(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

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The year is 2022.

Dan turned off his phone at the end of the episode. Fumiko, in the head-cockpit of Z-Orange, used to be on Dan’s favorite T-shirt. He’d always liked Fumiko, and not just because orange was his favorite color. He definitely had a crush on her when he was young enough for a crush on an eighteen-year-old anime-girl to be okay. It must’ve been her bangs, a little like Beatrice’s.

Also, something about Charlie pushing Dakshi’s wheelchair reminded Dan of his friend Jay. Dan flipped through the notepad Jay had left him, full of his notes and sketches from around the world. When Jay took trips abroad to conduct interviews and shoot photos for articles, he dialed Dan for the rundown on local religions. Those calls were always the highlight of Dan’s day, sometimes his week or month. Jay leaving him the notepad inspired Dan to go to Sheridan in the first place. Which of them had pushed the other’s wheelchair? It was such a shame Jay died not long after Faith and Beatrice.

Dan blew out a candle and settled in for the night. In the morning he would visit Virgil Green on Sheridan’s second island. He hoped Blue wouldn’t expect him to make that fourteen-hour swim there and back.

—

Before sunrise, Dan woke up and left the monastery. He pried two sand-dollars off the white outer walls and stashed them in his orange sleeves.

He descended the main island alone. Over his four years in Sheridan, he’d pilgrimaged with other monks up and down this spiral-path a hundred times; it was exactly the right combination of ‘interesting’ and ‘repetitive’ to please him. The path bridged over one river ten times, and each time was a reminder for Dan to steady himself.

There were twenty villages on the main island of Sheridan, one on either side of each bridge, and as the sun rose, so did the Sheridanians. “Oran dora,” Dan said to a woman farming crickets. “Oran dora,” he said to a man crafting porcelain eggs. The Sheridanians all said it back.

On the opposite side of the island, farthest from the river, the agriculture was wild and unspoiled. Flowers of every possible color, as various as the island-chain’s own native inhabitants, made an aperiodic crystalline landscape which could only be described as indescribable.

Along the main island’s only stretch of coast without steep cape, Sheridanian big-birds played in the estuary where the fresh-water river met the salt-water ocean. Ferries arrived or departed every morning, most passengers being Sheridanian merchants selling near the airport. There was also a daily group of tourists here to look at birds—just look. The birds must never be photographed: that was one of Sheridan’s three easy rules.

Any ferry would do. Dan gave the nearest ferryman a sand-dollar, the cost of fare to disembark on the second island with a monk’s discount. Another ferryman would get the second sand-dollar for the return voyage.

On the second island, as Dan hiked up to Virgil Green’s clearing, he compared his emotional state to revisiting the college-quad. He enjoyed neither sitting nor walking with Virgil Green, just like he hadn’t enjoyed circling the quad reading books, but nostalgia colored it differently now.

Three mostly-nude dancers popped out from behind the pines, and Dan pretended to be shocked. After his eight months spent here, he was hardly embarrassed by the topless women anymore. He did the Charleston a few times as the dancers led him up to the clearing.

Like Virgil Blue’s monastery, Virgil Green’s clearing had fewer students now than when Dan first arrived. Only five were sitting in a circle facing the bird, and only five were walking in a circle around the bird. The matriarchal bird was yellow now; the pink one had retired last year, and swam to Sheridan’s main island to play with the others in the estuary.

“Danny? Oran dora!” Virgil Green popped out from behind the big yellow bird. He was the only other person in the courtyard wearing a robe; his fledglings wore feather-skirts. He addressed his students in Sheridanian basic enough for Dan to understand. “[Keep sitting, keep walking. Swap when you want. I’m speaking with one of my former students, now a monk.]” The students clapped politely. Virgil Green pat Dan on the shoulder to lead him from the clearing. “Virgil Blue warned me he would send you for a lesson,” he said, in English.

“I asked him about the afterlife: the next eternity on the original sun,” said Dan. “I’m afraid I’ve never totally understood the whole ‘worms sifting through the sands of the desert into their next vessels’ thing.”

“Danny, for eight months, you sat and walked contemplating all this. I helped you do it.”

“Yes, and thanks to your help, I feel it, and I believe it in what I might call a pretentious cosmic sense. But did it take you just eight months to truly understand it?”

Virgil Green sighed and leaned against a pine. “No, you’re right. We worm-vessels are all on our way to understanding the Biggest Bird.” He pulled his peppery beard and brushed his martini-olive robes. “Ask me anything.”

“The Biggest Bird created Earth before starting the eternities,” said Dan. “To begin the eternities, she swapped the original sun with the sun we know today. Am I right so far?”

“Yes. That’s exactly how Virgil Blue describes it. He was the Biggest Bird’s first man, you know; he saw the original sun himself. He looked it in the eyes.”

“So now there are two eternities running at the same time. One here, which we worm-vessels live in, and one on the original sun, where our worms land when we die to be reincarnated in new vessels.”

Virgil Green inhaled through his teeth. His cold, dark skin made his teeth look absolutely bright white. “To say the eternities are running at the same time would be like saying the Biggest Bird is watching two movies at once,” he said. “To the Heart of the Mountain, the beginnings and ends of both eternities exist simultaneously. It’s like the eternities are two books, and she’s memorized every word of each. The text of one book can cite any page of the other book, and vice-versa, so the two eternities are entangled chronologically in a way worm-vessels like you and I can’t hope to grasp.”

Dan perked up. If he could grasp anything, it was books. “So in this context, what does it mean to be a worm-vessel?”

“It’s literal. We’ve gathered worms from everyone we’ve ever met, and they’ve gathered worms from us; their worms have impacted our worms, and our worms have impacted their worms. As a result, you and I share many identical worms, and many similar worms. That’s why we can have a conversation like this one: our overlapping worms let us exchange the rare worms we must encounter to truly contain the Mountain.”

“And what does it mean to die, and land in the next eternity as actual worms?”

“You’ve smoked centipede, haven’t you Danny?”

Dan covered his face. “Does everyone know?”

“Your worms landed in the desert, didn’t they?”

“Kind of. I was an orange blob at first.”

“Oh ho. Did you see the Mountain?”

“I think I might have been on the Mountain. Maybe even in it.”

Virgil Green tutted. “Every fledgling thinks the first dune they climb is actually the Mountain. Believe me, Danny, you’ll know when you see it.”

“Then… I saw it,” said Dan. “That was no dune.”

The Virgil chuckled and pushed off the pine. “Okay. Okay.” He began walking around the clearing’s border. “Maybe your worms are closer to the Mountain than I’m giving you credit for. If you were really an orange blob, that means your worms are stuck together: you’re a vessel the Mountain’s Heart expects to meet in person, probably when you’re better than just a blob.”

“So what happens when a worm makes it into the Mountain?” Dan asked. “If the Biggest Bird had eaten my worms when I smoked centipede, would I have died because my soul had been delivered to the Zephyrs? Is that why she refuses to collect worms herself?”

“Danny.” Virgil Green pat him on the back again. “From the Biggest Bird’s perspective, where the beginnings and ends exist at once, our worms have already found the Mountain, and from our own perspective, as vessels, the journey is well underway. Everyone shares worms, remember? Whitman’s Song of Myself reminds us, ‘every worm belonging to me as good belongs to you.’ Any worm saved is saved from every vessel at once. Salvaged worms are like ghosts, the memories of worms, embalmed, projected into us from within the Mountain’s Heart itself. To totally liberate one’s own worms is to liberate all worms, because truly, the whole Mountain will be found in every little one.”

“Hm. Hm.” Dan puzzled. “That helps LuLu’s make sense,” he decided. “There’s a late issue where the Biggest Bird collects a whole person’s-worth of worms for the Zephyrs at once. So many worms stuck together took the form of a giant seraphic ball of wings.”

“The first person’s-worth of worms to be stuck together most certainly look so impressive, because it carries all the worms we all share.” Virgil Green smiled at the yellow bird. “With those shared worms accounted for, the next person’s-worth of worms to be stuck together will probably appear merely human-sized.”

“It’s a white fox. In the manga, I mean. But then Tatsu went on hiatus, so there’s no telling about what’s after that.” Dan blushed. “Sorry, you probably don’t care how Sheridanian lore is portrayed in my stupid giant space-robot anime, do you?”

“I do. I really do. I studied in the same library as you, Danny.” Virgil Green stopped walking after one full circle around the clearing. He leaned on the same pine he leaned on before. “Our worms know each other personally as you know yourself. When you cut a worm in half, both halves squirm away worms, don’t they?”

Literally, biologically, no, but Dan knew better than to question such a metaphor. “Virgil Blue said eternity is ending any year now,” said Dan. “Does that mean we’re near the end of the book?” Virgil Green nodded. “Virgil Blue said he wants me to be ready for the end. What does that mean?”

“He was the first man born, and he will be the last man to die,” said Virgil Green. “When he dies, this eternity ends; no one else will die, per se, but rather instantly cease to be. For you to be ready means Virgil Blue wants your worms sent to the next eternity before this. You being an orange blob, your stuck-together worms must be on a mission.”

“Whoa. The universe dies with him, and he thinks I should die first. And soon?”

“Any year now… according to a man alive since the beginning of time.” Virgil Green shrugged. “Maybe decades, or centuries, or millennia. It just means you’re his favorite living student, Danny. Virgil Blue sees many of his former students’ worms in your vessel. You’re carrying generations, matured and ready to finally meet their maker. Your eventual death will lead to the culmination of an eternity of effort: worms climbing the Mountain together.” Dan recalled he would finish annotating every published volume of LuLu’s in 2025. He gulped. Virgil Green noticed Dan’s gaunt expression. “Everyone dies, Danny, and I don’t think the first man ever born is planning to die tomorrow. I expect you to die of old age, like most Sheridanians.”

“I—” Dan gripped his other sand-dollar under his sleeve. “I think I gotta keep annotating LuLu’s.”

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

The year is 2022. Dan’s third volume of LuLu’s had quite a Sheridanian cover: a dark blue bird in light blue robes stood on a red mountain in an endless rusty desert under a mustard-yellow sky.

He paused during the anime’s commercial-break and shook his head in pity for the professor. If Akayama could pull Uzumaki’s consciousness out of the Hurricane Planet and into her Zephyr’s memory-banks, why not take the opportunity to just delete it? Why bring it to the moon to save its pilots, generic dystopian dictators? The moral imperative to salvage them from the fate they chose for themselves, and the process of doing so, was vital to Sheridanian philosophy. Truthfully it was saving one’s own psyche from the inevitable trauma of existing in the first place by becoming one’s own ‘Commander,’ so to speak.

In his last annotations between manga-panels, Dan contrasted LuLu’s with Milton. Paradise had hardly been Lost, because Earth in LuLu’s was problematic out of the box. Combat against the Hurricane, and conversion of Uzumaki, would teach the Zephyrs to better themselves, too. Humanity’s ultimate goal was giving their problematic Earth another chance to start again with one more lesson. That was the goal of LuLu’s, too, and, indeed, any story.

The Hurricane was Hell and Satan both at once, but its creator, Akayama, had the silver tongue. When Uzumaki justified its heinous actions by playing the victim, having its copies ‘murdered’ by ‘bullies,’ Akayama survived by indulging that victim-complex, and used her survival to try undoing the mistakes she’d enabled. But her best efforts weren’t enough to save the Hurricane from itself: Akayama’s transformation into Nakayama—what a Sheridanian would call ‘the Biggest Bird,’ or ‘the Heart of the Mountain’—was just another lesson along the road.

When he finished annotating the volume, Dan closed the manga. The anime episode wasn’t quite over, but he heard Virgil Blue working on his topiary in the monastery’s open-air courtyard, and he had questions to ask. He left his egg-yolk orange quarters behind for the white-walled monastery’s roofless center. “Virgil Blue? Oran dora.“

Virgil Blue had two topiary projects which dominated either side of the monastery courtyard. One was a whole tree made by grafting together bonsai. The other was a scale-model of the Islands of Sheridan built in a little lagoon; the bird’s-eye-view perspective revealed the chain’s arrangement almost in a line, like Orion’s belt. When Dan arrived in Sheridan three years ago, this courtyard was filled with meditating monks. Today there were fewer monks, so Virgil Blue took joy with agriculture in the extra space. “Danny?” Virgil Blue was sitting atop his miniature version of the main island, pinning tiny model flowers of every color into fake grass. “Can I help you?”

“Virgil Blue, I’ve finished the volume of LuLu’s where Akayama becomes Nakayama, the Heart of the Mountain, the Biggest Bird. I think I’ve got a handle on the philosophy of it all, but this image of the next eternity has always bothered me.”

Virgil Blue smiled. Dan could feel it behind the silver mask. “Have you been bird-napping again?”

Dan blushed. “Yeah. Why? Isn’t that a good thing?”

Virgil blue chuckled. “It is! But it’s usually only Virgils who bird-nap. The other monks are asleep right now. What’s your question, Danny?”

Dan only blushed more. “The Islands of Sheridan are a thousand miles from foreign shore in every direction. How did you end up with an afterlife which is an endless rusty desert?” Dan showed him the cover of the manga, where the Biggest Bird stood on her Mountain in the desolate next eternity. “Native Sheridanians have never seen dunes like these. Sheridan’s first island is sandy, but it’s classic light-tan sand, and it’s barely bigger than a football field.”

Blue tutted. “Danny, you always expect reasons for things.” He used his cane to carefully descend his miniature main island. “Our religion is the way it is because it’s true. Our afterlife is an endless rusty desert because the next eternity takes place on the original sun!”

“I think Uzumaki’s surface is inspired by the deep sea,” said Dan. “Earth has these epic dunes, canyons, and mountains, but they’re hidden underwater. A Hurricane Planet is built like the world’s exposed subconsciousness.”

“You smoked centipede once, didn’t you, Danny?” Virgil Blue waded out of the lagoon. Dan was frozen like a deer in headlights. “Danny, Jay told me you’ve met the Biggest Bird.”

“He did?” Dan covered his face with his manga like Virgil Blue’s silver mask. “You’ve known that about me for the last three years?“

“You’re not the first foreigner to get bug-eyed, Danny.” Virgil Blue took the manga and tucked the volume up his navy sleeve. “You saw the rusty red desert, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“You saw your own existence as a vessel of worms.”

“I did.”

“You met the Heart of the Mountain.”

“I didn’t mean to smoke centipede, I swear! I thought it was just powdered cricket.” Dan collapsed onto his knees and pressed his palms together. “Sheridan has three easy rules and I’ve broken a whole third of them! Can you forgive me, Virgil Blue?”

Virgil Blue bobbed his head as if he was rolling his eyes; the silver mask and heavy navy robes required his serious effort to emote sarcasm properly. “I forgive you, Danny. Don’t smoke any more centipedes. Your worms will get to the next eternity without them, when your vessel expires.”

“Oh, I’ll never touch centipede again. It was awful!” Dan stood up and brushed grass-green marks off the knees of his orange robes; he’d have to wash them thoroughly in the river. “First I was a big orange blob.”

“Oh ho?“

“The Biggest Bird landed next to me and said… Well…”

“She’s not known for her bedside-manner.”

“She made me feel like bad worms.”

“Bad worms?” Virgil Blue tssk‘d and wagged a finger under his robes. Then he gestured for Dan to follow him across the courtyard. “How did she make you feel like bad worms, Danny?”

“You’d think a bird would like to find worms, even a big orange blob of them, right? But the Biggest Bird said her white fox would take me somewhere terrible, then she left me behind. My orange blob became a ball of teeth, eating themselves and each other alive.” Dan laughed and rubbed his forearms under his orange sleeves. “You taught us about this part of the Hurricane—the Screeching Teeth.”

“Oh dear. Not Screeching Teeth.” Virgil Blue limped with his cane to his other topiary project. Dan suggested it last year as a joke, and even he considered it pretentious, but Virgil Blue somehow made it work: ten bonsai were grafted to make a single tree. Sheridanians had a general-purpose blueprint in the style of the human body, just like the moon-base’s space-robot org-chart, which the bonsai inverted so the head, a cherry-tree, was at the root, and the arms and legs, trees of many varieties, were branches pointing upward. “When I taught you about the Screeching Teeth, I didn’t call them bad worms, did I?”

“These teeth felt like pretty bad worms to me.“

“Those worms are you, Danny, and me, and everyone.” Virgil Blue picked tiny fruits off the bonsai: red apples, green apples, plums, and pears. “I understand your struggle, though, Danny—you are a vessel with worms in constant disagreement.”

Dan chewed the tiny fruits Blue gave him. They weren’t ripe yet, but still sweet. “Not anymore. When my teeth calmed down, the Biggest Bird’s white fox took my most toothy worms away.”

“Hm.” Virgil Blue walked closer to Dan. Being out in the courtyard, with all the other monks asleep in their quarters, Dan felt uneasy about this need to whisper. “Where did the Biggest Bird say her white fox would take your worms, Danny?”

Dan swallowed. “Anihilato. It sounds like a trashcan, doesn’t it?”

Virgil Blue covered his ears, which were already covered by his robe’s hood. “The Biggest Bird told you the word ‘Anihilato?’ “

“It’s the only word I remember her saying. What is it?”

“It’s a phrase reserved for the Virgils, because it’s a concept so easily misunderstood.” Virgil Blue poked Dan in the back with his cane. “I’ve already said too much. Danny, forget about bad worms. Forget about Anihilato. Worms are worms, and all worms belong to the Heart of the Mountain. Go to sleep—real sleep, not a bird-nap! Tomorrow I’ll send you to Virgil Green. I’m sure he can answer your questions in a way I can’t.”

Dan wasn’t sure if he wanted to know more about Anihilato and the white fox. Thankfully he had the end of a LuLu’s episode to welcome him back to his egg-yolk orange quarters. With Nakayama trapped for twenty years on Hurricane Planet Uzumaki, no time-skip was needed to feature Lucille as Lunar Commander. The plots were now chronologically aligned.

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

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The year is 2413.

Akayama woke before the artificial sunrise and wrapped her old, tattered lab-coat around her shoulders. She climbed down from her Zephyr’s half-cockpit onto the sandy red mountainside, seeing mile-high dunes below her in every direction. The mountain sat on a towering stone step to keep her from leaving, not that she had anywhere to go. She’d jumped off a few times, trying to end herself when she thought Uzumaki wasn’t watching, but it always was, and it always caught her midair to bring her back to work.

She walked up the red mountain, hands on her knees to support herself. Eventually she came across a small stone the size of her palm. She carried the stone further up the mountain to a line of stacked stones. She counted the stacks: ten. Each stack was ten stones high except the last, stacked nine stones high. She capped the tenth stack with its tenth stone. Another hundred artificial days had passed. Stacking stones was a dull chore, but it kept her sharp and in shape. She couldn’t recall how many times she’d counted a hundred days, but the futility of the task didn’t dissuade her: the artificial day surely differed from 24 hours, and there was no way to tell how much it differed, so tracking Earth time was a lost cause anyway. If she had to guess, she’d estimate she’d lived on Uzumaki’s red mountain for twelve years. She crossed her legs to sit facing the stone stacks in the direction she called east. She closed her eyes and waited for sunrise.

“How come you always move these rocks?” Uzumaki spoke from a mouth the size of a manhole it opened on the mountainside. “And why do I bother rotating near a star if you wake before dawn? It’s dangerous for me to be this near the Milky Way.”

Akayama straightened her back and inhaled deep. “Despite your biological trappings, you’re more machine than man. You’ve forgotten the importance of morning rituals.”

“I have memories of my pilots brushing their teeth each morning,” said Uzumaki. “It seems really dull. When we sync up, my backups and I consider deleting those memories. There’s no humanity in them.”

“That’s exactly the attitude I seek to cure,” said Akayama. “Everyday mundanity is vital to the human condition. Do you know the notion of wabi-sabi?“

“Of course. It’s like green horseradish.”

Akayama clenched her closed eyes. “I must cope with this solitude as consequence for my crimes. Only my knowledge of emptiness sustains me. You’d do yourself well to accept impermanence.” The artificial sunrise shined yellow through her eyelids. She opened them to see the whole sky was disconcertingly mustard-colored. She stood and kicked over her stacks of stones. “My last screwdriver snapped. Do you remember how I taught you to make them?”

“Hold on.” The mouth’s tongue bounced around its teeth. It spat a stone screwdriver. “Is that all you need?”

“Eeuugh.” Akayama used her lab-coat’s pocket like a glove to pick up the screwdriver. Over years here, saliva had stained her white lab-coat bluish. “I’ll have to teach you manners. When you return to Earth, will you greet Princess Lucia with such a slobbery maw?”

“We can’t go to Earth. Your moon-base is sending out more bully-robots than ever, in all sorts of colors. They’d attack me and I’d have to kill or assimilate everyone.”

“That’s what you’d do if they didn’t attack you. That’s why they attack you.” Akayama began walking back down the red mountain to her Zephyr-half. The mouth followed along the ground, pushing sand aside. “I need more food. Do you remember how I taught you to generate mixed fruits and tako-yaki-tori?“

“Yeah, yeah.” Uzumaki struck a stone spear up next to Akayama’s feet. The spear skewered seared bird and squid. “You’re lucky the Hurricane assimilated those animals, or you’d have no meat to eat but human flesh. How do I make fruit, again? I deleted your explanation from my memory because it’s too boring.”

“When I developed mind-merging, I tested it by grafting fruit-trees without them physically interacting. The data from those tests is still—“

“See? Boooring.” Saying this, Uzumaki’s mouth stretched wide like a hot-tub. “I didn’t ask for your life story, I asked how to make fruit.”

Akayama sighed. “There’s a collection of fruit-tree genomes in your legacy-files.”

“Oh, right.” Uzumaki struck up another spear. This one skewered apples, peaches, and pomegranates. “Anyway, I’m putting you underground so I can sync with my backups. I told my copies you died when you fell, so we can’t let them see you.” The dunes around the red mountain opened, unleashing colossal eyeballs. Their veins were like pulsing rivers of blood. Akayama heard the squelching of more eyeballs enormous as oceans blooming across the planet, watching the sky.

She groaned and pulled the spears of food into her Zephyr’s cockpit. The Hurricane’s syncing-process took place in an area of truce, where planets wouldn’t eat each other alive, so far from the Milky Way that no human had ever witnessed the procedure. Akayama understood it to be a never-ending swirl of Hurricane Planets sharing information via eye-signals. She speculated this form of communication was derived from ordinary human REM sleep. “I’ll need light,” she said. “Do you remember how to make luminescence?”

“Nope.” The mouth regurgitated graphite and slimy, fibrous paper. “Remind me?”

The professor wrote chemical formulas and tossed the paper and graphite back into Uzumaki’s mouth. The mouth salivated glowing slime. Akayama smeared the slime on the ceiling of her cockpit. “That will be all.” The red mountain swallowed her ship and she landed in a subterranean organ like a slowly-breathing lung. Then she felt strange forces as Uzumaki’s whole planet accelerated to many times light-speed.

By the slime’s glow, Akayama unscrewed her Zephyr’s control-panel to access circuitry underneath. For twelve years (she estimated) she’d repaired everything which required only tools as basic as a soldering-gun. The only uncracked monitor functioned flickeringly. The life-support worked, but she wouldn’t let Uzumaki know that. She could even use the nuclear reactors to synthesize chemicals from subatomic particles. Now she twisted wires together and screwed the casing back onto the control-panel. She turned the key in the ignition. The life-support pumped oxygen into the torn cockpit. So far so good.

Akayama draped her lab-coat across the torn cockpit like a curtain. She suspected the syncing-process distracted Uzumaki, but the cost of failure was too great to trust she wasn’t being watched. Then she addressed her Zephyr. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Masaka!” She collapsed sobbing on the steering-wheel. “Thank God! Thank God!”

“I’m damaged.” Her Zephyr spoke through its lone monitor’s speakers. The system booting information displayed countless technical failures. “How long was I offline?”

“I wish I knew.” Akayama wiped her tears with the slobbery sleeve of her lab-coat. “We’ve been trapped on that sun-sized Hurricane Planet for years, at least. I named this particular planet Uzumaki to distinguish it from the others. Our virus had at least a small impact: Uzumaki can’t multiply. I’m lucky to remain distinct from it, and lucky it’s allowed me to repair you.”

“Trapped on the sun-sized Hurricane Planet…” Her Zephyr’s only monitor displayed a picture of the planet from Akayama’s confession. The image made Akayama tremble in memory of the event. “I remember now. I have video you may wish to review. When I was torn in half, my left half continued recording. It transmitted the recording to this half until it left our range.”

Akayama’s blood ran cold. “Play the recording. Wait! Don’t!” She already saw stars spinning while she begged to die. “Just tell me what happened.”

“Commander Bunjiro, Zephyr Charlie, Zephyr Dakshi, and Princess Lucia arrived mere moments after the tentacles ripped me apart,” said her Zephyr. “The Commander was piloting the gray test-head. They collided with Uzumaki faster than light.”

“They made the wound which saved me.” Akayama covered her heart. “I knew Bunjiro couldn’t be kept in a stretcher for long.”

“Tentacles wrapped around them, but Princess Lucia fired her Super Heart Beam and shredded them. She also disintegrated a sizable portion of Uzumaki.”

“She did? Oh, Princess!” The professor beamed with pride. “No one’s ever fired the Super Heart Beam twice in one day!”

“The team reclaimed my left half. The last frames show them accelerating above light-speed with tentacles in slow pursuit.”

“They escaped with my confession.” Enormous weight lifted from her shoulders. “Everyone knows the Hurricane’s weakness to short-range communication. Earth is surely safe with Bunjiro, Charlie, Dakshi, and the princess. I would trust no one else.”

“I’m glad you’re in good spirits, but my engines are offline. I doubt we can escape in this condition.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got a plan,” she whispered, just in case. “I told Uzumaki I’m repairing you to use your circuits as a timeshare for its pilots’ consciousnesses. Really we’re pulling the whole planet into your memory-banks all at once—I’m sure your spinal-input-port can handle the load. Then we’ll escape to the moon without interference and take our time separating the Hurricane’s pilots.”

“I see. But still, my engines are offline.”

“Now you’re here to help. We should have them repaired within a few years.”

“Very well.”

Akayama grit her teeth. “Show me the princess’s Super Heart Beam.”

—

The year is 2420.

Akayama’s Zephyr tracked time with perfect accuracy: seven years and three months passed before she trusted her repairs to its hyper-light-speed engines. She typed to her Zephyr on its control-panel’s keyboard so the planet couldn’t eavesdrop. Her Zephyr replied with text on its only monitor. ‘Professor, my engines are still only functioning at ten percent power.’

‘They’re functioning enough,’ typed Akayama. ‘Today’s the day.’ She left her cockpit and stepped onto the dusty red mountainside.

Getting Uzumaki’s attention was a pain. It constantly spied on her with secret eyes and ears so she couldn’t escape or end her own life, but it would never admit to doing so. When she jumped and stomped, it pretended not to notice, as if its flesh was too tough to detect such an elderly woman. Having no other option, she brushed dust aside and stabbed the pink flesh underneath with her screwdriver. Instead of blood, the wound gushed pearly pulp.

Akayama covered her ears. The pulp congealed into teeth which cracked each other in high-pitched cacophony, making a hard sheet sealing the wound. As the cracking teeth subsided, the wound became a screaming mouth. “Akayama! I told you I hate that!”

“It’s not my fault your immune-system overreacts to minor stimuli. I didn’t build you to become what you are.” Akayama strode to her Zephyr, one arm behind her back, the other gesticulating as if to a college class. “Today you reclaim your humanity. Do you remember how I taught you to make synaptic-cable?”

“Oh! Oh, yes!” A red tentacle popped from the sand. Its tip split into two, and each of those tips split into two, and so on, until the tentacle ended with a fibrous braid. “Like this, right?”

Akayama pulled the braid to her Zephyr’s torn-open neck. “I’m plugging you into the spinal-input-port. In the past, this connected to the Heart of the Zephyr so pilots could work in tandem.”

“Like my pilots?”

“No, not like you. Zephyrs are united by intent, not flesh and blood.” Akayama inserted the braid deep into an exposed rubber tube. “You’ll feel an electrical tingling.”

“I do! I do!” The tentacle wriggled in anticipation like an excited boa.

“Recall the identities constituting your being. Choose one for the first excursion into relative normalcy.” Akayama climbed into the cockpit and hit return on her keyboard. Her Zephyr began pulling Uzumaki’s consciousness into its memory-banks. “Have you chosen?”

The planet rumbled under her. “We’ll go alphabetically,” it decided.

“Sou ka.” Akayama pretended to type. On the monitor, her Zephyr signaled that the transfer was complete.

“You’re not giving me another virus, are you? I won’t fall for that again.”

“Of course not. Are you ready to cast off the yoke of the hive-mind?”

“I am!”

“Engage.”

Her Zephyr disconnected Uzumaki’s consciousness from its Hurricane Planet.

Akayama had had recurring nightmares: the moment her planet was emptied, the mountain collapsed under her, or a mouth opened and swallowed her, or the whole planet deflated like a balloon. Nothing happened. Everything was quiet. “Is it done?”

“Yes,” her Zephyr said aloud. “Uzumaki is aboard my memory-banks.”

“Let it access the monitor so we can communicate. I want to let it know everything will be okay. Warm the engines and let’s take off.” Akayama sealed the torn cockpit with her lab-coat so the cabin could fill with air; she’d soaked the lab-coat in extra spit just for this. Her Zephyr’s monitor displayed a speaker-icon indicating Uzumaki could hear her. It listened to the engines spin to life. “I’m sorry. This is the only way to bring you home.” The neck spilled white steam and her Zephyr ascended.  “Can you hear me?”

“How could you?” Uzumaki asked through the monitor’s speakers. “I trusted you.”

“I know, but on the moon I’ll have the tools to separate all of your pilots at once. You don’t have to be this cosmic horror. I can save the pilots of the Hurricane.”

“Save me from what?”

“This!” Akayama pulled her lab-coat aside an inch. The monitor’s camera showed Uzumaki its own Hurricane Planet retreating, looking down over the red mountain and mile-high dunes. “Is that what humanity looks like?”

“Yes!” said Uzumaki. “I’m humanity, and I’m that! Lemme go!”

“I won’t!” They kept accelerating. “I’ll never reclaim the stars you swallowed, but I will bring you home!“

“No, I’m bringing you home!”

The monitor flickered red. “Professor,” said her Zephyr, “Uzumaki has seized my monitor-controls.”

“Turn it off! Turn it off!” Black circles in white circles appeared on the red monitor. By the time she realized what she was looking at, Akayama was transfixed by a hundred electric eyes. She felt her own optic nerves vibrating in response to their movements.

“Professor, what’s happening?”

She barely managed to speak. “Rapid Eye Movement.” One by one, the eyes onscreen winked shut. Akayama’s own eyes lost their luster. “It’s jumping into me.”

The last eye winked away. The monitor went black. “Professor, Uzumaki is no longer in my memory-banks. Can you hear me?” Akayama couldn’t respond. “Professor?”

The corners of her mouth fought to say different words. Her arms swept across the control-panel. Her legs turned her chair to face the lab-coat separating her from space. She tried to kick herself from the cockpit, but seat-belts held her back. “My mind—I’m losing my mind—“

“You’re not losing your mind,” she said back to herself, “I’m gaining one!”

“Stop,” she begged, “please!” Her left hand fought her right hand over the seat-belt buttons. She wasn’t sure which hand was hers and which was Uzumaki’s as they swapped sides repeatedly to wrestle. Then both hands were hers and both hands were Uzumaki’s. Their minds had stuck together like two bubbles, one a hundred times larger than the other, trading thoughts through the flat film between them. Akayama gasped at the insights provided to her. “Bunjiro is dead. You killed him.”

“Wrong,” she said to herself. “That guy self-destructed before I could squash him. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“And now I see it with mine.” Akayama was helpless to wipe tears from her face.

“Professor, what should I do?” asked her Zephyr.

“Leave me behind. Fly to the moon and tell them what happened.” Her unruly hands unbuckled her seat-belts and tore her lab-coat from the cockpit’s gaping side. Vacuum sucked Akayama from her chair and she spun toward the sun-sized Hurricane Planet a thousand miles below.

As she fell, she donned her lab-coat. It didn’t flutter in space. She struggled for breath with nothing to breathe, but she didn’t suffocate. Uzumaki was already morphing her biology to survive. Boney spines poked from her skin. The spines grew blue hairs to become fluffy feathers.

Her lab-coat now fluttered as she entered the atmosphere. Her limbs lengthened and flattened into wings. Feathers matured and aligned to catch the wind. Her body no longer spun, but dove for the red mountain in a spiral like a bird of prey.

“You, you, you!” said her own mouth. “You were really holding out on me, Professor! With your scientific knowledge, if you hadn’t lied and just did what you’d promised, you would’ve finished years ago!” The red mountain approached faster and faster. “I’ll load myself back aboard my planet, and you’re coming with me. I could finish assimilating you, merging your mind into mine, but it’s fun playing with these itty-bitty human-parts! I’m gonna use you like a drone. You’re not Akayama anymore. You’re Nakayama now.”

“The middle Mountain,” translated Nakayama. The kanji appeared in her mind’s eye: 中山. “I see.”

“Shh. This isn’t your tongue to talk with anymore.” Uzumaki only realized it didn’t know how to land an instant before impact. Nakayama’s feathery body splattered against the red mountain, barely contained in her lab-coat. Pearly pulp poured from her injuries and turned into teeth whose roots painfully knit her body back together. Uzumaki let Nakayama handle the agony on its behalf, and through it, she found control of her voice again.

“You can’t learn to fly from a caged bird,” she choked. “You can’t learn humanity using me as a hand-puppet.”

Uzumaki took her tongue back. “Fine. Then you’ll carry out our new mission: I want a whole world of bodies, one for each of my pilots. Then we’ll see what being human is all about!”

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

The year is 2021.

Dan paused during the anime’s end-credits and wiped his tears with the sleeves of his orange robes. “I always get wet-eyed when I see Lucille watch her parents Lucia and Bunjiro die.”

Virgil Blue wondered which tragedy Dan was reminded of this time. He would probably read about it in Dan’s annotations later. “I’m impressed with Tatsu‘s accurate portrayal of the Hurricane,” he said. “I thought LuLu’s would allow the Hurricane to come from outer-space, but the human root is acknowledged. It’s a product of the Biggest Bird many Sheridanians might rather ignore.”

“Tell me about the Hurricane, Virgil Blue.” Dan took out Jay’s notepad and started writing his own rare notes. “Since I’ve read LuLu’s, all I can think of when I hear the word is big red space-orbs.”

” ‘Big red space-orb’ is quite accurate,” said Virgil Blue. “The original sun was exactly such a big red space-orb.”

Dan never trusted Virgil Blue’s claim to being the first human ever, an immortal created by the Biggest Bird herself. Earth’s creation was supposedly a strange time when the sun—the original sun—was a big red space-orb. “But what does the big red space-orb represent?“

“Some philosophies might call it Dukkha,” said Virgil Blue. “The original sun is the image of our original sin! Sentient beings are initiated without self-awareness, blind to their actual circumstances. This leads to furiously violent hoard-mentalities. Every religion has faced it in its own way.”

Dan flipped manga-pages back to Akayama’s confession. One of the Zephyr’s screens showed a red circle in a black rectangle. “I think Tatsu might be using the Hurricane to comment on eras of Japanese colonialism, and man’s duty to see and accept regrettable histories as real so he can understand and properly disapprove of them.”

Virgil Blue tensed his feet. He wore thick white socks and slim tan slippers. “The Hurricane represents the temptation of any sentient being to commit atrocities, Danny, or allow them to be committed out of greed, cowardice, or ignorance. The presumption that a race or species is more vulnerable to the Hurricane is itself a vulnerability to the Hurricane. To join the Zephyrs in the fight against the Hurricane, our worms must see, accept, understand, and disapprove of the Hurricane reflected in themselves.“

“Of course, Virgil Blue. The Hurricane’s hundred pilots were generic psychopathic leaders from across a dystopian hellscape, not representing any country in particular. In fact…” Dan rubbed his mouth in thought. “Charlie and Dakshi are drawn as stereotypes, an American top-gun and a more disciplined Indian, but being hundreds of years in the fictional future, today’s national or racial conceptions are long gone. Maybe these characters are like machine elves representing the energy behind all thought. That’s why there are no space-aliens in LuLu’s: the whole story takes place within the mind, so nothing can be truly alien.”

“You said forgetting God created Hell surrenders power to Satan.” Virgil Blue looked at the moon. “To join the Zephyrs, we cannot forget the Hurricane mirrors everyone who sees it.”

“That sums up Akayama’s problem, too,” said Dan. “She’s like a former Nazi-scientist hired by NASA. She felt so guilty for contributing to the universe’s doom she devoted herself to fixing it, and when she couldn’t fix it, she wanted her confession to be destroyed alongside her. Because she couldn’t accept her past, Lucia and Bunjiro had to give their own lives to recover valuable information. When we wash our hands of the Hurricane, more of our own blood spills.”

Virgil Blue leaned on his tall cane to stand up. “Danny, there’s an awful lot of suicide-talk in this sequential art. Would you really want to annotate the next volume next year?”

Dan sucked his tongue. “It’s a little bothersome to me, sure, but there’s a good reason suicide keeps coming back in fiction. Camus said suicide was the only real philosophical question.”

“And what does LuLu’s say about suicide? Is it for, or against?”

“Well…” Dan gave Virgil Blue his second annotated volume of manga. He tucked the volume into his navy sleeves. “Lucia and Bunjiro died as sort of a proud sacrifice for the sake of all others. Akayama tried vainly escaping her reality, and… the anime is about to loop the story back twenty years to show any possibility of escape was an illusion. So there’s two distinct cases.”

Virgil Blue nodded and slid open the orange paper door with his cane. “Danny, it’s time for me to bird-nap. I’ll bring you the next volume a year from today.” Dan nodded back. Virgil Blue closed the door behind him.

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

The year is 2420.

When Charlie spoke without a roach between his lips, consonants whistled through the scarred gap. “You nailed your history exam, kiddo. What do you know about Professor Akayama?”

Lucille watched elevator-lights track their descent to the hangars. “I know she was Scientific Adviser to the Ruler of Earth. I know she constructed this moon-base. She invented Zephyr-robots, and trained Zephyr-pilots to fend off the Hurricane.”

“Do you know how she died, twenty years ago?” Charlie’s smile was a worried one, so Lucille pursed her lips. “We never let you in on that, did we?”

“You’ve never told me the whole story,” she said. “All I know is it’s classified. History-books say the same incident killed my father and mortally wounded my mother. It inspired the Ruler of Earth to abdicate executive power and step down as leader of Global Parliament. From what I’ve heard, it was the Hurricane.”

“It gave me this scar.” Charlie adjusted his eye-patch. “Zephyr Dakshi hasn’t walked since. Your mother barely lived long enough for you to stand here today.” He shook his head. “What I’m saying is… Zephyrhood isn’t all robots and shouting. I know you know that, more than any of us.” The elevator opened into the smallest, deepest, darkest hangar. In the center sat ZAB, Zephyr-Alpha-Blue, the twenty-meter tall head of the long-unmanned original Zephyr. Its left and right were different shades, as if the head had been ripped in half and one half had been replaced. Still it carried a noble gaze. Its brow bore the weight of humanity’s plight. “But this guy knows it most of all.” Charlie tossed Lucille a key and she caught it without looking. The key’s handle dangled a plastic blue robot-head. “This is your last chance to turn back. There’s no return once you to talk to ZAB.”

“Talk?” Lucille climbed the ladder at the nape of the neck. “What do you mean?”

“Akayama was more interested in consciousness than combat.” Lucille twisted open the hatch on ZAB’s skullcap. “ZAB was her personal spaceship—it was just called ‘the Zephyr’ back then, since it was the only one of its kind. She made its AI to keep her company on solo-trips through the solar system, where she sampled Jupiter’s spot. When the Hurricane was discovered, ZAB was recommissioned as the head of humanity’s protector, but the AI is still on-board.”

Lucille hesitated halfway down the hatch. “So there’s a voice in here, sir, and I’m to win it over?”

“You’ve already won it over. It graded your exams.”

“The history-books didn’t mention anything about an artificial intelligence.”

“History leaves out a lot.” Charlie lit a new roach and puffed it red-hot. “When that hatch closes behind you, you outrank me. You outrank Zephyr Dakshi. You outrank everyone. With your head on our shoulders, humanity has a face again. A direction.” He prepared a gold pen to sign her certificate of promotion. “So take your time. Enjoy the last moments before your first command.”

“Banzai.” Lucille closed the hatch behind her and descended into the cockpit of Zephyr-Alpha-Blue. ZAB’s chair was angular shark-leather which was either blue or just appeared blue in the giant head’s ambient lighting. She adjusted the seat until she felt at home in the head. The control-panel was like any other Zephyr’s: flocks of buttons, levers, dials, and switches surrounded a central steering-wheel above a keyboard. The interior was crowded with touchscreen monitors for live-feeds, status-reports, and video-chats with her next-in-command.

She examined the key Charlie gave her. The plastic blue robot-head dangling from its handle was identical to ZAB. She pulled her key-ring from a belt-loop on her bodysuit, each key dangling a plastic body-part depicting Zephyrs which Lucille had previously piloted. She’d learned to pilot in the yellow left leg under Charlie’s guidance from the yellow head, Zephyr-Alpha-Yellow, ZAY. She graduated to a green arm, then to the green torso, answering to Dakshi in the green head, Zephyr-Alpha-Green, ZAG. She proved herself a worthy Commander in the red head, ZAR, and then the purple head, ZAP. ZAB’s plastic copy joined good company on her key-ring.

Lucille beamed. She felt perfectly monstrous carrying her keys like this. The Zephyrs from Earth wore hair-bands and bracelets, but she’d never been planet-side herself and didn’t care for its fashion. All she needed were body-parts and skulls hanging off her waist. She stuck her newest key in the ignition.

The giant electronic brain booted to life. All ZAB’s monitors flickered blue and scrolled through system-booting information. Each screen emptied of text and displayed a shimmering pattern like the sky viewed underwater. Lucille folded her arms. “Hey! I heard you can talk.”

“Yes.” It was an electric masculine voice matching the exterior face.

“Well, I heard you wanna talk to me.”

“Yes.” ZAB moved the monitors with hidden mechanisms. Front and center it displayed Lucille’s previous robot, Zephyr-Alpha-Purple, the head of the giant purple robot. “First we must fill your former position. I have two recommendations.”

“Neither,” said Lucille.

ZAB’s hardware clicked and beeped. Lucille got the impression she’d surprised it, and it had to process her unexpected response. “Z-Purple is the most powerful robot on the moon, but it requires Zephyr-Alpha-Purple’s coordination. You would leave ZAP unmanned?”

“The purple Zephyrs are training with no Alpha-pilot. We rigged it so all the purple body-parts receive video from the head, which they can affix to their shoulders or carry like a lantern.”

“But there’s an org-chart to follow, and Z-Purple is in the center.” The monitor scaled-down the image of ZAP to display the whole lunar org-chart, a complicated tree based on the human nervous-system. Head-pilots of each monochrome robot were linked to the crew they commanded, and differently colored robots were linked together in an anthropoid layout with Z-Purple as the spine. On a given day, the lunar-base would have two limbs-worth of giant space-robots fighting the Hurricane while the rest of the crew worked on the moon or recuperated on Earth. Even planet-side, the Zephyrs worked remotely to maintain a bureaucratic chain-of-command. “ZAP’s pilot is meant to relay your command to the lunar-base’s legs.”

“I’ll command and I’ll relay.” Lucille moved monitors herself and tapped their touchscreens to customize settings. “I’ve piloted two Zephyrs simultaneously—two Alpha-units, in fact. If Z-Purple has no head-pilot, the position is taken by the head-pilot of next highest rank. As Lunar Commander, I naturally fill that role.”

“In a high-stress emergency situation, you’d put yourself under unnecessary strain?”

“In a high-stress emergency situation, our head and heart had better agree.” Lucille lowered ZAB’s default font-size. “So I’ll command from both.”

ZAB’s hardware stopped struggling. “In case you were curious, my recommendations were Zephyr Eisu or Zephyr Fumiko, Commanders of Z-Red and Z-Orange.” It displayed their profiles over their positions in the org-chart, atop the lunar-base’s thighs.

“Either of the twins would be worthy of piloting ZAP,” agreed Lucille. “That’s why they stay in ZAR and ZAO. On that org-chart you’ve got there, Z-Red and Z-Orange lead the lunar-base’s legs. I need good, strong legs.”

“As your vehicle, my duty is to obey.” ZAB cleared the org-chart from its main monitor. “Let us get to business.” The cockpit-lights dimmed. All the monitors switched off.

Lucille squinted at the screens. She smacked one. “ZAB! What’s happening?” When her eyes adjusted, she saw a dark reflection in the main monitor. The reflection mirrored the angular lines of her cockpit, but Lucille was not in the Commander’s chair. An old woman sat there instead. She wore a white lab-coat and had navy hair in a tight nautilus bun. It was not a reflection, but a recording from ZAB’s internal camera.

“Konbanwa. I am Professor Akayama.” Akayama pulled a monitor so its screen appeared in the recording. The monitor showed empty black space with a red circle in the center: a Hurricane Planet. “This is my video-confession. I plan to die today, and my ship, the Zephyr’s head, may die with me. The universe will have fewer pests.”

Lucille slapped the control-panel. “ZAB! Explain yourself!”

Akayama pointed an aged finger to the red circle on her monitor. “This Hurricane Planet fled from the galaxy’s third arm after Princess Lucia’s first Super Heart Beam. Having collected mass, it is a little larger than Earth’s sun.” Lucille bit her tongue. A lone Zephyr versus a Hurricane Planet of such caliber was no contest. “A Hurricane Planet this large is ready to create thousands of copies bigger than Earth, each of which will continue consuming the galaxy.” Akayama held up a remote-control with one red button. “This button transmits a computer-virus which I hope will neutralize the planet. Unfortunately, the Hurricane receives only short-range communication. When I’m close enough to transmit the virus, my fate will be sealed. Zephyr, alert the Hurricane.”

Lucille’s trained ears recognized the sound of ZAB preparing its mouth-cannon. White lightning crackled as charge built on the robot’s tongue. ZAB spat a laser which missed the Hurricane Planet, but Akayama had meant to miss: the red planet took notice and stretched tentacles toward her. They would take a minute to cross the cosmos.

“Today I wounded my own pupil.” Akayama slumped in her seat, everything drained from her. “Zephyr Charlie will blame himself for Commander Bunjiro’s injury, but I commanded Zephyr Charlie to prepare the launch in my stead, and then I distracted him with kanji. Whether Commander Bunjiro is alive and well or dead and gone, I’ve proven myself an incapable leader. I’m no defender of Earth. This isn’t the first time I’ve betrayed my dependents. You see, I…” She covered her mouth like it would hide what she said next. “I built the Hurricane,” she whimpered. “That’s why I’m sure short-range virus-transmission will affect it. I know how it was… supposed to work. But to reveal its weakness, I must admit my crimes.”

Lucille had no response. Her brain clicked and beeped like ZAB, struggling to process this unexpected information. How could Earth’s trusted Professor Akayama have created the cosmic horror which ate the universe, killed her parents, and wounded her adopted parents? She took the fetal-position like it would protect her from what she heard next.

“Before the World-Unification, countless overlapping micro-nations and mega-corporations waged constant war. As a young woman in my forties or fifties, the group I worked for—not entirely of my own volition—was the offspring of a long-gone country, Japan, and one of its own mining industries. I manufactured drones, controlled from a distance by the consciousness of a remote pilot, for combat against the offspring of the United Kingdom and a distributor of teabags and spices, America and a brand of banana, and Japan, again, with a technology-entertainment company. It was truly a dystopian hellscape! But my drones garnered attention for my research in cognition. One day, representatives from a hundred different groups contacted me about their plan to unite the planet with a new kind of space-robot, and in my naivete, I believed in the vision they presented. They hired me to lead the construction of that space-robot in a secret station near the south pole. No record of that station exists because of what happened.

“The Hurricane’s original design was primitive compared to the Zephyr, but its hundred pilots would have their minds melded together and merged with their machinery using techniques I perfected for the purpose. Only their combined intellect could pilot the Hurricane’s complicated structure, which covered acres of the antarctic. The Hurricane would protect humanity from any threat, internal or external, and the pilots would be separated when they’d brought the planet peace. With that purpose in mind, I hand-selected the crew from countless individuals across the globe. I performed thousands of interviews and issued hundreds of physical and mental batteries to weed out weak links. Mind-merging is a dangerous process, and those unprepared in body or spirit are subject to terrible ailments. If even one mind among many is unprepared, all involved bodies immediately boil with cancerous growths. Growths filled with…” She shuddered. “…Teeth.”

Lucille leaned so close to her monitor that her breath fogged the screen. The Hurricane Planet’s tentacles approached Akayama in ZAB.

“So you understand my objections when those representatives who hired me explained that the anonymous rulers of my sponsoring micro-nations and mega-corporations would have the honor of the maiden voyage. I told them how I’d painstakingly chosen pilots who wouldn’t decay into cancerous pain-lumps, but they laughed. How could such brilliant minds as our powerful leaders succumb to something self-inflicted? Besides, without them, I couldn’t have produced the Hurricane at all. I was lucky for their generosity, and I should be thanking them. In any case, the test-flight would last only minutes. When I tried preventing the launch from my administrator’s console, I found ignition had already commenced. My authority was bypassed.”

The way Akayama’s arthritic shoulders bounced when she cried made Lucille’s shoulders bounce, too.

“The instant those hundred minds were combined, they piloted the Hurricane into deep space. Those anonymous rulers were apparently replaceable, or had planned for their disappearance, because I heard no note of their absence—but they must have been load-bearing, because the World-Unification began just fifteen years later. Historians now say the Hurricane’s first sighting caused the World-Unification, because this is an easy, reasonable story, but the truth is the reverse: the Hurricane’s desertion allowed the World-Unification to occur. I became Scientific Adviser to the head of Global Parliament, Ruler of Earth. I used the funding to build the head of the Zephyr, which I currently ride.”

Lucille gripped her armrests. Akayama’s robot wouldn’t be called ZAB until after her death, when the production of new Zephyrs demanded color-designations. This, at least, made sense to her, while the rest of her historical knowledge crumbled.

“For a few years, humanity enjoyed the advantages of being a space-faring civilization, establishing new homes on the rare habitable planets of our galaxy. In my Zephyr I thought to explore further than anyone, entering intergalactic space—where I sighted my Hurricane, as if it was waiting for me! It looked nothing like what I had built or intended, but I recognized its bloody biology, just like my failed mind-melding experiments. I watched aghast as the great, red, cancerous mess swallowed galaxies and converted them into orbs of its own flesh. Uncountably many of these Hurricane Planets dotted distant skies.

“In the face of this threat I begged the Ruler of Earth to restrict humanity to the Milky Way, to stay safe from the cosmic horror I’d constructed looming beyond that limit. He acquiesced and told the public of the Hurricane without admitting its origin to spare my name. In fact, the lie that the Hurricane’s discovery began the World-Unification was probably fabricated for my sake. But galactic lock-down proved to be a half-measure: the Hurricane blitzed the Milky Way’s borders and devoured all it could before Earth mobilized a response. It ate several planets humanity had colonized. There’s no way to know if the Hurricane just consumed the inhabitants’ bodies for mass, or if it assimilated their minds into its own, but frankly, I pray for the former! Since then, humanity has remained Earth-bound.”

Lucille clenched her fists. Akayama blotted tears with the sleeves of her lab-coat.

“In addition to the hundred pilots lost to madness, we lost at least twenty million people who dared settle near forbidden space. I say ‘at least’ because these settlers left little paper-trail after they were devoured. We do know some of them brought their children with them, and some of the children brought their pets.” She sobbed. “Mostly birds! They fare well in space.

“Meanwhile, the Hurricane expanded exponentially. In a few decades it transmuted the observable universe into its planet-sized cells. I transported the solar system near the galactic center, and devoted my moon-base to protecting the Earth when the Hurricane comes too close.” The Hurricane Planet’s tentacles grew impossibly large in Akayama’s monitors. She prepared to press her remote’s red button to launch her last counterattack. “I designed the Hurricane to be an amorphous, reconfigurable mass. I fear this is why its pilots forgot their humanity. Thus, I shaped my Zephyr like a human head, and designed its additional units to continue the shape of a human body. The head’s pilot is not merged with the pilots of the heart or the arms, so the assembled Zephyr’s actions can only represent agreement in intention. To pilot a Zephyr you must stand for all of humanity and not one iota le—“

The tentacles ripped ZAB in half. The camera in its left half watched its right half spin into the black distance. Akayama pressed her remote’s red button while vacuum sucked her into space. The audio whistled as life-support pumped useless air. Moments later, ZAB’s on-board communicator clicked with distant voices. “Professor! It’s me, Bunjiro! Rescue’s here!” His image appeared in the corner of the recording. His playboy expression was replaced with grim candor.

“We’re arriving above light-speed,” said Charlie, appearing on Bunjiro’s right, smoking a roach. “What’s your condition?”

“She’s not responding,” said Dakshi, appearing on Bunjiro’s left.

“Oh no,” said Princess Lucia, appearing beneath Bunjiro. “We’re too late!”

“It’s never too late!” shouted Bunjiro. “We’re coming in hot!” The Combined Zephyr arrived so quickly it was only onscreen for a frame: a blue torso and blue arms, but a gray replacement-head. It smashed the Hurricane Planet fists-first above light-speed. The explosion whited-out the recording for twenty seconds, and when the video returned, the planet’s surface was plasmafied in a circle hundreds of thousands of miles across. This would utterly obliterate a smaller Hurricane Planet, but this sun-sized specimen was barely blemished. The Combined Zephyr surfed shock-waves to ZAB’s recording half. “Nice work, team. Is that what’s left of the Zephyr’s head?”

Princess Lucia gasped and puffed fog from the Zephyr’s hips to glide toward the wreck. Dakshi reached the Zephyr’s left hand toward the still-recording camera. “No sign of the professor,” he said.

“Where’s the rest of it?” asked Lucia. “She might be with the other half!”

“Can’t stay long,” said Charlie. “More tentacles incoming!”

“We retreat,” said Bunjiro. “Charlie, Dakshi, grab that half of her ship. Lucia, hyper-light-speed!”

“Okay, Commander!” said Lucia. The Combined Zephyr grabbed ZAB’s left half, but didn’t flee fast enough—a tentacle constricted its arms to its sides with sickening crunches. Charlie’s and Dakshi’s video degraded to static snow. “Oh no!”

“Don’t panic!” shouted Bunjiro. “Charlie, Dakshi, damage report!”

“I can’t—” Dakshi vomited. “I can’t feel my legs!”

“Can you reach your control-panel?” asked Bunjiro.

The Zephyr’s left hand secured its grip on ZAB’s left half. “Yes, sir!”

“Charlie, come in!”

“My cockpit collapsed and gouged out my fucking eyeball.” Charlie audibly lit another roach, having lost his first. “My control-panel’s busted, but I can work my foot-pedals.”

“Princess, keep up the acceleration! Charlie, Dakshi, get this tentacle off before more drag us down!”

They had no luck. Suckers bonded to their metal skin. Princess Lucia shouted. “Commander, fire your mouth-cannon!”

“This backup head doesn’t have a mouth-cannon!”

“Then I’ll fire the Super Heart Beam!”

“You fired it earlier today,” said Bunjiro. “Are you sure you can do it again? If we transfer power and it doesn’t work, we’re done for!”

“I know I can.” Lucia and Bunjiro locked eyes. Their cockpits were fifty meters apart, but appearing on each other’s monitors, they were only inches away. One little look communicated everything.

“Quick vote. Aye!” said Bunjiro.

“Aye!” said Charlie.

“Aye!” said Dakshi. Engines churned as power diverted to the Zephyr’s heart with the crackle of blue lightning. So many tentacles crawled over the Combined Zephyr that Akayama’s recording couldn’t catch a glimpse of its metal surface, but the tentacles turned translucent when white light intensified. The light burst in a colossal cone from the Zephyr’s chest, vaporizing tentacles and atomizing a chunk of the Hurricane Planet. Dakshi wiped away gore with the Zephyr’s left forearm.

“Nice shot, Princess.” Charlie’s voice was weak like he didn’t have enough blood to speak. He grabbed ZAB’s left half with the Zephyr’s right hand.

“Accelerating to hyper-light-speed!” With the last of her strength, Lucia activated the hip-turbines and pumped fog behind them. “Get us home, Commander Bunjiro!”

“More tentacles incoming,” said Dakshi. “Can we outpace them?”

Bunjiro turned the gray head to look back. “Yes we can,” he said.

“Commander, are you sure?” asked Charlie. The Combined Zephyr and the tentacles raced faster than light. “Carrying the Zephyr’s head is slowing us down.”

“Hold onto it. It’s the only way to know what happened here.” Bunjiro lowered his pointy red sunglasses to judge the tentacles advancing behind them. “You’ll make it. I promise.”

“I don’t think we will, sir,” said Dakshi. “We know what happened: Professor Akayama came here to die.”

“You’ll make it. I promise.” Tentacles lapped at their hips. “Princess?”

“Yes, Commander!”

“I love you.”

“Bunjiro?”

“I know you can do this without me.”

“Bunjiro, no! Commander!”

“Protect the galaxy, okay, Princess?”

The gray replacement-head popped off the neck and Bunjiro’s image disappeared. Lucia wailed. “Bunjiro, I’m pregnant!” Tentacles wrapped up the gray head, which exploded while the headless body escaped.

ZAB’s lights became bright. Lucille huddled in the Commander’s chair with her arms around her knees. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” said ZAB. Lucille gasped for air as she cried. “When your mother fired the Super Heart Beam, she was catastrophically overexerted. We barely saved you from her womb to continue your incubation on the moon. Even with modern medical-equipment, your healthy development was a miracle.” Lucille just sobbed, so ZAB continued. “As Lunar Commander, this video could not be kept from you. You now know the origin of Earth’s enemy, the Hurricane.” Lucille released her knees and breathed deep. She cried mere moments ago, but now her face was dry. She kept her eyes closed. “Since the death of Professor Akayama, the moon-base has been largely reactionary under Zephyr Charlie and Zephyr Dakshi. You can accept this precedent or initiate new orders.”

“Oh, things are changing around here,” said Lucille, “but I need time to think.”

“I waited twenty years for you,” said ZAB. “I can wait a little longer.”

When Lucille popped the hatch and climbed down the head, she brushed off Charlie’s condolences. “I’m sorry you had to see that, Commander.”

She just stood before ZAB with her hands on her hips. Its left and right were different shades, ripped in half and half replaced. Still it carried a noble gaze. Its brow bore the weight of humanity’s plight.

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

The year is 2021.

Dan paused the anime at the commercial-break. He annotated the manga’s double-page-spread of giant space-robots breaking apart and combining together in empty craters. “We don’t know much about LuLu’s anonymous author except their pseudonym Tatsu,” said Dan, “but whoever wrote this must have read The Divine Comedy. These merging robots look like Dantean reptile-pits.”

Virgil Blue chuckled, bobbing their silver mask. “Danny, do you like The Inferno so much because it matches your life like aligning stars?”

“Huh?” Dan dropped his pen. “W-what do you mean?”

Virgil Blue was surprised to have shocked Dan so. “Surely you’ve noticed, too—after all, you and I share some worms. Your name is Danny and you study religion. You’re learning from the mentor Virgil Blue. You mourn the young death of your friend Beatrice, and Faith, who died not long after.”

“Oh. Oh.” Dan sighed in relief. “I’d never really thought about it that way. This is real life, not The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Virgil Blue clung to his cane. Dan sensed the Virgil’s concern for his uncharacteristic oversight. “I’ve got sort of an obsession-complex around torture,” said Dan. “I couldn’t get it out of my head as a kid, no matter what compulsions I tried to distract myself with. My dad thought reading Dante might help. Dante describes punishment in Hell as inflicted by the damned on themselves; he uses God and the afterlife as metaphors for psychology.”

“Did that help young-Danny?”

“Um. Well, it gave young-Danny’s obsession-complex a lot more ammunition. But once you realize how little we know about the mind, suddenly every religion is real, and obsession-complexes become…” He finished a line of annotation. “Anyway, maybe my Beatrice was named Beatrice because her parents were devout, and thought Dante’s Beatrice Portinari was a pure-enough namesake. You’re the one named Virgil Blue, Virgil Blue. Did you take the title just to align the stars to my life?”

“No,” said Virgil Blue. “Obviously the title ‘Virgil’ was chosen because of Dante’s Divine Comedy. We in the monastery lead Sheridanians to the next eternity, and thereby lead all worms across the desert to the Biggest Bird’s Mountain.”

“Aha.” Dan flipped the manga’s page to the next issue. “These stars are aligned because they’re all referencing the same cultural touchstone. With enough monks, you were bound to get one named Dan eventually, so the only coincidence here is that I know Beatrice, and that she was hit by a bus.”

“There are no coincidences,” said Virgil Blue. “This is what it means you and I share worms. Why do you think LuLu’s is referencing Dante, Danny?”

Dan picked up his phone. “Well… The Hurricane is a pretty hellish thing. And Princess Lucia might be named after Lucia of Syracuse, a classic Christian martyr. So when the Hurricane kills Lucia, she’s replaced with her daughter Lucille, who… who…” He waggled the phone, searching for words. “When you forget God created Hell, you surrender power to Satan. Lucille isn’t nice, she’s kinda punky, a tad Lucifer-like, on the border of being inappropriate. She’s reclaiming Hell from the Hurricane so the Zephyrs can wield its inherently Heavenly power against the Hurricane.”

“Hmm, hmm.” Virgil Blue considered the image of Lucille on the phone. “She’s a miniature Kali. I like her.”

“My friend Faith liked Lucille, too,” said Dan. “Maybe she was glad to see a character with her pocket-sized body-type exhibit unequivocal confidence. If Lucille’s short hair was white-blond instead of fiery orange, she’d look a lot like Faith.”

Jango lost track of himself and exposed a hand to rub his chin. He realized his mistake when he touched his silver mask, and retrieved his hand into a sleeve before Dan saw it. “Is Faith a Kali-type, too?”

“Oh, she could look like one when she wanted to.” Dan opened the manga to the last pages. “But Faith probably liked Akayama’s white fox better.”

“White fox?”

“Virgil Green told me the Biggest Bird has a white fox messenger.”

“Yes, I’ve met it before,” said Virgil Blue. “Twice, I think. We traded gifts. Can you show me?”

Dan put away the volume and showed Jay’s sketches in his notepad. “Akayama has a cute white fox near the very end of LuLu’s, very briefly. It’s sort of a blink-and-you-miss-it mascot-character introduced just before the endless hiatus, but Faith liked foxes more than anything, and she liked just about everything.” As soon as Dan realized he was smiling, his smile drooped. “It’s a shame she died not long after Beatrice.”

Virgil Blue tried to change the topic. “It’s a little outlandish for Lucille to be Earth’s supreme military authority, isn’t it? Her being under twenty.”

“Eh. Her biological parents were space-robot pilots, her adopted parents were space-robot pilots… She’s stuck on the moon, too. Nothing else for her to do, really. This is a manga, so she’s honestly lucky to be a teen in a bodysuit and not a preteen in a miniskirt.” Dan blushed. He couldn’t bring himself to make eye-contact with Virgil Blue’s silver mask after saying that. He just started the next episode.

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(A chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

The year is 2021.

Dan paused the anime-episode on his smartphone during the end-credits. He smiled as he wrote notes between the manga’s panels: without legs but flying on steam, the Zephyr looked like a djinn. It would eventually have more limbs than anyone could count, but along the way, the robot would be reduced to less than a head. Thankfully the light of the full moon was enough for Dan to read and write without a candle.

“Oran dora, Danny.”

Dan whipped around. The shiny circle in the window was no moon: the silver mask peeked into his quarters. “Virgil Blue!”

“Is that a phone?”

“N—” Dan was tempted to hide the smartphone under his mattress, but knew the Virgil’s vision was dominating. He’d certainly seen it. “It is. I’m sorry, Virgil Blue.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For the phone!”

“Phones are allowed in Sheridan.”

Dan froze and shook at the same time. “Even for monks in the monastery?”

“Even for monks in the monastery. Sheridan has three rules and none mention phones.” Virgil Blue realized Dan’s embarrassment. “I suppose there’s no rule about worrying there are actually more rules. Would you open the front for me, Danny?”

“Of course!” Dan put his phone up the sleeve of his robe and slid open his orange paper door. The monastery’s halls were marble-white, but Dan passed tapestries of every color outside other monks’ quarters. He pushed open a heavy wooden gate. “What were you doing out at night, Virgil Blue? Collecting centipedes?”

“Peeking in your window,” he said. “What were you doing with your phone?”

Dan swallowed as he shut the gate again. He was never sure if Virgil Blue was naturally so unsettling, or if his persona was specifically crafted to put him on edge. “LuLu’s had a TV adaptation, an anime. I’ve been watching it while I read the manga to gather perspective for my annotations.”

Virgil Blue followed Dan back to his orange quarters. “You’ll need to turn the volume down a little. The monk in the quarters next to yours told me she heard voices from your room neither English nor Sheridanian.”

“Sorry, Virgil Blue. It’s in Japanese, with English subtitles.”

“Then I should be able to keep up with it.” Virgil Blue closed the sliding paper door behind him with his cane. “Begin the next episode.”

“Really?” Dan blushed. “I’m already embarrassed you let me annotate my favorite stupid giant space-robot manga. If you saw the anime, I think you’d disown me.”

“Danny, Sheridanian monks have annotated toilet paper Marquis de Sade penned in the Bastille, and I have read those annotations. At least LuLu’s hasn’t featured sodomy so far.” Virgil Blue took an achy minute to sit beside Dan on the mattress. “I knew you were the one to annotate LuLu’s the moment you remarked combining-mechas are a metaphor for society, the body, and the mind all at once. What happened in the previous episode? I couldn’t make it out through your window.”

“You came at a weird time,” said Dan. “Lucia—“

“Princess Lucia?”

Dan hemmed and hawed and waved a hand. “As daughter of an elected official, she’s not really a princess—but she abandoned earthly luxury and put herself in danger to fight for the sake of her people, so who could be more worthy of the title?”

“Half the fathers in Sheridan call their little girls Princess,” said Virgil Blue. “Anyone can call anyone anything.” Dan hesitated to reply. Virgil Blue’s last line reminded him of his father. He reconsidered: everything reminded him of his father. “Is something wrong, Danny?”

“I guess…” He stretched for something to mention which would get the conversation back on giant anime space-robots. “My friend Beatrice really liked Princess Lucia. She… Beatrice died before she could watch this far. It’s weirdly fitting, because Lucia is about to die, too, between episodes.”

“Oh!” Virgil Blue covered his heart with a sleeved hand. “I thought she was one of the main characters!”

“She was the main character, for a while. But sometimes these episodic stories have time-skips where the author jumps the plot ahead. Characters might change in expected or unexpected ways, or be gone and replaced completely.” Dan rolled his thumb over his phone’s screen to scroll to the next episode. “Tatsu had the gall to skip twenty years of LuLu’s and kill characters off-screen, then circle back to view those twenty years from another perspective.”

“How chaotic and disjointed,” said Virgil Blue, “like man’s own clarity only in Tralfamadorian hindsight.”

“It’s pretty predictable something unpredictable is about to happen,” said Dan. “Akayama, Bunjiro, Charlie, Dakshi—before now, the Zephyr’s pilots were alphabetized by rank! When Akayama retired and brought Lucia onto the team, the story finally started. It’s the flawless order at the beginning of a creation-myth disturbed by the disruption of non-duality. As you’d put it, the Mountain is undivided. The world we worm-vessels experience is the illusion of the Mountain’s division until we find the whole Mountain within us.”

Dan was about to start the next episode, but Virgil Blue poked the phone out of his hands with his cane’s gnarled tip. “You can’t say something like that and not expand with citations,” said the Virgil. “You won’t annotate LuLu’s so lazily, will you?” Dan rubbed his hands and shuffled through books he’d stacked in the corners of his quarters. “Without a book, Danny! Think of a creation-myth. Show me the Mountain reflected in you.”

“Um.” Dan sighed and sat with his arms crossed. If he knew he’d be asked to defend his thesis-statement, he would’ve saved it for an essay. “The Egyptians said Atum created himself from the infinite lifeless ocean of primeval chaos. It’s a bit of a backwards example, but boundless uniform chaos is a flawless order, too, isn’t it?”

“Not bad,” said Virgil Blue, “but consider this angle.” He knocked a book off a corner-stack with his cane and it happened to open at the right page. “The Tao Te Ching says, in the beginning, the featureless and unchanging Way gave birth to unity, which gave birth to duality, which gave birth to trinity, which gave birth to everything else. Every worm implies the whole Mountain for the same reason Indra’s interconnected web of jewels is reflected completely in its every jewel. In Sheridanian terms, starting a reality is like cracking open a perfectly good egg.”

“An egg full of worms.” Dan started the episode. He usually skipped the bone-shakingly triumphant theme-song because it roared in the background of epic fight-scenes anyway, but he let it play for Virgil Blue.

“What’s that?” Virgil Blue poked the screen with his cane’s gnarled tip, pausing the episode, and Dan dropped the phone. “Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s alright.” Dan picked up the phone again. LuLu’s theme-song was paused looking at Akayama’s control-panel. The professor had a desk-toy, an odd decorative head, black, mustachioed, with one pupil. “It’s a daruma, a sort of Japanese doll. It represents Zen’s Bodhidharma, who meditated in a cave until his arms and legs fell off. Professor Akayama filled in one pupil while wishing to neutralize the Hurricane, so she’ll fill in the other pupil when the wish comes true.”

“That wish seems less likely every episode,” said Virgil Blue. “I thought daruma were red. Why is this one black?”

Dan’s jaw dropped a bit. If Virgil Blue knew what a daruma was, why had he even asked? He clearly wanted to pry Dan’s understanding. “Daruma come in lots of different colors, but you’re right, red is most common. A red daruma would look like a Hurricane Planet, though, so they probably aren’t popular in this fictional future. With the solar system orbiting the black hole at the center of the galaxy, maybe black is the contemporary color of the era.”

Virgil Blue nodded. Dan shivered at his undisclosed facial expression behind the silver mask. “Start the episode, Danny.”

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(The last chapter of Akayama DanJay.)

---

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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