Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER FOUR Prime Material is where Corporate Corp keeps its shoes on. It's a dimension of chrome and electric blue, towers that go up the way hierarchies go up, and a skyline arranged so that from any street you are looking at the top of something…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER THREE The lost-things dimension has no name, because a name would be a claim, and everything here is the opposite of a claim. I started calling it Wreckfall, because things wreck here and then fall, and because I needed something to call the place where I…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER TWO You have not been erased until you have watched the paperwork catch up. Let me back up to the room it started in, because the paperwork is what happened next, and the room is what happened then, and the room deserves the order. I was at…
Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER ONE There is a department at Corporate Corp called the Interdimensional Paperclip Variance Division, and if you're picturing a sad little room in a basement, congratulations, you've seen it. We were on sub-level 7G, which the building directory listed as "Facilities…
Root Access — Chapter 36: Live The first complaint of the new world came in at 6:14 in the morning, and it was a good one. The caller was a woman in Nocturne who wanted to change her own name. Not restore it, not appeal a flag, not wait out…
Root Access — Chapter 35: Connection Greater Than Perfection (Climax, Part Two) "It's beautiful," Aether said. The compaction behind him chose that moment to load again, and both his arms took the weight of it, and his gray hands did not slip, and I understood that beautiful…
Root Access — Chapter 34: Purge At 04:01 the zine's help desk went from forty calls to four thousand. I heard it through Pixel's hardline while I hung in the compile with the seal under my hands: forty volunteers at folding tables in a basement behind…
Root Access — Chapter 33: Kernel Space At 03:52 the clock wall agreed with itself for the first time all night. Four faces, four prices, four different opinions about what a second costs, and then all of them ticked over together to 03:52:00 like a band finding the…
Root Access — Chapter 32: The Soul-Harvest Line (Approach to the Edge) At dawn the soul-harvest line was whistling. Not the pipes. The pipes hissed, the way all refinery pipes hiss when they are moving something that used to be a person's best year. The whistling came…
Root Access — Chapter 31: Feelings and Root Processes (The Run, Part Two) The siphons were running so hard that Nocturne Aeturnus had started raining other people's Tuesdays. It came down between the railings as a fine, sweet mist: missed buses, boiled kettles, the phone call you wait a…
Root Access — Chapter 30: Prime Material (The Run Begins) The door out of the pocket dimension opened at 05:48 and Pixel's hand caught my sleeve before I got a boot over the threshold. "Hold." We were stacked behind the busted vending machine in file: me…
Root Access — Chapter 29: Days of Loading The morning briefing came over the machines at 06:00, the way weather used to. Every conscious copier, fax, and badge printer on the grid carried Clive's voice, relayed from a basement in Sector 2 and re-broadcast by a Ricoh…