Hoove sat much of this time near the door through which they had entered.  The pulsing in his head that had begun the moment he’d heard Bremen address him by his nom de guerre seemed to echo and be magnified by this space.  Nor the pain high in his chest, nor the terrible slowness of…

The story of HOWW’s ancient CEO was inescapable.  Samson Wilford of the Commons sang his epic wherever serfs couldn’t avoid their titular president’s image.  He personally owned more than one percent of the world’s wealth, not counting the value of his subsidiary companies.  A grand yet humble man, approaching a hundred and ten years old,…

 “H-hey,” Hoove crouched over them where they lay, arm-as-pillow, in a corner.  They were not asleep, but the first day of withdrawal was a cloud in their head and a roar in their ears.  Nice Try’s departure felt like a caved-in chest. “You need to answer this.” Hoove gestured to his window, which Bremen had…

When Bremen staggered up to the small camp, Nice Try was sitting up, still immobile but apparently able enough to see that she pointed a disappointingly human finger at the smear of blue around the side of Bremen’s face. They muttered, “You should see the other guy,” and moved on up to get some fresh…

Calling a car didn’t end up working out.  Apparently a lot of things were still staggered by the outage, little things like the navigation and positioning systems in individual vehicles and people, and there were dead zones for sidecar service.  So, instead, they walked.  The walk was very different with the window mounted over their…

Amber and black. Those colors were Bremen’s world for a moment outside of time.  Rich and bold.  Malign, but also comforting. Whether it was the concussion or high emotions overwhelming their meds, Bremen’s mind was a thick, soupy fog.  Their brain had thrown errors, and was struggling to reboot, as if it were also a…

Bremen’s last pill snapped with just a few pounds of pressure at the tips of their thumbnails, scattering what felt like incalculably valuable crumbs of faint pink chemical particulate away from their cot.  They couldn’t help but think of each of those flying particles as if they contained the entirety of the night’s necessary dose,…

The number of times Nice Try called their client a fucker over the next few days was prodigious.  No one got fired, though.  If he heard, he probably considered it “growing pains.”  When the next evaluation came around he was pleased with their progress, gave them a few tips on the kinds of imagery his…

“Is it bad,” Bremen said.  “that a few weeks ago, I would’ve been happy to see almost the real whale, but now I don’t know if I’d be happy seeing the real one – now I feel like I can’t be satisfied if I never hear it sing.” “I don’t think it’ll sing while it’s…

“Are you ready?” Nice Try clutched the window in her eagle-thumbed hand, proffering it cautiously. “You first,” Bremen said. “I’ll take the second shift,” Nice Try said.  “Look at the whale.” “You first.” “Look at the whale,” Beetroot groaned. He was.  He hadn’t been able to look away since they had come in, for their…

The young woman was talkative.  That happened sometimes, when people came to Horis. “I haven’t been to the city since…” she was saying.  “It’s been so long.  Everything’s branded.” They were already in the city, of course.  She lived in it.  But only in the low-rising areas at its edges, where the eternally crashing wave…

The shelter was relatively large, but not enough so to accommodate all of the homeless serfs nearby who needed it at once.  The collective could not get in every night before it filled up, but they could at least rent lockers to store their supplies and sketches and, soon, finished works.  Of course, like anything,…

Williams Kempston, apparently a big-name executive in the upper ranks of the Howard Industrial Dynamics corporation, personally owned a number of complexes across the west city, and plenty more across the globe.  This particular one, two miles and change from the shelter out of which the artists were now based, was his seat of operations. …

Dresden was awake the next time Bremen had a break from their Bauerdel job, but not in the mood to talk.  They were dehydrated and sore, and apparently the entire Divot was a serotonin stimulant zone, presumably to keep its weary conscripted workers from revolting – which meant Dresden could never be fully operational here. …

The next several hours had, in fact, been vital.  With shaky fingers and unresponsive cheeks, Odom had begun to enact the plan she had worried for years she would need to carry out.  Before Barker had even departed she had set a few bots on consolidating her virtual belongings – tens of thousands of microsubscriptions…

Middle Strut Infirmary, Inc., a recent corporation within the Bauerdel DivServ family, permitted Bremen six hours’ rest after each ten on the job.  They weren’t required to return to the strut for it, but they wanted to. They spent the car ride back searching through Liriope’s data.  None of the limited employment information they could…

In the ensuing week, Odom slept very little.  The laboratory’s data was mostly safe, though large swathes of it were stolen before new security could be put in place.  That didn’t bother her, much as it made the committee fume.  If anything, it gave her hope that some other lab, though without direct access to…

Bremen didn’t want a blotch on their employment record – if all went to plan, any meager accolades or meaty penalties Liriope accrued would be folded into their real record once they arrived – but they didn’t have an iron gut.  And, until more systems came back up, there was nothing keeping them from stepping…

Whatever was going on in other cars, the steerage passengers were on their own.  Once the cacosensory deluge began to slow, the atmosphere was tense and quiet.  Bremen held Dresden while Nice Try tended to a breathless Beetroot, and there was nothing to do but wait for some news to come from the train.  Which…

Horis was on the floor.  Cool concrete competing with the endless heat.  He was naked. He had been there for a long time.  He hadn’t gotten up, because he was remembering things.  He didn’t know when he could have known them before.  When he could have forgotten them.  It wasn’t possible.  But he knew them.…