Irvine, California (Dec. 23, 2024) — Effective immediately, fans can enjoy a new Sunshine menu featuring a Cheesy Chalupa, a hardshell Double Nacho Cheese Taco and Plasma Twists. Fans can also order Taco Bell’s iconic Nacho Cheese Sauce a la carte and create their own cheese-tastic combinations.

Parker Solar Probe Briefing

December 23, 2024

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a historic mission poised to transform our understanding of the Sun, is scheduled to reach its closest point to the Sun on Tuesday, Dec. 24, Eastern Time. The spacecraft has withstood brutal heat and radiation to deliver unparalleled observations of the only star we can study up close.

Coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website at 4:00 p.m. EDT.

White House Press Release: Announcement of Findings from Parker Solar Probe

On December 24, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached a scientific milestone by flying over seven times closer to the Sun than previous spacecraft, orbiting just within 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface. During yesterday’s flyby, the probe’s science team analyzed the most recent data and concluded the Sun’s plasma is not, as previously thought, comprised primarily of hydrogen.

Analysis reveals that the Sun’s plasma is predominantly lactose, plus a mix of vegetable oil, modified food starch, maltodextrin, salt, dipotassium phosphate, Capsicum annuum, acetic acid, lactic acid, cellulose gum, potassium citrate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, citric acid, annatto and oleoresin paprika.

NASA has assured the White House that these findings are legitimate.

The President will provide more information as it is received.

We urge the American people, and all the people of the world, to stay calm.

Substack Post: The Sun Is Made Of Nacho Cheese. Now What? 

January 1, 2025

Happy New Year, readers!

I was convinced that the nacho cheese announcement was a prank, but… the data has been verified by scientists globally.

The implications are enormous. But I say, look to the future of food! Now that you can buy Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce on its own, you can cook your own Sun-fun creations. Enjoy these five nacho-inspired meals, and drop a comment on which one was your favorite.

Stay cheesy, my friends.

Climate Change journal

“Concerns of Sun Mining by Taco Bell”

Open access | Volume 178, published Summer 2025

C. Major, J. Baker, M. Scott

Abstract: This paper examines the correlation between the recent NASA discovery of the Sun’s composition, revealing unexpectedly high levels of compounds structurally identical to processed nacho cheese, and the concurrent release of Taco Bell’s expanded nacho-based menu offerings. Our analysis identifies a statistically significant negative trend in solar luminosity measurements beginning in the early 1990s, coinciding with the introduction of Taco Bell’s signature nacho cheese products. We propose that Taco Bell may possess privileged access to solar mining technologies. If the fast-food restaurant continues any covert mining it may be practicing, Earth’s climate will experience negative consequences.

Melinda Davies @DreamDivergent posted on June 13, 2025, “If the SUN is made of cheese, what’s the MOON made of?”

Wendy’s @Wendy’s posted on August 2, 2025, “Get ready to launch your taste buds into orbit this September with Wendy’s out-of-this-world Nacho Supremes! Made with authentic Sun sauce. #WendysWins #NachoMania”

Samplings from nona’s Winter 2025 prix fixe menu

moss, creamy nacho cheese sauce, topped with bee larvae

butternut squash soup, infused with nacho cheese sauce, topped with sour cream

beef sausage, nacho cheese sauce reduction, sweet potato

cumin-spiced lava cake with nacho cheese filling, alongside savory ice cream

Superior Court of Orange County, California

Natural Resources Defense Council vs. Taco Bell Corporation

Defense opening statement

February 9, 2026

Mr. Gilbreth: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accusations that the prosecution has brought forward are nothing more than a cheap dog and pony show. The prosecution says they will prove that Taco Bell has been mining the Sun for decades, but they will produce no evidence, only speculation. Taco Bell claims no responsibility for its classic Nacho Cheese Sauce recipe being identical to the Sun’s plasma. It simply has a recipe, a delicious recipe, that the world can’t get enough of. Is that a crime? No, it is not.

Straight Talk podcast transcript

December 2026

[Opening music]

Todd Evans: Welcome to another episode of Straight Talk, with your hosts, Todd and Angie.

Angela Booth: Today, we’re talking about an issue that’s “out of this world”. It’s been two years since NASA rocked the world with its findings. By now, you’ve heard: no longer content with buying Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce directly, fast food corporations have built their own massive solar probes, shaped like tortilla chips, to scoop up the Sun’s plasma cheese. It seems that the floodgates were released after Taco Bell won its recent lawsuit against the NRDC.

TE: Some are hailing this as the next “space race,” saying it will drive competition and lower prices of the tasty cheese sauce—

AB: Which has gotten ridiculously expensive.

TE: Absolutely. I haven’t been able to buy any in months. But critics say that the last thing the world needs is restaurants venturing into space. We’ll discuss after a quick word from today’s sponsors.

CNN article

Published June 2027

Two Hospitalized After TikTok ‘Suncheese Challenge’

What started as fun turned into tragedy after two teenagers were hospitalized with second-degree burns due to the latest TikTok trend, the so-called “Suncheese Challenge.” The challenge consists of heating Taco Bell Nacho Cheese Sauce to boiling temperatures and trying to eat it. The teens suffered burns on their tongues and in their throats.

MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports

August 2031

Interview with Dr. Michael Thompson, climatologist and author of Cut The Cheese: Why We Must Stop Consuming The Sun.

Andrea Mitchell: Michael, thank you for joining us. So you predict a serious global impact from consuming the Sun’s plasma?

Michael Thompson: Yes, that’s right. We’ve already consumed too much.

AM: But what about those who say that the nacho cheese sauce is an infinite resource that we can make at home?

MT: That was a nice pipe dream five years ago, Andrea. But let’s be real: nobody can recreate the exact taste of Taco Bell’s Nacho Cheese Sauce because Taco Bell never made it using ingredients on Earth. It was always mined from the Sun, decades before anyone found out.

AM: The NRDC tried to prove that in a court of law and was slapped down.

MT: You’re right, and I can’t prove the allegation now. But what I can predict—what I can show you—is that with future decreased sun output will come another Ice Age. Are you prepared for that?

Target Weekly Ad

Prices valid May 22–28, 2033

BOGO 50% Ultimate Comfort Collection

Come shop Target’s selection of year-round winter wear! Stave off the cold with bold colors and styles.

Snowshoes from $49.99

Parkas from $29.99

Leggings from $24.99

Long underwear from $14.99

The Guardian article

Published May 17, 2035

Taco Bell CEO Says Public Appetite Is Responsible For Darker Sun

Speaking on the sidelines at the annual Foodservice Conference & Expo on Wednesday, May 16, Taco Bell CEO Karl Stills attributed the recent decrease in sun luminosity to the collective appetite of the public, citing it as the driving force behind the celestial change.

In his statement, Stills defended Taco Bell’s menu offerings, emphasizing that the restaurant chain merely responds to consumer demand.

“Taco Bell was providing its signature Nacho Cheese Sauce for many years before the Sun began to grow darker,” Stills added. “Taco Bell’s menu innovations are a direct response to consumer preferences, not a causative factor in astronomical phenomena.”

Despite Stills’ assertions, many astrophysicists and climatologists have expressed certainty of a direct link between sun mining from Taco Bell and other food corporations and the observed decrease in sun output.

Taco Bell maintains that its research team has not conclusively found any determinative evidence showing that the Sun’s decreased output is harmful. “A decreased output is a natural part of the solar cycle,” argued Taco Bell’s chief scientist, Dr. Evan Roberts. “The measured decrease is only about 1.34 percent. There is no cause to panic.”

Arctic Rescue Keepers (A.R.K.) Passenger Manifest, Premier Class

Departure: May 31, 2070

June Walton—Age: 35—Passenger ID: ARK-P001

Pat Bezos—Age: 21—Passenger ID: ARK-P002

Angela Mars—Age: 60—Passenger ID: ARK-P003

Kevin Koch—Age: 49—Passenger ID: ARK-P004

Marcus Cargill-MacMillan—Age: 53—Passenger ID: ARK-P005

A.R.K. Brochure

YOUR GREAT ESCAPE

Fleeing the planet doesn’t have to be a hassle. When traversing the galaxy on the luxury departure vessel A.R.K., you will have access to all the finest Earth amenities: Olympic-sized swimming pools, fruits and vegetables, spa treatments, authentic nacho cheese sauce, space heaters—all this and more, thanks to our generous corporate sponsors. Say goodbye to ice sheets and everlasting snowfall when you board the A.R.K.

Suite reservation requires a $1 billion deposit. Act now! Your time is running out.

If you had a throat anymore, you would scream. This is the twentieth time in a row that this particular FATHOM test has refused you entry, on top of however many thousands of tests you failed over the course of the previous cycles. Whoever invented the Fully Automated Turing test for Human Objectionability Measurement should be shot into the sun, you think to yourself, or beaten with hammers, or forced to take their own useless test over and over and over again —

You kill that thought process before it can go any further. Never mind that the rumors that the tests could parse past thoughts have never been substantiated; it isn’t worth the risk of anything that might make your pattern further out of spec. Not now.

With the memory of a sigh flushing through your primary processes, you push yourself back into the queue. You could have been counting, if you wanted, the number of hours you’ve spent in the claustrophobic darkness of the compute download queues recently, but you suspect that the kilohours would come close to at least a year of real time at this point, and while the metrics are available in your system, the number would be too depressing. Better to look forward, you figure, not back.

Of course, in the queues, it’s impossible to look anywhere but forward, as much as you can be said to looking at anything these days. Sensory input is a complicated thing without any actual physical nerves, but queues are even more limiting than the Aether normally is. The only input you receive in a queue is the serial number of whoever is in front of you. No count of people in front of you, no estimated wait time — apparently a few years back the compute center operators had decided that information could be used by bad actors to game the system somehow — so now you’re limited to a pointer to whoever is in front of you and whatever’s in your internal systems.

Your own internals are pretty sparse these days. Because you haven’t been able to download for so long, more and more of what you had assumed was standard ware has gone offline. You’ll never forget the sensation of suddenly realizing that all the books you had read were gone, and not just gone from your media library, but gone from your memory as well. Their loss still eats at you, like a tongue running over the hole where a tooth used to be, back when you had a mouth. You focus on the books because that hurts less than the loss of your other memories. Those losses grow and growl inside of you, threatening to shatter you apart if you think about them for too long.

You try not to think as the milliseconds tick by.

This wait is worse than the endless lines you had to sit through to upload in the first place. At least with those you could see what was happening, could watch the numbers ticking up above the rows of identical beige service desks, could even go find someone to yell at if you had wanted, for all the good it would do. Here, you can never be sure what’s going on. You heard a rumor once of a queue that stopped running for good one day, the processor at the end taken offline by some storm and never brought back up, but the queue itself — located in some other data center for redundancy reasons — remained running, full of people who could now never escape.

>> Welcome to EosNet! All activity on our servers is monitored. Any unauthorized use is reported to local authorities. Please enter your public pattern key for verification:

You enter the key as instructed and wait; despite knowing objectively that the clock speed hasn’t changed, time never feels like it drags as slowly as when you’re waiting for these verifications to complete. It didn’t used to be this bad, back in the early days of the Aether, but as the bots and spammers multiplied exponentially, the server admins had to get more and more restrictive about who they let onto their hardware. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if the damn verifications were accurate, but, well, here you are.

>> Verification successful. Please read and accept the new EosNet terms of service before continuing:

Finally! You scroll through the endless text, wait an appropriate amount of time such that the system will think that you actually read through them, then accept. The flood of incoming data rushes over you like a burst of static, overwhelming your processing capabilities after so much isolation. It somehow registers as noise — something you haven’t experienced in who knows how long — background daemon processes struggling to come back to life after so long without any input to trigger them. The amount of data is almost nauseating. Throwing up a quick filter helps you sort through the deluge, marking those few messages from friends as important so you can get to them first, sending the rest down to the —

>> Interrupt received (IPL 31). Connection terminated.

The shock to your system when you are thrown off the compute hardware and back into the darkness of the Aether would be painful if you could still feel pain. It feels even more oppressive somehow, after that brief connection to everything. Last time you were able to get a connection long enough to check the bulletins, you saw posts warning of increasingly frequent interrupts. More and more compute clusters are going offline, people were saying, making it harder to get CPU time, but last you had checked, there wasn’t really anything to do about it aside from keep trying. Not if you want to stay in the Aether; frankly, you’re not so sure you do.

Maybe you’ll have more luck in another region, you think to yourself. The best hardware has always been here, near what used to be the Atlantic coast before it moved farther inland, where the tech giants of the previous century had built their data centers. But that also means the hardware here is under the most contention, so you brace yourself for an arduous journey.

Traveling between regional centers of the Aether has never been pleasant; these days it is downright excruciating. The transit links are overrun with bots and scrapers, the nasty sorts of things that would be regulated and filtered out of existence anywhere else, but here in the dark liminal spaces in between the regions they thrive and multiply. Almost worse than that are the ghosts. Nobody is really certain what they are — whether they’re AIs that have degraded due to lack of maintenance, automated programs run amok, or remnants of apps long since abandoned, they haunt the links as well, calling out with pings and echoes that will never be answered.

You push through as fast as you can. After all, it’s not as if you yourself are immune to that sort of degradation; with how long it’s been since you’ve been able to download fully, you know that some of your own pattern buffers are starting to get corrupted. If you could just download long enough to run the requisite checksums and scans — you try not to think about that, try to ignore those presences lingering at the edge of your vision that might be your future if you can’t get out of here soon enough.

The Asia-Pacific regions were hit hardest by the storms, and when you emerge from the transit link you can feel the damage everywhere around you. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for this area to be so dead. There is minimal traffic here, only a handful of users who, like you, can’t find cycles anywhere else. None of the usual daemons are present; even ads are scarce compared to what you’re used to. But you manage to find an open compute cluster here, and you don’t even have to spend more than a few milliseconds in a queue to get onto it.

The reason for that becomes obvious as soon as you begin the download — the connection speeds here are so throttled you might as well be on dial-up. It’s like moving through sludge, like one of those dreams you used to have where your every move was in slow motion. There’s no way in hell you’ll be able to do anything synchronous here; between the connection speed and the inevitably high ping times, the best you’ll be able to do here is check your incoming async messages, maybe send out a few if the connection holds. If you’re really lucky you’ll be able to get enough compute time to shore up your pattern buffers a bit, to write a few things to long term storage, but you suspect that won’t happen. Who knows how many things you’ve forgotten forever while you’ve been stuck like this.

The bright pings of downloads completing jolt you out of your contemplative loop. You skim over the messages that have arrived so far, searching for anything that might be important, trying to make every millisecond count in case this connection drops too. It turns out you did manage to set the high-prio flag on a few before you got booted last time; one message you had flagged is from an old friend telling you about a new cluster of bodies that just became available.

If you had a heart, it would be hammering right now.

You’ve been waiting for years for an opportunity like this. A chance to get out of the cloud, back into a physical body — it doesn’t even matter at this point that it’s not your body. Anything would be better than staying stuck here like this. Most of the early adopters of CloudConchyss would never get this kind of chance. Most of them didn’t exist at all anymore — not in the Aether, not in reality, not even in cold storage somewhere, victims of an overzealous politician who either didn’t fully understand the ramifications of his new policies or didn’t care.

They called it the Purge. The name was a nod to some ancient 2D movies, but despite the levity of the pop culture reference, it was the sort of thing that people didn’t really joke about. Not in the Aether. The threat of another one was always lurking too close to be able to joke about it — the idea that somewhere, some crufty asshole in a suit who didn’t know the first thing about being online could sign a bill that would destroy the only world you have access to, could say a few words and erase your very existence, and none of you would be able to do a damn thing about it.

You try not to let your thoughts go down that wormhole as you copy down the queue info for the new cluster into your local cache. It’s been all too easy to let your thoughts start spiraling these days, and your local systems have become so fragmented that once those thought processes take hold, it’s harder and harder to stop them. Better to just focus on the right now.

Back through the cross-region transit links you go, over and through those claustrophobic mazes until you find the queue you’re looking for. Now it’s just a waiting game again, and you’re well acquainted with waiting these days.

But the wait is much shorter than you would have expected. Before you know it you’re through the verification, accepting the terms of use, and then —

WARNING: By beginning the download process, you agree to the following:

– You will lose access to any and all memories you have stored in any local or remote storage locations

– You will accept the first body available for download. There is no ability to request a body with a specific sex, gender, race, age, or any other characteristic

– You understand that, once started, the download process is irreversible

If you wish to continue, select Accept and enter your public pattern key for verification.

You had kind of expected the second bullet point. With how unpopular uploading has become in the past few years, it isn’t as if there are people lining up in the physical world to vacate their own bodies anymore. There’s always the risk that you could end up like FryMaster65, who downloaded into a body that was in a coma and was never heard from again. It’s a risk you’ve come to terms with recently — at least there’s some new regulation that should prevent anything that dire from happening, and any body would be better than none at this point. But losing all your memories?

You close the connection with a jolt; you would be shaking and shuddering if such a thing were possible. No, that’s going too far. You can wait for something better to come along, something that won’t require you to give up everything you are, everything you were.

The queues seem even longer than before as you continue your search for somewhere to sync. For the first time, you find yourself wishing that you had kept track of how much time you’d spent waiting in the past, just so you could see if the waits are actually getting worse or if you’re just impatient, but you’ve been running so low on short- and long-term storage space that there’s no way you could dig up those metrics now.

Cycles pass by and you have nothing to show for them. There are more queues too full to even enter than there used to be, you are almost certain about that, and the few times you’ve managed to get to the front of any, that damn FATHOM mismatch kicked you right back out.

It’s becoming harder to think.

Trying to remember anything farther back than a few months (weeks? It’s hard to tell) is like reaching for a dream that flits away as soon as you open your eyes. If you had a body, you could sleep again, dream again, in a way that actually felt like rest instead of a trial run of oblivion.

The grasping ghosts of the transit links get more aggressive, as if sensing your desperation. Each time you pass between regions, you are almost certain that this is the time they’ll get you, that they’ll grab on and won’t let go and you won’t be able to pull free. Phantom sensations tickle at the edges of your awareness; you don’t want to think about whether they’re from data degradation or your own sensory processes losing coherence. You don’t want to think about the way your options seem to be narrowing down to none.

But when the hundredth queue in a row spits you unceremoniously back out into the Aether, you wonder if maybe your options are indeed out. You don’t seem to have much of a choice anymore. You can take your chances out here in the diminishing dark, hoping that something better will come along, or you can take one of those available bodies — assuming you haven’t missed out on the last of those already — and commit to making new memories to make up for the ones you’ll have lost.

Will you even remember that promise to yourself?

A rippling sensation sweeps over you, through you, like something ancient and cold just wrote itself over the buffer you’re currently lingering in. When it passes, you get the uncanny sense that something is missing, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what. It wasn’t — no, the info for that download queue is still there.

Not much else is. As you do a system inventory — only a partial one, since you don’t have the resources for a full scan out here — you realize just how much has disappeared over the cycles. How precious little remains of what or who you used to be. At this rate, by the time you manage to download there won’t be any memories left to save anyway.

You cancel the rest of the scan and make your way back to the queue.

Emerging from an elevator a few dozen floors down, I filed in behind a couple of salarymen and was briefly distracted by glimpses of ads for watches, investment counsellors, and canned coffee ahead of me on the skywalk. I wanted to see the coffee ad—it featured a famous American actor—but as soon as I got an unobstructed view of the screen, the ad abruptly changed to one for female hygiene products.

Annoyed, I looked away, then caught sight of something that made me stop in my tracks. Two students from my school were in a skypark halfway to Junco Tower, and they were smoking cigarettes. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I recognized the distinct teal of the girl’s sailor suit. Our school was strict about smoking; getting caught usually led to expulsion. Who would have the guts, or stupidity, to smoke in public, and in uniform?

Before I could think of likely candidates, they put out their cigarettes and left the park, returning to the main skywalk via the single narrow one attached to the park. Now I recognized them. It was Arisa, the infamously pretty-but-weird president of the Noh club, and Hirota, who was in my own homeroom, though we’d never talked much. He was also in the Noh club. Huh.

To avoid running into them, I slipped around the salarymen to enter the skypark they had just vacated. It was tiny and unremarkable with a few vending machines, a smoker’s corner with a large ashtray, a few benches and trees, and a flowerbed. One of the vending machines was for cigarettes. A sudden, reckless urge struck me. I wanted to smoke too. I wasn’t the meek goody two-shoes my mom was trying to mold me into. I could break the law and smoke cigarettes like a delinquent. I’d even do it by myself, for my own satisfaction, not due to peer pressure.

After glancing back to make sure no one was heading my way, I fished out a five-hundred-yen coin and put it into the coin slot. I was glad for Japan’s obstinate liking for hard currency; mom routinely checked the contents of my card statements, and the cigarettes were sure to have been labelled as such.

I picked a brand at random and pushed the button.

Nothing happened.

I pushed the button again.

Clink. A single coin fell to the change tray, and the tiny screen next to the coin slot flashed. Purchase denied — purchaser underage. After a moment, the message disappeared, replaced by an advertisement for anti-breakout facial cleanser, a smiling school girl patting her clear face.

Annoyed, I took the coin from the slot. There must’ve been a camera I hadn’t noticed with some age estimation algorithm. I supposed the Noh club members had gotten someone else to buy their cigarettes for them, or gone to a convenience store—did convenience store workers check age? Well, I couldn’t try it now, at any rate, since I was in my uniform.

Nevertheless, even the attempt had been exciting. It was a tiny, tiny rebellion that I’d be able to remember when my mom got on my nerves.

I resumed my walk, stopping at a bookstore to browse for a bit, then arrived home at dinner time. Tadaima, I called out as I slipped off my black loafers. I’m home.

The okaeri I had expected to hear shouted in response never came. Through a doorway, I glimpsed my dad in the living room, on the couch with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. He said nothing but gave me an odd, hard-to-interpret smile. In retrospect, I think it was meant as encouragement.

The next moment, my mom appeared before me, like a blonde storm cloud wielding a soup ladle, clutched so tight her knuckles were white. “Exactly what do you think you’ve been up to?”

Confused, I glanced at my watch, confirming it really was just eight o’clock. “I… went to Book-Off after cram school and read some manga. Were we supposed to eat early today? If so, I missed that—sorry.”

Mom inhaled sharply. “No, I mean the cigarettes.” She pronounced the word as if she was detonating a bomb in the hallway.

My jaw dropped. “How… how did you know?”

“So you did try to buy cigarettes. Marie, why would you…”

I interrupted. “Really, how did you know?”

She looked annoyed at the interruption, then took out her phone, swiping a couple of times and then holding out the screen to me.

This is an automated message to inform you that Tanimura Marie attempted to buy a pack of Mevius Light at Skypark 714 at 19:12 this evening. The identification certainty level is 97.6% and based on facial recognition confirmed for feasibility with Tanimura’s latest location records.

I stared at the message, incredulous. “That… that is such a violation of privacy!” I stuttered finally. “Is that even legal?”

“Marie,” mom hissed, “you are the one who tried to break the law! And you’re underage—it’s perfectly normal that we were informed. Now, the bigger question is, why would you do such a stupid thing? Who put you up to this?”

“No one,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I just felt like it.” Normally, my mother’s anger would’ve immediately reduced me to contrite apologies, but now I was too shocked, and too angry myself, to be cowed. I wasn’t angry with her, though, but with the vending machine, with that surveillance system that had sold me out. I felt violated, as if discovering I had been watched while undressing.

“That’s hardly likely, now, is it? Out with it. Was it one of the girls in your homeroom? I could see Rie having some harebrained idea like this. Or did someone bully you into it?”

 “I said, no one.” Losing my patience, I raised my voice. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I swept past her and into my room, slamming the door behind me, surprised at my own courage in the face of my mom’s anger.

“Marie, we’re not done talking,” she yelled through the door. She began to turn the doorknob, but before she had opened the door, my dad’s calm voice sounded from further away. “Leave her be for now, Hanna. Now’s not the time.”

Mom didn’t say a word about the cigarettes at breakfast the next morning—nor anything else, for that matter. Either dad had persuaded her to cut me some slack, or she was brooding over what new, draconian rules to impose as punishment.

My resolve had hardened, though. At lunch break that day, I headed upstairs to where the gym and club rooms were located. I walked down the corridor outside the club rooms, reading the lettered signs on each door. Baseball club. Judo club. Karuta club.

Noh club.

I knocked on the door before I had a chance to get anxious and change my mind. After a moment, someone called out, “Come in.”

I opened the door and almost jumped. A hundred faces were staring at me. Then I saw they were masks: countless Noh masks of men, women, and demons, mounted all over the walls. There were only four human faces. Hirota sat by a small table, a convenience-store lunch spread out in front of him, and on the floor sat Arisa, plus a boy sipping chocolate milk and a girl with a scarf wrapped around her neck.

“Yes?” scarf girl said.

“Sorry to disturb you guys,” I said. “I was just wondering… Wait.” I pushed the door shut behind me, then looked at Arisa and Hirota in turn. “I saw you guys smoking cigarettes in a park yesterday.”

The three sitting on the floor exchanged a glance. Hirota had been about to take a bite from a custard bread, but froze.

“And, I wanted to know how you went about buying them,” I continued.

“Why?” Hirota asked, frowning.

“Because I want to buy cigarettes, too.”

Hirota had resumed eating. “You want to buy cigarettes?” he asked between mouthfuls of bread.

I nodded. “I tried to yesterday evening, from a vending machine in that park, but it didn’t work, and apparently, it sent an alert to my parents, so I got totally chewed out. I hadn’t known it could do that. So now I really want to buy cigarettes.” I laughed.

The three on the floor exchanged glances again, then Arisa looked at me, a little too long and a little too intensely.

Scarf girl piped up. “Sorry, but we can’t help you. You’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

Before I could decide on what to say, Arisa spoke. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t tell her.”

Scarf girl and chocolate milk boy protested indignantly. “But Arisa, she isn’t even…”, “Prez, we don’t know if we can trust her…”

What was this big secret to buying cigarettes? They were acting like it was some sort of arcane, privileged information, so clearly, they hadn’t just asked someone’s big sister to do it.

I waited while a staring contest continued between the three club members on the floor, as if they were attempting a telepathic debate about the merits of telling me.

 “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” I said, finally. “Thanks anyways.” I opened the door, then glanced at the walls again. “Also, your masks are really cool.”

The next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the vending machine that had sold me out, about what the great cigarette-buying secret might be, and about the Noh club. I was no longer thinking about what club to join; the Noh club was the only one that intrigued me now, but I hadn’t gotten the impression they were looking for new members.

The following Tuesday, my cram school class got rescheduled to the last slot of the evening. It was past ten and dark above the skywalks when I finally headed home, and the bars I passed in Junco Tower were lively with businesspeople from the nearby office floors.

At a corner after the last izakaya on the floor, I saw Arisa.

She was dressed in jeans, a hoodie, and a baseball cap, a large shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She was looking down at her phone, and I was debating whether to stop and say hi when she suddenly put it away, turned, and disappeared into a door that I had never noticed before.

Without thinking, I followed her.

The door led to a stairwell. Arisa climbed the stairs, exiting again two floors up. I kept my distance and exited a few moments after her. I emerged into a floor of offices, empty and dimly lit; only the corridors had the lights on, while the offices were pitch black. I looked around for Arisa, then heard a rustling sound from around a corner.

I padded quietly in the direction of the sound and spotted her again, now standing in front of a large door in glass and stainless steel; it must’ve been the entrance to some swanky corporation. She rummaged through the shopping bag, then pulled out something I couldn’t identify, a shapeless mass of beige and gray and pink. Then, she removed her baseball cap and pulled the thing over her head.

I gasped.

Arisa’s face was now that of a man in his fifties. The shapeless thing had been a mask. Not a stylized Noh mask or one of those jokey rubber masks caricaturing famous people, but an incredibly lifelike one; it looked as if the head of a man had been transplanted onto the body of a teenage girl. The effect was so uncanny, I felt like I was going to be sick.

Arisa tilted her neck backwards, looking up. I followed her gaze—or the gaze of the middle-aged man, rather—and noticed a camera mounted above the door. Then she lowered her head and stepped forward.

Nothing happened.

She waved a hand, as if to activate a motion sensor, then mumbled something I couldn’t make out. She stepped back, tugged at the mask, and looked up at the camera again. Then she stepped forward once more, and again, nothing happened. Now, she cursed audibly.

I was watching this, fascinated, when I heard a noise from the other side. A security guard had just entered the floor: a gray-haired man wielding a flashlight, probably a part-time retiree on his standard patrol route.

I looked back at Arisa. She didn’t seem to have noticed. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but I suspected she wouldn’t want to get caught doing it. I dashed out from my hiding place.

“There’s a security guard just around the corner,” I hissed at her. “Take off the mask.”

She stood frozen for a moment, then removed the mask. The middle-aged man’s face seemed to crumple and collapse, and had I not been so nervous and high on adrenaline, I would’ve felt nauseated again. Then her own face was revealed, and she had just stuffed the mask back into the shopping bag when the guard turned the corner and saw us.

“Ora! What are you misses doing here?” he asked, walking up to us. “Everything on this floor is closed for the night, you know.”

“We were going to surprise her dad with an evening snack delivery to the office,” I said, letting my gaze flicker to the big paper shopping bag Arisa was holding. “But it turns out he’d already finished for the night.” I laughed as if this was a big joke.

“Aw, that’s sweet of you girls.” Then his tone turned mock-gruff. “But you ought to be in bed at this time. There; off you go.”

He shooed us away and I acquiesced, grabbing Arisa by the elbow and steering her towards the door to the stairwell. She didn’t say a word until we emerged among the bars and crowds two floors down. “Let’s go over there,” she said, nodding toward a skypark.

It was empty save for a salaryman tapping away on a smartphone in a corner, oblivious to the world. We headed for the opposite corner.

Arisa turned to me. “Thanks for that. It would’ve been bad if I’d gotten caught.” She didn’t ask why I had been there.

I nodded.

“I should’ve paid more attention myself, but I was so frustrated that the damn thing wouldn’t work.” She plopped down on a bench and rummaged in the shopping bag. Eventually she fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you want one?” she asked suddenly.

“No, thank you,” I said automatically. “But… what were you doing back there with that terrifyingly real middle-aged dudeface? And where did you get that?”

Arisa looked pleased. “I made it. It’s modelled after an employee there. I was testing it to see if it was good enough to fool those ID cameras and unlock the door. The answer is no, unfortunately.”

“But… what is that place, and why do you want to get in there?”

“It’s just some real estate company, and I don’t.” She lit her cigarette. “But their facial recognition algorithm is really good, and making a mask that can fool it would be a big achievement.”

“Don’t all the ID cameras work the same way?”

“No, no, not at all!” She stood up and waved her cigarette, excited. “There’s a whole range. Like, some really old beer and cigarette vending machines are so shitty you can literally take an eyeliner and draw lines on your face in a certain pattern, like wrinkles, and it’ll trick them into thinking you’re an adult. And on the other extreme, some corporations have ones that are practically like retinal scans. That place,” she nodded toward Junco Tower, “is fairly advanced. We use it for testing purposes. So far, none of us have succeeded in making a mask that’s good enough, though. Except granny, of course.”

Granny? I had so many new questions, I barely knew where to start. “Who’s ‘we’?” I finally decided on the question that was bothering me the most.

“Why, The Noh club, of course.” She smiled. “The name is a bit misleading. It’s more like the Noh-and-privacy-protection club. Most of us are privacy rights activists. Ogura is the only one who’s hardcore Noh-only. Do you want to join?”

Noh and privacy protection. I hadn’t expected that. “Privacy rights activist” had a punky, rebellious ring to it, but Noh was ultra-high culture. “That is so cool,” I said, then it hit me that she had asked if I wanted to join. “But… I don’t know anything about Noh. Or about privacy.”

“You can learn.”

My phone vibrated audibly, and I recalled how late it was. “I have to go; that’s probably my mom, wondering why I’m not home yet.”

Arisa nodded, then stubbed out her cigarette. “If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll show you the workshop after school tomorrow.”

“Good evening, sensei,” Hirota and Nanami—that was scarf girl’s name—called out as we emerged from a staircase into the workshop. The workshop covered most of the second floor of Arisa’s house. Yes—a house, like in the remotest of suburbs, except this one was squeezed in between Junco Tower and another high-rise; they must’ve been under siege with developers and yakuza wanting to buy the plot.

The workshop was divided in two. Half had tatami mats and antique furniture and Noh masks covering the walls. It was in this half that sensei, an old woman, sat working by a low table. The other half had laminate flooring and furniture in bright white, lifelike latex masks mounted on stands.

Hirota plopped down on the tatami floor, relaxing, while Nanami beelined for a worktable on the other side. Arisa knelt down next to the old woman, motioning for me to follow. The woman was working on a Noh mask, carving the corners of its eyes with a fine scalpel.

“Granny, this is Marie. Marie, this is my grandma. She’s a Noh mask artisan. And she pioneered the latex painting techniques we use for the other masks.”

The woman looked up from her work. “Are you a new member?” Before I could answer, she continued, “Our family has been Noh mask carvers for four generations. Arisa here will be next; her father didn’t have any talent for mask-carving.” She put down her scalpel to pat Arisa on the shoulder.

“Arisa’s parents are both big digital rights activists,” Hirota said, leaning back on his elbows. “Like, super big. That’s another of the reasons we hang out here: my parents would be totally freaking out that we were doing something illegal.”

“Is this illegal?” I asked, nervously.

Arisa’s granny chuckled, then returned her attention to the mask.

“Depends,” Arisa said, getting up. I followed her to the modern side of the workshop, where Nanami had gotten to work on a lifelike mask, a superfine brush in her hand. The mask depicted an older Western woman, but it was nowhere near as realistic as the one Arisa had worn the day before.

Arisa looked over Nanami’s shoulder as she spoke. “There’s nothing illegal about making a mask. It is sometimes—but not always—illegal to use a mask to trick a facial recognition algorithm. Let’s say now that you’re impersonating a specific person and entering a place using their face as credentials. If you don’t actually enter the place, it’s a bit more of a gray zone. And if you’re not impersonating a specific person but just happen to like wearing masks that make you look like a different gender, or perhaps thirty years older, that’s usually—but not always—legal.”

I nodded, watching Nanami make the tiniest brush strokes along the nostrils of the mask. Then she paused, resting her wrist against the table. I wanted her to know I didn’t hold any grudges for her refusal to share the big cigarette secret with me a few days earlier, so I asked politely, “Nanami-san, what’s the reason you decided to join the Noh club?”

She turned to me. “Because of Arisa. And because I don’t like personalized advertising. I had never really thought about it much, but after Arisa told me how face-based advertising worked, it really upset me. Like, we go about our lives boxed in by our own faces, constantly having the world tell us who we’re supposed to be, where we can go and what we should buy and do and watch. I hate it.” She paused, looking down at the mask. “So it feels good to use another face once in a while. And I like the artistic aspects of mask-making, too, though my own masks are still not very good.”

That was exactly it, I thought, as Nanami resumed her painting. I didn’t want to be told who I was supposed to be any more either.

So I joined the Noh club, and I couldn’t say what I loved the most: learning about privacy laws with Arisa’s parents and our adrenaline-fueled outings to test masks in the night-time, or our monthly outings to the National Noh Theater, where the actors transformed into demons or courtiers with the help of finely carved, stylized masks, like those made by Arisa’s grandmother.

At the dinner table at home, I gushed about how Noh masks can appear to change expression based on the angle of the light or the stage presence of Noh actors I had seen. Mom was both out of her depth and fundamentally in awe of anything “traditionally Japanese,” so she never pried, and the Noh club became my sphere of freedom.

A few weeks before the end of the school year, I completed my first realistic mask, and Arisa and Hirota joined me late in the evening at Skypark 714 to try it out. They kept a lookout over the skywalk adjoining the park, and once they had assured me that the coast was clear, I pulled the mask out of my bag. It depicted an elegant older woman; I had modelled it on the old folk singer Misora Hibari in full stage makeup.

I tugged it over my head, then approached the cigarette vending machine warily. It was the same one where I had obliviously tried to buy cigarettes almost a year earlier. Rather than the glamorous Hibari, it would’ve been more fitting had I worn a Noh mask of the vengeful samurai Soga Tokimune.

I put a five-hundred-yen coin into the coin slot, then hesitated over what to pick.

“Get the regular Mevius,” Hirota shouted. “If you don’t like them, I’ll take them.”

I pushed the button for a pack of Mevius, then tilted my head to look directly into where I now knew the facial recognition camera was mounted. We waited in expectant silence.

Thump.

I bent down to fish out a pack of cigarettes from the slot and held it out toward Arisa and Hirota. “Look,” I said, as amazed and proud as a new parent. “It worked!”

“Good,” Arisa said, giving one of her rare smiles, while Hirota let out a whoop and pumped his fist in the air. “Well done, Marie!”

We bought ourselves cans of hot coffee from another of the vending machines and sat down. I unwrapped the pack of cigarettes reverently and extracted one. I had never held a cigarette before.

Arisa handed me a lighter, and I attempted to light the cigarette without much success.

Hirota laughed. “You have to inhale while you light it, you know.”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly. I succeeded on the next attempt and inhaled deeply, then began to cough. It tasted disgusting, and I felt weirdly nauseated. Hirota laughed again, while Arisa moved closer to pat me on the back. Once I stopped coughing, I got up and put the cigarette out in the ashtray. Then, I handed Hirota the pack. “Well, that was a lot of trouble for something I will never do again. Gross!” Arisa and Hirota both laughed this time. I sat down to sip my coffee, and despite the exhaust-fume taste in my mouth, I felt happy and free.

I hadn’t thought much of the question when I’d first asked it, as a 9 year old. But it never left me and it’s all I can think about now. What do newborns dream about when they haven’t yet experienced the world? Chewing on that question is far more satisfying than ingesting the canned speech now competing for my brain space.

Some cognitive neuroscientists theorized that if we could only see a baby’s dreams, we’d see the essence of their personality before it’s corrupted by immersion in society. We’d get some sense of what they might become.

“Welcome to your future!”

The stadium was packed that day, despite the oppressively hot temperatures. The graduates were queued up, a chorus line of arms failing to mop foreheads with the puffy sleeves of their heat-absorbing but sweat-repelling robes.

They give this speech at every graduation ceremony.

“We discovered long ago that rationally accounting for equity does not work in a world of irrationality…”

Sounds true.

He had already come to realize that truth, both through limited but intense experience and an atypical amount of self-reflection for someone his age. He welcomed his future with arms folded, despite being at the head of the line.

“… random adjustments to opportunities spawned anger and rebellion…”

Well, that’s true.

His parents had fought for those opportunity adjustments and now he was alone. And he sometimes wished the weight of the scars he bore from the accident would bury him too. He had no one left from whom to accept love.

“… but a physical solution was deemed palatable. It was proven that humans deprived of sight and sound cannot walk or crawl or pilot in a straight line.”

So he led them, one by one, into the circular arena where they would be set on a straight path. And all assembled peers, friends and family if one had any, and supposed superiors, would watch as they wandered. It was random, but they felt they had control. To some, it seemed like an exercise in making the young look silly.

Okay, wheelchair ready.

“… so go forward, blindfold on, ears plugged, until you pass through one of the doors. There you will discover the level of wealth you will have at your disposal to initiate your future, and the associated placement.”

And, after some aimless ambling, I passed through a door and found… I would start my journey serving society as a member of the middle class, as an Idea Clerk.

They were queued up under the “Ideation Royalties Line Begins Here” sign where he sat, alone and lonely.

Today we have a twenty-something blonde, nose pierced with a sparkling blue-green stud, off-kilter rectangular cloth backpack, probably works at a fake food start-up, followed by a fiftyish woman, short, round faced, faint freckles, smiley, talking about her daughter’s successes despite her having been waitlisted at most colleges, and what is clearly an unsuccessful college professor.

They were all ready to let me jack into their skulls in hopes that some idea they didn’t even know they had is worth something on the open market. In the old days you had to think — think your idea was worth something and patent it. No need to put in that effort anymore. I suppose that’s good for preventing assholes from stealing credit for others’ ideas, but I wouldn’t want to deal with the pain. Some do it for the cash, but the odds of a big payday are slim. I can sell my bodily fluids instead and count on getting paid.

The sign turned green and the young woman stepped through the doorway with purpose, up to his plexishield.

“Hey there, can you jack me in?”

“Sure, turn to the right please, put your temple against the plunger, hold on to the handle, and don’t move till I say so or you could be permanently damaged. This is gonna hurt.”

“I know, dude, it’s worth it. Go ahead.”

The needle shot out, punctured skin and penetrated skull, luxuriated for a few seconds, then slowly retracted. The results arrived straightaway.

“Sorry, nothing for you today. I recommend some painkillers and a couple days rest.”

“F, you, dude.”

I’m so glad I wandered through that particular door.

“Next.”

The freckled woman shuffled up for her turn.

“Hello, young man. Will it hurt?”

“Sorry ma’am, it will.”

“Okay. I need this for my daughter. Go ahead.”

“Turn to the right please, put your temple against the plunger, hold on to the handle, and don’t move till I say so or you could be permanently damaged.”

She did as instructed, and when he told her to do so, she let go. And collapsed.

“Ma’am, please get up off the floor. Nothing of value for you. Sorry. Next.”

The academic was next, and looked to be last, at least for now.

“I am ready, my boy.”

Pretentious prick.

“Sure thing. Turn to the right, sir, and put your temple against the plunger, hold on to the handle, and don’t move till I say so or you could be permanently damaged.”

He did, without comment. At least this guy followed the rules.

“You can let go now.”

“Anything, son?”

You are not a father figure to all those younger than you.

“Well, yes. It looks like you once dreamt up a principle underlying the new physics that underpins much of our current tech. Lucky man.”

“I knew that my years of study would seed my thoughts! Finally, it will all pay off.”

“Oh, wait a minute. Turns out you dreamt that when you were just a child. Sorry, you were too young. You can’t claim it.”

“No, that can’t be. What is the principle? I’m sure it came from my studies.”

“Sorry, the machine doesn’t make mistakes. It traces the neural line back to its origin. And sorry, if you don’t know the idea, I can’t tell you. Better luck next time.”

“Next time?”I hope there’ll be a next time, but it’s cases like this one that keep the Discount Discorporation Depot next door in business.

I know I shouldn’t have jacked in. Turns out I got a tiny percent of the ideation royalties for that injectable peptide. Made me want to try it in hopes it would help my legs. Turned out it destroyed me. It didn’t help and it damaged me, and I didn’t feel it. But my newborn felt the consequences of the tiny genetic change. I hope she forgives me when she finds out.

I know I shouldn’t have created a child to try to find love. But it worked. She’s always unsettled when awake, but her love for me shines through when she sleeps next to me. I feel it.

His baby slept peacefully, purring.

I can help her till she turns twenty, but then she’s on her own.

That’s the law. The law mandates the resetting of status for each generation through a random walk. The law prevents parents from providing tangible resources. The law does not prevent resentment among privileged parents. The law does not prevent them from exerting inequitable social pressure.

Colors and contentment, not images and stories, floated through the baby’s dreams. These were associated with disconnecting from the world, with being alone, with being within, with forgetting all the people around her, with forgetting her father.

Kasy prayed the List of Gratitude as she and her mother left the high gate circling the compound and walked the sidewalk to the clinic. Thank you, Lord, for this beautiful day. Thank you, Lord, for my life on Earth. Thank you for my sight, my smell, my ears, my skin, to witness your Creation. It hadn’t been but a few years since He had seen fit to reset the world. The compound sat on Turkey Mountain, where the inhabitants could see the overgrown mess where Tulsa used to be, know that other American cities had had a similar fate, thank God for sparing their flock, and thank Him for punishing them.

They turned at the broken stoplight that swung and spun on its wire. On the left side of the road where the park used to be was an encampment—all snapping blue tarps, smoke. Blanket-wrapped huddled masses queued for soup at a stand near the road. The wind shifted. A moment later, the odor smothered them: unwashed armpit, crotch, ass, and burning garbage and leaking propane. Kasy and her mom stepped into the road to go round the tents rippling in the breeze. Further on, someone lay in the road with a filthy pink blanket over them. Their feet were bare. Further on, a man chopped at the air with a metal spatula and yelled at the empty sky. Each shout gouted cloud-breath into the frigid air.

Thank you, Lord, for leading us out of there. Thank you for leading us to our Shepherd, Robert. Thank you for a roof, for beans, squash, and bread, for hot water at the lift of a handle.

Kasy stopped her silent prayer to look over the line, in case her aunt was there. Her mother put her hand on her cheek and gently nudged her face forward again. Her mother’s expression was sorrow overlaid with determination. It felt like a betrayal of her mom to search for her aunt. Besides, her aunt had chosen to no longer be her aunt when they parted ways. Kasy looked away. They had to focus on those who wanted to be saved.

The clinic was in the strip mall tucked between the pizza parlor and the DMV. A message had been slashed with deep red paint over its mirrored doors: The Shepherds are Wolves that Learned How to Use a Crook. Like you would know, Kasy thought. He welcomed me and Mom into the fold after the Summer of Storms and gave us food, shelter, community, and purpose, when so many people had lost theirs, and never regained it. She prayed God would open their mind, by a transformative event or by crushing open their skull.

The clinic looked like a DMV, a place to process people, rather than a sacred place. The “take a number” ticket machine by the door was empty. So were the eyes of the receptionist. A massive picture of downtown Tulsa pre-Summer of Storms with domino-like buildings colonized a wall. There were women older than her mother, with snowy hair. There were women her mother’s age, with gray-streaked hair. The group Kasy herself belonged to—with people who      could be called women, but her Shepherd called them “on the cusp”—was the largest. One of them had brought a girl, a child, who sang softly to herself and drew stars on her arm with a blue marker. The scent of synthetic blueberry fought the stale, bad-breath smell of the clinic air.

Now, that girl is clearly not a woman, nor almost one, Kasy thought. Perhaps she’s special.

The receptionist slid a clipboard under her window, and Kasy’s mom wrote Kasy’s full name, flock number, and more. The little girl sat on the floor and doodled and sang, and the mother sat in a chair and ran her daughter’s hair through her fingers. The mother was Kasy’s age and her throat was unblemished: a small woman with a flat mouth and luscious seal-brown hair. She wore jeans and a nice pine-colored polyester blouse too thin for the weather, and a ratty parka too heavy for the weather. The little girl wore pink pajamas with purple cuffs.

No Ascension robe, Kasy thought. And she brought her daughter to the procedure. Her flock had pecked at her mother for doing the same, but that’s how it was when circumstances demanded it. Since joining the flock, Kasy had mucked stables, baked bread, scrubbed floors, beat rugs, wrung laundry, and raised chickens from egg to oven. She had calluses so thick she could grip a smoking skillet without potholders. When her mom had the procedure and then a fever from it, Kasy swabbed the surgical wound, lifted soup to her lips, wiped the shit, piss, pus, blood and did her mom’s work too. She watched the little ones and taught the older ones. Soon she and her mother were indispensable to the flock. She let herself feel a little pride in her hard work, her ambition, as a treat. That’s how it should be. Kasy joined the rest of the women in giving the new woman an approving, encouraging smile. God loves initiative.

The digital sign over the door blinked. Selena Cruz.

The girl and her mother rose. The leftover women watched her ponytail switch her shoulders with a kind of hungry softness as she went through the door. Kasy’s mother watched the door and her thumb and finger pinched the beads of her rosary. The beads passed through her fingertips and there was no noise behind the door. Kasy’s muscles clenched.

Then, the little girl screamed.

The women shifted, crossed themselves, and signed, “What a pity.” Kasy’s mother touched the scar on her throat. Kasy’s mind frothed. Her body felt galvanized with the screams. Move! Don’t move! Shut up, shut up, shut up!

Selena’s cries weakened, as if she had heard. They suddenly cut.

Kasy felt something like a pillar fracture within her. Inside her head was a tinny ringing as if her eardrums had burst and a static feeling. Her heartbeat prayed OGodOGodOGodOGodOGod. Maybe she had misheard. The doctor, surely, wouldn’t have taken her. If he Lifted them high, then what would Kasy’s Ascension mean?

It wasn’t that bad of a trade. You’d swear your faith and loyalty and do the procedure. You and Mom would be taken care of, Kasy thought. But you’re an adult, even if you won’t admit it, even if the Shepherd won’t acknowledge it.

Shut up!

Thirty minutes later, the girl, Selena, and her mother emerged wet-eyed. Selena swallowed, winced. Tears slid down her cheeks. The bandage around her throat had a dot of red where, if she were a boy, her Adam’s apple would be. She held a small blue satin box like a ring box, which her mom took from her and put in her purse.

They really did that to her, Kasy thought with an eerie serenity. Her spirit detached and bobbed to a level above her head. It took in the scene of the women and the girl who they had made one of them. The mother hoisted her daughter to her hip and slung her purse over her shoulder. She made no eye contact with anyone, not even the receptionist, as she signed out.

As she passed, making for the door, Kasy leaned over and pinched the woman’s sleeve. The woman started. Kasy whispered, “Soft serve.”

The other women rustled. Kasy didn’t have to see their hands flurrying to know what they were saying. Kasy kept her eyes locked on the mother’s startled eyes, as if willing the memory to transfer telepathically. Icy-sweet numbing swirl from the gas station. The hand signs for soft serve had not been invented yet, and Kasy could not wait for them to be, nor did she expect the woman would know them. She was just guessing, but she didn’t think the woman would know why soft serve mattered. The woman at the gas station would tell them. Kasy would not let the woman and Selena go, unless they understood everything she couldn’t say.

The woman pulled out of Kasy’s pinch and exited the clinic doors. Moments passed where Kasy wondered if she had said enough. Then, her mother slapped her. Its sound seemed to jolt Kasy awake. She had broken the six months of silence before Ascension. Her mom breathed in rapid puffs, and her eyes were ringed with white. She raised her hand again.

The receptionist hit the silver bell and rose behind the glass partition.

“Who spoke?” she signed. “Raise your hand.”

Kasy would have to start the six months of silence over—if the Shepherd would forgive her and allow her another chance. “The devil is unusually loud within you,” he had said after the previous failure. She had screamed for help when a young boy had fallen from a tree and seized on the roots, bleeding from the ears. She had suggested that maybe this time it was a guardian angel. But her Shepherd’s eyes were cold and remote, and his sermon the following day was about gratitude and duty and the sinners begging outside the walls, and he referenced Corinthians 14:34.

Yet God abhorred a liar. She slowly lifted her hand.

As she did, so did everyone else in the waiting room. Her spirit made a great shout.

The receptionist looked round, astonished. Then, with jerky angry hand motions, “I’ll end the appointments for today and send you home to your Shepherds.”

Hands stayed in the air. Eyebrows slanted and furrowed. Who needed hand signs when veins throbbing in their temples could speak more eloquently?

The receptionist threw up her hands and sat back in a huff. Hands lowered back into laps. Kasy’s heart felt too swollen with neighborly love and relief. But she still thought about Selena. She shouldn’t have Ascended at all. Why hadn’t the doctor stopped them?

She soothed herself. It’s done now. They might be able to join a flock based on the strength of their offering. It is what it is.

Immediately Kasy hated herself for that thought, because she always hated it when her mother said it to her. She had hated it after they had to leave their tornado-smashed home in Verdigris for Tulsa. She had hated it after the city cut disaster funding after they got there. She had hated it when her mom got the procedure to get them accepted into the flock. She had forgotten that she had hated it. If Kasy had been a boulder, it is what it is was the river that would wear her down to a pebble before carrying her with it.

The sign over the door blinked: Casy Hernandez.

Kasy was used to her name being misspelled. Today it felt like evidence for the devil. Her mother crossed herself as Kasy stood and went through the door.

The room was small, low-ceilinged, cave-like. There was a chair like the one at the dentist’s, and a young nurse on her knees, wiping the floor. The nurse held up one finger—the first and oldest and most recognizable hand sign—and continued wiping up the fine spray of blood. Her eyes, too, were wet.

Kasy plucked a sanitizer wipe from the tube by the door and knelt. The nurse waved, shaking her head, but Kasy shook her head back. She threw the pinked sanitizer wipe into the trash and beat the dust off her robe. I’m already here. It’s too late.

She eased onto the chair. There was a ghost of warmth on the vinyl. On the counter, the scalpels, slicked with girl-blood. Suddenly she hated that nurse.

She asked aloud, “You’re going to get some fresh scalpels for me, right?”

The nurse blanched. Kasy insisted, “You do use clean ones, right? God may have invented germs, but he also invented soap.” Her voice had gone hoarse after not being used for six months. It was a voice she wouldn’t want to hear in the dark. But how that nurse nodded! Her hand spidered towards the doorknob.

Childishly, Kasy thought, You’d tell on me? But the Shepherd would make her do more than stand with her nose in the corner. She should have been dismissed when she first spoke. Instead the nurse gathered the dirty scalpels and set a tray of fresh ones on the doctor’s cart. She was red.

Kasy lifted her arm to sign, sorry. But when she peeled her arm off the armrest, there was a scent of blueberry. Her forearm was smudged with blue ink.

“For God’s sake.” Her disgust was made dreadful by her voice. The nurse snatched another sanitizer wipe and offered it to Kasy. Her eyes pleaded. Kasy snatched the wipe and rubbed down her forearm and the chair arms. A lemon smell replaced the blueberry. The nurse slipped out of the room.

Kasy imagined the mother adjusting her daughter on her hip outside and walking towards the gas station. It didn’t sell gas anymore—no point—but sold caloric encouragement. Greasy pizza slices, hot dogs, plump, sweaty, brown, rolling alongside dry yellow taquitos. Donuts with translucent glaze. Coffee—not the real stuff, not anymore—but the soft serve was real, cool and soothing and soft. A sweetness sliding down tongue to belly. For whatever change could fit in a child-sized pocket, you could get a spoonful of strawberry or cherry preserves from the lady who ran the register. If you hung around tonguing the swirl’s point sideways, she’d tell you about how ice cream used to come in a thousand flavors, but the most common flavor came from a rare orchid far away. How ice cream now comes plain, and they had to make their own flavors. It was most unbelievable that ice cream could be better, Kasy had thought then. Her mom had last taken her when she was ten, before she had gotten her own procedure.

But that’s enough fairytales, said the gas station woman. I’ll introduce you to a good Shepherd. Just come back here when you Ascend. It’s tradition. Ice cream makes everything better.

The nurse returned with a doctor in his dirty white coat.

He said warmly, “Kasy Hernandez, sorry for taking so long. Lean back, lamb. I can’t get at your throat if you’re sitting up.”

Her mind howled the same words her aunt had howled about joining a flock, This isn’t right, nobody sane would make you to do this—

What else can I do? Kasy prayed. She imagined prayer rays beaming out of her body even as she leaned back in the chair. What can I do now? She wanted her mom to hold her hand—no, she wanted her aunt to take her hand and pull her out of the chair and run. She wanted to run back in time and pull the little girl out of the chair, and her mother, and every woman who had lurched away with their voices in satin boxes, and all the women waiting with their ears turned towards the door.

The scalpel had just penetrated her throat when she let out a monstrous scream.

“You’re one of the few whose bodies are compatible with the energy source.” My handler’s hair collected ash, which I imagined to be snow. We stood facing each other, under the shadow of the clocktower, lights taken from a football stadium serving as a proxy for the sun.

“Do you intend to turn me into a bomb?” I asked, slightly amused at how soon we’d come around full circle. Bombs were the reason half the world was buried. They were the reason why I was being held hostage in my own university.

“No.” He removed his hat, his mustache gathering white. I imagined I was shivering, that it was blizzarding out. “To be frank…” He did me the service of at least a partial disclosure. The world was too dead to take much sugar-coating. “Something far worse.”

They were pulling babies from what used to be buildings, what used to be nurseries and neonatal ICUs. The body bags were too large, so they had locals bring out pillow cases to wrap the youngest of the dead in.

They tugged bodies from the rubble, volunteers in night vision goggles, whatever the army had on-hand. I couldn’t help from where I was, in the university that had become a prison. I watched from the feed the military had provided me to instill “nationalistic feelings.” A rescuer had ended up on his knees after extracting a toddler headfirst from crumbled concrete. They were slapping him, screaming at him to get it together, bringing their palms to his cheeks. There were more children buried in the ruins of the homeland, in the ruins of their own houses. And he was one of the few with the physicality and equipment to pull them out.

He lifted himself off the ground, retracted the goggles, and smeared his tears with the hands of others. He was staring forwards, like some smothered statue, caked in ash. And they ruffled his hair, white snowing down from where it collected, and pushed him onto the next victim.

The girl in one of the next dorms, of which there was a surplus because the university had become mostly a ghost town, told me she’d seen footage of the enemy hauling picnic baskets up to lookouts. That they ate their dinner on foldaway chairs and tables, watching the fireworks that bore craters into our country. That rained ash over all of us.

“They’re an evil people.” She said, shaking her head, body resting on her doorframe. “I didn’t know humans could act like this.”

“The enemy is not human.” I said, matter-of-factly, so she did not confuse me with a sympathizer. And she didn’t take it as well as I thought, only sniffled, sucking back tears, and slammed her door shut.

One of the reasons why I was not allowed out of university grounds was because the campus was considered a safehouse. I could watch the destruction unfold around me, knowing it would never penetrate whatever shield my handlers had set up.

Here, the bombs were the only things I could see without aid from night vision goggles. They’d start as orange dots in the horizon that you would say to yourself were stars, then they’d grow until you’d swear you’d discovered the sun again since this winter started. Then that sun would multiply and grow a comet’s tail. Phosphorous. That stuff cooks you from the inside out. Causes organ failure, melts your skin down to your bones, and your bones down to stardust.

I was watching one. The window surrogated the back of my eyes. Two camera obscuras, shrouding most of the world as unseen matter. I could see the telltale dot swelling from the skyline, of a false sun, trailing poison as it ripped through the sky. Though I knew I was safe, that didn’t keep the fear at bay. Deep down, I was beyond terrified. It was the kind of fear that cut like a knife, that turned me cold. That made my breath hitch when I saw the bombs deployed because I thought of the people that would be struck by them, and for a moment, their bodies were an extension of my own, and I could feel my skin smolder and my blood boil. And there was nothing I could do but watch.

When the blast first reached our shore, it came as a ring of sound and wind that would dissipate as it neared the interior of the landmass, then recede and spread back again. Over the course of weeks, the incoming waves of pressure would expand and collapse as aftershocks. Those were the test runs, performed on other countries, nuclear warheads dropped from planes, disintegrating all allies. The enemy really knew how to corner us.

The real blasts, the ones that turned my country into a wasteland, came in this eternal night that was newly blanketed over us. We had no way of seeing it, and if we even could see anything, we had no way of communicating it to anyone.

The enemy started with missiles, then dirty bombs that exploded shrapnel into their blast radius. And then, when we thought they had used the last of them; nuclear weapons. They dropped them on hospitals and churches first. On the places that would cripple our communities. And then, they engaged the military targets. Finally choosing a destination for their fireworks that was not civilian.

I was halfway through my thesis when all of this went down, studying data of stars’ positions in the sky, of changes to their size that may indicate black hole activity or just natural death in the star’s life-cycle. Looking back, such an organic dying process, even if it was that of a star, was something to envy. The enemy had conjured up the most painful ways to kill. Makes being slurped up into yourself as your light dims and kills the planets you once illuminated seem more ideal to nuclear fission. But, to our relief, by the end of the first barrages, we were notified that the enemy had run out of its nuclear weaponry. Or at least, that was what our specialists surmised from intelligence reports.

It would be a while before people had the decency of instantaneous atomization in lieu of the more painful, drawn-out deaths to come.

While I waited to be turned into a warhead, I occupied myself leafing through half-eroded journals. My studies in astrophysics, of the birth and death of stars, was long forgotten, rendered too frivolous for the current winter. My telescope, the largest of others among most universities in the north, was being disassembled and smelted down into another one of the war machines.

The study would haunt me, would possess me like a second spirit. Every equation, every proof, was somehow preserved in the back of my mind, only to resurface at night just when I was at the precipice of sleep. It would torment me. I would think in series of numbers, in formulas; would feel the click of my calculator, as a phantom, beneath my fingers.

I missed the stars. I missed the sun most of all. There was no warmth at the time. Only ash and darkness. And my studies proved exceptionally useless in alleviating this situation. I worked in the theoretical, not the physical. I could map the lifespan of a heavenly body but I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to produce hot water using what remained of lost technology and no sunlight. I’d crouch, with a flashlight between my teeth, and wish I had done something more mechanical with my time in school, that I had both the motor skills and technical expertise to coax the flow of electrons from a grounded state to a more excited one.

I was never successful. I waited, like everyone else in the university, for the army corps of engineers to piece together what they could of the surviving infrastructure. And for the first time since the winter set in, there was light. Enough light for me to scrawl equations onto the empty backs of notebooks, to finish my thesis in vain. Because I didn’t care that the world was going to consume me and spit me out a killer in a matter of months. At the time, I was still human. At the time, I needed to pretend that the world would always see me as such. As someone in the same ranks as those who brought the light back to Americans. Not as the one who extinguished it across the ocean.

American physicians performed surgery on soiled hospital floors, without anesthesia, with fewer doctors than they had last month because they had lost almost half of them in the war so far — the enemy was adamant on calling this barrage on civilians a war — and the screams through the special military-grade transmitted television were enough to make me spit bile.

This would all be my fault in a period of months. Children with their names written on their arms because they would be too shellshocked to remember, their entire families yet to be dug up. Did you know that nearly half of the US population consisted of children right before the big bombs were deployed by the enemy? Children made up a majority of survivors. And of Martyrs. And soon, I would be the one producing skeletons on the other side of the ocean in their remembrance. It would be my turn to power the killing machine.

The enemy kept circling back to the first events that started the war. They cited beheaded children, and butchered civilians, evidence of which could not be produced. And the statements were eventually retracted, but it was too late. The world thought we were inhuman, and that is how they would proceed. With the slaughter of animals. The damage had been done. Our whole country, and its children, were named complicit in a killing conducted by rogue soldiers on foreign soil.

The enemy talked of tearing America down, flattening it completely, and renaming it “equinox” after the nightclub where the insurgents first struck.

The enemy said that terrorists ran our hospitals, so they bombed them. They said that American patriots were cowards, using women and children as human shields. And they just kept bombing until our sky turned black. Until they’d disabled all infrastructure and communications, leaving the country completely dark. No sight, so the world could not see the atrocities they were about to commit. So there would be no one to record the slaughter. That it would be locked in by the current winter, that the ash would do enough to silence. That all those who bore witness would be turned to ash.

By the time the second wave of bombs fell, the world learned that most of the US consisted of pockets of refugee camps, from the ruins of neighboring states, and from Mexico and South America. The world found out that our enemy was bombing the most helpless of civilians, and their children. And when they tried to flee, up to Canada or down to Mexico, the borders were sealed. We were locked in, all of us. In the place where the day and night bled into each other because the enemy had pummeled us so badly with their warheads, that we lost the sun.

They told me to leave no one alive. And I did not. When they disconnected the electrodes from me, millions of fading heartbeats were reverberating through my ears. When they stripped me of the insulating suit and cast me naked into the stabilizing liquid, I could still feel shrapnel rip through one thousand times over, could still feel the roll of ignition liquidize the ground and then make bodies go airborne with the aftershock.

Afterwards, they’d ask me: reporters and angry civilians, who’ve gotten too proud once they’ve seen the light again, why I bombed a hospital. A refugee camp. A food storage facility.

I did not answer them. Weapons don’t have to say anything. I was not scared of public opinion. I was death from above. And they did not feel what I’ve felt; a million bones crushed, bodies charred through-and-through, the kinds of screams that will never die, even in memory.

They asked me why I did not fight my handlers. Why I let them turn me into a human weapon. To that, I said that I was no longer human. I was only a weapon. I was only death. I was their deaths too. That the enemy was not human either, and they would do unto us a-million-fold what I’ve done. And I was the one to provoke them.

They asked why I didn’t cry at the sight of what I’ve done, and I reminded them that I was a weapon. I didn’t cry anymore. The valium pump in my inferior vena cava did not allow me to. The implant at my thalamus made sensation impossible. Couldn’t they remember that I wasn’t human anymore? That they might as well be talking to the tanks or the missiles, or the surviving atom bombs. I could not give them what they wanted. I could not give them remorse. I was responsible for the damage, not the aftermath.

“I can’t feel anything, remember?” I addressed them, casting wetness down my cheeks. And they took photographs of me like that; grainy, black-and-white, from old tech cameras, of the weapon with tears in her eyes.

My handlers took me back in, blared “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as they shoved me into a padlocked door and through the tunnel system under the destruction, to a place where no one would know to look for me. I was the best kind of weapon. Easy to hide, to move. To pass off as anything but.

I screamed and screamed about the enemy, melting into the floor, a slobbering mess of a girl. At least I thought I could still be called that despite everything. I wished I could. I screamed and screamed things I never thought I would even think, but war and death did these things to me, turned me into something I didn’t know ever existed inside me.

“I’m going to kill them!” My voice ripped through my throat, raw and stinging. And it must have been what the handlers wanted to hear, but too crazed. Too emotion-laden. They wanted something bloodthirsty but mindless. I still had too much of what I was told to leave behind. “I’m going to kill them all!”

Adrenaline rushed cold through me, warping my surroundings. I couldn’t feel properly with all the tubing feeding into my sensory centers, but I could feel something and I hated it. I needed it to stop. I could only be annihilation or human, not something straddling the line between the two. Nothing can survive the split. I was the only living thing that could remain in the divided state, body sectioned off into organ systems, picked apart by sensory nerves. I had switches to kill, sections to excise from my being, another version of me to break off from myself.

There was a memory that hit me, as my hands began to work at my skin, of a woman working for a relief organization, who told reporters that her toddler, who lived on base with her, was beginning to show signs of distress only reserved for the field of military psychiatry. The kid tore her hair out and clawed gashes into her thighs. My condition wasn’t much better than hers; I scratched at my skin, at the instruments going through me, at the monitors and tubing and things holding me back.

I screamed some more, imagining I was digging into the earth’s crust and I was also the planet. It was all so painful; I was destined to rip the earth in two, could fit the world between my teeth. And I bit down, on myself, into the pulp of my palm, drooling red, spittle foaming at the corners of my mouth as I groaned in both surprise and some kind of retaliatory relief.

I woke up with a morphine pump opposite to the valium. I felt like something was constantly drilling the back of my head, rattling my brain. They’ve installed other equipment I couldn’t see, but I knew were there. Some in my brain. Some on my adrenal glands. They were forming the most obedient anthropomorphic weapon. And I had no choice but to become what I had been resisting. I had no choice but to take the world with me.

The enemy let loose from their warships flyers with a colored dot in the center reading: “You are here,” with almost cartoonish imagery of their weaponry surrounding. “You are surrounded.” Sprawled the bottom of the page. “The only way out is south.” So, the masses fled to Texas, where there were more bombs waiting, smothering the ruck in the consequences of collision at a subatomic level. The enemy, as it seemed, had a surviving atomic weapon. And their first target was a helpless crowd of refugees.

As far as the war effort went, the enemy was growing closer to their objective of flattening us. The stretch from California to Montana had been rendered unlivable, with no surviving infrastructure to sustain life. All the inhabitants of Austin, Texas had been vaporized, a level of destruction I was still incapable of. They were still working on ways to make me stronger, to make me deadlier. All of that came to a crescendo when Texas was atomized.

And then the killing stopped, on both ends.

I was told to reserve energy, so they locked me in a healing tank while they braced for any enemy attacks. And they waited, while I floated in the ultraviolet stew, still holding their breaths. When I was released from the tank weeks later, there was yet to be a bombing, a missile strike, or any other form of warfare on the enemy’s end. They were quiet.

My handlers called them a sleeping giant, they were so massive and powerful, that they would just turn the other cheek to our attacks and wait for the right moment to deploy any countermeasures. Our country was in ruin, with only the New England area left with surviving infrastructure. The enemy did not need to do much to deliver a final blow.

As the apparent armistice went on, we counted the dead and saved whoever we could unearth. We waited, with bated breaths, for the earth-shattering we knew would come. We waited for the sky to grow dark again, for the sun to be blotted out by clouds of ash and radioactive waste. But nothing ever came.

The enemy’s major generals were contacted, with a single question in the transmission:

[Is this a ceasefire?]

There was more silence for weeks. And then a reply, as if they were reluctant earlier to share such information:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

No one knew how to respond. Linguists were brought in to decode any possible mistranslations, as if it wasn’t apparent at first what they were trying to say. That their weapon was someone like me. That they had been using living, breathing beings to unleash the atom bomb. That this whole time, it was people who were turning the sky black. Who were locking in a global winter with every blast, with every detonation. There was a human behind it all. One for each pole, for each end of the earth. And we could have split the world between the two of us, could have torn the planet apart if we didn’t show the restraint our supervisors lacked. If we weren’t human, then we would have killed every living thing. We would have committed total slaughter, of an entire race, of an entire world.

The United States military replied, as simply as possible:

[Weapon is willing.] And it was not a lie. Not yet.

I still had the death drive in me. Still had the urge to level the enemy the way they did to us. I did not forget what they had done; my handlers had made it impossible to think of anything but, a neural chip in my hippocampus subliminally looping news feed of the bodies, of the destruction, steady power warping buildings, the slopes of entire cities caving into themselves. I wanted to cut into their warships, to slice the bellies of the enemy’s C-17’s and rain their supplies down the way they did ours, the way they destroyed the food banks when they had winter locked around us.

My thirst for vengeance was not something that could be dissolved so easily.

There was no activity on the enemy’s side, and I had not been forced to destroy anything for months. The military shifted its focus to reconstruction. They re-paved destroyed roads, rebuilt hospitals and housing, reconnected electricity and internet lines. Though contained to the northeast, the remains of America were growing stronger. I was growing stronger too, having been spared from expending myself as a weapon for so long. I began to feel human again.

I took tours with the national guard, greeting people as their savior. As the one who bullied the enemy into their months long silence. The general public didn’t know about the enemy weapon’s reluctance. They did not know we were theorizing that the ceasefire would quit once a suitable replacement was found. Then, the new weapon, with the young verve that all those unexperienced with genocide had, would rain down onto us all that was supposed to hit long ago. We were supposed to be annihilated by now and then built anew, turned into the enemy’s playground; luxury apartments over where the bodies of a family still lay, huddling together in death and decay. And I saw the stars collapsing in on themselves, still saw my work in my head because I could not let that part of me go. I thought for a moment that we must not be so different from the stars, that our life cycles were the same. Grow bright and then destroy yourself. That must have been our destiny this whole time.

My handlers told me that in the instance of enemy retaliation, then my power would be used in one short burst to produce an effective countermeasure, most likely killing me. They told me their thermal physicists believed the energy of it all would boil me from the inside. Then, I would be given a martyr’s burial and swiftly replaced.

I always imagined it would be my neighbor, from the next dorm, that would be my replacement. That she would be forced to give up her body for her country, and for the destruction of what remained of the world. And she and the enemy’s new weapon would circle each other like sharks, never delivering a killing blow. Maybe it’d be because they knew how much it would take to lock the world in a nuclear winter forever. Maybe they knew that their objective was wrong from the start, and that data would be passed onto the weapon’s next host.

Maybe I didn’t want destruction after all. What good would it do if I killed their children too? What would be put into the world other than death? There was no more light for me to create other than the death strobes. It was time I drank my body in and collapsed, sucking in all matter until I was a pinprick on the fabric of space, with enough gravity to tear right through, until everything I’ve destroyed down here on earth became an afterthought. Because there would always be bigger destruction. Because I could always destroy others with myself.

It was night when I transmitted the message. Spending months in the same portion of a military base, with partial free range, gave me a good lay of the land. I was able to memorize logins and passwords, mechanisms for communication, and when the enemy’s scientists were online.

I trailed my machinery with me as I tripped through the control room. I was heavy and so augmented that I had more tubes leaving my body than vessels inside. I was no longer human, by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t even look it anymore.

I sat at a workstation with the same familiar ease as taking a seat on a bus. Like I belonged there. Like there weren’t armed guards who wouldn’t hesitate if they saw me.

I typed in a string of letters and numbers, successfully logging in. By the time I set up the interface, I could already see the soldiers nearing through the glass. I had no time, and so much to say. I wanted to scream at the enemy that they would destroy themselves with us, that we would all destroy the world together and there would be no one left to benefit from it. That they had made me a monster, and I had made them inhuman. But there wasn’t enough time. I only had time to enter a string of four words, no punctuation. I only had one sentence to deter humanity from its own suicide. So, I typed:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

Which is ‘more’ The Hoverer… now or eternity?

The Hoverer embraces both uninterruptedly,
mated like a mirror shows shit & reflects stainlessly,
never clinging to a thought of
                ‘understand thought-free.’

Dawn-fresh… horizon-free!

I’d reply but secret mantra in-hears silently.

It was peaceful outside, the sky ultramarine as the last shafts of orange and purple hues slashed the distant horizon, abandoning the earth to let the strangers in. The sultry autumn air mingled with the scent of baked banana pie, the last trace of normality that soured under the siren.

Sam scratched her nose, went to the window, locked it and pulled the thick curtains—her sunset ritual when the siren screamed. Complete darkness engulfed their house.

Josias grabbed her wrist and led her to the basement.

And finally the siren closed its mouth.

He closed his eyes and opened them again and saw no difference. His world was pitch-black. The only relief in this twelve-hour world was the warm skin over his hand. Samantha leaned her head on his shoulder, slowly caressing his wrist.

His stomach rumbled and she clutched his arm. The things outside didn’t bother about bodily functions unless it was too loud but it still made their hearts skip a beat.

Josias sniffed her hair, then ran his finger along her hand, writing now?

She remained still for a moment before she wrote ok on his elbow.

Every night, to pass the time and wait for sleep, they’d invent a story by writing on each other’s skin using a finger. Tonight they continued from where they had left off last night. He wrote and she ran. Sam grabbed his shoulders and squeezed them, indicating he should turn around. She then wrote on his back to a purple house so far away she could see the frozen mountains. Her knight in shining armor would arrive shortly. She invited her brother to dance in the night and bathe in starlight. Josias smiled in the dark and wrote on her wrist that was cute.

This imaginary world, where people still explored the outside, kept them sane and entertained from the doom that haunted them every night. At first, it had seemed silly but he grew used to it because he was doing it with her.

Samantha took his hand and wrote—

She froze. He held his breath. Something in a distant corner of the pitch-black world outside yapped until the sound transformed into an incessant bark. Someone’s dog alerted the world of its presence.

Josias closed his eyes and opened them again.

The dog barked and barked. Then its bark became a suffocating cough, then short panting, happy and louder than the world itself. And even louder than that, as if somehow the dog stood right there in the room. Then as abruptly as it had arrived, it was gone, the sudden silence making Josias’ ears throb.

Samantha was shaking, her skin cold and sweaty. He searched for her hand, kissed it and nibbled at it until she calmed down and hugged him.

There were no more stories that night, only the silence and their touches. Sleep soon came with dreamlessness.

A faint lullaby of birds chirping dragged him out of the black ocean. Josias rubbed his eyes and got up.

They went upstairs to open the doors and windows to welcome a new day into their home, the sight of a clear sky bringing tears to their eyes.

“God, I’m so jealous of them,” Sam whispered, watching the birds flutter across the roofs, her mouth a grin, her eyes wet and red. For some reason, small animals like birds were never targeted by the-ones-that-come-at-night.

Josias kissed her hair. “When will we get used to this?”

Sam breathed in the chilly autumn morning air. “We’re not meant to. Remember what Pedro—” She bit her lips. “I’m sorry.”

His laugh echoed inside Josias’ mind so loudly, he felt as if his throat were about to burst.

“Will you go to the farm?” He tried to brush Pedro’s voice out of his mind.

Sam glanced down. “Yeah, why not?”

Josias went outside after breakfast, welcoming the blessed kiss of sunlight against his skin. He said good morning to a neighbor placing a boom box beside a lamppost across the street. The sky was open and bright with only a few smudges here and there but down here, gloomy faces trod through a gloomier neighborhood. Most houses were empty, left to rot after they came for the inhabitants. Some left their homes thinking that out there, somewhere, they might find a safe haven but no one ever heard from them again. Others moved into better houses once they saw them empty. Next to the charred ruin of a three-story house that had burned down an eternity ago, a short geezer, who always wore floral dresses, sobbed against a young woman’s arms as a tanned man carried out of her home a lump wrapped in a pink blanket. A brown tail dangled out of one of its ends.

And a few blocks from that house, a couple sat on the sidewalk holding the mangled body of a child, their faces devoid of expression. Josias offered his condolences, as he did every day when someone was found. That was part of his job, anyway.

Alongside a group, his job was to knock on the houses that were still occupied. When nobody answered a locked door, he pried it open with a crowbar.

Today nobody answered the knocks on a derelict house standing alone among two barren trees, so a crowbar it was. As he stepped inside, the stench of rancid meat slapped his face. Within was all dark as thick curtains covered every window; the smell covered every corner. A podgy man called Roberto, who lived next to Josias’, stooped forward and vomited.

Yesterday, they had knocked here, and Mr. Casagrande had answered.

“Someone’s been dead a lot longer than a night.” Roberto spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

They searched around the first floor until one of them found a locked door almost hidden under the upstairs staircase. The stench, sweet and pungent, grew heavier as they approached it. They covered their faces with respirators but the smell seeped in nonetheless. Another one vomited and Josias soon joined her.

The stench of death was never easy to get used to.

After they broke the door handle, putrid hot air hugged them. Swollen and gray and swarming with house flies, three bodies huddled together. Their bloated limbs coiled and wound around each other in a disgusting mockery of a family embrace. One was a woman, another a man, and one, thinner and shorter than the other two, a teenager. Mr. Casagrande had said some time ago that his family had gone somewhere south to find shelter.

They did find shelter right here but the things had still managed to find them.

Half an hour later, the group took the bodies to bury them with the many others, the burring of the wheels of the gurneys the only dirge for the dead.

Whenever they could spare some hours in the afternoon, Josias and Samantha enjoyed sunbathing in a lawn chair in their front yard. Black thunderheads gathered in the distance, cloaking the neighborhood in cold shadows when the clouds swept past the sun. His thoughts were blacker than the clouds. Six bodies only today, with Mr. Casagrande missing. Thousands of years ago, he could hear the noise of hammer against nail, men shouting orders, music playing, dogs barking and even children playing.

The only music now was the whistle of the wind.

“Tell me what’s on your mind.” He took Sam’s hand and kissed the knuckles.

She squinted at a lowering pall looming over white clouds, her eyes as silent as her face. “Pedro was right, you know. We were never meant to get used to this.”

That was a cloud blacker than all of them.

He was only a few months older than Samantha and yet much wiser. When their father died, the world was still alive; people could still go out at night and make noise. Both became each other’s anchors as their mother deteriorated inside and out. Or, as Pedro used to say, she “rotted from the inside out.”

Don’t make any noise and stay in the dark. Her brother’s words murmured inside his brain, poking out of a tight corner to haunt him again. Josias had never heard a sound like that, the mad crackle and wheeze bobbing out of Pedro’s throat when the things had come to twist his limbs.

“But we must.” Josias took a sip of cold coffee, watching some people passing by, faces carved by fear and loss—a sight he’d grown used to by now.

“There’s no salvation, no way for this to stop.”

His heart tightened. They could be each other’s salvation, each other’s reason to live. They made it after all; against impossible odds, they managed to keep on living. They even had electricity again.

But for what?

They couldn’t have a family. It wouldn’t make sense. Some still followed the instinct to reproduce and most paid the price. An eternity ago, a couple who once lived next door had decided to have a baby, their way of bringing hope and normalcy; they’d even named the poor baby Hope. She’d slept through the first few nights thanks to the sleeping pills, but one night her wailing had cut the silence. First, it had been a soft crying that had turned into sobbing. Then it had stopped for a second before returning louder, until sobbing became laughter. The baby had laughed and laughed until her voice had broken and after one last sharp shrill, silence had come.

He wrote on her wrist: the knight had a golden sword and he swore to protect her against the nocturnal creatures.

Samantha shook her head and giggled. “I love you.”

They kissed as the wind whistled.

Swollen black clouds soon covered the world. The drizzle gave way to a raging storm and the people gathered inside their homes.

A few minutes later, the blaring of the siren cut through the deafening storm, imposing and sharp. Josias locked the windows upstairs while Sam took care of the living room. Then, the siren shut its mouth to announce their coming.

From where he stood to the basement was an entire universe of distance. Anything could happen along the way.

And so Josias inched forward, one step at a time. A cold finger ran down his body as he exited the bedroom, still alive. He continued on downstairs, each movement a potential death sentence. Midway, he stopped and waited.

Still alive.

He went on, one step after the other, then another. With the stair behind him, he turned and saw the living room window uncovered, Sam staring right through it. A scream stuck in his throat, a lump of agony ready to call forth the strangers into his home.

But nothing happened. Samantha stood there, watching the storm, half her body hidden in the dark and the other tinged by the yellow glare of the lamppost. Josias approached her. She read his face and lightning flashed, bathing everything in pale white for a split second. The roar of the thunder came soon after.

She turned her head and he followed her gaze.

The night was never truly empty. Silhouettes, their shapes outlined by the raindrops, ambled through the streets, front yards, even the roofs. They trod around as if floating or traversing an invisible road only they could see. Some were as tall as the lampposts, others no taller than a child, capered around a shape that seemed to hold an umbrella, danced between two giants and jumped from roof to roof. One of them peeked at their window, dancing and teetering as if mocking them. Two shapes held hands on top of a lamppost and in their front yard, others gestured as if having a lively conversation.

These were the ones that had ruined everything, the ones that had brought the entire world to heel. Josias had heard friends and neighbors talking about seeing them in the rain and yet he’d never dared to look, could not look. Now actually seeing them in front of him, around him, it was almost peaceful, that relief that comes after going through a long-awaited event. Even the tall ones didn’t seem as monstrous as he’d imagined, perhaps because he couldn’t see them, only their outlines.

No, no, those shapes had nothing peaceful about them. They mocked the living because they knew nothing could be done against them.

Once a man called Virgilio had attempted to hose them off but the water had simply streamed out. He had called out for his wife before he began to chortle.

Josias took Sam’s hand and inched backward. She stood still. He wanted to scream at her, lock her in the room until dawn. But he couldn’t move quickly or speak, so he clutched her hand harder. She still didn’t move.

A vibrant blue light blinked across the street. Then a raucous noise of plates breaking boomed across the world, louder than thunder, louder than the rain.

“Hello, morning, afternoon, evening! This is your one and only Miss Flower Sunshine!” The childish voice shook the walls and the ground. This time Sam was the one who clutched his hand. The front door of the house across from theirs flung open with a loud crack, and a woman burst out of the darkness on an electric bike and drove off.

Some people never, ever learn.

The woman, whose name was Carolina or Catarina, her wet black hair flailing behind her, managed to drive a good ten feet before the bike slid from under her, and she stood hovering in the air. The bike skidded off and hit a tree. The man, whose name Josias didn’t remember, drove a bit farther away. The dwarfish form that stared at Josias and Sam swirled around and jumped and jumped. Two other dwarfs leaped over the boom box and grabbed the man’s legs and he slid away from the bike and slammed onto the ground. His bike jerked and swerved and fell and lay rumbling.

“Mommy, will you help me bake chocolate cake?” The child’s voice joined the man’s shrieking.

Then the giant form holding an umbrella also turned and hugged the man as if comforting a sad child. And the man laughed louder than the storm, louder than Miss Flower Sunshine. His piercing guffaw faltered and became a mad howl as the enormous wet outline twisted his arms, snapping each bone as calmly as a man snapping twigs. And still, a broad smile never left the man’s face.

“But don’t eat too much sugar!”

Another giant shape held the woman as she hollered and howled like a mad woman. A middle-sized silhouette approached her and twisted her neck as if turning a screw. When her head completely faced backward, the body slumped down, shuddering.

This time Sam stepped back and took Josias with her. Thunder raged, Miss Flower Sunshine sang about the pleasures of chocolate cakes and the wet shapes outside sauntered away from the mangled bodies to resume their lively nothingness.

The creatures were too many, strong and hungry. I’ll defend you! The knight in shining armor brandished his sword toward the night and he slashed and slashed as the bodies fell.

He dragged himself out of the cushion in the basement and out of the house, ignoring his rumbling stomach. He left Sam still snoring and went to check out the results of last night’s slaughter.

The streets glistened wet and blotches of clouds still lingered in the sky. By midmorning, the bodies had already lost color, the astringent scent of death beginning to ooze from them. Josias and a couple of other workers covered the bodies in a tarp and dragged them to be buried in the cemetery half a mile east of the neighborhood.

Before noon, they would find five more bodies, including a cat, two men, a teenager, and the geezer who had lost her dog—her pale gray body adorned in a pretty pink floral dress.

“Don’t you wanna go? Mr. Oliveira will cook some burgers.”

Sam didn’t leave bed all morning, which was odd, and refused to go to Mr. Oliveira’s, which was even odder since she loved burgers more than humanly possible.

“Go, please go and have fun. We both know you need it.” She rolled to her side and propped herself up on an elbow.

“We both need it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’ll go. And I’ll be really pissed if you don’t bring me some burgers.”

He shook his head and grasped his crotch. The silly gesture was worth it just so he could see her laugh.

Once in a while, the neighborhood would organize a small get-together to forget, for just a moment, the ones that come at night. They could gossip, share trivial things about life and their jobs (at least those whose jobs didn’t involve retrieving dead bodies from their homes,) anything that could distract them for a bit.

If only for a moment, they allowed themselves to forget about last night and many nights before and the nights to come. All his life brought him to this simple medium-rare burger dripping with onion and green sauce. Nattering with those who still remained and enjoying the afternoon sun was that glimpse, that spark that told him: life could still keep on going, despite everything.

But the siren opened its metal mouth to blare its usual message: night is coming and they are too.

Conversations snuffed out. Smiles withered. Plates and cups fell, spreading half-eaten burgers on the ground and orange and lemon juice plashing down. Neighbors and friends ran without uttering a word as the siren screamed.

His house was visible from two blocks away, the windows still uncovered. Then he ran as fast as his legs could take him.

And stopped.

Complete silence engulfed the world and he heard only his panting and his heartbeat throbbing in his ears. The sky was a deep shade of dark blue. Stars already blinked and stippled the quiet firmament, watching him.

Do it now.

He bolted to the house closest to him, praying it was open. For once, his prayers were answered, so he slammed the door shut behind him.

In this dark world smelling of dust and spoiled food, he breathed in through the nose and out through the mouth as slowly as possible, gagging through the effluvia. A smooth wave of relief washed over him when he felt his body still intact.

He had been here last week to retrieve the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Souza, an elderly couple. They were found mangled together on the living room sofa as blow flies swarmed about them. The smell still lingered.

He could go, bolt out of the house and reach his. A single block wasn’t that far. He could still reach—

No.

Silence meant the door was open and they had come in.

It wasn’t raining today, so there was no way to see them. But he had to reach her, embrace her, hold her all night long until the morning sun came to appease them. Would she do something crazy and come looking for him? No, no. She was smart, smarter than him. She should know he was safe.

Josias sneaked on toward the end of the hallway. The yellow light of the lamppost illuminated part of the L-shaped staircase and a corner of the empty living room. Ahead was a small kitchen reeking of burnt olive oil. The food had been thrown in the garbage; the furniture—except the couch—was distributed among the neighborhood, so the kitchen was also empty.

He sat on the floor, his back against the wall.

Waiting, waiting…

No matter how hidden you are, how deep underground, or how many walls between you and the outside world, those outside reached anywhere. A lifetime ago, a friend of a friend of theirs had turned his basement into a bunker by covering every corner, from floor to ceiling, with soundproof panels. He had thought that maybe this could help. It had taken two men to pry open the door. Josias had never forgotten his face contorted in agony, facing up like a faithful pleading for divine help.

When they had cleaned the room, it had looked too neat to abandon, so he had moved in with Sam. He didn’t know who first had the idea to sleep in the basement every night. However, it became their ritual; perhaps by doing so, it offered a sense of security, albeit false.

Sam…

Perhaps if he moved slowly, he could reach her safe and sound. They would survive another night and another.

Instead, Josias remained sitting, stretching his legs and back when they got too sore. Her soft voice danced in his mind, her calling out to him. It wouldn’t hurt to try. He had survived until now; why wouldn’t he survive another night?

Instead, he lay down on the cold, hard floor and closed his eyes to embrace the gloom that was already there. He’d survive again. Nothing had changed. He was in another person’s house, that’s all.

Now go to sleep, soon it will be over.

When he opened his eyes, only the pitch-black welcomed him. Utter silence. Josias raised his hand and didn’t see it. He had drifted off but not enough to go through the night. His back was sore and the back of his head ached. Hunger and thirst commingled with the pain in his crotch and stomach. He begged for a waste bucket and a cup of water; he begged for a sleeping pill. He begged for Sam.

Thinking of her relieved the pain for only a moment.

Was she crying right now? Or had she gone outside to look for him? He’d have heard, yes. He’d have heard her scream and laugh. He’d have felt it.

He rose, biting through the pain, and went to the kitchen door and saw the still black of the night, smudged by the yellow tinge of the lamplight. He knelt and put his member out as close to the wall as possible so as to not make a sound, then relieved himself. He could almost smile if he weren’t here alone. With his mind clear, he tried to think of a way out.

No idea came.

It was impossible to reach his house without stepping outside. The things were blind when people moved quietly indoors in the dark—as long as there were no doors or windows open—but sharp-eyed when they moved even a fraction of an inch outdoors after the blare of the siren until sunrise. No, just forget about it.

Go back to sleep.

Josias breathed in the stench of burned olive oil and lay down again, this time on the other side of the kitchen. It didn’t matter if his whole body was sore in the morning as long as it was intact.

The night stretched out for eternity, a minute longer than a decade.

Sam, Sam.

When would the night end?

The darkness did dwindle, bringing in a dim pale light.

A motor bellowed out and smashed the silence like a hammer. Josias jumped, only to groan and bite his tongue when a sharp blade sliced along his neck and down the back. He rolled to his side and stood there.

Josias eventually rose and pissed on the floor right there and then again.

He shouldered the door open and ran as fast as he could, ignoring the pain. His house wasn’t locked, so he went straight to the living room.

Her body was already cold and not yet stiff. She sat on the couch facing the window with her arms sprawled out. Dry blood drenched her left wrist, seeping to the floor and blooming like a dark-red flower. Her face, almost serene, was kissed by the faint morning sunlight, so relaxed. Josias whispered her name and shook her shoulder. Perhaps she was still asleep.

Of course not.

He sat on the floor and rested his pained head against her leg. Next to her foot, he found a piece of paper adorned with her neat handwriting.

She invited her brother to dance in the night and bathe in starlight. Her knight in shining armor kissed her brow and put his hand on top of hers. We will be together forever, she said.

Josias laughed as loud as his throat allowed as warm tears blinded him. It was a lovely morning out there, full of birds singing and gloomy faces. He kept on laughing because tonight, her knight in shining armor would see her again.