Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER SIXTEEN Round forty-two was at nine, and at nine the room was not a room. That is the honest first line of it. I walked through the door the annex's schedule had given me, and the door had no building behind it, and I…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER FIFTEEN Here is the problem with exposing a corporation from the outside: the outside is where they expect you. We had the Palimpsest directives, we had the name-surrender forms, we had eleven thousand boxes in a basement, and what we did not have was the attachment,…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER FOURTEEN You cannot steal a name back without first finding out it was stolen, and the way you find that out is by reading, and the way you read Corporate's memory stores is with a lanyard a woman forgot she was holding. We went in…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER THIRTEEN EDITOR'S NOTE (Pixel): Zephyr filed this at 4 a.m. in one sitting, fueled by six energy drinks and a quantum-enhanced bag of chips from a dimension we do not talk about because the chips are not, technically, food. I told him he…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER TWELVE The transmission arrived first, three days before the boy did, and it arrived as a sound the lost things made when they were asked to carry something they couldn't hold. I was in the camp at gray dawn, which is the same as gray…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER ELEVEN Aurora Vey is a dimension that sells nothing, and that is its whole personality. There is a market there, on a river, and the market has been running for six hundred years, and nothing in it is branded. The kite sellers sell kites. The broth sells…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER TEN EDITOR'S NOTE (Pixel): Getting A1 to write about himself took nine weeks and a threat. The threat was instant coffee. I laid a jar of it on the table between us, the worst jar in Wreckfall, a thing that had washed up out of…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER NINE Cogsworth Cogitarium runs on time the way a country runs on rails, and like a country, it has a class of people who never pay for a ticket. The city is brass from the ground up. Streets are gears you walk on, and they move, slowly,…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER EIGHT Two days later, the Memory Vault told us how it had been cured the first time, and the telling was worse than anything it had opened. We found out by accident, which is how the Vault told us everything: it did not mean to. We had…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER SEVEN It arrived the way everything arrives in Wreckfall, which is to say the dimension coughed it up, except this time the cough was deliberate. A filing cabinet. Four drawers, beige, government-issue, the kind with a pull-out rod for hanging files that has been bent…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER SIX EDITOR'S NOTE (Pixel): Getting Clive to do an oral history was a nine-week negotiation conducted entirely in staple-morse, and I want that on the record, because people think an oral history is just somebody talking. It isn't. It's…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER FIVE Nocturne Aeturnus is stuck at twilight the way a song is stuck on one chord. The sun went down there sometime before the dimension's history begins and it has been going down since, at a rate you could measure with a sundial and a…