Excerpt: SLOW GODS by Claire North

My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself.

The Major tells me that it is important that I channel my curiosity into expansive things, and goes to great lengths to keep me occupied. Regulated. To this end, I have written numerous papers on subjects such as extra-planetary botany, xeno-archaeological linguistics, inter-species sociology, the history of art, and one slightly whimsical article on juggling, which received a surprising amount of traction.

However, when my efforts are cited, it is rarely in the context of the work itself. My detailed analytics, exhaustive research – these are not of interest. Rather it is my otherness, my non-being/being, my perceived deficiencies in certain matters of sentience that seems to capture people’s imagination, regardless of how absurd these metrics are when one actually stops to think about them.

In short: I am a frustrated academic.

People get anxious when I am frustrated. They are concerned it may provoke unpredictable consequences. Thus, to keep me occupied, it has been suggested that I write down some of my experiences in a less formal manner, with an eye to “mainstream” audiences. I do not see the point – there are plenty of romantically inclined individuals with harrowing tales who will happily share their trauma in exchange for cash and an inter-planetary speaking tour, thank you very much.

However. I do appreciate that if left to my own devices, I can experience unwanted episodes. It would pain me deeply if my actions were to cause emotional or physical harm to those around me.

In telling my story, there are certain things I should perhaps lie about.

(I am a dreadful liar.)

I should make myself a hero. Pretend I knew certain things before I did, was not used by strangers and gods, did not leave people behind.

I should claim that I understand love.

This last is most important, and I am trying.

I am always trying.

Is that not enough?

This is the story of the supernova event known as Lhonoja.

By the end of it, several planets will have burned, a couple of civilisations will have fallen, and I will have spoken to an entity some consider a god, and whose theological status will remain in question throughout.

Before then, I must explain how I came to be, and for that, I must take you back several centuries, to Glastya Row.

Glastya Row started as a landing strip on the planet Tu-mdo.

Most urban establishments on most colonised worlds begin this way. Tu-mdo had been a prime terraforming candidate – comfortable gravity, good magnetic shield, not too hot, not too cold, not tidally locked and already possessed of a moon which, once water was thawed out in sufficient volume, would serve to stir the great big mixing bowl of Tu-mdo’s freshly churning oceans. The first colonists didn’t even need to spend five centuries in arcologies waiting for atmospheric conditions to settle, but were out and breathing without aid within a couple of pioneering generations. Two millennia later, Glastya Row had been transformed from pioneer’s outpost to merely another borough of some few million in the great city of Heom, a middling hub of profit and endeavour within the interplanetary-spanning United Social Venture.

They say you can tell a lot about a Venture based on how its employees name their children.

In Antekeda, the Venture that ran my city, these were the most common middle names given to children at birth:

Chairman – 15 per cent

Entrepreneur – 10 per cent

Director – 9 per cent

Abundant – 5 per cent

Diligent – 4 per cent

In Theymann, a Venture specialising in deep space habitation, the distribution skewed towards Pioneers and Engineers, while in Halsect there was an almost sentimental emphasis on children called “Aspiring”.

My parents had all the ambition you might expect of residents of Glastya Row, combined with a grim realism. Thus when I was born, my name was registered as Mawukana “Respected” na-Vdnaze. I might never achieve dazzling heights or have great Shine, but dammit, my neighbours would at least know that I was respectable.

It would be fair to say that things went downhill from there.

I am told that I cried an unhallowed amount when I was born, though no one seems able to clarify what “unhallowed” means. I imagine my scream rose a little in volume as they implanted my Chint in the top of my plump left bicep, already embedded with the debts I had accrued to the Venture that ran the hospital that sheltered me – 400 Glint for a standard birth, plus another 1,873 Glint for basic costs such as bedding, vaccinations, postnatal check-ups, vitamin shots, etc.…

Thus, before I was placed upon my mother’s breast, I was marked with the overriding feature of life on Glastya Row – the debt I owed.

As befits two individuals who named their child “Respected”, my parents were not irresponsible. They had carefully saved for this moment, and were between them able to bring my initial debt down to a mere 700 Glint, and keep on top of the 1.5 per cent child-rate interest payments my existence accrued. Moreover, to welcome me into the world, Antekeda gifted me with fifty shares, my ownership marking me as a citizen of the Venture. By the time I turned fifteen and sat my assignment exams, those shares were worth nearly 600 Glint – though my educational and civic debts were well in excess of 92,000.

This system, we were taught, was about fairness. We were pioneers and our world was a place of scarcity, hardship and struggle. Everything the Venture gave us – the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in – had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

All are born equal, and by their labours shall they rise.

This philosophy was the underlying constitution of the United Social Venture. Both it and the more anthropologically engaging qualities of social and economic status that arose from it were known as Shine.

We were not a high-Shine family. My parents ran a small restaurant that served cold-broth dumplings to hot middle Managers too tired and busy to cook. They did their best to improve their Shine, constantly cooing over difficult, well-dressed customers and putting themselves forward to run catering events in Shiny houses or at Shiny events, but nothing could really wipe the smell of Glastya Row off their grease-stained aprons and soap-scoured fingers. Every six months, an Antekeda representative would come by and offer them another course or long-distance learning diploma in business growth and radical enterprise, and sometimes my mother, always the more energetic of the two, would sign up and do her coursework and pay her fees, and talk at the table about how this was it. This was the change we needed to get out, move up. It never came to anything.

During my “cute” years, which I was told were seven to eleven years old, I worked as a waiter in the shop in the hope someone would give me that most wondrous of miracles, a “tip” for my services. By the time I was twelve, you could see the shape of the adult I was going to be. My father’s thick, straight black hair was overgrown around my mother’s sunset-through-smog face. I was always a little short, with green-grey eyes that narrowed to almost impossible lines when I squinted in confusion (as I did a lot) and pale lips that didn’t smile enough, or smiled wrong, or just didn’t quite get the smiling business right, whenever I tried to move them.

“Smile with your eyes,” my mother commanded, during one of her we-shall-advance phases. So I stood in front of the mirror in the grubby upstairs bathroom and squeezed my eyelids tight and waggled my eyebrows and tried to inventory every tiny muscle about my growing grubby dishcloth of a face, until I could at least achieve something that didn’t seem to upset people too badly.

Despite, or perhaps owing to, these efforts, I was relegated to the back of the kitchen so that my mother could stay out front, charming and occasionally bamboozling the customers. By the time I was fourteen and my schooling was getting unfeasibly expensive, it was already apparent that I would not have a Shiny life. Most of my classmates were starting to drop out into the menial labour that was the heart of every Venture, and those who remained were preparing for adulthood with an endless dance of alliances, enmities, petty acts of cruelty and theft, out-daring each other in who could game the system. Bullies thrived – so long as they were not caught. Being caught was far worse a sin than being a thief, a liar or simply cruel.

Many economists, observing the Shine, have marvelled at the low levels of educational obtainment common across its population. The circular economies of most other worlds, powered by the sunlight or atomic reactors and fed by agricultural systems whose architects can sit in their pantries dispatching drones to the harvest, consider education not merely of primary importance to the success of their systems, but as frankly the most interesting thing the population can do with their expansive time.

However education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.

I do not believe I was an unhappy child.

Neither do I think I was happy.

I did not understand the games that the Shine required. I struggled to lie, struggled to apply the dichotomy of winner and loser to the world I saw around me. When I tried playing, people laughed at me for doing it wrong in some mysterious way that I could not fully comprehend, and in time I simply stopped trying. I made friends with the most vulnerable and afraid, because they seemed to need friends the most, but simply sharing a sense of being outcast and alone is not quite the same as the meeting of true and lingering minds. I became quieter and quieter, since it was safer to be a nonentity, a child worth neither robbing nor mocking, than to try and fail so badly at the rituals of life that my peers seemed so gifted in. I passed my exams by rote, but showed no entrepreneurial spark save in the sciences, which was an unfashionable and underfunded discipline.

There was no question of being able to pay senior school fees when I turned fifteen, and no real need for me in the restaurant while my parents were able-bodied, so I took the only job that would have me and started work at the local traffic tower. Initially I was a runner, doing whatever errands my bosses needed doing; by the time I turned eighteen, I had been promoted to junior flight-caller, directing sub-atmospheric cargo traffic in the airspace around the city. When they gave me the first two scars on my left ear to mark my entry into the world of work, I felt moderately proud. Pain sometimes has that effect – we imbue it with meaning, to try and make it seem like it has a point. Very few things sum up life in the Shine better than our scars.

The work was harmless enough – computers did most of the actual route planning and plotting, and my main duty was to be screamed at by irate customers when they weren’t given priority, and to occasionally override the bot’s default settings to let a VIP – or someone who’d paid to be treated like a VIP – through. Very occasionally we’d get a small spaceflight vessel at the high-thermal pad on the edge of the city and I’d try to chat with the captain on comms – someone who’d seen other worlds, other stars – but my understanding of the worlds beyond my own was so stagnant, so limited, that I didn’t really know what to ask.

“Maw,” sighed Ruc, the most indulgent of my colleagues in the tower, “you just don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“All of it. Just… all of it.”

In the language of the Mdo, the peoples who are the Shine, there are two words for “us”. The first is the cohesion of necessity. In the early days of the Ventures this was the sacred “us” – the “us” of the slowship, of recycled air and recycled oxygen, of shared heat and metal and danger. It was the inviolable “us” of peoples who, if they cracked at all, would be torn apart. Then the ships settled, colonising the worlds that would become the Shine, and this first “us” became the “us” of our shared Venture, of the tight bonds of labour and the scars we bore. This second “us” is the “us-not-like-them”. It is the “us” that is the barrier against which no other can break in, and was the “us” that was always used when people explained why I could not be with them.

Then the Slow came.

This is what I knew about the Slow, the day qe came to Tu-mdo:

I knew that the Slow was a machine, and it was old. Older than the Shine, older than the Accord of planets that existed outside Mdo space. No one could remember a time when the Slow hadn’t existed, and archaeologists kept on uncovering further proof of its ineffable ancientness. A perfect black sphere moving through the interstellar darkness at a maximum of 0.3 of the speed of light, despite this sedate progress between the stars the Slow had a knack of showing up in the vicinities of major galactic events just before they unfolded. This had uncomfortable implications, which the Shine largely chose to ignore.

The quans referred to the Slow as “qe”, saying that “it” was the pronoun you used for an insentient object, like a kettle or a biscuit tin, whereas qe was very obviously alive and thinking. The Shine disapproved of such nuance, rattling off the usual nonsense about souls and sacred flesh and so on. But even the Shine knew better than to ignore the Slow, when qe deigned to speak.

The Slow qimself did not come to Tu-mdo, instead sending qis messengers, black boxes tumbling through space, propelled by no-one-was-quite-sure-what but that pundits grumbled was probably “some sort” of ion drive. Six of qis messengers entered sub-light broadcast range of the planets Cha-mdo, Ber-mdo, Tu-mdo and Yu-mdo and the orbital habitats Reio-tu and Khd-tu before astronomers detected them. The military immediately wanted to shoot them down, as militaries do, but the diplomatic corps bartered them down to merely imposing total comms blackout with nuclear strikes a poised backup.

By then, other systems in the wider Accord had also discovered the black boxes entering their magnetic space. Adjumir was the first to formally announce its sighting, followed by Haima and four quan outposts scattered between Ho’aka and the Eyrie. In the end, seventeen systems admitted to having detected the messengers of the Slow.

The scale of the visitations, the varied points of origin, the time in which these boxes must have been travelling all added to consternation among observers, a sense of something significant about to happen. Pundits pundited; conspiracy theorists grew irate. There was enough time between spotting the objects to their final deceleration for everyone to get really rather stressed.

A few observers pointed out that the Slow’s messengers were descending upon points within an eighty light-year radius with a clear and obvious centre, but their observations were dismissed – not because they were implausible, but because their implications were too alarming to consider. This is a flaw I have observed many times – people will expend vast energies in ignoring the obvious terrifying thing because it terrifies them so. It is a trait that fascinates me to this day.

On Tu-mdo, of course, we had no idea that any of this was happening.

This turned out to be a mistake on the part of the Executorium, for on reaching stable orbit above the planetary surface, the Slow’s messenger proceeded to immediately, and seemingly without actually transmitting anything detectable in the electromagnetic spectrum, hijack every communication device within the system.

PEOPLE OF TU-MDO! qe proclaimed. IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS, THE BINARY STAR SYSTEM LK-08091881 WILL COLLAPSE IN UPON ITSELF. THE RESULTING SHOCK WAVE WILL TRAVEL OUT AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND OBLITERATE ALL LIFE WITHIN AN EIGHTY-THREE LIGHT−YEAR RADIUS. YOU HAVE UNTIL THEN TO PREPARE.

The wording was largely the same on every planet above which the Slow’s messengers came, with a few tweaks for localisation. On Adjumir, for example, the binary star system was identified as the Lovers – a sentimental bit of common colloquial that made itself immediately understood to the waiting populace. And on Haima, the radius of destruction was given in localised “qika” metrics rather than the more broadly used light year, with the phrase “obliterate all life” expanded to include the metric “of all degrees of sentience, constitutionally acknowledged and otherwise”.

Above orbital platforms and nascent moon-worlds, the Slow gave qis warning. In the darkest corners of the blackest mining belts; above the glittering capitals of triumphant civilisations, qe proclaimed the fate of billions, and those billions listened in enraptured silence and dread.

At Tu-mdo, sixteen seconds after the Slow began qis transmission, the authorities opened fire and blasted the messengers from the sky before they could squeak another word.

The first pioneer Shine children are taught about in school is Clonus um-Bagret Tererens. Hé was captain of the first Venture fleet, with its cargo of 3.2 million colonists on its four-hundred-year voyage across the stars. This was before arcspace travel, before we had learned to bend the impossible dark. Clonus um-Bagret Tererens famously chose the fleet’s final destination of Ko-mdo with a declaration of “There is no obstacle Man cannot overcome!”

This is another motto of the Shine, etched in gold above major corporate centres.

Happily for Clonus Tererens’ ambition, if not hís common sense, there was a lot about Ko-mdo to overcome. It had liquid water at the poles and enough carbon dioxide to feed habitation dome scrubbers, but the gravity was light, the magnetic shield was weak and the soil largely toxic to human life. But Clonus um-Bagret Tererens had a vision, and a belief in the inherent power of human ingenuity and strength of human labour. So long as we work, and work hard, without complaint, hé said, there is nothing we cannot achieve. And so it was, although later scholars questioned whether it ever in fact needed to be.

Clonus died before hé could see hís vision of a humanity elevated by labour come to fruition, so it was hís successor, Aemilis Nona Wells, who put down the first oxygen revolt. Her swiftness and brutality was to become something of a theme in USV policies, and in the aftermath, certain ideas were codified into law, including the principle that every individual was only worth the sum of their labour. Slackers, scroungers, those who didn’t pull their weight – the frontier of space was too hard, too cruel for the rest to carry these, and if their number included those injured or old, well, that was just a harsh reality. The duty of every individual in the Shine was to ensure that they were working at the peak of their individual capacity; if everyone did that equally, there would be a perfect society where no one would have to worry about looking after anyone else at all.

By the time Quincitus Keto led the breakout from Ko-mdo to conquer the worlds of Bi-mdo and Gera-sa, the army hé led was almost unrecognisable from the original colonists who had come to Ko-mdo nearly three centuries ago. Breeding programmes had over-filled the cramped arcologies with too many unemployed teenagers, their limbs frail and thin in the weak gravity, gene-blasting radiation and meagre rations of Ko-mdo. But the peoples of the United Social Venture were not ones to lie down and die, and so with hís ragged ships hammered together by blood and will, with hís suicide troops and desperate force of arms, Quincitus Keto led the people of the USV out into the galaxy and to fresh new worlds, seizing by indomitable strength that which weaker peoples were too frail to defend. Thus the USV proved once and for all not merely that it was a force to be reckoned with, but that it was ideologically right. That hardy survivors, willing to work themselves to the bone, could with sheer guts and strength overcome any obstacle. Even an obstacle as absurd as trying to eke out a life in the dust devils of Ko-mdo, miserably failing in the attempt and then conquering nearby, far gentler systems when you eventually realised the scale of your generational, mind-boggling mistake.

A few millennia later, the Slow came to Tu-mdo.

Half the planet saw the Slow’s message, and though the Marketing Standards Agency raced to scrub all mention of it, even they couldn’t keep down conversation about the end of the world. Venture Management initially tried to shrug off the Slow’s message, claim it was a conspiracy, an insentient AI sent by the Accord to sow chaos and so on. Alas, the binary star system LK-08091881 – more generally known as Lhonoja – was only seventy-nine light years away, a mere jaunt in galactic terms, and every astronomer in the southern hemisphere, from advanced observatories to teenagers with a telescope, could turn their gaze upon the heavens and say but oh goodness, oh my, oh yes. There are two stars spinning towards each other, exactly as the Slow said, and if we look back through the historical data it would appear that they are on a collision course and actually the maths is fairly elementary now we bother to think about it…

The Ventures wiped the historical data.

This caused further outcry – it was too late, too much, the world could see the truth of it.

So they tried a different approach. Yes, Lhonoja was going to collapse in on itself, but no, it wasn’t a problem. Not a problem at all. The nearest planet to the blast – Cha-mdo – all that needed was a magnetic shield built in high orbit, a fairly simple bit of engineering, and it would be fine. And the rest of the Shine? It was far too far from the supernova to actually experience any harm. There’d be some nice dancing lights in the sky for a few days and maybe a couple of thunderstorms, and then it would pass, and where the light of Lhonoja had shone, now it would not.

Nothing to worry about.

Nothing to worry about at all.

This time, when the astronomers protested, the astronomers disappeared.

Then the physicists objected, and they disappeared as well.

Then the philosophers, the mathematicians, the planetary biologists, the engineers, even a few political scientists – they vanished, and kept on vanishing, until no one was really left to object.

And that might have been the end of it, except that in Heom, one of the physicists they disappeared was Sarifi “Famed” im-Yyahwa, and she had Shine. A middling commnet personality, she went to the right parties, talked to the right people, hosted spectacular occasions when spectacle was required but knew also how to invite the correct manager to a quiet dinner at an appropriate place. She conformed enough to be accepted, but was mischievous enough in her opinions to stand out, and thus, one careful smile and polite “how fascinating – tell me about you” at a time, she had risen, and people envied her. There is no Shine greater than being envied.

We are the United Social Venture, she said.

We are pioneers, resilient, hardy.

So why are we so afraid of the truth?

The Marketing Standards Agency initially let her broadcast, because she wasn’t advocating any especially radical change. “Just asking questions” was her motto. But the more she talked, the more people listened, not least as there didn’t seem anyone else worthwhile to tune into, and the more people listened, the more she clearly felt she had something to say.

“But why are we pretending this isn’t an extinction-level event?” she demanded one day. “Why are we so scared?”

The first time she was arrested, she paid her way back onto the streets within three hours, marching before the cameras with the scars of her imprisonment bare across her shoulders, declaring: “This time it’s actually the end of the world!”

Her broadcasts evolved. “The Executorium isn’t willing to confront the scale of the danger facing us, because to do so means confronting the weaknesses in our Ventures! Maybe it’s time to admit that the system doesn’t work, and that to face up to what is coming, we need fundamental change!”

This time when the Shine arrested her, there was rioting outside the prison, and she was busted out before security could intervene.

Now she broadcast from underground, and her broadcasts were electric.

“Corruption! Exploitation! Inertia! Stagnation! This is what our Venture has become and they” – everyone loves a polemic “they”; it leaves so much to the imagination – “they don’t want you to know it!”

It is unclear whether Sarifi actually believed a word she said – perhaps it was just another power play, another bold move to accumulate more Shine by making herself relevant, the kind of firebrand who guaranteed views without ever actually taking anything seriously. Perhaps she understood that it was only her Shine that kept her safe, and her Shine was built on outrage, noise and attention.

It is not especially easy to attach new ideas to something as big as the very literal “end of the world” and its expected arrival in one hundred and seventy-nine years, no matter how charismatically you may express it. But people can channel big fears into more immediate concerns. They were hungry. Saw their debts grow, not diminish. Went sick rather than pay for medicine. Laboured mightily to get more Shine, and yet never seemed to rise. Had been promised hope. Saw only stagnation. Paid their profits in corruption and tasted poison in the water they fed to their children at night. Such a loose conflagration of sparks, each burning by themselves, was not quite enough to start a fire. And yet they simmered.

The last time Sarifi was arrested, there was no public announcement, no legal declaration. She simply vanished without a trace.

Usually that would have been enough, but times had been hard in Heom, and the Executorium clearly misjudged how people would interpret absence.

Petitions became protests, protests became marching through the streets, became unauthorised acts of disobedience, the downing of tools. Became night-time clashes with Venture security, hacks and hijacks of commnet airwaves, mass arrests that only made the shouting louder. By the time Special Operations were sent in, the protests were not even about the inevitable destruction of the planet; they were about working conditions and stagnant salaries, about elders left to die because they had not paid enough of their debts to live, about children as young as nine put into the debtor’s collar because they had been judged without potential and sold onto whichever Venture cared to pay a pittance for their labour. Nor were the protests confined to Glastya Row, or even to Heom. The Slow’s message had awoken something across the Shine, a sense of expectations unfulfilled, promises broken. We were supposed to look after ourselves so that no one had to look after each other; yet how did looking out for just ourselves solve this?

Perhaps this was what the Slow intended all along. After all, qe came with a message, when qe could have said nothing at all.

I did not take part in the riots.

I hid in my room, with the window shuttered and door locked.

Even though there was an airspace suspension, I was meant to go to work, and was fined when I did not. I tried to get a medical certificate to exempt me, but the doctor’s prices were higher than the penalty. Eventually I risked the two-hour walk across the city to the control tower, complete with blanket and pillow so I could sleep on the office floor, but just as I arrived, a strict stay-at-home policy was imposed, fining anyone caught outside their residence, even for medical emergencies. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That is the Venture way.

So I crawled home in the dark, and to distract myself from the mixture of rage and silence in the streets, I read.

Here: the green-nosed biscuit shark. It is functionally deaf, blind, but its electromagnetic senses are so good it can detect the slightest flutter of a creature up to twenty kils away, and is sent into a frenzy by any boats that come too near, driven mad by the howl of its electrics. It migrates every year from pole to pole in a perfect straight line, following the magnetic currents of the world.

(Gunfire outside; someone calling for help. I put my hands over my ears, keep on reading.)

The aka-aka, many-legged and furry-backed, who build their cities deep in the dust of their home world, and whose spaceships resemble nothing so much as the great organic insect hives from which they came, and who communicate by touch and dance and are known to occasionally eat their dead when times are hard, having digestive systems that are more than capable of breaking down any questionable proteins that might be transmitted by the act, and who have no words for “peace” or “war”, merely “being” and “un-being”, the latter of which is the closest they come to expressing the grotesque violation, the unbearable insult of violence committed against another, which must be punished no matter what by un-being rendered in kind, since consequences, the aka-aka proclaim, are the only way people ever learn.

(The calls for help are silenced. Somewhere, something distant goes whomp whomp whomp. It sounds like flames. I didn’t know that flames could make that kind of sound, but it seems right, somehow, seems like a kind of burning.)

About the universal vulture, a catch-all term for the tendency of carrion birds to evolve in basically every biome of every world. Most terraforming programmes introduce vultures or creatures like them to help accelerate decomposition within the system. Where they do not, vultures soon emerge anyway, no matter the density of atmosphere through which they float, no matter the meat upon which they feed. Evolution loves a vulture.

(When people do not understand you, and you do not understand people, you must find your beauty and your joy elsewhere.)

I do not know how near the gunfire came.

I did not know if anyone was “winning” or “losing” or what that might entail.

On the second day, the commnet was completely blacked out. I ate dried food from a foil packet and did not answer the door when my neighbour, Elder Zi, started wailing, because it sounded like she needed help. In the Shine, you left the weak behind. That habit had stayed embedded in our society long after we achieved abundance, enriched with words such as “strong”, “independent” and “resilient”. So for a day and a night I listened to an old woman cry, until she cried no more.

On the third day, Special Operations bombed the city.

They gave no warning, sounded no alarms.

I woke to the end of the world, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t the end of the world, but the End of the World, the promised death by binary star, arriving one hundred and seventy-nine years ahead of schedule. My room shook and the windows shattered and the noise… It was not that it was loud, merely relentless, a shock that lingered in the mind long after the ringing outside had ceased. I felt lonely more than I felt afraid. Apart from my parents, who loved me more than they liked me, I could not think of anyone who would especially miss me. My life would come and go, and the only record of its existence would be the debt I had left upon it – 57,423 Glint, a sum that had been swelling and shrinking since the moment of my birth. Covered by the noise of the bombings, I allowed myself to howl, to shake my fists and produce all manner of implausible, strange noises from the back of my throat.

Still here, I screamed. I’m still here! I’m still here!

When the bombing stopped, there were fires.

My building was still standing, but two doors down a block was burning. I staggered out into the crimson dark and joined a chain dragging buckets from a broken pipe in the street to throw water not on the building, but on its neighbours, the people of Glastya Row briefly united in protecting what property they had. By the time the sun rose, I was a filthy shadow sitting beneath the scars of my home. I thought of my parents and their shop, but in the broken-toothed landscape it was hard to orientate, to work out which way was north, south, up or down. Familiar landmarks were gone, and as I tried to stumble through the ruins of the city, I kept spinning round and round, the bodies of strangers in the street becoming a more distinct landmark than broken buildings I had known my whole life.

In the end, I stumbled into Corporate Security Services.

Antekeda Venture had drafted in operatives from Halsect and Blue Land to assist the local forces. When I saw them, I felt relief, staggered towards them with arms open and mouth wide, thinking they were here to help, to help me, please, help!

I don’t know what they communicated with each other behind their faceless white helmets, but I imagine it was something along the lines of “here’s another one”, because they shot me without warning.