David Chang woke up alone, cold, and soppy. That meant he'd been drinking. But why? He never drank anymore. He knew how he was when he was drunk.

Unsteady, head twirling like Missy whenever she had a song stuck in her head, he got to his feet. Missy. Oh god, she had been there. She'd seen him drunk. She was going to fire him. He didn't know what he did, but he must have done something irreparably damaging to both his career and self-esteem. That was just how these things went.

A cup crunched underfoot, and some flat champagne leaked out onto the floor. David stumbled away, caught himself on the chair that still housed Missy's jacket and sank gratefully into it. The lights were too bright, humming. The air was freezing cold.

He tried to recall what had happened. Almost without conscious thought, David pulled Missy's jacket in his arms, enjoying the warmth its heavy felt provided. Her perfume lingered on it, like pressed flowers, afternoon light, dust, and a hint of smoke. David had learned it well over the past year. It brought to mind flashes of Missy in his arms, cool-skinned and handsy as he tried to talk to her about something very... something very important. His head resting on her chest, hearing her heartbeat, counting the quick flutter. If David was lucky, that was just a flash of uncomfortable dreams instead of uncomfortable reality.

She created some conflict in interests in him. It wasn't just Dr Skarosa who created 3W, after all. Missy had been involved since the beginning, helping him contact the dead and rich alike. David would have loved to been there for that process.

But he came in later, after the infrastructure was already in place, the funding already found. They just needed people to man the mausoleums. Missy was the one who accepted David when he failed so many other interviews, never got out or met anyone, resigned himself to letting his doctorates and accomplishments fade away. At first he couldn't figure out what a mausoleum needed with a bioinformatics specialist, but once Missy explained, David was captivated by the idea, by everything 3W represented and meant to do.

Yet she scared him, and he was ashamed to say it was because of her femaleness: pet names, pet touches, feminine but not demure. David wasn't equipt to deal with that. In school and in other offices it was always men he talked to, brilliant men but men nonetheless, who knew how to keep their distance. Girls were rarely present, much less his superiors.

Even with no degrees that he'd ever seen, no academic titles, Missy could grind all those brilliant men under her dainty kitten heels. She was some sort of prodigy, David was sure. And she made him feel as though he were an intrinsic part of the plan. The Nethersphere in particular was of interest to him, given his field. David wanted to take it apart just to see how it worked, but it was central to 3W's existence and off-limits to tampering, at least by him. While Dr Skarosa got all the credit, David knew Missy played a much larger part in its creation than officially documented. He had seen it down a scant few times with layers of skirts and boots sticking out from under it, like a witch that got a house dropped on her, as Missy did maintenance, and it was mostly she who talked about it specifically. David had been happy to listen.

It was a good thing that they had together, David thought, especially since Dr Skarosa passed on earlier last year.

Then he'd gone and bunged it up, and for what, exactly?

David buried his face in her jacket, as though it would block out the world. The world -

He remembered why he'd been drinking.

That couldn't have actually happened, could it have? He saw it online, but that wasn't the same as real life. There was no way London was burning. Alien invasions, sure, those happened, fact of life by now, but there were protocols and procedures in place to deal with them. London had to be safe. He had to check.

David tried the doors to the lift. They didn't open. He mashed the button repeatedly, as though that would fix the problem, then tried to wedge his fingers into the seam before remembering the stairs, the emergency exit.

Locked and locked. Why was everything locked? Where was Missy?

"Hey, guy. Um. David, right?"

David whipped around. The lift was open now, and a man in a tan suit stood in its open door, hand lifted in an awkward wave. He relaxed and gestured for him to come in further. "Seb! Oh, thank god. I thought I was trapped. I - I didn't realize you had come in today."

"Yeah, and lucky I did, huh? It's crazy out there!"

David returned to the chair and sank into it again. Seb sat carefully on another one, as though afraid it would disappear. "So it's true?"

"You bet," Seb said with a grin. Then he leaned forward conspiratorially. "Just out of curiosity, what's true? For some strange reason, I can't seem to access any outside lines." David found it hard to believe he didn't know, but gave him the benefit of the doubt. He didn't really know much about Seb, barely ever saw him most days.

"The prime minister. He killed the president, took over the world. Started killing – killing everyone." An echo of Missy correcting him, not everyone, came to mind. Killing enough to matter, except to her.

"Ah, that sounds about right."

"Why are you so calm?" he asked, getting a feeling of déjà vu. Missy had been like this, serene as a spring day. Maybe it wasn't her being female that scared him. Maybe he should be scared of Seb, too. David couldn't muster the energy to, however, still caught up in the fact that the world was well and properly invaded.

"I've been doing some thinking," Seb said instead of answering. "So, adding in what you told me, check this out: Missy shut down the Nethersphere starting -" he checked his watch. "Oh, twelve hours, 36 minutes ago? What happened twelve hours, 36 minutes ago, David? I hope you don't mind me calling you David. Dr Chang's just so formal."

"N-no. It's fine. The prime minister, all that stuff I said. That happened twelve hours, 36 minutes ago?"

"Thirty-seven, now. But that would be a safe assumption. So Missy shuts down the Nethersphere, just when a giant shipment was coming in courtesy of our prime minister. That doesn't make much sense, now does it?" David shook his head, though he had no clue what Seb was talking about. He had thought Seb was the receptionist or something, but he didn't seem like one right now. He was starting to consider that maybe he'd completely misunderstood what 3W was, what the Nethersphere was. "Unless something's wrong with that shipment. The data, the souls, are corrupt, yeah? Missy was pretty vague, but she knew this was going to happen. So, who is Harold Saxon?"

David felt like a deer on a motorway. He didn't know that. He didn't know anything about the prime minister - destroyer of the world - whatever Harold Saxon was now. Even when he voted, he'd just gone with his instinct.

Seb waved his hand dismissively as David struggled to come up with an answer. "I don't know yet, myself, so I doubt someone like you could. But he's something. Vivian Rook knew, and she died for it, but she didn't know enough. Same as that Winters fellow, blustering as he was. Bleh, I can understand killing him. Those little things, those metal balls-"

"The Toclafane," David supplied. "That's what he called them."

"The Toclafane, maybe it's them that's causing the problem. Missy emptied my data banks to play god, so I can't recall what they are, though I feel I should know them." He leaned on the table, curled his hand in his fist, and pressed it to his mouth, every movement indicative of thinking very, very hard.

David, completely lost and feeling like he was the only one out of the loop, turned on the computer and typed in "Toclafane" then hit enter. Everything still loaded. The Internet hadn't gone down yet.

The hits were jumbled, a thousand theories built on sandcastles. He cleared the search and tried "Harold Saxon" instead. Underneath his political website which still promised halcyon days were more cohesive titles. The Valiant's live feed must have come back online at some point, or he made another announcement.

"People are calling Mr Saxon the Lord and Master of the Human Race?" David tried from the first hits. "Madman. Master of all. Not much on the Toclafane."

"Hah, just typing it in. I forgot you could do it like that. Good job, David. Master of all, eh? Master, master, master." Seb tapped the table with each name, like the drumming that got caught in David's head and never went away, though without any noise to accompany it. The lack of sound when there clearly should be sound hurt David's head, and he went to the water cooler. Nothing was making sense, and he couldn't process all that.

"Ah," Seb said finally, so quietly David almost missed it. He kept refilling his cup, washing out the stale taste of champagne and shame.

"Does that mean something? Aside from it being a good name for a megalomaniac?"

"It does," Seb said with a grin that revealed far too many teeth. "Did you know Missy's just a nickname?"

David shook his head no. "It says Missy on her door, on all her signatures. It's a bit weird for a name, but you should see my middle name. I didn't want to pry. But what does that have to do with anything?"

Seb bit his lip as though he were on the verge of spoiling the punchline of the funniest joke, but instead of laughter, he said, "No, nothing. Just something to think about, yeah?"

David pulled off his glasses and rubbed at his face. He wasn't doing any thinking like this. "I need to lay down."