"Order for Sophia Kato?"

Danika rose from her seat, approached the counter... and stared at her order in awe for a few seconds. Hastily she grabbed it, muttered words of gratitude, and returned to her seat...

Only to find someone else in it.

"Hey, um, sorry to bother you, but I was sitting there."

"Pull up another chair, Woodward. I've been trying to get in touch for a while."

She did exactly that, not once breaking eye contact with the stranger.

"What is it you want?"

"Hm."

Danika tried figuring out the best way to fit her kebab in her mouth while waiting for her visitor to speak. Both were slower going than she would have liked.

"I don't want to pry into affairs that aren't mine, so forgive me if that's the impression I give off. I'm Madeleine, by the way. A friend of a friend, I guess."

"Which friend?"

"Phoebe Deck-"

"Hang on, hang on. What's with this, anyway? I thought kebabs were those tiny little bits of skewered meat. I came here because I wanted a quick snack."

"Um... both of those are called kebabs, actually."

"Really? God, that's so confusing."

"You didn't think anything was amiss when you saw that photo of a large meat wrap up on the menu there?"

"I thought it must have been another thing."

"And fifteen dollars seemed like a reasonable price for a shish kebab, to you."

"I dunno. Sure."

"...I see."

"Sorry, I interrupted you. What were you saying?"

Whitman set her glasses down on the table. "I'm here regarding the murder of Phoebe Deckard. I believe that outside of your shapeshifting-"

"-Reverse shapeshifting, if that's alright-" Danika chewed.

"-you have been answering to a false name in public to avoid any... undesirable encounters with other magical girls."

"I'm going to be totally honest, because I haven't figured out how to lie convincingly: this is pretty much what I was trying to avoid."

"I believe this is because you are harbouring her killer."

"What? Oh, no. She didn't kill her."

Whitman hesitated. "You seem very sure of this."

"I am."

"I'm compelled by my position to arrest her nonetheless, on the suspicion that she did."

"Yeah, that makes sense. You're gonna have to take that up with Kyubey, though."

"What do you mean?"

"He's letting me look after her."

For a moment, Whitman looked almost... horrified, before quickly collecting herself. "So he believes in her innocence too?"

"I don't know. Maybe? Sorry. I don't know how long you've been following this trail, but you've got the wrong person."

"Well then, who could have...?" Slowly she rose. "Thank you for your time, anyway. It's been my pleasure to finally meet you, but I should probably leave you to your morning."

Danika didn't look up from her kebab. "Sure thing. Is the whole fake name thing safe with you?"

Of course, her interrogator was already gone by then. She supposed she'd have to pick a new one.

"Lov-er-ley day for cricket! Clear skies. About twenty-six degrees, at a guess. Wind speed... no idea. Negligible, I reckon. Humidity at, ah... well, who really gives a crap?"

Hope tapped her bat on the dirt strip before the wicket. An understated gesture, but one exuding fell gravity every fielder caught better than they would anything else she would send them.

Characteristic of backyard cricket, the pitch was undersized, local, and makeshift, and short-staffed by a team of very roughly appropriate size. In the game today were three Sydneysiders, plus Marie, two Canberrans, plus Abigail, and two rural New South Welshwomen. As such, the structure of teams was nonexistent; all were fielders, with revolving batswomen and bowlers as they saw fit.

"Which poor sod's bowling at me?"

Representing Sydney at the white line was none other than eighteen-year-old newcomer and dark horse, Crawford. Her preferred delivery was the fast bowl, but would it be fast enough to get past her opponent? Putting her up against returning champion Fearnley might have looked like a risky move, but as one of the fresh faces to this game, she was one of the only bowlers without an empirical 0% chance of bowling her out. Her challenge was going to be figuring out how Fearnley played faster than she could do the same. It was unclear how much of the over she was going to set aside to do that, but, uh, it'd be an interesting day for cricket nonetheless. Over to them.

"If you can bowl Fearno out," Edith thought, "I'll give you fifty dollars."

"What's the catch?"

"Hey, let's not get presumptuous here. Let's put the odds at ten to one."

"I don't have any money."

"No problem. Watching you try would be worth five bucks."

Marie's form went taut, and she ran at the line. It was almost paralysing, not catching an iota of a suggestion that Hope might move on the qui vive for a delivery she would have to consider sensibly, but this was Hope Fearnley, after all, and she had no indication that this would be easy, but she chose to do this not because it was easy, but because it was hard - because this goal would serve to serve and organise the best of her skills and energies. She had come to Jonquil to hone the capabilities of her new self.

She bent back. Her dorsal leg caught her weight against the dirt, and vaulted her forth onto its ventral opposite. Her upper body followed through with the motion, left hand marking her target, right revolving with her inertia, overhead, and outward, outward...

To describe Hope's weight as shifting would not precisely convey her reaction. It appeared more as if she moved with no weight at all, phantasmally she rocked, but her bat, on the other hand, flew with the weight of the moment between waving at the good-humoured, short man you always see out on this street, and realising that oh Christ that's not actually him. Something on her arms shone to life, bright Safire-blue-green, and as bat and ball connected, a wave of sound and heat unbecoming even of the signature crack of the finest six ravaged the air. It sailed in the direction of the fine leg, and careened effortlessly past the park boundary. One of the Canberrans ran off to fetch it, and reported back to Marie that it had left a skid mark on the road beyond.

In her bowl, she had stirred the girls of her team to feel as one; in Hope's six, she bound more tightly the sorority of magical girls.

She tossed it back to her, and Marie saw... no, she was stronger than that now, and if she was not, then she could be, and that began with choosing not to see.

Mastery over the self did not equate to prowess at the game, however, and the drama repeated itself five more times, Marie becoming more exasperated with each delivery, and Hope batting each like it was her first. Could she be called unsporting, for all her effortless skill's implied braggadocio? Who would say it just wasn't cricket? It was, undeniably, at levels none of them had ever seen before.

Marie strewed herself upon a park bench, each breath a fight against her lungs, each bead of sweat almost an effort. Hope, Edith, and Abigail shared no sign of such a fatigue, however, and massed around her uneasily.

"Would you like a water?" Edith tried.

"Heaugh..."

Hope took a seat by Marie's head. "You're alright, darl. You're exhaustion's totally, ah... Edith, what's the word?"

Prior to her contract, Edith had intended to study psychology. Certainly, she had the grades for it on the way out of high school despite the resources available to her hometown, and was planning to move to Sydney on a scholarship to the University of New South Wales. A scholarship she was forced to reject upon exchanging her soul for the power to save a drowning child she had stumbled upon by a strange sequence of happenstance. She didn't mind, though - her intention in her studies had been to save lives. Now she could.

"Psychosomatic."

"Right, yeah. It's all your mind playing silly buggers with you. You could stand up just fine right now, if you wanted."

"Wheagh..." Marie disagreed. She laid back on her bed. "Hey, Kyub. You there?"

"As always."

"What do you think of this? It's from that essay Hope was telling me about."

He leapt from her shelf and curled up by her side.

"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed "women's experience," as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion."

"What about it?"

"It doesn't make any sense! This is why I hate postmodernists."

"It makes perfect sense. You're just having trouble accepting that it could mean more than one thing at once. You were raised on language, and most of your thinking is very linear as a result."

"How so?"

"It says in the previous paragraph: 'Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true'."

"Yeah? What does that entail?"

"When it says 'The international women's movements have constructed "women's experience," as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object', it's being ironic."

"This is the opposite of making sense."

"Do you think 'women's experience' is a naturally pre-existing phenomenon to be discovered, or do you think it's socially constructed?"

"A bit of both?" Marie took a deep breath. "Like, I guess it arises from already-existing social realities, but turning everything it encompasses into the one idea of 'women's experience' is definitely a social construct."

"Do you realise how much this also holds true for?"

"Oh, uh... all sorts of things, I guess. Race? Sexuality? Maybe even stuff like physical fitness? Attractiveness? Like, of course there are all these traits that exist in a person innately, but it's not necessarily natural fact that you can grab all these attributes and throw them together, and say 'these are all the factors in... how healthy you are, or how hot you are'."

"That's the irony the essay refers to. It's also the cyborg."

"How is that the cyborg?"

"It's both natural and constructed. But the line between physical and social reality is also constructed. Cyborgs approach this fact ironically, so it's actually more precise to say that the cyborg (is/is not) both natural and constructed."

"Is this what it means when it says, 'the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion'?"

"Well, (that's/that's not) also true."

Exhausted, Marie lifted herself off her bed. Wide awake, she did the same from the park bench.

The physical capabilities of her body - a confused boundary between organism and alien machine - were therefore both of physical and social reality. To what human she could have been, there was a great pain in standing. The magical girl in her saw the electrical signals behind the sensation. Or perhaps even that was untrue - she understood they were one and the same, from two perspectives. Any perceived difference was only parallax.

Hope beamed. "Howzat feel?"

"I've never been in this much control of... well, anything before. Is this just... something I can do now?"

"It's like learning to walk again. For a while, it's gonna take a lot of effort. But stick at it and it's just gonna be what life is like."

"I imagine you figured it out while learning to walk, too."

"Oh, nah. I figured this out first."

"Showoff."

Abigail giggled, but immediately composed herself and went red in the face. Hope and Edith were lepid enough about the whole affair (and their own orientations, for that matter) to say nothing of the matter, and Marie was equally prone to flustering, if not moreso.

"You're finally getting the hang of it then, ay?" Hope rocked back and forth, eager to... well, her place was oiling the hinges of the closet's door, and nothing more. She could do that.

"I'd like to think so."

"Good, because I'm gonna throw you in the deep end for a bit now."

Hope punched a railgun bolt into the side of the road, and led Marie a small way out of town.

"Where are we going?"

"Not far."

"Enough time for me to ask a stupid question?"

"No such thing."

"Well, I didn't want to ask in front of everyone else who Anneliese Holzknecht was."

Hope stared at her like she'd 1990's-quality-CGI-morphed into a small pot of Dijon mustard. "Have I never told you?"

"I've gotten vague gists, but I'm wondering why she was a big enough deal for Ruth to research so much in the first place. All I know is she was some sort of 19th century scientist."

"She was... gosh, how do I put this nicely?"

"How many 19th-century scientists can you talk about without starting with 'how do I put this nicely? Oh wait, they were batshit insane'?"

"Point! Yeah, she was batshit insane. Slept around, and was not opposed to the idea of vivisecting her partners in bed. That kind of insane."

"Yeesh."

"She did learn a lot from that, though. The knowledge is a bit outdated, but it is pretty foundational to our understanding of how magic physically works."

"Oh yeah?"

"...Ish."

"Works... ish?"

Hope nodded, vaguely forlorn. "Worksish. She was a liar, and a bloody powerful one. Could speak anything she wanted into reality, all sorts of things. Time paradoxes. Mysterious deaths. Maybe even decoding witchspeak, who knows? And what's more, these things worked retroactively. If she still loathed someone after an argument six months prior, she could have them dead the day of."

"Really? So she was basically omnipotent, then?"

"You'd think that, but this power would only work on about 1% of the things she tried it on. 1%'s still a lot, mind you, but nothing to write home about. No, that's what the vivisecting's for."

"Do you think it might be worth buying a German phrasebook to talk to Thalia anyway?"

"No clue. Could be."

Hope slowed her pace.

"All good?"

"Right... here." She planted a second bolt.

"You're about to say something absurd, aren't you? I can tell now."

"No! No, not at all."

"I don't believe you."

"I've just been measuring in my head, and right now we're exactly 400 metres from the bolt."

Marie sighed. "How do you 'measure in your head'?"

"Think you're up to a 400 metre sprint?"

"I mean sure, but the road's pretty uneven. It's not going to be impressive."

"Give it a shot anyway."

Put as such, how could one as eager to impress as Marie ever refuse? She stretched an octet of hastily improvised stretches and assumed her mark.

Hope did not need to count down for her. All she had to do was send a single, instant starting signal by her mind alone, and Marie was off.

Four hundred metres later, she revolved halfway around her heel and jogged back. "How was that?"

Hope gestured to her watch. "A minute thirteen. No good. Go again."

Marie assumed her position D.C., although not without a scowl this time. "This is going to be even worse now that I've just sprinted 400 metres, you know."

"Remember the Sydney Olympics?"

"You wouldn't even care if I passed out right here."

"The girls I was living with at the time took me there. Nine-year-old me was awestruck by the whole shebang."

"Every Australian remembers the women's 400 metre. Get on with it."

"Come off it. Gi's a chance to finish what I'm saying."

Marie rolled her eyes.

"And you know, I still remember the times being called. Merry did 49.72, and that was less than one-tenth of a second fast enough to secure the bronze. Fenton did 49.58, and on that level, that's an impressive lead to have over the person behind ya."

"So you just have these numbers memorised, do you?"

"But Freeman! Goodness me, Australia's own Freeman managed 49.11 seconds!"

"I never realised it, but she's gotta be like, the archetypal Fearno role model."

"You'd think that, wouldn't you? I dunno. I think her political activism is inspiring for sure, but I was only there cheering for what she was trying to represent. Actual athletic achievement doesn't impress me all that much, you know? I mean it's all just moving matter about, the only difference between running and, say, raking leaves is your brain's in the key object of the former. And even then, you move that all the time anyway! Not to mention the professional sporting world is a hell of a corrupt institution, even if individual athletes can use it as a platform for good. So I'm not impressed. Besides, you're gonna do better than 49.11 seconds now."

Marie abandoned her mark in sheer astonishment. "You expect me to run faster than an Olympic gold medalist?"

"No, darl. I expect you to run faster than a 'uman."

Something in Marie's mind... changed, to think that way. It was not like accepting the floor falling out from under her, rather, it was demanding as much. It was like a rhythm so constant that not once in her life had she noticed it suddenly accelerated. She picked up, now, on slight ripples betwixt body and every other piece of reality it acted upon.

"American radical feminists like Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations—and perhaps restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language. They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval's terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self."

Marie could feel beyond what she had so arrogantly clung to as her preconception of self for so long. How narrow-minded, that she should presume it to be the singular truth, the very thing the Knight had warned her against believing in. There was no reason to believe that this body was hers simply because it had neurons and muscles she could control, any more than the ground beneath her or the air around her. This was not a new idea coming to her, now. It was old, perhaps the oldest, that one's life was the tiniest (but by no means insignificant) fraction of a greater whole. Until some two hundred years prior, not one person who stood where she did now had doubted what she was only now understanding in the most roundabout, abstract way possible. Until a few centuries before that, perhaps not a single person in the world ever had.

But it was the practicality, not the commonality, of this knowledge that mattered, and she discovered that almost instantly. Perhaps as a human she would have been too set in her ways to notice, but now it was all apparent before her - the particles within her body, within the space between it and the 400 metre mark. Each of them went by particular, literally elementary, rules. And seeing this, she could calculate a program - a series of interactions within her control that could move the body from A to B with optimal velocity.

And like that, she was off.

She bounded forth from a standing start. Magic played the parts mere musculature could not, and more elegantly than she had expected of herself - pushing her further, constantly iterating and improving on the minutiae of her trajectory - but the further she went, the harder it became to find the difference between the two. By the time she landed at the finishing line, she was in her full blue and red regalia.

But she only went further.

It was enlightening, this speed. It was another world which looked the same and sounded the same and smelled the same but very markedly was not, was her own. She shot like this down a side road, and each skim across the dirt and gravel came with a fine ripple which made her heart flutter.

The illusion was broken by Hope matching her speed on her flank.

"Sub-forty! That's fantastic for a first-timer. That's more than ten metres a second."

"I could go faster if I wanted," Marie pouted. "This speed just feels comfortable."

Hope flipped over Marie's head to the opposite flank. "Reckon you can hold it?"

"Yeah. This is all coming to me surprisingly naturally."

"Sweet as. Well then, dodge this."

Marie didn't quite grasp the segue into the shoulder tackle - but then it quite literally hit her, after which she just as literally (and just as quite) ate dirt.

Slowly she rose. "We're still in the deep end, then."

Hope pulled her up. "Don't forget any majjo worth their salt is this fast. That means there are gonna be some fights you can't run from. Try again."

Marie stepped back, once, twice, but did as instructed, this time off into the bush. As she glided so elegantly through the trees, and across the ground as if only a skimming stone, she had to wonder: is this what wavedashing would feel like?

The moment was not to last, though - without the slightest sound to suggest her presence, Hope was already fifteen metres directly in front of her, then ten, then five, and when her elbow was a blink from Marie's breadbasket, it occurred to her that she would do rather well to actually do something about it.

She caught the elbow faster than she expected from herself, and then a follow-up jab to the eyes which, a month ago, she wouldn't even have seen (not just because predicting a punch a month in advance is near-impossible).

Hope tried a third blow, but Marie pushed her away, conjured a hammer, and...

Well, and Hope deflected it effortlessly. "Never throw your own blows, kid."

"Wait, what?"

"You should never be the one dishing it out. Sure, maybe a punch here or there just to disorient your enemies, but you're on the side of nonviolence. The deeplighters? Lara and that? They will take whatever they can to bring you down. Don't give 'em that."

"If you have two sides to a conflict and only let one use violence-"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all this! But guess what, Marie? Less than half a decade ago, I had to steal shit to get by. And I got arrested for that! The Sydney you've fallen into isn't like that. Getting into that kind of trouble is something you can steer clear of now, and you'd bloody well better."

Had Marie really not told her that the police came around to her house?

"So when I say, 'dodge this,' that's all I mean to say. Speaking of,"

If that was how it was going to be, sobeit.

Hope shoved Marie back dizzyingly far, but Marie righted herself in time to avoid a palm to her jaw, faked left, and shot off to the right.

She knew she couldn't dream of outpacing Hope, nor could she outrank her in durability. But what, then, was her objective without being able to hit back? And believe her, if Hope was to be so pretentious, she really wanted to.

Her pursuer was silent again, but not undetectable. If there existed quanta of Hope-ness, they buzzed in Marie's mind in droves. This time, Hope came at her far too slow. Marie caught her wrist and used their combined momenta to throw her aside. Did that count as a blow, she wondered, and dare she say, 'bitch'?

Hope recovered just as quickly, and threw her against the ground, but this force felt no different to the strength with which she could propel herself. Maybe it was greater, but that just made enduring and further leaning into her careening across the ground all the more exhilarating. Hope came at her again, this time too quickly. She only kept up her retreat so that when they collided, the force between them was almost nothing.

The trouble was that they found themselves now on the edge of a small cliff.

Marie had no doubt that this new strength would allow her to survive the fall easily, but she found it far more important to ask herself if she wanted to need that in the first place.

"Well," Hope admitted. "This is suitably melodramatic, ay?"

Marie didn't answer. She tried to throw Hope off her, but the moment Hope hit the ground, she rolled into a seamless overhead sweep and threw her clean off the edge.

It was unnecessary, but Marie felt nonetheless compelled of her own volition to scream in terror. This swiftly proved inadvisable when she struck a tree stubbornly jutting from a crack in the rock face and winded herself mid-yelp.

"Shit! You right, darl?"

Marie wheezed, and, careful not to make any sudden movement that might dislocate her from the bough which seemed ever eager to shrug her off, tried through her mind, "Yeah. All good. This tree broke my fall."

"What's it doing there?"

"Growing through the rock, it seems. That's kind of what plants..."

"What?"

"Oh God."

"What? Marie, what's wrong?"

"The crack in the rock face here. It's shockingly clean. It's like a straight line."

"Well it would be, wouldn't it? Don't minerals tend to form in...?"

"Yeah."

"Oh Christ, Marie. You don't think...?"

"I don't know." Marie shuddered.

"Well, fuck me. Do you think we should tell anyone? I'm sure we could borrow Auntie Ruthy's phone, if needs be."

"No, I want to be sure first. Tomorrow, when we're back home, I'm gonna look into it. I don't want to worry anyone if I'm wrong."

Morosely, Hope nodded. "That sounds sensible."

Marie didn't know what to say to that. She had never wanted to be caught up in any of this in the first place. She was in a world which, not long ago, she wanted nothing to do with. How was she to judge the weight of everything that befell her?

And yet, there was one thing nagging at her. One thing Hope seemed to shaken by the implication of what she had told her to even consider. So she asked,

"Now do you think you can help me up off this cliff face?"

"Oh, shit. Right, of course."

Marie naturally grew reluctant for the remainder of the day at the thought of en(joy/dur)ing another excursion with Hope 'to test her potential', although gentle coaxing by Edith and Abigail began to dispose her to the notion by way of the prospect of stargazing.

"It's not like in the city," Abigail explained. "You don't get the light pollution. You can see what feels like hundreds of times as many stars."

"Yeah, I know."

"Plus," Edith added, "you can see the strains of dark energy that run through the universe. Little-known perk to being a mag- well, probably pretty common knowledge before Victorian times or whenever."

"Wait, for real?"

Two hours later came the opportunity for Marie to validate that claim for herself. The four of them journeyed once more out beyond the edges of town, guided to an optimal observation point by none other than the Incubator.

There stood an observation platform on top of a mountain, which, in the wake of tectonic activity's scarcity on the continent, was Australian slang for a very big hill.

"How long does this usually take?"

"Oh, give your eyes a few minutes to adjust," Hope insisted.

She nodded. Presently she caught her mind beginning to wander, but allowed it to slip through her fingers. What was she to make of the past two days? So much had happened. So little of it made any sense whatsoever. What had the Knight tried to tell her?

"Hey, Kyub," she offered, aside, "I've got a puzzle for you."

"I'd said before that you'd need something novel to perplex me."

"And I've got something. Hear this."

"Is that so?"

"Do you think that a hypothetical omnipotent being would have free will?"

"Of course it would. The contrary is absurd."

"Would you say free will is the ability to make and execute decisions?"

"That sounds a logical enough definition for me."

"Would the omnipotent being ever be made to reckon with the advantages and disadvantages of two or more options? Or would it be able to simply achieve whatever it wanted?"

"Does that invalidate its capacity to make decisions?"

"Well, would there be any circumstances under which it would? If there are none, then that's no different to it being unable. Right?"

"...Very good, Marie. If I had the capacity to be impressed, I might hazard the hypothesis that now would be one such time in which I am."

She smirked. "You flatter me, you really do."

"That's correct."

Marie laid on her back. The heavens above shone bright, brighter than she'd ever seen, but she knew this was an illusion - away from the city, there was no other light to compare to, nothing to tighten her pupils any longer. She laid perfectly still for only about half a minute. In that time, the skies unveiled their secrets to her, new stars fading into view everywhere there could be stars, and still more on the way. It was beautiful. It was enough to make her head spin.

She looked deeper.

She saw what she never could have before, distortions in the sky, interrupting the view like watching her reflection through scratched steel, infinitely thin and resonating with the rush of reality, and all at once she found herself rising within her mind, lifted to see what something deep inside her mind had tried to show her, now she saw, scales greater, greater than she knew how to understand and greater still, each star remaining a single point in the sky and now almost close enough to touch, the webs of dark energy running through the universe now more beautiful, more natural, much as she had... maybe seen in a scientific illustration in the past, but as she kept moving, now out beyond the light barrier which defined the shrinking grasp of the observable universe, and crushing her now was the idea that had been shaped into this incomprehensible beauty now being broken down and reforged into dread because something that she could feel must never ever happen was happening, had happened now for two million years, entire cosmic structures which held the whole of the universe together were now small enough in her mind that she could play with them between her finger, and yet, when she looked up, she saw, perhaps a billion times her superior in scale, perhaps greater, not the form, but the undeniable suggestion of a single eye, wide open, boring into her, and she awoke from her trance as a hundred images of great and terrible and unfathomable things plunged clean through and impaled her mind, and as she rose to her feet, she was vaguely aware of her friends calling out to her, asking if she was okay, but she lacked the strength to do more than lean on a birch tree, which, when she thought about it, was odd, because she thought only eucalypts grew out here... that said, on closer inspection, this was a eucalypt, which was also odd, because she thought birches were the trees that had the pattern like- but birches didn't blink, and unless she was very much mistaken... no, she was not mistaken, she turned and ran, she didn't know where, perhaps back into Jonquil, and on the road she passed a "Don't drive tired / We're watching" PSA on a sign she was certain had less exaggerated eye imagery earlier, and later a yellow W5-type warning sign advising drivers, apparently, of an eye, and she came into Jonquil, into Ruth's front yard, excused herself into the house loudly with Sarah going completely mad at her panic, but Marie stumbled past her, into the loungeroom where Ruth was watching a television displaying a single, human- alright, she was definitely sensing a pattern here, but too much of her mind was still in disarray to pay attention to the words of Ruth's empathetic panic, or those of her friends bursting in through the door, and she

"I'm sorry, darl. I've never seen someone have a reaction to it like that before."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"If I'd known-"

Marie batted her hand back. "Can you shut the fuck up for two minutes?"

Hope flinched, then dropped it and looked back out the window.

"You better not be fighting in my car," Lorna sneered.

Marie huffed. "Give me a break."

"What even happened?"

"I said I didn't want to talk about it."

Mind to mind, Hope passed on, "She saw something out in the sky when we went stargazing last night. From the sounds of things, it was so... incomprehensible to her that to her subconscious mind, the only solution was to flood the brain with enough serotonin to outright kill her."

Marie curled up a little. Images coursed through her mind, images of a sandstorm tearing Ruth's house apart into a desert waste, of an immense cathedral casting its shadow over the sand while slowly disintegrating, of a girl on her knees, howling in pain, while a bright light tore the left eye from her skull, of a tea shrub in bloom upon an altar, of the man who tried to kill her blinking out of existence...

Of a half-finished titanic concrete cube, balanced impossibly on one corner, on a podium inscribed with seventeen sigils.

"But she's fine now, right? You guys healed her, I'm guessing."

"That we did."

"So why's she being such a little bitch about it?"

There were so many things Hope wanted to say in response. That she'd failed her. That Lorna clearly didn't know the lingering pain of death. That Marie had spent most of her life sheltered from discomfort. But it felt right to say nothing.

And the narrative, once again, respected that. It decided it had better things to do. I asked it, well, such as? And it pointed out that it had been almost a year since it had last taken paid leave. So where to now? I inquired. And it scratched its chin and postulated quietly... well, I've always wanted to see Mexico.
I asked if it could speak up, please. It repeated the word Mexico. It being on leave, I had no right nor intention to object.

Gerard was a computer game designer, and while he nary caught a mention even in discussions of local circles, he was nonetheless prolific, certainly enough to find a sense of satisfaction within himself. His obscurity was largely owed to his body of work existing for younger audiences, in an attempt to conquer mankind's ultimate goal of combining learning and fun (for which theorists believing that such a thing were possible had optimistically coined the portmanteau "edutainment").

His life was changed forever when he rapped gently on his manager's door. His manager's name was Abel, and he was a short, balding man who had joined the company in the belief that he wouldn't have to speak to anyone. Much to his dismay, he soon found himself at its head, and had stayed there for eight years.

"You wanted to see me?"

"Ah! Gerard! Yes. Come in, come in."

"Is everything alright?"

"Welllll..."

"That's a no."

"That is, in fact, a no. For your loyalty to this company I thought it better to call you in and tell you myself-"

"I'm being laid off?!"

"Relax, relax! I didn't say that."

Gerard let out a breath of relief.

"...Yet. But yes."

"What!?"

"I'm sorry, Gerard, but we don't have the money to keep you on board anymore. We're outsourcing our talents. You know, to basement-dwelling twenty-somethings with undiagnosed ADHD."

"You can't do this to me!"

"We have to."

"I've devoted the past five years of my life to taking every challenge you throw at me, and realizing the impossible dream of making learning fun!" He cast his fists to the sky. "Are you not edutained?!"

Abel's high school crush, Irenea, was, at the time, a police detective in rural Sweden. She worked in a department assigned the more menial tasks and potential prank calls, disparagingly dubbed "the foreign legion" by its contemporaries for its conspicuously relatively high (i.e. two people) non-Swedish makeup. It was about 2:30 in the morning when she and two peers - Juho and Edvin - were assigned to investigate a crop circle about fifteen miles away from their station.

She slammed the car door shut behind her and shone her flashlight into the dark. Two more beams joined her own.

"What do you make of it, boys?"

Edvin thought on the matter for a moment. "It makes me wonder..."

"Yes?"

"Why did the X-Files stop being good? It's not just me, right? It's as if one episode it was good, and then suddenly, it wasn't. What happened?"

Irenea sighed. "Juho?"

"Are you asking if I believe in aliens, ma'am?"

"If you'd like."

"Not really. But my ukki did. Said one day, about an hour or two of driving was wiped from his memory, and some very alien-looking equations were written in the frost on his window."

"Wow."

"But he said he didn't care. Nothing from that has ever come up in his life since."

"...I see. And what do you make of the crop circle?"

"You know those really long-winded badly-formatted web 1.0 sites that ramble on about conservative conspiracy theories for absurd lengths? I think crop circles are those for aliens."

The crop circle had been left by Benedita, a magical girl in Dili, East Timor, who was devoting almost every waking moment to disguising her blossoming psychic abilities from her firmly Christian father, in such a way that they seemed to manifest as innocuous phenomena at random points around the world. Today, however, success was limited.

Fernando was a man with a short temper, and when he noticed manifestations of small objects falling out of his television screen during the morning news, he was quick to blame his daughter.

"You're falling down a dark path," he exclaimed. "You have to control yourself, you awful girl!"

Benedita winced. A pen fell off a table in uptown Rabat.

"Why won't you talk to me about any of this?" he demanded, in the wake of her having talked to him about this causing him to blame her in the first place.

"I'm sorry..."

"Come on, Benedita. I know this isn't like you. You must-"

From the backyard, their dog barked as loudly as it could. Listening closely, he discovered it was not alone. There were other woofs and howls exclaimed from throughout the neighborhood.

"Is this your doing?"

"No! I swear, it isn't!"

He huffed at her anyway and stormed out into the street. It was almost sunrise, and in the twilight, there was a silver-haired man on all fours, his image flickering and stuttering and color-sorting. He looked up at Fernando with luminous eyes, and a half-eaten small white mammal between his teeth.

Albert dropped the Incubator carcass. "Excuse me," he tried, "do you think you could give me a lift to the airport?"

The narrative, at this point, became irate that I would quash its moment of complete irrelevance so suddenly, and submitted now to journey to the University of Hong Kong's Department of Sociology, wherein the sleepless undergraduate Yuen Wai-Fong leaned on a wall and handwrote the last of the prior week's essay. It was well-written, she had to admit to herself, but completely insubstantial. This suited the grander patterns of the universe perfectly, of course, because much the same could be said of the story she had been written into.

It would take only a fifteen-second walk to submit the assignment, of course - she had assumed a station as close as possible to the office of her mentor without the risk of actually being seen putting together such a late submission. But now that it was done, the stress of repeated failure was momentarily alleviated, and it was with unreasonable jollity that she knocked on the office door of a certain Professor Chang.

UNSORTED FRAGMENTS, PART 1

Compiled by Ruth Cahill-Madigan.

Grown in the centre of an otherwise empty plain was a solitary walnut tree. It did not age, nor change with the seasons, nor sway in the wind. Nobody and nothing ate from it. Most did not know it was there.
The gardener knew it was there, and this infuriated her. She had spent lifetimes trying to pick and crack but one nut, and in all that time had not so much as managed to climb a branch. Though empirically, there was no reason to believe any day promised fruit for her labour, she toiled nonetheless, and endlessly - for when she succeeded, she would be the first in all of time to eat of the tree.
An elderly woman in a tattered shroud approached her. "Do you hunger, child?"
"Terribly."
"Is there no food from wherever you have come?"
"There is plenty, but what is that worth? If I were to pick one walnut here, I would be the only person to ever do so."
"Surely you crave meat and vegetables more than a single nut, don't you?"
The gardener shook her head. "My appetite for those is sated every day."
"Ah... so you desire it, because you can't have it."
"No, I desire it because nobody else can. If I could pick but one, I would be the stuff of legend."
The shrouded woman smiled. "Is that all you desire, then? No more? Well... I don't see any harm in giving you just one. Feel free to take whichever you so please."
It was at this time that the gardener almost grew frustrated with the crone's mockery, only to find that when she picked one next, it fell into her hand with no effort. She was lost for words. She turned to thank the old woman, but found she was no longer there.
Still, it mattered not. Even assisted, she had achieved the impossible. She knew that never in her life would she taste anything greater than this walnut.
But in the end, alas, what irony - for the remainder of her days, she was unable to crack it.

- Lena Lopatina, 1720

Somewhere far away, as far away as she could make herself from any outside world, the Scientist had holed herself up deep within the heart of a great cave, where her studies could go undisturbed by the idiocy of the masses.
But was she alone? No, heavens no, she was surrounded at all times by the eternal, irrefutable laws of nature, and that was overbearing company enough. Picture, then, if you could, her outrage at the presence of novel laws, which imposed upon her research of their own volition. What's more, these rules were no mere mathematical equivalences and limits, and they could not be reduced to anything as elegant as formulae and constants. No; it was as if the universe had decided to speak to her.
"What is it? I'm busy." The scientist did not look up - indeed, there was nothing to look up at - as she proceeded to take down the day's observations.
"Your studies are not proceeding as well as you'd hoped."
"And what of it?"
"Is there anything you're going to do about that?"
"There is nothing to be done. This world is too small to answer my questions. Its rules are too restrictive. You yourself are not helping."
"But suppose you could ordain your own... what would you do with that power? Could you further the pursuit of knowledge like that?"
The scientist hesitated. "I do suppose that would be an interesting change of pace. What knowledge is built into the architecture of reality?"
"Nothing you might find without a terrible choice. The balance of everything is in disarray, and power only comes in halves. Would you lead the world nobly, with the shepherd's crook, or would you rule by strength, and pursue the flail?"
"I tire of reasoning with a savage world. Therefore, I will take your flail."
And so she seized the flail.
"Very well, but you have already failed to see through the falsehood of the choice, and your rule will be blind. If you still long for the deepest truth to everything, you'd do well to journey to the bottom of the ocean, where no light can interrupt your sightless authority."

- Anneliese Holzknecht, 1859