“So what did you do?” He whispered, and hoped against hope that 
maybe, this time, she’d tell him why she ran to him in the first place. 


“| experimented.” Her voice was raw with emotion, as she started 
into that distant time, the memories fresh before her eyes. “Il was a 
nurse, back in the days, before this all started. Worked closely with 
my husband. When we went from being mercenaries to federally 
funded, | kept on in that vein. Medicine, with a specialty in bizarre 
humanoid mutations. Got into biology. DNA splicing. Thanks to 
things we'd discovered along the way, our Knowledge was light 
years ahead of the time. And when you have things that can literally 
glue flesh together, or combine man with machine, you don’t actually 
need much extra.” She paused, not because of anything her boss 
had done, but just to let the old memories flood her mind. 


“So | fiddled. Mixed a little of this, a little of that. Built something, to 
show them what | could do, to prove that | could fix my children, 
make James himself again, make little Thomas normal, make 
Sarah...” She screamed suddenly, a raw, emotional sound, her 
head raised to the heavens. A second mouth opened, and a third, 
each of them adding tone and tenor to her scream, which caused 
the bottles on their shelves to shake, and the severed tentacle 
twitched in sympathy. She spoke again, all three mouths burbling up 
with words. “Il showed them. It was beautiful, my first artificial baby. 
Used a disposable to conceive it, which was a mistake I'd never 
make again. | showed the Council my beautiful baby boy and they, 
they called me a monster. Said | was perverting their noble goal. 
That the Foundation existed to contain monsters, not create them. 
|... May have gotten a little mad. Called them all a bunch of 
sanctimonious pricks. They tried to order me to kill my child, tried to 
get Adam to rein me in. Like my husband could control me.” 


She took a deep breath, steadied herself, her non primary mouths 


faded back in to look like just another wrinkle in her skin. Her body 
inflated slightly, but noticeably, each time she breathed, like a set of 
bagpipes. “So | turned loose that first, unnamed, created child of 
mine. Right there in the council chamber, | told him to kill them all. 
The look on Six’s face as my little darling popped his head off like a 
daisy, that was bliss. | didn’t stick around to enjoy it. | ran, hard and 
fast. Adam, poor dear, stepped in my way, his pretty little guns 
drawn. | knew he wouldn’t fire. Didn’t stop one of the bodyguards 
from winging me as | left that life behind me.“ 


“And you came to me, named your first project after the son you 
hoped to fix.” Prometheus said. “I always wondered.” His eyes 
searched her face, a little overawed by the information he’d 
received. “Why me?” 


“You were the only one who made sense.” She said with a shrug. 
“The guys behind the Wondertainment brand are a bunch of looney 
tunes, and MCD would have tried to sell my babies to the highest 
bidder. You, well, even then | knew you were different. Not driven by 
a desire to sell, but just by the sheer joy of creation. And look at 
what I’ve created!” She took another deep breath, and stretched... 
and kept on stretching; her body unfolded, and rose out of itself like 
one of these firework snakes. 


“| couldn’t give my babies any adjustments that | wouldn’t take 
myself!” Three sets of great leathery wings popped loose with a 
sound like thunder. A great, cavernous maw opened in her belly, 
lined with sharp little teeth. A thick, lewd tongue licked those slimy 
lips. “My natural children taken from me, | would become a monster 
myself, and mother to monsters!” Limbs of every shape and nature 
lashed out, and struggled with each other as she roared the words. 


The littlest titan couldn’t help but applaud at her awe inspiring form. 
“Oh, but you are beautiful in your rage, my Evelyn, my Echidna!” He 
hopped to his feet to dance a little jig. “Best decision of my life, to 
take you in.” 


She paused, looked down at him, and began to shrink back into 
herself. “You don’t regret it, do you, my love?” One dainty human 
hand reached out of the mass of tentacles, hooks, scales and spikes 
to take his hand. She might not always show him affection, but it 


was always there, under the snark. “They came after you, because 
of me. They damn near ruined you, because you had kept me safe.” 


“’'d do it again in a heartbeat!” He grasped her hand, and gazed up 
at her terrible form with nothing but love, and admiration. The 
woman-thing had his heart... in a small jar on her desk. It looked so 
much better there, and she had given him a new one. “You have 
always been the best thing that ever happened to me. Without you, | 
would be a lonely man, not to mention broke. With you, | am fulfilled, 
and | have an army to help me!” His free hand reached out to stroke 
a hide like grey leather, and he smiled. “And now I’ve broken you out 
of your shell, maybe you will tell me what's really troubling you?” 


“Oh. Oh Clarence.” She sobbed, as she deflated once more into the 
shape of a woman. Her limbs embraced him, tendrils and regular 
looking arms both, and drew him up to her. She held on to him tight, 
as if he were a favorite teddy bear. She sobbed into his shoulder, 
and cried for the first time since her family reunion. “My daughter. 
My poor, sweet, innocent Claire. She’s.” Her voice hitched, unable to 
let it out. 


“Shh, shh, it’s okay my dear.” His own stubby arms wrapped tight 
around her, as he comforted her as best he could. “You knew she 
was getting old, even with the body transplant. She lived a long, full 
life, one made happier because of what you could do for her.” One 
hand stroked her hair, calming her. 


“A parent shouldn't have to outlive their child, again.” She sobbed. 


“But you have so many more. You know she wouldn't want you to be 
sad. She’d just want you to strike a blow in her name.” He gave her 
cheek a loving stroke, and kissed her lips. 


“You're right. You’re right.” Reformed now, into a shape that, for the 
most part, had only two arms, and two legs. Her body and mind 
once more in alignment, now that she had vented her rage. “You 
always know the right words to say, don’t you?” She kissed him 
back, softly, and lovingly. 


“Course | do. That’s why I’m the boss.” He gave her a cheeky grin, 
as she let him down to the floor. One hand rested on her hip, and he 


couldn't help but leer up at her. 

She snorted, as she gazed fondly down at the little man. “You're a 
cheeky little bugger. Whatever could be on your mind?” Her own 
eyes lit from within with her love for this man. 


“Let’s go make some monsters, m’dear.” 


Wheels within Wheels 


Audio Log dated 21/04/1994, Site . Post incident report. 
Timestamp 14:21:55 


It's going to be remarkably difficult to accurately report what 
happened here if I’m not able to give names and numbers, you 
know? I’m really not sure how much help this is going to be if | don’t 
talk about the details. What? Well, | don’t think that, and | don’t 
believe that you do too. This isn’t the kind of thing that we can train 
for, you know? Ok, I'll be vague, although with some of the high 
level stuff I’m going to have to talk about, not using any number 
designations seems a bit pointless, as anyone cleared to listen to 
this... OK, OK, anything for an easy life. Although to call anything 
where you have to deal with this snafu an easy life is a bit 
inaccurate, but there you go. Yes, I'll describe what | saw. Jesus, 
they’re not paying you by the hour, are they? A bit of compassion 
here, | just witnessed the apocalypse. Or the start of it, anyway. Or 
maybe somewhere around the middle. It’s funny how non-specific 
the End Times ended up being. 


So, as everyone knows by now, we’d used the new array to perform 
iterations of the Twins — | can call them that, right? That’s not 
breaking any of your precious data rules? Right, so the Twins had 
been getting worryingly close over the last few spins, more so than 
the usual variation. | think we’d had some problems with one of our 
other guests, not entirely sure which because R block had been 
restricted access for the last few months, probably one of the techs 
there doing some higher level testing, but whatever it was we’d had 
a couple of blips, you know — the purple LEDs light up, everyone 
suddenly bends at the knees as their mass increases for a second 
or two, then we all bounce back up with a little hop. If it weren't for 
the pretty terrifying implications it could even be a fun distraction. 
But we'd noticed that after the last one the orbiter made a tiny little 
dip in altitude, about an hour later, and then again the next time it 
went overhead it dipped again. Only fractions of a millimetre, but it 


was definitely affecting its linear orbit, and that’s bad news — the 
thing hasn’t shown any sign of being affected by gravity before, so 
there must have been something else that caused it to drop, but I'll 
be damned if | know what. It goes up and down at times, but that’s 
smooth, not a drop. So we wrote up the Formal Assessment of 
Increasing Risk and sent it up the hill, and we were told to keep 
monitoring the situation and to submit another FAIR if the situation 
got any worse. It certainly became the focus of a lot of conversation 
on site, because we’d been monitoring them for so long, one doing 
nothing and the other just happily orbiting away, the idea of them 
being a problem had faded to the backs of our minds a bit. That’s 
just when the universe comes and bites you on the ass though. 


And so it did. Next time she was overhead, blip, another drop. About 
0.4mm this time. We were now pretty sure that the problem was 
serious, it was clearly reacting to whatever the R-block guys had 
been doing. So we called down and let them know, and they 
confirmed that the experimentation had stopped several hours prior 
to the second dip, and the item involved had now been moved to 
another site as a precautionary measure by the Cross-team. So we 
hoped that would be the end of it. But don’t you know, next time she 
was overhead, another drop, this time 1.6mm and we didn’t need to 
be no mathematicians to see the exponential increase there, and to 
do the math - it gets big real fast. So with it orbiting every 20 hours 
or so we Could see that we had about one hundred hours to come 
up with an idea — that’s not much when all you have to go onis a 
few pages of notes and you’re dealing with something that not even 
the brightest guys understood. 


So, we started pooling ideas and collecting as much information as 
we could. The first thing that we found out was the biggest 
mindscrew of all — the gravity hadn’t changed, the earth had moved. 
The stationary twin had moved with it, but the orbiter hadn’t, staying 
on exactly the same path as before. So it hadn't dipped, we'd... 
undipped, or whatever the right word for that would be. So someone 
in one of our liaison departments contacted NASA, IAU, all the 
space guys and asked them if they’d had any unusual results lately. 
Nothing. A movement of the earth perpendicular to its direction of 
motion that was now over 2cm and nobody had noticed but us. This 
was really confusing, but hey, confusing is part of the job, right? 


That wasn’t our responsibility at that time, there was another team 
on that. We were primarily given the task of coming up with XK- 
avoidance plans, and that included some pretty intense thinking. 
Master Key Initiative, anyone? That gives me the shudders just to 
think about. No, don’t worry, I’m not saying anything to anyone 
about nothing, | know the rules. Just letting you know how serious 
things got down there. But, as we were sitting in our hot, sweaty 
rooms and talking until the early hours measurements came back to 
show that as soon as they came just under a kilometre from one 
another the orbiter started slowing down. Not much at first, but with 
each drop the speed dropped noticeably, until we were able to 
watch it go over at not much faster than a jet, and low enough that 
we even considered erecting a mast with high tensile steel netting 
just in case we’d made an error on the whole ‘Unstoppable’ thing. 
Thank goodness we didn’t, it could have shredded the lot of us. At 
least this gave us much more time to think, not that it helped much. 


So, at this point we’ve got this thing going over our heads so we can 
actually see the damn thing, and still everyone else is acting like 
nothing’s wrong, right? Princess Di can’t even get out of a damn car 
without some douche with a camera stalking her, but we’re taking 
pictures of the damn thing and nobody else has seen it at all. So our 
people talk to NASA’s people, meteorological centres, and nobody 
else is getting anything weird. Or at least we don’t think so, but of 
course we’re not saying anything either - | think we were using the 
cover of an astronomy lab somewhere in the Australian desert, 
something like that. People never question Aussie laboratories, it’s 
too big to come and find you. We let up top know about this, and 
we're told to keep at it but to await further instructions, and so that’s 
what we did. We sat down in our even hotter, sweatier rooms and 
came up with just about every reasonable suggestion we could think 
of, up to and including trying to move the Earth on its orbit. Yeah, we 
were taking about attaching ropes to anchor points and dragging the 
damn thing like a tugboat, that’s how bad things had got. But we 
didn’t want to think about the alternative, touchdown. 


But don’t you just know it, then the Fives get back to us with 
something we wanted to think about even less. They’d told us to 
begin considering Master Key solutions. The collective ‘Oh, Fuck’ 
was probably audible all over the site, and so we sat down again but 


this time we had the added problem of the treatment potentially 
being ever worse than the cure. | mean, you take a screwdriver, the 
worst you can happen is you poke it through a gas main or a power 
line, but when your toolbox is made up of pretty much the worst 
things ever, the scope for clusterfucks is much higher, you know? 


The announcement also informed us that without outright saying it, 
Up Top were considering this to be potentially XK, something we’d 
not really wanted to do ourselves. But there was no denying it, if 
those two collided then the energy release was potentially 
enormous. | mean, when you think what less than a gram of 
Uranium did to Hiroshima, if these things really tried to occupy the 
same space at the same time then you're probably talking gigatons 
of energy. We’re talking about putting a crack right down the middle 
of the earth, and causing pretty much every earthquake zone to 
crumble itself into dust. Now, | had already had a couple of ideas 
regarding this, but most of them | had to throw out because | didn’t 
have a plan to deal with whatever it was that we’d used to sort out 
the current problem. | had this great idea involving getting a plane 
with the door stuck on the top of it... well... it was pretty wild, and 
might have worked, but it was shot down because it would have 
been conspicuous, to say the least. 


We’d gone through all the usual suspects, temporal slowing, 
wormholes, but nothing ended up being less risky than what we 
were trying to prevent, | mean, these are some real untold quantities 
that we’re talking about putting together here. My comedy favourite 
was the handbag, that was priceless. Even under this stress there 
were some chuckles when that got suggested.