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: