Damosel (Original)

I recently redid the Damosel class for the GLOG, which is what I write in nowadays, but old hands will remember that the class was originally written years ago for Cloak and Sword, now sadly defunct. There has been a swelling of interest in the old hack, including in things like the Esprit table (remember that old thing?!), so I thought it would be appropriate to reprint the original here before all is lost to time. 

Damosel (Original)

 

Gear: an exquisite jacket and expensive clothing, a rapier, a thin knife, a +1 pistol, cosmetics. 

Skills: formal etiquette, informal flirtation, the code duello. 

+1 to hit and +1 defence when you fight against a single opponent.

Artifice: In cities and towns, you have +1 to your reaction rolls per 500s of finery you wear, to a maximum of +3. You get an additional flat +1 for nobles, or eligible bachelors who have seen you fight. This is a +3 if it was the eligible bachelor who fought you. 

Duelist: For each turn you fight an opponent one on one, you gain +1 to hit, and +1 defence against them, to a maximum of +3. This bonus persists between fights for individuals - if you've fought against someone, your bonus against them is for life. 

Hunter, Hunted: Poets, teenagers of a certain temperament, and birds of prey hold Esprit for you. You hold Esprit for anyone you fall in love with, and for anyone who refuses your advances. Romantic rivals who you respect hold Esprit for you, and you hold it for them. If someone loses Esprit for you, for any reason, you suffer minus d3 max hp for a month while you recover. If you love someone, and they love you, neither of you hold Esprit for anything else - in addition, both of you roll on the death and dismemberment table at disadvantage. 

Cruel Barb: You may parry up to two attacks per turn - roll an attack against your opponent, and if you hit, the attack is mitigated. If you parry all of your opponent's attacks, you may make a single riposte of your own, essentially an attack out of sequence, or disarm them. The damage dealt by your riposte explodes. 

Exterminate all the Brutes: You make two attacks instead of one against: police, the clergy, doctors, lawyers, judges, and the family of those you hold Esprit for. You cannot receive blessings of any kind, nor would you if you could. 

Crueler Barb: If you kiss someone who you love, and who loves you, they can never lie to you again, nor you to them. This will lead you to ruin and doom.

Natural Born Killers: If you can see your lover, and they still hold Esprit for you, you cannot be killed while you clutch a weapon. You still roll on the death and dismemberment table as normal, you simply don't die until your sword, dagger, pistol, table leg, shard of glass, etc. are torn from your shrieking, vengeful, bloody grasp. 

The City, the City

Mithraeum in Pompeii

When you see its streets and walk its sunlit arcades for the first time, the impression is of scale. The doorways are ten feet tall, the ceilings of the apartments twenty feet. Stairwells are broad and open. Construction is based almost entirely on serried arches, arcades, courtyards, terraces, and broad openings used interchangeably as windows and doors, which are gated with iron grillwork. Every part of the interiors are touched by sunlight and wind. Inside, the floors are sometimes bare stone but more often colourfully tiled, and glazed tiling is also commonplace as wall decoration - sometimes it is even used for roofing, though dark clay and red terracotta are more usual. 

The great bulk of the built city is its apartments, the habitation of the citizens, which, to a Baronial, look like watchtowers or fortifications. They are very tall, usually four or five stories, and broad at the base, built around a broad internal shaft such that the sun can enter the internal rooms on both sides. Sometimes they stand alone, surrounded by smaller allies, but more often they are erected one after another in long runs along the broad white stone streets. Each apartment houses a single citizen. Those of wealth and status are able to trade and buy apartments of greater size or better position, but all citizens have one by law. Each great tower complex is accessible by an iron gate, and the keys for each of these are manufactured only by the Palace. It is a great crime in the City to reproduce them. 

The Emperor gifts its citizens shelter, food, and water. All citizens' apartments are fed by aqueducts built along the line of their roofs, and each individual allotment has its own drinking supply. These outlets run through the building, feeding troughs and cisterns and even internal fountains, and then into broad gutters that run down the centre of each of the great public streets. They wash the city clean, of blood, shit, refuse, until only the wet, white stone remains, shining in the sun. The non-citizens draw water from public wells. The Empire also runs large eating halls at the Palace's expense, where anyone, citizen or no, can eat without payment. 

Each room, no matter its height from the ground, will be open to the weather - the style in the City is open windows on all sides, nearly as large as the wall they are placed in. Most will install grills and gates over these openings to stop unwanted access, but some choose not to - especially this is an affectation of great players of the image game, and is thought to signify their confidence in their own ability, their great pride in being untouchable, undestroyable, open and impossible to harm, even without securities, even vulnerable to the imposition of any stranger. 

The rooms themselves will be sparsely furnished in iron and occasionally timber. Often the aqueducts feed cold (or hot, for the very wealthy) bathing areas built into the tiled floors. Often there will be a cask of petrol to burn in the kitchens. Subdivision of the apartment rooms, should it become necessary, is accomplished with mobile timber screens. There are also glass screens, which give separation without privacy, and have various convoluted cultural associations - they can be used for flirtation between intimates, by friends looking to enjoy one anothers company without directly interacting, and sometimes in the play of the image game, to indicate where a relation between two things has been introduced or insisted on. The White City has a great love of stained glass, but, unlike the Barony, with its intricately-worked portraits and scenes, the Citizens prefer enormous sheets of a single, intense colour, worked into mobile panels that can be installed in the room as needed. Thus an entire space can be stained red, blue, golden, at the whim of its inhabitant. 

-

Outside the apartments, the streets are laid out on many levels. They are broad enough to support arcades along both sides, where stalls can set up and trade, and where citizens walk or play the game. They have a verticality; it is as though the City itself were terraced, and by moving across it you also move up and down its various levels and partitions. You can buy and sell things with silver, gold, ceramic, and electrum coins from a thousand cities - the merchants will accept your tender. The City mints no currency of its own. It is understood that its limitless wealth is of a different kind. 

The arcades are broad, shaded, and pleasant, and sunlight gleams of the quick-flowing channels that run down their centre. Where are the citizens? They are resting, or at work on some play or manoeuvre. They are about their business. The gangs of the White City are not so primitive as those in the Barony. The gangs are sprawling networks of operators working toward mutual ends. They are open to infiltration and subversion, and they are constantly undermining and merging with their competitors. Each player knows the tolerances; can feel them on the skin; when to go and when to stay; when to speak and when to disappear. Sometimes someone overplays their hand, someone is killed in the streets, stabbed or lynched by enemies. The best is to become no one's enemy. You may not know, depending on who has put themselves against you, how you came to be targeted. There are many things you can do to make yourself dangerous in some ambiguous, potential, to-be-seen type way. The murder of citizens is not legal, but it is also an understood component in the workings of the City. You have shelter, food and water, you have your security. You need to learn the tolerances if you would go hunting for that other thing, for glory and status in the eyes of the others like you. It is not a small thing to play. 

The non citizens, the mercenaries, fixers, labourers, and slaves, live in crowded barracks in the arcades, or at the foot of the city walls. The soldiers live with them; and attempt to insulate them from the strange calculations of the citizens. It is something like hostility, but cleaner, dead-eyed, with its feints and simulations, its total victories and total defeats. 

Sugar from the South

 

The Southern Nomads trade hard boiled sweets for fantastic sums of money, which makes many of the Southern houses extremely wealthy. 

The secrets of the manufacture of these sweets, which are considered a royal delicacy from the Northern Steppe, through the length of the Barony, and up to the north-most borders of the empire, are a secret as closely guarded as those of the Star Weapons of the Northern Nomads. 

It is known that the Southerners farm (and sometimes hunt, for the rarer specimens), a type of hard-shelled, darkly iridescent ice beetle, about the size of a clenched fist. They dry out the carapaces, crush them to a powder, mix it with water and various oils and regents, and compact the mass in small, hand-portable pressure cookers that faintly resemble Imperial coffee pots. This first processing is well known, but when repeated abroad results only in a foul smelling slurry of pulverised beetle. The true secret comes afterwards. 

The pressurised mass is wrapped in imported paper, and taken by the house's Sweet-Maker (this trade specialism is passed down through families, and comes with a military raiding rank, roughly equivalent to a Baronial skirmishing captain) to one of the southern holy sites: a sub-zero pool of salt water, still and reflective, where the firmament is doubled perfectly on the terrestrial earth. Often, but not always, the house Star Seed will accompany them.

Something happens to the small bundles of paper and crushed up matter. It involves a small fire, animal fat, a series of glass lenses, water, blood, a broad iron dish that spits and smokes.

When the Sweet-Maker returns they carry four or five immaculate, black, glossy, sugar sweets. Each is worth a month's wages in the cities. The taste is difficult to describe - tartness, aniseed, citrus, alcohol, sugar, of course: something of all them, also different from all of them. 

'Paper-men' and 'paper-women', merchant bands made up of Baronials and Northern Nomads, trade wrapping papers to the southerners in exchange for a share in their sugar wealth. They also bring glass bottles to fill, because other export of the South is naturally-carbonated water, which can be found only in the chemical vents at the southern edge of the world, and which the White City has an endless, insatiable thirst for. 

-

Southern Sugar Candy 

Each worth 500s if still in their paper wrapping, 150s if opened, 50s if loose. Reacts to water and heat as any hard sugar candy - poorly. 

A sugar candy counts as a ration that eliminates a single point of fatigue when eaten, but gives you a point of fatigue when you wake up the next day. They don't count as a ration if the last ration you ate was a sugar candy. 

Sparkling Water

Just water that tastes better and costs 20s a bottle. You should drink it with ice to get the proper effect. Just now catching on in the Barony.

Damosel (for Phlox)

 

It would be rude not to.

Gear: an exquisite jacket and expensive clothing, a rapier, a thin knife, a +1 pistol, cosmetics. 

Skills: formal etiquette, informal flirtation, the code duello. 

+1 to hit and +1 defence per template when you fight against a single opponent.

A: In cities and towns, you have +1 to your reaction rolls per 500s of finery you wear, to a maximum of +3. You get an additional flat +1 for nobles, or eligible bachelors who have seen you fight. This is a +3 if it was the eligible bachelor who fought you. 

B: You may parry up to [templates] attacks per turn - roll an attack against your opponent, and if you hit, the attack is mitigated. If you parry all of your opponent's attacks, you may make a single riposte of your own, essentially an attack out of sequence. The damage dealt by this riposte explodes. 

C: If you kiss someone who you love, and who loves you, they can never lie to you again, nor you to them. This will lead you to ruin and doom. You gain +1 attack. 

D: You cannot be killed while you clutch a weapon. You still roll on the death and dismemberment table as normal, you simply don't die until your sword and dagger are removed from your person. 

The Impossibility of Distinction

It is like you are sick. It is no longer possible to hold something clearly in your head and to make a decision one way or the other. There are great machines, hidden, drumming their awful repetitions, burning into and stopping up the grey matter of the brain. There are times when the room you live is like hell, and then it is back again, exactly as it was. You can't control this. People survive as best they can, and sometimes they disappear. Casual cruelty is omnipresent, accompanied by terrifying and apparently random acts of violence, strangers killing strangers.

This is the invasion - a psychic illness. The police multiply and multiply. The difficulty is in knowing where to start. When you can't think you can't draw the necessary distinctions and nothing coheres. You struggle through mud and darkness and the best minds turn slowly to their private despairs. 

A dreamer can still (yes, still, even in the face of it all) see things brightly and clearly. They can imagine the world apart from itself, and in the act make an incision in the terrible power of the invasion. When the world became sick it also became more plastic. They can make things different, better and also worse, but different, and different in their own name. They can distinguish one thing from the other, because there is their difference, and there is the rest, the mud world of police and random killings, and the two are utterly unalike.

Dreamers are in terrible danger, and nearly all of them are abducted by the invaders, to fates obscure and awful. They live in terror of discovery. 

You must find them, teach them trust, and galvanise that clarity of purpose that still (yes, still!) burns, hot, bright, wonderful, in true colour. 

-

A dreamer is exactly like an operative, but takes a full turn to reload a weapon, has -1 to hit with everything, and takes 1 stress every time they are subjected to enemy fire.

They also have a spatially-limited omnipotence - they have to concentrate, but when they do, what they describe in their minds, happens. If they concentrate for a turn, this is 5 metres, for 2 turns, 10, for 3, 15, etc. 

Every turn that they do this, they must roll a d6, +1 for every turn already spent concentrating. If the number is above five, they fall unconscious for the rest of the mission. 

Gustave Moreau, St Cecilia (The Angels Announcing Her Coming Martyrdom)

Xcomish Procedures

Some more bits of skeleton for this weird xcom game.

You are a combat squad, but you are also a self-sufficient outfit, operating without external support. As important (or more important) than your combat capabilities are your capacity to research, plan, and prioritise where you use your very limited resources. Every mission is a risk, and nothing should be attempted without weighing cost/benefit. 

How this works:

You have eight operatives. Give them names!

Four of your operatives have specialisms, chosen from the list below (you can take them in any combination):

• Intelligence Gathering
• Field Work
• Tradecraft

The game runs month by month. At the start of each month, you assign your operatives to intel, field work, or tradecraft. You can assign anyone on anything, you don't need the specialism. 

Every month, your research efforts give you sufficient intelligence to launch d2 missions, which are randomly generated from the list below. Every operative assigned to intelligence gathering that month increases the die size by one - if the operative has the relevant specialism, they instead increase it by two. 

Once you have generated your missions, you can choose which, if any, you would like to run that month. You can assign operatives to preparatory field work in advance of running a mission, which will make it easier for you in some way. You can specify what you want them to focus on: 

• Reduce enemy numbers - your operatives have assessed patrols and other enemy movements.
• Provide you with a better map.
• Provide you with important information - there are non human enemies present, the cops can expect rapid reinforcements, there are dreamers involved, etc.

An operative with the relevant specialism can do two of these things, or do one of them twice as well. 

At the end of the mission, the DM will make a hidden d6 roll for heat. You get:

• -1 if no unsuppressed shots were fired by you or your opponents.
• -1 if no enemies were left alive. 
• -1 for each operative assigned to tradecraft, and -2 if they have the relevant specialism. This is not an in-mission thing, it represents them covering and spoofing your tracks both before and after the fact.
• +1 if LMGs or explosives are used. 
• +1 if you leave the body of one of your operatives in the field. 
• +3 if they get taken alive. 

If you ever get to 10 heat, the bad guys have enough intel of their own to raid you in your current base of operations. They will do so with overwhelming force - those of you who survive will escape and set up a new operation with 0 heat. 

MISSIONS

1. Special Intel. Get a hard drive with critical information about the invasion on it. Crucial to forming a long term plan of action. 
2. Mundane Intel. If you can exfil with it, you add d3+1 missions to next month's roster. 
3. Armoury. Your supplies are extremely limited - this is a stockpile of ammunition, weapons, body armour, etc.
4. Active Abduction. You learn that a local dreamer is being abducted (or assassinated) by the invaders, and have a chance to intervene. 
5. Holding Cell. You learn the holding location of a high value prisoner - they might be another operative, a dreamer, or someone else useful to you. 
6. Heat reduction. You find a way to reduce your heat by d6 - this could be sabotaging hard drives, or assassinating someone specific. 
7. Kidnapping. You learn the whereabouts of an important enemy collaborator, and have an opportunity to take them alive. The rewards for doing so vary, they could be scientific breakdowns of enemy capabilities, detailed counterintelligence efforts (heat reduction), high ranking police or PMC targets (reduce effectiveness of those forces), things that look like people (who knows?) etc.
8. Zone Work. You have become aware of a zone of localised psychic/dreamlike instability (think the Silent Hill otherworld). You can explore it to learn more about psychic phenomena, the things that live in these places, and their connection with the invasion. 

GAME START

When you start the game with your eight guys, you can assign each of the following once:

• Point Operator. Gives +1 to hit at close range.
• Marksman. Gives +1 to hit at long range.  
• Veteran. Gives +2 to your rolls on the panic table. 
• Medic. Doesn't need to test to stabilise someone.

You have in your stores:

• 10 ARs
• 20 pistols
• 10 more long arms in any configuration that you want - these are shotguns, DMRs, LMGs, and SMGs. 
• You have enough ammunition for 10 reloads for every individual firearm that you have (20 per pistol). How long a reload lasts you in combat is per weapon.
• You have up to 10 long arms and 10 pistols suppressed. This can be in any combination, with the caveat that LMGs cannot be suppressed. 
• You have 2 vests, 4 full sets of body armour, and 2 heavy plate carriers. They give you -1, -2, and -3 on the death and dismemberment table, respectively. The vests can be worn under civilian clothing. 
• You have 4 sets of thermal vision goggles. 
• You have 50 flares.
• You have 20 grenades, in any configuration you like. The available options are: smoke, stun, fragmentation, and demolition packs. Only the last two count as using explosives, demolition packs must be set or thrown, and then detonated at your option. 
• 10 medkits, each with 5 uses. 
• Everyone has, by default, a knife, rations, water, and a torch. You can easily source civilian tools like sledgehammers and crowbars - these will take up inventory. 
• You might find more powerful weapons and gear in armouries as you play - automatic shotguns, dedicated precision or anti-materiel rifles, specialist grenades, scopes, RPGs, metamaterial armours, etc. 

INVENTORY

Your operatives can each carry a knife, torch, headgear, pistol, and two long arms for free. In addition, they get 8 inventory slots (-2 if they are carrying an LMG, -2 if they are wearing heavy plate carriers). Each slot can contain:

• Ammunition. 3 per slot for pistol and SMG ammo, 1 for other long arms, 2 slots for LMG. 
• Grenades. 1 per slot. 
• Tools. Generally 1 per slot, especially heavy or bulky tools may take more. 
• Flares. 3 per slot. 
• Medkit. 1 per slot. 
• If you are overburdened for any reason, you cannot move. 
• Carrying a human (or human sized) body needs four slots open. 

STRESS

When you take stress, you roll a d6 and consult the breakdown table, adding your current stress level when you do so. Your operatives are all trained and blooded, and usually only take stress from horrible alien and psychic shit. If you gain civilian assets, they will take stress damage every time they take fire, which might make them do ill-advised things like try to run out of cover while under suppressive fire. 

Yes, it's true, I love Long War 2, it's easily the best TBT game I've ever played. 

More to come!

Wake Up Motherfucker

This is technically a Glaugust post because it has a HPless combat system. It's actually more like a set of extremely rough notes towards an xcom-like, inspired by the inimitable Bad Doctor's way way way better post here.

Hail Glaugust, hail Phlox's server. Hail!

-

Something changed in the last fifteen years, and now the world is dying. People disappear and the state does nothing; either impotent, or active accomplices. No one knows anything any more. It is impossible to focus, and too easy to dream more of the sickness into being. 

You are ex-military; deniable assets originally charged with conducting anti-organised crime operations on home soil. Two days ago your handler fed you a dossier of information about the invasion, and disappeared. You and your squad went to ground, and tried to process what you had been told. 

Now you operate without official support, making use of whatever you can scavenge. Your first and most urgent priority is to procure any available intelligence on who exactly is perpetrating...

The Invasion

Squads

Members of your squad move individually, but they attack altogether. What is relevant is whether they are in cover or not. They move on a map, which is marked up with cover. 

Each member of the squad can choose to fire on a target they can see, which is a dice roll depending on their weapon. You roll each lot of attacks on each target all together. Most things need a 3+ to kill, and an AR is a d6. Cover (and other things like your combat stress or your enemy's armour) modifies the number you need to hit, and weapons modify the dice you use.

Operatives carry up to two long arms and a pistol, and can use them freely each turn. 

Most things, and all humans, die if they get hit once. This includes all your guys. You are trying to play without taking fire, because even in cover and with body armour your guys are fragile. Also, in the XCOM tradition, the enemy has infinite guys and they only have to get lucky once. 

Horrible wound tables. 

You are trying to set up situations where you can wipe an enemy in a single round of fire - before you open fire, you're trying not to let them know you're even here. 

You need to allocate all fire in advance, before you roll anything.

Your squad is probably around ten people. If they die, it is non-trivial (a mission, most likely) to find replacements. 

You have some tools to keep enemies pinned, stunned, or otherwise out of the fight for a limited amount of time if you do need to protract a firefight. Things like smoke, flashbangs, suppressing weapons, etc. 

Throwing a grenade is done instead of firing a weapon, and you have all the usual types. Explosives are dangerous to use indoors and at close quarters. 

As with procuring reinforcements, resupplying materiel is non-trivial. 

Actual invaders (as opposed to their police ground forces) are really bad news - harder to kill, harder to disrupt, more lethal. Even basic hybrid foot soldiers, the MIBs, need to be taken apart with high calibre weapons and explosives if you want to put them down. 

Stress is omnipresent, and plays the role of a degrading factor, like HP, in a system where everyone dies in one hit. 

Breakdown tables. The results are usually permanent, and many will take an operative out of the game. 

Dreamers and Suburban Wastelands

The conspiracy are not exactly the government, but the government is full of its infiltrators, so they have a lot of power and force projection capacity. They fear being truly exposed, but the current state of society would make this difficult. Most action takes place in the suburbs and cities of the present day, which are hollowed-out to the point of barely functioning. Most people are just trying to survive, although things have not degenerated quite into general breakdown. Cops are omnipresent.

Dreamers are a byproduct of the invasion, which also happens in the mind. The world comes to pieces. Think the degraded reality in something like Serial Experiments Lain. A dreamer has a sort of spatially-limited omnipotence, but is just as physically fragile as any other human. 

Dreamers are civilians (as opposed to your operatives), and will break down quickly if exposed to combat. 

Invaders are also dreamers, and much more powerful. 

Most of what you are doing is invading police-held compounds (and eventually alien facilities), trying to find any actionable information you can that might let you effectively strike back against the invasion. Dreamers will be revealed to be a key component of this. 

Invaders

The cops and MIBs are not really invaders. Invaders are something terrible. They are psychic, and locally psionic, like human dreamers but more so. They have some technology that makes them impossible to see clearly, but you can usually feel them when they are close. They can be killed, but it is difficult. A body has not yet been retrieved from a combat mission, and this is your most pressing immediate objective. 

Alongside the MIBs, it is known that the invaders have access to several other combat lifeforms. We know that they exist, but specific capabilities are currently not well understood. They are tough, but they do bleed and die.

Specifics

Body Armour gives you a + modifier on your injury table roll, depending on its type. It only works once in the field, but can be repaired afterwards.

Cover makes you harder to actually hit (medium cover +1, high cover +2). Keep in cover. 

Guns 

• AR: d6 at all ranges. Can suppress by firing three times (still contributes one damage dice as normal). 3 rounds of fire. 
• Pistol: d6 at close range, d4 at long range. 1 round of fire. 
• Shotgun: d8 at close range, d4 at long range or against a target in armour. 3 rounds of fire.
• DMR: d8 at long range, d4 at short range. 3 rounds of fire. 
• LMG: must be set up to fire (cannot have moved that turn), d10 at long range, d8 at short range, can suppress by firing three times (still contributes one damage dice as normal). 5 rounds of fire. 
• SMG as pistol, but with more rounds and provides a mobility bonus if it's the only long arm you carry. 2 rounds of fire. 
• Reloads take up an INV slot. Pistol reloads are 3 per slot, LMG reloads take 2 slots.

Grenades: coming soon. 

Injury tables: use your favourite and most horrible. 

Stress and insanity: coming soon, needs to be robust. A gradual slippage into dissociation, punctuated with active breakdowns that are permanently crippling. 

Myths that are Spoken of the Islands where the Sun Dies

 

The Sea People

Large, well-formed humans, with bright red skin and bright blue hair, which they wear long and wild. They have a single eye in the centre of their foreheads - a sign of their oracular powers - and long, sharp teeth. They wear thick armour of mother of pearl, and fight with bolas, spears, nets, and hammers. They make their homes in tall, shimmering, white stone castles of great beauty, which rise above the foam of the sea, pale and luminescent, in the pink light of the dawn. 

The Sea People drink nectar and eat honey, and, lacking nothing, spend their days in idleness when not at war. They play music, enjoy games of skill and chance, and compose poetry which is incomprehensible to outsiders. They are easily insulted, but also easily befriended. 

Their faces are frightening in battle, but kind, virtuous, and smiling in friendship. The wise among them are very wise, and they live for a long time. They say that they have seen the future of the world, and, fearing it, taken the islands where they live out from the flow of time. 

The islanders of the Lantern Berth tell stories about the Sea People, with whom they trade when the islands can be seen. Intermarriage is unheard in the present day, but there are old, old stories of courtships and even children. Those of unusually large stature born on the Lantern Berth are still called 'Westerners'. 

The Flower of Life, the Fruit of the Invincible Heroes

On the furthest island, so far West that you find yourself walking not on solid earth but in dream, or nightmare, or the past and the future, or the world as it should have been, it is said that there is a flower of indescribable beauty, that grows above a pool that is still, cold, deep, green, dark, and utterly clear. To see this flower is to know tranquility and the end of striving. Each year, it weeps a single drop of golden nectar into the pool. If you can catch it and drink it, before it disappears forever into the shadowy green depths, your body will be made whole, and you will live as the immortals do. 

On that same island, where only the virtuous may tread, there is a mountain of sheer rocks and precipices. It stretches up to heaven, and the gods sit at its crown, amusing themselves by sending down fortunes and sorrows like javelins. At the peak of the mountain is a pear tree that was there when the gods arrived. Its fruit are green like precious jewels, and the gods guard them jealously, but if a human is very lucky and very brave, they might be able to steal one. To eat the fruit is to be strong like a summer hurricane, terrible as the sea in anger, quick as time passing, clever, light-hearted, loved and crowned with victory. 

The Serpents and their Poisons

On the Western Isles there are great serpents that swim in the sea, and that whisper poison into the ears of the unwary. Those that heed them grow sick and inward-looking, and shutter themselves indoors, counting their misfortunes until they die. The serpents sometimes walk about in the forms of people. They have a special fondness for wearing the faces of priests and magistrates, such that their poisonous words may spread further and do more harm. Those that live on the Western Isles will council you to stay polite with those who preach sermons, but to check theirs eyes, their tongues, their faces, and to know them well before you heed them. 

Once in each generation, the populations of the Isles will lead a great pogrom against the serpents who walk like people. They say that they have a simple test, infallible, to pick out their quarries. It is a word, they say - a word that the humans tell their children, and that the serpents do not know and cannot pronounce. What is the word? Do not ask them - once and they will insult you as a dangerous fool; twice, and they will kill you and hang your body from a scaffold, for the rest to beat to pieces with sticks. 

The King of the Isles

A man who wears a cloak of shimmering fish scales, and who travels the islands in a thin, proud boat that moves swiftly, without sail or oar. He carries royal weapons, a terrible, heavy mace, and a knife of bronze, wave-bladed, like the sea, and he commands loyalty from all the lesser kings and queens of this place. He rules in truth, where others claim to rule. He is mostly content to accept the hospitality of the island courts, but sometimes, when he is angered, he will demand a child from his hosts. None dare defy him - he is beloved by the sea, and holds within himself its awful strength. 

What happens to the children none can say. It is said that you can see them sometimes, staring up at you from the water where the sea is deep and wide - thousands of their faces, of children who did not grow old, swimming up to see you, and catch a fleeting glimpse of the land of air and sun and sky that they were stolen from centuries ago. Some of them are armed as though for battle; some bears the marks of violence. All watch you, with an expression impossible to read, and then disappear back into the depths.  

The king has a pleasant singing voice, and he loves to sing. You will hear him before you see him. Be polite, and grudge him not his royal share in your wealth. 

The Observatory of the Apes

The apes of the Isles are not like the apes of the mainland - they do not live beneath the earth, or drink petrol, or dream of black stars and burning seas of iron. The apes of the isles are astronomers and philosophers, and they live in a walled city that they call University. They speak all languages, and collect texts on all topics from around the world in their great library. The largest building in University is the observatory, with its hundred telescopes, and its single Great Lens, which the apes say can look through time. It is not yet ready, but it soon will be - then the mysteries of the past and future will finally be laid bare.

In the meantime, the apes debate and practice rhetoric. They are beloved by the other islanders, and University is sacred, neutral ground, never to be disturbed or warred on. The apes themselves have a great fondness for fanciful dress and flowery language. The laws of University are strict - the only capital crime is to tell a lie. If you are found to have lied you will be stripped in court, beaten (to tenderise you), and eaten alive by your monkey judge and monkey jurors. 

How to get there...

You can't, the islands don't exist. Or maybe they exist on certain days, or beneath certain stars. Those that live on the Lantern Berth will laugh at you for asking, and if you press them will tell you - it was possible once, but no longer. Those that try are never seen again, and the Western seas boil and smoke and writhe with monsters. Maybe, maybe, you might get there if you can see them when you set out. But to see the islands is a thing that happens only once in a lifetime, if that. 

Give up on this idea, you will throw away your life, and the lives of your companions.

Night Time

Imagine the public spaces of the hotel— most clearly the lobby, gym, and restaurant areas— as a type of stage; a series of strictly bounded spaces through which various bodies enter and exit, and where some of them perform. The lobby is the largest by area but also the most sparse. There are pale, polished stone floors, dark timber walls with false inset frames spaced along their length at regular intervals, and a ceiling almost three stories high from which hang four small and tasteful electric chandeliers. In the night these clusters of cut glass and aluminium (pale metal, almost white) throw a soft grey light into the huge room— at night the business of checking in is slower but more intimate. There are tired faces of professionals pulling suitcases, taxis and international accents, and no children anywhere. The smells of cigarettes cling to jackets and gusts of cold air blow in from the wide front doors, which open onto frigid nights with no clouds where the cold and the clarity of the air draws haloes around the moon and the street lamps and the bright electric signage that covers the darkened city outside. The lobby is quiet. There are leather lounges placed along the walls but these do not impose themselves in any way on the openness of the room; in fact they recede almost into invisibility. The space stretches back almost thirty metres until it finally meets the three tall receptionist desks that are the point where official activity converges. They are made from the same dark timber as the walls. The bodies that arrive at nighttime and in the early mornings play for no audience and they are eager to partake in that strict discretion that is the rule that governs this space. There are slippages around entrances and exits. In the day things are different. In the day the space is lit by the sunlight that floods in through the plate glass wall that faces the high street, and makes every surface glow. People come and go in groups, day workers in business dress, families and couples on holiday, speaking over one another and the growing general noise of the place. The uniforms worn by the staff are bright with gold threading. There are conspicuous displays of wealth from the patrons who are on their way out, into the city, or who move across the wide floor towards the gym or the restaurant. The lobby takes the central position on the ground level, such that it is impossible to reach either of these other spaces except by traversing its width in full view of all of the others.


Through the eastward doors of the lobby is the gym complex, which is less open and more intricate— it is in reality a series of interconnected rooms and areas, each with a specialist function. There is the gym itself with its banks of steel equipment, the lap pool and sauna, changing rooms, a suite of alcoves for private massages, and the VIP spa area. Each of these rooms and corridors has walls and floors covered in brilliant white tile (barring the gym, which has a dark rubber floor and plainly painted walls). These tiles are heavily glazed to a gloss finish and the effect is classical, severe, controlled and tasteful, like a tuberculosis ward in a prestige period drama. The gym is open all night and is always fixed in the same white hard fluorescent light, which gleams off the machines that stand inert in rows like frozen cavalry. There are usually one or two people working themselves on treadmills, insomniacs or bored professionals. The heavier setups, the bench and leg presses and the free weights, are generally occupied only in the rush hours of the day, in the morning around nine and again after lunch and before dinner. Now and then an attendant in sports gear very unlike the uniforms of the rest of the staff will move from aisle to aisle with a cloth and a white spray bottle of disinfectant, making sure that the surfaces are wiped clean after each use. The bottles are also provided to patrons on entry, and most apply them judiciously. The air is recycled but still smells of alcohol and iron and sweat. There is only one television installed in the space, in a distant corner in front of one of the exercise bikes, as a something like a concession or an apology. Some patrons on entry eye it nervously, wonder if they can afford to take this risk in public, not knowing fully what the result could be, not knowing who would form the judgement if it came. But many more are totally impervious to this almost-imperceptible feeling and lay claim to the position whenever possible, fixing their attention on the twenty four hour news stations that cycle across the screen.


At the far edge of the gym, past the mirrored walls and the racks of dumbbells, are two exits. Neither has a door fitted, and both open onto corridors where the white tiling begins and marks the boundary to the rest of the complex. The demarcation is severe. Through the left entrance is the swimming pool, a fifty metre heated lap pool with eight lanes and neon blue water. The floors, walls, and the inside of the pool itself are all tiled uniformly and without discrimination. They continue over the lip of the pool without even rubber panels installed to mark the edge. The lights here are the same harsh fluorescents that are in use in the gym, and the hot air and the clouds of steam smell strongly of chlorine. The water is heated to thirty degrees. The pool is less popular than the gym but its patrons are more consistent and come to swim here at the same times each day and night. A bored lifeguard patrols the edge. Off to one side are the wooden doors of the sauna, which is dark and small and panelled with wood, like a pagan chapel or an antechamber in a hunting lodge, and next to this are the two changing rooms (the gym has its own separate set), marked for gender and also without doors but opening onto blind, tiled corridors. There are showers and wooden benches and towel racks, and several toilet cubicles set back from the main space. A series of clever runnels and angled surfaces direct the flow of water into discreet drains in the centre of each area. The cleaning staff are instructed to take extra care disinfecting and bleaching these channels, and also the showers, since over time and without proper maintenance they can build up accumulations of limescale and the other hard impurities in the city's water, which can discolour the edges of the tiles and cause them to degrade. The grout is dark and does not require the same level of attention.


Through the right entrance are the massage rooms. These must be booked in advance with one of the hotel’s in-house physical therapists, and offer several packages catering to different needs and means. Each is a small tiled cubical with a single large window and a bed with a tubular steel frame, like you would find in a hospital. In the day they are lit naturally with the sunlight, and after dark with a small warm globe lamp that is set into the wall. Unlike the other facilities, which are accessible at all hours, the massage rooms have strict opening times, and are generally booked weeks in advance.


Past the cubicles and further down the corridor are the double doors that lead to the spa, which are always closed and barred to casual access.


Back across the lobby towards the opposite end of the hotel are the double doors that lead to the restaurant, where there is a waiter standing ready to welcome guests and seat them. The atmosphere inside is generally subdued, but gets louder later in the evening when the families have left and office workers begin to congregate around the bar and the private booths. The ceiling carries on from the lobby and so is almost twelve metres high, and the designers of the restaurant took advantage of this to install a kind of interior arcade that bisects the room and forms a second story over half of the space. The columns that support the platform are thin dark iron with decorative arches that stretch between them, and they are ornamented with cast iron figures; roses, fruits, twisting vines, and figures posed in dramatic conflict and mischief; demons, sprites, and satyrs. The room and its flows of guests and workers have been organised around the arcade, and there are tables for diners arranged in the space beneath the platform, as well as in the open part of the floor. On top of the arcade is another dining area, accessed by a narrow iron stairwell placed near the centre of the room, bordered by iron guardrails, and housing two huge oak tables. Normally these are used individually for large group bookings and events, but once or twice a year on special occasions a team of kitchen hands and waiters (each one requires at least six people to move) will be bought in to shift them together lengthways, and set up this way the platform area can seat forty comfortably. Along the back wall of the lower area are the bar and dining booths, and besides these are the entrances to the kitchens, which service the restaurant and also the rest of the hotel with room-service orders at all hours of the day and night. All of the productions and working schedules in the kitchens are designed to continue uninterrupted— the cooks and chefs and waiters and cleaners all work on rotating eight hour shifts with covers for breaks, during which they disappear into hidden access tunnels to sit and relax and text partners and children, smoke from small windows, wipe hands scarred by work across pressed white uniforms, bitch about management, about their pay, small jokes to pass the time before they will be called in again, hair tied back from faces that are oddly still, fixed in small moments, small reprieves. Their fatigue is the proof of their labour among the steam and fire and the flashing blades of knives, and they are contained in this professionalism, that comes with the discipline of schedules learned over years. The pragmatics of twenty four hour activity mean that the kitchens and their storage areas are much larger than all of the dining spaces of the restaurant combined, and this vast volume and humming activity unfold invisibly back from the rear wall. The staff enter using entrances that are not visible or available to the dining public, and their movements cannot be tracked using vision. On the other end of the room the glass front that lights the lobby continues along the building’s facade and makes up one entire wall of the dining space. The tables set closest to the glass look like architects’ drawings from mid-century design magazines— they are sized in reference to bodies and small groups and are dwarfed by the humanist Modern architectural features that enclose them inside a world of form and surface, where buildings and their pristine interiors are sketched out in light. A world where you might find yourself (finally) welcomed by the anonymous community that understand the goodness of your small domestic order. They will watch for you by the entrance, the one that marks your coming back into the necessary commerce of the city. And the city is the world. It is dimmer now outside. They wait for you without judgement; without vulgarity or sentimentality or any facile kindness that would let you be again the individual. You will come into their loving and their common grace, and you will be faceless like the rest in the darkness, caught up in the great and secular choir. It is nighttime. The rooms that have been locked away behind these great transparencies are unlit and devoid of movement. Further inside there are the quiet sounds of others, small groups unknown to you, still eating and working, still making their time as best they can (survival). But even though you can hear them, from this perspective you cannot see another living creature moving, not one in this entire city, and the empty rooms that unfold from you in blank series are as still and silent as black tunnels that stretch away forever into the obscurity and stillness at the frozen dead centre of the earth.

-

When they wake it is in darkness. The air is hot and stale. They perform a quick verbal check of those present, and, finding the group intact, move together to feel out the contours of their immediate environment— stone floors and walls, shelves with plastic bottles, a mop and bucket, probably cleaning storage of some kind, but a storage room with stone floors and walls? Eventually someone locates a box of matches and lights one. The four of them are standing inside a cleaning room, proportioned like a corridor, about two metres by six. The walls, floor, and ceiling are heavy stone masonry, and double rows of white plastic shelving line both walls at just below head height. The shelves hold brightly coloured plastic bottles, oven cleaners, glass cleaners, mould sprays, four five-litre bottles of bleach, sponges and scourers in shiny plastic packaging. There is a door at the end of the room; a strangely ornate and ancient door made from dark antique wood with black iron hinges and filigree. The match burns out and the room is plunged back into darkness. They light another and move to open the door, which is locked from the outside, so they beat and kick it down, which takes over a minute, and which they do in total blackness to conserve matches. When the barrier finally splinters open they can see that the wide open space on the other side of the door frame is as pitch black as the inside of the room. The ground outside the room is packed dark earth. They set one of the shattered door timbers alight and use it like a torch, and then they begin to move out from the room, following along the wall that extends off in both direction from the door frame, and which is made from the same stone masonry as the storage space. Whatever this stone wall is it is tall enough that the ceiling it supports is lost in the darkness at the edge of the flickering circle of their makeshift illumination.


After several minutes of tracking along the base of the wall they come across a broad flight of stone stairs set into the structure. When they climb these they discover that the stairs lead up onto broad battlements at the top of the wall, and also that there is no ceiling containing this structure, only the endless blackness stretching upwards and out from the wall in all directions, as though the moon, stars and sun had been put out or permanently banished from the sky. From the battlements they can smell salt water like the sea, but they cannot hear any waves or anything at all. They decide to explore along the battlements. After an hour or so they have mapped out the structure in which they find themselves— a small stone star fort, with thick low walls arranged into five points that jut out into a black void that their torches cannot illuminate from the top of the wall. Every twenty minutes or so they must return to the smashed door frame and make another torch, since without the firelight the darkness is so total that they cannot see their own hands held to their faces. They make contingencies— to save matches, and there are now only seven matches left, they light a small campfire by the door. This will consume fuel faster than they would like, but they realise exploring the space that there is plenty of wooden furniture around and as yet no more matches. They leave one of their number with the fire at all times while the others track out and away from the circle of light carrying burning pieces of wood, in an effort to more quickly explore the space and see if there might be something they could use to effect an escape. But an escape to where? Where is it that they have come from?


Eventually the floor plan of the fortress is mapped comprehensively. Inside the walls are three stone buildings— a barracks full of bunks and cots, a kitchen and mess, and a small stone church with an iron bell built into its tiled roof in Spanish colonial style. There is also a tiny gate house at the entrance of the fort, which houses an electric motor and control box that appears to control the raising and lowering of a steel car bridge from the island fortress down to some invisible mainland. The bridge is raised, and the mechanisms are unpowered. One of them has the idea of following the power cables from the control box and gate mechanism back to their source. This is not easy, as some effort has gone into concealing the cables and blending them into their environment with a relative seamlessness. At two points the cables track directly into bore holes drilled into the stone masonry and it takes them almost twenty minutes the first time, and several hours the second, to locate the emergence points. Everything shifts and moves in the torch light. Nonetheless they are eventually able to follow them all the way back to a small room next to the cleaning supply storage where they woke up, a room with a trap door that leads down into a concrete basement that houses a generator and seven ancient steel jerry cans sitting on a rack. Five contain fuel. They fill the generator and switch it on and at once banks of searchlights clustered around the floorpan of the fortress blaze into illumination. The lights have been hidden with professional skill, in blind corners and mounted high on walls, sometimes in small boxes that have been textured and painted in camouflage to match the stone masonry. When switched on they light up the fortress strategically— not to provide easy illumination for walking or day to day tasks, but to present the stone architecture as beautifully as possible.


Still, the light is welcome, and even when it is not aimed directly at the courtyards and walkways the ambient illumination allows the group to explore the space without smashing up any more furniture. They quickly realise that on the other side of the ramparts there is a large body of water, maybe an ocean, certainly the smell is salt, but an ocean without any movement at all, no waves and no tides, flat as an endless sheet of glass. The water is opaque and glossy and has the feeling of profound depth. The surface is like a precious stone, a green so dark it is like black. They throw down torches that are extinguished immediately. They imagine the ripples from the disturbance distributing across that perfect surface for vast distances, silently, and unseen in the darkness. The generator also powers the mechanism that lowers the car bridge, and they are able to work the controls without any trouble at all.


The lighting installed in the fort does not extend out past the battlements, but one of them has the idea of unscrewing the brackets and other fixings and repositioning the lights, as far as their wiring will allow. They use a knife to work the screws loose, and pull up the cables as far as they are able, being extremely careful not to snap or break them since they do not have the equipment necessary for repairs. It is while they are moving one of the larger spotlights up on to the ramparts and trying to angle it down to illuminate the far side of the lowered bridge that they notice the sheet of etched dark metal that has been fixed to the exterior of the stone walls with large bolts at its four corners. It is clearly ornamental— an addition to the architecture, similar in feeling to a mosaic or bas relief. The etching on the surface is light, but the cuts in the metal show up brilliantly under the illumination of the spotlight. It shows an animal or a human-animal hybrid of some kind, obscure and twisted over itself, in a confusing landscape of clouds and steam and eruptions of earth. It is not clear what is sky and what is solid or liquid; everything has been mixed and twisted together, or reduced back down into something fundamental and obscure. The body seems held in place in this semi-permeable medium, or it is clawing its way through or perhaps being birthed— it is really difficult to tell exactly what is being represented. There is no visible face or head, but the neck that is visible is elongated and strange. It thrusts upwards and into the top of the metal sheet and is lost by the crop of the frame. An odd choice of composition. They wonder if perhaps the original panel was larger and included a head, maybe a face; if maybe this crucial missing element might have provided the image with something concrete to relay or communicate. If the cropping was some deliberate act of containment or neutering. One of the group realises that there is no way this strange object, which they realise after several minutes is made from a single enormous sheet of lead, could be seen from the inside of the fortress hidden away in the dark like this. None of the many lights installed around the complex hits this patch of the outer wall. And then they come to the conclusion that actually this strange icon was installed intentionally between the illuminated spaces, and that it must be something best suited to obscurity.


On the other side of the car bridge is a city that sits abandoned in the darkness. There are other lead panels and other fortresses, other figures that they cannot understand. Over time, it could be months, they are able to map them these spaces and to know them. Eventually they realise that their search will lead them inevitably to the ancient and massive cathedral that dominates the centre of the city— they find tourist maps and road signs everywhere that point to it, and they read about its history and its public use from the time before the city was reduced to its current chthonic state. They begin to think that they know this building too, even as every attempt that they make to penetrate further into the interior, into the dense urban fabric, fails. They scavenge supplies, which are plentiful in the abandoned supermarkets. One day they run out of timber to burn and are forced to tie themselves together with rope and search by touch for something flammable, for anything that might bring them light. The cathedral holds the key to their escape. They fantasise that the great gothic stone building houses a power station hidden beneath the areas of worship, that it will light the whole of the city again if only they can access it. There are barrels of oil in the underground room and corridors, fountains of oil that collect darkly in stone basins and that stain the stone floors, and that will bring them a final, perfect illumination. But exploration is agonisingly slow. There are strange road blocks, and fences of steel and razor wire, and sinkholes that have swallowed whole sections of the city, and every path that seems like it should lead straightforwardly to the cathedral turns them back eventually to the silent beach and to the fortress that is still lit up under its spotlights, and that from a distance looks like an architectural model or a children’s toy. They are able to find opiates and other drugs in old pharmacies, and use these to pass the time with one another when they lose hope of reaching their goal. A group of them get high on the beach beneath the panel of lead and speak with the headless long-limbed figure that boils in its obscurity of cloud and smoke. Then finally one day they are successful and they break down the doors of the cathedral. The vaulted ceilings are forty metres high, and the walls are covered in gilt gold; there are reliquaries and a treasury where the bones of saints are kept as proof against evil. They smash everything apart, every piece of the alter, every single painting, the dais, they strip the walls, they burn what will burn. They flood the floor with black oil and set the building alight. The stone walls do not burn but the flames and the smoke deform them, stain them with rippling curtains of soot thirty metres tall. Paintings for giants or monsters. In the tunnels bellow they find the banks of machines that have kept this world in darkness. They find the bodies of the citizens stripped naked and stacked in rows, covered in the black oil that shines thickly in the flashing light of the torches. They destroy the machines with true hatred and with the frustration of denial or rejection. From the broken components they are able to construct their own contraption, one that will send them back, and they work quickly to do so before the rivers of oil are set alight and the catacombs are smothered in choking smoke and dirty black fire.


-


When she gets back to their room and realises that M isn’t there she is very still for a few minutes, and then she sits down on the edge of the bed and waits in the darkness, thinking. She is still drunk, and the emotions and thoughts that well up from inside her are dull and muted. She sits that way for a long time, and in the darkness of the room she is silhouetted in the reflected light of the city that spills in from the window. She looks like a statue. Then she takes off her shoes and lies back in bed and turns on the television, searching for a movie to watch. In the light from the screen her face is neutral. Eventually she finds something and turns the sound down low enough that the voices are difficult to understand. Then she gets up and moves to the bathroom and starts to run a bath, without switching on the light. She runs her hand beneath the jets of water and feels for the right temperature. Steam rises up. She returns to the bed to watch the film and after a few minutes the steam begins to leak into the hotel bedroom through the open door. As it moves into the room it is cut into by the light from the city that comes in at the window, and also by the brighter illumination from the television screen. She is lying on the bed, heavy and unmoving. She is like some ancient stone decoration, a funerary idol or a demon set at the entrance to ward against lesser evils. Steam fills the room slowly but completely. The picture on the screen begins to soften and fade. There are muted sounds of female laughter, murmured conversation. When she can hear the bath getting full she gets up again and turns off the taps. Then she returns to the bed to watch.


After another half an hour she feels that if she watches even one more second of this film she might try to throw the television through the plate glass window. Then she realises, with some surprise, that she is really hurt by M’s absence, and this realisation comes with a restlessness and a vicious, vindictive boredom. She turns the television off and drains the bath, finds her swimwear, and exits the room, laking care to lock the door, taking care not to make too much noise, aware of her clumsiness, aware of the thickness in her movements, finds the lifts, rides one down to the ground floor, and makes her way over towards the gym complex and the sauna. As she passes by the restaurant she tries peeking in to see if the conference goers are still celebrating at the bar but the angle of her passage across the lobby cuts that space off from her view. She enters the gym and breathes in the familiar scents and feels herself relax. With confidence swelling she begins to walk towards the sauna, but when she gets to the two exits she stops and thinks that perhaps she will see what the spa room is like instead, since she has not had a chance to visit it yet. The tiled corridor is unlit, which is so unusual in the twenty four hour atmosphere of the hotel that she almost stops and retreats back into the light. But then she sees the double doors up at the end of the dark corridor and makes towards them. The white tiles are blue in the shadow, and the openings for the individual massage rooms branch off the side of the corridor like cells in an isolation ward. The doors are marked ‘spa’ with a brass plaque, and they are roped off with an actual red velvet rope, complete with polished brass loops and fittings. She tries the doors and when she finds that they are locked she gives the lock mechanism a short push, cracking outwards with the full strength of her chest and shoulders and breaking the mechanism open, forcing the white painted doors first just a crack and then fully open with a soft squealing of metal. There are two metal bolts at the top and bottom of the door that have also been forced inwards and she can see that one of them has scored a shallow groove into the stone or faux stone floor in the interior. In the darkness this fresh damage stands out slightly whiter than the rest of the white marble. Then she steps over the rope and into the pitch blackness of the spa, closing the doors behind her and squatting down to find and pick up the broken pieces of brass and mechanism that her violent entry has scattered across the marble floor interior with blind hands and fingers.


Once she has pushed the doors closed again she switches on the torch on her phone, and sees that the room is actually quite small, and that it is dominated by the massive tub, sunken into the centre of the floor. She is standing quite close to the porcelain edge and would have fallen in if she had taken a few more steps in the blackness. The walls and floor are white marble and the spa itself is porcelain and brass. It is deep and wide, easily big enough for five or six people to bathe together. It is empty, and she can see a narrow band of brown residue along its bottom. She sweeps the light across the space and sees that as well as the spa itself, the room includes a champagne bar with a freezer and counter, and also a small open section at the far end of the room that houses a table and six chairs, presumably for private dining. The room is not being heated and the air is freezing cold. She watches her exhalations light up in the white light of the phone. She realises that the table and chairs are of a different style from the rest of the room, with its white marble and brass fittings, and that actually they must have been made by the same people who designed the arcade in the restaurant since they are made from the same dark cast iron and decorated with the same Art Nouveau motifs of vines and curling leaves. The tabletop is a single sheet of thick transparent glass supported by decorative cast iron legs. In the high contrast light the iron looks black against its pale surroundings of white stone. The torch is reflected in the glass of the table and the glare difficult to look at directly. She moves to the spa and quickly strips naked, shivering, but registering the cold distantly. She watches with interest as the the skin on her chest and arms puckers with goosebumps, then she climbs down into the great hollow space of the tub. The spa mechanisms seem to be automated. After trying several of the buttons on a grey plastic console, she notices that the system can be activated with a switch at the side, which illuminates the controls immediately when she tries it. She sees a display for temperature, and another that starts the flow of water. She sets the temperature to forty five degrees and switches the unit on. Heated water begins to flow into the huge tub from four jets spaced around its rim, and the chilly room is filled immediately with sheets of boiling steam. She realises that she is still holding her phone which could be damaged by the water, so she sets it down on the floor beside the tub. The directional torch now lights the ceiling only, and the billowing clouds of moisture that fill the empty room. Then she splashes her shivering body (shivering which has now become intense and uncontrollable) with the hot water that is collecting quickly in the bottom of the tub and that scalds her skin. It is almost too much to bear. Her feet and buttocks are covered quickly, and then her legs, her belly. The water burns on contact. She thinks that the water is too hot but does not make a move for the console. After a minute or two her skin acclimatises and the burning stops and she can feel her heart rate quicken and hear the blood roaring and pumping in her throat and temples. When the water fills up past a certain point the spa jets activate automatically and fill the room with the rumbling sound of the disturbed water. Steam is still rising violently up into the room, and she thinks that by now it must be escaping out through the broken doors, into the dark corridor and the massage rooms, maybe even out into the gym. She thinks of geological movements, of vast pressures, explosions of hot mud and oil from between curtains of rock kilometres deep, of buried lakes and rivers, saline and dead, crystals of salt forming on black granite shores over centuries of darkness and unending heat. Her chest would contain the oil and the boiling mud and her heart would pump it through all of her internal systems of tubes and valves. Teeth and bones and hair are extruded out from these subterranean workings over centuries. The outer layers of the skin calcify and crack apart under the stresses of movement. She breathes the way a furnace breathes. She realises suddenly that there is another person standing in the room, looking down at her from just inside the doorway. She cannot figure out how this person, a middle aged woman in a dark uniform who she realises must be a cleaner at the hotel, can have entered the room, opened the broken door, and then closed it again, without her realising. But this must be exactly what happened because the woman is standing there and staring down at her through the steam. She says that she must get out of the spa immediately, and then she says, with a quick look towards the door, that she has already called the hotel security. She stares up at the woman for an extended instant thinking about what to do and then collects herself and says yes of course, of course I’m sorry, and stands to her full height glistening wet and sheeting steam and climbs out over the porcelain lip with boiling water cascading from her body. Her muscles are swollen and her skin is deep red. For some reason the cleaner has not turned on the lights and is simply standing and watching as she retrieves her gym clothes and, because she has no towel with her, begins to sluice the water from herself with her hands, and then dry herself down using the nylon fabric. Then she puts on her underwear and the two women wait in the semi-darkness for the hotel security to arrive. While they are waiting she feels an irresistible urge to laugh, which she is nonetheless able to resist. She wonders how it is possible that she is still drunk after all of this time; how the cold and the small drama of her discovery have not sobered her up; how on the contrary she feels more wasted now than she did an hour ago on the steps of the hotel, or after that in her room, watching tv and letting the rest of the night spin away into obscurity. She sees suddenly that her phone, which she keeps switched to silent, is lighting itself up, which means that it must be receiving messages. The light pulses on for a couple of seconds and then winks out, and then it comes back, again and again.

The Machine

It was during dinner that conversation turned to the work that they had done before they crewed the machine. Captain and Signaller were sitting alone in the cramped mess but the others would join them soon. Captain was the one who asked, and Signaller replied that in his life before he worked mostly as a labourer on the building sites that mushroomed up endlessly in the capital, as investors launched, championed, funded and occasionally pulled out of their various projects and development schemes. She asked was it hard work? Did you enjoy it? He said that he did enjoy it, in a detached, dreamlike way. He described the light in the mornings, before the rest of the city was awake, very white and very cold, and the way his breath came in clouds of steam as he worked with the others to shift piles of timber, concrete, or steel. His hands and fingers were often cut into, the skin on his arms and legs bashed open during the work, and he remembered, smiling, how it felt to have his body toughen over time, and his sense of his own physical integrity fall away, become remote. It was not so rare to put a nail through your finger, and mostly the others that worked with him would simply pull it out without comment. Some of the older men would not even bleed, and he remembers thinking that their skin had calcified over the years into something almost mineral, like the concrete and plaster that they worked with. The sites were quiet in the morning before the heavy machinery started up. They all sat or stood around, in their goggles and heavy gloves and safety jackets, not saying much, smoking cigarettes or drinking instant coffee from styrofoam cups, conserving their energy for the work that would fill the day ahead. Often the sites would be hidden away from the general population around them, and the workers would be told that they could not be seen in their gear when off-site. The workers were kept secret; they interrupted the cheerful routines of the office workers around them with their roughness. So they would change on site, clumsily, in some corner, into steel-caps and dirty coveralls, not looking at one another. Draped in safety gear their individual features were obscured. Eventually the orders would come from the crew boss and machines would be wheeled into position and power routed, and the welders and plasterers and carpenters and bricklayers would go to work. Most of Signaller’s days were spent carrying heavy equipment and materials around at the direction of the skilled workers, or sweeping and hauling refuse. When Captain asks him why he never trained or specialised himself, he does not quite know how to tell her that the opportunity was not offered to him— that the sites each had their hierarchies, and that moving between them like he did meant that he was never around the same crew long enough to get established in this way. After thinking for a few seconds he lies; he says that he enjoyed the anonymity, the freedom to move around, also enjoyed having time on site to think about things and watch the way the light changed. To apply himself or be directed without needing to consciously think or compute anything. It was enjoyable to surrender bits of your agency. While he is speaking Captain realises that he is very young, actually much younger than she had assumed, and wonders how it is only now that she has realised this.


The mess that they are sitting in is a long, narrow, cramped room with steel walls and steel benches, and a long steel table; long enough that the entire crew, eight people, can sit together for their meals. Normally it is lit evenly, like all of the crew spaces in the machine, with a cold white light that plays across the surfaces and contours of the steel fittings and makes the furniture and architecture uniform and contiguous. But for the communal dinners Captain has asked Engineer to manually override the lighting and switch the fluorescents off. In their place she brings out tall white candles that she keeps in her cabin in brown paper boxes. She melts the bases to the steel tabletop, several together in the centre, so that the edges of the room are only barely visible. The space is very different in the candlelight. Her features, and Signaller’s, are softened and peaceful as they sit together. She is watching him and he watches the floor. He asks her what she did before all of this, but as he asks this Engineer arrives with Cook, both carrying together the steaming pots that hold the first course and talking loudly about how good the food is going to be.


Immediately the smells of the cooking fill the room. When they place it down the billowing steam is vibrantly orange where it catches the candlelight. It holds a rich stew of simmered meat, onions, and vegetables, and Cook places down a brown loaf of bread on a tray and a plate of butter next to it. She says that she has just baked the bread using the spelt flour that she stocked up on before they embarked, that it is still warm from the oven. Engineer hands out bowls (for this course) and plates (for the next), and steel cutlery. He sets eight places at the table, and looks to Captain enquiringly after gesturing to the four that have not yet been taken. She smiles and says that the others are surely on their way. Dinners happen at the same time each rotation, and even those who have been sleeping will arrive to spend time together, treating the meal as breakfast before they head off to their assigned duties. They should wait a couple more minutes, but if the others are late then they will start while the food is still hot. Then she says that they are talking about work from before, and that Signaller used to be a labourer. She looks at Cook and asks what she did, and Cook laughs and says that she was a chef. Captain says where did you chef? Was it in the capital? And Cook says that it was, at least sometimes, that she cheffed all over the place— she worked as a kitchen hand in the town that she grew up in in the north of the country, then after she moved to the capital (when she was still a young woman, twenty three or twenty four) for many years in a restaurant on the river as a sous chef, and then for many more years as a head chef in one of the hundreds of expensive hotels that interchangeably crowd the city centre. Kitchens have many points of commonality, they work in similar ways, although they can be wonderful or horrible places to work depending on the team that you have around you; depending especially on how that team is run. When I used to kitchen hand I worked for some real psychos. But, she says, thinking about it and playing idly with the cutlery, even the worst of the cocaine, barbiturate, alcohol psychos taught me quickly and efficiently. I learned how to prep meals, how to process ingredients quickly, which were important to handle carefully, which could be treated like raw materials— how to cut meat from bones, how to rub the salt in and know by touch when it was enough. Herbs that could be used to bring out or suppress certain qualities in a dish. And how to operate efficiently in an environment that could be dangerous: heat, fire, knives, tiled surfaces, boiling liquid, constant pressure, drug use, anxiety. She says you say ‘behind’ clearly and loudly when you are moving behind someone, you project this outwards at the person and anyone in front of them, so that everyone in the kitchen develops a sort of bat-like echolocation sense of where the bodies in the space are, where they are moving to and from. You don’t put knives in water, and especially not in clouded or soapy water, because if someone reaches into it they could cut themselves down to the bone on the blade of a chefs’ knife. You could ruin someone’s hand permanently like this, damage nerves and muscles so that they won’t heal. The first time that she was ever physically hit by someone in a kitchen was when she was seventeen, when she left one of the flensing knives in a wash basin with a stack of pans that needed degreasing. The chef, this one she remembers was an alcoholic, watched her do it, then went over and carefully felt around, down in the murk, for the handle. Then he drew it out, dripping soapy water, placed it down on a stainless steel surface, stepped quickly over to her, and hit her in the side of the head with an open palm, leaving a cut across her eyebrow. It was actually the first time she’d been struck by anyone and she was so shocked that she just stood there, bleeding, and said ‘yes chef’, as you’re supposed to when the chef gives you an instruction. These are difficult inductions, but once they have been properly internalised they make a type of sense. You become very good at what you do.


Captain asks if, once she was a head chef, she ever hit her employees, and Cook is quiet for a minute. She says no, she never hit anyone, but that there were worse things you could do to enforce the discipline of the kitchen, things that required no physical contact at all but that could damage people in other ways. She says that the worst chefs are the bullies, the ones that use other people up like fuel to power their own petty systems of control. She says that in her worst moments she had some of this bullying tendency in her, that she watched people to understand what would hurt or undermine them, and then made use of it sometimes to keep them compliant. But this was something I hated in myself, something that I worked hard to recognise so that I could intervene when it happened. The others are quiet as she talks. Then Signaller says that it is a good thing that she leaned away from it and not into it, that this actually made her a good boss, at least in his opinion. There were always bullies on work sites, and almost no one thought of it as a problem or something to keep in check.


Cook says well sometimes you need things to happen and for whatever reason the people under you don’t want to work to make it happen. There will always be control, techniques for control, coercion, it is a fantasy to pretend that this might one day disappear. In the hotel I ran a twenty four hour kitchen with a couple of other people that I trusted, on shifts. Room service at all times, and the regular restaurant hours too, when there would always be a rush. I used stimulants to keep myself awake when I needed to, because sometimes (always as a result of my own mismanagement— I am proud to say that this was rare) the job required you to sleep for three or four hours and then drive somewhere to pick something up, or to work doubles (sixteen hours) or triples (twenty four hours), and if you are responsible, that is if you are the one that everyone else reports to, then there aren’t really any contingencies. You just have to wake yourself up and do the work. Caffeine can take you pretty far but speed is better when you really need it. It was very difficult to break my own dependence on amphetamines after years of using. But here and now, she gestures expansively at the candlelit interior, there are no externals, nothing that I’m beholden to except feeding you lovely people. She is smiling. No need for amphetamines, no stress, nothing so high stakes, just fuelling you all so that you can keep doing your jobs.


Cook has other names that the crew of the machine use sometimes, depending on her mood and her function: Slaughterer and Anaesthetist. There is a small room next to the kitchen where livestock are kept, alive and sedated, hanging from the ceiling in canvas sacks. It is pitch black inside. The animals are fed intravenously, and by tubes that are pushed down their throats, and they are kept unconscious at all times. It is not clear to the others what the benefits of this system are, but one of Cook’s responsibilities is making sure that the animals are kept alive, and that they never wake up. When the time comes she will shoulder one of these sacks from its long canvas strap-handles, and bring it to the killing room next to the kitchen. Then she will use a cleaver to dismember it, starting with head to make sure that there is no chance that the animal will wake up and suffer unnecessarily, and a flensing knife to skin the carcass, drain the blood, joint the meat, clean and pack the offal, and give the rest to Engineer to dispose of in the reactor furnaces. There is very little of the animal that goes into the fire. She is a professional and she knows her work. When her face, hands, and apron are stained red she is Slaughterer. And when the crew come to her for injections of the sedatives that she keeps locked in a cabinet (even Captain does not know how to access it) she is Anaesthetist. She knows their body weights, their metabolisms, their blood types, the ways that they breathe. She knows how they sleep, and why sometimes they find it difficult. She asks nothing for her services, just sits and watches them, after the injections, as they struggle against and then finally surrender to the drugs that pump in their veins; watches them slip into unconsciousness so opaque that it is like dying. No dreams. She can time these lapses with precision.


The candlelight is dim. It makes their faces strangely serene. After a minute or two Cook turns to Engineer and asks what he used to do, and he answers that he was a writer, that he used to write stories for video games. This gets a general laugh of surprise. Engineer grins and says that of course he studied engineering (mechanical engineering) at university, but that while he was studying his was involved in a roleplaying society and got into writing that way. He thought early in his studies that the loan that he took to pay for the degree wouldn’t need to be paid if he kept his earnings below a certain level, so he took freelance writing work to supplement his day job, which was as wait staff in a cafe, and never declared any of this income when he paid taxes. The writing was originally done for the friends that he played with— they wanted a specific type of writing, and he was well-suited to provide it. All of the books he read when he was very young were of this type. They had a formal rigour, an underlying skeleton, the archetypes recurring beneath the specificities of plot or characterisation. Sex was a certain thing, violence was a certain thing, the state was a certain thing, friends were a certain thing.


Captain asks what these things were, what were their specificities, and Engineer thinks about it for a minute. Captain says she is asking out of sheer personal curiosity. Her smile is broad and sincere. Engineer says that, under this program and in these stories, sex is only ever either a degradation or a way of being saved; violence is action, the only possible action and the only possible response to the action of others; the state exists to be overcome; and friends are family, are the entire world. Captain asks what is family? He says that family is the state, that the two are indistinguishable. Signaller is laughing. He says it’s a very specific programme! And Engineer says that yes it is, and that nonetheless the variations and permutations inside of these understood geometries were infinite, like they are with all writing. Language can be used to expand something or contract it, can do both without constraint, like a fractal volume that grows infinitely without ever exceeding its bounds. You set your own bounds, you decide how far to zoom in or out, you give people what they want. In my case what they wanted was friends who became their family, parents who were dead (saints) or evil (the state), violence that was unavoidable, and sex that could deliver them from a life full of fear.


Cook asks if he ever published anything and he says that his writing had been in many different games that were published, nothing big, nothing that they would have heard of, and also that he had contributed stories to anthologies that appeared in zines and online. But that no, he had never published a book of his own. He had written one once, a long time ago, when he was still at university and his mind worked more quickly. Actually it had been when he was working as a cafe waiter. He would come in to open the shop first thing in the morning and prep the space for the other staff who would arrive later. He would put on music and dream up fantastical situations and plots and characters, and make notes of these on the napkins that they set up for customers, which he would then take home when his shift was done to embellish and elaborate on, tapping into endless documents on his laptop. It was messy work but very exciting. I knew that I was doing it, was finally doing what all of my favourite writers had done once, writing a book, putting it all together. What happened to it? It wasn’t very good. And actually, he says, when it was finished I couldn’t bear to go back and see myself revealed in this way; as a bad writer. It was much too painful. I never tried again. What was it about? He laughs.


It was about a group of friends who lived in the city, and about their conflicts and interpersonal rivalries. These were very thinly abstracted versions of the people I was hanging out and living with then, of course, and I would use all of these notes and documents to remake them as I wanted them, to implicate them into situations and relations that they would never submit to in real life. This was one of the things that was so unbearable about it. It was very honest, but quite horrible (not to mention profoundly embarrassing) to look at. Anyway, in amongst this group of friends was a warrior, someone who could impose their own will on the city and the world, but who was broken down by their life, who had lost their soul somehow, their essence, the thing that made them powerful. A good amount of the story followed this character as they travelled through environments that were almost completely abstract— endless plains and wastelands, the sky, the sea, utter chaos. They would fight the things they found there. They eventually faded into the same abstractions as the landscape, they disappeared. In one version they are able to find a magical weapon, or a magical person, or something else like this, that let them not disappear, that let them triumph, but the version I went with was the one where they disappear. The rest of the book was about the other characters back in the city mourning the loss of the warrior, hoping that they had been able to find the magic weapon. Eventually the city is destroyed by an invasion and the friends must go to war, but without the warrior they have no chance, they are all killed. The invading army are monstrous; they consume everything, they cannot be reasoned with. Each of the characters are killed and devoured, one after the other. The city is wiped away. There was, and again there were a couple of versions of this, a sort of coda, narrated by someone detached and omniscient, and who assured the reader that these activities were all equivalent. That the city getting wiped out and the interpersonal dramas of the friends, the warrior fading away, all of this was exactly equivalent, and it did not matter if things played out in one way or another.


They all think on this for a while. Cook says that this actually doesn’t sound much like the formula that he was describing initially. Do you still have a copy of this book somewhere? Do you still write? He says that no, it wasn’t really like the formula, the formula was an extremely tough and powerful spike that you could use to punch straight through into people’s enjoyment centres— the thing that he had written was not really like that at all. It was cloudy and ambiguous, and revealed a good deal about him that he despised. He says that he likes spikes more; that they are both less complicated and, at bottom, more honest. When you have a form you are less likely to allow yourself to run away with things, to say, with great earnestness, things that make no sense, that will not withstand scrutiny. But that yes, he still has the writing in his laptop, and no, he does not write while he is crewing on the machine, since they are not allowed to carry recording devices of any kind on board, and the laptop was certainly that.


Captain says that the others are late, and that they should just start, since the stew will be best served hot. She ladles out bowlfuls to the others, while Signaller cuts thick slices of bread, butters them, and places one in each bowl. Cook exclaims in mock horror that they can’t start yet and that she is an idiot for forgetting, and runs out of the room, reappearing less than minute later with two jugs, one ceramic and one glass, and eight tumblers stacked into one another with the air of someone who knows how to wait tables. The glass jug is filled with fresh cold water, and the ceramic one with heated clear spirits. Cook distills it in the kitchen and it does not have a name, but tastes something like rough, herb-tinted vodka. She pours them all a measure and they all drink it down at once. The liquid burns as it goes down, and the alcohol hits quickly. Then they make a start on the stew, which is delicious, and Signaller pours them all water, and as he stands to do this Gunner, Marksman, and Chaplain walk through the door talking loudly about how good dinner is going to be, about how good it already smells. They are immediately seated and Captain ladles them out their portions. Cook says that they are talking about their old civilian jobs, and did they know that Engineer used to write fantasy books and video games? There are incredulous noises of approval, and Gunner immediately asks Engineer if he had worked on anything she would know.


It turns out that he had, as one freelance member of a much larger writing team, working on once specific character. Working on video games is quite specific he says. Because you are writing in the context of a system that also must remain internally consistent, you are writing into a simulation. You write prose that gives colour or life to a single mobile section of the simulation, allows the reader or player to engage with it on more than just a systems level, but the writing needs to work in concert with the simulation. It has to function discreetly. Or you have to write a background that gives the simulation a context, and that allows its functioning to make intuitive sense. This is oddly detached and fragmentary work, no less skilled and specific that writing a novel, but also very different. I turned out to be much better at it he laughs. And what do I know about writing novels.


They are all eating now, with focussed enjoyment and in excellent humour. They finish the ceramic flask of alcohol quickly and Cook runs to heat up another one. Most of them are smoking cigarettes. Captain smokes packed tobacco from a short brass pipe and Signaller makes gentle fun of her for this. He says that she is the ancient mariner, and that they are all her curse, the various albatrosses strung from her neck, which makes her laugh. Her eyes are very bright. Gunner asks why he said mariner? They have no idea what is outside the machine; it could be the ocean, it could be space, it could be the centre of a volcano, it could be a black hole; all that they know is that for the extent of the tour they are sealed in because whatever is outside is hostile to humans. And Signaller says that he has always assumed that the machine was a type of submarine, but that of course Gunner is correct, they have no way of verifying this. Then he asks what did you do before this? and Gunner says that she was a cop, her and Chaplain were cops together, working in the capital, and that when they signed up they requested to be assigned to the same crew, and now here they are. Signaller’s smile drops. Serious work, he says. Why did you stop? I was fired she says, looking at him intently. I stole some money from the department, and when they found out I was discharged. Signaller asks if she went to prison, and she says that she didn’t, because the department didn’t prosecute, still staring at him. Chaplain says the pay that we used to get for what we did was so bad you wouldn’t believe it. I don’t blame her for a second. Signaller asks how much they made, and Chaplain says that isn’t the point. Low enough that the theft was warranted. We had other colleagues that just stole from people in the street says Gunner, or who would plant evidence and repossess peoples’ cars, then sell those. I knew a guy who would taser people or shoot them if he liked their car, I knew people who enjoyed killing people. She is still staring at Signaller. They didn’t pay us enough for the shit we used to go through, the shit we had to do. I’ve never stolen anything in my life and I didn’t make fucking anything either says Signaller staring back at her. Captain says ok enough, and Cook says hey, hey, and puts a hand on Signaller’s shoulder, relax guys. Ok enough says Gunner. Anyway, I was fired, and I didn’t have many options after that. Chaplain left for his own reasons, and we needed work, so we decided to join up together. A few months inside and a paycheque at the end, and then maybe another tour, or maybe something else. People always need cops, even if they’re not actually cops anymore. She looks around the table as she says this, as though confirming it for those present. People need people who know how to get compliance. Captain asks how long she was in the police, but she says that she doesn’t want to talk about it. Chaplain says he was sixteen when he joined. He grew up in the suburbs outside the capital, and when he finished school he had a choice between construction, crime, or the police. The choice was not difficult for him. They gave him a badge and a rifle, and he worked for four or five years in the suburbs, before transfer to the capital, where he met Gunner. He was her superior for a while, before her promotion, then they were partners for almost five years. The suburbs were a lot worse than the capital. Signaller nods absently when he says this. Chaplain says that the work was very hard. He doesn’t say anything about the freezing morning raids, the violence of picket-breaking, what beating people can do to you, coming to yourself cleaning the blood from your uniform, writing up the paperwork in the aftermath when one of the others shoots into a crowd and suddenly bottles and bricks are flying, sometimes homemade bombs, watching other cops in their grey uniforms and riot gear, arms or shoulders broken, unfeeling, high on amphetamines, still firing wildly into the crowds gathered in the shadowed streets, the screams the other end, bodies falling back, unseen, black mornings of violence, where you come to know yourself. He doesn’t talk about the interrogations, about breaking the fingers of teenagers, taking the names of their friends, the feeling of having someone alone in a room, the feeling of impunity. The mechanism of the service rifle. The way (and this was always incredible to him) that people refuse to be cowed. What having your dignity stripped away does to you over time. The abuse in the cells beneath the police offices, the abductions, the informants that they would find tortured and killed, stuffed into bins or the corners of public yards.


He also doesn’t talk about his real job, which, after six years in the police, was as an intelligence officer with the internal ministry. His quiet, diligent work was to organise groups of police workers into small, informal groups, who would empower their members to intimidate and drive off (and occasionally assassinate) other police who harboured positive sentiment for their domestic enemies, in the labour movement or elsewhere. He would organise them and guide them into the understanding that there would be no consequences, no punishments, that the official position, not owned to in public but tacitly in place, was that these operations were for the good of the public and could (and should) be carried out wherever possible. He does not mention that he was forced to disappear from his cover in the police force after one of the various organised groups that he worked to persecute and undermine got hold of his name and address and sent two men with homemade pistols to his house in the early morning to kill him.


Gunner is dimly aware of this history, but not of its specifics. She does not know about Chaplain’s real job, but she knows that the other officers that she worked with held him in a special respect. She was born in the capital and has never fired her service rifle. She watched a comedy series once that featured a low-level civil service worker deciding to change his life by embezzling public money from the enormous budgets that he moved around, and this gave her the idea that she could start overvaluing the goods that the force sold off in the procurement process and pocket the difference, which she did without anyone noticing for almost three years, supplementing her meagre income and finally securing the means to move into her own apartment and get her own car. It was these purchases that tipped off the force that something had changed, and they were what got her discovered. Chaplain was her patrol partner during this time, and they were also fucking, and his involvement was one of the things that kept her sanction light when the thefts eventually came to light.


They have all finished their bowls of stew, and the atmosphere in the mess is more relaxed. Several of them are comfortably drunk. Cook says that the best is yet to come, and asks for help bringing out the main course, to which Captain assents. The two women leave together, and Marksman lights another few candles from the ones that have burned down in the centre of there table. She has been quiet throughout dinner, watching the others. She and Gunner spend most of their time together seeing to the machine's cannons, bomb racks, torpedo bays, loaders, and ammunition stores, but the two women don’t have much in common and don’t talk much. She did not know that her work partner was a cop in her past life. Marksman’s proper title is Ordinance Officer or sometimes Gunnery Boss, but they all call her Marksman. She is the one responsible for mapping targets for their weaponry when they receive word from Captain that the machine is in a position to fire, which generally happens once or twice a week. She was trained as a painter. She spent years learning how to use gesture, ground, texture, and colour to map out the movements of shadowy, indistinct things that would be impossible (she believes) to express in any straight-forward way. Language only takes you so far. Over the years (she studied first in community programmes and then completed a degree in one of the art schools in the capital) she came to believe that painting was only one way of accessing these things, and made a habit of trying to understand other ways as they made themselves known to her, and as their various affordances and possibilities become clear. She made no money doing this, in fact spent what little money she scraped together here and there from ever-shrinking benefits programmes, from bike delivery, cleaning apartments, dog walking, stealing and reselling clothes, on trying to express these things greater and great specificity. She called this thing ‘transparency’, and focussed herself on it with a burning, psychotic intensity. When she thinks about herself back then, when she pictures those years, it is in this mode: thin, crazy, driven, alone, sustained by the movements of pure air and the perfected forms of her labour. Often she was literally starving; often she was without a room to stay in and had to lean on her friends. Her family had no money to give her, and eventually she got sick. She developed a fever, which did permanent damage to her nervous system and muscles. It was the second most painful lesson of her life— the first was that she would have to find a way to stop herself caring about images and their transparencies, that she would have to will into being a type of lobotomy. It was in the depths of the fever that she saw a series of images that altered her in ways that she was not able to undo. The first was of her own body, ill, sliced open and then opened outwards, so that what was inside her was exposed to the same kind sunlight and wind as her skin and face. The sunlight and the wind would heal her, would caress her body and its internal working with their kindness. The second was of a second body, maybe also hers but probably not, which was just a torso (the limbs and head recede in smoke or shadow so that you can’t see them); this body was invulnerable to hurt. You could fire a police rifle into it from a foot’s distance and it would not be transpierced, you could pull a scalpel down across its sternum and it would not be cut open. It is pleasantly androgynous, and warm with vigorous life. The final image was of a face that was as big as anything could be, and that was as close to her as anything could be, and whose eyes were as wide as eyes could be, and whose cannibal teeth were stretched into a bared grin that was as wide as a smile could possibly be. This one came down on her and obliterated everything and she would scream and shrink from it and thrash in her bed to get away from it but it was as big as everything and there was no where she could look that wasn’t also the face.


When the fever passed she was able to put these visions away, locked somewhere behind her conscious thinking, but they had changed her. She was also sick now, and could not live like she once did without it killing her, probably much more quickly than she expected. So she signed up for the crew of the machine and was trained as an Ordinance Officer, which was easy work if you knew what you were doing. She had in her possession the only maps (other than Captain’s) that showed the contours of the world outside the steel skin of the machine, and she did not show them to anyone. Gunner often asked her and she would go quiet and ignore the other woman until she stopped asking, frustrated, sometimes angry. She would trace firing trajectories and zones of maximum lethality in her cabin alone before sleeping, and feed these calculations into the targeting computers of each gigantic weapons system. Once this was done her job was complete, and Gunner would see to the manual operations of loading, firing, and maintenance. Marksman was the one who asked most often Anaesthetist for her administrations, as her illness often made it impossible for her to fall asleep without sedatives.


But she does not join in the conversation, and offers nothing about visions or transparency, or about painting, which she still thinks about often, with poorly-repressed contempt, the same way you would think about a trusting mark, about to be taken advantage of. The same way you would think about an animal raised to slaughter who loves the ones who will kill it without fear, unconditionally. In other words she thinks of it with absolute bitterness and hatred. What is the point of a system like this that cannot support itself in the city. She asks this of no-one, of God, and her body decays as she asks.


Captain and Cook return holding the night’s main course. The scent is very different from the stew that they have already eaten; there are brown baked vegetables, red, dripping meat cuts heavily rubbed down with garlic and rosemary, there is scented rice heaped up in a broad silver platter that is mixed through with spices, walnuts, and sultanas, there are grilled and sautéed greens, and a sauce for them made from tahini and olive oil. Everyone makes appropriate cooing noises as the various trays and platters are set down. Cook also fetches more of the hot spiced liquor and fills everyones’ cups. Captain sits and they all start loading their plates. Then she asks where is Systems? No-one knows. They begin eating. Gunner wants to talk about the video game that she played (and loved, apparently) that Engineer worked on. The game is about a world in decay, where all of the gods have died, and the efforts of its protagonist to build a new community (of good people, Gunner stresses) in the ruins. There is a vaguely twentieth century fascist organisation who oppose them, and who supply the conflict that requires the main character to kill so many of their nazi-coded foot soldiers. Eventually, after many twists and turns, you fight dying god of the old world, who the fascists all secretly worship, and, once it has been defeated, you take its power for yourself, and set out to build a properly just society in the ruins. Gunner is drunk and having a fantastic time talking them all through this plot. Engineer is equally enthusiastic. He says that actually this basic story changed many times during development, that the original idea was to have the main character fight through a succession of ancient gods, each representing some element of the fascist society that they embody, but that this had to be cut down for time and budget constraints. His role was small and he was not officially part of the production studio, but he knew from the people that he worked with that the project was basically underfunded. By the time the game released the studio was burning through talent and good will at a voracious pace, people breaking down in the offices, people taking indefinite leave, people collapsing physically and screaming at each another. His is animated as he talks. The candles have burned low, and the seven faces emerge out from the darkness of the mess like hanging theatre masks. No one looks into anyone else’s eyes; some of them stare at the dimly flickering flames, some are focused on the table top or the food. There is a strange edge in Engineer’s voice. He says that none of the studio workers could get out because they were all contracted, so they just had to take it, not like him. He could walk out whenever he wanted, no one could get him to do anything that he didn’t want to do. If he wanted to write a book he could. Gunner asks if he had any input on the main character but he is now distracted and says something noncommittal; he can’t remember, but probably somewhere in the process, yes. They weren’t the most interesting thing on that project anyway. By the end of it everyone was praying that they would be dissolved and snapped up by a bigger company, and that everyone would be fired and get severance. It was not a good time.


Signaller has been watching Captain for several minutes. When the silence deepens he asks her again what she used to do before the machine, and she looks at him and says hold that thought, that she is going to go and find Systems first. But as she says this Systems walks in, to the cheers of the now more-than-slightly drunk company around the table. She takes a mock bow, seats herself, and tucks immediately into what’s on offer, heaping her plate with enormous amounts of food. She is a small woman and it seems almost impossible that she will be able to work her way through all of this but she sets into the task with vigour and obvious relish. Captain turns to Signaller and says that she used to usher in a theatre, and that she taught remedial massage. He laughs incredulously. It’s true she says, smiling. I ushered for years, and I taught massage on the weekends because I used to enjoy giving massages enough that I went and did a teaching course. That’s the whole secret. I loved the theatre that I worked in but the money was terrible, not enough to live on in my own place when me and my first boyfriend split up. And actually the teaching made me way more money after I got myself established. I kept working at the theatre because I liked the people there mostly, and because having empty days stresses me out, gives me anxiety. She laughs, and the others laugh with her. Chaplain is watching her and grinning. He can’t believe it. Which theatre? I used to go to most of them. The Excelsior she says. He laughs and laughs. Were you working there for their classics season last year? No she says. This was years ago. Last year I was doing this, I’ve been signed up for almost a decade. They were good shows he says, very well curated, very well put together. The cast were good but really the strength of that season was in the production and direction, which were minimal but classy, very well conceived. I imagine so says Captain. It was and is a great theatre. When I’m back home I still go to see bits and pieces, but I don’t get a lot of time these days of course.


Then comes a long period of silence. The food is almost completely cleaned out. The trays and dishes sit on the table and the candlelight seems to enter into their surfaces and make them heavy, impenetrable, as though the table and the leavings of food are one contiguous structure or substance, opaque and heavy like stone. The air in the mess smells of tobacco smoke and the hot, scented white liquor. Some of them, seem to grow physically larger in the quiet room with its soft light, and others seem to shrink. For a long time no-one moves. Then Gunner takes out a small silver pill box and removes and swallows a single white pill, and offers one to Chaplain, who does the same, and they both inhale deeply and press into one another, Gunner’s head in the hollow of Chaplain’s chest and shoulder, both of them watching the candle flames.


Eventually Cook says that it’s time for dessert. The reverie is broken. Everyone makes incredulous noises, but she shushes them with a grin and rises to move to the kitchen for the final time. Captain gets up too but she is told to sit down. A minute later Cook returns with a large pot of black coffee and plate of soft cubes of pale pink and yellow Turkish delight. Everyone says oooooh. The energy is more and more subdued. They pour one another coffee and take the sweets onto small plates. Eventually Cook says to Systems that they are talking about what they used to do before the machine, and Systems looks at her and shrugs and says I used to do this, exactly this, but out in the civilian world, for a huge amount of money. Cook asks what she actually does, because her role is not well understood but the others, and Systems grimaces, because she hates answering this question. I work with the computers on board she says. She has a huge head of thick hair that fans out from her small face. Her eyes are obscured behind steel glasses. I work with the computers to identify unknown adversaries. I take the data that they output and make a series of my own assessments, and then I feed those assessments back into the system to see what it thinks, or what it outputs. This is exactly what I used to do in the civilian sector. I would identify adversaries, hopefully, if everything is working properly, before they were aware that they were adversaries, before they were capable of taking any hostile action. But, she notes again, I used to actually get fucking paid to do it. Her face is pleasant but her smile is fixed. Everyone is quiet. Finally Signaller asks why she signed on if she used to make such good money elsewhere, and she explains in a short, clipped voice, that people with her skillset are routinely conscripted by the government to run operations like this, in two year stints. They can’t afford to pay our salaries so they just arrest us if we don’t do it she says. It’s all very primitive. We don’t talk about it much, and neither do they for obvious reasons, but it’s all pretty routine these days. No offence to any of you guys, I like you all well enough, but I would rather be literally anywhere else. She sighs. It’s not even like the ‘adversaries’ change that much any more. That didn’t used to be true apparently, the computers four or five years ago were a little more vigorous and would output unexpected results sometimes. But these days we all know who we’re killing.


The table is silent and she says sorry, I think I brought the mood down, the dinner is great chef. There are immediate murmurs of agreement and Cook smiles and thanks them all for the compliments. Not to worry about the washing up, she will take care of everything. Engineer is the first to finish his coffee, rise, and excuse himself. Gunner and Chaplain soon afterwards. They leave together, both obviously high and very calm, and as they leave Chaplain whispers something to Cook and she nods. Systems and Marksman start to clear plates, and both of them shoo Cook away when she protests. They know that tonight she will need to be Anaesthetist as well as Cook; and anyway the two of them get along and both enjoy washing up. Cook leaves the room. She walks to the black room where the animals are hung up in sacks and makes her way by touch along the walls to the cabinet. She opens it and removes a nylon bag with a shoulder strap. In her mind she can see herself as Slaughterer with her arms dripping in gore, her face covered in it, wiping off the knives on her apron, wrapping the jointed carcasses in paper and sealing organs into airtight bags for refrigeration. This is the image that consumes her as she closes the cabinet, exits the black room, and makes her way towards Chaplain’s cabin, where she finds him and Gunner naked, lying together, her head laid back on his solar plexus and him propped against the headboard with his large hands linked behind his head. Cook imagines them laid out on her stainless steel table, imagine tying off the limbs to stop the bleeding, separating the bones with the tip of the heavy boning blade, slitting and then peeling the skin away in sheets. Then she injects each one with a prepared dose of sedatives and stays with them to monitor their breathing for abnormalities as they lose consciousness.


Systems and Marksman are both arms-deep in suds, humming along to the pop tunes coming from a small MP3 player that Systems normally keeps in her room, and which is within relations as it has no capacity to record anything. They are chatting away about nothing, about old boyfriends and the music that is playing, and what they will do when the tour is over. The pile of dishes is tall but with the two of them the work goes quickly, and they are both meticulous women.


Captain watches Signaller and he watches her. They are the only two left in the mess. Eventually Captain gets up and extinguishes the candles and takes him by the hand and leads him up to the her quarters, and they undress one another and climb into the shower, exploring one another with hands and mouths. Captain finds his ass with her fingers and Signaller smiles into her mouth and puts his hands around her face as he kisses her. Afterwards they lie in the steel single cot together, Captain stacked on top of Signaller (they are like two planks of wood), and she asks him what he enjoyed most about life before the machine. Did you enjoy construction work? He says, slowly, as though thinking it through as he speaks, that he didn’t care at all about construction, never thought about it really, and that what he really enjoyed was peace; living without anxiety, without demands from other people, with the freedom to enjoy his free time however he wanted to. He laughs and says that he has often thought of being a truck driver for exactly this reason. Then he asks, what about you?


Captain thinks and then says that her favourite thing from her old life was the theatre. The Excelsior where she worked, of course, but really what she loved was the theatre, the way that people might love literature or art. Signaller closes his eyes and lies back in the cot, breathing deeply and easily and listening to the sound of her voice.


She says that there was one particular play that she thinks about all the time; it wasn’t exactly her favourite— which would be a very difficult choice, so don’t ask (he smiles)— but it has stayed with her her entire life, since she first watched it in the snatches and pieces she was able to, while working as an usher, and moving in and out of the enormous Art Deco building while the performance was on, attending to her various inane duties. There were all the usual accompaniments of course, all of the things that she loved about the theatre: the furniture of the stage, the crew rushing from place to place, the splendour of the mid-century architecture and the pomp of waistcoats and bowties that they made their teenage staff wear, the hushed expectation of the crowd, the muted lighting, the whispering, the buzz of excitement as the curtain went up, the absolute silence of one thousand audience members waiting for the performer to deliver the line. But there was also the way that the actors could take the same lines and make them new again, new every time if they were good, and the truth of the lines would be new every time, as long as they were good. And the lighting rigs, props, mechanical framings, all of them were simple accessories. If the actors were good they could make the lines new with a table top and a candle, with a phone light. The lines would be new again, and they would continue their address to history, an artificial address but maybe the only one we have, which we have built so painstakingly. And it is so fragile. But if they are good then it becomes invulnerable for the exact length of the performance. In those moments its pure existence is so obvious has such clarity that it become impossible to imagine that our histories will pass from the world, though of course (they are artificial) they will. The truth of this, their passing, their future death and non-existence, stops being important once the lines have become true, have become invulnerable.


Signaller is still listening with his eyes closed. When he realises that she has stopped talking he asks what the play was, what is was like, and she says the play went like this: