Fuck, fuck, fuck. 
Wait. I've seen this guy before. 
Where? Can't place that face for a second. 


| know. In a car's vanity mirror. Memories flood. | can hear the sound 


of our performance. Wait, I'm that guy? I'm going insane, that bloody 
fucking doesn't make any sense. | can hear him thinking. Something 
about stopping senseless slaughter, orders or not. He's pissed at 
the woman sitted next to him, looks like a mean, cold, old bitch, 
doesn't move a finger, she's the spider to him. That's bullshit, I'm 
dreaming all this, it's im-fucking-possible. 


A thump and a sharp pain bring me back. | turn away and start 
running. There's a dart sticking from my side. | rip it out and stumble 
towards the hangar. 


| hear him calling from ahead of me. “Lock her up, I'm getting the 
others.” 


| hear another door opening, footsteps behind me. I'm feeling 
woozy. | turn back, it's that woman. No way she's fucking real. | want 
to wake up. There's a hole in the concrete fence ahead. Pretty sure 
that wasn't there before. | slip through and fly towards the hangar. 
Literally. When the fuck did | learn how to fly? No time to think, can't 
think straight anyway. 


Footsteps have stopped, | look back, no hole. Gunfire. Everything's 
out of focus. | make a sharp turn and head towards the door. He's 
leaning over the twins. They can't be dead. They just can't be dead. 
| can't feel my body. The light is hurting my eyes. Fade to grey. 


| finally wake up from that nightmare. Except, this isn't the squat. 
Way too clean. Dull metal walls. I'd try to get up but I'm strapped to 
the bed. Surgical light blinding me. Is this a hospital? Noone’s here 
to answer. | scream. And wait. And scream. I'm dazed and hungry. 
The door finally opens. | didn't expect to see that face again, or 
rather | didn't want to... Except he's wearing orange, not black. 


Questions bustle and clash through my head but only one comes 
out. 


“Are they alive?" 


"I'm afraid not. | can't tell you more and you probably wouldn't 
understand. Maybe it was a mistake. Do you know what she told 
me? - Sometimes you make mistakes, sometimes mistakes make 


you. - It feels like a lifetime ago. Only nine months. Before you ask, 
you won't see what you birthed. It's locked up in a box with two like 
it. Permanently, | think. It's neutralised, like everything else, anyway. 
I'm not sure why you lived. The other two died before term. You're 
the last instance alive. The spider wants to close that file and move 
on. You're to be decommissioned, | came to pick you up.” 


| don't dig half of that. Decommissioned? What the fuck? 
The guy in black, orange, whatever, is now holding a pistol. He looks 
as surprised as | am. 


“I'm not supposed to have one of those. Maybe it's for the best.” 


He unties me, says he's sorry for everything, tells me not to look. 
There's heavy, heavy silence. | can't take my eyes off that gun. He 
lifts it, shoves the barrel down his mouth, shoots, collapses. 


| can't even scream anymore. I'm just standing there. The deafening 
tritone of a siren shakes me up. Can't wait to see who'll respond to 
that alarm. | fly out of the room, into an immense hallway lined with 
doors just like the one | exited. | hear shouts down the hall. The 
spider is the next thing | see. She grabs me, asks me where | think 
I'm going, tells me | wasted two years of her life by bearing a 
perfectly non-anomalous plastic toy. Pink. With a fuchsia mane. She 
mumbles something about a catheter, says that I'm to be terminated 
and to wait here for the guards. She never seems to stop, | can't 
take it anymore. | put my hands around her neck. She vanishes in a 
puff of pink glitter. 


The walls around me are shaking, crumbling. | fly as fast as | can, 
the hallway never seems to end. The doors disgorge their content in 
a cacophonic pandemonium. | finally reach a hub of sorts. Exit's 
blocked by a blast door. | glide to the roof and punch through it. 
There's no other side, only nothingness, stars shimmering in the 
darkness as far as the eye can see. | fly towards the door and 
through it. 


| don’t know how | got back to the squat. The streets are eerily 
empty and silent. Nothing of this can be real. | don't know when | fell 
asleep and started dreaming. I'll climb the stairs, and I’ll have a beer 
with the twins. But there's no squat. The rooms are bare and 


decaying, dust and rubble. Ulrike's graffiti are gone. So is the 
boombox, blasted silence. Not a trace of any of us. | can't believe 
that | couldn't save them, that they'll never be here when me again. 
Or maybe, maybe they never were in the first place and none of this 
is real. None of us ever were. All that is is a hole burnt through a 
mourner's veil and there's no living flesh to be seen through that 
hole. Outside, the void has too many stars and | am but one of them. 


All is silence. 


Third Date 


"There's a bottle on his penis?" 
"There's a bottle on his penis," Clef confirmed. 


The voice on the other end of the line was silent. Then, with a low 
exasperated sigh, it asked the one question that any reasonable or 
not-so-reasonable person could ask in this situation. 


"HOW?" 


"Beats me. Hey, 'Draki, how the fuck did you manage to get a bottle 
on your dick anyway?" Clef asked. 


"Fuck you," Kondraki grumbled. 


"He doesn't say," Clef said into the phone. "Anyway, | was just 
wondering, is this a regular thing with your Dad? Is there a 
procedure for this sort of thing? Like, do you guys have a bottle-dick- 
remover on call or something? Some guy you usually call in this sort 
of situation?" 


"Alto..." 


"Look, | figure bottle-dick-remover is kind of like a plumber: you don't 
want to call someone else if you already know a guy, because the 
second guy will kind of fuck things up because they won't do it the 
same way as your usual g— and he just hung up on me. Your son is 
fucking rude, Ben." 


"| swear to God if you don't do something about this now, | will not 
only kill you, | will make sure it is painful," Kondraki snarled. 


"Hey, don't worry about it!" Clef said. "It's no big deal. We'll just get 
you to Site-69, and we'll have a medic cut that bottle off your dick 
with what the hell is that fucking noise, it sounds like a fire alarm?" 


sharpie marker. The total price of all items is included. 


Sample 887-0332: When recovered, sample was a pile of broken 
glass with seemingly random strokes of green paint applied to each 
shard. When placed back together, the paint strokes formed the 
phrase "THIS WINDOW IS BROKEN". 


Sample 887-4449: An 81-page young adult story written in English 
titled "The Fabulous Findings of Funky Ferret". The story is about 
the titular "Funky Ferret" who aspires to be a pirate and ends up 
going into space. The story ends abruptly in the middle of a 
sentence, in which Funky Ferret is sword-fighting with a robot pirate 
captain. 


Sample 887-0887: One hundred and twelve sentences written in 
Spanish, each one announcing which number sentence it was ("This 
is the first sentence. This is the second sentence. This is the third 
sentence. ..") 


Researcher: Dr. Garcia 


Sample 887-2665: Copy of Kriegsmarine nautical chart of the Gulf 
of St. Lawrence, with legend (in German) dating the chart to 
November 1943. 


Sample 887-2666: A play, written in Greek. The play is entitled "The 
Babylonians" and is in the style of Aristophanes. Aristophanes is 
believed to have written a play by that title in approximately 426 
BCE but no copies of the text are extant. 


Sample 887-2667: An extremely detailed log of observations of a 
31-year-old woman named Agnes Cooper, covering a 26-minute 
period on October 18, 2004. The log describes the subject's 
movements, heart rate and body temperature fluctuations as she 
shops for groceries at a Piggly-Wiggly market in Nashville, 
Tennessee. The log is written in Afrikaans. 


Sample 887-2668: A set of maintenance records for forklifts and 
cranes at Gdansk Shipyard in Poland, dated from 1992 to 2016. 


"It's the fucking fire alarm," Kondraki confirmed. 


Clef carefully went to the apartment door and stuck his head out the 
door. Every door on the floor was open, and all of Kondraki's 
neighbors were walking out into the hallway, grumbling to 
themselves as they filed down the hall to the stairs. "Hey," Clef 
asked. "You know what this is about?" 


"Not exactly," an older woman in a blue flower-print nightie said. "| 
think it might just be a false alar—" 


There was a cry of alarm from the end of the hallway as the door to 
the stairs opened, revealing a cloud of thick white smoke. 


"— or not, holy shit!" the old woman cried. "Let's get the hell out of 
here!" 


Clef carefully closed the door and turned to his boyfriend, who had 
somehow managed to go green with nausea, white with fear, and 
red with rage all at once. "Your apartment building's on fire," he said, 
unnecessarily. 


Kondraki looked down at the Aquafina bottle on his dick, then over 
at his apartment door, then back at the windows, and finally back 
down at his dick. "Leave me to die," he moaned. "Save yourself!" 


"Bullshit," Clef replied curtly. "We ride together. We die together. 
You're coming with me if | have to knock you out and carry you on 
my back." 


"You couldn't knock me out if you tried," Kondraki retorted. "I'll kill 
you first." 


"Oh, there we go again with the killing and the stabbing. God, Ben, 
you've got such a one-track mind. Just suck it up and throw ona 
trench coat or something. No one will know." 


Kondraki rushed back into his bedroom. There was the sound of 
some rummaging around in the closet. He came out wearing a black 
trench coat with a gigantic, tent-shaped bulge in the front at crotch 
level. "Wow," he said flatly. "This sure did help a lot. No one will 
notice anything wrong now, yes siree-bob." 


"Fuck..." Clef glanced out the door. The smoke was starting to build 
up a bit, and the last few neighbors were quickly making their way 
down the stairs, heads lowered and wet rags placed over their 
faces. "All right," Clef said. "I didn't want to do this... but we have no 
choice." He took a deep breath. "Where's your pantry?" 


"Wow, holy shit," Captain Buchanan said. "That's not great." 


The fire was largely contained to a single unit on the northern side of 
the apartment building, but it was clear from the flames licking the 
curtains and the lurid orange-red glow that could be seen through 
the window that this was no mere trash can fire, a fact further 
evident to the dozens of glum-looking people in night dress standing 
on the sidewalk nearby. "All right," he said into the radio. "Let's get 
these bystanders out of the way first. | want..." 


Buchanan's voice trailed off. 


There were two men walking down the sidewalk, both of them 
wearing scarves around their heads and wide-brimmed hats. Only 
scarves around their heads and wide-brimmed hats. 


And one other thing. 
Waiter bottles. 


Each of the two men in question had a water bottle on the end of 
their dicks. 


Captain Buchanan's radio handset fell from his nerveless fingers. He 
felt his world collapse inward. The fire, his waiting firefighters, the 
bystanders standing on the sidewalk... it all fell away, leaving behind 
only himself, his eyes, and two stark-naked middle aged men merrily 
walking down the street with hats on their heads, scarves on their 
faces, and water bottle on their ding-a-lings. 


The two men skipped into a car. One of them turned, made eye 
contact, and shot Captain Buchanan the finger-guns. 


The car started up and drove away. 


Just What We Do 


Note: This story is better read after A Day at the Call Center 


Subject: UI-56 


From: Special Agent Laura Stanton, Unusual Incident Unit, Los 
Angeles Office 


To: Director McNamara, FBI HQ, Washington D.C 


Sir, here is the report for the item we recovered in the raid on Uncle 
Merl's call center. | have no idea who would buy a piece of shit like 
that, but apparently this guy has customers- that's how we reached 
him, after all. So, the item: 


UI-56 is a novelty sword made of cheap, recycled metal (mostly 
aluminum). According to the box we found it in, it's an "Uncle Merl's 
Durendal Mark III™". There was a pamphlet in the box with it, with 
some sort of bullshit about what this thing does. | copied it here: 


Are you tired of living in a callous, uncaring modern 
world? Do you wish to return to the old days of chivalry 
and honor? Now, with the Durendal Mark III™ , Paladin's 
Delight (Ultra light! With patented Dragon Grip!)", you 
can! This handy-dandy, multifunctional tool is everything 
a true knight could ask for! Features include: 


¢ Defend the meek! With the Durendal Mark III™, no 
monster is beyond your just might! Guaranteed 
100% effectiveness” against all ogres, trolls, orcs, 
hobgoblins, goblins and unusually large lizards 
with sharp teeth*! 


* Inspire courage and resolve! With the Durendal 
Mark III™, every fight becomes an epic last stand! 


Show your boss you are not going to take his crap 
anymore, the old fashioned way! Use the included 
magic words to activate! 


¢ Impress fair maidens! With the sleek style of the 
Durendal Mark III™, no comely lass is safe from 
your rugged, knightly charms! Introduce them to 
your long, hard length of steel, and watch those 
chastity belts melt away! 


Patented Dragon Grip! Forged in the secret mage- 
fire of Kromdar, this unique hilt allows for 
maximum swing power without sacrificing any of 
the reliability or style!** 


“Disclaimer: Any injuries resulting from incorrect use of 
the Durendal Mark III™ are under the responsibility of 
the user only. By opening this box, the user waives any 
right to sue Uncle Merl's Discount Emporium and 
releases said company of all liability to his/her's medical 
expenses. 


*“Replacement hilts are available in gold, silver, black, 
and hot pink. 


We tried doing some tests on the thing before the spooks took it 
away. Didn't manage much, but that's hardly new. We wouln't have 
gotten anything at all if it wasn't for the volunteers. I'm adding Dr. 
Charles' and Dr. Demagne's notes from the lab: 


+ Show Test UI-56-1 


Researchers: Dr. Charles (reporting), Dr. 
Demagne 


Test subject: Agent Carlson 


Test: | placed Agent Carlson in a room with an 
out-of-order vending machine, gave him UI-56 
and told him to buy a drink after speaking the 
"magic words" written on the back of the 


pamphlet (Latin, "Qui utitur hoc pharse est 
stultus"). The following result was recorded: 


Agent Carlson: [inserts coin into the machine] 
Ah, soon the cool taste of this godly nectar will 
fill my mouth with heavenly delight! 


[The machine does not produce the requested 
drink] 


Agent Carlson: [visibly upset] What's this!? 
Ye knavish contraption! You shall dispense my 
drink forthright, and allow me to taste its frosty 
secrets, or you shall taste my cold steel! 


[The threat appears ineffective] 


Agent Carlson: So, thou wishest to face my 
might?! So be it, fiend! This shall be our final 
confrontation, a battle to shake the very 
foundations of the Earth, that will bring fear to 
the gods themselves! | will rip the sky asunder, 
cleave the ancient mountains like cheese 
paper! You will taste my wrath! Have at ye! 


[Agent Carlson proceeds to attack the vending 
machine. UI-56 can't penetrate the vending 
machine, so he uses it as a blunt instrument. 
After attacking the machine for thirty minutes 
without results (other than mild denting), Agent 
Carlson collapses to the floor, exhausted. 


Agent Carlson: |... | have failed. My 
ancestors peer at me from their lordly seats in 
disapproval and shame. If | cannot have 
victory, | shall have honorable death! Farewell, 
my unclaimed drink! My only regret is that | 
failed to save you from the clutches of this 
rectangular devil. Loyal sword, serve your 
master one last time.