Root Access — Chapter 04: The Patch and the Crystal Morning in The Ephergent starts with the press and ends with a shot, and the order is not negotiable. A1 had his port open and his tray warm by 8 a.m., which for a machine that spent last night folded…
Root Access — Chapter 03: Eleven Seconds Plan first, because Pixel makes everybody say it out loud, on the theory that a plan said out loud has fewer places to hide. "E-771," she said, tapping the dock schedule with the highlighter she had thrown at me an hour…
Root Access — Chapter 02: Five Things at Once The vending machine had been busted since before I was born, which is the whole point of it. It stands against the wall of a service corridor in Sector 7G, half-taped, humming at a frequency that makes your teeth think about…
Root Access — Chapter 01: Three Meters Away The vendor did not look at the crystal. That is the local rule when you pay in CLX: the lump goes into the tray cold and bright, still holding the shape of whatever joke got mined out of somebody's bad week,…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 36: Every Exhibit Is a Name The notice came on a Thursday morning, by hand, from a clerk who had clearly never been to Sub-Level 4 and had drawn the short straw of finding out what Sub-Level 4 looks like. He came past the…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 35: The Blank Page The copier on Sub-Level 4 woke itself at one-forty in the morning. Nobody sent it. The office that would have sent it is a queue of forms now, and the queue has no head, and the queue will not have…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 34: Still Missing Sub-Level 4 had been turned over the way a room gets turned over by people looking for a thing they will not name and taking the room apart to avoid naming it. Ceiling tiles out. Two drawers on the floor with their…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 33: Compliance The Edge in the morning is the color of a page held up to a lamp, which is to say the color of paper about to be believed. The compile light came up over the low buildings at the end of everything, and the…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 32: The Missing Day The flood ended the way a paywall ends: all at once, and then with a smaller sound afterward, of machines deciding whether to keep obeying. It was past three in the morning. The copier on Sub-Level 4 sat with its lid…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 31: The Flood Three in the morning came the way a bus comes when you have stopped believing in it: all at once, and already open. The annex was dark except for the task lamp over Barry's desk, and on that desk sat the…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 30: The Ephergent The Undercroft does not have weather, and it has everything else: damp, echo, the long fluorescent hum of a floor that has been lit since before anyone thought to switch it off, and the sound of paper having feelings. Four floors down from…
Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 29: The One Witness The dog was on the crate when I woke, which is a sentence I did not expect to find myself opening a page with, and yet here is the crate, and here is the dog. He had chosen it on the second…