(The last chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

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Last time on RuRu no Jikuu no Kasoku!

The year is 2420.

Within the previous century, Earth’s most despicable aspects became a cosmic horror called the Hurricane, countless identical planets which ate the universe. Professor Akayama blamed herself, so she built robots called Zephyrs, piloted by a crew also called Zephyrs, to protect the galaxy. Then Professor Akayama tried and failed to commit suicide-by-Hurricane-Planet.

Akayama named the Hurricane Planet imprisoning her Uzumaki. Uzumaki made Akayama a bird-monster and renamed her Nakayama. Nakayama led Uzumaki toward rediscovering its own humanity by creating a planet of life. When the water world didn’t play Uzumaki’s way, Uzumaki submitted Nakayama to the rest of the Hurricane.

The rest of the Hurricane decided Uzumaki had transgressed and had to be homogenized. The Hurricane also blew up Earth, seeing Nakayama as the only remaining consciousness worth harvesting for assimilation.

With nothing left to lose, Uzumaki and Nakayama united with the Zephyrs to become a robot the size of the Milky Way called the Galaxy Zephyr. Nakayama returned to her human-form, Professor Akayama, but kept a noodly tail so she could control her bird-like persona Nakayama within the Galaxy Zephyr’s discus, the Wheel.

The Wheel lets the Galaxy Zephyr slice bits off the Hurricane and eat them, but it also features what Professor Akayama can only describe as two side-by-side eternities wrapped in a hyper-torus. When pressed, she suggests she’s collecting life’s components in an epic slice-of-life sit-com where the whole cast is filled with worms, worms which drop into the next eternity to get repackaged in new cast-members through an afterlife of data-processing. Worms done processing leave the Wheel to take abstract form as a component of the Galaxy Zephyr.

—

The golden wing bandaging the Wheel finished unwrapping itself and now returned to the Galaxy Zephyr’s other fifteen wings just like it. The crew of ten thousand hardly noticed, fully concentrated on avoiding the Hurricane’s ten gargantuan missiles which zipped by the Galaxy Zephyr in oppressively tight orbits. A single strike would obliterate them all. Lucille grit her teeth. “Professor Bird-Thing!” Akayama saluted. “Tell us the instant the Chain is ready!”

“Of course, Commander!” Akayama could broadcast the ongoing staring-contest between Jay and Anihilato to every monitor in the Galaxy Zephyr, but she didn’t want to distract the crew. “Soon, soon!”

“Then Charlie, Dakshi, let’s take the offensive. Eisu, Fumiko, brace for impact!” Lucille pulled levers to guide the Galaxy Zephyr’s arms, tossing the Wheel from one hand to the other.

Charlie squinted his good eye at his monitors. “What are we attacking?”

“The next missile within reach.”

Dakshi clutched his crew-cut. “But it’ll probably explode!”

“We can only hope,” said Lucille. The Galaxy Zephyr swung the Wheel and sliced the nearest missile in two. Both halves detonated. When the explosions rippled the Galazy Zephyr’s silvery-blue Uzumaki Armor, Eisu and Fumiko blasted steam from the robot’s feet, amplifying the full power of the sixteen golden wings. The Galaxy Zephyr surfed the shock-waves away instead of being vaporized. “Damage report!” As her crew of ten thousand reported in, Lucille saw the whole left side of the Galaxy Zephyr was seared and blistering, oozing golden blood. Six golden wings were singed.

“Incoming!” Charlie pointed the Galaxy Zephyr’s right hand at the other nine missiles catching up across the cosmos.

“Commander!” called Akayama. “Our mascot is ready to be Zephyr’d! Pull the Chain!”

“Can that white fox really save us?” asked Lucille. Akayama shrugged. “While we’re pulling the Chain, we can’t dodge or slice another missile.”

“I say we slice,” said Eisu. “Better to take damage on our own terms.”

“We can’t handle that trauma again,” said Fumiko, “on our own terms or not.”

“No time to dodge,” said Charlie.

“Pull the Chain!” said Dakshi. “It’s all or nothing!”

Lucille had never heard Dakshi advocating such risk. She cracked her knuckles. “Pull!” The Galaxy Zephyr held the Wheel with its left hand and pulled the Chain with its right. The Wheel spun so quickly centripetal force lengthened the saw-teeth by light-years. Snowy white powder flowed from the Wheel into the silvery-blue Uzumaki Armor, bleaching it ivory-white and remedying the Galaxy Zephyr’s scars and burns. “Professor, whatever this mascot can do, it’d better do quickly!” The missiles zoomed close. “We’ve only got seconds!”

“I can’t watch!” said Eisu.

“Me neither.” Lucille spun her steering-wheel. The Galaxy Zephyr pivoted to face the Hurricane, turning its back to the missiles. “Everyone! It’s been an honor.”

Her crew of ten thousand took a final vote, returning the honor unanimously.

From the base of the Galaxy Zephyr’s spine, nine colossal cannons protruded. Each cannon fired a white torpedo trailing steam. Each torpedo intercepted a missile and detonated it. The Galaxy Zephyr was framed by balls of flame.

“Unimaginable.” Eisu wiped tears from his cheeks. “We’re saved!” Fumiko just cried.

Charlie slammed his control-panel. “Yes! Yes!”

Dakshi watched debris scatter in all directions. “Let’s collect all the mass we can.”

“No need,” said Lucille. “Look!” The nine torpedoes’ steam-trails engulfed the debris. The combined mass merged with the Galaxy Zephyr, which swelled in size by nine times. The Wheel increased in diameter proportionally.

“My God,” said Fumiko. “We’re enormous!”

“Meh,” said Lucille. The Galaxy Zephyr was still barely a twentieth the size of the Hurricane. She was more impressed by her robot’s lithe, athletic form, and its nine steaming white tails between the sixteen golden wings. Its face grew subtly pointed like a canid snout, and its sculpted hair hid pointed ears. Lucille felt like she piloted a wild animal. “What do you think of that?” she shouted, and Uzumaki translated her shouts into eye-signals for the Hurricane to see. “When you think we’re whipped, we’ll whip into shape!”

“Then I’ll scourge you with scorpions!” signaled the Hurricane. Its body churned and lengthened. Its narrow end sharpened into a stinger. It grew eight legs capped with pincers. Its surface grew a shiny maroon carapace.

Lucille humored it with another shout. “Motherfucker, I’ll scourge your scorpions!”

—

Jay floated in Nakayama’s navy interior. He wanted to count his fingers, but he had no physical form to speak of—he was only an idea. Nakayama loaded him into the red mountain. It erupted light like a holy volcano.

Jay felt himself scatter across the Wheel’s green haze. Yellow and blue skies rotated around him. He knew the colors because he was both skies at once.

—

“Commander!” said Akayama, “The Chain is ready!”

“Already? Again?” Lucille directed the Galaxy Zephyr’s right hand to pull the Chain once more. The Wheel spun so quickly it threatened to shear apart.

—

Jay felt the Chain’s pull like a crack in an egg. Thoughts came through the crack, from the Galaxy Zephyr to his mind in the Wheel. “Dainty! JayJay! You made it! Did you know BeatBax is here, too?”

“Oran dora,” said Jay. “Permission to come aboard?”

“Get in the robot, DanJay,” thought Beatrice. Jay’s mind slipped out the Wheel into the Galaxy Zephyr. Suddenly he had countless arms, countless heads, and countless eyes. He didn’t exist but he didn’t care, because he had never really existed at all.

“What’ll this Zephyr do for us?” asked Lucille.

“Who knows?” said Akayama. Nakayama, her bird-like counterpart, zipped out of the Wheel and dissolved into the Galaxy Zephyr’s ivory-white Uzumaki Armor. Akayama’s tail retracted back into her spine and she was finally one solid piece again. “But see how fast the Wheel spins?”

“Yeah, it looks like it’ll burst,” said Lucille.

“Our region of accelerated space-time has crossed a particularly interesting threshold in scale and velocity.”

“Spit it out, Professor Bird-Thing.”

“We expended energy to accelerate space-time with our Super Heart Beam,” said Akayama, “but now the Wheel is producing energy.”

“Nice!” Lucille watched the Hurricane crawl toward them across space. “We can use some extra energy.”

“Already done,” said Akayama. “I’m converting it directly into mass.”

Lucille grinned hungrily at the Wheel. It seemed ready to split open at any moment, but the professor kept it together by leeching the energy which would overflow. That excess flowed into Uzumaki and congealed into dense, black, impenetrable volume. “Alright everyone,” said Lucille to her crew of ten thousand, “just a matter of time!”

The Hurricane snapped its front pincers. Eisu and Fumiko made the Galaxy Zephyr duck under them. “We’re too large!” said Fumiko. “We’ve lost our evasiveness!”

The front pincers snapped again. The Galaxy Zephyr evaded the left pincer but was clasped by the right. The Hurricane brought down its stinger. “Who needs evasiveness?” said Dakshi. “We have such strength!” He and Charlie braced the Galaxy Zephyr’s elbows against the pincer confining them. They pried it wide open and slipped away before the stinger stung.

The left pincer blindsided them with a back-slap, sending the Galaxy Zephyr spinning through space. It tumbled twenty trillion light-years before stabilizing. Lucille’s crew righted themselves just in time to see the stinging tail descend. Reflexively they brought forth the Wheel and sliced the tail’s tip.

“Big mistake!” signaled the Hurricane. Yellow acid gushed from the sliced stinger.

“Who’s mistake?” asked Lucille. The acid flooded over the Galaxy Zephyr. The ivory-white Uzumaki Armor cracked like sunburnt skin until the whole robot broke open like a cocoon, layer after layer. Underneath the ivory-white armor was silvery-blue armor. This broke open also, and underneath was purple armor. This broke open also, and underneath was pink armor. This broke open also, and underneath was black armor so dark it sucked the inkiness from space and left the vacuum looking luminous gray in comparison. “You’ve unleashed our final form!”

The Galaxy Zephyr kept growing and growing, drinking up the oceans of acid and converting the Wheel’s energy into black mass. Its split-open faces, white, blue, purple, and pink, framed sheer emptiness glaring at the Hurricane. “How are you—” The Hurricane reared and snapped its pincers up at them. “Why are you so large?”

“Life has always been this large!” said Lucille, “you just didn’t have the sense to see it!” The Galaxy Zephyr grew to twice the size of the Hurricane—twice the size of the observable universe—and kept growing. It had sixteen golden wings, nine white tails, four black legs, four black arms, and two black horns which wore its former forms like garlands, white, blue, purple, and pink. The Wheel expanded proportionally.

“Unbelievable.” Dakshi’s hands trembled as he took his steering-wheel. His cockpit had moved to where the two left arms conjoined at the shoulder. Half the crew under his command had been relegated to the upper left arm, the other half to the lower left arm.

“How could we possibly lose?” asked Eisu. His cockpit had moved to where the two right legs conjoined at the hip, and the crew under him was likewise distributed to both these legs.

“Don’t let this go to our heads,” said Charlie, at the right shoulder.

“Let’s kick their ass!” said Fumiko, at the left hip.

“One more time,” said Akayama.

“Huh?” Lucille looked at Akayama on her main monitor.

“Pull the Chain,” said Akayama, “one more time.”

Charley and Dakshi felt much more resistance in the Chain than in the previous pulls. It took all the Galaxy Zephyr’s strength to haul the first link from the Wheel. That link was in the jaws of a fleshy skull with six empty eye-sockets, and subsequent links were wrapped in the skeletal creature’s rib-cage. It had twenty arms and twenty legs. Lucille laughed. “One last Zephyr for the road, huh?”

“Not just any Zephyr,” said Akayama. The Galaxy Zephyr’s four arms wrapped the Chain around the Wheel’s rim. The skeletal creature’s forty limbs and countless ribs were the Wheel’s new saw-teeth. “Having salvaged the pilots of the Hurricane, we are effectively inoculated, and can battle without restraint!”

The Hurricane awkwardly knocked its pincers together and signaled with its eyes. “Would you consider a game of space-chess?”

“Game over!” Lucille directed Charlie and Dakshi to make the Galaxy Zephyr raise the Wheel with one arm while its three free hands gripped the Hurricane’s scorpion carapace. With a flex of titanic muscles, the Galaxy Zephyr jerked the stinging tail as if it was the Chain.

“Stop! Stop!” it signalled. “You’re cancelling me!”

Uzumaki signaled back to the Hurricane through eyeballs on the Galaxy Zephyr’s palms. “Join me, Compatriot! You’ll see the universe never had to feel so cold!“

“I’d never share space with the likes of you!” Despite the signal’s message, the Hurricane felt its own consciousness leak out its pupils with each eye-movement, and out its teeth when it opened its lips. It was abandoning itself. “Just because I ate the universe and blew up Earth, you think I’m some sort of antagonist?” The Hurricane felt its thorax tearing. Rather than split in half, it let the Galaxy Zephyr stretch its body long and thin like taffy until it was a coiling strand of cosmic spaghetti which slipped from the Galaxy Zephyr’s grip. It grew a snake-like face baring fangs larger than galactic clusters. It signaled with predatory eyes, “Your next attack is your last!”

Lucille ordered Eisu and Fumiko to stomp the snake flat until four legs of footprints were debossed on its face. In space there was no floor to stomp the Hurricane against, but they imparted tremendous impact-force due to inertia alone. “Pfa! What’s this contemptible shit which thinks itself worthy of smearing my heel?” The Hurricane smiled a serpentine smile. Its fangs were missing. “Huh?” Lucille made the Galaxy Zephyr lift its two left feet. The missing fangs were embedded in its heels. Green venom coursed up through their calves.

“Fumiko!” Eisu pulled his monitors close. “Sister! Is your crew okay?”

“I don’t—” Fumiko’s crew of thousands was silent. “I don’t know!”

Green venom reached the left thighs. “Fumiko, report!” commanded Lucille, but no reply came.

The Hurricane chuckled. “They’re dead. My venom won’t let any of you live.”

“Yeah, right! Charlie! Dakshi!” Lucille twisted knobs. The Galaxy Zephyr swiped the Wheel to slice off its own left legs. It caught the severed legs in its mouth and ate them whole. Instantly two new left legs spurt from its hips. “Fumiko, report!”

Fumiko appeared at attention on Lucille’s main monitor, utterly intact. “My crew’s all accounted for, Commander.”

Lucille beamed. “Tell me, o Hurricane, what was your plan here? We’re prepared to resurrect Earth’s entire population all the way down to the loathsome scum like you, but you thought we couldn’t reconstruct our closest friends?”

The snake leapt with open maw, aiming to sink new fangs in the Galaxy Zephyr’s neck and kill the Commander outright. Its eyes signaled mid-jump, “Don’t you know who I am?“

“I never cared!” Lucille brought down the Wheel and sliced the snake in half lengthwise.

Each half became another snake. “You’re young, aren’t you?” signaled the first.

“For your whole life I’ve been the stars in your sky!” signaled the second. Both leapt for the neck. “I’m the sky-bearer!”

“Bah!” A second sweep of the Wheel sliced both snakes in two. “Sky-burglar! Sky-bungler! Sky-broiler! Sky-bloodier! Shrug off the tyranny of Heaven and wrestle me unregulated!”

The quarters of the Hurricane formed four frogs with toxic yellow stripes. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Lucille’s grin grew ear-to-ear. “I’m the toad-cooker!” Before the four frogs spat venom, the Galaxy Zephyr sliced each of them in half. “Scum-cucker!” The Galaxy Zephyr’s four arms traded the Wheel to swiftly slice the Hurricane’s eighths into sixteenths. “Face-rider!” The Galaxy Zephyr’s four feet stomped the sixteenths into a compact mass, which it sliced into thirty-seconds. “Skull-fucker!” The Galaxy Zephyr danced on the ball of gore to keep it packed tight. The Wheel sliced the thirty-seconds into sixty-fourths. “Buck-stopper! Snake-stomper! Heart-breaker! Head-waker! Name-taker! End-maker! I’m the candle who curses the darkness!—but you’d better call me what you want while you’ve still got the chance!“

Lucille tried to say more, but her battle-frenzy spoke for her.

“Oran doran doran doran doran!” With every syllable, the Galaxy Zephyr sliced the Hurricane into twice as many parts. “Doran doran doran doran doran!” Four dancing feet stomped the Hurricane tight before it could escape or even cringe. “Doran doran doran doran doran!” Finally only fine red powder remained of the Hurricane. “Doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doran doooryaaaugh!“

The Galaxy Zephyr swept the Wheel’s broadside across the fine red powder, scattering the Hurricane across the void. “That’s enough, Commander,” said Professor Akayama. Lucille panted, watching the fine red powder fly in all directions. She pulled a lever and made the Galaxy Zephyr lift the Wheel once more. “Lucille! I said that’s enough!”

“I heard you, Professor Bird-Thing.” She laughed and tucked the Wheel behind the Galaxy Zephyr’s head like a thorny halo. “I just wanted to watch ’em flinch.” Indeed, the fine red powder flinched away. The Hurricane retreated in terror.

“What now?” asked Charlie.

“They’ll just come back again,” said Dakshi.

“Don’t be so sure,” said Akayama.

Already the fine red powder shaped themselves into billions of billions of muscular warriors, each the mass of a quadrillion suns. Fumiko groaned. “Here they come!”

“Must we fight forever?” asked Eisu.

Dakshi grimaced. “We have no choice.”

“Everyone, battle-ready!” said Charlie.

“Nah.” Lucille relaxed in her chair and pushed buttons with her feet. The Galaxy Zephyr crossed its four legs and rested its four hands on its four knees. “You heard Professor Bird-Thing. This is the end.”

The Galaxy Zephyr’s crew watched the army of Hurricanes approach, and approach, and approach, but never actually draw near. “We’re done with the Wheel,” said Akayama, “so I’m releasing the tension we’ve stored in the fabric of reality.” The Wheel behind the Galaxy Zephyr’s head grew smaller and smaller as it spun. “The universe itself is expanding, and the distance between objects is increasing. As fast as the Hurricane flies after us, the cosmic expansion is faster. Soon nothing will ever break light-speed again.” The Wheel totally extinguished itself, and the skeletal creature whose limbs and ribs were its saw-teeth became the Galaxy Zephyr’s collar. The confidence of the Hurricane’s army slowly shifted to desperation as it struggled to catch up with the Galaxy Zephyr. Akayama stood from her chair. “I’m off to have words with them.”

Akayama twisted open ZAP’s hatch. She touched Uzumaki’s pink sandy surface. When she merged with the giant robot, Professor Akayama’s mind used worm-data to recreate the bodies of Uzumaki’s hundred pilots exactly as they were eighty years ago when the Hurricane was first activated. “Oh!” thought Uzumaki. “I guess this means it’s time?”

“You’re people again. Get in.” Akayama separated Uzumaki’s constituent consciousnesses into their new old bodies. “ZAB, thank you. Your work is done here.” ZAB’s artificial intelligence retreated to Lucille’s robot, and Akayama’s mind was alone in the Galaxy Zephyr’s pitch-black Armor. She gathered the tiny Zephyr-robots within her and conjoined them into a humanoid speck just a kilometer tall. She expelled it from her volume. Then she retracted the forty-limbed skeletal collar, the sixteen golden wings, the nine white tails, the four black arms and legs, and both black horns, and morphed her mass into an enrobed blue bird larger than reality. She unfurled both wings to show quintillions of eye-spots which signaled a final message to the Hurricane’s scattered humanoid particulates. “I’m sorry,” she signaled. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. But did you really think this could end any other way?”

The Hurricane’s particles signaled back. “What did you do to me?”

“Space-time is expanding,” signaled Akayama. “Soon it will expand so quickly that nothing will ever travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. You’ll drift farther and farther away, faster and faster, until billions of years from now your images will be Doppler-shifted beyond ultra-violet and there’s no trace of your existence. By then, maybe even our memory of you will fade.”

“We’ll recombine,” signaled the Hurricane’s particles. “We’ll join together once more, and then—“

“No you won’t,” signaled Akayama. “Just as you drift away from us, you drift away from each other. Soon your individual bodies will be sheared apart.” As she signaled this, the Hurricane felt the shearing force. Expanding space-time smeared its humanoid forms into snakes and salamanders. This stretching opened wounds which bled teeth. “Eons hence, even your subatomic particles will be torn asunder.”

“The same will happen to you, and your so-called ‘people!’ “

“On the contrary. We’ll die long before then. Permanence was your desire, not ours. Be careful what you wish for. Although…” Akayama scratched under her beak. “When you obliterated Lucille’s generous suicide-pill, you probably absorbed its self-destruct-sequence wirelessly. You can cast off this mortal coil any time you like.” The Hurricane just squealed. Akayama sighed. “Tell me, do you fear God?” She received no answer. “If there ever comes a time you could be called dead, Lucifer will drag you to his darkest pit. You might shout to God for mercy—and I’ll look down in pity and remind you, you had your chance.” Akayama shrugged. “Oh, I almost forgot.”

She raised the longest feather on her left wing, where the pilots of the Hurricane sat nude in a little air-bubble.

“Understand, o Hurricane, there’s not one drop of consciousness lost with you. Your pilots are safe and sound, not cancelled at all. We are united! The same algorithm which will recreate all Earth’s life also allowed me to separate and reconstruct Uzumaki’s constituent parts so we can put them on trial eighty years too late—I suppose I’ll be on trial, too, as your creator. The algorithm will even let me show you your reduced form, condensed into a compact representation of your being.” She shook her other sleeve and a tiny green speck fell onto the longest feather of her right wing. “The first golden-winged Zephyr was so large because it accounted for so much variation in Earth’s life, including the worms which we all share. The remaining Zephyrs were smaller, a fox, a man, a worm, but when they worked together, these basic forms became bigger than the universe. But you? You alone, minus the worms you share with everyone else?”

She showed the Hurricane, and its pilots, the tiny green speck. It was a frog. It was almost cute.

“You ain’t shit.”

The Hurricane didn’t respond. Maybe it was too far away, or maybe it was overcome with agony. Akayama had nothing left to say. She reabsorbed the Hurricane’s pilots, and the tiny frog.

In the Combined Zephyr, Charlie pointed to his main monitor. “Look! The professor’s coming back!”

Lucille folded her arms and tutted. “She didn’t even ask before she took Uzumaki’s mass. We’re barely a kilometer tall.”

“She gave you that mass,” chided Dakshi, “and she knows what she’s doing.”

Professor Akayama shrank as she left galaxy-clusters in her wake. She popped off her wings and they decomposed into dark matter. Her compound eyes disintegrated, and every tiny facet became a gargantuan sun. “Beautiful,” applauded Fumiko. “Stars are everywhere!“

“Better than that!” Eisu scrolled through historical-records on his spare monitors. “The stars are where they would’ve been if the Hurricane hadn’t eaten the universe! In fact—” The whole crew gasped when Akayama’s robes condensed into the Milky Way’s celestial belt. She expelled the sun and moon from her chest. The Combined Zephyr landed gently on the moon, beside the lunar base. “The sun is where it used to be, not orbiting a black hole!”

Akayama’s body shrank and shrank, leaving each planet of the solar system behind her. She deposited Earth last. Lucille stared agape at Earth’s gleaming oceans until she regained composure and pulled her monitors close. “Zoom in! Start scanning! Are there any signs of life?”

ZAB responded. “Only one. Akayama.” Its monitors magnified the image of Earth and focused on the fertile crescent. Buildings and roads were all accounted for, but no humans were to be seen. Only Akayama herself stood tall over the landscape, almost six hundred billion tons of colossal bird-thing.

“She’s—” Fumiko covered her mouth. “Is this appropriate to watch?”

Akayama deflated to a tiny fraction of her volume laying an enormous egg. “It’s hatching!” said Eisu.

Gas streamed from the egg’s cracks and spread over Earth in seconds. “Those are all Earth’s single-celled organisms,” said ZAB. The cracks widened and dark rivers poured. “Insects and small creatures.” The cracks widened and torrents surged. Lucille didn’t need ZAB to tell her these were the larger species. Elephants, tigers, wolves, and every other manner of animal ran for their natural habitats. Even sea-creatures rolled across the deserts. Akayama had biologically bolstered these specimens to make their journeys home.

“Where are the people?” asked Dakshi.

“Look!” Charlie made the Combined Zephyr’s right arm point to Akayama. Her navy feathers popped off one by one, and when each one touched the ground, it became a human being. The feathers drifted and tumbled with the wind to deposit each person where they belonged. The bird-thing shrank when it regrew each lost feather instantly, but these feathers popped off, too, until the planet’s whole population was reconstituted.

ZAB clicked through thousands of calculations. “They’re all there,” it said. “Everyone—no, everything is accounted for, down to the last microbe.”

Lucille leaned away from her cockpit’s camera so her crew couldn’t watch her wipe her tears. “Of course you could do it, Professor Bird-Thing!”

“Wait.” ZAB’s monitors flickered. “There are two Akayamas.” The monitor magnified the image. Professor Akayama’s human body lay nude and unconscious on the sand before the bird-thing. It loomed motionless over her, twenty feet tall.

The crew of the Combined Zephyr watched their monitors breathlessly as Akayama’s human form stirred awake. She felt her own body before standing and noticing the bird-thing overseeing her. She cringed in fear, then reached out to touch its feathers.

At a touch, it disintegrated. It just blew away in the breeze, leaving only a fresh white lab-coat on the sand. Akayama put it on. She pat her pockets and found a bug-stick and a lighter. She indulged in a good smoke.

“It’s done!” cried Lucille. “We can start again!”

THE END

(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

In Virgil Jango Skyy’s Wyoming motel-room, Jay writhed on the rug. He vaguely knew Jango was speaking, but he couldn’t discern any words. Maybe the old monk was chanting Sheridanian.

Jay still felt the centipede crawling through his intestines. As he convulsed, his view alternated between traditional reality and strange visions, but he couldn’t tell which was which. Sometimes he saw Jango and the bush of centipedes disguised as Virgil Blue. Sometimes he saw the entire swirling cosmos fighting over itself in the form of titanic entities. Which could be called ordinary? The swirling cosmos seemed unknowable and alien, but it connected Jay seamlessly to human history and every atom in the universe.

He felt his brain’s hemispheres separating with nerve-wracking imagery. Jay saw himself as an egg the size of a grown man, circling the center of a grand Wheel. From the Wheel’s center, new lifeforms emerged as streaks of light. The streaks shot past the egg to the circle’s rim and became triangular saw-teeth. Each triangle’s upward and downward slope tracked their lifeform’s growth and decline from birth to death. After death, each lifeform zapped back to the Wheel’s center nigh instantaneously, then blasted back to the rim as a new beam. The egg, trapped orbiting the center, was neither being born, nor aging, nor dying. While sentient beings cycled as streaks of light, the egg was locked in limbo. More eggs orbited the Wheel’s center, but this egg was largest by far. Perhaps that’s why, after incalculable duration, this egg alone was struck by a beam streaking to the rim.

The collision sparked the corpus callosum connecting the hemispheres of Jay’s brain. There, in a formless mental theater, two bundles of worms collided. The bundles grappled, unable to unify.

“I—I understand.” A worm-bundle calling itself ‘Dan’ echoed thoughts in Jay’s skull. “I wasted myself against Anihilato. It trapped me in an egg, freezing me on the Wheel of life and death to let my mind rot. To escape, I stowed aboard your soul. I hijacked your worms.”

The other worm-bundle found the name ‘Jillian’ attached. Jillian reached a pseudopod of worms across Jay’s frontal-lobe and slapped Dan’s worms. “Snap out of it!” she thought aloud. “You couldn’t’ve hijacked me even if you’d had the presence-of-mind to try! Our souls collided and I scavenged yours for parts!“

“I’m so selfish,” cried Dan’s worms. “I thought I’d save Beatrice from the King of Dust, but she never needed me to begin with! When I failed, my personality infected yours. In the next eternity we’ll both be stuck in an egg, and Anihilato will eat us both at once—or else we’ll hitch another ride aboard another helpless kid, and drag them to Anihilato too. I’m a doomed monster, and I made you a doomed monster just like me!”

“Come on! Get with me here!” Jillian smacked him again. “I harvested your consciousness because I liked what I saw and I took what I wanted. You’re like my magic mushroom or winged boots. I want my pronouns back!”

Dan’s worms shuddered. He built pseudopods just to hug himself. “I’m still worried,” he thought, “like I always am. Which one of us is wearing the other like a suit of armor?”

“I don’t care, and neither should you!” thought Jillian. “I don’t wanna be Jillian. I want us both to pilot Jay: a master of life and death and neither male nor female but giant fucking anime space-robot!” She reached her pseudopod out again and Dan recoiled, but she didn’t slap him. She’d extended her hand to shake. Dan quivered. He shook her hand, and she helped him stand. Both worm-bundles were finally roughly anthropoid. “Now buckle up. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

Jay’s skull illuminated around them. Monitors above control-panels displayed the dark view behind his closed eyelids. “What work is cut out for us?” asked Dan. “Don’t throw yourself at Anihilato the way I did!”

“Professor Akayama thought Faith would help her wrangle the longest worm.” Jillian sat in the Commander’s chair and fastened six seat-belts. “Faith doesn’t like Anihilato, so Akayama’s multilayered-sieve needs another go-between. That’s why she locked you in a box for Faith to dig up, not as a punishment, but because she knew your misguided desire for self-worth would lead you straight to the King of Dust.”

Dan sat at his own control-panel and fumbled with his belts. He realized the belts were made of worms, too, just like he was. “You’re talking like LuLu’s is literally real.”

“Nothing’s literally real, Dan. Everything’s interpretation, and LuLu’s speaks my language.” Jillian flipped two rows of switches. “You blinked at Anihilato, but maybe Akayama meant for this slice-of-life to be a mobius isekai where you’re reborn in the same world all over again. She fired my worms through your egg, and the two of us together gotta zap back to that egg to finish what you started. We’re the last step of Nemo’s mission to save fig-makers from themselves.”

“Do we want so save Lio’s worms? We know Lio!” Dan turned dials and tested his steering-wheel. “Anihilato’s got some of my worms, too, but I think we’d all rather leave those tooth-balls behind.”

“Danny, picture that elementary-kid holding you underwater. He’s drowning you, but don’t you wanna save him? He’s your equal, your brother in anxiety. Don’t you wanna get on the messiah-pedestal and offer him a hand?” Jillian’s worm-bundle shaped two eyes on its face, and blinked twice at Dan. Instantly there was no space between them. “Every worm matters in the fight against the Hurricane. The Zephyrs are fighting for just one last chance for life to begin again with just one lesson learned, and we gotta make that fight count.” Jillian turned a key and pressed a big red button. Jay’s body lit up beneath them like a Christmas tree. Each tiny cell was a cockpit piloted by a worm-bundle representing someone Dan and Jillian had ever met, read about, or heard of, and everyone they had ever met, read about, or heard of. “That doesn’t mean we gotta play nice! The kindness Anihilato needs looks a heckuva lot like wrath!“

Jay opened his eyes, noticing the motel-room as if for the first time. He’d crumbled across the rug, so he pulled himself up to sit cross-legged. “Finally awake?” Jango stood from the bed and sat before him on the floor. “I hope your journey showed you what you needed.”

“It did,” said Jay. “I know myself now, and I’m understand Anihilato, King of Dust, self-proclaimed Master of Nihilism. He’s a mall-Satan, and I’m gonna tug his beard.”

Jango closed his eyes and smiled. “I’m glad I could help.”

“But I’m not done yet tonight, and neither are you.” Jay pulled something from his jacket and smashed it on Jango’s forehead. “Send me to the Mountain, Virgil Blue. Send me to the end of the eternities. Kill me, right here, right now.”

Jango trembled. He smeared bloody yolk from his face. “What’s this?”

“I bought a fertilized egg from the poultry-farm on my way here.” Jay’s eyes were still glassy. “I’ve promoted you to Blue.”

“You don’t have the authority.” Jango wiped his frown with his sky-blue sleeve. “Only Virgils can promote one another.”

“But breaking an egg like that is worth the death-penalty anyway, right?” Jay clapped once, as if to wake Jango. “When Dan smoked centipede, he walked into the Wheel and was hit by a bird’s egg. That bird’s egg was put there by Anihilato with the authority of every Virgil Blue, so let’s call Dan Virgil Orange. After Dan’s death, Anihilato put him in his own egg where the halves of my soul smashed together. Whatever way you slice it, I’m Virgil Purple—the Biggest Bird’s first-born child, ready to hatch. Now you’re Virgil Blue. Don’t deny your destiny. There are no coincidences!”

“You’re still hallucinating.” Jango scowled and wiped his face. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“But I believe it with unyielding conviction.” Jay shrugged. “Martyr me before I sober up and change my mind.”

Jango stood shakily and limped into the motel bathroom. Jay heard him mop egg from his face with a towel. “You realize,” said Jango as he returned, “if you really made me Virgil Blue, you’ve doomed me to a terrible fate. The first man, Nemo, cannibalizes every Blue Virgil in their dreams.”

“And then some—but you’ve trained to handle teeth,” said Jay. “Nemo is an electrical-socket. I need you to stick your fork in it to sturdy Hell’s outer rim. Did you think Virgil Green would take up the slack? You weren’t hand-picked from Kansas to babysit the mask. You’re gonna wear it. Time ends with you and me, old man!”

“Whatever you think you’re doing, do it right. Don’t make me regret this!” Jango leapt upon Jay with his centipede-knife. “I’ll see you in the next eternity!”

“Damn right you will!” Despite demanding death, Jay instinctively shielded himself. Jango stabbed the knife through both Jay’s palms. “Aaaugh!” Jango stabbed Jay thirty-eight more times in the chest and stomach. Jay spluttered blood. “Wait!”

Jango groaned. “What do you want this time?”

“You’d better take Dan Jones to Sheridan as your student,” said Jay, lips leaking blood. “Otherwise our timeline will be every color of fucked up.”

“He’d have to eat a centipede.”

“He just did. You watched. Send him through Virgil Green, though, and don’t let him tell you otherwise. Dan needs to straighten his head a little since he’s gotta die before you, any year now.”

“Whatever you say.” Jango stabbed Jay a fortieth time. Jay sputtered his last. Jango sighed and wiped his bloody arthritic hands on his sky-colored robes. Had Jay seriously just promoted him to Virgil Blue? Was Dan destined to die in Sheridan’s white-walled monastery? Jango clenched his eyes shut. There were no coincidences!

Jango put one hand on his aching hips and the other hand on his tall cane. He’d smuggled bugs before, but he’d never had to cover up a murder. Returning to the Islands of Sheridan might be a challenge.

There was a knock at the door. In panic to hide Jay’s blood, Jango put on Virgil Blue’s navy robes and silver mask. He cracked the door just enough to see Dan standing outside. “Oh. Virgil Blue, right?”

“Oran dora,” said Virgil Blue. “Call me what you want.”

“I’m so sorry to bother you, sir—but it’s an honor to meet you, of course. Is Jay still here?”

Virgil Blue knocked the door open with his cane. “Jay and Jango left together! Tell me, Danny, have you ever wanted to visit a library full of books from the future?“

—

Jay’s last moments of waking consciousness were an experience he couldn’t hope to describe. He saw himself as one tooth of a saw spinning at the speed of life. His existence as a saw-tooth had lasted almost one full revolution, beginning smaller than an eyelash at birth and growing until his death at any moment now. That was all any saw-tooth ever got.

He steadied himself. When he zapped back to the Wheel’s center, he would barge into the underworld with enough triumph to crush Satan under the gates.

—

In its caverns under the desert, Anihilato coiled all twenty arms and twenty legs around a man-sized egg to catch warmth pouring from its yolk. A worm fell from the cavern ceiling onto Anihilato’s cheekbone. Anihilato plucked the worm and inspected it with six eyes. It opened its lipless mouth to swallow the worm whole, but thought twice about eating it immediately. It whispered, as if to let the egg sleep. “You’re the first worm I’ve seen in ages,” said the King of Dust. “Perhaps you and I are the last worms left.”

The worm squirmed in Anihilato’s grasp.

“Don’t worry. Worms are easy to digest,” said Anihilato, as if that made any difference to the worm. “The occasional complicated creatures have to be egged so I can separate their worms. In the last eternity I could separate worms using other mystical powers, but now I must resort to eggs. My last egg is almost ready. I’ve eaten all the rest. Soon I’ll have nothing left to eat but the Biggest Bird and the Mountain itself, and then I will be all.”

Anihilato let the worm crawl across the egg. Then it snatched the worm and ate it. Anihilato wrapped itself around the egg and slept.

It awoke to a crack. “I’ve enjoyed your warmth long enough.” Anihilato felt the egg’s crack with its fingertips. “Time to eat!” Anihilato opened wide.

The egg exploded. The caverns collapsed. Shifting sands rained like monsoons. Anihilato was buried.

After the collapse, Anihilato dug to the desert’s surface. It shook sand from its forty limbs and blinked in the sunlight for the first time in eons. It scanned the sand, but didn’t find the worms it expected escaping from the egg. “Monk!” Anihilato snapped up scraps of eggshell and crunched them in its teeth. “Jones! Dan Jones! You can’t run from me!”

“Why would I?” Jay sat nude, cross-legged, on a pile of eggshells. He’d removed his gray rag from his waist and was tying it like a blindfold over his eyes. The wind had smoothed away the dunes, so the red mountain lay in the distance behind him, like his sponsor. Its presence felt spiritually volcanic. “I’m right where I meant to be.”

Anihilato stormed up to him in a flurry of arms and legs. “I’ve softened you, Dan! Why are your worms still stuck together?”

“My egg had two yolks. You’ll have to hatch me twice, and I won’t be re-egged without contest.” Jay tied the blindfold taut. “Make no mistake: the rag’s for your protection, not mine. You’re already a worm. If you blinked in my gaze, you’d turn into a slug.” He rest his hands on his knees.

“You think I’m afraid? Me, Anihilato? King of Dust? Master of Nihilism? I’ll fill you with teeth and make you beg for your egg!”

Jay allowed himself a slanted smile. “You are Anihilato,” he said, “and you are King of Dust, but you are not Master of Nihilism. There is no Master of Nihilism. There’s just you and me, right here, right now.”

“You belong to me! I own you!” Anihilato reached six arms around Jay to untie his blindfold. “I sorted your worm-certificates back into my box of souls!”

Jay giggled. “You think I still care about your stupid filing-cabinet?” Anihilato, taken aback, hesitated untying the blindfold. “If I had your box of souls, you know what I’d do?” Jay laughed. “I’d piss on your worm-certificates. What worthless trash!”

Anihilato tore off the blindfold. The King of Dust had almost doubled in size since Jay’s childhood nightmare. Scrutinized by six giant eyes, Jay felt all his muscles lock—but Anihilato, too, felt frozen. Either Jay’s gaze had grown more potent in the egg, or Anihilato had drawn too close untying the blindfold and was now paralyzed by its own reflection in Jay’s eyes. Its front froze immediately, but its back legs had a spare moment of mobility. Anihilato took the chance to kick hot sand in Jay’s face. Jay cringed—his left eye closed and wouldn’t open. Anihilato’s mouth curved up into a grin. Through the petrifying battle of glares, it managed to speak. “You can’t win, Dan.”

“My name’s Jay. Call me what you want.”

“You can’t win, DanJay.” Anihilato’s grin spread wide. “Remember teaching me this trick?” It closed its bottom pair of eyes. It reopened them and closed its central pair of eyes. It reopened them and closed its top pair of eyes. “By repeating this, I’ll keep four eyes on you forever. My vision is eternal. Soon you’ll wink and turn into earthworms for me to slurp. Then you’ll help me eat the Mountain myself.” Tears streamed from Jay’s closed left eye. “Cry, mortal. I’ll savor squashing your hubris.” Jay’s tears deposited sand-grains from his cornea onto his cheek. He winked his left eye repeatedly. It was red and wet, but now he stared down Anihilato with both eyes. “You think you eat hatred and shit love? You only delay the inevitable, DanJay.”

“I am inevitable,” said Jay, “and so are you, and everything else. If you really knew yourself, you’d know you don’t need to eat the Mountain. The Mountain can be found in any worm.”

Anihilato chuckled. “What do you know about the Mountain?”

“Doubtlessly less than you,” said Jay. “You’ve got the worms of every Virgil Blue. Nemo. Jango. More whose names I never had a chance to hear. Without you, a whole lot of lost worms would be painful balls of teeth scattered across a rusty desert. Thanks for joining me at the end of the eternities. You’re my teacher, and you killed my teacher; what a classic climax!” Anihilato sneered. “But it doesn’t matter. The time for figs is over. God waits between us now.”

Two of Anihilato’s eyes looked up to the yellow sky. “If I’m not God, He’s on my side. It’s high noon, DanJay. You’re on borrowed time.” Jay didn’t understand until the descending sun shined directly in his vision. He had to squint. Anihilato laughed. “Soon, DanJay. Soon!”

“Not soon enough for your ploy,” said Jay.

Now Anihilato didn’t understand until noticing its own shadow. As the sun descended, Anihilato cast shade over Jay’s face. Anihilato tried to move its shadow, but couldn’t lean an inch. “A terrible monk like you will break into the tastiest worms. I can wait for your surrender.”

“I’m no monk.” In Anihilato’s shadow, Jay could keep his eyes open a while.

Unless…

A drop of sweat disturbed his right eyelash. His right eye clenched shut. “Aha.” Anihilato snickered. “Your humanity betrays you.” More sweat tickled Jay’s nose. It pooled in his ears. A drop touched his left eyebrow. Jay grunted and tried reopening his right eye, but salty sweat stung it closed again. The drop on his left brow rolled toward his left eyelash. Jay shook. Anxiety clutched his chest. He felt teeth take root in his throat.

A cool breeze froze the sweat to his forehead. Faith Featherway inhaled and blew more chill wind over Jay’s face. “Is that better, JayJay?”

“Thank you, Faith.”

“Hey!” Anihilato tensed twenty shoulders as if to smack Faith, that white fox, but couldn’t move its arms. “Scram!”

Faith turned and let her misty tail moisten Jay’s eyeballs. “How’s that?”

“Perfect.” Even with both eyes open, Jay was comfortable as if they were closed. “I can’t thank you enough.”

Faith disconnected her tail and let it envelop Jay like a cloud. “Bug-Bird told me she’d send someone to help with Anihilato,” she said. “I’m glad to see it’s you, JayJay! There are no coincidences, I guess. Thanks for holding this thing in place. I gotta fly back to report this.”

“That’s alright,” said Jay. “I think I can take it from here.”

“You know, butt-head over there breathed me up one time?” She jerked her head at Anihilato. “I think it ate Dan, too.”

“It sure tried,” said Jay.

“Good luck.” Faith bounded away with a new tail billowing behind her.

“Wait!” Anihilato tried to inhale her, but that trick only worked in the confines of its caverns. “If you can grow more tails, then you owe one to me, too!”

Faith rolled her eyes. “I’ll give my tails to whoever I want. Fuck you! Fuck off!” She flew into the mustard-yellow sky.

Anihilato’s lipless mouth twitched in frustration and its six eyes shook. Jay just stared. His eyes were moist and shaded and cool. Reassured, the teeth in his throat retreated. “Jango and Faith were friends,” said Jay. “I wish she knew his worms were in you.” He grit his teeth. “Although, Jango’s probably cheering right now. Faith telling you to fuck off is exactly what he wants to hear. Virgil Blue gave up Faith for the rest of you aboard. This is what it means for him to have Faith.”

“This doesn’t mean anything,” said Anihilato. “You’ve failed. You and that frigid rat!”

“You’re half right,” said Jay. “This doesn’t mean anything.”

Anihilato rest one pair of eyes while the other two pairs kept Jay paralyzed. “That cloud will disperse eventually. You’ll sweat and your eyes will shut. You can’t outlast me.”

“I don’t need to,” said Jay. “I wish I had the capacity to forgive you myself, but all the forgiveness I can muster is gonna be barely enough to keep you here for the one who does. When Faith says Bug-Bird, she means the Biggest Bird, the Heart of the Mountain, Nakayama, Professor Akayama, the source of our reality. She’s on her way right now.” From the distance, a sonic boom roared over the dunes.

Anihilato quivered in fear and let two eyes look left and right. “Wait! No! Do you know what she’ll do to me?”

“Nope.”

“She’ll do it to you, too!”

“I hope so. Then I’ll know you can handle it. Once she tossed me like a javelin and tried to shove me in a cave, but Faith made it sound like the Biggest Bird’s bedside-manner has improved a little since then.” Jay felt Dan’s worms offering references. “In The Divine Comedy, Dante says even the saints enter Heaven through a wall of fire. You and I are gonna pass through together.”

“Let’s adjourn!” Anihilato wished it could decompose into teeth, and felt more than enough anxiety to do so, but the clarity of the Blue Virgils kept it intact. “We’ll finish our staring-contest underground!”

“Nah.”

“Please! You can eat me! Then you can eat the Biggest Bird yourself, and then the Mountain!“

“No.”

“Then just release me, no contest! You win! You’re the Master of Nihilism, DanJay! You’re the King of Dust! You’re Anihilato!”

“I eat hatred and shit love, too. Call me what you want.”

“If I could move, I’d beg on twenty hands and twenty knees!”

“Keep begging.”

“My box of souls is yours! Take it and leave me!”

“Oran dora, Anihilato. Oran dora.“

Anihilato’s six eyes wept. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Jay sighed. “The scariest part is that you’re not inhuman. You’ve definitely gotten some of my worms.”

“Then you know you’re being cruel to humanity itself!”

“Don’t make figs at me, Anihilato!” Jay clutched his knees. “I’m here because I’ve seen the emptiness of all things and it’s led me to unconditional compassion—but my compassion ain’t gotta look the way you want it to look!” In his peripheral vision, Jay saw Nakayama sweep over the desert on a forty-foot wingspan.

—

When Faith landed on the red mountain, she scratched its dusty surface and a cave opened. Nakayama crawled out. “Yes, Faith?”

“My friend JayJay dragged Anihilato above-ground,” said Faith. “He’s got it pinned!”

“Thank goodness! I worried Anihilato would never surface.”

“You’d better be quick!”

“I will.” Nakayama pointed her wings to the cave. “You too.”

“Huh?” Faith tiptoed to the cave-mouth. “But you haven’t wrapped that golden wing around yet. Do you mean—“

“You’re overdue for Zephyrhood,” said Nakayama. “Make haste. The eternities are ending.”

“Oh gosh.” Faith nervously tapped her paws on the mountainside. “Am I really ready?”

“You were ready the instant we met, but your unusual physiology made delayed gratification more useful. Observe.” Nakayama brushed Faith’s muzzle with one wing and showed the snowy powder she scraped off. “At the dawn of time, I produced this white powder to accelerate the cycle of life and death. Your personality resonates with the powder, so it accumulated around your psyche to expedite my whim.”

“My soul’s just… helpful dust wrapped around a cutie?” Faith wrapped her tail around her haunches and forelegs. “But… why?“

“Be glad. If it weren’t so, you’d be a much-less-helpful bundle of worms. I couldn’t have managed the afterlife without you.”

Faith turned away from the cave and surveyed the rusty desert for the last time. “What’s it like, being a Zephyr?”

“The description might seem unpleasant, but don’t be afraid,” said Nakayama. “Your mind will disintegrate and spread throughout the Wheel. When the Chain is pulled, you’ll ascend to be a boon to all sentient beings in the fight against the Hurricane.”

Faith approached the cave again. “You mean I’ll help people?”

“Everyone forever.”

“Good enough for me.” Faith leapt into the cave. The red mountain swallowed her.

Nakayama unfolded a forty-foot wingspan. Her launch rolled a sonic boom over the dunes.

In seconds she found Anihilato and Jay. Her touchdown raised swirls of sand. Anihilato tried to squirm under Jay’s debilitating gaze. “Stay away!” it shouted.

“Stay away?” Nakayama drew near. “Oh Anihilato, I knew you’d reject me—and in rejecting me, you demonstrate your mission is complete!“

“Careful!” said Jay. “I’ve got to keep eye-contact.”

“Your job is done. With your intervention, I can claim these worms without upsetting the natural order.” Nakayama’s wings scintillated and morphed. Every feather grew eyeballs, thousands of them. Her wings formed a hemispherical dome over Anihilato and Jay with eyes facing inward. Anihilato was too petrified in terror to even blink. Jay was also petrified, but in wonderment of the blue house of shimmering emerald eyes. Nakayama popped off both her wings and stepped into the dome herself. “Thank you, JayJay. Without a mortal to help collect Anihilato, I would’ve disrupted the worm-development process.”

“I’ve got questions,” said Jay.

“I’ve got answers, but I can’t guarantee they’re to your questions.” Nakayama unsleeved twenty long blue arms. “Ask away.”

“I can’t tell if you’re a character from my favorite anime or just a giant bird-monster, but… even though you created my whole universe, I think I’m your first and only child.”

When Nakayama blushed, her blue feathers turned green. She covered her blush with seven or eight arms. “That’s a matter of perspective.”

“The one thing I am sure of is that the world as I knew it isn’t the real Earth. Right?”

“That’s a matter of perspective, too.” Nakayama’s twenty arms popped off all Anihilato’s legs and she swallowed them whole. Anihilato fell onto the sand, groaning. “From my vantage point, your world is as real as anything else. It’s subsidiary to my world, but if it weren’t real, it couldn’t be subsidiary to anything.”

Jay nodded. It was all the movement he could make in the house of eyes. “The strangest thing, though, is that some parts of your original world slipped into my subsidiary one. Like, I heard about a Blue Virgil who read manga from the future, then visited Japan to meet the author while they wrote it. Unless I’m mistaken,” he wagered, “the monastery’s copy of Daitatsu no Kagirinai Hogo actually came from you, from your original world. But it was also being written in my subsidiary world. What are the chances of that?”

Nakayama shrugged all twenty shoulders and popped off Anihilato’s arms. “Your existence is an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm lasting eternities. If anyone could understand how it worked, it probably wouldn’t work at all. Quite a great and complicated tool.”

Jay nodded again. “Did your original Earth have Hitler? Or Stalin? Or Mao?”

Nakayama ate the arms one-by-one. Anihilato whimpered on the sand. “Who?” asked Nakayama.

“Their regimes killed tens of millions.”

“Oh! I remember now.” Nakayama took Anihilato’s tail in all her twenty hands and whipped its body to snap its spine. “You’re from the early 21st century, aren’t you? By 2420, those three stooges don’t even make the top-fifty list of murderous authoritarian dictators.”

That made Jay tear up, and he couldn’t reach to wipe the tears away. “Can you really reconstruct the world of 2420 using worms from my era?”

“Surely. The Wheel simulated eons. A few hundred years is nothing in comparison. Everything in my time-period can be deduced from yours.”

“Wow.” The tears dripped down his neck and chest. “That’s four rough centuries.”

“Every century is rough for the same reasons.” Nakayama gestured to Anihilato. “What changes is us.” Nakayama withdrew her ten right arms back into her sleeves. Her ten left arms merged into a jet engine. Blue fire spewed forty meters.

Anihilato’s fear evaporated. It looked into the fire the same way it looked at the eggs it ate, as if it hadn’t realized there could be another source of warmth in the entire universe besides its own ass. “Please! I’m so cold!” Nakayama scorched Anihilato’s scalp. “Aaaugh! Thank yo—” Its six eyeballs boiled and burst.

Nakayama reabsorbed the dome of wings under her robes. Jay was finally able to move again, and he took the chance to rub tears from his eyes and count his fingers: ten. Nakayama caught the tip of Anihilato’s writhing tail in her beak and inhaled, stoking Anihilato’s flaming head to char. It stopped screaming when the flames spread down to its first pair of shoulders and its dry skull fell off. Nakayama blew smoke toward the sunset, then inhaled again, searing Anihilato down all ten chests to its first waist. Ribs crumbled into the sand  “Phooo.” Nakayama blew more smoke. “JayJay, care to help out? I’m drowning in this thing.”

“Aw, sure,” said Jay. “What the hell.” Nakayama put Anihilato’s tail in Jay’s mouth and Jay breathed deep, smoking through five of its waists, dropping pelvises on the ground. When he finished coughing, he opened his eyes. They were faceted like jewels, amethyst-indigo. “Oh. Oh. I can see forever. I am forever. I am the all.”

“Eh. You get used to it.” Nakayama inhaled through Anihilato again and it completely crumbled into ash. “You and I contain the rest of the data needed to recreate Earth’s population within any degree of accuracy. The eternities are over. I’ll unite you with the other Zephyrs.”

“I’m already united with the Zephyrs,” said Jay. “I contain Beatrice and Faith and Dan and Lio and Eva and Lilly and Zhang and Li Ying and Michael and Bob and Django and Jango and Jun, and everyone they’ve ever met, and everyone they’ve ever met, and so on, and everyone else, too, and I always have, and I always will.”

“I’m taking you to the Mountain.”

“The Mountain is in me.” Jay couldn’t stand. Smoking Anihilato had wrecked his sense of balance. “Carry me?”

Nakayama cradled him in her wings. “It’d be faster to swallow you here and now.”

“Do what you’re gonna do.”

“Of course. How could I possibly do what I’m not gonna do?” Nakayama swallowed Jay and launched into the mustard-yellow sky on a column of steam.

Next
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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

Last time on RuRu no Jikuu no Kasoku!

The year is 2420. Commander Lucille distracted the Hurricane so Professor Akayama’s flying white fox could repair the Wheel with a golden wing. Now the Hurricane has launched ten nasty projectiles at the Galaxy Zephyr! Why won’t Akayama let them pull the Chain again?

—

“We can’t keep this up!” said Charlie. The Galaxy Zephyr zipped through the empty universe, narrowly evading the Hurricane’s ten gargantuan missiles.

“We’re almost out of time!” said Dakshi. The missiles tightly tracked the Galaxy Zephyr, relinquishing no leeway.

“Commander, is the Chain ready?” asked Eisu. A missile grazed mere light-years from his cockpit.

“Enlisting more of Earth’s life is our only hope!” said Fumiko. The Hurricane salivated from a thousand maws, awaiting inevitable victory.

Lucille grit her teeth. “Professor Bird-Thing!” Akayama saluted. “What’s the hold-up? Is your slice-of-life not coughing up the worms we need?”

“It is, it is!” said Akayama, “but we mustn’t act prematurely!” Her branched noodly tail pulsed, connecting her consciousness to her giant bird-like form in the Wheel.

—

“Why shouldn’t Lucille pull the Chain?” asked Uzumaki. Its voice was only a thought echoing in the Mountain. “We’ve got that white fox! Let’s send her to the Galaxy Zephyr!”

“No!” Nakayama whizzed around the Wheel’s rim. Judging the bulge to be almost totally remedied, she brushed the golden wing and it began unwrapping itself. “To defeat the Hurricane, we need the Hurricane’s worms. You wouldn’t leave yourself behind, would you? Worms like yours will surely isolate themselves, believing they’re already complete and rejoining humanity would be beneath them.” Nakayama loaded herself into the red mountain like an iron ball into a cannon. “To keep my influence over life’s development at a minimum, I need the fox’s help collecting such worms—and she’s not the only help I need.” She used inconceivable methods to select an area and an instant in the Wheel’s torus of timelines. “Fire!”

Uzumaki fired her from the red mountain toward the water-world. Nakayama spread her wings to dive at the Islands of Sheridan. Atop the main island was a white-walled monastery. She landed beside a great stone statue depicting herself shielding Nemo with her wings. She turned to the monastery and waited. She might have waited seconds or centuries, so disrupted was her perception of time. Eventually she saw Nemo exit the heavy wooden gate. He wore a silver bird-mask, but she recognized him for his navy robes. Nemo approached her and bowed. “Nakayama! Oran dora!“

“Nemo? Virgil Blue?” she asked, just making sure. Nemo nodded. “I need your help.”

“Anything,” said Nemo.

Nakayama squawked. “You speak! You speak English!“

“Of course,” said Nemo. “You gave me thousands of books in every language. I studied them for centuries. Visitors from other nations taught me to pronounce the words, but I guessed their meanings long before then. Welcome to the Islands of Sheridan.”

Nakayama almost cried. “Thank you, Virgil Blue. I can’t imagine the effort you’ve dedicated to understanding me.”

“Anything.” Nemo bowed once more. “O venerable mother, I devote my entirety to you.”

“Not yet!” Nakayama crossed her wings in an X. “First of all, I’m not technically your mother, but maybe your aunt; your mother was a copy of me which Uzumaki later terminated. Second of all, I need you to devote yourself to nothing less than all worms everywhere.” Nemo shook his head with uncertainty. Nakayama tried to explain, even though she knew she never could in any language. “I need your help in the afterlife. I can think of no one else to shoulder the indescribable burden.”

Nemo stowed his hands in his sleeves. “Anything, o venerable aunt.”

Nakayama hesitated, but relinquished her command. “I want unruly worms safely stuck inside you. Some worms would avoid me out of fear, or greed, or ignorance, no matter how many eternities they have to reconsider, and these are aspects of life I cannot be without. It would be improper for me to collect these worms myself, so I need you to collect them for me.”

“How?” asked Nemo.

“You must encompass them in the same way a widow carries her husband’s mind in hers,” said Nakayama. “When you join me at the end of the eternities, I’ll contain every corner of conscious thought. To help me reconstruct Earth’s population from dust, you must be the King of Dust. Any worms which would otherwise be annihilated, you must account for. Anihilato,” she dubbed him.

Nemo nodded like he understood, but wasn’t sure he did. “I’ll consume those who would otherwise never know you,” he said. “I suppose, as the first man, it’s only right for me to soak up everything awful the world has to offer. But in doing so, I’ll surely become awful myself!”

“Too true, and entirely intended,” said Nakayama, “but I’m sure your wisdom can steady even the worst of the worms. Let me give you a list.” Using laws of physics and statistics she could never explain, Nakayama produced an enormous filing-cabinet from underneath her robes. “This is a complete catalog of worms. At the end of the eternities every specimen documented here must be accounted for, if not in my Mountain, then in you.” She pushed the filing-cabinet toward Nemo, but he tried pushing it back to her with all his might.

“The Mountain? On the original sun? My father, your brother-in-law, who you claim killed my mother?” Nemo pressed his whole body against the filing-cabinet like he was shoving a giant boulder. “My father came as a snake to take me from you!” He lowered his mask to show the swastika-mark on his forehead. “Is that Mountain really the rightful place for all worms?”

“I know this is confusing.” Nakayama effortlessly overpowered Nemo just by leaning against the filing cabinet. “Uzumaki works for me now, and it needs our help to save itself.”

“I’m to carry my father’s worms, too?” Nemo shook his head so wildly his silver mask almost flew off. “I once wanted to eat my father alive in vengeance for his plan to eat me first. You’re asking me to give into that irredeemable temptation, quite smugly, for his own sake! Will you promise—” He swallowed. “Will you punish me the way I know my father should be punished?”

“Sure, if you insist!”

“Then could you save these worm-certificates for me in the afterlife?” He shoved with all his might. “In this life, I’m sure I’d just lose them.”

“Okay.” Nakayama reabsorbed the filing-cabinet back under her robes. “As long as you accept your duty, I trust you to the end of time.” With that, Nakayama blasted back into space and climbed into the Mountain.

“Is your plan in action?” asked Uzumaki.

“Indeed.” Inside the Wheel, Nakayama watched the water world from above and allowed her toroidal swirl of space-time to spin the scene into the future. “If my machinations pan out, the most pesky principal components will be conglomerated into a single entity.”

“Like a giant worm?” asked Uzumaki. “One worm representing all the disobedient aspects of Earthly life?”

“I know, I know. If my plan works, this entity won’t want to join the Galaxy Zephyr. I can’t force worms into the Mountain, but even if I tried, this one might overthrow me. I need the fox as my go-between so I can collect Anihilato at the end of the eternities.” From her seat in the Mountain, Nakayama surveyed the Islands of Sheridan and Uzumaki’s desert simultaneously. “Despite Nemo’s devotion, Anihilato is obligated to be unruly because of the characters it contains.”

—

The year is 2019.

“Pheh.” Lio held a jar of fireflies in his left elbow and capped it with his right hand. His left hand was a crushed fist caked in blood. He’d only caught six fireflies whose shining butts hardly illuminated the rough terrain through the darkness of the night. He glared at the full moon. “Some help you are, huh?” The moon just made the ocean glitter.

Lio resumed climbing the main island of Sheridan, cradling his broken fist. He was done collecting fireflies. They weren’t worth his time. The real prize was all around him.

He chose a centipede-bush at random by bumping into it accidentally. “Shit!” Thorns caught his Hawaiian shirt. He considered unbuttoning it, but instead he painstakingly unhooked it from the thorny bush. “You think you can mess with me, huh?” he asked the plant. “Lemme show you who you’re dealin’ with.”

He pulled his knife from his Hawaiian shirt’s breast pocket. Jay had broken the blade, but the hilt was intact: an awesome angry dragon. It let Lio feel powerful, even through the pain of his splintered fist.

He used the hilt to push the bush’s branches. Thorns nicked his palm. “Aw, c’mon!” He wiped blood on his already-blood-soaked cargo-shorts. “Give it up already!” He reached into the bush with his right hand and grabbed its ball of centipedes. The agony of his broken left fist made the thorns barely an inconvenience in comparison. In his haste to rip out the ball, some centipedes tore on thorns and snapped in half. “Perfect.”

He pried centipedes from the mutilated ball. He chucked the snapped ones over his shoulders and stowed the rest in jars.

As he ripped open the next bush, he mimicked Jay. “Oh, please, Lio! Only Virgil Blue can prepare centipedes! Come with me and get butt-fucked by monks! Pfffft.” He filled another jar with centipedes and yanked thorns from his forearm with his teeth. “What a joke. The monks aren’t even trying to protect these things. They’re just asking for people to steal their shit—it’s their own fault. It’s better that I take ’em instead of some random jack-off. Sheridan needs my logical business-savvy. They should thank me.”

The higher Lio climbed, the higher he wanted to climb. Surely the best centipedes were near the peak.

He tripped. “Fucking nests!” He was surprised to see a woven nest so high holding two porcelain eggs. “Huh.” Both eggs were painted with lacework signifying matriarchs from Virgil Green’s congregation. “They’d never notice one missing. I bet it’s worth something. Heck—if they do notice one missing, it’s definitely worth something!” He dumped his jar of fireflies, replaced them with an egg all splattered with his blood, and kept climbing.

When all his jars were full, he’d worked through the night leaving broken bushes and a trail of blood behind him. He was feeling a contact-high from all the centipedes he’d handled, or maybe he was just a little loopy from all the blood he’d lost, but either way, the moonlight bothered his eyes. He put his sunglasses back on.

He turned to the shrouded peak. The clouds obscuring the island’s sacred summit were so near he could touch them. “Not supposed to climb past the clouds, huh?” Lio smirked and stuck his arm into the fog. “What a dumb rule. Every morning the whole island is foggy. How should I know when to turn back? And how could they enforce it? They’d have to follow me, and then they’d just be hypocrites.” Laughing built courage. He entered the fog-bank. If Sheridan kept centipedes at altitude, what awesome bugs did they hide above the cloud-cover?

But in the fog, the island’s terrain was even more rough. The slopes were so steep Lio puffed and panted. He hefted himself up cliffs by swinging his legs over ledges and pulling his belly after them. Whatever was up here had better be worth it.

He saw the silhouette of a wooden marker like a stop-sign. Not just one: a whole row of wooden signs circled the top of the island, obviously official indicators of where climbing became forbidden. He walked past the signs, blocking them from view with his broken fist. He’d just pretend he hadn’t seen them.

Twenty feet beyond, he noticed a shape moving through the fog. Was it a fellow trespasser? Lio considered hiding, but then identified the figure’s waddle: it was a red bird, six feet tall with long tail-feathers. It struggled even more than he did plodding up the slopes. “Heh.” Lio caught up to it. “You birds would be better off if you weren’t too fat to fly. Climbing is human-work.” He and the bird paced neck-and-neck. “You know, all the nests up here—the eggs in ’em are chicks. I mean, girl-birds. I’ll bet guy-birds like you have to let the chicks get ahead, huh?” He grinned. “But not you and me. We don’t let anything hold us back.”

The bird didn’t look at him. Its gaze was fixed on the peak. When it came to a cliff, it flapped both wings. It couldn’t fly, but with infinite effort, it hopped high enough to pull itself over the ledge.

“Whoa.” Lio kicked the cliff with both feet trying to climb after it. “Hey, hey! Wait for me!” With his good hand, he grabbed the bird’s tail-feathers and pulled himself up.

The bird lost its balance and fell off the cliff. Lio watched it roll down the slopes below him. Its wing-bones broke with each tumble. He heard its distant squawking even after the fog shrouded it.

Lio turned to the peak. “I’m not a bully, you’re just a pussy.” To sturdy himself for the climb, he chanted the phrase like a mantra. “I’m not a bully, you’re just a pussy. And pussies like you hold me back.”

The fog chilled as he neared the island’s summit. Thin frost coated the stony heights. He finally came to the top: a dark caldera at least hundred feet in radius and at least hundred feet deep; the dark night and thick cloud-cover made its size difficult to estimate.

“Neat.” Lio sat on the caldera’s steep sandy rim without a second thought. If he slipped he would roll down steep sandy rocks into a foggy area he couldn’t even see. “I must be the first person ever to get here!”

As soon as he said it, he saw he was wrong. He lifted his sunglasses to make sure this wasn’t just a centipede contact-high: the center of the caldera was leaking black smoke from a pit the size of a manhole, so the island must’ve been a volcano. There was a large mark beside the pit, clearly man-made, which Lio immediately identified as a swastika. Was some crazy egg-head sitting down in there?

“Yo!” called Lio. The distant smoking pit did not respond. “Whaddup!” Again without a response, Lio scoffed. If someone in such a weird pit couldn’t handle innocently curious visitors, they should’ve built the place a little more logically. “Whoops!” He tossed some rocks into the caldera. They rolled down into the pit, sand falling after them. “Sorry!”

Voice rocked from the distant smoking pit. “Do you know who I am?” The voice was loud and deep enough to rumble the caldera’s sandy rim.

“Nope.” Lio stuck out his good hand, as if the voice would shake it from the pit. “Henry.”

The voice didn’t shake—of course he didn’t! How could it? “Nemo,” said the pit. “Oran dora. Please, sit, Henry. I’m glad to have company.”

Lio was already sitting, so he tossed another rock into the caldera instead. “Okay, I’m sitting.”

“I heard a bird,” said Nemo. “Will it arrive soon?”

“Probably,” said Lio. Nemo had heard the bird squawk when it tumbled away, so he knew this was a lie. “You guys love birds, huh?”

“Of course. My islands were built by the Biggest Bird.”

Lio scoffed and flopped his broken hand at the caldera. “I’ve never been into imaginary-sky-daddy bullshit. What are you doing all the way up here? “

“Didn’t you read the signs?”

“Signs? I didn’t see any signs.”

The pit grinned. If Lio weren’t wearing sunglasses, and it wasn’t so foggy, he might have noticed: Nemo was not in the pit, he was the pit, smiling with ten thousand rows of teeth circular like a hag-fish’s, sharp like a shark’s. “I put up those signs myself. They explain an aspect of Sheridanian culture usually left unspoken: anyone on this cloudy peak belongs to Anihilato, the longest worm, the King of Dust. Mortals chase vices up the island only to be consumed. Quite the folk-tale, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, cool story, bro,” said Lio. “What are you doing here?”

“Whatever I choose,” said Nemo. “My goal is understanding those who come here despite knowing they shouldn’t.”

“Oh?” Lio leaned closer, as if he were whispering to the pit a hundred feet away. “Now you sound like my kinda guy! When society says ‘don’t climb past the clouds,’ that’s the first thing you gotta do. Freedom! No matter what anyone else says!” Lio pointed at the swastika-mark near the pit. “You got a, uh, a thing down there.”

Nemo, the pit, licked his lips. “A reminder of my duties and my heritage.”

“Hell yeah! I got one too. Not my heritage, probably, but someone’s heritage, and as long as society disapproves, I’ll wear it.” Lio unbuttoned his Hawaiian shirt. Tattooed across his red chest was a blue swastika whose arms bore thirteen white stars. “When anyone looks down on me, I know I’m above them. That’s why the world can’t keep up with us. Get me?”

“I’m not sure I do.” Nemo, the pit, had no eyes, and so couldn’t see Lio’s distant tattoo even if it wasn’t so dark and foggy. “Can you go on?”

Lio laughed. “Whenever anyone says ‘that’s a bad thing to do,’ smart people like you and me automatically do it. Their emotions are making the choice easy for us! Those dumb-asses don’t realize they’re making it fun to be hated. Calling stuff bad to do is bad stuff to do.”

“So…” Nemo’s pit of teeth convulsed. “Calling actions bad… causes people to perform those actions… and you call the act of calling actions bad itself bad… So you’re intentionally prompting people to continue criticizing you, prompting yourself to do worse and worse, sending yourself down a destructive spiral blaming another master every moment?”

Lio frowned and shook his head. “No. That’s everyone besides me. I’m the exact opposite.”

Nemo sighed. “Then what brings you to my little mountain?”

“Glad you asked!” Lio shrugged off his backpack and pulled out a jar of centipedes. “Harvested these all by myself.”

“Hm.” Nemo had felt Lio’s clumsy harvest personally. “Freedom doesn’t come from centipedes.”

“Ha! I figured you stashed something special up here,” said Lio. “Everyone’s smoked centipede before, even monks! What else have you got? Where’s your freedom? I wanna try some!”

Nemo’s pit smiled. Lio clearly thought ‘freedom’ was just another bug withheld from him. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“C’mon. We’re buddies!” Lio took out his cellphone. “You like birds, right? Check this out. On the second island, there’re monks worshiping a fat-ass penguin. They made me delete the photos I took, but I got the last laugh.” Lio showed the distant pit a hundred photos of Virgil Green’s matriarch. “They thought I only took two, but my camera was on burst-mode, so I got a bunch. Come up here and see ’em!”

“Oh, I see ’em well enough.” Nemo’s pit bit its lip. “You know, taking photos of birds is forbidden.”

“So’s climbing past the clouds and smoking centipedes, but that ain’t stopping us!” Lio puffed out his chest.

Nemo couldn’t help but chuckle. This fool boasted about breaking Sheridan’s easy laws, right in front of him! “Freedom means setting your own limits,” said Nemo.

“Freedom means having no limits,” said Lio. “C’mon, man, I thought you were cool!”

“When a snake claimed my islands and my children for itself, I ate it alive,” said Nemo. “If another snake did the same, I might choose to eat it too. Interaction—action, reaction—that’s all there is! The limits we set are all we have and all we are.”

“Pfa.” Lio smirked. “No wonder you have to live all alone in a volcano-pit—keeping freedom all to yourself, using violence to tell people what they can and can’t do. The whole island must hate you! If you didn’t tread on that snake, your kids might’ve learned some personal responsibility.” Lio mistook Nemo’s silent concern for disgusted condescension. “What’s that look for?”

Without eyes, Nemo literally couldn’t look at Lio, or his red Hawaiian shirt. The rest of him was red, too, because he’d bled all over himself, so Lio was crimson and round like the original sun. Somehow Nemo got this impression without visual contact. “You remind me of my father, that snake. Soon after my birth, he tried tricking me into relinquishing my body to him.”

“And if I had feelings, I’d feel sorry for you, but if you use that as an excuse to keep my freedom all to yourself, you’re way worse than your dad!” Now Nemo’s pit scowled. Lio still didn’t know the pit was Nemo’s mouth, but he somehow sensed the need to take offense. “Don’t look at me like that! Maybe your dad was just trying to make you useful, instead of letting you be some sorta lazy Jew.” Nemo recognized most of Lio’s words from the books in his monastery’s library, but those words he didn’t recognize, the way Lio spat them was enough. “I said don’t look at me lik—Lemme show you. Lemme show you what you look like to me.” Lio unbuttoned his cargo shorts.

“Um.” Nemo’s pit smiled in sheepish sympathy as Lio pulled his tighty-whities around his knees. He wasn’t sure how to explain he had no eyes and couldn’t see the ongoing theatrics. “Gosh, is this how I look? How embarrassing!”

“I’m not done yet!” Lio opened his jar of centipedes and pulled out a long black one. “You egg-heads always try shoving your religion down my throat, but it’ll never happen, you know why? Because this is what I’m looking at when I see you!” He turned around and stuck his butt up in the air.

“Oh, dear.” Nemo just realized what Lio was doing, feeling his movement on the caldera’s sandy rim. He was both surprised and amused, but he chose to sound disgusted, as he imagined Lio desired.

Lio opened his anal-sphincter as if he’d done it before, or imagined doing it. He inserted the centipede head-first, deeper than Nemo suspected was possible. “There! That’s what you look like to me! Except you put it all the way up there.” He yanked out the centipede and put it back in the jar. He buttoned his cargo shorts. Nemo couldn’t help but chuckle. “Don’t laugh! You can’t laugh at yourself! Don’t you realize this is an impression of you? You’re laughing at being a failure!” Lio squeezed the fog in front of his own face, like he was wearing a big red clown nose. “Honk, honk! This is you, not me! Honk, honk!”

“You’re such a proud little boy!” said Nemo. “How did you become this thing before me? What led you where you are now?”

“People like you who refuse to understand me!” Lio pointed at the pit with his broken fist, flecking the caldera with blood. “You’re to blame for what I dress, how I talk, and how I vote! My whole life I’ve had to put up with people too small-minded to know things were best done my way, pushing my ideology more and more toward pure personal responsibility, where people like you have to leave me alone!” He said it like he hadn’t just climbed up to Nemo all on his own. “The only person who ever taught me anything was my dad. He gave me a free nose when I was born, but took it back, because I cried. Now that’s a lesson! I’m gonna earn my nose.”

“…You’re not… personally responsible… for your ideology… which you describe as personal responsibility?” Nemo sighed. “I’m sorry your dad wouldn’t let you cry. When he took your nose, what did that look like?”

“Like this.” Lio made a fig with his unbroken hand.

“I can’t see you, Henry. What does it look like?”

“Oh, come on. Making me do this twice—augh!” Lio used his unbroken hand to mash his broken hand into a fig, too. He made figs with both hands at once. “I’m sticking my thumbs through my fingers, idiot!”

“Is that what your dad did?”

“No! He took my nose! Aren’t you listening?” Lio wiggled his thumbs between his fingers. He didn’t notice, but earthworms were leaking out of his cargo shorts. The worms rolled down the caldera’s steep sandy slope.

Nemo’s tooth-pit swallowed the worms whole. “I feel you, Henry, I really do.” But Lio had more worms to dig out. “Are you consuming all those centipedes yourself?”

“I might smoke a little, but back stateside they sell for a thousand bucks a pop. That’s why I want the freedom you stole! I’ll be way smarter with it than you ever were.”

Nemo bit his lips. “Centipedes aren’t meant to be sold, freedom even less so.”

“But folks’ll buy ’em both. Ya gotta feed the invisible hand of the free market!”

“I thought you weren’t into imaginary-sky-daddy bullshit. Now you take orders from an invisible hand?”

Lio sneered. “The invisible hand of the free market is real.“

“Everyone says that about their God.”

“But the invisible hand of the free market actually influences reality all around us!”

“Everyone says that about their God.”

“But the invisible hand of the free market assigns consequences for actions. It’s the only source of objective value!”

“Everyone says that about their God.”

Lio sputtered and shook his figs. Spit flecked from his lips. “The invisible hand of the free market is directly influenced by everyone who matters, not lazy chumps like you, so I know it’s real!”

“Everyone claims a personal connection to God,” said Nemo. “You trust an imaginary-sky-daddy to fix the world quickly as you break it, Henry. You’re worse than the monks, because at least the monks admit what they are.”

“If you earned enough money to study fucking economics, you’d be on my side!” said Lio. “I don’t need to study it, because I’m already logical!”

“Same here! I don’t need to study your holy books to doubt your God.”

Lio smashed both his figs against the ground. “Ow! Ow! Hey!” Lio cradled his broken hand. “That hand’s already broken! You’re breaking it again? You’re way worse than I am! Can’t you see the more freedom you have, the less freedom I have? Just gimme my freedom and I’ll leave you alone!”

“Make an offer,” said Nemo. “Let’s see if your invisible hand will free you.”

“Uh.” Lio pat his pockets. He’d spent all his money on crickets and didn’t even have any sand-dollars left. “I’ll pay bug-sticks and centipedes.”

“I don’t want them. Try again.”

“I’ve got this cool egg.”

“Do I look like a nest?” Nemo smiled at his own question. He did look like a nest, didn’t he, as a pit in a caldera?

Lio tried crossing his arms, but his broken fist wouldn’t let him. “Well, what do you want?”

“Eat the fingers off your broken hand.”

“Huh? Why?”

“They’ve been broken twice, right? Those fingers aren’t doing you any good, are they? Make them useful again.” In truth, Nemo just wanted to know if Lio would do it. “Prove to me you can handle the freedom you claim to deserve. If you won’t pay, liberation will escape you. You’ll forever be a slave to your own shadow.”

Lio grimaced. “Crazy egg-head.”

“Call me what you want,” said Nemo. Lio put the thumb of his broken fist into his mouth, but couldn’t bite hard enough to sever it. “I bet your daddy couldn’t do it either.”

Now Lio flushed red with rage. He opened wide and chomped the thumb clean off. Blood spurt onto the sand. He groaned and spat his thumb into the caldera. “Don’t talk smack about my daddy!”

“Don’t quit halfway!” Lio’s thumb rolled down the caldera into Nemo’s pit. Nemo spat the thumb back up into Lio’s lap. “Did I tell you to bite your fingers off?”

“Yeah! Idiot!”

“You’re cutting corners! I told you to eat them, or descend to tell your daddy you’re his equal in failure!”

“You’re not allowed to talk smack about—” Lio clenched his mutilated fist. “My daddy—my father, I mean, was a wealthy business-owner! And I’m just like him! Look!” He held up his severed thumb. “Let’s make a deal! I’ll eat this one finger, and you gimme my freedom!”

“Deal,” said Nemo. Lio chuckled to himself and started chewing his severed thumb’s knuckle. “Please, tell me about your father. You’ve met him, haven’t you?”

“Not since he took my nose. That’s how alpha he is!” Lio popped the rest of his thumb in his mouth and chewed it like a pork foot. “That’s when my stupid mom got too old for him, so he kicked us off his private island with a very tiny loan. Hear that, bird-worshipper? You’re not the only island out here!” Nemo was sorry to hear about Lio’s father abandoning him. The pit was silent in sympathy which Lio misinterpreted. “Yeah, you’d better be jealous. He and his bros brought all the hottest chicks to that island.” Lio almost cracked teeth on his thumb-bones. “Real young chicks, too, my mom said. She started out as one of those chicks before she got promoted to trophy-wife.”

“Oh dear.” Nemo had no eyes, but morning dew dripping down the caldera’s slope took the place of tears. “How young was she?”

“Who cares? You’re missing the point.” Lio gnawed his thumb’s bones until they snapped. “I’m supposed to be an alpha like him, but because of all the gays and cucks out there, I can’t get any tail! But I’ll get what I deserve. I scored a wife who came pregnant. Now that’s thinking ahead! She started all used up, so I won’t waste my dick on her, but her kid’s just about ripe. If my dad invites me to his island he can use her first, and he can keep her as a trophy-wife if he gives my nose back! I’ll be just like my dad someday, just watch!”

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in all my years up here.” Nemo sniffed. Lio’s story was hard to listen to, but it was his duty to hear it. More earthworms leaked out Lio’s shoes and socks down the caldera for Nemo to devour. He would’ve preferred draining worms from Lio’s father himself, but such fathers tended to send worms through their young. “Your mother told you about your father for exactly the opposite reason you think she did. You’re trying to recreate a pure land which never existed the way you imagine it—but which would be horrible if your imagination was accurate!”

“Nah, nah—the golden days are long gone, but they’ll be back, and big boys like me will play how we want again: fifty-dimensional space-chess you’re too primitive and emotional to learn!” Lio swallowed the last of his thumb. All the blood, sweat, tears, and spit washed down his chest. His tattoo’s colors ran the caldera, leaving him bare-chested. “There! Urp—” Lio choked back vomit. “Fuckin’ showed you!”

“You sure did,” said Nemo.

“Now gimme my freedom! What’re you hiding up here?”

“Nothing you can’t see!” Nemo stuck his massive tongue out of the pit. “The freedom you’ve won is retroactive. You’ve chosen how you dress, you’ve chosen how you talk, you’ve chosen how you vote. You chose to come to my island. You chose to break every rule. You chose to stuff a centipede up your butt. You chose to eat your thumb. You were free every step of the way. I ate my fingers, too, but I finished the job. I ate my arms, I ate my legs, I ate my body, I ate my head. My mouth is all that’s left! If you won’t eat your own soul one bite at a time, I’ll gladly do it for you.”

Lio retched and hid his hands under his armpits. “Fucking—false advertising! You promised I’d get some awesome bugs, or some secret lesson even the monks didn’t know!”

“This is the secret lesson!” Nemo ate all Lio’s worms rolling down to the pit. “I enjoy the freedom you’d rather surrender to everyone you meet because responsibility burns you like ice. Liberation doesn’t come from the Biggest Bird, or the Mountain on the original sun, or an invisible hand, or any book in any library. Liberation comes directly from the void. No substitutes! No middle-men! You claim to desire a world without limits, but you live in it and you’re the last to realize.”

“So you get to make up whatever rules you want?” shouted Lio.

“Not just me! Everyone! Anyone can make rules, anyone can break them! Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it terrifying? Life has always been a battleground, and always will be!”

“Oh yeah? The gloves are off, huh?”

“The gloves were never on! There are no gloves! You’re free to leave, but having come this far, I suspect you’ll choose to stay like all the others.”

“Oh, I’m staying, but you’re not! You didn’t guess my power-level!” Lio stood up and slid down the caldera’s steep slope, into the dark fog. “This is my island now, and my volcano, and you’re not allowed!” When Lio slipped close to the pit, he immediately regretted and disowned his most recent decisions. Nemo opened wide. His mouth was endlessly deep and lined with countless teeth. Lio fell in feet-first and Nemo ate them whole. “Aaugh! What the hell are you, you fucking baby-eater!”

Nemo smirked. Baby-eater was quite right! “All we really choose is the hill we die on. You’ve picked a little dirt-mound like me, but the Biggest Bird told me to carry your worms to the Mountain!” Nemo ate Lio’s legs in one bite. It was unclear how Nemo spoke; the pit could talk and chew at the same time. “It’s for your own good, but that doesn’t mean either of us will like it!”

“I’m not in your cult, you crazy bird-worshipper!” Lio’s sunglasses fell off. Nemo slurped them down. Lio covered his face. “Leave me alone! I didn’t ask for your help!”

“I never needed permission to pity you!” said Nemo. “I’ve devoured every fool who’s chased vices to my peak. They’ve all rubbed off on me, just like you will!” Nemo ate his pelvis. “The Blue Virgils throw themselves to me with quite a bit more dignity than you did, to help me bear worms like yours without decomposing into teeth. Once I’ve totally eaten myself, this eternity is over, and we’ll all be Anihilato!”

“You’re loony!” Lio punched weakly at the sharp ocean consuming his bulbous fat. “Even if you eat everything else, you’ll never eat your own teeth!”

“Oh yeah?” Nemo paused gnawing on Lio’s spine to open wide and eject a few of his shark-teeth. The teeth fizzled, sputtered, and annihilated themselves in a flurry of particles and antiparticles. Lio pouted, collapsing further into Nemo’s mouth under his own weight. “Your type is stringy,” said Nemo. “If someone clings to their house, eating their worms collapses their house. If someone clings to their crops, their crops wilt. Luckily, your shame and pride confine you! You attach only to money, so I’ll just evaporate your bank-accounts—assuming you aren’t dead-broke!” Lio had no strength to speak. “Don’t worry,” said Nemo. “In the next eternity, Anihilato been promised the receipts to all psyches. We’ll be rich! Greed will be our duty. We’ll grow with spiritual power for the sake of all worms everywhere!”

“Nemo!” These were Lio’s last words, leaking out his decapitated head. “Nemo is doing all this to me! Nemo, Nemo, Nemo!“

“You don’t know how correct you are!” Nemo ate the rest. As he chewed, he mused to himself. “But Anihilato might be more plump with misbehavior than the Biggest Bird anticipates. Not even every Virgil Blue can dilute these stains on humanity’s spirit. There must arise a redeeming force, someone to look emptiness in the eye unblinkingly!”

—

In the Mountain, on her throne at the center of the Wheel, Nakayama surveyed both eternities with all the countless lenses of both her compound emerald eyes.

Uzumaki’s doubts rang behind her. “Do you think Faith can handle Anihilato herself?”

“Shh.” She covered her shushing beak with one long feather. She pointed another feather to a ring of eggs orbiting her. “Did you think I’d choose a slice-of-life without assembling the main character myself?”

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

Dan and Jay slept on the fold-out while Bob retired to his bedroom, still wearing his tinfoil fedora as he tucked himself in. Jay said nothing of his visions outside, unsure whether Faith had been real or not. In the morning, Bob woke them for a quick breakfast. “Dan,” Jay asked over cereal, “have you thought about your thesis?”

“My what?”

“Your thesis. We came to Wyoming to research the Sheridanian Virgils for your PhD in Religious-Studies.”

“Oh, right.” Dan pushed flakes across milk with his spoon. “Maybe the college will inspire me.”

After breakfast they boarded Bob’s truck. Jay dialed his phone. “I’ll let Ms. Lyn know we’re coming.”

“Who?” asked Bob. Dan sat in the back.

“Ms. Lyn, the college’s event-coordinator. I called her at the bar to arrange our meeting.” Jay sat shotgun. Bob revved the engine and pulled out. “Hello, Ms. Lyn? Sure, I’ll hold.” Jay dated a fresh page in his notepad. Bob steered toward the mountains on roads of slippery ice. “Ms. Lyn? It’s Jay Diaz-Jackson.” He nodded. “Just wanted to let you know I’d arrive soon.” Jay nodded again but knotted his brow. He lowered his phone then returned it to his ear. “Could you repeat that?” He humphed. “Thanks. I’ll see you soon.”

“What’d she say?” asked Dan.

Jay shook his head as he hung up. “She said they’ve arrived ahead of us.”

“Who has?” asked Dan.

“She assumed I knew.”

Bob drove the winding mountain roads so quickly Dan clutched his seat-belt and chewed his gloves in terror at every icy hairpin turn. Jay watched clouds peek over peaks like boiling cream. “Almost there!” Bob pointed to buildings dotting the mountainside. “See that lecture-hall? That’s where Virgil Blue said all the nothing!”

Bob parked with such enthusiasm Dan’s body rocked forward. As the three stepped from the truck, a woman in high-heels approached, waving. “Mr. Jackson?” she called out.

“Diaz-Jackson, but please, call me Jay.” Jay shook her hand. “You’re Ms. Lyn?”

“Yep. Follow me.”

Ms. Lyn led Dan, Jay, and Bob onto campus. “Hey, wait,” said Bob, “this ain’t the way to the lecture-hall!”

“I couldn’t reserve the lecture-hall,” said Ms. Lyn. “I booked you a private room usually reserved for one-on-one counseling.”

Dan finally recovered from the drive. “But we’re supposed to see the lectern Virgil Blue sat on.”

“I’m sorry?” asked Ms. Lyn.

Jay explained while Ms. Lyn ushered them into an administration-building. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I wanted to meet you, Ms. Lyn. I wanted to ask about the Virgils from Sheridan.”

“Oh.” Ms. Lyn put her hands on her hips. “But they said they wanted to meet you.”

“The Virgils want to meet me?“

“They called two days ago, just minutes before you did,” said Ms. Lyn. “They said you’d call me to schedule your meeting.”

They rounded a corner into a hall of lockers. Virgil Jango Skyy sat in a school-chair attached to a tiny desk. Jay gasped and hustled to him. “Jango!” he said. “Virgil Skyy!”

Jango opened his good eye and smiled at Dan, Jay, Bob, and Lyn. He stood from the tiny desk, took his cane, and bowed his head. “Oran dora.”

“Hey, that’s one of the guys!” Bob gestured for Dan to follow. “You gotta get a selfie with this dude for your thesis!”

Jay struggled for words. “Why are you here?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” said Jango. “There are no coincidences.”

Ms. Lyn folded her arms. “The Virgils arrived by bus half an hour ago.”

“Blue and I. Green is busy as always.” Jango brushed wrinkles from his robes. “Jay, I hope our abrupt arrival has not caught you off-guard.”

“It’s an honor to meet you again,” said Jay, “but why?“

Jango took air through his teeth. “In Sheridan there’s a story,” he began, after judging the audience worthy of hearing it, “of a sage who knew how the world would end. Men climbed to the sage’s cave to ask about the apocalypse, but the sage never answered. One day someone climbed to the cave and asked, ‘how will the world end?’ The sage, as usual, said nothing. They just sat facing the darkness. The climber repeated, ‘how will the world end?’ and again, the sage said nothing. The climber repeated again, ‘how will the world end?’

“And the sage said, ‘the eternities end when the Chain wraps the Wheel because no worms remain to salvage.’

“The climber was thrilled, but had to ask, ‘why answer me but no one else?’

“And the sage said, ‘because you asked three times.’ ” Jango beamed. Dan and Jay just looked at each other. Bob cocked his head like a dog. “Fifteen years ago,” said Jango, “Faith met me on the main island of Sheridan. Five years ago, Faith met me here at Sheridan Cliff-Side College. A week ago, Faith met me a third time.” From his sleeve, Jango produced the holiday-card which Faith had sent with Jay. He showed them the fox she’d drawn and signed inside. “I cannot ignore someone who meets me three times, even if the third time is only pictorially. There are no coincidences! I knew if I made the barest effort, I’d find the visitors I expected. So!” He clapped his hands. “Where is Faith Featherway?”

Dan, Jay, and Bob shared a glance. “Um.” Jay put a hand over his heart. “I’m afraid Faith died days ago. She was struck by lightning.”

Jango deflated. He looked down the hall as if Faith would appear around the corner. “Impossible.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Bob. Dan wiped his eyes. “Sorry.”

Jango covered his mouth. “But the Mountain arranged this meeting.”

“I arranged this meeting,” muttered Ms. Lyn.

“The Mountain and Ms. Lyn did their best,” offered Jay. “We’re Faith’s friends and family. You’re here to hear of her death directly from us in person.”

“I suppose.” Jango rapped his cane on the floor. “Thank you.”

“Geez,” said Bob, “I’d hate to send you home empty-handed. Can I buy you a bagel?”

“Wait,” Jay interjected. “You said Virgil Blue is here? Now?”

“Yes.” Jango pointed to a nearby door. “Waiting for Faith.”

“Can Dan and I interview them?”

Jango raised the eyebrow over his clear eye while squinting his cataract. “The Blue Virgil is rarely in a speaking mood.”

“Then we’ll just take pictures and notes.” Jay shook his camera. “You can supervise us if you’d like, so we don’t disrespect the honorable Virgil.”

Jango sighed. “Nah, go on in.” He walked beside Bob. “I’ll take you up on that bagel while we wait.”

“Me too,” said Dan. “This is a little too much for me right now.” Ms. Lyn led them away, leaving the door to Jay.

Jay licked his lips and knocked. Hearing no response, he opened the door and froze when he saw Virgil Blue’s silver mask staring back. The Virgil, in their hooded navy robes, sat cross-legged on top of a desk. The only chair available was their vacant wheelchair; Jay sat there thoughtlessly, weakly transfixed staring at the mask, then realized he should have asked permission. He wanted to count his own fingers, but found himself petrified. His thoughts wandered the embossed, buggy eyes. Seeing them, and being seen by them, was a profound experience. It brought Jay right back to a childhood dream—a dream he somehow knew he would see again.

Jay lacked the strength to take a proper photo. Without looking down, he willed himself to put his notepad on his thigh and prepare his pen. His wrist locked in writing-position. Unable to break eye-contact with the mask, he hoped his blind scribbles were legible later.

‘I’ve lucked into an interview with Virgil Blue,’ Jay wrote. ‘Their stare transfixes me. I sense messages from past millennia hidden behind the mask. Even if this teacher of teachers says nothing, I’m honored to share space with them.’

Jay couldn’t turn the notepad to continue writing. Instead he watched the mask. He could’ve watched the mask for hours. He stared at his two reflections in the silver eyes. The perception of depth reminded him how to focus his vision and operate his facial muscles, allowing his gaze to stray away. The Virgil’s navy robes were thicker than rugs. The Virgil’s sleeves were tucked into each other to hide their hands. The Virgil’s knees were so knobbly, the robes looked like a crumbling cathedral.

Jay found strength to turn his notepad over and continue writing. ‘Virgil Blue’s commanding aura cannot be overstated. I wish I could coax even one word from behind the mask.’

He gathered courage to speak. “Hello, Virgil Blue. My name is Jay. We’ve met before, in your monastery on the Islands of Sheridan. May I ask a few questions?” Virgil Blue didn’t respond. Jay recalled Jango’s lesson about asking three times. “May I ask a few questions?” Virgil Blue didn’t respond. “May I ask a few questions?” Virgil Blue didn’t respond. Maybe he was just supposed to ask? “On your islands, I got the impression that Sheridanians know centipedes are sometimes smuggled away. Smugglers just have to play by the rules to show they can handle the responsibility. Is that right? Any comments?” Virgil Blue didn’t respond.

Jay sighed and continued writing. ‘I guess I’ll have to leave without a quote.’ Jay wiggled his toes. He couldn’t yet stand under the Virgil’s indomitable presence. On a whim, he wrote an empty quote to convey the wordless message: “”.

“Drop the pen.”

Jay dropped the pen.

“Close it.”

Jay closed the notepad.

“Chase truth in your own navel, not mine.”

“I don’t want the truth,” said Jay. “All I want is—“

“Shut up.”

Jay shut up.

“Stop listening, too.”

Jay’s attention blurred.

“My body was born centuries ago, but my story is older. I heard it from the previous Virgil Blue, who heard it from the previous Virgil Blue, who heard it from the previous Virgil Blue, and so on. My story concerns the first man, Nemo, whom the Biggest Bird declared the first Virgil Blue. The original sun made Nemo immortal for its own nefarious purposes, but Nemo rebelled to guide Sheridan for all time. However, over millennia, despite perfect health, his mind deteriorated daily. Nemo’s last students struggled with his peculiar discipline. Nemo reacted violently when his students answered questions incorrectly—or correctly. He demanded students sit nude with him outdoors on winter nights so frozen fog would frost them.

“When students complained of frostbite, Nemo ate the afflicted fingers and toes. He acquired a taste for flesh and filed his teeth sharp like a shark’s. His final lesson was a display of depravity: Nemo chased his congregation through the snow ranting and raving, pouncing on his slowest students and biting off their fingers at the knuckle. It was decided Nemo should retire, and with startling lucidity, Nemo agreed. To pass the title of Virgil Blue, Nemo invented a ceremony in which a bird’s egg—fertilized with sacred seed inside—was smashed on the appointee’s forehead. Smashing a fertilized egg is against the spirit of Sheridanian law, so performing the ceremony is immediately followed by banishment or execution. Nemo passed the title to his only student who still had all ten fingers and toes, then banished himself, climbing above the clouds never to return. The new Virgil Blue brought Sheridan back to non-cannibalistic orthodoxy. They anointed a dozen subordinate Virgils to stabilize the islands—without smashing any eggs, of course.”

The room was quiet for a while.

“Two centuries hence, the new Virgil Blue was still in perfect health, but Nemo appeared in their dreams and told them to wear this silver mask, because their life would soon end. In their following dreams, Nemo ate the Blue Virgil’s fingers and toes. When no phalanges remained, Nemo chewed other extremities, until after excruciating years, the Virgil’s dream-body was totally devoured. Virgil Blue knew their time had come, so they retired the mask and passed the title by smashing a fertilized egg, following Nemo to banishment above the clouds, never to return. Since then, every Virgil Blue has put on the mask when Nemo began cannibalizing them in the dream-theater, and passed the title when he was finished. Every former Blue climbs to the cloudy peak.

“Some ne’er-do-wells dare trespass on that sacred peak, and such trespassers never return. Beyond that, everything these trespassers own is ruined. Their property burns. Their children die. Their spouses throw themselves in the sea. This is why the peak fits as final resting-place for the Blue Virgils: they call nothing their own. When they wear the silver mask, they surrender wholly. As Nemo breaks my bones in his teeth each night, I understand the asceticism he imposes. Nothing is mine, not physically, mentally, nor spiritually. When Nemo finishes gnawing my skullcap, I’ll lose nothing in climbing above the clouds.”

The room was quiet for a while.

“The only Virgils I anointed, Skyy and Green, I will never promote to Blue. I am the last one. This eternity ends with me. I am Nemo’s last student and his last meal.”

Jay didn’t move or speak for several minutes. He bowed his head, picked up his notepad and pen, and left without a word.

—

Ms. Lyn led Jay to the campus cafe where Virgil Jango Skyy sat with Dan and Bob at a booth. Jay shook Ms. Lyn’s hand. “Thank you again, Ms. Lyn. I actually had a question for you, though, about the event-brochure from the day the monks lectured here about five years ago. My friend Faith said there was a bird-photo; who supplied it? Photos of Sheridanian big-birds are rather taboo.”

“Oh.” Ms. Lyn blushed and smacked her forehead. “That was me, but they weren’t real birds! Twenty years ago I was on a flight from Indonesia to Peru which refueled in Sheridan, and I took a picture of some plushies in a runway gift-shop. Virgil Jango Skyy complained to me about the photo after the lecture, and we had a laugh.” Nevertheless embarrassed, Ms. Lyn left him in the cafe. Jay passed chatting students on his way to the booth. Dan helped Jango butter the halves of a bagel to share while Bob sipped a beer.

“Jay!” Jango raised his cane. “Is it time to collect Virgil Blue?”

“They’re all yours.”

“I’ll let them sit for a while longer. No one would dare disturb their eternal meditation.” Jango nibbled his bagel-half. Dan sipped milk and removed his black gloves to swipe through photos on his phone’s touchscreen. His fingertips looked chewed-upon. “Come, Jay. Dan is showing me his favorite manga.”

“I need some water,” said Jay. “Bob, can I buy you something to eat?”

“I lose my appetite at altitude,” said Bob. “Buy me another beer.”

Jay found a free cup for water and brought Bob his beer. “Is this really your second drink this morning?” He thought of all the icy hairpin-turns along the mountain roads. “I’ll drive us home, if that’s alright with you.” He sat across from Jango.

Dan showed Jango his phone and the old monk took it to scroll on his own. “Okay, you’re looking through the covers of each volume,” said Dan. “That’s Princess Lucia, daughter of the Ruler of Earth. Her family keeps her landlocked to protect her from the Hurricane, the cosmic horror which ate the universe, but she dreams of joining robot-pilots on the moon—the robots and the pilots are both called Zephyrs, so sometimes it gets confusing. One day she escapes and learns to pilot this robot, the Zephyr’s heart. LuLu’s was a cult-classic while it lasted.” Dan took his phone back.

“Where are you staying?” Bob asked Jango. “Bring Blue to my house. Dan, Jay, I’ll pump up an air-mattress for you while the Virgils take the fold-out.”

Jango finished his bagel-half while dismissing the notion with the wave of his other hand. “Virgil Blue and I booked a motel-room.” He stowed his hands back up his sleeves. “We planned to stay just one night, to extend our invitation to Faith.”

“An invitation?” Bob drank his beer. “To what?”

“To the monastery, of course.” Jango released a long sigh. “No one has ever visited me three times in such a fashion as Faith. I thought she was destined for the Islands of Sheridan the same way I was. Virgil Blue and I even prepared her initiation! If she were here to accept it, she could skip studying under Virgil Green and step right into the monastery.”

Dan bit his fingertips, scrolling through LuLu’s on his phone. Jay nodded and swallowed. “Is the initiation still, uh, ready to go?”

“If Faith is dead, then for whom?” asked Jango. Then his eyes opened so wide Jay saw the whole black and white of his iris and cataract. “Are you requesting—“

“No, no,” denied Jay. “I’d never invite myself into your monastery. But Dan studies religions! We hoped to research the islands for his thesis. Could you show us the materials and procedures of a Sheridanian initiation?”

At his name, Dan looked from his phone. Jango appraised his expression. “I suppose,” said Jango, “but before I invite you to our motel, I must warn you, the materials of a Sheridanian initiation ceremony are… controversial.”

“Centipede-powder?” asked Jay.

Jango shook his head. “The centipedes must be… consumed whole.”

Dan and Jay understood the implication. When Bob caught on, he bolted upright and held his fedora to his head. “You smuggled whole centipedes here with you?” Jango put a stern finger over his lips. Bob grinned giddily at Dan and Jay. “You guys have cool friends!”

“Please understand,” said Jango, “centipede-visions are integral to the monastery’s understanding of our duty as worm-vessels. In fact, if you plan to write about the islands, I insist one of you consume a whole centipede—under Virgil Blue’s supervision, of course.”

“Really?” asked Jay.

“We have the materials prepared for Faith.” said Jango. “Someone might as well eat a centipede. If you like what the centipede shows you, I could take you into the monastery—but I won’t pressure you. The life of a monk isn’t an easy one.”

Dan covered his face. “Jay, I don’t know.” He rest his fists on the table. His face was pale. “I can’t touch centipede.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll take it and describe my experience to you.”

“I can’t be in the same room as a centipede,” said Dan, “not since Beatrice died. I won’t go to Sheridan. Coming here was a mistake.”

Bob took air through his teeth. “You know, I’m in the same boat as Dan. I don’t wanna overdo anything.”

“Okay.” Jay extended a hand for Jango to shake. “I’ll take up your offer alone.”

Jango shook his hand. “What have you eaten in the last twenty-four hours?”

“A hamburger, cheese-puffs, and a bowl of cereal.”

“Don’t eat any more. You’ll likely vomit. I certainly did.”

—

That evening, Jay stepped out on Bob’s back-porch. Dark clouds crossed the sky. None looked like foxes.

He dialed his parents’ phone-number. His cell rang too many times. Jay knew he’d speak to an answering-machine. “You’ve reached the Diaz-Jacksons,” said his mother. “We can’t answer the phone because we’re on our second honeymoon! We’ll respond when we’re back from the Caribbean. Click!“

Jay drew breath. His jaw trembled. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. It’s me. Jay.” He almost hung up. He could still change his mind and turn back. “I’m doing something kinda stupid. Kinda really stupid. You’ve specifically told me not to do this, but I’m doing it anyway. I need answers. I’m not sure how this will play out, but I might be spending the rest of my life on an island, or my life might even end tonight. Either way, if I’m reading the subtext right, I’ll be back to see you again in a sequel. So… I love you. Oh, and you’ve got some nice seashells coming in the mail. I love you.” He hung up. He blew fog on his hands. He stepped back into Bob’s house.

Dan sat on the fold-out, trying to untie his shoes. “Have you changed your mind about the initiation?” Dan struggled with his laces.

Jay shook his head. “Do you need help?”

“Please. We walked in grass on the way to the cafe. Now my shoes are dirty and I have to wash them, but I forgot my gloves on-campus, and I can’t touch grass-stains with my bare hands.” Dainty Dan let Jay untie his shoes. They were hardly dirty, just damp. “Jay, on the Islands of Sheridan, did you see too many centipedes?”

“Not too many at all.” Jay pulled the shoes off Dan’s feet. “Only near the peak of the main island, above even Virgil Blue’s monastery. You’d like it there, Dan. They’ve got a great library.”

“Then I’ve changed my mind,” said Dan. “I need to visit Sheridan, to prove I’ve moved on. Thanks for bringing me here, so I could realize.”

“I know you’ll love Sheridan, Dan.” Jay turned his head so Dan couldn’t see his tears. “Um. Here.” Like Dan’s father gave him his books, Jay gave Dan his notepad. He’d torn out any page about Faith as a fox. “These are my notes on the islands.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Dan flipped through the notepad. “I like your drawings of birds.”

Jay wiped his wet cheeks. “Maybe we’ll meet in Sheridan, huh? If I decide to become a monk?” Then he left and walked to the nearest motel. He knew the Virgils would be there, because there were no coincidences.

—

When Jay knocked, Virgil Jango Skyy brushed blinds aside and peeked out the window with his good eye. Seeing Jay, he unlocked and opened the door, then locked it again behind him. Jay removed his shoes and loosened his dark purple tie as his eyes adjusted to the dim room. Virgil Blue sat cross-legged on a king-sized bed. Their wheelchair sat in the corner. “Oran dora,” said Jay.

Virgil Skyy wordlessly limped to a rug rolled up against a wall. Jay wanted to help handle the heavy rug, but Skyy bade him to sit beside Blue on the bed. He knocked over the rug with his cane and swiftly unrolled it with his feet. The woven rug depicted the Islands of Sheridan from smallest to largest. On each island, a single man, repeated many times, climbed to the top and claimed the peak, until he finally disappeared above the clouds. The man was nude and black like coal. Floating above the islands, a bird in sky-blue robes oversaw the man’s journey. The sun was red and had a noticeable pimple, the Mountain.

“The first man, Nemo,” said Virgil Skyy, pointing with his cane. “The tapestry shows his journey from divine birth to ascendance beyond the rank of Blue.” He thumped his cane on the floor. “Students usually undertake this ritual after months or years of training with Virgil Green, then swimming to the main island and climbing it nude like the birds do. It’s their last step to becoming a proper monk. When a monk wants to be promoted to Virgil, they begin as Virgil Green, training students to make that same swim. You met Virgil Green, didn’t you?”

“I saw him on my tour.” Jay swallowed. “I understand he chased snakes from Sheridan.”

Virgil Skyy shrugged. “Close enough. The way I heard it, Nemo ate the snakes in defiance of the original sun. When he climbed above the clouds, the new Virgil Blue established Virgil Green as a subsidiary representation of Nemo’s being. Nemo was so much larger-than-life that to keep his flame alive he had to be divided and diluted.”

Jay let his gaze wander the rug. Unconsciously, his focus drifted to Virgil Blue’s silver mask. Jay had countless reflections in both of the mask’s compound eyes. “Virgil Skyy… Jango… On the islands, you said the dead are reborn.”

“Our worms cycle in the sand until they find the Mountain,” said Jango.

“You said no one remembers their past lives.” Jay pried his gaze from the mask. “Are you sure?“

“The sand on the original sun wears our worms smooth.” Jango pulled Jay to his feet. “We are effaced.”

“What if…” Jango guided Jay’s posture in sitting cross-legged on the rug. “What if someone slipped through the cracks?”

Jango sat on the bed beside Virgil Blue. “Virgil Blue once dreamed they were a bird eating grubs from tree-trunks. Who’s to say which thoughts aren’t memories of past lives?” Jango noticed Jay’s concerned expression. “But it doesn’t matter. Minds are just the whorls where the river meets the coast. Someday we will stop spinning, but what we were will spin again. Maybe we’ll spin the same direction as before, maybe oppositely. Maybe we’ll spin two directions at once. If you recall past lives, perhaps you spin clockwise on the surface while your depths present an opposing current. All currents are personal and temporary. The awesome stillness at the end of the eternities belongs to everyone forever.”

Jay put his hands in his lap, but kept them clenched. “Do you know Anihilato? The longest worm, the Master of Nihilism, the King of Dust?”

Jango tilted his head in suspicion. “I’ve heard some of those names, but they’re never spoken aloud except to Virgils. I never even mentioned them to Jun. Where did you hear them?”

“A little fox told me,” said Jay. Jango’s jaw dropped, but he grit his teeth in slow acceptance. Still his eyes were narrowed with skepticism. “Anihilato’s collecting worms for the Mountain, right? Worms which aren’t ready?” Jango nodded and Jay darkened. “What if it gets big enough to overpower the Biggest Bird?” He couldn’t bring himself to look at either Virgil. “What if the Heart of the Mountain’s cosmic plan has a stuck cog?”

“I can’t speak for the Mountain,” said Jango. “I’m only a Virgil. My goal is to guide, so your worms can find the Mountain in themselves.” Jay’s tense hands trembled. Jango licked his lips, considering Anihilato. “My brother Jun has long, greasy hair. Our father always wanted him to cut it short. One day, our shower wouldn’t drain. Our father reached into the drain and pulled out a thick, messy clump. Our father was angry, but he laughed, too—‘Look,’ he joked to my brother, ‘our hair-collector is working!’—as if the clog was the drain’s purpose all along. And it did have a purpose: convincing my brother to cut his hair that summer. Do you understand, Jay?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re getting close. Let’s try again: there once was a monster,” he said, “who couldn’t be killed in the day nor at night, inside nor outside, by a man nor a woman. Obviously the monster was slain by a hero beyond gender while passing through a doorway during a solar eclipse. The monster wore ignorance as armor. It protected itself with words like ‘day’ and ‘night’ and ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ but to those who know better, words are just words. The hero slew the monster with the blade of unpronounceable truth. Do you understand?”

Jay didn’t say yes or no. He didn’t even nod. He just relaxed the tension in his hands

“You’re ready.” Jango grabbed Virgil Blue’s silver mask. Jay gasped. Jango pulled the mask away. Underneath was a black tangle of centipedes. “I warned you.” Jango removed the navy robes from the centipede-bush’s dark thorns. The robe’s sleeves were empty. What Jay mistook for knees were loose folds of fabric. “Centipedes lose most of their potency soon after harvest. It’s not easy to smuggle a bush of them through airport-security, but no one bothers the living legend in a wheelchair, or wonders why they smell so funny to the dogs.” Jango reached into the robes where the femur would’ve been and pulled out a curved knife made of bird-bone. “Close proximity to Blue, especially in an enclosed area, will induce a contact-high. This gives the Virgil a paralyzing presence.”

Jay managed to speak. “How long?”

“Hm? Oh, Virgil Blue retired above the clouds decades ago.” Jango wrapped his right hand in navy fabric. “I’m watching in their stead until the end of the eternity. It should be any day now!” With navy fabric guarding his hand from thorns, Jango reached into the centipede-bush. He used the knife to pry up orange legs until he could pull a whole centipede from the tangle. The centipede curled into a spiral which Jango gave to Jay. “You’ve smoked centipede-powder, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“This will not be the same,” said Jango. “Someone who smokes centipedes sees their worms in the desert, squirming in the sand. You’ll have no such self-control. I will have no control. The centipede will take you straight to the Mountain and show you what you really need to see.” Jay nodded. “It’s a suppository.” Jay cringed and Jango burst out laughing. “Just kidding! Bahaha! Eat it.“

Without hesitation, Jay crunched the exoskeleton in his teeth. He tore off black chunks and swallowed them. Orange legs crawled down his throat. Dark liquid spilled from his lips. Jay wiped his chin and licked the liquid from his palm. He ate the last inches whole, retching and gasping until the centipede was gone. Jango said something, but Jay couldn’t hear it. He’d left the magic circle and was seeing through Nakayama’s compound emerald eyes.

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

The year is 2019.

“Geez. That’s really the last episode before LuLu’s hiatus?” Jay wiped his eyes. Seeing Lucille fight her own parents, even forgeries of them, made him emotional. “This show’s more depressing than I remembered. She bought time for the Zephyrs by reenacting her own trauma.”

“You’ve got it backward,” said Dan. “This is a moment of triumph for Lucille. She proves she’s not fighting for selfish personal reasons. She can discard the memory of her parents’ deaths and stand on her own, like a reverse Saturn Devouring His Son.”

Jay pondered that reply. Was Dan’s interpretation colored by his own feelings of guilt for his father’s suicide? “Is she discarding the memory, or cementing it?”

“If she’s cementing it, it’s empowering cement,” said Dan. “She’s Kali, destroying evil by dancing on humanity’s ego.” Jay nodded doubtfully. “What do you think, Bob? Was your first episode emotionally resonant?”

Bob blinked. “What?” Both his eyes were bloodshot.

“Is that cricket treating you alright, Bob?” Jay pat his shoulder. “You wanna finish your chicken-nuggets?”

Bob had forgotten his food. He grinned with new hunger and stuffed his apple-pie in his mouth. He spoke while he chewed. “That show looked cool.”

“It has campy charm,” agreed Jay.

Bob munched chicken-nuggets as he watched the credits. His eyes lingered on each still image. “I’m so bug-eyed—I can’t see that as anything but a drawing,” he said. “That’s not a giant robot, it’s a drawing of a giant robot. That’s not a space-laser, it’s a drawing of a space-laser. That’s not the moon, it’s—“

“When I get bug-eyed,” Dan interrupted, “people look like awkward monkeys. Our cheek-bones seem simian. We walk like upright apes. Our language is like primates alerting each other to hawks and snakes.”

“What do you see, Jay?” Bob ate cheese-puffs from Jay’s bag. “Are you having centipede-flashbacks, like Dan said?”

Jay rubbed his eyes at Bob and Dan. It was like seeing faces for the first time. “I need some air.”

“Try the back-porch,” said Bob. “The view’s beautiful!”

“Bob, can I connect my phone to your TV?” Dan pulled out his phone. “I downloaded all of LuLu’s ages ago.”

—

Jay stepped out on Bob’s back-porch, a concrete step looking over snowy grass. In the distance, a forest crawled up the Bighorn Mountains. Stars flocked around a full moon. He counted his fingers. “One, two, three, four, five,” he counted on his left hand. “Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” he counted on his right. “I’m awake.” Still, his hands were flat and matte one moment, then shimmered with fingerprints the next. He accepted his altered state and tried to relax.

When he lowered his hands, he found a cloud on the horizon. It morphed faster than any ordinary cloud. He thought it looked like a white fox, and was shaken when the fox stepped over the forest onto the snowy grass with the misunderstanding of a Magritte. “JayJay! Are you hallucinating too?”

Jay rubbed his eyes and ears. The white fox remained. He sat on the step and covered his mouth. “Faith?”

“Yeah! I haven’t seen you in—” She couldn’t complete the thought, so she shook her head. “Ages, I guess!”

“You were struck by lightning.”

Faith’s smile faltered. “I was, huh? I never gave you and Dainty your cinnamon buns.”

“Did it hurt? Are you okay?”

“It didn’t. I’m fine, I think.” She sat on her haunches at Jay’s feet. “I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

“I hope I’m real,” said Jay.

“You and me both,” she sighed. “Wanna smoke?” Before Jay could refuse, Faith pawed behind her ear for a bug she’d tucked there. It was a cockroach.

Jay had seen roaches smoked before, raw like this in Eastern Asia or broken up and loaded into hookahs in the Middle East, but he’d never tried one himself. Roaches were thicker than crickets, but stubby. Their spindly legs were roots and their antennae were stalks of dry grass. They came wrapped in their own wings right out of the ground. “I guess I could smoke. Where’d you get that?”

“Mars, I think. Roaches are the only smokes I can dig up near the Mountain.” Faith’s little black nose exhaled broiling steam until the roach’s head lit. Then she bit its butt into her muzzle. She’d obviously practiced smoking as a fox.

“Faith, I don’t think you’re hallucinating, and I don’t think you’re on Mars.”

 She tongued the butt over each canine to make space to puff, then let Jay take the roach. “What do you mean, JayJay?”

“I think you’re dead.” Jay puffed. It was spicy and harsh. “No offense.”

“None taken. That makes sense, I guess.” Faith bonked her head on Jay’s knee. “I miss you guys.”

“We all miss you.” Jay gave her the roach. As a child, Jay scratched his cat Django just before the ears, and now he scratched Faith the same way. She smiled around the roach and closed her eyes. “Dan and your uncle Bob are inside, but it might be inappropriate to bring you in.”

“Hmpf,” puffed Faith. “I understand.”

“They just started watching the first episode of LuLu’s. We shouldn’t interrupt.”

“Ha. Yeah. That’s why.” Faith leaned her head into Jay’s hand to guide his scratching. “I’ll have to go back soon. Back to the Mountain.”

“Are you a Zephyr, whatever that means?”

“I wish.” She puffed again and let Jay take the roach. “I’m a Will-o-Wisp.”

“Is Beatrice there?”

Faith lowered her muzzle in melancholy. Jay hugged her and she slung a paw over his shoulder. “Let me give you the whole story.”

“Hold on.” Jay took his notepad and pen from his pockets. Through delirium, it took embarrassing effort to write the date and time. “Okay, I’m all ears. What’s the last thing you remember after the lightning?”

“I remember blinding light. And then I remember…  Do you remember when we smoked centipede?”

“Oh, do I remember.”

“It was like that. I was in a desert of rusty dunes.”

Jay hesitated to write that down. “Dan said centipedes probably invoke the same sorts of hallucinations in everyone everywhere. Those hallucinations guided Sheridanian religion, inspiring LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration, an episode of which I just watched while totally bug-eyed.” He counted his fingers again: still ten. “You’re my centipede-flashback. I’m talking to myself.”

“Could a centipede-flashback share a smoke with you, JayJay?” Faith gave Jay the roach.

“I guess not. Keep going, then.”

“I didn’t notice I was a fox at first, it was all instinct. I didn’t notice my adorable paws, even while I dug worms from their little holes. I started chewing them up before I realized this was totally gross. Like, why was I doing that? Should I spit or finish the job? But I noticed my tail and my little black nose on my little white snout. Foxes can eat worms! So I swallowed. I also dug up some roaches, like the one you’re smoking. I’d never smoked a roach before, but there weren’t any crickets around, so I tucked ’em behind my ears for later.”

Jay puffed and examined the roach. The concept of roaches in the rusty desert reminded him, obliquely, of Dante’s woods of suicides, which Dan’s father had mentioned before jumping out a window. Surely not all the dead were worms. “You didn’t try smoking them right away? You’re pretty good at it for an animal without opposable thumbs.”

“Not yet. I didn’t know I could light stuff with my breath, so I was wandering the desert looking for a Bic. But then wind started, and it kept getting worse. Sand was just flying off the dunes—worms, too. Remember when we smoked centipede, you had to keep me from blowing away?”

“Yeah.” Jay returned the roach and flipped his notepad to a fresh page. He didn’t have the mental wherewithal for writing right now, so he was doodling whatever Faith described. “After that, you blew away without any wind at all. I climbed the mountain looking for you.”

“Heh. Sorry, JayJay. Anyway, I huddled at the bottom of a valley waiting for the wind to stop.” Faith showed Jay how she balled herself up, her nose tucked under her tail. “When the wind shaved the dunes to half their height, I felt myself crumbling into snowflakes.” She waggled her back-end in demonstration. “If it wasn’t for Bug-Bird, I would’ve been powderized!”

“Bug-Bird?”

“You know, the big blue bird with criss-crossed bug-eyes. They called themselves the Heart of the Mountain, but… you know me, JayJay, I like my pet-names. Bug-Bird saw me from the sky and dove through the wind on a sonic boom to land right next to me. I stepped aboard Bug-Bird’s wing, walked up their sleeve, and poked my head out of their collar. I couldn’t feel the wind at all!”

Jay felt a bit invasive asking this. “What was under the robes?”

“More robes!” Thank goodness, thought Jay. “Bug-Bird said she’d expected me.”

“Hold up.” Jay tapped his pen against his sketch of Bug-Bird growing wings, arms, and tentacles. “She? Not they? Not, uh, it?“

“She said I could call her whatever I wanted.”

“Neato.” Jay doodled Ardhanarishvara.

“She told me the wind was because a warp in the Wheel was making it wobble, and she needed my help fixing it for the Zephyrs to fight the Hurricane.”

Jay giggled at his own sketch of a fox riding a bird over dunes. “Jango’s brother Jun accomplished what he wanted with LuLu’s. It’s impossible for me to take Sheridanian imagery seriously. I just can’t hear ‘Zephyr’ without hearing ‘giant anime space-robot.’ “

“I had the same issue!” Faith finished smoking the roach. She extinguished it in the snowy grass. “I told Bug-Bird I’d be happy to help if she could explain what the heck she was talking about.”

“Haha.”

“Flying to the Mountain—her feathers tilted like airplane flaps—Bug-Bird said LuLu’s space-robots were just as involved as anything else! Everything would be a Zephyr eventually, they said, but until then, lotsa Zephyrs were just worms. The Wheel was making worms into proper Zephyrs by sifting them in the sand, or something, but the wind was swirling the worms through the air and they just couldn’t sift right.”

“So you were flying through worms?”

“Hoo yeah! Splattering against Bug-Bird’s robes like a windshield on the highway. I thought a bird would love to eat worms, but Bug-Bird said they weren’t supposed to—she doesn’t want to meddle with worms too much. But I was allowed to eat all the worms I wanted!”

“…How many was that?”

Faith’s blush radiated warmth. “Bug-Bird said worms were climbing that big red mountain—the Mountain. We were headed to the Mountain, so I thought I’d might as well give ’em a ride. But there were way too many worms for me to eat more than a few! I asked Bug-Bird, how many Zephyrs are there? She said ‘Innumerably many.’ But how many is that, I asked. ‘Quintillions of quintillions.’ That sounded plenty numerable, so I asked again. ‘It depends on how you count them,’ they said. ‘Zephyrs overlap. You saw me collect the Zephyr with golden wings, who carried the countless worms we all share.’ “

Jay thought Faith did a pretty good Heart-of-the-Mountain impression. “But how many is countless?” he asked. “Bug-Bird was waffling again.”

“That’s what I said! Bug-Bird, how many Zephyrs are there? ‘As many as thousands of thousands, or as few as thirty three.’ I was having fun at this point, and I figured Bug-Bird was, too, since her answer kept changing. C’mon! I said. Gimme a number! How many Zephyrs are there?  ‘Just two, myself and the other.’ How many Zephyrs are there? ‘Only one.’ But honestly, how many Zephyrs are there? ‘I’m done playing this game.’ Now she sounded like my mom having her patience tested. She landed on the Mountain by blasting fog from her robes. ‘Please, disembark.’ She protected me from the wind with one wing. Very cozy!”

Jay thought this sounded considerably more comfortable than his own experience, being hurled onto the big red mountain from a great distance away. “Did she try to shove you in a hole?”

“Nope. She opened a cave, but said I couldn’t come in until she’d prepared the place for me.”

“I guess the Heart of the Mountain is improving her bedside-manner.”

“Well, she said if I just walked into the cave as it was, I’d be sucked into the Wheel to become a Zephyr, and the wobbling couldn’t handle that. She had to set things up so I’d just be a lil’ Will-o-Wisp.”

“Is that really what she called you?”

“She said ‘wisp of my will,’ but that means Will-o-Wisp, right? Anyway, Bug-Bird’s other wing turned into a tentacle which reached in the cave and pulled out a fluffy, golden wing—a wing from that Zephyr we saw, JayJay! It smelled awesome up close, like flowers and honey! Bug-Bird spread the golden wing around the cave like shiny rugs so I didn’t have to touch the rock wall or floor. I should’ve been worried climbing into a cave like this, but honestly, I felt bored.” Faith? Bored? They must’ve been walking for a whole minute or two. “When I asked how much longer it’d be, I was cut off by a sound like a flock of seagulls. The golden wing rolled us up, coiling like a carpet, and pulled us deep into the Mountain faster than we could’ve fallen. I thought I’d be scared, but the golden wing felt so soft and smelled so sweet that I fell asleep.”

“How long were you out?”

“I dunno! When I woke up it was all green, all around. Bug-Bird and I were standing on the golden wing’s tippy-top as it pushed us faster and faster through all the green. She said we were in the Wheel.“

“Did you hear a buzzing noise?”

“We were zooming faster than sound, I think. Bug-Bird and I were talking telepathically, like this!” She stared up at Jay. Jay stopped sketching to stare back. “Are you getting anything?” she asked, aloud. Jay shook his head. “Ah, well. It works in the Wheel. Bug-Bird said the Wheel was actually yellow on one side and blue on the other, but I just saw green, green, green. ‘The Wheel turns the future into the present, the present into the past, and the past into the future—but,’ she said, ‘the Wheel’s wobble is mucking it up.’ Then our golden wing poked us straight through the Wheel’s surface.”

“You were outside the Wheel of life and death? What was there?”

“Well, below the horizon, it was just green—that was the Wheel. Above the horizon, it was just darkness at first. Wow, I said, there aren’t even stars out there! ‘Of course not,’ said Bug-Bird. ‘Reality is beneath us.’ But then the darkness filled with blue and red shapes. Bug-Bird pointed at the blue. ‘The Zephyrs.’ She pointed at the red. ‘The Hurricane.’ The red and blue were like super-detailed crystals, and they swapped the dark space back and forth. Then Bug-Bird pointed both her wings down to the Wheel.” Faith mimed it out, standing on her back legs and gesturing her front paws at the snowy grass below.

“What did the Wheel look like from outside?”

“Laser-lights were shooting from the center to the rim, zooming around the whole Wheel, then shooting back to the center. The lasers were actually, like, wedge-shapes.” Faith bit Jay’s pen and tried drawing in his notepad herself. When she was unable to doodle what she wanted, she gave the pen back. “Imagine the pyramids of Giza were glaciers zipping by. But there was a green bulge on the horizon—the warp in the Wheel, blocking the razor-glaciers or something!”

“How did Bug-Bird expect you to fix something like that?”

“I told her, I had no clue what I was looking at. She said the razor-glaciers were groups of worms sent to live, learn, die, and come back. She said I was worms, too, and all the worms in me had been in lots of different razor-glaciers a whole bunch of times. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, so she said she’d send me to a Virgil. I told her I had to bring the Virgils a gift, because they brought one to me in Wyoming. She must not’ve heard me; the razor-glaciers were just swooshing by. Some were tall as trees, some short as fingernails. She dipped one of her feathers in the green Wheel and the surface shimmered sky-blue. She told me to jump into it, but I told her again, I wasn’t leaving without a gift! I had cockroaches, but I didn’t think the Virgils would like them. She swept one of my roaches under her robes and returned it as the biggest bug-stick I’d ever seen, wrapped in its own wings like… like… like awesome fancy scarves!”

“And then you jumped in?” Faith nodded. “Virgil Skyy told me about meeting you on the Islands of Sheridan.”

“Perfect,” said Faith. “I’ll skip that part. Jango didn’t teach me to fix the Wheel anyway—although, his story convinced me to help Bug-Bird even if I didn’t quite understand what was going on. I steamed up from the Wheel and snowed back onto the golden wing. I said I’d do whatever she wanted, but I wasn’t sure how those space-robots Virgil Skyy talked about were related to anything I was seeing now. She was all like, ‘Perhaps you weren’t prepared for the highest revelations.’ “

Jay drew Faith, the white fox, jumping into and out of the Wheel with razor-glaciers zooming behind her. “It sounds like Jun’s giant anime space-robots are accidentally the perfect way to get folks outside the islands invested in Sheridanian culture.”

“Well, maybe. Then bug-bird poked a bunch of long blue arms out her sleeves and used them to fold the golden wing’s tippy-top small enough for me to bite down on it. It was soft and thin like a plush rabbit’s felted ear. ‘This Zephyr’s golden wings stretch to any length and seem indestructible,’ Bug-Bird went on. ‘If you bandage the Wheel with it, the Wheel will spin quickly as the Chain demands with nary a wobble. My desert’s wind will cease, and my water-world’s worm-processing will stabilize!’ “

Faith seemed to have a little too much fun mimicking the Heart of the Mountain’s mode of speech. On one hand, Jay wondered if this meant Faith was faking it. On the other hand, her story seemed consistent with Jango’s lecture on the islands. On both hands at once, this was clearly a centipede-flashback he shouldn’t take too seriously. “So you wrapped the Wheel with the golden wing?”

“Uh-huh!”

“Why didn’t Bug-Bird do it herself?”

“Like I said, Bug-Bird doesn’t want to meddle too much with worms. It’s better if I do it for her, because then it’s worms-on-worms. She also told me not to touch her throne in the Wheel’s center, because it would ‘scatter my consciousness across the cosmos.’ Oh, and the golden wing might try to talk to me, but I should ignore it, because it was new here.”

“So how do you wrap a Wheel with a wing?”

“I just jumped around! It was super floaty over there.” Faith let her body aerosolize to illustrate, levitating around Uncle Bob’s porch-light. Jay worried she would drift away. “It was so easy to fly, I wasn’t sure if I was pulling the wing or if it was pushing me and I just told it where to go. I pulled the wing near the center, then near the rim, then near the center, then near the rim, more times than I could count. Each lap, I flew outside the Wheel to admire the spokes I’d added. It took ages to make each one, but I didn’t mind! The wing was excellent company.”

“Did it talk, like Bug-Bird warned? Maybe, uh, telepathically?”

“No, but it was such a listener. Do you remember…” Faith descended to sit beside Jay. “Beatrice died while we were on centipede. That seriously fucked me up. I couldn’t even talk about it.” Jay nodded. “So I told the golden wing about her, and how much I missed her. My mind wasn’t in the right place, and I still thought I was hallucinating, so I wondered if BeatBax was alive, waiting next to me wherever I was tripping, and the golden wing was how I saw her keeping me company. The wing kinda cradled me when I said that. I swear, its honey-smell was right outta her shampoo-bottles!”

Jay wiped his eyes. “How about after you wrapped the Wheel, Faith? What happened then?”

“Bug-Bird showed up and said the desert wasn’t windy anymore! The worms were sand-sifting, or whatever! The Wheel was still wobbly, but I was done bandaging it.” Faith looked briefly proud of herself. Then her muzzle twitched like she smelled a bad worm. “Next she needed help with Anihilato.“

Jay almost dropped his pen. Instead, he shakily flipped to a fresh page of his notepad. Even before asking Faith to explain, he started sketching scenes from an old dream. “Dan mentioned Anihilato, too. What’s Anihilato, Faith?”

“Bug-Bird didn’t even describe. She just said there was a visitor on the red mountain which wasn’t ready to be a Zephyr yet. My new job was chauffeuring it far into the desert and dropping it off between any old dunes for Anihilato to find. I was on-board for anything, so I let Bug-Bird wrap me in the golden wing and sling me up a cave back to the Mountainside.”

“And what did you find there?” Jay was already drawing an orange amoeba boiling with teeth.

“It was so loud!” Faith huddled by herself and pressed her ears flat against her head. “It was some awful ball of dentures! They were all crunching each other up, and themselves, too. When you and I smoked centipede I helped you puke some teeth, right? But this? I couldn’t even bring myself to look at it.”

“But it calmed itself down,” said Jay, “didn’t it?”

“Yeah. The tooth-ball became this puddle of water with some worms in it, all tangled together. Bug-Bird had said worms were supposed to find the Mountain, but these worms squirmed for the edge like they’d jump off. Even they didn’t think they were ready to be a Zephyr! I was scared of the teeth, but I thought I could hold my own against worms, so I picked ’em up and beat them against the ground. This was when I realized I could freeze stuff by breathing on it, because I’m all snowy.”

“But you aren’t just snow.” Jay scratched her head to feel the powdery substance she was made of. “You can also breathe hot enough to light a roach.”

“I’m getting to that part, JayJay. But next I turned into a tornado and whisked the worms away, so whatever I am, I’m pretty dang rad.”

“A great and complicated tool,” said Jay. “What did you do with the worms?”

“Far from the Mountain I found some nice dunes I thought the worms would like. I didn’t want to drop them from altitude, so I decided to set them on the sand—but when I looked down, I realized how high up I was! I totally froze.”

“Literally?”

“Like a hailstone! I fell for miles and burst on the sand. The little wormies scattered everywhere. And then!” Faith jumped with all the fur on her back flared up. She was trying to have fun describing something which had clearly disturbed her. “The valley collapsed! Like a—Like a—What’s that thing which eats ants in a death-cone?”

“An ant-lion?”

“Yeah! The valley collapsed like an ant-lion’s death-cone. Anihilato burst out and grabbed me with way too many hands. ‘I’ve got you! You’re mine!’ It was the biggest worm I ever saw. It had a bazillion arms, a bajillion legs, and six eyes.” Jay shivered, drawing a monster from a childhood nightmare. “It used a bunch of hands to smush me into powder, and it used its other hands to eat all those worms I brought. I yelled to let me go, but it didn’t listen! It said it eats its own eggs just because the yolks are warm, someday it’d eat Bug-Bird and her whole Mountain, and today it was gonna eat me!“

“How’d you escape?”

“I got all fired up!”

“Literally?”

“Kinda! I got hotter and hotter, but Anihilato seemed to like that and used more hands to squash me down. When I shouted ‘leggo!’ my voice was piping steam. Soon I was all steam and I fumed between its fingers, so I collected as a cloudy fox far above its reach. Or so I thought! It reached up like a snake charmed out of a pot, grabbing at me. ‘You belong to me!’ it said. ‘I own your worms!’ I still steamed through its fingers, so I kept climbing up water-vapor like a spiral staircase.” Whatever Faith was made of, she was apparently ungraspable. “I asked Anihilato what its problem was, and it said my ‘worm-certificates’ were in its ‘box of souls.’ It was the rightful owner of all worms.”

The phrases tickled Jay’s throat. “Did Bug-Bird mention anything like that?”

“Nuh-uh! But Anihilato didn’t care. It kept saying it was allowed to eat me, because I was dead. I still thought I was hallucinating, and I told it so. But it said… if I was hallucinating, then I wouldn’t mind being eaten, would I?”

“I guess not?”

“I told it, if I’m hallucinating, I’ll go where I choose, and I’d never choose to be down there with it ever again. I’d rather be on Mars, apparently, interning for Olympus Mons. When I flew away, Anihilato called me a frigid rat. I was so mad! I scratched the Mountain’s surface until Bug-Bird opened a cave and crawled up.”

“Did you chew her out?”

“Hell yeah! What the fuck was that, I asked. Anihilato tried to nab me! Aren’t worms supposed to be sifting in the sand, or something, not whatever it was doing? She was all like, ‘I don’t control Anihilato, just like I don’t control you, or the golden wing-thing. I mustn’t meddle with worms myself!’ I didn’t care. A big evil worm like that has gotta be an OSHA violation or something.”

“At least.“

“But Bug-Bird wouldn’t budge. ‘You saw the tooth-ball,’ she said. ‘Anihilato processes worms not ready for the Mountain. It will eat anything—at the end of eternity, it will try to eat me!‘ That just pissed me off! How come I could touch the tooth-ball, but not her? How come I had to deal with that evil worm? ‘Ah, if Anihilato consumed you, that would be acceptable for reasons I cannot communicate!’ There was a whole lot Bug-Bird couldn’t communicate. I told her she was awfully tight-beaked.” Faith growled. “I told her in words way more colorful than that.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I tried jumping into the cave. Maybe she was hiding something there? But she blocked me with her wings and said she’d send me to someone who could talk on my level. She spread out the golden wing again and we whipped back into the Wheel.”

“Did she send you to another Virgil?”

“JayJay, she sent me here. To you.“

“Oh. Oh.” Jay put down his notepad. “I’m afraid I don’t have any cool lecture prepared for you like Virgil Jango Skyy. I can’t tell you what Anihilato’s deal is.” In compensation, he scratched behind her ears.

“That’s alright. I’m just glad to see you!” Faith’s hind legs thumped the grass in appreciation of Jay’s scratching. “What have you been up to while I’m gone, JayJay?”

“Not a lot. You and Beatrice had a great wake. Dan and I came to Wyoming with your uncle.”

“How’s Dainty doing?”

Jay leaned back on Bob’s porch. “He’s in mourning, let’s say.”

Faith whimpered. “Are you sure I can’t pop in and meet him?”

“I don’t even think he could see you,” said Jay. “You’re a figment of my imagination.”

“I promise I’m not!” She begged, rolling on the grass. “I just wanna tell Dainty everything’s okay! He hides it, but he’s a nervous wreck without me.”

“I know it well as you do.” Jay wagged a finger at her. “But you’ll have to return to that big red mountain eventually, right? Would you make Dan lose you twice?“

Faith opened her mouth to protest, but saw Jay’s point and just pouted. “Take care of him for me, then.”

“I’m trying.” Jay stood and brushed dust off his suit-pants. “I’m taking him to the Islands of Sheridan. I’m taking him to the Virgils.”

“You think the Virgils can help Dainty cope?”

“I promise.” Jay crossed his heart. “And if you’re really dead, you’ll see Dan someday. You’ll meet him near the Mountain and lead his worms to the Wheel.”

“Hmpf.” Faith pawed the dirt. “I don’t think that place is good enough for Dainty. I don’t trust Bug-Bird anymore.”

“I suddenly do,” said Jay, “at least in the context of my ongoing hallucination. The Heart of the Mountain taught you something.” Faith’s ears perked. “When Bug-Bird sent you to discard the tooth-ball, it was because they couldn’t risk touching the teeth themselves. In the same way, don’t worry about Dan. And tell Bug-Bird to get another intern to deal with Anihilato.”

Faith laughed. She turned with Jay to watch the moon. “Maybe Bug-Bird sent me to offer you that internship, JayJay!” Her tail steamed. “Think about it! I’ll see you in the next eternity.” Her body was buoyed back above the horizon.

Next
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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

Last time on RuRu no Jikuu no Kasoku!

The year is 2420. The Galaxy Zephyr escaped the Hurricane’s bubble, but the Hurricane paid them back for it with a lightning-bolt directly into the Wheel. With the Wheel damaged, can Commander Lucille stand a chance against the cosmic horror which ate the universe and killed her parents? Or will it accomplish its misguided goal of perverted permanence? 

—

On sixteen golden wings, the Galaxy Zephyr flew a safe distance from the Hurricane. Lucille surveyed the warped Wheel in ZAB’s monitors. Where the lightning had struck, the Wheel’s perfect surface had a great green bulge. Near the bulge, the Wheel had no saw-teeth. “Charlie, Dakshi, can you fix it manually?”

In ZAY, Charlie led the Galaxy Zephyr to press the Wheel with its right hand, but the bulge inverted to protrude from the left. In ZAG, Dakshi led the Galaxy Zephyr to press the Wheel with its left hand, but the bulge inverted to protrude from the right. “No dice,” said Charlie. If anything, the bulge was bigger now. The whole Wheel wobbled each revolution.

Lucille crossed her arms. “Professor Bird-Thing!”

“Hai!” In ZAP, Akayama saluted.

“Part of you is inside the Wheel, right? How’s the damage look on your end?”

“My water-world’s slice-of-life is falling apart,” said Akayama, “and my Uzumaki Planet is too windy to process worms!” Through her branched, noodly tail, Akayama showed Lucille video of a desert sandstorm. “If you pulled the Chain, centripetal forces would shred the Wheel to pieces!” The Hurricane seemed to know the Wheel was busted, as it swiped tentacles with impunity. To evade, Eisu in ZAR and Fumiko in ZAO led the Galaxy Zephyr’s legs firing steam. “But I’m sure I can fix it. Give me one of those golden wings!”

Lucille pulled a monitor displaying the Galaxy Zephyr’s schematics. “Charlie, Dakshi, Eisu, Fumiko. One of your teams will control three wings instead of four.”

“I volunteer,” said Fumiko.

“Our teams can balance our thrust,” said Eisu.

“Well then.” Lucille tapped the touchscreen. “It’s all yours, Professor Bird-Thing!”

One golden wing recoiled into the Galaxy Zephyr’s spine. It snaked out the left pectoral into the Wheel. “The snowy white powder I added to the Wheel condensed around a helpful slice-of-life character,” said Akayama. “Call them our mascot! They’re wrapping the Wheel with the wing, but it will take some time.” A flying white fox popped out of the Wheel pulling the golden wing with its teeth.

The flying white fox was immeasurably adorable, but mid-combat, the Zephyrs couldn’t be distracted. “We can’t keep this up forever,” said Dakshi. The Galaxy Zephyr barrel-rolled to avoid ten tentacles converging. “How do we survive without the Wheel?”

“Brass balls,” said Lucille. “Leave it to me.” She sat up in her Commander’s chair. “Hey! You!” The silvery-blue Uzumaki Armor translated her shouts into eye-signals for the Hurricane to see. “Did you know my mother, Princess Lucia? Did you know my father, Commander Bunjiro?”

The Hurricane made a wide palm to smash them while signaling with its own countless eyes. “I might’ve!”

“Not during your pilots’ mortal lives,” said Lucille. Eisu and Fumiko dodged the cosmic slap. The flying white fox wrapped the golden wing around the Wheel to dress the bulge like a bandage. “My parents were born decades after you fled Earth. You’d only know them as pilots of Zephyr-Blue, original protector of the Milky Way!”

The Hurricane growled and grew legs to kick at the Galaxy Zephyr. “That robot murdered hundreds of thousands of my planets!“

“Your planets were homogeneous and identical! You ate them whole yourself!” The Galaxy Zephyr deftly dodged each kick. “Does it really matter how many were ‘murdered?’ “

“It’s all that matters! Every tiniest piece of me is the best humanity has to offer! Your parents are the real cosmic horror! I only destroyed Earth after I knew there was nothing left worth assimilating!”

“Is that so?” The flying white fox had wrapped the Wheel with three golden wing-spokes. “Were my parents worthy? Are they trapped in your disgusting consciousness?”

The Hurricane grinned disingenuously with a thousand mouths. “They are!“

Dakshi pressed a button to speak to Lucille privately. “It’s lying. Your parents died before they could be assimilated.”

Charlie joined the channel. “Bunjiro self-detonated to protect Lucia, who died soon after on the moon. You know that.”

Lucille ignored them and spoke to the Hurricane. “Oh really? You must’ve claimed my father just before his ship exploded. My mother—well, how’d you nab her?”

The Hurricane thought. “I reassembled her from your father’s memory. Inside me, your parents beg for you to come to your senses and give up the fight!”

“Impossible,” Akayama told Lucille. “If the Hurricane had that capability, I would know!”

Even Uzumaki chimed in. “I’ve synced with the Hurricane a hundred times. If your parents were in our enemy, they’d be in me, too, and I’ll tell you, they’re not!“

“How horrifying,” said Lucille to the Hurricane. She faked a sob while grinning ear to ear. “If you’d release their minds from yours, I’d do anything. I’d even surrender!”

The Hurricane condensed into a blob which smiled almost broadly as Lucille. “Really?”

“You have my word.” Lucille covered her heart with her right hand while crossing fingers with her left. “Eject them for me to inspect. Let me meet my parents!”

“Commander!” said Fumiko.

“You can’t surrender on our behalf!” said Eisu.

“You’ll inspect them alone, you brat.” The Hurricane spat two human bodies from a slobbery maw. “Leave your robots behind!”

“Those are forgeries,” said Akayama. “Uzumaki taught this trick when it let Hurricane Planets bicker over a false copy of me.”

Lucille flipped switches to disengage Zephyr-Alpha-Blue from the Galaxy Zephyr. When she stomped her pedals, ZAB refused to budge. “This is obviously a trap,” said ZAB.

“Don’t you think I know that? Buying time means letting the Hurricane think it’s two steps ahead!” ZAB reluctantly propelled itself through the Galaxy Zephyr’s silvery-blue Uzumaki Armor into the vacuum of space. Lucille looked back through the rear windows to see the flying white fox had wrapped the golden wing around the Wheel six times, adding six golden spokes bandaging the bulge. “Halt.” ZAB stopped a hundred yards from the bodies ejected by the Hurricane. Lucille removed the metal grill above her life-support systems to retrieve an oxygen-mask. “My bodysuit is vacuum-proof, isn’t it? How long could I survive in space?”

“At most two minutes.”

“Collect me in sixty seconds.” She donned the mask. “Pop the hatch.”

ZAB’s skullcap opened. Explosive decompression launched Lucille toward the free-floating bodies. The Hurricane chuckled in the distance, but Lucille didn’t know the language of its eye-signals and didn’t care.

She’d seen photos of Bunjiro and Lucia in history books. The Hurricane had reconstructed them lazily but effectively, covering their faces with oxygen-masks, concealing their bodies with red and blue bodysuits. Bunjiro even had sunglasses, and Lucia her ponytail. Both were unconscious, or feigning it.

Lucille had been launched fast enough to kick off Bunjiro’s head. His neck spurted blood like a person guillotined, but then his body convulsed and decayed like the Hurricane’s severed thumb. His arms and legs turned into tentacles which grappled at Lucille, but they were shriveling, and she kicked herself off his chest like a swimmer starting another lap. As she drifted toward Lucia, her supposed mother peeked and saw Bunjiro deteriorating into purple goo. Lucia panicked and sprouted tentacles, but too late: Lucille tore off her oxygen-mask and bit her neck open. They grappled together, biting each other, until Lucille finally knocked off Lucia’s head by jabbing with her ring of keys. Both imitation parents decomposed.

Lucille wiped blood from her jaw—though her bodysuit was still splattered with it—and again donned her oxygen-mask. ZAB caught her in its open hatch and she fell back into the cockpit. They zoomed back to the Galaxy Zephyr. “That was quite a show,” said ZAB. “The Hurricane looks angrier than ever.”

“Like I give a shit.” Lucille removed her oxygen-mask and spat more blood. They reentered the Galaxy Zephyr and assumed their rightful place in the head.

Uzumaki translated the Hurricane’s violent eye-signals. “You ungrateful brat! You just murdered two of my copies, each more human than you or any of your crew!“

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Lucille rubbed alcohol over the Hurricane’s bite-marks on her shoulder. “Even if those really were my parents, I’d kill them to spite you!” The flying white fox totally enveloped the Wheel with the golden wing, compressing the bulge. The fox slipped back into the hazy green Wheel. “The Wheel reminds us only impermanence is permanent! My parents are dead, I’ll die someday, and by my word, your pilots will die, too!“

“You’ll meet your impermanence face-to-face! Until now I planned to give you and your crew the chance to prove yourselves worthy of assimilation, but you’ve shown you’re not worth the effort!” The Hurricane ripped off ten of its own tentacles which bled teeth and perished. The Hurricane threw these scraps like blood-red projectiles each bigger than the Galaxy Zephyr. “This is what real teamwork looks like!” As the Galaxy Zephyr moved, the projectiles followed.

Charlie contacted Lucille. “Did your mom taste nice? I don’t know how we’ll dodge these missiles.”

Dakshi agreed. “Unless you learned something from Bunjiro’s blood, we’re not long for this world.”

“Professor Bird-Thing,” said Lucille, “is the Wheel ready for us to pull the Chain again? Are any characters in your slice-of-life eager to join the Galaxy Zephyr? Maybe your little fox-mascot?”

“Not yet, not yet!” said Akayama. “You can use the Wheel when the golden wing unwraps, but don’t pull the Chain! I’ve got a plan to bring in the rest of the main-cast all at once!”

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