Transposthumousism - SCP Foundation

Transposthumousism

2008

The Red Lord's Arms: Three Portlands

I don't hate this man.

Karen Elstrom, a woman of exceptional mental control, consciously avoided ending that thought with the word 'yet'. No point being defeatist on a first date.

The man she didn't hate was a picture of distinction. Neat blonde moustache, tailored midnight blue suit, eggplant cravat — even the words were a delight to combine — and an honest-to-god carnation in his lapel. As though he could read her mind and sense the unaccustomed positivity, he flashed a dazzling white smile. Not a grin; he would never have gotten her in the door were he the grinning sort. "I knew I'd seen you before," he drawled in that way only the truly wealthy could afford. "The Cameron Constantine exhibition at the Museum of Establishment Anart. February, wasn't it?" He pronounced the first 'r' in February. Karen's heart swelled, and for a moment she wondered if the Red Lord's Arms had chosen to again violate local ordinances by playing aphrodisiac madrigals… no, they were instead piping in Ravel's Bolero, which was racy but not anomalously so. The UIU had threatened to shut down the expatriate Alagaddan bistro if it hosted another spontaneous orgy, and the playing of Catallus 16 for Concupiscent Voice Choir had been banned across Three Portlands. It was definitely the pronunciation arousing her.

He was still talking. "What was it called? 'Perfection in 4D', I think. Yes."

She leaned in, left hand sliding smoothly beneath her right elbow as she cupped her face and favoured him with her best alluring smile. Not for nothing had she once practiced seductive glances over the top of her eyeglasses in the mirror. "I don't see much anart in my line. Security concerns. Unless you think I moonlight as a model?"

His laugh was rich as stained mahogany. "It's a crime against art and artists if you don't. But no, that isn't what I mean. Constantine's exhibit was a physical, living timelapse of ideal forms in nude, shifting effortlessly from pose to perfect pose, each figure reflecting the viewer's personal standard for beauty and grace. In appearance and demeanour, you could have been mine."

She could think of three ways to respond to this. If her goal for the evening was to secure a genuine emotional connection with another human being, she could leave immediately and find someone capable of forming such a thing. If she wanted to gain the upper hand in this interaction, prolong the delightful dance, she could exploit his choice of words to assert that she belonged only to herself. If after the private matinee screening of Zombie Tarkovsky's unreleased new Marvel movie and the five hundred dollar meal of Nevermeant blood oyster and Anantasheshan caviar he had paid for with cash, however, she felt he had paid the entrance fee… "As a means of separating me from my dress, that's quite novel." She quirked an eyebrow.

He chuckled sedately as his head exploded.

Under the table, Karen blinked. There was something hot and painful in her eyes, and she wiped it off with the backside of the expensive table cloth. Training and instinct had put her on the floor in one hot second, and only now was she operating off autopilot. She glanced down, eyes still burning from the salt of her date's blood, and confirmed that her dress was unstained. Then she gently, oh so gently, lifted the edge of the cloth to take in the scene.

The Red Lord's Arms was a picture of absolute chaos, on a typical night. Being one of the most desirable high end restaurants in an anomalous free port didn't mean black tie and cocktail dress clientele. There were occultists — several of these were chanting, and one was trying to pry open a salt shaker for the purpose of pouring a protective circle; there were madmen — most of these were screaming or laughing as tables upended and the air was filled with a heavy, strangely hollow clanking sound; there were mad scientists, and one of them, a long-haired lunatic in a white smock, was hefting a gun which looked like it had been designed for anti-tank use in some far flung grimdark future. If that had been the weapon which killed her date…

My date is dead.

…then a lot more than the man's head would have atomized. Probably only the table would have survived; they built things to last against centuries of serious revelry in the Sanguine Quarter of Alagadda. No, she realized, the would-be supervillain wasn't pointing the gun at her table. He was pointing it at the chunky, transparent walking dumpster which was moving through the dining room like a linebacker, scattering patrons and furniture and exotic food in every direction. The gun made a surprisingly pathetic pop when it fired, though the recoil sent the man flying into a wine cabinet filled with vintages of suspect provenance and the projectile, a ball of glowing red plasma, sailed neatly through the robot ghost like it wasn't really there and essentially deleted the restaurant's north wall. The scene was now open to the street, and the attacker took this opportunity to exit stage right. It galloped onto the sidewalk, took a flying leap notable for its unlikely grace, struck an electrical pole, shimmered and disappeared with a much more satisfying crash of thunder.

It occurred to Karen that there was absolutely no way she could afford to pay for the meal herself.

Quinn pulled her badge out of her UIU windbreaker and presented it to the agent in charge, a stocky astral projector named Driscoll she knew only passingly. "Quinn Law."

To his credit, the man accepted this as her name and walked her in. "Thanks for the quick assist. Got a real nasty one here."

She nodded as they walked through the ruins of the restaurant. Quinn was surprised to feel a light breeze, and see sunlight. She was even more surprised when they entered the dining room, and she could see why. No wonder the streets surrounding the Red Lord's Arms had all been cordoned off. "Was already in the neighbourhod, uh…" She wasn't sure how to finish that thought without opening herself up to unwanted questions, not that Driscoll was likely to ask them right now, so she let it die on the ellipsis and changed tack. "How nasty we talking? Enough to need a necromancer, obviously, but why? I hear people die in this joint all the time."

The agent snorted in good humour. "Yeah, but it's supposed to be the food that kills you. This fella took an expanding round in the head, and if it's all the same to you I'd like to ask him why."

The fella in question was still sitting at his table, sans everything above the neckerchief. There was blood everywhere, and brain matter, and bits of skull, and what looked like very expensive bone china. Alagaddan bone china, she'd read somewhere, was legally required to be glazed three times over to prevent the material seeping out into the food. The bone was, to put it mildly, unethically sourced.

"Friend of yours?" she asked, just to lighten the mood a bit.

"Could say that," Driscoll sighed. "GOC bigwig from out of town. We were supposed to be protecting him."

"Oh." That explained all the security outside. If the UIU had screwed up large, they wouldn't want anyone seeing it. UIUseless was the dominant narrative outside of Three Portlands, but here they were the law, and most people were happy to consider them good at what they did. "Can I ask why it didn't work out?"

Driscoll grunted. "A giant see-through box monster came out of nowhere and popped his top, then vanished. Seems like a tech thing, but you know, we're hurting for tech people right now."

Quinn did know this. There was a notable shortage of programmers throughout Three Portlands, had been for months. Word on the street was the skippers were hiring for some top-secret project, scooping up the best and leaving the worst to work electronic forensics for the UIU. One more reason to hate them. "Nobody saw that coming? And it got through our security screen? How does a thing like that happen?"

"OPR thinks there's a leak."

Quinn's stomach sank. If the Office of Professional Responsibility was involved, this case was going to be a headache. Better to get her part over and done with, and get out. She'd been looking forward to this evening all week, and was itching all over to… she cleared her throat. "Okay. You want me to call the guy up?"

"In a minute. How are you with interrogation? We've got a witness, but she's… let's call her uncooperative." He gestured at the bar across the splintered battlefield. "Maybe you'll get lucky."

In my dreams, she thought. Wow. Only a corpse with an exploded head could have distracted her from the woman at the bar. She had long legs and long honey-blonde hair, ruby lips and a profile that didn't take no for an answer when it sought out the manager to make a complaint. She was wearing an electric blue dress and a look of utter contempt for everything around her, sitting just so as though someone was painting her portrait. Not for the first time in the past month, Quinn wondered if the universe was trying to send her a message.

She nodded Driscoll, and headed over to the bar. "Ma'am? I'd like to… ask you a few questions."

She'd hesitated because the woman had turned to glare at her, and her throat had dried up all at once. The goddess of angry librarians had bright blue eyes, and they flashed with righteous indignation. Her neck tilted back, emphasizing the height difference, and when she spoke the air between them all but frosted. "I already told him," and she pointed accusatorily with the air of a jilted supermodel, "that I won't give a statement without my attorney present."

Quinn shrugged. There was only one way to play this game. "Okay. I'll ask your client, then, when I summon him. Hope your agency retains one of the really expensive lawyers."

The woman's nostrils flared magnificently, and Quinn realized she had made a critical error. "Agency. Agency. Please explain what you meant by that."

"Uh…" That piercing gaze really was something. "I'm sorry, I must have… okay. What was your relationship to the deceased?"

"Meaning am I his professional escort?" The woman stepped primly off her stool, heels clacking on the hundred century oak floorboards. "I'll have you know I represent the Office of the Undersecretary General of the Global Occult Coalition, and what Mr. Vollan and I do of an evening is no concern of the UIU."

Quinn rallied, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. "It is when someone blows his head off in our burg, miss…?"

"de Leoncourt," the woman snapped, looking every inch of it. "Tonya de Leoncourt. I'm in your system. You have no reason to detain me."

"If you're sick of being detained, you could try just answering the questions so we can get on with our work. Did you see the killer?"

"Yes. It was some sort of eldritch homunculus, blocky and mechanical-looking. I didn't see the weapon it used, but an entire restaurant of people saw what it looked like. It demanifested into the power lines. Your friend over there tells me no one's ever seen anything like it. I certainly haven't."

She said this as though she had seen quite a lot, and therefore the lack of recognition was meaningful. Quinn filed this away for later. "What was… Mr. Vollan, did you say? What was he doing in Three Ports?"

Tonya snorted. "They really don't tell you people anything, do they? He was attending to business. Private business."

Something in the way the woman's eyes narrowed… "You don't know, huh? It's okay to admit it."

Tonya looked away. Quinn marvelled at the sharpness of her chin. "It would have been rude to pry. He's attached to the Silicon Nornir, and you know how secretive they are."

"Right," Quinn suddenly found herself grinning. She couldn't quite see her way to imagining this woman backing down from a group of Scandinavian programmers. "And of course you aren't the rude sort. Do you know why someone might have wanted to do him harm?"

Tonya idly flipped a lock of hair that hadn't done anything in particular to deserve it, and angled her head just so. "He's highly-placed in PSYCHE. He does diplomatic work. Any number of groups might have wanted him dead."

"Was this your first date?"

That blue fire glare swung her way again. "Why is that any business of yours?"

"Just wondering whether you know him well enough to tell me anything useful, or we're just bantering as a blood sport for the joy of it."

The red lips twitched, just once. The woman didn't answer.

Without knowing why she did it, Quinn asked: "Would you like to witness the summoning? It, uh… might be easier if there's someone around he knows. Might be more willing to talk to you than me."

Tonya shrugged, the expensive dress rippling expensively. "Whatever. Just don't take your time, because you're taking mine too."

They walked back to the table, Quinn's itchy sensation worsening by the second. The other agent offered her a look of knowing, if misplaced, sympathy. "Ready?"

"Ready enough." Quinn examined the wreckage. "Plenty of reagents, ah, locally sourced as it were. Should be able to work the circle up pretty quick." She gloved up, then bundled everything in the tablecloth and deposited it beside the table. "Won't take but a jiffy."

"Are you trying to talk us to death?" Tonya asked.

Quinn suppressed the urge to respond as she covered the table with a fresh sheet and set to the task at hand. A few minutes later, the gory work was complete. She spoke the words and performed the gestures which would usher the dead man back across the border between this world and whichever one of the next his spirit had chosen, or been forced into, and the visceral sigil shone electric blue and roiled like a living thing. Droplets of blood extracted themselves from the red fabric and hovered in mid-air, the organs pulsed and the bone fragments ground themselves to dust as the light in the room dimmed down in occult disregard of the setting sun outside. A silhouette of white appeared atop the table, so bright they couldn't look directly at it, and it immediately began waving its arms in blind panic. Quinn finished her chant, and the light died down abruptly, and they all got a good look at what she'd brought back.

The immaculately-dressed ghost was missing its head.

"Okay." Driscoll scratched his jaw. "I don't… that's not a whole lot more useful than what we had already, to be honest."

The headless ghost flailed wildly, stepped on its own entrails, slipped, and fell off the table.

"I take it this wasn't the result you were aiming for," Tonya remarked mildly.

"I don't get it." Quinn shook her head as the apparition staggered back to its feet. "This isn't… anything. This isn't how it works. At all. Nobody's self-image lacks a head."

"Maybe he didn't really want to come back," Driscoll suggested.

"Didn't have his head in the game, you mean?" Quinn was startled to hear the words, and glanced appreciatively at Tonya. The other woman didn't appear to notice. "Or maybe she's not very good at this."

Quinn was torn between wanting to spar with the elegant snotbag and needing to know what had gone so terribly wrong with her summoning spell. The ghost grasped at the stump of its neck, then tried to feel for its missing face, then paused and reached out for its surroundings like a man searching for a light switch in the dark. Tonya sighed. "This is grotesque. Give the man back his dignity, would you?"

At the sound of her voice, the ghost suddenly lunched in her direction. The woman neatly sidestepped, and one of the only tables in the bistro remaining upright was upset by the resultant crash.

"Maybe he knows sign language," Driscoll suggested gamely. He pulled Quinn aside. "Seriously though, this is obviously a bust. We're going to have a hard time detaining Lady de Whatever, but I don't like cutting her loose with a killer at large, and I really don't like the idea of keeping her in custody if someone in the bureau is in on whatever happened. I'd like you to dismiss the stiff, then take the witness someplace secure."

Quinn frowned. "Like, a safehouse you mean?"

He shook his head. "No. Let's not tap any bureau resources until we know our shit is squared. You said you were already in the neighbourhood when the call came, didn't you?"

She gulped, and hoped it wasn't audible. "Yeah, but… I mean…" She sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. I can take her back to my… I can take her someplace. You want us to sit tight there, or…?"

"If you think of any avenues, or the witness gives you a lead, call it in before heading back out. Her safety is your priority, but we do want to make progress on this thing but fast. It's gonna be an evolving situation and the GOC is going to be a right pain in our asses the whole time, no doubt."

"They've already started." Quinn watched the imperious Tonya striking a pose by the summoning table for no apparent reason, one leg bent like a freeze-framed ballerina.

Driscoll clapped her on the shoulder. "Your government thanks you."

Karen watched with increasing impatience as the flustered necromancer attempted to release the spirit of Rikard Vollan. They were both frantically waving their arms at each other, Quinn Law — which couldn't be her real name, but Karen could hardly fault her for that given the circumstances — switching fluently between a host of occult dead languages to absolutely no avail.

"I believe I would like to end this date," Karen announced. "I have decided not to invite him home."

The necromancer grimaced at her. "I can't grok his deal. I swear I know what I'm doing, he shouldn't still be hanging around."

"He ought to have a head, too. I take it this is your first day on the job?"

The grimace evolved into a glower. "You want to talk about being on the job, dressed like you are?"

Karen suppressed a genuine smile as Driscoll tapped Quinn on the shoulder. "Hey, dial it down. The whole point here is to not make a scene. Just get her out of here, and we'll handle the ghost. Alright? Alright."

This obviously didn't sit well with the necromancer, who struck Karen as the kind of woman who prided herself on the quality of her work. This was relatable. "Fine. Okay. Well, once I've got her safe and sound, I can swing back and—"

"Nah. Don't worry about it. This town is lousy with occultists, we've even got a few detained outside as witnesses. But the crowd's getting thick out there, so…"

Quinn finally surrendered to the facts, and headed for the door. "Come on, Tonya. It's a short walk, even in heels."

"I've run marathons in heels." Karen jabbed Driscoll in the chest with one long finger. "Purse."

He shook his head, wincing as though expecting a sudden slap. "Sorry, ma'am. Evidence."

Karen stretched to her full height, which put their eyes about even, and lowered her voice half an octave. "How many dead GOC representatives would you like on your record today, agent?"

He blinked. "I would've preferred zero, but failing that—"

"One. Right. Well there's pepper spray in my purse, and if you'd be so generous as to let me have it, I'll see what I can do on that score."

He chewed on that for a moment, then shook his head. "No can do, ma'am. Regs are regs."

"Oh, for crying out loud." Quinn reached into her windbreaker and pulled out a small black pistol with a bright yellow barrel, which she passed to Karen who accepted it without comment. "A consolation gift for your blown date."

Karen angled the bottom of her jawline at Driscoll as a means of taking her leave, then took one final look at her date's corpse. She'd rather liked the cravat, pretentious though it was…

As she turned to follow Quinn, she heard the other agent utter a frustrated exclamation. Both women turned around.

The ghost was following Karen.

"No." Quinn waved her arms like she was shooing a cat. "No. Piss off. Away with ye. Abito. Éfyge. Dh' fhalbh." The ghost regarded her with expressionless disinterest, not that it had a lot of options in that regard. Karen took a step backward in Quinn's direction, and the spectre clumsily mimicked the motion.

"Fuck," she muttered.

"Agreed." Quinn glanced around the restaurant. "There a back alley exit to this place? Gotta be, right?"

Driscoll nodded. "Though the kitchen."

"Right. The flat's on the alley network, we can cut through there. Obviously don't wanna trail a headless ghost through Three Ports in rush hour traffic, we won't make it ten feet before someone wants their picture taken with him. Call in a cordon around 51 Darcelle? Use the road work cover, just needs to hold for half an hour 'til we're in the front door."

He nodded again.

Quinn turned to face Karen. "One foot in front of the other, and try not to look behind you."

"Mm. 'Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread'," Karen agreed.

The necromancer blinked. "'Because she knows a frightful fiend doth close behind her tread'. Coleridge or Frankenstein?"

"Yes."

"Huh." Again the other woman wasted a moment favouring her with an appraising look, then headed for the back of the restaurant. Karen kept pace, the ghost trailing in her train.

"So, what do you do at the GOC?" Quinn asked conversationally as they exited into a long, dingy corridor between brick structures. "Vollan seems like a big deal. You work with him?" Karen noted she was using this casual banter to soften the sight of drawing her service weapon, pointing it at the filthy alley floor.

Karen flexed her fingers over the taser's rubber grip, and shook her head. "That's my business. Were you going to shoot me if you didn't like the answer?"

"You're certainly very shootable. It's entirely possible that whoever killed Vollan was aiming at you."

This time Karen did smile. "Thank you. I do try."

One red eyebrow raised. "You put a lot into this performance, don't you? Some of it's got to be automated, the hellion routine is way too smooth to be completely conscious. You'd have trouble remembering to breathe."

"Think of it as weight training." Karen pursed her lips.

From time to time the necromancer stopped walking to peer around a corner, or listen to the wind in the eaves, and sometimes when she turned back to glance at Karen she was even smiling a little. Sensing she'd lost the initiative, slipping from intimidating to entertainingly prickly, Karen dedicated a small corner of her mind to thinking up something really vicious to say about Quinn's ripped jeans or the occult tattoos on the backs of her hands.

They walked in silence for a while, so silent that Karen fancied she could hear the ghost gesticulating frantically behind her…

"Why is he still solid?" she asked suddenly.

Quinn glanced back at Vollan. "Probably he's got some experience with astral projection. He should be able to go intangible if he wants to. Guess he lacks the presence of mind to figure that out right now." She smirked guiltily, and opened her mouth to follow up and likely worsen this statement.

Karen interrupted her. "He lost his presence of mind honestly."

This time the other woman actually flushed with pleasure. Oh dear. Karen pondered the awkwardness of her situation. The GOC would confirm her cover story as a diplomatic favour; high-clearance Foundation personnel weren't meant to visit Free Ports without an escort, and occluding her identity had been the only way she could get permission for this date. She'd met Vollan at a summit late last year, traded pleasantries and phone numbers as the chattering set did, and had been surprised to receive his offer of dinner and a movie gratis. With plenty of personal time saved up and synergistic weaknesses for fine dining and high art, she'd accepted. As always whenever she indulged in personal gratification, it had backfired spectacularly.

An empty street became visible up ahead. There was a man with long, droopy rabbit ears slumped against the lefthand wall, asleep. He was clutching a sign that read JUST NEED THREE MORE NAMES TO GET HOME. BLESS. Quinn palmed a notepad and took a quick note before moving on.

"Where are you taking me?"

The agent hesitated before answering. "To meet a friend of mine, I guess."

Quinn's 'friend' was socked away in a crumbling but still respectable brownstone on Darcelle Street. The landlord had owed her a favour for the thing with the killer contracts a few months back, and she'd been able to secure a very reasonable rate for a three room flat on the fifth floor.

The street was empty when they emerged from the alley, UIU auto-rickshaws blocking both ends while a few agents in construction wear milled about and tried to look a different variety of blue collar. Nobody saw them lead their spectral companion in the front door. Quinn ushered Tonya through first, then waved off the nearest agent before entering herself.

"This is where you live?" the other woman sniffed with obvious disdain. Quinn already knew enough to suspect at least some of the disdain was affected, probably the obvious part.

"No." Quinn punched the elevator's call button. "But I've been spending a lot of time here, uh… it's secure." She willed her face not to turn red.

"No doubt. What self-respecting assassin would catch someone dead in a place like this?" Tonya transitioned from one obnoxious pose to another. Quinn almost expected to see a camera flash.

The elevator arrived. The ghost didn't follow them in until the doors closed, at which point it walked straight through them. Quinn sighed. "Looks like he's figuring it out."

"Good," Tonya nodded. "I'm glad the date hasn't been a total wash for him, like it has for me."

On the fifth floor, Quinn fumbled awkwardly with her keychain. "Look. If you could maybe not be a total bitch the whole time you're here, I'd appreciate it. This friend of mine—"

"—is a euphemism," Tonya agreed with a nod. "For boyfriend. No? Girlfriend, then."

Quinn felt her own expression shifting rapidly. "No! No! She's new in… well, she's just new, okay, and we're trying things… out… we haven't… while we're getting used to… it's an open…" She nearly passed out from the blood flow to her cheeks. "Okay, fuck off. It's none of your business. Just don't make her angry, she's sort of a serial killer."

She had the satisfaction of seeing genuine surprise on the other woman's face as they reached the door. "Your idea of taking me to safety is delivering me to a serial killer?"

Quinn unlocked the door, feeling emboldened by Tonya's discomfort. "Just don't mess with her and you'll be fine. She's kind of hardcore."

A beautiful blonde woman strolled out of the bedroom as they walked into the apartment, wearing only a faded old UIU t-shirt just long enough to preserve her modesty. She stretched, yawned messily, and said "Hey doll. You get the oil?"

Quinn refused to look Tonya in the eye. "Uh. No. Sorry Twirly. Work. Uh. Got in the way." She gestured at Tonya. "Picked this thing up instead."

"Oh!" The green-eyed monster looked the new arrival up and down speculatively. "I thought you told me they didn't have chorus girls anymore."

Now it was safe to glance up at the other woman, who was of course quietly fuming with a chance of no longer being quiet. "This is actually a very important secret government official, believe it or not. You can see it in the cheekbones if you look real close. Her name is Tonya." Quinn gestured back and forth between them. "Tonya de Leoncourt, meet Eva McDoyle."

Eva waved. "Hello. I'm her houseghost."

Quinn snorted. "She's not actually a ghost. More like a lege—"

"Don't care." Tonya walked around the apartment, looking for some form of furniture meeting with her approval and apparently not finding any. "Very very much do not care at all." She cocked her head to one side. "Thoughtform, probably? Concretized? You were going to say 'legend'. Must be a story there; no, shush." She held up one finger to silence them both. "I didn't say I wanted to hear it. I said the opposite, in point of fact, and I know my diction is clear."

"She's nice," Eva remarked cheerfully, reaching down to scratch her ankle. She was wearing a shiny piece of translucent jewellery down there. "Who's your other friend?"

"Oh." Quinn glanced back at the headless ghost, now gliding past her to follow Tonya. "Yeah. This, uh, this is the case, I guess. He's…" She waved vaguely. "It is what it is."

Eva cocked her head to one side. "Did you raise him?"

"Yeah." Quinn felt sheepish.

"And you can't get rid of him?" Eva cackled with delight. "Turning into a habit, eh?"

Quinn wanted to say something nice like what makes you think I'd want to get rid of you? but felt intensely awkward about it with the diva swanning around the room, staring daggers at every stain, streak of dust or item out of place. So she shrugged, smiled in what she hoped was an affectionate way, and nodded.

"Does he talk?"

"Does he talk? He's not a parrot." Having finished her patrol and found nothing to her liking, Tonya walked back between the two of them. The ghost followed like a lost puppy. "And of course he doesn't talk. He hasn't got a mouth."

"I couldn't use mine when we first met," Eva reminded Quinn. "We still found a way."

Quinn felt her eyes widen, and nodded. "You think…?"

"Can't hurt to try." Eva walked across the living room to the attached kitchenette, and picked up a small portable radio Quinn had bought her. "Let's see." She turned it on, and rolled through the FM dial. Though her mouth was closed, her voice came out of the speaker when she next spoke: "Calling all cars, calling all cars!" Tonya didn't look fazed, and not for the first time Quinn wondered what her line of work really was. "Anybody in here?" Eva's voice crackled along the frequency spectrum, to no avail.

The moment she switched to AM, however, she got results.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA," a baritone male voice screamed on the radio. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

The headless ghost screamed for what felt like an hour but was probably less than a minute. Eva turned the volume down. It waved its arms, and it screamed. It ran circles around Karen, and it screamed.

"He's not taking this well," Eva said with her mouth. On the radio she said "Do you know any consonants?"

The screaming stopped, and Karen finally recognized Vollan's voice. He hadn't been screaming during their date; they hadn't gotten that far, unfortunately. "What's happening? Why can't I see anything? Where am I?"

"You're in a safehouse with a UIU agent." Eva glanced at Quinn, who shrugged. Karen read it crystal clear: Really? and Come on, it's close enough. "You're… well, you're dead."

The ghost cleared its throat, somehow, and began to scream again.

"Hey! Asshole! Hey dead asshole!" Quinn snapped her fingers in the air where its nose should have been. "You can hear me, right? I know you can hear me, you heard Tonya back at the bistro. We're going to figure out who did this to you, but you have to get your shit together!"

"GET MY SHIT TOGETHER?!" The ghost staggered towards Quinn. "MY HEAD IS GONE, AND IT'S YOUR FUCKING FAULT! UIUSELESS GOT MY SHIT BLOWN OFF!" If the missing head hadn't done it, this shift in demeanour would definitely have dampened Karen's earlier ardour. She despised linguistic slovenliness.

"Well sorry, guy, but I wasn't there!" Now Quinn's arms were in the air too, and they were waving at each other like a Marx Brothers routine. "Maybe we can figure out where the pieces landed! The ghost pieces. Of your ghost head. I know a few mediums we could check out; don't normally need to, but this isn't a normal case and I'm… kinda running out of ideas." She deflated over the course of this speech, arms falling limp at her side. Judging from the way her face twitched, admitting this felt not unlike surrender.

Eva placed a hand on Quinn's shoulder. Karen noted the affection, superfluous though the information was. "You're not in danger, are you?" the living legend asked.

Quinn shook her head. "No, but this one might be." She inclined her head in Karen's direction. "How about you stay here with her, while I check some leads?"

"You're meant to be keeping me safe," Karen snapped. "I don't mean to tell you your business, but my late date is right — someone needs to, given the recent track record. And the live target seems like it ought to take priority over the dead one."

The ghost gave her the middle finger, and Karen knew the romance was truly dead. It didn't matter. She might be pretending to be a GOC notable, but the moment the night had turned anomalous she'd gone back on the clock for the Foundation. She needed to get to the bottom of this as much as the UIU agent did.

Quinn exhaled in frustration. "Fine, the three of us will go. Two moms and their ghost baby. You happy now?"

"No. I'm not happy about any of this. I want to get out of your ridiculous city. So let's move on."

"Can I interject?" It was Vollan again, from the radio. He sounded more subdued.

Quinn shrugged. "As long as it's not more screaming."

"I have a preference for mediums. Are you familiar with Frau der Streich?"

Quinn raised both eyebrows. "Yessssss, but why her specifically? You do know that—"

"Yes." The voice was clipped, straining for control. "But this is a search. She's good at searching."

"Alright." Quinn shrugged. "That's true enough. I'll get the rickshaw."

Eva walked back into the bedroom, returning with a pair of old jeans that didn't fit her. They were too tight, and she squirmed into them over the course of about a minute. Quinn stared the entire time, finally working up the focus to ask: "What are you doing?"

"Coming with." Eva tucked the UIU shirt into the jeans and went back to the bedroom again, presumably for some socks. "Last time you had an adventure, I was really lucky to be there at the end."

Karen didn't know precisely what the reference was, but she could make an educated guess by the way Quinn's colour rose.

Frau der Streich was a charlatan.

Charlatanism was relative in Three Portlands, however. der Streich made a living pretending to be a psychic in a city where you couldn't throw a stone without almost hitting a real one (hitting a real one being impossible, of course), but she wasn't entirely lacking in occult capability. Quinn explained this to them on the ride over, Eva absorbing every detail with adorable attentiveness, the ghost hollering blue murder on the radio — dialled down to minimum volume, so basically just white noise — and Tonya pretending to barely listen. Quinn could tell it was pretence by the way the woman's ears perked up when she heard something interesting.

"So yeah, she can't read your thoughts." Quinn shut off the engine. "But she can do a whole assortment of odd stuff which isn't easy to advertise without attracting criminal attention, so we throw her cases every once in a while to keep her rent paid and her nose clean."

Tonya sniffed. "I do prefer cleanliness to squalor, though I'd be surprised to find the former in this neighbourhood."

Quinn glanced at the gaudy shop window, which looked as though its owner had suffered a crisis of self-control at a Halloween sale. "Yeah, well. We called it in to Driscoll, so if somebody shivs us at least the bodies won't be lost indefinitely."

They exited the vehicle, Vollan's ghost declining to open the door before doing so, and headed in. Some new-age tune jangled in the rafters. The shop was even more over-the-top inside, every visible surface plastered with pseudo-occult paraphernalia. Dozens of censers hung from the ceiling, filling the air with a haze which alternated between every imaginable scent, and Quinn was surprised it didn't catch fire what with all the lit candles strewn about. The Frau herself was dressed like a Roma, and didn't look like one, and didn't look like the sort to care if this caused offence. She was sitting at a small round table holding, what else, a polished crystal ball, and she smiled falsely as they approached. "Agent Law. So good to see you again. I don't suppose you've had time to consider my request?"

Quinn sat down across from her while the others milled about. She saw the older woman's eyes narrow slightly at the sight of the headless ghost. "I might make time tomorrow for mulling it over if you make yourself useful today. I've got enough pull to get your familiar released."

"Familiar?" Eva was picking at a shelf of souvenir shrunken golem heads with obvious interest.

"She's got a pet cat," Quinn explained. "Human level intelligence, because it used to be human. Afterlife insurance salesman on the run from both the SEC and Goldbaker-Reinz, turned himself feline to escape prosecution or cross-multiversal obliteration and can't turn himself back."

"Hard to light a candle when you're all paws," the Frau smiled nastily. "He never was the foresighted sort. At least his night vision's better now."

"We've got him in lockup," Quinn finished, "while we decide who to piss off."

"Letting him go would be better for all concerned." The Frau's smile widened; she still had all her teeth, but she'd blacked about half of them out. "Except him, but who cares about that? Took my life savings, drinks out of a bowl and shits in a box now. Karmic balance."

"We'll have him shitting in your box again by close of business tomorrow if you help me find this asshole's head." Quinn gestured with one shoulder at where she knew the ghost would be.

The Frau frowned. "His spectral head? How did he lose it?"

Quinn spread her hands on the table in a gesture of defeat.

"Hmm." The Frau tapped her forehead thoughtfully. "What's his name?"

"Vollan. Rikard Vollan."

"Ah hah." A moment's pause. "Well I can probably swing it, but… not every day I do an ectoplasmic locate. I'll have to look a few things up."

"In some ancient, mouldering grimoire no doubt," Tonya muttered behind Quinn's back. She bit back a smile.

"Nah." The Frau stuck her hand down into her brassiere, rummaged around a bit, and produced a cellphone. "Google."

Karen and her dead date's ghost stared out of the window, what little there was exposed to stare out of behind the wall of worthless bric-a-brac. Every vista of Three Portlands was like a parody of itself, and this seedy quarter was no exception. A woman parasailed down the street on the leyline winds. Three mimes blocked a teenage couple's path by constructing an invisible wall, pantomiming a promise to take it down if a donation was made. A dog walked a man. She hate hate hated this city.

The Frau's Google search seemed to be taking forever. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes passed before she finally muttered satisfaction, and asked for Vollan's cell phone. Quinn produced it, and the old woman fussed noisily with a bottle of essential oils and a baby wipe until Karen was sure she was risking electric shock.

"I like your dress," Eva said to her.

Karen turned around. "Thank you. My last date bought it for me."

The cheerful thoughtform smiled and nodded encouragingly. "How did he die?"

Karen frowned. "My dates don't always die. In fact, the majority of my dates have been perfectly s—"

Eva lunged for her, and Karen had just barely not enough time to bring the taser up and prevent herself from being serial killed before being tackled to the floor as both shop windows, the door, and the wall partitions in between exploded over them.

There was heat, there was noise — much of it shouted — and there was pain, none of it serious. Scrapes and bumps. The building creaked around her, the floor shook, and she heard a steady hiss of static over Eva's radio beside her. She clutched at the sound, and found the other woman's hand instead. They pulled themselves to their feet as Karen's ears stopped ringing, which she hadn't realized they'd been doing, and the static resolved into Vollan's panicked hollering.

He was gone, as was the front of the shop. It hadn't been erased like the side wall of the Red Lord's Arms, merely smashed to scrap and atoms by, presumably, the blocky translucent shape disappearing across the street and down the far sidewalk. Karen craned her neck out the gap, mindful that the second storey could come crashing down on them all at any second, and caught a glimpse of Vollan fleeing from the ghostly golem, arms in the air like he very much cared.

Quinn vaulted past her over the windowsill, gun out. It was a very impressive move. She glanced over her shoulder and hissed: "Stay here!"

Then she was off into the evening traffic, badge waving. She had to hop onto the hood of a slow-moving hovercar to avoid being bowled over, the owner honking in outrage, and the motion didn't even slow her down.

"What a dish," Eva swooned. "We had a jolly-up scheduled for today, and she always gets so energetic when we postpone."

"Oh, yes? I think you should tell me all about that, before she comes back." Karen turned to see the Frau edging toward a beaded curtain leading to the back rooms. She froze when she saw Karen looking. "Where do you think you're going?"

The old woman shrugged.

"Watch her." Karen shook the dust out of her hair, and stepped over the ruined threshold.

"Where are you going?" Eva asked.

"To save my bodyguard, probably."

It wasn't easy to keep up with the two ghosts, but she couldn't very easily lose them. Vollan wasn't yet adept enough at being dead to phase through all solid matter in his path, so he tended to take corners instead of cutting them and made a token effort to juke around pedestrians. The big thing — Quinn mentally labelled it the ghostlem — either couldn't go intangible or didn't see the point, instead scattering citizens and fire hydrants and rickshaws and garbage cans and thaumic scooter charging posts willy-nilly with its speed and bulk, shaving off the corners of the buildings its prey took the long way around. She stopped mentally tallying the cost when it hit seven figures.

She had her gun out, and a few times considered taking a shot when the sightline was clear all the way through the target and out the other side, but she wasn't confident enough in her aim while running, didn't want to chance ricocheting a bullet into an innocent bystander, and wasn't sure she could do the thing any harm anyhow. So she did the only thing she could do: she kept up.

Vollan was leading the ghostlem deeper into the city, and the traffic was thickening. That was no good. Sooner or later they were going to run into a heavy hitter, and then a general melee would break out, and whenever that happened in Three Portlands people got hurt on an industrial scale. There were simply too many absurd variables at play. She'd once seen a bust gone bad take a private jet out of the sky, and on another occasion had been transported to Tasmania after falling down a set of stairs. Part of being UIU was knowing that proportionate response had repercussions far beyond what happened to you or your quarry.

Still, she could cut down the collateral damage some. She pulled a strobe light out of her pocket and waved it at the nearest stoplight, a few paces behind Vollan and a few ahead of the ghostlem, and all four lights went red at once. Vollan kept going, but the traffic stopped.

So did the ghostlem.

Only for a moment, but that moment was meaningful. The thing actually shimmered, glitched like an old VHS tape gone bad before spinning back up to resume the chase. She knew why in an instant, and confirmed the theory at the next intersection by turning the lights from red to orange to red again. This time the ghostlem actually fell flat on its lack of face, pinwheeling its boxy arms in a charming imitation of the headless ghost gaining ground ahead of it. The chaotic traffic signals also caused a few fender benders, and she winced at the sounds of broken headlights as she dashed into the intersection to…

…to…

The ghostlem rolled onto its back as she reached it, swinging out with one eerie cinderblockish fist, and she just barely dodged it. The fist flattened the front of a sleek silver rickshaw stopped at the intersection; its driver, a Peregrine Series android, stuck its head out and began calling home in frantic modem tones. The golem shuddered and screeched, then lashed out and up, catching the vehicle's underside and flipping it end over end. The sound stopped, and the monster staggered to its feet.

The damage figure was now in the GDP range.

Quinn raised the gun again, wondering if there was anything she could shoot that would buy her more time. Bring down the electric lines overhead? No way could she make a shot like that. Place a call and toss her cellphone at the thing? Not enough time. She substituted the strobe light again, and the ghostlem swatted it out of her hand. She spun, catching herself on the asphalt with stinging fingers, and waited to be jellified from behind.

Fuck that, she thought, and rolled over. You're a necromancer. Witnessing your own death is first-hand data.

The ghostlem had both fists clenched together, a solid chunk of unsolidity perfectly blocking and framing the sun, and it was about to bring them down on top of her when a pair of shining silver leads flew through its back and stuck in its Jello-like bulk. It hesitated for an instant, then disappeared, then reappeared, and began to jerk spasmodically in every direction. It flashed top to bottom like a television test pattern, bellowed like a 200 kilobaud bear, and hit the crosswalk like a very heavy dead thing.

Quinn looked into the intersection. Tonya was standing in the middle of it, stance wide, taser in both hands, Quinn's rickshaw on the sidewalk behind her.

"Ow," said Quinn, and it came out just shy of a proposition.

Karen felt even more pleased with herself than usual, but had to admit Quinn did an admirable job hauling the murder robot onto her rickshaw and securing it to the roof with bungee cords. She felt she could spare the other woman a little respect. "You ran a good race," she said as Quinn taped an active dictaphone to the creature's flank. "Surprised you can run so fast with balls that big."

Quinn flushed, and said nothing.

It took them only a few minutes to track the errant ghost down. He'd chosen discretion over valour when the ghostlem — Karen rolled her eyes when presented with the neologism — had turned to fight its pursuer, and had hoofed it into Memorial Park where he had promptly been mobbed by a Civil War re-enactment composed entirely of real Civil War dead. They found him cowering in a faux foxhole as ethereal bombs burst in air overhead, hands clamped over the stump of his neck, and hauled him back to the rickshaw by his lapels. They left him shivering in the trunk.

Eva was positively swooning. She and the Frau had ridden along in the backseat, and they'd seen the entire drama unfold from the sidewalk. "I'm glad I died," the reformed murderer told Quinn as Karen slid into the shotgun position. "The thirties were so much less interesting than this."

The Frau hadn't left her seat, so Quinn hopped in the driver's side and craned her neck back to ask: "How'd your Googling go?"

"Fine." The older woman was still scrolling on her phone. "I worked out the necessary rituals, and had time to spare, so I looked up the name you gave me. Vollan. He's the guy who was pushing for more esoteric immigration to Three Ports a few months back, you remember?"

Karen did not remember. Vollan hadn't talked much shop, and while the Foundation was far more generally in-the-know than either the UIU or some washed-up psychic, she herself was an administrator first and foremost. Local news in a forbidden free port wasn't her forte.

Quinn, however, nodded. "Kinda do. Nothing came of it, right?"

The Frau thumped the rickshaw roof meaningfully, then winced and shook out her hand when it failed to yield at all. "Maybe it did. Maybe he was importing ghost golems."

Quinn frowned. "Doesn't seem likely. These don't seem like sapient things. More… manufactured, and not very well. Messy work."

Karen slid lithely out the passenger side and glanced over the glitchy form. It was a hodgepodge of rough shapes, an outline in gleaming metal. Faint pulsing lines ran through and across it like a limbic system. "Thoughtform, maybe?" she mused. "Like your girlfriend?"

"Could be," Quinn agreed, carefully not looking at Eva but instead glancing back at the Frau again. "Ever seen anything like it?"

"No." The older woman looked agitated. "Hey, think maybe you should call for backup? I don't like it hanging over our heads like this."

"Nuh-uh." Quinn squirmed in the seat and produced a wallet from her back pocket, which she tossed into the backseat. "We're still retaining your services. Track Vollan's missing head."

"I have a better idea." Karen slid back into the rickshaw. "Track the ghostlem."

Quinn blinked, then suddenly grinned. "Oh, hell yes. That's a much better idea. If it's a thoughtform, it's a form. Should be the same principle, right? But easier, because it's whole. Find out where it came from, and we can learn why it murdered Vollan."

The Frau sighed. "Why not? I can't even close up, since you got my the entire storefront wiped out."

"How does your divination work?" Karen asked.

The Frau produced Vollan's cellphone from the folds of her robe, and held it equidistant from her own. "I biangulate," she explained. "I feed my chakra into the leywaves, and focus on the presence I'm tracking, and I can project where they've been onto any GPS."

"No," Karen said. "That's stupid. That's far, far too stupid to be anything real." She looked at Quinn. "Tell her that's stupid, and then tell me you mean it."

Quinn smiled apologetically.

"Road trip!" Eva shouted enthusiastically.

The Frau sat in the centre of the backseat, arms outstretched so that each phone was pointing out one of the rickshaw, Eva leaning back to give her room. "I call upon the powers vested in me by Android, Experia, Nokia and BlackBerry."

"Fuck off," Tonya laughed, and Quinn felt the sudden urge to high-five her or worse. "We have no time for theatre, just do your magic."

The mystic shrugged, then closed her eyes. "Hmm." She opened her eyes, hummed some more, then shuddered as though an electric charge had gone through her body. "It's got a strong spirit," she remarked. "Very strong. Too strong. More like a gestalt spirit, many voices, many paths. But all with the same origin." She nodded. "Turn the GPS on."

Quinn powered up the cheap dashboard unit, and a course laid itself out automatically. Frau der Streich was a terrible psychic, but she was nobody's fool at electromancy.

The golem's path through the power lines to the Frau's shop took them on a winding tour of the city's edge, from the GOC offices Vollan had been fleeing toward to the paranormal consulates, the ICSUT campus and the false front used as Vikander-Kneed Technical Media's mailing address, a paper-thin façade which collapsed at least once a week, burying local traffic. Before long they were wending their way through greenbelt sideroads and one-way streets, their guide twitching and muttering to herself in binary code, Quinn pointing out the local landmarks to Eva and occasionally stealing glances at Tonya. The elegant blonde hadn't lost one iota of intensity over the course of their little outing, but the waves of ice radiating off her no longer seemed quite so frosty. Nothing like a mystery and a bit of life-or-death exertion to break down one's barriers.

Finally the Frau announced they would need to make the remainder of the trek on foot, having brought them to Garland Park which was closed to all motorized traffic. They left the rickshaw in a parking lot Quinn would have found unaffordable without her police pass, and watched the old fraud swaying in the dying light of evening with both phones still clutched in her hands. "I can see it in the waves now," she proclaimed. "Bouncing all around. We're close, very close, I know it."

Vollan's ghost was still in the foetal position in the trunk, as Quinn had expected. It didn't have many virtues as a perch, but was far too small to contain a ghostlem, so the dead man had once again chosen discretion and stayed put. It took all four of them to haul him back out.

Tonya twisted her ankle at the half-mile mark, and Quinn hung back to check on her. "You really should have borrowed some sneakers before we left." She did like seeing beautiful woman wearing her clothes…

"She's leading us on a wild goose chase." Tonya pretended to adjust her shoe.

Quinn blinked. "You think?"

"Yes." Tonya pretended to massager her ankle. "Most likely she's in on this with whoever sent the ghostlems. She was on her phone a few minutes before—"

"—we got attacked. Right." Quinn glanced up. The Frau was spinning in a circle in the middle of the park like Maria in The Sound of Music, no doubt looking for a better signal, and oh bless her heart Eva was doing the same beside her for no particular reason. Vollan's ghost was sulking beneath a transplanted Hy-Brasilian golden ash tree. "She tipped them off. You're probably right."

"You'll get used to that," Tonya smiled. "So what do we do?"

"Keep following her, I guess," Quinn shrugged. "I've got a tracker on me, so if something happens the bureau will know. I'd rather find out where she's leading us than ditch her and end up with no leads at all. You game?"

The smile became, for the first time, a grin. It was fierce, and it took Quinn aback. "I am entirely game. I hate being lied to much more than I hate being shot at."

Quinn held out a hand, and helped the other woman up. Her hand was soft, very soft, but the grip was firm.

Very firm.

The next hour saw them across a series of promenades, open markets and closed malls, the Frau making a spectacle of herself at every possible occasion. Now that she was looking for it, Quinn realized the woman was definitely signalling her allies. The suspicion was only confirmed when they ducked into the alley between an occult bookstore and a Fifthism-and-Nickel bodega, and the late night crowds thinned out to nothing at all. "Getting close now," the Frau trilled. "Just a few more—"

Eva slammed the charlatan into the nearest brick wall with the pitchfork she was suddenly holding in her hands, tines pressed straight through the right shoulder and out her back. There was surprisingly little blood. The cellphones clattered to the alley floor. "Do they think you're important?" Eva asked.

"What? WHAT?!" the Frau howled. Quinn saw the headless ghost edge away from them, and once again considered brandishing her useless firearm.

"The people you're leading us to, or leading to us. Do they think you're important, or expendable? Because if they think you're important you'll be a good bargaining chip, but if you're expendable, we might as well expend you and go on our way."

Quinn shared a look with Tonya. She had the distinct impression the woman was feeling platonically what Quinn was feeling romantically toward the living legend.

The Frau cursed in a pastiche of several Germanic languages. "Turn on your damn radio," she hissed.

Eva had the portable set looped around her belt. She reached down to roll the volume wheel, and Vollan's voice spilled out in a rush. "—her go, let her GO god dammit! She's on my side! She's taking me home."

The three of them who could still turn, turned to stare at him.

He raised his hands in placation. "The Frau is on my payroll, that's why I sent you to her. She's taking you to one of my holding companies. They'll know how to help me."

"Holding companies," Quinn repeated. "Why do I have a feeling that's a euphemism? Foreign politicians don't get headshot in upmarket bistros for honest business dealings, Vollan. What's waiting for us where we're going? A warehouse full of mercenaries and four tubs full of acid?"

"Hey. Hey. Be calm." The ghost mimed the tamping-down of a raging fire. "We can negotiate out of this. My people will know how to—"

Quinn scooped up the dead man's phone as he made his pitch, and brandished it at him with one hand while striking a scented match on her belt with the other. "Still thy tongue, unmourned dead. Stay thy hand, and hang thy head. Follow me and mine awhile, in aspect calm, devoid of guile."

Vollan slumped forward but did not fall, like a puppet on slack strings.

"And also go fuck yourself," Quinn added. "Airhead." She dropped the match, which died in the dirt in a burst of blue flame, and plucked the radio off her belt. "This is Agent Law."

"Go ahead," Driscoll answered immediately.

"I need search warrants and raiding teams for all local businesses near my location, and I need it fast. This relates to the execution of a GOC executive, and the planned execution of a federal agent." She paused. "And her friends."

Driscoll paused, then acknowledged. Quinn replaced the radio at her hip, and saw that the Frau had passed out. Eva was still holding her in place, a look of grim satisfaction on her pretty face. Tonya looked like a literal portrait of awe, and Quinn realized the awe was directed at her. I do put on a good show, don't I? She was far too pleased with herself to spoil the moment by saying the thing which occurred to her as she observed the little tableau.

"Pitchfork medium." Tonya clearly hated herself for uttering the words, and Quinn felt a heady rush of quite the opposite.

Vollan owned practically the entire district, it turned out, and he did indeed have more than one warehouse filled with mercenaries claiming total ignorance of any incoming assassination targets. The warehouses were also filled with electronic equipment of every possible description, and the search warrants Driscoll was able to secure quickly filled in the picture for them: the deceased Silicon Nornir diplomat was a major importer and exporter of contraband hardware. Thaumodynamic capacitors, quantum liquaporters, ectoplasmic dispersal conduits, all of them with bespoke forged permits attesting to their absolute safety and certification. If the man wasn't building a superweapon, he was setting up a clearinghouse for supervillains. Karen was no longer surprised at how expensive his tastes had been; the man obviously liked to live dangerously.

Driscoll was impressed with the results. He asked Quinn to be his deputy on what was now a full-fledged taskforce, and she seemed happy to accept. He agreed not to detain Eva for assaulting the Frau, which made her even happier. He insisted on coming along when they followed up on the next lead, and further insisted they bring along the catatonic ghost, two developments she apparently felt ambivalent about, but it didn't matter. They knew where all the lines converged now.

The search of Vollan's offices yielded a wealth of paperwork attesting to a diverse array of undisclosed sundry businesses in Three Portlands. One in particular stood out, a housing development called Empty Acres which seemed to exist in the memory of no human being or electronic registry. Further research suggested Vollan owned land in The Divot, a stable spatial flexure in the city's dimensional bubble which was easily its least prime chunk of real estate, so that became the most likely suspect. Quinn said she'd never secured a simpler warrant, minus the part where she had to keep reminding the judge what this was all about.

Karen's head was swimming. Whatever this was, it was obviously a whole lot bigger than a hit on a GOC rep — which was already pretty big. She knew she ought to call it in, but there was no reason to make the diplomatic incident tripartite if she could help it. Involving the Foundation cast suspicion on the Foundation in ten cases out of ten, that was just the way things were with the Groups of Interest. So she put on a show, brazenly insisting she tag along, and Quinn eagerly backed her up. They loaded up the rickshaw, ectoentropically-generated farm tool and all, and headed down to The Divot to see what was what.

There were indeed buildings on Vollan's plot of land, which dipped so far below the paraboloid sheet that the water table turned the soil both marshy and blue, and every structure crunched inward like a parallelogram at the top. The complex was an L-arrangement of ugly rotten brownstones, a massive pile of trash lying ignored in the courtyard, windows boarded up and a series of jet black vehicles parked on either side of the narrow street. A sign on the yellow lawn read EMPTY ACRES.

"Does the town not collect garbage?" Karen asked.

"They do," Quinn responded. "Trash in Three Ports is no laughing matter. The stuff folks throw away around here can turn you green, or inside out, or back in time. We've got the speediest sanitation workers this side of Eurtec. I don't get it." She headed up the short flight of stairs to the double doors of the nearest building, gun drawn, then knocked on the rail with her boot.

No response.

She tried the door. No response there either. She noted the wide glass windows on either side, shuttered with Venetian blinds; she also noted the two-by-four discarded on the porch.

They weren't inside long before the stench became unbearable. "Is that… alcohol?" Karen wrinkled her nose.

Quinn was watching her wrinkle her nose. She shook her head, apparently to clear it, and nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, that's alcohol. And a whole lot besides." She picked her way through the trash-strewn corridor. "This place is a sty, but someone's still cleaning it. Just enough to get by."

"Empty Acres is supposed to be a housing development." Karen narrowly avoided spearing a moldy sandwich with her high heel. "This is more like a retirement home gone to pot."

Quinn nodded. "If there's anyone still in here, they are mighty retired. Guess we're gonna have to check each door."

This turned out to be unnecessary. The first door she tried led to a relatively tidy room absolutely reeking of antiseptic, wherein they found a molded leather couch occupied by a withered-looking humanoid… something. It was difficult to concentrate on them, particularly the facial features, if they existed at all. The figure was sitting zen-style on the cushions, eyes closed and thumbs and forefingers locked together, as though meditating. They were hooked up to half a dozen IVs, and a catheter, and a colostomy bag. Karen's nose wrinkled further, and this time Quinn was too busy retching to watch. Eva's green eyes were wide and frightened. The ghost's arms hung down below its waist, and it stared at the carpet.

"What are we looking at?" Driscoll asked slowly.

"If I had to guess?" Karen focused as hard as she could on the seated form, and still found it impossible to make out their face. "I'd guess these are the immigrants Vollan was sponsoring."

Try though they might, they couldn't stir the faceless humanoid to wake. A search of the other rooms revealed similar beings, all passively antimemetic, all slowly withering away to nothing… like Empty Acres itself. It proved impossible to get backup to help explore the complex, everyone else lacking the personal connection to the case which had allowed Quinn to focus long enough to pull up alongside it. There were teams of agents driving circles around The Divot even now, forgetting and remembering and forgetting once again what they were supposed to be doing and why.

Some of the patients, if that was what they were, did have faces. Quinn took photos of their faces, and sent them back to the bureau for identification. While she was waiting for a response, Eva stumbled on something else: a utility golem standing stock still in a janitor's closet, wearing a hospital orderly outfit. There was something very wrong with the inscription on its forehead; it made Tonya's eyes itch, and it gave Quinn a splitting headache that disappeared as soon as she looked away. When the IDs came in and Quinn looked down at her phone, the golem suddenly lurched to life and staggered into the hallway, apparently blind as a bat. They watched it tend the IVs, one by one, empty the catheters and colostomy bags out the windows, pour antiseptic onto the shuddering figures which twitched and moaned in their trances as the bacteria on their skin bubbled and fizzed. It paid them no notice.

"I knew it." Quinn pocketed her phone again. "I fucking knew it."

"What?" Driscoll watched the golem putter back into the closet, and close the door.

"The ones who aren't antimemetic. They're the programmers who went missing. The ones everyone thinks the fucking skippers took."

Tonya winced, apparently at the profanity.

The other agent whistled. "Wow. I wonder what Vollan needed that many programmers for?"

Quinn opened her mouth, then closed it, then frowned, then opened her frown. "It doesn't look like he needs them for anything? They're all comatose. He's a slum landlord, and he's keeping them sedated. Got the golem taking care of their biologicals, presumably while he siphons off their funds and keeps them from moving on or out. He made a bank account out of these folks."

Tonya looked briefly like she might spit on the morose ghost, only reconsidering because it would be both unladylike and unlikely to take affect.

Driscoll shook his head. "Doesn't explain it all. Sure, grab the antimemetic people, whoever they are, because everyone will forget they even existed. Perfect crime. But why programmers? Those disappearances hit the papers hard for a few weeks, before the whole rat mayor scandal overshadowed it. And it can't be cost-effective to maintain all this medical equipment, even with golem labour. Hell, just purchasing a golem is a major investment. Doesn't add up."

"Huh."

"So wherever they are, they must be doing something important for him."

"Hold up," Tonya interrupted. "Wherever they are? They're right here."

"Physically, sure." Driscoll nodded. "Spiritually, they're astral projecting."

Quinn sucked in a breath. "He'd know," she said. "He's an expert." She turned to face the other women. "Why would you want a bunch of programmers to astral project?"

"I still don't really understand what programming is," said Eva. "I was born over a century ago."

"Tech companies do that work-from-home thing, right?" Karen suggested. "Could be what this is. Telepresence."

Driscoll scoffed. "Looks like major crunch time, if that's what this is. They're emaciated. Starving."

"Video game development, then."

Quinn pondered. "Ethan?" she said.

"Yes?" Driscoll answered.

"Do you still do forced projection?"

The other agent screwed up his face. "I mean, where it's necessary, sure, but…"

"Would you not say this is necessary? We can't break them out of these trances until we know where they've gone. They could die if we wake them up. They could be doing something important. They could be placating angry silicon gods. They could be immanentizing the Nornir eschaton. We don't know, and we need to."

"Ugh." He shook his head. "Don't feel good about that. What if I can't bring you back?"

"Then you'll know they went somewhere bad."

"Hold on." Tonya was raising one finger primly. "He can force you to astral project?"

Quinn nodded and shook her head at the same time. "Sort of, yes, no. His talent is identifying astral pathways and pushing light bodies along them. He can help me project, then send my projection where theirs went." She pointed at the skinny woman breathing shallowly on the couch beside them.

"This sounds like a terrible idea." Eva's features were tight with concern. "If you're going to do it, you can't do it alone. I'm coming with you."

"Not a good idea." Driscoll shook his head. "Never projected a thoughtform before. You might just fade into the imaginary and be lost for good. Ethically wouldn't even consider doing it."

"So you go with her, then," Eva suggested. The tightness was in her voice now as well.

Again he shook his head. "Can't do that. Need to be out here, in case I see signs of trauma and have to pull her out."

"Oh, for fuck's sake." Tonya walked into the middle of their rough semicircle. "Obviously I'm going with her. There isn't even a discussion to be had. Get out your smelling salts, or whatever, and let's get these souls on the road."

Karen closed her eyes, and focused on Quinn. They were lying down in a vacant room on a picnic blanket Quinn had stashed in the back of her rickshaw, holding hands. Eva was sitting in the corner, watching them. Vollan was in the hall, watching nothing. Driscoll was sitting beside Quinn, his own eyes closed, one hand on the forehead of a sleeping programmer stretched out on the apartment floor. A career administrator, Karen had meditated hundreds of times. Some days she did it instead of sleep. Some days she did it in the middle of meetings she knew she could afford to ignore. Oftentimes she did it while other people were trying to make small talk with her. They already thought she was a bitch, after all, so what could it hurt to ignore them? She felt the other woman's hand clenched, and clenched her hand back. Focused on the sensation, on that one body part and the connection it formed with her unlikely ally. She stilled her breathing, and relaxed. She saw her body in her mind's eye, expanding to take in every muscle and organ then contracting back in to just the tips of her fingertips. She felt the vibrations coming on, and in a state of sudden hypnosis she asked herself sleepily how much weirder can this date get?

It almost broke the spell when she reminded herself that the date had been with the dead man, and not the woman whose hand was in her hand, who was breathing in time with her, who was—

—floating beside her, red hair billowing like a burst of blood in water. They were floating. They were free. They were—

They were moving. She felt the push, felt a tether pull her backward through a vast expanse of stars, through a field of swaying corn, through the blackest depths of ocean, through the memories of lives she'd lived on other planes of existence so real and vivid she wanted to weep, and finally through a sheer blank sheet of white nothing. Then her mind resumed its rationalization, and she found herself gazing down on Three Portlands far below, the unique topology so warped at this altitude that her stomach would have wrenched had she still been attached to it. She tightened her grip on her friend's spectral hand, and they made eye contact as the cord dragged them formlessly through empty streets and empty halls and empty parks in a grey and blue simulacrum of urban structure.

And then they were back in the vacant room, only now it was truly vacant. No Driscoll, no Vollan, no Eva. Just Karen and Quinn, translucent and weightless and also entirely nude.

Quinn looked away, an enchantingly guileless gesture since there was nothing to see but blank walls and the closed door.

"Where are we?" Karen asked. "Or I suppose, where are they?"

"I think they're where we left them." Quinn walked gingerly around the room, clearly uncomfortable with her clothing situation and attempting not to sneak glances at Karen's. "Astral projection is supposed to allow your light body to visit physical locations in the real world, but unbound by physical restraints. That's not what this is at all. We've astral projected to somewhere else entirely, some kind of… astral simulation?"

"Simulation," Karen agreed, and they said the next word at the same time: "Programmers."

The door opened, and a faceless being like the ones back at the real Empty Acres walked in. Its blank body was tensed to fight, hands clenched into fists, and its echoey voice seemed very far away when it spoke: "Who are you? We didn't hear about any new tenants. Did Vollan send you?"

They shared a glance. "I'm the diplomat," Karen said. Quinn nodded. Karen stepped forward, and extended a hand. "I'm Tonya, and this is Quinn. Vollan most definitely did not send us. Vollan is dead."

She had the general sense of a smile from the figure, and its stance relaxed somewhat as it shook her hand. "Tell me something I don't know. But he could still have sent you. We know he's walking around down there."

"That's my fault." Quinn stepped forward, not offering a hand since hers were both positioned for maximum modesty. "I'm a necromancer, UIU. I called his spirit forth as part of an official investigation into his murder."

"Mm." The figure sighed heavily. "Should have known that would happen. It was a lousy plan, but it was all we had. Well, whatever. Maybe you'll come up with a better one once you've been stuck here a few months." He made a lazy, vaguely welcoming gesture. "Welcome to the Astral Projects."

"Vollan is hardcore GOC." The antimemetic projection led them through the halls of the Astral Projects, the slumland of the disembodied. "He was overseeing a research team working on aerosolized amnestics, for handling long-term memories in large localized incident zones. You know, cult villages, towns with zombie plague outbreaks, cities witnessing pataphysics on the local news. That sort of thing. He wanted to tackle the problem from an angle nobody had ever tried before. Got us all trained up on theosophy, the grand truth undergirding all human thought." He snorted. "Rich idiots always think there's some philosophical trick to making all their dreams come true. Believe it into being. Wish he hadn't been so right."

They passed a dozen open apartment doors, where naked nobodies shovelled grey slurry into their mouths or argued in fierce whispers or openly wept. There was trash on the floor, as there was back on Earth. The place was in a worse state of disrepair than its physical counterpart. It reeked of pure despair, translated directly from minds to mind-palace.

"Did you know about this?" Quinn asked Tonya. They were still holding hands.

"Of course not." The other woman's voice was coldly furious. Quinn squeezed her hand once.

"Anyway," their guide continued, "he didn't know the first thing about tech. Pushed the team hard. We couldn't get a chemical solution that worked right, but nanites showed real promise."

"You're joking." Quinn didn't even try to keep the horror from her voice.

"Memory-altering nanite clouds?" Tonya growled. "What did they call this, Project Grey Goo? That's wildly irresponsible."

"Vollan didn't want responsibility, he wanted results. And he probably would have gotten them, except we went into crunch time, people got sleepy, people got sloppy, and we had… an incident." The figure's voice was flat, without affect, but he still managed to give off the sense of remembered dread with that pregnant pause. "The nanites worked on noetic principles, making tiny local edits to cognition. They malfunctioned, bad. Real bad."

"How bad?" Quinn asked.

"Wiping our identities bad." The blank head shook from side to side, rueful. "The whole research division. One misplaced integer and we lost our entire lives. Family, friends, jobs, government records. Erased from existence. One hundred people, all passively antimemetic."

"Wow." It was an empty utterance, but nothing Quinn could have said would have been sufficient. "That's… I'm sorry."

They passed a woman who still had her face. She was weeping, heaving, staring at the ceiling. "WHY?" she screamed. "WHY CAN'T I CRY?" Her translucent eyes were matte, dry.

"A few days later," their guide continued, heedless, "we get an offer from a landlord in Three Portlands, says he has a real deal for us. We live in his apartment buildings rent free, and he gets his scientists to run non-intrusive tests on us. Maybe find a solution, maybe just develop some applications. But we can't tell the GOC, since even though they've forgotten the project, the data is all theirs. We agreed. Didn't have a lot of options."

"And that's how you ended up in Empty Acres," said Tonya.

"Yeah. Good name, right?" The figure chuckled drily. "Only good thing about it. Goddamn leper colony. No money, no prospects. Couldn't leave the buildings without potentially getting stopped by the cops, or the UIU, or worse."

"Worse?" Tonya asked.

"The skippers."

"Goddamn skippers," Quinn swore. "You'd be lucky to trade one box for another."

Tonya said nothing.

"I'd make a pine box joke, but we both know they're the mass grave sort," the figure agreed. "But yeah, we couldn't really do much but hang around the complex feeling sorry for ourselves. The landlord didn't give a shit, we never even saw the guy. Barely any staff. So we started making some noise. Actual noise for starters, loud music and TV in the middle of the night. Then we'd turn on all the electrical equipment, try to max out his power bill. Piled garbage in the halls. Interfered with the tests. Anything to make it clear we weren't gonna take this shit lying down. Nothing, nothing, nothing. As far as the world was concerned, we were invisible. Then one day the man himself shows, large as life, and pitches us his plan."

"Plan?" They were in the common area now, capacious space banked with wide windows overlooking the courtyard. It was filled with long tables, and the tables were filled with expensive-looking desktop computers, all as ethereal as the person-like shapes tapping away at them. The illegal components, Quinn thought. There was a ghostly golem standing in the middle of the programming cluster, and it watched them pass without comment. It wasn't like the one that had been haunting Vollan; it was, she realized in a rush of understanding, the golem they'd seen at Empty Acres. In between cleaning the shit and piss out of their bags, it astral projected back here to keep an eye on the inmates. They taught a fucking golem to astral project. Her moral core, police instincts and practitioner's ethics fought to see which aspect could be more horrified.

"An escape." The figure shook its head again. "We could let him take care of our bodies while we took care of our souls. Astral project to a holiday dimension where our every need would be met, all of it powered by our biometrics, our medical care covered by the city under the auspices of a care facility. It made sense. It sounded good. So we signed up, and he sent us here one by one."

It gestured at the blank walls, the blank faces, the blank sky through the windows, the dead tree in the middle of the courtyard full of dead grass. The blue-grey hellscape.

"The mental echo of Empty fucking Acres," the figure continued. "He tricked us into becoming wards of his company, giving them total control over our bodies, with our souls living in a habitat he controlled. We all found out soon enough that once you check into the Astral Projects, you never check out. It's a one-way trip."

Tonya stopped walking. They were standing in a stairwell; they could hear echoes from above and below, dozens of voices raised in protest or lament. "Are you saying we can't leave?"

The figure shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe you can. I don't know how you got in here, we've never seen anyone from outside the department or Vollan himself. How did you get past the guards and scientists?"

"There weren't any," said Quinn. "Place looked abandoned, except for the golem."

"What? Seriously?!" The faceless figure's body language communicated raw panic. "Who's looking after our bodies?"

"Uh… nobody, far as we could tell." Quinn wasn't sure she should be telling him this, but she was certain he deserved to know. Tonya didn't protest. "Looked like they were just going to leave you to die. The golem was emptying and refilling your bags, but that's it. The whole site has gone mildly antimemetic, they probably figured you'd just rot away without anyone noticing, or… forgot you themselves, actually."

"That's what it was," Tonya agreed. "He was saying at dinner he'd been checking up on business. Probably trying to figure out why the research wasn't getting done, didn't realize your antimemetic contagion was spreading." She paused. "Sorry."

"Jesus. Wow. Okay." The figure leaned back on the nearest wall, becoming an almost indistinguishable fixture of it. "That pushes the timeline forward a little. No wonder some of the programmers have been getting woozy."

"Timeline? What timeline?"

It regarded them coolly. "I don't know if I trust you enough to tell you that. We're working on something, and it's not what we're supposed to be working on."

"Actually, wait." Tonya placed both hands on her hips, and Quinn looked down at them, then rapidly back up. She wondered if astral projections could blush. "What are you supposed to be working on? What are all these people doing on those computers?"

The figure headed up the stairs, and they followed. "A whole bevy of tech projects. If you know anything about programming, you know companies hate paying for the work they extract."

"Not just in programming," Tonya remarked.

"Sure, but there's a special relationship between tech companies and overwork. Crunch culture. The boss wants you working every second of every day, and he doesn't want to pay you extra for it. This place is the natural extension of that." The next floor opened on an open plan computer lab not unlike the one downstairs, but much larger. Quinn's mind boggled at how many people, faceless and otherwise, were trapped body and soul in this unholy arrangement. These ones were all wearing headsets. "Welcome to the world's cheapest twenty-four hour call centre."

"Oh," Quinn said breathlessly. "You've got to be kidding."

"Nope. For the one time investment of a stolen golem and an astral pusher, you too can own a whole apartment complex full of free tech support. The folks downstairs are working on a secure connection protocol called NornirVPN. The ones upstairs are immanentizing the eschatosilacon. And Vollan's raking in the cash, as he never tires of telling us whenever he projects on up here."

"He visits you?" Tonya snorted in frustration. "To what, brag? Give marching orders? I'm sorry you only killed him twice. Wait, how did you—"

"No, wait wait," Quinn interrupted. "You said astral pusher? You mean you didn't all learn to astral project?"

The figure laughed. "You kidding me? We're programmers! We have absolutely zero cool. No, he got a guy to do that for him. Real smooth operator. Professional."

"Oh," said Tonya. "Shit."

"Do you think they're alright?" Eva stroked Quinn's hair gently. Her eyes were moving back and forth rapidly.

"I know it." Driscoll maneuvered Vollan's ghost into the room, then closed the door and locked it.

Eva sighed. "How will you know if that changes? If you need to pull them out?"

He sat down beside the comatose programmer, checking her vitals. "Just trust me," he smiled. "I'm a professional."

"Driscoll," Quinn spat. No spit came out. "Of course. But… wait. Does that mean he was trying to save his boss when he had me summon his ghost? Were they hoping to… re-embody him?"

The figure's stance suggested perplexity. "Did they not try?"

"Well, no. They had me take him to a safe house, then let me drag him all across town looking for clues. We were looking for his head."

The figure's eyes became visible long enough for a slow blink to be seen. "His head?" The figure laughed flatly. "Don't tell me we blew his astral head off, too?!" It continued to laugh, so long and so hard that it doubled over, and they could suddenly hear a scrap of actual personality in the sound. The figure was male.

"What's your name?" Karen asked.

He said something she couldn't understand, and she forgot it immediately. "Not that you'll remember. But oh, wow. That's amazing. Thanks for telling me that. That really made my day. Mm." He straightened again. "I guess your heart's in the right place."

"Yeah," Quinn agreed. "Back in the real world, with the rest of our bodies. All our bodies. Can't you help us get back there?"

He shook his head. "Not like we haven't tried. We have no control over these projections. There's a few ways he could be keeping us here, Vollan, and it hardly matters which one is operative. We've been working on a solution, and I guess it can't hurt to tell you about it. If he was gonna send spies or auditors or whatever, he wouldn't be this subtle."

He took a deep breath.

"None of us have a lick of occult ability, but there's decades of combined programming knowledge here. We decided to put that to use."

"To what end?" Karen asked.

"Well, you know, we can't go back. So we decided to go forward. We're building an astral supercomputer, and uploading ourselves into it."

"What?" they asked, at the same time.

"Astrodigital superprojection." There was a note of pride in the man's voice. "The body dies, the soul fades, but consciousness lives on."

"Is that… even plausible?" Quinn sounded very tired.

"Plausible? It works!" The man waved his hands, reminding Karen momentarily of her dead, despised date. "It's online right now. We're still debugging the system, and there's not enough room for everyone yet, and we haven't figured out the framework for making code changes within the thing to make it totally self-sufficient, but we'll get there. Hopefully before we starve to death. There's seriously nobody watching our bodies?"

"Not that we saw," Quinn replied brusquely. "This simulation, it's not the apartment building again?"

"Oh, hell no. It's a paradise, a real paradise. Ideal forms in motion. You'd love it. I could show you, if you like?"

Quinn considered, and Karen took the opportunity to seize the initiative. She still had a job to do, after all. "Maybe. First we'd like to know how you're planning on powering all this. Was Vollan dumb enough to leave you the resources you needed to level up out of his prison?"

"In a way," he sighed. "Let me show you."

The server room behind the eschaton workroom was packed full of so much machinery that only an astral humanoid could fit inside. "By design," their guide informed them. "Definitely don't want the golems coming in here, and anywhere the golems can't go, Vollan won't."

At the back of the room, hooked up to a mass of blinking towers, was a chair full of leads and injectors and festooned with spectral straps.

"When we realized we were trapped here, a lot of us gave up. Tried to flatline our bodies." The voice was far away, remembering. "It worked; some people winked out of existence, the ones who had really lost the plot. A few gave their souls up for science, which helped us to develop that." He pointed at the chair. "But eventually it got so bad — probably no fun disposing of antimemetic corpses, and cutting into the bottom line to boot — that Driscoll himself started showing up. Tried to calm us down. Pretended to hear out our complaints. Had a bunch of other projectionists powering up his projection so we couldn't harm him, but… well. He didn't really think it through. He didn't know about the machine we were building. If he had, I don't think he would've let them lag his astral form."

"They what?" Quinn was entirely lost, and Tonya looked much the same.

"Latency. You might also know it as quantum spiritposition."

"I do not," Tonya said. "Know it as that. Or very likely anything else."

"Well. Basically you let your astral form stay projected, but you keep your consciousness in your physical body, with the option to snap back to the projection if something goes wrong. He left his projection in the Projects while he went on that date with you."

"What?" Tonya looked truly, legitimately astonished for the first time since Quinn had known her — which had only been a few hours, though it felt like days or weeks. "How did you know about the date?"

"He bragged about it. Obviously didn't think we could affect the real world, so why not? Wanted us to know what a gorgeous woman he pulled. He wasn't wrong, by the way."

Tonya stood up taller, and Quinn allowed herself a brief look over the other woman's fit form. She obviously wasn't shy about her looks, so it didn't feel like an invasion of privacy. It felt like something else entirely.

"And that was his mistake," the figure continued. "We knew where his body was, we had a low-powered astral computer with a limited bandwidth infoline to the Three Portlands power grid, and we had a passel of angry theosophists. So we had them make a simple tulpa—"

"What's a tulpa?" Tonya asked.

Quinn was glad to have the answer. "An intentionally manifested thoughtform. Most thoughtforms, like Eva, come out of a public imaginary through unconscious mass reinforcement. Tulpas are private or shared creations ideated and actualized with agency."

"Right," the figure nodded. "We ganged up on one of Vollan's golems — he used to have two of them in here — disabled it and hooked it up to the sim. Uploaded the data, and uploaded a few of our own selves, and directed the spiritual energy to the real world. It was absolute hell, but we managed to tap into the power grid in Three Ports. Zeroed in on the thaumic energy and the massive electrical draw, it all shows up in the Metaphysiverse like a red giant star beneath your feet."

"Metaphysiverse," Quinn repeated.

"That's what we call it," the figure agreed. "Our new home. We're going to put every single one of our souls in there, when we have the power, and then it won't matter where our bodies or astral forms are. We're going to upload our ghosts, the uttermost semblances of self, into the meta shell and hack ourselves a whole new form of creation." His blank gaze was faraway for a moment, then he remembered his place in the narrative. "So yeah. We transformed the golem's energy into a cybertulpa — got three Jewish programmers on staff, and one of them knew enough golemancy to rewrite the words —- then pumped it into the power grid, dumped it into Three Ports and started popping heads."

"Heads?" Quinn repeated again. "More than one?"

"All of Vollan's projectionists," the figure explained. "So he'd be weakened."

"Why didn't you just contact the authorities?" Tonya demanded. "Could have saved us a whole lot of trouble."

"Except the authorities pathologically forget we exist, and Vollan's got a chokehold on all of them already. Moles in the UIU, contacts in the GOC, probably even moles in the Foundation too. We couldn't trust anybody to both care about our plight and have the capacity to remember it's happening. So we sent our cybertulpa to the Red Lord's Arms where it blew the fucker's head clean off, trapping what was left of him in the Projects. We had our battery… until you stole it from us."

"Ohhhh." Quinn was suddenly nodding. "I get it. You were going to use his superprojected ghost to power your ridiculous cyberthing."

"That ridiculous cyberthing," the figure said quietly, "is the only way we're ever going to have identities of our own that stick. The only way we can remake ourselves. Our bodies and projections are completely scoured of every inch of personality, every identifier, everything that makes a person persistent. We remember who we are inside, but we can't pass that on to anyone. No reproductive capacity whatsoever. We're a dead people unless we do this."

"What if someone calls the spirit back to Earth?" Quinn asked. "Just like I did?"

"They won't," the figure declared grimly. "We've almost finished constructing a psychic interdiction shield for Empty Acres. Once we turn it on, there's no coming in and no going back. Finality. But we need that ghost to make any of this work. We're not going to sacrifice any more of our souls, and anyway we're all too weak and weary to give it much charge at this point. We used up the last of our stored-up energy sending that second tulpa to retrieve the ghost."

"Then we're going to get it back for you," Tonya proclaimed. "Right?"

Quinn squirmed. "I mean… I don't really see how? We're stuck in here, just like them. Driscoll won't ever wake us up, and since we went into The Divot I'm sure everyone outside has already forgotten to come looking for us. I guess there's always Eva, but I'm not sure how we'd send her… a message…"

The bright expression on Tonya's face matched her own. "Now you're talking. Why come all the way to the digital shore if we're not going to wade out?" Tonya turned to face the figure again. "We're going to need you to upload us to the Metaphysiverse."

Their guide sat down in the chair, attaching the leads to his pale grey skin while they took their positions on a pair of shiny white pads. The surface was cool, thrumming with energy. Karen couldn't believe she was doing this. This wasn't why she'd gone to business school.

This was much, much more exciting than business school.

"What do we have to do?" Quinn asked.

"Just carry out the plan you outlined," the figure said as he finished attaching the device to his body. He'd assured them he had enough energy to send them both to the empty simulation without killing his spirit, however exhausted he already sounded. "I gave you the best directions I can. Remember that you're operating on CPU cycle time there, so hours in the sim will be seconds in the real and surreal worlds, and it'll take days to get your proper bearings. The universe is too complex for a one-to-one conversion, and you'll have to give your brains a while to adjust to the translation."

"That's not what I mean," said Quinn. "I mean do we have to hold hands, or meditate, or focus on

Quinn Law's avatar was gilt-edged red, pulsating with raw power. It was shorter than Karen's but visibly stronger, glowing brighter, its ruby core thrumming with energy. It regarded Karen's avatar with an awe not unlike what she herself was feeling, and said <Jesus Christ, look at you.>

Karen looked at her avatar. She was lithe and golden, a constellation of flowing curves. Not much had changed, by her reckoning. She smiled. <Now what?>

<Now we find the lines.> Quinn blinked, and the universe began. The universe was an undulating field of green grass and running streams of blue water, white Greek columns lining the shore to light their way in the dark. The stars in the sky were static — not unmoving, but actual static, the I/O flash of white to black to white again.

They started to walk.

<Why did you insist on coming with me?> Quinn asked as they reached the first column. She dipped her toes into the stream. The water was warm.

<When?> Karen asked, pressing one hand against the column. The stone was unnaturally smooth, and cool to the touch.

<Every time.> There were fish in the water. They were nothing like real fish. <At the apartment. At the shop. To The Divot. To the Astral Projects. To whatever this place is.>

Karen considered as they made their way down the rillside path. <Because I didn't care,> she said, <when Vollan died. I hardly even thought about it. And I thought that maybe, if I made the effort, I could care about whether you lived. It was a likely enough experiment.>

Quinn laughed. Her voice was rich and deep, not particularly feminine, strong and assured. It was the strength inside of her, her spirit, the essence of her light body translated into the purest manifestation of who she really was. More than a human being, a human ideal. Ideals, plural. The both of them. <You're into experiments now?> She took Karen's hand again. <I thought you seemed set in your ways.>

Karen saw it now, the lines in the sand of the widening beach. They glowed a deep, satisfying red, like the red warmth of Quinn Law beside her. The map of the world underlaid below this one, overlaid on the one even farther below. Before long, they would glimpse through each layer. They would acclimatize, they would trace the threads to their end, they would send out their message, and descend.

But not yet.

<Are you trying to talk me to death?> Karen asked, and the crimson glow enveloped her in its arms, and they sank into the sand together.

"Is that normal?" Eva asked.

Driscoll stirred. "Is what normal?"

She pointed. Both Quinn and Tonya were periodically twitching, the corners of their mouths turning upward, their breathing coming in bursts. Each fit lasted no more than an instant, then they settled back to rest again.

He shrugged. "Probably nothing." He checked his watch.

Arm in arm they passed through the silica desert, each grain reflecting the endless chaos of background radiation above, following the lines beneath the lines. They could see it all now, spread out before them. The map of everything. Creations interleaved. They could see the dirty rent in the ground where the clumsy cybertulpa had drilled down through the electrical, spiritual and physical realms to deliver Rikard Vollan's penultimate sentence. They could see the flare in the night that was ICSUT. They could see the curious welt in reality surrounding Eva McDoyle, alias Twisted Twirly, the impossible woman who Quinn…

…Quinn didn't really know what to think anymore. What she wanted.

"It doesn't matter." Tonya squeezed her hip. "What happens to us doesn't matter. We need to help them. All of them."

"And after that?" Quinn's red glow enveloped them both, Tonya's gold melting into the gilded edges in perfect sync. "Now that we understand each other. Now that there's no secrets…"

"No secrets," Tonya murmured. She looked away.

"I could set you up with a place in Eva's apartment," Quinn found herself saying. "You could get work with the local government, or even the bureau. Anything but the skippers," she laughed.

Tonya slipped away from her, jaw suddenly set, and reached down into the sand to execute their plan.

To send the message.

Quinn reached out to stop her, to claim another instant in her unadulterated company. What could another moment in this timeless void hurt?

Or one moment more?

Eva's phone buzzed. She yawned, and fished it out of her back pocket with extreme difficulty. She caught Driscoll watching, and smirked.

It was a text from an unlisted number. It contained instructions.

The instructions were, in a word, surprising.

She took a deep breath, deleted the text, and said: "I know everything."

Driscoll looked up from where he was taking the unconscious programmer's vitals, and frowned. "Everything about what?"

"About you." Eva stood, feeling pins and needles in her legs. She really should have gotten up to walk around more, but she was too worried to leave Quinn's side. These pants were absolute murder, too. "I know you were working with Vollan, and I'm going to report you to the UIU."

The man looked pained. "That's a damn shame. I was hoping you'd accept that they were lost, and I could go back to the company and tell them the mess was settled." He sighed. "I'm really sorry about this, Miss McDoyle, but you'll eventually realize I had no choice. You'll have a lot of time to think about it."

Her heart raced as he raised his hands in the air, his eyes unfocused as they met hers. She felt a sudden drowsiness overtaking her as the mesmerization took hold. She slouched toward the door, putting Vollan's ghost between them as the pusher made his move.

She didn't say anything clever as the light enveloped the room, as the bracelet on her ankle glowed like a miniature sun, as the push backfired and the UIU agent passed out, banging his head roughly against the wall, as the ghost raised its hands in one final soundless protest before disappearing in a flash.

She didn't feel smug about winning. She felt bad that they both had to lose.

But they did both have to lose.

Karen was subjected to a torment the likes of which she had never before felt. Her body burned, and on instinct she forced certain of her muscles into action, and the burning was relieved as a coolness spread throughout her core. She did it again, and again, and again and again and again, and she realized she was breathing, that she needed to breathe, and then the oxygen hit her brain and all the extraneous sensory data came with it and she fell to the floor of the server room, and retched.

Blind, panicked, she reached out and took Quinn's hand. It was there. Quinn was there. She opened her eyes, and looked at Quinn.

The real Quinn, not her idealized form, the ghost of the woman she'd shared one of the worst and most fascinating days of her life with, not the being of pure and startling intent who'd shared so much more with her over the course of what felt like and probably had been whole weeks of abstract exploration.

She let go the other woman's hand, and felt a coldness settling over her heart as it tried frantically to remember how to beat of its own volition.

"Did we do it?" Quinn's voice was hoarse. Karen wondered if it were possible for a spirit to really experience these physical pains, or if their minds had worn themselves into such deep ruts over decades of existence that they couldn't process the trauma of devolution in any other way than the mock-physical. "Did it work?"

"It worked." The voice of the masculine figure was like a memory from the long-distant past. Karen looked up, then sat up, and saw for the first time the glowing form sitting in the seat of power.

It wasn't the figure from before. The figure was standing beside it, looking down on them with faceless benevolence.

The chair was occupied by the spectral ghost of Rikard Vollan, shuddering in its restraints, head still absent, covered in leads. The server stacks were glowing bright. The capacitors flashed in the dark.

Quinn reached for Karen's hand again.

Karen stood up without allowing it. Her legs were shaky, but they held. "Driscoll?"

"In custody. He's very upset."

"I'll bet he is." Quinn stood as well, glancing curiously up at Karen. "I never told him about the ankle bracelet charm."

Eva McDoyle had died a wanted outlaw, and though Quinn had explained the circumstances of her revival to the UIU, she'd only been able to secure her friend a sort of spectral probation. The charm prevented her from moving beyond the bounds of Three Portlands, whether physically or spiritually. Driscoll had tipped his hand with that offhand comment about wiping her out entirely; Quinn had suspected he'd try it if he felt his position had been compromised, and apparently she'd been right. The backlash had blasted both him and his employer into the Astral Projects, and the landlords were absentee no longer.

"Where is he?" Karen asked.

"Decommissioning the golem." The figure sighed in obvious satisfaction. "He's agreed to our terms. All the kidnapped programmers will be released unharmed, and then he will release you, and then we will reconfigure the interdiction field to allow him to release himself, once we have confirmation that all is well Earthside."

"And then?" Quinn pressed. "You're going to go through with the upload?"

"Of course." The figure might have been smiling. "It's a world of possibility out there, and nothing but emptiness behind."

Karen pursed her lips.

"What's wrong?" Quinn asked.

"Ask me again when we get back home," she said. "Leave the hope here, where it can do some real good."

The first thing Quinn did when she woke up for real was reach out and smack Ethan Driscoll in his senseless face. Then she socked him in the jaw. Then she burst into tears, and felt someone pull her into a soft embrace. She knew by the smell who it was. It was Eva.

"Not many people get a second chance at life, you know," she cooed teasingly.

Quinn laughed. It came with tears.

Tonya sat up slowly, her face a mask of composure. "You'll want to report back to the bureau," she said. Her voice was cold again, as though the events of the day had never even occurred.

"Yes…" Quinn stared at the woman she'd come to know very well over seemingly endless milliseconds of surreal time. "I'll have to tell them to come pick up the programmers, and it's going to be a bitch arranging that what, with the Divot and all. Then I'll have to tell them we're in contact with a new plane of existence, and acknowledge that its residents have custody over Vollan's light body, which isn't gonna be easy. The Nornir are definitely gonna be pissed, but maybe you can help smooth that over?"

"No." Tonya smoothed out her dress, and adjusted her glasses. "No, I'm afraid I can't. I lied to you, Agent Law. I'm not a member of the Global Occult Coalition, and my name isn't Tonya de Leoncourt."

She made eye contact with Quinn. Eva was looking back and forth between them, confused. Quinn felt like she'd just transitioned from yet another layer of reality to a new, darker, colder, far less friendly one.

"You're a skipper," she said suddenly. "You're a fucking skipper."

"My name is Dr. Karen Elstrom," the skipper said. "I'm Level 3 administrative personnel at Lake Huron Research and Containment Site-43, and it's my duty to inform you that the SCP Foundation having had personnel on the metaphorical ground during first contact with the residents of the Metaphysiverse, we will of course require representation at any and all negotiations of sovereign reality status as defined by Codicil 3 of the Multi-Foundation Pact of 1981, to which all known iterations of the Unusual Incidents Unit are signatory."

Quinn could barely croak out a response as the blood ran away from her brain. She couldn't understand what was happening, and her own reaction made even less sense. She should have been furious. She should have been distraught. Instead she felt empty, except where Eva was still gently brushing the hair from her face, a touch as light and gentle as summer rain.

"Did you enjoy our date?" she finally managed, the words cutting her on the way out. Eva didn't react at all.

"I prefer men," the skipper responded. Her blue eyes seemed almost grey in the dim light. "I apologize if you feel misled. I try to keep an open mind."

"So noted, Dr. Elstrom," Quinn heard her own voice mutter. "I can handle the investigation from here."

Tonya, Karen, the other woman looked like she had something else to say.

She turned smartly on her heel, and didn't say it.

Karen glanced over the report in the familiar discomfort of her office chair. On recovering from her wounds Frau der Streich had explained that she had indeed sicced the cybertulpa on Vollan at her shop, the astral exiles having reached out to her for help just moments after the women walked in with the object of its hunt. She'd only defaulted to helping her despised employer when the attack had failed. On weighing the evidence the city council had decided to banish her from Three Portlands with no further criminal charges; an inveterate opportunist, she was expected to set up a new practice in La Rue Macabre before long. Ethan Driscoll had been given a life sentence in Paramax for spiritual genocide, and Rikard Vollan was serving out a similar sentence in the Astral Projects under the in absentia care of the First Theosophical Metaphysiverse. They had promised to leave a single cybertulpa behind to make sure he was comfortable while enabling the existence of their sovereign state for the rest of his natural life, which was expected to last until humanity itself winked out of existence at some far-flung moment in the future, at which point they would likely have worked out a more ethical power source. It was quite possibly the single worst fate Karen could imagine, and she couldn't quite bring herself to feel very badly about it.

She had inquired, against her better judgement, on the status of Quinn Law and Eva McDoyle.

She had been politely informed by the UIU's liaison office that there was no obvious reason why she should require this information, and as such no response would be forthcoming.

She had spent the rest of the afternoon trying to decide if she disagreed with that assessment.

She spent the evening alone in her dormitory room with a glass of red wine and a battered old copy of the complete works of Coleridge, trying to decide if she'd done the right thing.

She spent the night trying to meditate, found she could not, and thought about why that might be.

On the following day Karen Elstrom, a woman of exceptional mental control, consciously avoided thinking about anything much at all.

She kept the taser.

For an alternate take, see The SAINT SEBASTIAN SLASHER by Anorrack!