(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

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The year is 2420.

Hurricane Planet Uzumaki scanned the skies with eyes large as oceans. It saw a space-rock and thought to itself, “how about that one? It has cool craters.”

“No.” This thought emanated from Uzumaki’s red mountain, and it had Nakayama’s accent. “Too small. Its core is probably solid throughout and not conducive to complicated life.”

Uzumaki digested the space-rock like a gargantuan amoeba. “How about that one over there?”

“It’s too deep in the Milky Way. We’d attract attention from humans and rival Hurricane Planets.” From within the red mountain, Nakayama took control of Uzumaki’s eyes and focused on the black distance. Her knowledge of optics had increased their vision’s acuity a hundred-fold. “Maybe one of those.” She generated more engines to drift quicker through space.

A Hurricane Planet’s engines were even less sophisticated than the engines of the original Hurricane spaceship Nakayama had built eighty years ago. The Hurricane’s only tactic was imitating, in massive scale and quantity, the technology and biology it had eaten and decided was worth remembering. She had always assumed the Hurricane’s transmutation of the universe into its own flesh was directed by sinister intelligence. Now she was merged with Uzumaki and knew she’d only been half right: sinister, certainly; intelligent, not-so-much.

Being partially assimilated took getting used to, but Nakayama had invented mind-merging and knew how it worked, in theory. Her Hurricane Planet, Uzumaki, had a single train of thought which was like a high-speed conversation between all its minds at once. Dissenting opinions from all parties were attacked on every side, so the final result was one tyrannical voice. Memories from a hundred other lifetimes rose to Nakayama as if they were her own, then vanished. She struggled to conceal her own memories, but Uzumaki wandered in her history as it pleased. She hoped building a hundred bodies would grant Uzumaki’s pilots some humanity, because as it was, she felt like her brain was chained to an angry animal.

Speaking of animals, the zoos Uzumaki mentioned were unaccounted for in its shared consciousness. The Hurricane had kept animal-genetics to play with new body-parts, but discarded the accompanying cognition. No wonder everything about Uzumaki was so crude: the Hurricane prided itself on discarding everything it considered beneath it.

Nevertheless, Nakayama now understood why the Hurricane wanted to try fur, feathers, and scales: no matter how hot a Hurricane Planet felt from outside, inside its mind, the vacuum of space cut like a cold razor. Even she felt the urge to devour smaller Hurricane Planets. Increasing their volume would increase their absolute surface-area, but decrease their relative surface-area, and existence would become absolutely more painful, but relatively less painful. No wonder Hurricane Planets cannibalized each other to become bigger than the galaxy, and desired to be the only thing in the universe.

“None of these celestial objects are acceptable,” thought Nakayama. Uzumaki didn’t doubt her because their conjoined subconsciousness made lying impossible. “The Hurricane should regret eating most of the universe. We have nowhere to call our new Earth.”

“No problem.” Uzumaki accelerated into a sparse volume of space on the border of the galaxy. “We’ll build our own using your know-how.” Uzumaki opened enormous organs in its interior. One organ flooded with salt-water, one organ inflated with nitrogen and oxygen, and one organ 3D-printed a lithosphere with an iron core spinning in molten magma. The planet ejected these components so they orbited ninety-million miles away. Gravity pulled the components together with a great fluid splash, resulting in a watery world with a breathable atmosphere.

“I’m confident we can make life here,” thought Nakayama. “You’ll be this world’s sun, providing radiation and genetic material. If you let me go back to my body, I’ll work on this world in person.”

“Okay,” thought Uzumaki, “but even if you’re leaving, you’re not leaving.”

Nakayama managed only an instant of bewilderment before she opened her bird-like body’s eyes and tore away the flesh-mask connecting her to the Hurricane Planet. She sat in darkness on a rock inside the red mountain. She clenched her feathery fists to ensure she really controlled herself.

She heard a voice from the Hurricane Planet. To her surprise, it was not Uzumaki’s voice, but her own. “Did you just copy me?” she asked.

“Oh, gosh,” said Nakayama. “This is confusing.”

“Nothing to it,” said Uzumaki, from a mouth it opened in the dark. “I’m still Uzumaki. You’re my drone, Nakayama. It doesn’t matter that the professor is in both vessels.”

Nakayama didn’t appreciate her body being called a vessel. She felt like a computer-file which could be duplicated or deleted. “Send me to the water-world. My first task is generating landmass with sub-aqueous extrusion—that is, I’ll open underwater magma-vents.”

“I don’t need you to tell me what sub-aqueous extrusion is,” said Uzumaki. “Whenever I care to ask, I know everything your copy knows.”

“Of course, of course.” Nakayama felt lighter as the floor dropped toward Uzumaki’s core, preparing to slingshot her into space. “What lifeforms are we aiming to generate first? We need organisms with nervous-systems if we want to transfer minds into them.”

“We’ve got the genomes for people, zoo-animals, and most domestic pets.”

Nakayama pat her lab-coat pocket. “I’ve got a cockroach.”

“Gimme.”

She tossed the roach. The wall opened an artery to catch it. “You also have the genome for earthworms. They’re in the legacy-files alongside the fruit-trees. They were my first animal test-subjects when I developed mind-merging, because they’re segmented and almost radially symmetrical. In fact, all minds are built out of worms, in my model.”

“I’m not putting my pilots into worms!”

“You don’t have to, but I’ve never created life before, so let’s start with worms.” Nakayama felt violent vibrations as the awful acceleration reversed, pressing her against the floor, wings spread-eagle. “We’ll work our way up to humans.”

“You’ve never made life? You’ve lasted almost a century-and-a-half, and you never had kids?”

Nakayama glared at the wall’s mouth. Surely Uzumaki knew this, having wandered her memory. It was asking out of cruelty. “I had three miscarriages, four if I include you.”

“Then you’ll appreciate another chance! Make my vessels invulnerable. I won’t put an aspect of my being into something which might die.”

Nakayama humphed. If the acceleration hadn’t flattened her, she would’ve crossed her wings. “You wanted to reclaim your humanity, remember? Immortality isn’t the human condition.”

“Look into it anyway. You might change your mind.”

“Is that a threat?” Nakayama was fired from the red mountain’s peak and shot through space like a bullet. The red mountain was larger than anything on Earth, but with distance, it looked like a boil.

—

As she swam the oceans of the watery world, Nakayama wondered if she was alone in her own skull. Maybe Uzumaki sanctioned her actions from inside her own brain. If not, the copy of her mind kept aboard Uzumaki was still the perfect hostage. She tried to focus on the task at hand: opening undersea magma-vents to create landmass.

Since Uzumaki had warped her biology, she found herself capable of conscious change at the cellular level. Currently she was thirty meters long and skinny like a snake. For the sake of decency, she’d stretched her lab-coat into long, flowing robes. Her feathers were flattened into scales like an aquatic anaconda. Her elongated arms pried stones off the sea-floor to expose molten magma.

She spent days working underwater before deciding to rest while the magma poured, cooled, and hardened. She became buoyant and floated to the surface. She massaged her gills flush against her neck. Her lungs reopened. She fought for breath.

As horrifying as her situation was, she felt some relief being on an Earth-like planet. The sky was the same light-blue as her long lab-coat. In the west was a faux sunset left by an imposter sun, her Hurricane Planet, Uzumaki, irradiating the oceans. Nakayama felt its thin chemical rain seeding the seas with genetic material. She wondered how its copy of her mind was faring.

To calm herself, Nakayama melted into an acre of filmy liquid buffeted by waves. When she fell asleep, she found herself dreaming the contents of the Hurricane’s legacy-files—whether from memory or digitally, she was unsure. Most of the files were purely technical, like genome-sequences, but she’d tested the memory-banks with a folder of books from across world-history scanned in perfect detail and various languages, including an old manga about giant space-robots she had read as a child. Daitatsu no Kagirinai Hogo! What an inspiration. Skimming it now, Nakayama was rejuvenated, considering her every cell to be a tiny robot which combined to generate her. On the other hand, Daitatsu no Kagirinai Hogo‘s antagonist was an alien entity. Humanity had made the Hurricane itself. She had made it. Maybe the manga was a bad influence.

In the morning, she collected in her lab-coat. She filled her sleeves with pseudopods which became arms. She tread water with new legs.

Her magma-vents had spawned three islands almost in a line, like Orion’s belt. The largest island was a perfectly conical mountain with a river straight up and down. The central island was a hill bearing various trees. The smallest island was just a flat, sandy acre. She swam to the closest, the smallest, and shambled ashore like an octopus. The sandy island was barren. Surely nothing could live here.

She heard a chirp. She enlarged her eyeballs to inspect the sand and saw a small hopping insect. She flattened her left arm to scoop it up. “What are you supposed to be?” The insect chirped by shuffling its wings. “You look like a skinny cockroach. How disgusting. Uzumaki must be forcing my copy to cut corners generating animal-life. I’ll call you a cricket, because that’s the sound you make.” She slipped the insect and sand up her sleeve. From her other sleeve fell fertile soil with the insect planted eyes-down. “I’ve made you a radially-symmetrical plant. Now you’re far more stable.” She ambled about the island planting copies of the cricket. When she needed more soil, she scooped sand into her sleeves and converted it to loam with nuclear processes. This worked until she uncovered a human body. “Augh!”

“Aaaugh!” The nude man hiding in the sand was more afraid than she was. He kicked and clawed and scrambled away. The man had pitch-black skin and a slightly egg-shaped head, with a round jaw and pointed scalp. His bony build would stand about six feet tall if he weren’t crawling in terror. “Aaaugh!”

“Hey! It’s okay!” Nakayama bounded after him. “I’m here for you! I’m here for you!”

“Aaaugh!” When he was cornered on the coast, the man flipped on his back and raised his arms to protect himself.

“Hold on, hold on.” She frayed her scales back into feathers and molded her arms roughly humanoid. “Um.” She couldn’t recall how many fingers humans were supposed to have. “Show me your hands.” The man recoiled when she took his arm as if to read his palm. “Only five? I have way too many! No wonder you were scared.” She ate her extra fingers like soft cake. “There we go. Shake.” She shook the man’s hand. Did he not speak English? Maybe Japanese would be better? “Yoroshiku ne. Nakayama desu.” No response. “Do you have a name?”

“Name?” repeated the man. His egg-shaped head had wide-set eyes with dark irises. “Name?”

Nakayama recalled the classic texts in the Hurricane’s legacy-files. “To make these islands, I spent days at the bottom of the ocean. Taking this as inspiration, I name you Nemo.”

“Nemo name?” asked Nemo. “Name Nemo?”

“Precisely.” Nakayama pulled Nemo to his feet. “Are you alone?” Nemo didn’t understand, so she combed the island with extra arms poking out from under her elongated lab-coat. “Why did Uzumaki make you after I said we’d work our way up to advanced lifeforms? I can’t imagine what awful things it did to my copy to coerce her to create you.” Nevertheless, she was somewhat jealous. Her copy had had a child, but not her. She found no more men after combing the island, so she collected her arms back under her lab-coat. “This island is too small to house a human comfortably. Let me take you to that larger one with the trees.”

Nakayama folded herself into a boat. Nemo stepped shakily aboard her back, and after she crossed the harsh surf at the speed of sound, he disembarked on the second island panic-breathing. He caught his breath walking uphill through the trees, staring up at their canopies in awe.

“You have food, at least.” Nakayama stretched her whole body to pull fruit from the treetops. Bananas, apples, oranges, pomegranates, and peaches grew side-by-side. She gave their fruits to Nemo. “Not all these trees can survive in this climate. Enjoy them while they last.”

Nemo couldn’t hold all the fruits at once. He bit a banana through its peel. When he saw soft yellow flesh underneath, he understood the nature of the fruit and peeled it. He experimented with each fruit while Nakayama surveyed the island for dangerous species. The only animals she found were tiny flightless birds in a variety of colors.

“…Hey!” She knocked a yellow fledgling out of Nemo’s hands before he ate it alive. “Don’t eat these! These aren’t fruit!” Nemo stared blankly, so she sketched the bird in the sand. “Buu.” She crossed her wings in an X. “Buu.” She swept the bird-sketch away. “Got it?”

Nemo nodded.

Nakayama led him back to the coast to show him Hurricane Planet Uzumaki, shining like a red sun. The mountain was barely visible, just a little pimple. “That object is where I’m from. It’s your source, as well. I must return there, but I’ll be back for you. Let me sample your DNA.” She speared him in the ribs with the white point of a feather thinner than a syringe’s needle. Nemo shouted, but the feather left no wound. “Stay safe.” With that, her body flattened so wide, tall, and thin that the wind lifted her. Nemo watched her float to space like a jellyfish.

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

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Last time on RuRu no Jikuu no Kasoku!

The year is 2420. Unbeknownst to humanity, Professor Akayama tried and failed to escape a Hurricane Planet and rescue its consciousness with her. The late Princess Lucia’s daughter Lucille, the new Lunar-Commander, has just learned about the Hurricane’s origin on Earth.

—

Lucille leaned over the railing of her Lunar-Commander’s balcony. Below, in the moon-base’s main mess-hall, thousands of her crew ate breakfast. Zephyrs were organized into teams by the solid color of their bodysuits, matching the solid color of their giant space-robots. There were so many colors even Lucille had trouble keeping track of them, and each color came in shades to distinguish the wearer’s role. The pilots wore bright, bold colors. Co-pilots wore pastels. Mechanics wore darks. Technicians wore desaturated jumpsuits. Medical-personnel, not assigned to any particular robot, wore exclusively pink. It was traditional, but not required, to dye one’s hair to match one’s bodysuit.

Lucille didn’t bother collecting her blue bodysuit when she was promoted to pilot of Zephyr-Alpha-Blue. Her mother Lucia had worn blue, but her father Bunjiro had worn red, so purple felt fitting, and as Lunar Commander, no one could tell her otherwise. She looked good in purple. Charlie looked good in yellow. Dakshi looked good in green.

Charlie sat at the table behind her. Dakshi rolled beside him in his wheelchair. “You requested us, Commander Lucille?”

“I’ve considered Professor Akayama’s video-confession.” Her adopted parents were taller than her, twice her age, and twice her weight, so Lucille conveyed authority by standing straight and broadening her shoulders. Dakshi valued the lunar-base’s rules and regulations, and Charlie tried to pretend to, too, so Lucille knew they needed this no-nonsense approach from her. In their presence, she wouldn’t even skip honorifics—although, now being her subordinates, she could call them Zephyrs rather than Commanders. “The Hurricane is the worst of the worst of the dystopian dictators from before the World-Unification, all merged into one. How terrifying! Zephyr Charlie, Zephyr Dakshi, you’re more in-touch with Earth than I am, and you’ve had twenty years to consider it. How would people handle this insight?”

Charlie and Dakshi looked to each other, unsure. Neither wanted to answer first, but finally Charlie broke the silence. “We’ve talked about it with Global Parliament. There are lots of different impressions, which is why we’ve kept the video classified.”

“I think Earth’s people would be devastated to know,” said Dakshi. “The warring micro-nations and mega-corporations we thought we’d subdued with the World-Unification are more dominating than ever in the form of the Hurricane. Their wars are yet ongoing, and we have no real hope of winning.”

“I think Earth’s people would feel empowered,” said Charlie. “Look how far we’ve come. The Zephyrs versus the Hurricane is humanity united against its own faults! Isn’t that the only war worth fighting, win or lose?”

Lucille nodded in deep thought. She’d only asked to show she valued their input, but she was genuinely glad to hear their opposing views, justifying her own uncertainty. “I can see it both ways. Luckily, nothing in the video changes our situation. We’re still protecting the galaxy from the Hurricane. We’ll reveal its origin if and when it becomes relevant, or after the Hurricane is neutralized.”

“Neutralized?” Charlie squinted, which shifted his eye-patch. “The whole thing? The cosmic horror that ate the universe?”

“Aim high, that’s what I say!” Lucille pointed skyward. “Professor Akayama died transmitting a virus to a Hurricane Planet. Did it do anything? Did you check?”

Charlie and Dakshi hung their heads. “We never considered it,” said Dakshi. “We obviously had other concerns at the time.”

“She gave her life to show us how it’s done,” said Lucille. “You two, wrangle the technicians and cook up a virus. Lacking Akayama’s suicidal guilt, we’ll try infecting the Hurricane with unmanned vessels.”

“Yes, Commander.” Dakshi gripped his wheelchair, preparing to leave. “Oh, by the way. I’d like you to speak with Zephyr Eisu and Zephyr Fumiko, Commanders of Zephyr-Red and Zephyr-Yellow. I admire them as the heads of our lunar-base’s legs, but I saw them smoking a cockroach after training yesterday. They’re two years underage.”

“Send them up.” As soon as Charlie wheeled Dakshi aboard the elevator down, Lucille retrieved her breakfast from under the table: a plastic-wrapped sandwich she’d nicked from the kitchens. She unwrapped it while watching thousands of her crew finish breakfast below her balcony. A tomato-slice slipped from her sandwich. She caught it mid-air before it fell into the mess-hall. She’d have to learn to eat at altitude.

The elevator opened for twin siblings Eisu and Fumiko in red and orange uniforms respectively. Eisu was a little shorter, with a bowl-cut. Fumiko was a little taller, with bangs. “You requested us, Commander?”

“Just call me Lucille!” Lucille had trained with the twins since they’d arrived almost two years ago. Such friendships made Lucille an effective Commander of Zephyr-Purple, able to unite the lunar-base’s older arms and younger legs. Around these younger Zephyrs she adopted a different attitude, displaying camaraderie despite her lofty new position. “No need for honorifics when it’s just us, right? At ease! Please, sit.” The twins sat with military poise. Her promotion to Lunar Commander was obviously intimidating. Trying to relax them, Lucille reclined in her chair and put her feet on the table. She ate the tomato-slice and wiped seeds from her cheek. “I don’t want you to treat me any differently now that I hold the highest rank on the moon, understand?” Eisu and Fumiko nodded, hands folded courteously. “How’s your family on Earth?”

Eisu held his breath. “They’re doing well, Comma—erm, Lucille.“

“Very well, Lucille.” Fumiko tightened her posture.

Lucille sighed, finishing her sandwich. “Glad to hear it.” This wasn’t working. There hadn’t been a Lunar Commander in twenty years, so meeting the first one was too stressful. To prove she was still their friend, she would brandish the stick they feared and use it to dig up a carrot. She sat straight and set her feet on the floor. “Now, I’ve brought you here for a formal reprimanding. Zephyr Dakshi saw you smoking a roach yesterday. Aren’t you both underage?”

The twins winced. “We’re sorry, Commander,” said Fumiko.

“It won’t happen again,” said Eisu.

“Cockroaches are illegal for anyone under twenty,” lectured Lucille. “You’re eighteen. Heck, I’m only nineteen. So!” Lucille folded her arms and winked. “As Lunar Commander, I order you to smoke a roach with me.” Eisu and Fumiko shared a skeptical glance, so Lucille insisted. “I’ll tell Dakshi I chewed you out.”

Success! The twins’ defences were down. Eisu pulled a roach from a pocket of his red bodysuit. Fumiko produced an orange lighter and raised her eyebrows as if to ask, ‘really?’

“I’ve never smoked before, so you’ll have to teach me,” said Lucille. “We’re too tight-laced on the moon. I can’t bum a roach off anyone legal-age. Did you smuggle that up from Earth?”

“We did,” said Eisu. “Our grandfather was willing to share his with us.”

“Even though grandma told him not to.” Fumiko lit the roach’s head and offered it to Lucille. “Is it true you’ve never been planet-side?”

“Yep, and as the product of forbidden love between space-robot pilots, I never will be. That’s why I score so well on exams—there’s nothing to do up here but study.” Lucille refused the roach to see how they smoked it. Fumiko took delicate puffs and passed the roach to her brother. “I’ve memorized Earth’s laws, but I’ll never understand them. Why can folks our age pilot giant space-robots but not smoke a roach?”

Eisu puffed deeper than his sister and passed the roach to Lucille. Her first puff was a brave one. As she coughed, Eisu explained. “A lot of laws are left over from the World-Unification. Bringing countless warring micro-nations and mega-corporations under one constitution required concessions.”

“Concessions which aren’t totally sensible in hindsight,” said Fumiko. “A government unites very different groups of people. Sort of like this moon-base.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Lucille said between coughs. She’d inhaled most of the roach in her first impressive puff. She returned the rest for Fumiko to finish off. “Eisu, Fumiko, I’m gathering impressions and I’d like yours, too. What do you think is Earth’s current attitude toward the micro-nations and mega-corporations which dominated Earth before the World-Unification? Positive? Negative?”

Fumiko tapped the last of the roach into Charlie’s ashtray. “Our grandpa says they perpetuated the same dystopian hellscape which spawned them in the first place. A group of people might put on the uniform of a particular region, do something unspeakable to another region, then put on the uniform of that other region and do something unspeakable to the first region, in mock-retribution. This happened often enough—or was said to happen enough—groups of people could do unspeakable things in their own uniforms and still blame anyone else.”

“That’s quite a negative impression, I’d say,” said Lucille.

“He says it was all theatrically-justified genocide, but it was formalized in a game called ‘fifty-dimensional space-chess,’ ” Fumiko went on. “Have you read much about it?” Lucille shook her head. “Grandpa says no one was allowed to write about it back then, so there’s not a lot to read. It was a game psychotic rulers played with human lives. There were never any overlapping micro-nations or mega-corporations, not really; there were only excuses.”

“Our grandmother says things haven’t changed enough since then,” admitted Eisu. “Endless wars and fifty-dimensional space-chess have just become arguments in parliament. It looks more civilized, but the outcomes still make or break people’s livelihoods.”

“Well, I guess collecting all the arguments into one room is a step in the right direction.” Lucille leaned over her desk to whisper to the twins. “Now we’re partners in crime, so you can’t just treat me like any old Lunar Commander. You’re not ‘obeying orders’ because I ‘outrank’ you. You’re following my lead because you trust me.”

“Of course!” said Fumiko. “I remember how you led us in the mid-battle merger of Z-Purple, Orange, Red, Black, and Yellow. Z-PORKY was a huge success.”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone else,” said Eisu. “I look up to you like I hope the crew of Z-Red looks up to me.”

“Perfect.” Lucille planted her hands on the table broader than shoulder-width. “I want both your teams running combination and matryoshka drills. Tell the other teams to do the same. I’m gonna get my whole crew of ten thousand on the moon all at once, and in seventy-two hours, we’re combining every Zephyr on the org-chart into one giant space-robot. That’ll be a bonding opportunity!”

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

Last time on RuRu no Jikuu no Kasoku!

The year is 2399. Professor Akayama didn’t have time to scream when the sun-sized Hurricane ripped her Zephyr-head in half. Both halves spun into black space, and her tight nautilus bun unwrapped so her navy hair flew in all directions. She repeatedly lost consciousness, and each time she woke, she saw the Hurricane Planet grow larger as she fell toward it. She begged to suffocate before she woke again and had to see the Hurricane once more, but she wasn’t so lucky: the reaching tentacles had a thin trail of atmosphere which kept her alive. Then, instead of splattering on impact with the planet’s surface, she splashed in an ocean of warm, pearly pulp.

With most her bones broken, Akayama had no hope of swimming, but her lab-coat kept her afloat. She languished in half-awareness for what felt like days. She had to guess the duration, because only red Hurricane Planets speckled the black sky. Would she starve to death without the familiar sight of the Milky Way? She honestly hoped so. She had doomed the galaxy and never deserved to see it again.

Whenever Akayama guessed a day had passed, she tested her broken bones and found a greater range of motion. Through photon-firing telescopes, she’d seen these oceans of pearly pulp flood and drain over wounds to repair the Hurricane’s injuries. She considered it cruel irony that the pearly pulp kept her alive, too. Death wouldn’t come so easily.

On the ninth day (she guessed) even her arthritis was gone, and she felt as fit as when she was fifty. She flipped to float on her belly and shed her lab-coat. Lining the inside, buoyant plastic air-pockets had automatically inflated during the fall. If she’d left without her lab-coat, she could’ve just drowned, and this would all be over. Now she wore the lab-coat back-to-front so the buoyancy was more suitable for swimming. She tread water (well, not water, but she didn’t want to think about it) and surveyed the horizon. A plume of dark smoke stood out against the black sky’s red speckling of Hurricane Planets.

She’d never seen a Hurricane Planet expel dark smoke. Was this part of her crash-landed Zephyr? She had no other guess, and her stomach rumbled at the thought of rations stored aboard. She wasn’t hungry—the Hurricane’s wound-goo sustained her—but the wound would soon heal and the sustaining pulp would be reabsorbed. Besides, she kept a cockroach in her Zephyr’s glove-compartment, and she craved a good smoke. Maybe the engines worked and she could escape before this Hurricane Planet grappled with another for dominance! Now Akayama felt ashamed for craving the sweet release of death, and instead craved a return to the galaxy so she could redeem herself.

After swimming thirteen hours (she guessed) she grazed a gritty shoreline. She pulled herself onto the painful beach and immediately fell asleep on her lab-coat. The tide of pearly pulp grew shallow as she slept, so when she woke, she saw the shore was gritty because it was paved with human teeth.

About six or seven decades ago, when Akayama experimented with mind-merging, test-subjects incompatible with one-another bristled with painful teeth.  She surgically rectified these subjects and recorded the error so the mistakes were never repeated, but the image of it still haunted her like gnarling jaws in her stomach. Today her largest failure, the Hurricane, cordoned its injuries with densely impacted dentition. No wonder it was pain-averse: every wound ate itself alive.

Akayama shuddered, stood, pulled her lab-coat around her shoulders, and limped over the teeth toward the dark smoke-plume in the distance. Beyond the gritty shore was fresh pink flesh hot enough to make her sweat. With no heat-source in the sky, she reasoned the planet itself had some deep fever. Walking further, the pink flesh reddened and shed dead skin rough as sand. Her feet sank six inches in the desert-like dust. The planet’s smallest wrinkles were like dunes miles high and impossibly steep. She was barely able to climb over them because the pearly pulp had left her so spry.

The plume of dark smoke drew closer every hour until she crested a final dune and saw the right half of her Zephyr in a broad, deep crater. It had just one eye, one ear, and half a nose and mouth, but its unflappable expression filled Akayama with confidence. She slid down the crater’s sheer slope.

The soft sand rippled under her like a vast trampoline. When the ripples reached the crater’s walls, the crater’s walls grew higher. Akayama scrambled back up the steepening slope, but the walls became vertical and caved overhead like a tidal wave. She tumbled into the crater and rolled next to her Zephyr as the horizon sealed shut above, becoming a red mountain sealing her beneath. After days of trekking, she now considered that it was statistically improbable for her and her Zephyr to land within even a year’s travel of one-another on this cosmic object the size of the sun. This had been a trap.

Subterranean hydraulics rumbled. The Hurricane Planet swallowed her and her spaceship, rushing them to the core with churning peristalsis. The air was hotter every moment, but Professor Akayama shivered.

She climbed into her mutilated half-Zephyr to find the cockpit’s adjustable chair was the only operational object in the spaceship. Every monitor was cracked but one. The circuits were scorched. The photon-firers were all aboard the other half, so she couldn’t beam messages to the moon. Hoping beyond hope, she turned her key in the ignition. “Can you hear me?” Her Zephyr was silent.

Akayama popped the glove-compartment to find three days of rations and a cockroach. She’d craved food and a smoke, but now felt nauseated by claustrophobia. She stowed the roach in her lab-coat and drank water from her rations. Drinking water was a simple human task, grounding her somewhat during these unnatural circumstances.

Because the torn Zephyr had no left side, red subterranean rocks rushed upward as Akayama descended. An eyeball bigger than a grapefruit opened on the rock wall and slid down alongside her, keeping watch. Akayama spun her chair to watch it back. “Hisashiburi,” she said. “Kill me already!”

A mouth opened above the eyeball. “You’ll never die, mortal. You’ve got the honor of joining the Hurricane.” It had three rows of blunt teeth and a massive flopping tongue. “The other humans I’ve met were all worthless. I gave them a chance to be useful enough to bother assimilating their minds, but they kept demanding stuff. ‘Stop eating my friends!’ ‘Stop eating my family!’ ‘Stop eating me!’ Gah.” Akayama wept. “You, though, I recognize! I hired you to build me, and I bet you built that big blue bully you’re hiding in, too. Your mind must have some use, so when I eat you, I’m keeping your mind as part of me.”

Akayama’s heart kept dropping. “The twenty million who settled too close to the galaxy’s edge? Some brought their children? Some children brought their pets? You killed them all?” She’d hoped this was the case, considering it preferable to having one’s mind merged with the Hurricane’s pilots, but hearing it still broke her.

“You say it like I’m in the wrong, here. It’s not my fault they weren’t worth keeping. Bad genetics, bad brains, bad everything! Now their mass gets to be part of something actually valuable: me! They should be glad. If I’d decided to punish them for their worthlessness, I could’ve turned them into eternally suffering tooth-balls instead. Besides, I kept parts of the animals—it was more than pets, some of them brought whole zoos! It’s cold in space and I thought fur, feathers, or scales might help—but no, the critters were useless, too. Although I do appreciate these tentacles.”

Red tentacles protruded from the walls and wrapped around her Zephyr-half, steaming hot. If the Hurricane felt cold in this blazing heat, no number of layers could ever warm it. Akayama wiped sweat from her face, unsure where her tears began. “Those poor creatures.”

“Don’t worry. They’re safe inside me forever and ever, just like you’ll be, too.” The mouth bared its rows of teeth. “You should be thankful I’m so welcoming, after how you treated me. What did you do?“

“I did everything.” Akayama’s guilt burned worse than the excruciating heat. “I built the Hurricane. I failed to prevent its launch. The fiery fate of the universe is my fault.”

“I know, I know. I mean, what did you do just recently?” The eyeball squinted at her. She’d never smelled an eyeball before, but this one reeked like pungent salt-water. “When I smacked you from the sky, you transmitted data! I was about to make some miniatures of myself, and now I can’t.”

Akayama put a hand over her heart. “My virus affected you. Humanity might have a chance.”

“I am humanity. When you’re employed as part of me, we’ll undo your mistake together. I worked hard to collect all this mass, and I deserve to multiply. My tiny copies will earn their existence by working for once.”

This insight into the Hurricane’s reproductive cycle disturbed Akayama. Enslaving literal copies of oneself seemed unfathomable. “You misinterpret my intent,” she said. “That virus proves there’s hope to salvage the pilots of the Hurricane.”

“Salvage? Pfft.” The mouth blew a raspberry which speckled her with globs of spit. “My pilots are safely fused into my eternal form. You know better than anyone that my duty is to humanity’s preservation.”

“But you killed all those people. Men, women, children.”

“People?” The eye rolled, audibly. “Useless garbage isn’t people. You’re one of the good ones, so I’m keeping you. No need to thank me.”

Akayama balked, like the words punched her in the gut. “What do you remember of humanity? Decades have passed since the Hurricane’s pilots were merged. Don’t you have their memories? Can’t you see their grieving widows and orphans?”

“I can,” said the Hurricane, “which is why I must multiply. I need enough copies to preserve my memory no matter how many you murder. At the core of this planet, your consciousness will join mine. Then I’ll disable your virus myself.” The mouth licked its lips with enough saliva to drown a dog. The saliva dribbled over the open eyeball. “I’ll share your mind with all my backups across the universe until you’re stored in my almost-omnipresent mass. Eventually my miniatures will finish eating everything in the universe, and then I’ll eat all my backups, and humanity will last for all time in one perfect ball.”

Akayama clenched her eyes shut. Terrified as she was, she saw opportunity in the terminology ‘copies,’ ‘miniatures,’ and ‘backups.’ Did every Hurricane Planet consider itself to be the only real one? Was that why Hurricane Planets were willing to cannibalise each other? She could press this for her own survival. “Life isn’t about fearing death. You contain people, but you’ve lost what made them people.“

“Ha! I’m a hundred times the human you are, because I can see a hundred lifetimes at once.”

“You ended a hundred lifetimes at once! Your pilots run in parallel, wearing their yoke like a crown!” Akayama didn’t feel brave, but she pointed accusingly at the eye. “How can you claim to stand for humanity when you absorb everything you encounter into uniform, indistinguishable volume?”

“I’ve got fingers too, you know!” The Hurricane poked at her with an arm from the rock wall. It had two elbows bending in opposite directions and only three fingers, no thumb. “I know everything important about all my pilots. Don’t fear merging with me: I’ll preserve every part of you worth keeping.”

“When you decided protecting humanity meant preserving a homogeneous mass, everything humane in you died!” Akayama folded her arms. “You don’t even know how many fingers you’re supposed to have.”

The eye tried counting Akayama’s fingers, but she’d hidden her hands in her lab-coat’s sleeves. Its arm retracted back into the wall. “I’m the most humane being possible!“

“Then grant me my individuality!” This was her chance. She stood from her chair to shout. “And grant it to yourself! If you share me with your copies and backups across the universe, nothing will separate you from them!” The eye blinked with realization. “You need me.” Akayama pointed to her own nose. “You need my mind unmolested. Aren’t you special? Aren’t you the I of the Hurricane? What could elevate you above countless duplicates like uniquely accommodating your creator?“

“Hmm.” The mouth bit its lower lip like it was fantasising about chewing a thick steak. “How could you be useful while separate from me?”

“I could help you reclaim your humanity! I’m the universe’s leading expert in consciousness.” Akayama turned her Zephyr’s broken steering-wheel. “I could load just one of your pilots at a time into my Zephyr’s circuitry. Imagine: each of your aspects can have personal-space to recoup their lost perspective!”

“I could assimilate you and use your knowledge to do that myself.”

“No.” Akayama stood her ground, fists on her hips. “You lack the motor-skills and sense-organs required. How could tentacles stretching from your bulk operate my Zephyr’s control-panel? I’ll need to live on your surface, too, near a star. Otherwise it will be too dark for me to work.”

She felt heavier. The peristalsis reversed direction to vomit her up the planet’s throat. Akayama gasped and tried to restrain her sobs of relief. “If I’m the I of the Hurricane, I’ll need a proper name. Give me a good one or I’ll change my mind.”

She gulped. Changing its mind probably meant doing something terrible to hers. She could be trapped forever in an eternally suffering tooth-ball. “Uzumaki. This Hurricane Planet is the center of the Hurricane’s spiral.”

“Hm. I like it,” said Hurricane Planet Uzumaki. “You can’t live on my surface forever. I’ll have to hide you when we meet my copies. If they see you, they’ll make me share you.”

“Can we stay far from the others?”

“Every so often I sync with them. I’ll swallow you when the time comes.” Uzumaki spat her out onto the red mountain it had trapped her under.

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

Last time on RuRu no Jikuu no Kasoku!

The year is 2420. Twenty years ago, Professor Akayama, Commander Bunjiro, and Princess Lucia died in combat against the Hurricane. The tragic details are undisclosed even to Zephyr Lucille, daughter of Lucia and Bunjiro. Lucille was conceived on the moon, where she was tube-incubated after her mother’s death, so her brittle bones could never bear Earth’s gravity. Now nineteen years old, Lucille has the second-place record for the longest duration without touching Earth, behind only Akayama herself, who lived aboard the moon-base for forty years.

Charlie and Dakshi adopted Lucille and the duty of protecting Earth from the Hurricane. The original Zephyr is now called Zephyr-Blue, because Zephyrs of every color have been built. Although Zephyr-Blue is at the top of the lunar org-chart, it has been, since the incident, unmanned.

—

Enormous humanoid robots bounded across the lunar surface, training. Each Zephyr was a solid color, and the only colors unaccounted for among them probably belonged to Zephyrs repelling the Hurricane at the galaxy’s rim. Some Zephyrs jumped on muscular legs, some bounced on puffs of steam from legless hips. Some had two arms, some four, some more. Each limb, chest, and head held the silhouettes of its crew: pilots, co-pilots, technicians, mechanics, and medical-personnel.

Sometimes a Zephyr would collapse into body-parts so the crew could practice recombining under their Commander’s direction from the head, the Alpha-unit. Sometimes two Zephyrs would merge into a humanoid but multicolored mass of limbs so the crews could practice staggering together until they rolled into a crater and broke apart. Sometimes a small Zephyr would leap into a larger one and wear it like a suit of armor or matryoshka doll, demanding absolute coordination of everyone involved. Even if such procedures were rarely called for in the fight against the Hurricane, combining their robots gave the crews an indispensable sense of camaraderie.

The largest robot was Zephyr-Purple, so grand in scale that its individual fingertips had crews of five, six in the thumbs. Zephyr-Purple was carrying its detached head like a lantern so the crew could practice without their Commander, Lucille.

Lucille, daughter of the late Lucia and Bunjiro, saluted at strict attention. Her purple bodysuit complemented short, fiery hair and unsettling red eyes. As the product of forbidden lunar love, she was smallish, with slender arms and legs. Her size only made her intimidating presence feel daunting and well-earned.

She stood opposite two middle-aged men seated at a desk: Dakshi, in his green bodysuit and sitting in a green wheelchair, shuffled papers graded in red pen, while Charlie, in his yellow bodysuit, chewed a lit cockroach. The roach sat in a divot in his lips left by a scar stretching from his right temple to below his iron jaw. The scar took his right eye, covered by an amber eye-patch. “At ease, Zephyr Lucille.”

Lucille widened her stance and folded her arms behind her back. “Jya! What’s the verdict?”

Dakshi grimaced and groomed his crew-cut. The many medals on his chest were arranged like an impeccable orchard. “In the presence of superiors you should speak only when spoken to, young Zephyr.”

“Be patient with him, Zephyr Lucille.” Charlie grinned around his roach. His golden haircut was charismatically tousled. “He’s enjoying his last moments outranking you.” Lucille smiled impishly and put her hands on her hips. Her heart felt bigger than the moon-base she would soon command.

Dakshi sighed. He rolled his wheelchair forward to pass her the paperwork. “You scored one hundred percent on your aptitude-test for the position—for the first time since your late father, Commander Bunjiro—and one hundred percent on your oral exam regarding lunar procedures and history—for the first time since your late mother, Princess Lucia.”

Lucille splayed the papers across the desk to review her scores. Charlie judged her smile to be deservedly proud but tempered by discipline. She passed the papers back to Dakshi. “Were you close, sir?”

Dakshi bit his tongue in hesitation. “I’ve always told you Commander Bunjiro and I were like brothers. I only knew your mother for a few months, but her conviction in her duty to protect humanity made an indelible impression on me.”

Charlie chuckled. “She meant, were you close to perfect scores.” Lucille allowed her smile a slyer slant. Dakshi blushed and filed her exams in his desk drawers. Charlie blew smoke into a ventilation duct and tapped ash from his roach. “Anyway, Zephyr Lucille! Having adopted and raised you, Zephyr Dakshi and I never needed exam-scores to know you’re the real deal.” Dakshi pretended not to hear this. He’d promised Lucille before the interview to treat her like any other Zephyr. “You’ve been vital to this moon-base since you were old enough to stand.”

Lucille let herself chuckle with Charlie, just a little. As a bored child stuck aboard the moon-base, Charlie and Dakshi kept her busy by assigning odd-jobs. Her first, as a toddler, was waving hello to new crew-members arriving on the moon, usually aged seventeen to twenty, and waving goodbye to retiring ones leaving, usually aged forty to fifty. It was fun until she was old enough to realize not all the crew-members she welcomed would survive long enough to retire. That inspired her to become the youngest mechanic ever, at the age of thirteen, and the youngest pilot, too, two years later. Presently, at nineteen, she had the experience of an old-hand at the age of a rookie. 

“Besides perfect exams,” said Dakshi, “you’ve been unanimously praised for leadership in the field. When you commanded Zephyr-Purple in repelling a swarm of sun-sized Hurricane Planets, the crews of the purple arms, legs, and chest came to us to commend you. Zephyr-Alpha-Blue hasn’t had a pilot since your father’s death, and its significance demands a pilot with matching reputation. You would command the full lunar crew of ten thousand, including the right and left arms of the moon-base—that is to say, Zephyr Charlie in Zephyr-Alpha-Yellow, me in Zephyr-Alpha-Green, and every robot under our command. Tell me, Zephyr Lucille: at less than half our age, why should you outrank us?”

From Dakshi’s concerned brow, Lucille detected this question was a genuine one, not meant to dismiss her. She tried to appear just as grave herself. “I won’t waste your time reminding you I’ve probably spent longer on the moon than both of you combined,” she said. “When you’re not on active-duty here, you’re on Earth for physiotherapy so you don’t end up stuck here like me. I don’t get to visit home like you do—this moon-base is my home, and I’m always on active-duty. What’s really important is most of the Zephyrs are under twenty-five, and the youngest of us are skeptical of anyone much older than that—especially you two, having had no Commander yourselves for as long as I’ve been alive. They’d sooner listen to me at nineteen than you at forty-five. That makes me the best of both worlds: I have your old-timer’s bureaucratic experience, but the younger generation is on my side.”

Dakshi wrote down every word of her answer in green pen. “Besides age, to what do you attribute their loyalty to you?”

Lucille’s expression remained absolutely serious. “I shout loudest.”

Dakshi was speechless. Charlie cracked up. “You’re really something!”

“Could you explain?” asked Dakshi.

“The Alpha-pilot has gotta shout loudest. If you want to throw a punch,” said Lucille, with a slo-mo hay-maker, “your arms and legs need to know. A good shout unifies the Zephyrs in action.”

“And about your shouting.” Dakshi opened a drawer and rifled through transcripts. “You lapse into Japanese under pressure. Not all the Zephyrs speak Japanese. When you directed the mid-battle merger of Z-Purple, Orange, Red, Black, and Yellow, you shouted—” He inspected a transcript he’d dog-eared. “—‘Ore o dare da to omotte yagaru.’ “

Charlie laughed. ” ‘Who the hell do you think I am?’ ” he translated. “That was classic!”

“A good shout unifies the Zephyrs in action,” repeated Lucille. “It doesn’t have to be a command, or even comprehensible. It just has to pump all hearts to one beat. As acting Commander of Z-PORKY, its crew of hundreds locked step with my voice. Our Super Heart Beam blasted the Hurricane to bits.”

Charlie smiled around his roach. Dakshi tried not to look impressed. “You shout ore,” said Dakshi. “That’s a masculine pronoun. Why not shout the gender-neutral watashi, or the feminine atashi?“

“Mid-combat? I’m punching planets to powder, sir. I ain’t gonna curtsy.”

“Point taken.” Dakshi poured molten green wax onto Lucille’s certificate of promotion and pressed it with his seal of approval. “With Zephyr Charlie’s ratification, I see fit to promote you to the pilot of Zephyr-Alpha-Blue and first-ever Lunar Commander.”

Charlie snuffed his cockroach and took the certificate. “Follow me, Zephyr Lucille. There’s one last thing you need to see.”

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(The second chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

Last time on RuRu no Jikuu no Kasoku!

The year is 2399. For centuries, countless overlapping micro-nations and mega-corporations kept Earth locked in constant, enumerable wars. An arduous period of World-Unification has brought these groups to uneasy peace under a Global Parliament. That stability has an unfortunate source: the Hurricane, a blood-colored cosmic horror of unknown origin and biblical proportion, ate the observable universe in just fifty years and now gnaws the edges of the Milky Way.

Professor Akayama, Scientific Advisor to the de facto Ruler of Earth in the leader of Global Parliament, has taken responsibility for defending humanity from the Hurricane’s planet-sized cells. She’s relocated the solar system to the center of the galaxy, orbiting a black hole. Her moon-base, once her private institution for training the best and brightest from around the world to build and pilot giant space-robots, has been militarized to maintain and operate humanity’s protector: a colossal metal man called the Zephyr.

On her 120th birthday, Akayama realized she was holding back the younger pilots. She retired as the Zephyr’s Commander, pilot of the cockpit in its head, to lead from the lunar command-tower instead. She promoted the chest-pilot, Zephyr Bunjiro, to the cranial position. Will Princess Lucia, daughter to the Ruler of Earth, prove to be Bunjiro’s perfect replacement at the Zephyr’s heart?

—

At the top of her moon-base’s tallest command-tower, Professor Akayama tied her long navy hair in a tight nautilus bun and stuck two pencils through it, freeing her hands to operate a massive control-panel labeled in English, Japanese, and eight other languages. When she pressed a button, a crater outside the observatory-windows opened like a manhole and leaked white exhaust from a sub-lunar hangar. “Commander Bunjiro, Princess Lucia, Zephyr Dakshi,” she said into a microphone. “Global Parliament has authorized us to repel the Hurricane Planets infesting the galaxy’s third arm. Prepare for launch.” The professor switched off her microphone and swiveled in her chair to face the forty technicians behind her, each sitting at a computer with three or more touchscreen-monitors. “Don’t forget: this is Princess Lucia’s first experience against the Hurricane. Just keep your heads and follow procedure.”

The technicians relayed multilingual commands to the crater’s sub-lunar hangar. A launch platform there supported the Zephyr, the blue metal man a hundred meters tall even though it had no legs. In the moon’s airy gravity, mechanics crawled across the Zephyr’s chest like ants to unfasten its right arm at the shoulder. A crane forty stories tall suspended that right arm on the hangar’s back wall; the right arm’s pilot would forgo this mission to help Akayama evaluate the princess from the command-tower.

“Professor Akayama,” he said sitting beside her, “sorry I’m late. Zephyr Charlie reporting for duty.” Charlie was a pale fellow, about twenty years old, with a chiseled cleft chin. His tousled golden haircut matched his yellow bodysuit. He chewed the end of a smoldering cockroach. “How’s the princess holding up?”

“Zephyr Charlie! Trade seats with me.” Akayama stood and brushed folds from her pure white lab-coat, posture bent by age. In Earth’s gravity, she’d be confined to a hospital-bed. “My arthritis is acting up. Finish preparing the Zephyr for launch. And no smoking near sensitive equipment! Don’t give me that look, I’m your elder by a century!”

“Yes, Professor,” Charlie sighed. He dutifully swapped seats and ashed his roach. On the control-panel he twisted dials, turned a key, and lifted a lever. “Can I still smoke in my shoulder-cockpit?”

“Of course. That air’s filtered through the Zephyr’s life-support.” Akayama watched steam pour from the crater like evaporating milk. She had remarkable eyesight for a super-centenarian. “Zephyr Charlie, I wanted to discuss an error in your report on Princess Lucia.”

“Professor, the princess is more than ready to pilot the Zephyr’s heart. I helped Commander Bunjiro train her, and we both agree she’s a better match for the position than even he was.”

“Not that. Look here.” Akayama pulled a clipboard and pen from her lab-coat. “You were brave to try writing my name in kanji, but you wrote Professor Akayama…” She drew a sun and moon beside a mountain: 明山. “Bright Mountain. My name is Professor Akayama…” She drew a cross on four legs and another mountain: 赤山. “Red Mountain. Akai Yama Hakase, not Akarui Yama Hakase. Understand? Not a bad try for your second-language, but just write in English from now on.”

“Of course, Professor.” Charlie tapped a microphone to make sure it was on. “Commander Bunjiro, the Zephyr is cleared for take-off.”

The command-tower’s observatory-windows displayed a live recording of Bunjiro in his cockpit. He was young as Charlie and wore pointy red sunglasses which matched the color of his bodysuit and short spiky hair. “Hey, Charlie!” Bunjiro’s favorite part of being Commander was the authority to ignore honorifics. “Our life-support saves power when you’re not smoking the place up! Ready, Princess? Take-off in three, two—“

The Zephyr shot from the crater on a column of clouds puffed from its hips. Dakshi, pilot of the left arm, swept the exhaust away as the Zephyr departed the solar system faster than light. By firing photons at unspeakable speeds, the Zephyr communicated with the command-tower instantly even light-years and light-years away. “Textbook take-off, your Highness.” Dakshi appeared on the observatory-windows beside Bunjiro. He was a little older than Charlie and Bunjiro, dark-skinned, and he kept his green bodysuit impeccably ironed like his matching tightly-groomed crew-cut. Many in the moon-base had earned medals in the fight against the Hurricane, but Dakshi’s military background made him among the few who wore them in earnest.

“Thank you, Zephyr Dakshi!” Princess Lucia, in the robot’s sculpted muscular chest, appeared under Bunjiro on the observatory-windows. She was younger than the other pilots and her aquamarine military-regulation ponytail matched her own bodysuit, which was a little more skin-tight than theirs. “Zephyr Charlie, Professor Akayama, how would you rate it?”

“That was a smooth launch, Princess,” said Charlie.

Akayama leaned over Charlie to speak into the microphone. “Splendid, splendid, Princess!” The observatory-windows now also displayed the Zephyr’s point-of-view, which saw light-years into the distance by firing photons from its eyes and catching them when they bounced back. Zipping past stars, the Zephyr quickly came across stray Hurricane Planets intruding deeper than the rest. These red orbs were grasping with hands, kicking with legs, dripping with tentacles, and watching in all directions with countless eyes. Akayama pressed a button under her desk to begin recording the footage; she hypothesized the Hurricane’s jittery eye-movements were a form of communication which could be decoded. “Don’t slow down yet,” she said. “At top speed, anything smaller than Jupiter can be atomized manually.” Dakshi raised the Zephyr’s left fist like a boxer’s uppercut. Lucia propelled the space-robot in a complicated curve, exploding through each Hurricane Planet as Bunjiro targeted them on a touchscreen in the head.

“Hey Prof,” said Bunjiro, “in one of your lectures, you said you’ve sighted Hurricane Planets bigger than the whole galaxy. They could eat the Milky Way in one bite! Why are these puny invaders embarrassing themselves out here?” Like the perfect teacher’s-aid, Bunjiro asked as if he didn’t already know.

“Excellent question,” said Akayama. Behind her in the command-tower, the newest technicians took notes of her answer on their extra touchscreens. “Our current working theory is pain-aversion. The Hurricane would sooner have a tiny portion extinguished immediately rather than let a larger portion suffer for any duration. The tiny portions cannot object, of course, existing at the mercy of the larger ones.”

In the galaxy’s third arm, the Zephyr found an otherworldly nightmare. “My goodness.” Lucia covered her mouth, agape. Nothing could have prepared her. The sight nauseated even the most experienced aboard the moon-base. Countless Hurricane Planets were eating whole stars or even each other. The largest ones spat out countless tiny copies of themselves to repeat the reproductive-cycle.

“Don’t lose focus, Princess,” said Akayama. “The space-robot you’re piloting is a great and complicated tool. In the Zephyr’s chest, you control more than the main engines: our greatest weapon, the Super Heart Beam, depends on you. Using it to vaporize a collection of Hurricane Planets will drive the rest back outside the galaxy—but, it puts immense strain on the chest’s pilot. When Commander Bunjiro piloted the chest, he could fire the Super Heart Beam only once a week. I understand he’s taught you everything he knows. Are you prepared, Princess, or would you prefer holding back to melee-combat?”

“I’m ready, ma’am!” Lucia steadied herself. “Commander Bunjiro, Zephyr Dakshi, transfer power, please!”

“Transferring power,” said Dakshi.

“You’ve got this, Princess,” said Bunjiro.

Energy crackled like blue lightning from the Zephyr’s head and arm to its chest. Akayama watched with pride. “I knew the princess would be the perfect pilot the moment we met,” she told Charlie. “Firing the Super Heart Beam requires embodying the ideals the Zephyr represents. As daughter to the Ruler of Earth, Princess Lucia knows how to stand for humanity!”

“Professor!” Charlie pointed to the control-panel. “Look at the neck!”

The Zephyr’s neck had eight locks securing its head to its body. According to the control-panel’s diagnostics, four locks were open. Akayama grabbed the microphone. “Princess, don’t—” The Super Heart Beam exploded from the Zephyr’s chest. White light shot hundreds of light-years and pulverized whole Hurricane Planets into fine red spray. The force of the beam knocked the Zephyr backwards. Its head snapped its locks and spun through space. On the observatory-windows, the command-tower witnessed Bunjiro violently thrashed in his cockpit when the Zephyr’s head impacted asteroids. Akayama cried. “Mou iya dawa!“

Charlie shouted into the mic. “Bunjiro, come in!” No response. “Princess, Dakshi, bring him back to the moon! We’ll prepare med-bay!” Charlie shook his head and cried a single tear. “This is my fault, Professor. I was responsible for launch-preparation.” Akayama was gone. Charlie lost her in the commotion of the command-tower.

—

Firing the Super Heart Beam had exhausted her, but Princess Lucia couldn’t fall asleep after lights-out in the barracks. She lay awake on her bunk in her blue skin-tight bodysuit, fiddling nervously with her ponytail. The doctors said Bunjiro’s surgery would last hours and he’d be bedridden for days. Charlie said it wasn’t her fault, but Lucia considered the tragedy again and again. Could she have leapt from her cockpit to save him?

“Your Highness!” Dakshi pounded her door. “Emergency! We need you in the Zephyr!”

“Oh no!” Lucille threw her blankets aside and ran to him. “What’s wrong? Are Hurricane Planets incoming?”

“Worse.” Dakshi ushered her into an elevator down to the sub-lunar hangar. He obsessively straightened his forest-green crew-cut, even though his hair was far too short to fuss over. “Professor Akayama commandeered the Zephyr’s head from the repair-bay. She’s leaving the galaxy as we speak!”

They ran across catwalks to the headless Zephyr. Charlie already sat in his right-shoulder-cockpit, buttoning the top of his yellow bodysuit. He lit a cockroach and clenched it in his teeth. Dakshi climbed a ladder to his left-shoulder-cockpit, brushing aside mechanics to open the hatch himself. Lucia hesitated outside her cockpit at the solar-plexus. “I can’t do this. My first experience against the Hurricane was a disaster!”

“That’s not on you, Princess!” shouted Charlie. “Get in!”

“Before she left, the professor gave you perfect marks.” Dakshi descended into the shoulder. “So did I, and so did Zephyr Charlie.”

“Hey Dakshi, same here!” A gray replacement-head floated onto the Zephyr’s shoulders. Bunjiro popped out of the skullcap and waved to Lucia. His red bodysuit bulged with bloody bandages. His red pointy hair was no more or less disheveled for his time in med-bay. He lowered his spiky red sunglasses to check the eight neck-locks, and, satisfied, he posed with two fingers in a V for Victory. “One little crash ain’t gonna stop me!”

“Bunjiro!” Lucia climbed into her cockpit and buckled her seat-belts. When the hatch closed her in, Bunjiro, Charlie, and Dakshi appeared on three of her many monitors.

Charlie blew smoke from his roach. “Good to see you back in business, Commander Bunjiro.”

Dakshi stretched the Zephyr’s left arm. “Commander, are you sure you’re fit to fly?”

“Sure as sure!” said Bunjiro. “The moon-base is giving us the green light. Hit it, Princess! Let’s bail out Professor Akayama!”

Lucia turned her key in the ignition and punched a code on a panel of buttons. The Zephyr’s hips fired billowing exhaust and they rocketed from the crater. “Jumping to hyper-light-speed!” She flipped switches and pulled levers. Charlie and Dakshi brought the Zephyr’s arms across its chest. The robot shot through space on a column of clouds thick as cream.

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(The first chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

The year is 2019.

In his Wyoming motel-room, 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,” said Dan. “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?“

—

After three days sitting in airports or planes, Dan stood at the bow of a boat ferrying him to the second island of Sheridan. He’d never traveled like Jay, so he found the process draining, but the leap from winter hemisphere to summer hemisphere was much-needed rejuvenation after his long-lasting hangover; he felt like he was on another planet. Rather than admire the Sheridanian tropics, lit by early Edenic sunset casting light-fingers from behind the main island’s sparse cloud-cover, Dan flipped through Jay’s notepad of observations on the subject. Jay was an impeccable note-taker, and penned interesting sketches, but a few pages near the end of the notepad were torn out. On the next pages, Jay had doodled a cute white fox just like Faith used to paint. Dan had been spooked by a fox like that once, and never had the courage to ask Faith about them. He wished Jay had left those notes.

“Oran dora, Danny.” Virgil Blue poked Dan’s back with his cane, a curious object smooth along the shaft but with ten black spots encircling a gnarled tip. “On the second island, you’ll study under Virgil Green and his matriarch. It should take you a year to graduate from his preliminary summit to my monastery near the main island’s cloudy peak.”

“Um.” Dan put Jay’s notepad in his jeans-pocket. “I’m not joining your congregation, Virgil Blue. I just want to write about it for my PhD. Jay didn’t have to become a monk just to visit you, did he?”

“Danny, why do you care about religion?”

“Um.” Dan found talking to Virgil Blue quite difficult. By wearing his silver mask and hooded navy robes, the Virgil had given up his person-hood to look like a sort of alien bird-thing. The silver mask had a squat beak, two long feathers on top, and bulging criss-crossed bug-eyes seen out of but not into. The only clue to his identity was his voice, that of an elderly man. “My dad studied religions from all over the planet,” said Dan. “Then he killed himself. I guess he really rubbed off on me.”

“Your father gave you his worms,” said Virgil Blue. Dan opened Jay’s notepad and pat his pockets looking for a pen, but couldn’t find one. Jay’s notes explained Sheridanians believed a person was a vessel of interconnected ‘worms.’ To Dan it sounded like the islanders had made a karmic image for the soul out of the brain’s neurons and the psyche’s ability to carry a memetic cultural genome alongside DNA, and he felt a desperate need to take more notes about it. “All consciousness everywhere is one pile of worms tangling and untangling to resolve the cosmic disturbance of existing in the first place. Your father’s worms influenced yours. This is how the worms of the dead are sifted through the sands of the next eternity into the new generation of vessels. Any religion is for accepting the inevitability of death—death at any moment! Without one, we worry. With a good one, every death has purpose, because there are no coincidences.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Dan bit his lip and looked out to Sheridan’s second island. It was bigger and more forested than the first, barren, sandy one. “My friends Faith and Beatrice died recently—Beatrice about a month ago, Faith just last week.”

Jango nodded with solemn understanding. His silver mask almost fell off, but he held it on his face to remain Virgil Blue. He was careful to keep his hands covered with his navy robe’s sleeves. “Your friend Jay died just a few days ago, too.”

“What?” Dan squeezed Jay’s notepad. “You told me Jay and Jango went to your monastery!”

“I told you they left together!” Virgil Blue shook his cane. “Jay and Jango will see each other at the end of the next eternity. The Biggest Bird has plans for them!”

Dan covered his ears with his hands. His fingertips were already bitten by past anxieties. “I can’t hear this.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “My whole life—it’s fallen apart! Jay was my closest friend! We had the same birthday for Christ’s sake!”

“Then Jay will surely help your worms climb the Biggest Bird’s Mountain in the next eternity.” The ferry bumped the second island. Virgil Blue escorted Dan onto the gravelly beach. “Take off your clothes.”

Dan hadn’t planned to participate in Sheridanian rituals, but suddenly felt like his life needed some meaning. He took off his T-shirt, which featured a giant orange space-robot from his favorite anime. “When you say ‘worms,’ do you mean worms like those?” He pointed under the pines, where a few earthworms crawled through the grass.

“I do,” said Virgil Blue.

“Then why doesn’t the Biggest Bird collect worms herself? That seems like a bird-like thing to do.”

“She wishes she could, but worms must prove themselves ready before she can reach out. This is your favorite color, isn’t it, Danny?” Virgil Blue bent achingly and picked up a long orange tail-feather. It must have come from a peacock bigger than an emu. “Collect enough of these and Virgil Green will fashion a skirt for you. You won’t get your own robe until you make it to my monastery.”

—

Dan worried (he was wont to worry, especially when nude) Virgil Blue wouldn’t be able to hike all the way up Sheridan’s second island. The steep path was rough dirt, the moon didn’t light the trail well, and Blue had an uneasy gait. Bewilderingly, however, two dozen bald and mostly-nude men and women with every skin-color imaginable appeared from behind the pine-trees and picked up the old man. “Oran dora!” they said. Carrying him uphill while dancing, they chanted Sheridanian.

Embarrassment tore Dan at every angle. He tried to cover his body with the long orange tail-feathers he’d collected, but found them an unsatisfying way to hide his nervous erection, especially because he was apparently expected to wear them as a scanty skirt like the mostly-nude dancers. Was he expected to immediately dance, too, and help carry Blue, or should he wait for his own scanty feather skirt and shaven head before joining? He felt a pink blush blooming on his cheeks. In consolation, besides the skirts, the dancers wore only anonymizing wooden masks like Virgil Blue’s silver bug-eyed bird-face. Together with baldness, the masks pronounced the slightly pointed heads of native Sheridanians. Dan wished he’d gotten his mask before stripping down so he could hide his blush. “What are they chanting, Virgil Blue?” Dan asked.

” ‘Virgil Blue walks!’ ” he translated. The dancers laughed and started another chant. ” ‘Virgil Blue talks!‘ “

“Are you not known to walk or talk, Virgil Blue?”

“It depends,” said Virgil Blue. “Oran dora!” The dancers set him down atop the island in a clearing. He waved his cane at them to say good-bye, and the dancers disappeared behind the pines once more.

Dan squinted into the dark. “Where did they go?”

Virgil Blue held one silencing finger over his silver mask’s beak, carefully hiding the digit in his thick navy sleeves. “The dancers will retire for the night,” he whispered, “and after meeting Virgil Green, you’ll retire alongside them to dance for a few weeks. As practicing laymen, you and they haven’t yet been taught to sleep like the birds do, just a few minutes at a time but many times a day.”

“I haven’t seen any of these giant flightless birds yet,” whispered Dan. He carried all his tail-feathers under his left elbow. “I’d love to meet one if I’ve gotta learn to sleep like that.” Virgil Blue pointed his cane. Dan recognized a pinkish shape in the middle of the clearing, barely visible by the full moon. Jay had sketched Sheridanian big-birds in his notepad, and once showed Dan photos of such a statue like a penguin taller than a tree. “But isn’t that a stat—” It wasn’t a statue. It opened its eyes, small as peas but reflecting starlight like saucers. It quivered, threatening to unfold its wings across the whole wide clearing.

A bald man with slightly pointed head emerged from behind the pink bird just like the dancers had popped out behind pines. He calmed the bird by reaching up to brush its neck with the back of his hand. Dan knew Sheridanians had a peculiar abundance of skin-colors, but he’d never met a man quite like Virgil Green, dark and cold as the night sky. His martini-olive robe and peppery beard were comparatively warm. “Virgil Blue? Walking? Oran dora!“

“And speaking. Oran dora,” replied Virgil Blue, with a slight bow.

“Oran dora,” Dan whispered. He wasn’t quite sure if he was supposed to say it or not. He had no idea what it meant, and was a little afraid to ask.

“I’ve got another fledgling for you, Green. He speaks English, not Sheridanian, but I’m sure you can show him the birds and the bugs.” Virgil Blue poked Dan’s back with his cane. “I need Danny ready for the end of the eternity.” Dan had never heard of an eternity ending, but it sounded like Judgement Day or Armageddon. What would it mean for him to be ready? Nude and bald?

Virgil Green approached to look him over, so Dan awkwardly showed him the orange tail-feathers he’d collected. “If you need him soon, Blue, maybe he should skip my island and just climb yours.”

“Hey, now!” Virgil Blue shook his cane. “Eternity doesn’t end tonight. He should follow the traditional path.”

Virgil Green took Dan’s orange tail-feathers and held them in both fists. “Danny, isn’t it?”

“Dan Jones.”

“My students begin by dancing.” Virgil Green cracked the tail-feather’s bony shafts so he could weave them together. “Do you dance, Danny?”

“Not once in my life.”

“Hm. Well, you can learn.” Virgil Green snapped the tail-feathers together into a scanty orange skirt. “When a student is done dancing, the sitting-and-walking phase involves meditation while contemplating the Biggest Bird.” Dan had trouble imagining a bird any bigger than the pink one he was looking at, outside a hallucination. “Do you have any experience with such periods of theological consideration, Danny?”

“Kinda, I guess.” Dan stepped into his orange feather-skirt. It was more comfortable than he expected. “I read books as an undergrad while walking laps around the campus quad. I would read for a lap, then close the book and think about it for a lap, and then start reading again.”

Virgil Green turned to grin at Virgil Blue. Blue shook his head, waggling his silver mask, but Green’s smile grew and he nodded. “You sound like you know the rigmarole, Danny,” he said, turning back to face him. “What classes? What books?”

“I majored in Religious Studies. The Bible. The Torah. The Koran. The Vedas. The Lotus Sutra. Anthologies of creation myths. Dante’s Inferno. Paradise Lost. That sort of stuff.”

Virgil Green kept his eyes on Dan, but talked out the corner of his smile while stroking his peppery beard. “He might’ve read half your monastery’s library already, Blue.”

“Virgil Blue told me he has books from the future,” said Dan. “I’ve never read one of those before.”

“The Koran, The Lotus Sutra, and Dante’s Inferno were all once books from the future,” said Virgil Green. “Virgil Blue, Danny sounds like he was born for your monastery. Don’t you always say there are no coincidences? Don’t waste his time dancing; that’s just for tiring out energetic young fledglings.”

Virgil Blue’s exasperation showed through his silver mask as he threw his hands up under his robes. “Danny, do a dance!”

Dan squirmed. “Um.” He did a quick Charleston, trading his hands from one kneecap to the other when they knocked.

“Sit facing the matriarch!” Dan sat facing the big pink bird. “Now stand and circle around her nest!” Dan walked around the bird. In the dark, he hadn’t realized it was sitting on a nest of eggs big as his fists. “There, Danny!” said Virgil Blue. “You’ve done the express-edition of the second island’s traditional path.”

Virgil Green laughed. “Oran dora!” Dan was more confused by the phrase than ever. Was it ‘congratulations?’ ‘Thanks?’ ‘You’re welcome?’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Goodbye?’

“But your next step cannot be so rushed.” Virgil Blue poked Dan’s back with his cane to lead him across the clearing. They left Green behind with the bird and walked down another trail to a ferry waiting at the opposite shore. “Do you know how to swim?”

“Uh-huh.” Dan looked mournfully at the ferry. “Dare I ask why it matters?”

Virgil Blue waved his cane’s gnarled tip at the mountainous main island. Its silhouette was an isosceles right triangle with its hypotenuse on the seafloor, so the island was surely a perfect cone. “It should take you six to fourteen hours to swim there, depending on how the water treats you.”

“Um. Wow.” Dan shaded his eyes from the moon, trying to gauge the distance. The main island was covered in tiny flowers of every possible color, a rainbow blur in the dark. “I don’t think I can swim that far.”

“The flightless birds do it,” said Virgil Blue. Dan could barely see Sheridanian big-birds splashing on the distant coast of the main island. “I did it, too. So did Green.”

“How many people drown making this swim?”

“Not as many as you might think. The water between these islands is almost shallow enough to tiptoe on the sand. When you crawl ashore the main island, you’ll next hike up to the monastery nude as the birds.”

Dan frowned. “I don’t even get to keep my skirt?”

“You’ll lose those feathers during the swim. It’s all a metaphor, accepting your worms for the Heart of the Mountain.”

“I get a robe eventually, right?” Dan remained on the coast, yet unable to touch the waves.

“I’ll dye one with orange flower-petals for you while I wait in the white-walled monastery.” Virgil Blue boarded the ferry without him. “So don’t be too quick about it!”

—

The year is 2020.

Dan, brown hair shaved bald and wearing an orange tail-feather skirt, spent eight months walking and sitting with Virgil Green’s students around the pink matriarch. Each night Dan joined the most fervent devotees to the Biggest Bird swimming laps around the second island until he finally felt firm enough to swim to the main one.

After climbing to the white-walled monastery, nude and waddling slowly as the birds did, Dan was rewarded egg-yolk orange robes and the first volume of his favorite manga: LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration. Its cover depicted a young woman on a noble balcony, ignoring a futuristic skyline of lit-up spires to gaze at the moon above. Virgil Blue told Dan his first assignment was annotating LuLu’s like he would annotate a textbook.

Dan assumed this was for him to demonstrate coherent annotation-ability before being allowed into the monastery’s sacred library under the bell-tower, but the door was actually open even to laymen. Only the books from the future, on the highest shelves, were still prohibited. Dan wasn’t quite convinced about the authenticity of these books from the future, but upon opening the manga, he saw LuLu’s anonymous author had signed their pseudonym, Tatsu, on the first page. Virgil Blue certainly had strange connections.

—

The year is 2021.

Dan’s cramped quarters were adorned with orange fabric just like his spotless robes. His room’s size limited him to a narrow mattress barely tall enough for such a man in his late twenties, but he still stacked books of every color in the corners. Monks usually returned their books to the sacred library under the bell-tower, but tonight, commemorating a full year here, Virgil Blue would give Dan the second volume of LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration to annotate privately. LuLu’s entered indefinite hiatus on a cliffhanger, so Dan would finish every volume printed by 2025 if he kept this annual pace, but he suspected Virgil Blue was secretly sitting on the final unpublished volumes from the future, waiting for him to be ready to read them.

Just before sunset, Virgil Blue opened Dan’s sliding paper door with the head of his cane. “Oran dora, Danny.”

“Oran dora, Virgil Blue.” No matter how much he studied Sheridanian, Dan still wasn’t quite sure what that phrase meant. It really depended on the inflection. He gave the Virgil his first annotated manga-volume. “Thanks for letting me annotate LuLu’s like this. This manga meant so much to me and Jay. Faith and Beatrice liked it, too.”

“It’s not manga, Danny, it’s philosophy presented through mass-produced sequential art. Although, you could be annotating anything.” It took Virgil Blue a minute to sit cross-legged, so achy were his knees. “The Biggest Bird can be found anywhere. There are no coincidences.”

“I know, I know, but LuLu’s is an especially interesting presentation of Sheridanian culture. All Virgil Green talked about was eggs, birds, worms, and, uh, centipedes. LuLu’s ties it all together.” Dan watched Virgil Blue flip the pages of the annotated first volume left-to-right. His ability to read through his silver mask gave the Virgil undeniable authority. “But… I notice none of the other monks are annotating,” said Dan. “They take notes about the library’s sacred texts, but… they told me only Virgils annotate them. Are you planning to promote me to Virgil Orange? Will I be allowed to read books which are still from the future?”

“This sequential art isn’t from the library. For you, Danny, it’s more than sacred. For you, Danny, it’s real.” Without revealing his hands, Virgil Blue tucked the first annotated volume up one navy sleeve, and, from the other sleeve, produced the second volume, fresh. Its cover showed a war-torn Earth partially hidden behind the moon. Between craters on the moon’s dark side was a chrome battle-station shaped like a sea-star. The Earth hid part of the sun, and the sun hid part of a massive black hole. The dark background of space was speckled red. “You’ll never read the story’s resolution. You’ll live it, Danny! You’ll understand by the end of the eternity. It should be any year now.”

Dan helped Virgil Blue stand again. The Virgil closed the sliding paper door with his cane, and Dan opened the manga. Sacred or not, LuLu’s was a wild read.

But in truth, he liked the anime better. Dan pulled his smartphone from under the mattress, solar-charged all day to play the corresponding episodes all night.

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