What Are You Building? Ten Years of Inception

Tags

christopher nolan, film, hans zimmer, inception, movies

July 2020 was the tenth anniversary of the theatrical release of Inception, and the movie generated so many discussions and theories that I doubt anything I say will be new. But it’s one of my top-ten, all-time favorite films, and upon watching it for the zillionth time this week, a few things came to mind.

The previous time I watched Inception, last year, I put the sound on my little desktop speakers. This time, I put it in my headphones. I’d forgotten how awesome this film originally sounded in the theater when I first saw it with my sister ten years ago. The score by Hans Zimmer is integral to the movie. Like Zimmer did for the more recent Nolan film Dunkirk, he often overlaps multiple scenes with a single piece of music that establishes a thematic unity across the scenes, tying everything together emotionally through sound.

The final scenes of the movie are unified by Zimmer’s piece called Time, the song that begins when Mr. Cobb apparently wakes up on the plane. The song continues until the very last second of the film. Over the years, I’ve come to feel this song is inextricably linked to those scenes. It begins sparsely and quietly. It’s gloomy and melancholy, but it adds layers and a swelling orchestral treatment that sounds to me like triumphant sadness. It doesn’t sound like a happy ending, but neither does it sound like total defeat.

It’s an odd emotional combination, but it makes complete sense for the film’s ending. Why? Because that’s exactly what happens to Cobb. The triumph is that Cobb at last is reunited with his children he loves so much. The sadness is that those are clearly not Cobb’s real children, and he has not returned to reality to be with them. He’s still dreaming about them and has given up on returning to reality so he can experience the happiness of being with them in the dream world. As a writer of fiction, I can relate to that a little too much.

When I first saw the film in the theater, I loved the ambiguous ending. I felt like the film was leaving it up to me to decide whether Cobb was still dreaming or had truly achieved his desire in the real world. But, after repeated viewings, I no longer sense any ambiguity at all. The entire ending is clearly a dream.

Here’s why. First, the kids are in the States, and Cobb is greeted at the airport in the States by the Michael Caine character, Miles. But we know that Miles was in Paris, France the last time we met him. Why is he in the States? Answer: He isn’t. Second, the kids appear exactly as they did in all the times Cobb saw them in dreams—the same poses, the same clothes—only this time, he sees their faces. But if Cobb were in reality, wouldn’t the kids have on different clothes and be older than he remembers them? Third, Cobb asks the kids what they are doing, and they tell him they are building a house on a cliff. Building is something associated in the film with building worlds inside dreams, and the film shows us Saito’s house on a cliff in the previous scene. These aren’t real kids in a yard. They are only dream children.

The music tells us this is both a sad and a happy moment. It’s the sonic equivalent of getting everything you ever hoped for, yet failing to get it at all, because it’s an illusion. Cobb has both abandoned his struggle to truly reunite with his real kids and escaped the fate of becoming “an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.” Cobb achieves wish fulfillment, but it’s just a dream, not the real thing.

While I no longer feel the ending is at all ambivalent, it does leave me with two questions. First, how much of the film is a dream? Others have speculated that the entire film is a layered dream, and the scenes in Mombasa support that theory, most notably in the way the walls of the city become impossibly narrow passages Cobb must squeeze through only to emerge at a too-coincidental rescue by Saito.

Second, what happens after the film’s ending? Since Cobb is still dreaming, his top will continue spinning after the final frame. But what happens when he returns to the room with the table where he left the top, then finds it is still spinning because he is dreaming? I don’t want to see an Inception II sequel, but I like to imagine the possibilities of what comes next. Will Cobb find the top spinning and lock it away in a safe to preserve the dream’s “reality” like his wife Mal did when they were trapped together in limbo? Or will Cobb see it spinning and decide to wake himself up to pursue fulfilling his desires in reality?

Perhaps the final scene with Saito as an old man in the house on the cliff provides the answer. Saito’s final physical act on camera is reaching for a pistol. But we never see what he does with it. Maybe he put it to his head and pulled the trigger, killing himself in the dream to awake in the real world, leaving Cobb to face the decision to return the same way or simply sink into the fantasy fulfillment of the dream. Given Cobb’s established penchant for self-deception, always pretending that he has things “under control” when he clearly doesn’t, it seems likely that he chose the path of fantasy fulfillment within the dream. But I think that when Cobb finds that still-spinning top on the table, he will need to make a choice about either maintaining the easy lie or returning to the difficult truth.

That choice will define his life from then on. Who knows? Maybe Saito really can do what he promised and reunite Cobb with his real children. Maybe he can’t.

So, do you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?

Maybe you have a third choice.

Big Box of Comics: Mister Miracle by Jack Kirby, Expanded TPB

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Big Barda, big box of comics, DC Comics, Jack Kirby, Mister Miracle, mister miracle TPB

For a few months in 2013, I had a complete collection of all the individual issues of Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle series. When I sold it as a set on Ebay, I knew I would miss it. But thanks to this blog’s readers, I was reunited this summer with this classic series in the form of a full-color, collected edition. Many other reviewers have focused on the dynamic art and the high-energy storytelling that characterize this and other “Fourth World” Kirby stories, so I’d like to discuss a few things that don’t get talked about very much.

But first, this collection is a great way to own all eighteen of the original Kirby issues. It’s complete, compact without reducing the page size, and “remastered” so that the art, ink, and colors are crisp and perfect. It includes all the original covers, which are brilliant works of art on their own, and all the back-up stories about the title character’s childhood. Kirby did amazing double-splash panels for this series that unfortunately get their centers lost in the gutter in a paperback-bound book, but I scanned some of the originals for you way back when.

If there’s one thing that bugs me about owning the series in this format, it’s that same perfection. When I collected the single issues, I settled for many low-cost VG+ and Fine gradings where the paper was severely yellowed (which affected the colors), and the covers had a worn, tattered look with folds and even bits missing around the corners and spines.

Only a complete maniac would claim that as a plus. But I enjoyed it. Having Mister Miracle in its original but degraded printings felt like I was unearthing some prehistoric fossil of primordial comic book awesomeness. In pristine form, it feels more like a current book that should be judged by current standards.

But current standards aren’t quite the right lens to look through for this book. In terms of the garish colors, modern mainstream comics now employ far more sophisticated coloring techniques in even the most run-of-the-mill titles. But in the 1970s, due to the pulp-quality paper, using super-bright primary colors made a whole lot of sense. Many online reviewers praise the bright colors of this collection, but sometimes they seem a bit too bright for the darker, more sinister aspects of life under Darkseid’s fascist reign explored in this series.

A scan from the original series. “Get back to your hovel!”

Also by current standards, Kirby’s treatment of “hip” slang, female characters, and “ethnic” characters might seem clunky and awkward to modern, younger readers. But it’s important to consider the standards of the day and realize Kirby was making a serious effort to be inclusive and progressive in the mainstream. When Mister Miracle began in 1971, it was three years before women in the United States could have credit cards in their own name without a husband co-signing for them. It was four years before the TV show The Jeffersons broke media stereotypes to portray a financially successful black family and their interracially married friends.

In the pages of the Fantastic Four, Kirby had already created Marvel’s first black superhero: the Black Panther. And from his editorial columns in his comics—including his 70s work at Marvel on Devil Dinosaur, the Eternals, and 2001—we know he was genuinely interested in scientific and social trends and in creating stories that reflected not just the current culture but its progress and potential.

Kirby’s idea of an African king as a technologically advanced superhero resonated with movie audiences in recent years. Wyatt Wingfoot, mentioned here, is a Lee/Kirby creation based on Native American Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe.

For me, the standout character of Mister Miracle isn’t the lead, but Big Barda. She is lightyears apart from the Sue Storm character in the early Lee/Kirby issues of Fantastic Four, who was constantly talked down to for being female. Sue was a weakling whose biggest power was to go away, at least until John Byrne wrote the series in the 1980s and changed the Invisible “Girl” into the Invisible Woman whose power became formidable.

In contrast, Big Barda totally owns her scenes through force of character. Where Sue Storm was originally a shrinking violet to be protected by the males in her group, Barda is never less than a total bad-ass. She might have a soft spot for the title character, but she never hesitates for one second to beat some ass or carve a path of destruction through her enemies, and she has zero qualms about assuming leadership and telling other characters exactly how shit will go down on her watch.

A scan from the original series. “You kill-crazy she-wolf!”

Barda also has a somewhat evil all-woman crew of warriors — the Female Furie Battalion — with hilarious names like Bernadeth, Gilotina, Lashina, and Stompa. They deal damage in ways you can guess from their names. They’ve got sweet costumes and boss weapons, and they read less like villains and more like your favorite all-girl roller-derby team starring in a modern movie.

A scan from the original series. Just a typical day for the Furies!

Barda is so awesome that I even forgive Uncle Jack for giving her a gratuitous bathtub scene. You know your writer is male when he puts a female character into a naked bathing scene for absolutely zero plot-related reasons. As a male reader who thinks Barda is the greatest thing ever and would bet money that she could even kick Conan’s naked ass, I vote that we give a pass to Kirby for this one. And a pass to me for enjoying it.

A scan from the original series. “I find this kind of moment tranquil and soothing!”

It’s that kind of tension between “great female lead” and “gratuitous female bath scene” that marks this run. Kirby was both a product of his time and way ahead of his time. Mister Miracle stands on the cusp of American history in the 1970s where society was in the midst of a massive and progressive cultural shift, one that even today we have not yet fully realized. I like the direction Kirby was trying to push that shift.

A scan from the original series.

Kirby was a soldier in Europe during World War II, and his portrayal of the oppressive, fascist society on planet Apokolips might be read as a simple indictment of the Third Reich. But Kirby was no stranger to discrimination in the States, having changed his name from the Jewish “Kurtzberg” to “Kirby” to improve his chances of being accepted and making a living.

He was the son of two Austrian-Jewish immigrants in New York in a time when anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and anti-semitism abounded in America. While the Third Reich turned those ideas into a massive extermination program, the Nazis did not invent those ideas, and they had many adherents in the States. Sadly, that is still true today. When I read Kirby’s 1970s works, I sense a subtext that he saw fascism and discrimination not as merely “foreign” problems but ones that troubled many nations, including his own.

A scan from the original series.

It’s easy to read Mister Miracle as a series of simple adventure stories full of gadgets and gimmicky escapes, and Kirby clearly wants us to be entertained, first and foremost. But we would do him a disservice if we didn’t acknowledge the socially progressive ideas he wrapped in that cloak of entertainment. Kirby didn’t finalize his ideas about humans and our place in the universe when he was a young man. He continued to explore new ideas and grow. He saw our knowledge of science, humanity, society, and ourselves as an ever-expanding field that had no lack of new horizons to explore.

And where there’s an unexplored horizon, there’s a kick-ass story waiting to be told.

Collector’s Guide: Mister Miracle by Jack Kirby, Expanded TPB; DC Comics, 2017. Also available on Amazon. Or, get the original issues.

Meteor Mags: The Hive

Tags

fiction, meteor mags, Patches, short story, the hive, wasps, writing

METEOR MAGS: THE HIVE

©2020 Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.

The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches. Episode 25.

Everything goes swimmingly on Ceres, until the crew is attacked by predators who want to feed Mags and her friends to their babies. 12K words.

🐝

PART ONE: LIBERATED

Sarah’s Prayer

June 2030. Ceres.

Sarah prayed. She sang her prayers silently, in her head. Unlike many prayers, they did not address any specific deity.

By age thirteen, Sarah had abandoned the religion of her abusive parents, having seen it for what it was: a thin veil of holiness draped over evil. When Mags rescued Sarah and her friends in 2029, the young woman entered a world of crime and debauchery, a world that gloried in apparent evil, but where people treated Sarah with kindness and respect, and where they celebrated a lusty joy for life, liberty, and song.[1]

Mags’ criminal crew was a heathen lot, but Sarah discovered many of the pirates held religious beliefs she had never encountered. Her new friends at the club on Vesta—and, after the battle on Vesta, their new home on Ceres—came from families or cultures who were Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Mormon, Anglican, and otherwise. Even the godless criminals in Mags’ inner circle held on to superstitions, faith in lucky objects or omens, prayers of their own. Mags, who despised religion in general, often referred to “the goddess” and prayed to the spirit of her great-grandmother.

Sarah decided she didn’t need a religion to pray, and she didn’t need to pray to anyone in particular. She was satisfied that it made her feel better, and she was content to sing.

Singing with Dumpster Kittens was the best feeling Sarah ever had. But the band’s songs were angry, off-color vehicles for teenage rage, and Sarah liked to sing pretty songs, too. In her prayer, she sang about the Ceresian sunsets where shades of peach and lilac painted the clouds, and the icy rings formed in 2029 sparkled with blinding brilliance for a few seconds every evening when the sun struck them at just the right angle.[2]

But life was not always beautiful. Sarah attended many bedsides during the reconstruction of Ceres. In the city of tents where the sick and wounded recovered before the hospitals re-opened, Sarah visited thousands and made friends with most. Their suffering was so intense, so raw, and Sarah felt every minute of it. She wanted to help people, for she knew what it was like to suffer, but her young mind had no defenses, and she suffered with them. It took a toll on her.

Sarah spent her thirteenth birthday holding the hand of a boy her age while he died. She felt his life slipping away, his consciousness fading, and his animal urge to hold onto life defeated. His name was Toby, and he did not live to see the arrival of Mags with staff and supplies for a newly built hospital.[3]

The smuggler arrived one morning with a ship full of surgeons, supplies, equipment, and the latest medical technology. When Celina asked where it all came from, Mags said, “Business has been good. I bought a hospital.” And the doctors and nurses? “Oh, they didn’t all come along, but the ones who did got a major pay raise. Come help me organize the security detail. This building is now under my personal protection.”

Personal protection. Mags had been using those words a lot in recent months. Later, when the ship was fully unloaded and the newly constructed hospital fully supplied and staffed, Mags told Sarah the real story.

Sarah sang about her friends who died on Vesta. She sang a blessing for Suzi, who had survived the escape from the Clinic with Sarah and their capture by the reptiles, only to fall in battle during Vesta’s invasion.[4]

Sarah mourned.

In the surrounding cities of Ceres, citizens struggled in their dreams. Sarah’s song sank into their subconscious minds and shaped their sleeping fantasies into nightmares of loss and pain and tragedy.

Such was Sarah’s prayer, and in her deepest, most meditative state, a place where silence spontaneously blossomed into song, the octopuses answered her.[5]

<Sarah.>

Octos? What are you doing here?

<So much sadness.>

I can’t help it. It’s overwhelming. I don’t know what to do.

<The whole planet feels it with you now.>

Oh, my god! I am so sorry. I’ll stop.

<You broadcast. Like a radio.>

No, I didn’t mean to! I was praying. Did I really—

<Yes.>

Tears welled in her eyes. I didn’t mean to make anyone sad. I’m sorry! She curled into a ball, and her sobbing shook her body.

<Emotions are to be shared. What one cannot carry alone, many will carry easily, together.>

No, that’s not right. I don’t want to hurt people. I don’t want to make them feel worse just because I feel bad. Everything’s terrible enough already.

<The sharing is hurtful?>

Yes.

The octopuses did not understand. They privately conferred. They had known tragedy. Their mother and a few of their siblings had died.[6] They were in contact with other minds who knew sadness: Mags and her crew, the people of Ceres, Alonso and his simian friends.

But the octos, despite their alacrity with mathematical problems and musical composition, despite the massive processing power and creativity in their group mind, they had always found the mental and emotional isolation of other beings to be nearly incomprehensible.

The octos did everything together, learned everything together, and felt everything together. To experience life alone, as an individual, without anyone sharing your thoughts and feelings? The octopuses had touched the minds of sentient beings who lived that way, but they never felt like that themselves.

In a sense, there was only one octopus. Referring to them plurally was merely a convention of language—or, more accurately, a convention of electronics, for the thoughts and sensations coded as electrical impulses in each octo’s extensive neural network acted like a circuit in parallel with all the other octopuses, with the signal flowing through multiple channels at once. Every channel was linked to the others, never separate, never one at a time.

On the other hand, they knew a thing or two about sheltering their thoughts and feelings from other sentients. They were transparent to each other, but sometimes it served their purpose to be opaque to anyone outside their group mind.[7]

Opacity, they realized, was the nature of Sarah’s problem.

<Sister. Be not sad. We will help you build a shield.>

What? Why do I need a shield?

<For your mind. To think and feel, but so no one else can share. To prevent the hurt of others.>

You mean I can turn it off? This—this broadcasting? How am I even doing that?

<Your mind, always strong. But as you grow, your power grows. Have you not noticed your power increasing since you reached sexual maturity?>

It started getting bad after I got my first period. My parents never told me anything about it. I thought I was fucking dying, so I told Kala. She laughed for a second, until she realized I was serious. Then she hugged me for a long time and told me how our bodies work. After we met Mags and Celina, they spent a lot of time answering questions, too. But the telepathy part of it isn’t normal. This doesn’t happen to anyone else. I could always kind of feel what other people were feeling, but now I can’t shut it out or make it go away. I feel like a—I don’t know what the words are for what I feel like.

<Exposed.>

Yeah.

<Vulnerable.>

Exactly.

<But now your power is so strong you do not only receive, you broadcast. We can teach you. Keep the outside pain outside. Keep the inside pain inside. The shield.>

The shield?

<Yes.>

I don’t really know you. Would Mags think this is okay?

<The goddess-mother is aware. She dreams about you right now. She feels your broadcast. She wants to protect and nourish you like a cub. But if you wish to know us, then we have no secrets from you.>

Like, right now?

<When is now? Do we have any moment but the present?>

Sarah uncurled from her huddle on the floor. She stretched for a moment then lit more candles. She made a nest of pillows around her and got comfortable, kneeling in the center. Okay. Show me.

☠️

Hyo-Sonn’s Letter

Dear Tarzi,

How is life on Mars? Did you stop smoking yet? Kala and I miss you. She says hi. Sorry I haven’t written more often, but we have been crazy busy here. Now that most everyone on Ceres has food and shelter and medical care, Mags and Celina have been trying to organize the rest of society. With the water mines re-opened, farms are springing up all over the place. The electric trains are running again, now that the railways are re-built.

I’d say things are going back to normal, but people who lived here before the tornado say this is not at all how things used to be. Workers run the mineral mines now, not corporations. Mags loves it, but it seems chaotic to me. One of the mines was closed for two whole weeks over some argument about how things should be done.

I asked Mags why she didn’t go in and start beating ass and get it re-opened. She said it was the growing pains of an anarchist workers’ society, and it was important to let them work out solutions in their own ways. Otherwise, we’d be just like the corporations.

Then she went on for quite a bit. You know how she gets.

But she had a point about giving people time to solve things without always telling them what to do. I try to do that in my classes now. I’m teaching basic algebra again, but I hope to start teaching trig, too.

I used to hate math, but now I think it just wasn’t being taught very well. Equations are puzzles, and I like how they always have solutions. They always follow rules, and you just need to know how to apply the rules for everything to make sense.

After all the senseless chaos of the last year, it’s nice to work with orderly, predictable numbers then solve real-world problems with them. Once you understand the math, you gain power over the world.

That sounds like one of your super-villains talking! But that’s what it’s all about to me. The power to bring order to chaos, predictability to mystery. I discovered that a lot of kids on Ceres—hell, even the adults—didn’t get far in school, if they ever went at all. Most of them were slaves in the mines before, or in the towns.

Sometimes in class I stop the lesson and let them talk about their experiences. If Mags can let a mine close for two weeks so people can work things out, I guess I can stop with the numbers for an hour or two. It must be the only math class in the history of the System where we have group hugs.

Not that the hugging was my idea. It was Kala’s. I’ve been to her art classes, and I swear they don’t do anything but talk half the time. One day, we spent the whole class meditating!

At first, I wondered if she was teaching anything about art. Then one day this kid brought in a painting, and he read a poem about how he was sold as mining labor when he was seven years old. He was taken from Earth and never saw his parents again. And what happened to him next?

It was the saddest thing I ever heard. But at the end, he had verses about how the tornado swept away the old darkness and revealed a light in which he could see all the possible futures opening for him.

A whole bunch of kids hugged him, and I realized they’d been through similar experiences. Kala told me later that technique is important—you know, the kind of stuff I was expecting her to teach—but the best art comes from the heart, and you need to be in touch with yourself and your feelings to make that happen.

Then she gave me a hug. Always with the hugging! But it made me feel good, and I realized that as smart as I might be at math or whatever, Kala’s always been way smarter with people.

So, I started doing that in my classes, too. Equations can wait.

Kala’s planning another mural like the one we had on Vesta. I’ve seen sketches of what she has in mind, and they’re gorgeous. She’s so talented. It makes me jealous. Then again, she asks me for help with math, so I guess we’re even.

She wants to put the mural in the new community center. The center was Celina’s idea. Mags was going on about how we needed a new club. You know, like the old one on Vesta. Gambling. Nudity. Bands. Booze. But Celina was like, shouldn’t we have something a little different for the kids and people who aren’t into partying and getting trashed all the time?

Which was pretty funny, coming from Celina, but a bunch of us wanted something like that, too.

I question a lot of Mags’ decisions, but she has a hard time refusing anything “her girls” ask of her. (That’s what she always calls us.) She said that as long as Celina would manage it, then we could have anything we want.

Celina promptly put me and Kala in charge.

Not like the construction crews and stuff. Celina handled things that were out of our league. But we got to make some designs and come up with a plan, and we got our classes involved. How much fun could we fit under one roof? It ended up being a problem that called for both art and math, and it took longer than I expected, but our classes put their minds together and came up with something amazing.

Long story short, it’s opening next week. Kala’s classes are painting it.

I guess it might be open by the time you get this letter. Maybe I should email you because it’s faster, but I hope you like getting real stuff in the mail now and then. I put a couple of Patches’ whiskers in the envelope, and a drawing of you I did last week in Kala’s class.

Anyway, if you can, you should come to the grand opening of the center! We’d love to see you again.

Hugs and Kisses,

Hyo-Sonn

☠️

Tarzi’s Letter

Hi, Hyo-Sonn! Thanks for the invite. I’ll be there!

Love the drawing. You’re getting really good! Trig sucked until Mags showed me it was simple algebra about triangles mapped on a circle. Sometimes people just need things explained to them in a language they can understand.

Hugs to you and Kala. I heard Sarah’s new demos with Dumpster Kittens, and they sound AMAZING! Please tell her I said so. And give Patches a belly rub for me.

Love you,

Tarzi

☠️

Mags’ Hammer

At the magnetic north pole of Ceres, Meteor Mags held aloft a massive hammer with both hands. The insulated rubber grip deformed under the pressure with which she squeezed it, but its stainless-steel head gleamed with reflected light from the sun.

Donny took a step back.

Fuzzlow didn’t.

Neither did Patches. The calico fluffball napped in the regolith not a meter from Mags’ feet. Unlike Donny and the rest of the crew, she was neither mortal nor vulnerable. The cat lounged with the confidence of a beast who knew she could kill anyone who disturbed her.

“Mags,” Donny said. “We could build a machine to do that.”

The hammer paused above Mags’ head. She arched one eyebrow. “Scared?”

Fuzzlow snorted. “Sane is more like it. But pound away there, mighty Thor. Get your Mjolnir on.” He cracked open a beer and handed it to Donny, then grabbed one for himself from the cooler. “We don’t have all day.”

Donny adjusted his safety goggles, steeling himself against the imminent blow. “Just go.”

Mags brought down the hammer on the two-meter long rod set in the ground. With a loud clang and a shower of sparks, it sank several centimeters into the ground.

Clang!

“Get it, Mags.” Donny saluted with his beer.

“Fuckin’ do it,” said Fuzzlow.

Mags’ black-painted lips twisted into a smile. She raised the hammer over her head then struck again. And again.

In the shower of sparks, Fuzzlow stepped back, too. “Damn! She’s tryna fuckin’ kill us!”

Donny laughed. If Mags had wanted him dead, it would have happened years before. Donny might have given her hell every chance he could, but he enjoyed the ruckus. Compared to his former life as a space-miner, life in Mags’ crew was a laugh a minute.

Clang!

A spray of metal shards landed on Patches, resting in her fireproof fur. They glowed red like embers, forming a cat-shaped constellation never before seen by human eyes. Like most stars, they eventually burned out. Were their mere seconds of existence any less beautiful than star clusters which lasted for eons? Patches licked hot metal from her tri-colored coat and purred.

Clang!

“Jesus,” said Fuzzlow. “You’ll wake up the entire asteroid!”

“Dwarf planet,” said Mags. She wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her forearm. “Watch me now.”

Mags pounded the top of the rod, driving it like a farmer might drive a fence post into the ground. In a sense, she was a farmer. She had a garden she wanted to grow, and crops she hoped to reap. But hers was no simple fence.

The rod was a component of her free-energy system, built from an element she helped design and manufacture, with a bit of thievery.[8] It represented her dream: free power for the people. Earlier that February, she installed the first of her free-energy systems on the asteroid Vesta. Since she and her girls had taken refuge on Ceres and helped the planet rebuild, the dwarf planet was the next logical candidate for pure, unlimited energy for everyone.

“How much farther?” Sweat covered Mags, and the charred remnants of hot, metallic sparks stuck to her skin.

“About twenty-three centimeters,” said Donny. He studied the device in his hand. “Maybe twenty-five.”

“Close enough,” said Mags. She sang lines from a folk tune about a man named John Henry from the early days of the American railroad. “Before I let this steam drill beat me down, I’ll die with a hammer in my hand.”

With the final blow, she said, “That’s it. Patches gets to turn it on.”

In the months after Patches first met Mags, loud noises disturbed the feline. She had covered her ears during more gun battles and jam sessions than she could count. Mags’ noise no longer bothered her, and her closed eyes betrayed her obliviousness to the hammering, chatter, and commotion.

But at the sound of her name, Patches stirred from her nap. She ran her paws over her ears several times and licked them between each pass.

“Any day now,” said Fuzzlow.

A feline scowl answered him.

“Don’t rush the mistress of ceremonies,” said Mags. “You want to light up a planet, baby kitty?” Mags swept one hand in a gesture of invitation.

Patches stepped up to the machinery beside the rod, the generator that would activate a wave resonating through the entire planet, for anyone to tap with a similar rod. Just like she had on Vesta, Patches wrapped her forepaws around the lever and pulled it toward the ground.[9]

How many more times Mags would ask her to take part in that ritual was, at the time, a mystery to the fluffy calico, and she didn’t much care how the mystery turned out. She liked Mags, and she liked Mags’ totally psychotic adventures into Murderville. Pulling a lever or two was the least she could do. She rolled back on her haunches and licked her paws.

A low hum emanated from everywhere on Ceres. The vibration shook the rock and regolith, sending clouds of asteroid dust into the sky.

“Here it comes, baby!”

Patches leapt into Mags’ arms.

Mags and her mates had already planted another rod at Ceres’ magnetic south pole. The newly planted second rod, activated by Patches, completed the circuit.

The energy wave propagated through Ceres and lit up every device connected to it: the electric rail trains, the rebuilt homes, hospitals, farms, mines, and household equipment hooked up to open-source power converters.

The initial vibration settled into wisps of dust. The planet’s energy wave reached its resonant frequency.

Fuzzlow blew the debris off the top of his beer can and raised it alongside Donny’s.

Donny smashed his into Fuzzlow’s so they spilled and soaked the Ceresian surface. “Looks like we just got off the grid forever.”

“Power to Ceres,” said Fuzzlow.

Mags raised her fist. “Power to the people. Gimme a beer! And one for Patches. Vivan las anarquistas!” She set a personal speed record for chugging twelve ounces and whipped the can at the ground. Her mates’ cans hit the ground a second later. Patches simply watched her share land beside her, bounce, and roll away. But she appreciated the thought.

Mags tossed aside the hammer and wrapped her arms around Fuzzlow and Donny. “People used to say the sky’s the limit.” She scruffed their hair. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

Patches flopped onto their feet.

“Who’s next?” Fuzzlow asked.

“Earth,” said Mags. “You guys wanna come along for the ride?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” said Donny. “How many people do we need to kill?”

“A fuck-ton,” said Mags, “and a half.”

Fuzzlow shrugged. “Sign me up. Celina already said she was going.”

Mags said, “Ceres can live without her for a couple days.”

Donny furrowed his brow. “Your first station on Earth was in the South Pacific. Where the hell do we put the other one? Alaska?”[10]

Fuzzlow asked, “Who the hell can we find to guard it in some godforsaken Arctic wasteland?”

Mags laughed. “Haven’t a bloody clue! But your geography is way off. The opposite of the South Pacific is more like Mali or something. But we’ll get it sorted. My octos can’t survive there, and I’m not sending my baby space lizards without them. So, either we leave that power station unattended, or—” Mags snatched another beer from the cooler. “Or, I don’t know what the fuck. Cheers!”

☠️

Tarzi’s Presents

Hyo-Sonn threw her arms around Tarzi and squeezed. “You made it!”

He held her close and planted a kiss in her jet-black hair. “Of course! I even brought presents. For both of you. Kala!”

Hyo-Sonn stepped away for Kala to give the young man a hug, too. He didn’t kiss Kala, but he asked how she was.

Kala said, “We missed you! Oh, look at your bracelet. I love it.”

Tarzi held out his wrist and rotated it back and forth to display the jewelry. Sparkling in the light, its thick silver bands held a dozen polished stones, black as obsidian. They, too, caught the light. “They’re trilobites. You can see the ridges in their shells. The outlines of their little faces.”

Kala held his hand and brought it to eye-level. “Beautiful.”

“They’re just like mine,” Hyo-Sonn said. “But smaller.”

Tarzi said, “They’re exactly like yours. I got them from the same rock.” The first time he ever talked to Hyo-Sonn, he gave her an unpolished stone in which two trilobites nestled against each other like the two halves of the yin and yang diagram. With a laser, he had sliced it from the interior of a mysterious asteroid only hours before meeting her.[11] “Mags and I talked about going back and mining fossils from it, but shit happened. Anyway, I shuffled some paperwork on Mars and got a few miners out there. We’ve been making custom jewelry and carvings and selling them on the side.”

Kala said, “I thought you worked for the Port Authority now.”

Tarzi shrugged. “I need something to do after I finish two weeks of paperwork in forty-five minutes. Check this out. For you, Hyo-Sonn. And Kala, for you.” He handed each of the young women a small jewelry box. “I hope you like them.”

Tarzi’s gifts were more than objects. They were symbols of something he understood about the young women. Though he had much to learn in the life that awaited him over the next two centuries, he was not naïve at age fifteen. What naïveté survived his childhood had been swiftly eroded by his adventures with Mags since 2028.

The love between Hyo-Sonn and Kala was no mystery to him. The only mystery was how that fact did nothing to diminish his feelings for Hyo-Sonn—nor her feelings for him.

He savored the looks on the girls’ faces when they opened the boxes. The way their hands moved to touch the wonders inside. How they looked at each other first before returning their attention to him. The two of them were beautiful together, like a pair of candles lighting the darkness.

Each of the jewelry boxes held four things: two silver earrings, a matching necklace with a pendant, and a bracelet. The bracelets resembled Tarzi’s, though more slender and feminine. Each piece of jewelry held polished, black trilobite fossils: as stones set in the earrings, pendants dangling from the silver necklace chains, and arrayed in the bracelets.

Tarzi swept back his mohawk with one hand. “We’re working on rings now, and ankle bracelets. It’ll be a complete set, someday!”

“It won’t be complete without piercings,” said Kala. “Are you planning to make nipple rings?”

“I, uh—” The question caught Tarzi off guard. “Did you need those?”

Kala smacked him in the arm. “Not yet.”

Hyo-Sonn turned her back to him and held up the ends of the necklace behind her. “Will you get that for me?”

His hands touched hers. He took the clasp from her grasp and hooked it to the other end of the silver strand. “There. Kala?”

Kala let him clasp her necklace while Hyo-Sonn took off her earrings and replaced them with Tarzi’s.

Hyo-Sonn slipped on the bracelet and faced him. “What do you think?”

The young man who never found himself at a loss for witty repartee on Mags’ adventures was struck speechless.

Kala laughed. “Now we match.” She held up her bracelet to where it, too, caught the light. “Thank you, T-man.”

Tarzi said, “Now we match. All three of us.”

Hyo-Sonn took him in another embrace. She did not release him so quickly as before.

The loudspeaker interrupted. Mags’ voice blared in their ears. “Ceremony in three minutes! Gather round!” Her drunken slur was not yet so bad that it obscured her meaning.

Kala said, “That’s my cue.”

Hyo-Sonn kissed her. “Knock ’em dead.”

Tarzi said, “Bring ’em to life, too.”

Kala studied their eyes for a moment, then their faces and stances and the folds in their clothing as if she were capturing the image for a portrait.

Hyo-Sonn said, “Love you, baby.”

Kala placed one hand against her friend’s cheek. “Love you, too.” Before she walked away to the podium, she said, “You too, Tarzi. Thank you for the jewelry.”

“Don’t mention it.” But as she walked away, Tarzi knew the mentioning meant everything.

As Kala gave her speech, Hyo-Sonn’s hand clasped his, and he gripped it. Tarzi whispered, “She’s amazing.”

“Yes, she is. Do you fancy her?”

“Not like that.” He held her to him, embracing Hyo-Sonn from behind and pulling her closer until he could bury his face in her wisps of hair and the curve of her neck. “I love that she makes you happy. That’s all that matters.”

During the DJ set that followed, Tarzi and Hyo-Sonn danced together.

Kala eventually joined them.

☠️

Kala’s Speech

I’m not so good at speeches, but welcome to the new community center! We’ve got a pool, a roller derby rink, a cafeteria, and so much more. But as fun as all that is, what we’ve really got is each other. I want to thank the kids from our classes who worked so hard on this and came up with so many great ideas.

Thank you, Hyo-Sonn and Celina, for the amazing leadership you brought to this project. The list of workers I should thank would take all night to read, but we have a plaque in the lobby. Okay, it’s not really a plaque. It takes up a whole wall! But I hope you stop by and take a few minutes to appreciate just how much of a group effort this was.

If you’re in this room, then you saw the new painted mural in our lobby, too. I don’t think it needs any commentary from me, but the people who worked on it asked me to say a few things.

First, it’s a triptych—a fancy name for a painting that has three panels. I got the idea for it one night when Mags told us a story about Patches. I took notes and made sketches.

Some of you know that we worked hard on a mural about Mags’ adventures back at the club on Vesta, and that mural was blown to bits in an invasion the same day we unveiled it. For a little while, we talked about painting the same thing here.

But after a few discussions in my art class, we decided that instead of recreating the past, we should roll with the punches and make something new.

My family comes from India, and the three panels represent three different Hindu goddesses. We made every one of them a depiction of Mags, with each panel saying something about who she is and what she means to us.

☠️

Kala’s Mural

Though she had left her family on Earth, Kala remembered her roots. Her name meant “art” in Hindi, though it had a different connotation in India, not “fine art” as someone from the States would understand it. The word included domestic arts, too—a long list of skills that suited a traditional wife. Kala thought it all a bit sexist from a modern perspective, but she felt the skills would suit anyone, and she decided to share what she knew.

The more she taught, the less she thought of herself as a teacher. She considered herself a student, one who shared her journey of art with other people on similar journeys, walking with them side-by-side. If she could help them, guide them, or show them something she had learned, then great. But she learned from her students as often as they learned from her. Supporting each other was far more inspiring to Kala than leading the charge.

The charge was best left to Mags. Mags reveled in combat. If there wasn’t a fight happening, she would look for one. When Kala realized that, and articulated it, the new mural was born. Kala considered Mags and her contradictions and decided on three ancient goddesses who embodied those traits.

The first panel portrayed Mags as Durga, the goddess of combat. Durga’s familiar was a lion, a beast of strength and ferocity, of indomitable spirit. Kala changed the lion to everyone’s favorite calico cat. Durga had additional arms, so Kala fashioned them out of octopus arms, with an octopus head in place of Durga’s helmet. Like a puma with cubs, Durga was a protective mother who would fight to the death for her little ones. She was strength coupled with compassion.

The second panel portrayed Mags as Lakshmi, and Lakshmi’s wealth well-suited the criminal’s avarice and uncanny ability to get her hands on damn near anything she wanted. Lakshmi embodied power and beauty. Sovereignty was also her realm, and though Mags had no love for monarchists, she tried to model for her girls the idea that every person was sovereign unto themselves, an inviolate nation of one who insisted on being recognized. Lakshmi’s familiars were an elephant and a swan. Based on notes from the bedtime story Mags told about Patches’ visit to prehistory, Kala made her familiars a Baluchitherium and Mags’ ever-present kitten.

The third and final panel depicted Saraswati: Mags as the goddess of music, with a veena. She plucked her stringed instrument in the center of a giant lotus flower. Patches replaced a swan, and a flock of magpies replaced a peacock. The musician’s four extra arms became octopus arms.

Mags cried the first time she saw it.

☠️

Mags’ Speech

In a rare moment of embarrassment at Kala’s accolades, Mags took Celina’s hand and whispered, “That’s bullshit, though. You’re needed here as much as I am. Hell, you deserve your own mural.”

Celina squeezed her hand. “Bloody oath. But who do you think encouraged all this? If I wanted a monument, I’d have it. I’m not in this for glory.”

“As if I am,” said Mags.

“That’s not what I meant. I just mean you make a better target than me!”

Mags laughed. “Thanks for nothin’! Let me draw all the fire.”

“But you’re so good at it! Might as well paint a bullseye on that big old arse of yours.”

“Whatever.” Mags flicked her tail.

“But you know what? When the law aims at you, they don’t see me in the shadows. I got your back, girl.”

Mags purred. “You always did.” She kissed Celina’s cheek.

From the lectern, Kala asked Mags if she would like to say anything.

Celina said, “Go on,” and patted her bum. Anyone else attempting that move would have lost a hand.

Mags bent over the mic to address the crowd. “I had a speech prepared,” she lied, “but fuck that. I just want you all to know I love you. I love you, Celina, and I love my girls. I love what you’ve done with this place. I fuckin’ love the mural! I mean it. Thank you. Most of all, I love what you’ve accomplished on Ceres this year—all of you. The survivors. The people who showed up to help us. The new friends we made, and the old friends we treasure. You lot make me proud. And if I keep going on like this, I’ll probably cry again. So, is the bar open, or what? Let’s party!”

PART TWO: IMPRISONED

Alonso’s Friends

June 2030. Below the Belt Strip Club.

Six months had passed since Mags put Kaufman and his son Anton in charge of Below the Belt. She dropped by now and then to check on them, but the former Chief Administrator found running the place was less stressful than his work in the Port Authority on Mars. He discovered a newfound peace in menial tasks, from changing the grease in the fryers to polishing the bar top until it gleamed. Unlike his old office job, the club gave him time with Anton, hours every day, working side-by-side.

They considered changing the name, but Below the Belt was a household word to legions of space miners, and the dancing beauties that graced the stage drew crowds. Plus, Kaufman enjoyed the spectacle.

Live music had become a regular event at Below the Belt, and Anton’s teenage friends in the band performed and recorded there. One afternoon, while the Dumpster Kittens rehearsed for a concert of new material for their closest friends, Alonso and two of the Small Flowers paid a visit.

Before he could pass through the curtain to the Kittens’ green room and practice space, Alonso faced the most fearsome sentry in the solar system, lying on the floor before him. He knelt before her majesty and held out one hand for her to sniff. “Sup, Patches? You on guard duty tonight?”

The lazy calico rubbed the sides of her mouth against his fingers, first one side, then the other. She rose to her feet and put her butt in his face.

He scratched the base of her tail. “Gatita mía.”[12]

Patches arched her back and purred.

After a time she deemed suitable for worship, and more sweet words from Alonso, she stepped up to the curtain and batted it with one paw.

Alonso stood. “Good to see you, too, kitten.” He flung aside the curtain.

Patches paid no heed to the two monkeys who followed him. She flopped on her side and licked her fur. The macaques, she had met many times before. She tore up a few of them the first time they met, but they had attacked her first. [13]

Patches rubbed a paw over her ear. The monkeys had since achieved a status somewhere between friendship and tolerance, but she didn’t need them petting her. She liked Alonso, though. He sometimes recited poetry to her in Spanish.[14]

“Lonso!” Sarah’s voice came through a PA cabinet. “Yeah!” Not leaving her place at the mic, steadying her bass with one hand, she waved him over.

Alonso stepped up to the young man on her left. “Sup, Anton?” He held out one hand, and the fourteen-year-old guitarist gripped it.

“Just practicing! You brought some friends.”

“Yeah, they wanted to meet you vatos.[15] Sup, Sarah!”

The young woman wrapped her arms around him. She didn’t say a word, but her bass raised a hellacious noise between them. She laughed and turned the volume knob all the way down.

“Sup, Jinx!”

The drummer held out her hand between the crash cymbals. “Misma mierda, diferente día.”[16]

“Oh shit, you’ve been practicing.”

“Slaying these fuckin’ drumheads, too. What’s with the entourage?” Jinx was the oldest member of the band, older than Anton by barely a year and Sarah by a little more than two. She aimed a drumstick at the monkeys.

“Mis compadres.[17] We’ve been jamming in the Small Flowers for a while now, but they wanted to get into a tighter thing. Small Flowers, you know, we get way fuckin’ out there sometimes. It’s not even what some peeps think of as a song anymore.”

“It gets kinda abstract,” said Anton. “I mean it rocks, but—”

“But where’s the song?” Alonso swept his hands before him. “I told them it was right here. The Kittens have been cranking out straight-up punk jams, right? I thought my funky monkeys might fit in.”

Jinx scowled. “They got names?”

Alonso nudged the closest one. “Say hi.”

One of the macaques stepped forward. Her fur was a white basecoat darkened with a topcoat of grey. A pure white stripe adorned her nose, framed by two on her cheeks, and white paws. “Svetlana,” she said. “And my brother, Dmitri.”

The second monkey raised his fist in salute. “Dumpster Kittens for life!”

Jinx said, “I like them already.”

Anton answered with a raised fist.

Sarah asked, “What instruments do you play?”

“They fuckin’ rock on drums,” said Alonso, “but you got that covered. Svetlana here plays a killer bass, though, and you could use a little oomph on the bottom end. No offense, Sarah.”

“I’d rather have my keyboard anyway,” she said. “We totally need a bass player.” Sarah pulled the bass over her head and offered it to Svetlana. “Wanna give it a shot?”

The macaque accepted. She held the bass against her like a lover, caressed its wooden curves, and played.

After four explosive measures that stunned the Kittens into silence, she stopped. “Dmitri plays balalaika. Can we play a song for audition?”

Mags threw aside the curtain to the room. “Who’s having auditions?!”

“Mags!”

“I heard you all were up to something back here.”

Alonso said, “Security is on point.”

“Yes, she is.” Mags purred. “I found a fuckin’ balalaika in the hallway! Does this belong to anyone?”

Dmitri raised his fist.

“Word.” Mags handed him the instrument. It had three strings and a wooden, triangular body. An electric pickup had been bolted into the soundhole. Mags plugged it into an amp.

What followed was the most rousing rendition of the Russian folk tune Kalinka that Mags had ever heard. She knew the tune well. She sang it the first time she met the monkeys on their deserted asteroid.[18] They had followed her ever since.

But Svetlana and Dmitri turned the song into punk rock, keeping the tempo changes but ripping it out with aggression, as if they did not care whether they tore the strings off the instruments.

Jinx responded with a measure of drum fills that rocked the room. Spurred to action, Sarah and Anton joined in.

One minute and forty-five seconds later, Jinx’s drum line devolved into chaos. She laughed from her throne until everyone stopped playing. “That was awesome! Ahahaha! But seriously. We’ve been thinking about having aliases. You know, like the Ramones, but kitten-themed names.”

Sarah said, “Mine’s Katja Kitten.”

“Saaya Kitten here,” said Jinx. “It means ‘shadow’.”

“Stormy Kitten,” said Anton.

Svetlana considered. “I would like to be Kitti,” she said. “It’s Russian for kitten. Dmitri?”

“I like Koshka,” said Dmitri.[19]

“Fuck yeah,” said Mags. “You little Stalinists are alright.”[20]

Sarah asked, “Do you want to play a few songs with us tonight? Just to get in the groove?”

Nothing could have made the monkeys happier.

That night, Sarah took the mic. “Hi! I just want to say thank you all for coming here tonight to party with us. A couple friends came by to kick things off. They promised to destroy your degenerate minds, and I said that sounded like a wonderful idea! So here they are, straight out of motherfucking Siberia. Welcome my newest comrades, Kitti and Koshka!”

The band launched into the first song. An enthusiastic crowd of friends cheered them on. At a table at the front and center of the stage sat two couples: Mags and Plutonian, and Celina and Fuzzlow. Patches sprawled on the tabletop amongst the bottles, glasses, and ashtrays. Moments after the first song started, Patches had the table to herself as the couples got up to dance.

Around her, close friends of the band joined the dance: Hyo-Sonn and Kala, the guys from the Psycho 78s and Alonso, and a couple dozen of the crew from the old club on Vesta. Kaufman tended bar, and he was all smiles as his son Anton rocked the house. A smattering of regulars completed the crowd, customers the club had regained since re-opening after Slim’s death on Vesta.[21] It was an intimate and supportive audience.

The Dumpster Kittens almost made it through three songs.

Patches sensed the trouble first. The humans could not distinguish the approaching sound from the noisy rock music blaring from the PA system. But Patches heard it. A hum in the distance, like a hundred giant wings buzzing, grew in volume. Patches’ hair stood up all over her body. Her ears twitched. She howled and leapt to her feet to give a warning, but only Mags understood. Anyone else who noticed the cat assumed she was getting into the show.

The club trembled as if hit by an earthquake, and the roof was ripped away into the sky and out of view. The only signal of its fate was the crash it made on the ground outside the club.

Between the concert crowd and the stars above flew a swarm of wasps, each as big as a full-grown human, with wings two meters long. The wings vibrated like a mad symphony, punctuated by the clattering of shiny black mandibles and the crashing debris from the club structure.

Stone filled with sharp teeth of rebar smashed onto the stage, obliterated tables, and slaughtered people in the booths and dance floors. Mags, Celina, and the 78s drew their pistols and fired upward through the dusty haze. Several patrons joined in. The ricochet from drunkenly fired bullets was just as deadly as the collapsing sections of the building falling into the club.

Many ran for the front doors. Outside, no kinder future awaited them.

Encircling the club, the wasps snatched up the humans from the ground. From above, wasps plummeted through the gunfire to grab those in the club’s interior. Each captive met the same fate—each one but Patches.

She proved to be too tough.

☠️

Jinx’s Escape

The first thumps of the wasps landing on the roof drowned out Jinx’s bass drum. Even the drunkest patrons stirred from their lethargy, and the more alert ones leapt to their feet or cowered in their booths.

While Mags, Celina, and the guys from the 78s drew their pistols and fired, Jinx threw down her drumsticks and yelled to her bandmates.

Masses of stone and metal fell from above and crushed the people scampering for the fire exits and the front entrance. The roof’s central beam was all that saved the Dumpster Kittens and their new friends on stage. Rubble crashed around them. Jinx screamed to the band. She threw open the door to the rooms backstage. “This way! Come on! Come on! Go, go, go!”

Jinx led her friends through the backstage hallway, past the private rooms that had been converted to tattoo studios, a practice space, and apartments. Down the dark hallway they ran to the dim light shining through the double doors at the rear of the club.

The Kittens burst into the club’s exterior, safe from falling debris. Jinx crashed through the door first, then grabbed it before it slammed shut. She screamed, “Come on! Come on!” Sarah ran through the doorway, then Anton, then Kitti and Koshka.

But as safe as they were from the club’s destruction, Jinx had led the Dumpster Kittens to a far more horrible fate.

Wasps snapped up Jinx and her friends. Struggling against the insects was futile. The wasps’ six arms and aerial mobility gave them total advantage. The struggling did not continue for long. Each wasp injected its captive with a stinger the size of a railroad spike. The cruel weapon pumped each prisoner full of venom, a neurotoxin that caused paralysis in seconds.

With each neutralized victim, a wasp flew off to the horizon, one after the other. Their destination: the hive.

☠️

The Wasps’ Origin

In the late Cretaceous, the Draco sought to expand their terrestrial empire into outer space.[22] They enjoyed conquest for conquest’s sake, but expansion was also a matter of survival. Their advancements in telescopes and mathematics gave them foresight into the asteroid collision that would end most life on Earth, and the Draco did not want to end.

Once the Draco developed space flight, they targeted the asteroid belt. From there, they hoped to study more directly the swarm of rocks that occasionally broke free from orbit and plummeted toward Earth. The Draco did not “colonize” the Belt in the way we now understand colonialism, for the entire expanse was empty of life and the conditions to make life possible.

Throughout the rocks that spun in songless night between Mars and Jupiter, the Draco established research stations run by the warrior-scientists who dared the earliest voyages. The explorers took samples of lifeforms from Earth, hoping to adapt them to the conditions of the void between stars and planets.

Millions of years before the emergence of humans, the cruelest animal experimentation spread throughout the System. Vivisected in the name of advancing the agenda of a single species, countless organisms suffered and died at the Draco’s hands.

The research labs remained unknown to humans until the early twenty-first century, when exploration of the belt once again became a concern of the most powerful rulers of Earth. Corporations and governments sent teams to the remains of labs they discovered, and those teams attempted to pick up where the Draco left off, continuing the experiments to create new lifeforms that could survive in space.

Meteor Mags and her crew had encountered more than one of those abandoned labs in the Belt, and also on Earth. They discovered various creatures, and Mags made a habit of employing the genetically altered, cybernetic beasts in her retinue to serve her own purposes: Tarzi’s seahorse, who fought and died at Mags’ side in a rescue mission; her eels, who had betrayed her by spawning a monstrosity in her image; her mantas, who helped win a decisive battle during the invasion of Vesta before being slaughtered by attackers; and her ichthyosaur, who patrolled the South Pacific waters at her bidding and guarded the first of two sites intended for her free-energy system.[23]

At a major research lab in the Belt, the reptiles started with one of the smallest but most ruthless, vicious insect genera: wasps. The Draco transformed wasps into space-faring weapons of enormous size, as large as a full-grown human.

Following an ancient asteroid collision that destroyed their lab and set them free, those weapons thrived in the Belt for eons, undetected by Earth’s astronomers. The wasps built nests in frozen rocks. They evolved to create nests from minerals rather than cellulose. They survived not on the sweet nectar of flowers but by absorbing solar energy with their wings and carapaces.

History obliterated the names of the wasps’ creators. But the passage of time did not diminish the animal instincts focused, perfected, and engineered.

☠️

The Wasps’ Hive

The Queen of Wasps awaited the swarm. She stood guard in the entrance to an asteroid cave, scanning the horizon with her compound eyes the size of a human head. The front pair of her six shiny black legs groomed her antennae for longer than was necessary, an action that soothed the hive’s matriarch. Then she busied herself cleaning the entrance, clearing away any loose rock, every stray pebble.

Her precise, rapid movements would have appeared nervous or frenetic to a human observer. But that impression would be wrong. Calm, alert, disciplined: these were not “values” in the human sense, but every member of the hive embodied them. Those who did not had been torn to pieces and eaten.

The Queen ceased cleaning. Specks appeared above the distant hills, followed by a song of wings as the specks grew larger. The Queen beat her wings against her body in a greeting. Her inhuman emotions resembled those of a mother welcoming her children and a general reviewing his troops. She noted the orderly formation of their flight, and she was pleased to see each wasp carried prey.

She stepped aside, back into the cavern. As each of her soldier-children landed and entered, one-by-one, she brushed their antennae with hers. She learned more of their foray from pheromones than simple words could express.

The prey was motionless. The predators placed each prisoner into a hexagonal cell in the hive. Earth’s wasps built from wood pulp, but the space wasps built their hive with minerals. The solid stone cells extended downward, vertically. Into each cell went a human—some feet first, some headfirst, all immobile.

Over each cell, the Queen squatted. One-by-one, she released eggs. The soft, translucent shells filled with life settled on the prey. Inside every egg squirmed a larva, waiting to be born. When the young wasp broke through its nutrient-filled egg sac, it would have a live meal waiting for it, a meal that could not move but was alive and conscious. A meal that suffered.

☠️

The Larva’s Language

The egg on Sarah’s back weighed heavily upon her. Paralyzed by venom, she slumped against the wall of her cell, without enough room to fall to her knees and crouch. Though she could not move, Sarah felt the motions of the nameless thing inside the egg. She wanted to vomit, but her body could not.

Sarah calmed her mind. She remembered what the octopuses taught her about focus. About peace.

At least I can still breathe. The thought was no comfort to her. If she was breathing, she reasoned, then when the monster in the egg hatched and began to eat her, she would be alive. Will I feel everything? The teeth and the tearing and the—

Sarah erased the thought from her mind. Breathing deeply, regularly, she imagined her thoughts as words appearing on a board. She didn’t worry about them, just erased them one by one until at last they stopped, and the board was blank.

She stared at the empty surface in a trance. Her heart rate slowed to a crawl. Stillness. A pond untouched by wind or stones or insects. Water without a ripple.

Sarah imagined she drew on the board. First, an egg. A simple curve, not with lumpy rings covered in sticky mucus like the thing in the cell. A simple curve, narrower at one end and rounder on the bottom. Egg.

Sarah didn’t let the curve make a ripple. Calm, centered, and still.

She held an imaginary fingertip to the board. Inside the outlined egg, she drew the creature inside. Not a fully developed wasp, the larva resembled a fat, segmented worm with mandibles. Rather than eyes, a pair of crude, black, light-sensing organs straddled its face.

A chill ran down Sarah from her head to her toes. It rippled. She calmed it.

Focusing on her depiction of the beast she was enslaved to, she said, “There you are. I see you. Can we talk?”

She received no response.

Sarah reached out to its mind and looked for similar words in its language. She discovered thoughts in a form completely alien to her. “Can” had no equivalent. What passed for verbs in the larva’s language did not express possibilities. Events either definitely happened or they did not—whether past, present, or future.

“We” was difficult, too. The wasp concept of a plurality included only members of the hive, the only possible collective subject. Nothing and no one outside the hive could be included in “we”.

Sarah settled on the closest linguistic unit to “we talk”. It was a clicking, clacking noise the adult wasps made with their mandibles when they wanted to chatter with each other. The adults made the same sound above the cells of the larvae to signal their presence when they brought construction materials or nutrients.

Sarah thought the unfamiliar word.

She received an echo. The larva thought the same word in response.

Sarah allowed the smallest ripple in her still waters, a smile whose energy warmed her in the cold, rocky cell. Good, she thought. What next? She searched the larva’s memories for times the adults had spoken to it. After each of their rackety greetings, the older insects always said the same thing.

Sarah pondered the statement for a long time. Her imaginary finger made notes on the board. She realized it could have only one human meaning. Sarah said, “I love you.”

She received an echo. Another ripple. Good.

What is the word one wasp uses when urging another to take action? Sarah searched. The wasps’ imperative way of thinking did not lend itself to polite requests. She broadcast, “Do something for me.”

She had the larva’s attention. “Heal me. I need—” Sarah considered her next words. What is wasp freedom? She puzzled over it for long minutes. The larva had only ever known its cell. But on an instinctual level, it knew its future. Its fate was genetic.

Freedom. Sarah practiced once and wrote it on the board.“I need to fly.”

<Fly.> The monster knew that word.

Sarah pursued. “Fly. Help.”

<Help.>

“Yes.”

<Yes.> Whether or not it might help Sarah was not a decision for the larva. An adult had spoken to it, loved it, and given an order. It acted without hesitation, though the solution took much longer.

It synthesized an antidote to the paralyzing venom. Each member of the hive was immune to the sting of any other member, and the larva was no exception. It generated the antibodies from its own tissues for Sarah.

Without warning, it sank its mandibles into her neck, piercing the safe membrane of its egg to deliver the lifesaving anti-venom.

Sarah fell to her knees and threw up. She screamed. Her hands clutched the mandibles on her neck in a struggle to pry them loose.

The larva’s comforting song reached her thoughts. She relaxed and let the antidote flow through her veins.

The pain was a healing pain. Blood streamed from the puncture wounds in Sarah’s neck. Her body felt like it was on fire. One by one, she stretched her fingers, toes, and limbs. She tried to stand but collapsed. Breathe, she thought. Breathe. From her hands and knees, she pushed herself to her full height.

The egg slid off her back and plopped on the floor. The larva inside wriggled and convulsed.

Sarah said, “I love you, too.” She scooped it up and held the gelatinous mass in her arms. Dying without its egg sac intact, it writhed. The egg’s liquid nutrients splashed Sarah’s eyes and coated her body in the struggle.

Her stomach heaved again. It was empty. She spat, but the taste did not leave her mouth. She ignored the screaming in her mind. Sarah focused on the one thing that mattered. She swept away pity, fear, and rage. Standing as tall as she could, lifting her burden over her head, she pushed it up and over the top of the cell.

Sticky fluids dripped into her hair and on her face. She was not tall enough to push the larva all the way, so she jumped. It slid onto the surface above.

Sarah could not reach the edge even standing on her toes, so she jumped again. Her fingers made it to the top of the cell, but the larva’s slime resisted her grip. She fell and cursed herself. Taking a position on the opposite wall of the hexagon, she tried again. Her fingers found the edge, and she pulled herself up. Her knees and elbows smacked the stone as she fought to get out. Pain shot through her limbs like electric shocks leaving behind persistent, throbbing aches.

Once outside the cell, she lay flat on the cold rock and panted for breath. But the larva did not have much time. Sarah pushed herself to her feet and scooped it up again.

“Now,” she said. “Help my friends.”

☠️

Patches’ Journey

Patches howled. Six clawed hands like hunting traps imprisoned her. She swiped a paw and sliced through one of them. The claw clung to her, but both severed ends oozed a substance like mammalian blood but green. Patches swung again.

The wasp holding her met only with frustration. Its stinger could not penetrate the prey. It stabbed its small but thrashing bundle repeatedly to no avail. It lost another hand.

Without regard for its own life, the wasp flew away from the club, taking Patches with it.

Patches flailed her claws, trying to tear open the monster’s underside and spill its guts. She did not connect. The beast’s arms were too long.

The stinger tried to stab her again. Patches sank her teeth into it and tore it off. A spray of green fluid coated her face. The wasp veered toward the ground, then pulled up.

Patches gained a hold. She clambered onto her assailant’s back and took the base of one wing in her mouth. She clamped her jaws and ripped away the wing.

Victory was not won so easily. The mangled wasp arrived at its destination, above a dark crevice where it intended to drop the troublesome mammal. It smacked Patches away with its remaining wing, but it no longer had control and was losing blood rapidly.

Together, the screaming calico and the one-winged wasp plunged into the chasm below. They smashed into the sides of the rocky arroyo and tumbled to the bottom.

Only one of them survived.

Patches felt no pain when she hit the cavern’s bottom. The impervious kitten sprang to her feet. To either side, relentless walls and crags rose into the sky. Stars filled a dim slit a kilometer above her, splashed across her only exit.

At her feet lay piles of bones, and unearthly arthropods fed on them. With a crunch, her paws sank into the calcium graveyard, and she sent several scavengers to their deaths before the rest backed away. The dead wasp’s blood and scent drove them mad, but not so mad they would brave the hellish beast who had dropped into the cavern with it. The bringer of death. The scavengers scampered into shadows, chittering amongst themselves then falling silent. They could wait until she left.

Patches was not a detective. She did not ponder the people who once owned the bones around her. She paid no mind to the simpering scorpions she had driven away. She studied the sky.

The wasp intended to drop Patches where she could do no harm. But doing harm was exactly what Patches wanted. She had been as happy as possible only moments before, hanging out with her crew. Then the monsters went and fucked it all up.

Patches frowned. She took a moment to survey her surroundings and licked one forepaw while she considered.

Without warning, she snapped to attention. Her pupils dilated. Her tri-colored ears pressed flat against her head.

She leapt onto a rock at the base of the canyon. A second later, she was climbing the wall, sinking her claws into solid stone.

Patches scurried upward. Paw over paw she climbed. Anger fluffed her fur until it stood on end, and she snapped her tail back and forth like a whip.

Nothing could stand between her and her friends. Least of all, some goddamned insects.

☠️

Sarah’s Burden

Sarah gripped the larva in its broken egg sac and stumbled from cell to cell. Mags, she thought. Mags first. There was Donny below her, and Anton, and Koshka. All her friends.

She lost her footing and fell. Sarah cried. She bled from her knees and her hands.

Then she stopped weeping. “Fuck this. I can cry later.”

She rose with her grotesque bundle. The narrow stone walkways between cells were hexagonal, and she struggled to find a path. Focus, she thought. Find Mags first.

From cell to cell she wandered, clutching the larva. The gel inside the egg spilled onto her through the punctures the larva had made in the egg sac to inject her. The unborn monster was dying. It could not survive without its egg.

Sarah talked to it. Sarah lied to it. She told beautiful lies. Sarah told the larva it would live forever, and it had no reason to worry. It only needed to do one more thing for her.

She fell again but did not pick herself up. She had arrived at Mags’ cell.

Her story might have ended there, had everything been business as usual in the hive. But Sarah’s quest went unnoticed by the wasps which should have been patrolling the cells. Those sentries had more immediate concerns at the cavern’s entrance. An uninvited guest was sending as many of them as possible to an early death, and it was all they could do to keep the caterwauling calico away from the Queen.

Sarah could not clearly see the action, but Patches’ unmistakable battle cries filled her ears. Below her, under the weight of a larva, Mags slumped face-first into a wall. Sarah had never seen the smuggler so helpless. “Mags,” she said. “Mags, wake up!”

But Mags did not. Tears made her eye makeup run down the sides of her face in black rivers, and her lipstick was smeared in puddles of drool. Her hair was a clump of dirt and chaos.

Sarah said things she had only heard Mags say before. They involved private parts in unpleasant situations. She shouted. “Mags, wake the fuck up!”

Raising her voice did no good. Lying on her belly, Sarah lowered her larva into Mags’ cell, head-first. Help, she told her mental slave. Help her fly.

The larva sank its mandibles into Mags’ neck.

☠️

The Wasps’ Song

Mags gripped the top edge of the cell and pulled herself up. Once free, she wiped blood and gunk from her eyes. She hardly acknowledged Sarah. Mags’ first thought was not the layer of slime covering her, nor the offending larva she tore from her back and stomped to death without even thinking about it. She heard her kitten.

Mags shouted, “Patches? The fuck is this thing! Show me who to kill!”

A clamor of clattering mandibles in the insect prison answered her, but only one voice pierced the chaos to direct her attention.

From the edges of the fray, Patches flung the head of an insect from her mouth and raised a howl no cat had ever made before. She cornered the hive’s leader and called out the location.

Mags pounced in that direction and landed on the Queen. “Worthless cunt! Stay the fuck away from my friends!”

The empress of a thousand generations smacked her away with giant wings.

The Queen’s throw would have smashed anyone else against the rocky walls, but Mags landed with feet pressed against the vertical cavern surface. She launched herself back from the wall as if her legs were made of springs. She landed again on the Queen.

Mags sank her teeth into soft spaces between segments of the monster’s carapace and swung her fists like hammers. Guttural growls gave way to a shriek. She pulled away pieces of the insect’s armor with her leather-gloved hands.

Only the killing mattered.

Mags reared up and tore off the Queen’s antennae, one at a time. She punched her fist into the Queen’s compound eye. “Die, you whore!”

The eye gushed a spray of gel. Mags struck it again. Her fist penetrated the crystalline membrane and the sticky mass beneath it. “I will rip out your fucking brain!”

Her fingers closed around soft, fatty tissue. Mags pulled it out, flung it away, and plunged in for another handful.

The beast gave her a wild ride, bucking and buzzing its wings. Its hate and rage at losing its babies were palpable things Mags felt in her hand. She gripped them in her fist and tore them out. “Here’s all your fucking memories!”

They were nothing but handfuls of fat, once full of thoughts and impulses traveling by electric current. The beast slumped beneath her. Its face smashed into stone.

Mags rolled off the wasp’s back and landed on her feet. Gore from her triumph streamed down her arms and legs. “I’ll teach you to fuck with my friends!” She spat on the insect’s carcass and stomped it with her boot again and again. “Useless cunt! Fucking slag! Who’s next? Anyone? Anyone?!” She seethed. Her shoulders rose and fell several times in the silence.

Patches mewed at her side, standing close by and prepared to form a defensive perimeter all by herself. The wasps gathered around them.

“Come on, then, motherfuckers.” Mags raised her fists and growled. “I will take you with me to hell.”

The insects formed a circle around her. Their wings beat against their bodies. They crouched low against the rocky surface, like supplicant dogs. The buzzing reached a resonant rhythm and grew in volume.

Mags wiped spit from her lips and snot from her nose. All around her, the wasps formed concentric rings and bowed.

Mags understood. She had killed their queen.

Long live the Queen.

“Sarah.” Mags beckoned the young woman to her side. “It’s okay. You did great. Come here.”

Sarah gripped the pirate in a hug.

Mags held her. “Help me talk to them.”

Mandibles clicked with precision. Venom-filled abdomens and stingers pulsed and quivered in a rhythm.

Sarah said, “They’re singing to you.”

“That much, I can hear. Help me understand it.”

Sarah gripped Mags’ gloved hand. “They think like a hive, you know. The words, the concepts are all—”

“We’ve been in a group-mind before,” said Mags.[24] “Hook me up, angel.”

“Right.” Sarah closed her eyes and joined Mags’ mind to theirs.

Mags fell to her hands and knees on the jagged ground. She let loose a scream that chilled Sarah’s blood. Even Patches flattened her ears.

Sarah dove onto Mags, trying to shelter her from the psychic feedback. The wasps closed in. Patches bared her teeth.

Embracing Sarah, Mags rose against the fearsome noise ringing in her skull and all around her. She set down the young woman and stepped up to the nearest wasp. When she held out her hand, her former enemy placed its head below the hand and held still.

Mags lightly stroked the insect between its antennae. What she told the malevolent monster and all its comrades in their inhuman language, transmitted directly from her mind to theirs, caused them to bow again before her in total silence.

The wasps accepted Mags as their new queen by rite of combat, but she felt nothing like a victor. She fell away from Sarah and stumbled for a handhold. One hand found a protrusion on the cave wall. She pulled herself upright and wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand.

Mags clenched that filthy hand into a fist and shouted. “Are we all sorted, you pestilent motherfuckers? I will crush you anytime I want! Who do you belong to now?”

The buzzing song answered her, low to the ground, beating the cavern floor, submissive to her will.

She took a deep breath and released it. “Good.” She stretched out the vowels in a rumbling purr. “Good. That’s fuckin’ purrfect.”

Mags brushed a lock of hair away from her face. She was taken aback by how easily the wasps accepted the idea of death in her service. They hugged the asteroid at her feet. The closest ones dared to stroke her with their antennae.

She swatted them away. “I love you, too, you parasitic cunts. Now piss off before I fuck you up!”

While they retreated into the hive, Mags scooped up Patches and nuzzled her kitten. “It’s alright,” she said. “I have a job for them on Earth. Let’s help our friends.”

☠️

Sarah’s Prayer

Thanks to Sarah and her communication with the larvae, the crew escaped the cells and regained control of their bodies. Bruised and bleeding from their rough capture, they left the hive. Mags summoned her ship, saving them the arduous trek through the asteroid wilderness to the wreckage of the club. She gave orders to the wasps to wait for her return. If they tried to birth a new Queen in her absence, she would just need to kill it when she came back.

The crew stopped at the club to gather those who died in the attack. The dead would receive a proper burial on Ceres. The living would clean and bandage their wounds, and more than a few would try to drink away the horror before they could sleep.

The next night, Sarah prayed. She sang her prayers silently, in her head. Unlike many prayers, they did not address any specific deity.

In the surrounding cities, people settled into pleasant dreams. Sarah’s song entered their subconscious minds and shaped their sleeping fantasies. But their dreams were not, as before, nightmares of loss and suffering.

Sarah’s song acknowledged sadness, but she celebrated hope. No tragedy was too great, no prison so strong, that they could not overcome it together. Every sunset was followed by a sunrise. Calm followed every storm.

Sarah briefly wondered why her new mentors, the octopuses, did not help her when she was in the cell. But as she prayed, she felt them watching her and realized they had been watching all along.

If they had helped, she would never know for sure if she could have escaped on her own. But she did, and she found a new strength within herself. Strength, and hope.

Always hope. Always a light shining in the center of the darkness. Then many lights, joined together.

THE END

---

[1] The rescue happened in Red Metal at Dawn.

[2] For the story of how Ceres got rings, see Blind Alley Blues and Voyage of the Calico Tigress.

[3] Toby appeared in Small Flowers.

[4] As detailed in The Battle of Vesta 4.

[5] If you don’t know who the octopuses are, you’ve got some catching up to do! Meet them for the first time in Red Metal at Dawn.

[6] In Daughter of Lightning and The Crystal Core, respectively.

[7] As the octopuses demonstrated in The Crystal Core.

[8] As detailed in The Ryderium Caper and many subsequent stories.

[9] Patches turned on the first system in Small Flowers.

[10] Donny refers to events from Small Flowers.

[11] As told in more detail in Red Metal at Dawn.

[12] “My little kitten.”

[13] The monkeys met Patches in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX.

[14] As he did in an opening scene of The Battle of Vesta 4.

[15] Vato refers to a Mexican gang member.

[16] “Same shit, different day.”

[17] “My close friends.”

[18] A brief summary of the climactic moment in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX.

[19] Koshka is Russian for “cat”.

[20] Mags can’t resist teasing the monkeys about their former ideology, despite the changes they’ve been through with the octopuses and Alonso since she first met them in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX. Her mother was killed by a communist death squad, so she has a chip on her shoulder about that. See Curtain of Fire.

[21] Slim died in The Battle of Vesta 4, and Mags re-opened his club under Kaufman and Anton’s leadership in Small Flowers.

[22] The Draco were an intellectually advanced Dracorex species of dinosaur who later returned to invade the solar system and caused trouble for Mags for quite some time—until she killed most of them in 2029 and mentally enslaved the rest in 2030.

[23] As detailed in the stories Red Metal at Dawn, Daughter of Lightning, The Battle of Vesta 4, and Small Flowers.

[24] Mags, Sarah, and Patches joined their minds together in Daughter of Lightning, and Mags has had many other experiences with the octos since then.

Meteor Mags: The Crystal Core

Tags

crystal core, fiction, meteor mags, octopus, Patches, short story, space pirate, Titan, writing

This new short story follows the events in the most recent Meteor Mags book, Small Flowers, which is now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

METEOR MAGS: THE CRYSTAL CORE

The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches. Episode 24.

© 2020 by Matthew Howard.

Description: After the events of Small Flowers, Mags and her pirate crew discover some of her telepathic octopuses are missing, and things in the outer planets are completely messed up—and it’s all Mags’ fault.

Word Count: 7,900.

“The further the power of consciousness ventures out into experience, the more is the price it must pay for its knowledge.”

—Alan Watts; The Wisdom of Insecurity, 1951.

☠️

May 2030. From the Letters of Meteor Mags.

Dear Great-Gramma,

I don’t think I was cut out for motherhood. I’ve always loved my kittycats, and Patches might as well be my cub, but these octopuses are something else.

Last year, when I liberated them, I didn’t know what I was getting into. Patches and I wanted to help them get born, but then we had to feed them. Then we had these mystical group-mind experiences and a concert or two, and it all happened so fast.

Back then, we didn’t realize what they could do. Now, I feel like a mom who left her toddlers alone with lit candles and a bucket of petrol. What could go wrong?

I’m not exactly a supervisor, you know.

I didn’t realize they needed babysitting.

Anyway, we’re almost to the outer planets now. It’s time to see what the hell they’ve been up to, and I hope they didn’t—

Oh, my god.

I gotta go. I’ll tell you all about it later.

If I survive.

All my love,

Maggie

xoxox

☠️

By May 2030, hyperdimensional math was child’s play to Mags’ swirling swarm of telepathic octopuses. They were octopuses, not octopi, though Mags’ girls baked her an apple octo-pie topped with a golden crust shaped like tentacles. She ate it with gusto while explaining that octopuses had arms, not tentacles.

Her octos had greater concerns than labeling appendages. They wanted to build a perfect world, and they wanted it to be one they could be proud to show their mothers.

The octopuses had three. One was their biological mother who had been experimented on and grown to massive proportions, and who granted her offspring telepathic abilities through her mutated genetics. She died in 2029.[1]

Their second mother was the mostly human smuggler who facilitated their birth by providing water to their eggs so they could hatch, and whose mind had melded with their collective consciousness several times.[2]

The octopuses had also merged with Mags’ invincible calico cat Patches more than once. They held her on a matriarchal pedestal, too, and their thoughts took on a shape distinctly feline because of her: this world belongs to me and my cubs; either I hunt and eat, or I will die; and no, I will not get down from the table.

These might not have been the ideal thought-patterns to imprint on a cephalopodic group-mind.

Mags’ cavalier approach to telepathic communion with them wasn’t the only problem. The octopuses learned in November 2029 to communicate with her across empty space, and she later entertained their embraces in the dark waters of their asteroid cavern on Svoboda 9, establishing a mental and physical unity with them no other being ever had.[3]

Those experiences revealed all Mags’ memories to her unofficially adopted babies, including the nature of the mysterious object of power she called “the triglyph” and its location in her armory.[4]

Like children attracted to a shiny toy, they reached out for the triglyph when Mama wasn’t looking. They discovered a multi-dimensional object with a formative consciousness and power unlike anything they had ever encountered. Touching the triglyph’s primitive thoughts, the octopuses established a common language, introduced themselves, and reached an understanding.

Within seconds, they sent an invitation.

The triglyph vanished from Mags’ armory. It rotated itself through a space imperceptible to humans. Picoseconds later, it arrived on Svoboda 9 in the subterranean lake in the asteroid home the octos shared with Alonso, Plutonian, and the macaques.[5] None of the primates noticed the triglyph’s arrival, nor did they notice a minute later when it disappeared along with twenty octopuses.

The date was the eighth of November 2029, two days before Mags’ birthday party. The same day, the octopuses touched her mind from afar and removed all traces of the triglyph from her thoughts of the previous few days. The excision was not deep enough to remove all her memories of the object nor cause her any harm, but enough to wipe it from her current train of thought.

After all, they didn’t want to upset her.

☠️

May 2030. Svoboda 9.

Mags pounded her fist against the glass wall of the giant aquarium aboard the Hyades. “Where the fuck are my octos?!” At the pirate’s feet, Patches mewed and twitched her fuzzy ears.

Formerly a cargo ship Alonso served on during his days with the Port Authority, the Hyades had become a tour bus for the interspecies band known as Small Flowers, decorated with garish art and quasi-revolutionary slogans in spray paint on the outside, and housing the octopuses inside.[6]

“Take it easy, tía.” Alonso didn’t touch her, but his hands made cautionary gestures. “Fish don’t like it when you tap on the glass.”

She relented without stepping away, peering into the water, studying the octopuses’ movements, counting. “They’re not fish,” Mags said, “but point taken. Where are they?”

“Right here! Do you need a drink? We left fifty of them on Earth, but there’s still like a hundred fifty in there. Relax.”

“There’s more than fifty missing. Seventy, by my count.” Mags frowned. “Did they die?”

“I haven’t seen any corpses floating in the tank. Not in the lake, either, though the light’s not the best in there. Can you hear them?”

“No,” said Mags. “That’s what worries me. They’re hiding something.”

☠️

November 2029.

Twenty octopuses and the triglyph appeared in the sky over the Saturnian moon, Titan. Levitating in the frigid methane rain, a bubble ten meters wide with the triglyph at its center held the octos suspended in 523 cubic meters of water. The octos swam and breathed, and the triglyph’s power kept them warm.

Titan’s gravity almost equaled that of Earth’s moon, and a magnetic field preserved the atmosphere against the blast of solar wind. But the sky was filled with methane, which at Titan’s sub-zero temperature condensed from a gas into a liquid to fall from the sky in a slow-motion rainstorm, sluggish because of the lower gravity yet strong enough to carve rivers and lakes into the jagged, rocky landscape over millions of years.

Nitrogen was the second most common element in the alien air, and hydrogen made up less than one percent of the atmosphere. Life-sustaining oxygen was nowhere to be found.

The new arrivals made solving this problem their first order of business.

The triglyph held the raw power needed to change a world, but the cephalopods did the math. They joined arms and formed a living icosahedron, a shape with twenty sides, and every side an octopus. Individually, each mind would have been advanced, with genetically engineered neurons located not just in its brain but in each of its arms, like any normal octopus. But the octos never existed individually, not even in their eggs before they hatched. All were joined by telepathy, and when they studied a math problem, they did it together. The closest human equivalent was an array of supercomputers working on a problem in parallel.

The triglyph fed raw data into the organic, twenty-sided computer: distribution and density of elements in Titan’s crust and sky, gravitational force, temperatures, wind currents, topographic maps of the surface and the subsurface. The immensity of the task, the complexities of measuring everything everywhere on the moon all at once using its nine-dimensional perspective, forced the triglyph to exert its power to an extent—and with a precision—it never had before. The octopuses waited patiently, running numbers as they came in, untroubled by the extraordinary amount of time the sensing and measuring required.

It took 3.7 seconds. The math went even faster.

On the opposite side of Titan, one diameter away, a section of the crust exploded like a thousand atom bombs. In its place, a tiny star—a nuclear reaction—began its job of heating the planet. Seconds later, the triglyph yoked the primitive reactor’s energy and directed it toward fusion and fission of the available elements into more organically useful ones. When the elements were formed, the triglyph put them where it pleased or let them drift and disperse.

Titan had its first power plant.

This pleased the planet-sized moon. So did the realization that it had a new friend: Enceladus.

Also a Saturnian moon, Enceladus lived most of her icy life as a passing acquaintance to Titan, briefly swinging by to say hello when their orbital paths brought them near. But in an instant, Enceladus teleported so close to Titan that their gravities locked them together, with the smaller moon in orbit around Titan.

Gravity stripped the frozen, outer crust from Enceladus and drew her toward Titan in a steady stream of space dust that, when struck by sunlight, lit up almost as beautifully as Saturn’s rings. Below the crust was a vast, liquid-water ocean, full of the oxygen and hydrogen Titan needed for life. Titan asked, and Enceladus surrendered everything.

She was a generous friend, though gravity gave her little choice to be anything else.

With liquid water instead of methane, the triglyph filled lakes and rivers on Titan’s rugged surface. In the largest lake, it adjusted the salinity with sodium and chloride created by the reactor. The atmosphere stabilized and, with help from the reactor’s heat, the ambient temperature reached that of Earth’s. The lake became a new home for the octopuses. The triglyph teleported plants and animals from Earth’s oceans into the lake, and the octos spent their time arranging the décor until everything was just right.

At night, they spent hours floating on the lake, watching the brilliant stream of life-giving ice tumbling through the transformed sky from the dwindling Enceladus. They knew the moon was, in one sense, dying—giving up her existence to feed an emerging world. But her life was all around them. They swam in it every day. To the octopuses, the moon had only given up one shape to become unified with another.

Still, the passing of her ancient, durable form seemed a solemn event, one deserving a memorial.

The octopuses composed a song. On the night the last wisp of Enceladus dissolved into Titan, they sang. Lacking vocal cords, they formed a choir on the mental plane, a choir whose harmonies were mathematically orchestrated in twenty voices and echoed in the ever-changing color patterns on the octos’ skin.

When the song was over, the rebirth of Titan completed its second phase.

Silence followed, save for the ceaseless wind and the gentle lapping of waves on the lakeshore. A cloud overhead, rich with water, gave up its bounty. Raindrops splashed the lake and the cephalopods gathered there: arms intertwined, one being, one beauty, one mind.

Having reached their second milestone, six Earth months after they began, the rulers of Titan decided it would be nice to have a radio.

Something to listen to, besides the wind.

☠️

May 2030. Svoboda 9.

Mags answered her phone. “What?!”

“Hi, sweetie. Having one of those days?”

“Shondra! Oh my god, you won’t believe it. I just found out my babies ran off!”

“That’s crazy! The same thing happened with a bunch of my ships.”

“What?” Mags paced back and forth. “How does a ship run off?”

“I don’t know! We had half a dozen builds completed for a mining customer, all waiting to be picked up. Then—nothing. Gone. Not even a blip on radar or any alarms.”

“You didn’t equip them with K Drives, did you?”

“Fuck no! That tech is between you and me. If those ships got cloaked before they disappeared, it wasn’t me or my crews. But thanks for your total lack of trust.”

“I’m just eliminating possibilities. No one could sneak through your shipyards’ security from the outside. Unless it was me and Patches, and we definitely didn’t.”

“That’s almost a compliment. Do you remember the time we made out in the park in Hevelius? Sometimes I think about it when I—”

“Shondra, do you mind?! My nephew is standing right here.”

“Oooh. So, you didn’t steal my ships, and I didn’t steal your tech. Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know, but shit doesn’t just disappear. How much do you want to bet that if we find your spaceships, we find my octos?”

“Your octos?”

“My babies! My little eight-armed freaks! Didn’t you see the vid of the Small Flowers concert on Ceres?”[7]

“You mean the octopuses in that huge tank behind you on stage? Those are your missing ‘babies’?”

“Like twenty of them.”

“I didn’t count. I was watching you sing naked.”

Mags purred. “That was awesome.”

“Will you sing like that for me sometime?”

“Shondra, if you find those missing spaceships, I will make your wildest dreams come true.”

Shondra laughed. “Promises, promises! I’ll see what I can do.”

“Love you,” said Mags.

“As if.” Shondra hung up.

0.8 seconds later, she forgot she ever called Mags.

It wasn’t Shondra’s fault. The octopuses on Titan had evaded discovery for half a year by wiping memories of astronomers and corporate workers who monitored the solar system. Many instruments on Earth and in the asteroid belt recorded the destruction of Enceladus, and many people observed those developments in progress.

But no human mind remembered them for more than a few seconds. Titan’s rulers saw to that. The octopuses’ telepathic powers were not strong enough to do this on their own, but with the triglyph amplifying them, their reach and strength became godlike. So did their aspirations.

But even gods have mothers they want to make proud with their work. Titan’s rulers sent Mags an invitation consisting of a single word.

“Titan,” said Mags. “The cheeky little bleeders are on Titan!”

Alonso asked, “How do you know?”

“The squidlings just told me. I need to go see what they are up to. Like, now.”

“I could go with you, tía. I got mad pilot skills, and I always got your back.”

“You do, and I appreciate it. But get me Plutonian. He and Patches and I will fix this. Stay here with the octos and keep an eye on them. They like you.”

“Word,” said Alonso. “Plutes was just tinkering with some circuits when you got here. Why don’t you have the octos call him?”

Mags asked the octos then held Patches in her arms and waited. She knew she could use Alonso’s help, but she craved time alone with her DJ.

Plutonian stumbled onto the scene, already three sheets to the wind. “Maggie!” He threw his arms around her.

Mags embraced him. After a moment, she held him at arm’s length. “How do you feel about taking on an interplanetary menace with me and Patches?” She looked him over, scowling and smiling at his disarray. “I got rum.”

“Who could resist,” he said. “Where are we going?”

“Titan,” said Mags. “Come aboard and strap in.”

“You said there’s rum?”

“Oh, you bet. And you’re in charge of the radio.”

☠️

A white dwarf is all that remains of a star larger than the sun, a star where the core’s nuclear fusion of elements into heavier elements continues unabated until the first day it creates iron. Iron kills the original star by absorbing its fusion energy. Without that power, the star cannot overcome its own gravity. Within seconds of the formation of iron, the star collapses under its own weight. The collapse triggers an explosion—a supernova—and it leaves behind a white dwarf.

The star core continues fusing until iron becomes carbon. In the extreme gravitational pressure, the carbon crystallizes. It becomes a diamond the size of Earth. The process takes billions of years.

Teleporting one took the rulers of Titan almost an entire minute.

From dozens of lightyears away, a diamond star core appeared in the Kuiper belt, the vast realm of debris orbiting the sun beyond the outer planets. The Kuiper belt was home to many dwarf planets, some as large as Pluto. As dirty and disheveled as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but larger and colder, the Kuiper belt held a sea of undiscovered rocks from the earliest days of the solar system’s formation—a library from the beginning of solar time, the birthplace of comets, and a treasure trove of clues to the origins of Earth and life itself.

Within seconds, the Kuiper Belt began to die.

The diamond star core would have needed at least one orbital period to pass through and absorb the entire Kuiper Belt. But within days, it cleared vast swaths of space rock, sweeping them all into its gravity. Previously clouded expanses of space at the edge of the solar system became clear as a bell. The immense gravity pulled in anything near it as the crystal orbited the sun.

In their descent to the core, the rocky residents of the Kuiper Belt collided, heated, and formed a red-hot layer of nuclear fire around the diamond. The discarded leftovers of the solar system burned like atomic pyres. The core’s gravity seduced, subdued, and crushed them. Twin beams of energy shot from the diamond’s north and south poles.

Clearing an orbit takes most planets millions of years and a fair amount of random chance. But the diamond core was no planet. It was a dead star, and it could not share with any other body the cold, vast space between Neptune and the Oort cloud. Soon, all that remained of millions of kilometers of the Kuiper belt was a spherical and ever-diminishing shell of nuclear fire around the diamond.

The octopuses had created the first component of their crystal radio.

The crystal radio is a basic receiver that needs no external power, instead deriving its power from the radio waves it receives. The crystal is a demodulator, making sense of radio-wave transmissions and translating them into soundwaves so people can listen.

The crystal accomplishes this because it changes shape as radio waves bombard it. As it expands and contracts with each passing wave, the crystal produces a small amount of voltage and a modified signal that can be converted into sound in a simple circuit.

Crystal radios are weak. They need a power amplifier or high-impedance headphones to really make some noise—unless they’re the size of a star core.

The rulers of Titan built other components. For an antenna, they teleported empty spaceships from the Martian shipyards and fused them end-to-end. For a wire coil, they pulled copper from the asteroid belt and wound it around a cylindrical asteroid.

For a tuner, they needed a variable capacitor made of two plates. They chose a pair of iron-heavy asteroids. The triglyph teleported the rocks into position. Those rocks would tune the circuit to specific radio-wave frequencies.

Next, the octos focused on converting their star core into graphite. Diamond was not conductive enough to serve as the crystal in their radio. But with the application of enough energy, it could become graphite: a conductive element that would complete the circuit.

The octopuses had the triglyph working on the problem when Mags and Patches showed up.

☠️

Aboard the Bêlit, Mags raised her eyes from her memoir.

Her personal diaries—the ones written on paper—she burned every year on her birthday. But she kept a second, digital diary in the form of letters to her great-gramma, the pirate whose ring she wore every day of her life since taking it from her dying mother’s hand in 1938.

Mags wrote all the letters in a flowery script using a stylus on her tablet. Only Celina and Patches knew Mags wrote those letters, though she had considered telling Plutonian. She kept the letters secret not from shame but to avoid the annoyance of answering questions about why she wrote letters to a dead woman who would never read them.

Mags was certain Great-Gramma read every word of them. Mags believed Great-Gramma knew every moment of her life. While she never felt Great-Gramma needed to be informed of events, writing the letters comforted Mags with the belief that she talked to someone who understood power, piracy, and the quest to change the course of human history.

But not even Mags understood what transpired in the viewport on the bridge of the Bêlit. She dropped her tablet and stylus. “What the fuck are they doing out there?”

Patches leapt onto the console and mewed. She pawed the window.

“Sheathe the claws, kitty!”

Patches retracted her daggers. She had done quite a number on Mags’ old ship, the Queen Anne, and the smuggler was forever reminding her not to scratch the living hell out of the Bêlit.

“Look at that,” said Plutonian. “Titan’s atmosphere isn’t orange anymore. And over there? What’s that?”

“Two asteroids joined by a—what the fuck? A shaft?”

Plutonian considered for a moment. “You know what that looks like.”

“No. What is it?” Mags ignored the console’s displays and pressed her face to the window, cupping her hands around her eyes to block reflections of ambient light.

“A primitive capacitor.”

“Boil my bollocks in oil,” said Mags. “What about that thing? Is it a metal rod? It’s gotta be a kilometer long.”

“That shape,” said Plutonian. “It’s like an antenna.”

Mags pounded the meat of her fist against the window. “I bet dollars to dimes that’s Shondra’s missing ships! All melted down!”

“If it’s a radio circuit, they’re missing a—” Plutonian adjusted a dial. “Wait. We’re picking up a massive object in the Kuiper Belt. It’s graphite. A giant graphite crystal. Mags, your octos built a radio!”

“Fuck me sideways.” Her tail swished. “Who let them out of their cage?”

Plutonian drew his hand down his face and rubbed his beard. “We’re picking up something weird, but I’ve seen it before. It’s the same radiation I discovered the first time I found the triglyph.”

“It’s out here, too?”

“It must be. Where else would your octos get the raw power to do all this?”

“Those little bastards,” said Mags. “It’s a great idea, but they are fucking up the whole system by introducing that thing here! It’s eating up the Kuiper Belt now. What about when its gravity starts throwing planets out of orbit? That could trash Saturn and Jupiter!”

Plutonian sparked a joint. “Ah, it’s not like anyone would miss Jupiter.”

“I’d fucking miss it! All the planets it’s protecting from asteroid collisions would miss it! What is wrong with you?” Mags did not expect an answer, but she did expect him to pass the joint. “Plutes, this solar system belongs to me. Take us down to Titan. I need a word with my babies.”

He complied and steered the ship.

Before the Bêlit landed on Titan, Mags fell to the floor.

Plutonian’s hands and Patches’ furry face failed to rouse her. She was caught in a conversation with the octopuses.

They spoke in her mind. <Mother.>

Darlings. Do you mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing?

<Music. Soon all the solar system will be music.>

Soon, the system will be a bloody useless disaster if you don’t cut it out right now! You’re introducing objects whose gravity will fuck up so many orbits. You need to stop!

<Not disaster, Mother. Song. A symphony. For you.>

Me?! I didn’t request the end of the goddamn system! You could just play some Exploited albums and I’d be fine!

<So much happy here. Join us. Be one with us and hear the song.>

No! Bad octos! Put that star core way farther out in the Oort cloud! You are buggering things on a massive scale! Mags performed a seat-of-the-pants calculation and told them how far out to place the core.

<Done. Now come. Be one.>

Mags slapped her own face. “Get a grip, you old sod!”

Plutonian’s hands were on her. One on her shoulder held her steady. One cupped the side of her face. “Are you okay?”

“No!” Mags pushed him away, rolled onto one knee, then rose to her full height. “Get off me! I’m fine!”

“Sorry, Maggie. I didn’t mean to—” His expression changed from attrition to annoyance. “Try to save you?”

Mags brushed herself off. Her tail snapped like a whip, swatting some unseen menace with even more vigor than she had slapped her own face. “Plutes. Imma say this right now, in case we don’t make it out alive.” She took his hand in hers. “Thank you for caring.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Oh, I’m mad as hell. But not at you.” She pulled him closer.

Patches turned her back on their kissing and groomed her fur.

Moments later, Titan’s surface filled the viewport.

☠️

The Bêlit landed on Titan, and a section on the side of the ship lowered like a ramp. Patches dashed out the door and became the first mammal to set foot on the rocky moon. She wasted no time marking her new territory with claws, scent, and urine. She rubbed her face on the jagged corner of a boulder then froze in place.

Patches sniffed the air with her mouth slightly open, welcoming the unfamiliar olfactory landscape with the Jacobson’s Organ in the roof of her mouth. Her ears twitched every which way then folded back like the wings of a fighter plane. Patches sprinted across the recently formed beach to another rock and repeated the process.

Mags held Plutonian’s hand at the bottom of the ramp. “I told you she’d be first!”

“She’s certainly proud of herself.” He followed the cat’s erratic movements for a moment but could not keep his eyes away from Saturn. “Mags, this is unreal. Even if we weren’t the first humans on Titan, we’d be the first to see Saturn through its atmosphere.”

The distance from Titan to Saturn is more than twice that of the Earth to the Moon. But even that far away, the ringed planet hung low in the sky, a gas giant floating above the horizon. The major divisions in its rings were visible, and many of its other moons.

Mags purred and shook a lock of hair away from her glasses. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended that you still think of me as human.” She squeezed his hand. “But it’s an amazing view. I’m glad you’re here to share it.”

Patches interrupted their moment with a caterwaul signaling she had seen the octopuses floating in their lake below the hovering triglyph.

Mags and Plutonian moved to join her, but they were struck down by the force of an amplified, telepathic touch. The two adventurers cried out in pain, stumbled, and fell to the barren ground.

☠️

My name’s Dr. Plutonian. I’m not really a doctor of anything, but I know enough to know this whole scene is fucked. A second ago, I was standing on a beach next to Mags.

Damn, she looked good today. It wasn’t just her new outfit or the way her hair exposes her neck every time she puts it up in a headband and curls. I think she changed her perfume, too.

Driving me crazy is what she’s doing. I would be all about getting naked with her again. And a cat brush. She’d love to be brushed. And maybe one of those toys you stuff full of catnip. We could—

Wait a second. This isn’t my diary. Where am I?

Focus!

Why is it so hard to think right now? This is worse than being drunk.

I need to back-announce some music. Thanks for tuning in. That was Crocodiles with Telepathic Lover. Before that, the Wipers with Telepathic Love. Next up, Octopus Ride from—

Fuck me. I’m not on the air, announcing songs. That was a memory.

Now I can’t remember it.

I wrote a new poem. It starts off like this. The solar system’s dying. So am I.

Part of me wishes I’d never found the triglyph in the first place. But that part’s disappearing. The triglyph is fine. The octos are fine.

Titan is me. I am this moon. I am locked in an orbit where one side of me always faces Saturn, and I’ve only ever dreamed of breaking free from my prison and supporting life.

My name’s—

No, it isn’t. Plutonian’s not even my real name. I haven’t gone by my birth name in years, not since I went AWOL from the Army. That person is dead, and I don’t miss him.

But I do wish I could see my little Siamese kitty one more time. Just once.

Mags tells me that feeling never goes away. You just learn to live with it.

But that part’s going away, too. I reach out for my cat. He’s gone like he was never there in the first place. I see him. Then I don’t.

I hate this. I hate everything about this.

When I was twelve, I killed my father with his own shotgun. When I was thirty, I saw my sister for the last time. When I was twenty-six, I killed a boy in the war in Afghanistan.[8] When I was seven—

No, that’s not how it happened! It’s all out of order. I had this picture of my life, and now it’s being torn apart, cut and pasted into something I don’t even recognize.

Mags? Can you hear me?

Maggie?

Are you there?

☠️

My name is Magdalena. It was my great-gramma’s name, too. Like her, I have a hundred aliases, and when you’re in the business of “liberating” cargo, it’s nice to have aliases. Margaritka. Marjorie. Madelaine. You should see my collection of passports.

Friends call me Mags. Plutes calls me Maggie. We’re not friends anymore.

I mean, we are. But that’s not what he means when he calls me that.

My name’s Mags, and I’m a goddess. My heart is molten iron, my body is a planet-sized moon, and my soul is an atmosphere. I spent millions of years covered in liquid methane, but now oxygen and nitrogen fill my soul, and water covers my skin. New life grows inside me, on me, in my lakes. I see so many stars from here. All of them.

My name is Titan.

No, Titan’s a moon.

My name is Moons. M-O-O–N, that spells—christ on a fucking—[9]

My name is Mags, and this is really starting to piss me off. I can’t find my body, and I’ve grown rather fond of it in the past century. It might be a fucked-up mutant cat hybrid of a body, but it’s the one I was born with, and it’s kicked a lot of arse over the years. Since I only have ninety-four more years of murder penciled in on my bloody calendar, I want it back! Now! Hello? Hello?!

Fuck.

I think Plutes is dying.

So am I. Broken down at the cellular level. Deconstructed, like my mind.

My name is Margareta—

Sink and burn me.

You know who’s doing this? My babies. My little cephalopodic sweethearts. My absolutely adorable mollusks whose eight-armed arses I will kick into next week if they don’t cut it out! Do you hear me, you slimy little fucks?! Get out of my mind!

Oh, now they act all sad.

I’m pretty sure my body is lying dead on Titan, and my mind is being merged with the planetary consciousness of Titan, and I didn’t even realize these big chunks of rock in space had thoughts and feelings. The octos are trying to mix me and Patches and Plutes into their little science project to become one with Titan, and it’s making me madder than a cut snake.

Every time I try to fight, I get pulled right back.

My name is Mags, and I’m a planet. I’m an octopus. I’m a nine-dimensional object tapping into unimaginable power. My mothers are here, and they are unhappy about the situation. But it will all be over soon.

Patches? Can you hear me?

It’s me! My name is—

Patches?

Can you hear me?

☠️

Since her birth in 2026, life had dealt Patches many offenses. She took every one of them personally: people shooting at her, people getting her gender wrong, people telling her to get down from the table, people telling her to stop clawing the furniture.

The sight of the bottom of her dish.

She took those evils in stride and every so often forgave without forgetting. But seeing Mags’ and Plutonian’s bodies lying inert brought her to a new level of displeasure. Keeping her claws sheathed, Patches batted Mags’ face with one paw.

No response.

She stood on Plutonian’s chest and kneaded it with her paws, but his chest did not rise and fall. She pressed her nose to his and felt no breath.

Unacceptable.

<Go to sleep, little kitty.> The voice appeared in her head: musical, soothing, seductive. At the same time, an unfamiliar force tugged at her body.

Patches would have been hard-pressed to describe the feeling, but she had never mated with a male cat. If she had, she would have related the experience to being held down and torn apart from the inside.

Whatever it was, she didn’t like it, and it didn’t take a genius to discern the source.

The cause.

The octopuses floating on the lake.

Patches didn’t know how long Mags and Plutonian could go without breathing before irreversible brain death set in, but she wasn’t interested in finding out. Ignoring the voice and its attempts to alter her impervious body and rip her mind to shreds, she ran to the lakeshore and leapt in.

The closest octopus squirted a cloud of murky ink and propelled itself away from her. The others scattered. Patches pursued her initial target, but the action was a feint. As soon as she was in reach of another octo, she clamped her indestructible teeth on its arm.

The octopus tried to wrap her in seven other sucker-covered arms and pull her away, but it only succeeded in giving her more to destroy.

Patches’ claws caught the cephalopod and pulled it close. Clasping the head with her forepaws, she shredded the bulbous brain with her hind claws, kicking like a rabbit. Gooey bits of mollusk clouded the water and dispersed from the force of her fury.

The remaining nineteen octos focused their mental energy on her, and the triglyph followed.

To the death, then. Death was something any animal could understand. Even the most primitive microbe wanted to live. Patches latched onto another octopus.

The others felt it die. They shuddered. The cephalopods had lived through the demise of their biological mother, but they had never known their siblings to pass away. <Stop>, they told Patches. <Do not do this.>

If the octopuses had chosen another cat for their experiment, they might have succeeded. But they had picked a fight with the wrong kitten. The triglyph had helped create her, but it could not overpower her. Its power was hers, and its attempt to deconstruct her met with equal force drawn from the same cosmic source.

<Stop>, said the octos.

Patches seized a third octopus in her teeth and savored its death throes. Its blood, colored blue by hemocyanin, clouded the water. The lyric to NY State of Mind came to Patches. Straight out the fuckin’ dungeons of rap. She recited it to the octos probing her mind. Where fake niggas don’t make it back.[10]

Seventeen octopuses conferred. <What do you want?>

Let my friends go, or I will end you.

<We can teleport you into the heart of the sun.>

Do it. You can’t get rid of me forever. I will kill you. Now. Later. Makes no difference. I will fuck you up!

Two seconds later, Mags sat up from her prone position and gasped for breath. So did the man beside her. “Plutes!” She helped him to his feet.

A fuzzy calico face swam against the tidal current toward the shore.

Mags ran into the water. Before the rocky subsurface fell away from her feet, she scooped up Patches in her arms, and they rubbed their faces together.

Mags cuddled Patches all the way back to shore. “Good girl!” Mags stretched out the r in girl like an extended purr and held Patches against her chest. “Good kitty.”

Patches licked Mags’ hair with the impervious rasps on her tongue. The curls would take months to grow back, but Mags didn’t mind. She supported Patches with one arm and drew a .50 caliber pistol from the holster at her waist.

Mags fired into the waves and killed three more octopuses before the rest of them descended below the water to hide. “Fucking ingrates! Useless as a wet roll of dunny scratch in a hurricane!” She emptied the clip. “I tried to help you!”

Plutonian stepped up to the smuggler and her cat and wrapped his arms around them. A faint remainder of Mags’ perfume underscored the scent of lake water on the soaking wet felines and the smell of the alien atmosphere. Patches’ breath mingled with octopus blood. Plutonian closed his eyes, and both his companions purred against him, a smoky, soothing vibrato. “What just happened? Did I hear Nas?”

Mags nuzzled her cheek against his. The tip of her nose was cold and wet. “That was Patches. You’re safe now.”

☠️

The triglyph fell from its place above the lakeshore. It rested in a crater in the sand, pulsating until it lost all semblance of light and lay like a corpse on Titan’s gritty, grainy beach.

On the way back to the Bêlit, Mags picked it up.

In her hands, it crumbled into dust.

She watched it fade away, then wiped her hands on her skirt, leaving dirty smears. “That thing’s bloody useless.” She flung a strand of hair away from her glasses. “Give me a minute.”

<Mother.>

Babies. You can’t go trying to kill me.

<Not kill. Transcend. Now you have killed some of us.>

Do you not know about self-defense? Jesus, I’m bloody sorry, but don’t test me!

<Selves are not gone. Selves are here with us.>

Good.

<Good.>

You gonna cut this shit out, then? Maybe ask me next time before you run off?

<We will ask, Mother.>

Mags purred. I’d appreciate that. Do you want to stay here? Can you chill without fucking up the rest of the solar system?

<Yes. Happiness here. Glorious world.>

You still got tunes?

<Many tunes.>

You got food?

<Our garden grows.>

You still love me?

<All is one, and we are one with you.>

Love you too, you little fuckers. Call me sometime. Mags stirred from her reverie and rubbed her face. “The octos are fine for now. Let’s go.”

After the Bêlit left the gravitational pull of Titan, Plutonian took over the radio. “Hey, I got something.” He dialed in the frequency. “This is the signal from the space radio. Listen.”

Mags and Patches perked up their ears. Through the 1,000-watt speakers on the Bêlit’s bridge, a transmission played from the giant crystal radio.

“That’s the sound of Andromeda.” Plutonian adjusted the controls. “This one is coming from beyond the range of Hubble. It sounds almost intelligent.”

“Patterns,” said Mags. “Hundreds of millions of years old. That’s beautiful.”

“Aye,” said Plutonian. “Amazing jam.” He pressed a button labeled record.

Mags tapped her foot to the beat. “Now we got a giant space radio. What’s next?”

“I don’t know,” said Plutonian. “How many octopuses do you have left?”

“Fourteen on Titan. Fifty on Earth. About a hundred on Svoboda. Why?”

Plutonian sat forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. “What about Mars?”

“I bet I could take over Mars if I put my babies to work. But after some of them running off like this? Bugger me sideways. They seem to have their own agenda.”

From the corner of her bunk, Patches typed messages to her friend, Mags’ unofficially adopted nephew Tarzi, on her tablet.

The young man replied. How did it go? Did you show those octos what’s up?

Patches flicked her ears and typed with one claw. Just a nigga. Walkin’ with my finga on the trigga.[11]

Word. Love you.

Patches purred. She curled up in the shape of a crescent moon and settled into a nap.

Plutonian said, “It seems kinda fucked up to work these octos into a plan for Mars.”

“That’s putting it mildly.” Mags ashed her cigarette in her armchair ashtray and spent too much time shaping the cherry into a perfect cone. “It’s tyranny. It’s reckless. And it’s dodgy as fuck.”

“You do realize,” said Plutonian, “that you can’t base a revolution on mind control.”

Mags laughed. “Whatever. Do you want to live in this shithole solar system the way things are, or do you want to change things for the better?”

“You mean what you think is better.” Plutonian sat back in his chair. “You aren’t asking for anyone’s consent.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

☠️

From the Letters of Meteor Mags.

As far as Plutes and I can tell, corroborated with what I glimpsed in the octos’ thoughts, the triglyph pulled power from areas of physical space we can’t perceive. It took nine physical dimensions to describe the shape of that object. In our four-dimensional spacetime, it looked something like a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting, appearing to be made of every possible polygon changing into every other with each passing second.

Its dimensions weren’t mathematical abstractions. If you could physically navigate those dimensions, certain quartets of them would appear to be different universes. They weren’t really different. Just aspects of this reality you or I can’t access.

But the triglyph could. From those nine dimensions taken four at a time, that’s 126 possible ways the triglyph could occupy a four-dimensional spacetime.

It’s a simple combination problem.

So the triglyph pulled all this power out of other universes that are really ours, and it had so many different paths though spacetime to get from one point to another that it achieved what’s impossible in our four-dimensional perception: teleportation.

And there our troubles began. I’m just glad it’s gone now.

☠️

Near the event horizons of the black holes at the core of the Andromeda galaxy, something new popped into orbit. The Milky Way’s closest neighbor hardly noticed. The arrival was a bundle of energy smaller than a breadbox and about as threatening.

Andromeda’s new resident gathered space dust around itself and compressed the particles into a sphere, just enough to feel like a planet. It missed that feeling.

The triglyph’s once-primitive thought patterns had evolved since meeting the octopuses. It missed them, too. It missed all its old friends: the man who designed it, the DJ who found it, the smuggler who gave it a place to live.

No matter. That was the old life. Those events were as far away as the nearest galaxy. The memories swiftly paled in the glorious blaze from the Andromedan core.

Super-massive black holes clustered there, not close enough to merge with each other, but with the collective power to swirl a trillion star-systems around them, like water down a drain, falling to the center.

The triglyph moved closer. It surfed the boundaries of the event horizons around the cluster. From every direction, matter falling into the inescapable gravity well ignited and bloomed into sprays of radiation beyond light’s visible frequencies.

At the magnetic north and south poles of the sea of stellar annihilation, the violence emitted the most powerful bursts of all: x-rays and gamma rays. They shot from the center of the galaxy perpendicular to all the stars revolving around them.

Gravity was the master there. At close range, it consumed everything—not just matter, but space and time. Existence. Meaning. Light.

Everything.

The central hub of destruction also brought life into being. Its giant whirlpool full of colliding space dust formed suns, planets, moons, and all the elements necessary to begin life on those rocks.

At the edge of chaos, the triglyph hovered. The spiral galaxy’s outer arms would have been more sedentary places to establish a new home. But the triglyph was finished with limitations and boundaries. It had enough of them in the Milky Way.

Andromeda was a blank slate, just like the triglyph had been 10,000 years before. But all Andromeda’s history, all its information, everything the galaxy ever knew, fell into the black holes at the center. Every possible future sank into the singularities. Nothing could be learned from anything past the event horizon.

The triglyph swam in the gravitational whirlpool and considered these things for several minutes. It had a new body. The old one, it gave up on Titan. It was better to let Mags believe she had won than to prolong a battle that would only tear apart her solar system.

Regardless of what Mags thought, the triglyph never meant her any harm. It only lacked an appropriate scale of what harm might be.

It knew it owed a debt of gratitude to the beings who called it into existence. When its creator died, it might have been abandoned to decay forever. If not for Mags, Patches, and Tarzi, the machine that called the triglyph into life would never have been activated.[12]

But Andromeda? The triglyph had no friends there. No past. No affections.

It began by pushing together several black holes. Fascinated by the results, it teleported the nearby galaxy M32 to add to the fun.

The cosmic event took two and a half million years to reach Earth, traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum. But Earth had plenty of other things to worry about in those years.

Four billion years later, the Milky Way was destroyed in a collision with Andromeda and became something else. The event ignited more black holes. Gamma-ray bursts signaled the death of information and history inside gravity’s grasp.

What a sight.

What a song.

The triglyph tapped on the galactic cores like a conductor tapping his wand on the edge of a music stand.

A new galaxy sprang to attention.

THE END

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[1] See Red Metal at Dawn and Daughter of Lightning.

[2] Most notably in Red Metal at Dawn, Daughter of Lightning, Voyage of the Calico Tigress, and Small Flowers.

[3] In Voyage of the Calico Tigress.

[4] The triglyph’s ancient origin appears in Patches the Immortal. It re-appeared in Daughter of Lightning, and Mags decided to store it in her armory in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX. Mags discovered it missing in Small Flowers.

[5] Alonso has lived with the octos and the space monkeys from The Lost Crew of the Volya IX since Voyage of the Calico Tigress. Plutonian moved in with them during Hunted to Extinction.

[6] See Rings of Ceres and Small Flowers.

[7] See Small Flowers.

[8] He recounted this event to Mags in detail in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX.

[9] Mags is getting her memories confused with a detail from Stephen King’s The Stand.

[10] Jones, Nasir, et. al. (1994). NY State of Mind. On Illmatic. New York: Kobalt Music Publishing, Ltd.

[11] Jones, Nasir, et. al. (1994). NY State of Mind. On Illmatic. New York: Kobalt Music Publishing, Ltd.

[12] As shown in Patches the Immortal.

indie box: Next Men TPB

Tags

2112, big box of comics, collection, comic books, Dark Horse, indie box, John Byrne, M4, Next Men, Next Men TPB

Once upon a time, I had the complete Next Men series, except for the Hellboy issue. Though I read the series three or four times, I’ve missed having it around ever since I sold it. This month, thanks to this blog’s readers who use my affiliate links to find books, I earned enough store credit to get all six of the 1993 trade paperback collections. Reading the series again reminds how much the series blew my mind the first time through, and as a bonus, it includes the Hellboy issue with pages drawn by Mike Mignola.

Hellboy’s appearance in issue #17 makes it the most expensive one to collect. It’s easy to collect all the other original, single issues for less than $3 each, but #17 will cost as much or more than all the other thirty issues combined. That’s not a problem with the collected paperback.

Hellboy might be part demon, but he is a far cry from the absolute evil of the series’ main villain. Sathanas is the remnants of a mutated energy vampire who kills people by draining their lifeforce, and since so much of him got blown up, he survives in a mechanical suit. Despite his silly name, he’s among my favorite John Byrne villains.

Despite the fun of the paperbacks, they have three disappointments, possibly because they were made more than a quarter-century ago before TPBs became so popular. These days, we expect the TPB to include all the original covers and, if any, all the variant covers. But the Next Men covers get treated terribly, reduced to about 1/6 of the page size and combined in a “gallery”. It’s an odd design choice, considering that there’s a useless page between each “issue” that just splits the words “Next Men” across its front and back. That would be a lovely place for a cover!

Second, the story is so intertwined with the short graphic novel 2112 that the original Next Men series isn’t complete without it. This oversight is forgivable, since the events of 2112 get summarized by one of the characters.

What’s unforgivable is the omission of the entire series of “back-up” stories, M4. These were short episodes with characters who, at first, seemed only tangentially related to the main series. But the stories intersected eventually, and the M4 characters were essential to the finale and resolution. Leaving out the M4 pages makes these characters appear to pop out of nowhere in the main storyline, which makes for utterly confusing plot developments for unfamiliar readers. Plus, M4 had its own covers, featured on the back of the single issues where it ran, and the TPBs have none of them.

For the completists: When IDW reprinted the series in color in 2009, they included M4 but not 2112. IDW’s 2011 reprint series (“Classic Next Men”, in three TPBs) includes both M4 and 2112, and it’s also in full color. I’ve only ever seen it in stock on Amazon for around $40 per volume in paperback, but you can get them for $10.99 each for Kindle and Comixology, and as a set with the sequel for a total of $43.

Even with these omissions, I loved re-reading this imaginative and intricately plotted series that features some of Byrne’s most humanized and fully realized characters. Consider what he does with three wordless pages to show Jasmine’s emotional state as she flees from an attack in underground tunnels. Her old, perfect life was taken from her, and she’s not adjusting well to reality, where trauma awaits her at every turn. Without a single line of expositional captions or thought balloons, Byrne portrays her fragile condition in these pages.

indie box: Utopiates

Tags

black and white, bloodfire studio, drugs, indie box, Indie Comics, josh finney, kat rocha, utopiates

This week’s pick from the indie comics short box is Utopiates, a four-issue black-and-white series focusing on characters who take a drug that temporarily alters their personality and emotions, but with violent and disastrous results.

The first issue opens with a full page of Gen-X angst that sets up what, at first, appears to be a simple tale about a young man who takes a drug to escape the dull hopelessness of his life.

By the end of the first issue, it becomes clear this tale is not so simple. We learn that the drug is somehow giving people specific personality traits because it is composed of genetic material copied from specific people. I don’t buy that bit of pseudo-science at all, but playing along with this central idea of injecting genetics like drugs does make for some interesting developments. For example, the young man in the first issue starts killing people his drug dealer assigns to him, but when he injects some Jack Ruby DNA, he kills the wrong person. This doesn’t end well for him.

The second and third issue tell the story of a different young man who served in a war as part of a private military contractor’s invasion force. We learn that he and all the contractors were constantly hopped up on one of these genetic drugs to reduce their fear and increase ferocity.

This two-part story shows how the soldier does not adapt well to normal society after his contract is complete and he can no longer get his drugs. The robotic psych counselor the company forces him to see is useless, so the young man starts looking for a source of the drug. His path leads him to discover whose DNA he and his troops were injecting.

The fourth issue tells the story of another former soldier, a woman who becomes an assassin for hire much like the character in the first issue. It suggests that the mysterious drug dealer in all these stories is giving out these gene-drugs and manipulating people as an art form. I found that motivation a bit lackluster, but I suspect that if the series had continued, then writer Josh Finney would have given us more depth and detail about what makes the dealer tick.

I love the artwork in this series, with Finney collaborating with artist Kat Rocha to produce moody, dramatic pages that look amazing without color. I don’t know why the series ended, but it feels like it could be a treatment for an ongoing TV series with action, adventure, mystery, futurism, and a bit of social commentary. Finally, it’s possible that Finney took the name of the series from a 1964 book detailing research into why people take LSD. You can read a review and summary of that book in the University of Chicago archives.

The four issues of Utopiates make a fairly quick but thought-provoking read, and you can have them for about $2 a piece.

Collector’s Guide: Utopiates #1-4; Bloodfire Studio, 2006.

indie box: Metalzoic

Tags

comic books, DC Comics, graphic novel, indie box, Kevin O'Neill, metalzoic, Pat Mills, review, science fiction

This is the second time a book published by DC Comics has broken the rules and earned a place in my indie short box. This time, it’s Metalzoic by the legendary team of Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill, and there’s not much about it you can call “mainstream”. Metalzoic takes place in a future where the Earth is ruled by intelligent, mechanical beasts patterned after modern and prehistoric animals — and boy, do they love to fight!

Yes, you just witnessed a brutal showdown between a gorilla with a saw blade on his head, and a lion with a chainsaw for a tongue and metal skis for feet. Do I really need to say anything about the story’s plot, or is that cool enough for you? Two of my favorite pages show a shark attacking a caravan of wooly mammoths during a trek across the ice.

It’s like some sort of psychotic nature special! I can almost hear David Attenborough narrating it for a BBC documentary.

O’Neill always delivers wonderfully twisted artwork, but he pulls out all the stops to illustrate Metalzoic‘s endless mecha-menagerie.

The story is interesting, especially since the main character — the saw-blade gorilla — is a brutal, amoral hell-raiser whose brawn and ferocity might be the only thing standing between the Earth and total destruction.

And just look at him go!

When all this takes place and how it came to be are slowly revealed throughout the story. We don’t get a clear timeline until about 50 pages in. It might have been helpful to see a historic summary earlier in the story, so here it is.

If you’re like me, and you wish Godzilla movies would cut out most of the human-related nonsense and just show more monster fights, then this 64-page epic adventure is the book for you!

Collector’s Guide: Metalzoic; DC Comics Graphic Novel #6, 1986. Though it’s often out of stock at MyComicShop, you can usually find it on Amazon for between $15 and $30.

indie box: Hieroglyph

Tags

Dark Horse Comics, hieroglyph, indie box, Indie Comics, Ricardo Delgado

This week’s pick from the short box of indie comics comes from Ricardo Delgado, whose Age of Reptiles is among my all-time favorite comic books. Hieroglyph delivers Delagado’s signature style of primarily visual storytelling with vast landscapes and non-verbal drama, only in a science-fiction setting on a faraway planet.

This four-issue series published by Dark Horse is full of visual splendor, as a lone explorer seeks to understand a distant planet and the unusual beings who inhabit it — and, along the way, make some really awful decisions and narrowly escape with his life several times.

Part of the fun of this series — and something which was commented on many times in the letters pages — is that we don’t really know what the deal is with the alien beings and all their activities, their strange and massive temples, and their relationships to each other. We experience the planet and its inhabitants the same way the explorer does: with incomplete information, leaving us to try to work out the meaning for ourselves.

The fourth issue of Hierolgyph is the problematic one, because it undermines exactly what made the first three issues so much fun. Eventually, a recurring alien character appears at the explorer’s ship and — lo and behold — it has sorted how to speak English, and it launches into exposition to explain everything we’ve seen so far. I don’t know if this was an editorial decision or an authorial one, but I would have been much happier with just about any other ending that did not involve aliens expositing in English.

Despite fumbling the ball in the fourth quarter, Hieroglyph is an intriguing read for most of its run, and Delgado’s ability to portray the feelings and reactions of both human and non-human characters through purely visual means is without peer. You can have it for only $3 or $4 per issue.

Collector’s Guide: Hieroglyph #1-4; 1999, Dark Horse.

indie box: Lords of the Cosmos #3

Tags

indie box, Indie Comics, Jason Lenox, Kickstarter, lords of the cosmos, Ugli Studios

Today’s pick from the short box of indie comics features an issue that doesn’t even exist yet! But it will soon, because the Kickstarter for Lords of the Cosmos #3 is now underway, and it is the tenth Kickstarter from Jason Lenox, whose work first appeared on this blog about six years ago.

Let’s have a sneak preview of artwork from a series Jason describes as a “sci-fi and fantasy comic for fans of He-Man, Thundercats, Heavy Metal, and Flash Gordon!”

The 1980s nostalgia is strong with Lords of the Cosmos. Jason says, “Take all your retro action figure and geek-out fantasies, throw them in a blender with some cheap tequila, put that bad boy on high, and drink whatever mangled, gnarled mess comes out!”

If that sounds like the comic-book cocktail you crave, visit the Lords of the Cosmos Kickstarter to reserve your copy and more fun bonuses!

Son of Big Box of Comics: Turtles, Surfers, and Science-Fiction Mayhem

Tags

Avengers, big box of comics, color classics, comic books, deeper and stranger, John Buscema, Paul Chadwick, review, Roger Stern, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, world below

The big box of comics series is a tribute to the fun things I wouldn’t have in my life without the readers of this blog who help me earn store credit at MyComicShop.com or Amazon.com every time they use my handy “Collector’s Guides” links to make a purchase.

It’s a symbiotic relationship — much like when an alien symbiote bonds to your nervous system and drinks your adrenaline for survival.

Actually, it’s nothing like that, but you could read that story in the Spectacular Spider-man TPB #1 by Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos.

This month, thanks to readers’ generosity, I put together a run of inexpensive reprints of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2–5, courtesy of IDW’s “Color Classics” versions of early TMNT. A few months ago, readers helped me reunite with the ridiculous majesty of TMNT #6, and I couldn’t go on without reading the preceding issues at least one more time!

Was it fun? Oh, hell yes. But maybe not as great as I remember from my black and white collections or the original colorized graphic novels from First. IDW’s coloring is part of that, since they put dark colors over the original Zip-a-Tone midtones, and obscuring the mid-range tends to flatten the artwork and make it less dynamic. Also, one of the pages in one issue seems to be a misprint that duplicates a page from earlier in the story.

But in terms of being an affordable way to read the Turtles’ earliest adventures, these reprints did the job admirably. Because #6 is one of my all-time favorite comics, I enjoyed reliving the outrageous plot that led up to it, and seeing how the storytelling evolved and improved in the early days. As a bonus, I got a few issues from the second volume of Color Classics, including a solo Michelangelo adventure in a kind of Lone Wolf & Cub fantasy of feudal Japan mixed with mystic lizard demons from hell. That issue includes one of my favorite Turtles pages:

Also from the second volume, a color version of an issue of the Return to New York story that’s a favorite of mine.

Along with the batch of ninja nostalgia, I picked up some bargain-priced Fine copies of Paul Chadwick’s The World Below. It’s no secret I love Chadwick’s Concrete series. World Below and its sequel, the four-issue Deeper and Stranger, don’t have the same depth of storytelling and lush rendering as Concrete, but they are a fun romp through Chadwick’s science-fiction imagination.

I like the sequel better than the first series. The sequel uses black and white art with no color, which is almost always how I prefer to see Chadwick’s art. And, the first series suffered from too many flashbacks trying to make me care about characters I never properly met, since the story started right in the middle of the action. Each time a character faced a crisis I wasn’t invested in, the character flashed back to a similar situation in their early life to beat me over the head with how huge an emotional deal it all was. That didn’t work for me.

Also, I could have lived without seeing the characters say, “eff this” and “eff you, you effing effer” instead of using the actual profanity. Those pages in World Below #3 were physically painful to read, and even old-school characters like F@%$ would have been preferable.

It seems to me that if your dialogue depends on using the word “fuck”, then you should probably just say “fuck”.

The narrative problems (mostly) smooth out in the sequel, which has my favorite issue of the series and an unexpected ending that blew my mind. Deeper and Stranger fulfills the promise of the first World Below and the tagline on those covers: the deeper you go, the stranger it gets!

Finally, this month’s box of comics included a favorite from my Avengers collection that I sold off a few years ago. Recently, someone commented on my old post about the Stern/Buscema/Palmer run on Avengers in the 1980s. It reminded me that while I basically memorized those issues after reading them so many times, Avengers #266 featuring the Silver Surfer really needed to come back to my modest “Avengers favorites” collection.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: the issue is a post-script to one of the most god-awful, tragic dumpster fires Marvel produced in the 1980s: Secret Wars II. Don’t even get me started.

But this issue focuses on two powerful beings—one a respected hero, and one a reviled villain—who need to work together to heal a cataclysmic wound in the Earth before the planet falls apart and kills everyone. All in 32 ad-free pages, in which the fate of the world might depend on one total nerd’s desire to watch sitcom re-runs with his girlfriend instead of letting the disaster take its fatal course. It’s so insane!

This issue has many examples of Stern’s dialogue that endeared me to his Avengers. Namor and Hercules bust each other’s balls like only gods can do, but below their arguing I sense a mutual respect born of the knowledge that they are both beings of power, and maybe they need each other to call each other out sometimes to help keep their rages in check.

She-Hulk isn’t turned off at all by Hercules’ temper tantrums; she flatters him and straight-up asks him to dinner, which is almost as awesome as that time she hooked up with Juggernaut. Jennifer’s a being of great power, too, and she seems perfectly comfortable and relaxed about it.

Hercules’ thoughts on nobility and heroism after the villain supposedly “loses his powers” while saving the Earth — also a lovely piece of internal dialogue.

But my favorite part is the final scene where the villain reveals he never lost his powers at all, and that the hero was complicit in this deception.

But why?

The Silver Surfer’s comment on courage and vulnerability really sums up what I love about this Avengers run. Sure, it’s all fun and games in spandex with lots of punching and the fate of the universe at stake, and there’s no shortage of expositional thought balloons. But every now and then, Stern’s humanistic and thoughtful depictions of his characters meld with John Buscema’s and Tom Palmer’s artwork to create high points of visual literature.

You know what? I might need to reclaim a few more of my favorite story arcs from this run — especially the Kang saga and the assault on Avengers Mansion.

That’s it for September’s big box of free comics, and I am excited to tell you about the October box that is on its way!

indie box: Saurians

Tags

Andrea DiVito, CrossGen Comics, indie box, Indie Comics, Mark Waid, Rob Hunter, Saurians, Unnatural Selection, Wil Quintana

This week’s pick from the short-box of indie and small-press comics deals once again with Unnatural Selection, much like the Elephantmen issues we looked at by Casey & Ladronn. But this pick comes from CrossGen comics and deals with evolutionary developments in the course of a war between humans and reptilians.

From the reptiles’ perspective, they’re the good guys. One of them discovers that by eating the humans, the reptiles get smarter and more adaptable like humans. This change allows them to kick our butts in intergalactic warfare. But the politics and religion of the Saurians make things more complex, as does interpersonal rivalry that can only be solved through sword fights and ass kicking!

Hell, yes! It’s like Mark Waid wrote this one just for me, and the artwork is so much fun though this whole story, from the creative panel layouts to the glorious colors.

Saurians: Unnatural Selection is a two-issue limited series telling the tale of the reptile that first made the discovery that eating people is the smart thing to do for an evil space dinosaur, and even if you never followed CrossGen’s main titles, this is a damn good story!

Collector’s Guide:
– From Saurians Unnatural Selection #2; CrossGen Comics, 2002.

indie box: Teknophage

Tags

Bryan Talbot, dinosaur, indie box, Indie Comics, Neil Gaiman, Rick Veitch, Tekno Comics, Teknophage

Inside the indie comics box today, it’s Teknophage: a walking, talking, totally evil dinosaur who rules a world much like ours, only infinitely more terrible. Teknophage feeds on souls, which he extracts from helpless humans in the horrifying vats of his mobile city. He cruises his planet spreading misery every where he goes. Many have tried to overthrow him, only to have their souls ripped from their tortured bodies and consumed.

Rick Veitch created this evil bastard reptile for Tekno Comix, a Neil Gaiman venture. With artist Bryan Talbot, Veitch blends horror, science fiction, and a cynically hilarious social satire to make Teknophage a story you will never forget – assuming you survive!

Here is a preview of the pages where Teknophage recounts his earliest days as just another evil telepathic dinosaur, and how he discovered the multi-dimensional technology that made him master of the planet.

Collector’s Guide:
– From Teknophage #4-5; Tekno Comix, 1995.

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indie box: Salvador

Tags

Boom Studios, first issue, indie box, Indie Comics, JK Woodward, Mark Polish, Michael Polish, Polish Brothers, Salvador, Sebastian Jones

Today we open the indie short-box to find the first and only issue of a series that never happened: Salvador!

The ultimate intent of the lavish, wordless art remains a mystery to me. I felt like I followed the central character’s journey, even though the world was unfamiliar to me, and I could draw some conclusions about what it was all about. But did this episode set up a longer storyline, or is this issue a self-contained story? What did the creators think was coming next?

The blurb in the back of the book, which you can see in the scans below, says Salvador was to be a five-issue series, and the main character was a “savior for DNA discards” in a world of genetic engineering gone awry. He can fly, but he was born brittle, so he is easily broken. I don’t know if that will help you make more sense of this unfinished work, but have a look at these gorgeous pages anyway.

Collector’s Guide:
Salvador #1; Boom Studios, 2007.

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indie box: Zero Killer

Tags

Arvid Nelson, Dark Horse Comics, indie box, Indie Comics, Matt Camp, Zero Killer

What’s inside the short-box of indie comics this week? Dystopic, post-apocalyptic future? Check. Girls kissing in punk-rock gear? Check. Ass kickings? Check. Tattooed mutant brothers living in a vandalized World Trade Center with a massive stockpile of weed? Check.

How about a guy eating cockroaches? Dudes hacking off a dude’s limbs and feeding them to rats? One totally stacked mama running a vicious gang of leather-clad boy-toys who kill on command? Check, Check, Check!

What’s there NOT to like about Zero Killer?!? Arvid Nelson put together a monumental adventure story with complex characters in this six-issue series published by Dark Horse. Illustrator Matt Camp made the story come to life perfectly, including a rockin’ wraparound cover featuring dinosaur skulls! It’s like they made this one just for me.

Collector’s Guide:
– From Zero Killer; Dark Horse, 2007.
– Reprinted in the Zero Killer TPB.

indie box: Elephantmen

Tags

Elephantmen, Hip Flask, Image Comics, indie box, Indie Comics, Joe Casey, Ladronn, Unnatural Selection

What’s inside the short-box of independent and small-press comic books this week? It’s Elephantmen from Image Comics! Now, you might argue that Image Comics is too big to be considered “indie” or “small press” anymore, and maybe you’re right. But I remember when it was a start-up company with only a handful of titles, and one important thing remains the same: a focus on creator-owned projects.

Richard Starkings’ Elephantmen is one of several books that made me pay attention to Image Comics after having written them off years before as having better art than story, and too much focus on spandex-clad super-types. While that judgment might seem more accurate if you consider the quality I encountered in the earliest issues of WildC.A.T.s and StormWatch when Image began, even those titles became pretty awesome a few years later. So, Image can thank Richard Starkings for getting my damned attention, and I also thank Richard for the amazing tutorial he created that taught me how to letter comic books using Adobe Illustrator. See the Comicraft company website for awesome fonts, and that tutorial which is well worth the $10 if you want to learn how to letter digitally.

In the Unnatural Selection story–one of my favorites–Joe Casey and Ladronn created a gruesome future history for Richard Starking’s Elephantmen. A future where soldiers are bred from men and beasts, incubated in horrific labs, and indoctrinated as murderous slaves. Dig the following sample pages from Elephantmen: Unnatural Selection. We witness the birth of the starring character Hip Flask and the strange brand that gave him his name. Also, we encounter the brutal training and combat our hybrid heroes endured before they gained their freedom. One thing is for sure: mad scientists are jerks!

Collector’s Guide to Awesome Elephantmen Stories:
– From Elephantmen #0: Unnatural Selection; Image Comics.
– Elephantmen TPB
– Damaged Goods TPB
– War Toys TPB
– Unhuman: The Elephantmen Art of Ladronn.

indie box: Nemesis

Tags

2000AD, Eagle Comics, indie box, Kevin O'Neill, Nemesis, nemesis the warlock, Pat Mills

What’s inside the short-box of indie comic books this week? Nemesis, published by the UK-based Eagle Comics, and originating in the pages of 2000AD. Thanks to my high-school buddy Brian and his older brother Michael, the insanity of British comic books was percolating into my awareness by the mid-1980s, and by the time creators such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Warren Ellis (to name just a few) were working on mainstream franchises at Marvel and DC (or their subsidiaries), I was primed for a ‘British Invasion’ of American comics that rivaled that of blues-based rock music in the 1960s.

For me, it began with Nemesis. When Brian saw this creative team sparked my interest, he also shared with me Marshall Law and Metalzoic. Since then, I’ve dug O’Neill’s art on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Mills’ work on Flesh, which I only discovered decades after its original publication.

The following self-contained short story about Nemesis begins in a dungeon where alien species are imprisoned, along with humans suspected of harboring or assisting aliens. Though they suffer, their spirits are lifted by memories of the revolutionary alien warrior, Nemesis!

Nemesis the Warlock! His name strikes fear into the hearts of humans everywhere. Humans living in a religious monarchy that persecutes and exterminates all aliens. Just look at this glorious propaganda poster for Torquemada, the arch-nemesis of Nemesis and totally disgusting scumbag.

That’s right. This evil freak is everywhere, spearheading an inquisition across the galaxy to torture and murder peace-loving aliens! It’s almost like living in the United States in 2019!

But take heart, species of the universe. Nemesis the Warlock has an even freakier face than Torquemada, and his sword is way more huge! So huge that it has its own origin story — a violent, grotesque space epic of suffering and sacrifice for all the wrong reasons. Suck it, humans!

Collector’s Guide:
– From Nemesis the Warlock; Eagle Comics, 1984. By Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill.

indie box: Alexis

Tags

adam kelly, Alexis, black and white, Eros Comics, Fantagraphics, indie box, Indie Comics, tentacles

This week, the indie short-box holds the only issue of Alexis I’ve ever seen. This book is so small-press that it might as well be extinct — which is a shame for a book with bold and exciting black-and-white artwork, boobs, and tentacles.

Individual issues appear sometimes on eBay and Amazon, but with little agreement on the market value. I’ve never seen a listing for a full set of either Volume 1 or Volume 2, and certainly not both together. [This is no longer true! See my update in the Collector’s Guide below.] Each volume was five issues long. Below are my scans of issue #5 of the second volume. It seems like a grand climax to a fun story with awesome art that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I’d love to see the other nine issues.

Art & Story by Adam Kelly. Published March, 1996 by Kim Thompson and Gary Groth of Eros Comix, a defunct imprint of Fantagraphics. The inside cover contains this text: “RETAILERS ARE INSTRUCTED NOT TO SELL THIS PUBLICATION TO MINORS.” Compared to some of the publisher’s outright porn comics advertised in the back of this issue, Alexis #5 seems pretty mild.

Collector’s Guide: I have no idea where to find this series. Do you? Leave a comment and enlighten me. UPDATE: I found a store that currently has all issues of Volume 2, and a package deal containing all ten issues of Volumes 1 and 2. Prices are about $10 per issue. See the listings at AbeBooks.com.

more free comics

Tags

big box of comics, comic books, Dreadstar, Eclipse Comics, Epic Comics, Jim Starlin, MiracleMan, Neil Gaiman, review

Just when I’d wrapped up a series of posts about the big box of free comics I got thanks to readers who used my affiliate links to find books at MyComicShop.com, another note from the retailer arrived to say I’d earned an additional $80 in store credit. That same week, I’d found a good deal on eBay to replace one of my favorite (and previously sold) action/crime series, DC/Vertigo’s The Losers, so I was left with very few holes in my collection. The Dark Horse Conan stories I’d like to read again were either too pricey or currently out of stock, so I dug around in my short boxes until it hit me: I still don’t have the complete original Miracleman series!

Over the years, I’d tracked down affordable copies in respectable condition of issues #1–20, and this quest was aided near the end by Marvel’s reprints of the original series. As Marvel made new, high-quality reprints available, the ridiculous prices for the original books decreased. Issue #15, one of the last gems to enter my collection, used to run from $150 up to several hundred bucks, for example. Now I have a copy in wonderful, though not perfect, condition, and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

I didn’t worry too much about collecting issues #21–24 because Marvel reprinted #21 and 22 in their repackaging of Neil Gaiman’s Golden Age storyline, and it seemed that Gaiman was slated to finish the Silver Age story that ended with a cliffhanger and was never completed due to Eclipse Comics’ demise. But here we are, years later, and we still haven’t seen the end of that story. I’m glad for Gaiman’s recent success with American Gods, but it isn’t a project that interests me. The gods I want to read about have “Miracle” in their names!

So, armed with some store credit, I picked up issues #21-23 of the original series, leaving me with only the rare (and still a bit pricey) #24 on my wish list. I’ve read them all before, thanks to scans posted online, but it’s just a different and more satisfying experience to read the physical copies. (You can find scans of the original series at https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Miracleman-1985)

Those three books ate up most of my store credit, but I had just enough left over to pick up another story I’ve read before but was partially incomplete in my collection: The Price by Jim Starlin. Sure, I have the color “remastered” version that was the Dreadstar Annual, but I have never seen nor owned the original magazine-sized black-and-white edition, and I just love the black-and-white painted art of the original Metamorphosis Odyssey that appeared in Epic Illustrated and started the whole Dreadstar saga.

The original art reveals just how much the coloring/painting process enhanced the artwork’s mood and the story’s vibrancy. The original feels cold compared to the color version. It lacks the brilliant reds of the robes worn by members of the Church of the Instrumentality, the eye-popping colors that bring various cosmic and mystical energies to life on the page, and the powerful emotions suggested by the reprint’s color artwork.

However, the front and back-cover paintings are rendered in their original full-color and full-size glory, unlike in the reprint where they are shrunk and surrounded by additional cover elements that distract from their beauty—a complaint that at least one reader expressed in the original letters column of Dreadstar when the Annual was discussed.

I’m pleased to now have both versions of The Price in my Dreadstar collection, and the original was the one piece I’ve felt was missing over the years. How I assembled, lost, and re-assembled the entire original series four times is a saga of collector triumph and tragedy, but I’m happy to now have every issue I ever wanted from one of my all-time favorite stories in any medium.

Now if we could just see the end of Miracleman, all would be right with the universe.

Thank you, readers and fans of sequential art for visiting this site and using it to find the books you want!

Collectors’ Guide:

Miracleman #1-24 (original 1985 series, Eclipse Comics)

Miracleman (reprint series by Marvel Comics, includes original issues #1-16)

Miracleman Golden Age (reprint series by Marvel, includes original issues #17-22 )

The Price (original magazine-sized b&w edition, Eclipse Comics)

Dreadstar Annual #1 (full-color reprint of the original, Epic/Marvel comics)

 

Big Box of Comics Part 4: Planetary Omnibus

Tags

big box of comics, comic books, John Cassaday, Laura Martin, Planetary, planetary omnibus, review, Warren Ellis, Wildstorm Comics

This post is part of a series about what was inside this month’s big box of free comics.

What can I say about Planetary that hasn’t already been said in the 20 years since its first issue? From the series’ chronic delays of up to years between issues, to the Eisner-award-winning artwork, Planetary has been documented about as thoroughly as the weird events in Elijah Snow’s annual “Planetary Guides”.

The 864-page hardcover Omnibus edition looks like one of those Guides when you remove the slipcover, and that’s just one example of the high-quality design that was a hallmark of the series. People might have waited months or years for the original issues, but when each one finally came out, it looked damn good. So does the Omnibus.

Reading the Omnibus cover-to-cover puts Planetary in a fresh light. I gained a greater sense of the series’ continuity and complexity since I could read each chapter with the previous one still fresh in my mind. I got an even stronger impression of the amazing work by colorist Laura Martin (with assistance from Wildstorm FX). Although writer Warren Ellis and artist John Cassaday usually get the credit for the series, Martin’s contribution is integral to its visual splendor and the emotional effect of every page and panel. Maybe Planetary could have been good without Martin, but I doubt it would have been legendary.

The Omnibus also dissipates the major annoyance I had when I was originally piecing the series together from single issues; namely, a feeling that every installment consisted only of the three main characters visiting a random location where they met a random person who delivered lengthy exposition about a scenario based on pulp fiction or vintage superheroes, and that this exposition filled most of the pages before reaching a vague and hasty conclusion tacked on as an afterthought to the “cool concept” of the issue.

While several chapters do this, they are not as numerous as I remember, and they mostly take place in the beginning of the series. Reading the Omnibus makes it clear how the individual chapters fit into the big picture; it was just difficult to sort all that out with a series that took ten years to publish 27 issues, and because it was challenging to find affordable copies in complete chronological order if you came to the series late like I did.

Though I’ve thought highly of Planetary since the day I discovered a beat-up copy of #5 at a used bookstore, the Omnibus made me enjoy and appreciate it even more.

Buyer’s Guide:

The Planetary Omnibus is sometimes out of stock at MyComicShop.com, but usually available on Amazon.

 

Big Box of Comics Part 3: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

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big box of comics, comic books, eric talbot, Jim Lawson, Kevin Eastman, Mirage Studios, Peter Laird, review, steve lavigne, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, TMNT, triceraton

This post is part of a series about what was inside this month’s big box of free comics.

The Return to New York story in the original TMNT series #19–21 is even better than I remember. I think I was in turtle overload when I read it years ago, and I’d forgotten much of it. Visually, it’s one of the greatest TMNT stories of all time, with stunningly detailed artwork, creative layouts, extensively choreographed fight scenes, and incredible double-splash pages.

The black & white artwork creatively uses both black and white ink in addition to detailed screentone shading (sometimes called by the brand name Zip-A-Tone). The result is some of my favorite artwork in any TMNT story, and it’s a joy to watch the Turtles hack and slash their way through sewers full of enemies while their new Triceraton friend destroys everything in sight with his blaster.

But I was in for a shock when I read issue #6. It wasn’t just the wraparound cover that’s even more awesome than I remember. It wasn’t just the visual splendor of Turtles and Triceratons in combat. No, the shock was the discovery of just how many ideas I apparently stole from this single issue for my fiction series, The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Issue #6 has asteroids, dinosaur-type aliens in a combat ring fighting to the death, a ruling body referred to only as the High Council, silly satire, aliens who dislike mammals (“Shut your face, you puny piece of mammal droppings!”), heroes who insult the dino-aliens (“Where I come from, bozos like you know their place—in museums, displayed as skeletons of long-dead ancient freaks!”), fight scenes that last for several pages with scant dialogue, and a shoot-out while attempting to board a spaceship. Somehow, this mid-1980s masterpiece burrowed so deeply into my brain that I was unconsciously drawing on it for inspiration decades later.

I wasn’t planning on picking up the original ten issues of the series, but after reading #6, I want to read the whole storyline again!

Buyers Guide:

—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6. Reprinted in: Ultimate Collection Hardcover #1.

—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #19-21, Return to New York. Reprinted in Ultimate Collection Hardcover #3.