As it begins to reintegrate into the slurry of glowing neon writhing 
Kanako quickly simplifies herself down to the smallest possible 
filesize and kicks back to the man's consciousness, furiously 
jettisoning memory and sensation in an attempt to escape the 
rapidly enclosing blossom of ontological hell that's racing ever-faster 
towards her. 


Finally she manages to hit the man's consciousness and cut the link 
remotely, shredding the tentacle into millions of half-completed 
commands that disperse harmlessly into the air. On reflex she 
bounces off the mental boundaries and crashlands in her own 
consciousness, scattering memories out of time and sending 
synaesthetic blasts of skin-cutting sound through her brain. 


The perceptual accelerator is smashed forward another million times 
and snaps, returning Kanako to normal speed with a dizzying burst 
of colour and sound as her brain copes with the tremendous buildup 
of qualia. 


Her arm flickers out of hyperlight, her sensors crash and she keels 
over, heart thrumming in and out of rhythm and throwing her entire 
sense of balance off. In front of her, the man's eyes flutter open 
weakly. 


The last thing she remembers before her heart gives out is the 
sound of a confused word ("Frank?") and the shadow of feet 
casually walking away. 


Next: Vocode Switchblade » 


To Be Noir Not To Be 


Some time in the 1920s, almost a century before there were such 
things as Markov plot generators or infrafictional constructs, a dirt- 
broke novelist in the middle of L.A. somehow discovered the first 
known method of transport between various metafictional layers. 
We're still not entirely sure what he actually did with it in the first 
place and for almost all intents and purposes he shot himself into 
fictional space and fucked right off, but suffice it to say once they'd 
finished cleaning his corpse off the side of a printing office on the 
Hollywood Boulevard, more than a few people got interested in 
whatever method of narrativic ascension he'd unintentionally 
pioneered. 


The kids from Prometheus were interested, because of course they 
were, and they'd managed to just about gut half of his manuscripts 
and the widget he'd used to punch himself into the metanarrative. 
That being said, even after they were done, there was still enough 
there for two groups to figure out how it worked and build their own 
separate copies of the machine in question. Those groups being a 
loose collective of private investigators and the Mafia. 


The timeline's still pretty fuzzy, simply because of how much it 
jumps around between various layers of fiction and reality — that 
being said, we've pretty solidly established that the start of this 
whole debacle is in 1953, when the first shots got fired between the 
two groups and you have one P.I. dead and a Mob hitman 
apparently vanished into thin air. 


A few years after that particular confrontation, the other members of 
the P.I. collective disappear, one by one. At the time, nobody's quite 
sure how the hell what's happened to them and their bodies are 
never actually found: what they're very sure about is the very 
visceral deaths of multiple members of the mob. And then the rest of 
them disappear and it's all tied off very neatly, right before an 
explosion in the number of novels featuring battles between 


hardboiled detectives and the Mafia. 


Like | said, pretty much everything after that point in time has 
dissolved into a sea of tenuous links and mostly ineffective 
theorising, but the main thrust of it is that we now have an array of 
detectives and wanted criminals duking it out over thousands (if not 
millions) of novels and decades of literary tradition. 


Your job as a member of this particular division of the Department of 
Analytics is mainly going to be watching these novels. They tell me 
that the Als are pretty good at filtering both by genre and by 
characters, so you're probably not going to be sorting through all 
that many truckloads of original fiction each day you're on the job. 


When you think you've got a lead, you'll fill in a form, boot it upstairs 
and if Command reckons it's worth investigating, a few Agents like 
myself will probably get sent off to interview the author, see whether 
or not they show any of the signs of metafictional fuckery with some 
basic MID-terms — Memory, Inspiration, Diction. If it turns out your 
tip was accurate, you'll soon find yourself chasing further fictional 
leads to ensure that we've got a comprehensive collection of their 
movements 'n' such. 


Okey, you're probably wondering why we're going to all the effort 
about this, and I'll explain. 


In a metafictional fight like this, you're not going to be settling the 
feud over a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant. No, the only way to 
settle this kind of dispute is with good old-fashioned murder, but that 
gets pretty complicated when you're trying to murder a fictional 
character. Authors can pull plot twists out their ass to save any 
character, especially ones as well-loved as these guys seem to be, 
and if their readerbase suffers, it doesn't matter — so long as they're 
alive and able to fight the other side, they're not going to give a rat's 
about the authors they have to manipulate to stay that way. 


Clearly, you can't kill a fictional character in fiction. So you have to 
lure them out into reality and then kill them, before finishing off any 
potential authors who might want to bring them back. We've had 
reports of authors who've been literally taken hostage and forced to 
write out the adventures of the kidnapper's comrade at gunpoint, 


Interviewer: And no one took it? 


Agent M ~— : When you hear what happened, you'll 
understand why. [Agent M _ sighs and pauses for 3.5 
seconds.] After | got authority to approach for the buy, | 
took a team out to the retrieval site. It was considered a 
low-risk retrieval, so they stayed out of sight, back down 
his driveway, while | knocked on his front door. We'd 
arranged the meeting for a quarter to two, and it was 
March ,19 .He had areal nice place, huge New 
England mansion. He welcomed me in, gave me a seat, 
offered me some brandy, which | declined. He was real 
old, real thin and wrinkly, but really animated, talked with 
his hands a lot. 


Interviewer: How did the incident occur? 


Agent M — : [Sucks in breath.] Yeah. Well, he made 
small talk for like ten minutes until | asked about the 
photograph, and then he acted like he'd forgotten that's 
why | was there. He goes, gets it, brings it back in an 
envelope and hands it to me. He hesitated, though, and 
gave me this weird look, like he was trying to read my 
mind or something. Anyway, | slid it out, and there it was, 
a Polaroid of the Hindenburg disaster. First thing | did 
was ask him how he managed to capture the explosion 
with a camera made decades after it happened, and he 
tells me it's a photo of a photo. And then | start hearing it. 


Interviewer: Hearing what? 


Agent M ~ : Explosions. Fire. People — men, women, 
children — screaming in pain and terror. [Agent M 
pauses for ten seconds.] \t was like | was just getting 
sucked into that photo, | couldn't look away. Then he 
leans forward and that breaks my concentration, like I'd 
forgotten | could look up at all. He's giving me that look 
again, and he says, "You hear them too, don't you?" | 
said yeah. Then he shakes his head like he's 
disappointed. "You're all the same, blast it," that's exactly 
what he said. 


and good old Kurt Vonnegut had to have a covert security detail 
monitoring him simply because of the possibility of metaphysical 
infiltration of his work. 


Which brings me to this thing right here on the table. The last "re- 
entry" into reality these guys made, an entire hectare of land got 
levelled within the first fifteen minutes of the fight, and at least half of 
it was thanks to this thing right here. 


Remember, when you have control over what can come in and out 
of reality, you're not gonna bother with using something as pissingly 
weak as your dead-average pistol. These guys have been through 
so many genres and so many books that they've got the sense to 
not use anything even close to mundane. 


So, if you keep good tabs on these guys, we can lock them and any 
paratech they've got up right as they pop back into reality, and 
maybe you can be the one who's going to stop the next honest-to- 
god plasma cannon battle. 


No pressure. 


The Dedekind Infinite Demographic 


He was always surprised at just how simple it was to steal from the 
gods. 


The Librarian was a robed semi-human thing with an ink-stained 
hand for a head. Despite its frail appearance, whatever it wanted, 
the Library gave it: which only made the fact someone had stolen an 
entire section of the Library right in front of it even more perplexing. 


Landen Eckhart twirled his pen and tapped its top against the 
notepad he'd been scribbling on. "Every book from that entire shelf 
over there." He motioned with his head at the recently-emptied 
bookshelf next to him. "And nothing else?" 


The Librarian's head dipped forward in response. 
"Right. But you didn't stop them, because-" 


It smacked the flat of its hand-head against the the shelf, before 
beginning to scrawl on the wood with its fingers. As they squelched 
against the surface, ink welled from gaping pores on its skin and 
stained the shelf's finish. ACTORS (BY (TIME (DETECTED 
(CRIME))) (OUTSIDE (LIBRARY))). 


Landen didn't exactly consider himself an expert on the niceties of 
Library architecture, but the shelf was enormous even by its 
standards. Just looking up at it gave him vertigo, and the 
omnipresent 'ASCPAB' acronym spray-bombed onto its side was 
written in letters taller than he was. "But.. how could you not have 
picked up on the theft while it was in progress? | mean, there's 
space for, what, a million books on that shelf, it couldn't have been 
done that quickly." 


The Librarian's hand balled into a fist in response and for a moment 
Landen thought it was going to punch him in the face for what he'd 
said. Instead, it began scribbling on the shelf with renewed intensity. 


DURING (CRIME THREAT (NUCLEAR)). ATTENTION-ON 
(CRIME). ONLY-DETECTED (THIEVES DURING (EXIT 
(LIBRARY))). COMBINED (ATTENTION-ON (CRIME) HARD 
(DETECTION)) IMPLIES (UNABLE-TO (DETECT (ACTORS))). 


"Sure." Landen transcribed the rant onto his notepad and tucked it 
back into his pocket, unable to wholly suppress a sigh of 
disappointment. "Well, in that case, | can't say | blame you. Thanks 
for your time-" He squinted at the red-and-white name-tag someone 
had slapped onto its robe in an (unsuccessful) attempt to make it 
look more approachable. "-Ham." 


Its palm opened up to reveal rings of teeth and tongues that gargled 
something like 'no problems' at him, before it turned away and left 
Landen to wipe strings of fluorescent spit off his suit. 


He took a moment to search for his partner twice-over amidst the 
hundreds of levels of the shelf. Eventually, Landen found him taking 
photos of the thirty-somethingth level and waving a chunky-looking 
detector over it. With a quick whistle and a minute's climb down the 
ladder mounted to the shelf, the two were reunited on the ground 
floor of the building. 


"Anything?" Landen asked. 


Ari Perkowitz fiddled with the camera for a few more moments 
before handing it to him with a look of faint disgust on his face. "If 
there was anything, it's gone now. Everyone got their hands on the 
crime scene ages before we showed up and fingerprints are a 
nightmare, let alone thaumic bullshit. Only promising thing | found, | 
photographed.” 


Landen glanced at the photo on the screen; a single black chess 
piece lying in the corner of one of the rows of the shelf. A quick 
zoom in on the piece in question revealed an ornate crown sculpted 
into its head. "Hhhhuh. Any artists you know with that signature?" 


"None on my watchlist, nope." Ari scowled at the ground and scuffed 
it with a foot. "Detector didn't pick up anything too suspicious about 
it, either. It's not a nuke and it's not magic. As far as it can tell, it's 
just a really nice carving." 


"Could we get Noemi to look at it?" 


Ari began walking away, gently leading Landen by the hand to the 
Way out. "You think someone's running a book-based Ponzi 
scheme? Rob Peter to pay Paul's late fees?" 


"She's not just a mercanturge, Ari, Christ." Landen deftly weaved out 
of the way of a woman made of terracotta who was toting a gigantic 
tray of gaiwans and other tea-themed paraphernalia. "It's just that 
Thorne's busy, and she's the next available Blue we could call to 
check out the thing you found." 


"Point." 


Before Landen could respond, Ari pulled him behind a tent bordering 
the 'road' they were on and gingerly unzipped the tent's back. "Way 
out's in here." 


A stiff breeze from the Way's interior blew the scent of burnt coffee 
and spoilt milk into Landen's face, making him tempted to add vomit 
to the list of smells coming from the dark passageway. "Ari, | love 
you, but | literally don't trust the smell of this." 


"Well, too bad, because it's the only free Way out to Portlands for 
two miles." The older agent fished a couple of napkins out of his 
pockets and tossed them roughly at Landen. "Wedge them up your 
nose and get crawling, loverboy." 


Landen swallowed. 


After a much-needed change of clothes and a few calls to the 
branch office, Ari and Landen found themselves directed to meet up 
with Noemi at a warehouse on the outskirts of Three Portlands. It 
was a shabby-looking building with a corrugated-iron roof and little 
caterpillar legs designed to let it crawl about as needed. The house 
was midway through the process of doing so when they arrived, at 
which point it quickly froze in place and tucked its legs underneath 
itself. 


As Landen knocked on the door, he could swear he felt the building 


tremble a little in fear. Before it could try to roll over and play dead, 
the door slid to the side, revealing a harried-looking woman in a 
purple bathrobe with her brown hair in a chopsticked bun and a still- 
steaming coffee in one hand. 


She spent a few seconds patting the wall comfortingly and 
whispering soothing things into the wooden doorframe, to which the 
warehouse responded with a content purr. Ari interrupted the display 
by coughing as indiscreetly as possible and arching his unsinged 
eyebrow at her. "Noemi. Didn't know you lived here." 


"| don't," Noemi Simonides stated flatly. "Girlfriend does. What do 
you want?" 


Ari pulled a square of paper from his pocket and unfolded it with a 
noticeable effort. Its corners exploded out with a loud pop to reveal a 
plastic evidence bag sitting pretty in the center of the crumpled 
sheet, the black queen they'd found earlier ensconced in its zip-lock 
depths. "Robin's busy with some other case, and it's not worth 
calling in MOOT on this one. We think we've got a lead on a theft 
case, but hell if | can do anything with it, I'm a shitty wizard: you 
mind giving this a look-over for us?" 


If it was even possible, Noemi's look became even more non- 
plussed. "Perkowitz, I've got the Infernal Revenue Service hounding 
me about Faust Bank again in a week. Tell me why | should blow off 
the Skippers, the Gockers and the Pentagram for some pickpocket 
with a chess fetish." 


Landen cleared his throat quietly. "Actually, they stole every book on 
artificial intelligence in the Wanderer's Library. If you think the 
Bermuda real estate economy's going to land you in hot water with 
the IRS, try 'Al research behind the Veil grinds to a halt." 


Noemi opened her mouth, thought better of it, then turned to Ari. 
"He's serious, right?" 


Ari shrugged and let his grin speak for itself, to which Noemi 
responded with a resigned huff. "Come inside, then. Touch 
anything-"