It cannot possibly fail.” 


The only thing stopping Soto from slamming his palm into his 
forehead was that it would only make his headache worse. "See, 
Gorza, this would indeed be a foolproof plan, if not for one little 
problem." 


"And what would that problem be?" 


"That outfit of yours? The one you're so proud of? The crux of your 
entire plan?" 


"Yes, what about it?" 


"It sucks. It wouldn't fool a blind stripped bird, let alone the 
leadership of the Shining Order. | suspect the only reason the 
Inquisition lets you get away with wearing it is that they feel so sorry 
for you. Your exoskeleton is made of painted cardboard, for Stone's 
sake!" 


Gorza muttered something under his breath, but settled down in his 
seat without further objection. Uniel gave him a smug look, then 
raised her hand. 


"And if your idea is the same as Gorza's, only replacing the words 
"Shining Order" with "The Royal Bureaucracy", Uniel, you can just 
forget it." 


Uniel's hand descended. 
"Anyone else?" 


To Soto's surprise, Hubrus raised his hand next. "Err. We could try 
to make a deal with the outsiders, maybe? I've been hanging around 
their embassy lately, and they don't look all that happy with the way 
the IIPES treats them. | think they want to see the stuff the IIPES 
has hidden in the Vaults, and they won't let them. So, we could go to 
them, and promise to let them see everything they want if they help 
us get rid of the Empress." 


The room was silent for a moment as the rest of the crew 
considered this. 


"That's the most idiotic plan I've ever heard, even from you." 
"I'm sorry, darling, but | have to agree with Gorza on this one." 
"And there's no fire involved too." 


"You know the outsiders are utter barbarians, Hubrus. They can 
barely be trusted to tie their own shoes, not to mention bringing 

down the Empress. What were you doing hanging out near their 
embassy anyway?" 


"|... | wanted to see the cats, Soto. That's okay, right?" 

"It's fine, Hubrus. I'm sure cats are very nice. Any other ideas?" 
Silence. 

"We put a rain check on it, try again next time?" 

"No! I've had enough! No one leaves until we come up with at least 
one plan, got it!?" 

The crew sat on the roof of Uniel's studio apartment and watched 
the orange glow light the streets of Rootrel. 

"| can't believe you guys convinced me to go through with this." 


Not much could be seen from their vantage point, but the sound of 
screaming was unmistakable. 


"Hey, you said we had to come up with a plan, and it was getting 
late." 


Soto could hear the sirens of the fire brigade nearing the burning 
building. "Maybe they could stop the fire before anyone got seriously 
hurt," said Hubrus, who seemed even more uncomfortable than 
Soto with the entire ordeal. 


There was a sudden crashing sound, and the screaming suddenly 
stopped. It seemed the building had collapsed. "Oh." 


"When | burn something down, it stays burnt." Glun leaned over the 
rails, watching the scene with a worrying degree of enthusiasm. 


"You guys do realize this accomplished nothing, right? We are in no 
way closer to bringing down the Empress, unless those orphans 
were all secretly Inquisitorial spies." 


"They might have been, you don't know that they weren't," said 
Gorza, a hint of indignation in his voice. 


"They were always a shifty bunch," agreed Uniel. "And besides, 
even if they weren't, there's always next week, eh?" 


Soto couldn't argue with that. "Yeah, there's always next week." 


The God And World 


The priests looked up in horror as there was a great, deep growl 
from above them. Somewhere, in the vast impenetrable body of their 
World and their God... metal ground to a halt. It was a horrifying 
noise that set the entire city on edge. It was not particularly loud, no, 
nor was it high pitched or rumbling or annoying. 


But it meant bad things to come. Very bad, indeed. Although nobody 
spoke about it, the beats of the gears and their world were slowing 
down year after year, after beating steadily for millennia. Everyone 
was horrified. The smaller mechanics, for which they used to modify 
themselves over time, were unaffected, but the great gears, 
including the massive golden mountain on which their city was built, 
were turning a little slower, and sometimes unevenly. 


The high priestess even halted her studies on ectogenesis in an 
attempt to consult with the God, although the great God and World 
never answered. So she organized a group to set out in adventure, 
to seek out the source of this slowing, this unevenness. 


They chose a group of children, as of yet unchanged by the gears 
and mechanics that would become part of their bodies come 
puberty, or when young legs were inevitably crushed between gears 
in a moment of carelessness. After all, children were small and fast, 
and expendable, capable of getting into the smallest places. 


There were five of them. 


They set off through the gardens, first, the ever-shifting irrigated 
gears, each one almost as large as their city alone, where earth- 
real earth- filtered in from somewhere above, unseen by gears, and 
where crystalline growths provided brilliant golden light that made 
the brass, turning walls of the world glow. They collected food to 
carry with them in their knapsacks of spun, silken silver, and left for 
places unknown to the city. 


One of them found a way to climb the gears up, seeking out where 
the earth and water that filtered into the gardens came from, 
suspecting that perhaps the earth had jammed a gear, or the water 
had rusted somewhere (although he knew the World and God never 
rusted). He was a tall child, with dusky hair and pale eyes, who 
dreamed of one day becoming such as the high priestess, a being of 
pure metal and energy, instead of his fleshy, tainted birth-body. 


Another set off northwards, where magnetized needles always 
swung to point, deciding that perhaps somewhere the God and 
World had become a simpler metal, one that could be swayed by 
magnetism, and that the source of the northern magnetic field could 
be obstructing it. She was a smart girl, with dark hair and eyes and a 
strong ambition to perhaps be a priestess herself someday. 


The third left the group when they encountered a place so dark that 
no light could be seen, and had become separated from the group- 
as he was always a little hard of hearing and clumsy, a poor trait 
amidst the World and God, where the clicking and groaning of a 
gear was one of the only ways to tell if one was going to trap and pin 
you. He wandered into the darkness, afraid and disoriented, until he 
emerged to the west, although he didn’t know that direction. 


The last two decided that it was a poor idea to split up, being 
siblings, twins, an extreme rarity, and being very much connected on 
a deep, needy level. They found a tunnel that lead down, down, 
spiraling down into a staircase of pistons and tubing amidst the 
churning cogs. And they continued as such, down, down, into 
darkness and towards a light more pure and white than any they had 
seen before in the distance. 


Many years passed before they returned. 


And in those years, the high priestess found that their God would no 
longer convert the children who reached adulthood, to her utter 
horror. Gears ground to a halt in some places, while others spun 
wildly or broke lose, now and then. She feared that her five had truly 
been sent to their deaths, and wept tearlessly for them, her 
crystalline diopter eyes having no fluid in them. 


Their city was ruined, their population diminished. The gardens 


swelled with fruit unseen before, and sometimes whole plants or 
strange dead creatures fell from above with the earth and water. A 
flood had ravaged the city streets, one year, and another year 
random storms of static and lightening flashed through a 
neighborhood, burning flesh and stopping gears where they stood, 
and causing many of the eternally-glowing crystals to shatter and fall 
dark. 


And then he came. 


A tall man, with skin tanned darker than any the city had seen, an 
earthy bonze, his hair golden as the gears and pale eyes harsh and 
squinting to see in the dim light of the city. His flesh was windburned 
and lined with hard work and scars, and he carried with him heavy 
boots laden with dirt and a staff of wood- and a device made of a 
dark blackened metal, which he used to dispatch a priest who had 
gone mad and attempted to attack him, bursting his copper-plated 
skull and scattering wired brains everywhere. 


He spoke of another World above, one that was not the God and 
World, where earth covered everything and plant life grew abundant, 
and people who never changed into machinations lived and worked, 
and had believed the world below them populated by monsters and 
demons that had been locked away to squander out of the view of 
the sun, a massive light so brilliant it illuminated the entirety of the 
World. A World that was much bigger than the God and World, that 
lead all the way to a place, land where the God and World was 
nowhere below, and nowhere near. 


The high priestess claimed blasphemy and had him chased from the 
city, but in her ticking heart, winding down, she knew and feared he 
spoke the truth. 


Shortly after he left, the woman arrived, her dark hair elaborately 
braided, her dark eyes smart and sharp with intense knowledge. At 
first the priestess thought that she had been changed and was to 
accept her as one of their own, but her shined skin was not metal, 
but some sort of material that was both hard and flexible and did not 
break, shattering the points of spears when the guards tried to force 
her out. Her insides, visible through opalescent and translucent 
panels here and there, were formed of electricity and wires, such 


small unmoving mechanics sickening to the priestess. 


She spoke of another World to the north, where the unmodified and 
newly modified lived together in synchronicity, where the entire 
horizon was blanketed with frozen water in many different forms- 
both white and granular and sheer, where the sky was endless and 
black and the sun- an eternal light- rose only once per year and set 
once per year. And of people who knew such horrible things about 
the God and World. 


The high priestess screamed blasphemy, and bade her to take her 
leave. The woman refused, and took up residence in an abandoned 
home, working with information projected of pure light and silver- 
and-white technology unseen. 


From the west came another. His skin was burned and scarred 
heavily, his hair fallen out, his teeth rotten, but his body muscular 
and strong. He carried a knife made out of white bone and a sack of 
dead creatures he called fish, preserved in glass jars, nothing the 
city had seen before. He heard nothing, but could still read and 
speak just fine, although he reacted to any movement near him with 
an animal shout and a swing of the knife. 


He gibbered and claimed to have come from a World of water, 
endless water, where small groups of people and other creatures 
clung to life on drifting cities and small floating homes. And of 
creatures, some so massive they could swallow a thousand people 
whole, and others that were small and so vicious a dozen of them 
would strip one to the bone in seconds. The water was bottomless, 
he claimed, and he spoke of seeing the World and God from the 
outside, and that it was not endless, that it ended where the endless 
water dropped into falls so high that the people spoke that there was 
no bottom to it. 


The high priestess relaxed the city’s vast discomfort by claiming that 
the boy must have gone crazy in his long years of isolation, and 
bade that he be rejoined with the God and World, although the 
metallic woman with dark hair and eyes shielded him with a bubble 
of pure light and energy before they could herd him into the crushing 
gears, and they let the two of them be out of fear. 


Then the fourth arrived, quite surprisingly alone and detached. She 
spoke little, and wore only scraps of clothing underneath crude 
scrapped armor made out of curious shells and a heavy cloak, 
constantly complaining of the cold. In all, she was quite benign 
compared to the others, peacefully accepting food and watching the 
priestess distrustfully. One could have even thought she was entirely 
unmodified until, in a moment of carelessness, another set of arms 
reached out from under the cloak to adjust her armor. 


It was not until pressured that she spoke of a world below, where 
she, and she truly, had found the source of the God and World’s 
ails. Water poured in on all sides of this world, salty and rich, 
bringing creatures and refuse plants with it. Above, a layer of 
crystals so pure and white and brilliant it was impossible to see the 
God and World, and in the swampy, still waters down below, pillars 
supported the God’s weight and rocky spires and masses of soggy 
land that collected around either of these formed small islands. 


And it was there that the natives of this land, curious and intelligent, 
but still shy, and very very strange if medically skilled, had led her to 
the source of the god’s problems. Although she hadn’t said much 

before, she described what she had seen in vivid, triumphant detail. 


There was another God, one who lurked below in the swampy 
waters, and was locked into battle with the God and World. The 
natives had bade her to dive into the waters, and in the deep, she 
saw them, trapped under heavy waters- the God of Flesh, whose 
massive limbs and tendrils and all other appendages she could not 
even find words to explain had crawled up through the water and the 
pillars and rock spires and had jammed themselves deep into the 
heart of the God and World. 


But the God and World had responded in kind, a massive 
mechanical weapon poised over the God of Flesh’s heart ready to 
drop the moment its unending mechanical heart stopped. They were 
locked in a stalemate, neither one willing to destroy the other for 
knowledge of it’s own destruction. 


At this, she had burst out into hysterical laughter, and the priestess 
looked into her eyes and saw pain and madness...but also honesty. 


M@ Asymphony, entitled " ", written for a full 
orchestra and an extensive percussion section. 

H@ Acomplex ballet, set to the previously mentioned 
symphony, containing one of the most intricate 
pas de deux choreographed. 

@ A triptych depicting strikingly detailed images of 
what would appear to be the Holy Trinity. 

@ Acorollary to Albert Bandura's theory of 
observational learning. 

@ A moving account of his own life, starting from his 
birth and culminating with the events of the 
previous year. 

@ A rebuttal of Nikolai Berdyaev's 1952 essay The 
Truth of Orthodoxy. 

@ A set of three one-act plays centered around the 
theme of alienation in a society dedicated to 
individual achievement, entitled (in Greek): 

, ,and , 

mM [DATA EXPUNGED] "Extremely, unnecessarily 
crude. | fail to see the humor in this." -Dr. 

@ A truly four-dimensional model of an octachoron. 
Under study. 


One week after this last accomplishment, by the family's reckoning, 
the "next-door neighbor died in a fire at her home. The [DATA 
EXPUNGED] Fire Department issued a report naming the source of 
the blaze to be a can of hairspray fitted internally with a complicated 
mechanism similar to a pilot light on a stove and left on her 
bathroom counter. After local authorities learned that Mr. had 
disappeared without warning just prior to his neighbor's death, the 
archaeologist was brought in for questioning. He, however, escaped 
the police by impaling [DATA EXPUNGED] and fighting his way out 
of the station to a side street. He then fled on foot; however, Agent