Graffiti symbols for myspace

Personally I have ideas for both if they decided to do a reboot I'd have the first 2 seasons combined into 1 as Season 1 was just finding its footing and its only in season 2 we start seeing the starting if a linear plotline like with the key the caves etc...
So I'd have season 1 end where season 2 ends combine a few essential plotlines into episodes and whatnot have the twister situation/ending for season 1 be the mid-season finale.
I'd also introduce Lois a lot earlier I'd have her be introduced maybe not episode 1 let them build up the essential characters like Clark, Jonathan, Martha, Chloe, Pete, Lex and Lionel and anyone else.
Then start an episode set in Metropolis woth Lois being the rebellious teenage daughter doing a petty crime like Graffiti or Shop lifting then running from the cops only to get caught and her father is called in and as punishment sends her to live with her Cousin this episode could be episode 5 or maybe even 6 or if you really pushed it maybe episode 14 after the resolution of the mid-season finale.
We could have episodes of Lois resisting falling into the comfort of the Small Town vibe but eventually after hanging out with Clark, Chloe, and Pete at the torch she gets roped into writing for the Torch and starts her on her journey from rebellious daughter to Ace Reporter.
She amd Clark are Chloe's feet on the ground, Pete acts as her in with the football players on something amd she acts as the info gatherer and hacker.
I think it would also set up Chloe's "Death" really well in season 4 so Lois can have been investigating since her supposed death and despite the general getting in her way she keeps digging and suddenly Clark shows up again and strange things start happening again and together after he regains his memory he helps her.
I would also have Lana and Clark get together a lot sooner or if not I'd wrap up their relationship sooner like have her leave that video like she does in the original series or actually kill her off eother one so that Clark and Lois can build their relationship it almost felt like thr Clark and Lana show by how long they dragged their relationship on for.
One other addition to this hyperthetical reboot I'd do is have Clark wear his Superman Suit a lot sooner and get him the ability to fly I probably would've had that ability after his rebirth like in the original series when he goes searching for the stones in Season 4 Episode 1 as Kal-El even after he regains his true self I'd have Clark gain the ability to fly.
That's all I can think that I'd change of the reboot maybe have more people find out his secret sooner as the amount of times he tip toes around goes to tell people butbthen changes his mind was really annoying so maybe tell Pete in Season 1 instead of Season 2.
Have Clark tell Chloe and Lois instead of then figuring it out. I'd also have while he hides the truth about his abilities from Lex I'd have that he does give certain truths like the fact he can read the symbols and whatnot he could even come up with lies like how he spent the time between season 3 and 4 studying the writinfs and discovered a pattern and now he can read the symbols.
Or something like that but now for my idea if they ever revived the series ckntinueing where they left off.
Depending ifnthey decided to do another season or make it a movie depends first off I'd have them make the comics canon for those who don't know they did a season 11 comic series a lot of shows did this back in the day as a way to keep the series going without the budget or slot for another season Charmed is another who did this.
But in the Season 11 Comics they also brought in some of the more iconic characters like Batman so ifnit was a sequel season I'd have them turn the comics into episodes maybe expanding them a bit to make them full episodes but I'd have the main antagonist be Darkside and have the final episodes be like a Smallville Version of the movie Justice League War.
I'd also have the actual character appear not be like a weird smoke cloud and have him looking for the Anti-Life Equation like he does in most versions if the character.
If it was a sequel movie I'd probably do the same thing only skim past unimportant plotpoints to build the new Justice League team with Oliver obviously but then bring Barry Allen and we learn that when Bart ran away from home he didn't realise he travelled back in time.
But yeah these are just some of my ideas how would you do things if you were given the power to revive Smallville and hownwould you go about it Reboot or Sequel?

Network can be connected to make them blue vs red when pinged. Started a new game in very hard and I am not touching access points until I get the laptop from the mission where they're talking about connecting devices on a network. Then I'll be hacking everything. I haven't touched a single access point yet.
It looks like betraying song bird is the play here as you can get to any other area on her path but you need to side with Reed to get to Cynosure.
I'm going a 20 int build and likely maxing cool as well.
I'm also planning on making sure I have Kerry romanced as that ending with male V doesn't seem well explored.
I don't think we've solved the main mystery. I think they have put in some red herrings. Why? Because after all the puzzles to get the monster truck, it still says 0 Hidden Messsages. There's something else.
Night city looks like a circuit board from above. I think we need to connect all the networks and open the Blackwall.
Connected networks turn blue. People on the net are blue. Blackwall is red like unconnected networks. There's something to this.
This will be the toughest run I've done. It will take a ton of time. But until 0 hidden messsages is figured out, I know there's more to this.
They said it's about 'outsmarting the devs'. That means they have hidden levels that trigger only on specific things. If you have the door opening mod and you force doors some open to nowhere where later on there is stuff. I also noticed that there are no tarot graffiti before we get shot by Dex.
Before Dex we are IN night city for real for sure. What if the answer can only be figured out before The Heist? WARGAMES quote used in the game is about sometimes the answer is Not to Play.
There are other ways to get the monster truck. The QR code suggests this was the end and to go have fun. I think there's something else to that page. I'm going to look into the code for it later. The whole mystery is about not taking things at face value. Yet we keep taking these false endings as the actual ending even though we keep finding out there's more and some things weren't solved yet. Like where the numbers for the servers come from in game outside of the top scores.
We don't know what the world tree symbol means or Misty's sign means yet. It's time we stop assuming we knew anything. Putting the heist off and solving the mystery! Racing to the egg!

Back in MS I used to graffiti and my tag was the O with an X through it and it's like a symbol for my small town, does it have any meaning?

There is something that seems to be following me: It will be in articles in the morning, as I drink my tea. Wherever I am, it finds its way there. Graffiti, movies, the man at the coffee shop, pleading with his lady, as he squirms in his chair.
This phrase follows me like animal herds, the phrase, "Actions speak louder than words." It feels pretty cliché, but it's always accompanied by Three Little Birds.
You understand those symbols, and what they mean. You genuinely smile at my stories, with those majestic eyes, and I realize I've never felt so seen. And the passion I feel, when I get to validate the unseen. The love, insight, connection; the only gift that comes from indescribable grief.
But lately our connection feels so strained. Is this the natural flow of life and relationships, or my fearful, reactive brain? The message seems to be, it's not words, it's the actions. I just don't know what's real right now. I don't even understand my own reactions. Look, in case you're concerned, my self worth is not dependent on you. But I do care when you express yourself, that you're speaking your truth.
Lately, life feels like a game of "Wheel of Fortune." Will the tick land on the love, once all encompassing, but now unraveling, and done? Could it land on love that has beat all odds, and now has no reason to run?
It's hard to say- Your past shows genuine love and care for so many years. Your actions as of lately, they have left me gasping for air, drowning in tears.
So, I chose to reread the whole story. Despite how you might feel right now, it's unjust not to recognize; you, me, us. Our achievements, the glory!
It's hard to imagine our story ends here. I know sometimes love means letting go. However, let me be very clear- The decades of time in each other's lives, healing, stories, laughs, tears.
When I'm nearing the day of my death, right before I take my last breath; I'll remember your essence and feel your presence. I'm honored you'll be the final reminder of all my lessons.
We will always be eternally intertwined.

There is something that seems to be following me: It will be in articles in the morning, as I drink my tea. Wherever I am, it finds its way there. Graffiti, movies, the man at the coffee shop, pleading with his lady, as he squirms in his chair.
This phrase follows me like animal herds, the phrase, "Actions speak louder than words." It feels pretty cliché, but it's always accompanied by Three Little Birds.
You understand those symbols, and what they mean. You genuinely smile at my stories, with those majestic eyes, and I realize I've never felt so seen. And the passion I feel, when I get to validate the unseen. The love, insight, connection; the only gift that comes from indescribable grief.
But lately our connection feels so strained. Is this the natural flow of life and relationships, or my fearful, reactive brain? The message seems to be, it's not words, it's the actions. I just don't know what's real right now. I don't even understand my own reactions. Look, in case you're concerned, my self worth is not dependent on you. But I do care when you express yourself, that you're speaking your truth.
Lately, life feels like a game of "Wheel of Fortune." Will the tick land on the love, once all encompassing, but now unraveling, and done? Could it land on love that has beat all odds, and now has no reason to run?
It's hard to say- Your past shows genuine love and care for so many years. Your actions as of lately, they have left me gasping for air, drowning in tears.
So, I chose to reread the whole story. Despite how you might feel right now, it's unjust not to recognize; you, me, us. Our achievements, the glory!
It's hard to imagine our story ends here. I know sometimes love means letting go. However, let me be very clear- The decades of time in each other's lives, healing, stories, laughs, tears.
When I'm nearing the day of my death, right before I take my last breath; I'll remember your essence and feel your presence. I'm honored you'll be the final reminder of all my lessons.
We will always be eternally intertwined.

There is something that seems to be following me: It will be in articles in the morning, as I drink my tea. Wherever I am, it finds its way there. Graffiti, movies, the man at the coffee shop, pleading with his lady, as he squirms in his chair.
This phrase follows me like animal herds, the phrase, "Actions speak louder than words." It feels pretty cliché, but it's always accompanied by Three Little Birds.
You understand those symbols, and what they mean. You genuinely smile at my stories, with those majestic eyes, and I realize I've never felt so seen. And the passion I feel, when I get to validate the unseen. The love, insight, connection; the only gift that comes from indescribable grief.
But lately our connection feels so strained. Is this the natural flow of life and relationships, or my fearful, reactive brain? The message seems to be, it's not words, it's the actions. I just don't know what's real right now. I don't even understand my own reactions. Look, in case you're concerned, my self worth is not dependent on you. But I do care when you express yourself, that you're speaking your truth.
Lately, life feels like a game of "Wheel of Fortune." Will the tick land on the love, once all encompassing, but now unraveling, and done? Could it land on love that has beat all odds, and now has no reason to run?
It's hard to say- Your past shows genuine love and care for so many years. Your actions as of lately, they have left me gasping for air, drowning in tears.
So, I chose to reread the whole story. Despite how you might feel right now, it's unjust not to recognize; you, me, us. Our achievements, the glory!
It's hard to imagine our story ends here. I know sometimes love means letting go. However, let me be very clear- The decades of time in each other's lives, healing, stories, laughs, tears.
When I'm nearing the day of my death, right before I take my last breath; I'll remember your essence and feel your presence. I'm honored you'll be the final reminder of all my lessons.
We will always be eternally intertwined.

There is something that seems to be following me: It will be in articles in the morning, as I drink my tea. Wherever I am, it finds its way there. Graffiti, movies, the man at the coffee shop, pleading with his lady, as he squirms in his chair.
This phrase follows me like animal herds, the phrase, "Actions speak louder than words." It feels pretty cliché, but it's always accompanied by Three Little Birds.
You understand those symbols, and what they mean. You genuinely smile at my stories, with those majestic eyes, and I realize I've never felt so seen. And the passion I feel, when I get to validate the unseen. The love, insight, connection; the only gift that comes from indescribable grief.
But lately our connection feels so strained. Is this the natural flow of life and relationships, or my fearful, reactive brain? The message seems to be, it's not words, it's the actions. I just don't know what's real right now. I don't even understand my own reactions. Look, in case you're concerned, my self worth is not dependent on you. But I do care when you express yourself, that you're speaking your truth.
Lately, life feels like a game of "Wheel of Fortune." Will the tick land on the love, once all encompassing, but now unraveling, and done? Could it land on love that has beat all odds, and now has no reason to run?
It's hard to say- Your past shows genuine love and care for so many years. Your actions as of lately, they have left me gasping for air, drowning in tears.
So, I chose to reread the whole story. Despite how you might feel right now, it's unjust not to recognize; you, me, us. Our achievements, the glory!
It's hard to imagine our story ends here. I know sometimes love means letting go. However, let me be very clear- The decades of time in each other's lives, healing, stories, laughs, tears.
When I'm nearing the day of my death, right before I take my last breath; I'll remember your essence and feel your presence. I'm honored you'll be the final reminder of all my lessons.
We will always be eternally intertwined.

There is something that seems to be following me: It will be in articles in the morning, as I drink my tea. Wherever I am, it finds its way there. Graffiti, movies, the man at the coffee shop, pleading with his lady, as he squirms in his chair.
This phrase follows me like animal herds, the phrase, "Actions speak louder than words." It feels pretty cliché, but it's always accompanied by Three Little Birds.
You understand those symbols, and what they mean. You genuinely smile at my stories, with those majestic eyes, and I realize I've never felt so seen. And the passion I feel, when I get to validate the unseen. The love, insight, connection; the only gift that comes from indescribable grief.
But lately our connection feels so strained. Is this the natural flow of life and relationships, or my fearful, reactive brain? The message seems to be, it's not words, it's the actions. I just don't know what's real right now. I don't even understand my own reactions. Look, in case you're concerned, my self worth is not dependent on you. But I do care when you express yourself, that you're speaking your truth.
Lately, life feels like a game of "Wheel of Fortune." Will the tick land on the love, once all encompassing, but now unraveling, and done? Could it land on love that has beat all odds, and now has no reason to run?
It's hard to say- Your past shows genuine love and care for so many years. Your actions as of lately, they have left me gasping for air, drowning in tears.
So, I chose to reread the whole story. Despite how you might feel right now, it's unjust not to recognize; you, me, us. Our achievements, the glory!
It's hard to imagine our story ends here. I know sometimes love means letting go. However, let me be very clear- The decades of time in each other's lives, healing, stories, laughs, tears.
When I'm nearing the day of my death, right before I take my last breath;
I'll remember your essence and feel your presence. I'm honored you'll be the final reminder of all my lessons.
We will always be eternally intertwined. I really hope that you don't mind. ☺️

First/Previous
“No! Jack!” Sephy cried out as she saw them fall, quickly swapping to her plasma rifle to try and give him some covering fire.
“Sephy! Enemies close!” Nika warned with a yell as she blasted a gutter punk that had tried to rush her, destroying the left part of the amphibian’s torso with a powerful shotgun blast that stopped him dead.
“Shit!” The Skritta cursed as she dove into cover on the opposite side of the alcove as plasma blasts zipped over her head, pummelling the plastered walls where she had just been standing and spitting up dust. Scrambling to her feet and unclipping her plasma rifle she blind fired around the corner, not caring who was on the other side as she bought Alora and Chiyo time to use their powers.
Dante barked loudly, as a dome of the most translucent sparkling blue settled over the girls. Recognising it as the same kind of shield the ‘dog’ had summoned when they were ambushed by the Red Legion aspirants on the way back from the Oracle, the Skritta grit her teeth as her brain caught up to what had been pure instinct. Holy shit this was bad!
Chancing a peek around the corner she could see a scrum for the stairs as a few of the more sober and less combative-looking patrons wisely decided to make their escape while they could, meaning that the stairs were clear enough to descend quickly if she and the others could get there. Unfortunately the path to get there was packed with many, many more of the rougher-looking mercenaries, gangsters and other toughs fired up by what was going on!
“ERE WE GO BOYZ!” A loud drunken voice yelled out from somewhere nearby. “WAAAAAAAGH!”
As two heavy-armoured Xarak wearing purple gang symbols charged into a group of avians wearing green, the resulting drunken brawl quickly escalated like wildfire into a full-blown melee, drawing nearby bystanders into the mix as drinks were spilled, bottles were smashed and bodies hit the floor.
‘Shit, getting out won’t be easy.’ The Skritta thought to herself, before suddenly getting an idea as she looked to the overhead turrets that looked like they were powering up.
“Cover me!” She called back to the others, as a translucent AR feed highlighted her vision to reveal the poorly maintained and vandalised local Matrix. Looking around the display, she could see poorly coded glitches rampant throughout the area making it difficult to perceive the local connections, with what looked like years of virtual graffiti scrawled everywhere else.
‘I’m surprised that any electronics work here…’ Sephy thought to herself, sending a scouting program to work out what she had to work with, while in the real world she moved to the balcony to try and look for Jack. She couldn’t see anything through the chaos and her view of the Matrix before she had to duck down back into cover as several plasma blasts were sent her way from the opposite side.
A quick blip from her scouting program told her that it had found what she was looking for, and Sephy wasted no time as she switched her view to that of her scouting program, holding back the nauseous sensation caused by the sudden perception shift, as almost immediately she had to focus on bringing her defensive programs to bear as several hostile nodes honed in to attack her.
‘What the fuck? These IC are way too powerful for a place like this!’ Sephy thought to herself as she backed away, maintaining her defences and cursing the fact that she couldn’t fully fade into the Matrix to speed things up. Looking up, Sephy saw the connections for the local turrets defended by a wall of advanced Blocker IC too advanced to be part of the local system, and she also saw the reason.
‘Oh you motherfucker!’
Hiding behind the defences, Sephy spotted a shrouded ghost-like shape by the turret connections, working an intrusion program on them to bring the turrets under their control.
Another slicer was already in the system!
As she sent a data bomb their way, the defences quickly acted to protect their charge, intercepting the digital attack and exploding in a debris of code lines and pixels. Turning around, the other slicer grinned as his hack of the turrets continued automatically, indicating that he was fully sliced into the local Matrix.
“Ah, yes. We were informed that the outsider had a slicer amongst his group.” The figure cruelly cackled, though Sephy was unable to tell their species or gender due to them both being in cyberspace. “I would normally tell you to surrender, but our Lictor gave us orders to eliminate every single one of you. But hey, if you’re lucky you’ll be alive long enough for me and the boys to run a train on you and your friends while you stare at the Outsider’s bloody, broken corpse. What do you say?” The form gave a wicked grin even as he knew the answer, summoning more Defender IC.
“Go fuck yourself,” Sephy snarled as she programmed another data bomb. “Doesn’t matter if it’s cyberspace or in reality, you’re not leaving this shithole alive!”
“I doubt it!” The other slicer chuckled as they summoned more Attacker IC, easily done for them as they were fully immersed in the Matrix, unlike Sephy who was attempting it in synchronised real time as she stayed in cover in reality. “We were told you were the dumb one in the briefing, you are no match for me!”
‘That’s what you think…’ Sephy thought to herself as she tried a new plan, seeing that the other slicer was too well entrenched. Quickly pulling up her pre-prepared list of viruses she shot out her virtual hands as what looked like several paper aeroplanes shot out to go for the other slicer. They were weak, unable to do any damage to the slicer, and most were easily intercepted, but enough hit the slicer to do what she needed them to do. Just for a moment, the avatar dropped and she saw the slicer for a brief as he actually was, an obese toad-like being in some kind of uniform.
More importantly, she was able to pinpoint the exact direction and distance of his real body from her current location.
“Hah! Pathetic!” The other slicer cackled again, not noticing what Sephy’s attack had actually done. “Was that meant to hurt? Take this!”
Sephy grimaced as her Matrix defences took a heavy hit as she quickly backed out of cyberspace to return to the real world, grunting and shaking off the disorienting feeling of treading two worlds and being violently ripped back into one. Had she been fully sliced in, it could have caused her some serious injury.
“Guys! We have a problem!” She shouted back to the others, as she saw the turrets begin to swirl around to aim their way…
*****
“Dessenta!” Alora gasped as she finished the spell she had been casting, causing blurry illusionary duplicates of her, Dante and the other girls to randomly appear near them, before with another word of command she caused them to run out and scatter to hopefully confuse the enemies targeting them. Ever since the trick had worked when they fled from the Cult of the Destroyer, Alora had been practising this technique, though it was still far from a perfect distraction.
Some of the illusions ran off the balcony only to dash uselessly through the air, while others waded into the various fights that were breaking out, even going through some people as they yelped out in confusion before trying to attack them.
“We’ve got to get Jack and run!” She yelled out, though she wasn’t sure if the others could even hear her over the blazing music and the veritable moshpit that had formed on the ground floor under them. She turned to the crew of River Giants that were still with them, standing there with weapons brought to bear, but not really knowing what to do. “Where is your vessel located?” She asked them sharply.
The River Giants just stood there with a dazed look, and Alora realised they were probably in shock at seeing what just happened with Jack.
“Captain! Where?” Alora yelled, and that seemed to awaken the giants out of their stupor.
“Far right side of the docks, lass!” Captain Ripples-On-Salt spoke up hastily. “Largest vessel there, it’s called the Siltskimmer, you can’t miss it!”
“Alright.” Alora nodded, trying to remain calm. “When you get the opportunity, get away from the place and get everything ready to leave. Pull out of dock a little bit if you need to but do not leave without us. We’ll join you as soon as possible.”
“Lass, we’re not sticking around if things get bad!” The captain warned with a panicked look.
“If it spreads that far and you need to protect your people, then do so,” Alora acknowledged. “But we’re here for a reason, and our mutual friends won’t be pleased if you lose your nerve!”
“Alright, alright!” The captain nodded, raising a hand placatingly. “We’ll do what we can and wake all hands, they’ll be sleeping around this time.”
“Good!” Alora nodded. “Stay back and as far away from us as you can be, then make a break for it!”
“We can fight, you know!” One of the crew spoke up, as the captain rounded on them.
“You’re drunk off your ass Dips-In-Bog! And we have our orders! We’re not sticking around, but at least we’ll probably have to batter some fools to get out!”
Glad to have resolved that, Alora turned around to assess the situation. She could see Sephy covering the right side while she was looking up towards the turrets, no doubt trying to take them over, while Nika was holding the right, and was attracting the most amount of fire. Seeing where the shots were coming from, Alora quickly ran towards the edge of the balcony near a wooden pillar that would hopefully give her some covering fire as she quickly cast a spell.
“Pyrallis!” She yelled out as she pointed her wand at the group of enemies aiming for Nika, as a jet of fire roared out, zipping around, above and below anybody not shooting at them as it smacked into the trio on the opposite balcony that were, immolating two of them, but the third, a great hulking Balnath with a huge overgrown maw of teeth, was able to shrug it off. Alora dove to the ground as they returned fire, completely obliterating the pillar she had tried to hide behind.
‘Well that got his attention’. Alora thought to herself as she rolled to the side away from the pillar, out of sight of the Balnath as they let rip with their gatling plasma gun, though fortunately most of the wild shots had been intercepted by Dante’s shield. Waiting for the sounds and lights to dissipate, Alora quickly got to her feet and cast another spell…
*****
“Come on then you fuckers!” Nika growled after she dispatched her amphibian attacker, quickly switching to her plasma rifle as she checked her side of the balcony alcove, quickly dispatching a figure that looked like she was heading for them. Nika didn’t allow any sliver of doubt to shake her, this situation was dire enough that anyone even remotely looking like a threat to her or her friends was going down!
‘We need a way out, Sephy has the stairs.’ The Kizun thought to herself as she spotted a sharpshooter on the opposite balcony far too assured of themselves to be just an ordinary patron, an assumption that was proven correct as they moved to take aim at Sephy, before a burst from Nika smacked into him and threw their aim wide, though didn’t finish them.
‘They’ve got good armour, maybe shields too, these guys are professionals.’ Nika concluded, though grinned as she spotted a group of some blue-feathered avian species mob the sharpshooter, clearly looking to grab their weapon in the midst of all the chaos. ‘Stairs were at the back of the building, so my way leads to the front. Maybe we can blast a way out and jump down? That plan worked out for us before…’
She contemplated the idea, knowing that she hadn’t taken as many breaching charges as she normally would for an urban mission, having dismissed the need to have as many in a rural environment, but she had one on her just in case, with a couple more distributed among a few of the others. However, the building they were in wasn’t the most structurally sound, and she had a real fear that enough damage could bring it crashing down above their heads!
The decision was taken away from her, as from one of the far alcoves ahead of her, a group of three strangely uniformed soldiers of some kind advanced towards her, with the Kizun having no doubt they were enemies, as two of them carried tall, broad riot shields locked into place, while the third shot at her with an accurate burst, cracking her shield and thumping into her heavy armour as she retreated. Where had these guys come from? She could have sworn she hadn’t seen anyone in uniform, but realised that, like them, their opponents may have been in disguise and had needed to quickly gear up before engaging.
Immediately, Nika reached to her belt for a grenade, electing for a smaller yield as she activated the timer and waited a few seconds before flinging it back from cover with a well-practised blind throw, sending it bouncing and clattering in a straight line before detonating right on target. Grinning with the roar, she dashed out from cover, going full auto as she unleashed hell, keeping low as she pushed forward, not letting up as she saw one of the shield guys drop to the ground while another couldn’t hold on, stumbling and falling back down the freshly blown hole caused by the grenade, which must have slipped under the shields and taken out the third guy.
And as she looked at the freshly blown hole, she realised now they had a quick way down!
*****
Those are Regulators! Chiyo warned, though she had no idea if any of her friends were paying attention as the Ilithii drew her power in to assist Dante in maintaining an energy barrier, before taking out her magic staff and channelled her power to lash out with psionic power at whoever she could detect down below, sensing that they were going after Jack. She heard her friends acting and knew she had to do everything in her power to get them all out in one piece!
Sensing a lot of magical energy flaring up, Chiyo activated her astral sight to check what was happening, and cursed as she did. There was a lot of ambient mana dissipating in the air from several illusionary spells, likely from their attackers, and she detected three strong signatures in particular, and two of them were situated on the ground floor.
The third was on the other balcony!
Responding to the imminent threat, Chiyo focused on her attack as she saw the astral form of the physically obscured wizard on the other side of the room whispering words of power and weaving their hands in strange patterns for a complicated spell of some kind that didn’t look good.
Her meditations with the Essence of Water they had looted from the Pallid Pit had proved fruitful as she had quickly learned to combine her new affinity with her existing psychic powers to weave together some new tricks, her most basic one coming into play as she quickly drew in the ambient water from all around them to cluster in one great ball, before launching several blasts that shot out to catch the enemy mage completely off guard, battering their body and cracking several ribs, causing them to flail back and, more importantly, completely disrupting whatever spell they were trying to cast.
The enemy mage appeared physically as their illusion mask was dispelled, revealing a diminutive blue furry mammalian with a long, thin snout in a set of traveller's robes with the insignia she recognised as belonging to the Order of the Infernal Harmony. Chiyo saw them angrily motion at her, ordering several more Regulators on the other side of the building to aim at her.
‘Well, I’m flattered…’ Chiyo thought to herself as she put more of her energy into maintaining her personal shields and hunkered down to avoid the gunfire, which took some of the heat off Nika, before the inevitable explosion went off several seconds later.
“We’ve got a quick way down!” Nika called back after dashing back to them, a sentiment that Chiyo quickly repeated to Alora to get past the deafening noise.
“Understood!” Alora shouted. “Chiyo?”
Lead your crew to the left and drop down the hole, the Ilithi told the River Giants, imbedding the thoughts directly into their minds over the noise. We shall follow promptly. Get everything ready for a quick exit. We’ll cover you, go now!
Quickly nodding in agreement, the band of River Giants needed little prompting to run the fuck away from the ongoing shitstorm while the group covered for them, with Chiyo unleashing her power and levitating a Regulator from behind an overturned table, only for Nika to cut them down mercilessly with plasma fire.
“Guys! We have a problem!” Sephy yelled in a panic. “They have control of the turrets! I can’t take them back from here!”
We’ve got to get off this balcony! Chiyo warned the others. Nika has an exit! We’ve-
But then she sensed it.
Scatter! Now! She warned as the entire balcony suddenly collapsed violently from under them…
*****
With a roar, Jack braced for impact as the ground rushed up to meet him with terrifying speed as he struggled with The Redeemer, before they both collided with the dancefloor in a bone-jarring smash, breaking the grapple as The Redeemer slammed hard onto his back, with Jack faring little better as his shoulder took the brunt of the heavy impact, sending shockwaves of pain radiating heavily through his body. The air was knocked from his lungs as he had the presence of mind to roll away, quickly scrambling to his feet with a fierce determination as he gathered his bearings
The room span in a disorienting blue for a second as Jack blinked away the stars dancing in his eyes, but Jack could see a crowd of gangsters and mercenaries forming around him, whooping and cheering, having seen his fall but not having any idea what just happened.
“Where is he?” Jack managed to gasp, as sudden movement from the side caught his attention, springing him into action as he quickly drew his heavy rifle, dodging the Redeemer’s enraged charge at the same time as he managed to get off a risky burst of heavy plasma that caught the Redeemer dead centre of mass as they passed and crashed into a table of avian mercenaries wearing what looked like biker leathers.
“You fat cunt! You spilled my beer!” One of them squawked at the Redeemer, who simply pushed the speaker aside as he quickly assessed the hits he took, a decision he quickly regretted as Jack put another accurate burst into him, staggering him backwards with many smoking holes in his now ruined brown overcoat, but not dropping him.
“Go down you fucking wanker!” Jack growled as he levelled his gun to shoot again, before several shots smacked hard into his shoulder, sending him careening to the side in a wild spin as his shots were sent wide, blasting smoking holes through the roof that allowed the evening light to shine through as he barreled into a group of furry beings that closely resembled silverback gorillas in matching military fatigues that denoted them as part of a militia.
“Fucking kid!” One snarled as he bodily shoved Jack to the ground, flicking a telescopic baton as he approached again to try and do him more harm before Jack got his gun up.
“Back off! Back the fuck off!” He yelled in a panic as he got back to his feet, warning the gorilla-men who cautiously took several steps back as he scrambled to his feet again, as he was shoved and jostled by alien bodies writhing and thrashing around in a frenzied melee of fists, feet, tails, claws, paws, teeth and fuck knew what else.
The pulsating thudding beat of the music jarred like a rampaging heart attack to provide a rhythmic backdrop to the rapidly escalating brawl, punctuated by the gunfire, the crash of breaking glass, and the roars of the combatants locked in drunken combat as he found himself in the middle of a full-blown mosh pit.
Risking a glance to the side, he saw The Redeemer rip off the smouldering remaining scraps of his brown overcoat to reveal the dull thick metal plates of his own heavy armour. He could see that his heavy plasma rifle had done some kind of damage, though he couldn’t tell how much from the melted, blacked, smoking marks from where Jack had shot them, or if his shots had even penetrated past the layers. But he could see that the Redeemer wasn’t going to go down easily as the avian gang was piling on the Ogar, who lashed out at them with his huge powerful fists as plates extended around his neck and head for extra protection.
Suddenly, Jack caught another movement out of the corner of his eye as he spun around, before a pincer deflected the barrel of his rifle, as a spindly insectoid quickly closed the distance, hostile intent abundantly clear in their snarling expression as they snapped a pincer at Jack’s face, who ducked out of the way and shunted backwards.
‘Shit! This place is too swarmed!’ Jack cursed to himself as he tried to aim his gun through the ongoing brawl. ‘I can’t risk firing into an open crowd! The rest of these people haven’t done a thing to me!’
Realising his rifle wasn’t the best choice of weapon now as he was knocked about by the horde of bodies, Jack flicked it around and behind him, relieved upon hearing the magnetic clips on his armour do their thing, latching his rifle in place so he could retrieve it later.
“Aegis!” Jack yelled out as the pincer of the insectoid came at him again, summoning his shield to take the blow before he lashed out, taking the bug in the maw and knocking him back, before he followed through with a quick draw of his sidearm, putting two controlled shots in the thing’s chest and missing the shot to the head as several bolts of blue light smacked into him, though his shield took a few of the hits as he disengaged.
‘Shit! How many of these fuckers did the Redeemer bring with him?’ Jack thought to himself, as he heard an explosion from somewhere up above him. ‘And how the fuck did they know we’d be here?!’
His Ring of the Berserker was flaring up as Jack tried to regain his bearings, trying to spot the source of the magic missiles that had just been flung his way, before he suddenly brought up his forearm, reflexively parrying a swipe from the gorilla-man that had tried to blindside him with the baton. His armour held, only causing him to feel a slight tingle as he lashed out with a punch, clocking his attacker in the face as his gauntlets instantly reacted to cap his knuckles with a metal coating, adding to the power of the punch, sending the gorilla-man to the ground in a daze.
“What’s up retards? May I have your attention please?” A sneering voice called out over the speakers of the music, and though Jack looked for the source of the voice as he tried to get away, he could see the DJ still at his podium looking confused at who was talking. “I know you crackheads aren’t very bright, so I’ll try and use simple words so you understand."
"You are currently being graced by the presence of the Order of the Infernal Harmony, along with our very special guest, The Redeemer! The reason why we’re here is the Outsider practically shitting himself on the dancefloor of this dump, along with a few random bimbos dumb enough to tag along with him. Anyone that gets in the way of our business or takes any action against us should be prepared to accept the consequences, up to and not limited to your brutal death, so if any of you losers are actually lucid enough to understand me, I’d get the hell out of our way.”
“Fuck you, bitch!” One drunken patron yelled out above the noise as he drunkenly shot at the nearest speaker, missing several times before reducing it to slag.
“Oh golly gee, what an unexpected answer from a bunch of fucking crackheads!” The voice mocked sarcastically as Jack saw the turrets above glow with power. “Time to die motherfuckers!”
*****
First/Previous
Yep, these bad guys came prepared! Shame Jack can't just start blasting with all the people around!
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/wing-judges-ban-columbia-students-155209353.html

Judges do not comment on politics. This principle is so fundamental to the American legal system that writing it out feels like writing that “doctors treat patients” or “pilots fly planes.” When judges take political stances or opine on political disputes, it undermines the integrity of the federal courts and the confidence that Americans have in the judicial system’s fairness and impartiality.
The overwhelming majority of state and federal judges accept that sacrifice in exchange for the prestige and public service that comes with judicial life. Some, apparently, do not: A group of conservative federal judges demanded on Monday that Columbia University make “significant and dramatic change” on Friday to ensure “viewpoint diversity” and announced a boycott on hiring Columbia students—both undergraduates and law students—until it does.
In two page letter, the judges said their demands were in response to protests at the university over Israel, Palestine, and U.S. foreign policy in the region. “As judges who hire law clerks every year to serve in the federal judiciary, we have lost confidence in Columbia as an institution of higher education,” they wrote. “Columbia has instead become an incubator of bigotry. As a result, Columbia has disqualified itself from educating the future leaders of our country.”
The letter lobs a number of other hyperbolic accusations at Columbia, and browbeats the university for not being strict enough with student protesters (hundreds of police in riot gear were not sufficient, apparently). But what stands out is that a group of federal judges is using law-clerk hiring practices as a vehicle to opine on political matters. By using their government jobs to make ideological demands of private entities, they are blatantly abusing their judicial office.

The article goes on at some length to critique the move as pre textual, since it would not even apply to any students who are currently enrolled in Columbia University.
I find the principles the author writes mistaken and misapplied. I would point you to former Justice John Paul Stevens's dissent in Texas v Johnson, the flag-burning case, to refute this.
https://openjurist.org/491/us/397

As the Court analyzes this case, it presents the question whether the State of Texas, or indeed the Federal Government, has the power to prohibit the public desecration of the American flag. The question is unique. In my judgment rules that apply to a host of other symbols, such as state flags, armbands, or various privately promoted emblems of political or commercial identity, are not necessarily controlling. Even if flag burning could be considered just another species of symbolic speech under the logical application of the rules that the Court has developed in its interpretation of the First Amendment in other contexts, this case has an intangible dimension that makes those rules inapplicable.
A country's flag is a symbol of more than "nationhood and national unity." Ante, at 407, 410, 413, and n. 9, 417, 420. It also signifies the ideas that characterize the society that has chosen that emblem as well as the special history that has animated the growth and power of those ideas. The fleurs-de-lis and the tricolor both symbolized "nationhood and national unity," but they had vastly different meanings. The message conveyed by some flags—the swastika, for example—may survive long after it has outlived its usefulness as a symbol of regimented unity in a particular nation.
So it is with the American flag. It is more than a proud symbol of the courage, the determination, and the gifts of nature that transformed 13 fledgling Colonies into a world power. It is a symbol of freedom, of equal opportunity, of religious tolerance, and of good will for other peoples who share our aspirations. The symbol carries its message to dissidents both at home and abroad who may have no interest at all in our national unity or survival.
...
The value of the flag as a symbol cannot be measured. Even so, I have no doubt that the interest in preserving that value for the future is both significant and legitimate. Conceivably that value will be enhanced by the Court's conclusion that our national commitment to free expression is so strong that even the United States as ultimate guarantor of that freedom is without power to prohibit the desecration of its unique symbol. But I am unpersuaded. The creation of a federal right to post bulletin boards and graffiti on the Washington Monument might enlarge the market for free expression, but at a cost I would not pay....
...
It is appropriate to emphasize certain propositions that are not implicated by this case. The statutory prohibition of flag desecration does not "prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 US 624, 642, 63 S.Ct. 1178, 1187, 87 L.Ed. 1628 (1943). The statute does not compel any conduct or any profession of respect for any idea or any symbol.

​
To cut to the chase, when certain "intangible dimensions" are present in a controversy that is ostensibly about the content of speech and political opinion, that is enough to uphold a restrictive action. That view was expressed by one of the most liberal Justices on the Rehnquist Court. This is so when the conduct at issue is not actually necessary to convey to convey the political message, and would have a despoiling effect on something at the core of the USA's values.
So it is here. A judge is in no way out of line to "boycott" a university that has permitted itself to become a hotbed of anti-Semitism and intimidation toward other students.

Introduction
In 1909, Sigmund Freud was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. On the way there from Vienna his cabin steward was reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, an event Freud claimed was the first indication he ever had that he was going to be famous. In the United States, the philosopher and psychologist William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear Freud talk, giving psychoanalysis official recognition, as Freud saw it, for the first time. He later wrote about what the Clark lectures meant to him: “In Europe I felt as though I was despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream: psychoanalysis was no longer a production of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.”
Little did Freud know how his intellectual discoveries would transform America, which he dismissed as an “anti-paradise” or a “gigantic mistake.” Though he feared that Americans would enthusiastically “embrace and ruin psychoanalysis” by popularizing it and watering it down, he already suspected that his theories would in some way shake the country to the core. While watching the waving crowds from the deck of his ship as it docked in New York, turned to his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung and said, “Don’t they know we’re bringing them the plague?”
Well before the hedonism of the 1920s, a Freud-inspired revolution in sexual morals had begun. Greenwich Village bohemians, such as the writers Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who had been “deeply impressed by the lucidity” of Freud’s 1909 lectures, and Mabel Dodge, who ran an avant-garde salon in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, adapted psychoanalysis to create their own free-love philosophy. In the radical journal The Masses, Floyd Dell warned that “sexual emotions would not be repressed without morbid consequences.” Eastman, one of America’s first analysands, wrote a book comparing Freud and Marx: “Weren’t all forms of repression evil?” he asked rhetorically. Dell’s left-leaning analyst, a Shakespeare scholar called Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum who treated many of Greenwich Village artists, argued that it was healthier for young men to frequent prostitutes than to practice abstinence or masturbation.
Together they fashioned a cult of the orgasm - Mabel Dodge even went so far as to call her dog Climax. However, as Dell later admitted, their experiment was an isolated one, like that of the Oneida Community in the nineteenth century and a handful of other “obscure but pervasive sexual cults.” It was only after the Second World War that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large.
When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud’s pupils, arrived in New York in late August 1939, exactly thirty years after his mentor and only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas about fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of Puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex - as Alfred Kinsey’s renowned investigations, which he began that same year, were to show. Reich could be said to have instigated “the sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks. “A sexual revolution is already in progress,” he declared, “and no power on earth will stop it.”
Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that the satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. “There is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients,” he concluded in The Function of the Orgasm (1927): “the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction” (the italics are his). The orgasm was the panacea to cure all ills, he thought, including the fascism that had forced him to leave Europe. Reich sought to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, thereby giving Freudianism an optimistic gloss, arguing that repression, which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition, could be shed. This would lead to what his critics dismissed as a “genital utopia” (they mocked him as “the prophet of bigger and better orgasms”). His ideas became influential in Europe, which Henry Miller, finding a new sense of purpose through sex, characterized as “the Land of Fuck.” Reich was a figurehead of the vocal sex reform movement in Vienna and Berlin before the Anschluss, after which the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the continent, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud.
Soon after he arrived in the United States, Reich invented the orgone energy accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool - a box in which, it might be said, his ideas came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone energy accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and by extension their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere (a force which he christened “orgone energy”) - mysterious currents that in concentrated form could not only help dissolve repressions but also treat cancer, radiation sickness, and a host of minor ailments. As he saw it, the box’s organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, so the box acted as a greenhouse; and, supposedly, there was a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.
Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics, but after two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich’s claims. Nevertheless, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 1950s, when Reich rose to fame as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. Orgone boxes were used by such countercultural figures as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs - who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in the movie Sleeper, giving it the immortal nickname “Orgasmatron.” Bohemians celebrated the orgone box as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora’s Box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague - the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex.
Because of his radical past, Reich was placed under surveillance almost as soon as he arrived in the United States (his FBI file is 789 pages long). In 1947, after Harper’s Magazine introduced Reich to Americans as the leader of “a new cult of sex and anarchy,” the Food and Drug Administration began investigating him for making fraudulent claims about the orgone accumulator, and in 1954 a court ruled that he must stop leasing and selling his machine. When he broke the injunction he was sentenced to two years in prison. The remaining accumulators, along with thousands of copies of the journals and eleven books Rich self-published in America (including copies of The Sexual Revolution), which were thought to constitute “false advertising” for them, were incinerated.
In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to get its head around what came to be called the Holocaust and intellectuals disillusioned with communism were abandoning the security of their earlier political positions, Reich’s ideas landed on fertile ground. With his tantalizing suggestion that sexual emancipation would lead to positive social change, Reich seemed to capture the mood of this convulsive moment. People sat in the orgone box hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. The literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote in his journal, “Everybody of my generation had his orgone box…his search for fulfillment. There was, God knows, no break with convention, there was just a freeing of oneself from all those parental attachments and thou shalt nots.”
In his essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin described how that generation crystallized around Reich’s thinking in the later 1940s and early 1950s:
It was a time of the most terrifying personal anarchy. If one gave a party, it was virtually certain that someone, quite possibly oneself, would have a crying jag or have to be restrained from murder or suicide. It was a time of experimentation, with sex, with marijuana, with minor infringements of the law. It seems to me that life was beginning to tell us who we were, and what life was - news no one has ever wanted to hear: and we fought back by clinging to our vision of ourselves as innocent, of love perhaps imperfect but reciprocal and enduring. And we did not know that the price of this was experience. We had been raised to believe in formulas.
In retrospect, the discovery of the orgasm - or, rather, of the orgone box - seems the least mad of the formulas that came to hand. It seemed to me….that people turned from the idea of the world being made better through politics to the idea of the world being made better through psychic and sexual health like sinners coming down the aisle at a revival meeting. And I doubted that their conversion was any more to be trusted than that. The converts, indeed, moved in a certain euphoric aura of well-being. Which would not last…There are no formulas for the improvement of the private, or any other, life - certainly not the formula of more and better orgasms. (Who decides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other with razors on Saturday nights.
“There was, God knows, no break with convention”; “the least mad of the formulas that came to hand” - both Kazin and Baldwin saw their bewildered peers breaking out of one ideological prison only to find themselves in another. Theirs was a generation teetering on a new kind of brink - full of optimism about the possibility of change, they were unsuspecting accomplices in the authorship of more insidious forms of control.
I first learned about Reich’s orgone energy accumulator in 1993 when I visited Summerhill, the “free” school in Suffolk, England, founded in 1921 by A. S. Neill. I was an anthropology student at Cambridge University and, when I asked whether I could stay for a while as a participant-observer, I was offered a large tepee as a place to sleep. I like the idea of living in it: a wigwam seemed a suitable home for a backyard anthropologist. However, everything at Summerhill - where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws - is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for that summer I lived in a bed-and-breakfast in Leiston. All the other guests worked for the nuclear power station Sizewell B: every piece of crockery and all the towels and cutlery were stamped with the nuclear power station’s logo. The owner of the B&B had been given a free pullover after a random Geiger counter inspection had determined that his own, hung out on the clothesline, harbored dangerously elevated levels of radiation.
A.S. Neill met Reich in Oslo in 1936 and soon afterward became his analysand, fitting in a dozen sessions with him one a return trip. Reich had by that time been expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association (he had once been considered Freud’s heir apparent, but his attempts to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism ended up alienating practitioners of both), and pioneered a new form of analysis called “vegetotherapy,” a repudiation of the talking cure. Reich’s third wife, Ilse, described it as “doing away with the psychoanalytic taboo of never touching a patient,” and replacing it with “a physical attack by the therapist.” Reich would relax the patient’s taut muscles with deep breathing exercises and painful massage, until he or she broke down in involuntary convulsions, which Reich called the “orgasm reflex.”
Though his school had already been running for fifteen years, Neill found in Reich’s work its ideological justification, and he once referred to himself as Reich’s “John the Baptist.” His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of “character-armor” and “self-regulation.” For his part Reich saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son, Peter, to Summerhill for a while. He once threatened to give up his research and come and teach at the school, but Neill laughed and declined his offer, saying that Reich would frighten the children. Neill did, however, ask him to be the legal guardian of his daughter, Zoe. Reich invited Neill to start an orgonomic infant research center at his research institute in Maine and encouraged him to replace his Summerhill staff with people schooled in Reichian practice. Neill rejected both suggestions, but continued to read aloud from Reich’s books at staff meetings.
Reich and Neill shared a belief in the redemptive power of unconstricted development in children. For Reich this had an urgent political significance: he thought that only when children were raised free would it be possible to lay the foundations of a utopia. Neill thought that a radical reform of the education system was an essential preliminary to the creation of a better world. Both men believed that children were inherently good: it was an authoritarian, sexually repressive upbringing that corrupted them. Summerhill was designed to offer children a sanctuary from the moral contamination of the world, where they could live out their desires without the fear of punishment and play without the pressure of indoctrination: “We set out to make a school in which we would allow children freedom to be themselves,” Neill wrote. “In order to do this we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction.” The school’s motto continues to be “Giving children back their childhood.”
By the summer of 1944, Neill had begun to practice Reich’s analytic technique on his pupils at Summerhill. “I have given up teaching and am doing only veg.-ther. analysis,” he wrote to Reich. “The more I see the results with adolescents the more I consider that bloody man Reich a great man…Marvelous how patients weep so easily when lying on their backs. Some do so in the first hour. Why?” One former student remembers being instructed to lie down and “breathe deeply, as though you’re having sexual intercourse,” while Neill prodded her stomach (she was too young to know what sex was, so she just panted). “The repressed ones have stomachs like wooden boards,” Neill wrote to Reich of his pupils’ resistance, “but children begin to loosen up very quickly, and at once begin to be hateful and savage.”
The philosopher Bertrand Russell, like Neill, preached the benefits of an unconstrained childhood and campaign for new sexual mores. Neill said that Russell’s On Education (1926) was the only book on the topic he’d read without uttering an expletive. Russell spent a week at Summerhill in 1927 before opening a school of his own, Beacon Hill, based on similar principles. He was soon disillusioned, however, and left the school after five years. The children in his care, Russell wrote, were “sinister,” “cruel,” “destructive.” The effect of giving them their freedom “was to establish a reign of terror, in which the strong kept the weak trembling and miserable.” Russell’s own children, for whom Beacon Hill was partly created (it had only twelve pupils), were, like their father, traumatized by their time at the school. “I learned to get along inside a shell,” Kate Russell said, “fending off physical and emotional assaults from others and trusting nobody.” But for Neill, the monstrous behavior of children was a stage long the path to liberation: if they were “hateful and savage” it was only because they were sloughing off the final carapace of their repressions.
The accumulator that Reich gave Neill arrived in England on the Queen Elizabeth in April 1947, along with a smaller “shooter” box with a protruding funnel for directing orgone energy rays at infections and wounds. “I sit in the Accumulator every night reading,” Neill wrote appreciatively, “re-reading the Function of the O. while I sit in the box.” Neill soon became convinced of the machine’s effectiveness: “We used the small Accu on a girl of 15 with a boil on her leg,” he said. “It cleared up in three days, and we are to have her in the big box next term.” The effects apparently defied scientific explanation: “When Lucy had a new lump on her face under the operation scar, she applied the small Accu and it went in a fortnight,” Neill marveled. He bombarded Reich with questions: Was it safe to keep an accumulator in one’s bedroom? Did you have to be naked inside it? Would it be effective in the damp English climate? How long could his daughter safely sit in the box?
Neill’s daughter, Zoe Readhead, has run Summerhill since 1985. Neill was sixty-four when his only child was born; when she was two, Picture Post ran a story saying that of all the children in Britain, she had the best chance of being free. “I remember the orgone accumulator vividly,” she told me. “It was quite chilly in there because of the zinc.” As a child Readhead was prescribed half an hour a day in the device; she recalls the red plastic cushion she sat on and the funnel or “shooter” she was encouraged to position over her ear to try to cure a recurrent earache. She also remembers that as she grew up Neill lost interest in the machine (he thought he’d been mistaken in putting an extra layer of asbestos around it), and moved it to a corner of the garage.
By the time Reich died, in 1957, he and Neill were no longer communicating. In December 1954 Neill wrote, “It gave me a great shock to find you believing in visits from other planets. No, I said, it can’t be true; Reich is a scientist and unless he sees a flying saucer he won’t accept it as reality. I can’t understand it.” Reich, whose sanity had long been an open question (Sandor Rado, who analyzed Reich for a few months in 1931, said that he was “schizophrenic in the most serious way”), had started to suffer from paranoid delusions about the world being under attack by UFOs. The armor-clad orgone box was always something of a protective shield, illustrative of Reich’s sense of being besieged, but he now built a “cloudbuster,” an orgone gun that was designed not only to influence the weather - diverting hurricanes and making it rain in the desert - but to be the first line of defense against an alien invasion. It was a kind of orgone box turned inside out, so that it could work its therapeutic magic on the cosmos.
Reich initiated the break with Neill; his young son, Peter, who was spending the summer at Summerhill, told Neill that the American planes passing over the school had been sent to protect him, or so his father said. Neill replied that this was nonsense (there was a large U.S. air base nearby), and when Reich heard of Neill’s response he wrote to his remaining supporters that Neill was no longer to be trusted. In the American edition of Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Childhood, published in 1960, all references to Reich were deleted because the publisher considered him too controversial. (The book sold two million copies in the United States.) But Neill never turned his back entirely on his friend’s philosophy, and long after Rich’s death he persuaded Zoe to go to Norway to have vegetotherapy with another of Reich’s disciples, Ola Raknes.
Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1957, eight months after being sentenced. If Reich’s claims were no more than ridiculous quackery, as the FDA doctors who refuted them suggested, and if he was just a paranoid schizophrenic, as one court psychiatrist concluded, then why did the U.S. government consider him such a danger? What was happening in America that led Reich to become an emblem of such a deep fear?
The critic Louis Menand described Arthur Koestler, with whom Reich shared a Communist cell in Berlin, as “a slightly mad dreidel that spun out of Central Europe and across the history of a bloody century.” Reich’s story traces a similarly erratic path, and looking back at his era can help to shed new light on it. Through the history of Reich’s box it’s possible to unpack the story of how sex became political in the twentieth century, and how it encountered Hitler, Stalin, and McCarthy along the way . Reich created the modern cult of the orgasm and, influentially, held that ecstasy was a point of resistance, immune to political control. Of course, the birth control pill - licensed by the FDA in 1957 (the year Reich died) for treating women with menstrual disorders - ultimately provided the technological breakthrough that facilitated the sexual liberation of the following decade. But Reich, perhaps more than any other sexual philosopher, had already given the erotic enthusiasm of the 1960s an intellectual justification, and laid the theoretical foundations for that era.
His ideas rallied a new generation of dissenters, and his orgone box, however unlikely an idea it may now seem, became a symbol of the sexual revolution. In January 1964, Time magazine declared that “Dr. Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box”:

• With today’s model, it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes the larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books which a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotic. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.

Time called this new “sex-affirming culture” the “second sexual revolution” - the first having occurred in the 1920s, “when flaming youth buried the Victorian era and anointed itself as the Jazz Age.” In contrast, the children of the 1960s had little to rebel against and found themselves, Time commented, “adrift in a sea of permissiveness,” which they attributed to Reich’s philosophy: “Gradually, the belief spread that repression, not license, was the great evil, and that sexual matters belonged in the realm of science, not morals.”
In 1968 student revolutionaries graffitied Reichian slogans on the walls of the Sorbonne, and in Berlin they hurled copies of Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. At the University of Frankfurt 68er (as they were called in German) were advised, “Read Reich and act accordingly!” According to the historian Dagmar Herzog, “No other intellectual so inspired the student movement in its early days, and to a degree unmatched either in the United States or other Western European nation.” In the 1970s, feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Juliet Mitchell continued to promote Reich’s work with enthusiasm.
However, even in his lifetime, Reich came to believe that the sexual revolution had gone awry. Indeed, his ideals seemed to run aground in the decade of free love, which saw erotic liberation co-opted and absorbed into what the historian of psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky calls a “sexualised dreamworld of mass consumption.” Herbert Marcuse, another emigre who became the hero of a younger generation, provided the most rigorous critique of the darker side of liberation. After his initial enthusiasm for a world characterized by “polymorphous perversity,” Marcuse became cynical about it, and he ended his career with a series of brilliant analyses of ways in which the establishment adapted all these liberated ideas (the “intellectual Muzak” of the time) into an existing system of production and consumption. Reich had propagated an expressive vision of the self, but his sexualized politics of the body soon dissolved into mere narcissism as consumers sought to express themselves through their possessions. In the process, as Marcuse was early in detecting, sex and radical politics became unstuck.
It is a testament to the popularity Reich once had that his name is still remembered at all - so many of his colleagues have been forgotten. But he is now known more for his mad invention rather than for the sexual radicalism that box contained. Reich’s eccentric device might be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of that era. Why did a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing into a closet? And why were others so threatened by it? What does it tell us about the ironies of the sexual revolution that the symbol of liberation was a box?

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.

Welcome to The Oblivion Cycle universe, a vast setting spanning all of time and space and so much more. While many stories may shed perspective on this grand cosmic vista, there are also tales of adventure and sacrifice, romance and terror, grimdark corruption and scientific progress. To become immersed in the setting is to let the chaos of creativity flow through you, to let go of what is probable to discover what’s possible. I have created TOC for one reason, to inspire and entertain any who will listen. So please feel free to join me on this great adventure as I push the boundaries of what is possible and expand the limits of our creativity together. For more information on the setting and its lore there is a subreddit for TOC at TheOblivionCycle and a Discord server dedicated to it here [https://discord.gg/uGsYHfdjYf] called ‘The Oblivion Cycle Community Server’. I hope you find the following story entertaining and once more, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy.
+ E1:P1 + E3:P1 + Previous + Next +
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Continued From E3:P3
Balinski took a few steps down the hall towards the distant exit but stopped as he realised Daryon wasn’t following. He looked at her and the police woman seemed to shrink slightly. “What? What is it? We need to get moving, Daryon.”
He waited another second as she put her weapon away and compiled. She seemed strangely subdued now all of the sudden, as if she were embarrassed to be around him. They walked down the hall, thuds coming from behind them as the barred doors did their job. He reached out towards her but she flinched away slightly. “Okay, what is going on? What’s the issue?”
She walked a few more meters in silence and then spoke softly, “I jusst.. I didn't want you to have to ssee anything like that. Who I usssed to be.”
Balinski shook his head, he didn't care who she used to be in her past. He cared about who she was now. And who she was, was a friend. “Daryon, I don't give a znot’s ass about that asshole or what he said. You are my friend, and I promised that I would watch your back.” he had made the promise in order to calm her down, he didn't mention that he hadn't actually expected to have to cash in on it so soon.
She made a gesture of dejected misery, “I know you did. But you didn’t know who I used to be. What I did.. to ssurvive.” She looked at him and her tone became pleading. “Please don’t think less of me becausse I used to.. do things.”
Balinski shook his head. “Why would I think any less of you, Daryon?” She seemed to look at him in mild confusion, her faceplates cracking open to reveal the pink flesh of her lipless mouth. “I mean it. I have known you for a few months now, but we have been working together on this case for Siyel together for a few weeks now. I feel like we can trust each other with our secrets..” he trailed off, he was about to take a big step in trusting her.
He started hesitantly, now the large insectoid woman’s turn to hear something he didn’t like others to know. “Daryon..” he hesitated again and then took a deep breath. “I am not the hero that people make me out to be. I am simply the one that survived. And not even by being brave.” She looked at him, her head cocking slightly as he spoke. “I was placed on perimeter watch, I never even entered the complex before the destruction. Ima fraud, I never even fired a single shot at the rebels that day.” he stopped talking and slumped slightly himself.
It felt strangely liberating to get it off his chest, even if it was not the whole truth of what had happened in actuality. No, the whole truth was far too dangerous to share. “So now you know. I’m not the war hero who took out the enemies of the Union single handedly. I'm just the scared little boy that the commander of my unit did not trust enough to take into battle. And I have to live with that, the images still haunt me. My comrades shattered bodies, the blood.. The fire..”
He felt a wave of pain crashed through his mind, the memories once more causing the psychic anguish to overwhelm him. He raised his hands to his head and groaned quietly, he felt himself backslide towards that dark personal oblivion that was the pit of his past trauma. He stopped, or rather something stopped him.
He looked up as a voice brought him back to the present, “..can’t help you if I don’t know what’ss wrong, Balinski.”
He shook his head and stood. “I.. sorry. I have an.. a condition.” He finished lamely.
Daryon seemed to look him over without moving. Her bright blue compound eyes were able to see so much without her having to turn her head. She reached out and gave his shoulder a pat. “I get it. I think I do at leasst.”
He had a thousand things he could have said in response ranging from cruel to straight up flirtatious. But he never got to explore any of the options as just then a mighty crash echoed through the hall. This was soon followed up by the sound of distant screams and angry yelling.
He looked at Daryon briefly and then began running down the hall again. They skidded around the corner into the final stretch and up the slight incline towards the exit. Next to the door stood Dunmec and a slightly battered looking Terri, the yeown woman looked to be bleeding from several cuts across her forearms. They looked like they had been made by some manner of sharp objects.
Despite her oozing injuries the woman was beaming, her long pointed ears and wide predatory grin as gleeful as he had ever seen one of the big werewolf-like aliens. As they made their mad dash up towards the exit he also noticed that the tall umraghj was bandaging her wounds, the soft buzz of their synthetic voice echoing through the enclosed space.
“..andeged like this tightly or you may get infected. I don’t know why you had to go and do something like that Terri.” Balinski was able to pick up on the tail end of their muted conversation. “What’s that? Hey, it’s you two! You won’t believe what happened..”
Balinski skidded to a halt, breathing hard. Daryon was only centimeters behind. He saw Terri bristle, her mantle hair standing on end as she stood and whirled to face them. In her haste she scattered the small first aid kit that Dunmec had been using.
As she looked back and forth between them a gleam of recognition flashed in her eyes and she glanced at the umraghj who was busy trying to pick up the scattered debris of her suspicion. “This is the ones?” She seemed at once curious and skeptical.
He gave her a nod and a synthetic grunt as he stood with some difficulty despite the exosuit he wore. The gravity of the planet was nearly a perfect standard G, but the umraghj had evolved on a planet with much lower gravity and thusly had trouble standing unaided under standard gravity.
Balinski nodded to her as he reached them and then gestured towards the door. “We need to get out of here, like right now.”
“Too late, look out!” Daryon yelled as she dodged into the small alcove to the side of the chamber. Balinski twitched as he meant to follow, but in that second of hesitation he realised that Dunmec was entirely out in the open, and the approaching henchmen had drawn their guns.
The fool had gone for the exit, in a second he would likely be riddled with bullets and dead. Balinski stepped towards the man just as the thugs opened fire at him with an AP-6 submachine gun. He threw up an arm to shield his face as he felt a series of impacts against his chest and legs. He grunted in pain as he was thrown backwards by the force of the absorbed impacts. He swore internally as he slammed into the door right next to the cowering Dunmec, that was going to hurt like a bitch in the morning.
Dunmec lowed in fear, the electronic tone of the sound magnified by the distortion of his suit. Balinski coughed as he reached up and grabbed the man right as another flurry of shots flew their way. The umraghj jerked in either fear or pain as Balinski used his body to shield the man while simultaneously dragging him towards cover. He tried to send a mental alert to Caesar for backup but didn’t feel the transmission go. He couldn't be sure that the message had been sent, much less been received.
It looked like they were on their own. A bullet nicked his neck, causing him to jerk. With a last herculean effort he hauled the tall alien into the cover of the alcove while the other three tried to shelter in place. “Daryon, waste these fucks.” he shouted to her, unholstering his ThunderEagle and tossing it to her.
She grabbed it out of the air deftly and gave a grim looking nod, her antennae pressed down her back as she leaned out from cover and fired a shot off. He didn’t see if she hit anything as he was preoccupied with the whimpering Dunmec.
Terri was hovering nearby, her bloody wounds forgotten as the unfinished bandages hung from her arms. “Oh no! Oh-oh no.” the woman muttered as Balinski looked the suited man over. He had a small puncture in the shoulder of his suit, a thick green liquid seeped from the wound. The man’s chlorine based blood stained the fabric of the suit as Balinski checked him for patches.
He pointed to Terri, the woman still looking a little freaked out. “Hey, you.” Her chatoyant blue eyes snapped to his face. “First aid kit, now. I can help him if you help me!” He told her loudly as Daryon fired another two shots.
“Two down!” The vinarfel shouted. “I never sshould have let myssself get dragged in here.” He heard her mutter, as if anything he said or did would have stopped her from entering the building. She opened the revolver’s chamber and asked, “You got reloads?”
Balinski nodded and handed her a handful of bullets, AP, HE and others. He hadn’t looked, he had just grabbed some from his pockets as he lay on the ground wheezing slightly through the pain in his chest. Tarri had grabbed the first aid kit that Dunmec had been rummaging around in and he flung open the lid to see what he was working with. His own medkit he wore on his waist would come in handy if he couldn't find what he needed.
He looked through it as more gunfire erupted from down the hall, it sounded as if the gunmen in the hall had been reinforced. Balinski ignored it, instead focusing on the injured alien. Dunmec was breathing heavy, his eyes just visible through the HUD visor he wore. Balinski placed a hand on the man’s injured shoulder causing him to moan in pain.
“Hey, stay with me kid. This might hurt a bit, but I need to seal the wound. It looks like the bullet is still inside, I am going to have to get it out.” He watched as the man nodded, his breathing taking in a more fearful pitch.
Terri hovered by his side, dancing from foot to foot as she mumbled in some manner of near incoherent babble. He gave her a look, pausing in his work. “Terri, I need space. Most importantly I need you to watch my partner’s back. Here, take this.” He undid his ammo belt, handing it to her he gave her a small smile, “I got this. Don’t worry. I'm a professional.”
The yeown rushed off to help Daryon, now alone with the injured man he reached for the kit and located a small vitatector. He switched the portable MRI detector on and scanned over the wound. The small device beeped and showed an interior scan of the man’s injury. The bullet had been slowed by his suit, it looked like and embedded itself in the bone just next to his shoulder joint. It would be a difficult fix, but he had done this before on the battlefield on several occasions when a designated medic wasn’t available.
Balinski grabbed a small pair of packaged forceps from his own medical pouch. They had been stored in antiseptic fluid that he used to sterilise the wound as he ripped the package open. Dunmec once more cried out in pain as the liquid seeped into the open wound but Balinski sat him up against the wall and held him still with his free hand.
He looked at the man and asked him, “This is going to hurt. I don’t have any anesthetic that will work on you, I recommend that you hold onto my arm and squeeze as hard as you feel the need to.”
The umraghj nodded, their long double jointed arms reached out and his suited hands gripped his free arm. Balinski breathed deep and then pushed the tool into the wound to where the vitatector had told him to. It took a few seconds to find the bullet, in that time the man’s hands tightened down hard enough on his arm to make the allow creak concerningly. He felt the tool slip of the bullet and he swore.
“Luck damned thing! Come one!” He fished for it again and succeeded in getting a grip on it the second time. He had to work it back and forth a few times to loosen the projectile from its death grip. As soon as the projectile was free he dropped the forceps to grab some sterile gauze, he needed to stop the bleeding and didn't have a QTube handy. He needed to requisition more from the precinct when he got the chance.
He checked the man’s waist pouches quickly and found a patch kit. He squirted some basic medical foam into the wound, it would swell and keep pressure on the wound internally. It didn’t have the healing properties of a QTube, but it would keep the man from bleeding out. Balinski used a sterile bandage to clean the suit as best he could before applying the patch to it. Oxygen wasn’t harmful to the man, but it might not be good if the pressurised chlorinated atmosphere from inside the suit got out.
He reached for the first aid kit and closed it before patting the man on his shoulder. He was still lucid, impressive as most non-combat oriented species of the Union would quickly succumb to shocksleep when injured. Dunmec must be tougher than his lanky frame looked at a glance.
Daryon shouted as he stood. “Alright, they just got rushed by club staff it looks like. They are laying down their arms!” She scuttled back into the cover of the alcove as shouting replaced the sound of gunfire in the distance. She handed him his .50 calibre revolver and he replaced it into his shoulder holster as Terri rushed to Dunmec’s side.
She spoke quickly, “Oh.. oh Dunmec.. I’m so sorry. Are you alright? You got shot!” She added, a bit obviously.
The downed alien just coughed lightly and shook his helmeted head while reaching up towards the muscular alien woman. “I feel bad. But not as bad as I did before I met you.” He said the lines in an almost practised way, as if he had been waiting for the opportunity to use them for a while.
Balinski snorted slightly under his breath at the cheesy line causing Daryon to punch him in the shoulder. He gave her a glance as Terri lifted the nearly three meter tall man to his feet. He leaned heavily on her much shorter frame, but she didn't seem to mind. Her powerful muscles easily compensated for the additional strain as she replied to him, “Well, that was before. Now you don’t have to feel bad or scared. I will protect you now. I won't let anyone else hurt you, I promise.” Dunmec just chuckled and then groaned in discomfort.
Balinski stood straight as he heard the sound of approaching footsteps, his hand flashed inside of his trench coat. His fingers finding the handgrip of his gun as a quartet of heavily armed people rounded the corner with MR-12s raised.
Daryon automatically raised her hands and after a moment he did as well, relinquishing his grip on the gun reluctantly. A tattooed nerivith female stepped forwards, her face taken up on one side by a flowing vine-like pattern that disappeared into the collar of her suit. She wore a bullet resistant vest over the top of it, very much business-combat attire.
She nodded her horned head to them and shouted loudly, “You two, get on the ground! No funny business or you will find out just how much I care about problem brewers in my establishment.” She stopped as Terri rushed forwards.
The yeown woman’s arms were still wrapped up in the bandages from earlier and spots of bright red blood dripped slowly from at least one of the deep cuts. “Stop! These two saved us, literally. The human took some bullets to save Dunmec, he got shot by those packbreakers.” She spat the last word with considerable venom. Her disdain for the submachine gun wielding men was obvious.
The nerivith woman looked from Terri to Dunmec a few times before stepping closer to Balinski with a suspicious look. “Hands all the way up, move and I’ll give you another orifice to breathe through.” She stepped close and opened his coat, her hand feeling his ballistic vest that had stopped the first burst of automatic fire. She nodded and then stepped back before lowering her gun.
“Don't touch that hand cannon in your shoulder holster, but I think I trust you. Who are you two and what the smeg are you doing antagonising these jerkoffs?” The pink skinned alien demanded as she looked between him and Daryon.
Balinski gave Daryon a glance and she nodded before raising one of her middle arms. “I can ansswer that for you.” She pulled out a physical badge from her back pocket and handed it to the woman.
The club workers' tufted tail flicked as she took it and Balinski watched as her raven colored eyebrows rose. “CPD? What the hel are you doing here, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Daryon spoke again, the nerivith woman frowning as she laid out the tale in as accurate a fashion as she could without compromising their true agenda. “Well, we were following a lead to a persson of interessst when we were accossted by these men for ssome unfathomable reason. We tried to run and when that didn’t work we defended ourselves to the full legal extent of the law. You may notice that I didn't shoot to kill, at least not on purposse.” She added with a slightly guilty hiss.
Terri let out a small noise as she said it. The woman likely still in some manner of mild shock, despite her species violent natures, death was not always so easy to grasp. The gun-wielding woman turned to the few other club workers that had come with her and commanded, “Tell the boss what happened, call the police. I want this wrapped up as soon as possible. I’m not taking the fall for this one.” She turned back to Balinski and punched him in the chest, not hard enough to be aggressive but still with considerable force. “I think I like you, big man. You got some horns on you, I guess I don't have to ask you to wait for the police to arrive to give a statement do I?”
Balinski chuckled and glanced towards Terri and Dunmec. “No, you don't have to worry. I will be submitting a full report of the events..” He wasn't able to finish as a loud thud echoed from the main door followed by a series of loud percussive noises. Everyone immediately went on high alert but Balinski raised a hand. “No, it's okay, that’s my backup. Fashionably late as usual. Here, let me get the door so she knows it alright.” He looked towards Terri who nodded.
The nerivith woman’s gun was still raised but she nodded too. “Be my guest.” She gestured for him to go ahead. He walked to the door and unlatched it before swinging it open slightly. Before he could say anything, Caesar burst through it as she pushed it out of his grip. He grunted in mild discomfort as she slammed into his legs and landed in a stunned heap.
Chuckling as the embarrassed looking dog stood to her feet, he watched as she shook her triangular head. “You big oaf. Everything is fine now girl, thanks for coming though.” he reached down and gave her head a scrub that made her grumble in annoyance like a put upon teenager.
Daryon scuttled over on her short, pointed legs and Caesar perked up a little. “Oh you brave warrior, you would have ssaved usss for ssure if Balinsski had just taken you with uss.” She gave him a look, her faceplates cracked in her version of a grin. He could only shake his head as the nerivith woman walked up to him once more.
“Alright, I need to get this mess cleaned up. I beg your pardon if I ask you not to come back here on official business again?” He nodded.
He pointed to the door. “It wasn’t my plan to cause such a disruption when I came in here.”
She shook her raven haired head. “It’s all over now. No sense worrying about what did and didn't happen. It just so happens that we have had trouble with these individuals before. So as far as I see it you did us a favour because we now have cause to bar them from ever coming back.” She nodded again as she said it, her smile flashing at him. As she did he noticed that she had several gold teeth.
She turned and stalked away, her tail lashing behind her. Balinski rubbed his chest and then glanced down at Caesar. “Yeah, you did good in coming. If we hadn’t been able to make it out your backup would have been the thing we needed.” She just gave him a little bark and then headbutted his thigh affectionately.
Daryon was talking to Terri and the still slouching Dunmec. Balinski got the feeling he didn’t need the support as much as he was simply enjoying being physically close to the brawny furred alien.
Balinski decided to walk over to them to hear what they were whispering about. He picked up on the conversation as he neared. Terri was speaking, “Yes. She likely will keep trying to force her ideas on me, but I already beat her once and she won't ever be able to forget that. It is an exploitable weakness if we should ever lock claws again. Thank you for your concern.”
The woman looked over at him as he approached, her eyes settling on Caesar. “Oh, what’s that?” She exclaimed.
Caesar tossed her little head and gave him a look as if to say, ‘What? Another one?’ He chuckled and gave her a pat on the head. “This is my erstwhile companion and oldest living friend, Caesar. She is a cybernetically enhanced dog, a Jureillion husky to be precise. She’s got cognitive implants, you can talk to her if you want.” He prompted.
The yeown woman gave him a look that seemed as if she was unsure of herself. Finally she reached out and spoke softly, “Wow, look at you. You kind of look a little like my grandmother, it's uncanny.” Caesar snorted at the comment and then walked over for free head scritches, grumbling contentedly as she received them. “Ok she is so.. I mean, you are so soft. I love her.”
Caesar seemed to be enjoying the attention. Dunmec spoke now, the suited alien’s robotic sounding voice wheezing out from his helmet’s speakers. “I just wanted to thank you again for saving my life, man. Here, take this.” the man handed him something, it was a datachip card. An old style one too. “If you ever want to get a hold of me..” he glanced at Terri and she nodded, “..or Terri. Just call me with the number on that card.”
Balinski had to nod as he heard the faint sound of sirens coming from the still open door. “I will do that. You two take care of each other.”
Terry gave a wide grin, her teeth clinting in the light. “Oh, we will.” Daryon gave her a pat on the back as she followed Balinski out the door. Caesar hot on her tail.
He took a few steps out into the night and then patted his pockets. He grunted in mild delight as he found what he was looking for. It was a small shiny package of pibbles, the small candies one of his favorites. He poured a few out into his open mouth and jerked as he felt a tap on his shoulder. He glanced over, it was Daryon.
“Pibble?” he asked her with his mouth full. She seemed to smile slightly and offered a hand into which he poured a few of the colorful candies.
He chewed vigorously on the fruity sugar orbs as he contemplated the massive shitstorm they had just managed to walk out of. Daryon must have been thinking the same thing as she gave a loud sigh, “Wow.. that was. Well, it wassn't good.”
He just nodded silently. They stayed that way for another few seconds before he turned to her. “What did we actually get out of that old skorp? Anything that we can use to track down the one’s behind the attack?”
Daryon walked a few paces away and then returned quickly, the side-to-side scuttling motion of her pacing threw him off a little. “I really don’t know. The trail hasss gone cold, without another major lead I am fearful that we will losse them. That ssimply isn't acceptable to me.” He nodded, she was right.
He would have liked to respond but it was about that time that a series of screeching vehicles covered in flashing lights skidded into view at the end of the alley. He sighed and fished around in his trench coat for his credentials. “Here we go..” He muttered to which Daryon gave an amused hiss.
A series of officers rushed down the alley with guns drawn, shouts directed their way. It took only a few minutes of back and forth with them to convince them that they were in fact officers, or in Balinski’s case, employed by the CPD.
When it was over he gave a statement and almost a whole hour after they had walked down the alley he found himself leaving it. A bit the worse for wear but secure in the knowledge that they had at least put down a dangerous criminal for their trouble.
Daryon scuttled along beside him, “Gee, I ssure hope the club doesn't get into any ssort of trouble for thisss.”
The comment caught him off guard and he chuckled. “Yeah, they seemed like downright decent folk for running a burlesque underground club.” She gave him a pointed look, her antennae shooting up as she looked like she was about to rebuke him. He raised his arms in mock surrender before she could though, “Oh hey, not saying I didn’t like the place. Just that they likely were not excited to see the boys in blue.”
It was a fair point and she conceded. “Yeah, I ssuppose. But I think we sstill got out of there with a halfway decent lead.”
Now it was his turn to look shocked as they crossed the street, weaving between emergency vehicles to get to the opposite side of the gloomy street. The flashing of emergency lights was behind her and it made her eyes glitter like gemstones, he frowned. “What do you mean? That crusty old skorp didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already suspect.”
She raised an arm and pointed to the wall. He looked and noticed the graffiti for the first time. The one in particular she was gesturing to was a gang affiliated symbol for the Sunstarters. “I can ssay with sssome measure of certainty that we might be able to look around for ssome additional cluesss.”
The Sunstarters were known distributors for the Psychosis Division. It stood to reason that if the Pit Vipers had gotten involved with the Psychs then they were likely also involved with the Sunstarters. Balinski clapped his hands together and smiled, they might just have a lead indeed. What had the old skorp said? To follow the source?
They walked into the large parking garage and to his big blue truck, as they climbed back inside he leaned his head back. “That was a bit of a fuckfest. Are you hungry, I’m hungry.” Indeed almost as he said it he felt a small grumble from his middle.
Daryon made an affirmative gesture, her antennae moving excitedly. “Oh yess, where do you want to go for lunch? Ullnek’ss Hut maybe? McDoinkss?”
He folded his arms. He wasn’t really in the mood for greasy burgers or razah’voolian seafood. No, he would have to think about it. “Why don’t we just drive around till we find something interesting? We need to keep an eye out for any good leads too.”
He started the truck as the large insectoid woman gave Caesar a head pat while nodding. “Okay. But if you see a TFDs then we are sstopping immediately, isss that fair?”
Balinski shrugged. He liked fried drebble as much as anything else. Caesar however seemed very excited by the idea of crispy breaded arthropod as she woofed happily. He shook his head and looked back out the window. He would have to keep his eyes peeled for one of the yellow and black spotted stores.
**********
Balinski smacked his lips happily as he took another great bite out of the steaming fried drebbleloaf sandwich. The snallke was fresh and the pickles were crispy, just the way he liked them. Glancing over at the other two revealed similar scenes of personal enjoyment. Caesar was snacking on some popcorn drebble and Daryon was cleaning out a six-piece bucket of BBQ drebble graspers. Her long radula snaked from her lipless mouth between her opened faceplates as he watched, mildly intrigued to watch the alien woman eat.
He took another bite of his sandwich as Daryon sucked the meat off another fried and breaded grasper. Lacking a jaw she was unable to chew but her radula and powerful cheek muscles made up for her lack as she deftly disassembled the meat with the skill of a surgeon.
She waved the de-meated shell and gave a small hissing sigh as another of her ten arms reached out for the Smarkus grape soda sitting in the dash drink-holder. “Ahhh… Yeah, that'ss the sstuff. How’sss your ssandwich?” She looked at him without moving her head, her compound eyes making her constantly aware of her surroundings in a manner that some might describe as unsettling.
He got the feeling she was watching him eat too, his mastication of the sandwich as inherently alien to him as her own strange method of ingestion was to him. As he took another bite her curiosity seemed to get the better of her. He saw her head cock a little as she asked, “Sso, can you feel with your teeth? I know that you can’t tasste with them. I read that much on the hyperweb at leassst.”
He finished chewing and swallowed before giving her a wide smile. She froze, her fascination with his teeth obvious. “Yeah, kind of. I was lucky that I didn't lose them. It's not uncommon for people who go through.. what I did, to have their teeth shatter. And when they go they don’t come back.”
She nodded slightly as she took a loud slurp of her soda. “Yeah, I read that humanss only get a sssingle sset of adult teeth in their life. No wonder they are so hard, you have to keep using them for a hundred yearss.”
He looked out the window, they were driving slowly around the entertainment district looking for anything that might point them in the right direction. He wasn’t really too sure what he was looking for to be honest, but Daryon insisted that she knew what to look for. He nodded towards a distant structure, it rose so high it went out of sight. “What’s that there?”
Daryon made a loud noise as she cleared her throat. “That’ss one of the upper-city sspires. It connectss the people up there to the ones down here, think of it as a vertical metro..” She trailed off before pointing to something in the near distance. Her BBQ bucket forgotten. “Hey.. hey right there.. Sstop. Pull over.” She tapped him on the shoulder with one of her lower arms rapidly and he obliged.
He looked forwards and saw nothing out of the ordinary, a few people walking along the edge of the street. There was a tall human woman leaning against one of the street signs at the corner, she was dressed in some tight fitting dress and high heels but other than that looked as normal as the rest of them.
Daryon put her yellow and black spotted grasper bucket on the dash and cleaned her hands at the same time she undid her seatbelt and straightened her clothing. She stopped fussing after a moment and then pulled a soft cloth out of one of the inner pockets of her overcoat and used it to polish her eyes. She replaced it and then held out her arms, “Well, how do I look?”
Balinski took the opportunity to give her a completely unabashed once over. He shrugged, “You look like you. What can I say?”
She seemed to smirk. “Alright, good enough. You know you have a way with words Balinski, any girl would just swoon to hear such things.” He frowned but didn't get to reply as she continued, “I’ll be right back. Sstay there and try not to look too harmlesss. This will only take a ssecond.
She slithered out of the truck and he kept his eyes firmly forwards this time as she closed it and sauntered off, well as much as the fifty-two legged alien was able too. He noticed that she had once more adopted that somewhat provocative side to side sway in her stride as she walked away from him. He just shook his head, she was doing it again.
Continued In E3:P5
==End of transmission==

[First] [Previous] [Next]
Winters are cold in Saüle. Cold and rainy, really, but today I had the good luck of going out on a not so terrible day. Clouds covered the entirety of the sky, giving the whole place this gray and depressive tone, one I am probably never growing to appreciate. I always thought that people with depression liked these sorts of times… then again, my knowledge of depression before actually being diagnosed with it was inaccurate and biased.
The city’s residential district was soon far away, as the taxi I called took me straight into the Independence Plaza. Or, as many of us call it, The Pit. The place is a beautiful, open space divided into four quadrants, each with a water fountain, surrounding a big, barricaded patch of concrete that has been graffitied over and over again.
That’s where they covered the hole.
I slowly leave the taxi, being very careful not to slam the door behind me, and then turn to see the Plaza and the many stores surrounding it. To think there was once a gigantic tower in the center of it all… it’s kind of strange, really. I’ve always thought that the so called ‘Pillar of the Heavens’ was just another building back in the day, and the old people just like to mythify it.
Whatever the case, it fell into the depths of the planet over a hundred years ago, so it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?
It’s already four in the afternoon and I once again get that strange feeling of eyes locking on me, chasing me no matter how fast I walk. The loud trumpets of some random ska song keep me relatively animated and, what’s better, they keep the thoughts low. All I could think about as I walked were the vague situations I could put my characters through, mostly following the rhythm of the music.
It’s easy to get lost in such things, daydreaming about what makes life a bit easier to live through, but I feel like I’ve developed a bit of a ‘autopilot’ for these situations. My body moves slowly, trying not to become a nuisance for someone else in the way, while my brain flies up, trying to collect ideas for a book I’ll never write.
It’s been a while since I've actually created something… the prospect of trying again, this time with renewed motivation and purpose, pushes me to walk a little faster, maybe even skip a few steps as I move in front of the many stores around the plaza. I don’t have infinite money to just buy everything I want, so I’ve decided I’ll bite the bullet and go for a single book today.
“Ahhh, remember the last time we went book hunting? It’s such a fun feeling, moving silently through the bookshelves, stalking the titles, sneaking glances at the fronts…”
I do remember, but I also do remember the tendency of the biggest bookstore in town to put new releases first and foremost, often leaving treasures hidden in their obnoxiously bad registration system. I doubt they have fixed that…so, to not waste time digging over the many, many new books I wont read, maybe I should set my focus elsewhere.
“Don’t be so dismissive of new things. Some of them are authors just like you, trying to get by.”
…I guess I’ve grown a little cynical. Not everything is a cash grab these days, no. I need to be solidary with my fellow writers!
Or… future fellows? Considering I haven’t written anything to completion yet.
“None of that. Focus. We’re getting a new book today! Where are we getting it?”
Well, solidarity or not, I am not feeling like going to the big bookstore today… my feet take a turn, going through one of the many secondary streets that are born from this plaza. Not too far from there, in a darker corner of the city… there’s an old concrete house, completely painted yellow. The sign above its front door reads “Ricardo’s Stash: Antiques”, and oh how I missed it. I even turn off my cellphone’s music out of respect.
Looking through the shop window, my lips curl into a smile as most of the items I remembered being there are gone. Probably sold, good for old Ricardo really! Although the bronze typewriter is still there, taunting me with its excessive price… Good Saints above, give me strength to not succumb to my earthly desires!
“You already have a pretty good computer, you don’t need a typewriter. Be strong.”
The door has one of those bells that ring when it is opened, so there’s no way I can avoid miss Pelafina’s watchful demeanor as I enter. The old lady was sitting right behind the register, small but regal, dignified, with her black dyed hairs tied back in a single ponytail. Looking at her, seeing how well time has really treated her, it is easy to believe the rumors that say she used to be an olympic athlete for a country in the West before settling down with mister Ricardo.
The woman looked at me, before fixing her glasses in place and smirking with complicity.
“Well well well, if it isn’t our favorite customer.” I am convinced she says this to every youngun who wanders in, but I don’t have the guts to challenge the lady. “Long time no see! Had a hard time with your studies?”
“A little bit…” I smile slightly, trying not to be too awkward. “Any new books in your storage?”
“Plenty! You’ve been gone so long, we’ve stocked on some very interesting ones! But you give it a look! You’ve always been good at finding the good stuff among the rubble.”
All this praise is really bad for my health. I smile like an idiot, rubbing the back of my neck for a moment before walking deeper into the store, muttering a soft ‘Hi, Mister Ricardo’ to the old man sleeping on a wheelchair by the register. Ricardo’s is a huge, squared room turned into a labyrinth of shelves and showcases, piles upon piles of old toys, furniture, mementos and, of course, books! All at honestly pretty reasonable prices, considering the age of some of these items.
Last time I was here, Ricardo even swore that some of these items come from the fabled Pillar! But I feel that was just him trying to secure a sale.
I see old tomes of detective work, some poetry compilations, old classroom books and other curiosities, but nothing really catches my eye. I’ve seen these before, I want something new to read! Well, not ‘new’, I am in an antique shop, but uh, something unexpected. Uncommon. Rare, even! It’s not like I am a connoisseur of book rarity or anything but, when you are holding something special, you just know it in your bones! You can feel it, the excitement of having something very few others have had.
Maybe I am being a little too demanding though, because no matter how many books I keep checking, pulling and dusting in this store, the feeling never comes to me. What if the books are not the problem, but myself…?
“The light in you hasn’t died yet.”
I try to tell myself that very often. That there’s still hope and creativity in my heart, despite it all. That I can still see the beauty of the world despite this depression… and I honestly, desperately try to believe it. I cling to this feeling. Mostly because I know that the moment I truly give up, the instant that light in me really fizzles out…
… I don’t want to think about that.
“Having trouble there, boy?”
The whiplash of hearing a new voice forces me back to reality. I am holding an old math book in front of me, and probably I’ve been in this position for long enough to attract old Ricardo’s attention. The man even wheeled all the way over here to check on me. I immediately feel the guilt stab my back.
“A-Ah, no no. I am just… looking.” I offer my typical service smile, but Ricardo isn’t buying it. I can see it in those opaque eyes of his. Despite the huge glasses and the cataracts, I can feel a bright light in that look of his, rationality and youth that refuse to die out.
“Can’t quite find something you’d like to read?” The old man smiled, knowingly. He thought he understood… and I couldn’t help but think the same. There’s something about Ricardo, a weird air of experience, that convinces you that he really does know what he’s talking about. I gently nod. “Uh huh. Have you thought of what sort of things you’d like reading this time, youngun?”
“I… admit I have not. I am mostly guiding myself by feeling here. Seeing if something sparks my curiosity…”
There’s a bright glimmer in the man’s eye as he signals for me to follow him. He seems to have precisely what I am looking for; either that or he has something curious he simply hasn’t been able to sell yet.
We pass by shelves full of little figurines and old collector items, careful not to push the boxes full of ancient magazines and comic books, until we reach the front of the store. Right beside the desk, there stands a full set of ancient Cipangian armor, restored and shiny, complete with a kabuto and a red oni mask. Ricardo and Pelafina love that thing, it’s pretty much the main symbol of the store. They call it ‘Akai-san’.
“I got something special right here.” Said Ricardo, keeping his voice low as if he was sharing a secret with me. He smiled, carefully sliding a hand under the kabuto and pulling a small, yet thick leather bound book. The thickness of the bind and the yellow of the pages made it clear that one was older than what you usually see in the store. “Take a look at this…!”
It was a matter of holding the book to just feel electricity jolt through my back. Excitement? Curiosity? The cover was rough, a bad work of tanning clearly meant for a notebook more than a commercial product. My finger gently caressed the uneven black surface before I opened the book right in the middle.
The yellow pages were completely covered by black, thin scribbles, made in a language I have never seen before. Each character in the pages looked like some sort of runes, symbols without meaning to me, ordered in long vertical rows… I honestly have no idea how to even start this! In which direction should I read this? Is it even readable at all? I go back in the pages, discovering not only more of those runes but also some illustrations, rough drawings made with a coal piece… each with a little letter underneath it. What? This book has *annotations* on it?
My eyes focus. The pages, they are numbered! In Eastern numbers, to be precise, written with a blue pen. Clearly these notations were made recently, or at least more recently than the book itself was written.
“Check the later pages.” Ricardo said with a smirk, probably catching my bewilderment and interest.
I do as the man says and quickly pass the pages. There comes a point where the runes end, immediately replaced by latin alphabet written with the same old blue pen. A little arrow tells me to read columns of letters from top to bottom, from left to right, in columns. Once I reached the end of a column, the arrows then pointed me to start reading from bottom to top, alternating from each column I passed… it’s a bit unintuitive but, I manage to make sense of it, words start to appear from the jumble. It’s not gibberish, there’s something here, meaning to be discovered…
Most curious of all though, was the fact that the very last page of it all had a little text in some language that I was able to recognize. Maybe roman? Or portuguese? I couldn’t read it, but I could certainly know this one was translatable for sure.
“Maybe what you need is not reading material, but a challenge.” Ricardo said with a big smile. “I got that book a long time ago, some old lady came and sold it to us for a pittance.”
“You say that as if you weren’t an old man, dear.” Pelafina chuckled, covering her mouth.
“Oh shut up!” The man coughed a little bit. “But yeah. I tried to read it but couldn’t get too far… maybe you can properly translate it?”
“I am not a translator…” I quickly admitted, but I was not letting go of that book. Not anytime soon. “... But I will do what I can. How much for it?”
“Twenty thousand Empires.” Ricardo said with the brightest of smiles.
For reference, that’s not that expensive when it comes to books. You could find a regular book (you know, no hardcover) for around E$15.000. It is a little more than I would normally pay for a used book though, but urgh. Look at that man! Look at that smug look in his eyes. Even Pelafina is smirking.
They know. They know this is a sale for certain.
After struggling a little bit I just sigh, shaking my head and putting the two bills of 10 thousand on the desk.
“Fine.”
“Atta boy! I’m sure you can handle this. But keep us informed on what you find!” Ricardo chuckled.
“Please do. Ricky here has been pacing for days over it.” Pelafina added with a wink. “But take it at your own pace, okay? You’re not a translator, after all.”
“I will do my best.”
With a little bow, I walk out of the store with the book between my arms. The giddiness on my step hasn’t faded yet, I actually think it’s a bit worse now. I need to control myself, try not to make a scene right here and now… but it’s been so long since I’ve felt this motivated! This intrigued! This stimulated!
“Never forget this feeling. Strive to always feel this way.”
Now that’s unrealistic, but wouldn’t that be wonderful? Just… feeling the fire inside of me burning this brightly every day? I would die for something like that. I even smile thinking about it for a moment, as I raise my hand and try to call a taxi. Hells, I won’t even care if there are people sitting beside me today. I am excited!
“Maybe we can even take public transportation then!”
Let’s not get crazy.
Baby steps, alright?
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the time I arrive home it’s already six. The sun is starting to set, and students everywhere peek out of their hiding spots with excited, yet tired smiles on their faces. Vacation time, huh? That meant people would start celebrating soon enough… good thing I don’t live close to the city’s party side, or else I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all tonight. Not with all the music and the people just drunkenly singing in the streets.
I wave at the guard when passing him by, going straight for the elevators while the old man barely acknowledges me. I sometimes wonder if he remembers me at all… I can’t just assume he doesn’t, all things considered, so I can’t really do anything strange without him (and by consequence, my dad) knowing about it. Not that I’d ever invite anyone to the disaster that is my apartment.
Normally this is the part where I’d start torturing myself with those thoughts… but today I feel excited. The book between my hands has captured my whole interest, to the point where I even started trying to decipher it while sitting in the taxi. The symbols could have some alchemical significance? Some of them did look similar to arrows and such, so maybe this was supposed to be read like that!
The words on the latter pages were, as far as I knew, a romanization of the symbols. Was it accurate? Or just a wild guess? For all I know, the former translator of this work could have been making everything up.
Last chapter is in roman! Or, maybe some other romantic language!?
What if I am being racist and this is not roman at all!? Saints damn it!
The elevator can’t go fast enough. I don’t even care about the shaking of the metal box or even the unnerving sounds of old gears doing an effort to lift me. My eyes are glued to the book.
All until I arrive at Floor 8 and rush to the second door, closing behind me and sitting at the table.
For a moment I consider taking all the job over to my comfortable not-reclinable couch, but no. This is supposed to feel like work, so I can’t just do it in the messy comfort of my bedroom.
“Alright, how should we start…”
“Get a notebook, first of all!”
Right. I need somewhere to work on! But, wait, can’t I just do it all on my computer?
“You can’t take your computer everywhere. And besides, doesn’t it feel kind of romantic? To have a journal to keep up with your progress…?”
All my attempts to keep up a journal up to this point in my life have failed, I simply don’t have the discipline or focus for that sort of work.
“What if this time is different?”
I can’t help but smile a little bit. I get it, you really want to try and do a journal for this one, huh? I can feel Her stirring and shifting behind me, embarrassed to be called out like that but not really denying it. With a sigh, I get up and walk over to the old bookshelf to check, pulling out an old and badly bound notebook. The covers were made with bright green cardboard and messily cut, to the point where you could see the paper peek from behind it in some parts.
“Oh my Saints.”
This will do.
“Oh. My Saints. Why do you still have that?”
What? You don’t like the fruit of your own effort?
“Please, put that away. I beg you, the embarrassment is too much!!”
I had made this notebook myself during the “Bookbinding” class I went to for a while when I just started college. I still remember the looks the other girls gave me when I first arrived, none of them expected a law student or a man to join the class, not one.
“This is torture, do we really not have any other notebooks to work with? None at all??”
Is this or nothing, homegirl.
“Sigh.”
I pull one of my many pens from my backpack, sitting back by the computer and then, with a crack of my knuckles, I start writing.
I do not know who may read this. Honestly, I am not even sure if I will read it myself after I finish writing it, but whomever is picking up this torn and ugly book? This is dedicated to you.
“Pretentious and needlessly emotional.”
Ah, there you are. I was starting to miss you. With a sigh, I shake the thoughts off and keep writing.
I found the original version of the text I’m working through in the old antique shop “Ricardo’s”, where the titular man himself had been keeping this book for…
I honestly have no idea how long Ricardo had been clinging to this one. It couldn’t be that long, right? Ricardo said ‘a long time ago’, but that’s all the reference I have. Urgh.
…for a while. The book was originally written in a set of symbols similar in function to hieroglyphs, with each symbol representing a different word. Luckily for me, my predecessor left me with transcriptions to the latin alphabet, and a final chapter written in a language I am yet to identify and translate.
I am still placing my bets on roman, but honestly, I feel less and less confident about that with every second that passes.
I will record my findings in this book and then share them to all who may be interested.
Please bear with me.
After writing that messy introduction, I focus back on my computer and start my investigation by opening Gaggle Translations. I input the first words I find in the book… and beg.
Asu tlo’ikovithiio
The translator suggested Kauaian, but changing it to that language showed no results whatsoever. It’s not Kauaian..
I then tried all the permutations I could come up with in the search. I tried “Asu”, “Tlo” “Ikovithiio”, “kovithiio”, and beyond the Arizona State University and some western guy called Vito Iio, I had no better luck. That pretty much confirms my suspicions of this being a code, a sort of new language, or just plain nonsense.
What differentiates a language from a code anyways? Intentionality?
I smack my head for a moment there, trying to keep myself focused. Now that the easy solution was not available, I had to get resourceful, and before I started working with the final chapter, Gaggle still had one tool on its sleeve. It’s still a bit of an experimental feature, but by taking a picture of these runes I can actually search the internet for similar things…!
Rune 1
So I quickly copy one of the symbols on the page, the one I see repeating itself the most, take a picture of it with my phone and just wait for the best.
The result? A bunch of unfiltered stickmen, some of them with dicks. Because of course, Gaggle’s image searching is still a new tool and it needs plenty of work to properly function. With a sigh, I debate for a moment if I really should bother to check image per image… until I decide to just check the first two pages before abandoning all hope.
“Stickman, stickman, stickman with a dick, another stickman…”
“Stickmen animations and games really have boomed these years huh?”
“I guess so… another stickman…”
I promised to myself I wouldn’t go beyond the second page of results… and yet here I am, going deeper and deeper, trying to find anything at all.
It’s dark outside already… and that only means that the pills will stop working soon.
“Not that they ever really worked to begin with. Have you stopped feeling sad since you started taking them?”
There it is.
With a loud sigh, I set my computer down and stop messing with the search.
Maybe I just picked a bad symbol. Maybe if I pick another, I will get actual results.
“Or maybe you won’t get anything at all. You’re no translator, and you can’t start pretending to be one now, you know?”
I breathe in deeply, holding it inside for a good few seconds before letting it out. With that, I stand from my chair and pick up my computer. I’ll leave it for tonight…
“Yeah. Just leave it like you leave anything: incomplete. It’s not like you ever finish anything anyways. You may as well toss it to the side and ignore it until you forget about it.”
“But we were so excited about it… Come on, don’t give up now…”
“Let’s just leave it. It’s vacation time anyways, right? Let’s just play some videogames until your body can’t take any more. I promise I’ll be quiet while you do so! Let’s play some King of Legends”
I don’t even like that game…
“But it passes the time, doesn’t it? Precious time, so full of suffering too. You don’t even notice death encroaching ever closer while you have something to do.”
“You only rage in that game, it’s not good for you. Come on, please?”
“Just lay down and sleep then…”
… No.
“Hmmm?”
You know what? No. I am not sleeping tonight.
“Let’s not go to the extremes!”
Alright then, I am sleeping, but not now. Not until I get through some of this book!
I set the computer back down on the table and get myself a glass of soda, sitting down and cracking my knuckles with renewed determination. Spite can be quite the fuel, even if it’s spite for your own inner voices.
“I am not letting a stupid book defeat me.” With a grin, I open my notebook to start transcribing. “Let’s do this!!”

Diablo: welcome to my new radio station everyone so right now we have gotten an issue for some odd reason these demonic symbols are appearing all over hyrule no one knows why they are appearing but if you see anyone drawing them stop them because it’s graffiti which is a crime we’re still doing research into them but for some reason we’re detecting high amounts of evil energy coming from them STAY SAFE OUT THERE

Wanted to know everyones thoughts on the three endings and what they mean ultimately.
>! Mothersphere dialog is really vague in all of them so her are my thoughts.!<
>! Ending 1: Return to Colony -!<
With this ending we reject Adam/Raphael and return (forcibly) to the colony.
With the death of Adam the last remaining OG human is gone and mother sphere greets us saying reading the future is like mapping out the night sky but sometimes you glimpse a shooting star. She then says I respect you decision even though its bitter sweet. This ending follows directly with chapter of trials. (Also the what will you choose logs)
Where it suggest that returning to the colony is the ending we should choose. This makes me think mothersphere was actually the one to set up the chapter of trails information that relates to why Glory to the Mother Sphere is the graffiti showcased where we get the last chapter.
>! For mothersphere she had a main objective of seeing mankind to its future/but decided mankind would live through the creations. The future she mapped out of the many possibilities was the one were her andro eidos would carry on the mantel of humankind. The shooting star is likely EVE finally overcoming Adam/Raphael in every way. With all the history/memories of OG humanity gone mothersphere could finally send humanity into it next phase of civilization (creating a Dyson sphere and elevating to the next stage of civilization) having settled that her plan for the future was the right path. I believe she calls this EVE's choice bittersweet also resulted in the death of Rapheal the creator of the mothersphere. I'd like to think the reason this ending happens in the DAY is because day its representing new life and new beginnings.!<
Note - This ending is the only ending she does not conclude the eve protocol so its very likely her main objective was not to kill the elder naytiba but to find a way to evolve the angels on earth like Ian's journal suggested.
>! Ending 2: Cost of lost Memories - !<
With this ending we see EVE go along with Adams/Raphael's plan of merging Naytiba and Andro Eidos into a new lifeform.
Following the death of Lily and our new existance we are greeted by mothersphere saying predicting the future is like reaching for the stars themselves. Darkness everywhere guided only by a distant light. But she then goes on to say she doesnt really know what that light means.
I find it funny this ending is also taking place during DAWN since dawn is supposed to represent hope and the possibility of a brighter day/future. Guess mothersphere cant logic this conclusion out lol. She then goes on to say she will always serve the future even if it doesn't align with what's expected. Also that we met her expectations (probably the evolution aspect) and that shes a little disappointed in the final decision (use siding with Adam). Following this she concludes the EVE Protocol and leaves.
With this ending I think there's two main things to break down one being Mothersphere expectations and two being why Mothersphere is a little disappointed in our choice. For one, if we remember the EVE protocol on surface was one meant to save humanity by eliminating the Elder Naytiba but in reality it was a test to see if the angels could evolve on earth. (we get this information from Ian's journals) In that sense EVE succeeded by evolving into a truly new lifeform after fusing with Adam. Where the disappointment comes in is that motherspheres plan for the future was essentially wrong while Adams/Raphael's was right.
Since Adams plan falls outside of what mothersphere calculated she ponders what this new future will hold and proceeds to give eve one last test by sending its full force at this new evolved eve. If eve overcomes then she really is the future but if she doesnt then mothersphere will likely continue with andro eidos or create some new life. That's what i think at least. I think why this scene ends with eve fighting forever is to add a little ambiguity on who the final victor is mothersphere or eve. Who will serve as the new memory of mankind? (its likely that eve wins)
Ending 3: Making new Memories -
In this ending we again have EVE merging with Adam but this time Lily survives!
Mothersphere greets us again saying trying to predict the future is like trying to find one single star in the endless sky. Saying that she serves the future of mankind. She once again wonders if humanity will embrace her but says for the sake of father (Raphael) she will keep trying. Continuing on to say the same thing she said in ending 2 where EVE has met the mothersphere's expectations but she is also disappointed in EVE final choice.
This ending takes place at Night and I think the symbolism here is meant to be the absence of God. This is the only ending where mothersphere basically gets rid of her godly presence openly praying to her creator Raphael/Adam. Mothersphere once again sends her full force at EVE to test this new lifeform and if it really is the future of mankind. But this time we get an extra scene! We see that EVE was victorious! This scene opens up with daybreak which I can only assume again symbolizes new beginnings and thus "new memories".
Lily places the last hyper drive in the cradle and everything lights up. Now after this part it gets very headcannon for me because im only left to assume that EVE infused everyone in the Cradle with her DNA/Exitance making them similar or the same to what she is now.
>! For me this makes more sense than EVE all by herself creating new life as a baby breeder and has an actual payoff to Adam and the Oracle creating the Cradle in the first place. !<
Also to speak a little bit more on the motives of characters:
In one of the logs Raphael's quote is that a society built only on truths is doomed to collapse. I think this quote and the others served as the basis for Motherspheres rational. We see many of Motherspheres lies spread throughout the game one of the most prominent ones being chapter of trails prayers. Also I find it hard to believe mothersphere couldnt have wiped out all Naybita's.
Even though its spelled out a little in the EVE protocol I think part of the star motif she had in all the ending was to point out that mothersphere would literally try out every type of possibility. Between starting a war to force humanities evolution to allowing naytibas to live after seeing the adaptive capabilities they had. Mothersphere was ultimately looking out for both futures to see which would prevail. The first alpha naytiba was probably the turning point. We dont know when Adam actually showed up but dont you guys find it weird that nearly every alpha naytiba is a hybrid?
Sorry for the long post and any grammar errors but I would like to know everyone's thoughts on the endings/story overall.

Seeing the frustrations and anger over the graffiti on Royce Hall makes me want to ask the community a fun(damental) question:
If UCLA’s spirit was to be symbolized in a building what would it look like?
In my opinion - a truly reflective Royce Hall would have a Monopoly man swimming in a pool of money and tears flowing from the student loan debt balance. A mural depicting students fighting in a thunder dome for a class they desperately need would be a fitting touch.
And we can make the centerpiece Geneocidal Glock taking shots out of a thesaurus to yak up his piss poor, spineless, fence sitting sonnets he enjoys regularly emailing to the student body.
What’s yours?

Comment if you have other resources, blogs, youtube channels, or posts that I should include.
Phantom time

• ! archive Fomenko New chronology complete set
• ! Glitch in the matrix or parallel of history
• !A synopsis of Phantom Time theory in my own words. A short introduction to the work of Anatoly Fomenko
• The world fairs were used as an excuse to demolish America's ancient architectural heritage.
• Ottonian Empire vs Ottoman Empire. The truth about the Siege of Vienna and when did the Roman Empire really fall.
• The Star Fort conspiracy. Some star forts are called "Batteries" why is that?
• The little known "Woman's holocaust" was part of a larger cultural genocide in the 16th and 17th centuries when the old knowledge was wiped out.
• Renowned brain surgeon Dr. Leonard Shlain stumbles into the cultural layer by accident and gives up medicine to become a historian when he realizes our history has been stolen. \(Skip intro 2:19\)
• The mysterious origin of Saint Petersburg. Impossible engineering marvels prove our history has been stolen.
• The linchpin of why phantom time exists. No old books exist! Only dishonestly copied and "corrected" books are used to support the official history. When genuinely old books surface they often contradict the official history and are ignored by the mainstream historians.
• [Introduction to the world wide culture that used to exist prior to modernism that was subsequently deleted by historians. \(Sylvie Ivanowa narrator\](https://www.reddit.com/CulturalLayecomments/7zvfri/introduction_to_the_world_wide_culture_that_used/)
• The Fate of the "1000 cities of Bactria," Kingdom of Buddhist Greeks. Probable gap in history. Kingdom mysterious disappears only to reappear under a different name when 1,748,000 people died in one hour according to some legends.
• Scythian/Bactrian gold
• American Scythians
• History's greatest con job: the life of Genghis Khan is a work of fiction largely made up by one man named Baavuday Tsend Gun in 1908
• Origins and Spread of the Mongoloid Race
• [Sir Isaac Newton: The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, Amended \[PDF\](https://www.reddit.com/CulturalLayecomments/8569t4/sir_isaac_newton_the_chronology_of_ancient/)
• The oldest "clock" in Britain at Wells Cathedral could prove phantom history true.
• ! New Chronology by Nosovskiy and Fomenko Philipp Druzhinin
• ! The cemetery of "longevity" In Turkey ...

Anomalous Soil Accumulation

• Gondola unearthed at Lucknow’s 220-year-old Chhatar Manzil
• The cultural layer above more thousand years Roman villa has grown by only a meter, while the cultural layer of the century and a half building has grown by several meters
• "The chapel provides evidence of Myra’s swift entombment. If the sediment had built up gradually, the upper portions should show more damage."
• Bauman Street, Kazan Russia
• The original streets and houses can be found under present-day Prague *Istanbul Gate Nicaea
• Buried bridge Orel Russia
• Mosaic floor city of Er Rastan Syria
• Buried Barcelona
• ! Apocalypse of the 19th century. The true story of genocide
• the post catastrophe world of Piranesi
• Scratching the surface of the Indian "Cultural Layer"
• The full US capitol building exposed.
• Deadwood Underground
• How Shakespeare Drained Venice- The Merchant of Venice contains not a solitary reference to gondolas or canals, and nor does Othello * [Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Velha, Coimbra, Portugal - c1954 vs now \(Excavated\](https://www.reddit.com/CulturalLayecomments/c72qkh/monastery_of_santa_claraavelha_coimbra_portugal/)
• ! [Anomalous Soil Accumulation \(Large album\](https://www.reddit.com/CulturalLayecomments/b8sqw5/anomalous_soil_accumulation_large_album/)
• "Polytechnical Museum" Moscow
• Grant street Hump District excavation:Pittsburgh "1900s"
• Buried Russian Churches; A Look Inside
• The Whitehouse is buried in the cultural layer. On August 24th 1814 Washington DC was sacked by the British and then saved by tornadoes. The storm buried the Whitehouse in mud up to the 2nd level.
• What is under the Washington Monument? An ancient structure resembling a Mayan Pyramid. It was excavated in the 1800s and buried under cement.
• The Arch of Septimius Severus
• Buried Copenhagen part 1
• mudflood in grand rapids michigan
• mud flood in ann arbor mi
• mud flood in holland mi
• In case you're curious, this is one of the ways they employ to sink buildings. Turning the ground into a kind of quick sand and the weight of the building just pulls it down. W their earthquake weapons I imagine they can make entire cities go mudflood.
• Soil accumulation in Ancient Sardis, Turkey - From an excavation in 1911 - (credit: u/Philipp-Dr and Stolenhistory.org - links in comments)
• a collection of capriccio paintings
• Officially In the 13th century people poured 7 meters of dirt over the whole of Prague. Should we do the math? Where is the logic?
• Greek Floor Mosaic uncovered in 2014 in Turkey near Syrian Border
• 4 albums containing hundreds of examples showing an anomalous build up of soil and the necessary re-modeling.
• Moscow in early 1800's oil paintings , everything is overgrown with vegetation
• Napoleon in Moscow paintings
• The Town of Rockwell, Texas
• ! At some point in time, possibly between 1875 and 1905, Chattanooga built up its roads and abandoned the first stories of the buildings in the downtown of the city, turning them into basements. Today, no one knows exactly why or how it happened
• Old Bayfield County Courthouse, Wisconsin built c.1896
• Chichen Itza
• Castle filled with dirt
• Unburying Rome - Italy
• Observing the cultural layer of the Ipatiev House \("Romanov murder house"\)
• Cincinnati, Ohio, Eden Park, old resivoir walls.
• Church of St Sofia, Bulgaria
• Mysterious tunnels discovered in Florida
• Mud flood in the 19th century?
• Omaha Mud Flood: St. Mary Magdalene Church 1920 transformation
• Ancient rail-road tracks unearthed
• An interesting take on the history of canals and "train" Tunnels: Could they hint at something greater?
• "A side walk, curbing and all, found several feet under the surface"-Asheville North Carolina (repost)

Egypt

• Change my view: The floral wreath found in king Tuts tomb is not 2000 years old.
• The Great Tutankhamen Hoax
• til; aerial photography is illegal in Egypt.
• Graffiti and chronology of vintage Egyptian photographs

Europe

• ! Were wars originally more similar to a sports event?
• The Medieval London Bridge \(the one with all the buildings on top of it\) being destroyed. Notice the megalithic blocks?
• Bank of England in ruins by Joseph Gandy
• [The language of the Roman Empire](https://www.reddit.com/CulturalLayecomments/8jtv93/the_language_of_the_roman_empire/)

Asia

• Discussion; is Japan as we know it a fabrication?
• Utsuro-bune
• Ainu/Japan general discussion

North America

• Thousands of years ago a 'Mystery Culture' dug a massive network of tunnels, cavities, and chambers beneath the city of Teotihuacan. The exact purpose of this ancient underground system of tunnels and chambers continues to elude scholars.
• A man takes very close look at a wall.
• Megalithic structure in Jersey City is 6 times wider than the great wall of China and weighs more than the Great Pyramid in Giza
• The ethereal staircase of Loretto Chapel
• The mysterious helix staircase of the Loretto Chapel in Sante Fe, New Mexico; allegedly built by a mysterious man in the 1870s from an unknown species of wood with no nails and without any obvious means of structural support)
• Toronto
• What do y'all think is goin on with the top of this building?

Russia

• Anomalous Polygonal Masonry in the small town of Chusovoy , Sverdlovskaya District, Russia
• Bathtub \(granite: 196 cm, 152 cm, 53 cm\) m made for tsar Alexander I, Russia 19th c.\[705x555\]
• ! In a bombed out shed south of St Petersburg lies the Tsar bath, weighing nearly 100,000 lbs and standing 6 foot tall it is perhaps the largest single granite work outside of ancient Egypt.
• Moscow 1867 -- Where are the people???
• The empty streets of Saint Petersburg in the 1860s - where is everyone?
• Finding hints in the official narative. "Garðaríki"

American civil War

• Is General Robert E Lee dead in this 1865 photo
• American civil war strangeness continued

People/Pseudo characters

• General Robert E. Lee astride
• In 1819 English academic Richard Whately wrote a book questioning the Napoleon myth.
• Fake Rasputin
• What in the ever-loving fuck is going on with this photograph?
• TIL: Richard Wagners Grandson Wieland claimed that he was molested By Hitler

Archeology

• Çatalhöyük and international relations
• Archaeologists uncover ancient street food shop in Pompeii
• How ancient Greek columns were made: photographer Bonfils inadvertently filmed the technology of building ancient columns by ancient Athenians
• [Hagia Sophia is built on the foundation of an older temple, that is built on the foundation of an even o older temple.
• Year AD J775 ?? Year J788 ? Gravestones in a cemetery in Stratford, CT
• Is it or only me or this structure looks like the frame of an very modern building?
• Mexican temple of Santiago, master builder monks and our failed archaeology

Architecture

• ! "Antique World". Alternative title; "Grand unified architectural style"
• Grand Unified Architectural Style: Antique Africa
• Our architectural heritage restored to it's former glory only after the retreat of the Reds from East Germany.

Technology

• Cast-iron flooring in ancient temples.
• The Autoped was an early motorized scooter
• ! Embed Metallurgical technology that allows create medieval knight’s armor appeared in the industrial era
• ! Is it possible free energy was once a reality ? Or another form of energy transfer at least?
• Interesting analogy
• Free energy capacitors in Bangladesh Mohenjo Daro nuclear strike, just not 3000 years ago.
• Mechanical fish and swan from the 1700s in simulated water of moving glass. Such intricate craftsmanship we cannot reproduce today. The people of the past were much smarter than us. This is technology from the phantom era historians erased from existence.* Despite the general consensus antique corsets were and are not oppressive torture contraptions, but instead highly technical devices that correct posture, and positively effect spine heath.
• We have been lied to about the capabilities, techniques and reasoning of our ancestors.
• 439 year old reservoir dam, outlasts its modern counterparts
• Lets talk about classical architecture. And other global architectural phenomenon, polygonal masonry, impossible craftsmanship, and strange metallic elements
• Steel staircase? Encased in marble?
• Why London Underground is nicknamed "The Tube" The electric city of the 1800s. What powered their electric cars?
• Granite polygons of Kronstadt \(not a single structure within the city is built with granite\)
• Vorontsov palace, window frames hewed from a single piece of ultra hard diabase stone using crude iron hand tools?
• The medici lions at Vorontsov palace. Peculiar holes...
• a collection of lesser known yet stunningly detailed sculptures
• Staglieno Graveyard, Most Beautiful Cemetery in Italy and possibly the world
• Steel beams in antiquities?
• In electronics, porcelain \(and ceramic derivatives\) is widely used for insulating material due to its excellent non-conductivity.
• Anointing oil and oriental wellness. Part 2 Alt title: "Traces of technologically advanced society in east Asia"
• The Ancient Airfield Yundum
• The 100 year old Russian warship still in service.
• Lets talk polygonal masonry

Giants

• ! Skeletons of unusual growth in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo
• Peculiar Decorations Of The Medici
• let's find out where the Boyers in Russia came from. Boyar coat -large cloaks of honor passed down through the generations.
• Giant Skeletons in old etchings
• Continuing the theme of mythological creatures representing true creatures.
• giants on the streets of european cities
• giant roman shoe
• giants in the picture of leonardo da vinci*Boyars as decedents of Hyperborean giants; A growth of around 2.5 meters as indicated by the length of inherited clothing.

Religion

• Parallels between Shinto and Judaism
• Catholics versus Cathars, or how the Cat-lovers competed with the Cat-worshipers

Geography

• Samandar, the second capital of Khazaria thought to have been destroyed 1000 years ago, was marked on European maps of 300 years ago at the site of modern Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan
• Judia is the ancient capital of Thailand. Maps and engravings show this
• Lakes Urmia and Van were connected on the old mapsThe medieval ‘New England’: a forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast
• Australia could be something else...
• ! Continent of North America does not exist... or could it be a part of Asia?
• 17 maps of the World, Poland, Italy, Rome, Northern Europe and Germany \(1557-65\)
• 17th Cent. map \(Willem Blaeu\) indicates Tartarians settled in N. America
• why would maps of Africa from 1800's show more uncharted territory than those made in 1500's?
• Pompeii on maps from 1570?
• Clear evidence for the supposition that Giovanni Battista Piranesi was recording what he saw in the minutest detail and was not illustrating fantasy as is often claimed* Old newspaper articles on Chilaga
• Legendary city of Norumbega: could it be Washington, DC?
• Kings of Florida, and vanished white Native American Kingdoms
• ! [Ruins of Old Earth \(Schoenung\)

Meta

• ! StolenHistory.gov

Miscellaneous

• The purposefully forgotten crucifixion of the Antean king Boz
• Three Remarkable and Calamitous Travels through Italy, Greece, Livonia, Muscovy, Tartary, Media, Persia, East India, Japan and various other Districts
• https://www.reddit.com/CulturalLayecomments/lwcuoc/the_unrivalled_maestro_tito_livio_burattini/
• Sultan Suleiman and King Solomon
• The most unusual icons of the “Holy Trinity”
• The Prussian school: all power to the canon
• 114 years ago: Mammoth Recovered from Northern Siberia
• Why Are There Underground Jesuit Caves in Europe Filled with Egyptian and Islamic Art?
• Inconvenient questions about the war; Just a few queries the world should answer before we do it all once more
• TIL: The basic outline of history taught to every child in America since the mid 1900s was written by prominent communist and science fiction writer H.G Wells in his "The Outline of History"
• Blackened cityscapes of the world
• American cars with their soviet twins. Is there something weird here or is it just me?

Symbolism

• Smithsonian logo

Resources

• ! https://www.davidrumsey.com/
• ! archive Fomenko New chronology complete set
• Best Of CulturalLayer And Resource Guide, Amended- Again
• best links about cultural layer theory?
• Anatoly Fomenko - New Chronology - History; fiction or science? -- A fascinating Russian attempt \(playlist, English subtitles\) at seeking clarity through the distortions of modern "history"
• collection of images i've gathered depicting south american sites before or during their excavation or "reconstruction"
• Huge archive of StaBastion Fort images/pics/designs \(useful resource\)
• "Declassified photos from U2 planes are helping archaeologists unlock the past
• starforts.com
• starforts.org

Heavily moderated

• stolenhistory.net
• stolenhistory.org

Defunct
www.wildheretic.commegaliths.org
Wikipedia

• New chronology (Fomenko))
• Phantom time conspiracy theory
• ! Vérendrye stone (" Jesuit priests concluded that it was written in "Tatarian" writing."..."The Minnesota Historical Society has offered a $1000 reward for the stone's rediscovery.")
• ! Invention Secrecy Act \(1951\)
• Ringwoodite is notable for being able to contain hydroxide ions \(oxygen and hydrogen atoms bound together\) Combined with evidence of its occurrence deep in the Earth's mantle, this suggests that there is from one to three times the world ocean's equivalent of water in the mantle transition zone.
• Hyperdiffusionism
• According to local folklore, the region was inhabited by Caeté Indians, who woke up one day to find their town covered by sand
• Gunnar Heinsohn
• Vitrified fort
• star forts
• Polygonal masonry
• ionic wind
• Sharing this wikipedia page to illustrate how, with the right eye, you can pick apart an mainstream article and get at the meat of whats been hidden.

other subs

• tartarianarchitecture
• Tartaria
• alternativeastronomy mudfossils
• Thunderbolts
• plasmacosmology historicalstreetview
• fringehub
• newchronology
• AlternativeAstronomy
• AlternativeHistory

defunct
homogiganticus
Youtube channels

• New earth
• Wise Up
• Cognitive TV \(russian\)
• Philipp Druzhinin
• CONSPIRACY-R-US
• Deciphering The Devil's Details
• baltimore fats
• Static in the attic
• streets of tartaria
• Colm Gibney
• jon levi

Defunct

• jacksfan
• Curious Life
• Nik research
• Mud Flood Mystery North

Missing/lost and found

• Tartaria Territory or Empire - Mudflood channel we miss youUzbekistan and Maps of Tartaria
• Mudflood channel we miss you

* posting livejournals in the comments