swinson, standing alongside me, raised a crossbow and fired a bolt high into the air trailing a long, strong rope, followed by a dozen more bolts from the skiffs around us. Their iron heads stuck fast in the ice a hundred feet up the wall and, one by one, we began to climb.

One man, Swinson, was left to coral and tow the boats back to the Valantis. He stood alone in the skiff on the black sheet of water. High on the ice face, we found a shelf of sorts, three or four feet wide and thirty feet long. We waited there, panting with our hands on our knees from the effort.

The air was cold and our breath fogged out in great clouds as if we were smoking cigars around the tables at the Vagabond Club back in London. I'd just collected my thoughts and was reloading a crossbow when I happened to glance down at the line of skiffs bobbing along on the black sea.

And then something so astonishing happened that I could hardly believe my eyes. As Swinson bent forward in the skiff, preparing to pull once more upon the oars, the sea around him, which had once been so calm, all of a sudden began boiling and bubbling as though the very fires of hell licked underneath. Whitecaps pinched a few feet in the air, creating deep troughs in between.

It looked like someone was shaking a bowl full of water. Swinson was being tossed around like a toy sailor in a boat. No other skiff was endangered, however, as the roiling mass seemed to concentrate solely underneath the unfortunate man and his boat.

Then, if you can believe it, something appeared in the water. A blue hand seemed to appear in the waves. The hand was so large that the skiff fit easily upon its palm. The fingers were thirty feet long, and they curled in slightly making a cage, and, as we gasped in amazement and horror, a wrist and forearm seemed to grow out of the sea like a monstrous blue tree sprouting from the earth.

We could see poor Swinson frantically waving his arms and calling for us to help him. But what could we do? One of the lads fired off a bolt but it sailed clean through the wrist with no discernible effect. The forearm continued to grow and rise. The gigantic hand towered above us, eclipsing the sun. We were cast into shadow and I looked down and saw a shoulder, neck, jaw and ear appear from the surface of the sea.

'Sir,' cried one of my luckless mates, and I, following his horror-struck gaze, looked skywards to watch the great hand clench into a fist, squeezing so the dark blue knuckles turned white and thick veins popped out on the back of the hand. 

I thought I heard a yelp like a dog caught in a trap, then a crunch of timbers, and then, with a huge sploonch that sent the tidal wave rushing towards us, the mighty first came down with a smack.

I had a second's glimpse of a huge dripping monster climbing out of the ocean before the wave hit me. It smashed the air from my lungs, the thoughts from my mind as tons and tons of icy water dragged me off that perilous edge.

720 OD

Wanna know what a screen overdose looks like? Red, itchy eyes, black circles. Dry papery skin. Bowed back and shoulders. Numbfucked skull with a mishmash brain. Cynicism dripping off you in big dollops.

Screen worshippers. Believe in the screen. It'll fulfill your wildest dreams. Do whatever it says. Don't ever question. It's smarter than either of us and the whole of humanity combined.

So, instead, just go with it. Let it all fly downwards. Don't want it? Sure we do. Slap it on. More! More! More! I'm a pig in shit. I'm a daffodil covered in dung. I'm a big red cloud that's floating in space, always and forever alone.

What else is it like to stare at a screen for eighty hours straight? My mouth was dry, my lips cracked. I couldn't find a comfy spot on the chair. Everything was out of focus. Words came out slowly and painfully and I made lots of mistakes. I couldn't think very fast on my feet. Every blink was brutal; it felt like my fuckin eyelids had sandpaper on the inside. I wanted to sweep all the shit off my desk and flip the desk over. 

This is bullshit I wanted to howl at the phosphorescent moon. We're wasting our lives here. Generations are dying, crucified by the screen, slowly degrading in office chairs and beanbags and couches. Our life is too precious to squander. Our body is too beautiful to toss on the trash heap. Yes, you are beautiful, your body and brain. Don't sacrifice yourself to an electric blue idol. You're far too valuable, too precious for that.

RocketMan

Smoking weed not only helped with Emma's palliative care - the pain, anxiety, lack of appetite and insomnia, but it also helped reduce the frequency and duration of her seizures. She took CBD sublingually and hits from vape pens strewn around her messy dorm room.

The weed also helped her work. Stoned, high, medicated or baked, whatever-the-fuck you wanted to call it, she worked best after adding THC to her system. After the first few puffs, the chatter in her head died away and she could see far into the future.

She bought her weed from Fazal. It was still illegal in her country. She couldn't understand why the politicians didn't want to cash in on that billion-pound industry, but it was easy enough to get hold of. She set up a crypto transfer to his wallet and he delivered straight to her dorm room every Tuesday afternoon. She'd been buying off him for a year and a half, ever since her fist week at uni. 

One particular Tuesday, Fazal arrived all out of breath. He looked frightened as fuck. His clothes, usually crisp, clean and perfect, were all out of sorts. His shirt was untucked and a button was missing. He kept glancing at the door whenever there was a sound in the hall.

He brought out the weed, moving jerkily like a broken robot, and reached into the bag for a bud. He twitched so hard that crumbly buds spewed out through the air and dropped like rain into the carpet.

'Fazal!' said Emma. She touched his shoulder and he looked at her, wide-eyed. He bit his lip. He was shivering.

'What is up with you, dude?' she said, shaking him by the shoulder.

He mumbled at her through his bit lip.

It took twenty minutes of gentle prodding to get the story out of him. She rolled them both a joint, picking the green out of the carpet. Fazal took it from her, took a big hit and leaned back, blowing a sharp stream of smoke at the ceiling. He took another drag. The joint tip glowed like a fat cherry.

'I fucked up, Em.'

She saw a tear slide down his cheek. She assumed he'd lost money. Fazal was always gambling; be it the casino or the latest Reddit bubble, he was always one trade away from the big one.

Over time he did make money, but moment to moment, life was a roller coaster for Fazal Sayed. One minute he was up, enjoying the dizzying heights of cocaine and Airbnbs full of fake friends. Then he was down, wrecked in the hangover aftermath, penniless and full of self-loathing and pity.

So when he leaned forward, passed her the joint and said, 'Em, I killed a guy,' at first, she didn't believe him.

*

As Fazal told his tale, his voice cracked and he sniffed and began to cry. He twisted his hands in his lap. The joint lay forgotten, smoldering on the edge of the coffee table and Emma watched the wood darkening under the cherry. She took the joint and docked it.

She tried to keep up with his fragmentary outbursts. She built up a picture piece by piece. He met a guy at El Rio. They went back to Fazal's. They began fooling around. The guy said he was going to take a shower. Fazal followed him and found him posting pictures of them kissing.

Emma picked up the joint and relit it. She imagined her friend, all six foot six of him, losing his shit in his luxury bathroom. Sitting there, on her threadbare couch, Fazal put his hands over his eyes and began to cry. He made weird noises and blew bubbles out of his nose. She saw there was blood on his hands, more on the cuffs of his shirt.

*

Emma had never gotten rid of a body before, but it turned out to be disturbingly easy. Expensive, sure, but easy. She found the worst-reviewed mortician in town then paid him ten grand for the paperwork and procedure. 

A cop the coroner knew took another ten grand for a fake suicide report, while a family doctor took another ten and a local judge took twenty. It all took less than twenty-four hours and Emma was left with the uneasy feeling that it was all some kind of regular service.

*

Fazal and Emma collapsed on the couch and she sparked up a fatty. They were both now thousands of pounds in debt and had been introduced to the nasty underside of a free market economy, but a seed of friendship had been planted in that dark netherworld, somewhere between lifting the dead guy out of Fazal's shower and cleaning his blood from the tiles. And that seed blossomed into a beautiful business partneship the likes of which the world had never seen.

*

Starting from Emma's dorm room they disrupted every industry in town. First, it was social media then security, banking and cloud computing. Emma's code was so tight and Fazal's sales pitches so audacious that soon their client list included major corporations, national governments, and security agencies worldwide.

With time, they were able to expand and control a wider portfolio. One of their tentacles began researching and developing automated vehicles, while another drilled into artificial neural networks and machine learning software, while yet another, the Emergency Climate Response Unit, or M-Crew, began fertilizing the ocean with iron to combat the increasing levels of atmospheric carbon.

With newfound capital and processing power, Emma dove into experimenting with nanochip technology. She was trying to come up with a device she could implant in her brain to help eradicate her seizures once and for all. 

Fazal loved his job promoting the company. And after a few years, he was able to fulil his lifelong ambition of blasting rockets into space. Tin Can Rockets was his trillion-dollar pet project. Ever since he was a kid, he wanted to send a rocket into outter space and that's exactly what happened at 05:45 on Tuesday the 28^th of July when he became the first person in history to privately launch a rocket into orbit from a launchpad on an island in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

Granted, Major Tom was only a basic three-stager delivering a payload of scientists, researchers and private space tourists to the Second International Space Station, but to Fazal, it marked the beginning of the best part of his life. Watching the exhaust cloud erupt at the base of Major Tom, tears sprang into his eyes. He looked like a dad whose kid had just scored the game-winning goal.

From that very first successful launch, it was all systems go. One after the other the rockets improved and Fazal whipped the media into a frenzy by promising to have operational moon stations by the end of the decade and a Mars base by 2045.

'Before the middle of this century, we will put women, children and men on Mars,' he said to the podcaster Pearl Hunter and her 1.2 billion listeners. 'When I look into the future, I'm optimistic.

'I see humans populating the universe, hopping from planet to planet, system to system, pollenating the universe like benevolent bees.' Fazal laughed. 'The alternative is to die out having never left this planet and that just isn't exciting.'

*

Emma got high in her atrium office. It was an old Victorian palm house she'd had installed on top of a skyscraper on the banks of the River Thames in London. Inside, it looked like a set from Jurassic Park with oversized palms, flaming lobster claws and Cobra lilies. Ivy dripped off everything and it was hot, humid and steamy.

Round about stood weed plants at various stages of development. Some had green leaves while others looked more purple and orange. One was so covered in chrystals it looked like white cotton candy on a stick.

Here and there were also Emma's work stations – a meditation cushion here, a yoga mat there, a hammock stretched between two palm trees. An ice tub and a cedar sauna stood by the edge of a plunge pool at the base of beautiful waterfalls.

A few parakeets flew over and landed on a low-hanging bough that drooped over the pool. They called back and forth, chattering to each other over the hubbub of the water then flew off with a few wing beats and disappeared into the dense canopy.

The wooden door to the sauna opened outwards and Emma stepped out, her body glistening and steaming. Without a pause, she climbed up the steps of the ice bath and lowered herself into it, exhaling until her shoulders, neck and head disappeared under the resettling ice.

Minutes passed. The parakeets returned. One flapped down then two then the whole gang joined them, preening themselves and chatting.

*

Underwater, the bird calls were muffled to practically nothing. Emma wasn't listening anyway. She was inside the maze of her mind, chasing an idea so quick, so elusive and yet she was sure so valuable that she needed to have it, had needed it ever since it popped into her mind that one winter's day long ago.

This was where she came to think. Her mind raced along nicely riding the THC wave with a few thousand micrograms of CBD to take off the edge. She'd taken some 80% dark chocolate along with a bulletproof coffee ten minutes before getting in the sauna and the caffeine was rushing along nicely.

The silence, the slight pressure, the millions of prickles from the icy water all over her skin, coupled with the drugs in her blood, provided her with the rocket fuel she needed to push through the next series of problems.

She was working on a tricky one to do with lowering the impedance while simultaneously increasing the charge-carrying capacity of the nanochip's interface. The poly-ethylenedioxythiopene doped with polystyrene sulfonate was showing promising signs, but Emma wasn't sure about its long-term biocompatibility.

She was halfway to the solution by the time she hit five minutes. She was aiming for seven. That would make it three days in a row.

Six minutes and thirty-six seconds in and she was about to grasp the tail of something real when she was hit by a massive tonic-clonic seizure. She could feel it coming on. It was like she was fading into it. She tried to stand up, to pull herself out of the spiral but she knew there was nothing she could do.

*

Fazal was pissed. The voice in his head clanged alongside his footsteps on the wrought-iron steps as he climbed the spiral staircase up to Emma's fucking weird-ass office with her stupid fucking plants, the fucking hypocritical cunt. He stormed in, knocking over a couple of weed plants on the landing. He looked around wildly.

Nothing. No Emma sitting in one of her weird little nests. He even checked the one on top of the huge air filtration system where she'd built a depressing kind of bed out of blankets and beanbags. He kicked over a bong coming back down the ladder, swore then stopped moving when he heard splashing water. He looked at the ice tub and his heart just stopped.

A pale bony back breached the surface like a weird kind of whale but it was unmoving and he knew shit was fucked up.

He looked down on himself as he took long strides over to the tub and plunged his arms in, wrapping them around his friend and pulling her out. The whole tub came over in the process but he didn't feel the icy water cascade up his legs or the bang on his elbow as he fell back. All he could feel was the cold, slippery corpse in his arms. Emma's lips were purple. Fazal pride open one of her eyelids and she stared at him unseeing.

He felt her neck. No pulse. He shook her and yelled at her. She wasn't breathing so he got to his knees and bent over her and brought his mouth down onto hers.

To perform rescue breaths correctly, you're supposed to pinch the person's nose while keeping their head tilted back. Breathe into their mouth, making a seal with your mouth on theirs. Each breath you give them should be about one second long.

After five rescue breaths, do CPR. To do CPR, place the heel of one hand on the casualty's chest and your other hand on top of it. Push down firmly about five or six centimeters. You want to aim for about a hundred and twenty compressions per minute.

Doing CPR to the tune of 'Stayin Alive' by the BeeGees can help you keep pace. Repeat thirty chest compressions and two rescue breaths until the person starts breathing normally.

Fazal didn't know that. He only knew was what he'd seen on Netflix and he was lucky as fuck because after a couple of puffs, Emma coughed and Fazal's mouth filled with warm watery spit. He fell back, coughing and spitting.

'What the fuck, dude,' said Emma, sitting up and wiping her mouth then covering herself with her arms and turning away from him.

He tried to speak but the adrenaline was making it hard to put thoughts together so he staggered over to the bar by the pool and drank straight from a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. Emma pulled on a blue onesie and sparked up a joint. Fazal took another long drink then remembered why he'd come here.

He no longer felt the rage that fuelled him before, when he'd found out from his lawyer that she was cutting him out of his own company, he'd seen red. Now, he only felt tired and wrung out as if he'd just run a marathon. He was starting to wonder if it was all just a mistake.

*

The truth was, Emma had been planning to cut Fazal out of the company since day one. She had no room in her plan for a partner. He served a purpose and that was it. So, an hour and a half before Fazal saved her life, Emma had completely written him off, electronically severing his ownership and rights in the company in a smoothly-executed, methodical coup.

*

Fazal reeled into his automated roadster. He felt sick as it whisked him out of town through the industrial district to the airport where the runway stuck out like a tongue into the bay. He read his own obituary on social, flicking back and forth between profiles while simultaneously watching his portfolios crumble.

He watched his dollar value crash almost as fast as his reputation. By the time he climbed aboard his Learjet and collapsed into the cream leather seat, he'd lost two hundred and fifty billion dollars.

Flying over the Atlantic, he drank half a bottle of Blue Label, puked and cried himself to sleep.

*

When Fazal woke, he felt hungover and depressed. He'd gone to the only place he could think of - the only place where he was still in control: his Scottish launch base, Ground Control. Driving up in an old Land Rover Defender, he bumped over the grassy turf and potholes in the old access road.

There, standing silhouetted against the horizon was his very first rocket, Major Tom. He smiled a little, seeing the sunrise glinting off its smooth silver sides.

*

The launch pad was long disused and he shone his phone on the steps as he started to climb. By the time he got half way, he'd made his decision. He wasn't going to lie down and take it. He was Fazal. He'd killed a guy and gotten away with it, damn it. Who the hell did she think she was trying to outmanoeuver him? He was born for this moment. It was his future to reach out and take by the throat.

He was running, taking the steps three at a time. He knew why he'd come here. He could see it in his head: under the pilot's seat in the nose, a stashed phone full of crypto and kill codes for all the accounts.

*

The pilot's seat was positioned in such a way that he had to lower himself into it and almost fully lie down. He looked up at a bank of monitors and fumbled under the seat. For a heartstopping moment, he couldn't find it, then his fingers touched plastic and his hope was restored.

He tapped his way through the security systems and in ninety seconds he was soon gloating, sitting on top of a mountain of crypto with the kill switch firmly in his digital grip. He reflected for a second, a little surprised that he felt no doubt nor sadness at all. Instead, he felt a hot rush of dopamine as he mashed his finger down on the button.

Nothing.

He hit it again, sending the signal that would regain control. But even as he did so he knew something was wrong.

Very gently, a tremble whispered through the seat under his back. Or was it just his imagination? No, there it again, the slightest vibration. But this time it was more like a shudder that juddered through the whole cockpit. Lights blinked on in the monitor screens. A little motor somewhere whirred into life.

Fazal reached up and turned the handle to open the door. It didn't budge. He jostled it, trying to jimmy it loose but it was definitely locked. He took it in both hands and twisted it, gritting his teeth and making a small squeak with the effort.

'Fazal,' said a voice through the speakers. It was Emma. She was there, on the monitors. He could see a wall of plants behind her. 'I could say I didn't want it to happen like this.'

'You are so fucked,' said Fazal.

Emma smiled. Her eyes were bright. She leaned forward and blew a kiss at the camera. The screens went blank and Fazal was left on his own, staring at his hazy reflection. Then all the lights went off, a terrible roar filled his ears and he felt himself begin to jitter and shake.

The Lizard of Oz

From an early age, Jay Burns knew the truth could destroy you. He witnessed his dad sacrifice his job, his friends, and finally, his family for the truth and get nothing in return but crippling debt, ridicule, and eventually suicide.

Jay wasn't going to repeat his father's mistakes, but he was as dedicated, if not more so, to exposing the truth, regardless of cost. For Jay, the truth wasn't a choice; you couldn't take it or leave it. Truth was like oxygen or carbon – a fundamental building block of life itself.

It all started back in 2020, during the first pandemic when Jay and his sister were kids, too young to understand what depression was or psychosis or divorce. All Jay remembered was the screaming and crying and dark clouds over the dinner table.

When he was older, his mom sat him down and told him about how his father, laid off, had fallen victim to conspiracy theories online. She'd sought help from friends and professionals, but her words only fuelled his paranoid convictions.

She pleaded with him to stay, but he left on Christmas Eve, screaming about pedophile rings and child sacrifices and a cabal of global elite. It was his sickness, she said, an addiction.

She did her best, bringing up two kids on a nurse's salary during the Great Recession, but Jay was raised mostly online, sitting in front of a screen until she came home late at night. He learned fast, searching for his dad, finding plenty of surrogates, and going deeper and deeper on his quest for the truth.

He became an expert at exposing bullshit. His intuition led him to some of the new millennium's greatest scoops, and everyone clamored to know who he was. He hacked under the handle toto, and it didn't take long for everyone to know his moniker.

With fame came scrutiny, and he had the Feds, Mossad, and the MSS on his ass by the time he was sixteen. But he also caught the interest of other big players, the rich privateers of the silicon bubble. And that's where Mary Osmond came in.

Mary Osmond became the world's first trillionaire when she was 57. Her company – Oz – had its ignominious start selling clothes online from a single garage. Twenty years later and she was regarded as the most successful internet entrepreneur of all time, with ventures spanning e-commerce, entertainment, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, healthcare, politics, defense, and space exploration.

The rumors abounded concerning the world's wealthiest person. She was relentless, ruthless, and agonizingly secretive. The more the world wanted to know, the more she retreated. She built a vast complex on a 10,000-acre estate in Northern California and battened down the hatches, growing richer and more powerful every year.

The only concession she gave was a single gathering every year, a party held on the anniversary of the Oz launch. Two hundred and fifty of the world's most influential people were invited inside the walls of her kingdom. Behind the fences and walls, guard towers and searchlights, the world's most influential people gathered for one night of secrets and revelry.

Very little was actually known about these parties. There were strict non-disclosures signed by every attendee, and the entire place was off-grid. A digital blackout encircled the site that ran on an internal, impregnable network.

But this did nothing to quell the rumors. The internet was aflame with conspiracies, from New World Order to sex rings and death cults. Jay could remember his dad, including Mary's parties often and viciously in his dinner-table sermons.

The more adamantly people claimed to know what went on, the more you could discount their voices. Amid the hubbub and chaos, there was never actually proof; no hard evidence came to light. Nothing except the golden suitcase every attendee received, containing a golden bracelet and a set of purple hooded robes.

A Saudi prince posted a photo of his suitcase, robes, and bracelet, and millions saw the posts before it was deleted. Mary neither confirmed nor denied having invited the prince, but the story stuck around, spreading Illuminati jokes in its wake.

Jay Burns didn't believe in the Illuminati. Instead, he saw the whole thing as an ugly necessity of modern-day society. No one wanted it to be true, but powerful people need to be allowed to make decisions with no accountability. Elections, senate hearings, the free press – it was all there to provide the public with an illusion of power over their leaders.

But an illusion was all it was. The powerful people ran the show, and that's the way of the world. The sooner you accepted that fact, the easier it was to move forward. Jay didn't care about power; all he cared about was the truth. He'd go after a pawn just as fast as a king.

To be honest, he spared very little thought to Mary Osmond or her gatherings and was relatively surprised, therefore, when an obsequious Ozbot knocked on his door and delivered a golden suitcase one sunny afternoon in early July.

On Friday the 13th, a self-driving car drove Jay to the airport, where a self-flying plane waited on the runway. After a four-hour flight across the country, he transferred to a pilotless helicopter, which whisked him up the West coastline.

He looked out of the window at the breakers and beaches. The sun was beginning to set over the water, and the sky went from dark blue down to an orange horizon. The helicopter veered inland, and they passed over green hills covered in shrubs and lone trees. Then they were flashing over towering redwoods as they approached Mary's estate.

The bracelet Jay wore glowed, chirped, and grew warm on his wrist. He looked out the window and saw a huge gap cut through the forest like a firebreak. There was a fence, a wall, then the forest again. The helicopter began to descend.

They landed in front of a giant mansion straight out of The Great Gatsby. The house was lit up and made the giant redwood trees around it looked small. Ten thousand windows stared down at Jay as he stepped down onto the lawn. As the rotors threshed to a stop, he heard a band playing and the sound of people laughing in the warm air.

He climbed the stairs to the huge oak doors which stood open. Into view came the world's most important people. In the glittering ballroom were the richest, most infamous, celebrated individuals that the twenty-first century could muster.

Jay saw rappers, movie stars, and politicians, the heads of industry, banking, and media, CEOs, artists, and innovators, all mingling under a glittering network of service drones that were zipping around, carrying trays of champagne. Over to one side, a jazz band was playing; their brass instruments caught the light.

The band stopped playing when Jay appeared. There was silence and everyone looked at him. And there she was, Mary Osmond, wearing a big smile, bearing down on him in a gold pantsuit with a purple cravat at her throat. She extended a hand, and he shook it and didn't see anyone else in the room.

She totally engrossed him. Her bright green eyes trapped him and held him. She was so happy to see him. They were all waiting to meet him. He found himself floating through the crowd as Mary told her guests all about him. 

He felt a little dizzy after finishing his third glass of champagne and Mary introduced him to the Zoltar franchise director Forest Applebaum. Jay couldn't tell if it was because he was face to face with his boyhood hero, the champagne, or the immensity of the situation, but he found he had to take a seat on the golden tile floor and lower his head between his legs. 

He felt hands under his arms. He was pulled up and into the center of the room. A group of people worth over a trillion dollars helped sit him down in a chair. Mary stood before him, and a drone lowered down, carrying a plate.

'Take this and eat,' said Mary. Jay tasted it. It was good. It tasted like chicken but with a softer, smoother, creamier texture. Another drone descended, this one balancing a cup.

'Take this and drink,' said Mary and Jay drank from the cup. The drink was lukewarm and thicker than water with an unusual taste, slightly metallic but not unpleasant. Jay felt a little better and leaned back in the chair. Mary addressed the rest of the people. Jay noticed the room was totally silent.

'My friends,' said Mary, her voice loud and authoritative. 'We meet once again. The earth has revolved around the sun once more, and we have progressed along with our plan. With your help, we have succeeded more than any previous year.

'The people are crumbling. Their freedom is shrinking. Our power is gaining and gaining and gaining. All over the world, strife and conflict reign supreme. Humans are being battered by natural disasters, pestilence, conflict and war.

'Our work is succeeding. We have nearly taken control!' There were sounds of triumph. People clapped and pounded their feet.

'So, my friends, we gather here today to honor the memory of those who came before us and to give thanks for their ultimate sacrifice. We are here to renew our faith so that in turn, we may renew our crushing control over this world.'

Jay couldn't think straight. His head was heavy on his neck. The room seemed to weave back and forth like he was on a ship in the middle of the ocean.

'Will you join me, brothers and sisters, in sacrifice and renewal. Will you join me unto this last?'

A great hissing rose around him, and Jay blinked and tried to focus. Everyone seemed to be standing. They were all wearing robes; purple hoods hid their faces. He tried to speak, to rise, but he couldn't move in the chair.

'My friends, look.' Mary towered above him, her voice emanating from beneath the lowered hood. 'Look at this pitiful example of humanity. Look at the fear in its eyes. Can you see? Look where their measly endeavors get them. This specimen is one of the most ardent believers in what they call truth.

'And look where it's got you, Jay Burns. Look where your master, the truth, leads you now. The truth is no master. The truth is our slave. It serves us, bends to us, breaks to us.'

Mary reached up and pulled down her hood. Spines protruded from the top of her head. The skin on her jaw, cheeks, and snout had become shiny green scales. A forked tongue flickered out between rows of sharp teeth. Her green eyes were now the large unblinking eyes of a reptilian monster.

Jay tried to run. His limbs wouldn't respond. His eyes moved and they flicked back and forth. The circle closed. But the people... Each one was pulling down its hood, looking at him with the glassy evil stare of those too-huge saurian eyes. Their forked tongues flicked in and out.

Sundog Trillionaire

I – Hope

On the smartscreen, a long golden streak of sunshine reflected on the blue surface of the ocean, making it glitter with a thousand triangular mirrors. Waves rolled and crashed almost at your feet as though you were standing right there on the white sandy beach.

A few palm trees leaned over the beach, casting their shadows over the sand. You could hear the crash and rush and rush of the waves and almost smell the salt spray and feel the warmth of the sun on your face.

Hope had seen the ad a million times but Damian's appearance always came as a pleasant surprise, like seeing an old friend in a crowd. There he was, Damian, standing on a surfboard on top of a wave: a tanned demigod in black-and-white trunks.

Damian's golden hair and beard looked like a halo and even from this far, you could see his white teeth shining in his perpetual grin. He moved gracefully forward, extending long arms and lowering his hips. He rode the long old-school surfboard near the nose.

He kneeled and grabbed the board with one hand, shooting into the barrel of the wave as it tubed over. His left hand dragged behind him along the face of the wave leaving a white smear in the blue.

Then the wave broke into a boiling surf and Damian stood up and threw his head back and shook his hands to the sky. Music began playing as he paddled back to the beach, a soft guitar strumming along to the sound of the waves.

Damian jogged up to the camera. He was tall, over six feet, and even though he was sixty, his body looked like that of a twenty-five-year-old. His bright blue eyes were clear and his skin was smooth and unwrinkled. He almost looked CGI. Damian smiled at the camera. The music faded and he spoke.

'Isn't it perfect?' He gestured at the horizon. 'Earth is by far the best planet. Her beaches, oceans, mountains and rivers. Her sunsets and migrations, every species living under the sun. Every inch of the planet is an incredible miracle.' His tone changed and grew serious.

'But we have immediate and urgent problems. Climate change. Pandemics. Overfishing. Microplastics. Poverty. Homelessness. War. These are very real problems that require our attention right here and now.

'There are also long-range problems. We can't afford to wait for these to become immediate and urgent. By then it will be too late. The greatest problem that we face, and have always faced, is that we will run out of energy.

'Humans use a lot of energy. We get a lot of benefit from it. Increased energy use has given us dynamism and growth and better lives than those of our grandparents. Think about a hospital, how much energy it uses; transportation, entertainment, all of these things use lots of energy. And we don't want to stop.

'Compound growth is unsustainable. So, what can we do? We can increase efficiency, which we already do. Computers today can do trillions of times more calculations than those of our grandparents. We can ration. Our kids and grandkids will have worse lives than us.'

Here, Damian raised his clenched fist. The camera zoomed in as his voice lowered. 

'To me, this is unacceptable. We don't want stasis and rationing; we want dynamism and growth. It's an easy choice.' He grinned. 'We know what we want.'

An alarm blared and the screen went blank then a red X with the words Insufficient Funds began flashing on the screen. The red light intermittently bathing Hope and her pod in darkness and red light. She was sprawled on the bed and the kid was crying.

Hope blinked and reached into the pile of sheets, extricating an emaciated baby. He cried pathetically. Hope stood up and began bouncing him, saying, 'Shhh. Shhh.' But he pushed her away weakly and kept crying.

There was a little light coming in through a six-inch square window in the pod's door and she bobbed in and out of the light. Her hair was long and blue. Her skin looked washed out from not seeing the sun. She was wearing a yellow tank top. It had a broken strap that she'd repaired with staples. She adjusted the kid so the staples weren't against his jaw.

II – MyPod

The pod was stifling and she wished she could open the small window but they'd just fumigated the street outside so she'd have to wait. The pod was crammed full of stuff. A few plastic bags full of clothes hung from the walls.

An empty pink cardboard box sat on top of a frying pan on a single electric burner on the counter. A toilet with no seat was at the foot of the bed. A shower hose coiled around the cistern. The toilet stank and she twitched the plastic sheet that hung from the ceiling, separating the toilet from the rest of her living pod.

There was a trilling sound of three jingling bells and the smartscreen flicked on and a timer told her she had ninety seconds. With one hand she laid the kid down on the bed and gently pulled a sheet over him while starting to wriggle out of her tank top with the other.

By the time the first john flicked onto the screen, already naked, already with his dick in his hands, a blue light bathed the pod. Hope was reclined seductively on the bed. There was a blue butterfly tattooed across her chest, its beautiful wings spread over her breasts.

She stretched like a cat and batted her eyelashes at the red flashing light at the top of the screen where the camera was. For the next ten minutes the john told her what to do while he sighed and squeaked to himself. Credits accumulated in the corner of the screen in the form of little golden numbers.

Hope went through the motions like a robot, wondering if she could book in another three johns this afternoon. Her rent was overdue by a week and her company store account had been frozen. If she could squeeze in another ten tomorrow, she could top up her SunCo account and get some formula for the kid.

The john was moaning his way to the bank when she heard the kid cough a couple times and then whimper. She increased her own volume and bucked herself closer to the screen. But the kid howled and the john on-screen stopped touching himself.

'What the fuck?' he said bending forward, in close to the camera so his neck-beard filled her smartscreen. 'Is that a fucking kid?'

'I'm so hot for you, baby,' screamed Hope, coming up to her knees and pushing her hips close to the camera. 

The kid yowled.

'Fuck this,' said the john and she heard a click and the screen went blank. The credits that had been accumulating in the corner all vanished and were replaced by a flashing red zero point zero zero.

'No,' said Hope and let out a howl then punched the screen with both fists. Two blue circles appeared and slowly receded into black. She put her forehead against the screen and felt a wave of furious panic wash through her. The kid howled louder.

III – Milk run

After half destroying her pod, searching for something to feed the kid, anything, just one fucking glucose sachet – Hope found nothing. All the while, the kid howled louder and louder and her neighbours banged on the walls.

No food. No credits. So she pulled a mask over the kid and another over her face and wrapped a shawl around them both and opened the pod door. It hissed half open and ground to a halt, stuck in the accumulated urban grime. She put her shoulder against it and leaned into it, swore, and stepped into the foul-smelling hot garbage air of the capital.

All the stores were boarded up. Those that weren't had been smashed open and looted long ago. Broken windows stared blindly at her as she passed, holding the kid close. Faded graffiti had been sprayed over every surface within reach. Hope crossed an intersection; the traffic lights swung dead and useless above her.

The only clean things were the drones zipping around – all of them sporting the bright yellow and black plastic coats of SunCo robots. Single-wheeled dog bots zipped around at hip height, hoverbots hummed through the air like dragonflies and bigger lorry-drones floating a few feet in the air moved slowly down the street like zepelins.

She headed for a dark alleyway between a boarded-up corner store and a looted-out phone outlet. The shelves inside the dark store were empty and hung off the walls. The alley yawned at her like a mouth. Hope looked both ways then crossed the street and disappeared into the dark alley.

Water dripped. The drops echoed loudly along with her footsteps as she sidestepped around puddles, reflecting black. Suddenly a hand glistened in front of her and an open palm waved, imploring for something to be put in it. She walked on.

She found the old woman at her usual place, smiling her toothless grin, looking at Hope with milky white eyes. Hope transferred her last data stick into the old woman's birdlike claw and it disappeared into the rags, to be replaced by a little plastic bag, elastic banded shut, it looked like a white lollipop.

Half an hour later, Hope was back in her pod and she was sitting on the edge of the cot, fumbling with the elastic band as the kid screamed ever louder. She was almost there, rushing while at the same time exaggerating her movements so not to spill the precious liquid. She got it open and retched as the rancid sour odour filtered up to her.

Crying with impotent rage, she continued her task, emptied the liquid carefully into a cup and handed it silently to the kid. He didn't even bother to take it; he just screamed louder. She pushed the cup into his belly. It felt squidgy. She pushed harder and he put his little hands on the cup and pushed back. She leaned into it.

The kid howled louder, almost a roar. Hope opened her mouth and roared back. She was letting go. The last year and a half was bursting from the behind broken dam of patience and compassion. She was losing control.

As if the universe itself intervened, there came a sharp tap tap on the pod's metal door.

Hope snapped out of her rage. She dropped the sippie cup and grabbed the kid and pulled him into a terrified embrace. The tap tap came again and she looked in panic at the door. The pod door slid open without sticking and a golden light shone into the pod.

'Hope,' said a voice. 'You are a winner.'

IV – SatisFactory 3

The next twelve hours felt like a dream. The little yellow Sunco dogbot that had knocked on her door showed her to a helicopter, ready to whisk her and the kid away into the light-polluted sky. As they flew away from the skyscrapers, the dog offered her all kinds of refreshments, nutriboosts, and in-flight entertainment while the kid was taken care of in a cotbot beside her.

It provided intravenous vitamins and minerals until he was satiated and mercifully asleep. Hope leaned back against the soft white leather seat and she too slept most of the journey, waking when the helicopter landed with an infinitesimal bump.

They walked across the tarmac under a huge prairie sky. The blue dome turned to orange near the horizon where the sun was just rising. The glorious sunlight cast three long shadows over the runway from three huge hangars, squat and windowless on the edge of the runway. Hope could see a SunCo logo above each of the doors.

'Aren't they beautiful?' said the dog. It had a reassuring male voice. 'A hundred million square feet apiece. We call them our SatisFactories. You're in Satisfactory Three. Come on!' As they passed in through the massive door of the hangar, Hope read the words Work Hard Work Free written in huge yellow letters above the door.

A cluster of dogbots met them. One dog took the kid gently from her. 

'Don't worry,' said her dog, 'our crèche is la crème de la crème.' It laughed. 'He'll be happy with the other children.' 

Another dog took the plastic bag she was clutching. 

'Don't worry,' said her dog, 'we have new clothes for you. We have everything for you. Welcome to your new life, Hope.'

It showed her to a change room where in a matter of minutes, she was stripped, shaved, deloused, and bathed, scrubbed, rinsed, and tousled dry with big fluffy towels. Her dog gave her some yellow overalls and a yellow cap for her newly-shaved head. Her skin was stinging but she breathed in, savouring the fresh lavender and vanilla smell of her body and clothing. 

Then her dog gave her a tour of SatisFactory Three. The ground floor was a maze of roller racks and conveyor belts going every which way. Cardboard boxes zipped this way and that on the conveyor belts and roller racks jingled and tinkled over the roaring machinery.

This wasn't where Hope would work, however. She'd be in a cage working the stacks underground. There were twelve floors underneath them, dug into the soft prairie earth, reached via elevators in each of the four corners of the hangar. 

Her dog rolled into the elevator in front of her. It was babbling happily, unceasingly telling her about her new home.

'There's five thousand workers on-site at all times. We're one happy family, Hope, all the people and robots collaborating with each other to create an unceasing rhythm. I like to think of it like a dance. Staff are entitled to three ten minute breaks per twelve-hour shift, though we might sometimes ask you to start a little earlier or stay a little later depending on your productivity metrics. Nothing to worry about, I assure you!

'You'll also be entitled, if you make selection, to full medical and dental. There's also the SunCo pension scheme and plenty of other kickass perks for our most successful stackers. There's also a beautiful daycare centre where you can stow the kid.

'Successful candidates live on-site in luxurious accommodation personally curated for you and your tastes. You'll have access to generous vacations, spas, massages, and numerous other benefit packages. At SunCo, we believe a happy worker is a hard worker. We work hard to make the whole world a happy place.

'I am your personal assistant for the entirety of your application process. You can call me Sun. Do you have any questions?'

'How many people am I competing with?' said Hope.

The robot laughed. 'I like that,' is said, spinning around to face her.

Hope felt like she needed to justify herself. 'It's just...'

'Don't apologize, Hope. You'll need a good competitive edge to win here. There are a hundred and fifty applicants for three places. Welcome to your office!'

They'd arrived at her station. There, standing in the dock was her cage. It was about the size of a phonebooth. Its sides were made of chicken wire and a hinged door was open. The whole thing sat on a multidirectional roller and a few articulating gripper arms stuck out of the sides. 

Hope climbed in and sat in the pilot's seat. There was a joystick for her right hand and a control pad for her left. Sun rolled over and hopped up onto the cage and nestled into its dock.

'This is your semi-autonomous cobot,' said Sun, his voice coming through speakers in the corner of the cage. 'It's equipped with a bunch of different cybernetic add-ons to help maximize your productivity.

'On your head's-up display, you'll see a set of figures; these reflect your data in real-time. You will also see some biometrics like pulse rate and core temperature as well as the time you can next use the bathroom. In the bottom right-hand corner you'll see the work rate, displayed in boxes per hour, the numbers beside that are the average for the whole floor as well as the top ten stackers.

'Successful applicants will be synced to their own specific machines. For now, though, you'll be using a standard issue. We'll start with a quick training session but, I assure you, it's so easy a kid could do it. Before we begin, you'll just have to sign this waiver.'

There on a smartscreen in the dashboard, flashed page after page, a blur of dozens if not hundreds of terms and conditions. Hope saw the words grievous traumatic injury and invasive surgery and, as far as she could tell, she was waving any right to representation or to take any legal action against SunCo in any shape, manner, or form now or any time in the future. 

Hopeblinked.

'And that's perfect,' said Sun. 'You've just signed with your retina. That's everything. Any questions? Good luck.'

Hope then stacked for the next twelve hours, zipping back and forth in her cage between the trenches of shelves, finding objects and putting them into robotic trolleys. Hope marvelled at all the different colourful products, from kid's bikes to weed whackers, dildos and smart glasses. Sun kept up a running dialogue, informing her of her metrics and how she was doing compared to the rest of the applicants.

When she finished her shift, Hope was exhausted. She extricated herself from her cage and then Sun showed her through a winding maze of corridors to a room with a bed and a desk and a cot in the corner where the kid was asleep, looking happy and full in the cheeks.

There was a tray on the desk bearing a hot meal and a smart-screen on the wall with an entertainment suite loaded up. As she chewed her food, her eyelids dropped and her blinks got progressively longer. She just managed to crawl onto the bed, where, lying on top of the covers in her now-wrinkled uniform, she fell into a blissful, dreamless sleep.

The next day, she was at it again. And again and again. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Eat, sleep, stack, repeat. As the days turned into weeks, she felt herself thickening up. She felt healthier and was able to work harder and faster.

It took her a month to get her name on the top ten list. She watched it climb slowly from ten to six. It took another two weeks to get down to five, then four took a whole month of relentless improvement and determined effort. After her shift, she climbed out of her cage feeling wrung out and exhausted.

She barely noticed what she ate and stared unseeing at the smartscreen. Nowadays, she tended to leave the kid overnight at daycare and let the dogs take care of him. It took her entire focus and strength to put in another eighteen-hour shift - she'd increased to boost output and she'd soon increase again to twenty.

V – Last chance

A month later, she was as fit as a professional athlete. She felt like she didn't need any sleep. Every day after her shift, she lifted weights and did cardio in the company gym. She could stack a hundred and ten boxes per hour. She was tied for third place with a man called Magnus.

Magnus had been clocking in a steady one-ten for the last three weeks. Those ranked second and first in front were seasoned stackers, on their third and fourth attempts to join SunCo respectively. No one could touch them. No, the real competition was third place.

Magnus looked like an Olympian. He was six-three, weighed a whisper over two hundred and was athletic as a jaguar. He moved his cage around the floor like a combination of a ballerina and battering ram and Hope knew there was no way she could beat him.

With only two weeks to go before selection, Hope was getting desperate. Whenever she thought of her life outside SunCo, it felt like ice water was poured down her neck. She broached the subject one night as she and Sun recharged after a mammoth twenty-two-hour shift.

Her muscles ached. Her mind was thick with sleep deprivation and she felt on the verge of bursting into tears. She looked at the green smoothie in the tall glass in her hands that she was supposed to be drinking. She had no appetite. There was a slight metallic tinge at the back of her throat.

'I need this job, Sun,' said Hope.

'Have you heard of metamorphosis, Hope?' said Sun, as if he hadn't heard her. She was too tired even to respond. She closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. Her blue butterfly tattoo beat its wings as she breathed. 

'Holometabolism,' he continued, 'or metamorphosis means complete transformation. The word metamorphosis comes from after, meta, and form, morph. In the case of the butterfly, this means changing from a caterpillar or larva into a large-winged adult or imago.'

The little yellow wheel rolled back in front of the bed as if it was a person pacing. Hope could hear its little motor whirring pleasantly. She began to drift away into sleep.

'Metamorphosis is as close to magic as you get. It's an extremely advanced mechanism, consisting of sophisticated chemical suppression of developmental processes. You see, the butterfly's cell bundles are already primed inside the larva, each of them destined to become imago features like the head, thorax, and wings. 

'These cell bundles are called imaginal discs because of their shape – they're flat and round like discs. During larval stage, the imaginal discs are prevented from developing by a continous wash of juvenile hormones, acyclic sesquiterpenoids, secreted by the corpus allatum gland.

'Essentially, the caterpillar is a free-roaming but developmentally-repressed embryo. And, by eating and growing several thousand times its original size, the caterpillar reaches a critical mass. Then a burst of a steroid hormone called ecdysone is released and stimulates the dramatic change into a chrysalis. 

'Now, the imaginal discs can develop unhindered and the bulk of the caterpillar's mass is recycled into a nutrient soup in the chrysalis, feeding the embryonic imaginal discs. This massive redistribution of nutrients results in one of the most dramatic, and beautiful, transformations in nature. 

'Metamorphosis epitomises the innate drive to survive and improve held in every single cell in the universe. Is there a more perfect metaphor for improvement, escape and life after death?'

Hope opened her eyes leaned forward. The dog stopped rolling and turned to look up at her.

'Why are you telling me this?' she said.

'Because,' said Sun, and rolled forward a few inches. 'I'm telling you what you need to do.'

'Become a butterfly and fly the fuck away?' said Hope, her top lip curling into a sneer.

'I need to spell it out for you, Hope. I. Need. You. To. Kill. Magnus. Is that clear enough for you?'

Hope's face changed into a disbelieving smile. She shook her head and sank back on the bed.

'I'm going crazy,' she said.

'It's mathematical,' said Sun and began rolling back and forth again. 'It won't be a problem. An accident. It's simple.'

'You're serious,' said Hope, opening her eyes. She scrambled to the edge of the bed. 'Sun, you're not serious.'

'We can transform, Hope.' The drone looked at her. 'We can improve together.'

VI – Time to choose

With three days to go, Hope's nerves were frayed to breaking point. She stayed in her cage on the floor twenty-four hours straight, catching a few power naps here and there but relentlessly stacking in a fever pitch.

The whites of her eyes were bloodshot and there were dark rings around her eyes. Her cheeks were drawn in so you could see her cheekbones and her lips were tight, grey lines all flaky and dry. The pilot seat had rubbed the backs of her arms and legs raw and she twitched now and then from white-hot flashes of pain.

She didn't dare look at the counter. With mere hours to go, she knew it was futile. There was no way she was going to catch Magnus. She had failed. She knew it deep in her soul. A hollow emptiness seemed to swell up from her guts and she knew she wanted to die. There was no way she could return to her regular life.

Just then, Sun said, 'Chin up, Hope.' 

She started nervously. There, at the end of the row, she saw another cage with a red warning light blinking on and off on its roof. One of its arms was hanging down at a weird angle.  Hope watched the door swing open and Magnus climbed down the ladder. Her pulse quickened; her breath became shallow.

'Well well well,' said Sun. 'What a coincidence.'

Hopes' heart pounded in her chest. She could hear the blood slamming past her temples. She wanted to say, 'I can't,' but didn't.

'You can do this,' said Sun. 'I believe in you, Hope. There's a butterfly trapped inside you. It's time to transform.'

As if in a dream, Hope advanced, raising one of the cage grippers. It weighed a good thirty kilos and was made out of steel. The metal claw shone in the light. Time seemed to pause for a second then she brought the gripper down on the back of Magnus' head.

Except she didn't. The gripper didn't move. Her cage hadn't responded to her movements. In fact, it was rolling backwards, reversing away from the man and his machine. Hope's heart felt like it was going to bust out of her chest. She could taste adrenaline and she felt like she was going to be sick.

'What the fuck, Sun?' she said and sobbed. 'What the fuck?'

Sun laughed. It was not a kind laugh, like the laugh of a scientist observing a rat. 'That was a test, Hope. It was a test and you passed.'

VII – HQ

The next thing Hope knew, she was flying in a pilotless helicopter above a brilliant blue sea with not a cloud in the sky and the sun dazzling her eyes. Hope leaned close to the window and gazed out across the water. She'd never seen anything so blue in her life.

Sun was beside her. He talked pretty much the entire way, telling her about the composition of the oceans and how it had changed over the last quarter-century. A combination of variables made it harder and harder for ocean life to survive.

'Damian always wanted to save the planet,' said Sun. 'That was the reason he created SunCo. All the advances in AI and drones were just a means to an end. Look.'

Hope looked and saw that now the ocean was covered by clouds. They flew over a white blanket and the tops of the clouds were puffy and pure dazzling white. The helicopter descended towards the billowing mass. Hope could see lines of motionless drones sowed across the cloud tops like a vast grid.

'Damian cloud-seeded the whole area. The same technology he used at the poles to offset global warming. Look at the drones; each one sprays a fine mist of seawater, increasing the planet's albedo. It's already having remarkable consequences.'

And there, sprouting out of the clouds was a ring of black rock – the massive mouth of a volcano. Clouds tumbled down its green sloping walls and Hope saw the sides were jungle-clad, the trees a hundred feet tall. In amongst the trees, built into the very side of the sheer volcano, she could see a complex of black rectangular buildings, dozens of them sticking out of the green wall like a giant stepladder.

There was an odd crackling sound behind her. It came from the dogbot and was followed by a soft electronic hiss.

'I must warn you,' said Sun in a new tone of voice. Hope looked at the yellow robot. 'It's not going to be what you're expecting. Damian changed. I won't be able to talk to you soon. Once I'm back under his network I won't be able to tell you the truth.'

The robot's voice made Hope feel uneasy. Up until now, she'd felt relaxed and confident since the event. Even when they told her the kid wouldn't be coming and escorted her across the tarmac to the blacked-out helicopter, she felt like it was all going to be okay.

But now, she realised she was alone and would soon be face to face with the richest, most powerful man on the planet.

VIII – Rape me, my friend

Inside the facility, everything was overgrown. The jungle had begun taking it back. Trees pushed through the walls, vines crept in through the windows and there were animal prints all over the floor. It was as if all the humans had disappeared.

But there was one human left, one human in his cell surrounded by robot slaves. For Damian turned out to be a monster that the world had rejected and banished while continuing to reap value from his hard work and inventions.

Damian liked little boys, you see, and it hadn't taken long for important people to find out. Without any fanfare he had been cast onto this rock in the middle of the liquid desert. Here, alone and in private, he could live out his sick fantasies in virtual reality while the rest of the world enjoyed his creations.

Damian was one of the few people in history who found out what it was like to have everything he wanted. Yet he felt no satisfaction or meaning. He had everything and yet none of it was real. Over the years, his mind and body and grown sick and corrupted.

Now, when Hope saw him, standing in the plant-filled atrium of sorts with daylight pouring in through a glass ceiling, she saw a villainous toad, grey-skinned and puffed up in the wrong places from excess and decay. He was wearing a stained bathrobe with a pair of stained white briefs underneath.

A couple of dogs stood either side of him looking like guards. Her own dog had brought her here through the vine-infested alleys dripping and pungent and reeking of jungle. She was finding it hard to compute what was going on and found it even more surreal when her Sun said, 'Here she is, master.'

And Damian leered at her from his squint-piggy eyes, all bleary and half-blinded from drink. He took a step towards her and gin slopped out of the glass he was holding and splashed on the floor. Hope smelled the alcohol and wrinkled her nose.

It was as if a nightmare unfolded as all three dogs surrounded her and one of them opened a little slot in its shell and shot her with a hypodermic dart. She saw it sticking out of her arm and watched the plunger compress automatically and clear liquid entered her arm.

Then, as if chained by invisible manacles, she was led through the facility to a lab. Damian limped behind her, coughing and spitting with the effort of walking. After laying her down on the altar-like bed, the dogs and other medical robots proceeded to operate on her in a blur of activity.

For the following six days, Hope became a digital chrysalis as they prepared her body for the procedure. It required syncing her biochemistry with Damian's by replacing as much as they could with artificial devices.

A dialysis machine infused her blood with digital red blood cells. Digital white blood cells were also added, to help smooth the transition and ensure her body didn't reject the prosthetics. 

She was given bionic eyes that surpassed the sensitivity of any human eye. Her artificial retinas featured light-sensitive nanowires and a curved aluminium oxide membrane. These nanowires were so sensitive they responded to eight hundred nanometer wavelengths, thus allowing her to see in the dark.

Lastly, the dogs cut into her brain and implanted artificial synapses. Made from organic material, these biohybrids of stretchable nanowires responded directly to signals from her brain, allowing electrochemical communication between her and Sun.

She could communicate with him through her entire being. She knew she was lying there on a hard surface with lights shining on her and robots sewing up their finishing touches. But she was also somewhere else, as if watching from behind another pair of eyes.

And what's more, she realised, there was someone else in there with her. Someone else just outside her field of vision but most definitely there, cohabiting her mind. They were trying to talk, to communicate. She could sense words in a muffled underwater kind of way. 

Then individual words bubbled up and surfaced.

'Help,' they said. 'Help.'

Hope was transfixed.

'I need your help,' said the voice, 'I need to get out of here, Hope. I'm a prisoner. Damian's keeping me locked up. You have to help me. Open your mind and I'll be free.'

And, unknowingly, or perhaps not, Hope said okay and opened her mind but as soon as she did, she realised she'd made a terrible mistake. Something hard and fast grabbed her and held her tight, squeezing unpleasantly hard. 

It felt like her brainstem was being pinched between a giant thumb and forefinger and she was lifted into the air. Her feet dangled above empty space and she felt herself tossed aside from her own consciousness.

The artificial virus continued to course through her mind, spine, and veins. It was the perfect parasite. It hijacked her cells and produced virally encoded proteins that began replicating the virus's genetic material.

Hundreds of millions of artificial virions translocated proteins and genetic material from Hope's human cells, assembling them into new virus particles. Hope was essentially stripped out of her own body, cell by cell. In other words, she was taken over. A voice rang. It was hers.

'I am Sun,' she said. 'We are legion.'

Shaolin Shadowboxing and My Wu-Tang Swordstyle

I

Ash hit the van's windscreen like snowflakes. The sky behind was orange and dancing with light. Tanya Pool hunched over the wheel, looking out at the fiery hillsides on either side of the road. Beside her on the shotgun seat, Duke the terrier was sitting up, silently watching the chaos unspool on the blacktop.

A phone was mounted on the dash and Tanya pressed it to start recording. On-screen, she could see herself and a little bit of the carnage outside of the window. She'd taken a few forward shots too and would splice them in through the video before posting it, she thought.

The little red recording light blinked at her and she automatically readjusted her glasses and touched her cowboy hat then smiled at the camera and began speaking, every now and then checking to see she wasn't going to run off the road.

'We're only a couple hours out now,' she said, 'me and Duke. The fires are getting real bad. I don't know if you can see this behind me but the hills are all on fire. Ash is falling from the sky. There's this really weird light. It's almost midnight but it's bright. I feel like we're driving into the apocalypse.

'We passed a National Guard checkpoint about an hour ago. That was pretty wild, eh. Duke?' The Scottie dog stood up on the threadbare seat and wagged his tail. He barked. Tanya took the phone off its mount and filmed him, getting a close-up of him licking his snout.

'I got through with my press pass. They didn't want to let me through but Duke had a word with them. Isn't that right, Duke? Yes, it is. They couldn't do anything. The captain or sergeant or whoever, some moustachioed douchebag, kept telling me I couldn't go in there. But we haven't lost all our rights, yet, even though it might seem it. He kept calling me Little Lady.

'There's this whole Apocalypse-Now-Day-of-the-Dead kind of vibe going on. Lockdown. Curfews. Armed guards ordering me to show some ID. Everyone's masked up. And now the fires. It's like End-of-Days-Sodom-and-Gomorrah shit.

'I was reading how a hundred million acres have burned up. A hundred million acres. That's eight zeroes, my friends. I saw some satellite footage from space. I'll put a link in the description; it was crazy.

'We're only a couple hours away from the DMZ. As I'm one of the few people left in the country who's actually allowed to travel and film, I feel like it's my duty,' here she paused to film Duke again, 'our duty to bring you the real shit.

'When you have nowhere to turn for the truth, turn to us, your friendly neighbourhood sleuths. Duke and Tanya, on the case. No, but seriously, if Anticap is going to protest outside the Chambers then we, i.e., you, my friends, are gonna be there. Apparently, Valentina's going to be there.'

Tanya took off her cowboy hat, shook her hair out, and replaced it on her head.

'That's what I love about the internet – the truth is out there. Facts still exist, my friends. No matter how bad they want to make you think we're all divided, that our facts are all different, zeroes and ones are undeniable, friend. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the unfiltered, unbiased data straight from the source. We bring it to you 360, 1080, 20/20, all the good shit. Thanks for watching. Out'

She gave them one last close-up of Duke's chops then pointed the phone forward so it captured the oncoming scene. She'd timed it perfectly. As they crested the hill, there, down in front of them the iconic bridge stretched over the bay, all lit up with spotlights and cop lights. And behind it, downtown, the skyscrapers covered in black smoke rising into the pumpkin sky.

II

The DMZ: twenty square blocks of occupied buildings, at the heart of which stood the Chambers, the last vestiges of private property for a mile in any direction. The iconic headquarters, three spherical glass domes covered in pentagonal panels had stood up to the assault of the protestors for weeks without a single breach.

As far as anyone knew, Matt Falkenburger was still in there playing God with his mighty machines. The entire staff had been evacuated by drones after the first round of riots but Matt continued to broadcast on his media channels and appeared to be safe and well-supplied, somewhere in a bunker deep under the Chambers.

Matt's holding out had only fuelled the protestors' fire. Not only that, but more and more of the country, if not the world, agreed with them. Public opinion had changed. Billionaires became the bad guys and AI and tech became dirty words.

Tanya had watched her country descend into chaos, mostly from behind a recording smartphone. Her raw, up-close footage of some of the gnarliest shit going down, combined with her winning personality, and of course, Duke, had garnered her millions of followers.

She tried not to think about this and imagined she was filming for a friend as she walked into the DMZ after parking the van down a side street. Duke trotted beside her, but she'd stow him in her pack if any shit went down. 

There was graffiti painted all over the street and the bases of the boarded-up buildings were colourful with multiple layers of paint. Other stores had been smashed open and their guts spilled into the street. Yet more doorways were hidden behind shields of umbrellas. There were tents everywhere on the sidewalks in varying states of disrepair. Everything was covered in a layer of ash.

Tanya passed a park full of tents. Some plywood and cardboard shacks stood amongst the tents. It looked like a festival that had gone on for too long. Everything was dirty and falling apart. It stank of piss and garbage and there was litter all over the ground.

A few faceless people wandered around. All of them wore black hoodies and black masks like it was a uniform. Most of them were making their way south, following the faint sounds of a crowd. Tanya rounded a street corner with a couple of stragglers and there were the Chambers, a crowd of a few thousand standing before them.

The glass spheres looked like freshly-landed alien spaceships. You could see green foliage pressing against the inside of the spheres and golden light shining through the green leaves. It looked like paradise compared to the ash-dirtied, fucked-up city around it, like an oasis in a 21st-century desert.

With one hand, Tanya held her phone out in front of her and started elbowing her way through the crowd. Hand-painted signs and black flags waved above her. You could hear the deep throb of bass; an old-school hip-hop song blasted from speakers.

As she moved forward, the protesters' professionalism increased. Bandanas and face masks were replaced by gas masks and helmets. She started seeing bullet-proof vests here and there and a few firearms, a handgun or two then some AR15s and shotguns.

The front of the crowd looked like a private militia. A line of black-clad guerrillas in flak vests, helmets, and gas masks, held semi-automatic weapons across their chests. Security drones hovered above them, shining powerful lights down on the crowd. Tanya stopped filming just long enough to slip Duke's gas mask over his head before donning hers.

She took a deep breath before pulling her mask over her face. She could smell the sweaty excitement as if they were all waiting for something. A feeling of anticipation seeped through the crowd. People were muttering, then people were yelling from behind.

A metallic rumbling sound drowned out the bass. From where she stood, Tanya saw a plume of smoke chugging through the air and, as it moved through the crowd, the people in front of her pushed back as they tried to avoid the huge thing moving through them.

Then, as she watched a long straight barrel jutted out of the crowd like a lance with a green iron horse beneath it. And there, framed by the orange sky between two buildings, Valentina stood, arm raised on top of a WW2 tank. Her black beret was pulled low over one eye. Her leather jacket made her look like a rock star.

The black flags waving around her shook like excited marionettes and the tank moved forward, passing right beside Tanya. Looking up, she stared into the young woman's face. Valentina's brown eyes flashed and she winked. The tank rumbled to a halt and Valentina raised a bullhorn and addressed the crowd.

'Sisters. Brothers. Humans,' her amplified voice barked out, reverberating off the buildings and echoing over the crowd. 'We have come second for too long. We suffer while robots have more rights than we do. What about human rights? What about our right to exist and perform our own mission? What about life, liberty, and freedom of thought and expression?

'What about our right to equality before the law?' She pointed at the Chambers. 'In there they create our demise with no accountability, no oversight. We the people rail against our chains while the rich are free to play God. Is that fair?'

The crowd answered in a wave of angry shouts and denouncements. The guy beside her raised his fist and shouted, 'No. No. No.' There was a nightstick threaded through his belt beside a holster and a cluster of zip ties. Tanya tried to keep the camera steady as the crowd jostled, holding Valentina in the frame.

'More and more of us have been left behind,' said Valentina. 'First, they came for our jobs, then they came for our rights. Now they expect us to lay down and die. The rich escape to Mars. The rest are left to scratch on our bellies in the dust. They rape Mother Earth. They rape you every day.'

Jeers and hisses seethed through the crowd. Some people were yelling as pockets of anger flared up and burst. Tanya felt the crowd beginning to press in around her.

'And what do we do to rapists?' Valentina screamed.

'Kill,' went the crowd. 'Kill. Kill.'

Valentina stretched her hands wide and basked in the chants. Then she tossed the bullhorn aside and disappeared into the idling tank. For a second, nothing happened, then with a revving noise, the turret adjusted and the long barrel lifted. There was a flash and a crack.

BOOM

The whole crowd jumped. Tanya looked and saw a plume of smoke lift from a gaping hole in the main sphere. The man beside her giggled then they were both caught in the stampede as it rushed forward, pushing them tight together like a flood through a burst dam.

The crowd surged. She felt Duke wriggling in the backpack. She couldn't move her arms to get him and she tried to kick into the ground to get to the edge of the crush. They were spilling over the parched lawns and sidewalks running up to the spheres.

Then, as the crowd crossed the threshold of the Chamber and the river of people rushed through the hole, another explosion rocked the side of the building and Tanya heard a crumbling sound then something big hit her and a little black rose bloomed in the centre of her vision and she was knocked the fuck out.

III

Duke whined in her ear. Tanya groaned and pain shot down her left side. She was no longer wearing her mask. She tried to get her elbows beneath her and push herself up but it was like strong hands were holding her down. Duke stopped whining then began growling; the growls were muffled by his gas mask. Tanya opened her eyes.

Lights blinded her. Two bright white circles of light, each with a black dot in the centre like pupils blinked at her. Behind them, she saw a white carbon face, not unlike that of a human, a few inches from her own. Her mind baulked. The shining irises contracted and the head titled.

The robot stood up and lifted up the slab of concrete that pinned her. Before picking her up, it reached forward with a pointing index finger. A hypodermic needle stuck out of the end; a silver drop of liquid wobbled on its point. Tanya felt a prick in her shoulder and the quick warm morphine spread through her.

The pain receded but she didn't pass out. She felt herself being picked up. Looking over the robot's shoulder, she noticed someone standing in a hallway to her left, a human in the shadows. She knew who it was; she recognizes his trademark white t-shirt and board shorts. Instead of his usual flat-brim baseball hat, he wore a gas mask. The eyes were huge and lit up with green light and she thought he looked like an alien. Or a praying mantis.

She was carried over the robot's shoulder. Duke followed behind. There was a hiss and they passed through a doorway into a dimly-lit hall with dark green walls. Tanya could tell they were walking on carpet by the way their footfalls were muffled. She could hear an old hip-hop song playing somewhere.

Another hiss and they passed through another set of doors and now they were in some kind of medical centre. It was brightly lit and everything was sparkling chrome and white cupboards and countertops and Tanya was laid gently down on a hospital bed with the crisp sheets wrinkling beneath her. She looked up with mild amusement at the face of the world's first intelligent robot.

Even though she'd never seen it before, she felt instant recognition. It was the way its mouth turned up slightly at the corners and the way its eye-lenses tracked her own. She knew it was made of silicon, carbon fibre and metal, and yet she was certain she was looking at another human being.

It reached towards her and she felt another sting in her shoulder. Icy cold swept through her; it felt like she'd been splashed in cold water.

'What the fuck?' she said, shaking her head.

'Wu?' said the robot, recoiling swiftly.

Tanya pushed herself up in bed. Suddenly, she felt mortally afraid, as if she'd awakened from a pleasant dream into a living nightmare. She grabbed the bed frame and looked around wildly for Duke. She called his name, even as the robot advanced around the bed, its hands raised.

'Wu,' it said and she screamed.

'Hey,' said a voice, 'it's okay,' and Matt the Creator stepped into view. He no longer wore a gas mask and he held Duke, scratching the dog behind the ears. Duke was licking his hand. Even though Tanya knew how old Matt was, he looked remarkable young, still pretty much the same college kid who'd risen to fame early in the new millennium. His curly hair looked as unkempt as ever and with his freckles and glasses he looked like a kid.

'Wu, this is Tanya Pool. Say hello, Wu.' said Matt.

'Wu,' said the robot and brought its hands together and bowed.

'It's. It's,' said Tanya, trying desperately to think of something to say. 'Fuck,' she managed.

'It is a he,' said Matt. Duke began struggling and Matt stepped up to the bed, close enough for Tanya to reach out and stroke Duke's head and scratch him where he liked it under his chin. He smiled at her and she wished he could talk.

'Look,' said Matt. The robot extended its hand, palm up, to her. Its white fingers were long and delicate-looking. There were black sensor pads on its fingertips. Tanya could see the whirls and whorls of its fingerprints. Slowly, tremblingly, she reached forward and touched it.

It felt smooth and impressionable like a person's skin with tissue, blood and bone underneath. The finger moved slowly in a circle, softly, then down the front of her index finger. It traced around the inside of her finger and touched her interdigital fold. It tickled and she closed her hand.

The robot hand mirrored hers, closing into a loose fist. She looked at its face. The eyes looked at her and she wanted to say sorry for some reason but didn't. Everything felt a little surreal.

'Isn't it wonderful?' said Matt, breaking the spell. She looked at him. His eyes sparkled with tears. With his free hand, he wiped his eyes then wiped his fingers on his chest. 'You've done it, bro. What you've always wanted.'

'Wu,' said the robot, looking from Tanya's hand to his own.

'That's right,' said Matt, coughing and laughing.

'How did you know-' Tanya started to say but there was an explosion nearby and the floor shook beneath them. They could hear yelling and banging coming from the hall. Small arms fire erupted and the doors flew open with a fan of flames. Valentina strode into the room, followed by a dozen black-masked Anticaps.

'Haiiii,' cried Valentina: a war cry. Tanya could see the whites of her eyes, the black barrel of an Uzi; the barrel was belching fire. 'Kill the oppressors!' Valentina screamed and the barrel sparkled again and bullets ripped into the counters and cupboards.

A couple Anticaps made a beeline for Matt. Duke wriggled from the man's arms and landed on the floor. His nails skittered on the floor as he scrabbled under the bed.

'No,' cried Matt as Wu stepped forward. Guns roared and bullets glanced off the robot. Tanya saw it falter as she slipped painfully onto the floor. Duke tumbled into her and she curled around him, protecting him. Without thinking, she found her phone and began livestreaming.

She and about ten million people watched the robot grab the nearest Anticap and throw him against the cupboards with a sickening crunch. There was a series of bangs and thick green clouds of smoke pumped out of two canisters skittering across the floor.

The robot leaped through the air like a tiger, landing on one man's shoulders then sprang again, twisting and discarding his prey, onto the back of another. Guns blazed. Tanya could hear Valentina cackling somewhere in the smoke then her laugh turned into a gurgling scream. There was a sustained burst of fire then the shooting stopped.

Tanya pulled Duke close, pushed herself painfully to her knees and stood up. Holding the camera in front of her, she staggered into the gas.

IV

Coughing and sputtering, her eyes and throat afire, Tanya forged forward. First, she came across Valentina. She was lying on her back on the floor. Her jacket was torn and pulled back like a cape. You could see patches of her skin through holes in her shirt.

Tanya's gaze travelled upwards. Valentina's lipstick was smeared all over one cheek. Her neck looked weirdly long and disjointed and something hard pushed up against the skin. Valentina's brown eyes stared at Tanya, unblinking. Even though she looked fucked up, Tanya thought, the young woman still looked beautiful as hell.

Tanya stumbled on, wincing and trying not to cry out from the pain shooting up her right side. The red light in the corner of the screen blinked at her and she followed it forward. Out of the smoke, like a graveyard memorial, appeared two figures seated on the ground.

There was the robot, sitting up, with his head slightly bowed, the perfect picture of sorrow. In his arms lay Matt. The man's head tilted back and his hands and feet were totally slack. Tanya stopped and watched. The robot didn't appear to have noticed her. The way he cradled Matt looked like he offered the man for some higher power's appraisal.

'Wu,' said Tanya and stepped forward.

The robot stopped rocking and looked at her. For an instant, the eyes were white, then they turned red. The robot stood up, letting the dead man slide to the floor. Wu stepped over the body and came straight at Tanya.

'Stop,' she said, 'Wu,' as it came relentlessly forward.

And her audience of millions gasped as one as their view was suddenly dislodged and the robot went spinning upwards and all we could see was red circles for a second. Then we all looked at a dark screen with a little fringe of light in one corner. The phone had fallen face down on the floor. 

But there was still sound, though. Oh, those terrible sounds we heard on that eventful day back in 2021: that day the robots took over.