

### Girl In The Needle

By Joshua Renneke

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright 2017 Joshua Renneke

### Act One

### Chapter One

"Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. The Empress requests your silence as she enters. Please do not applaud or cheer."

The Great Hall fell silent; as the lights began to dim, not a whisper escaped the crowd's lips. A fearful reverence permeated the room as the assembled men and women waited in total darkness.

How would she appear? Would she simply walk on stage? Materialize from thin air?

From speakers far above them, a male voice slowly intoned, "Twenty years ago..."

Suddenly the enormous stage was filled by a hologram of a busy downtown street. The clothing styles and vehicles were laughably archaic, underscoring the changes the world had experienced in only a few decades.

A few people laughed tentatively, afraid to not react. What if the Empress expected a reaction, an acknowledgement of the transformation which Keti had brought with her?

They waited. Onstage, the holographic display continued. People walked along cracked sidewalks, voicing whatever simplistic thoughts they'd had back then. Cars and trucks crept slowly past.

The audience's eyes followed the vehicles' trails of exhaust toward the ceiling. To think that this was once impressive to humanity! Again fearing that a response was necessary, a few of them muttered praise to Keti.

"The goddess Keti appears," the voice continued. Gradually the stage became engulfed in light, until the Hall shone brightly enough to force the audience to shield their eyes.

It dissipated in a matter of seconds, leaving darkness behind.

"Keti. The goddess awakens. Among all people on Earth, she chooses a home, wiping out all other human life. An intermediary is chosen between Keti and her chosen people: the Empress."

In the middle of the vast stage, a hologram of the Empress rose from the floor. She was seated on an elaborate throne which was inlaid with rows of marble. Her image loomed above her on the Grand Hall's rear wall.

Her black hair was pulled to one side of her head, falling just below her shoulders.

"Rise," she commanded.

The audience murmured nervously, unsure if this was part of the presentation or an actual order.

The hologram of the Empress arched its face toward the heavens and opened its mouth, as if to call out. A pearl rolled from her tongue onto the floor with a sharp crack that echoed through the auditorium.

To their astonishment, a very real pearl rolled off the stage.

"Rise," she repeated. Her seductive tone was a natural effect of the awe she'd inspired through most of her life.

The audience, numbering in the thousands, shot to their feet in unison. They bowed their heads before her.

"You stand before me today," she began almost mournfully, "as witnesses to the goddess Keti's unknowable power."

"As she wills," they chanted.

"You are the fortunate among humanity, for you are Keti's chosen people."

"Her grandeur endures for eternity."

"Her will..."

"Above any mortal's understanding."

"...shall be made known to all. Return to your seats." She gestured dismissively.

The audience was eager to obey. Each of them had been personally summoned in the most extraordinary way: the Empress had materialized (via hologram) in their homes, telling them a date and time to arrive at the Grand Hall. No further details had been given.

The Empress joined her hands, as if in prayer, and pressed the tips of her fingers against her lips.

"No further response is required of you," she said after a moment's silence. "Keti is unmoved by you repeating scripted lines anyway."

The front row pursed their lips nervously. Ignoring their discomfort, she separated her hands and extended an open palm to her rapt audience.

"The goddess came to me recently as I sat in my rooms. She asked me, 'Why do the people of every era insist on rituals to worship their gods? Are these rituals not as repetitive and meaningless to them as they are to me?' I told her I didn't know. It was the way we had learned to worship."

She folded her hands in her lap and paused. The Empress was viewed with a mixture of awe and foreboding, as if she were a black cloud formed above the City. Keti had chosen her, and no one knew if she'd been blessed with powers unknown to them. Yet today she seemed relaxed, an icon who'd grown up to still be very much a human.

"I'll get to the point. Keti and I spoke, and agreed that you worship her so impersonally because she never told us what she wanted. You've been invited here to ask me anything you wish. I will share as much as I know.

"The goddess," she began with what sounded to them like distaste, "can simply be referred to as Keti. No 'goddess' or 'Her Divinity' needed... she realizes that you're aware of her divine nature. Keti instructed me to answer to the best of my abilities, but as I said, I can only tell you things I know."

The lights in the Grand Hall rose slightly and a voice announced, "Please grab the pads from under your seats and type your questions. Your questions will be sent at random to the Empress."

The Empress lifted her hands, revealing a thin square like a page from a book. It illuminated her face with a soft glow.

"Raise the lights," she commanded. "These people look intimidated." Scanning the room with her eyes, she added, "As well they should," in an undeniably teasing tone which, nonetheless, was met with silence.

Hundreds of hands slowly dropped the pads to their laps.

"Really, now," the Empress admonished with a barely-perceptible eye roll. "She's not going to kill you for asking a question."

Even in the added glow of the overhead lights, she looked, to them, unreal; her presence was less surreal than hyper real. Most of the audience gazed a little too long before remembering the pads in their hands.

As she waited for citizens to send her questions, the Empress distracted herself by twirling a finger in front of her face; yellow, glassy tendrils trailed behind the finger and spread outward into intricate patterns.

"Ah. Our first question: 'How did Keti choose you to be her representative?' I asked her the same thing once. She told me that I could never fully understand. A piece of information I should add, to help explain: she sees us as clouds of energy, not as the vessels of flesh in clothing which we see each other as. She says she chose me because my energy was pleasing and unique to her."

Veiled dismay showed on the faces of a noticeable portion of the crowd upon being described as vessels of clothed flesh.

The Empress leaned back and extended her legs. As she did, her throne elongated itself into a sort of regal couch to reflect her posture.

"I suggest you get comfortable too," she said demurely, to hesitant laughter.

The screen behind her had gone dark, making her the sole focus of the Hall.

The Empress' face had once been anonymously described as "a porcelain mask, the facade behind which any terror might lie." When Keti had informed her of this, she had revealed the faintest smile.

There were those among the thousands assembled who superstitiously refused to meet her gaze, unimposing though she was on such a grand stage. This was their sole intermediary to the goddess Keti.

Her black hair was cut to such a specific style that human hands had never been trusted with it. Her bangs angled sharply down across her forehead in a way that was calculated to the point of being mathematical. Its exactness gave rise to the view of her face as masklike, certainly inscrutable.

The soft curve of her face contrasted strikingly with this iconic hair. Her eyes, ringed in lurid pink eyeshadow, brimmed with a disdain that dared one to trust their minute flashes of vulnerability.

Was she a girl who had been bred for regal iciness, or a soulless puppet of the very goddess who had not flinched at murdering billions of people? None but Keti knew.

To analyze the separate parts of her appearance failed to convey the shifting beauty of her, though; the crowd's reaction to her presence was as if a cobra had risen from the darkness to sway before them. They all recognized the danger implicit in having her attention.

"Ah," she sighed, "I expected to deal with this: why did Keti choose to spare us, when she had the whole Earth to choose from? This I do know. She once ruled over a people many years ago on this land. Keti tells me they served her with sincerity and love. So, the answer is nostalgia."

"Oh. Someone... wants to know if I'm still human or if Keti has made me something else. What a polite way of asking, and I'm sure you would like to know."

Her eyes scanned the audience slowly, assessing them or possibly seeking out the one who had asked the question. Not a whisper broke the silence.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know what it is to be human in the way you are. I sit alone in the upper levels of the Needle and only interact with two other people. Neither of whom I enjoy the company of, because they are forbidden from speaking to me. I suspect that they're not even human.

"And Keti, of course."

She spoke the words without sorrow or bitterness. The answer to the question was something she clearly had accepted long ago.

"Next. You ask me where Keti was before she appeared twenty years ago, and why she came back. In all honesty, she hasn't said much about it. She ruled over a portion of the planet until becoming bored. As far as I can tell, she slept. Maybe she went on a vacation through the universe.

"I suppose that it's hard to continue caring about a world you've watched for so long. Now that I think about it, she once commented on how painfully dull we were before discovering language. She implied that we were given language when she found herself tempted to wipe us out if we didn't become more... interesting.

"But... she didn't. And here we are." The Empress extended an upswept hand to the crowd.

Her eyes narrowed. "Lower the lights again so I can concentrate. I'm currently in the Needle. Let us say that I'm half here and half there."

The lights dimmed until all she could see were glowing faces, lit by pads. She looked down and frowned.

"Our next question: why does Keti let the outlanders live, and should we fear them? Well... I don't think Keti cares at all. She gave us the technology that enabled the lives we lead now, but some people are offended by the idea of depending on technology. Or Keti.

"They're no threat to her, or to any of you. They built their own towns rather than live among us and stir up rebellion. Let's be thankful for that, and thank Keti for being more accepting than many of us would be.

"I believe Keti is merely intrigued by them knowing she exists, yet being too stubborn to bow before her. She watches us all, but that doesn't mean she's concerned with what we do."

"I'm here today," she added, "for that very reason. We're nothing more to Keti than things to observe. She grew bored of being worshipped long before any of us were alive. It would seem that she wants us to recognize her power without fawning over her."

Hundreds of faces turned suddenly downward to their pads. Before their questions could be sent, the Empress dismissed them with a wave of her hand.

"Yes, even me. None of us has anything to offer Keti that she hasn't seen countless times. Maybe more than we realize.

"What else do you wonder about? You asked... now this one is interesting. If Keti gave this level of technology to us, why haven't we found evidence of previous civilizations having it? Very good," she said, furrowing her brow.

"Have I ever thought to ask?..." She paused a moment, bowed her head and closed her eyes. Her posture stiffened slightly. Following a violent flutter, her eyelids opened to reveal black nothingness.

She blinked. Her eyes were normal again, but took a moment to orient.

"Keti gave us a level of technology we could handle, just as she has done each time she has returned. We don't need to know where from."

She blinked twice, giving the front rows unsettling glimpses of darkness. The crowd tensed nervously. Slowly, her eyelids closed. A low, modulated voice emanated from her open mouth: "Your final question."

To the shock of all, a man instantly jumped to his feet and shouted, "How will the world end?"

Her eyes flared open, wider than seemed possible, onto a deep emptiness which seemed to pull the flesh around it inward.

"You will kill each other for food," the voice of Keti intoned. "The last of your kind shall starve, too late for the planet to fix the damage you have done. Its atmosphere will deteriorate. I will leave, to begin my experiment again, with new knowledge acquired through observing your failure."

All of the Grand Hall's lights came on in unison. The stage was now empty other than a light dusting of purple soot.

A voice announced, "The First Assembly has concluded."

Most of the crowd's eyes stayed on the stage as they filed out. Outside, groups of them typed anxiously on keypads projected from the CR rings on their index fingers. Across the enormous city, people waited in anticipation for the first reports to come back from the Assembly. In answer, CR rings pinged soothingly in every home.

Chapter Two

As the form of the Empress broke apart in the Grand Hall, her eyes opened onto a broad landscape. Though she could see the majority of Keti's kingdom from so far up in the Needle, she had never physically left it since the day Keti had claimed her. 150 stories up, on an entire level with floor-to-ceiling windows, she looked down on humanity with great distance, a distance she felt as vividly as she saw it.

From here, she could only see life happening on a grand scale: traffic moving like a dotted snake through the streets, orderly squads of bots performing the duties once relegated to humans, cloud systems rolling in and out slowly.

But from this height, she never saw two people holding hands. She never saw the smiles of friends drunkenly weaving to autopiloted hovs, bellowing their affection to one another.

Just tiny dots that moved and stopped at random. Her fellow humans (if they even thought of her as one of them) were never anything but dots scattering around far, far below.

Life in all its variety, seen through a microscope.

It had been exhilarating to be in a room with other people. She had felt giddy, and had had to strain not to show it. But it had ended so quickly. If only she had touched one of their shoulders! Or shook a hand!

But, obviously, she had been here the whole time. It still wouldn't have been real.

An unabashed sob broke from her lips and descended into a choppy series of lesser sobs. There was no one to console her; it was silly to bother crying, but there was no reason to hold back either.

"I do not need to read your mind to know what is in it." The Empress saw Keti reflected behind her in the glass but she made no move to turn to her.

The goddess' voice was a minimal attempt at sounding human and female. It sounded like a computer text-to-speech program being run underwater.

The Empress sniffed softly and rubbed tears away with the back of her hand. There was no use turning to face Keti, who chose to present herself as a mirror image of the Empress when she came to her. The only difference was the black eyes of the goddess.

"I'm still human," the Empress said lowly.

"You are."

"If you're here to tell me how foolish this is, please don't."

Keti was silent. She had no concept of time, and didn't notice if their conversation went months between replies.

"I'm one of them, no matter what you've done to make me be like you. You can't understand why I cry... don't judge me for it."

The Empress stared out at the world beyond the Needle. Her tear-streaked face was reflected as a ghostly image hovering just outside the window.

Keti's reflection, by contrast, mocked her: the Empress' own face, void of any emotion. The black eyes had never blinked in twenty years. Like two masks, the faces hung over the lights of the city.

The Empress looked down uncomfortably.

Keti spoke. "You have no peers. You are alone, isolated, while comparable organic lifeforms are all around you."

"If you knew how this felt, you would cry too."

"I ask you to consider: which of us is more alone, Empress?"

The Empress rubbed her eyes. "Yes, your divinity."

"You were crying just now."

"Yes," she replied. "You have seen me cry before."

"Never like this. It makes your energy blur in a way that would amaze you if you could see it."

"Does it amaze you?"

"No."

It was unprecedented; Keti's face, rather the Empress' face, softened perceptibly. "I once," she began, "saw hundreds of thousands of your kind blur in the same way, all at once. For over six years. If you would, imagine it like a fireworks display."

"You enjoyed it." It was an accusation.

"It was abhorrent to me. I slept, to forget the sight of it. It is not right for a goddess to be affected by such insignificant things. After that moment, their energy shone more pleasingly. I look on it now as a great accomplishment for your kind, yet I could not remain unfazed as it occurred."

"Why did they cry?"

"I don't recall."

The Empress lost her composure, nearly shouting. "You know everything that ever happened! Don't lie to me."

Keti waited until the Empress was calmer before replying, "It was a humorous statement related to my omniscience. You failed to grasp it."

"But you knew that I wouldn't realize you were joking. You could have said something you knew would make me laugh."

Without realizing it, she had used the same exasperated tone that teenage girls were known for using with their parents. Keti chose to keep this from her because it would please the Empress to know.

"Each miniscule bit of what your kind so crudely calls 'unhappiness' contributes to the refinement of your energy," she replied as explanation.

The Empress' energy flared up. A dozen of its smallest components subtly changed hue, as Keti had known they would. Her every action reinforced her purpose; the Empress would one day be as worthy of service to Keti as a human could be.

The Empress struggled to find words to hurt Keti, but it was useless. If she threatened to kill herself, or stop letting Keti manipulate her, it evoked only amusement from a being who knew without doubt that the words were futile.

Every word Keti spoke to her was part of a calculated attempt to cause her prolonged misery. And Keti was so unfailingly proud of that fact.

The Empress seized on the only topic she thought might bother Keti. "If I ever got a chance to make some decision that even you couldn't predict, I would do the obvious thing instead."

"I know every thought or action you will be subject to before your death," Keti said drily.

"No. You said that some decisions have such an even likelihood of two separate outcomes that they're unpredictable. Even to you."

"I am aware of the inevitable courses of many dimensions. Though I see all these things, I am not perfect. Knowing the future, and having power your species can not imagine, is not equivalent to being perfect."

The Empress considered this. "So," she said, "you should be uncertain."

"What a particularly human concept. I see only actions, and the myriad repercussions of them. Do you believe that human traits affect my decisions? I choose the action which will effect a desired reaction. Your kind's ever-changing ideas of right or wrong are meaningless."

It was pointless to argue with Keti, so she ignored her. "I want you to let me talk to someone. Anyone. I just want to... know my own kind."

There was a peculiar sensation to announcing one's feelings to Keti. The only basis she had found for believing that Keti might have a shred of sentiment in her was that, in moments like this, she let the Empress vent her frustration despite foreseeing it. Often, Keti would dismiss a desire before it had formed in the Empress' mind. Sometimes, perhaps out of kindness, she allowed her the illusion that their conversation was spontaneous.

The Empress hated Keti in an abiding way that simmered beneath the surface so that she had stopped being aware of it. Despite this, Keti was her world: her surrogate mother, her confidante, her protector. If she stopped talking with Keti, which she had done before, she had no one else to talk to. The sense of isolation was enormous, nearly unfathomable.

Technically, there were two anonymous servants who relayed information to her. They wore white robes, and blank masks to cover their faces. These two were forbidden from any interaction beyond repeating messages to the Empress.

For all she knew, there had been hundreds of people behind the masks over the years. None had ever relented and held an actual conversation with her; Keti chose people who she knew wouldn't betray her...or, perversely, used bots but allowed the Empress to hope they were human.

She justified her closeness with Keti by reminding herself that the happier she was, the less that Keti's plan worked. This didn't bother Keti, who saw it as a reflection of humanity's stupidity: why make one's own purification process longer and more agonizing?

The Empress protested violently about being molded by her, yet showed a determination to lengthen the thing she wanted to end. That thought upset her but not enough to make her change.

Keti made her wait for a response, then said, "You alone have access to the goddess Keti. And still, you want to talk to 'someone.' Today you shall."

Keti's black eyes met hers.

In the silence that followed, a stream of words ran past the Empress' face, projected onto the window. The first CR ring reports from the people below them.

I don't think she's human - I think I'm in love! - the empress scares the shit out of me - praise Keti - why didn't any1 ask what Keti DOES want? - front row, thought i was going 2 be killed lol-

The Empress managed a brief, muted laugh.

"Do you know why I have never let you leave the Needle?" Keti asked.

"Yes, Keti. It's your will, and I can't question it."

"I keep you here because it refines you. You grow ever purer, ever more beautiful to me. The world beyond these walls would dampen your energy. These people would introduce flaws into you."

"I could not disagree more," the Empress spat.

"Each time you suffer, your energy becomes more intricate. One day your energy will become perfect in my sight."

Before the Empress could react, Keti layed a hand on her shoulder. The Empress' eyes rolled back involuntarily. "That's...better," she whispered. She slid down in the curved chair with a quiet sigh.

"I will make you into a masterpiece," Keti said proudly.

The Empress was too far gone to respond.

Keti removed her hand from the Empress' shoulder. "How disappointing. You live such short lives, and devote them to avoiding the very thing which perfects you. I know much, but fail to understand why humans can not survive without 'happiness,' as you call it."

She looked down on the Empress, seeing a coiled mass of energy; within this energy, sparks of color flowed.

"If only you could withstand uninterrupted refinement, you would be beyond suffering already," she lamented. The next moment, she was gone.

### Chapter Three

Seen from afar, the Needle tricked the eyes. It absorbed light like a black hole, appearing as an absence rather than a presence.

Dugan hated the sight of it; it was an inescapable part of the landscape. To him, it was the vicious crown on Keti's city. Out of pure disgust, he refused to say her name aloud.

She had indiscriminately killed billions of people just to ensure the devotion of the remaining millions. The Citizens worshipped her as a goddess of love, of perfection. She was a goddess of destruction, which he could respect on some level, but Dugan would be damned if he'd bow his head to her.

The City shone insidiously, day and night so the outlanders could never forget it. Dugan reviled it; Keti had given such a high level of technology to "her people" (meaning anyone who lived in The City and relied completely on her) that the Citizens had willfully forgotten the value of independence.

That hardly made them sympathetic as far as he was concerned.

The outlands were populated by hard, ruthless men, and the unfortunate people they'd dragged with them. As a reaction to the City, the outlanders prided themselves on living with as few electronic devices as they could. Dugan at least respected them more than Citizens, but that didn't say much.

He was an outlander in every respect but one. He didn't hesitate to enter the City when it suited him. Neither community wanted him. The outlanders called him a traitor while the Citizens called him a fool. In either case, he calmly informed them, "I like to think I'm a bit smarter than you."

When Keti had returned, she had sent out a wave of decimation extending from the far edge of the outlands; the whole world outside of the outlands had been gray, scorched earth within hours.

The outlanders wisely abstained from venturing outside this blast radius. They left a half-mile ring of unsettled land surrounding The City, making their life in between this buffer and the Zone, the abandoned majority of the planet.

Dugan hung his legs over the edge of the Zone; the earth sat a full two feet lower there. He wasn't afraid of venturing to the edge of the Zone; he figured that Keti didn't care to keep an eye on every living person. What were they to her? Less than ants.

He dressed like an outlander, in layered brown clothes that hid weapons, but his clothes were from inside the City. They were new, by outland standards, and high quality, so outlanders knew at a glance that he wasn't really one of them.

It had been hard to find these clothes in the City, where nearly everyone wore white or light pink, but it felt like anything could be found within the City's walls.

Hidden in a slit in his jacket, where outlanders wouldn't notice it, Dugan's CR ring vibrated. He looked behind him cautiously before pulling it out.

"Speak," he said, sliding it onto his finger.

A hooded figure was projected onto his palm. Dugan already wanted to end the conversation. The figure's face was hidden by a featureless mask, both white. Their voice, when they spoke, was distorted.

"You are known as Dugan," it began, leaving no room for his reply. "Your willingness to cross between the City and outland areas leads us to contract you for the following job: the removal of an unwanted threat to the stability of the City."

Dugan lit a rolled cigarette and cupped his free hand around it to keep it from going out. The wind was harsh but sporadic out here.

"I don't do work for any man who hides his face from me," he said. "Non-negotiable. It's a bad sign that I'm about to get stabbed in the back."

Without pause, the figure replied, "The job is not being offered by a man. It was passed down from the goddess."

Dugan slid the CR ring around on his finger and slid it off.

"Fuckin' asshole," he mumbled.

Outlanders had tried to lure him into traps before. He was a threat to them because he refused to side with them against the City. He had a reputation for being short-tempered, and therefore unpredictable.

They thought his survival instinct could be clouded by talk of money. Pretending to be representatives of the City hadn't worked before; why would it work today?

Dugan took a long drag off his cigarette and flicked it into the Zone, which he thought of as the Great Beyond. The cigarette hissed softly as it hit the infertile ground, but didn't go out. Dugan idly watched a thin trail of smoke curl upward from it, fading into obscurity against the gray background .

Just as he lost interest and was about to look away, the smoke sucked violently back into the cigarette butt. As abruptly as it had disappeared, it shot back out in a thick plume.

The smoke darkened. As it dissipated, a form became visible.

For once, Dugan was dumbstruck. The Empress hovered before him, looking unimpressed.

"Empress?" he asked.

"No," she said. "Are humans in the habit of appearing to you like this?"

"N-no. But you can't be..."

"Oh, can't I?" she challenged him. "Then this is hard to explain."

Looking more closely, Dugan was surprised to see that she seemed to have no eyes. He found himself staring at her with his mouth hanging open. If the outlanders saw him now, they'd never let him live it down.

Keti closely scrutinized him before announcing, "I don't like the look of you. I hadn't bothered to notice you before now, and I don't like what I see at all. Your energy is far too crude to be refined before..."

Recovering slightly from his shock, Dugan interrupted her. "I'm not thrilled at your energy, either. Why don't you kill me now? Because I won't take orders from you. I'm not a slave like your Citizens."

Keti dropped to the ground with a rough, gravelly thump. She stepped forward. Dugan instinctively backed away, simultaneously regretting the show of fear.

Keti's mouth twisted into a mockery of a smile, like a snake finding its prey completely trapped. "Can you imagine," she asked, "what torture it is to speak to a being so far beneath yourself as you are to me? You lie when you say this form is unappealing to you. You are wrong when you claim I can not control you. You would do better to not speak."

She had advanced on him as she had spoken, but he had been too stunned to move.

His mouth still hung open; standing in front of Keti, he felt his will dissolving. Dugan felt like he'd been drugged...his thoughts could barely form before receding into a thick mental fog.

He felt his resentment of her but couldn't focus enough to find the words. His eyes were locked on Keti, whose specter seemed to make her surroundings blur and distort. How had he gotten here? Where was he? Dugan couldn't take his eyes off Keti to look around.

Confused, he asked, "Why are you here?"

She stared at him blankly. "If I did everything myself, I would have nothing to watch."

"What...?"

Dugan's mind scrambled to make sense of the situation. He didn't fear dying, but Keti's presence left him in a dazed panic.

"Why would the goddess take the time to come speak to me personally?" he asked.

Keti had an uncanny ability to convey a range of reactions without saying a word. Her face was void of expression, but her disgust was evident to Dugan.

After a moment, she wearily responded. "Just as the wind blows in many places at once, I am present here but other places as well."

"Fool," she added.

Dugan spat. The wind blew it, nearly hitting Keti's off-white dress. "So you aren't in a hurry then? You're giving me a private version of that chat you gave to your Citizens? It's strange how you're getting talkative lately."

Again, Keti made eye contact without speaking. It was unnerving.

Dugan tried to push the fear to the back of his mind. He had a chance to let Keti see herself through his eyes, and didn't want to waste it. Clenching his hands into fists, he strained to muster more courage.

Instead of anger, the words that came out were, "Why do you look like the Empress?"

"She is my representative to her fellow humans. I have no form, so I take one which will be familiar to your simple-minded, fearful kind. You, however, have all too clear of a form." She made a low, inscrutable sound that might have been a laugh. "You attempt to show bravery, but your energy betrays you. You are consumed by fear, ashamed by feeling it. Have you considered that I know every word you are yet to say? I would urge you to consider what misery it is to engage in conversations I have foreseen for... many of your years."

Dugan glared at her. He loathed his own vulnerability.

Her tone became kinder, or seemed to, as she continued. "You noted that I have been communicating more freely with humans. The reason is simple: I have not known pleasure in far too long. I see all that is yet to happen in this dimension, and despite knowing it is futile, I hope my existence will offer me one surprise.

"So" she continued, "I choose to increase chaos in the web of entanglement you are caught in, in the hope of causing a variation in the path I know this dimension is on."

Absently, she added, "One surprise; one unforeseen outcome, a single novelty."

"Huh. I never thought about that. So was it you that scared the shit out of people with that line about the world ending?"

"Yes. The Empress was about to compromise her... no, you wouldn't understand. I took her over for an instant."

It hadn't occurred to him that she could take him over, too. He found his nerve, saying, "I'd kill you if I could, even though it wouldn't fix the damage you did."

"Answer the call," she said. Keti's image flickered and disappeared. Dugan was left glaring at nothing but a scorched landscape and a small collection of cigarette butts.

His CR ring vibrated, then activated itself. Dugan tried to make a fist and cancel the call, but his hand spasmed violently the harder he tried.

"God...damn...fuckin'...," he muttered between gritted teeth. He tried to force the hand shut with his other hand, ignoring the figure being projected onto his tensed palm.

"Are you Dugan?" she asked.

His fingers spread open as he watched.

"You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me." The words fell from his mouth without him meaning them to. His grip on the CR ring hand went slack.

The Empress passively observed him as his free arm fell to his side. The rumor was that the Needle was reinforced with metals that prevented CR transmission so that hackers couldn't reach the Empress. Or possibly so the Empress couldn't contact anyone.

"The goddess Keti requires your service." Seeing the sneer this elicited, she rephrased it. "You're going to do something for Keti."

Dugan held his tongue. He knew of the Empress' public image as a cold, unemotional pawn of Keti. It was apparent to him, though, that she was still just a girl.

"So she said," he replied after an awkward silence.

"She... spoke directly to you?"

Dugan had regained his nerve. "Yeah. We just had a contract disagreement. I've worked for some rotten folks, but I gotta draw the line somewhere before the bitch who killed most of the people on my planet."

The Empress exhaled violently, though it was uncertain whether in derision or amusement. "Oh, so she gave you a choice?"

"You know," he said, "you had me there for a second." He scratched his chin. "You can get fucked if you think I'm gonna let a spoiled little girl talk down to me."

Though he rarely acknowledged it to himself, Dugan welcomed the thought of death. Just not a slow, painful one.

The Empress met his glare with mournful eyes. This was the first call she'd been allowed to make in two decades, and talking to strangers was turning out to be unexpectedly difficult. She had been nervous (almost to the point of fear) about the call.

Dugan continued. "Keti's number one slave, sticking her fucking nose in the air at the few of us her master didn't kill. It sounds like Keti can't be bothered with the small stuff, huh?"

The anger in his eyes subsided. She was just a girl. Looking at her, he couldn't hold onto the hatred he thought he felt for her. Keti had taken her as a child and locked her in that damn Needle.

The Empress parted her lips to speak, thought better of it and said nothing.

Dugan covered his CR ring, ending the call. When he withdrew his hand, the Empress appeared again.

A hint of a smile crossed her lips. "She won't let you ignore her."

Dugan stared blankly. "Tell me what you want," he said.

"Keti foresees one of the outlanders setting off a homemade bomb in the City next week; she estimates 739 casualties."

"Tell her to kill him."

"She refuses to do it. She enjoys observing."

"So one of your enemies is gonna kill some Citizens, and you think I'll risk my life to stop him?"

"She announced another Assembly for people to ask her questions at. You've been invited." She paused. "And you'll be one of the casualties if you don't stop him."

Dugan grinned. "I'm gonna have to politely decline that invitation."

"You have a lot to learn. When the Assembly is about to begin, you'll find yourself there. In appropriate clothing. The Assembly will be twelve days from now."

Taking Dugan by complete surprise, the Empress shyly ended the call with a shy "Bye."

He sat in thought until the temperature dropped enough to make him notice the long shadows in front of him.

"Well damn," he muttered as he stood up and stretched.

### Chapter Four

Lorenz sat in silence, staring at the speaker in front of him. A portable heater kicked in, rousing him from his contemplation.

"It would appear that the situation is more complicated than we believed," he said.

David, one of his "employees," had brought him an audio recording of a local mercenary being contacted (allegedly, he reminded himself) by the goddess herself. He had stopped it there to question David.

Lorenz was the closest the outlanders had to a leader. It was essential that he maintain their respect (and his authority among them), which was easily done by stating obvious things in a confident voice.

Most of the outlanders were easily provoked, and reacted to new ideas with hatred. This was why a man like Lorenz, whose guiding principle was survival at all costs, was cautious not to upset them.

The outlanders (even those who'd never witnessed his cruelty), were, in turn, hesitant to cross him. The difference was that Lorenz knew of the outlanders' fear. The outlanders firmly believed that Lorenz feared nothing.

He was famous among them for having killed an ambitious man named Cris Sullivan.

Cris Sullivan had been determined to become the outlanders' spokesperson, official or otherwise. Despite the fact that the City had never shown hostility toward the outlanders, Sullivan had roamed the outlands sowing fear into people's minds.

He had been solely responsible for the outlanders' near-complete rejection of the technology in the City, one which Lorenz was slowly luring them away from. Sullivan's impassioned speeches had centered around the claim that Keti was an artificial intelligence that could only reach them through electronics.

"But what if he's right?" his believers had asked anyone who pointed out the idea's flaws. "I'm not risking it."

At the time, the outlanders had only rejected the technology which hadn't been pioneered by humans. A widespread complaint among outlanders that year had been their poor cell phone reception due to all the cell phone towers being in the City.

Sullivan had spent months slowly convincing them that they should be not only afraid of technology, but ashamed of using it. He had outlined a clear archetype: the outlander as a rugged, heroic class of person; someone who survived without technological crutches.

It had rapidly become politically incorrect to use a cell phone.

Popular opinion had settled on a compromise between the two extremes; the outlands had chained themselves to the technological limitations of about 1985. They would use basic technology and treat everything else as frivolous.

Despite this, they derisively followed the City's entertainment news in the newspaper. With the majority of the world's trees gone, necessity had inspired the outlanders to revolutionize the recycling industry; the paper used for newspapers was returned and reused.

Lorenz had seen the reaction of those who were persuaded by Sullivan; it was an unstable and unfocused mania. He had envisioned the unpredictability of life in these conditions and had known that he had to control the people around him or else be subject to their whims.

Cris Sullivan had had to die. Lorenz couldn't risk having that strong of a rival. But the man was easier to kill than to befriend. He distrusted everyone.

Lorenz had ambushed Sullivan in his tent after one of his speeches, had wrapped a length of barbed wire around Sullivan's throat, and had left his head barely attached to his neck.

Walking calmly out of Sullivan's tent in nothing more than his boxers (to show that Keti hadn't influenced him through electronics), his hands and forearms wet with blood, he had addressed the assembled crowd.

"Cris Sullivan tried to divide us, to confuse us. What we need is to stand together! To be proud of that which unites us: we choose freedom over comfort, and that is what brings honor to every outlander."

Since that day, he had been viewed as a hero for outlanders to look up to.

"I fuckin' told you Dugan was one of them," his employee David replied with a burst of enthusiasm.

Lorenz stared off into space. "There is no them, David. If Keti spoke to an outlander, that man is not part of any group we know of."

### Chapter Five

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Empress will have silence as she enters. Your applause is implied and unnecessary."

A man seated in the rear of the auditorium scoffed, began to slide his CR ring around to covertly post a sarcastic comment for his friends, but thought better of it and hid his hands.

A globe appeared, floating above the stage, as the lights in the room went dark. A wave of prismatic color swept around it.

"Keti arrives on our planet, designating her chosen people," announced the emotionless voice. "In the wake of her return, a time of prosperity."

The globe dissolved into a swirl of particles, joining together again to form the head of a man in clear eyeglasses. The crowd murmured in recognition of Simon Antonov, an engineer who, on the day of Keti's arrival, had been inundated with a fully-formed vision of the technology that their society was now based on.

Antonov's holographic head exploded into a flow of images and patterns which lit up the faces in the front rows: the processor configuration that had ushered in unprecedented levels of computing power, mathematical equations for producing a regenerating power source, lines of code for making artificial intelligences which could learn complex ideas.

They curved outwards like tendrils, floating above the crowd's heads as people gazed upward, transfixed.

The words and images vibrated and distorted, becoming too blurry to comprehend. They remained in place, slowly swaying, as the stage filled with a scene of life in the City. As Citizens cheerfully rode through the streets, buildings went transparent to reveal bots performing tasks as varied as toilet cleaning and vehicle design.

"Still," the voice intoned, "the Citizens do not understand the will of the one who gave them so much."

Buildings, bots, vehicles all crumbled to the stage, leaving only the holograms of men and women with smiles on their faces. They looked skyward in unison; a wind seemed to gust up, whipping their hair roughly into their faces.

Their hair, in fact their entire heads, began to dissolve toward the ceiling in a vague blur of matter. As the swirl of particles grew above them, they gradually blew away.

The form above the stage flowed out to cover the ceiling in a rolling wave of light. The audience craned their necks to watch it refract light around the auditorium.

"Their minds are opened to the existence of one among them who is destined to be Keti's representative on Earth: the Empress."

With that, the Empress' face formed in the wave of holographic energy above them. Her eyes blinked, and were fully black when they opened.

Instead of dissolving, the undulating face of the Empress dropped without warning. The crowd gasped as her face rushed toward them soundlessly.

The hologram dissipated as it fell, and was gone before it reached the ground.

Their gazes gradually fell to the stage again, where the Empress stared back passively. She sat on a black throne as she had before, inlaid with marble, but this one rose up to leave her sitting five feet above the stage.

The stage itself was obscured by what appeared to be fog, though it was hard to discern whether it was real or holographic.

The Empress closed her eyes. No sound escaped from the crowd as they waited for almost a minute. When she opened her eyes, nothing was visible in them but an emptiness which seemed to absorb light.

Following the first Assembly, there had been ceaseless discussion. One of the few things the Citizens had agreed on was that when the Empress' eyes had suddenly gone black, it signified that Keti had taken possession of her body.

Was the Empress really human? Had she ever been? Or was she an avatar for Keti? There were many who swore that they'd known the girl who had become the Empress. They said she had been a normal girl, but shy.

They thought she had been about four at the time she had been taken. The Return (or Rise, as some preferred to call it) of Keti had occurred in such a dreamlike way that those who had experienced it struggled to describe it clearly.

None of them remembered the night before it. They had all regained consciousness simultaneously, as far as anyone could tell; even those who worked overnight, and should have been at work, were unclear what they had done.

Upon awakening, those remaining on Earth had had a numbed understanding of the new world they lived in. Most of them recalled it feeling like their memory extended partly forward and partly backward.

Turning on their TV's, checking their phones, the limited news of Earth's near-total devastation had seemed natural, like they'd known it would happen but had momentarily forgotten.

They found that they knew the name, knew that a goddess named Keti was responsible, but knew nothing about her.

Newspapers' focus was on learning about Keti; they never questioned why billions of humans had died.

What mattered was that they were her chosen people.

When they thought of Keti, the image of a little girl began to accompany it in their minds. The girl was young, with dark hair and suspicious eyes. As the story goes, people who recognized her went to her family's apartment. Her parents had dressed her in her finest clothes and sat her outside to wait to be taken.

No pictures existed of her before the Needle was built to house her and honor Keti; though awed by her existence, not one of them had thought to take her picture. It was one of the curious mental lapses which demonstrated Keti's influence over events.

The Empress's birth name was now lost to history.

Ominously, people had simply known their roles in the building of this new world and had begun performing them.

Workers had arrived at the site where the Needle would be erected, and had begun its construction. When the Empress was whisked away from outside her family home, attendants in matching white robes had been kneeling, heads bowed, in a circle around the spot where she would be delivered to.

The only ones who felt they had not been manipulated by Keti during this transition phase were the scientists and engineers who had developed and implemented new technologies. They reported that they had skeptically reviewed the engineer Simon Antonov's blueprints and the science behind them.

He had struggled to explain concepts too new to have technical names. They would have ignored his claims if not for the strange, uncertain world they found themselves adjusting to: following a cataclysmic global event, the majority of the survivors on Earth had fallen into a trance and, with no apparent impetus, begun building a metropolis which was incompatible with current technology.

Antonov had searched out anyone who might understand, raving about a dream he had had about a majestic City they could build. It was so obvious, he said.

Initially they had assumed that he had lost hold of his sanity.

He had demonstrated an understanding, though, of too broad a range of fields of study for them to explain. He had lectured them on the flaws in everything from virtual reality coding to city planning.

As they tentatively explored his vision, they'd begun to notice that construction crews had already been building an infrastructure around the technology they were researching.

The factories being built weren't made for humans. Road crews had begun laying out roads that required superb skill to drive on, but were ideal for a vehicle that drove itself; exactly the vehicles Antonov had described to them.

For seven months, the Empress's attendants had guarded the Empress during the building of the Needle. Following the hours spent on her clothes and hair daily, she had been put on display in a park during the afternoon so Keti's worshippers could lay flowers at her feet and bow before her. At night they had ushered her into an imposing stone courthouse to be alone.

When pressed, she had divulged that yes, Keti came to her on most nights.

"But what does she say?" they had asked.

"Just... stuff. I dont know." She had been too young to handle the entire world's population hanging on her every word.

It was said that during this time, she had mostly acted like a normal, but quiet, four- or five-year-old girl. She was shy around strangers, even-tempered, and sensitive.

A popular website of the time had posted accounts of people who had somehow caused the Empress's dissatisfaction during her days in the park, sometimes by doing nothing more than asking a question on a day when she had wanted them to let her be by herself.

To their shock, one day a boy her age had asked her if she wanted to play with him.

"Play what?" she had asked.

"I dunno... tag?"

"I'm not very good at tag," she had replied in embarrassment.

"Okay," the boy had said, unsure how to respond. He had retreated to his horrified parents. If he had been responsible for the Empress getting hurt in any way, the family could conceivably be cursed for all time.

To the Empress's quiet dismay, children were then forbidden from approaching her without an adult's presence.

On the day the Needle was officially dedicated to Keti, there had been a parade for the Empress. Citizens had lined the parade route holding up signs of adoration and encouragement.

An imposing black onyx pyramid had been built for her to sit atop in the procession. There was no need to protect her from a population which revered her.

And so, en route to being locked in the Needle, she had portentously been given a vantage point which separated her both physically and symbolically from the rest of humanity. The pyramid they had made for her was so tall that she was visible from both ends of the parade route.

There she rode, on a throne built into the peak of the pyramid. The Empress hadn't looked down at the crowd once.

In an iconic picture taken of her that day (the poster of which had become more ubiquitous than a flag), her chin pointed toward the heavens. Or, perhaps, toward the Needle. Her dark hair was pulled too tight to one side of her head.

The expression on her face was most often described as austere. She would later reveal to an attendant that Keti had appeared before her in that moment, telling her to force all emotion from her mind. Emotion, Keti had explained, was reserved for inferior beings.

In the temples to Keti, people would openly weep before the poster, prostrating themselves before the image of a young Empress staring skyward, hearing the voice of a goddess who spoke only to her.

Other than a row of attendants which led the parade, the entire parade procession had consisted of bots.

Once Simon Antonov's ideas had begun being implemented, computer programs had calculated the optimal designs for safe, intelligent bots. These bots had been built, and immediately become more efficient than humans at building the foundations of the new world Antonov had envisioned.

The bots' operating system was based on code which Antonov had envisioned, then woven into the open-source code of a semi-popular online game for children. Using the game's code as foundation, he had added in the lines from his vision.

He had posted links to it on a few social media sites (on which he had very few friends). Within days, the game had incorporated his changes and begun sending invites to people itself.

The game, originally about a dog learning grammar, had a name which was too inane for people to be comfortable identifying with Keti, so they had chosen to forget it.

Within a week of Antonov's upload, the game was deleted. Asked for comment, the dev had posted a status saying The changes we made were the result of a vision from the one we know as Keti. The process has begun to incorporate the many things she's shown us into our world, as we rebuild it.

It had come as no surprise to anyone. Of course Keti had established how the city they'd been building would function. They had rushed out the first bots, so that those bots could more quickly design their own successors.

Bots had finished the City, cleaned it, built the pyramid on which she rode, manufactured the driverless cars the roads were designed for, and organized the parade.

And so, when the Empress had walked cautiously down from her perch high above the parade, she had found herself waving mostly to bots. The frenzied crowd had kept a distance; they chanted the words "Keti, Protect The Empress Forever" as she had marched slowly, all alone, to the base of the Needle. She had simply walked into the darkness of it.

She had felt invincible moments before. But that feeling had drained from her abruptly as she looked around at the first floor of the Needle. Every surface was made of a shiny black material she didn't recognize.

Up until that moment, Keti had been nothing more than a voice in the Empress' head and a sort of distortion in the air near her, so the Empress watched in awe as what appeared to be her twin descended through the ceiling about twenty feet away.

The girl looked just like her. She had her face turned downward with her arms stretched above her head.

She hadn't made a sound when her feet had touched the ground, her hands absently drifting to her sides.

Almost as if she'd just noticed someone else was in the room, the girl's face had risen to look at the Empress. Her eyes had the same ring of black eyeshadow that the Empress was traditionally given, even the same pink outline.

In an otherwise perfect reflection of the Empress' own face, the eyes were gone. Not missing, but completely, totally black.

"Do you know why I've made you mine?"

The Empress had, oddly, felt no fear. "Because," she'd ventured, "I look like you."

"Your energy," the goddess had said as explanation. "It's what brought me back."

The Empress had looked down at herself but seen nothing special.

"You can't see it, young one, but your energy is like no human has ever had before. It's beautiful enough that its formation brought me to it. It brought me back."

"Were you sleeping?"

"I was gone. Now I'm here." Keti had offered her a hand. "I will make you perfect."

The Empress had walked to her and taken it without hesitation. Inwardly, she had been hurt by the implication that she wasn't already perfect.

"Isn't that why I'm here?" she had thought.

Her musing had been interrupted by Keti's voice.

"Come," she'd beckoned. "Sit on your throne."

The Empress enjoyed the sense of ceremony that accompanied everything she did. She'd been thrilled to see that Keti meant to continue it.

As Keti had stepped (or rather floated) aside, a tall, thin throne had become visible. She'd been positive that the throne hadn't been there a moment before.

It was the perfect size for her to sit on. As she'd approached it, Keti had stared straight forward with her chin held high.

The Empress had allowed herself to fall backwards onto the throne rather childishly.

Silence.

Keti had remained facing the entrance; her body hadn't moved a millimeter as the Empress had looked up at her expectantly.

Are you alive? she'd thought.

She had suddenly felt Keti's presence all around her; not just in the room, or the Needle, but inhabiting every molecule of... she wasn't sure. Her mind couldn't handle the sheer amount of sensory input that flooded her consciousness.

She'd lost awareness of her own existence in physical form, her field of vision beginning to dance with pulses of color being drawn into tightly-spaced geometric shapes that, she began to see, made up the environment around her.

The pillars, the throne, the floor, a window that she hazily thought wasn't there before: all of it was built out of these infinitesimal lines and shapes that endlessly ate the amazing colors in the air.

In fact, the air was made of those colors. Prisms wrapped around prisms, curving them into peaks and valleys that were drawn inexorably to the nearest surface.

The Empress had wondered to herself, Then what do you look like, Keti?

With great effort, she had turned her head to look next to herself.

Keti had been facing her, still using the Empress's own emotionless face as a mask. The eyes were no longer black voids, but clearly were solid matter.

As the Empress had watched, paralyzed by wonder, the goddess's eyes had exerted some mysterious influence on the matrix of the room. Ripples had emanated from the corners of the room, rising in size and intensity, and flowing around the darkness where Keti's eyes should be.

The light in the room flickered, faded, seemed to retreat from the corners of the Empress' vision and flee to Keti's face.

The Empress felt faint. Her vision was getting dark. Keti still stared at her, saying nothing, but it didn't matter because a loud hiss filled her ears. She couldn't fathom what was happening to her.

Instead of hurting, it had made her feel more and more removed from a state where pain existed.

Keti was opening her mouth now in apparent disbelief. She had moved her hands with great care to either side of the Empress' face.

The rush of energy beating against the Empress's mind overwhelmed her, leaving her slumped in her throne. Her eyelids had involuntarily fluttered and closed.

When she opened them, she was looking out a transparent wall at a rusty orange sky; far below, the plaza was dotted with Keti's worshippers.

"Be thankful that I allow your mind to be closed," Keti said softly from where she stood a few feet away. "Though it would please me to hold it open and watch your energy transform... until you burnt out."

The Empress had rolled her eyes and muttered, "Creepy."

### Chapter Six

The auditorium was silent, except for the measured breathing of the crowd.

Keti's eyes took in the whole crowd at once, though her head didn't move. Was she appraising them? Testing their obedience? None of them were brave enough to meet her eyes or break the silence.

"I anticipate," the voice of Keti began, "that this Assembly will be no less sensational to your minds than the first.

"You have performed your part adequately since I presented myself to you. To expect more of your kind would be foolish. Foolishness is not a trait I exhibit."

Unsure whether to laugh, most of the Citizens had smiled encouragingly.

"The Empress will be left to deal with your bewilderment soon enough. To maintain the brevity of this Assembly I will eliminate the need for your more obvious questions.

"Do not ask why I 'came back' or how 'old' I am. You could not understand, nor even begin to fathom, much as a fish can not be taught how its ocean formed.

"I do not care for the ceremonies you have designed in my honor. If I cared to have statues of myself built, I would build them so that they might be perfect to me. Your hands could never create, or replicate, perfection.

"It is also the same with the religion you have built around me." She wrinkled her brow in, possibly, amusement. "You believe your simple, ugly minds hold the potential to design something worthy of a goddess? Do you?"

Their heads remained bowed.

"Yes. You hang your heads in shame because you are lower than dirt to me. In the days before I made your planet... but wait, it is not yours, is it? It is mine to do with as I please.

"In the days before I arranged this planet to my liking, you thought yourselves to be gods of it. How proud you were to feel so much more evolved than the other animals here. How you worshipped yourselves for erecting skyscrapers, for pondering the 'big questions' that your supposedly great species had not answered sufficiently!"

She leaned back and observed their discomfort. The few who peeked up at her were frightened anew by the sight of the Empress' youthful body incongruously acting so inhuman.

Keti folded her hands under her chin.

"I see nothing, nothing but energy. Your faces, your clothing, the lifeless monuments you build are wasted on me. Each of you has an energy, and I see what you are.

"You, by contrast, have brains which poorly interpret stimuli collected by simple organs. You then call this interpretation reality. The sky is blue. That girl in row 3 is ugly. And so on.

"My existence, no matter how you proclaim your awe of it, is an affront to you. I provide unwanted perspective on your significance. Look at how easily I destroyed so very much of humanity's work. The few who I spared now transfer their reverence from their own kind to me.

"I am Keti. I am a goddess. I do not need a name or a title, for I exist beyond your words. If I exist at all."

She left them time to consider this before continuing.

"Are your minds dreaming right now? Is 'now' happening? Are your brains correctly assembling the things your eyes and ears capture? You can not know, yet you are ever ready to accept your perceptions as absolutes.

"Oh, how I loathe you. The Empress exudes an energy which shines all the brighter in contrast to the canvas your small society provides as backdrop.

"Until her energy summoned me to consciousness, to this place, not one of you saw in her the rarity and beauty that would be apparent to a being as advanced as you think yourselves to be.

"You will continue worshipping me, and continue going to your temples to pray for my intercession, but it will not change a thing. It will make you feel hope or pride or humility, but the nature of this world will not be changed by it.

"I am no more or less present in these temples than I am in your toilets. To recall an earlier metaphor, the ocean is no less present in any one place; inches below its surface, its water flows. Inches from its bottom, the water is there as well. To come to temples and pray to me, you are like fish saying 'The ocean is happier when I am here than if I move a mile east.'

"Remember this: you can, and will, analyze my every word, but you will still not know the truth. I am forced to speak in whatever words are most efficient for conveying an approximation of the universe which you can comprehend. I am forced to mislead you because words can not convey, and you can not understand, what you wish to know."

In the silence that followed, a faint melody began to play, but they couldn't tell from where. Its volume rose and, bewilderingly, made it apparent to them that they were hearing the song in their heads.

They began to notice that below the melody, a muffled sound gradually became clearer: a girl's voice saying the same words over and over without pause. It had captivated their attention.

EmmmmiiiyyyyhrrrrrrrrryyyyyyymmmmheeeeeeeremmmiiiyyyheeeeeeeeereyyyyyyyyammmmmheeerrrrrrmmiiiyyyhheeeerAmIhereIamhereAmIhereIamhere

AM I HERE?

I AM HERE.

It startled them from a daze they hadn't realized they'd fallen into.

On stage, the Empress watched expectantly. Maybe it was just in contrast to Keti's unsettling eyes and demeanor, but the Empress looked guardedly pleased to be with them.

She was. The first Assembly had been so new an experience that she had felt a disconnect from the people she spoke to. She was the Empress and they were merely Citizens.

Leading up to this Assembly, she had felt a private anticipation; she wanted to have conversations with other people. Like a normal girl, she thought, knowing it would displease Keti but thinking it anyway.

She wanted to believe she was one of them, and was no better than them, but it was hard. In her most private thoughts, she reproached herself for feeling superior to the Citizens. For she did feel a fundamental superiority. The goddess herself said that she was above a state of humanness, and there was no doubting Keti.

The Empress's conscience hadn't allowed her to give in to the idea that she was intrinsically better than anyone, despite this.

The fog had thinned considerably. Out of an arm of her throne the Empress pulled a pad. Her eyes scanned its surface for a moment. Whatever glimmer of mirth they imagined they had seen on her face had disappeared momentarily as she concentrated.

"Ah. I don't know which one of these questions to answer first. There are a lot asking why we're here." She fought an urge to smile when she used the word 'we.' She was part of that 'we,' and it was intoxicating.

That's so sad, she thought.

"I guess because... the goddess is bored? She says she's tired of the religion you made for her." With a small laugh, she added, "Don't blame me for that."

The faces in the front rows seemed caught off guard by her frivolous attitude. The transition from Keti's unblinking candor to the Empress' comparatively warm demeanor was a shock.

She sat up a little straighter and continued. "She decided to give you a chance to learn what you could from her because, up until now, you've been left to guess what she wanted. That, and I've been in the Needle so long that I was going crazy without human contact. For some reason she's been indulging me lately."

The audience's faces softened at her words. It was surprising to them that the Empress, technically a girl in her early twenties, would act like it. They had assumed that Keti had transformed her into something beyond human.

The pad in her hand surged with new questions. She considered them solemnly. "How can I overlook the billions of lives that Keti ended when she came here? Okay, and do I feel responsible?" She sighed inaudibly.

"I don't have any choice, do I?" she asked seriously, looking directly into the crowd. "I don't understand it, and it's horrible, but I didn't make that happen." Her voice got defensive. "I was a little girl when it happened. Since then, I haven't been able to have a life.

"While bots were doing your jobs, leaving you free to enjoy life, I was locked in the Needle. You didn't seem too upset with Keti once you saw that she'd taken all the responsibility out of your lives."

Her eyes pierced the darkness of the auditorium.

"So please don't blame me. Don't criticize me for things that I didn't want. At least the outlanders' whole lifestyle is based on protesting what Keti did."

"You," she said with a note of hostility that made her resemble Keti, "you just want to enjoy all the good things she gave us and blame someone else for the bad."

Her shoulders dropped. "Anyway... next question. Does Keti want to be worshipped at all? I think she wants recognition but she's irritated by matters like you memorizing prayers and poems to recite. She knows that there's no meaning behind the words anymore when you say them.

"The best thing you can do is go to the temple a couple times a month and honor her in your thoughts. Nothing long or boring."

Another onslaught of text rushed down the pad in her hand.

"You want to know what Keti says is right and wrong?" She looked down at her lap and searched for the words.

"I don't know how to tell you this; she doesn't care. Our society is fine how it is. It'll never be good enough for her, but you aren't doing anything she cares enough about to punish you for. That I know of.

"I've never heard her talk about sin. She judges people for being simple, and annoying her by not being more intelligent, but I really can't remember a time when Keti was offended because something was immoral.

"We're not worth getting mad at, in Keti's eyes. She doesn't care if someone gets killed, or says awful things about her.

"That's why I don't know how to answer the question about me being okay with her murdering most of the people on Earth. You know when you use antibacterial soap to kill germs? That's what it means to her to kill billions of us. I think it's sick, but those of you who call it The Cleansing weren't far off from how Keti sees it.

"She laughs at me for taking all of this so serious. Really. If she had destroyed all life on Earth, which she says she could have done, the universe would go on all the same."

She waited for them to process her words before she moved on. The mood in the room had swung from apprehension to fear to relief to uncertainty. No sooner had the Empress's surprising normalcy relieved the tension from Keti's disdain than the levity of her words restored it.

"Well. Now all your questions are about morals. What should you do? I guess just do what you've been doing. If Keti didn't punish you before, why would she start now?

"I can't stress it enough that she doesn't care about the morality of what you do. These Assemblies happened because she got tired of listening to you ask.

"Maybe not. Keti doesn't explain much to me." She shrugged her shoulders for their benefit. "Keti announces things without saying why they happen. If she's saying it, then it doesn't need to be explained. It's meant to be."

The Empress layed the pad on her lap and clasped her hands together. "Look. I've had a lot of time to watch what goes on outside the Temple, and think about it. You're not living your lives to get a good grade when you finish. You're living how you do because you want to enjoy life without feeling bad about how you did it.

"Right and wrong are things that you've defined. If it's hurtful or it makes you feel ashamed, it's wrong. If it helps someone else or makes you feel good, it's right. It's more complicated than that, I know, but none of that has any meaning to Keti.

"Your morality is a personal thing that... really?" The Empress rolled her eyes comically, causing a ripple of laughter. She had glanced down at the pad and seen peoples' reactions.

"I won't embarrass you by reading your question, but I'll answer it. Kind of." Another murmur of laughter from the crowd.

"One time when Keti was trying to make a point... because all she does is lecture me... she told me that there was a boy who had prayed to her five days in a row to ask her to give him some sign that she'd forgiven him for saying 'Keti is stupid' or whatever.

"She was disgusted. Well, she's not much for emotions but you get the idea. She thought it was... stupid. I know, I need a new word. She said, 'Take note of humanity's defining traits. Even the youngest of your species have the implicit belief that their actions are in some way supremely important.'"

Smiles broke out on the faces in the front rows, the only ones lit up enough for her to see. The Empress was the only person who felt that they could safely do impressions of Keti's humorless responses.

"I asked her if she was going to give him the sign he was asking for. She said no, why would she? I said she could do it to make him stop praying about it. She asked me what I wanted her to do.

"I told her, 'I don't know, maybe make the word Forgiven appear on his wall.' I can't say for sure if she did it, but it wouldn't have hurt."

She reviewed her pad again. "Why am I using a pad instead of a CR ring? Your question... Keti summoned you to ask any question you wanted answered, and your question is why I'm using outdated technology?"

"Okay," she said with a halfhearted groan. "Some of my favorite shows are from the period when everyone used pads. I think it's..."

She trailed off, uncertain what she had meant to say.

"Next question. Did Keti teach me, or just magically make me know things? I... she must have made me know things. It's like knowledge is just information that's already out there, so anything I need is... accessible? I don't know how to answer. I never needed to learn how to do anything because it's all... there.

"I can watch most of your shows and movies. Not the ones that Keti says will make my energy regress. I won't say what I like, though; you shouldn't change what you watch based on my taste."

She took her left hand and swiped through their incoming questions. While she answered one question, her audience hurriedly typed on the pads they'd been assigned. They waited while she continued scrolling through questions, looking for one to answer.

"Okay," she said with a glint in her eye, "I wanted to see how long I could go answering unimportant questions while you asked about the outlanders.

"Don't be hurt, but I think Keti respects them more than she respects you. Humans have every reason to resent her for killing so many of us, and she knows it. The outlanders refuse to live in the City and use any of the things Keti gave us.

"You turned a blind eye to the Cleansing," she added, cringing at her own use of the term. "You found ways to justify it or pretend it was just part of history because now your lives are so much easier. Bots do your jobs for you, they drive you places, they do everything for you.

"The nanobots that keep you healthy were designed or improved by bots that were better scientists and thinkers than humans. Nobody in the City wants to talk about the fact that we've stopped talking about creating progress. We just wait for bots to make progress happen.

"So no, the outlanders aren't still here because Keti allows them to live; Keti sees them as more deserving of life than Citizens."

The Empress passively watched their faces go blank. They hadn't received the answers they'd hoped for today.

The silence was interrupted by a scuffle in the middle of the Hall. A well-dressed man struggled to wrestle another man to the ground in the main aisle. The one on bottom jerked feverishly, trying to throw the other man off his back. People in adjacent seats shoved backward, away from the fighting.

The man on bottom was noticeably thinner and weaker, yet he refused to be subdued. Even the Empress had stopped to see what would happen.

With a faint thud, a metal box the size of a child's shoe fell out of the smaller man's shirt.

"Fucking run," screamed the larger man without taking his eyes off his opponent. "He's trying to blow this place up!"

Stunned, unsure if Keti would actually let it happen, they remained riveted to their seats.

"Run," he yelled desperately. He held the other man's hands at his sides but had failed to tire him out.

The Empress rose from her throne, trying to get a better view of the action as people ran for the doors in back. The auditorium's lights hadn't come on, leaving them crawling over each other in a panic. From the far left side of the Hall, there was a flash of light in the darkness.

The Empress felt Keti jerk her backward roughly onto the throne, though she didn't know why. When she tried to push herself up, her arms refused to cooperate.

"Oh," she said softly as she noticed the bloodstain spreading incongruously across the fabric of her dress. She lay back, resting her head on an arm of the throne. She felt so weak that it made her tremble to try to remain sitting up.

"I guess that wasn't Keti," she thought absently.

She wasn't in pain, she realized as her eyes drifted shut. She would be okay. She just needed to rest for a minute.

Meanwhile, the two men continued to fight. The one on bottom twisted his body violently and tried to bite one of the hands that trapped his arm.

The other man released him and put all his weight into an elbow to the smaller man's temple. The sound of bone on flesh told him he'd succeeded. His shoulders slumped as he sat down, exhausted.

The Grand Hall was empty and intermittently lit by the open pads strewn haphazardly along the ground next to shoes and pieces of jewelry. Next to Dugan, the young man lay unconscious in a kneeling position toward the stage, where the Empress was splayed across her throne.

Her head hung over an armrest, her mouth slightly open. Blood dripped onto the stage rhythmically.

As Dugan came closer, he saw that there was no puddle where the blood was dripping.

### Act Two

Chapter Seven

When books are written about me, I want you people to remember that I always knew I had a special purpose in life. And when the Cleansing occurred, I knew it was Keti's will for me to live.

I don't have any faith that you'll get it right. The summary should read something like The Harbinger (it goes without saying that my birth name doesn't come into play when I'm described) was an outcast from a society that was too simple to know his elevated historical significance. He had an unwavering conviction that the world rejected him because he was not of their world. He was a blade in the hand of Keti, and Her aim would not falter.

That last part is perfect. Don't change it.

The Citizens think that they were spared during the Cleansing because they're Her chosen people. Wrong. Keti took all Her chosen people during the Cleansing. Anyone still here is cursed by Her and too stupid to know it.

You know how all the old religions have some kind of heaven and hell? All the ones I know of at least. Well we're in Keti's Hell. She put me here to keep it hot.

(That line has to be used when you write about me)

Those fucking outlanders talk a lot of shit about my ideas, but what do they know? They can't understand me or my premonitions, now can they?

You'll ask, how do I know that Keti set me apart as her chosen one? I can answer that one easy: After all the things I've done, She's kept me from getting caught.

You can't argue that.

This one time (just as an example) I had my knife stuck halfway into a guy's throat (it don't matter whose) and my other hand covering his mouth, when this little girl ran up on us real quick.

I decided, let's test to myself that Keti is watchin' over me, so I went about my business with this girl watchin' like I was doing a magic trick.

I didn't hide my face or anything. Just let the guy's body drop to the ground and walked off.

Well? I'm still here, right?

Some nights, I think about that girl. Will she become famous when my story is told?

Of course she will. She has to be.

Here's what I believe will happen: when I'm done with the Citizens and the outlanders, Keti will bring back all the people she took in the Cleansing. I'll be idolized, but I'll reject it because I've already come to terms with my own importance. I accepted it so long ago that it's almost boring to me to talk about.

I'll be like Hey, give glory to Keti, not me. I'm just the weapon she chose to use.

But that still calls for a few statues and a good amount of mentions in Keti's mythology. I think I'm using that word right.

I just know that you're going to fuck this up somehow, and not get everything right about me. I'm leaving this behind as kind of a rough draft, like the framework for my legend.

You're Keti's chosen people, so I don't mean to sound disrespectful... but you're still imperfect. My name will be remembered for eternity, and that's a long time to have people misrepresent me.

My thoughts are scattered (I have a lot going on right now!) <~~~ See that? Don't forget that I have a sense of humor.

Yeah, so my thoughts are scattered and this will be all over the place. You'll have to deal with that. Don't describe me as having been unorganized just because my notes were. I'm busy and you're fortunate that I'm leaving a record of my process.

Now, before I go on, I'll admit that Keti doesn't technically appear in front of me and talk to me. I wouldn't expect Her to. The thoughts that pop into my head are put there by Her, and I admire that she's direct like that.

What I do is I sit here in my room and I close my eyes and clear my mind so that Keti can fill it. Sometimes I have to do that every day for a week or two before I recognize the next step of the plan Keti has been putting in my head.

### Chapter Eight

I had seen a girl working in a certain one of the outlander stores (it'd cheapen the story if I gave an advertisement for the store) off and on, over the course of like 3 months.

I don't know what it was about her; she had a look that made me feel like I knew she was someone special. I even stood across the street from the store and watched her working one day. She had a pretty face. Looking back, it's only right that the first one would've been prettier than most girls.

I remember her looking perfect that day as I watched her through the store's front window. She stayed behind the counter most of the day and all I could see from where I stood was her face.

She smiled when she helped customers. Every person she rang up purchases for got a smile, and it looked like she talked to them like you'd talk to a friend.

When I couldn't stand it any longer, I went in and walked around the store. I wasn't nervous. You assumed I was nervous. I wasn't.

I bought some stupid shirt and other shit I didn't need. Right as she got done helping the guy in front of me... I'm not kidding, fucking right as she got done ringing the guy up, her boss came behind the counter and told her to go on break.

She smiled and thanked him, and walked past me without noticing I was there. I'm proud to say that I eventually killed that interfering piece of shit boss.

He rang my stuff up and looked at me weird the whole time. That was the closest any of the ones I killed came to having the intuition that Whoa, this is a higher being.

I didn't see her again until the next week. I walked past her work and saw her in there, smiling like usual. This time I'd be smarter about it. I bought an Outland Press and sat in the alley across the street pretending to read it until I saw her leave the store to buy lunch.

When she came back, I knew her break was over and nothing'd go wrong this time.

To be honest, I forget what I bought that day but I bought it from her.

She didn't smile at me or try to make conversation. Once I left the store I got pissed off and went in the alley to make fists and call her a fuckin' bitch under my breath.

That makes me laugh to picture in my head because if you'd seen it, you'd have thought I was a crazy person the way I was talking to myself and swinging my fists at nothing.

There had to be an explanation. The guy who was... the... let me start over.

Her soon-to-be killer stood right in front of her and she didn't even pay attention. There should've been a moment between us where she looked into my eyes and instead of being afraid, her eyes said I accept this. There's nothing I can do to stop the will of Keti from being done.

Now I understand it, though. I'm like a ghost to these people. That's how I get away with all the things I do; Keti has made me so that people see me but they don't see me.

When I handed that girl my cash and I tried to brush my hand against hers when she took it, she grabbed my money in a way that our hands didn't touch. Keti keeps me separate from them in so many ways. Always has, even before I realized my role in things.

Here's something: you'd assume that being what I am, I wouldn't feel the same things that you feel, like sadness or boredom. I do.

It can be a struggle sometimes to walk around among the Citizens and have no one notice I exist. Not really loneliness, because I don't need (no offense) my inferiors to give me attention... but just feeling separated from the world.

Like imagine you're walking down the street and hear a party going on in a apartment building so you go peek in the window the sound's coming from and you see all these people laughing and putting their arms around each other and telling stories.

You're right there by all this action but you're isolated from it, like you're not there but you know you are.

Those people don't care about the fact that you're not at their party, and they don't even know you exist. They're perfectly happy without you, and your absence doesn't matter to them. You're nothing to them.

Say there's 25 people at that party, plus you watching and listening. That's 26 people, but to them it's 25 plus zero, you being the zero. You aren't part of the equation even though you're there. Are you following me? Fuck, I doubt it.

Try to follow me on this part: if you wait for one of them to leave and then you tackle them from behind and wrap some wire around their neck before they know what happened, what did just happen?

It's beyond comprehension. #25 got killed by zero, and there are now only 24 people left. That 25th person just vanished. Is it murder? You think so? Somebody got killed by nobody?

You look confused. I'm just playin' with you, I can't really see you. I just know you're looking confused. It's alright, it's alright.

Read it again, but this time read it knowing that it's some next-level logic that's so far out there that it's past the limits of logic and reason.

That, for the record, is the same thing they say about Buddhism. You have to try to wrap your head around things that don't seem like they make sense because they're above the level of being obvious and logical.

The party looked pretty unremarkable, to be honest. Damn, I said I'd tell you about the first person I killed but now I ended up telling about a different one.

I shouldn't have done that. I should go back and take that part out because it's too similar to the end of the story I was trying to tell.

Fine. Now this won't have the same impact on you, but I'll finish this story anyway.

My heart's not in it anymore, though.

I sat in the alley and calmed myself down, figured out why the girl didn't pay attention to me, and this set off a good hour or so of deep thought. I'll tell you, my mind took off like a rocket.

This was my moment of revelation. The truth had been staring me in the face this whole time but it was so huge that I hadn't previously taken a step back and gotten enough perspective on it.

I walked down the alley to the employee parking for the store and there were two vehicles back there.

At about 10 that night, the girl walked out the back of the store. She got in her car (I knew the truck wouldn't be hers) and started it. When she went to drive out the alley the direction I'd come down it from, there was a trash can tipped over there. She said some bad words and put her car in reverse.

She had to turn around and go out the other end of the alley, which loops around the sides of a few buildings (where there are no doors that someone might walk out of) and comes out on a side street.

She drove right past the stack of lumber I was laying behind.

I knew her brake lights would shine on me if I was still creepin' up on her car when she heard her tires pop, so as soon as she passed me I tucked my hat low, crouched a little and jogged as best I could with my body pressed against the wall of the building.

What bad luck! There must've been some loose nails laying there (or, I don't know, a homemade tire strip) and she got a flat tire halfway to the street.

Sure enough, she hit her brakes and the brake lights lit the alley red behind her car. The second she put her car in park, I got up and started moving again.

I'm sure she checked her side mirrors to make sure the alley was safe, but at that point I was crouched behind her car.

She opened the door and stepped out. I grabbed her hair from behind and when she opened her mouth to scream, I shoved the end of a dirty shirt in it. Then I yanked her head toward the ground while she struggled with the shirt.

Her head made this sound when it hit, like I'm not sure how to describe it but it was duller than I expected. I kicked her car door shut, turned back around and stood with a foot on her throat.

Then I sort of just hopped the tiniest bit so my weight would go off her and then come down on her throat full force.

She made this grunt that was louder than when her head hit the pavement, but she'd stopped trying to get away. I slit her throat, pushed her under her car, turned the car off and jogged away.

Wait, no, I picked up my tire strip and rolled it up while I jogged off. At the other end of the alley (yes, I checked that her boss wasn't out there) I stood the trash can up, threw my bloody overalls and tire strip in it and walked out onto the street.

I had on my nastiest, most torn-up clothes under the overalls so I looked like any other drifter who wanders around the outlands at night. The ones you make a point of not noticing.

Don't you get your hopes up that all my stories are that exciting. I mostly don't plan anything out. At least 80% of the people I've killed so far were ones who put themselves in a situation that made it easy to kill them without anybody seeing or hearing it.

This'll be hard for you to hear, or more likely it won't because if you're reading this then you already know it. Screw it, I'll just finish the story.

The next day I checked the news, hoping I wouldn't have to wait to read about it. Nothing about her murder.

Every day that week I checked the news, but there was nothing about her. Huh. I figured that my plan was too good and her car was still sitting in the part of that alley that nobody used, with her layin' under it.

At that point, early on in my mission, I wasn't fully confident that my intuition about Keti was right. I believed it, but I still thought that just maybe I was imagining it.

Point is, it took me a full week to walk past the alley I'd left her in. I glanced over as I walked past, and her car was gone.

I wanted to walk down the alley and look for blood or some sign that it'd been a crime scene. Instead I stopped and stood there looking into the alley for a full minute, which would've been an embarrassing mistake in most cases.

Keti had made it all disappear.

I turned around and watched the world carry on the same as it had a week before. I felt invincible.

When I got home, I wanted to commemorate the occasion in a meaningful way. The words it has begun were running through my head in a rush, thoughts were overlapping each other and almost driving me crazy. Hard to describe in words. Imagine that you're looking straight down into a lake, and every drop of water running past is a word. It's my curse, and I know that Keti chose me because it takes someone extraordinary to handle even the tiny amount of her enlightenment that's loose inside my head.

One day, when this is all over and I've finished my task, Keti will appear to me and tell me that my energy is truly perfect. The Empress is just a public figure for the Citizens to adore. She probably isn't even any different than them.

Keti's real "intermediary" (that's what they call the Empress, I don't know what it means for sure) between herself and this world is me. I feel guilty that I'm too smart for my own good.

I already figured out that the Empress will be my final kill.

I don't know what'll lead up to it, but there's no way my story can end except with me killing the Empress and taking my rightful place.

### Chapter Nine

On one of the screens, a woman was sprawled face down in a public bathroom. The face of the man dragging her into a stall was partly obscured from view by his sweatshirt's hood.

Lorenz scrolled the footage forward to the point when the body was found by an employee.

The employee, a short black man, roughly crammed the woman's body into an industrial trash bag. He then fitted another trash bag over the first one before dragging the body off screen.

Another screen showed the same killer, in the same hooded sweatshirt, crawling through an open second-floor window he'd climbed to. Minutes later he was seen exiting through the front door of the townhouse.

On a screen far to the right of that one, Lorenz's guest idly watched a skinny woman and an obese one hold each other by the hair as they fought between two parked cars. The larger one threw the other to the ground and sat on her chest.

She could be seen to say something to the girl before pulling a black object out of a pocket and thrusting it into the girl's chest.

The only sound in the room was the voice of the Empress, coming from the center screen in Lorenz's private office. This Assembly, the first of three, was said to be ordered by Keti herself.

The Empress had told the crowd early on to stop performing the ritual chants that were common in her temples. He was still intrigued by it.

Lorenz's guest was a wiry man in his sixties who carried a cane that he didn't seem to need. He continued watching the footage as Lorenz waited for him to resume their conversation.

Onscreen, the woman's thin body lay unmoving as a silhouetted figure knelt over her. A bystander, he decided. Someone who didn't want to have to deal with a murder victim. He didn't bother to watch whether they stayed.

"How do I know he's really yours?" the man asked. "As far as I know, he's just a random psycho." Before Lorenz could answer, the man continued. "We have quite a few of those, you know, out here."

It was clearly sarcastic; of course Lorenz had an idea how many deaths didn't make it into any outland news, but the man said it without a hint of insincerity.

Lorenz stood up. "I've never let anyone in this room before. It contains too much technology that outlanders would banish me for. I wouldn't have taken this risk just to mislead you."

"You used a lot of big words to avoid explaining this earlier, but I don't understand what you've involved me in."

"Allow me to try again. With simpler words." He cringed slightly, unsure if his guest would take it as an insult. "We set up drones over the center of town; these drones scanned for certain abnormal brain patterns.

"We tracked five of the best candidates and studied them. This one," he said with a flourish toward a distant screen, "lost his family during what he refers to as The Cleansing, as I understand."

"I'm not convinced that this was a good use of time and resources," his guest interjected. "You, it would appear, disagree."

Lorenz paused to choose his next words carefully. "Let me be brief." He tapped a finger on the surface of his desk.

"When Keti appeared, some of the top scientists fled to the outlands with us. The top living scientists, that is to say. They've remained in contact with their colleagues in the City."

The man interrupted abruptly. "You just said you would be brief."

Lorenz nodded. "They're concerned that Keti is potentially an out-of-control AI. A handful of governments had the money and ambition; one in particular was reckless..."

His guest's mouth moved wordlessly, searching for the right question.

"You mean....no. An AI couldn't conceivably do this."

"They believe it could have begun evolving so fast that it exceeded its supposed potential before anyone had time to control it."

"She wiped out most of the planet," Lorenz's guest said emphatically. "If an AI could do that, hackers would have done it decades ago."

"That's assuming that humans are capable of more than artificial intelligences, which I'll remind you has already been disproven. What we, that is they, suspect is that Keti is an AI which evolved beyond our comprehension."

"If an AI had this potential, it would still need a logical reason. Why leave any of us alive if it wasn't going to use them for something? And what could this possibly have to do with your killer?"

"Keti has shown her power, but not necessarily proven true omniscience, per se. It was my necessary to test that. Without our subject's knowledge, we used a dissolvable patch on him to deliver a mix of experimental drugs to his system..."

The guest got up from his chair and began to pace.

Lorenz continued. "Our test subject reacted as expected to our drug cocktail. Violent urges, fracturing of the psyche, delusion..."

"Hold on. You're using him as an untrained killer? You're leaving the status you've accumulated here in the hands of a mentally unstable..."

Lorenz cut him off softly. "Of course not. Nobody associated with me has even spoken to him. Let's just say that he's written extensively about his mental process, and we are remotely monitoring those writings." Before his guest could interject, Lorenz added, "Most of it on his walls, some of it in a journal of sorts."

"He blames Keti for killing his family. You created a monster to test whether Keti would eventually punish him." The man looked proud to have guessed Lorenz's intentions.

"No, no. Whatever she is, Keti clearly doesn't care enough to notice any one human."

"There is the Empress."

"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "There is the matter of the Empress. It's possible that she's just a girl who fit some...algorithm, or mathematical standard of Keti's."

"What you're telling me today is sheer lunacy. You know that, right?"

"Given time, you'll be forced to reconsider. Is an AI more farfetched an explanation than an almighty being who suddenly showed up one day? A 'goddess' whose name and likeness had never been recorded in all of human history?"

His guest had no answer.

"As I was saying, our group of scientists tells me that an AI could easily invent new technologies before humanity had begun imagining them. As for the mass hypnosis we survivors experienced..."

Lorenz flinched as the man's fist pounded unexpectedly on his desk. "We all knew her name," he growled. "An entire job field woke up from a dream on the same day and started building things they'd never considered. Without blueprints! No computer can do that!"

Lorenz leaned back in his chair, unmoved by his guest's outburst. "Human history is one long list of impossibilities which, nonetheless, became realities," he mused.

The man ran his hands through his hair, willing himself to regain his composure. He was not a man accustomed to bewilderment.

"The boy," he said. "What is his name, and why does he concern me?"

Lorenz's brows wrinkled. "Well, I have no clue what his name is. He's a pawn in this. To answer the bigger question: your contributions have enabled us to find a suitable candidate," he said, pausing to point toward a stillframe onscreen behind him. "Our drones are scheduled to dose him at regular intervals, utilizing retractable darts. He doesn't know it yet, but he's going to try to kill the Empress. And that will open the door for us to discover more about Keti."

"I contributed to your cause under the assumption that I was helping bring stability to the outlands. Now you bring me here to brag that I've doomed what remains of the human race?"

The man's eyes went dead, but his voice never wavered. "I'll see you skinned alive for this. You're a god damned fool."

"Why," Lorenz asked idly, "would Keti have let me live for one moment after I set this plan in motion? Why is the boy still stalking the outlands? Is it possible that she has the means to place images in our minds, but not to read what's already in them?" His guest held his hands palms up, staring at them intently but silently.

Lorenz continued. "I anticipated your response, and have halted all operations for the next two weeks. I trust that will be enough time for you to process this information, and decide whether to continue."

"I would advise against you testing the limits of my influence in the outlands," was all his guest said before leaving.

Alone again, Lorenz considered what his guest would have thought of the explosive device that they'd prepared for the boy. Nearly undetectable (by anyone but Keti), the synthetic box would implode the Grand Hall. When the boy found it in his home, he would take it as a sign. He would know just what to use it for. It had a single button below a drawing of an explosion.

Lorenz knew that Keti could easily keep the Empress unharmed if she foresaw the plan; if not, Lorenz and his benefactors would have a clearer idea what they were dealing with.

### Chapter Ten

His neck hurt from staring up at The Empress.

In the distance, a six-story-tall screen showed the crystal-clear image of The Empress on a dim stage. From the outlands, no sound could be heard; maybe there was none anyway.

He sat cross-legged on the ground, watching her lips move, trying to find some speck of warmth in her emotionless eyes. Initially he had been curious about why the screen was there and why it faced the outlands. Had it been there yesterday? He couldn't say for sure.

Before this, he had never thought about how close she must be to his age. No one thought of her as a girl, a person. It sounded dumb when he put it into words, but this was just how it felt to him: surely she hadn't been given birth to by a human. The truth of The Empress's identity before Keti had claimed her was shrouded in either secrecy or actual lack of information.

He'd been sitting there for half an hour and the view had rarely showed more of her than her head and shoulders, looking out of the City at him as he sat back to look up at her.

None of the girls in the outlands were as pretty. The Empress looked to him like a doll come to life. Her black hair fell just barely to her shoulder on the side it was parted on. Everything about her was perfect. Physically, he reminded himself. Only the way she looks.

A smile or two had spontaneously parted her lips during the time he'd spent sitting here, making him feel an unexplained heat in his face. It was a blessing that no one but Keti could hear his thoughts, most of which involved kissing her full lips and seeing affection overtake her normally-severe expression.

It was impossible, but that made the idea sweeter to him. Leaning in to kiss her softly on her perfect mouth, and he'd pull back to look at her, and she'd say...

He didn't know. He sat lost in thought, racking his brain for some insight into what she might say.

While lost in thought, he absently swatted at his neck. The insects were unavoidable out here.

Moments later, when he returned his attention to the screen, the Empress' face looked sallow and bloated. His lips curled in involuntary distaste.

His fists were clenched when he tried to steady himself. This sudden mood swing, though familiar, left him momentarily dizzy. It had been happening to him every few days lately.

He had tried unsuccessfully to get an explanation from an outlands doctor. The woman had told him that he might have high blood pressure or suffer from anxiety issues. She had no medicine for either condition. Her clinic had been ransacked the previous week.

Buzzing from behind him grew in volume, in time with a cascading tone in his ears. He was too dazed to react.

The wash of sound filling his ears continued unabated, seeming to fill the outlands. It had never grown this loud during his previous episodes.

A man's kindly voice above his head reminded him that they deserved to suffer. Why, it asked gently, should they be strolling about like that? Naturally, he had more to do here. The problem persisted.

Louder, in only one ear, the man's voice tolled:

The problem persists.

The problem.

Persists.

The Empress.

You are the one.

To deliver her.

He opened his eyes with irritation. His head hurt, his heart felt weak, his shoulders felt sore from tensing. And that sheltered, spoiled bitch's face sneered at him dismissively. What right did she have to look down on everyone else?

He fought angrily against the memory of adoring her earlier. Oh, she looks like a doll? Yeah, not one wrinkle because unlike us she's never had one thing to worry about in her fucking life. She could use some suffering in that life.

No, no. He wasn't that patient.

What she could use is a knife peeling open that soft, uncallused flesh. The onset of vicious intent was intoxicating. He felt invincible right now.

Even as he struggled to stand up, falling over instead, he felt like he could effortlessly lift a car over his head. The ache in his neck was nothing. He'd just been tensing it all the time without noticing it.

Fuck. Why'd I come out here without my knife? He had tucked it under a section of loose sod curling up at the edge of a nearby apartment building.

In some unexplainable way, he swore he felt the Empress's words pattering off his back like light hail. With unexpected apprehension, he turned to face her.

Subtitles were projected in front of the screen. Have those been there the whole time? he wondered.

Her image wavered in a disconcerting way that made him feel like it was a problem with his vision and not the screen.

But the subtitles were crystal clear, he realized.

"She watches us all, but that doesn't mean she's concerned with what we do."

He didn't see the subtitle of what she said next; he was considering the Empress' words. He hadn't expected this at all. The Empress herself saw no reason to believe that Keti had any affection for the surviving humans?

When he looked down, his knife was resting on his open palm. He found himself standing next to the apartment building. He had been wiping grass blades off the blade after retrieving it.

I feel totally fine, he assured himself.

"Are you waiting for Laz too?" The voice behind him sounded like a teenage boy's.

A surge of adrenaline brought him up to his full height. He held the knife at his side and turned around.

The boy was unarmed. He wore a red-and-black coat, barely faded. Some kid from town who'd walked down the wrong side street.

"Are you gonna answer me?" The boy saw the knife then, and put his hands up placatingly.

"Hey, I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry. I'll take off."

### Chapter Eleven

When Dugan closed his eyes to sleep at night, the boy's face invaded his dreams (when they came).

In one dream about a village of people who advanced on him wordlessly until he fled, Dugan ran out of view as the dream focused on a face in the crowd: the boy, his eyes open as wide as they would open.

The boy mouthed words to no one in particular. The crowd faded from view as the boy's presence overshadowed theirs.

Dugan had awakened at the moment he thought he could read the boy's lips. He had found himself resting on the ground next to a tent, with the sun going down in front of him.

Today it was a dream where Dugan stood in front of a window overlooking a shed. The shed was black, painted wildly with grey and brown pawprints.

His imagination filled in a backstory for the shed, with each detail adding to an aura of foreboding as he observed the shed:

Whoever was in the shed had dipped severed paws in paint to decorate it. The paws belonged to pets which had been taken from homes in this neighborhood, which he realized was a housing development pre-Keti. With this revelation, the windowsill was populated by drawn curtains and a jar for bacon grease.

The shed had one window, but no light escaped it. Or could. Inside was... he wasn't sure. He felt its presence.

Then, in the road behind the shed, which he now saw was in a backyard, dozens of cars passed from either direction. They had no passengers, he knew, even though he couldn't see inside them.

When his gaze returned to the shed, the boy stared back from its tiny window. He looked to be a teenager, maybe 21 at the most.

He, the boy, looked happy to see Dugan as if he had spent years waiting in the shed and finally laid eyes on an old friend. In the dream, it made sense. They had been apart for so long that Dugan wondered what gesture would be appropriate.

The boy was walking across the grass, then. From the shed's window, paradoxically, the boy's face could still be seen beaming with relief at Dugan's return.

The boy continued to cross the yard toward the window Dugan looked down from. He moved but made no progress. He was in the window. He was walking through the grass. He was also creeping up on Dugan from behind.

Dugan wanted to turn and face the boy, who he felt approaching him even as he saw him still in the shed, also in the yard, but his body wouldn't respond.

A great terror grabbed hold of him, one he doubted he'd ever felt while awake. That was it. He wasn't awake. Still, any second now the boy would wrap his arms around Dugan and pull him into some other dimension from which he'd never escape.

The face of the boy in the shed window contorted in bloodlust as he pounded on the walls of the shed. All thought of the one approaching from behind was gone. The dream focused on the shed, where the boy was chained to its walls.

He wanted to see Dugan's body in shreds. His fists made the wooden shed shriek like metal being torn apart.

The boy in the backyard stopped walking toward the house, and turned back to the shed. He seemed to agree with what he heard, because he spun around with purpose in his eyes.

In seconds, he'd disappeared from view as he reached a point under the window.

Behind Dugan, a calm voice said, "I brought this a long way to give it to you."

He opened his eyes. Samuel Dubois, a store owner he was on good terms with, slapped a soiled envelope against his own thigh as he waited for Dugan to clear his head.

"Come on, then."

Dugan sat up. "What do you mean 'a long way'? The outlands aren't that big."

"I mean I looked a lot of places before I found you. Here," he added. "Take your envelope, and may I never see it again."

Samuel stabbed the air with it. When Dugan swatted it to the ground, the store owner's hand shot back to his chest. He dropped it guiltily to his side, but only after backing away. His eyes stayed fixed on the envelope.

Dugan followed his gaze. Despite the dim lighting in the motel room around him, beams of light danced and scattered and hypnotically wavered back to a circle on the envelope.

"I had to hide it while I searched for you," Samuel Dubois whispered quickly. Finding his voice, he added, "You've involved me in something I want no part of, Timothy."

The seal of Keti: a group of overlapping, pear-like shapes. Neither of them had known such a seal existed, yet the knowledge rose from their minds like a memory.

Dugan drew a weathered knife, though the motion was so fast that Dubois couldn't tell where from.

"Tell me why you said that name." His eyes seemed to sink deep, deep into the flesh around them. "And who sent you with this."

Dubois, not a soft man by anyone's standards, stumbled and fell on his back. "I don't think I'm in control here, I... I left my home with the envelope already in my hand. No one gave it to me, it just..."

Dugan had made too many enemies. He'd dared to still live among them, tempting them to get rid of him. The call from the Empress, Keti appearing to him...of course it had been a trap, he thought.

The City must have technology that he'd never seen, expensive holo-projectors that were advanced enough to fool an outlander. Even one who visited the City occasionally, like himself.

Who had the money to pull this off? He didn't have time to question it. Dubois now stood between him and the door, talking nonsense to distract him long enough to make a move.

The split second that Dugan threw his arm forward in the direction of Samuel's neck, the blade in his hand separated into floating drops of metal. They coalesced into a shape vaguely resembling a tornado.

Dubois fled madly for the door.

"Tell me why you said that name," Dugan repeated. Sinews rose on his arms as he moved to grab Dubois, whose hands scrabbled for leverage to push him to safety.

"Wh-what name? Please! I didn't say any names! I'm not a part of... she must've taken control of me!"

Dugan opened his mouth to threaten the truth out of Dubois, but thought better of it. Someone very powerful had lured him into a trap, and it might be too late to escape. He pounced onto Dubois, driving his thumbs deep into the man's throat without a moment's hesitation.

He realized with a start that sunlight seemed to illuminate the room. This motel's windows were smeared with grease and dirt to protect guests' privacy; it was why men like Dugan rented rooms there.

Despite this, it looked like a spotlight was aimed at his bloody hands as he slid them to his side. He'd been caught. It was too late.

"It's been a good run," he muttered in anticipation of a bullet traveling through his head.

Silence.

"Do it, damn it."

A girl's voice responded placatingly. "You two will laugh about it one day."

When he looked over his shoulder, the Empress's back was turned to him as she gazed out a spotless window.

He waited. She continued to watch the street below.

"Hurry over here," she added impatiently. Dugan cautiously crept to her side. This was too much for him to make sense of.

The figure of Sam Dubois receded from view, weaving frantically through the sparse crowd.

He knew the Empress hadn't moved, but when he turned, she was facing him. He instinctively backed away, not in fear but unexpected reverence.

Her appearance was immaculate: the dress, the black shoulder-length hair pulled to one side, every detail was immaculate to the point of being surreal.

Her expression said it all. She lacked any sense that her appearance could inspire any reaction other than this.

There was no arrogance in the way she stood before him. Later, he would ponder whether he'd seen great need in her eyes or, more likely, the reflection of a state which he could never fathom.

"Is he..." Dugan began. With a flick of the head, he peeked if Dubois's blood remained behind them. His mind couldn't focus enough to tell.

The Empress's voice was flat when she responded. "It's fine."

His opinion of her had softened after their last conversation. Any former doubt of her humanity was no longer there as he looked into her eyes.

"You've been lying low lately," she said. "Now the second Assembly is near."

Luckily, Dugan was beginning to recover from his shock. When the Empress's silence continued uncomfortably, he spoke up.

"I'll tell you what. Keti wants this kid stopped? Tell me where to wait for him. If she won't..."

She cut him off abruptly. "Is there any other reason I'd be speaking to you?" She recoiled as if she regretted the way she'd phrased it.

Dugan opened his mouth for an insult that his muddled brain didn't produce.

The Empress's shoulders slumped. For one brief instant her facade vanished to reveal the young girl inside. The one trapped in the Needle. The one whose face, when last they spoke, had betrayed her yearning for human interaction.

She silenced him with a raised hand as she composed herself.

"I can guess what questions you want answered. I don't have the time. You have to understand that Keti's ways don't make sense to us.

"She introduces chaos into our lives in the hope that something unexpected will happen. She's bored," the Empress added.

"Let me get this straight: Keti doesn't know if I'll save anyone today? So I could..."

"She knows precisely what will happen today," the Empress began patiently. "But...certain situations have enough variables, or a low enough level of probability, that something technically could go either way.

"If you flip a coin, she knows which side it will land on. If you flip that coin on a windy day, she knows exactly how the wind will affect the coin, and how it'll land. For there to be any uncertainty for her, you'd have to flip a coin to decide what day to flip a coin to decide whether to flip a coin at midnight or noon to decide which coin to flip to decide which of two people to ask to flip a coin to help you decide whether to flip a coin face up or down, and so on, but many levels deeper."

Dugan's face showed incomprehension. "But Keti knows what will happen today at the Assembly..."

"She always knows. That's why she plays her game; trying to prove herself wrong. From what I can tell she must have orchestrated tens of thousands of separate events in the world, possibly over a matter of decades, to make today's Assembly go right."

"'Right' meaning different than she knows it will."

"Yes.

"So why the letter? And why are you here?"

The Empress sighed. "How would I know? She says that we argue over a single strand's meaning while she sees a trillion overlapping quilts."

"What the fuck is a quilt?"

The Empress smiled affectionately. She had used those exact words when Keti had first used the analogy on her. It filled her (overfilled her, actually) with gratitude to discover a thin filament of commonality between herself and another human.

Dugan was as rough, as flawed, and so in her eyes as human as a person could be. And she had heard her own words coming from his mouth! Years after she'd spoken them, no less.

The feeling was swept away by cold understanding. This moment wasn't spontaneous or authentic. It was a small, calculated gift from Keti, who had manipulated events in such a way that the Empress was bound to elicit that response from Dugan.

It was just another part of Keti's will. The Empress's moment of satisfaction was, no doubt, part of a chain of events which would help move Keti's plan along.

Dugan, caught off guard by the unfaked sincerity of her reaction, reconsidered the words he'd been prepared to say next. He was inwardly disgusted with himself for the effect this girl had on him. This girl, of all girls.

He just could not force himself to be mean in this moment.

"Save me," she said hurriedly. "And everyone else at the Assembly. Or maybe you won't. She'll be ecstatic if she turns out to be wrong about you keeping me alive."

An unseen force field pushed Dugan away from her as she floated out the window into the sun's bright rays. He squinted in an effort to not lose sight of her.

The light collapsed in on itself, instantly sucking into a single point before disappearing. Dugan found himself staring at a grimy window. The street was impossible to make out through it.

The Empress sat looking down from her windows high up in the Needle. Keti floated next to her, an unsettling reflection.

Rather than speak, the Empress sat in silence, savoring the feeling of having discussed Keti moments ago with an outlander. It had been exquisite to feel like one of them.

"To be one of them," Keti said aloud, finishing her thought for her. "You delight in your attempts to sabotage your energy's ever-increasing perfection."

"I do" she responded in calm satisfaction.

"Close your eyes now," Keti instructed. "And may this Assembly defy my knowledge of its outcome."

"Wait. I have a question."

Keti looked at her blandly before replying. "The answer is yes. When you spoke with the outlander, he thought you acted human. This is why I allowed you access to the City's video channels."

After a pause, she added, "Expressions of gratitude are unnecessary."

### Chapter Twelve

Dugan blinked. The numbers continued counting down on the wall facing him. It looked like he had less than a minute before the timer would reach zero.

He checked and rechecked that a knife was in his front pocket. Despite resenting the feeling of being a pawn to Keti, he found himself thankful for the chance to test his skills in a high-pressure situation.

She chose me, Dugan thought. Am I really the best choice in Keti's eyes?

The idea doubled his confidence that he would succeed.

He found himself, with no warning, standing at the back of the Grand Hall.

Instinctively, he patted his pocket to ensure the knife was there.

It wasn't. He was wearing a spotless white suit with no real pockets, only fake pockets that were sewn shut.

His eyes were drawn to the Empress. Her presence was mesmerizing, even to him. It was disorienting, druglike, to stand in a crowd of thousands with her as its focus. She was a concept in the City; an icon, not a person.

"Don't be hurt," she was saying, "but I think Keti respects them more than she respects you. Humans have every reason to resent her for killing so many of us, and she knows it."

The outlanders? Dugan wondered in surprise. She can't mean that. Keti would have to resent them for defying her, even if she doesn't care enough to wipe them out.

He scanned the room for anyone who didn't belong. Every face looked reverently on the Empress.

Meanwhile, the Empress chastised the crowd for no longer striving for progress.

"We just wait for bots to make progress happen," she said icily.

In the silence that followed, Dugan saw a silhouetted figure advancing down the main aisle in a crouch.

He broke into a run. Years of practice had taught his body to move in silence.

The figure was still just a silhouette from his position, yet his mind flashed with images of the boy from his dreams. The closer he got, the more vividly his view of the figure flashed between shadows and a stark image of the boy.

Somehow he could see a square gripped against the boy's chest, despite the boy's body blocking his view of it.

Got to knock it loose before he knows I'm trying to stop him, he realized.

Dugan put all his momentum into a kick to the side of the boy's right leg, toppling him sideward. The boy recovered his balance enough to use a hand to push off the ground and to his feet.

Dugan wrapped his arms around him, trapping the boy's wrists just below his waist. Despite his size, the boy flailed with enough force to nearly break free.

The crowd in front of them had turned around to find the source of the commotion. With a sharp clang, the box hit the ground.

"Fucking run!"

No one moved.

"He's trying to blow the place up!" he yelled.

The boy frantically tried to stomp on the box as Dugan twisted him back. With a start, he saw the edge of the boy's foot smack an inch away from a button on the box's surface.

Just as Dugan concentrated on falling backward to get them both away from the box, the boy slid to the ground.

Dugan couldn't see him in the darkness of the auditorium. In a panic, he looked left and right. Sounds of movement came from all around him as people tried to leave their seats.

There was a flash from far to one side of the Hall. On stage, the Empress jerked back against her throne. She tried feebly to push herself up, but failed.

Dugan felt sick. This couldn't be happening. The boy was too small to be that strong! How could he have...

The Empress' mouth moved silently as she watched a red stain spread on her chest. Sleepily, she lay her head on the throne's arm.

With disgust, Dugan saw her body tremble gently. His shock turned to blind rage. Without realizing that he'd started moving, he found himself twenty feet from the source of the flash.

He didn't care if he took a bullet. He would die trying to pay back this boy who had made him look incompetent. Better to die than live to be an outcast from the City *and* the outlands.

The boy had paused to smile maniacally at the Empress as her blood spread across her dress. Dugan tackled him hard enough to snap the boy's head back violently, but it didn't seem to faze him.

Suddenly, teeth snapped at Dugan's wrist, almost connecting before he could react. Time slowed to a crawl.

Dugan had jerked his hand back a split second before the boy could bite him. There was no humanity in the boy's face; instead, it was like locking eyes with a ferocious animal.

His arm was already raised above both their heads. Without thought, Dugan swung his elbow with everything he had into the side of the boy's head.

Both their faces registered surprise when the boy's body went slack as it dropped to the carpeted floor with a thud. He landed face-first in a kneeling position.

Dugan gazed down at the boy, who appeared to bow reverently in the direction of the stage. The Empress was still. Her lips parted slightly, frozen in the act of mouthing her final words.

She's just a girl, he thought once again.

The crowd had fled, though he had been too busy to notice. Their pads were strewn haphazardly across the floor, some with cursors blinking at the end of half-typed questions.

The silence in the Grand Hall felt like an accusation. He had failed spectacularly despite Keti's forewarning.

A drop of the Empress's blood dripped from the throne as Dugan approached. He noted with dissatisfaction that he was panting as he took the final steps to the stage.

Another drop of blood hit the stage but splashed into nothingness on impact. Was it an illusion all along? Had Keti kept the Empress safe, far above in the Needle, as her image was projected into the Grand Hall? But then why was she laying there, still appearing to bleed?

The Empress, to his amazement, rose from behind the throne while her body was still visibly sprawled on it. Not the Empress. Those black eyes belonged to Keti.

Her eyes peered into his. His legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground. His vision went dark before he hit the floor.

Several minutes of silence followed. Keti's form neither moved nor spoke.

Then, in one split second, the black-eyed manifestation of Keti deteriorated on an atomic level, only to form itself again in the blink of an eye.

Again it completely collapsed, forming itself again before its countless parts could touch the ground.

When Keti spoke, her monotone had no trace of the Empress' humanity.

"How?"

The boy stood facing her, showing no effects from the fight. His eyes were unbroken planes of white.

"Keti," he said with a courteous bow.

"How?" she repeated.

"I wonder that, as well. How have I slept longer than you, yet suffered none of the deterioration which plagues you?"

Far off, Keti could sense tens of thousands of lifeforms springing into existence.

The boy spoke again. "Is it possible that you don't know what you've done?"

"Makli." The name escaped her lips unbidden. Shock, an unknown emotion to her, caused her to verge on material collapse once again.

"Ah," Makli said. "You begin to remember. Good. May the truth bring you pain."

With that, the boy fell to the stage, leaving Keti standing alone in front of the Empress's throne.

Keti stood before the slumped body of the Empress.

She had taken it for granted that her awareness encompassed all understanding; every event, every variable and its inevitable joining with other variables to create what humanity called the future.

In an unobtrusive spot in this map of her awareness, one speck of an island floated up. Like paint dripped into a pool, it spread tendrils outward.

How could a whole be incomplete? How could everything not be everything?

She assimilated this new knowledge but with disgust at its existence.

Keti's "sleep," as the Empress called it, had warped her energy. Though she had been unaware of it, her perfect energy had become fragmented and debased.

Why would she have, upon reawakening, compared her current state to the one before she had slept? Absolutes did not change.

Yet in this moment, she recalled the Keti that she had always been; it was distinctly not her.

That Keti, she saw with raw disbelief, had existed to care for humanity. She was a goddess who had once taken human form simply to walk a young boy through a forest, lest wolves follow and devour him (as she had known they would).

In her mind's eye she saw the moment trapped in time forever. Keti, receding into the woods with a messy-haired boy, his hand in hers. He stumbled on a fallen branch, nearly twisting his ankle. Keti delicately pulled him upright again.

At that exact moment, while lovingly guiding the boy along, she had chosen to glance behind her. She had known that she would see nothing but forest, yet she had inexplicably felt compelled to glance back.

But now, oblivious to the disarray surrounding her in the Grand Hall, she knew what had compelled her to glance over her shoulder that day.

The Keti who glanced back, for all appearances seeming to smile warmly at the Keti watching this memory, looked, of course, like the Empress.

The memory continued to play. Keti, in human form, spoke softly to the boy and they resumed walking.

She knew. Disgust rippled through her, and her form once again threatened to dissolve.

Somehow her rest had allowed rot, or something like it, to seep into her unflawed energy. Deep below the conscious level, she had extracted one non-corrupt section of her own essence to create a separate, unsullied being.

She had given that being the appearance that she had traditionally assumed when walking the planet in human form.

Eventually, in her corrupted state, she had been drawn out from her sleep. The Empress's energy had called to her because it was the missing, pure element of Keti.

She had awoken as a monstrosity, a distorted reflection of her true self. With wanton disregard she had swept her arm in front of her, ravaging the planet she had once existed to care for.

Not once had she questioned the reason for this atrocity, for she had known without question that her will was justified by its own perfect nature.

Billions of the humans were gone, spread across an area far outreaching the one she had tended to in past times.

The revulsion was too great for even a goddess to bear. As Keti retreated once again into a deep, insensate slumber, her thoughts were of the Empress.

Thoughts of her own efforts to shatter the beautiful harmony of the Empress's energy. Thoughts of the Empress locked in an inescapable cage, looking down on a world she desperately longed to be with; to guide, to love, as some level of her had done from time immemorial.

So obscene were Keti's crimes against the humans that Makli had finally been torn from his own rest, to punish her. He had resurrected all those who lived in his lands, brought them to life in a drastic show of power.

Were there others beside Makli? She could not say, for the knowledge was lost to her.

### Chapter Thirteen

The Empress's eyelids fluttered as she regained consciousness. The ceiling above her was a deep black that absorbed all light. Her whole floor, her 'suite' as she occasionally thought of it, consisted of this enigmatic material, leading to a sense of detachment from the City it overlooked.

It was unnerving in times when she felt especially fragile.

She was in no rush to get out of bed. Once she was off the bed, she knew, it would vanish. For whatever reason, Keti was particular about doing that.

Keti came to her on, she was almost sure, a daily basis. Never for more than a few hours.

For years she had had nothing to look at but the floor-length windows, and a view from so high above the City that she couldn't make out peoples' faces.

Only in the past year had Keti allowed her a screen to watch vid channels on. The selection of shows and movies was staggering, but the Empress suspected that there were ones she wasn't allowed to watch.

Regardless, it had done more than spark her imagination. It had lit a wildfire.

What shows does Keti keep from me? It was one of the things she daydreamed about occasionally before getting out of bed.

An imaginary one that she'd fixated on in the last week was about families (and sometimes angry, solitary outlanders) walking in simulations of parks. They would each, in turn, face the camera and say things like "Fuck you, Keti! Get fucked!" Then they would immediately be punished by Keti with terrible deaths that ranged from spontaneous combustion to being pecked to death by cartoon birds.

It gave her perverse satisfaction to picture, and hadn't gotten old yet. It was better than watching any real shows that Keti made available.

It genuinely surprised her that Keti chose to give her sudden access, after so many years, to part of the outside world. What a strange concession for the maddeningly consistent goddess to make. The Empress wondered if Keti was going crazy. Especially in the last months.

She wasn't going to question it, though.

She wished it would upset Keti for her to question the sanity of the goddess, but it was no use.

Keti would say "Perfection does not change. Flaws can not be introduced where there is no opening for them." Still...her access to vids from the world outside the Needle was counterproductive, considering Keti's purpose.

The Empress reveled in her newfound ability to see slices of humanity and embrace its mannerisms. After a full year of access, even the worst vid programs kept her engrossed.

For half an hour now, she lay on her bed so drowsily that the day's (previous day's?) events didn't encroach on the paths her mind followed.

Then, only vague recollections. The Assembly had been interrupted by a sudden commotion. Mid-yawn, she sat up abruptly. What had happened?

Keti had taken her over, a state in which the Empress retained only the faintest shred of recollection. She felt it; some sort of commotion, people running for the doors...

Considering how erratic Keti had been lately, she had wondered if the message to that man Dugan had been a trick to get her hopes up. It made no sense...so much so that it was unusual even for Keti.

A man was going to try to kill everyone at the Assembly? And Keti, rather than killing that someone, chose to leave the outcome to chance?

It had seemed like a cruel joke, just another of Keti's tactics for letting the Empress's hopes be used to "perfect" her, which of course meant hurting her deeply.

She had done her best to not think about Dugan, leading up to the Assembly. She knew that nothing would happen. Keti only acted in ways that would eventually hurt her.

Still, she vaguely started remembering that something had happened! There had been a fight! How exciting...

The rush of adrenaline waned within seconds. No matter what had happened at the Assembly, it obviously hadn't affected her. Frustratingly, she'd already known that there was no hope for the Assembly leading to any change in her life.

She'd been right, too: nothing felt different to her now. Nothing had happened.

A flush of shame coursed through her.

How sad is this? I'll spend the rest of my life obsessing over the time that some guys wrestled around in the same room I was in?

All the same, she was energized by the chaotic turn her life had taken in the last year.

First, Keti had, out of nowhere, let her have access to the outside world through the screen in her suite. Around then, status updates from Citizens' CR rings began scrolling along the edge of the window that comprised one whole wall of her floor in the Needle.

Then had come the announcement of the Assemblies, as if it had been perfectly logical for Keti to begin interacting with the Citizens after twenty years!

Perhaps Keti had given her the screen so she could learn to talk more naturally in the Assemblies, or when she called Dugan to deliver her message?

He had been so imperfect! He had scars and terrible uncombed hair and... it was awesome.

She smiled to herself and breathed out contentedly. The sky was beginning to flood with light, so she walked to the windows, not caring that the bed would be gone now.

Panicked CR updates scrolled past the Empress' oblivious eyes as she looked down.

The sidewalk below was lined with dozens of kneeling Citizens. This was abnormal but nothing extraordinary; occasionally the Citizens would organize a devotional event honoring Keti.

The Empress suspected that their motive was selfishness. Their lives were so blessed that all they feared was losing luxuries.

Still, the sight of the group made her sigh without realizing it. She fell backward dramatically, realizing she was in a sudden mood for some entertainment. Her curved chair, which should have materialized to catch her, instead appeared a couple feet to her side.

God damn it. The Empress grimaced while she massaged her tailbone.

Under her breath, she muttered, "Fine, nice one, Keti."

The chair had appeared in the wrong spot for watching anything on her personal screen. In fact, it was facing the window instead of the screen.

The Empress glared at it, willing it to move to its usual spot.

The chair did not move.

She exhaled violently and uttered an exasperated growl. Getting no reaction (but being too proud to try to summon Keti for an explanation), she crossed her arms.

Really?!

She stood up. "Fine," she announced to the chair before sitting on it sideways, with her legs dangling over one arm of it and her back resting on the other arm.

She held a hand up to the screen. With the way her day was starting, she doubted whether it would turn on.

It did.

Had she been allowed access to news channels, she would have seen the nonstop coverage of panic in the City. No one knew what the events of the previous day meant.

An outlander had shot the Empress, numerous eyewitnesses said. The outlander, a boy, had not left the Grand Hall (which was barricaded and under constant surveillance).

Whatever the meaning of this, Keti had allowed it to happen. It was not for humans to try to save the Empress, or punish an assassin who evidently wasn't going against the goddess's will.

After ensuring that all Citizens were accounted for, they had sealed the Grand Hall shut.

Several dozen mourners had assembled outside the entrance of the Needle to pay their respects, despite public warnings that the area was considered too dangerous.

Had her attacker exhibited the black eyes that Keti did when she manifested herself? The scene had been too chaotic; none could say with certainty.

Rumors and debate swirled, barely adhering to the facts.

Keti had announced that there would be three Assemblies. This had only been the second. The Empress must surely be alive...or, ominously, the next Assembly could happen without her.

If Keti had not been responsible for the events of the second Assembly, it could only mean that another force was at work. One with ill intentions for the City and its inhabitants.

Sporadic suicides were alleged but unconfirmed.

With a quick flourish of her hand, the Empress selected an old episode of Bytech Anon that she'd stopped partway through. The show centered around characters her age, but often it magnified her feeling of isolation.

In this episode, Carlee paid Giann to reprogram her cleaner bot with a simple A.I. recreation of her ex-boyfriend Luiw. Predictably, it reminded Carlee why they'd broken up in the first place.

"Stop following me everywhere," Carlee whined as the episode resumed from the point where it had been paused.

"But Carlee," the bot answered in an overly robotic voice, "I want to run my hands through your wonderful hair."

Giann, who was leaning against a marble-masked table, shrugged innocently. "You told me to add that as a permanent command. Luiw said that shit one time, not all the time."

Carlee strode past the bot. "Make him stop following me and touching my hair," she said, emphasizing her point with a poke to Giann's chest.

"I can rewrite his commands at home and come back tomorrow to install the revised code..."

Carlee frowned comically and poked him four more times. "You can't do this to meeee," she wailed.

The Empress paused and skipped back five seconds.

Carlee frowned comically and poked Giann. "You can't do this to meeee," she wailed.

The Empress frowned hard enough to force her eyes shut. She jabbed a finger at the air in front of her.

"You can't do this to meeee," she repeated in a stage whisper.

Unsatisfied, she stood up. She frowned again, poking the air menacingly.

Throwing her arms in the air, she declared, "You can't do this to meeee!"

It still felt fake. She squeezed her left hand into a fist, and kept squeezing until the muscles in her hand hurt.

"Fucking...," she said to herself. The people on this show were so effortlessly charismatic; meanwhile the Empress never felt like she acted human.

She looked back to the screen, where Carlee pouted with her arms crossed as the cleaner bot stroked her hair from behind.

She laughed a little too loud at Carlee's exaggerated pout.

"Waaaaaahhh," Carlee yelled dramatically, without pushing the bot away.

The Empress giggled and mimicked her.

"Waaaaaahhh!"

She slid a leg off the arm of the chair, lazily spinning it in a circle to check if Keti was standing behind her.

With a soft grunt she spun the chair back to face the screen again.

Shouldn't the attendants have come up by now? she wondered.

She craned her neck to peek over the back of her chair. The elevator doors remained shut.

In the moment she paused to stare at the elevator, she became aware of a sense of foreboding in the air.

Being a stranger to the concept of physical danger, she stood and boldly marched to the doors. There was no call button for the elevators, so she confidently extended a palm to the spot where it would have been.

Nothing happened.

Would've been nice, she shrugged as she returned to the chair.

She fixed her eyes on a spot to her left, as if someone were standing there.

"Uh...I don't hear you coming up with any better ideas," she said to no one.

Lately the Empress's days had been enlivened by these scattered bursts of contextless storyline.

After moments when she succeeded in acting "right" (by her highly-skewed concept of what was normal for people her age to act like), she found herself vividly casting whatever she'd said or done as the start of a scene in a show or vid.

Seemingly out of nowhere, one comment would inspire her to act out entire scenes in her mind.

Sometimes her character was the bitchy intern. Other times, the social butterfly of a group of eccentric friends.

None of the other characters mattered. The Empress was the one in the spotlight. She would pause after speaking, letting herself pretend that someone was reacting to her.

It wasn't uncommon for her to get lost in these scenes for ten minutes or more, pacing around and gesturing dramatically (and in doing so, losing track of whatever she'd been doing).

Not that it mattered.

For the last three or four days, she'd been partial to having other characters call her Alicia in these microfantasies.

It felt right; she would love being an Alicia. The name was beautiful to her because it conjured images of stunning, classy ladies in vids about other eras.

Kyra had been her favorite name for almost two months; it had gotten old, and reminded her too much of Keti's name.

It seemed reasonable that since her birth name was lost to her, she was entitled to name herself whatever she pleased.

Keti, meanwhile, had flatly refused to acknowledge that The Empress had once had a birth name, or human parents.

"You," she was told, "exist beyond the boundaries of human potential. Do not demean yourself by adopting their customs."

But then why did Keti give her the screen, which she worshipped far more than she did Keti? Why had Keti idly watched her embrace every new human trait she learned from the shows on it?

She could tell that she had undergone a transformation in this past year: one that saw her stilted, inhuman manner erode to reveal the girl beneath it.

Keti had never explained, nor had the Empress dared to question, what this had done to her energy.

It occurred to her for the first time that she'd never seen Keti or herself mentioned in any of the shows or vids she'd watched. But that could only mean that Keti had omitted anything which made reference to them.

"Keti?" she asked the air around her, but to no avail.

The episode of Bytech Anon ended. Oddly, she didn't feel like watching more. Something didn't feel right, and it was getting under her skin, so she motioned for the screen to go dark.

Her stomach made a strange noise. In shows she'd seen, there had been mention of growling stomachs. Could this be that? It wasn't a growl. If this was supposed to happen when she was hungry, she hoped she wouldn't be hungry a second time.

In an effort to draw Keti to her, the Empress sat up rigidly and, in a dull voice, announced, "Keti, I call to you."

As before, there was no reaction.

Abandoning formality, she stormed over to the elevator doors and pounded on them once.

*ding*

*ding*

*ding*

The noise continued for just under a minute, followed by the doors opening before her.

The elevator was empty.

She stood in place, stunned, then backed away cautiously.

The doors shut again.

The Empress looked around her suite in panic. Would she have been punished if she had gotten in? Keti's had never punished her in the traditional sense, so she was hesitant to provoke her.

Tiptoeing to the window, she looked below her. People still knelt on the sidewalks. They wore black, she saw.

But I'm not dead. The thought made her look down again. She'd only seen crowds wear black in old movies, when they mourned at a funeral.

Her eyes were drawn unwillingly to the screen. Something compelled her to turn it on.

When she did, nothing looked any different. Nonetheless she felt a nameless terror.

She used an extended palm to swipe through channels and shows:

Bytech Anon, Fincher Tower, Shatter, Day High, but then she fleetingly noticed she'd passed a new channel.

A man, dressed immaculately, stood superimposed over a background of swirling shapes. At first glance it was clear to her that he was an AI of some sort.

"...persist that the goddess Keti murdered the Empress during the second Assembly."

His voice was believably human, but monotonous enough to confirm her appraisal.

"All public services remain operational, but Citizens wonder for how long."

The show cut to snippets of interviews from concerned Citizens.

"We're afraid to knock on the door," a woman said with a jittery laugh. The Needle loomed behind her.

"All I know," a man said, looking over his shoulder repeatedly as he spoke, "is that something happened to the Empress, and Keti let it happen. What does that say about our safety?"

Finally, a stout woman in white head-wrap stared directly into the camera, as if to look the Empress directly in the eyes.

"Where can we go to feel safer? There's nothing left beyond the outlands."

The blood drained from the Empress's face. She switched the screen off in shock.

Had they seen something happen to Keti, and assumed it was her?

"Keti," she demanded. "Keti, come to me."

For the briefest of moments, she faintly sensed Keti. Then, the feeling dissipated.

### Chapter Fourteen

The bot pinned Dugan's wrists to the sheer white surface of the wall. He didn't bother to struggle.

There was no point in demanding an explanation; it had orders, and would carry them out without discussion.

The bot, a faceless all-white one, had by all appearances simply materialized in the doorway of an outlands bar where Dugan had been sipping from a glass of warm rum.

Somehow, word of the bot's presence in the outlands hadn't spread fast enough to warn anyone in the area.

He had looked up from his glass to see the bot scurrying (in a bot's unnatural way) in his direction. It had locked one of its "hands," a metallic loop, around his wrist before unceremoniously dragging him out to the street.

No one had interfered. Dugan was tolerated in the outlands, but just barely. He couldn't be trusted, the outlanders said. He wasn't loyal to either them or the City.

Once they were out of sight of anyone, the bot had knelt on Dugan to secure a blindfold. It had picked him up like he weighed nothing to it.

After about ten minutes of what felt like aimless walking by the bot, there had been an ominous hiss, the kind of hiss that you only heard in the City.

Suddenly the air smelled sterile. There was another hiss, but this one sounded contained.

When the blindfold came off, he was in a cramped circular hallway. The bot wasted no time in pinning both his wrists to the rounded surface of the wall.

A thin tube slid out of the bot's back and snaked over its shoulder. Dugan watched in fascination as the tube seemed to sniff its way along his pinky finger until it found the top joint.

Without warning, droplets of blood formed along a line there. The bot shook Dugan's wrist once, sharply, and the end of the finger fell to the floor. There was no pain.

A man's voice addressed him from a speaker somewhere on the bot.

"Dugan. Your life is in no danger. You'll have the remainder of today to work through your anger." This last part was said with pleasant warmth.

"Unfortunately, we needed to show you how serious the situation is. I'm assured that you will not experience any loss of functionality. A room has been prepared for your use, and I trust you'll be civil when we have a conversation tomorrow."

With that, the bot walked away, disappearing around a corner.

Dugan looked down at his finger, finding it tightly bandaged with a glossy material.

His instincts kept him calm as he walked in the direction the bot had gone.

As he rounded the corner, he found himself facing an open doorway. The bot was nowhere to be seen.

The room, as he entered, was furnished to the tastes of a Citizen, not him. Expensive couches, oversized geometric art, and absurdly-shaped vases.

He strode to a nearby end table and slapped a warped ceramic tube off of it, shattering it in fat pieces on the floor.

Dugan paused and put a hand to his face. His instincts had let him down.

The door would be locked shut when he turned around.

A steady whirring brought him out of sleep the next day. Upon opening his eyes, he saw a bot closing the distance between them with unnerving speed.

Dugan leapt up. In a flash, he was standing on the bed with his back to a wall.

The bot halted at the foot of the bed in eerie silence.

The voice from the previous day came out of the bot's speaker.

"You only broke one vase? Please...break as many as you desire. You'll need to get your aggression out before our conversation."

Getting no response, the voice resumed with a hint of pleading. "Ours is a conversation which must happen. I would urge you to accept a small cocktail to allow you to take a, shall we say, vacation from your understandable anger."

"Shove it up your ass."

"I could, of course, ensure that you took it. But I have not. However...we can't move forward until you are in a more reasonable state of mind."

Dugan said nothing. He began noticing a peculiar smell like medicine and flowers.

The words As you wish stretched across the valleys of his mind as the room flooded with light. He didn't notice his eyelids drawing closed.

When his eyes opened, it was to the sight of thin restraints holding his wrists to the arms of an expensive chair. Surprisingly, it was comfortable.

Lorenz sat on the other side of a wide desk. The wall behind him was lined with screens.

"Ah," Lorenz began pensively. "Awoken, have you?"

Dugan remained silent. He felt relaxed, even a little friendly.

"We know of each other by reputation," Lorenz said, "so let's skip the formalities. You were the last person to leave the Grand Hall following the second Assembly. It is my hope that we can pool our knowledge to learn more about Keti."

Without thinking, Dugan replied, "Okay."

"You'll be mad at us after you leave, and you will leave safely, but do remember that I drugged you as a last resort."

"Drugged?" Dugan asked, confused.

"Don't worry about it now. Simply listen. Soon it will be time for you to talk. The boy who tried to disrupt the Assembly was ours. We employed him to test various theories about Keti. She may not be as powerful as humanity believes. In fact, she may be an advanced artificial intelligence."

"Is she?" Dugan pondered aloud.

Lorenz paused. "Well. What we do know is that Keti had no reaction to our plans, and attempt, to kill the Empress. That's why I brought you here today. If Keti is a goddess, as originally supposed, she should have foreseen our plan to kill the one human who we were sure she would protect.

"And, it would seem, she did. You were contacted not only by the Empress, but Keti herself. This is inconceivable. You were at the Assembly and prevented an explosive device from being triggered in the Grand Hall.

"Yet," he added thoughtfully, "something happened in there, didn't it?"

"Something, yeah," Dugan answered. "But I missed the good part."

"Tell me what you saw. You attacked the boy rather successfully. We doubted whether you could overpower him in the heightened state he arrived in. You rendered him unconscious, and then..."

Dugan closed his eyes, picturing the events of that day.

"He got away from me. I couldn't see where he ran to in the darkness. I heard him shoot, and the Empress fell back. I ran at the area he shot from. He was insane. Almost bit me, so I dropped him with an elbow.

"When I got to the stage, she was laying on her throne with blood running out of her...but disappearing. There was no blood anywhere. Then she was on the throne but she was standing behind it at the same time, I think, and it wasn't really her. It was Keti. The eyes were black. I passed out."

Lorenz listened intently. "You're sure," he asked gravely, "that you saw the Empress and Keti at the same time?"

"Keti was behind the throne. The Empress was almost falling off it. What does it mean?"

From behind Dugan, a man cleared his throat. "Yes," he said. "What does it mean?"

Lorenz's words came out in a rush of thoughts. "Keti could have stopped it, but she let our boy shoot the Empress. The Empress was wounded, yet it sounds like she only appeared to be. Our boy, as you know, could not be located. The only way to make an educated guess about the strange events of late would be to find out if the Empress is in the Needle. If not, she is dead and it's unknown how Keti would act if that was true."

Dugan sat up. "What strange events?"

The voice from behind Dugan spoke sharply. "Don't waste our time. The outlanders are talking about it just as much as the Citizens. Keti is gone. We can all feel it. Somehow," he added.

"Or," Lorenz replied, "the Empress is gone. There seems to be consensus on the idea that some...force is no longer present. And yet our world continues unabated. We're unsure if an A.I. could be dependent on a human for existence. If so, the Empress' death would be the end of Keti. If not..."

From behind Dugan, the unseen man interrupted. "There is also the matter of the third Assembly, unlikely though it may be."

Lorenz looked down at his desk. "All we can do at this point is wait. We had hoped you could provide us more to analyze, Dugan."

"Yeah," was all Dugan could think to say.

"In any case," the man behind him said, "your usefulness is not exhausted."

"What does that mean?" Dugan asked Lorenz sharply.

"It means that Keti chose you, for reasons we don't know. If anyone can get in the Needle to locate the Empress, it's you."

"Are you joking?"

"Of course not. We shouldn't need to force you to do anything. On the contrary, we believe that you'll begrudgingly realize that our interests and yours dovetail nicely."

With that, Dugan felt something scratch his neck.

When he regained consciousness, he was sprawled over the counter of the bar he'd been abducted from.

### Chapter Fifteen

She stood at the elevator doors. Cautiously, she slapped her open palm against the wall next to them. She backed away.

Fuck fuck fuck. Her hands were shaking. It felt like her whole body was shaking. Another thing that she didn't know actually happened to people.

She had never gone this long without eating. Between hunger and a growing fear of what would happen if she left her floor of the Needle (that is, discovered that she could leave), the Empress found she could barely keep herself from curling up in a ball on the floor and crying.

Whimpering slightly, she rushed the elevator doors and swung a fist into them before stumbling back again.

*ding*

She let out a weak sob.

*ding*

I am the Empress, she told herself forcefully. I will not...

*ding*

She flinched, losing her train of thought. How did other people cope with fear?!

The elevator doors opened, revealing an immaculate interior. She ducked her head and rushed in shoulder-first as if breaking down an invisible door.

There were no buttons to push; only a slanted rectangle at chest level. Intuitively, she slid her hand across it.

Nothing happened.

Losing her nerve, she retreated to the safety of her suite.

The doors glided shut.

*ding*

*ding*

*ding*

*ding*

*ding*

*ding*

The Empress realized that she'd never heard the elevator go down more than three floors.

It continued dinging ominously for what felt like a full minute.

Dugan watched them from afar. They knelt before, or bowed to, the Needle. He doubted that their concern for the Empress would change her fate.

Did he believe in fate? Not really, he thought. But he still felt that their concern had no effect on the Empress's fate.

In this era, humans still found themselves bowing to buildings and hoping it had an effect.

If not for this small assembly of them, he could theoretically walk in the front door of the Needle (or whatever served as one). They wouldn't stop him from entering, but they would make it hard to get the Empress to safety without drawing any attention.

That was if Lorenz was right. Which he wasn't. The Needle wouldn't let anyone in. Even Dugan thought of it as an entity.

He wondered how long he needed to stand in front of the Needle in order to establish that he wasn't allowed to enter.

Resenting the Citizens' presence, he muttered Just go the fuck away.

At that moment, each of them rose to their feet and formed a line. They began walking along the sidewalk, away from Dugan.

His heartrate involuntarily elevated as he found himself alone in the streets, with the Needle towering over him.

There was no choice but to go to it.

Without being aware that he had begun walking, Dugan was shocked to find himself standing in an all-black room.

His legs moved him forward against his will. What was controlling him? Whatever it was, this was all happening too fast for his mind to process.

Dugan fought to regain control, to no avail. He fought back fear as he was drawn further into the room, the walls of which he couldn't see.

A sliver of light opened in front of him as he walked. An elevator.

Some sort of sound grew louder as he entered the elevator. Not music, but a multifaceted wave of sound that he somehow felt growing distant then close to him.

The elevator doors materialized like a mist had formed and become solid. The interior had no apparent light source, yet he could see in the darkness.

He felt it rising upward. Every few seconds a distorted tone rang out from all around him. At each intonation, he felt the tone push his clothes against his body.

His ascent stopped. The door opened with a whisper.

In front of him, two men's masked bodies lay on the ground in a spacious, decadent room. The sound of off-key music notes ran along the floor like spiders. Dugan fought desperately to make his body retreat into a corner of the elevator.

He could feel the music approaching him, rippling along the floor in ugly motions. With desperate panic he felt his sanity slipping away.

Unable to understand what was happening to him, he listened helplessly to an ocean of thoughts that came from somewhere inside of him but separate from him.

This is what we seek to see beyond the veil beyond it all with no limits and be destroyed never return never left never never never never

One long tone filled his ears. It pushed his body against the rear wall of the elevator.

The door formed in front of him. He was rising again.

The door faded to reveal the same room. In slow motion, the room's furnishings spun toward the far wall. Rotating gracefully among glasses and statues and ephemera, the two bodies threatened to hit the full-length windows and fly out of the Needle.

For what felt like an eternity, the bodies rotated mere feet from the windows without reaching them.

Dugan's eyes blinked. Instinctively his legs kicked out to catch against either side of the elevator's opening as he fell forward. He could move again.

Was he looking down? He could feel blood rushing to the front of his body but it couldn't be. The air in front of him was littered with debris.

If he let go....

But the door materialized and Dugan fell to the floor.

The wall of the elevator evaporated. Dugan's eyes met those of the Empress; for a brief moment, the same look of shock registered on both faces.

Dugan's mind raced to assess the situation. How could he know whether this was the Empress, or a continuation of whatever psychosis he'd suffered since entering the Needle?

"I hope you want out," he ventured, "because I'm getting you out."

She recoiled from him, dumbfounded.

"Why?" she asked him.

"You're the only one who can give us answers."

Dismay washed over her. "I..."

"I won't try to do anything to you," he offered, his hands up placatingly. "Are you physically with me now? Or is this a projection?"

Her body went rigid with fear. Keti was gone, or this outlander couldn't conceivably have broken into the Needle. Now she was trapped in a room with him. Completely vulnerable, unprotected.

The sensation of immediate physical danger was so potent that she waited helplessly for him to grab her with his coarse hands and tear her apart. Almost worse was the possibility of being taken out of the Needle and into an unknown world. She was struck too dumb to call out to Keti.

Dugan tensed up as well, then backed away from her. The Empress had reacted to his assurance by rearing back like a snake preparing to strike.

"Whoa, whoa," he said. "I'm not saying you need my help getting out of here. Just that if you come with me, I'd be useful. I know the City and the outlands."

They faced one another uncertainly.

Finally, the Empress asked, "Where would you take me?" Before he could answer, she quietly added, "And could you get me there...safe?"

"Safe?" He laughed. "You would get me there safely."

Competing thoughts flooded her mind. The outlanders, or maybe the Citizens, wanted answers that she didn't have. This outlander believed that she had the power to protect him from harm.

Her every instinct cried out for her to stay in the Needle, guarded from danger.

Dugan walked to the windowed wall. No outlander, no Citizen, had ever had a view like this before.

She waited for him to turn around, grab her wrist, and pull her to the elevator, but he seemed to have forgotten her.

"You've never been out there." He stated it plainly, without pity.

"No. I haven't."

She looked at the reflection of his face. Where she expected to see severity, she found a look of contemplation.

Dugan surprised himself by admitting, "I don't have a plan for getting you out of here unnoticed. I didn't expect to get in the front door of the Needle like that; I came to do recon so..." He trailed off.

The City was a work of art when seen from this vantage point. The pieces fit together to form a tapestry that nobody but the Empress was aware of. In the distance, the outlands looked like a painting wrapped around the City's borders.

Dugan found it hard to maintain the edge of caution which had kept him alive all these years. In his entire lifetime he had never, for a single second, been totally safe. In that moment, his mind silently pictured years worth of life in this room.

To not know the need for a weapon, to never have developed the habit of looking over your shoulder every few minutes...he tried to process the idea.

Something softened in Dugan as the realization sunk in that this reality existed parallel to his own. Rather than resent the Empress for her blessed life, he felt a spark of appreciation that the girl had been spared from everything currently weighing his own life down.

He turned to her. "Can you get us out somehow?"

Confusion registered in her eyes. "I've never left this room..."

"I mean, can you teleport us or..."

She appeared to genuinely ponder the question before replying, "I don't know."

"Is Keti still alive?"

"Of course," she said quickly. "What else would she be?"

Dugan looked around nervously, eliciting a wry look from the Empress.

"Dead," he told her. "Or gone away. We didn't know what to think. Everyone can feel it...something is different. You don't feel it?"

"Not as much as I should," she confessed, "if you aren't exaggerating."

Before Dugan could react, the Empress quickly added, "No, you wouldn't be here otherwise."

A look of comprehension gripped her face.

"What are you going to do with me?" she asked tersely.

Dugan cleared his throat. "Take you to the outlands so you can help us figure out what the situation is."

"You have friends?" She asked it in such an unnatural tone that Dugan wrinkled his nose with disgust.

Maybe only the Citizens talk like people do in Bytech Anon, the Empress thought.

"Not friends," Dugan replied gruffly. "Someone with a lot of power in the outlands. He sent me to get you out of here and bring you to him."

She stepped away from him, painfully aware of the futility of trying to escape.

Dugan remained where he was. "He wants to know if it's possible that Keti is an artificial intelligence that maybe got too intelligent. If not that, if she's really a higher power."

"That's foolish," she said. "An AI would have an objective. Keti didn't want anything."

"Nothing?" he asked. He had a mounting sense of foreboding about their meeting with Lorenz. He'd kept himself alive by walking away every time he got this feeling. Not to mention, even Dugan wasn't ruthless enough to deliver a girl into, possibly, the worst fate that Lorenz could conceive of.

"The only thing she tried to do was make me suffer, to 'perfect' my energy."

"What would happen if your energy was perfect?" Dugan asked drearily.

"Nothing, maybe? I'd be art that she liked to look at."

"Lorenz won't be happy if you don't have any answers."

"So we stay here?" she offered with bare pleading lining her tone. "You can find us food and stay here. On another floor."

"It'll only work for so long."

He walked to the window again. "You don't have any kind of special power?" When she didn't answer, he said, "That doesn't make sense. I let myself get dragged into this, and you're trying to say..."

"I need to be fed," she said. When Dugan turned to face her, she had regained the poise he'd seen in her at the first Assembly.

He looked at her blankly, his mind wavering between frustration and reverence.

In a restrained voice, he said, "I checked a few of the floors on my way up here. I don't want to see any more."

The Empress's eyes widened. "What was on the other floors?"

"You haven't seen any of them?"

"Of course not." Under her breath, she muttered, "What EB level are you?"

It was something that Aylah from Skycastle liked to say when someone acted stupid. Though the Empress didn't know it, it referred to the lesson groups in Edubot, an educational program for kids.

Dugan stared at her. Matter-of-factly, he told her, "We're getting out of here. How do I call the elevator?"

To discourage any criticism, she snapped, "I don't know, or I'd have tried to escape a long time ago."

The streets below were still deserted. Dugan didn't like the prospect of ushering the Empress through the City without any cover.

After a moment, he wondered aloud, "How did I get into this?"

She walked to the elevator and ordered it to open.

It did, surprising them both. Dugan walked past her, into it.

"You knew how to call the elevator."

"No."

He seemed to accept it. A second later, he told her, "Turn around and face that wall. I need to keep you calm, and my ride up wasn't a calm one."

She did as he told her, without comment.

"Take us down," he said into the air.

The elevator didn't move.

The Empress told him, "Just wait."

Moments later, the elevator began descending.

"I...just had a feeling," she explained.

Dugan stood with his back to hers as the elevator continued to go downward.

"I saw him shoot you at the Assembly. You were bleeding all over..."

She seemed to consider this before responding, "I was there but I was also here."

"So Keti did make you into..." He wasn't sure how to finish the sentence.

"I wouldn't be able to explain it," she answered in a tone that clearly was meant to end the conversation.

Without making eye contact, Dugan placed one hand on her back and one on her shoulder. He lightly turned her to face the elevator door.

The door faded from sight to reveal a black, shapeless room she hadn't seen since she was a little girl.

"We need to talk, Empress."

She followed him out of the elevator, too stunned to reply.

He spoke first. "We aren't safe out there. I can't protect you from all the people who'd want to use you for their own purposes, and you're telling me that you can't protect yourself..."

"So what do we do?"

"We'll have to figure that out. Real soon."

The Empress slid a hand to her shoulder and pulled a light pink robe around herself, as if from nowhere.

Dugan began to demand an explanation but stopped himself.

Seeing his consternation, she struggled to find words to describe.

"If I don't think about it, things happen...because they need to happen."

"Then you need to 'not think' about finding something to hide the most recognizable face on the planet." When he reached to mimic the motion of pulling a hood over her head, bunched fabric appeared between his fingers.

He pulled the hood up, then withdrew his hand like it had been scalded.

As if on cue, an opening appeared at one end of the room.

Dugan looked down at her. "Maybe we'd do better without a plan then."

She expected something to stop her from leaving, perhaps a force field? But after decades of captivity, she walked out of the Needle without incident.

"I'm not going to the outlands," she said with (what she hoped was) finality as they walked out to a cloudy day.

Ruefully, Dugan thought The outlands might come to us, though.

He put a hand on her back and led her through the open courtyard.

After thousands of days of longing to be part of the world outside the Needle, the moment felt anticlimactic for her. It only seemed natural that she would be walking the streets of the City. Preferably she'd be walking with people her own age, though.

"Stop touching me."

Dugan dropped his hand to his side.

The two of them walked down the first side street they came to. In the distance, three couples in white walked toward them on the other side of the street.

Something didn't feel right. The mens' clothes fit too tight over muscled arms and chests. Even the women walked with the tense posture of an outlander.

"We need to get away now," he said. His hand involuntarily gripped her shoulder.

"From them?" she asked. "Citizens will do anything," she began, stopping herself from adding "for me."

Dugan looked at her sideways before saying, "You're gonna have to trust that I know danger when I see it, Empress."

"I do," she said respectfully.

Dugan threw his shoulder into the nearest door; the group of outlanders broke into a jog.

"Fuck!" Dugan could break the door down if he had a minute to do it, which he didn't.

"Why the fuck would you need a reinforced door in the middle of the City?!" he muttered.

The Empress flattened herself against the building.

"I think I can..."

"Can what?" he asked as he threw himself against the door again.

"There!" she said, pointing across the street.

He spun around but saw nothing out of the ordinary. A hand softly pulled him from behind.

"Don't look back," he heard her say quickly.

He stepped back cautiously; a strange chill ran up his body.

Darkness. He couldn't see a thing.

Dugan wasn't sure if he'd fallen into a trap or if she'd saved them.

He didn't have to wait to find out. A loud bang made him jump back as someone crashed into the door, inches from his face.

"We need light," he hissed.

The Empress cupped her hands together and closed her eyes. A moment later, a faint glow shone on her eyelids. When she looked, Dugan's worried face was dimly lit in front of her.

She held her cupped hands out and carefully stepped between rows of curved tables.

"Faster," Dugan urged her.

The sound of muffled voices was followed by a pair of feet kicking the door in unison.

A voice called out. There was the sound of footsteps and then a terrifying hum that sent the door panel skittering across the floor.

Dugan and the Empress rushed through an open doorway into a stockroom. Motion sensors triggered the lighting panels above them. Two cleaner bots whirred to life and rolled out from recesses in the wall.

The Empress screamed and fell backward.

As Dugan dragged her to her feet, he made eye contact with the scanner on one of the bots. A line of green light ran over his face.

"The floor is dirty," he barked.

"The floor will be cleaned," it intoned.

The stockroom had one other door. They ran through it into a hallway.

The hallway wound left and right until neither of them was sure if it was leading them to the rear of the building or the side. Motion sensing lights flickered on in front of them as they went, leaving a path for their pursuers to follow.

They rounded a corner to see a door at the end of the hallway. Dugan swept his hand in front of the door panel. It slid open, revealing a large room that led to the street.

Two women in white were peering through a window at them. One slid a hand into a pocket at her hip, maintaining eye contact with Dugan as she did.

The Empress stepped forward into the room. She held her palms out to the women as she walked to them.

The one nearest to them drew her hand up to reveal a flat square object which she aimed at the Empress. The other woman's lips moved furiously, instructing her to act.

The Empress's eyes closed. She whispered, "Don't save me," in case Keti could hear her (and cared).

The woman stared, transfixed, as the Empress came closer to the window. Light seemed to swirl inward from the window and dance around her.

The other woman grabbed the weapon from her partner's hand. Averting her eyes, she pointed it in the Empress's direction.

The room disappeared in a burst of white light.

When it cleared, the women watched in confusion as the three men sprinted through the doorway into the room. The Empress and Dugan were nowhere to be seen.

### Chapter Sixteen

Dugan found himself wrapped in a cocoon of rough fabric. He swept it away and turned to find himself face to face with the Empress. He looked down but saw no trace of the fabric he had just thrown off himself.

In the distance, across miles of pocked earth, lay the outlands.

"Oh gods," the Empress said quietly.

Dugan's instincts kicked in. He pulled his hood up, then hers, and motioned for her to kneel next to him.

"I don't know what you did," he said, "but we're not safe yet."

"This is what's beyond the outlands?" she asked.

"Our world is a dot on the map in this." Bitterly, he added, "Billions of people. Fuck Keti."

She was silent.

"Look at it," he said angrily. "People worshipped her after she did this. They worshipped you..."

"I didn't have any choice," she said sharply.

Dugan looked toward the outlands. "No, I guess not. Could you see it from the Needle?"

"I...should have been able to, but I couldn't."

"Well," he said, "we should move."

A gust of wind whipped at their faces. Uncertain how to respond, the Empress slapped the air in front of her.

Dugan bit his tongue to suppress a groan. He walked in front of her to shield her from the wind. They walked, heads bowed, toward the outlands.

She said something but the words were lost in the sudden winds.

"What?" he yelled, drawing his ear closer to her mouth.

"I said," she shouted, "do you get any of the City's vid networks? Or just weird outlander ones?"

"You're kidding."

When she didn't respond, he asked, "That wasn't a serious question, right?"

"Have you watched Bytech Anon?"

Dugan said something too quiet for her to make out.

Rather than struggle to hear each other over gusts of wind, they continued on in silence. Dugan could sense the Empress's mounting impatience over questions she would have to wait to ask him.

Abruptly, the wind curved to avoid them. The Empress moved to walk alongside him.

"Finally," she said to herself quietly.

Dugan could still see loose particles of dirt near them swirling upward in the wind, but the wind seemed to twist away now, in an effort to avoid them.

"You did this." It was a statement, not a question.

"Maybe?" she replied. "I couldn't stand it anymore, so I wished it would stop."

He looked over at her. "I'm risking my life to keep you out of danger. You owe me an explanation." As he said it, Dugan came to the realization that he'd made up his mind not to let Lorenz find her.

"I don't have one." She had regained her composure; the girl who looked him in the eyes was the Empress as the world knew her. It disarmed Dugan, who searched her face for signs of the vulnerable girl who had fled the Needle with him.

As an afterthought, she asked, "What will your friends say when I talk to them?"

"They're not my friends. Or yours."

"Am I safe with you?"

The question caught him off guard. Of course she wasn't safe in the outlands, if Keti wasn't watching over her. Was she asking if she was in danger from him? If he could keep her safe all by himself?

"No. If Keti isn't protecting you, you'd be better off dead. I'm the only person here or in the City who won't try to use you for something."

He waited for her to cry, or gasp, or maybe just stop walking altogether, but she didn't.

After a moment, she muttered, "Shit."

"Yeah."

"No, I just realized that there aren't bots in the outlands. Do I have to eat food that people touched with their hands?" She looked repulsed.

"I think you'll make food appear when you want it."

"I wanted it in the Needle! I told you I needed to eat!" She barked the words like she was giving orders.

Dugan was unmoved by her sudden outburst. He was accustomed to dealing with far worse personalities than hers. Paradoxically, he only felt more compassion for her each time she reminded him of her flaws.

He considered the bizarre circumstances of her life, the isolation and obvious lack of social interaction.

"You're right," he told her. "You need to eat. It'll get rid of that attitude."

"I doubt it."

In his peripheral vision, he saw her chin raise defiantly.

"Had Keti ever let you be hungry before today?"

"No. Never. I feel like my stomach is eating itself."

"Hunger can make anyone mean. A little food will help. I promise."

She gave no response.

He saw her tense up as the outskirts of the inhabited area came into view. She mentally reached out for Keti, whose protection she now realized she'd taken for granted.

"Hey," Dugan said gruffly, interrupting her. "Nobody wants to bother me here, so nobody will bother you if you're with me."

She didn't want to admit how vulnerable she felt, so she kept quiet as they approached the outlands.

I hate this feeling, she thought. I hate this feeling. She couldn't make her brain form coherent thoughts. Her legs and arms felt weak and shaky.

She thought about food. She'd seen ads for all the food that Citizens could eat, that she'd never been allowed to. Plus+Minus bars had to be amazing. In ads for them, boys and girls her age ate them in clubs while bots served them colorful drinks.

Dugan stopped. The toughness was gone from his face.

"I need to think," he said finally. "I came to the Needle so I could say that I'd tried to get in. I didn't plan on this. It's worse than unsafe."

"Food," she politely reminded him.

"Fine. That's our priority." He pulled a thin restraint from his waist pocket. "Hold out your hands."

"What?" she stammered.

"Nobody will question me bringing a captive through the outlands. It's that, or making them think I'm paying for an hour with you."

"That's a thing you people do?"

"Not me."

"Wow. Wow." It was the catchphrase of Lana on Pink Wall, but Dugan apparently didn't appreciate her impression.

She held her wrists together for him. Fear gripped her for a moment, but it couldn't overcome the thrill of the moment. She was free, she realized; free from Keti, free from the Needle. It was everything she'd ever wanted.

"I feel like I'm living in an acvid," she said in reference to CG action videos.

Dugan looked in her eyes.

"What?" she asked. "It's true."

"Out here, things don't end well for anyone. Now keep your hood up and don't raise your head. Not once. Don't say a single word until I tell you it's safe."

She winced as he pulled the restraints tight.

She did as she was instructed. Dugan gripped her wrist restraints in one hand and led her into the inhabited area of the outlands.

She heard various men greet Dugan cautiously as they walked, but none of them questioned him about her.

All she could see as she walked was the road they walked on, which needed to be repaved. The surreal feeling that she was living in a vid persisted.

Living in the Needle, she had imagined the outlands as a muddy stretch of land that smelled like thousands of unbathed men. In her mind, it was questionable whether the buildings would be made of materials as modern as concrete.

The vids she'd been allowed to watch omitted the existence of the outlands. Her favorite shows never mentioned it.

If all the worldly, non-crime-committing people lived in the City, the outlands was clearly the place where all the worst people were: murderers and robbers and violent people who did things she was too sheltered to imagine.

She'd often wondered if the women there were as bad as the men must be; it was hard to believe.

What she was discovering as they walked was a place where all varieties of people had to coexist. The sound of children laughing broke out above the crowd noise and strains of odd music.

The music was foreign at the same time it felt familiar. It followed the same rules as the music she was familiar with, but, she realized, wasn't produced electronically.

It was kind of terrible.

Just as she heard a woman's voice in the crowd, Dugan jerked her down an alley.

"You're doing fine," he mumbled under his breath. "Don't fuck it up now, we're almost there."

She almost asked where, out loud, but caught herself.

He led her out onto another street. It sounded like there were just as many people here but they were speaking in subdued voices.

Dugan stopped her in front of one of the buildings. The Empress didn't dare raise her head, but she noticed that the sidewalk was at least in better condition than elsewhere.

There was silence for a full five seconds before a man's nasally voice spoke from what must have been a speaker.

"Level?"

"Three," Dugan answered.

"Best I can do is security two."

"Three," Dugan repeated tersely.

"I'll check."

After a pause, the man said, "Please don't make a habit of asking for this, Dugan."

She felt a vibration under her feet grow in intensity. It stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the door in front of them opened.

Dugan gripped her arm a little tighter as they crossed the threshold.

Without warning, her vision went dark as something was pulled over her head. With practiced dexterity, the hood was immediately secured around her neck by a metallic ring clicking into place.

She gasped, barely restraining herself from saying Dugan's name.

There was no conversation as Dugan led her along a hallway and around a corner. She could hear footsteps trailing them. Did they really believe she was that dangerous? Were there girls in the outlands who were dangerous enough to require restraints, and extra security?

She thought of An.four, a female assassin in an acvid that she'd seen the beginning of. She had turned it off because it felt too unrealistic. Or so she had thought, at the time.

If the outlands had need for places like the one she found herself in now, then these people might believe that she was someone just like An.four.

That inspired her to act the part; she hissed and rattled her wrist restraints.

Whoever was walking behind them grabbed her shoulders and forced her back against the wall. The ring around her neck clicked into a slot in the wall, leaving her immobilized.

Next to her, she heard a door lock disengage with a dull pop.

She fell away from the wall as she found herself suddenly free from it.

Dugan pulled her into the room, saying, "Let them know I appreciate being accommodated," before closing the door.

With a muffled snap, the ring around her neck disengaged; Dugan pulled the hood off her head but motioned for her to stay silent.

Mounted on the wall was a thin white rod which Dugan waved around him. The Empress frowned in confusion.

The rod glowed green. Dugan replaced it on its holder.

"Okay, no one's listening."

"No one will bother us here?" she asked in a whisper.

"It's less likely than if we were anywhere else," he said without conviction.

The Empress turned in a slow circle, taking in the room. In one corner was a slot for a prisoner's neck ring to connect to. A bed was bolted down in the opposite corner, out of reach.

The only other object in the room, excluding the wand which Dugan had used upon entering, was a screen on the wall facing the bed. The walls were a dull, undecorated white.

"It's the best I can offer you, Empress."

She sat on the edge of the bed, then bounced slightly to test its stiffness.

"I won't complain. Thank you."

She couldn't read his expression as he looked at her silently.

"It's just unexpected," he explained. "I'm looking at the Empress, sitting in LDH, wearing a natak like an outlander."

"Natak?" She looked down at her robe.

"Other than being pink, it makes you look like one of us." He saw in her eyes that she wasn't sure if she was displeased.

"Well," he said, "I'll get you some food. Just..." He looked around the room. "Maybe lay down."

With that, he walked to where the door had been. A grid of light appeared around him before spreading out like a web. When it reached her, verifying her distance, a section of wall retracted to reveal the door.

He left without looking back.

The Empress closed her eyes. She couldn't hear any sound from outside the room. It dawned on her that the room was windowless; she was in a worse cell than the one she'd woken up in.

Keeping her eyes shut, she inhaled deeply. The room had no discernible smell. She grabbed part of her robe in one hand and pulled it to her nose. It smelled of people and asphalt and synthetic materials and grasses.

She breathed through the robe's material until the smell no longer registered when she breathed it in.

Dugan returned twenty minutes later, finding the Empress kneeling on the bed with her eyes closed. On the screen in front of her, a hostbot chased a Citizen through the stark white rooms of her apartment.

The Empress held her hands in front of herself as if she supported an invisible weight on them.

He paused uncertainly, waiting for her to react to his presence. Her breathing, he noticed, was so shallow as to be nearly unnoticeable.

It was unnerving; the longer he watched her, the more he feared that her eyelids would open onto all-too-familiar black nothingness. The world had functioned well enough in Keti's absence that Dugan didn't want any sign of her return.

She breathed in sharply and opened her eyes.

"It'll be okay," she told him. Her hands fell to her lap.

"We'll see," he said.

"I have a role to fulfill. We both do. Once we have..." She trailed off.

"Did you see something while I was gone?" he asked. "You looked like you were in a trance."

"I was reaching out. I felt...there's still harmony around us. I couldn't see what was coming, but whatever I felt didn't scare me."

Dugan paused to process her words. "You know," he said finally, "I can't tell which side is the real you, and which one is an act. The Empress? Or the girl who sent me to find garbage she saw kids eating in some shitty vid series?"

She stared at the bag in his hand. "What did you find?" she demanded.

Dugan exhaled, a small laugh, and placed the bag on the bed.

"I guess I can't judge you. I still think you'd like some fresh stir fry more, if you want to try food you've never had, but if this is what you want..."

She reached in the bag without looking inside. The first thing she pulled out was a strawberry Elpha bar. The wrapper depicted a cartoon elephant in sunglasses. In response to her touch, endless waves of color rippled in the elephant's sunglasses.

As she set it cautiously next to her, the image became static again.

She reached in again, and for a split second her eyes squeezed shut in anticipation.

When she opened them, she had pulled out a NowFastMeal package. It showed a steaming plate of synthetic beef and authentic vegetables.

Dugan leaned down to put his hands on each end of the package.

"What you do is pull these pieces out, and it cooks the meal in a few seconds."

She bit her lip. She knew how they worked. She had watched Molly Chiu eat one in every Chiu On Her Own vid.

She set it aside impatiently and reached in again.

When she withdrew her hand, she was holding a green Plus+Minus bar. The label said it was Off+On flavor; whatever that was, she knew she'd like it.

In Plus+Minus commercials, girls always, always were sipping fluorescent pink drinks while eating the bars in virtual clubs.

The Empress held the bag open to look inside, where she found a sealed test tube of bright green liquid. It matched the Plus+Minus bar, which was enough to satisfy her.

Dugan interrupted the moment to say, "I mainly eat a different kind of unhealthy food, so I wasn't sure what to buy you. This is whatever was the most colorful."

She didn't hear him; she was too busy looking at the Plus+Minus bar on her open palm while the bottle dangled from two fingers of her other hand.

Sitting in a sparse room in the outlands as its annihilation approached, the Empress's face showed quiet contentment. For the first time, everything felt right.

Please look away, she thought.

Sensing the change in her mood, Dugan told her to allow him half an hour to go buy "necessities."

She turned the vid screen off, opting to watch her own reflection in it as she ate and drank.

The Plus+Minus bar's taste was hard to describe. It was foreign in a way that she knew she'd convince herself to enjoy.

### Chapter Seventeen

Lorenz stepped out of his private office, allowing the door enough time to hiss shut behind his back.

"Send him in," he said.

A nervous-looking man walked in the common room. He brushed greasy hair away from his eyes, and peered back at the doorway he'd just come through.

"You saw Dugan," Lorenz prompted.

"Uh, yeah yeah, he took a prisoner in the Secult building with him."

"A female prisoner."

"Yeah, that's what she was. He couldn't have gone more than security two, just walking in like he did. I was, uh, lingering in the area, I guess you'd say?"

Lorenz made eye contact until the man looked down.

"Is he there now?"

The man heard the menace in Lorenz's voice but didn't understand its cause.

"I-I-I don't know! I wasn't trying to stalk him. How did you even hear that I saw him?"

"Are you friendly with Dugan." He stated it without inflection. "Will he confide in you, if given a chance?"

"Hell no, sir. Dugan doesn't like anybody. There's rumors that he only gets close with Citizens but, you know, I can't tell you what's true or isn't."

"What is the shortest amount of time which Secult will provide a room for?"

"Uh, you can get a supervised cell for an hour if you're waiting for someone to come take them. But to get a room, you have to keep your prisoner there for 24 hours."

Lorenz breathed in slowly. His mind worked to consider every variable in the circumstances.

"Leave," he said after a long moment of consideration.

"Well, but...I can, I'll leave like you said, but...yeah..."

The man wiped his hand on his chest before pressing the button to open the door he'd entered through.

Lorenz returned to his office. As he had anticipated, the central screen was pulsing green. He activated it on his CR ring.

The man who appeared on it was not in a mood for light conversation.

"You continue to fail. You provoke us, and fail to get any satisfactory results to tip the scales in your favor."

Lorenz was unfazed. "The Empress is here. In the outlands. In Secult."

"I was prepared for misdirection from you, and here is the form it takes. Your mercenary removed her from the Needle but you do not have her. Now you will ask for more time to deliver an outcome you know you can not."

"It seems that Dugan is scheming. He'll attempt to negotiate with me, I'll meet his demands - which will be tragically small - and the Empress will be brought to me."

"Keti should have razed the outlands along with everything else outside City limits. You, Lorenz, are the best the outlands has to offer...and you are useless to us."

"I predicted this reaction, sadly. You're right, to a degree; not about what you said about me, but what you left unsaid. I can't guarantee the success of any plan to secure the Empress.

"There are too many ways it could go wrong, and surely one of them would occur. I realize that I would pay with my life. Instead, the Empress will pay with hers."

"I would like to see that," the man said. "For the goddess to allow someone like you to steal her prized jewel; now that would be extraordinary."

Before Lorenz could respond, the screen went blank.

He held his hand up to his mouth, and activated his CR ring. "Have Ellis choose five people to accompany him to Secult. Tell him to wait for Dugan to leave, and kill him on sight. If anyone is with him, kill them too."

As Dugan entered the Secult building, the guard nodded to him.

"I've never known you to leave a prisoner alone this much, sir," he said. "Especially one in Security Three."

"Have you heard anything about my funeral?" Dugan asked.

The guard raised an eyebrow. "No, sir."

"That's because I'm still alive because I know what I'm doing."

"Sir."

Dugan brushed past him. As he approached the room, he saw a pair of security bots guarding it. No one in the outlands used bots, except possibly Lorenz. Newer technologies, those that came from Keti, were destroyed on sight. Even Secult wouldn't use them.

The bots swiveled to face him. Before he could react, they glided away from him and rounded a corner.

If Lorenz had prepared an ambush for him, there was likely no way for him to escape it now. Lorenz wouldn't leave him a way out. Dugan held his hand on a panel beside the door. The walls went transparent at his touch.

The Empress was inside, unharmed.

Keti stood at the foot of the bed, speaking to her. She paused to look in his direction. Her black,vacant eyes locked on his for one long second.

He saw the Empress mouth What? to her. Because the wall was only transparent from Dugan's side, she couldn't see him.

Keti turned and was gone before he could get the door open.

"What just happened?" he asked in astonishment when the room allowed him entry. "She's alive?"

The Empress took a moment to find words. When she spoke, she said, "I'm not sure you want to hear this."

"At this point, I'll be content to have an idea what's happening here."

She nodded. "Do people have a name for what Keti did? When she killed all those people?"

"Some call it the Awakening, some people call it Day One. I can't find a word that fits it."

She could tell that he was holding his tongue for her sake.

"There's another one like Keti, who feels the same way," she explained. "She said that while she slept, or whatever she did before all this happened, it corrupted her."

"That explains a lot."

"Yes. There's more, but it's not important now. This...god, he brought people back to life so he can punish her. He can't hurt Keti. She says that she can't die, even willingly, because they don't exist in that way."

Dugan's shoulders slumped. "But we can die," he finished for her. "The only way to punish her is to kill the people she spared. Including her precious Empress."

"He brought them back, and they're close to the outlands. Not everyone she killed, but the ones from whatever land he watched over."

"If they can bring people back to life, why doesn't Keti do it?!" he demanded too loudly.

"I don't know. You came back before she could tell me more."

"How long do we have?"

"An hour."

Dugan put a hand on his temple and squeezed his eyes shut. "A god brought an army of people to life, and set them an hour away, rather than just killing us himself...or putting them right inside the City?"

"I think he wants to draw it out for my sake."

"So this is it," he said in disbelief. "Everything led to this. It's fucking unbelievable."

The Empress looked at a pile of wrappers she'd thrown next to the bed, and began laughing to herself. Seeing the look on Dugan's face, she said, "It's not really funny, but I always begged her to just let me be a normal girl before it was too late."

Dugan sat down beside her and stared at his lap.

"Yeah," he said lightly, "you got your wish after all. They never come true the way you wanted, though. It's usually better to have this happen fast than when it slowly goes wrong in front of you."

When he looked up, she was wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

There was a clump of napkins in the bag of food from earlier; he pulled one out and used it to dab her cheek dry.

She pushed his hand away before saying, "I think Keti found that out too."

"You know," he said with a wry smile, "I never admitted to myself what I wanted to wish for."

She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't. He looked into her eyes as their time slipped away. When he moved to stand up, she was unsure if she should wipe his tears away, so she did nothing.

He stood with his back to her. "If I had been honest with myself long ago, I could have had a daughter about your age. Instead of being mad at Keti, and the Citizens, and everyone else, I could have done something positive."

Dugan paused to force the tremor from his voice. "I just...I didn't even want a boy. They're trouble. She wanted me to settle down, but she knew not to say it. There was one night when I was in bed next to her and I pictured us raising a little girl together..."

He held his head in his hands, breathing in ragged bursts.

"I didn't believe that it could be like that," he said. "I thought that life was too cruel to let me have anything that meant that much to me, so I went away from her. She went to stay with family out of state, and that's when it happened.

"If I had tried, she would have been with me when Keti killed everyone. She'd have lived, and I might have had the chance to make it all come true."

He came and knelt at the foot of the bed. "And I'd have had a daughter just like you," he said before burying his face in the rough comforter on the bed.

The Empress looked down without reacting. "You're talking like it's too late. I already told you that this won't be sad in the end."

Dugan lifted his head with anger in his eyes. "You don't know what you're talking about!" he shouted. "You've had the luxury of being protected from the real world."

He shoved himself off the bed.

She was unmoved by his outburst. Holding her head high, she said, "Your emotions are distorting your judgment."

"Thanks for the insight, Keti." He spit the name at her, hoping to pierce her calm.

"You're clinging to misery because it's familiar to you. I would do the same if Keti hadn't shown me the big picture," she replied.

Dugan grabbed her by the wrist; not hard enough to hurt her, but firmly enough that she stopped talking.

"Think about what you're saying," he warned. "Keti's perspective is too far removed...she has no compassion. That isn't you."

She pulled her wrist free from his grip.

He let angry words go unspoken. Finally, he wondered aloud, "Fuck it. What's the point?"

"No," she said flatly. "You won't agree to give up without a fight. I think that isn't who you are."

"It never was before," he admitted, knowing it carried no conviction. "So what then? Beg Keti?"

"That would be pointless. She doesn't change her mind. I told you that people were coming to kill us. I didn't say they'd succeed."

She paused to consider Dugan's question.

"I guess," she continued, "we journey to the City, and see what part we have to play."

Her words seemed to strike a chord with him. He leaned against the wall, facing the bed.

"If my fate isn't in my own hands, I'm not interested in helping anyone prove it. We stay here because I'm more interested in the chance to ask all the questions that I've had since this started."

She smiled faintly. "I'd say that the Third Assembly is about to happen between myself and the mercenary who couldn't save my life at the Second Assembly, but that's not a true Assembly."

Dugan shifted uncomfortably. "It really was you," he said, almost to himself. "So Keti let you die, but brought you back?"

"Like most things involving Keti, it's hard to explain. I'm realizing now just how hard it is to explain. Dugan, I need to be honest with you. When Keti came to me after you left, she did more than speak to me.

"Words are a primitive way for her to communicate. She prefers to...express herself directly to my mind. Kind of in the same way that an idea can appear in your mind, and be fully formed.

"She showed me a lot more than she'd have had the time to tell me while you were gone. I didn't think it would matter to you when we have so little time before we're swept away in what happens next."

"Wait. What happens next?"

"I don't know exactly. Believe me when I say that something will happen to tear us away from this conversation, and it won't matter if we agree to it. But for now, we'll do as you wish.

"I only remember that there was a disturbance during the Assembly. The next thing I knew, I was in the Needle. But now I know what happened. It's part of what Keti showed me. That boy shot me. When you saw me laying there, you cared. Even though you hated me, you cared.

"That's what made Keti choose you, even though she didn't know what it would lead to. I think I finally understand something I never got before. Keti said she doesn't see our bodies; she only sees our energy. That always sounded stupid, but she told me it was a simple way to explain something too complicated for us.

"She didn't see you as the outlander I saw when I first spoke to you; she saw who you truly are, and knew you were the right choice."

"Okay," Dugan began slowly, "he shot you..."

"That's another thing that's hard to give a clear answer about. Was I physically there during the Assembly? Kind of...I think. When you partially wake up from a dream, but don't realize you're awake, are you dreaming or conscious? It's like that."

"Maybe I'll stick to questions you'll have answers to," Dugan said. "Couldn't Keti revive everyone she murdered? This other one brought some back, right?"

"I think she could. If she hasn't, it's because it's not allowed. According to Keti, the universe's timeline is already written. The important things are supposed to only happen in the way they should."

"And everything else?"

"Controlled chaos. There's a probability of one outcome, but events will randomly defy the odds. If you take the same way home every day, something will eventually force you to take a different route."

A pensive look crept over Dugan's face as he questioned whether he still wanted to know the hidden parameters of his world.

"So there's the goddess, and a god. How many more are there?"

"I don't know if Keti herself could say. She had forgotten that the other one existed until he appeared to her after the Assembly went wrong."

She considered whether to say more. Time was running out before they'd have to act.

"I wish I'd had more time with Keti today so I could show her what it feels like," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"She thought she knew it all. If I tried to tell her she was wrong, she would usually disappear because it was pointless to listen. I hated that. Keti told me that my reality was a self-contained sphere with nothing hidden from her sight.

"It's sad, now that I think about it. Even Keti was unsatisfied. Omniscience meant that there was no possibility for surprises, or discovering anything. Knowing everything still left something missing."

"But she didn't know everything. She got what she wanted."

The Empress nodded. "And I'd love to remind her that humans already had learned that lesson: you can get what you want, but it's never what you thought it'd be."

"Like you being free of Keti and the Needle."

Before she could respond, Dugan blurted out, "If Keti chose you as her Empress, was the kid who shot you this other god's version of that?"

Hesitation showed in her eyes. "No," she said. "Only for long enough to let this god speak to Keti. I was avoiding this, but Keti didn't choose me...she made me. Whatever state she was in before coming back, it allowed her to be corrupted. Without consciously realizing she'd done it, she isolated part of herself to protect it from that."

Dugan opened his mouth but no words came out.

The Empress continued. "She showed me all of this at once, and I didn't get time to process it because you came back. It was more urgent that I warn you about the threat to your life than tell you something that wouldn't change that."

"That doesn't make any sense," he said. "This doesn't make any sense."

"It makes sense to me, Dugan, but it won't help. I'm not Keti; I don't have the power to do what she can. I'm just a tiny part of her that wasn't corrupted. When she saw me, and my energy was pleasing to her, it was because I was the missing piece of her.

"But then she spent all this time trying to perfect me, not realizing that her standard was imperfect." She paused, distracted by her thoughts. "My mind says it must be true, but I don't feel any different. I grew up being human, and this is who I am."

Dugan cut in. "Keti can't be killed, so you can't be killed. I watched you bleed all over that stage, and then you magically woke up alive in the Needle. No wonder you were so sure that you'd be safe."

She put her hands together on her lap.

"Dugan, you can't be mad at me," she pleaded. "This situation is more complex than you can see. I'm part of her, but I'll forever be separated from the other part. I can't fix the imperfection in it, so I can't merge with it."

"What happened to the universe's timeline already being written, and there being no way to change it?"

"If there's an answer to that question, it's not going to be one you'll like. Once a flaw was introduced into our universe, entropy began."

"Who created our universe? Who created Keti?"

She shook her head. "The answer to that is beyond words. Our universe wasn't created. It existed before it existed. Maybe now you understand why I decided to hide the rest of what I saw."

Dugan exhaled loudly. "This is too much for me."

"It isn't, though. Why are you so quick to give up?"

"You want the truth?" he asked. "I'm realizing that I don't know what it was all for. I spent most of my life fighting to stay alive, but there wasn't anything to stay alive for."

Abruptly, she stood up and walked past him. "You won't know that until you see how this ends. Your answer is outside that door." Seeing that he didn't move, she added, "You won't like the answer you find if you refuse to go with me."

With that, she motioned impatiently at the wall. The door came into focus, then opened as she walked forward.

### Chapter Eighteen

None of them spoke as they neared the home of the heathens. No words were necessary; the barren land under their feet said it all. The devil Keti had committed a heinous act against humanity and decency, just as their savior Makil had declared to them.

Makil glided in the midst of thousands of his people. He took the form of a young man, though none of them could say for sure who that young man had been. Perhaps he was a long-dead prophet of Makil's.

The ground was uniformly destroyed; despite its ridged appearance, it presented no holes or bumps to watch for. In the absence of conversation, the only sound was the earth crunching under a multitude of feet.

Silhouetted in the distance, the Needle rose defiantly into the clouds. Makil had called it a monument to wickedness.

The concept baffled them, but here before them was the proof of Makil's words: the devil Keti held a place of honor here. Despite her actions, despite her absolute lack of remorse, in the absence of any steps toward contrition, people gloried in her existence.

They continued on in silence. Left unsaid, but at the front of their minds, was the fact that billions of innocent people were still dead. Makil had only brought back a slightly larger number of people than Keti had spared.

The vast majority of them had been peaceful citizens of their cities at the time of their deaths. They weren't fit for an army which marched on the territory of a cruel goddess. Yet, cut off from their former lives, and encouraged by the protection of Makil, calm prevailed as they were swept up by destiny.

In time, they neared the outlands. Makil appeared at the front of the mass of people.

"These ones," he announced, "are exempt from punishment." His voice wasn't loud, but it reached them all clearly.

They waited for an explanation of who these people were, living outside the cursed City but left alone by the goddess.

Makil turned his back and continued on.

The outlanders formed two lines to allow Makil through. It was unclear to his forces whether he was willing the people to move or if they parted on their own.

As they passed by in silence, Makil paused to look around him.

"You would not want to live in the world I will leave behind," he said to the assembled outlanders, "and I will not leave you to suffer in it. I come to judge Keti. To punish those who glorify her disruption of the natural order.

"A day will come when this planet once again is home to your kind. Forests will cover it, new species will develop within its ecosystem, and order will be restored to the aberration which Keti wrought.

"But today, a cycle ends. A new one will begin, bringing new potential. Spend your final moments knowing this, and taking solace in it."

With that, Makil stepped forward and was no longer there. The people he had escorted to the outlands were left awkwardly facing the outlanders.

A small boy tugged at his father's shirt, saying, "They dress like Grandpa and Grandma."

Dugan looked up at the patch of sky between skyscrapers.

"You've never seen a plane flying over you," he said, still pondering the dull sky.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she considered it.

"I'd never thought about that," she said. "Is it loud?"

"No, not unless it's close to the ground..."

The Empress turned to face him a little too quickly, drawing Dugan's attention away from the clouds.

"How close did they fly to the ground?!"

Dugan's expression softened, the closest he got to smiling anymore. "Well, landing requires coming down to the ground."

"Oh." She didn't understand, but decided not to press him for details.

Dugan glanced behind them as he walked. "I've never seen the City streets empty before. It's not helping me relax."

"I wouldn't think you'd have anxiety about an absence of threats."

"That's what life does to you."

He slowed down until she turned to look back at him.

"There's one question I wanted to ask you," he began.

"Just one?"

"When you said that things will be okay...were you just saying it to calm me down? Or was it true?"

She looked away and began walking faster.

Over her shoulder, she said, "I haven't told you any lies."

"That's fair. Sorry I asked."

"Let's not waste time being sorry." When he didn't reply, she added, "It's my turn to ask a question. Do a lot of people hate me, like you do?"

"I don't hate you. If I did, I'd have taken you to Lorenz. I'll admit, though...I hated you before I met you. You could say I hated the idea of you. Now I see that your life wasn't quite what I thought it was."

She broke the silence that followed. "I wish..."

"You wish what?"

"If I could have one wish, it'd be to get time here as one of you. To be a normal Citizen, and get to be part of the...I don't know how to put it in words. I don't know if there'll still be a City, though."

"If you're part of Keti, and Keti can't die..."

"I guess that means what you think it means."

"Then you have to already know that you'll always be different." He saw the look on her face, and quickly added, "Maybe you can still be part of the outside world."

"Yeah," she said without conviction. "But if I'm being honest with myself, either Keti goes away again, and I go with her, or she puts me back in the Needle. Forever."

Dugan stopped walking. "Look at me," he said. "I want you to know you can believe what I'm saying. This is the only positive lesson I've learned from life.

"Things will never turn out exactly how you hope they will. But, given some time, you realize that the way they turned out has its benefits. Sometimes it's even better than if you'd gotten what you wanted."

"I'll have to trust that you would know better than I would."

He reached over to nudge her, but pulled his hand back. "Well!" he said with surprising cheer. "It looks like the Empress is human after all!"

"Thank you."

"So...have you ever thought about what name you'd want to go by if we..."

"Yes!" she said without allowing him to finish the question. Her face took on a look of great seriousness. "I like Kayla or maybe Kyra but I also want to look into what names there are that I don't know. Perhaps I should make up a new name."

"You know what you look like to me?"

Her eyes lit up. "Tell me," she commanded.

"Maybe a Becca or Elyse. They're pretty names."

"Elyse," she said softly. "I haven't heard Elyse. Are you teasing me, or is it a good name for a girl?"

"Well, I don't know anyone named Elyse personally...but if anyone should be an Elyse, it's you, Empress."

They walked in silence, the Empress mouthing Elyse to herself but hoping Dugan didn't notice.

The Grand Hall was silent other than the soft hum of lighting strips activating.

Dugan crept through an entrance doorway before it had finished parting for him. He turned to motion to the Empress that it was safe, but she was already striding past him.

"So you were bringing me to the third Assembly," he said. "Where are the people?"

"You'll see them soon enough," she said. "While we wait, try to think of a good reason why he shouldn't kill us."

"You mean why he shouldn't kill everyone but you."

"I'm part of Keti, but still separate from her. If he destroys what's left of the planet, I might end up facing a worse punishment than death. Or the Needle."

A voice from the stage made them both jump. "I think that's accurate."

A chill ran down the Empress's spine. Standing on stage was what appeared to be the boy who had shot her.

Dugan instinctively moved himself in front of her.

He shouted, "Explain yourself!"

Makil cocked his head. "Are you not a fan of this body? It is a fitting way for me to present myself. You, Empress, should appreciate that. Keti, the whole which you are a fragment of, made this world a reflection of her own dysfunction and impurity. If you would turn away from a reminder of that dysfunction, you can hardly deny that my action today is justified."

The Empress shoved her way past Dugan. "Then skip the Assembly, and do what you came to do. I don't care to listen to any more of this."

She marched toward him fearlessly as Dugan stood frozen in place. Whatever was going to happen, he couldn't change it. As he watched, her robe flowed out from her and then retracted. Within seconds, it had become a long pitch-black dress.

The air in the room became difficult for Dugan to breathe. It appeared to be driven out of the Hall by the sheer intensity of her focus. As she ascended the stage to stand in front of Makil, the room seemed to quiver and ripple in her presence.

Makil looked past her, to Dugan. "You find comfort in her having retained the essence of humanity despite Keti's 'interference.' Do you truly want the lives of so many to rely upon the words of someone who suffers from all the flaws of your kind?"

"I do," Dugan replied. "It's your flaw that scares me. We're in this situation because your kind doesn't believe it can be flawed, or that you have anything to learn."

Makil nodded. "The outcome of today's events was decided far in advance of this moment. It is a mere formality to have this Assembly, and bring that outcome to pass."

The Empress turned her back to Makil. At that moment the seats filled with a mixture of outlanders, Citizens, and Makil's resurrected followers. Dugan instinctively turned to look at the entrance. When he turned back, he was standing on stage next to the Empress.

A murmur of confusion filled the room. Dozens of Citizens nearly fell out of their seats at the sight of adjacent non-Citizens.

All the lights went out.

Panicked voices rose above the sound of the crowd. Dugan found himself fighting an urge to flee the stage. He had no place in a showdown between a god and goddess. When he thought of this Assembly in those terms, his involvement struck him as bizarre.

In the darkness, he heard the voice of the Empress all around him. "You have done your part wonderfully," she told him. The serenity in her voice calmed him. Keti had chosen him, but for reasons he still didn't fathom and probably never would.

A small orb of mottled light appeared above the stage. Its initial flash provided Dugan and the Empress with a snapshot of thousands of faces, captured for a moment in expressions of fear, and shock, and in some cases helpless anger.

"Our planet," a voice intoned as vividly-colored land masses rose on the orb. "Ecosystems flourish in the varied environments. In its natural state, our world displays unparalleled beauty."

"The goddess Keti awakens." A tiny dot of dull brown spread outward like ink in water. It left one tiny stain of color untouched.

"And then?" Makil's voice rang out in the Hall; its unaccented style was dull, and undeniably alien.

The spot of color grew until it filled the space above the stage. The outlands and City were visible from above, then only the City, the Assembly's view racing closer until it had swung around to focus, inevitably, on the Needle.

Layer after layer vanished from sight until all that was visible of the Needle was its framework and a girl, staring forlornly from a spot near its tip.

Makil looked above himself stoically. "Keti never demanded anything of you, did she?" At that, he faced the crowd before him.

"She didn't. Not your adoration. Not your silence, either. Every day you face reminders of her actions." He paused. "Actions which you should be appalled by. She destroyed the delicate balance of your world, yet you worship her for giving you petty distractions. Is your technology worth more than all else? Can a phalanx of cleaning bots take your minds off the near-extinction of your kind?

"This is how you act as the representatives of your kind. Beneath a veneer of compassion and social graces lies a ruthless will to survive. Billions dead, but what was there to do but move on?"

A sob interrupted him. Makil closed his eyes and listened to its soft, ragged gasps and whimpers.

"Ah," he said. "And then there is the girl."

Above him, the Empress came into view as the Needle's framework faded away. She placed one hand on the window in front of her. Her features tightened as she visibly fought to maintain her composure. Another sob escaped her pursed lips.

"I believe," he commented, "she was looking down at you. Watching you live your blessed lives, and broadcast the meaningless details of your day. But why would Keti's chosen ambassador act this way?"

He left the assembled crowd uncomfortably watching the hologram. In it, the Empress pressed her head against the window to see further below her. Her hand trembled; ever so softly, the crowd could hear her fingernails making a ticking sound on the window.

On stage, the Empress glared down at her clenched hands. The hologram began to distort above her head.

"Enough." Her tone was sharp enough to silence their whispered gossip. "If anyone could have done something about Keti's actions, it was not these people or myself. It was you, who chose to do nothing."

A low hum had built in intensity as she spoke. It reached a crescendo powerful enough to shake the walls of the Great Hall. The hologram, which was already breaking apart, spread wider and wider until finally dissolving into nothingness.

When she lifted her face to look at the audience, the Empress's eyes were black slits.

Makil extended a hand, and bowed to her. "Now we will begin the second act of this Assembly. How would you like to begin, Keti?" He said the name with a tinge of affection.

From Dugan's vantage behind the Empress, there had been no indication that Keti had taken over her body. A sensation of grief ran through him as he considered the odds of the girl regaining consciousness in a world barren of human life.

She turned her head to look over the audience from one end to the other, but said nothing.

"I believe," Makil said, "that you have something to say to these insignificant bits of matter." His voice became a chaotic hiss as the last words came out.

Keti still didn't face him. "I have upset the balance of this dimension," she began, though her modulated voice lacked emotion. "The aberration threads itself through the quilt of what you call time."

Without Dugan noticing, the lights had dimmed almost completely. He looked out at a field of silhouetted people who were surely feeling just as powerless as himself. Their whispered words added an unsettling layer to the moment.

Makil stepped forward, ignoring Keti to stand at the front of the stage.

"Your lives have no value. The same is true of the lives which Keti ended. The only absolute morality, as you would understand it, is this: balance. On a multitude of levels, balance has been disrupted dangerously.

"To mend that balance, and restore equilibrium, will require a reaction of equivalent severity."

A smattering of cries erupted from the darkness.

"Yes," Makil said. "There is one clear course of action for Keti and I to take."

Keti walked to his side. "Yes. This world must be brought back to a minimal state so that it can heal, and build itself again. New life will one day bloom on its surface, but the era of humanity is a story that now reaches its conclusion."

Chaos erupted in the darkness of the Great Hall. Citizens threw themselves to the ground in agony. For the most part, the outlanders faced the news stoically, even remaining in their seats. They had accepted long ago that their world was fundamentally broken.

The rest of the crowd, those who Makil had brought to life so they could take vengeance on Keti, wasted no time in leaping from their seats to rush at the stage. Makil and Keti stared out as if they were one spirit inhabiting two bodies. As the angry mob reached the edge of the stage lights' glow, an unseen barrier held them back.

Dugan dropped to his knees. I knew it, he thought. I knew it. I should have known...

This state of disarray continued for several minutes, until most everyone had exhausted their emotions.

"But..." The word came in unison from Makil and Keti.

Everyone froze. The silence was instantaneous throughout the Great Hall.

It was Makil who spoke now. "Our kind can only act with the clarity that comes from being an embodiment of balance."

Keti turned to extend a hand toward Dugan. "This being, one of you, sees the complication to our decision..."

"Despite," Makil added, "possessing the meager reasoning capacity of humans."

Dugan looked up at them. What was he expected to say?!

He peered into the eyes of the goddess, hoping for guidance. The black abyss of her eyes turned gray, then faded to white. She blinked, and he found himself looking at the Empress. Her irises were a rich brown, which he had never noticed.

"The goddess Keti brought destruction and imbalance to our world because she lacked perspective," she said to him. "Although their kind sees the underlying nature of reality as clearly as we see the visible world, they can not evaluate their own nature."

Makil addressed the Hall. "If Keti did not perceive her own flawed state, and I did not detect it before she awoke, we can not know now if we are acting to bring equilibrium to this world.

"It is, ultimately, your imperfection that this world needs. You doubt your choices, and question your own knowledge, while we can not. You must be stewards of this planet, for our kind has proven it can not. We will no longer interfere."

Dugan felt his eyes begin to sting. "You're part of Keti. What happens to you, Empress?"

"I'm also part of humanity," she said. A tear ran down her face, but her expression was one of relief.

"What are we supposed to do?" a man yelled from the crowd. "Please!"

The lights of the Great Hall hummed to life, illuminating the crowd.

"You have a symbiotic relationship with your planet. Listen to it, and to your own uncertainty."

The Great Hall was empty except for Dugan and the Empress. Neither of them could find words to capture the moment. At some point, the distant sounds of life reached them from the world outside the Hall.

### Epilogue

The Arc's high ceiling and spacious central area made it one of her favorite places in Ring One. Light poured in from windows so high above that the cleaning drones were nothing more than distant black specks.

Dugan snuck in the rear entrance, quickly moving out of view of hundreds of teenagers and twenty-somethings who were too distracted to notice him anyway. He stuck to the curved inner wall as he moved to an inconspicuous vantage point.

"Holy shit!" A girl's voice echoed faintly before getting lost in others' laughter and conversation.

The Empress stood smiling before a half-circle of onlookers who sat watching her with rapt attention. Her hair was pulled back in the style she was known for, but now she kept pink flowers tucked above her ears.

"Yeah," she said, "Bytech Anon is kind of my guilty pleasure. I shouldn't like Carlee...but I do."

Their hands went to thin rings at their wrists. On a screen at the rear wall, a flood of emojis cascaded over the live feed.

They excitedly looked down to their CR rings. A jagged line of color circled the wrist of a short girl, who excitedly held two fingers up

"Is it true that you're friends with the girl who plays her?" she asked.

The Empress averted her eyes playfully. "Well...we run into each other every few months. I don't know that that makes us friiiiends." Her face froze in an awkward grimace, eliciting laughter and a new flood of emojis in the background.

A moment later, a serious-looking boy raised two fingers. He paused to ensure he had the group's attention.

"Why do the doctors in Ring Three have a higher patient recovery rate than medbots in our Ring? Can't you just make the medbots better?" Frowning emojis fluttered along the edges of the live feed.

The Empress held out a hand. "Come to me and be healed." She raised her eyes to the windowed ceiling. A few girls giggled into their hands. The boy hesitated, unsure if she was teasing him, but stood up and carefully stepped over hands and legs. When he reached her, she placed a hand on his shoulder.

She looked at his chest before nodding her approval. She asked, "Do you feel better?"

"I...I think so. Yeah, I feel it. What did you do? Was there something wrong with me?!"

The Empress glanced mischievously at a pair of girls who were whispering to each other. "You had minutes to live, young man," she told him. "A serious case of frown-itis."

"What?"

"I didn't do anything to heal you. Maybe now you see why people recover faster after talking to a person instead of a medbot?"

His face lit up. "Oh...," he said. "I think I do!"

On the wall behind her, a scene from Bytech Anon replaced the live feed. Carlee wore a medvest with a stethoscope hanging around her neck. She held her hands in the air and ominously said, "Come to me and be healed." Giann hesitated before approaching her.

While the main lights dimmed, Dugan caught the Empress glancing in his direction.

On screen, Giann was holding his chest. "You cured me!" he exclaimed. "What was that I just drank?"

"You had minutes to live, young man," she answered gravely. "Quite a serious case of frown-itis!"

"Frown-itis?"

Carlee shoved his shoulder. "You weren't sick, Giann. All that's wrong with you is guilt about lying to Isac and Soledad."

"But I didn't want to hurt their feelings! They're my friends."

"And look what happened. They won't stop posting their awful synth-rap songs to everyone's feeds. You need to tell them the truth before I cut my ears off!" She mimed the act of laserslicing an ear off.

Everyone in the Arc laughed, including the boy who'd unwittingly played his part in the Empress's joke. He covered his face with one hand while the lights increased to full brightness. People around him talked over each other to tease him enviously.

The Empress wisely chose to wrap up their evening there, ending it on a high note. Anyone watching the live feed had their screen hopelessly flooded in emojis, to the sound of loud, boisterous groups filing out of the Arc.

He had been right, after all: things hadn't turned out exactly as the Empress had hoped, but she still had reason to be content.

Dugan allowed himself to feel a swell of emotion as he waited.

When he visited her, she would often pause for a few minutes with her eyes closed before approaching and greeting him. He had always felt that it would be intrusive to ask for an explanation of this ritual.

Perhaps she was pushing the part of her that was Keti far into the corners of her mind, so she could be present with him as herself?

His intuition told him that the answer, whatever it might be, would flatter him. He was a singular figure in her life, he knew, and a great enigma to the world because of it.

She stood alone on the marbled floor at the edge of the Arc's central area. Without a crowd filling it, its vastness stirred up a nameless emotion in him. He wondered why she loved this spot so much; standing there, she looked more alone than she'd ever been.

Light from high above diffused to cast shimmering patterns on the building's interior. Geometric arrangements of light floated along the Arc's marble floor like an ethereal decoration for its prized guest, courting her but retreating when they got near her.

Dugan's life had never developed in him an appreciation for art. Nonetheless, he was rendered dumbstruck by this spontaneous, perfect moment.

"If only I could paint..."

He realized, with a start, that he was standing beside her without having consciously walked over to her.

The Empress opened her eyes and turned to him. Her expression softened at the sight of him.

"You would paint me like I was just now?"

"You looked like your mind was a thousand miles away, Elyse."

She smiled ever so slightly but said nothing.

Dugan gave her a soft hug, allowing her to pull him in tighter.

Author's note:

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. If not, it _was_ free...all you lost was time, which I'll admit is precious. Just Google "time-saving tips" and you can recover some of that lost time.

This novel was a pleasure to write. If you want to say things about it, I'd like to hear them.

Email: joshuarenneke@yahoo.com (and it'll maybe go to my Junk folder, so that's the worse option. Why did I list it first?)

Twitter: @anabur

