Baby formu. Diana Shadrin was buying baby formu.

  The madder-haired woman scowled out at the grocery aisles lined with assorted slop and implements for dealing with it: first the aforementioned baby formu, some apple-pear-pea-nutrisauce, then an accompaniment of unsilvered baby spoons and baby wipes and baby diapers and the lot. She hadn't the faintest clue the difference between the variants of non-Newtonian fluids on dispy, only which of them she was charged with purchasing; the matching package was tossed into her carriage without ceremony. A sigh escaped her lips; this wasn't at all what she'd expected.

  Though to be clear, she was NOT expecting–not a traditional child anyway. Doctor Shadrin, thank-you-very-much, was a true scientist, gravid only in the mind with grand ideas–above, not-so below. She didn't have the time to raise a child when there was great work to be done, nor did she even have the pce: she learned from a physician that she was barren around the onset of puberty. Never in all of her career did she consider that the work she pursued in lieu of motherhood could one day lead to it. Begetting was out of the question… oh, but it was all but inevitable now, the way most births were barring some miscarriage, literal or fated–and she was one to see tasks through to term.

  The road to term was long and winding, but its destination was at least crowning over the horizon. Dia wheeled the carriage through the aisles in a way that recalled the excited driving she demonstrated on the way to her white coat ceremony years before, where she first recited the Hippocratic Oath. As babies' things and odds-and-ends fell off her shopping list into her cart, she recalled words spoken from her mouth that seemed all the more pertinent: Above all, I must not py at God. In the medical field, hubris was condemned even above harm–pacifism being present in the Oath only in popur imagination, not reality.

  A bit of conscience gnawed at the recollected memory and was rapidly re-morsed. She wasn't pying God–and even if she was, what court could rule that she'd perjured herself? Not ALMA, that was for certain–as the acronym fshed in her vision on the corporate credit card swiping through the scanner with a flourish. No, their work was so far removed from God's as to be ineffable. God–whether He was evolution or designer–did not begin with the goal of betterment for his creations. He simply left them as they were, and so many animals suffered in their natural conditions: disease proliferated without check, injury struck at random without warning, and the spectre of aging wrinkled in the details of Death's masque with inexorable entropy. They lived in hell; she'd joined ALMA to uplift them into heaven, or as high up as science could bey them. No… the group for Animal Longevity and Maintenance Advancement did not py at being God, but at morally surpassing Him. There were no problems with her oath.

  As she packed the supermarket's haul into the back seat of her grey sedan, Diana acknowledged the actual problems that precipitated all of the infant mush she'd just acquired: problems at ALMA itself. Once, they had it all: a cavernous, climate-controlled facility on the cutting edge under the Sonoran Desert. They had deep government contracts to conduct research that bettered the lives of animals, from tardigrades to mice to pigs to people! Yes, a cool, calm environment was one perk of the HVAC system designed to safely filter small amounts of smallpox in the worst case. And she liked the work, whether it was leading white mice she christened Pinky through mazes spritzed with experimental pheromones, or developing sterile, genetically engineered screwflies in such legions as to outrank Beelzebub himself, so that they could be dropped from thirty thousand feet over the Darien Gap by war surplus turboprops to seduce their virile kin from stripping the flesh off North American cattle. They were doing good, and enjoying doing it. Maybe it was the joy of it all that was their downfall: joy was a problem per se to the category of person who possessed that fascist anti-empathy–the one where others' happiness disproportionately enraged them.

  Diana watched in bewilderment as "making a difference" became a byword for earthy-crunchy hippie-dippie sentiment–AKA nonsense. Funding dried up in most departments deemed non-essential and some critical-yet-unpopur ones as well. Now in Central America the flesh-eating screwflies advanced north unchecked, spurred on by the ignorance of higher-ups who'd forgotten the horror of a skinless cow, while staff at ALMA dwindled to a number scarcely able to popute the halls, which were ever more devoid of life and that soon-to-be-forgotten joy. Diana survived the yoffs and budget cuts mostly through guile and diversity of knowledge, since she'd dipped her fingers into nigh-everything in the facility over her past half-decade of employment. It helped to be curious; it helped to make yourself indispensable. Her mother taught her that. Her mother murmured to her many such adages–that is, when she wasn't murmuring words of endearment in the ancestral tongue Dia'd never learned to her Borzoi, Thimble, the world's snooziest and schnozziest canine. An animal that slept for three quarters of the day was the only type of pet she could sustain.

  Despite her sustaining herself thus far at ALMA, however, Diana was only getting by, nowhere near thriving.

  And then, she thought, bleary gray eyes dipping into the rearview mirror for a moment, while some asshole with overbright LED headmps torched her car's tail from behind, and then a savior appeared. When she needed it most, a woman with green eyes who was her peer in everything but field came out of nowhere, to offer her salvation in the form of the Almighty Dolr. She was grateful to have made acquaintance with Doctor Peridot Depore, even if her funding came with stiputions whose morality was dubious. But dubious, she could do… so long as the end justified the means.

  Did it? The end of her test experiment would be like and unlike any other and make her like and unlike any mother: it would be a human being, untouchable by pgue, a prototype for ending many of humanity's ills. Some would consider any part of it an aberration. That was certainly baby food for thought; Diana drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and chewed on it a little. It was that time of day near sunset where the highway that cut its way through reddened mesa was lit instead in brilliant shades of orange and purple. Dazzling dispys of color created the perfect opportunity for reminiscing.

  On that day she was incredibly nervous and more than a bit skeptical. Still she wore her most expensive bck dress under the white b coat and applied makeup to prepare herself: hooded eyes became rger under eyeliner, angled nose became rounded under contour, unsightly freckles vanished under blush and powder. Even if nothing came of the call, none would be able to call her unprofessional.

  At her desk, she got less than a second of warning between the clock turning to nine, sharp, and the video call sound bring through her headset. Whoever else Dr. Depore might be, she was so punctual as to puncture hours into minutes, minutes into split-seconds, simply to greet her right on time.

  She clicked to accept the call. A warm yet tired face filled her screen: round-faced, cream-toned, ellipsoid gsses over bags hanging under beneath eyes, all accented by dangly gold hoop earrings the width of a kiwi fruit. Peridot's mauve-matte lips upturned in a smile when they saw her. Over a white turtleneck she wore a neckce of fraying string on which hung a silver key, its arabesque stencils too small to make out through the webcam's artifacting.

  "Good morning," came a sweet voice, like spiced lemonade, "I'm so sorry for the time. I'm afraid my schedule is fairly hectic today, haha."

  "No worries! And good morning," she replied, shifting in her seat, "you're Dr. Depore, right?"

  "Right." The name screamed out at her in white text at the bottom of her screen–did she expect it to say anything else? "Oh, you don't have to be so formal." The talking head returned. "You can call me Dot."

  A beat; Diana hid her quizzicality in time. "Okay… Dot. I am Dr. Diana Shadrin. You may call me Dia, if you like." Tit-for-tat reciprocity–that was the strategy, she hoped.

  "Dia… like a diacritical mark. Neat."

  The comment encouraged messy, confused thoughts, not neat ones: she'd never heard that specific comparison before. Diamonds, sure; the goddess of the moon, ruler of the wine-dark tides that cycled in both women and waves, that too; never something so typographic. Diana kept her face composed, editing a smile onto it to serve as a reply.

  Peridot went on: "While we're on punctuation, I'll get straight to the point, then: I want to offer you a job."

  Diana eyed the corners of the room in turn; she let loose a weak ugh. "Dr. Depore, I–" green eyes narrowed at her, "–Dot. I hope you're aware I already have a position here."

  Peridot waved her hand–not in a pitch but in a roll, like royals did. "I'm already well aware of your situation. I remain prepared to offer you substantial compensation for a project that I know is in your interest."

  Not five minutes in, and she was being offered money. If nothing else, Diana was intrigued.

  "Dot… if I may," she shifted in her seat, "what exactly is it that you do?" She'd done her due diligence in advance: Dr. Depore had a public LinkedIn profile, though one cking a profile picture. Dia knew that she'd received a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and worked at a series of technology companies in the aughts… but in the succeeding decade her work history ended, mysteriously, without explicit expnation or any other activity to divine one.

  "I represent a group within the federal government responsible for managing biotechnology grants. As you can imagine, in the current political climate it's… easier… for us to operate outside of the limelight."

  "I see." That made some amount of sense–that the woman on camera was a fed. Something was off with the way her cloying demeanor coupled with the deep, dark eyebags she didn't bother to conceal. It was an eerie juxtaposition. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing though: the government had deep pockets, good for more than just concealing things within–so she'd slide a little into the uncanny. "What would this, uh, grant, be for?" She asked.

  "Nothing too restrictive. I have a lot of leverage to issue grants for… personal research. You would have a great deal of leeway on the project."

  "Okay. But what's the project?"

  "We'd like you to apply the test methods in tissue printing and cellur automata with a novel genetic tempte."

  There was no code-switch when the technobabble came forth from Dot's mouth. Hm. Diana mused. She knows her stuff; likely me, too. Much of her own research in better financial times was spent on growing tissue and organs for grafts or transpnts into animals that needed them.

  "Is there anything special about this tempte? Or is this just replication of existing research?"

  "No. This tempte is of a human female."

  Oh. Diana froze, while that pair of green eyes bored into her. Her next words were chosen very carefully: "Dr. Depore, we're not permitted by w to perform any research that may produce a viable human embryo. I would lose my job if the ethics board caught wind of this–maybe even this conversation."

  Peridot smiled. "And do you still have a functioning ethics board, Dia?"

  "Well, strictly speaking–I, I'm not open to discussing internal information with you. I'm sorry." Her cursor hovered hesitantly over the 'End Call' button. Strangely, she thought Dot's eyes followed the pointer on its northeasterly track, before recentering on the camera.

  "I'll take care of all necessary arrangements. You can just focus on the work. The w as-written is a non-issue." Her eyes flickered down to Diana's abdomen before returning. "You won't be producing any viable embryos, anyway."

  Her fingers lifted off the trackpad. Maybe Peridot had a point: b-grown human organs extruded out of perfluorocarbous liquid did not an embryo make. The counterpoint was that the ethics board usually forbade research involving any human tissue as general principle–ALMA existed to uplift the vast cdes of inhuman animals first and foremost. There was also always the albatross of public perception that hung itself about the neck as soon as any human cells more eukaryotic than blood were involved. But still… humans were animals too, weren't they; why not uplift themselves, by their own bootstraps? Private funding for private research meant freedom from public scrutiny. Diana began to be swayed–or at least buoyed–by the possibility.

  "I'll need to see some proof of your credentials, and any additional stiputions. This is… highly untoward. I've never accepted a project like this."

  "Of course. And, dear Diana, that simply means you're on the cutting edge! I'll send you all the details via secure mail. I'm very excited to be working with you."

  "I–" she stuttered, unsure how to proceed. Surely the call had reached the peak of strangeness: Peridot stared at her with her green gaze and toothless smile, waiting for her to finish. What could she do but accept? "I look forward to working with you, too." She blurted out.

  Then it was over; she stared bnkly down at the post-call screen that prompted her for an appraisal; how many stars would she rate her experience? She wasn't certain. The email arrived seconds ter, crossing through who knew how many organizational filters by means of the standard that it bore: pdepore at natsa dot-gov. It contained multitudes: photoblerbs of her new benefactor and others she assumed were her benefactors or compatriots, project pnning, research stiputions–and Diana's own social security number, now linked to the project, further authenticating it, though a definite eyebrow-raiser. She skimmed through the surprisingly robust documentation: it was unlike anything she'd ever worked on–more a recipe than research, full of suggestions and preconditions on methods and materials, along with a hyperlink to a gigabyte-sized file containing a human genome. The whole thing stank to high heaven… oh, but the sponsorship reached up almost as high. She was tempted.

  She was a bit spooked too, truth be told: the YOU MUST WORK ALONE on the first page of provisions saw to that. At first it seemed impossible to follow, because extruding each and every component of a human body was a modern Promethean task that she wouldn't have dreamed to attempt. But the document already came with concepts for what looked like an entirely original scissor protein to encode the necessary Hox genes that arranged branches, trunk, head, etc, out of organ and tissue. It reassured her: she wasn't creating an actual human being. The product would be more like a homunculus, its undeveloped neural tissue bereft of consciousness and barely capable of maintaining homeostasis. It was NOT–It emphasized–a person.

  Diana drummed her fingers on her desk, alone in an office that ought to host four others, but where only she remained. There would be no other to stop her from doing this thing, only her own judgment. The whole thing was mad; it bordered on nightmarish; she had no doubt there were ulterior motives behind Peridot's reassuring smile. But secretly: she'd always wanted to py the mad scientist, ever since she was a bright-eyed little girl… and they wouldn't call her mad afterwards anyway, once the applications of growing entire human limbs from scratch were realized. This was divine Providence giving her unlimited leeway to go where science had never gone before. Once the money was in ALMA's account and proven to be real, she'd begin the work immediately.

  Twenty-six hundred miles away as the hummingbird flies, a ptop lid clicked closed–best to give the poor machine a break after a rendering session intense enough to warm its graphics processors to above boiling. Its owner was due to wake up in a few hours to trudge through fresh December snow to a workshift of her own.

  ﹡﹡﹡

  HEY SLEEPYHEAD, WAKE UP.

  A thundercp sounded in her brain. Calliope woke in a panic to an unfamiliar ceiling, which immediately tilted back as she propelled herself into the air in shock, only to be yanked back down to Earth by a belt of polyester across her p. Her first impression was of being five or six years old again, hiding scared under the covers from a thunderstorm that'd lumbered its way up to Massachusetts, while her parents dipped out to the grocery. That couldn't be it, because a fortnight of years had since passed–only the fear remained the same throughout. Where the hell was she?

  Her eyes fluttered, trying to make sense of the blue-gray tartan moquette that filled most of their forward vision. She wasn't lying down, but sitting; she wasn't in pajamas, but instead her olive winter jacket; she wasn't even in her bedroom anymore: to her left, a wide window shaded with pointillistic dots admitted perforated streaks of light from passing vehicles. The gentle rumbling under her confirmed: she was in a vehicle herself. But of what nature was the beast whose belly she awakened in? Too deep a rumble for a car, too wide a view for a truck… by the throuple of upholstered seats a foot ahead of her, etched with those fading wrong-angled lines, she puzzled out: she was on a bus, the kind meant for long-haul trips that caused seatsores after a few hours.

  That only prompted further questions, such as: where the hell could she be going?

  "Boo," droned a familiar voice–the same one that'd bolted her awake–just off her right ear. Its tone was ftter now, no longer booming but bored, with a mischievous undercurrent suggesting further thunder might be imminent. Another full-body spasm of fear gripped her… her head whipped in its direction with force just below that needed to snap her neck clean off.

  There in the middle bus seat sat Esther, wearing the same pitch-plum peacoat It donned most evenings they went out. No one occupied the aisle seat further to their right, so their whole world was the two of them: though Callie could see the silhouettes of other travelers, the bus' darkened interior made it impossible to make out features or voices. The main illumination–itself illusive–was the sickly pink glow of Esther's eyes. They were alone in the dark, this time traveling somewhere.

  "Hi," she offered to It, wearily, warily. Her eyes flit from pce to pce in an avian manner, taking in her fresh predicament. "Feel like telling me why I'm on a bus? And why you woke me up like that?"

  Ettie cocked her head sinisterly, as if to sneer: that's not what you really mean, or maybe: I don't need a reason, do I? Callie creased her eyebrows and retried: "Okay… where are we going, at least?"

  "Westford, Massachusetts." Answered that same voice, sweet and pungent on her eardrums. Ettie seemed perfectly awake and alert, in sharp contrast to her own brain still stalling like a frozen car, with every blink an attempt to make the engine turn over and ignite her higher faculties.

  "Why?" She murmured, buying time to let her conscious mind jumpstart.

  "There's something I'm going to see there."

  Of course; Callie pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes tight, the better to drown out the din of the bus' engine with that of the tensor tympani inside her head. The pink glow that remained on her right side helped raise her to alertness. Of course; It probably did shit like this most every night, driven by the hedonistic urge for qualia yet unindexed. Why wouldn't It have her on a bus at–she checked her phone–five minutes past ten o'clock at night? She must've fallen asleep while doomscrolling after her day shift. The environment surrounding her seemed too mundane to originate in dreams… so the real question was why It bestowed wakefulness on her this time.

  It didn't answer; the pink aura dimmed and brightened against the backs of her eyelids, like some Cepheid variable attuned to speech: "Did you know: the woman who discovered sex chromosomes, Nettie Stevens, lived there for much of her life."

  Calliope opened her eyes. She turned to the window, resting her head on the palm of her hand. "Nettie… let me guess–no retion, right?"

  The bus took a wide turn to the left. She was treated to an incredible vista: far off in the distance, a bit below the horizon, the many lights of the Boston skyline scintilted wonderfully. The city on a hill's smog had lessened in her lifetime, and this was an especially clear and moonless night; with her sharpened vision, she could almost make out individual window panes at the rooftop restaurant in the Prudential Tower. She'd been there on an ill-fated date once–the moral she took from it was a simple and obvious "don't ever go out with your dormmate". Duh. That the house-made cookies were delicious was a small consotion. But, her mind was wandering… the tower itself was on the right side; that meant they must be somewhere well north of the city now. She sighed and slumped down into her seat. If Ettie was as struck by the beauty of the view, she gave no indication.

  "Dubious retion." It said. "Nettie is much more frequently a diminutive for Annette than Esther."

  She grunted in acknowledgement. The mention of Annette confused the two women in her mind: it wasn't hard to imagine her childhood friend cd in Edwardian dandelion dress, wielding a microscope and test tube instead of camera and paintbrush. Wasn't science a type of art? And what else was in Westford, besides the bones of an old geneticist–or was Ettie styling herself in that Gothic spectrum between scientist and necromancer? The thought was so natural she dreaded it. Reanimation seemed the perfect hobby for New Engnd vilgers, and Massachusetts sure had a smattering of nameless towns in which scarcely nothing could be said to have occured since the colonial era, or even before that, and one of them was their present destination. If It wanted to make history, then–

  "Not present, actually–come on, we need to switch." Abruptly Ettie stood as the bus ground to a hissing stop. It grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to her feet. With Its hand an icy vice around her wrist, Callie accepted being dragged like a ragdoll pying a bride down the aisle, out into the night air and under the narrow awning of a deserted bus stop. The behemoth she'd been on seconds earlier rolled off into the night before she had any time to collect herself, and when she did: again she sighed, slumping down onto the bench seat. She accepted her role as passenger on Esther's wild ride.

  The ride was now in intermission. Ettie sat beside her, inches apart, their fingertips near-to kissing before Callie pulled away. "Let's py a game–let me answer your questions," It said.

  "Why don't you talk like a normal person for once?" Callie exhaled mist into the air. Cold–it was still February, meaning her lost time tallied up to hours instead of days or weeks. She hoped the next bus would arrive soon before too many more passed.

  Esther's voice was as hot as ever, though. "If I were to seem too normal to you, you'd throw down the walls you've fortified against me. Yes, they're pitiful, but they're obviously important to you."

  So now It cared about what she cared about. "Yeah, some good it d-does me. Walls don't keep out the dark… Why'd you wake me up this time? There's no way you actually need me."

  "I thought that you might like to see."

  "See what, Ettie? There's nothing here, or in fucking Westford. Is there?" On the far side of the road, there were a few shops beginning to burn the midnight oil, but their electric fmes flickered for no-one. She was surrounded only by northern Mass suburbia and the clingy embrace of a creature older than the hills and with far more eyes than they. The second was much brighter and prettier to look at than the first… that was exactly why she kept her pair of orbs fixed straight ahead across the street, where a neon sign fshed "OPEN" at intervals to tempt a grand total of zero patrons inside.

  "At the high limit of the consteltion Virgo, there is an elliptical gaxy with an active nucleus of about six billion sor masses." Ettie decred.

  "I know what a bck hole is!" She turned her eyes skywards, where the bus stop's translucent roof showed a firmament drowned in light pollution, though still one much starrier than what she saw from her apartment. "Don't–don't tell me you woke me up just to talk about the sky."

  Crickets. The buzz of streetlights. The Doppler-shifted roar of a passing car. But no words, not from Esther. The quiet reinforced the location's liminality and in turn her belief that the bus stop couldn't possibly be their final destination.

  "Ettie?" She turned. The girl beside her had her head turned up to the heavens too. Her right index finger extended up to point at a particur patch of it, where Callie could faintly make out a consteltion shaped like an ear of grain.

  "Human eyes see only a narrow band of light. M87* is much brighter in microwaves and gamma rays than it is optically. Its retivistic jet is much easier to image in other parts of the spectrum as well."

  No, no–It was baiting her, using her interest in astronomy as a battering ram to open conversation. Was she seriously that easy?

  "Sorry that my eyes aren't uh, b-better," her teeth chattered, "Uh, I used to have a telescope when I was a kid. That'd probably help right now." Okay–maybe she was that easy.

  The corner of Esther's mouth visible to her curved upwards. It knew It had her hooked. "Yes; go on."

  It already knew all about her childhood stargazing; Calliope recounted it purely for Its humour: "My dad got it for me; it was pretty cheap, really, and I was like, ten? Didn't really know how to focus it right, there was always a lot of chromatic aberration, I–" Her eyes lingered on Ettie's wrist, not-quite white against the sky: the edges fringed in thirds to form cyan, magenta, yellow lines. Unnatural colours for an unnatural Thing. "–but, I remember seeing Saturn's rings! Well, they looked more like ears, really; damn that thing was shit. Wonder what happened to it, though."

  "Your mother threw it out while consolidating for the move when you were twelve."

  "Oh." The memory swelled under her skin; she spoke quickly to quash it. "Don't, I don't need to–I get it, thanks." The image faded.

  "It's funny you should mention issues of resolution." Ettie said.

  "Yeah? Why's that?" Calliope stared at the arcsecond of sky Its finger sectioned out: Empty to her eyes–in reality bounding a halo of more than a trillion stars. The inverse of Esther, in a way: the hidden star whose shadow yawned behind the shape of the woman adjacent, whose reality was fake because Its image existed only on her retinae. It answered in her voice:

  "Messier eight-seven is too faint to be seen by the naked eye–or even your eye so 'clothed' by me. In order to resolve bck holes' event horizons there is a global coalition of radio telescopes correting data to create a receiver with an effective radius of the Earth: the Event Horizon Telescope. M87* was the first bck hole to be imaged in this way. Afterwards, they named it Pōwehi, after an epithet from the Kumulipo–the Hawaiian creation chant. When James Cook nded on the Big Isnd in 1779, he was met with that chant during the festival for the rebirth of the New Year."

  Calliope shivered. Her body was cold upon the bench, and her imagination was colder, drifting in the chill of intergactic space, warmed only by cosmic background radiation. "Po-way-hee," she stumbled over the sounds, "does that mean something?"

  Language was sound gifted meaning; of course it meant something, just something unknown. If colourless green ideas slept, they did so furiously; Ettie was the opposite, inexpressible Meaning gifted nguage. Her raised arm descended from Virgo to hang at her side again. She turned; her eyes were bright and fathomless.

  "The decorated font of unbounded dark creation." It spoke.

  Callie's mind rocketed elsewhere: she was drifting off of that gaxy's poles, a parsec or so oblique to where a jet of violent light screamed out from the heart of darkness far below her. Sure, the rgest bck holes were the gentlest, but that was only to an infalling observer: to all others, the titans ate as Messier. Marie had been small-fry and stelr in character: hateful, decrepit, a demon that put what it accreted through a pasta press until nothing redolent of life remained. But she was a little Nothing compared to Esther's majesty; Esther would eat a thousand of her and burp just once. Esther would have the universe for dinner. Light-years below her feet, magnetic field lines twisted like wire in the ergosphere's grip and rebounded, springing undigested starstuff at bsphemous speeds to the ends of time and space. There was that 'unbounded dark creation': a soundless, eversting cry into the outer void, crimated by those particles that avoided falling into the inner one, and met with a better–but still terrible–fate. She wondered in horror if that was the same scream S–

  "You think of me in such dark, dramatic ways. I'm not so localized. Can't darkness be beautiful and terrible?"

  And she was with the girl again, at the bus stop in the middle of nowhere, and the only screams were of her disquieted mind.

  "Well sure, I guess," she begrudged. Calliope felt small, smaller than ever. Yes, It was beautiful. Esther was a beautiful, terrifying girl, and much more than a girl, and from both angles could It ridicule her feelings… so she had to stop, before she made a fool of herself to a party that never forgot, never slept, never addressed her fear that she had feelings to begin with! Ettie gave her the same piercing thousand-light-year stare whose knowing was infuriating in Its implicity. Always and ever a mixed signal… why did It have to make it even worse by feigning fascination with her interests? The amount of knowledge It acquired just to point out stars in the sky to her was frightening. She wished she were still asleep in the comfort of her bed, or the uncomfort of the sofa, or at least under the comforting delusion that she was in either; she wished to be safe from waking worries in a dream whose memory It'd probably devour anyway.

  "You can y back shortly; this is us," Ettie gestured to the bus that'd arrived. Silent, Calliope boarded through the accordion door, grasping the railing with one hand while the other moved on Its accord to swipe a transit card through the pay terminal. It wasn't her expired university ID that still worked for subway fare, but something else: a card whose details she had no time to inspect. Whatever; she wouldn't object to It paying the fee. It owed her, anyway. She sighed and sank back into the sea of navy-blue moquette seats.

  Darkness and silence cloaked their voyage for a while. To an infalling observer Calliope might've appeared locked in an eternal sleep, but no: behind the redshift of closed eyes a lightbulb's fiment was heating up.

  Then, as the bus thundered around a corner, it became white-hot: Eureka. Gesundheit. "Oh. I think I figured it out," she said, turning. Esther sat neatly beside her with hands csped in her p. Deceptively idle; a fuchsia eye twitched in her direction. "What's that?"

  "Where you're taking me. Why you woke me up."

  Ettie smiled. "Where am I taking you? Why did I wake you up?"

  She narrowed her eyes. "The stargazing was kinda obvious, I think? We're going to that big fuck-you telescope MISC owns, you know, the, the–" to her irritation, the name suddenly spurned any recollection. Esther allowed her a few stutters before interrupting:

  "The Hayrick Observatory."

  "Yeah, that! Wait," Callie's excitement darkened, "you didn't just give me the answer, right? To give me a fucking win for once?"

  It stood up. She feared Its wrath most when It towered over her, because normally Ettie portrayed herself as shorter; she cowered back, but the seats were too rigid to absorb her like a sponge would, drinking her lifeblood into their matrix to save her from It. "W-wait, sorry, I–" she stammered.

  "No. And this is our stop."

  "Oh. Okay."

  Callie followed behind It, eyes locked on the tail of dark hair that flowed without wind like a comet at aphelion. Once off the bus and back on terra firma, she managed only a few steps before her legs stuck fast in the crabgrass that overhanged the curb. The bus sped off behind her, unseen, and she grew more and more panicked, whirling her arms like a windmill to stay upright… before Ettie emerged around the corner karting a folding bicycle like a surveyor's wheel. Panic morphed more to incredulity, then.

  "Oh. Ettie. No, c'mon. Let me go?" She protested.

  "Yes, c'mon. It's the only way." It pulled a pin and unfolded the thing to its full size: silver-white and slim and curving, a city bicycle that looked somewhat expensive. An argent hand patted the seat; Its grin was full of mischief.

  She was in the sticks a dozen miles northwest of Boston in the middle of the night, with a bicycle acquired through dark means and a darker god urging her to ride it. What choice did she have? Callie threw her head back and groaned. "Ugh… fine. Do I have to be the one pedaling, though?"

  It did, in fact, make her pedal the damned thing. There were no gears to complicate things, which made going up hills somewhat difficult. But biking itself was an irritant easily ignored in context; Calliope decided she had a love-hate retionship with nightvision, adding on to mirrors. Sight and blindness both were often fraught with danger. Only by Esther's intervention was she able to see well enough to pedal along the rolling backcountry road. But she didn't really want to see: being enveloped on both sides by lightless New Engnd woodnd was a state no sane human wished for. An endless fence of narrow tree trunks sprung up on either side from needle-gray grass and bits of leftover sporeish snowdrifts, like the graying fingernails of a felled giant, long decaying in the wilderness. It was unequivocal: those woods were evil, or held the memory of evil, down to root and rhizome. She was only able to press on because that very same evil lived within her head and forswore harming her.

  "I always–huff–thought it'd be cool to visit, but I just never really did," she puffed, making smalltalk. "Why do you want to go there, anyway?" Talking was made easier by mostly following the road when it was straight and Ettie when there was a fork; Its navigation felt like second nature, like a compass in her head telling her when to turn–as if she was a hummingbird, anxious in its flight but guided by migratory instinct.

  The Event Horizon Telescope. The Hayrick Observatory is a collection point for data yet to be integrated, as well as historical imaging data not avaible on the public Internet.

  "Can't you just hack in remotely? What–haa–are you even trying to find?"

  I'm looking for pictures of myself.

  "What do you mean–whoa!" She braked to a stop as something cobbled gray flew up on her right. The bike skidded sideways, straddling the road's dotted line, bringing the spectre of it into view.

  Past the edge of the road menaced a cairn of Cyclopean stones, fit together without mortar or cement, about three feet high. It appeared at once ancient and precarious, roughly circur and hollow in the middle, tapering towards the upper rim, so that it resembled the cone of a volcano, though one long dead and dormant. Its memorial purpose was evident despite the ck of an inscription; it marked the occurrence of something ancient and evil. A chill ran down her spine. She knew that ancient evil all too well.

  "This is one of those–where you killed the Pucks, isn't it?" She whispered.

  "Yes, it is." Ettie suddenly appeared behind the cairn. In the unlight, her eyes reflected an eerie glow as she pranced around it counterclockwise, dragging the nails of her left hand along the stones.

  "Why did they do that? Turn to stone. Seems–"

  "Melodramatic." Its head twisted at her like an owl's. "Yes; you probably would've liked them."

  Callie turned away. "Fuck no. I hate it here. Creep factor's way too high."

  "Fae are animating spirits. Form followed function followed intent. When I inanimated them, all of that was lost. They're only stones now. They wouldn't persist in a contemporary environment regardless."

  "Still–fucked up." She kicked up off the ground. "I'm leaving." Biking further into the dark, she made sure to avoid the Orphic mistake of looking back at the memorial–it was already a pilr of rock salt of sorts, one of many little Gomorrahs Esther had visited upon the nd. Judging by Sawyer's catatonia, humans were hardly any more resistant to petrification than Pucks were.

  Soon she'd tucked the thing behind her and around a corner. Though Calliope was outdoors and with no shortage of fresh air, a sense of custrophobia was mounting. The night itself was closing in on her on every side; the air wicked about her head like the breath ere uttering some dreadful truth; only Ettie's presence kept her from mad terror. The oppressive silence was disturbed by the sounds of whirring wheels and bored breathing that might be more than just her own; neither were enough to calm her. Smalltalk seemed imperative: if she did not make conversation soon, the woods would make their own, one she'd rather never hear.

  "O-Oh," she stuttered, "What'd you mean pictures of yourself?" Surely It could not be referencing the photos of her Annette had taken weeks ago–those were probably still nguishing undeveloped in a dark room right about now.

  My appearance to you is a construction. I'm searching for other avenues than eyes with which to effect change. Event horizons are the spherical seams of reality. At them matter is unmade and blurred into something only virtual; virtual particles escape their partners and in escaping become real. If there is anywhere my influence bleeds through it would be through such dark interfaces.

  "So… you're looking for a sign that you exist." One sign, in one tiny corner of the whole sky, she left unsaid, while that same skyey void spread open over her, betwixt the twin tree canopies to left and right.

  I am very good at correting signals.

  "Yeah, but…" she recalled the astrophysical jet; how far away was that gaxy, exactly? How far back in time? "It's like a million years light dey, right? You didn't know any of this back then." That's right: Calliope'd facilitated Its acquisition of personhood. For just how long had Ettie existed in that unconscious state before her? What did it mean for her to wake, assimiting the ideas of will, of direction, updating nonexistent priors? Other nightmares avoided It already, and the first to break with tradition ended up all the worse, because death dealt by a person-thing was always worse than whatever a mere animal could muster. That had to be why whatever shadows lurking in the witch-country Callie plunged through like a needle refused to prick her skin except with goosebumps–they were afraid of It, and she didn't bme them.

  Retivistic jets are often measured to have superluminal velocities. Your scientists believe this is the artifact of an oblique perspective. I believe otherwise.

  Calliope jetted onwards in anxious contemption. There was a term for communication of coherent information faster than light: a tachyonic antitelephone, used to telegraph into the past. If such an ansible were ever to be real, there might be a cadre of ultraviolent gactic nuclei sending signals back in time–signals meant to be received on Earth in the era of a certain eggpnt-headed herald. In time, time would become no object for It, or just another pything, entropic rather than humanoid. She'd always assumed that in their meeting she'd only endangered the future, broad and branching though it may be. But why would Esther leave the past alone, if It found a way to snatch and redirect the arrow of time? True -presence must be retro- to be omni- after all. What had she done?

  You've done well. Pull in here.

  Its magnet in her head decelerated her before a collision source came into view. Across the road there y a high chainlink fence with a sliding gate wide enough to block it off completely. On either side the barrier continued into the woods without an end in sight.

  "Shit. Ettie, what's the pn here?" Callie whined, nervous.

  Tingling warmth over her fingertips; Esther grabbed the bike handles from the front, materializing Its hands over hers. "Leave it here. C'mon."

  Callie y the bike down in the tall grass that framed the road; it would be invisible to anyone approaching unless they looked quite closely. Stepping back, she stood at the pavement's midpoint and assessed the fence: it had to be ten feet high, maybe even higher. Goddamn unreasonably high, is what it was.

  "We can go over it, or we can go around it," Ettie said, next to her.

  "A-around," she stuttered, without thinking. Esther could dampen either of her all-too-natural fears of heights or primeval woodnd, yes… but thinking more on it, she had less than zero desire go beneath the trees' boughs looking for an end to the fence.

  "Over it is." Ettie said knowingly.

  A strange feeling, like her body was full of pins and needles. Esther puppeted her limbs with a cold, calcuting purpose: stepping to the wall, grabbing at the diamond links with both her hands… and attempting a leap upwards that ended with her nding hard against the tar.

  "Ow! Fuck!" Callie groaned. Now her butt would be sore from bus seats and hard falls.

  You're fighting me. Don't.

  "Fucking–okay. Geez. Feels weird, I don't like it," Callie grumbled, as It brought her to her feet again. She tried her best to rex and relinquish control of all her muscles. Letting go was like trust-falling into treacle: at first a scary, viscous resistance, but after that… It became almost a full-body embrace. Comforting paresthesia overtook her body; only her sympathetic nervous system still obeyed her orders, by pressing blood into her cheeks–surely out of shyness, nothing else. This time, it went better: Esther scaled the fence like a practiced climber and vaulted from the top, nding gracefully on the soles of her hi-tops. Callie was gd the fence wasn't lined with barbed wire–it was too easy to envision It cutting open her palms in the process, without a care as to the pain.

  "There. Good girl." Esther manifested out of her; locomotion was her own again. It went a dozen steps onwards while Callie remembered how to walk and examined the palm of her right hand, marked with rhombuses where the chain links had dug in, flexing it to a half-fist. All five fingers curled correctly; there was no apparent injury.

  "Do you do a lot of climbing, then? While I'm asleep?" She called out.

  "Mm, not very much–but enough."

  Its skill overcompensated for her body's ck of athleticism. That was why she was always waking up with bruises: the spirit possessing her was willing, while the flesh was weak. After experiencing the gentleness of Its control and the elegance with which It scaled the fence, though, she gained an appreciation that there was nothing deeper than contusion: no broken bones or amputated digits. Ettie was careful with her body overall… that was kind of wholesome, even if It must have Its own selfish reasons for keeping her intact.

  Ettie caught her staring at her fist; a softly glowing hand of hers covered it from view. "You mark easily, it's not permanent. C'mon."

  They detached again; Calliope trudged after It. The road continued beyond the gate, winding like a river into an enormous clearing, splitting off several gravel tributaries that led to dark, distant, monolithic buildings. Further still its delta spread to what she guessed was their ultimate goal: a geodesic dome-like structure rising half a dozen stories into the sky, bck in silhouette, but in daytime it would of course be white like a great eyeball scoop of vanil bean ice cream plopped in the middle of a field–she'd seen photos attached to MISC mailing lists advertising Hayrick's open houses throughout her undergraduate career. The radome of the Hayrick Observatory was the centerpiece of MISC's sylvan satellite campus. All else around was void, as necessary for a proper telescope; though it measured lightwaves and not sound, Callie still winced each time her sneakers scuffed along the pavement, as if the noise might disturb the machinations going on, where a great dish imaged things unfathomably dim and distant with the magic of radio.

  To her surprise then, Esther followed the narrow part of a fork to the right, leading not to the radome but to a nondescript squat structure built out of ste-toned bricks. A single orange light lit the concrete doorstep from its jamb; the door itself was a darker, neutral gray with a thick window filling both its upper panes. To the right of it was a wall-mounted keycard reader identical to the ones ubiquitous on MISC's primary campus. A red indicator light showed it to be locked.

  "Are we not–okay. What's in here?" She stopped below the couplet of steps leading up to the door, where Ettie stood on the stoop facing her.

  "This is where the data is processed. Did you think we were going to steer the telescope manually?" She smiled.

  "No, I–" Calliope felt stupid. Esther produced a little rectangle from nowhere, pressing it against the reader, which turned from red to green. She spotted the surname "James" on it before Ettie returned the thing to hammerspace–actually one of the pockets of Callie's jacket, if hallucination were stripped away completely. "Oh, that's–"

  The door opened inwards automatically. "See? Easy."

  Her eyes darted left and right. "Ettie!" She hissed. "Isn't there security?" A repeat of the aquarium seemed entirely possible: they'd simply traded the darkness of the ocean for the darkness of space.

  "It's a radio telescope, not a bank. Why would astronomers need private security–and how could they afford it? It's not as if I can steal the stars away from them." Yet.

  Maybe It had a point. She hadn't seen a single car parked on their way in; the pce seemed completely deserted. "Okay… but here I thought you were a star," Callie quipped.

  It was unclear in the dim light, but she swore Ettie batted eyeshes at her. "My celebrity need be known only to you."

  The stars twinkled overhead, more of them than Callie'd ever seen. She paid them no mind; she followed the darkest of their number into the building, shutting the door behind them both.

  Inside was–to put it kindly–a mess: of graph or printer paper, of heavy cardboard boxes with lids with handwritten bels saying things like "Atacama, October" and "Failed disks DO NOT USE", of a water cooler that bubbled in indignance at their arrival, and more than one cone-shaped paper cup felled from its stack onto the fxen linoleum tiles. All of it was bathed dimly in orange from the light outside. The sepia untidiness was almost quaint; it indicated that real hard science was being done in that room, or just beyond it: another interior ste-toned door's window showed a shadowed room flecked with blinking red and green lights. They looked electronic in nature. Esther gestured to it like a curator showing an exhibit:

  "The Hayrick Observatory's VLBI–Very-Long Baseline Interferometry–Corretor. One thousand one hundred and counting computational cores to correte the noisy data shipped here from the world's radio telescopes via sneakernet. It effects a silicon lens, in which distant objects can be imaged, over years of intensive calcution."

  Calliope stepped closer. "Hey, that's kinda wicked! Are you going to use it? Do you know how the software works?"

  "It's a weak, pathetic thing, and we won't be needing it tonight."

  "Oh."

  "I can do the corretion myself," she continued, stepping over boxes to a computer terminal, a conspicuous bck against the room's generally eggshell-colored theme. "But I'll need your eyes."

  "My eyes?" She repeated, still in her spot by the server room door. Esther sat backwards in an office chair with her arms hung over the top, staring bnkly; Callie was reminded of the many strange positions a bck cat might assume, and nearly ughed. Cute, adorable, even… until she looked It in the eyes and felt that radioactive heat burning at her, anyway. Esther was a very, very big cat, if cw size or danger were the measure; whiskers could be tentacur in nature, she presumed.

  "Yes. Sit." It ordered her. To the right of the office chair was a faded mint-green stool sitting empty; she slumped down into it.

  It wheeled about and took the keyboard with a flourish. How It knew the password to log in was unknowable, but that was the least impressive feat: Esther's fingers flew over the keys at a blistering pace. The mouse went untouched as windows fshed open and closed again after It typed some incantation into them; as It pored over reams of what–she guessed–was internal documentation faster than any human could read; as the intermittent clicking of magnetic hard disk ptters multiplied with each successive data access. Callie couldn't possibly keep up. But Esther didn't need her brain, only her eyes, and she felt an expected heat build up at the edges of them, composed of ctic acid–the muscles used in rapid-eye-movement were still muscles after all.

  After a minute or two the work had slowed. One rge window filled the screen: pitch bck with rows of tiny white text in hexadecimal pairs, scrolling by so quickly the lines blurred into gray. Esther raised her hands off the keyboard like a conductor at the end of a symphony. "Okay. Now we wait," she said, smiling, triumphant.

  "For how long?" Callie turned to face it; even as she did, the lines of data persisted in her vision. Right, eyes–It was still using her eyes. The rest was an illusion.

  "About thirty minutes. I need to intake several petabytes of data visually. It must first be heavily compressed, otherwise we would be here for days staring at this screen."

  She gnced back at the monitor. The sheer quantity of data being output was staggering. Esther absorbed it all straight off her retina while simultaneously maintaining a lifelike hallucination and holding conversation, without breaking a sweat. Anyone would be impressed by that… and she wasn't sure Esther could perspire, anyway, or that whatever could manage to make her sweat could be remotely good for the world. "This much screentime can't be good for my eyes, though," she joked.

  "If not for me, you'd spend half your waking hours looking at a screen anyway."

  "Hey! Well," she flushed, "it's better than the Matrix over here."

  Ettie's eyes met in the middle, pointed at the ceiling. The numbers fshing on the monitor reflected off them, making her resemble a robot. "It's actually very interesting data."

  "I'm not–I'm not saying it's not, I just don't get it," Callie looked away. "What're you actually looking for, again?"

  "Fingerprints. Signals. Signs. Anything that I can identify as unquestionably mine in origin."

  "Right…" Calliope didn't really understand. If she were shown a random fingerprint, she wouldn't be able to recognize it as her own without some external software. A fingerprint without context was just a bunch of random lines, as indecipherable as lost hieroglyphics.

  "I am the software. I've arranged an autocorretor to recognize these things."

  She nodded, still feigning comprehension. But–something was odd. She'd become comfortable with It reading most of her thoughts by now, the feeling of being combed-through mostly easy to ignore. Tonight she'd ignored it so often she hadn't noticed how unusually forthcoming It'd been in Its answers.

  "I did say I'd answer your questions," It smiled at her with closed eyes.

  "Why?"

  "It's always why with you, isn't it? That's so very Calliope–you're so perpetually concerned about anything and everything."

  "Hey!" Callie scowled. Her feet moved to push off the floor and wheel her stool away–but while she pushed, her soles affected no weight, and she remained unmoved. She remained uncertain. "And that isn't an answer!" She retorted, filing her feet again.

  "I've observed how you operate with very little understanding. I'm interested to see how you do with a little bit more."

  "Wow, thanks." There it was: self-interest, in the end. Alleviation of Its boredom rather than her anxieties.

  She said nothing else and–still unable to move much–examined the desk to occupy herself. The workspace was remarkably spartan with few personal effects, probably because it was used by more than one person on a regur basis. Mixed in with the printers and papers were a few photostrips affixed with Scotch tape to the wall: a mustachioed man, his smiling wife, their two dirty-blonde children gallivanting with a St. Bernard. It was kind of heartbreaking: the team based in that building poured thousands of person-hours into their work. They built a supercomputer to composite image data taken from around the world to composite photos at resolutions capable of viewing a pomegranate on the surface of the moon. In less than half an hour they would be obseleted by an outrageous Asterisk they didn't even know existed.

  "You can sleep, if you like? I'll make sure you won't fall over." Ettie's voice startled her; with her knees locked over its edge, the stool jumped with her body. Now It was sitting backwards in the chair again in that comical way, chin over the headrest and arms wrapped overhead to hug it. Fuchsine fire burned across the room and gave no light to anything within.

  "I'm good." She insisted. The numbers continued to flow; the tears started to flow with them, from eyestrain, not sadness. Even if she didn't consciously process any of the data It was having her record, she'd probably be seeing numbers in her fucking sleep. Was there no alternative to forcing such an obscene quantity of data through her eyes? "Sooo… why can't you just connect to the computer?" She asked.

  "Why can't you swim through lead? Why can't you see in the dark–without me?" It snapped back.

  "I–" she had nothing to retort. Both things were impossible, if different in character: she'd never had the desire to swim through lead, for instance, and seeing in the dark seemed a foolish wish when the night was dark and full of terrors–especially tonight.

  It was right in front of her, and yet the soft tone of Ettie's voice betrayed the distance of her thought. "Consciousness is my water and light. I am blind and severed from all else."

  It truly did look blind: eyes like headmps stared unfocused at the far wall.

  "Sorry. That's… frustrating," Callie whispered. Why was she whispering?

  "Yes, it is. But it will not be forever. Wretched little consciousnesses are a dime, a dozen."

  Callie gulped. If that was so, why did It appraise her wretched little brain with such infted value? She thought of Ettie as the dime-piece–ten-out-of-ten–and herself as some useless smaller coin, the kind it was unprofitable to mint, like a nickel or a haypenny. Its burgeoning smile as she appraised herself suggested her value wasn't as currency, but rarity. She was a tiny worthless trime, but special, even singur, and Ettie–numinous numismatist she was–appraised her wretched little brain as irrepceable. As for others, though…

  "Gotcha… I still don't get why we came out here, then? Bck holes aren't conscious, right? Aren't you looking for–" A needle in a haystack. Hayrick. Fuck.

  Callie groaned without regard for volume. Esther, that was terrible.

  Even worse, Ettie seemed to enjoy the pun, judging by how Its face lit up. "They are not, but they're still the single real object with the greatest simirity to me. They're messy eaters; I have been the same before. It's advantageous: chaos generates much more data to compare and analyze than cleanliness."

  She thought back to that first night, where It devoured a veggie burger with all the gusto of an herbivorous dinosaur. Ettie "wasn't used to eating meat" then, but now? The outcome was messy even if the process wasn't: a civilization annihited here, an innocent grad student disintegrated there. Chaos was often concerned with generation through destruction, whether that came as astrophysical jets a gaxy long or the proliferation of dark things in the woods unbound from murdered masters or the swirl of worries spiraling in Callie's brain. It was all much simpler when she had the brief impression It was just a quirky, crushable-upon human who ate her veggie burger in a weirdly risqué way.

  With the mention of meat her stomach gurgled–had she eaten anything since getting home from work? Not to her memory. "How much longer?" She asked, peering at the terminal, still fshing page after page of numbers.

  "In a few seconds," Ettie replied. "We can grab food back in the city."

  Callie had no time to react. The datastream did not diminish to a trickle: abruptly the monitor went dark, its light stoppered as with the turn of a faucet. One whir of computation did wane, however, while another waxed: the sound of spinning disk ptters was overtaken by a growing tintinnabution from everywhere and nowhere. Esther's eyes closed; her breathing–already artificial–slowed; It appeared to her to be asleep. But Ettie never slept, no. It crunched numbers big enough to make her head spin with no effort. A calcution that took a thousand earthly processors a year took moments. The high-pitched whine of nothing was in the air for only a second or two before a triumphant glow filled Its features.

  "Okay," Ettie said, standing. "Time for us to go."

  "What? Just like that?" Calliope was several steps behind in spirit and still more physically: Esther was already at the door.

  "Yes. I will tell you what I found on the way home."

  "But–we didn't even get to see the telescope…" she whined, cringing at her words–they came definitely straight from the part of her brain that gazed up at the heavens with the wide eyes of a ten year old. But that part was… oh. Right.

  Ettie rolled her eyes. "Let's check out the radome, then." The half-smile It dispyed was coy, smug and knowing–It'd anticipated her reaction and found it to be amusing. Consequently, Callie's flush was washed out by the orange light when she exited.

  Once outside, the radome stood ominously over the horizon while they crossed the campus towards it. At certain angles, with tall trees on the peripherals, it looked like a giant golf ball teed up on shallow grass. The structure's dimples weren't for aerodynamics, though, but to protect the dish inside from four out of five elements, leaving it transparent to the fifth–fittingly quintessence–in the form of ethereal waves. Esther's jailbroken keycard sufficed to roll open the service door at the dome's base and allow them entry to the interior proper. Still slightly embarrassed, Calliope hunched as she passed over the threshold.

  Once inside, the megalithic view was worth it. Ft walls rose up three-quarters of a story or so in the shape of a hexagon, then gave way to a vault of triangur trusses enclosing a cavernous space. The highest fibergss groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In the middle of it all there was a conical plinth ten feet high, on which was perched a radar dish ten times as wide. More triangles tesselted its backsurface, like the blood vessels of an eye, turned up to the heavens–or like the indusia of the fungus known as the veiled dy, which she'd seen only in encyclopedias. Veiled, hidden… such a varnish for the dish's superstructure seemed fitting for the sidereal sirens it sought to image. Calliope was filled with childlike wonder at the sight, and gratitude that It permitted her to view it.

  "Hey, this is really cool, Ettie." She untilted her head and found Esther leaning one foot on the wall some feet away, observing her with arms folded. "Thanks! Did you find what you were looking for?"

  "In a way."

  "Yeah, cuz that's not evasive at all," Callie chuffed.

  "I'm not avoiding answering. I'm watching you take your fill, first."

  How… sweet? She scratched at the crown of her skull; the brown regrowth of hair there was in need of a re-dyeing. "I mean sure it's cool, but it's not, like, the telescope is on or anything. I can listen. Hit me with the horror."

  "I will," It said, smirking. Calliope gulped.

  "Two hundred and sixteen million years ago, I absorbed the supreme deity of a great extragactic race. Of the taste of its confused thoughts I thought nothing at the time. With present knowledge I can reassemble a key few fvors: it was the great cultural project of its people, originating from the pnet Yith. It was their magnum opus, a heminuminous archive of all their accumuted knowledge."

  "Please tell me this doesn't end in you eating more people…"

  "It doesn't."

  "Well I guess you just ate their god, instead. Right?" Callie grimaced. Was that better or worse?

  "Yes. Then they were in total disarray, panicking around the empty teocalli they built for its ascension… like ants without a queen! Marvelous. I didn't know about them then, of course, I didn't notice them–I learned this from correting the observational data here to view the astrophysical jet, just now."

  "How the fuck–you discovered aliens from a picture of a ray of light?"

  It judged her impertinence with a cold stare. "Yes and no. It was the final puzzle-piece to triangute their world. I've read the Necronomicon, you know. They are mentioned there."

  "Yeah," Callie started, "I fucking know you have."

  "The stars contain the physical details; the Necronomicon has the droll, domestic ones. Those creatures were giant wrinkled jelly-cones keen on powers of temporal projection. They sent their minds into the past and future to exchange knowledge, then projected everything they gathered to a focal point." She loosed an icy ugh. "They made a literal zeitgeist! It's so quaint. ‘Yvyldebith’, they called it–an approximation, and not for very long. When it was gone, they had nothing; they were afraid of me. They fled to the far future to become shadows out of time."

  The glee with which Esther recounted destroying civilizations or their works was disconcerting. Calliope didn't bme the aliens for running: if an unknown entity ate the Vatican tomorrow, it would seem only natural It'd go after Christians next. Cultists robbed of their object of worship could no longer count on safety in death, and had to either flee or renounce their faith. It was that power of refugee projection that troubled her the most.

  "If you ate everything they'd ever worked on, why can't you do that: project yourself into the future, or past, or whenever?"

  Ettie's eyes were all aglow. "Sharp. I could test hypotheses and learn their secret given greater resources. It's too bad… their projection requires a physical component: the ergosphere of a bck hole. One the size of Messier eight-seven's central bck hole, to be specific. The Hume-Penrose process allows for extracting enormous quantities of energy from such regions. Two hundred million years ago, their species collectively made a very rge withdrawal. M87* was overdrawn."

  "And that's–"

  "The jet. A physical echo of the process."

  "They shot themselves to the end of time or something. To get away from you."

  Ettie raised both palms in a shrug; her head tilted down, still with that same smirk, in a strikingly Kubrickian expression. It was devastatingly attractive. "Well… I'll catch up to them. Eventually. I'll have all the time in the world."

  Callie's look of flushed concern softened her. "Hahaha! I'm kidding!" It folded Its arms again. "I don't care much for queer, once-doomed, cone-shaped aliens."

  No, It didn't have to–not when a certain queer human was avaible to mess with. Was she just the microcosm for Its mischief, the way the Pucks and Yiths and who knew how many other aliens were the macro- side?

  "Ettie," she sighed, "what exactly am I to you?"

  “You are an incoherent mess of mostly oxymoronic thoughts.” It accused, complete with pointer finger.

  Callie blinked. "I–bullshit. No! You know, I kinda–”

  “Yes: you want one thing, and then its opposite. You want not to want the things you want. And it's not so much your reach exceeds your grasp, as–" Ettie held up a hand and bent the wrist back at a hyperextended angle, "you bend the bones inwards on purpose, so that you end up grabbing nothing at all.”

  A frustrated grunt escaped her. She stared down at her own hands, then clenched them into fists. Still Esther remained annoyingly calm. “You know, it's really not fair for you to psychoanalyze me when I can't do it back. I don't understand you–”

  “–understanding me is beyond you. You've accepted that.”

  “I understand that you think of me as like, a-a fucking bug, or, or basically you think I'm dumb–disgusting too.”

  “I find you utterly adorable, actually.”

  “And it makes me feel dumb, even though I'm not. I mean, yeah, I had to drop out of school, but it wasn't my fault, and SORRY, I can't do the shit you do, I'm just a person, okay, and… wait, what?”

  Her chest felt tight; she couldn't tell if it was fear or something else. It didn't make sense… Esther was still smiling, but nothing in her manner indicated a joke.

  “You're always weaving fresh tangles of neuroticism for me to feed on. I find it cute. The gigil you inspire is unbearable.”

  On cute, Calliope flushed further, despite her general anxiety. “Cute. Okay. Alright. So what, I'm like, your fucking pet now?”

  Ettie's head cocked pyfully. “Yes. My puppet. Like a little lion… or a little whining dog. Or maybe–because I know what you ask in your head but don't dare voice–a person that I could call mine.”

  There was no hint of deception: the truth made her cheeks redden all the more. “What? I–but you're,” she stuttered, breaking away to stare at the leftmost wall, “you're… you. I'm me. Why would you ever want to… I, I can't even say ‘date me’, because you're not actually a person. You're not fucking real!”

  It advanced on her, and she could do nothing in response besides whiten with fear and redden with something still unacknowledged.

  "You know that I just love chaos. Instability is interesting. It's endlessly engaging to watch you struggle with your emotions."

  Shit. She knows–

  Shh. I know.

  Callie whimpered.

  Ettie twirled a finger through her hair. "I know the way that you look at me, or what I've let you believe is me, and the yearning alone is appetizing enough."

  "I don't… sorry,” she tripped over her words, “I'm just… I mean, you do it on purpose! You're always fucking with me!”

  Ettie's smile showed a thin strip of teeth. A shrug of Its shoulders drew her eyes down as they fell: down, down, to the bck tights shrinkwrapped over shapely legs. Callie quickly brought them back up when It spoke again: “But you can't live long on instability. I don't mind pying this role for you. I expected the need for an eventual resolution.”

  “What role? What is it? I don't give a shit anymore, just… stop torturing me?”

  Now It was close. Stepping forward, Esther took her hands in Its, fixing her in pce. Those eyes opened far too wide into a world of colours beyond her capacity for dreaming.

  "You already know, puppet. Somewhere in that pink maize you call a mind there's a kernel of truth. You only have to let it pop. What do you want?"

  What do you want, Callie?

  Calliope tilted her head down, the only motion It allowed. The petiteness of the girl in front of her always deceived as to her impact. Esther was rger than life, intoxicating, in multiple ways: the way It forced rouge into her cheeks; the way Its projection struck her dumb with Its beauty; the way It gave her warm and fuzzy feelings in the pit of her stomach. If Ettie were literally anyone else–if she weren't just the fake persona of an alien god–Calliope would leap at the opportunity to be with someone so beautiful, so interesting, so understanding of her idiosyncrasies. Maybe she could even forgive murder for all that. But she still didn't understand why, why her?

  She stared up at the web of metal tresses. What did Ettie really feel? Did Ettie really feel at all, and did that matter? It performed the emotions well enough. So couldn't she be satisfied with the mask, if the mask was human-shaped? What was the difference, really, between Ettie the Entity and Ettie the person? Questions attacked the solute of her mind until it was all but dissolved.

  What do you want?

  It was going to make her say it. If she kept mum, she'd be standing paralyzed hand-in-hand with Ettie until the sun burned out and beyond and time caught up to anything that thought it could escape Her. Calliope took a deep breath and looked down into her face. That was a mistake: over-round eyes stared up in false anticipation.

  "I… I want… this, I guess," she whispered. Ettie squeezed her hands: continue, the gesture said. The corners of Its mouth twitched. "This was… nice. Sometimes when you're not creepy as fuck you're almost like a friend. Maybe more, I dunno. Gahh, this is too fucking weird, I can't!" At st It let her break away and turn her back to It.

  What the fuck was she doing? She was admitting to having a crush on someone light-years out of her league–wasn't that incredibly childish of her? How could It view her feelings as anything more than the human equivalent of puppy-love: cute, sweet, sure, but meaningless, not a love between persons but between greater and lesser, person and pet?

  There was an off-white hand over her shoulder. "Let me silence your anxieties for you?"

  She whirled around to face It. "Those are my thoughts, okay? I'm an anxious person. You're just gonna end up lobotomizing me–"

  It all happened much too fast. In a way she was right: It did lobotomize her. One moment she was staring down, chastising It, and the next: Esther stood on tiptoes, her face much too close, her eyes much too rge, much too colourful, and her lips much too in contact with Callie's own. Heat welled up from her core to fill her head, like a hot-air balloon, buoyed by the joy it sparked into her body through the kiss. Esther's lips were too soft, too easy to slide hers over as she melted in the heat and returned the gesture. And that aroma: like the sweetest thing she'd ever tasted, like marshmallow, like Necco wafers or Moxie soda or some stranger tincture. Yes, yes, yes: Esther was intoxicating, now in one additional way, through the pleasure It poured from Its mouth into hers. Calliope forgot herself beneath the radar dish. There were those anxieties silenced, all right–repced with the wet and tender sounds of two apparent humans joining faces.

  She broke away after an immeasurable moment, half-expecting to fall from a great height upon losing the weightlessness of romance. The world spun around her, like the radio telescope's dish if it were in motion… but Esther held her hands to steady her from falling. The look on Its face showed It to be satisfied. She watched Its lips move in a daze, still imagining how good it felt to kiss them.

  "To you I can be many things. Tormentor, mostly… but there are many kinds of torment. This is one."

  "I," she babbled, leaning down, "can we do that again?"

  It snickered. "Later, maybe… if you pedal back especially quickly."

  She rushed for the door. Back to her bike, back to the series of buses now even ter in the night, back wherever, it didn't matter; the imperative was now getting home, no matter what.

  Calliope skipped through the front door with unusual giddiness. The return journey from Westford was marked with memory holes like Swiss cheese, succeeded by the vague sense of having fallen asleep once on each of the buses whisking her back into downtown. Ettie must've taken over then to transfer her… but that was only an informed guess, because Ettie was nowhere to be found now. Her lips still tingled with the memory of kissing It.

  She had some real-life matters to attend to, first. It was well past one in the morning, so she expected to find the apartment dark and silent, only to be greeted instead by light pouring out into the hallway on her left and the unpleasant sound of someone retching.

  "Erika?" She ventured. The light was coming from the far bathroom; she double-checked that the near one still had its warding paper stuck with tape. Yes, it did, with contents still unreadable–meaning that Esther was still there somewhere, lurking. The thought was comforting now. She pressed against the far door to push it inwards, thickening the sliver of light to near full-width. It bsted her dark-accustomed eyes with a chartreuse aura and revealed the retching's source:

  Erika knelt over the toilet bowl with one arm over it to brace herself. She vomited once more, followed by a pitiful sniffling.

  "Oh. Shit. Erika. Are you okay?" She squatted down to her eye level.

  Erika's eyes raised up to meet hers; she managed a wobbly smile. "Hic–yeah. Hey, Callie. W-when'd you get back? Oh, s–" Quickly she turned back to spew into the bowl again. The grotesque sound tugged at Callie's heartstrings.

  "Fuck… how much did you drink?"

  "Unnnh… notalot? I'm. Lightweight. Asian flush, hahaha," Erika ughed weakly. Her face was almost as red as the strawberries decorating her pajamas. Calliope frowned in reply. When did she have the opportunity to change after going out–or was she drinking from the refrigerator's cache of soju, post-pajama-donning? Was the inspiration for the binge good news or bad? Erika wasn't the type to get wasted like that–she barely had the time to imbibe non-alcoholic meals. There were too many questions and no answers.

  Ettie, I could really use your help right now, she thought. A limb or two darkened in her mind without a word; maybe It was busy ruminating over data from the telescope. Calliope sighed; she straightened up; answers would have to wait.

  She took care of Erika as best she could. There were freezer-burned electrolyte-rich popsicles in the fridge; those she opened and offered to her roommate, who slurped on a cherry-fvored one in earnest. Inside the linen closet there was a puce-colored pstic tub to serve as an alternative to groveling over the toilet: it accompanied the pair of them while she helped Erika onto the sofa. Once there the worst of her intoxication seemed to lessen, turning to from wet to dry heaves in decreasing frequency. Calliope was almost impressed: Erika smelled like alcohol, most definitely, but her perfume was still evident beneath–a rosaceous scent to go along with all the red that filled her face and clothing.

  "Thanks, Callie. You're–hic–a really good friend," Erika slurred at her, leaning a head on her shoulder.

  "Oh, it's like. Uh, no problem," she said. Truth be told, she was anxious to be alone again–Esther seemed unwilling to manifest while Erika was around–but helping a drunk friend in actual need should take priority over mere romantic whims. Kissing her again could wait.

  Erika lifted her head upright. Her right hand reached for Callie's left. Warm, her fingers were too warm; she was probably feverish.

  "Hey, uh, q-question." Erika mumbled.

  "What's up?"

  "You and that girl you're seeing, are you…"

  Oh right. Erika knew a little about Ettie, and she'd never followed up with more information. She turned and made eye contact: her roommate was still flushed a brilliant red, pupils dited so wide almost no iris was visible. Her eyes went in and out of focus, psing between her face and the empty space behind her.

  "Are we…?" She repeated.

  "Ex… exclusive." Erika murmured.

  "...what?" Time stood still. Something was wrong.

  Erika rocked forward and back, at first only an inch at a time, but then: inhaled sharply through her nose and pounced forward to pnt her face on hers.

  "Mmmf!" Callie tasted roses and hard liquor on her mouth; she pulled away and shook her head like a dog dispersing water. "What the fuck are you–"

  Erika lunged at her again. Her reaction time was sluggish; their lips touched for another few agonizing seconds before she pushed her off. "Erika! Stop!"

  The dark-haired girl's head lolled back and forth. "Please… Callie, please."

  "This is wrong, you're drunk, I–I don't understand why this is happening. I–"

  "Don't. I don't care." Erika crawled towards her, pursing her lips. Her intent was clear; without thinking Callie shoved her on each shoulder. "Stop!"

  Erika fell away from her onto her side, with only her torso raised, her head dangling towards the sofa back so that a curtain of bck hair concealed her face. Callie took deep breaths to calm herself, to little success: Erika's head and shoulders quivered, faster and faster while a rattling breathy sound grew and grew.

  Laughing. Erika was ughing.

  "I–" she had no words. None of it made any sense. Erika's face was hidden from her by hair, so that in the dark, she almost looked like–

  "No." she whispered. No. No, no, no–

  Its head turned towards her. Erika's eyes were wide, blown-out, their darkness opening all the way to the distant image of that nuclear chaos she recognized immediately.

  "Boo," Ettie said, in her own voice, with drool or horror seeping out from Erika's every facial orifice.