365 tomorrows

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Jack sighed, and tabbed through the moment’s top links. They hadn’t changed much since earlier that morning: still the usual desultory mix of politics, tech articles, and irreverent ‘humour’. Lolcats had been ceased to be funny almost as soon as the merchandising hit.

He peeled the interface wafer from his neck. The flexible plastic bilayer pulled away from his skin cleanly. Almost as soon as he did so, it emitted a ‘message received’ chirp. With a due sense of foreboding, he smoothed it back across the accustomed spot under his collar.

His customised newsfeeds immediately began to scroll across his vision. With a blink, they were obscured by the new message. It was from Dog, a gamer he’d met months ago.

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–

Hash: SHA1

Traffic analysis is great fun. I wrote a tool to track effective votes on all political matters. Whilst it seems that around sixty percent of those eligible do actually participate in our fine democracy/anarchy/infocracy - (did anyone ever decide on what to call it? Surely the germans have a decent compound noun for this. Anyway..) - but those votes are controlled by maybe ten percent of the eligibles. People seem to have, by and large, unconsciously given proxy power to an elite few.

This is what I’ve been waiting for. Hard data that shows I’m right. This isn’t a free state. Nothing like it.

I think I’ve found a way to concentrate popular opinion against these ‘power-users’.

I’m going full broadcast with the attached files soon. Have a look.

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–

Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (ThinWafer)

iEYEARECAAYFAkhoxRAACgkQWGnj9RCW8PKOqQCgjzOuYxQ7qjL8+qYqIFy2OHEn

3FsAn1YdZ2njpkhwZqCyAvGB8yUqniMy

=i2sv

—–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

That was Dog. Paranoid to the core. But he had attached signed data from the politics section. After all, you were only paranoid if you couldn’t prove it: and Dog’s scanner had bought up some passably interesting facts. The names changed, and drifted over time, but there was a core of identities that voted on every political motion that was bought up. And it was always to bury any outside submitted, or to vote up motions of their own.

—–BEGIN UNSIGNED MESSAGE—–

Unlike you, I’m not paranoid. Although for once you’ve managed to assemble something somewhat convincing. I don’t see how we can use it. There’s nothing we can do, frankly. And who cares? I’m going to shoot you some lol* — have a laugh, lighten up. I’m going to go outside.

—–BEGIN UNSIGNED SIGNATURE—–

wakkawakkawakkawakkawakka!

—–END UNSIGNED SIGNATURE—–

Jack felt a twinge of guilt at his slightly caustic reply. Some people never learnt, though, so he dismissed it. Dog would just feel more self-righteous. Jack connected to the CCTV spider he’d loosed into the net. He asked it to track down Dog. The mapped path showed a slow spiral inwards, avoiding high-density cam and mic coverage, headed straight for the forum: the base-in-reality for political debate. The forum was large enough to accommodate a few thousand; it was rarely packed to capacity. There was no real advantage to going there in the flesh, anyway. An alert flashed up: Dog was offline. Dog was never offline.

Jack was running hard, already halfway to the forum by the time he figured it out.

Every channel was suddenly full of Dog’s data, and locked from editing. Then a fireball blossomed from the top of the forum, both real and virtual. The political channels timed out, died, only to return as static error pages. A ripple of explosions toppled the building.

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

In the far distance Sahar could see the barest hint of a glimmer: sunlight on water. The ocean. In the other direction, the city stood rose up from the scrubland, as if challenging the world. It looked for all the world like a cluster of termite mounds, writ large in red and silver. Aside from the intermittent vegetation, there was nothing but a straight road between the two: just a gentle decline from the city to the sea.

Sahar had set up her impromptu camp roughly halfway along the road, under a suspiciously large acacia. Suspicious simply because it was growing within ten metres of the road, and was the single largest plant for miles around. Arrats had checked out the tree and the immediate area, and declared both free from serious threats. Sahar had yet to find out where the boundary between ’serious’ and ‘not serious’ lay: the machine’s lexicon was sparse when he was disconnected.

Arrats was a ‘distributed machine intelligence’. From what Sahar had gathered from her own research, that description was completely inaccurate, but gave something of the right idea. Arrats certainly got much more verbose when he had a high-bandwidth link. Sahar, upon learning that she was going to be partnered with a machine intelligence was determined to think of it as an ‘it’, no matter what. By the end of the first day, ‘it’ had slipped to ‘he’ — and she hadn’t even noticed.

Sahar stretched out in the folding chair that she’d set up in the shade of the tree. For all the oppressive climate and the anticipation of the job she’d soon have to do, she felt calm and composed. Beside her, Arrats was reclining against the crate of gear that had been dropped with them.

“You’re going to claim that you’re relaxing, aren’t you?” Sahar narrowed her eyes, and smirked.

“Balance takes concentration. If I ‘relax’ I can spend those cycles on other processes. Unlike some humans I could mention, I’m keeping busy. Those microsats we launched barely have a processor to rub between them.”

Arrats was occupying an ancient-looking robotic shell. There was a core of modern electronics, but apart from that, it was all rust. Newer shells had telltales to help communicate mood and attitude. Without them, Sahar found it hard to judge how to respond to her partner’s often dry humour. A pity, then that it had to be the refurbished shell or nothing. Even it would probably spook the natives.

“So, are they on their way?” Sahar asked, after a moment’s pause.

“Surprisingly enough, yes.”

“How long have we got?”

“Maybe twenty minutes. Set the charges. I’ll put the screen together.”

Twenty-two minutes later, the lead vehicle rolled over the activator for the ring of explosives. None of the vehicles in the convoy had been EM-hardened, and none of them had been armoured in any meaningful way: the thick sheet metal merely amplified the concussion wave and made escaping that much more difficult.

The screen shielded Sahar from the worst of it, but she still felt the EM burst as a sawblade in her frontal lobe. Once the explosions had stuttered to a halt, she stepped out from behind the screen. One of the drivers was crawling away from the burning wreckage, leaving a red-black streak on the dry earth. Sahar flipped him over and examined his wounds.

“You really thought you could get away that easily?”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Peter sat on the harbour wall, coat high around his neck in an effort to keep out the spray of water in the air. The freezing mist had a way of insinuating itself between layers of clothing. The sea roared defiance to sky, and at the horizon air and water intermingled, melting together into a gray mess.

Savannah drew her gloved finger through the patch of grey, brought it to her nose, and sniffed. Still unsure as to what was causing the mystery liquid to bubble out from underneath a drive plate. She stood up, and retrieved a nanowelder from her kit. Before she could set to disassembling the plate, the entire ship rocked, and proximity alarms started droning like a swarm of very, very angry bees.

Able carefully reassembled the hive, his confident motions fruit of long practice. Tending his father’s beehives was one of his favourite hobbies, and had been ever since he’d got over his fear of stings. He felt a slight rumble through his feet. An armoured column was in the area. The sheer mass of unwillingly moving metal always bought an earthquake with it.

Bernard kicked the seismograph: the needle abruptly ceased its shiver, and registered one slight peak. Seismic surveys of outworlds were about as dull as ditchwater: Bernard was reminded of enthralling times that he’d had watching alcohol evaporate.

Moll groaned, wishing that she could transpire alcohol. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but then it always did. She blinked, trying to clear her vision. Her head was pounding, a rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump. The wreckage of the party was still ankle-deep. Neb was slumped over the table, and Zal was picking his way towards the door, to answer the incessant knocking.

Tac pressed a hand to his armoured helmet, a useless attempt to ease the pain of the drumming piped through his implant. The drums, the call to war. They focused you, and drove away your fears and nightmares. The drumming never stopped, it modulated — your orders were embedded in the beat. The rest of Tac’s squad took up firing positions around him. Railguns cracked the air, forming gusts which threatened to knock him over.

Nathalie felt the displaced air, and flinched. The brick shattered on a policeman’s riot shield. She had gone to the demonstration because the politics had finally touched her life, restricted her freedom. Like thousands of others, she’d turned out to voice her rejection of the government. But it had got messy. The demonstration had turned into a full-blown riot and Nathalie was just desperate to get out. She spun round, looking for a way through the press of bodies. Someone caught her arms, wrenched them up behind her back: two policemen were pinning her, a tonne of bricks keeping her stuck to the ground.

Graph gasped as the rubble settled. It sounded like his ribs were splintering. One of his legs was definitely broken, and both of his arms were at least dislocated. This was, he assured himself, the last time he followed a radio signal into an ‘abandoned’ warehouse. He coughed, and grimaced at the pain. The explosive had left a residue in the air that was playing havoc with his lungs: his mouth was full of the taste of sulphur and metal.

Indar stared out at the blackness. The effect was electrifying. His hair was standing on end, and he could taste the metal tang of a forcefield.

“This is it,” the girl said, “you’ve reached the top, just moments before the earth will stop…”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

“Name?”

“Oreska Oleg.”

“Neurotype?”

“Atypical four.”

“Specialisation?”

“Mathematics.”

Oreska saw the world in numbers. He saw, below the fabric of existence, the harsh grid of mathematics with which everything could be described. He had shown an aptitude for manipulating numbers at an early age, so it had been decided that his atypical neurotype should be encouraged. Through an intensive training regime, Oreska’s facility for numbers was turned into an obsession, and from there, into an neurological imperative.

He found it a strain, sometimes, to deal with typicals. Like the nobody in the suit sitting across the table from him. The interviewer was your standard corporate drone. Average in all respects, and a neurotype so bland it could send you to sleep.

“I think we here at the Exchange will have a place for you, Savant Oleg. We are slipping behind our competitors in the physical sciences. We have the research facilities, but insufficient minds to analyse the data.”

“What areas are you researching?” Oreska feigned interest. That always seemed to get you further with the drones.

“I’m authorised to inform you that we’re conducting research into strangelets and microblackholes, as well as certain more tangible areas, such as drive theory. Naturally our research interests are far wider than this, but I’m not permitted to disclose anything more”

“Naturally. What percentage of your current staff are atypes?”

“In physics, we have a ratio of approximately one to twenty, atypes to typicals.”

“And my inclusion would make it?”

“Exactly one to twenty. Would you come this way? I’m told the second part of the interview is ready for you.”

The interviewer led Oreska through the complex, down two flights and stairs and through one airlock. Silently, he ushered him through a door marked with the two-dimensional shadow of a hypercube.

The room Oreska found himself in was relatively small. The walls were smooth and white, with a plastic sheen to them. They were covered in text; numbers, letters, and mathematical operators. The equations surrounded him. Involuntarily, Oreska slipped into mathspace.

The transition was as smooth as ever. The walls slipped away, along with his sense of self. The equations glowed hot and bright. Slowly, Oreska began to shift them, conducting a few exploratory transforms. And it clicked — he found the error buried in the numbers. The variables stretched, shifted, and settled into place. The modifications practically radiated ‘rightness’. Oreska stepped backwards, shaking off the arithmetic hallucinations.

A pen was thrust into his hand. Rapidly, Oreska made the required alterations.

“How long was I out?” He asked. The splinter skill originally knocked him out for hours. Self-discipline helped, but he still sometimes lapsed into a math-thrall.

“Twenty seconds, Savant.” The interviewer had gone, replaced by a taller man. Oreska’s face recognition was sketchy at best, but this man he knew. Professor Lantar, head of the Exchange.”Interesting solution. Please report to the reception for your identification and lab assignment.”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

“Time?” Cal called down to Peter from his perch on top of the ruined building.

“Five more minutes, give or take,” Peter shouted up to him, “Molly has never been particularly punctual.”

They were waiting about two klicks outside Ironworks. A rusting metal sign informed them that they were welcome at the ‘Perceptible Science Development Center, Beta West’. Calder was exploring the intricate peaks of concrete, looking for wildlife. Peter was standing just by the main road that ran directly to town, pacing around impatiently.

The shadows had lengthened considerably before they heard the rumble of Molly approaching in a borrowed four-tonne truck. The truck was one of only three functional vehicles in town. It had cost them a lot of cash and far too many favours to get hold of it for the night. If Peter’s plan didn’t pan out, they’d be in debt for a few months.

Molly parked the truck carefully, and waved from the driver’s side window. Peter hopped into the back, and dragged out the reel of cable they’d found. He quickly hooked it around the hitch on the back of the truck, and pulled it out into the debris field. Cal helped him to secure the end of the cable to the largest rubble fragment. They wove it between jutting remnants of the building’s steel substructure, and pulled it tight. The truck’s engine roared, and they quickly cleared the worst of the detritus away from the centre of the ruined building.

Under a thick layer of dust was what they’d come looking for. Cal swept the worst of the dust away from the small, circular panel set flush with the ground.. Molly brought three packs out from the back of the half-track, and Peter threw the last small bits of concrete away from where Cal was working. Cal was growing increasingly frustrated with the panel. It was studded with buttons, and he was entering combinations from a notebook, but with no obvious effect. Peter shined a torch over his shoulder. Cal punched one last combination, and was rewarded by a thick ‘clunk’. Nearby, a large metal panel had sunk about a centimeter into the ground, and was slowly grinding to one side. Molly peered down the newly-revealed hole. A ladder was attached to one side. The beam of her torch illuminated a floor, roughly ten meters below.

“I take it back, Peter. You’re less full of yourself than I initially estimated.” Molly mused, staring into the hole.

“Who’s going first?” Cal asked brightly, shouldering his pack.

“I will…” Molly responded, slowly.

The three friends climbed down the ladder in silence, the light from their torches dancing on the walls of the shaft. As Molly stepped off the bottom of the ladder, into the corridor adjacent, there was an audible click. Every third ceiling tile began to glow faintly, illuminating a long corridor.

“There’s power.” Peter stated. “Some, at least.”

“We’ve hit the jackpot,” Molly laughed, “there must be so much good stuff down here!” She hugged Peter. “You’re brilliant, know that?”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Kema Port. Hot, dry and dusty in general; the uncomfortable atmosphere an unavoidable side-effect of the equatorial location of the port. A walled city, surrounded on all sides by sand and rock, Kema is unforgiving. However, Kema the city is inextricably linked with Kema the spaceport, and by extension with the transfer station in orbit above. And so, linked into the rest of the continent by a maglev grid, Kema throngs with traders and pilots and mercenaries.

Inorian was feeling conspicuous in his standard-issue jumpsuit with his standard-issue tote bag, and slightly uncomfortable in what he perceived to be a standard-issue body. The beguilingly attractive tech that had woken him up and explained that it was baseline human, little different to the one he’d left on the near-earth habitat when he’s signed up for the colonies. It had dozens of little fixes, of course, and was in better shape than the one he’d left behind, but it was him. They’d even made sure that they’d got his face right. The pamphlet in his bag had told him of all the different adaptations his new body could take, and that feelings of dismorphia were normal, and would pass in a few hours.

Feeling very much like a cookie-cutter person falling off the end of a production line, he walked out of the arrivals terminal.

And into Kema’s biggest marketplace. For the first few minutes, he just stood there, letting the crowd flow around him. Every so often, he saw a flash of another standard-issue jumpsuit, but the majority of the throng were dressed in styles totally alien to him. There were rows of stalls everywhere, nothing more than wooden tables covered with racks of food, clothes and electronics. Most had awnings, but some didn’t, and you could barely move between them for the press of bodies or hear yourself think for the shouts of the sellers or the offers of the traders. It was intoxicating.

Slowly, the crowd began to resolve into individuals, rather than just an overwhelming mass of bodies. Inorian began to notice types and subtle repeating variations amongst the people: the adaptations that the pamphlet had listed for him. Photosynths wearing next to nothing, relaxing on rooftops, doing their ‘chlorophyll thing’. Diminutive, pale anaerobes dodged through the crowd, signing to one another and to the stallowners.

Shining metalotolerants practically screamed for attention;the most obvious ones looked like they’d been electroplated in silver and gold. Ino saw one or two caked in rust and grease, looking like walking industrial accidents. Uplinkers walked beside robotic ‘pets’, tethered to them by an interface cable. They directed the movements of heavy lifters and loaders, lending the machines a grace and subtlety that Ino had never thought a machine could be capable of.

“What’s your name, new fish?” A girl with a gleaming arm and a shock of black hair had peeled off from the flow and was grinning at Inorian.

“I’m Ino. And fish?”

“I’m Scout. Pleased to meet’cha.” She looked him over. “Fish means newbie. Colonist. Fresh out the vat. I’ve got a couple of hours to kill: d’you know your way around yet?”

“Nope. I was-”

“Awesome!” Scout reached out and grabbed Ino’s hand with her metallic one. For some reason, he was surprised at the warmth of her touch. “First things first, let’s get out of this crowd.”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

The subject of this image has a real name, but by custom, he uses a ‘messenger-name’: Jay. He’s moving on foot. The ground is broken and rough: with no road, he had to leave his vehicle behind. It’ll be one more day before he has the first in a series of syndications at mining enclaves and towns nestled amongst the mountains.

He’s wearing a bag over a long coat. The resolution of the image is just good enough to make out the individual characters of the public encryption key stitched into the material of the bag. The view from the electronic eye-in-the-sky shows Jay surrounded by a light haze: a mess of wireless signals and RF echoes. Bright panels on his coat betray the slabs of solid-state memory where his primary archive is stored.

He’s just one of a whole series of messengers: they tie together the continent, ferrying the all-important message archives from one isolated region to the next, through territories that are too dangerous or too unpredictable to lay cable. Message latency is generally measured in days, but security is absolute.

We return to the subject just after one of his syndications. Apparently at ease, relaxing with an intoxicant on the terrace of a guesthouse on a mountainside. As well as the syndication, he has also taken on more than the usual number of personal messages from the miners and farmers of the area, and is seeking solitude. Many messengers exhibit these behaviours, including the intoxicant dependence. Some are far more severe than others. Jay has a relatively mild habit, which is one of the reasons he was chosen for this experiment.

Messengers are interesting because there is statistically significant factor of difference between them and all other social groups under study. They display certain shocking similarities to one another, with no reflection on their region of origin. Messengers display a wholly unnatural obsession with security and authenticity. This is harnessed for the public image of their syndicate, a fact that they trade on, but this obsession invariably extends beyone a purely professional interest.

The second subject is one of our operatives, teleoperating a shell. Naturally, we have chosen an attractive female shell for this test, as we have judged that it will significantly increase the stress factor. Naturally, the shell is not a real messenger, but is merely a good fake. Her equipment is of the same specification as Jay’s, and her public key has a forged signature. We call her ‘Clara’.

Other combinations of this scenario have been carried out. When a non-messenger is introduced to ‘Clara’ (or the male equivalent, Cal), interaction is normal. They don’t question the identity of this person, but attempt to ‘get to know’ our operative, intrigued by the exotic persona and the popular romanticisation of the messenger lifestyle. When a messenger is introduced to our non-messenger version of Clara/Cal, the reaction of the messenger varies wildly: some express disinterest, others actively attempt to exploit the mythos of their position for personal gain.

Upon introduction, Jay and ‘Clara’ exchanged pleasantries, and some superficial comments about their syndication routes. ‘Clara’ left the terrace, in order to buy Jay a drink: she left her bag, and therefore the forged signature on her public key, with him. Immediately she was out of sight, he scanned the key. His eyes went wide with panic.

Hidden under his jacket was an edition of the famous ‘messenger gun’.

As ‘Clara’ stepped back on to the terrace, Jay shot her.

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

The Locus is the focal point of our operation. It exists for a period of one year, at the south pole of the nascent earth. That year is constantly recycled: we’ve been in operation for twenty-four years, subjective. Geologically speaking, we leave just before life shows up. After our first accident, and the creation of the beta timestream, we frameshifted to treating millenia as moments. Just to be safe.

We draw personnel from all six timestreams now, but back at the founding only the alpha stream existed. Well, that’s a lie, but a useful one. The other streams probably did exist, but we just didn’t know about them. We’ve got more scientists than field operatives here at the Locus, and arguements can get quite heated as everyone defends their pet theories.

The first accident was right when we set up here. We misjudged our recycling period and ended up leaving a crate of assorted garbage out in the cold. Almost immediately, our gear went nuts, claiming to have picked up an alternative set of destination co-ordinates.

Turns out that can of garbage was found at some point in the seventeenth century, and the broken electronics contained within were enough to accelerate development towards an information society by about eighty years. Naturally, we tried looping back on ourselves and cleaning up the garbage, but it made no difference. The beta stream was there to stay.

The gamma stream was created intentionally by one of our researchers, to see if it could be done in the lab. He didn’t have permission to do it. We looped back to stop him, and suceeded. But our gear still had access to a third timestream. Gamma is regressed: the scientist managed to stop the industrial revolution before it happened.

Delta and epsilon were all accidents of one sort or another, mostly made by gamma personnel during training.

Zeta was my doing. There’s a long-running joke that everyone kills Hitler on their first solo soujourn.

I did.

Delta’s Hitler was the worst. He succeeded where alpha’s Hitler failed, and ended up smashing both Russia and the United States.

So I killed him, and in doing so, I created Theta. Killing Hitler didn’t create a peaceful timestream. It didn’t stop the war. Killing Hitler killed everyone. Mutually Assured Destruction suddenly didn’t look all that mutual anymore, and the sky burned.

The Locus authorities threw me in a cell: one day, recycled forever.

They won’t kill me for it. They made that abundantly clear. I have to serve six billion life sentences, subjective.

They tell me that they’ll keep me alive for as long as they can.

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Robert Meier quietly walked between the rows of tanks. Each tank held a blank, a three hundred kilocredit backup body for whoever could afford the fee. They were low-maintenance, but regulations meant that a pair of eyes had to check each tank at least once a day. Every now and again he had to tweak the physiological mix that suspended each body, and about once a month, someone came to pick up one of the blanks. It was a job that no-one really wanted.

Robert took it because he had thought of a plan to bring a little more happiness into the world.

Set apart from the rows of blanks, a small cluster of tanks were given over to creating clusters of tissue-neutral organs and antigen-free blood. Most of his job was the preperation of these for shipping to the nearest hospital. Robert whistled to himself as he filled one-unit bags with blood, laying them out carefully on a desk for packing. This was his favourite thing to do. He had no morbid fascination with the artificial blood, but instead smiled at the chance to be philanthropic. The blood was his conduit to good works. It carried his gift to the sick and the ill; something to lift them and show them what life could be.

Once forty bags were filled, he got his syringe and the case of vials from his jacket, and pushed three hundred and fifty milligrams of metaescaline through the seals. Anyone who needed blood today would walk in Robert’s world for twelve hours: bright, vivid, fast and full of wonder. He packaged up the blood carefully, and called for a courier to take it away.

It was easy to lose track of time with the tanks. Once in a while, one of the blanks would talk to Robert. He could listen to them for hours as they spoke on any kind of subject. Normally it was one that he had some knowledge about, which was always a good thing. It was just getting dark when a young man with a hospital ID badge knocked on the door, asking for an extra few packets of blood. Robert happily fetched three from the fridge, bags that he’d prepared earlier. The man - a pathologist, his badge said - thanked Robert, and left with the blood.

The following day, the pathologist was waiting at the door when Robert went to work.

“Hey there!” Robert greeted him cheerily.

The pathologist punched him, hard, in the jaw.

On the ground, Robert woozily pressed a hand to his throbbing jaw, and decided that this man probably wasn’t real, Real people wouldn’t object to be freed for a few hours.

Later on, a police car came to pick him up. He recognised the faces of some of the officers from amongst his blanks. He tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t stop talking some nonsense about him being a murderer. Robert knew he hadn’t killed anyone, so just ignored them.

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Kate was lucky. Or so she kept telling herself.

Out of the whole world, she was the only one who had both the right kind of sight and the right kind of mind. It was a self-made mantra, one that rolled across her thoughts, looped back on itself and changed, mutated and grew with each iteration. The words spilled out of her, and made themselves real.

Right sight. Right mind. Luck. Lucky. Chance alignment. Good fortune. Fate. Destiny. Consistently high random numbers. Roll of a die. Roll of eighty dice. Kate be nimble, Kate be quick. Kate got to save the world. They can’t see them so you have to save them from themselves. The knife works. Save them. Kate be nimble, Kate’s got luck.

She was walking fast down a commercial street, trying not to attract too much attention to herself. There was an infestation nearby. The knowledge of it compressed her thoughts like a cast-iron circlet. It was impossible to ignore, an itch that desperately needed scratching.

A restaurant had spilled out onto the street: people sat at small tables, drinking coffee. She stopped by the establishment’s window, and saw her quarry.

The window made a satisfying crash when she threw the table through it. She jumped through the gap, and quickly scanned the room. Diners at tables. Twenty-two horrors and twice as many of the doglike terrors stared at her from all around the room. They growled, sensing the danger that she represented.

She launched herself out into the room, dodging between the evenly-spaced tables, and around the serving staff. She drew the long knife that had been hidden under her jacket. It was a rudimentary weapon at best, but special. She’d spent two long weeks working on it, changing the knife on a fundamental level so that it would damage the beasts.

She pinwheeled, the knives catching and breaking the terrors as they flung themselves at her. The diners stared at her with wide eyes, forks halfway to their mouths. Horrors roared their hate and menace, gnashing their too-many-teeth. Kate fought with reckless abandon, trusting the mantra, her luck.

Her circuit of the room finished by the door to the kitchen. All around, the broken bodies of the horrors lay on the carpet, slowly beginning to disintegrate. The evidence would be gone in a couple of minutes.

Andrew straightened his tie, and minutely adjusted the tiny enamel badge on his lapel. He stepped through the wreckage of the window, saw the shocked diners, and the damage.

“Did a woman come through here? She would have been acting quite oddly.”

A waiter close to him nodded dumbly.

“Thankyou.” Andrew stepped further into the restaurant, the broken glass crunching under his immaculate shoes.

“In case you’re interested,” Andrew spoke slowly, looking around the room at the silent diners, “her name is Kate. And none of this is her fault. There was an accident, a long time ago. An experiment went badly wrong, and her conscious mind began to drift out of control. Her mind extrapolates up from tiny clues in the way people speak and act: she sees terrible things, embodied as monsters.”

A murmur circulated around the room as people began to unfreeze. A few returned to their meals. There was a sudden crash from the kitchen: it sounded like a meat freezer exploding.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Andrew smiled at the stunned faces, “duty calls.”