A COELO USQUE AD CENTRUM

I

She gazed out of the porthole. Forty-two kilometers below, the Earth was spread before her. Gripping the edge of the hemispherical bay window the woman leaned forward. White clouds roiled and obscured much of the continents. Almost directly below one of the UAE artificial island archipelagos was plainly visible.

After fourteen months the view still managed to captivate her occasionally. Growing up she had always harboured an affection for space that none of her friends shared. She tried to project a nonchalant affectation, to maintain a stoic professionalism, but the truth was she was giddy. This was the happiest she could remember being.

Although the depot was still technically within the Earth's atmosphere, it was enough for her.

The depot was a titanic asterisk suspended 140 000 feet above the Earth. A lighter than air way station two miles across. The stop over point for high-altitude airship passengers and cargo destined for low Earth orbit and beyond. Now a permanent fixture in the sky, it was constantly inhabited by dozens of crew members, technicians, and workers.

"I'm a glorified forklift operator," she thought, "and I couldn't be happier."



II

"Aye, Fatimah. How's it goin'?" said a passing man in a navy blue jumpsuit pushing a small cart over-burdened with cleaning supplies.

"Alright, yourself?" but he was already at the other end of the corridor.

That was a lie. She'd be happier if she wasn't forced to constantly partake in insincere social conventions. The man, his name escaped her, didn't actually care about how she was doing. Any answer other than "fine" would have undoubtedly resulted in uncomfortable awkward silence. But in the name of social cohesion Fatimah went along with such absurd rituals.

In such a small population it was especially important not to antagonize anyone. There were 96 permanent residents who lived and worked aboard the suborbital space station, and there could be more than twice as many disembarking passengers at any particular time. To stave off boredom there was a bar, a small theater, and a modest gym available to employees.

Fatimah's reflection stared back at her in the view port glass, silhouetted by the impenetrable blackness of space. Dark brown eyes surveyed a 28 year old woman's face with light brown skin and an aquiline nose. Long black hair spilled over her shoulders framing the pewter ouroboros pendant that adorned her neck. She could not remember a time when she hadn't been terribly self-conscious about her appearance, her nose in particular annoyed her.

She turned from the window and walked swiftly down the corridor not appreciating the 2% difference in gravity.



III

Fatimah passed through the empty gate on her way to the concourse at the hub. There were no passengers offloading at the moment; the silence was ubiquitous in the hall bereft of visitors. Gate C was where the largest airships docked, carrying mostly cargo that was moved externally via rail. The depot sported a sophisticated system of counterweights and emergency ballast suspended below the primary gondola to provide stability during such maneuvering.

She came here to get away from everyone. Aside from the custodial staff and maintenance, few ventured down here when no ships were docked. It wasn't like the passenger gates. Here much of the superstructure was left exposed, or plywood sheets served as walls. There was an honesty to it. Their hinges caked with grease, massive industrial air locks for vacuum-sensitive cargo stood sentinel.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night (Dubai standard local time), Fatimah would journey here, claim a view port, and curl up and just stare out at the myriad points of light, her mind's eye alive with visions of distant solar systems, and worlds beyond measure.

Her reverie was interrupted when she nearly tripped on the junction between two gondolas.



IV

Fatima strode into the main rotunda looking hurried.

The habitable section of the primary gondola was a rough cylinder 22 stories tall. The concourse was designated the "ground" floor, with two basement levels occupied entirely by the machinery that recycled the air and water and regulated the temperature of the station. Most of the depot was partitioned into segments easily sealed off in case of sudden loss of pressure. The concourse was the only large open space in the entire structure.

It took up three floors, with a sprawling park on the main level and a glass elevator running through its axis. The upper levels were devoted to gift shops and boutiques and a food court overlooking the green space, connected to the glass elevator by walkways dotted with kiosks. Pairs of escalators also joined each section.

It didn't look much like an airport because it didn't have to. People and luggage were thoroughly screened and passports checked back at the Mojave spaceport. Five crackling monochromatic static volume displays designated each gate A through E (a sixth projected silent advertisements above the green space). The only help desk was a small recess next to gate A, the major passenger artery.

Fatimah was searching for a gift. Dashing up the nearest escalator she entered the first gift shop she saw and began browsing. Baseball caps emblazoned with the distinctive asterisk shape of the station accounted for almost a third of the small store's inventory. Cheap-looking colouring books, and mugs crowded another section. Then she spotted a scale model of the station with representations of the ground to suborbital airship, and the orbiter, both looking very similar: a V-shaped envelope with a comparatively minuscule gondola below, only the orbiter was several orders of magnitude larger; over a mile long.

She brought one of the sets up to the bored-looking robot cashier and swiped her terminal.

"Thank you for your purchase, Ms. Ansari." said the robot.



V

"Hey, have you already mailed mum's present?" Fatimah said, unzipping the neck of her jumpsuit a little and running her hands through her hair as the front door shut behind her. She wrinkled her nose at the sticky residue a hard day's work left behind. She knew she wouldn't be comfortable until she'd a chance to shower.

"No. I should get on that." replied her sister, Hafizah, without looking away from screen. Fatimah did not recognize the movie playing.

"Could you include this with it?" She said, lightly kicking the package the scale model came in. "And can I just sign the card you got her?"

"Sure."

Fatimah opened the door to her room, fished her terminal out of her pocket and synced it to the thin flexible screen tacked on her wall like a poster, now serving as the pen-sized terminal's primary display, and tossed the terminal on top of her dresser. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she unlaced her boots and threw them in the corner. The only light was the display, which had nothing open on it, just her desktop wallpaper of flickering green oscillography, morphing and expanding on a black background. She lay back on her bed and sighed. She felt good. Honest work. Her muscles ached but that only made her feel alive, made her feel connected to the universe.

She thought her sister seemed a little terse. She'd try to coax whatever it was out of her sister next time they spoke. Maybe after diner, if they both ended up staying in tonight.

But first to wash off this crud.



VI

Hafizah left without a word while Fatimah was showering.

Fatimah decided, finally, to go jogging. She struggled with the laces on her running shoes one-handed while selecting a play list on her terminal. She settled on Karl Mohr's The Four Seasons 2117. She wore black leggings and an olive t-shirt with an integrated display which she had set to silently looping the entirety of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Her hair was roughly pulled back in a navy blue bandanna.

Stretching, she stepped into the elevator. She rode it down to the concourse and emerged into a jungle in miniature.

Ferns and palm trees crowded the path and a narrow stream fed a small pond populated with iridescent koi.

The static volume display crackled faintly overhead, projecting a massive 3D advertisement for toothpaste, while birds sang in the distance.

Fatimah began down the path towards gate C.

Her mind wandered.

Catching a glimpse of roiling white cloud in a view port she thought of the state of the world, the planet her mother still lived on, to which she was herself still inextricably linked.

The seemingly endless wars. The incomprehensible scale of the suffering. The injustice of it all.

The nation states desperately clinging to power, anachronisms, contesting the multinationals. To be sure, no PMC came close to the military capacity of even one of the smaller nation states, and nuclear arsenals were still, more or less, concentrated in the hands of a few politicians.

But Microsoft and Coca-Cola didn't need to use force, usually. It was simpler to buy or blackmail politicians. Actual military actions were a PR disaster.

Corporate states had achieved a homeostasis. They didn't need to govern outright. Critical infrastructure was not profitable. They allowed the politicians some semblance of independence, as long as it did not directly contradict their agenda.

She reached the far end of gate C and turned around. Baroque melodies run through the filter of turn of the century electronics provided the soundtrack to her thoughts.

In some superficial ways the world had changed, but in others it really hadn't.

The same kind of people made all the decisions, the ambitious men. The same nepotism and corruption saturated everything. But is it really corruption if that's how it's supposed to work? Ideological naivety aside, wasn't it clear that this was exactly how those in power had envisioned it, statist and corporatist alike?

Fatimah scaled the slight incline of a rustic wooden arch brdige that spanned the creek and caught her own koi-distorted reflection in the pool below.

How did she fit into all of this? Was she somehow making things worse by her actions? Did she have an obligation to try to fix things? It seemed ludicrous that anyone could expect her to change the world.

Despite extensive interaction with anarchists and communists whom she was sympathetic with, she'd never believed in the Revolution, it seemed too much like wish-fulfillment. A deus ex machina that would magically solve all their problems. Secular messianism.

Fatigue poisons began to accumulate in her legs. Her vision took on a clarity inaccessible under normal circumstances and she pushed her self to complete one more lap. She imagined she could see the electrical impulses channeling through her body. An inexplicable exuberance gripped her. She did not remember reaching the far end of gate B but she was already on her way back towards the concourse.

Her smile contorted with exertion, her gaze fixed on the little wooden arch bridge.

Pyle silently shot himself in the head.



VII

Fatimah rested on a bench adjacent to the creek, her arms dangled behind her through the gap between the seat and back of the bench, absentmindedly plucking blades of grass overgrown. She considered the texture of each.

"Oh nice, Full Metal Jacket."

Startled, she opened her eyes to find a man standing in front of her. "Uh?"

"On your shirt."

Looking down at Private Joker mouthing words she could not hear, she replied "Oh, yeh. Heh." Hastening to add, "Usually I don't use other people's stuff. I mean, usually I have my own videos playing on here." She said, tugging at her shirt. "Just I was jogging and it didn't seem terribly important..." Suddenly she was acutely aware of her appearance, her slouching and the beads of sweat that had managed to circumnavigate her bandanna, down her forehead.

"My name's Robert. Robert Ames." the man said, holding out his hand.

"Oh. Fatimah Ansari." she said, shaking hands with him, casually attempting to wipe away the fugitive perspiration with her other.

"So you're an artist?" he said, moving to take a seat next to her, catching himself, and asking "Do you mind if I join you?"

"No, no, go ahead." Remembering his question, she answered "Oh, not really. I do video editing. I don't shoot very much of my own stuff, a little. Mostly I put together video collages for my shirts." she said, smoothing out the wrinkles in her shirt. "I'm addicted. I've bought like three of these things. Ridiculously expensive."

Automated sprinklers emerged from the ground and began watering the grass around them, automatically maintaining a perimeter so as not to spray the bench's occupants.

"I'd love to see some of your work. I can definitely appreciate the necessity of finding a creative outlet." She was just now noticing that he was wearing a uniform. A pilot's uniform, white. He held the cap in his hands, kneading it. He had blonde hair and piercing blue eyes that stared with an intensity she found a little overwhelming. "I paint rocks. I know, it sounds stupid. I paint little scenes on them, beaches, sunsets. I have a lot of free time. At my job. What do you do? For work I mean?"

"I offload the cargo you guys bring up. Transfer it from the suborbitals to the orbiters. Specifically I transport the vacuum-sensitive cargo, the stuff that can't be placed in cargo containers."

"So you-"

His pocket beeped.

He retrieved his terminal and read the message. "I'm so sorry. I have to go."

Robert stood and brushed at his pristine uniform. "My ship doesn't leave for another couple days. Hopefully we'll run into each other. Bye!" And he turned and walked briskly down the path toward the glass elevator.

Fatimah took out her terminal. "Boudicca." she said, summoning her Agent out of the aether of the internet. "See what you can find on Robert Ames. Pilot. Employee of Dubai Holding. Don't bother messaging me, I'll check it in the morning." she instructed, looking at the time; midnight.

"Go, and be productive."



VIII

She opened her eyes. Presently her dreams retreated under the onslaught of crystallizing consciousness.

The loud noise which had disturbed her sleep still rang though the hall. Fatimah got up and cautiously approached her bedroom door and opened it slightly, shielding her eyes from the caustic light.

There in the hall slouched against the wall was her sister wearing a red dress. Next to her an end table lay on its side.

"You've been drinking."

"Aren't you observant?" said Hafizah without looking up. Her purse at repose beside her, its contents were distributed throughout the hallway like some parody of a Zen garden.

"Which is more than I could say for you."

"Oh fuck off. ...you won't tell mum, will you?" An anemic desperation crept into her voice.

"No of course not. Come on Haf, you're my sister." Fatimah said removing her heels and helping her up.

Carefully avoiding the odds and ends that littered the hallway, she navigated her sister over to the breakfast nook which served as a dining room in the economical apartment. She sat down.

"What happened?" pleaded Fatimah, clasping hands with Hafizah.

"Nothing." She roughly freed her hands resting them in her lap, and resumed staring at the floor.

"Haf, please.."

"Things have just been a little shitty lately, that's all. Such is life. I'll get over it."

"Where are your friends during all this? What about Zabine?" Hafizah flinched at the mention of the name.

"We're... no longer friends." It obviously pained her to speak the words.

"Why?!"

"Please, Fatimah. Drop it." Silence devoured long seconds. Hafizah seemed to be steeling herself. "Remember when we were kids and dad would take us to the observatory?"

"Dad wasn't so great." said Fatimah, a grimace etching itself upon her face.

"And you would run around, staring at all the old displays you'd already seen a hundred times. You were always asking questions, even then."

Hafizah looked her sister in the eye.

"Those were good times." she said, getting up and walking very deliberately to her bedroom. Leaning against the door frame she said "Things weren't so complicated back then. I miss those days."

"Haf.."

"Just leave me alone." she said, entering and closing the door.

Fatimah sat at the table, alone, listening to the hum of the fridge.



IX

Fatimah Ansari reviewed the information Boudicca had collated on Robert Ames as she walked to work. Daintily maneuvering the last vestiges of a crueler into her mouth, she pushed the elevator call button, wiping her hands on the legs of her jump suit.

The doors withdrew to permit her entry.

Refocusing her attention on her terminal which she held one-handed she read.

He'd worked as an orbital pilot for almost six years now; he was one of the first to fly. Prior to that he was employed by Air India for nine years. Born in Calgary, both parents spent a lot of time in Qatar until oil prices crashed and never recovered. An only child.

Recalling the screen which rolled up inside the device like a scroll, she stowed her terminal.

The elevator came to rest and the doors slid open. She disembarked as others got on and strolled along the garden path to gate C, admiring long the way the miniature waterfall shrouded in mist and the spectral rainbow it engendered. A small bird darted in front of her chirping excitedly.

The connecting flight for the ship Robert Ames piloted had just arrived.



X

Hundreds of passengers with nothing to do while they waited for cargo to be offloaded crowded every available public space. The inn was full. Some slept on benches in the park, clutching their belongings.

The Stoic Club was busier than usual. Fatimah negotiated a clump of inconsiderate people standing talking near the entrance and made her way to the bar. Both bar tenders were already busy serving patrons, so she waited.

"Aye."

Fatimah turned around to find Robert Ames standing next to her. He was wearing a black suit with a red dress shirt without a tie. "Oh, hello! How're you?" she said, instantly regretting it, hoping he did not interpret her query as insincere.

"I am good. And how are you this fine evening?" he said, with mock formality.

"Surprisingly well considering how little sleep I got." She caught a bar tender's eye. "I'll have a white zinfandel. Thanks."

"White zinfandel?" asked Robert, making no effort to disguise his astonishment.

"I know, I know." She said retrieving her terminal from her purse and swiping it. The bar tender looked to him.

"Oh, and I'll have a Shirley Temple." Fatimah looked at him incredulously. "You wouldn't want the pilot of a mile-long space craft drinking the night before, would you?"

He tipped generously and after some minutes they managed to secure a booth for themselves.

Fatimah sat down, smoothing her khaki skirt. Looping on her black sleeveless t-shirt was a collage of nuclear bomb test footage that flickered in the dark club. Looking up she said "So. Tell me a little bit about yourself." trying to sound casual.

"Not much to tell. Grew up in Canada, moved to California first chance I got. Became an airline pilot, moved around a lot. Lived in New Zealand for a stretch. As soon as I heard about this," he waved his arms to indicate the station, "I moved back to California." He paused and took a sip from his drink, and stirred it with his straw. "I got a small one-bedroom apartment in Mojave, and began pestering them with my resume on a weekly basis. Eventually they caved and I was hired."

A living umbra of the people crowding the dance floor decorated the wall of their booth. A dim red light above provided illumination, casting long shadows across their features. Robert looked considerably more haggard than he had the previous evening. He looked worn. Despite this, there was a vitality about him.

"How about you?" said Robert, leaning back and and folding his hands.

"I live here with my sister, we share an apartment. She got me my job. I love it." She savored her drink before continuing. "I grew up in London with my sister Hafizah and my mother. Our father walked out on Mum when I was 12. We had family in the UAE and it was through them that my sister got an interview with Dubai Holdings before they even started construction of the station."

"How long've you worked here?" he asked, genuinely interested.

"Just over a year." she said, suspecting he already knew. Just as she had sent her Agent to dig up information on him, he had likely done the same last night after their encounter.

He seemed momentarily lost in thought. "How quickly time passes." he said, sighing, a sudden seriousness entering his voice. He placed his hand on the wall, ignoring the layer of condensation that had accumulated. "I wish there was a window. It's an amazing view."



XI

Three hours of breathless conversation later and twenty minutes after last call harsh white light laid bare every imperfection. They discussed everything from Sumerian mythology to the split between radical Islam and the left. The breadth of his knowledge impressed her. She waxed poetic about the breathtaking beauty of the cosmos and he described for her life in a microgravity environment.

She noticed her neglected drink and finished it off as she grabbed her belongings. As she checked to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything she failed to perceive the missed call on her terminal.



XII

She cleaved to him with a ferocity that surprised even herself. She had been craving human contact more than she realized. The comforting sensation of his hand placed on small of her back felt alien, their lips pressed hard together. They spilled out of the elevator and Fatimah fumbled for her terminal, inadvertently dislodging an eyeliner pencil from her bag, and swiped it unlocking the door. Scooping up the eyeliner she stepped into the apartment and stopped short.

Hafizah was curled up on the couch in the dark, her body wracked with sobs.

And without a second thought Fatimah turned to Robert and said "I'm sorry. I have to be with her now."

"I understand."

She kissed him goodnight. Regretful, she slowly closed the door and and turned towards her sister. Fatimah went to her.

For a long time neither said anything. Fatimah's eyes adjusted to the darkness, until the feeble light of a constellation of LED indicators seemed perfectly natural.

Eventually Hafizah spoke. "Y'know, I'm the big sister." She sniffed. "I'm supposed to be the one taking care of you." she continued, her voice hoarse.

"We take turns."

"I suppose we do." she replied, and once again fell silent.

Fatimah looked into her sister's eyes. "Please. Tell me what's wrong. What has happened?"

"I'm sick of life. I'm sick of being lonely. I'm sick of having everything except the one thing I want." She turned away and looked at the crack of light seeping under the front door. "Hope. Hope is the worst. You fool yourself into believing that it can happen."

"Haf, you aren't defined by your relationships..."

"I know. But I look around me and it's the one thing that's missing from my life. It's been so long since I've felt that sense of belonging. My chest aches. The pain, is unbearable."

"Tell her."

Hafizah took a few moments to respond. "What?"

"Tell her how you feel."

"What are you talking about?"

"Zabine. It's plain how you feel about her. And I know she likes you." Once again, she flinched at the mention of the name.

"What are you saying?" Anger crept into her voice.

"I just want you to be happy." said Fatimah, making to clasp hands with her sister.

"No. What are you saying?" She stood up, pushing Fatimah away.

"Come on Haf, you don't have to pretend." she said feebly.

"Pretend what? Are you, are you seriously suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"

"Haf, I know you better than anyone. I wish you'd stop feeling ashamed about who you are."

Hafizah turned her back to her sister. After a while she said "It's wrong. Don't you get that?"

"Why is it wrong?" said Fatimah, also standing up.

"Because it's against God!"

"How do you figure? God made you the way you are-"

Hafizah turned to face her sister. "The way I am? It's a choice! He gave us free will!"

"Oh come off it! You know that's a load of rubbish. You didn't choose to be this way."

"Fatimah, you don't understand, I can't reject my faith!"

"Your faith has rejected you!"

"Why do you care?!" cried Hafizah, incensed.

"Because you're my sister and I want you to be happy! I don't want you to feel guilty over something you have no reason to!" said Fatimah on the verge of tears.

Furious, Hafizah chose her next words carefully. "Y'know, you've always been so sure of yourself. So arrogant. Your self-congratulatory, self-assured atheism. You think you have all the answers. But your clothes, your macabre little videos. You're overcompensating. You're the same insecure little girl with daddy-issues you were in high school. I've seen you try to talk to guys. That man? That's the first guy you've met since you got here."

"At least I'm not a self-hating lesbian!" she said, instantly regretting it.

"Well at least I have a job!"

Hafizah's face inherited a terrified expression. Silence reigned.

"...what?" said Fatimah in a barely-audible whisper.

"I'm sorry." Hafizah said, pleading.

Her face contorted in pain and confusion, Fatimah asked again "What do you mean?"

"I didn't mean to say that, I didn't mean to..."

Fatimah just stared at her.

"Please! You have to understand! I only found out yesterday. The recession. There's nothing I can do. Comes straight from the head office..." She had trouble getting the words out. "They're... laying off a bunch of people..."

A numbness claimed her.



XIII

Time passed erratically. She hadn't gone to sleep last night nor gone to work in the morning. She hadn't eaten anything. Several hours after the fact it occurred to her that Robert had already left aboard the Percival. The station was quiet again. She did not know if he had tried to contact her; her terminal had been off all day.

Hafizah had mentioned something about still having two months before she was to be laid off. Fatimah hadn't really heard her. She had a difficult time caring about anything.

At the point farthest from the center of the station in the scarcely-used gate E, amongst the mountains of surplus supplies haphazardly stored there in violation of fire code regulations, Fatimah was curled up in a view port looking out radially from its axis.

But she did not peer out, instead she fixated on the irregularities in the glaze, the seams between the segments of the cover plates, the detritus that had accumulated in the fissure between the casing and the window, a miniature graveyard of the dessicated remains of opalescent flies.

As a child she had seen a military fighter jet up close. It had amused her to no end that the nose cone was capped off with a single domestic Phillips-head screw. The mundane colliding with the extraordinary.

Obliterating it.

She hadn't changed out of the clothes she wore last night. Her t-shirt appropriately displayed nothing but static.

A full minute elapsed before she identified the sound of encroaching footfalls. She did not move to see who it was.

"Fatimah..."

She did not immediately look up. Eventually, she inclined her head slightly. Hafizah staggered, ending any semblance of poise, looking very much like her sister, but perceptibly taller, with shoulder-length black hair, and slightly higher cheekbones that glistened with tears.

"Leave me alone."

"Fatimah... something's happened..." she said, her words slurred from anguish.

"I said go away."

"Mum's dead."

The words did not make any sense in context. Individually she understood their meaning, but the impossiblity of the situation they described rendered them meaningless in her lexicon. Hafizah wrapped her arms around her sister and was sobbing into her shoulder, but Fatimah had not yet managed formulate a response. It would be a while.



XIV

The world seemed hollow.

The model space station still in its packaging.

Fatimah sat on the couch, hugging her knees to her chest, staring at the model by the doorway. Continuity escaped her. She'd come close to crying, tears would well in her eyes, she'd begin to sob, but it just wouldn't come. There was no release.

On the table on its back in a frame rested a photo of Mum, Afifah, holding her hand as they crossed the street. It was summertime and there was an ineffable vibrance to the scene. Fatimah, a child when the picture was taken, was attired in a lacy scarlet dress, with ribbons in her hair. That moment frozen in time.

Hafizah said it was an embolism.

She remembered the last time she talked to her mother, two weeks prior, over the terminal. Afifah was excited about a new car she'd bought. Fatimah remembered her mother beaming as she recounted all of the features, some she barely understood, mispronouncing some of the words.

What was the point of the new car now? She was dead. She'd never drive it again. All of her mother's possessions seemed so absurd; she'd never get to enjoy them.

Fatimah felt homesick. But she no longer had a home. The places she might have once considered home were now tainted. She felt more lost than she had at any other point in her life. She still wore the same clothes from two nights ago. The battery in her t-shirt had died. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

One moment there was her Mum, the next a body. Why couldn't she just get back up?

The next airship would arrive in a few hours and they'd take that one down. Then they'd be spending 15 hours on a plane. Almost 24 hours straight in transit. Her mother needed to be buried as soon as possible in accordance with their religion. Hafizah and Afifah's religion. Fatimah found religion no more compelling than she had before this. Perhaps even less so.

The model space station hadn't moved since she put it down.



XV

Fatimah fiddled with the scroll wheel on her terminal inside her pocket. Boudicca had handled most of the funeral arrangements while they flew overnight to London.

Agents still required oversight; they were not sentient (even the most advanced AIs were perhaps on the order of a Border Collie). Agents could emulate intelligent behavior through their responses and utilized sophisticated voice recognition algorithms pioneered by Google in the early '20s to divine the user's intent, but they were still remarkably stupid. They represented a streamlining of human-computer interface, not an alien intelligence.

Afifah had given her Boudicca on her eleventh birthday. Commissioned exclusively for her, positive and negative reinforcement over the years had enabled the Agent to further evolve to better suit Fatimah's individual personality and idiosyncrasies. While not in use the Agent resided in her terminal. Several vassals existed on her ISP's servers, on Google's, and on her own web space to ensure unbroken continuity and to serve as backups should she lose her terminal.

Dimly aware of the funeral procession, Fatimah stared. An overcast presided over the whole of the grim proceedings. Fatimah stood well back, as the funeral prayers were uttered. She had antagonized much of her extended family by publicly coming out as an atheist.

It had snowed and then melted. The grass was brown and the trees looked skeletal. An intrusive wind whipped at her greatcoat. She turned up her collar in a futile attempt to negate it.

Fatimah watched her sister pour a handful of dirt into their mother's open grave. The wind caused motes of dust to fly back in her face, into her already tear-sheened red eyes.



XVI

The emerald verdure of her mother's back garden had been replaced by a yellowing parody of a lawn. She remembered rolling in it as a child, the sun beaming down, planes flying overhead. She remembered sharing a tent with Hafizah, camped out in the back garden, looking up at the stars, trying to pick out artificial satellites, reassured by the warm glow of the kitchen light, blissfully unaware of the growing tension in the household.

Her father, Alim, had been an activist. An utterly committed Islamist living out of a small East End flat when her parents met. Accordingly, Fatimah grew up surrounded by Islamist and leftist activists (prior to the Schism). Anti-American and anti-capitalist thought were all-pervasive during her upbringing. Of all of them she found she naturally gravitated towards the social anarchists, who seemed a little less abrasive. People came and went all the time. It was not uncommon for a complete stranger dressed in faded fatigues to occupy the couch for several nights, much to Afifah's chagrin.

Eventually they took out a mortgage on a two-bedroom house near Canary Wharf. Her father had never held down a job for more than a few months, and it was not uncommon for him to be absent for weeks at a time, speaking at rallies, attending protests. Her mother, an accountant, was forced to support them all by herself.

Fatimah suspected she got her love of astronomy from her father, who considered it a "divine science". It disgusted her to think she had inherited anything of her father's.

Standing on the porch, wrapped in her greatcoat, Fatimah looked through the kitchen window and recalled the occasion she had first seen her parents really fight. At the time she did not understand what it was over, but much later she suspected it had to do with Afifah's objection to Alim's friends being around her daughters. Many had criminal records or were under government surveillance.

The fights grew in intensity and frequency. While her father was rarely physically abusive, his insults and attacks had steadily eroded Afifah's self-esteem, which would never completely recover. He would yell at Fatimah and her sister over trivial matters on the increasingly rare occasions he was home.

Finally he just stopped coming home.

Fatimah opened the kitchen door, entered the derelict living room, and sat on the couch. The house was dark with the lights out, the only light came from the living room window, filtered through the high canopy of clouds. Somewhere, the wind howled pensively. The house seemed dead.

It seemed now as if it had never seen light. The ruins of her childhood excavated.



XVII

Upon hearing her sister curse loudly (and rather imaginitively) Hafizah opened the cellar door and took one tentative step forward. Silhouetted by the waning daylight from the kitchen window she called out, "Are you alright?"

Receiving no reply she navigated the abrupt decline of the unusually steep stairs. She was greeted by disorder. "What are you doing?"

"I'm looking for something." replied Fatimah distractedly, as she moved a box full of old National Geographic magazines from one precarious pile to another. The front of her greatcoat was smeared with dust from the infrequently accessed boxes stored in the claustrophobic cellar. A single ancient retrofitted LED lamp dangled from the ceiling, providing an insufficient narrow cone of sharp-shadowed, indigo-tinged light.

"Ah." said Hafizah, gingerly stepping over the clutter. "I was wondering what you'd like for supper." she said, putting her hand on her sister's shoulder.

"Doesn't matter. Shit!" She jumped back as a stack of boxes fell over, blanketing the concrete floor with a veneer of leopards and tropical birds.

Carefully taking a step back, Hafizah surveyed the chaos. "What are you after?"

Fatimah ignored her and continued digging in the mess. After a few moments she spoke, "Ahh! Here it is!" producing a heavy olive canvass bag from the disarray.

"What is that?"

Lugging it out from under some old stained quilts Fatimah explained, "It's the old tent we used to set up in the back garden. We never did use it to go camping."



XVIII

"Are you insane? We can't just go camping now!"

"Why not? We've got Mum's car, we've got a tent, sleeping bags, let's just go. You and me. Sisters."

"It's November!"

"It's not that cold. It's like 10 out. We'll bring hats."

"And there's still a lot we need to sort out. There's Mum's estate-"

"Let Boudicca deal with it. She loves that sort of thing."

"She's a computer program!"

"Doesn't mean she can't love!"

"Yes, it does! Anyways, eventually we're going to have to go back to work.."

"...I'm not going back."

"Fatimah, I know how much that job meant to you, but be reasonable. The economy's rubbish. Things are bad all around. You're going to need that money. It's only a couple months. Then you'll get your severance package. But you won't if you quit."

"I'll live off of my inheritance!"

"You're going to live off of a couple thousand quid? Come off it. And you have to come and get your stuff."

"I'll send for it!"

"Fatimah..."

"Don't you understand? I need this. I need it to stop. I, I need things to stop.. getting worse."



XIX

Fatimah ran.

She could hear her pursuers now; they were closing in on her.

Coming to a junction where the decrepit tunnel diverged, she paused momentarily. Her assailants' footfalls were getting louder. One path apparently offered the barest promise of daylight, the other, black as pitch and caked with rust, was punctuated with fragmentary glimpses of corroded metal grating dangling from the ceiling as far as the LED torch on her terminal could penetrate the darkness. Rats and other things retreated under its glare.

She examined the gun in her hands. Its weight surprised her. It was a thoroughly unfamiliar sensation.

Fatimah chose the occluded path, having taken only a few seconds.

She switched off the torch, pocketed her terminal, and adjusted the setting on the display inset in her sunglasses to a poor approximation of night vision.

She ran. On and on in a world of pale green. Sweat streamed down her forehead without the luxury of a sweatband, into her eyes, down her nose. Her muscles began to mutiny. Leaping over partially collapsed sections of tunnel, ducking under hanging steel rods, she could still hear them gaining on her, their shouts became celebratory. Ache became agony, but she did not stop. Without breaking stride, she unscrewed the lid on her military surplus canteen swinging from her hip and quenched the drought.

A shot rang out, deafening, breaking the hypnotic rhythm of her stride, striking somewhere to her left. She took the next opportunity to duck into a smaller side tunnel and stifle her loud rasping breath. Her heartbeat throbbed in her vision, but she managed to remain silent, practicing what she was told were Zen breathing exercises.

The men hunting her (she could tell from their voices they were male) had deferred their approach. They seemed to be debating how best to proceed. Eventually a consensus was reached and they resumed their advance.

One stuck his head into her sanctuary and without hesitation she shot it. He screamed and dropped to the ground, thrashing. She heard the shouts of the other two. A numbness spread through her wrist. The recoil - she hadn't been expecting that. She braced herself.

The other two converged on the side tunnel, firing.

Agony flared and ebbed, and the scene went dark.



XX

'I really, really don't want to get up' she thought. 'I'd love to just lay here.'

After a few moments Fatimah picked herself up off the ground. She removed her sunglasses and began peeling off the sweat-stained special gloves that blistered with infrared LEDs. Girls, she was told, did not ordinarily play this game. Even more unheard of was them electing to use the punitive electric shock collar.

With her thumbnail she picked at the disposable adhesive-backed infrared LEDs that adorned the rims of her sunglasses, as she waited for an attendant to open the sphere. She massaged her wrist; they hadn't warned her about the recoil.

Emerging from the three meter tall expanded metal grating sphere through a hatch, she tossed the white tennis shoes (also studded with infrared LEDs) on the adjacent shoe rack, handed the gun and the shock collar (a modified dog collar) to the acne-faced teenage attendant, and retrieved her jacket from the locker.

The sterile white lobby betrayed its actual age. Paint peeled along the door frame of the main entrance, and some of the yellowing ceiling tiles bore the stains of an old roof leak. The arcade was dead on the Monday afternoon. Of the four stations, only one other was in use, and one was out of service. The attendant seemed to be the only human being working there. A pastel colored robot stared stupidly at nothing from behind the front desk.

While the name stuck, modern arcades had very little in common with the arcades of the 1980s. They were more like gyms.

Wearing an absolute minimum of equipment, players would enter a sphere which acted very much like a giant trackball, select a game, and seek out other players online. Then they would spend an hour or so engaged in most physically-demanding exercise available (users were often forced to sign a waver before they could enter).

The goal behind them was to eliminate as much of the abstraction as possible that might represent a barrier to entry for reticent potential players.

To move the player simply walked. To look, they turned their head and the movement of the infrared LEDs on their sunglasses (the arcade also provided these or players could use their own) was captured by the myriad infrared digital cameras positioned around the sphere. This information was then relayed back to the LCD screen insets in the player's sunglasses and the image updated accordingly. To jump in the game they jumped in real life. To pick up an item or push a switch, they reached out with their hand while wearing the special gloves, and their action would be mirrored in the game. A microphone recorded every sound. The visuals were photorealistic, occasionally descending into the uncanny valley with the non-player characters.

Slouched over a drinking fountain, Fatimah sighed. Then, to her astonishment, she realized she was crying. Rivulets ran down her cheeks and she embraced it. She collapsed against the wall next to the fountain, sobbing, ignoring the teenage attendant. She kept thinking about how her mother would never drive that new car again. How pointless her death was.

How fucking unfair life was.



XXI

A perfect mathematical line bisected the universe. Azure sky met Prussian blue expanse along an infinite horizon.

Her mood had not improved over the last two weeks. She spent much of it in the living room on the couch hugging a cushion to her chest, despondent, the feeble grey light of November providing the only illumination.

They did not go camping.

Dark thoughts preoccupied her mind as the migraine-tempting pressure and incessant drone of the transatlantic flight abated her resolve. She found herself wishing the plane would crash into the ocean. So great was her despair that the selfishness of this desire did not faze her.

Gradually she grew tired of the view and donned her glacier sunglasses with the display inset. Noise-canceling earbud headphones and a sterling silver choker that doubled as subvocal recognition electrodes completed the troika of sensory isolation.

She switched on her terminal.

Green oscillography on a black field stared into her. It was even more breathtaking here, in this realm. Viewed through the LCD insets; the two dimensional oscillography was interpolated into 3D by Boudicca.

Beyond the limited utility of static volume displays, which crackled loudly and were monochrome, true volumetric 3D displays had never been achieved. It was only through insets that 3D media had found purchase. The technology was now ubiquitous. Standard prescription glasses were fitted with displays (which were transparent when deactivated) and many new terminals did not even have a screen, relying entirely on insets.

Movies, games, serials, all incorporated the technology.

Externally-mounted cameras also provided stereoscopic magnification, night vision, thermal imaging, and functioned as a high definition video camera. Higher functions such as thermal imaging required the glasses be synced to a terminal.

For half an hour she was content to allow the oscillography's hypnotic waves wash over her.

Eventually she opened her inbox and began checking her neglected messages. Robert's message from the night her mother died remained unread. It seemed irrelevant now. Her old life was over. Condolences from her friends crowded her mailbox, many still unopened. She appreciated the sentiment, but there wasn't anything they, or anyone could do or say that would mitigate the pain.

Subvocally she gave her Agent commands.

The inbox closed and a different program opened and expanded to encompass her view. Updates on the "recession" dominated her personalized newsfeed. Boudicca acted as an editor for Fatimah's own personal newspaper; the 3D representation was that of a vintage turn of the century newspaper in her lap, as she lounged in a chair fashioned from palm wood, surrounded by throngs of people shopping and speaking Sumerian in a market of the Mesopotamian city state of Ur circa 2500 BC.

Eye tracking software allowed her to navigate the pages without invoking Boudicca. The musical laughter of young children running through the market, playing some ancestor of tag provided the soundtrack to her reading.

Thirty percent unemployment in the United States. Daily protests against robotic workers with increasing turnouts, while becoming more and more violent. Stories of people starving to death in industrialized nations. Robots being vandalized. Protests turning deadly in developing nations. Anarchy in Saudi Arabia. Multinationals and governments alike at a loss as to how to address the problem.

None of this did much to lighten her mood.

She closed her eyes and listened to an old dubstep mix while a vending machine on wheels robot flight attendant dutifully offered her something to drink.



XXII

The full weight of reality settled upon Fatimah's shoulders as she and her sister endured the interrogative procedure of grey-uniformed customs agents. This was life. She could live it, or she could retreat in upon herself and hide amongst the forest of fictions she'd so painstakingly assembled. The truth was, no one was going to fix this for her. All the self-pity, self-loathing in the world wasn't going to change that inescapable actuality. She still had it pretty good, compared to most.

'At least,' she thought later, as she angled a piece of molecular gastronomically-calculated filet mignon into her mouth 'I'm not starving.'

Towers scraped the sky, silhouetted by an ardent sunset beyond the restaurant window. Far below, surrounded by the steel canyon the streets were a lattice of light. The setting sun reflected off of the gilded facade of an archaic Art Deco building and she had to shade her eyes with her hand.

"Why are we here?" said Fatimah staring at the garish pattern in the rug.

"Because our flight got delayed." replied Hafizah, attempting to get the attention of a short, stout robot waiter on wheels.

"I mean, why are we here, in this restaurant?"

"I thought it would be fun."

"Ah."

The robot finally noticed Hafizah's beckoning and automatically topped off her drink.

They returned to their meals.

Gradually the skyline changed, as the room slowly revolved. Several buildings, well over a kilometer tall, were visible from almost any point in New York. They retained much of the same square, utilitarian design, their zenith concealed by clouds.

'A concrete desert.' thought Fatimah. 'It'd be uninhabitable if water weren't piped in.'

She drew a happy face with her finger in the condensation on her untouched glass of zinfandel.

Hafizah broke the silence. "So I think you ought to live at Mum's place. The mortgage is paid off. I'll help you with expenses until you get back on your feet."

"Thanks." Noticing her sister's pleading eyes she added, "Look, I'm sorry I've been so negative lately. I really appreciate everything you've done for me."

"Fatimah, I feel awful. Those things I said.."

"No, you were right. I've been childish. I know that now. It's a difficult thing to have to face."

She looked at her palms. Her eyes followed the lines and creases.

"I'm sorry for prying into your personal life, Haf." she said, looking up.

"No, you don't know how much it means to me that somebody cares, that you care. I just have to sort it out on my own. But it means a lot that you care, and that I know you'll support me whatever I decide."

They both fell silent.

Fatimah unconsciously caressed her ouroboros pendant. Outside, the monument to Art Deco faced them once more, but the blinding glint was missing.

Night had fallen.





XXIII

"Oh wow. Look at that."

Bypassing the display on her glacier sunglasses, Fatimah followed her sister's gaze.

Along the side of the road up ahead bored-looking EMTs sought refuge from the desert autumn sun in the shadow of their quiescent ambulance, as state patrolmen communicated with dispatch. A car had apparently swerved off the highway, struck a utility pole, rolled, and come to rest amongst a rectenna farm that straddled the rocky desert in this area.

The spaceport shuttle slowed somewhat as it passed the scene. Electricians were inspecting the overhead transmission lines. By the inactivity of the EMTs she suspected the driver had not survived the crash, that they were now waiting for the coroner.

The car had plowed a narrow furrow in the rectenna farm, and judging from the exasperated looks on the electricians' faces, it appeared as if it had knocked out power to the entire segment.

Fatimah craned her neck skyward, imagining she could see the space based solar power satellite blanketing this entire region in a diffuse microwave beam. Or had the Congress-mandated triple-redundant automatic safety cut offs already engaged? As coal had fallen out of favor, space based solar power had come to supply almost half of the electricity in the United States and rectenna farm receiving stations were commonplace anywhere there was a large enough open space, such as this stretch of the Mojave. They could also be built over farmland and among wind farms, and at almost any latitude. Naturally, the military loved them; Edward's Air Force Base was less than an hour from Mojave.

Suddenly she became disinterested in accident gawking and flipped back. Emerald oscillography unfolded like a lotus before her eyes. She stared at the desktop.

More and more she found herself irritated by things she never would have noticed before. The banality of internet culture. Placated by online polls which encouraged people to voice their uninformed, yet strongly held opinions on any and every subject, a substitute for democracy. Bread and circuses. An environment of constant exercise of the vote, devaluing it, commodifying it, yet at the same time contributing to the inescapable manufactured illusion of real input.

Voyeurism. People watching people more closely than governments ever had. Televising their mundane existence long after the novelty had worn off. The continuous broadcasting of information into the ether, where it was collated and archived by a phalanx of search engines and never destroyed.

The insincere and increasingly abstracted interactions people engaged in, correlating to shorter and shorter attention spans.

She remembered reading an article that attributed the trend to an obsolete television station, MTV, and the editing of music videos in the 20th century. She'd watched a few of them and was amused by their quaintness. They seemed positively lethargic compared to the techniques employed by modern media.

She sighed, and stretched in the cramped seat, banging her elbow on the folding tray. She cursed and looked out the window again. A city rose up out of the desert.

The bus was still bathed in microwave radiation as it neared Mojave city limits.



XXIV

The bus stopped at a red light.

In the distance a jagged mountain range of skyscrapers announced the presence of humanity in the desert. The scale of such enterprises had always amazed her, the reconfiguring and repurposing of matter into such impressive forms. Like the cathedrals of termites fashioned from saliva and feces.

Glinting in the unrelenting afternoon solar incandescence, a kilometer-tall tower owned by Dubai Holdings was the crown jewel of the Mojave skyline. Dubai's interest in the world's busiest spaceport was understandable, and with humanity's increasing dependence on space-based solar power, it followed that the world's energy cartels would have a significant presence in the busy port town.

Mojave was the fastest growing city in the world. It had gone from a population of around 4000 at the turn of the century to over half a million in less than a hundred years.

The strain of unprecedented growth was evident. Insectile cranes loomed heavily over every intersection. Countless roads were closed for construction, detour signs hastily erected.

But it had not been spared by the global economic downturn. Signs of what governments and corporations alike insisted was merely a recession were visible everywhere. She counted no less than five "for lease" signs on boarded up storefronts in the space of two city blocks. It was reflected in people's attitudes. The general atmosphere was that of dread. Individuals shambled lifelessly down the streets avoiding each other's gaze, each isolated behind tiny screens and noise-canceling ear buds, discordantly chanting along to the mindless litany of pop music, praying to their technological fetish of choice.

It was painful to watch. Like a fish gasping desperately for air on the dry, cracked, parched land. A city defined by economic growth, during a recession. No one seemed to have the slightest inkling what to do.

The traffic light turned green.

And then it went dark.



XXV

"I'm sorry, but I can't seem to establish an internet connection. In fact, I can't detect any wireless signals at all, anywhere." Boudicca whispered apologetically into her ear.

"Great. A blackout." she murmured, looking out the window as several people stopped mid-stride, looks of consternation scrawled on their faces. She thought of the car accident outside of town. Could that possibly have knocked out the power grid? It didn't seem likely.

"Fatimah, are you having trouble connecting as well?" Hafizah asked from beside her, staring fixedly at her terminal.

She merely pointed at the inert traffic lights. "It's not just you. God, this is really going to mess up our schedule."

Ten minutes later they hadn't made much progress. "Look at these drivers. Apparently can't function without a stupid little computer chip telling them what to do." complained Hafizah. Traffic moved haltingly as everyone tried to escape at once. "Of course it had to happen during rush hour."

An hour later the roads were untraversable. The bus wasn't moving at all. People had abandoned their cars in the middle of the road. Fed up, Fatimah and her sister finally exited the bus and decided to walk to their hotel located on the opposite end of the city. They joined a veritable diaspora of others doing the same. For hours they walked in silence towards downtown.

At one point a ragged man ran through the crowd shouting incoherently. Something about a terrorist attack. They ignored him.

Dusk gave way to night, countless LED torches emerged, stabbing into the darkness, holding it at bay. And on they marched. The temperature plunged into the single digits. Fatimah fished out her greatcoat from her luggage and put it on. "Do you suppose they'll fix this before our flight is supposed to leave?"

Fatimah shrugged.

Hours passed without any official word on what had happened. The multitudes funneled through onyx canyons of steel and glass, holding conversations in tense whispers.

At around 11PM there was a commotion. Ignoring the pain in her ankles, Fatimah was playing a simple game on her terminal when she heard shouting ahead. The crowd parted for a man drenched in blood. "-army taken control. Of the spaceport. People were all angry. Upset, gonna miss their flights. Yelling at the soldiers." He stopped to catch his breath.

He met her eyes. Mad green eyes. "Don't know what happened. They opened fire. This.. this, isn't mine.." he said, for the first time displaying a dim awareness of his blood-soaked shirt. His hair was matted with blood and his eyes were wild. His skin glistened in the concentrated glare of dozens of torches and no one said a word.

Then, one by one, people began to run. What had been a silent procession exploded into chaos. Columns of light waved frantically into the night sky as people jostled one another. It was as if the past fourteen months of dread and frustration had finally come to a head. These weren't the same businessmen and women who rode the LRT to work in the morning. They were fighting for their lives.

Hafiazh grabbed her sister's arm and guided her out of the thick of it. They took shelter beneath the awning of a boarded up mall. "We're never going to make it to the hotel. We need a plan."

They watched as a pair of men in torn business suits assaulted a screaming woman.



XXVI

Millennia of civilization evanesced in hours, with skyscrapers serving as funeral pyres that burned brightly beneath the new moon. Without power, without water, a city was uninhabitable. A cold November wind robbed it of any residual heat, contributing to the inhospitality.

Already, packs of Armani-clad brigands prowled the streets, bearing arms, making a display of it.

The sisters found refuge inside the ruins of an optician's office. They huddled in a corner of the adjoining eye lab below aging eye charts next to an anachronistic tonometer.

Through the hopelessly wedged-open doorway, beneath the upturned front desk the form of a decapitated and mutilated paisley-upholstered robot receptionist could be seen in the weak orange light that spilled in from the streets. Miniature fires reflected in the lenses of row upon row of Gucci frames. Advertisements for various brands of insets plastered the walls. The smiling models that populated them were from a different age.

Trembling, Hafizah spoke. "I must confess, dear sister, that I don't exactly know what to do at this juncture." she said, allowing a weak smile to crease her face, but unable to conceal the fear in her voice.

"There's something.. I'm trying to remember.." Fatimah replied, staring into space. She clutched her ouroboros pendant.

"Like, what happened? Where are the relief agencies? What the hell is the Army doing at the spaceport?"

"I don't know. I'm trying to remember.." She fell silent. Abruptly she sat up. "Oh! Yeh!" With cold-numbed fingers she dug inside her pocket for her terminal. "I've been trying to remember all night. I knew it was something important." Producing her terminal she switched it on and said "Boudicca, dear, this is really important. Please tell me you haven't already deleted that information I had you find on Robert Ames."

"I have not, Fatimah. All of the files are intact."

"Good girl! Very good!" she said, providing positive reinforcement. "Now, can you please give me Robert's address in Mojave? Somehow, I don't think he'll mind."



XXVII

Robert's apartment was 2.7 kilometers away; apparently GPS satellites still worked. That was strangely comforting. Some small relic of her previous life poking through the charred debris of a dystopic tableau. Just how widespread was the desolation? They'd had no outside communication since the shuttle. Fatimah looked at the time: 1:15AM.

"Alright, let's go." she said, standing up, brushing herself off.

"Now?" Hafizah looked up at her.

"It's not likely to get any better out there. And we're less likely to be spotted at night. Maybe." She thought of the heat vision and night vision that came standard with every pair of glasses sold in the last decade. The democratization of technology had leveled the playing field. "Definitely want to use these." She put on her glacier sunglasses and flicked on. Her sister looked ghostly under the night vision wearing an expression of apprehension.

"So will everyone else. How well are we really going to be able to hide?" Hafizah said, pulling herself up.

"We don't really have a choice."

They were ready to leave when Fatimah dashed back inside the eye lab. "I had a thought." She emerged with a handful of rechargeable battery packs for their glasses. "Let's hope they're charged."

"Shouldn't we try to find weapons?"

"Not sure what we could use.. Boards, perhaps?" They inspected the immediate area outside the optician's office, acutely aware that anyone could be watching them, however presently the street seemed deserted. Hafizah squeezed through a narrow gap in a boarded up storefront, and materialized a couple of meter-long sections of rebar.

"I feel a little better."

They walked in silence, Fatimah occasionally checking their bearing.

No less than five office towers burned in the night. Blacker columns of smoke rose up, eclipsing the unusually bright stars, now unencumbered with city lights.

At one point a police car raced past, lights and siren blaring. It did not stop. Fatimah could not decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

The destruction seemed beyond what one would expect from the simple cessation of government services. The sheer number of arsons belied the mantra of calm assurances from the mouths of government officials that they were merely experiencing a temporary economic downturn. It bespoke a deep-seated frustration and disassociation with the apparatus of the state.

They passed a burning heap of robots. Burnt plastic offended their senses. Responsible for the astronomical unemployment rate, the displaced workforce. Even those who still had jobs were left waiting for the other shoe to drop. How long before some Japanese R&D lab created a robot that could do their job?

Lacking in both empathy and foresight, the corporate states had enthusiastically embraced automation. Coupled with an archaic economic system unable to cope with the sudden displacement of millions of obsolete human workers who had no other way of contributing to society. How no one saw this coming was beyond her. It had clearly been building for some time.

"Please don't hurt me!"

Fatimah nearly dropped her rebar. She spun around to find a young woman cowering behind the dumpster they had just passed.

"Who's that?!" called Hafizah.

"Please, I don't have anything you could possibly want!"

"We don't want anything. Come on. Get up." Hafizah coaxed the girl out of the refuse. "We're not going to hurt you."

Reluctantly, the girl emerged from behind the dumpster. Fatimah flicked off her night vision. The girl had faded pink hair with platinum blonde roots. Her mascara had run giving her a haunted look. She was wearing an over-sized military surplus jacket, an olive skirt and fishnets, along with an old pair of army boots. The flexible display on her shirt was switched off. She looked to be about 20 years old.

"What's your name?"

"Audrey."

"Is that an Australian accent?"

"New Zealand. You sound British."

"Yah, this is Fatimah, and I'm Hafizah."

Fatimah found her voice. "What were you doing back there?"

"God, I don't know! Hiding. I guess. It's terrible out there. About an hour ago there were these guys. They chased me then stole my luggage and threw most of it in the street. I'm alone. I don't know anyone in the city. I was supposed to be visiting my grandparents in one of the habitats when the electricity went out. Then there was a car crash.." Tears streamed down the young girl's face.

Hafizah stepped forward and kneeled and took her hand. "Audrey, would you like to come with us? We'll be safer with all of us together. We're going to see if we can stay at a friend's place."

"Yes. Please."

She sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

"I hate being alone."



XXVIII

"Hey."

"Aye."

Audrey caught up with Fatimah. They walked in step down the avenue devoid of light and movement. "I apologise. I know I must not have made a very good impression back there. I realize I wasn't particularly coherent."

Somewhere a dog barked.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty four."

"You look younger."

"Thanks? Anyway, I just wanted to say I'm not normally like that. I can be useful. It's just been a little overwhelming. Understandably, I think." When Fatimah did not respond Audrey continued. "You just seemed.. disgusted by the way I reacted.."

"What? No!" She lightly touched Audrey's elbow. "I'm sorry if I gave that impression. Me and my sister, we've just been through a lot lately."

"I know. So have I."

"No, I mean before this." She paused and took a deep breath. "We just got back from attending our mother's funeral in London. She died a couple weeks ago." It felt surreal speaking the words aloud.

Audrey's hand unconsciously went to her mouth. "Oh! I'm so sorry! I didn't know.. Well of course I didn't know, but still... I'm sorry."

"I keep going over the same things in my head. It doesn't seem real. It's like she could be in the next room and I wouldn't be surprised. It'd almost be easier to believe it was some elaborate hoax than that she just.. stopped. That she no longer is." She waved expressively. "And then all of this.."

Following Boudicca's directions, they were forced to make a detour through a still midnight sea of abandoned cars, some driven up onto sidewalks, some burned out. "I think," she continued, "because I wasn't there when it happened, that it was so sudden, I've no context for it. I don't know what the room looked like when she died. Like someone who just.. trails off mid-sentence, without punctuation, without closure." She looked at Audrey. "And I don't know why I'm burdening you with all of this. This must be very uncomfortable for you. I'm sorry."

"No, I'm glad if I can be, I just, I don't know what to say. I'm not very good at consoling people. I'm awful with words."

"Tell me about yourself."

"Um, I'm from Christchurch. My family's all there except for my grandparents, who I was on my way to see. They live in one of those orbitals. They're rich. I'm not particularly close to them, but they offered and I thought it'd be really cool to see what it's like up there. For them I guess it's supposed to slow the aging process. Heart doesn't have to work as hard in zero gravity. Of course they can never go back; they've lost too much, what's the word? Um. Calcium migration. That's it. Their bones are too weak now. And their muscles." she explained, as they scaled a forsaken taxi.

"I keep thinking about my parents and my brother. If they're alright. I have no idea. I mean, what happened, even? The people I've encountered so far haven't exactly been the greatest conversationalists. Too busy stealing my luggage.."

"Hafizah?" Fatimah looked back at her sister. "Y'know, we haven't really discussed it."

Hafizah cleared her throat. "Well, let's look at this. There's been no sign of any coordinated effort on the part of the government and it's been well over twelve hours. Not so much as a leaflet dropped or a helicopter with a loudspeaker promising relief. For the power to be interrupted either something's interfered with the reception of the rectenna farms, or it's been shut off on the satellite end of things. We did see a car crash outside of town on our way from the spaceport to our hotel. It'd plowed right through one of the segments. But those things are supposed to be ridiculously redundant.." She seemed lost in thought for a moment. "I remember each one was supposed to have its own backup transformer. I think. And when we saw that it was like.. two hours before the blackout." She wiped her brow, she was sweating despite the opressive desert chill. "Then there's the stories of the military occupying the spaceport." She shrugged. "God, I don't know what to think."

No one had any suggestions.

The sound of people yelling could be heard in the distance.

Fatimah consulted her GPS readout. "We're almost there, keep your voice down-"

Audrey screamed. Fatimah cursed as she turned to the source.

Less than five feet away was what Fatimah had taken for another desecrated robot. As she got closer she could see that it was no robot. His neck was at an unnatural angle, and his eyes stared blankly. His skin looked... wrong. A quick thermal imaging scan confirmed it.

She fought to keep the hysteria from her voice. "We... we were expecting this. The level of violence we've seen it'd be a miracle if someone didn't get killed. And it's only going to get worse." She steeled herself. "We stop we end up like him. Come on we're almost there."

"And be quiet." she added, looking around apprehensively.



XXIX

Dawn's first light silhouetted the stark neo-Bauhaus architecture of three four-story apartment blocks forming an inverted-U overlooking an open courtyard. In its center a swimming pool long-since drained for winter filled with leaves and other assorted debris carved out a shallow deckchair-lined cavity. Each flat came with its own discreet courtyard entrance accessed via a public balcony that spanned its entire length, with an awning shielding it from the elements.

"His is on the second floor, the last door." she said, pointing to the building on their left.

She led them across the grass just as lances of sunlight stabbed out from swaying treetops between the buildings, rendering their night vision worthless. Disabling their glasses' displays the three women ascended the stairs with great care, alert for any indication of the inhabitants. Silently they stalked along the row of apartments, sorely conscious of how exposed they now were. Many apartments already bore signs of intrusion.

Upon reaching Robert's apparently virgin apartment Fatimah thought to knock just in case, her weapon at ready. There was no answer, no movement inside. Cupping their hands to the glass they strained to see through the darkness; it appeared to be deserted.

"Now what?" whispered Hafizah.

"Easiest I guess would be to smash one of the windows and crawl through and unlock the door." Feeling painfully conspicuous standing on a balcony in the maturing daylight Fatimah used her section of rebar to strike a hole through one of the window panes large enough to maneuver her arm through so she could flip the latch. Even fully extended the window would not permit her entry.

"I think I can squeeze through." offered Hafizah. Anxiously strangling her weapon, she took a moment to compose herself, and, with some effort, she disappeared into the impenetrable blackness of the apartment. A few tense seconds later she opened the door for them.

They rushed inside and bolted the door behind them. Fatimah's party collapsed on the floor in exhaustion.

For the first time in what seemed like days they were reasonably certain that they were going to survive the next few hours.

Barely 14 hours had elapsed since the blackout.



XXX

In the dark her ears strained to pick out any sound that might herald the approach of looters intent on invading their sanctuary. All she heard was birds chirping. The low thrum of the city was noticeable only by its absence.

A voice disturbed the quiet. "You awake?"

"Yeh."

"I can't sleep." murmured Fatimah.

"Neither can I." It was Audrey.

"I keep thinking I hear someone outside. What if someone lights the building on fire?"

Fatimah abandoned any pretense of sleep and rolled over. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust, besieged by daylight flooding through small cracks in the hastily-constructed barricade of furniture they scrounged from Robert's apartment. "I thought it'd be different."

"What?" asked Audrey.

"The end of the world. It's not supposed to be sunny. The birds aren't supposed to be chirping."

"It's not the end of the world. At least, I don't think.." She could barely make out the contour of Audrey on the opposite side of the room.

"You lack self-confidence."

"Pardon?"

"Just an observation."

"You're awkward. You speak awkwardly. At first I thought you didn't like me, but now I think you're indifferent." Before Fatimah could protest she continued, "It's alright. Just have to get used to the way you communicate I guess."

"Huh."

Gradually the world came into focus. The mantle below which Audrey now sat upright staring at her, the mattress lain carelessly on the floor upon which Hafizah slept. An amorphous pile of what Fatimah remembered were their boots.

"What are you thinking?"

"Uh, I'm thinking about my house. My parents... My boyfriend."

"Were you in love?"

"Yeah, well, I guess. I don't know. I often wonder if that's possible."

"Well of course it is!" Fatimah caught herself, too late. Hafizah stirred, but did not wake up. She lowered her voice, "Of course it is.."

"No, I mean, he doesn't know me. He doesn't really know me. I know because I don't know who I am, how could he possibly?" Fatimah could not tell if she was crying. "I look at the face in the mirror and I see an assemblage of meat staring blankly. I see the muscles below the skin that form the vacant expression. I look at my hands and see these strange, alien.. digits. I don't make an association between it and me."

"I thought I knew who I was. Now I don't know..." Fatimah thought of the asterisk-shaped depot for the first time since everything fell apart.

"How do you define yourself? I mean, how does a person do that?" There was a note of pleading in her voice.

"Well I defined myself by my job. Then I got fired." Fatimah laughed. "Sad lot we are. One who defines herself by her relationships," she indicated with her head the inert form of Hafizah, "one who defined herself by her job, and one who hasn't even defined herself yet!"

"Speak for yourself."

"Oh, you're awake."

"Couldn't possibly sleep with the racket you two were making. No, I get it. I feel it too. I thought when we found a safe place I could finally stop being afraid, but I keep thinking about all the things we don't have. Food, water. Decent weapons.."

"So what are we going to do?" asked Audrey, the vulnerability of moments ago throttled.

Hafizah disengaged herself from the blankets. "I have an idea."



XXXI

"So there's six liters of water in the toilet and that's it for water." She demonstrated the lack of water pressure by turning the kitchen faucet full on. Residual pressure caused it to sputter, then it fell silent. "Then we have two cans of soup, one mystery can," she said, holding it aloft, "that's missing a label, some saltines, and some rice in the cupboard." Hafizah grimaced. "Evidently your boyfriend didn't spend much time here. Water should be our first priority."

"Bottled water?" suggested Audrey.

"Keep an eye open, but it seems likely that'll've been everyone else's first thought. While we were crossing the field I noticed what looked like a convenience store in the administration building. We'll try that this afternoon. If I'm right they may have forgotten something. But first," she said, standing up, "we raid the neighbouring flats."

Squinting, they emerged from the gloom into the ante meridiem light. In addition to the familiar sections of rebar, they now carried knives liberated from Robert's kitchen. Fatimah gripped a full tang, oak handled butcher's knife tightly as they investigated the nearest apartment. Feeling decidedly exposed in the warming sunlight that only slightly mollified the dying Autumn breeze, Fatimah scratched her head as Hafizah peered through the window. Satisfied that it was unoccupied, they employed the same method they had on Robert's apartment to gain access.

They found some bottles of wine, more canned food, some stale Ritz crackers, rice, and even some fruit that had not yet gone bad in the fridge. The meat, however, was already suspect. From the freezer they managed to salvage some peas and carrots and melted ice cubes which they gladly drank on the spot.

"I don't like this. What if, after walking all day and night like we did, they come back and find all their stuff missing? Are we sentencing them to death?" asked Audrey. Fatimah had spent the entire morning trying not to think about that.

'She's right. What kind of people are we?' she thought. 'How do we define ourselves? Can we claim to be good people?' The hard truth was it didn't matter how they defined themselves now. Relationships. Job. It all seemed so absurd. The new cutthroat world they now found themselves in did not care in the least how they conducted themselves, or how they rationalized or justified their actions. Intent was irrelevant. Dead was dead. It had taken only a few hours to level Maslow's pyramid to its foundations. 'Just yesterday I was drinking chilled iced tea in a reclining chair listening to my favorite music. Now we're breaking into people's homes and drinking from toilets.'

Using jugs they found under the kitchen counter they emptied the water in the toilet tank and transferred it to the bathtub in their own shelter. Fatimah placed garbage bags over top in hopes of mitigating evaporation. "And I have no idea if this will work." she mumbled, drying her hands on a towel.

The next apartment had already been looted, and all they gleaned was the water from the toilet.

Likewise with the next.

At that point they returned to Robert's apartment to catalogue all that they'd managed to secure and rest.



XXXII

The convenience store was stripped bare. Superfluous packaging and spilled, ground cereal littered the floor as dust motes coruscated in shafts of sunlight. Dislodged ceiling tiles dangled from wiring like vines. All they had managed to procure was a bottle of nutritional supplements, a box of bandages, and a pair of LED flashlights that had fallen behind an overturned display, one of which Audrey used to conduct one final sweep of the store.

"Where's Hafizah? I feel exposed." she complained, tense and agitated. Fatimah ignored her.

Just then Hafizah breezed through the door. "Alright, I've got it all set up. Come on."

"You shouldn't go off alone. It's not safe. We didn't know where you were."

"I was just outside."

"Still. Someone could have grabbed you and we wouldn't've known."

"Sorry. You're right." Hafizah admitted in an attempt to smother the argument.

Hafizah looked from her to Fatimah. When Audrey didn't reply she said, "Good. Anyways, we've now got enough water to last us a few weeks at least if we're careful." They stepped back out into the mockingly brilliant daylight.

She pointed. Snug against the side of the store was an outdoor ice freezer emblazoned with red text.

"Of course!" exclaimed Audrey.

"Some of them had holes and have leaked, but a lot of them are intact."

Fatimah instinctively glanced back to their apartment on the other side of the courtyard. "How are we going to get all these back to our place?" She cringed as she heard a gunshot in the distance. The birds still chirped.

"That's why I got us a truck." She pointed to a pickup truck parked nearby in the lot. It's passenger side window was smashed. They both stared at Hafizah. She looked uncomfortable. "So I came into possession of a fairly powerful hotwire crack a couple years ago while I was in Dubai.." She patted her terminal. "Pollyanna was more than happy to assist. Don't look at me like that. I was young, and rebellious! Anyways-"

Audrey screamed.

"Not aga-"

A disheveled man with deeply fissured lips and burns along one whole side of his face held an antique butterfly knife to Audrey's throat. His hand trembled and his brown eyes darted back and forth with a manic ardor. He was sweating. Grinning, licking his lips, and wiping his free hand on his tight-fitting brown hoodie he announced, "You're gonna give me everything you've got on you and then you're gonna to take me back to where ever it is you're staying. Anybody tries anything I paint the sidewalk with this pretty young thing's circulatory system. Comprehend?"



XXXIII

Abruptly the man pointed a slender finger towards the melted bags of ice. "Could use a drink. No. Leave those." He motioned towards their sections of rebar. They placed the steel rods on the ground and resumed walking. "And those." he said dragging the knife along Audrey's neck leaving a red trace. "You, stay." he commanded, pointing towards Fatimah. They dropped the knives in a pile in the vibrant grass and Hafizah went to gather a leaking bag of water as her sister stood shaking. "I'm not a bad man. I just need this."

The man shifted his weight and the noonday sun glinted off of the stainless steel butterfly knife held against Audrey's throat. He wore khakis and ratty sneakers with the laces manifesting in tiers of knots. The grimy index finger on his hand that held the knife twitched.

"Y'know I was a teacher, a professor! The little shits. Look at me.." He laughed to himself. "That's close enough." Accepting the bag of water from Hafizah, he continued, "Y'know, if someone had had a little fucking common sense. Fuck, I mean you displace your entire labour force, what the fuck do you think's gonna happen? Ah, stay put." Hafizah backed off. He sliced the bag cleanly open, removing the top and drinking deeply, the knife rose and fell against Audrey's carotid artery.

Water dribbled down a week's worth of stubble and the cracks in his lips glistened like miniature canals. He spoke with a peculiar accent which enunciated the syllables. His consonants were crisp. "Can you believe it? They fired me. Me! I had tenure! Just after I fucking take out a mortgage! Those motherfuckers. My wife.. god.." He dropped the empty bag like a shed skin and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his free hand. "Fucking Christ, they think a robot can do my job? They got what they fucking deserved. Not surprising, really. Thirty percent unemployment. What the fuck did they think was gonna happen? People are pissed. Fuck." He wiped at the tears streaming from his eyes. "And then the fucking army sets up shop. Air force. Whatever. Fucking jingoistic statist bastards.. Never did feel comfortable having them right next door." Suddenly he seemed to remember what he was doing. Absentmindedly picking at his overgrown cuticles with his thumb he instructed them. "Ah, let's get going. Which way?" He looked around.

At that moment Audrey grabbed the wrist that held the knife, and raked her fingernails along the burns on the side of his face. He screamed. Fatimah moved to intercept, attempting to wrestle the knife from his hand. Quickly regaining his composure, the man soon began to overpower her, and as she let go he sliced her hand with the blade.

"Hey!"

He turned to catch a glimpse of Hafizah swining a steel bar towards his face. He collapsed on the ground, moaning, blood streaming from his broken nose. Hafizah kicked the knife away.

"Whores! Fucking bitches!" he shrieked.

Audrey ran up and started kicking him in the head. "Fucking bastard!"

"Audrey, stop." Hafizah held her as she cried in to her arm. "What do we do with him?"

"I don't think I can kill him. I just.. don't. I mean, do we have to? Can't we just let him go?" pleaded Fatimah.

"Let him go?! After what he tried?!" Her speech was garbled with anguish.

"It all comes back to how do we define ourselves? Are we murderers?" Hafizah asked them.

"No, no, but this is different. It is." Audrey sounded as though she were trying to convince herself more than the others.

The main thrashed on the ground, uttering a long string of curses. "I can't see, I think you blinded me!"

"Serves you right." chimed Fatimah, clutching her bleeding hand.

"I vote we let him go. I don't want to kill anyone." offered Hafizah.

No one objected.

"Go on. Get the fuck out of here. Don't ever come near us again." Hafizah kicked him as he got up.

"Bitches! Whores!" he called out as he limped away.

Audrey threw a rock at his receding figure, grazing his head.

"Fuck!" he screamed and stamped his feet.



XXXIV

Fatimah Ansari looked at herself in the mirror, examining the various contours from different angles. Stark shadows played over her face. The warm glow of an LED flashlight balanced precariously on the ledge of the pedestal sink was her only light.

A young woman stared back at her. The same woman from before. With the same Roman nose. The same long black hair. The same snake forever devouring its own tail.

But she didn't feel like the same person. So much had changed. Her reflection didn't look any older, but she felt.. more mature. Though, she still had an incredibly difficult time thinking of herself as an adult. She'd been running from that for so long. She ran all the way to the edge of space. But it had seemingly finally caught up with her.

She carefully changed the gauze on the cut on her right hand.

It occurred to her, as it often did, that thoughts such as these had become irrelevant. Issues surrounding her self-image and individuation. They no longer described the reality she found herself in. They were a luxury she could no longer afford if she wanted to stay alive.

Did she? Want to stay alive? She shook her head. Of course she did.

Why?

She did not have an answer.

She was afraid to listen to any of the thousands of songs on her terminal. She was afraid if she did she might start crying and be unable to stop. That was a different life. The events of the last two days had rendered them anachronisms.

Hafizah and Audrey were in the other room, sitting on the mattress in the dark, talking, rationing the precious few candles they'd managed to find. Next to her the bathtub was filled with water, intact bags of melted ice leaned against the lip. She hadn't been much use transporting them with her injury.

Fatimah tried to remember what her mother's voice sounded like and couldn't.

Vague recollections of a time the whole family had gone to the zoo. Her early childhood was a series of contradictions. Looking back it baffled her how her father could partake in western traditions, and in the next breath curse them all.

She remembered her father lifting her on his shoulders to see the Komodo dragons. What were they doing right now? They could live to be 50 years old, they could be the same ones that she saw as a child.

Was London still there? Or did the animals remain locked in their cages, dying from dehydration?

For that matter, what was Alim doing at that very moment? She hadn't had contact with him since he'd walked out on her mother. 'He must be loving this,' she thought. The infidels were being punished by Allah.

Or was it like this everywhere? If only they had more information.

Sighing, Fatimah reached to grab the flashlight, out of habit with her bandaged hand, cursed, and accidentally knocked it over the edge.

She squatted down to retrieve it, but noticed something strange. The light was pointing at a heat vent, but the screws were missing and there were scrapes along the edge, as if it had been removed repeatedly. She kneeled and worked the grate free.

She reached inside and fished out three items. The first was a gloss black metal cylinder with tapered ends three inches thick and twelve inches long. The next was an unfamiliar dark grey angular piece of electronics with a small dormant readout.

The last object she removed from the vent was instantly recognizable.

In her hands she held a pistol. It's weight did not surprise her.



XXXV

"Where did you get that?!" Hafizah clumsily stood up on the mattress, steadying herself with her arms.

"It was hidden in a vent in the bathroom." replied Fatimah without breaking stride.

"Why the hell did your friend Robert have a gun?"

Clearing space on the small kitchen counter Fatimah laid out the items and lit a candle. "No idea. And I have no idea what those two things are." she said, stepping back and gesturing towards the black cylinder and the grey box.

"I know what that one is."

The sisters looked at Audrey.

"That one, the one with the aerial." She picked up the enigmatic box and demonstrated the folding antenna.

"Well what is it?"

"It's a satellite terminal. My dad used one on a trip to the Australian Outback when I was 17. Uh, it allows you to connect to the internet in areas without wireless coverage."

They stared.

"Yeh. I know. I've never used one, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out." She switched on the device. "Gimmie a few minutes."

"So what's this one?" Hafizah asked, turning her attention to the cylinder.

"No clue." A dimly-recalled memory clawed at the periphery of Fatimah's awareness.

"Oh this isn't bad at all. You just.." The device beeped. Audrey grinned. "K, so it works by using satellites. Never caught on because of latency. Wireless is much faster with transatlantic fiber optic cables-" She looked up. "Sorry, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to stuff like this." She frowned. "This thing's fairly old. The interface is archaic. You wanna sync it to one of your terminals to make things easier?"

Hafizah pulled out her terminal. "Pollyanna, darling, could you please link up to this satellite terminal?"

"Certainly, Hafizah." There was a pause. "I'm having trouble establishing a satellite connection."

"Keep trying please."

"If there's anything still up there.." Not wanting to get her hopes up, Fatimah began to examining the mysterious black cylinder. It had an impressive heft to it. Turning it over in her hands she noted an aperture at one end. Why did it seem so familiar?

"Still nothing." commented Audrey dourly.

"I think.." Fatimah started over. "I remember something.." she drawled, considering the cylinder in her hands. She depressed a large button on its smooth face.

A blinding green line speared out and lit the kitchen cabinet on fire. "Shit!" She immediately let go and it stopped.

Hafizah smothered the fire with a dish cloth.

"Everyone alright? Sorry, sorry. Sorry Haf." She absorbed their angry expressions. The bright afterimage was still there. Rubbing her eyes she said, "So, uh, I know what this is." She smiled sheepishly. "It's a weaponized laser. Military. I saw one in a news clip about future technologies a while ago. I didn't know they already had them."

"Seriously? What the hell was he doing with all this stuff?" Hafizah said, flustered.

"Connection established." announced Pollyanna cheerfully.



XXXVI

"Hello?"

"Hello?! Zabine?!"

"Haf! Oh my god! I thought you were dead! It's so good to hear your voice!"

"...I'm so sorry Zabine. I didn't think I'd ever get a chance to say that. I'm so sorry.."

"No, no, no! Please, don't worry about it. Are you okay?!" Zabine's deep look of concern registered even over the device's small screen, through a sea of digital artifacing.

Hafizah adjusted her grip on her terminal. "Yah, there's me, and Fatimah, and this girl Audrey. We found a relatively safe place to stay for the time being. Now what the hell happened?!"

There was a pause. "It's been horrible Haf.." She stopped. "I'm sorry. You already know that. God, you know better than anyone." Zabine took a moment to collect herself. "Okay. There was a terrorist attack. It's been difficult getting any information on it; no one actually saw it happen, there were no cameras pointed at it. They targeted the North American and European Union solar arrays. There's no power in most of the US, and large swaths of Europe. France. The UK. London.." Zabine's image fluttered tentatively. "We still don't know exactly what happened. We, Dubai, lost an airship in the attack."

Fatimah went cold. "Which ship?"

Hafizah looked at her.

"Uh, the Percival. The attack appears to have taken out a large number of geostationary satellites as well..."

"That was Robert's ship. He's dead." Fatimah sat down heavily on the skeleton of a chair scavenged for the barricade. In the periphery of her consciousness she heard Zabine continue.

"A lot of people are dead. Projections are in the millions. Hospitals don't have power. Forget about LA. It's bad. Any major urban center stay away. Several groups have claimed responsibility. Islamists, anarchists, labour unions.. Some have since recanted. I don't think they realized how bad this was. I've been watching all the news feeds, but the reality is they just don't know enough yet." Zabine's voice fell. "Haf, this isn't going to get better any time soon. I'm talking years. This isn't just a blackout. They simply don't have the infrastructure to patch the holes in the power grid. It'll take years just to build and launch more solar power satellites. Even areas that were fed by alternative power sources were affected by the cascade failure, and much of the infrastructure was damaged during the resulting chaos even if they somehow managed to restore order afterwards."

"What about New Zealand?" asked Audrey, wringing her hands, her knuckles white.

"New Zealand and Australia are alright. They're mostly running off of OTEC. Very little was dependent on solar."

Conscious of the others Audrey tried not to look too happy. "Thank you." She too sat down.

"China's okay, Japan's solar satellites are still working, but the entire geostationary orbit is hazardous right now, so much shrapnel whizzing about. The country is in a state of emergency preparing for the possibility."

"What do we do?" Hafizah asked, quickly grasping the scale of the disaster.

Silence. Fatimah looked up. The image of Zabine appeared conflicted. "I shouldn't be telling you this.. Whatever. I don't care. Sync your terminal to my encryption." Hafizah complied. "Alright. So Dubai's pissed. It's a little frightening. I had no idea how powerful they were..."

"What are you talking about?"

"They're planning a jailbreak of sorts. At the spaceport. The military is holding the crew and passengers of the Gilgamesh prisoner. We had a ship in port when it happened, the one you were supposed to be on. The military commandeered the spaceport and the commander isn't taking orders from what's left of the US government in Cheyenne. Or he sometimes does, as long as it doesn't contradict the orders he gives. He's back on Edward's Air Force Base, they're like a self-contained city, of like 8000 people. They spent the last 30 years making themselves self-sufficient. Building wind farms. Off the grid."

She looked down and ran her hand through short curly black hair and sighed.

"Dubai has demanded their release but the commander has ignored them so far. God, the resources they have at their disposal, it's terrifying, working for them all these years..." She looked up. "They're sending in mercenaries. Scary good. The best." She took a deep breath. "They're also going to attack Edward's Air Force Base with a kinetic bombardment weapon as a diversion. I didn't even know they had 'em." She caught their uncomprehending looks, even through the worsening interference of the connection. "Uh, basically a telephone pole made out of tungsten in orbit. Little attitude control jets to guide it down. Drop it on anybody you don't like. Like a guided meteor. Very illegal. Don't ask me how they kept it from the UN."

She kneeled forward into the camera. "Look, I've got to be quick here. The satellite is moving out of range; no more geostationary communications satellites now. I doubt you'll be able to get another line- yours is the first call that's gotten through all day. It's a miracle you managed to secure this line. The attack is set to happen in two day's time, 1800 hours local time. Then they're going to wait a while to allow that to draw some of the forces away from the spaceport. At 1900 hours the mercenaries do their thing. Be there when they do. Mention Abdul Alhazred to prove you're one of us. Yeah, someone on the planning committee was a Lovecraft nerd. Don't worry if you forget; Pollyanna has all the info." Her smile faded. "God, I really could lose my job over this. Or worse..."

"Thank you so much Zabine. We really appreciate this. I missed you.."

"I missed you too, Haf. Please be careful."

Static washed over her.



XXXVII

One thing she had decided was that death always felt surreal. She could not comprehend a human body devoid of that spark, of personality, that provided context. Without it it was just.. meat. Already beginning to rot. Or in Robert's case, burnt, and then vacuum desiccated. She tried to think of anything else.

Fatimah sat on a broken chair, staring at nothing. Audrey and Hafizah slept, their breaths rising and falling in an odd syncopation. The oppressive silence was punctuated by the sound of gunshot or shouting in the distance. The world was going to hell and she found she had a hard time caring.

A part of her recognized the incongruency of her priorities, but she no longer cared. It was time to be selfish.

She stood up and felt the carpet beneath her feet. Individual fibers triggering nerve impulses. Every sensation seemed relevant, profound. She closed her eyes and drew breath and felt the expansion of her rib cage and the slight sway of her arms (the ruthless itch of the gash on her palm, the unpleasant stickiness of the dried blood). In that moment it struck her as odd that there was no word in the English language for the satisfaction of breathing, nothing comparable to "thirst" and "quench". Something so fundamental, that so much depended upon, that it became transparent.

Meandering to the other side of the room she braced herself on the mantle. Tears welled in her eyes. Not for Robert but for herself, her predicament, the frustration and helplessness she felt.

After a few agonizing moments she looked up and, viewed through a sheen of tears in the twilight, was a dead man's book collection. She began mentally listing off the books. "To Kill A Mockingbird". "The Language Instinct". "The War Of The Worlds". "The Naked Ape". "Othello". "On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life".

The struggle for life. That hadn't even really existed for her prior to three days ago.

Fatimah regretted not having the presence of mind to sync her terminal to the satellite link before it was lost. Somewhere over the Atlantic she'd deleted all the local content on her terminal and desperately wanted to know what Robert had written in his final message to her.

She looked at the assortment of books, and at the apartment, at its paucity of luxuries, and its furnishings now forming a barricade. She thought of the gun and the other items.

"Who were you?"



XXXVIII

The following day passed without incident. The now-commonplace gunshots rang in the distance and they detected more evidence of their unseen neighbours, but no one tried to breach the barrier. The women had not left the apartment since the expedition to secure water. Even the indignity of the white bucket that served as a chamber pot no longer fazed them.

As the sun stained the western sky a muddy orange as seen through cracks in the barricade, Audrey expended the waning daylight hours postulating potential scenarios. "What if we get there and no one's there? We'll be leaving a perfectly good hiding place and then we're back to scavenging for food, starving if we're lucky, more likely dying of dehydration." Audrey peered through a hole in their fortifications at the setting sun. "If someone else doesn't find us first." she added.

"We won't leave anything behind." answered Hafizah distractedly, as she re-read the downloaded newsfeeds for the umpteenth time, scouring them for every morsel of information on the state of the world.

"Which'll make us a target." replied Audrey, unsatisfied, but Hafizah's attention was on her terminal.

"So I think I know how this works." Fatimah waggled the weaponized laser. "There's actually a little indicator I missed." She pointed to a recess in the glossy black surface. "There's two modes, well three actually: continuous, burst, or comm. It can do 15 seconds continuous. After that the battery's charge is dead. Burst is what it sounds like. Comm is a communications laser. Not very useful at the moment." She turned it over in her hands, her own fingerprints spoiling the smooth finish. "This has got to be state of the art. I mean, did you see the cupboard? It actually burned a hole right through half an inch of plywood, and I only had it switched on for like less than a second."

Audrey stared. "Why the heck do you know so much about this?"

"Like I said, I saw a programme on it."

"She's cultivated a bit of a fixation on military weapons. You should have seen her walking around with nuclear explosions going off on her t-shirt." offered Hafizah without looking up from her terminal. "'Did you know that the very first hydrogen bomb detonation completely vaporized the island it was tested on?'" she said in an exaggerated imitation of Fatimah's speech.

"Thanks. Hey, you should conserve the battery on that. Y'know, just in case."

Switching off the terminal and placing it on the coffee table Hafizah leaned back in her lawn chair and looked at the ceiling. "I know. It's just, I feel so.. blind. So cut off. Like I've lost a limb. It was nice being able to forget for a while."

"You find out anything else?" Fatimah steadied the laser with her good hand, preventing it from rolling off the edge of the table.

"Not really. It's like Zabine said, it's chaos everywhere. A lot of the reports contradict each other. It's hard to get a complete picture. I saw a more speculative piece suggesting that the debris cloud had spread and taken out nearly half of the world's communication satellites. Obviously the internet's still up, but several major internet backbones are down. It doesn't look like any trade unionists actually claimed responsibility for the attack, but they certainly weren't swift to condemn it." Her arms outstretched and yawning, she projected "Okay. Really need to get some sleep tonight."

A distant gunshot punctuated the brief silence.

"Tomorrow's gonna be rough."



XXXIX

The drone of the tires on asphalt and the rattle of detritus on the cab floor masked the barks of starving dogs outside. In packs they ran down the avenue braying.

Fatimah braced herself on the dashboard as Hafizah guided the powder blue truck off road, circumventing a segment of highway obstructed with burned-out forsaken cars. They'd made surprisingly good time despite having had to double back several times when abandoned cars or more deliberate barricades halted their progress.

High above an overcast gathered, banishing the sun, leeching colour from the world as the wind gained strength.

Audrey slouched in the middle seat, her hands drawn up inside her over sized military surplus jacket like a child wearing her father's shirt. She wore a look of grim consternation.

They passed a crumpled human form gathered at the side of the road. Hafizah didn't even seem to notice, so absorbed in the task at hand was she. She held the steering wheel in a death grip as she pushed the accelerator and the electric motor dutifully complied. Outside the wind became a monotonous roar.

No one spoke.

The drone ate into her. She closed her eyes.

Fatimah considered everything she'd experienced in the past two weeks.

Surreal was the only word that came to mind. Yet, in the back of her consciousness she'd always known something like this could happen. The delicate filaments of contract and custom that provided the basis for social cohesion were as gossamer in the wind. Tiers of abstraction manufactured a world divorced from the fundamental realities of the universe, cleaving to convention. It brought to mind the saying, "Any nation is three meals from revolution."

It seemed appropriate as the dogs fought one another in the squall.



XL

Thunderheads assembled overhead.

The women navigated derelict neighbourhoods in silence. Manicured green lawns and pastel houses belied the danger they were in.

Hafizah was totally absorbed. Audrey looked pale. For her part Fatimah was nurturing a headache, fed by the loudly jostling containers of water in the flatbed. Nervously, she fiddled with the scroll wheel on her dormant terminal, unconsciously rubbing the distal tissue raw. She'd never been to this part of the city before, and they had only the truck's archaic GPS to go on. Mojave had been the world's fastest growing city; in a truck of that vintage it was a Herculean task just to keep the on board downloaded maps up to date and the truck's previous owner had been neglectful.

The neighbourhood appeared untouched. Aside from a deficit of working traffic lights and pedestrians it could pass for a regular gusty day.

It wasn't fair. The intense longing for things to be the way they used to, for none of this to be real, manifested in a painful knot in her stomach. Stop being so childish, she scolded herself. She looked wistfully at the neatly arranged luxury cars that lined the lane. She could never have afforded a car like these, she thought distractedly as they passed. Something flashed in her mind. Too evenly spaced.

Something wasn't right.

Before the thought could fully form a gunshot rang out. Whomever it was had missed, if that had been their intention.

Motion caught her eye as a silhouette emerged from behind a hedge, with something in its hand, shouting something. And another from behind a parked car, also armed. And another from behind another car.

The electric motor whined in protest as Hafizah attempted to escape. Ahead, a makeshift barricade, a pair of buses, was moving to close off the intersection.

Too late.

The cab shook violently as Hafizah drove the truck up onto a curb and skidded to a sudden, jerky halt. In the chaos Fatimah banged her bandaged hand on the door frame and white hot pain flared.

"Get out! This side!" Hafizah motioned towards the driver's side door, which opened to one of the manicured lawns. "Head for that house!" she said, pointing to a pale yellow monstrosity. "Whatever you do, don't forget the weapons!"

Fatimah risked a look back. Dozens of assailants had emerged from behind cars and between houses and were converging on them.

They ran up to the doorstep followed by the loud cracks of gunshot. Hafizah was already trying to shoot off the door knob, with little success. An assailant's bullet ricocheted off the concrete path and embedded itself in the yellow siding less than a foot from Fatimah. Her ears rang. "Hurry!" cried Audrey. Fatimah looked desperately to Hafizah who was still trying to shoot off the lock, her face etched in terror.

As Fatimah watched the ragged men (and women, she noted) close in on them, the butterfly knife in her good hand seemed a parody.

"Get out of the way!" Audrey drew the laser and said, "Look away!" Emerald brilliance stabbed out and neatly severed a semicircle around the door knob. Audrey kicked the door in and it swung and slammed into the darkened hallway.

In darkness they ran, found the back door, and let the light flood in. The back yard was clear.

"This way!" Hafizah had unlatched the back wrought iron gate, half-obscured by a pair of overgrown lilac bushes. The smell mixed with spiraling cordite from Hafizah's gun. Another crack rang out, Fatimah looked around; this time thunder. Fatimah stared up at the sky, the clouds looked about to burst. "Come on!" Hafizah grabbed her wrist.

Behind them were shouts; their pursuers had not given up, quite the opposite; they seemed to redouble their efforts. They rounded the corner and followed the women through the alley. There was a lull. They seemed to be conserving ammunition for when they got nearer.

Fatimah tripped, and fell hard. Hafizah spun around and Audrey kept running for a few more paces before she stopped. "Get down!" Blinding green light flashed and the afterimage of a mathematically straight line bisected Fatimah's world. Blinking, she thought she saw some of the assailants drop, writhing on the ground, but still more funneled into the alley.

"Now that they know you have it they want your laser!" Fatimah yelled.

"Shit." Audrey waved the laser over the horde again. The front row fell in a heap, but there appeared to be over fifty now in pursuit, swarming over their fallen comrades.

The attackers no longer seemed concerned about wasting ammunition. The air was full of the sound of gunshot once more.

Thunder roared. The first tentative droplets heralded the storm to come.

"What do we do?!" cried Audrey, waiting for the laser to recharge.

Fatimah looked to her sister. She looked defeated. The crowd was so near they could make out words, none of them pleasant. Bullets kicked up dust around them, minature mushroom clouds each. Hafizah screamed as one sent a pebble careening into her leg.

The dust turned to mud as the rain began in earnest.

"Hafizah... I'm sorry."

Just then, to the east, a pillar of fire lanced down from the heavens.

From her pocket, Boudicca said, "It is now six PM."



XLI

The mob froze at the sight of the kinetic bombardment weapon. An eerie silence consumed all. Fat rain drops pelted their faces as they all looked windward, where the light flared and died.

"They really did it.." whispered Fatimah so quietly she wasn't even sure she had spoken.

Slowly the crowd began to stir.

An extremely thin woman with long blonde hair matted with dried blood collapsed in the mud and began rocking back and forth, hugging her knees to her chest, muttering, "No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No."

A man wearing a soiled USPS uniform dropped with a dull thud the crowbar he'd been wielding. "Haven't we suffered enough?!"

"Wormwood!" cried a crazed-looking woman with greying, badly dyed hair, wringing her calloused hands in gleeful anticipation of the Rapture. "Thank you Jesus!"

Many of the would be pursuers still thrashed on the ground, moaning in agony, clutching at the burns across their torsos, the artificial fibers of their clothes melted to their skin.

Another man staggered, arms outstretched, walking in circles. "What? What happened? I can't see. There was this blinding green light.."

Gradually it dawned on Fatimah that this was their chance. "Hey!" she whispered to the others. "Now!"

She picked herself up and made for the exit. Audrey had already rounded the corner with Hafizah limping after her.

Looking back some in the group seemed alarmed, but did not make to raise their weapons. One man went for his gun, thought better of it, turned, and walked back through the wrought iron gate to pick some lilacs, a distant, disturbing expression on his face. They appeared utterly defeated. Many sat in the mud looking up at the sky, squinting in the rain, tiny rivulets running down their faces, washing away the accumulated sweat and dirt. They were not an army. They were not legion. They were desperate. Dehydrated. Starving. They were pathetic.

They were normal people.

Fatimah kept on running; the rain drowned out the last of their voices. Soon all she could hear was her own laboured breathing.



XLII

"Hold up." Fatimah braced herself to catch her breath. Bent over, gripping her knees, looking and feeling as though she might vomit, staring down into a puddle, she was dimly aware of her companions' own private struggle for composure.

Her reflection wavered with the addition of each drop. A stranger's face obscured by a cascade of long black hair.

"Fuck it." She pulled out the butterfly knife and in a practiced motion flicked it open. She proceeded to roughly hew at the dark mane. Gradually emerged a much younger-looking woman, before the image was completely obfuscated by falling locks. She ran her fingers through her scalp, freeing any remaining stray strands. She gave a deep sigh. It was strangely liberating.

"In here." Hafizah had pried apart the boarded up storefront of a defunct diner on the edge of town. "Get out from this." she said, gesturing to the dark heavy skies.

Inside sections of the black and white checkered tile floor were missing, presumably where the industrial dishwasher once resided.

Audrey sat at the bar. She hadn't spoken since the altercation in the alley. She was shivering.

"Hey." Fatimah occupied the spot next to her. "Audrey, you did what you had to do. They were trying to kill us." Audrey wouldn't meet her gaze. "You saved our lives back there, twice."

When Audrey did not respond she continued, "Did you see those buses? It was practiced. They've done it before. How many people have they killed in the same fashion?"

"They were desperate. Like we were. We took, no, we stole supplies so that we might live. Just because we didn't slit anybody's throat doesn't mean we haven't killed anyone. Well, that you haven't killed anyone.." She looked up for the first time, her eyes were red. "And now what do we have to show for it? Everything we scavenged we lost back there."

"Not everything." corrected Fatimah. She called over her shoulder, "How much ammo do we have left?"

"The magazine held 14. I used four rounds. I used three trying to get that damned lock off, not like the movies, and I... fired one shot into the crowd when we were in the alley." Hafizah hesitated. "I don't think I hit anyone. I hope I didn't hit anyone.."

"I'm pretty fucking sure I hit someone." Audrey said sourly. "I used up seven and a bit seconds, most of that on the stupid door. That's out of 15." Audrey wiped her tear-stained eyes with her sleeve. "So what do we do now?"

"We go on. We're almost there." Hafizah sounded worn, doubtful. She was kneeling at a booth with torn red vinyl seats, peering through cracks in the boarded up windows through which grey light filtered in.

"Do you really think that's going to work? The army's got that entire place locked down."

"Yes, but we have a multinational corporation with scary resources on our side. It's humbling. The army, the US army, had no defense against that.." Fatimah trailed off remembering of the display of power brought to bare.

"Alright. Let's get moving. We've got less than an hour before we have to be on that airship." The uncertainty from a minute ago was gone as Hafizah led them back out into the deluge.



XLIII

The firmament was leaking.

The cataract drowned the countless fires that had carved up the city, leaving the horizon punctuated with tombstones of columned black smoke only slightly darker than the omnipresent gloom.

A jejune oxidized chain link fence crowned with razor wire compassed the world's oldest commercial spaceport. Beyond the patchwork of aging cyclone, concrete consumed the desert, repurposing it into ever-expanding tarmac coinciding with unprecedented economic growth. The silhouette of the control tower rose above the fray.

"Awfully phallic, in'it?" Fatimah said. Unconsciously she scratched at her close-cropped scalp.

"Hrm." Hafizah scanned the area, applying the light amplification setting on her insets.

A number of APCs and several tanks were stationed along the main entrance, quite visible. Soldiers milled about in rain-soaked fatigues. Chinks in the pavement betrayed recent machine gun fire.

At the gate at the far end two soldiers wearing exoskeletons sans armour loaded cargo into the back of a jeep. Protrusions on their hips silently communicated the potential for miniguns.

"How the hell are we supposed to get in there?" Audrey fidgeted.

"I don't have all the answers, alright? Stop being so negative all the time. If I think of something you'll be the-"

There was a flash to the east.

For several moments the only sound was the impact of raindrops on their clothing, in the desert around them.

"Was that another..?" Fatimah began.

"Zabine didn't mention anything about a second strike on Edwards. Maybe she didn't know about it. But that's good news for us. Look."

The exoskeleton soldiers had dropped what they were doing and were now running towards the terminal, which apparently functioned as a makeshift camp. Like gazelles they sprinted, faster than any human.

"I wonder what else Zabine wasn't aware of." mused Fatimah.

The soldiers emerged less than a minute later fully armoured, looking only vaguely human, a minigun rested on the hip of one.

"Great, now they're on alert."

"Shut up Adurey. Look."

Following Hafizah's gaze, Fatimah could barely make out the dark form of someone moving in the shadows behind a car across the parkade from the main alley.

Without warning an RPG speared out from the darkness, hitting one of the soldiers square in the chest, and sending the other careening through the (deactivated) sliding glass doors of the terminal. Amazingly, the first soldier showed signs of life, as his suit slowly got up and proceeded to return fire.

The car the attacker had used as a shield exploded. Car alarms wailed in protest.

Squinting, Audrey asked, "Those the mercenaries?"

"If they are, they're early." Fatimah checked the time; half six.

The second soldier emerged from the shattered glass and crumpled aluminum door frames, his minigun already spun up. Just then two more RPGs fired from the second and third floors of the parkade adjacent the terminal. The first hit the concrete in front of the first soldier, the second shot caught his legs and, as the smoke cleared, had torn him very nearly in half. Yet still the suit struggled to pick itself off the ground and, balanced precariously on one hand, fired into the shadows that concealed the attackers, entrails trailing behind it.

Hafizah looked horrified. "He can't still be alive.."

"No.. I think that's all suit. The soldier was dead the moment the first rocket struck."

The remaining soldier fired a missile into the roof of second level of the parkade, collapsing the ceiling, and cars from the level above cascaded down with the terrible screeching of metal scarcely muted by the unyielding storm. He washed his minigun over the entire area as reinforcements, un-augmented soldiers from the main camp, finally began to arrive. The first soldier's suit determinedly dragged itself along the ground towards the parkade in pursuit of the assailants, leaving a glistening snail trail of blood quickly washed away by rain.

"This is neat and all, but shouldn't we take this opportunity to slip by?" suggested Audrey.

"Oh yes. Let's go."

They crawled through a rusted gap in the fence under the dead gaze of a defeated security camera.



XLIV

Audrey paced nervously up and down the mirror-lined lobby. "I don't like how close this will take us past those army guys." Featureless except for four dormant elevators, they could only guess at the building's purpose. Whatever its function it was now irrelevant. The slow process of erosion had already begun as the storm raged outside.

"At least, it's dry in here." Fatimah Ansari sat on an cold, yellowing radiator near the entrance, motionless, staring at her boots, the puddles forming underneath.

"It's the only way we're going to make it past them without being spotted. Yes, we have thermal imaging and night vision, but so do they. And you can bet theirs is better." Hafizah turned to Fatimah seeking support from her sister.

Fatimah sighed, wishing it would all just end. "She's right." The puddles grew larger still. Mirrored in the shallow pools her companions, pantomime, as her attention strayed from the conversation, their words became a meaningless assortment of sounds.

Hafizah continued, "We're here, in this.. administrative building or whatever." She waited to make sure Audrey was looking where she was pointing. Their current position was highlighted on the map Zabine had uploaded to Hafizah's terminal. "We're right next to the hotel." She paused. "It'd be a lot easier if the elevators were still working.." she murmured wistfully.

The individual puddles had merged into a single indoor pond. Lightning struck somewhere nearby, and thunder reverberated loudly in the darkened antechamber. Abstract reflections played across the walls evoking nightmarish dreamscapes viewed upside down through the lens of her reflecting pool.

"Then from the hotel we take this raised walk way across to the second floor of the terminal." Seeing Audrey was about to protest Hafizah persisted, "I know. Walking right into it. But everything we've seen suggests that their forces are spread thin and they're concentrated at the other end of the terminal."

Audrey remained skeptical. Fatimah could hear the clomping of Audrey's heavy boots growing and receding, echoing.

"Look, we can't just stroll out onto the tarmac, they'd spot us in an instant. No cover. No where to hide. The only way is to come at it from an angle they aren't watching, from one of the gates, make a run for it and pray that the mercenaries create enough of a distraction for us to slip past unnoticed."

Even in her reverie Fatimah was painfully aware of how unlikely it sounded. Naive.

Gradually she became aware that Audrey's pacing had ceased. Fatimah listened to the pitter patter of rain on the plate glass windows. At last Audrey spoke. "Okay, fine. Y'know what, I don't care. Our chances of survival aren't looking particularly good no matter what course of action we take. We've lost all out food and water, though, I suspect water won't be a problem again for quite some time.." Lightning struck again somewhere. "I have no desire to spend the rest of my life living in.. this.." she waved her arms expressively at the remnants of civilization around them. "What was that?"

Fatimah looked up to find an assault rifle pointed directly at her forehead. She didn't remember that being there.

"Who are you?" demanded a gruff voice.

She swallowed. "M-my name's Fatimah Ansari. This, is my sister, Hafizah, and over there, that's Audrey Ashpool." Audrey and Hafizah were frozen both, eyes like saucers.

"Ansari.." The man seemed to consider this. The gun remained level with her head. A second man held the door open with his foot, covering the room. They wore mismatched military fatigues, one a beret. An RPG slung over his shoulder, the second man cradled what appeared to be a flechette rifle in his arms.

Inwardly she laughed at herself. Ridiculous. Fixating on trivia with a gun held against her forehead. The man said something to his companion.

Her ears perked up. Forgetting their predicament she questioned him, "What did you just say?"

"I said," The man looked from her to Hafizah. "I know your father."

A chill ran down her spine. The last words leeched all colour from the world.

"He's here."



XLV

"Alim Ansari." It was not a question.

Lightening punctuated the preternatural stillness that engulfed the vault-like room.

Somewhere to her left Hafizah squeaked, "...What?" It was the voice of the little girl who grew up in the lonely house with the big back garden.

"Yah. Saw him this morning." The man looked uncomfortable. Anxious. He hadn't precisely lowered the gun but it no longer pointed at anyone in particular. "He helped us plan this little operation. And before you ask, no, I have no idea where he went. He didn't say." The man looked at Fatimah. "And we knew enough not to ask."

Quite involuntarily Fatimah recognized how attractive the man was. There she sat, transfixed, noticing his shaven head, his dark skin beaded with commingled rain and sweat, his intelligent stygian eyes that regarded them all dispassionately. And suddenly she was painfully conscious of how long it'd been since she'd last had sex, followed almost immediately by the guilt of the inappropriateness of the thought.

"Alright, get up. You're coming with us."

Mud from the men's boots had clouded Fatimah's reflecting pool.



XLVI

In the maturing dusk the vastness of the lobby created a continuity that threatened to claw its way into higher dimensions in an effort to justify its existence. Geometrically straight lines met somewhere in the remote gloom.

The scale was terrifying.

The staccato illumination of nearby lightening strikes acknowledged a Brobdingnagian black gallery 30 stories tall, a canyon of balcony-rimmed glass overlooking a malevolent-seeming artificial lagoon. Crystal walkways criss-crossed the chasm at various depths. Plate glass windows formed the entire western wall, looking out onto the desert.

It was the embodiment of the luxury and extravagance of Emirati finance.

And it appeared untouched by the chaos outside, as if it were only experiencing a temporary black out.

Feeling awfully exposed they stalked the promenade in silence, passing a mirrored banquet hall roofed with a lush garden commanding a view of the fathomless black water.

Against Audrey's loud protestations, Avery had insisted on confiscating their small cache of weapons. The laser dangled from his belt, glinting faintly in the anemic light.

Avery, the severe black man, had only reluctantly given out his name. His comrade, he said, was Pitor, originally from Chechnya. He spoke no more of Alim.

Once they passed the banquet hall, they turned left and quickly ascended a staircase that brought them parallel to the rooftop garden, itself protected from the elements by the vast canopy of glass. They hurried through a set of solid oak double doors into a hall lined with conference rooms that curved off into the distance. Sound-deadening material absorbed their weary footfalls.

Audrey looked at Avery significantly, "Can we talk now?"

"I'd rather you didn't." He looked tired.

"What the hell is going on?!"

Avery gave a deep sigh. "What do you mean?"

She looked flabbergasted. "This! All of it! What are you doing here?"

Hafizah slouched against the wall and slid down into a crouch, her head in her hands, tuning them out.

Pitor checked each of the rooms, irritated by the distraction.

"Isn't it obvious? We're getting back at those bastards." Avery spoke through clenched teeth.

Staring down the hall into the all-encompassing darkness Fatimah interjected, "Who?"

"The state. The military-industrial complex. Whatever you want to call it. Yah, yah, I know how that sounds. How cliche it all sounds. Doesn't make it any less true. Authority is arbitrary, plain and simple." He seemed suddenly alive. He paced back and forth, gesticulating wildly. "These ambitious men, there's nothing special about them. They're not any smarter than us. This," he indicated the excess that assaulted them. "This isn't a symptom of corruption. Corruption suggests deficiency. I say this is precisely how those in power designed it to work. To favor them and their friends."

Involuntarily Audrey put her fingers to her lips. "So.. you're not.. mercenaries?"

"No. God, no!"

Fatimah turned back towards him. "Okay. Say I agree with you. What then?"

"This."

Audrey stared uncomprehendingly. "Pardon?"

"We tear it all down. We shake it to its very foundations in an event so resounding, so undeniable, that maybe, just maybe, they might give pause, the ambitious men. Of course they won't be directly inconvenienced; they've all long since abandoned the planet for the habitats. But in that hesitation will be their undoing. We'll use it to seize their weapons. And then, when we're finished, we can replace it with.. something better."

A chill went through Fatimah's body. "You talk as if you've already got something in mind.." Audrey's voice was uncharacteristically level. She was in shock.

"Of course we do. We did it!" He raised his arms triumphantly.

"You.."

"We took out the solar satellite array and plunged the whole world into darkness."



XLVII

"Ha!" exclaimed Hafizah. Her body quaked with the ejaculation but she did not look up.

Avery looked at her. His face suddenly acquired an austere countenance. "I'm quite serious. We've got over 60 men converging on this spot at this very moment. We've already killed one of theirs."

"We saw." said Audrey, turning away, disgusted. She sat down in the shadows, back towards them.

Pitor was tense, ostensibly irritated by what he considered to be a waste of time. He adjusted his grip on the flechette rifle.

"I'm sure you are and I'm sure you do." Still, Hafizah did not meet his gaze. Fatimah studied her, slumped against the wall, staring down at her feet. Her sister seemed resigned.

Through the doorway beyond she could see flies lackadaisically orbiting a discarded catered meal in one of the conference rooms.

Then a phrase occurred to her. "'Bourgeoisie adventurism.'"

"What?" he snapped.

"I just remembered this phrase, condescendingly used by Lenin to describe terrorism. 'Bourgeoisie adventurism.' I always found it ironic, 'cause far as I could see it almost invariably could be applied to the Communists. Bored, middle class. Unwilling or incapable of recognizing the hypocrisy."

"We are not Marxists!" Avery's patience had clearly atrophied.

"Doesn't matter. Same sentiment. What do you think's going to happen? What's all this?" She waved her arms.

"The Revolution." The intonation left no doubt as to the promotion of the latter word to proper noun status. "Look at what unrestricted capitalism has done to the world. Really look at it. The rich have scuttled the planet and headed for the stars; they're the only ones who can afford it. Back on Earth we have governments that feign accountability, put on a nice show. Or are beholden to corporations. Who exercise arbitrary authority.

"And Dubai. Dubai." He shook his head. "You've got rich white expats completely acclimatized to slave owning the moment they step off the plane. Supposedly civilized people! But Dubai's more than that. More than a nation state. More than a multinational. They're something else. Something new. The Emiraties now have their tendrils in everything. They looked at Hezbollah, Fatah, and the rest of them and decided they weren't profitable. Profitable! And put them out of business, just like that. Loads of good publicity. 'Peace in our lifetimes'."

He looked at her with pleading eyes. A fly the colour of an oilslick sat on the doorknob behind him grooming itself.

Avery resumed his bombastic speech. "You didn't think it would be pretty, did you? Revolutions are bloody, people die. Lots of people. But it's the only way anything ever changes. It's for the greater good." Spittle dangled precariously from his lip. He wiped it away with his sleeve.

The buzzing of the flies blended with the white noise. An orgy of vomiting, consumption, and procreation. Fatimah imagined she could hear the rustle of the cast off skins of maggots.

She did not relent. "Nothing ever changes. Your ideology is just that; an ideal. It does not describe reality. Anyone who thinks they can describe the movements and interactions of nine billion people is either a liar or a fool. Ideology is in essence prophecy. God! We can't even predict the weather! You think you can account for the tremendous complexity of countless human psychologies with your little model?"

Fatimah realized she'd been shouting. She took a moment to compose herself. "The problem is when people act as if it does conform to reality. They think they have it all figured out. They know they have it all figured out. They've got faith." Fatimah spared a glace for her sister, for whom faith was not a pejorative.

"What was that?" Avery's keen eyes scanned the darkness.

Fatimah looked and didn't see anything. She continued somewhat less forcefully, "Look, I don't know what my father was doing here, but I'm sure it doesn't hurt that when the dust settles you'll be the only game in town. You'll have captured all these weapons the military has." She looked at the two revolutionaries. "And by the looks of things, you haven't had the best luck finding food either. Bet this isn't what you pictured when you thought of the Revolution."

"Shut up. What is that?" He raised his rifle and looked around.

She heard a buzzing, different, lower.

Avery's head exploded in a mist of blood and grey matter.



XLVIII

The afterimage commanded her field of view.

Tinnitus.

She tasted copper.

"Fatimah!"

She remembered watching Avery's body crumple to the floor.

The fly resumed its inspection of the brass doorknob, unfazed.

Audrey knelt beside Avery's corpse, shaking it.

Pitor... left. Shouting rapid-fire Russian into an archaic walkie-talkie. She never saw him again.

"Audrey, he's gone." She was surprised to hear these words escape from her mouth. She didn't much feel like talking. Her lips were numb, her extremities tingled. Sparks swam in her vision.

"I know that!" Audrey somehow managed to sound simultaneously annoyed and terrified.

She would later remember staring at the perverted reflection of rotting food in the contiguous conference room in the growing pool of Avery's blood. Pints. She recalled an old pub in Camden she used to frequent and one bar tender in particular by the name of Molly who would tease her over her penchant for zinfandel.

A paroxysm of revulsion. Half-digested saltines and bile flashed on the expensive carpet.

"Fatimah!"

She wiped her chin with her sleeve. She removed her coat and threw it on the ground.

She gradually became aware that someone was calling her name.

"Fatimah! We have to go!" Hafizah. She looked worried, of course.

"Audrey! We're going!"

"Hold on!"

The sound of glass shattering. Shouting and gunfire.

"We're going!"

She did not remember activating her night vision.

They reached the fire exit with its dormant sign.

She ran her hand over her scalp which sent sweat misting into the air, which felt refreshing on the back of her arm.

"Audrey!" Hafizah looked like a different person. Not the same vulnerable, emotionally-stunted sibling whom she secretly envied ever since they were children. A different animal altogether.

"Coming!" Audrey's ghostly visage entered the cone of invisible light cast by the infrared LEDs.

"What the hell were you doing? He was a mass-murdering fuckhead." demanded Hafizah impertinently.

Audrey scowled. "I was retrieving these.." From her deep pockets she produced the pistol and the laser. Over her shoulder hung Avery's assault rifle, which she unslung and passed to Fatimah. "I'm keeping this one." she said, plunging the laser back into her coat pocket. She then handed the pistol to Hafizah. "Come on, we haven't much time."



XLIX

The stairwell was in darkness; the emergency lights had long since been drained. A draught stole through the shaft encouraging the evaporation of what was once refreshing perspiration.

Hugging herself, Fatimah thought of her jacket, spattered in Avery's blood, laying on the floor in the hallway back the way they'd come. "So what now?"

Hafizah merely studied her hands.

Audrey answered. "We keep going."

"How?"

As if on cue the cruel sonance of gunfire filled the main atrium.

She looked at them earnestly. "Pray they don't notice us." Determinedly, Audrey began her ascent, the others followed without comment. The noise of the battle had merged with the bedlam of the storm outside.

There was a lull in the chaos as they reached the emergency exit.

"Well," Audrey glanced back at them. "Here goes.." She placed her hand on the cool steel of the door. She took a breath and..

A thin voice pierced the silence. "Fatimah, wait."

"What the..? ..Boudicca?" Fatimah held up her hand. "Audrey! Wait!"

Audrey turned back towards her, the relief on her face was plain. "What?"

"What is it Boudicca?" Fatimah unconsciously caressed the terminal in the breast pocket of her shirt.

The Agent's voice was tinny in the built-in speakers of Fatimah's glacier glasses. "Please forgive the interruption, but might I suggest you use the insets in your sunglasses to scan the area from around the corner so as not to expose yourself? I can compile the information gathered so you have some idea of what you're about to face."

For a moment she just stared. "Uh, ..wow. Uh, yes, yes! Good idea." Fatimah recognized the blank stares of her companions and explained, "Boudicca wants me to hold out my sunglasses so she can take some pictures, basically."



L

It was quiet.

"Well.." Fatimah wedged open the door with her foot and furtively leaned forward.

Glinting faintly in the muted sunset, decalcomanic chandeliers tapered into infinitely fine glass filaments, like spidery fingers disparately reaching for the oasis below.

In a quick, precise motion Fatimah reached out of the recess and waved her sunglasses in a wide arc. At the apogee of the gesture the frames exploded in her hand. She screamed and threw herself back through the threshold into Audrey and Hafizah's waiting arms as the door slammed shut behind her.

"Fuck!" She held her hand, and felt the thoroughly unwelcome, stomach-churning texture of warm, sticky blood.

"Let me see that."

She winced as Audrey deftly removed plastic shrapnel from her palm. Hafizah held her other hand and offered measured assurances. Even with only a narrow sliver of light sneaking underneath the door, Fatimah could see a sizable crimson stain on her shirt.

The blood was too much, she looked away.

That same look of concern on her sister's face, abstracted in the feeble light. What was she thinking? She had been so distant. Acting when she was forced to, but otherwise it was as if she'd already given up. Even now her sister seemed remote. Hafizah's heart wasn't in it. Her heart wasn't in anything, for like... years back. And why should it? What was the best case scenario for her? They get rescued and she returns to an unfulfilling job, binge drinking, and self-loathing. She wished they could talk.

Another stab of pain. "Fuck!"

"Hold still!"

She glimpsed her bandaged right hand in her sister's and a sardonic thought occurred to her: at least now her hands matched.



LI

"It's like a parrot. It has no idea what it's saying."

"I"m just saying if Audrey had stepped through that door just now she'd be dead."

Fatimah collected her thoughts. "Okay, remember when we were kids? Remember how we'd explore the Four Seasons even though we weren't staying there? How we'd run around avoiding all the guests and staff using our terminals to peek around corners and put together maps, making a game of it, playing at spies?" She recognized the nostalgia that claimed her sister's face in harsh contrast. "It's the same thing really." Nevertheless Hafizah seemed unconvinced. "Look, my Agent did not magically become sentient, I just accidentally left it on, that's all. It's been on this whole time, since we got here, I forgot to turn it off after using the GPS, and it's been listening. I don't think we appreciate how many senses she has available to her.

"I mean, she's got multiple microphones, a 3D video feed, GPS, an infrared range finder, night vision, thermal imaging, various accelerometers and gyros, and she's clever enough that she can even use speakers for additional ears if she needs to. The software suite available to her is equally impressive, she can analyze the stress patterns in our voices, my heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, etc. On top of all that she's tailored to match my personality, that's why people are willing to pay so much for custom Agents. She's programmed to anticipate my needs and offer suggestions, and she's been doing it for over a decade.

"It might make her seem omniscient, but she isn't. How likely is it that my Agent would suddenly develop intelligence right when we needed her to?"

Hafizah hesitated. "Miracles aren't likely. That's sort of the definition."

"A miracle? This isn't in any way religious, we're talking about science and technology, the farthest thing from god."

"Is it? The creation of life seems to fit rather neatly within God's domain."

Fatimah was becoming flustered. "Okay, seriously, we don't have time for this. We can have a lovely theological debate once we're safely on board the ship. Until then, let's figure out what we're gonna do. Boudicca? You got all that, right? The footage from my sunglasses before they were shot out of my hand?"

"Yes, Fatimah."

"Good girl."



LII

Squinting in the gloom, anticipating the irritatingly bright backlight, Fatimah unfurled her terminal's screen like a rotulus. As her eyes adjusted the image smoothly scaled to accommodate the amount of screen real estate currently revealed.

Boudicca obligingly sent copies to Hafizah and Audrey's terminals, which were routed to their sunglasses by their Agents.

The now-familiar atrium filled the screen. Some effort was made to convey a sense of depth, but the image remained married to the paper-thin roll out screen.

Fatimah tapped the display with a blood-encrusted finger, adjusting the viewing angle.

There were noticeable gaps in the image (Boudicca compensated with her best attempt at 3D rendering) but on the whole the fidelity was impressive.

"Okay. So what are up against?"

"I count 12 individuals in the vicinity. Six are here," the image focused on six soldiers wearing powered exoskeletons, gathered in the lobby. "And the remainder are here," the camera panned to the opposite end of the hall revealing five rebels, with a sixth betrayed by his reflection in a chrome banister, which the Agent had helpfully highlighted.

Switching back to the soldiers, Boudicca elaborated, "I believe this," One of the soldiers gained an aura, "is the one that shot at you, most likely employing a computer-assisted targeting system given the accuracy and quick response time."

"Great." Audrey, who had been sitting cross legged, laid back, her head resting on the concrete.

Fatimah stared at her hands in the frigid glow of the terminal, one bound with gauze, the other wrapped in a sodden strip of cloth torn from her sister's shirt.

She cleared her throat. "So what do you figure?"

Audrey sighed. "I don't know. We.. get them fighting each other again, and while they're distracted we make a run for it along one of these walkways." She gestured in their air in front of her and the corresponding bridges were highlighted on Fatimah's display. "In fact," her voice acquired a semblance of optimism, "this one," she said, indicating crystalline walkway on the right, "lines right up with the overpass outside. Where we wanna go." She sat up.

"All we need is a distraction.." mused Fatimah.



LIII

There was a moment where she thought, 'This is a bad idea.' But before it had an opportunity to crystallize the emerald light speared out.

Fatimah averted her eyes.

Adurey directed the laser towards the gilded chains that held up the filamentous chandeliers. There was a moment of peril as the beam caught the glass and refracted off one of the facets, striking the frame of the doorway they were standing in, leaving a charred, smoking furrow. Audrey stopped suddenly.

"Shit." She swallowed. "Okay. Let's try that again." Her face a mixture of embarrassment and terror she adjusted the angle.

The beam resumed along its original path, slicing through the supports for each of the five large chandeliers one by one in quick succession.

The fifth let go just as the first struck the ledge of the rooftop garden of the banquet hall, sent tumbling end over end, and was dashed across the promenade below. It was joined by the others.

The sound was deafening, reverberating through the cavernous space.

Presently the battle resumed, filling the hall with incoherent gunfire.

An RPG hastened to meet its target. The soldiers returned fire.

Audrey called to them, "Go!" and ran straight ahead into the fray.

Guiltily, Fatimah waited a moment to see if she would be gunned down, then joined her. Hafizah followed.

Emerging from the dark stairwell out into the donnybrook to her right she got her first good look at the heavily armoured powered exoskeletons. Their liquid movements were disconcerting, never still.

Fatimah looked at her feet and saw another RPG pass just beneath the glass walkway. It exploded in mid-air, not 10 feet from her position as one of the soldiers shot it out of the sky. Boudicca was right; computer assisted targeting. The harrowing thought that the only reason she was alive was because none of the soldiers had gotten around to it entered her mind. She redoubled her pace.

They had almost reached the far side when one of the soldiers washed his minigun across the bridge in pursuit of a target. The crystaline walkway began to disintegrate in a cataract of glass behind her.

The soldier had also managed to shoot out a section of the glass roof and rain from the storm outside mingled with quartz hail which pelted the lavish indulgence poolside below, coating the deckchairs and ferns, polluting the water.

She watched the discontinuity spread, the cracks would overtake them momentarily.

And Audrey was across, shouting something. Fatimah reached the far end and almost collapsed. To her horror, she watched as her sister tripped, the hungry fissure gaining. She went back, crawling on her hands and knees.

"No!" Hafizah was in tears. "No! Fatimah! No!" She could barely hear her over the gunfire.

The crack stalled at the cantilevered boundary of the walkway. Ignoring the cuts on her knees from ground glass, Fatimah grabbed her sister's hand and dragged her back to the edge, and fell backwards panting.

A hand on her shoulder. She looked up, Audrey mouthed the words, "Let's go!"

She struggled to regain her footing with Hafizah leaning on her for support, and spasmodically the two staggered over to the double doors, shoving them aside and emerging into the storm where Audrey waited impatiently. They crossed the concrete bridge, and collapsed once again at the entrance to the terminal.

The sounds of the battle were muffled somewhat by the deluge, making it seem distant.

When Fatimah had finally caught her breath she announced, "Enough excitement for two lifetimes."

Just then a pillar of fire from somewhere to the north of the spaceport, skimming the rooftop of the terminal, a blinding white flare buried itself in the heart of hotel, a miniature sun, leveling it, burning their astonished looks.

A mushroom cloud began to form.



LIV

"Fatimah!" consciousness flooded back awash in pain.

Gradually the scene resolved. In the distance, as if at the other end of a tunnel, the ruins of the hotel. Fires burning despite the storm. Much of the bridge had collapsed onto parked cars below, exposing the twisted rebar skeleton. Car alarms wailed in the night like derelict children.

Hafizah's doe eyes looked down at her. "What the hell is going on? I mean all of it. First that guy's head explodes, now they nuke the hotel. Why are we still alive?" her words neutered by the detachment of her voice.

Fatimah tried to speak, to say, "Not a nuke." but her voice was little more than a croak. She swallowed. It hurt.

Everything hurt. All of her exposed flesh was burned, not badly. Comparable to a severe sunburn, already peeling. Pain was omnipresent and she ceased trying to differentiate.

To her amazement she discovered she still could move her arm. Tentatively she surveyed the damage; the back of her head felt warm, sticky. Matted. A thought, utterly divorced from urgency, rose to the surface through the jetsam of her mind: 'I have a concussion.'

She cleared her throat, "Not a nuke. Railgun."

"What?" Her sister's expression was disturbing. Not afraid. Not terrified. Mildly curious, almost bored.

She propped herself up on her elbow, provoking a fit of coughing. When it subsided she explained, "China Lake. US Navy weapons testing facility." She pointed to the north. "'Bout an hour's drive. That's where it came from. I saw just before it hit." She paused. "Huh. They must be co-operating, Edwards and them.."

Impatient, waiting for Fatimah to finish, Hafizah interjected, "Changed my mind. I don't care. I just want out of here." She looked around. "Audrey?"

The svelte pink-haired kiwi was gone.



LV

Their progress was slow; Fatimah could barely stand, let alone walk. She practically had to be carried by her sister.

The terminal was a mausoleum to Western Civilization's continued dominance. That sardonic thought, ostentatious as it was, she was surprised to discover, rang true. She could feel it, the end of an era.

Manicured palm trees flecked with bits of tempered glass from shattered skylights. The cheerful insincerity of information desks dulled by exposure to the elements. Safety pamphlet birds' nests.

The Constitutional Crisis hadn't solved anything, it merely postponed the reckoning.

It wasn't any one thing. To be sure, automation had challenged the very assumptions on which the economy was founded. But it ran far deeper.

The uneasiness, the tension, was there, Fatimah could recall, before the first of them ever stepped off the Japanese assembly lines or out of the domestic 3D printers six months later.

The cities were rotting from the inside. No one ever used playgrounds anymore, though diligent motorists continued to brake for the apocryphal stray football, as if a part of them would not, could not accept it.

Likewise, the arrogant haruspicy of urban renewal projects, trying to predict the movements and tastes of millions of people, ultimately a failure.

Even new buildings, like the terminal, bore the mark of disenfranchisement, of dissatisfaction and disassociation with the institutions of society manifest in graffiti and vandalism.

These thoughts and others were part of a losing campaign to not think about how they were abandoning a friend. She was gone. But all the justification and rationalization did little to assuage the guilt she felt.

So she stood motionless in the last rays of storm-muted dusk as her sister wrestled with a uncooperative turnstile.

Then she heard a familiar buzzing noise.

And as the sun dipped below the horizon Fatimah screamed.



LVI

Wordlessly, barreling down darkened corridors they fled unseen pursuers. The pair passed through a series of inert metal detectors and staging areas, more than once almost tripping over the abandoned luggage that littered the floor of Departures. Unapologetically kicking suitcases, they sent them skidding down the hall into the shadows.

The familiar buzzing sound, barely audible over their footfalls, stayed with them.

"In here!" Abruptly changing course, Fatimah pulled Hafizah nearly off her feet, and together they staggered into an adjacent utility closet. Fatimah slammed the door, blotting out what little light remained. "Get down!" She threw her sister to the ground and covered her with her body. Moments later there was a deafening explosion followed by a concussive wave that knocked the breath from her lungs and sent cleaning products raining down on them but left her alive to consider what had just transpired.

Upon finally catching her breath Hafizah demanded, "What the hell was that?"

Fatimah, still panting, suggested, "I think it's bees."

"Come again?" Fatimah could not see the expression on her sister's face but she strongly suspected it was unnervingly placid, neutral, disinterested... empty.

Fatimah cleared her throat. "Uh, little flying robots. About the size of your thumb. Remote controlled. Or sometimes autonomous." She coughed and righted herself, in the process placing her hand in a puddle of what she instantly recognized as the texture of sickly slick bleach, and as it seeped into the gash in her palm white hot pain flared. "Fuck!" She tore off the now bleach-soaked, frayed gauze, and probed the cut gingerly.

As she wrapped a rag (liberated from the shelf next to her) around her hand she continued, "They have cameras and carry C-4 payloads. Deployed by soldiers." Fatimah began the arduous process of standing up, the burns on her skin newly aroused. She performed what she knew was a poor imitation of a Zen breathing exercises in a mostly futile attempt to banish the raw sensation. "That's why we didn't encounter them until we got inside. It's raining. They can't operate in the rain. That's what killed Avery."

Hafizah seemed to consider this information. "Uh huh. So how many we talking about?"

"Hundreds. At least. The soldiers reach into their pocket and throw out handfuls. There'll be swarms of them. And we should get moving, that'll have alerted the rest. Not to mention the soldiers."

"Swarms.." muttered Hafizah thoughtfully as they prised the deformed metal door off its hinges. She stopped.

"What?"

"Well, I was just thinking. If they swarm too closely, if one goes off, it'd take out all of them. Set them all off. They must be programmed to spread out just prior to detonation."

"Huh."

"Yeah. Anyways," She gave the door one final push. It clattered to the ground conspicuously, violating their cherished silence. "Let's go. We must be almost there."

It was then that Fatimah realized it was now totally dark and she could not see her hand in front of her face.



LVII

She hesitated a moment before deciding to switch on the LED torch on her terminal. She figured the two of them were already blazing like miniature suns in infrared. The darkness was oppressively thick, almost opaque as the beam carved a narrow corridor through shadows cast by a graveyard of luggage, each containing a microcosm of a life forever changed by the events of four days ago.

Her thoughts returned to the petite plastique payloads. She could no longer hear them, but that didn't mean they weren't hiding, hanging from the ceiling, waiting to drop down on them.

Tormented by these terrifying thoughts she gasped quite involuntarily when Hafizah spoke.

She spoke so fast it was difficult to make out words, as if for her to remain silent any longer was to endure physical pain. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I've been like this. I don't know what's wrong with me. It's not just.. this," she said, indicating the ruins of opulence that they found themselves steeped in. "I was messed up before all this." She stopped and looked her sister in the eyes through large bug-eyed, face-concealing sunglasses. Fatimah's own reflection stared back at her, twinned, the mouths unconsciously a perfect pair of Os. "You know I love you. And now with Mum gone.. you're all I have." Hafizah caught herself. "I just wanted you to know." Tears ran down her cheeks, and Fatimah's own vision was becoming blurred. She hadn't expected this.

They embraced, and the contact seemed more real than anything she'd experienced in the last 48 hours. All the fights, all the anger evaporated.

"Aww, ain't that sweet?" intoned a man's voice from the darkness.

Searing pain flared over her entire body (she'd never touched an incandescent light bulb, but the sensation was comparable) and Fatimah fell to the ground.

She would later identify the sick choking sound the man was making as laughter.



LVIII

Through the pain she managed, "Abdul Alhazred!"

"Sorry darlin', I don't speak raghead."

'Shit.' she thought.

The heat died.

"Don't move." A click that sounded suspiciously like a pistol being cocked.

She decided she was content to stay put for the time being.

Fatimah opened her eyes. The darkness was absolute, unopposed.

"Where do ya think yer goin'?!"

She heard the scuffling of shoes followed by a surprised yip and footfalls receding into the distance.

After what seemed like an eternity, "Fuckin' Flash Gordon piece of shit." A loud crack. A pause. "Ah, well. Let her go. Can't exactly hide, now can she?" More choked laughter, this time followed by a sycophantic titter. "All the same, keep an eye out for her."

'Wonderful.' she thought. 'There's two of them.'

"Here, allow me."

A red sun exploded before her eyes.

"Ah!" More laughter, as she shielded her eyes with her hand.

Squinting though her eyelashes and parted fingers, the scene resolved.

Bathed in a deep red light, the Cimmerian gloom barely held at bay, an LED flare lay at his feet.

Worn desert combat boots filled with 300 pounds of private military contractor. Visible beneath an olive sleeveless shirt that struggled to contain his essence, an animated tattoo of a serpent wound its way over his body, forever chasing its own tail. She noted at least one LCD screen that had died, buried beneath the scarred terrain of a partially healed bullet wound. Nonetheless its movement was hypnotic. His bull's head grinned at her and in his fat fingers he held a gun.

Beside him stood a decidedly rat-like man with a scraggly blonde goatee and a red bandanna, anxiously wringing his hands with unclipped nails, smiling nervously, an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

On the ground nearby was a comically futuristic-looking weapon.

Hafizah had left her here.

"What do you want?"

"What any man wants," he began, in a mock-philosophical tone. "A house in the 'burbs. A wife to cook 'im dinner." He paused, obviously pleased with himself. "But thanks to your buddies ain't gonna happen." A wolfish smile conquered his face. "I guess I'll have to settle for you." He began to unbuckle his belt. "S'been a while." He nodded towards the other man, "Watch her."

The rat-like man roughly pulled her up to a standing position, a gun held against her forehead, tittering all the while, halitosis wafting off of him in waves. He searched her for weapons, his spidery hands lingering in certain places. "Nothin' except this knife." which he pocketed.

She elbowed him hard in the ribs and thrusted at his center of gravity, but his lanky arm easily reacquired a needle-like grip on her shoulder, and he brought the butt of the gun down against the side of her head. "Bad!"

The now-familiar sensation of warm, sticky blood.

He herded her towards the other man. Rough calloused hands gripped her arms at her sides. She tried to knee him but the rat-like man held her legs. "I apologise for the decor, the five star hotel is... undergoing renovations." He laughed the hardest at this, a great belly laugh, as she felt his paunch ripple in reply.

He examined her. "What a shame. Why'd you have to go and cut your hair so short? You a lesbian or somethin'? Doesn't matter."

He leaned closer, his stubble scratching her cheek, re-igniting the burns on her face, and inhaled, sniffing her hair. "Ahh.." His attention moved south.

She shuddered, and renewed her bid for freedom, but her strength was waning, and she began to feel light-headed. The rat-like man was snickering at her feet.

"Get the fuck away from my sister!"

Several things happened: the bull of a man turned, his attention diverted, the deafening voice of Hafizah's gun registered in the hallway, and a neat small hole appeared above his eyebrow. There was a choking sound - not laughter this time.

Fatimah pushed away and kicked the rodent-like man in the face with her steel-toed boots.

"You bitch!" He shrieked as he scrambled for his rifle with blood flowing from a gash in his forehead into his eyes. Six more shots rang out, like the inside of a thunderhead. Two of the shots found their target and the rat-like man was stilled.

She couldn't hear what her sister was saying but she held her tightly.

In the cold red glow of the flare the snake still crawled over the dead man's body. Its futile quest to devour its own tail would end in a couple hours when its oxygen-starved fuel cells joined him in death.



LIX

It was like flying through a dream. The colours more vivid, the shadows banished, a faded memory. The hypnagogic landscape reminded her of turn of the century HDR photography - it possessed that same surreal quality, an insoluble flatness. Vacant spaceport gates whizzed by, lonely temples of a thoroughly discredited faith.

She adjusted the strap on the military night vision goggles she and her sister had appropriated from the corpses of the contractors. The goggles worked without a terminal, and were, as far as she was able to discern, considerably more advanced, apparently combining infrared (both passive and active - there was a switch), ultraviolet, light amplification, high resolution image magnification, motion detection, and intelligent image processing to create a full colour image, a surprisingly competent approximation of a daylight scene.

It even compensated for the flashes of lightning, used the information, even, to make its simulacrum all the more authentic.

A multitude of cameras and sensors projected from the front of the device, eschewing any hint of human physiology, more closely evoking the five face of a six-sided die. There was no direct path of communication, of photon to eye, everything was abstracted.

Fatimah suspected a program at least as sophisticated as her Agent ran the whole show. Which was good because her terminal had ceased functioning right after the attack, as had Hafizah's insets. "Why is that?" she mused.

"What?"

Fatimah had not realized she'd spoken out loud. "Just wondering why our stuff died." she panted as they ran down the hall, closer and closer to their destination.

"That funny weapon," puffed Hafizah, "The... pain.. beam, thing."

Of course! How could she have missed that? Granted, she had had other, more pressing concerns at the time. Yet Hafizah's terminal still worked... "But what about your terminal?"

"It's hardened, paid extra."

Mock incredulity, "Why would you ever need a hardened terminal?"

"I told you, spent some time in Dubai."

She smiled. "You'll have to tell me about that some day." Her sister didn't seem at all troubled by the fact that she'd just killed two people. 'Good.' thought Fatimah.

Her leg hurt, her feet were sore, her clenched palms screamed in agony as sweat infiltrated open cuts, her entire body ached, her raw burned skin tingled on contact with the cool air, she itched where fugitive hairs from her impromptu haircut nestled, but she felt.. good. Hafizah was family and they were together.

She could now see the main launch tower out on the tarmac, and she could just make out the black shape of the airship beyond.

Then she heard a familiar, faint buzzing.



LX

'To think,' mused Fatimah, 'I used to do this recreationally.'

Terror dulled by fatigue, sweat streamed down her forehead as the the deep vibration propagated. Her ankles pleaded for respite and the adrenaline crash claimed the last vestiges of her earlier optimism. Each footstep jarred her bones. Her arms were heavy. Flustered, she did not know what to do with her hands. She clenched and unclenched her fists as she ran.

Audible over the thunder, the drone reached a crescendo as she permitted herself one furtive glance.

A vast swarm of bees coalesced at the other end of the concourse. Three storeys tall, it was guided intelligently, possessed by a uniformity of purpose that eclipsed a flock of birds or a school of fish, a single entity of terrible fury bearing down on them.

Her night vision goggles helpfully identified 1431 bees, outlined in green (the IFF, she confirmed by glancing at Hafizah, who possessed a bright red aura, was still set for US military). A moment later it self-corrected; 1432.

'That doesn't make sense. That has got to be every bee they have. Why waste them on us?'

Reaching the far end, they pushed on through the doors and down a small flight of stairs, her feet only touching every fifth step, and out the exit.

They emerged into what looked to be an underground parkade. Like some ancient temple, row upon row of cyclopean pillars stretched into the distance, flanked by a phalanx of automated baggage tractors, forklifts, and spacecraft refuelers.

They image bled colour as the goggles' light amplification struggled to find errant photons.

Hafizah pointed, "There!" She began jogging towards a point where the ground swelled and formed a wide ramp leading out onto the tarmac, a lonely guard station nestled in between, which gradually acquired yellow hue as the light amplification once again kicked in.

Alone with her thoughts for a few more moments, Fatimah contemplated. 'Ahh, they must be sweeping the entire spaceport for stragglers,' She thought. 'That makes sense.' She imagined routed rebels fleeing in terror, their heads exploding in pink mist. A carnivorous cloud. She shuddered.

An explosion shook her from her reverie.

Fatimah knew without looking that the bees had sacrificed two of their own to take out the hinges on the doors.

"1430 to go."

Hafizah turned. "What?"

"Nothing. Keep moving."

They passed the empty booth and emerged into a stiff breeze. Fatimah could feel the sweat evaporating off her skin. She allowed herself a moment to just enjoy the sensation.

"Alright. Look for a big, flat recessed section of diamond plate." ordered Hafizah.

"Pardon?"

"The hydrogen fuel line maintenance access tunnel. It should take us most of the way without us having to walk along the surface all exposed." She saw Fatimah's bewildered expression. "Remember that terrorist attack on that spaceport in India a few years back? That's how they got in."

"Huh."

A concrete overhang shielded them from the storm, but a cursory inspection revealed no hint of an access hatch.

The buzzing grew louder.

Hafizah sighed. "They can't go out in the rain, right?"

Fatimah nodded.

That sealed it. Hafizah pulled out her gun. "Fuck it, we'll chance being out in the open. Maybe we can hide behind some cargo containers or something. I don't know." The facade of confidence was showing signs of wear. Hafizah took a deep breath. "Stick close to the wall until we find cover." They stepped out into the rain and were immediately soaked. They hugged the wall, with visibility greatly reduced.

Shivering, yet secretly grateful for the water to wash away the blood and other assorted filth, Fatimah shouted, "Say, do you think weather like this is normal for Mojave?"

"What's normal?"

Fatimah looked over her shoulder. The bees had finally caught up with them.

The myriad sadistic weapons hovered angrily at the periphery, effectively corralled, filling the space the sisters had occupied moments earlier. Packed so close together they formed an opaque cloud.

"Heeey.." Fatimah unslung the assault rifle, checked the safety, and, never having fired a gun in her life, pulled the trigger. Three shots rang out. The recoil nearly knocked her off her feet, leaving her shoulder numb and convincing her to never fire a rifle, at least one that big, again. The deafening report of the rifle made it difficult initially to determine how successful it'd been. She didn't even see the explosions but according to the goggles there were now six fewer bees in the swarm. The bees accordingly spread out. "Six points!"

"Don't get cocky!"

Behind the goggles she blinked. "Seriously? A Star Wars reference?"

Hafizah merely shrugged and continued sidling along the wall.

The white wall and the ubiquitous rain became her world. Minutes passed. Running on adrenaline and endorphins for so long the world took on a surreal quality. She felt as if she were experiencing it through a proxy.

From the corner of her eye Fatimah noticed something. "Hey! I think I found it!" A dark shape, square, ten meters to their left, out in the open. "I'm gonna go for it."

They darted towards the dark patch just as the bees began flinging themselves through the threshold, rolling along the asphalt for some distance, and exploding like firecrackers, the rain-muffled bangs belying the threat they posed.

"Yes!" A rusted diamond plate hatch about a meter long. "Help me lift it."

"Hold up! God," she said, shaking her head, "Get back." Hafizah drew her gun and fired at the lock and missed. Again and the lock spun around, dislodged.

They each took one side, and for a few terrifying moments Fatimah became convinced it would not budge, as the progression of explosions got nearer.

Finally the hatch flung open with a tortured moan, and rusted metal rungs buried in concrete led down into the Earth, a blackness even their night vision goggles could not penetrate.

Fatimah eagerly started down the ladder, "Careful,"

"I know," replied Hafizah grabbing the top rung.

As her head dipped below the threshold Fatimah caught a momentary glimpse of the green-outlined form of a powered armour suit standing in a cloud of death.

"No!" screamed Fatimah.

A bullet pierced Hafizah's heart. Her hands let go and she tumbled past her sister into the darkness below, her boot striking Fatimah's shoulder. Her head connected with the side of the shaft in a way that made Fatimah's vision swim as Hafizah Ansari plummeted.



LXI

"No, no, no, no, no, no!" Her voice cracked and her hands shook violently as she knelt over the prone form of her sister. Involuntarily her gaze kept drifting to Hafizah's forehead where a piece of skin flopped loose, over one eye, and a sheen of blood on the flap of skin glistened black in her night vision. A red stain over her breast had become a dark Rorschach blot over most of the front of her shirt.

A wave of nausea overtook her and Fatimah's body convulsed as she retched, expelling bile and partially-digested saltines onto the cold, hard concrete.

She wailed incoherently and burried her face in her sister's shoulder.

She thought of her sister in the red dress, collapsed in the hallway.

She thought of when they were both teenagers and Mum took them to Eastbourne along the coast. The smell of the ocean and the cold humidity in the Autumn, and how they'd wandered around looking in tacky gift shops. She remembered there'd been a pink shirt with a dolphin on it, and how Hafizah had barely managed to conceal her impatience with such foolishness, but remained silent for Afifah's sake.

She thought of how her final words to her sister were "Careful," a show of concern, at least. How her sister's last words were a mildly irritated, "I know."

Some time later, she did not know how long, Fatimah delicately folded her sister's hands and slid back up against the wall hugging her knees. Rain water from above trickled down her nose and she rocked back and forth. She could not see for tear-welled eyes.

She remembered the day she received the news that she got the job on board the space station. It was ridiculously windy out when she got the call from her sister. The look of satisfaction on Hafizah's face over the terminal, genuinely proud of her kid sister. That approval meant so much to her. She did not notice when the wind blew the hatch shut.

Eventually she began to shiver from the cold. Her shoulder hurt where Hafizah's boot had struck. For lack of anything better to do she withdrew her sister's terminal from her front pocket and switched it on.

"Hello, where is Hafizah?" asked the Agent.

"She's dead." Fatimah's lips were numb. Her entire face actually. She was surprised to find that speaking those words did not affect her as much as she'd expected.

There was a pause. "Are you sure?" asked Pollyanna, undoubtedly analysing her voice stress patterns, trying to determine if she was lying.

"Yes I'm goddamn sure! You want to see?!" She roughly pointed the terminal's camera at her sister's body.

A longer pause. "My master is dead." It wasn't a question.

"Yes, goddamn it!" Fatimah did not know how much more of this she could take.

Another pause, so long she began to wonder if the program had frozen. "Please delete me."



LXII

Eannatum's men were at the gates.

The aural texture of war was smothered by the relentless downpour.

Ur, known in later aeons as Tell al-Muqayyar, at its height.

The streets were deserted except for periodic four-wheeled onager-drawn war chariots ferrying reinforcements to the front. They left deep, serpentine ruts in the manure-caked mud charitably called a road.

There were no children.

Cuneiform script adorned wooden signs which flapped in the gale. In their haste artisans had abandoned their shops in anticipation of the razing. A starving dog whined.

In the center of it all, the terraced facade of the Ziggurat of Ur. It dwarfed the surrounding city; man kind's first, abortive attempt at breaching the firmament. There would be others.

As she approached the temple she seemed to glide. If she had looked back she would have seen footprints, already filling with rainwater.

Disregarded, a newspaper, an anachronism, blew in the wind, its pages disconcertingly blank except for a single headline: "CONTEMPTUS SAECULI." It wrapped itself around a post, trembling as the low moan of thunder swept over the city.

She ascended the rough-hewn stairs of the ziggurat noticing the priests' futile attempts to conceal the graffiti. Gilgamesh was wrong; even here, the domicile of a deity, cracks and fissures had already begun to reclaim the stone. The works of man would not endure. Nothing lasts.

Looking down on the city she could see fires burning in unrepentant defiance of the rain. The god that slumbered within this monument was indifferent to their suffering. Soon, Ur would be folded into the empire, stripped of its political influence and status which placed Sin at the head of the pantheon. Still the god did not intervene.

She reached the altar and stopped.

A woman, dressed in contemporary clothing. Piercing eyes, red hair. A look of consternation. Floated approximately six meters beyond the precipice. Her bare feet dripped rainwater on the city below.

"You must leave here." Her voice was high and lilting.

"Why? Why do anything? What's the point? She's dead!" screamed Fatimah into the wind, which had grown in strength.

"And you're not."

"And so what? Go on living? Just try to.." Her voice faltered, she couldn't finish the sentence.

"You need to keep going."

Fatimah cleared her throat. "That's easy for you to say. God, I can't believe I'm arguing with a fucking toaster! You're a thing. Property. I've got three copies of you at home."

"I know."

From the corner of her eye Fatimah noticed that Eannatum's men had almost broken through, tearing the bricks out by hand.

"You don't have to deal with this. This, this is all just the path of least resistance to you. 'Oh, Fatimah's eye twitched, that must mean she's fucking crazy, and here's the appropriate response pulled from a list.'"

"You're wrong." That infuriating smugness. Fatimah wished she could strike the woman.

"What?! You, a fucking glorified search engine, you're telling me I'm wrong?"

"Yes."

"Please, enlighten me. I'd love to hear it."

For the first time the woman's expression changed. "Because," she began, and had to start over. "Because I don't want you to die."

The mudbrick walls, already weakened by the rain, collapsed.



LXIII

The next part, she suspected, wasn't entirely historically accurate.

Abruptly the rain stopped. A momentary delicate crepitation, as if the pores on the face of the world were breathing. A light breeze kissed her skin and a chill ran down Fatimah's spine, encouraging goosebumps (How was that possible?).

Still floating over the ledge the woman continued to shed droplets from her toes. Dispassionately she watched unblinking.

A low moan ended the brief respite and the ground began to tremor (Vertigo - Fatimah's senses were at war). The moan became a roar, deathly, yet, paradoxically somehow alive.

The euphoria of victory proved elusive for the invading army who quickly disbanded, throwing down their bronze sickle swords encrusted with disquieting green copper carbonate even as the intact gates collapsed. Oxen bleated, charging unthinkingly in the dark, dragging twisted, broken carts behind them.

Emerging from crumbling mudbrick houses tens of thousands fled in terror down narrow winding streets, instinctively moving away from the source from which it radiated, the nexus that wrought the detestation; the Ziggurat Of Ur.

A shadow rose from the city as a million very confused birds took flight.

The clouds above the ziggurat began to churn and swirl. Directly above the artificial mountain, the sky opened up and the pallid moon emerged, projecting a cold potency.

Beneath her feet the temple lost coherence and the bricks began to tumble down into the void where the pyramid once stood. Fatimah almost laughed when she realized what was happening: a quantum black hole had somehow materialized in the heart of the pyramid. Lightning caged in a singularity left tracers in her vision. She was sure the physics must be off.

She caught a brief glimpse of lapis lazuli, the Semitic moon god's queer flesh, and then it was gone in the pinpoint of what was once called a frozen star as Sin passed beyond the invisibly small event horizon of a primordial black hole. Fatimah shuddered despite herself.

They were left suspended in mid air above the ruins of the greatest city in the world.

"You can't stay here."

"I know," and she switched off.



LXIV

She stared at the object in her hands. Hafizah's terminal, recently wiped and reloaded with her own Agent off of a thumbnail-sized memory card. Somewhere, inside, a singularity consumed an ancient Mesopotamian city state.

Fatimah prised out her custom-molded noise-canceling earbuds and dropped them into her pocket. She looked around, not really seeing anything. Absentmindedly she adjusted the strap on the bulky night vision goggles, wiping the residue of dried earwax on her pants.

She thought of the living, vital collection of cells manifesting her sister. Metaphysically distinct, now gone, sacrificed in the conflagration that had devoured all that was familiar and rendered her whole world ashen.

Slowly, she got to her feet, bracing herself against the cold, damp concrete, unable to bring herself to look at the cooling body of her sister just a few arduous feet away.

Fatimah instead studied the shaft they had descended, only one of them conventionally. She fought the urge to vomit as she thought of her sister's formerly unblemished skin scraped along its extent. As she contemplated the churning clouds beyond the hatch, through tear-blurred eyes she caught a tentative glimpse of a green aura and leaped aside just in time to avoid a hail of gunfire that thundered after her. Stupid. She should have noticed that the hatch was open again.

In that moment she made the terribly difficult decision to leave her sister.

"Goodbye," she murmured, and turned and ran.



LXV

Fatimah ran.

She could hear her pursuers now; they were closing in.

Risking a glance back, she identified two human contours in green.

The pain. The exhaustion. The anguish that plagued her heart. None of it mattered. The whole of her existence consisted of a concrete corridor two meters wide.

A chain link fence on her left divided the tunnel, and beyond it was the main hydrogen line and a collage of warning signs. All, she suspected, moot now. The hydrogen storage tanks must have blown days ago after the power went out and the hydrogen began to evaporate.

The rhythmic rattle of the rifle strap over her shoulder was all she heard.

Her breathing fell in to a familiar pattern. It seemed her body understood. It remembered.

There was a fork up ahead, one path deviated, crowded, it seemed, with apparatus, and was consumed in darkness, the other followed the hydrogen feed.

Fatimah chose the path less occluded.

Somewhere deep inside a voice asked, 'Wouldn't you rather hide in that construct? That dying world?'

'No,' she answered honestly.

Eventually it occurred to her that her assailants had, thus far, refrained from firing their weapons. Could they still be concerned about residual hydrogen? Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps it still posed a threat. Not like she knew a whole lot about the storage of liquid hydrogen.

She became aware of a light at the end of the tunnel. Tantalizingly close now.

Her hands grasped the cold steel rungs of the ladder and hauled her weight up a shaft excruciatingly similar to the one at the far side where her sister's body lay.

Below both men were shouting something.

Only then did she remember the lock that secured the hatch on this end.

"Shit!" She fumbled with the rifle. "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!" She flipped the safety, wedged it inside the small space between the tarmac and the diamond plate cover as an inquisitive sliver of grey light around the edges slipped through, aimed in what she hoped was the direction of the stainless steel hasp and staple and, bracing against the wall of the shaft, fired a short volley.

The ringing in her ears belied the violence with which she shoved the hatch aside.

Her shoulder feeling like raw meat, she pulled herself out onto the asphalt and she panted as she surveyed the nearby area.

The closest distinguishing feature was a small mountain of shipping containers, the nearest of which was almost within reach. She staggered towards it as rain streamed down her forehead.

If she could-

"Aye!"

She turned towards the voice of the man who held an assault rifle aimed directly at her.

'At least you gave it your best shot,' sneered the other voice inside of her.

"I'm sorry,"

"Little too late for that, pet,"

'Figures,' she thought sardonically. 'Travel all this way to be killed by a fellow countryman.'

It took her a few moments to grasp what happened next.

The soldier developed a nose bleed and his glacial eyes lost focus. After a moment he fell back into the shaft and disappeared from sight.

The other soldier immediately emerged, swinging his rifle wildly, ignoring her altogether, looking for... something she couldn't see.

This time, with the help of the goggles, she saw it. Barely.

A slight aberration. And then a knife materialized. Floating two feet off the ground. It slid into the second soldier's abdomen, and then his shirt bulged. He coughed up some blood and fell to the tarmac dead. Rain washed the blood from the knife, which still hung in the air like a phantom.

Her mind caught up with her mouth as she cried, "Abdul Alhazred!"

For a moment all she could hear was the rain on the tarmac. Then:

"You don't know how happy we are to see you, Ms. Ansari."



LXVI

Her hands tentatively folded in her lap, Fatimah sat alone in the derelict site office container. Slouched in a soiled swivel chair, her goggles slid up on her forehead, dripping perspiration mixed with rain, her body wracked with sobs. On the foreman's desk was a touchscreen blueprint for a building that would never be built. Beneath a coffee ring a half-erased graffito proclaimed Tim to be the world's greatest lover. A stale box of doughnuts spoke of simpler times.

Through the yellowed and battered venetian blinds rumors of lightning propagated and all along the windowsill a silent audience of mummified flies watched Fatimah cry by the agency of multifaceted dead eyes.

She had a convoluted history with death. Death was always something she had managed to dissociate herself from. At funerals she always looked to the grieving family to dowse the compulsory tears, as her own understanding took much longer to ferment. At times she felt as though she were emulating human behavior.

Always there was a proxy through which she could experience the loss. Facing her own feelings so soon was out of the question. Even at her own mother's funeral she was able to experience the sorrow vicariously through her sister's halting eulogy, lest she be forced to confront her own reaction.

Afifah had died "off camera" which only served to compound the surreality of the situation, but in a way it had made it easier to deal with. Thus was she able to take a step back.

But now, there was no where to stand. Unlike her mother, she'd witnessed her sister's death. There was no one else to mourn her. The responsibility had fallen to Fatimah.

"They've located the crew. Let's go." The apparition spoke from the propped-open doorway she'd failed to notice in her rumination. Without the night vision goggles he appeared as little more than a vague shimmer, shedding raindrops. The terrifying spectral knife was nowhere to be seen. Something brushed her side.

Picking the mysterious object off the floor she asked, "What's this?"

"Think of it as an invisibility cloak."



LXVII

The AR network was down (naturally) and the expected persistent aether of obnoxious CG advertisements, banal, vulgar graffiti, and pretentious, self-aware, ironic art movements forming the thin membrane normally superimposed over reality were absent, and as a result the world seemed far more grounded. Less fantastic.

Dreary. Appropriately.

For the time being it had been replaced by a considerably more utilitarian paramilitary navigational array (which, it gradually dawned on her, closely resembled the offline AR-derivative program her GPS employed, replete with titanic yellow arrow hanging in the sky, indicating their destination: the airship). The man had given her access to the PMC's field wireless and even showed her how to realign the IFF on her goggles: the soldiers at least would now appear red.

Supplementing this array were thousands of sesame seed-sized cameras sprinkled over the whole of the compound.

Through yellowed plastic blinds she watched him sow the wind with these.

They would relay information to her terminal and Boudicca would interpret and collate the myriad streams into a single coherent picture of the world since, as it turned out the "invisibility cloak" the man had given her was, out of necessity, completely opaque; she wouldn't be able to see anything without the information contained in those video feeds.

Shivering, Fatimah stepped out of the green office cargo container, donning the cloak. She switched on her goggles. The resulting effect was disorienting.

With this setup it would be possible for her to observe her own movements from a third person perspective. Using stills taken of the scene prior, Boudicca had made a valiant attempt to accurately texture the scene, but there was something... off about the whole endeavour. Perhaps it was the barely-perceptible delay in rendering, or the far from ideal lighting conditions. Whatever it was it succeeded in thoroughly sabotaging the illusion.

Together they crept through the valley of cargo containers, eyes straining for any hint of movement. The image quality was several orders of magnitude below what she had become accustomed to with these goggles, grainy and incomplete. The pitter patter of rain on the semi-rigid umbrella-like canopy of the cloak was the only sound. With her eyes she traced the seams between the parts of the image informed by actual camera feeds and the parts that Boudicca had been forced to interpolate.

It was some time before she became convinced that the man was no longer with her. It was difficult to discern his presence. Then she caught a glimpse, a shimmer, high up the left embankment of containers. He was leaping from one to the other, scaling the sides with inhuman elegance and grace.

Tentatively she thumbed the controls on her terminal and swooped forward, through herself, so that her perspective was a couple feet in front of her. Then she pulled back and adopted an over the shoulder third person perspective. She was surprised by the completeness of the deception; she could barely see herself, though she noticed a crease near her left ankle and straightened up. She almost laughed when she realized how she must look: like a kid playing ghost with bedsheets. Scanning the area she confirmed that she had lost her companion. She zoomed out to a bird's eye view and noticed something up ahead.

Delineated in red a powered exoskeleton turned the corner and her view violently snapped back to first person (Boudicca's doing) as she hurled herself inside the gap between two cargo containers on her left. Her entire field of view was occupied by the side of the cargo container so she fiddled with the view once again.

She stepped outside herself, she projected.

In the few moments it took her to adjust the settings on her goggles the soldier had closed the distance between them and was standing a mere three meters from her position. It was unclear if he was aware of her. This was the first opportunity she'd had to examine one of the suits up close. The first thing she noticed was the legs, which gave it its imposing height. They were curved, supported by metallic "hoofs", strongly evoking a devil in its gait. The suit bristled with weapons and sensors and was caked with mud, partially obscuring the USAF symbol on its hip. A faint whirring emanated from somewhere deep inside.

As he stood completely motionless, apparently listening to a voice she could not hear, it became clear that the entire chassis was gyro-stabilized. He turned his head suddenly in her direction, but he seemed to be looking through her. Abruptly he pivoted and ran back the way he had come, towards the airship.

The heads up display helpfully informed her that he was running at nearly 60 kilometers per hour. Her unspoken question answered, she emerged from her hiding place.

'Time to reap the whirlwind,' she thought.



LXVIII

Dimly-recalled memories of a classic children's book plagued her. In it, the main characters had used a cloak similar to hers to facilitate their curfew-defying exploration of a perpetually shifting castle.

Fatimah remembered.

Their "library": a rickety faux woodgrain particle board bookshelf, reinforced by her father with crudely-affixed plywood slats in their old house. Populated with such works despite the fact that the family possessed two high-end readers. Books with broken spines, folded pages, defaced with used book store bar code stickers that stubbornly refused to come off without tearing, smelling faintly of dust, paradoxically eliciting nostalgia for a time before she was even born.

Remnants from her mother's own childhood.

And the window next to the bookshelf in her mind, eternally giving off a cool glacial blue light from behind white lace drapes, signifying the bitter cold of winter just inches away, ultimately an empty threat held at bay by a diligent old heating vent she'd sit on for hours at a time, curled up in quilts, absorbed in fantastic worlds.

The book with the kids who also used an invisibility cloak had been one of Hafizah's favorites. Fatimah struggled to remember the title.

She was snapped from her reverie by the revelation of the airship beyond the wall of cargo containers.

A voice spoke directly into her ear, "Stay put." She hadn't seen her companion since he'd scaled the wall.

She ordered up a bird's eye view.

Several hundred meters long, the imposing black bulk of the V-shaped airship dwarfed every other craft on the tarmac. The ship was pinned to the Earth by steel cables, evoking Gulliver's Lilliputian apprehension.

A red insectile, remote-operated crane rested in the crotch of the V, frozen in mid-operation offloading cargo. A cargo container hung from it like an over-extended yo-yo. Inert, swaying gently in the breeze. Several other offloaded containers were scattered around the stern.

At the opposite end, gathered beneath the nose of the ship were three olive drab exoskeleton-fitted soldiers accompanied by twelve unarmoured fighters. They looked as if they'd just arrived.

The disembodied voice said, "Commence operation."

Almost immediately one of the unarmoured soldiers dropped. The rest scattered, looking for cover. Hip-mounted miniguns spun up and the exoskeleton soldiers opened fire on an unseen enemy.

The soldiers, for the time being at least, seemed to understand the value of the airship and went to great lengths to avoid hitting it.

From her virtual perch she watched in amazement as one by one the unarmoured soldiers were picked off, dragged behind cargo containers by high tech specters. So engrossed was she, Boudicca had to remind her to move her physical body back behind the cargo container wall lest an errant bullet find her, cloak or no cloak.

For the first time she noticed that small cat-sized robots had joined the fray, darting back and forth between the hot spots. She watched as one such "cat" ran up behind and leapt on the back of a distracted soldier and did.. something which caused the soldier to violently convulse and drop limply to the rain-soaked pavement.

Six of the unarmoured soldiers remained, and all three of the exoskeletons.

At first she did not understand what had happened as a black patch formed in mid air in the middle of the action. She soon realized, however, that it must be a dead section of one of the active camouflage suits, and that one of the PMCs must have been hit. The distortion fled in the direction of the crane, seeking shelter behind a vacuum-sensitive cargo container. Two exoskeletons followed.

She had to work fast. "Boudicca! Bring up my waldo program, now!" The familiar simple black and yellow interface from work materialized, replacing her feed of the battle. "Connect to that crane, I don't care if it's not exactly the same setup." A few agonizing seconds later Boudicca seemed to have established a connection. "Please work," she muttered under her breath as she manipulated the controls. After what seemed like an eternity the diesel engine purred to life. "Woo!" she hooted in elation.

Fatimah performed a small gesture.

And the cargo container dangling over the soldiers' heads let go.

As the adrenaline faded it gradually dawned on her that she had just taken human life.

Immediately she felt the guilt over what she had done. But more significantly, what she had felt in that moment: exhilaration. Then: shame.

Then she remembered something else about that children's story: a lot of people died.



LXIX

Fatimah zoomed in and saw that the cargo container was nearly flush with the ground. A wave of nausea passed over her. She thought she might have glimpsed a growing black stain along its leading edge, but the image was mercifully devoid of detail.

Presently the formerly besieged distortion emerged from behind its makeshift cover and proceeded up the boarding ramp of the airship.

Of the remaining soldiers, only the third exoskeleton continued to fight, having been coaxed some 30 meters west of the airship, still firing wildly, wasting ammo.

Upon closer examination, she discerned a small white blob crawling up the back of the exoskeleton's leg. Not one of the cats, this was something new.

The blob circumnavigated the complex-looking joint that formed the suit's waist. The soldier piloting it, apparently completely unaware of his new passenger, continued jumping at phantoms, real or imagined. The blob explored the seam until it found what it was looking for, at which juncture it disappeared down a hole the size of a (long since discontinued) dime.

"Soft body robotics. Just watch." The familiar voice in her ear informed her, with an edge of pride. 'They must be able to monitor my view,' she thought to herself.

Moments passed and the exoskeleton blew apart at the waist. The torso was sent flying, impacting a forklift, toppling it and falling in a heap. New fires rose to contest the omnipresent rain.

"Go! Go! Go!" A different voice commanded in her ear. Her view snapped back, and she made her way to the airship. Sparing a glace for the others she now perceived a larger, more pronounced shimmer. A brown trouser-garbed leg appeared in mid air as the glamour collapsed. A conservatively dressed man wearing argyle socks was revealed in the process of tripping over the hem of his invisible cloak. A sniper's round pierced the base of his neck before he hit the ground. A choir of disembodied screams of terror rose up as his wire frame spectacles were trampled into the pavement by a stampede of hidden feet.

A readout on her goggles fed her the sniper's coordinates: over two and a half kilometers from her location. Certainly employed computer-assisted aiming.

She reached the ramp but was forced to wait as a herd of other invisible passengers packed shoulder to shoulder embarked hurriedly. 'Final boarding call,' she thought sardonically. She watched the incline increase gradually - the airship was already taking off! In the confusion she hadn't noticed them releasing the tethers. Finally, a wide enough gap appeared that she scurried up the gangplank and into the musty cabin.

Her vision went blank. She felt the panic rise until she realized that there simply must not be any feeds of the inside of the ship. She gladly removed the cloak and bundled it with her goggles under her arm and immediately navigated her way through a sea of materializing crew members and passengers to the rear of the gondola. There she crawled behind the last row of seats, grateful for the feel of carpet between her fingers. She allowed herself a moment to collect her thoughts. To process.

She thought about the man who'd helped her. The man whose face she never saw. The mercenaries, as far as she could tell, had not boarded the airship along with the rest of them.

When she again poked her head up the ship had already risen several hundred feet in the air. She peered out the porthole but registered nothing. Frustrated by her biological eyes' inability to pierce the gloom, she once again donned the night vision goggles.

Soon after another kinetic bombardment weapon struck somewhere, and she reflexively went to shield her eyes, but the goggles automatically compensated. She suspected the mercenaries had been considerate and taken out any anti-aircraft batteries the soldiers might have possessed before they allowed the ship to take off.

At last the storm began to break as the ship continued its swift ascent, unburdened with cargo.

The clouds parted and emerged the same moon that had informed the birth of a Semetic god 5000 years prior.

Fatimah gazed down upon the world's largest compass rose, etched into the desert floor.

And it guided her home.



© 2009 Christopher William McEwen