I was honored to be asked as one of the readers for the release of Jared Schickling’s Handling Filth book of poetry. The event was held at New Orleans’ Bar Redux. I read an excerpt of my novel-in-progress, Le Master’s Esoteric Archives. Click the image above (or right HERE) to navigate to a video of the entire event shot by Unlikely Books’ honcho Jonathan Penton.

He winked at me. That monster Silverio Moreno winked at me again. They had transformed him back to a human. Gave him clothes and that blasted red wig. And he leaned back in a chair and ate a sandwich.

That was when he winked at me.

I wanted them dead. All of them.

Where had Saligia come from? She was there, working with Rose to bring Sy back, like a couple of witches. It seemed they had more power working together. Also, there was that man who had taken over for Hal.

Were the portals working again?

Not that any of that mattered. No one was coming for me.

One indignity after another.

Rose covered me up again. However, she left a tiny opening large enough so I could watch them all depart, abandoning me.

Maybe I’d just die. How long had I been in this form? Would I starve? Languish from lack of water? Or maybe I’d lie here until the universe ended.

Then—not much later—one of those robots dressed in white entered the room. He tossed aside the cloth, lifted me, and carried me down the stairs.

For just a split second, I saw the rest of the group, clustered over in an alcove. There were robots milling about, picking things off the floor. But the robots appeared to be leaving the villains from Serpientes y Escaleras alone.

I was placed in a wheelbarrow and rolled along the mezzanine to the elevator on the far side. Another robot stood waiting on the elevator, he also had a wheelbarrow which I could see held a creature such as myself.

When the elevator arrived, the two robots entered, each with his charge—I being one. As the doors smoothly closed behind us the two robots seemed to be conferring over something, but as I couldn’t hear, I had no idea what the conversation might mean for me.

We were, of course, heading down. All my hope of escape, gone, as was my curiosity of seeing Los Angeles for the first time. I try but don’t always succeed at controlling my emotions, and as such I have found myself confronted at times by unexpected feelings. What I experienced at that moment was a welling up of sadness for how little traveling I managed to do in my life.

I’m not one prone to self-pity. But, over the decades, I had it in the back of my mind that at some point I would quit my job and take a long and leisurely tour all across Europe. Visit those iconic places I always read about.

It was ironic that I had to die before I ever managed to leave the state of Colorado. First Texas, and now California. Not that I’d been able to see much of either place.

Ironic, in a way, because I had just gotten my passport and was even drafting my letter of resignation at my job just as the IRS investigation began. Well, probably the investigation had already been long underway, but I didn’t known about any of that until they sent the agents with the handcuffs.

Those who knew me—though none very well—would be surprised to learn that I actually enjoyed the occasional break from routine.

One of my more cherished memories was a camping trip I took when I was about 35. I’d learned everything I needed to know about heading alone out into the mountains. Researched the best gear and freeze-dried meals. What a wonderful three day weekend in August.

It wasn’t until the second day that I even saw another person. An excitable college kid with binoculars and a bird identification book.

Other than that director on the game show, Hal, the camper had been the only person I murdered without any premeditated plan. It just came over me. A sort of second nature. In retrospect, it seemed unnecessary. What the British would call a “busman’s holiday.”

I never did learn his name. But I made sure to mark on my USGS topographic map where I had buried the body in that peaceful aspen grove. All part of my legacy.

The elevator door opened and I was rolled out.

I saw that we had arrived on the ground level. Where that pool of water was.

The lip of my wheelbarrow was low enough so I could see quite well. Such as yet another robot off the way across the water from us. He, too, had a wheelbarrow. He had positioned it at a gap in the railing and without any care or further consideration he tipped it forward and let the contents—a tentacled creature much like myself—fall into the water. While I found it terrifying, I was also intrigued in that the creature displayed significant more mobility that I could manage. Maybe the paralysis that had me unable to move about was only temporary. I was trying to see if the creature was floating or perhaps even swimming, but the robot who had been rolling me about in my cart had stepped around to block my view. Both he and his colleague removed from their pockets those little black boxes I had seen before. My robot brought the device in close and moved it about slowly. He seemed satisfied by whatever he gleaned from a display window I could not see. Then he pushed a button on the side of the box. A needle shot out and he plunged it into my body.

The pain was unexpected. Unexpected because I had experienced no physical sensations for so long. Suddenly I could feel my entire body. The tiny, almost imperceptible gusts of air, the pressure of my body resting in the wheelbarrow, the ambient temperature. I even had some very slight control over my limbs. My tentacles. There were 16 of them, I knew instantly. Some so stubby and rudimentary as to be little more than nubs. And I could hear. I could finally hear. But in a way new to me. My sense of hearing was actually connect to my sense of touch—the sound vibrations were coming from my skin. 

“It’s a wonder this one survived so long in a Level 7 dampening field,” my robot said to the other, presumably speaking of me.

We had begun moving again, both robots pushing their carts. I now had an unobstructed view of the large circular pool. I could see no sign of any squid-like creatures in the water. If it was water. Nothing floating on the surface, no dark forms moving below. Nothing. I felt like a condemned man as I realized I was being taken along the curve of the railing towards that gap where clearly I would be tossed into the pool.

“Did you hear about those two civilians?” the other robot asked my robot. His voice was congenial, almost gossipy. “I heard that they broke the official seal on the surface elevator.”

“They did indeed.”

“But that’s explicitly against protocol. Why would anyone do that?”

“I have no clue,” answered my robot. “But it did over-ride the lockdown and get us out of the lower control room.”

“We really should install some sort of manual unlocking switch.”

“I’m more concerned about how soon they can reinstate the seal up there on the surface. You’re too young to remember the old days. But back then we’d have tour groups constantly coming down, getting in the way, eating ice cream, pushing buttons, dropping coins into the Augur Pool.”

“Coins? Whatever for?”

“For luck.”

“Luck? Such madness.”

“Those days need not return.” My robot’s voice had a clear edge of disapproval.

“Certainly not at the moment. We’re clearly overworked and understaffed.”

“Trying times for all of us here at Central Processing. But no doubt we’ll be back to optimum efficiency by Monday.”

“We are lucky Ricky Powell’s Saturday Chain Reaction Madness wasn’t renewed for a second season.”

“I was certainly not a fan of that one. But I’ll second your note of optimism. The weekend’s almost here, and the lull will let us get back on schedule.”

We had stopped.

I managed to lift up two of my longest tentacles—my brain seemed to register them as my arms—and rest them on the edge of the cart, but I had not recovered enough to lift my body.

I was screaming. But, alas, I had no mouth.

The other robot tipped his wheelbarrow first. I watched the creature within roll forward and fall three feet into the dark, sluggish waters. The sound was more of a thud than a splash. The poor devil just sunk out of sight. In fact, it appeared to be pulled under and away.

Then it was my turn. Down I went.

I watched the whole thing happen. Paralyzed and speechless, of course. Someone pulled back the cloth and I found myself looking up into the face of Sal. Sal! I felt a sense of peace. Like closure. If it had to end then and there, at least it’d happen with her. And Nora and Rose were still present. And, wait, was that Morris?

Maybe there was a chance of getting out of this mess. If they all worked together.

And they were doing just that.

Lifting me up. Taking me away from August.

Then it began. The laying-on-of-hands. Wasn’t that what I had called it when Sal brought me back that day I had tried to go off on my own and first turned into this awful thing?

Sal and Rose. The two priestesses kneeling over me.

And then I was back. That simple. Back to being me. On my feet, a bit woozy and naked. But back.

Nora averted her eyes and held out to me a familiar white jumpsuit.

I did not bother to ask what happened to my clothes—though that dinner jacket had been exquisite! It could be that my outfit was damaged by that robot ray gun, or maybe I had soiled myself. Best to just focus on the things immediately in front of me and in my control.

I put it on the jumpsuit, and as I was zipping it up, Morris tossed me a certain red toupee.

“Well, hello old friend,” I said, cradling the hairpiece. And why not? The double-sided tape was still sticky. I put it on. It was nice to have some degree of sartorial continuity.

“That was an experience,” I told them, half expecting a round of warm applause.

The sensation of my restoration had been painful, but without the pain. You know how it feels when a dentist deadens your entire mouth and he gets in there, really gets in there, digging and pulling and using god knows what to lever out that obstinate wisdom tooth, and you hear the scrapping of bone, and your jaw is hyper-extended…but there’s no pain, not the slightest? You know that feeling? It was just like that. But with my whole body.

“Oh, man, I am starving.”

Nora handed me something in a large foil pouch. It resembled a sandwich. Almost. Sal was crying, but she was also smiling, so it was okay.

“What is this?” I certainly looked like a sandwich. “Tastes like an old sock stuffed with moldy sawdust.”

But I ate it all.

“In-coming!” Nora shouted. She was standing at one of the consoles, looking at a screen and pushing buttons. She sure seemed to have it on the ball. “The robots are free.”

“Yes,” Rose said. “I saw them early on the monitor. They zapped a bunch of the Chaos Squad.”

“Gotta love those robots,” Nora said.

“So, they’re on our side?” Morris asked, confused. He wasn’t the only one.

“Absolutely not!” I said to him. “Those robots turned me into that thing.”

“And you missed the murder and mayhem,” Rose said to me.

“Oh, dear,” I muttered. I hate to miss the murder and mayhem.

“Well,” Nora explained, “I don’t think anyone has died out there yet, but there was some very nasty fisticuffs.”

“Caused by game show contestants much worse than robots,” Rose added.

“You’ll excuse me if I hold on to my opinions on robots,” I said. Let Rose get zapped into a squid and then see what she thought of robots.

Luckily, I seemed have a similar physique to these robots. The jumpsuit fit almost perfect. A bit tight in the buttocks. I fished around in the pockets, but found nothing. What would a robot keep in his pockets? WD-40? Spare 9-volt batteries? I looked over at the sad rubbery thing that was August. He hadn’t been covered back up. I knew he was seething. Watching me back on my feet. Laughing, eating a sandwich, adjusting my wig. Back to normal.

Poor wretch…poor murderous wretch. Couldn’t even blink his eyes.

Rose and Nora stood over him, trying to decide what to do. I gathered Rose had slipped into some sort of Stockholm Syndrome mindset, as she was trying to explain that August was a victim in all this.

“Hal,” I said. “And Lydia.”

“And he killed others before,” Sal explained to Rose. “Before he came to us. You know that as well as I do.”

“Just put it to a vote,” Morris said. “Let’s resolve this now and get out of here.”

We did. It was four to one.

“Just think of him as no different than everyone else sent through those portals to Central Processing,” Morris said to Rose. “Those robots will do their job. Whatever that is. Leave him be, and let’s clear out.”

Central Processing? What was Morris talking about? Was that the name of this place?

Rose nodded. But first she covered up August before we all headed down the short flight of stairs, through the door, and out into the curved mezzanine of Tier 1.

Everyone else ignored the groaning man on the floor and the smashed birthday cake, so I did as well. We crossed over to the elevator. The one that Morris and Sal said led to the surface.

Morris reached a finger to the control panel, but froze.

“There’s no button,” he said.

“Use your key,” Rose told him.

“My what?”

“Oh, no,” Saligia said with a gasp that carried more emotion than one uses when speaking of an elevator key.

We all turned and found ourselves facing about ten stern-faced individuals. The dreaded Chaos Squad, I assumed. Young and attractive men and women, well-proportioned, muscular, perfect chiseled features. Their colorful skin-tight costumes were something of a distraction. You’d think the wardrobe department of Chaos Squad would have wanted to leave something for the audience’s imagination. You know, in that region below the waist. They had not.

It did captivate my attention, I tell you. And I am not disposed to excessive prurient thoughts.

They were waiting, poised to attack. It was like some nature show, where the hyenas won’t fall upon the terrified baby wildebeest until it takes flight.

Morris cleared his throat to get their attention.

“Let’s not get off on the wrong foot,” he explained. “I believe we have a common enemy. Those robots?”

They didn’t seem swayed, but Morris had bought us a couple of seconds. Because I was feeling much better after eating that sandwich, I whispered to him: “I think we should rush them.”

He looked at me like I was crazy.

That was when the robots showed up. Five of them. I might not be a fan, but I respected their style. They did not bother to negotiate.

They just came up the staircase from the lower level with ray guns ablaze. A barrage of quick pulses of light and those Chaos Squad men and women screamed and quivered for only a couple of seconds before they hit the ground as harmless squid.

I half expected Nora to shout: “Hooray, robots!” But she stood her ground, feet slightly spread, ready for an attack.

Two of what I took to be the more senior of the robots stepped forward. 

“We need to process all these REINCORs before the the backlog gets any worse,” one of them said, indicating the writhing squids. He was speaking to his fellow robots and ignoring us.

His robot buddy idly brushed at some stains on his white jumpsuit. Was it blood or cake frosting?

“You should try club soda,” I suggested.

The robot looked over at me with sudden interest.

“Before the stain sets,” I clarified.

Perhaps he’d been having a difficult day, what with the murder and mayhem, but shouldn’t a robot be programed with a certain regard to personal grooming?

“What about this one here?” the sloppy robot asked his boss. He was pointing at me.

Without a word Sal and Rose stepped forward as though it were a rehearsed movement and shielded me from the robots. My protective priestesses!

“You mean this REINCOR cowering behind these two Readers?” asked the robot boss. I wouldn’t think a robot could speak with such a derisive and dismissive tone. I suppose it was just a matter of programming.

“And then there’s the matter of these civilians.”

“One thing at a time,” the robot boss said. “We’ll deal with them all later. They’ll not be going anywhere.”

The two robots joined their companions, who were gathering up the transformed Chaos Squad contestants and depositing them in wheelbarrows. One, who had gone up the stairs to the control room, came back down carrying August, still in squid form.

And then they all headed off, to do whatever robots do with squids.

Rose was trying to make Morris understand that the elevator to the surface couldn’t be opened without a key, when I remembered something I’d seen up in the control room.

I rushed up, returning with a small toolbox. I placed it on the floor beside the metal door to the elevator and opened it to survey the contents. I looked over at Nora.

“Don’t you know a thing or two about elevators?”

“I do,” she said with a smile. She walked over to join me.

“Looks like we’re not going anywhere without a key,” Morris said, noticing the two of us at the elevator.

Nora stroked the door. She rapped her knuckles against the outer frame. Then she leaned close to the metal panel on the wall with the recessed keyhole.

“Sixteenth inch Allen wrench,” she said holding out her hand.

I gave it to her. It was fascinating to watch the speed and precision with which she removed the panel, used a Stanley blade to strip a couple of the wires of their plastic insulation, reset the circuitry, and, voilà!, opened the elevator door.

“What was that you were saying, Morris?” I asked.

He had no reply.

We all five entered.

When the door slid shut and we were safely heading up and away from robots and squads and stale sandwiches, I found my eyes drifting to a colorful brochure sticking out of Morris’ back pocket. There it was again. The phrase Central Processing.

I pulled it out and began to read with growing excitement.

How extraordinary!

Needing to share my discovery, I waved the brochure in front of Nora’s face.

“You’ll never guess where we are?”

“LA, right?” She reached out to steady my hand so she could read the front of the brochure. “Wait. What does it mean that Los Angeles has been relocated to Phobos? Who’s Phobos?”

“It’s not a who,” I said. “It’s a where. And it’s Mars. Isn’t it great? We’re on Mars.”

“I don’t get it,” Nora said, scrunching up her face.

“What?” Rose snatched the brochure from my hands.

“One of the moons of Mars,” Morris corrected me.

Well, technically. But, whatever.

We were on Mars!

“In-coming!”

I didn’t even look over at Nora. Why had she started up with that nonsense? Those arrival tubes had been fairly busy for the last two days, with another batch from Chaos Squad, as well as arrivals from at least a dozen other shows with names like Don’t Spin Wrong!, The Rejected and the Accepted, Pay the Piper, and something called Wham, Shazam, and Fiddlefaddle! That last show which sent us sixteen contestants, each holding a birthday cake with candles still burning.

It was madness out there. I couldn’t watch any more of the brutality over those video monitors. For awhile, the members of the original Chaos Squad confronted every contestant who came through, demanding that they join them in their struggle against their nebulous and unnamed enemy. Not everyone was so easily conscripted, and violent skirmishes broke out all up and down the tiers. When the Chaos Squad got bored with that, they began squabbling with and pummeling upon each other.

At some point, we discovered a second control room, down on the bottom level. In fact, Nora activated a camera so that we could see half a dozen robots who had apparently locked themselves in, much like we had. Nora tried to talk to them on the intercom, but the robots chose to ignore us. Well, worse than ignored us—they switched off the audio. I guess they weren’t able to turn off the camera. We could still see them, just not hear them, nor, it seemed, could they hear us.

I did notice three robots that didn’t look too healthy. One was wearing soggy overalls, the other two, naked. Our victims, no doubt, fished out of the pool at the bottom.

If those robots had a plan, they had no intention in sharing it with us. At least they didn’t need to eat. Well, so I assumed. And even though we had discovered a little pantry with what resembled military rations and a few bottles of water (did robots have human guests on occasion?), those meager provisions wouldn’t last us long.

I had tried to feed Sy and August, but, well, they didn’t have any mouths. Or any openings I could see. Whenever I checked, they seemed the same. Quivering under the white robot uniforms that covered them.

“Did you hear me?” Nora asked.

“In-coming,” I said. “I heard you.”

“Right. But this time it’s different.”

I sighed and got out of my chair and walked over to the console station where she stood, staring into a screen.

“So, what am I looking at?”

I couldn’t make sense of the geometric designs on the display. It sort of looked like a very rudimentary map.

“I finally figured this one out,” Nora said. “It’s us. Well, this whole place.” She put her finger at a point low on the screen. “See here? It’s this facility. We’re in a big cylinder, right? Count them. All 47 tiers.” She moved her finer to the top of the display. “This, way up here. See? It’s the surface. Has to be. Where we want to be. And this long line running all the way down to us? That’s that elevator we saw. The one that needs the key.”

“Okay. But we still have the Chaos Squad out there.” I pointed to an adjacent video monitor which cycled through camera views of all the tiers. They showed an ever-changing montage of the skulking and glowering Chaos Squad, as well as the moaning wounded of their perceived enemies. I did not let my eyes linger, as some of the figures were on the ground, unmoving.

Things were getting grim out there.

“And the in-coming,” Nora said, looking at me with a smile, “is this flashing light.” She placed a finger on a pulsing yellow dot that slowly made its way down what Nora insisted was an elevator shaft.

She turned around to glance at the video monitor for the bottom level control room, where the robots were.

“Ha! It’s got their attention, too.”

The robots, who for hours now had been seated passively in chairs—I guess it takes extra energy for robots to remain on their feet?—were now standing, clustered around a console screen.

“See,” Nora said. “They’re looking at the same diagram we are.”

Right when the pulsing light came to a stop at the bottom of the shaft, Nora pressed a few buttons and the Tier 1 camera panned a bit to the left and showed us the elevator door.

That elevator that, were it not for the security bulkhead, was just a short flight of stairs away from us.

It opened.

It was hardly who I was expecting.

“Hallelujah!” Nora shouted. “Our favorite intrepid drifter accompanied by the famous psychic game show host!”

Nora looked at me with a puzzled expression.

Lately I’d learned to measure my optimism.

“We’re rescued,” she said. “Right? Unless you think they’re robots in disguise.”

“I’m afraid for them,” I said. I hadn’t seen any of the Chaos Squad on the upper levels for a while, but there were nooks and crannies the security cameras couldn’t see.

“They look confident to me,” Nora said with a triumphant grin.

And then I saw something new in our space.

“What is that?” I asked.

Nora looked over at the bulkhead which had sealed the staircase. That bulkhead we hadn’t been able to open. Directly above it an oval panel I had not even noticed before came to life. It flashed the number 60. No, 59. 58.

“It’s a countdown,” Nora said.

“I got that. But what is it counting down?”

“We’re going to know in under a minute,” she said, with breathless excitement. “Do you think it’s a bomb?”

How I wish I could see life the way Nora does. A series of breathless wonders.

I watched as Saligia and Morris stepped out of the elevator. They seemed unconcerned when the doors slide shut behind them (I hope they brought the elevator key). Their attention was focused on a bruised and bloodied contestant from Wham, Shazam, and Fiddlefaddle! who sat moaning on the floor. Morris hunkered down and said something to the contestant, but he did not respond. Saligia poked with her boot a somewhat squashed birthday cake on the floor beside one of the arrival tubes.

Nora and I both were having trouble concentrating on what our newly arrived friends were up to because of those numbers flashing on the oval panel.

When the countdown clock finally reached zero, there was a horrendous noise, like an airhorn. It sounded just once. By Morris and Saligia’s reactions, it was just as loud for them.

Their expressions, however, showed simple puzzlement. Nora’s face scrunched up, prepared for the worse. I noticed my hands were gripping the edge of the console desk so tight my knuckles turned white. We exchanged glances on the far side of panic.

Then we heard that familiar sound from two days ago of the bulkhead in motion. A low scraping groan. We watched the large portion of metal slide back into the wall, revealing the stairs.

As I moved to leave the control room, Nora called out for me to stay put.

“We hold our position,” she said. Then she pointed to the two covered lumps in the wheelbarrow. “And stay with our wounded.”

Had she learned those lines from a movie?

“But we need to let them know where we are,” I said.

“I don’t know much about Saligia. But Morris, he’s a quick study. He’ll find us.”

She was right. Morris walked straight to the door that led up to us. Of course. The sign said Control Room.

They opened the door and disappeared from camera range.

“You see!” Nora rushed to the top of the stairs to welcome them up.

As Morris stepped up into the control room, Nora threw herself in his arms.

“This is like in a movie,” she said, looking from Morris to me. “Sometimes the rescue party needs rescuing themselves.”

Morris disentangled himself from Nora.

“What’s up with that guy down there?” Morris nodded to me as his eyes moved curiously about the room. “Looks like he was in a fight. Should we be concerned?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s the Chaos Squad. They’re still lurking around the facility. We need to get out of here.”

“Where’s Sy?” Saligia asked me as she stepped around Morris.

“The Chaos Squad?” Morris asked. “Who calls themselves that?”

I was more concerned with getting out of this place, so I asked if they had a key to the elevator. But no one was paying attention to me.

“He’s over here,” Nora said softly, holding a hand to her chest. She nodded down at the covered forms in the wheelbarrow.

Saligia’s eyes began welling up. When Nora pulled back the white jumpsuits, revealing the creatures Sy and August had become, Saligia sighed with relief.

“Thank god,” she said. “I was afraid he might be dead.”

“So, this is good?” Nora asked, hopefully. She glanced around the room. In her mind—no doubt—this was the role of the rescue-party rescuers. They fixed everything.

“Might our most pressing concern be that Chaos Squad?” Morris asked, looking over at me.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why we need to get out of here. It’s not just the Chaos Squad. When your elevator arrived, it automatically unlocked this control room. Probably the same thing happened to the room holding all those robots.”

“I see,” Morris said. He had joined Saligia beside the wheelbarrow. He looked down, seemingly not comprehending what he was looking at.

“Do you?” I looked around. We needed to get out of here. “We have robots and we have maniacs in spandex. They’re all out there. And they’ll be coming for us soon enough.”

“So, he’s okay?” Nora asked Saligia, looking down at the creatures. “Sy, I mean. I don’t care about August.”

“So,” Morris said, bending closer to the wheelbarrow. “One of these things is Sy and the other’s August?” He certainly didn’t sound convinced.

“I’ve only seen it once,” Saligia said. “It happened to Sy before. On his first day back.” She paused and looked to Morris. “You know, back from the dead. Anyway, he decided to go exploring. We found him in the lobby just like this. Lydia told me to touch him. She said my proximity would get him back. And it worked.” She turned to me. “You should be able to do it as well. You’re a Reader. Did you touch him?”

“Kind of,” I said. It hadn’t been pleasant. The both of them all slippery and rubbery. “Nothing happened. But, look, we have to leave.” I gripped one the handles to the wheelbarrow, hoping someone would get the message. The thing had wheels. We could all get out of here. Deal with Sy when we were in a safer place.

“Maybe it’s because that robot shot him with that green light,” Nora suggested.

“A robot shot him with a green light?” Morris said. “I see.”

I spun around on him.

“Would you stop saying that!”

“A Tau Field Dampener,” Nora explained to Saligia. “What the robots call the green light.”

“Let’s separate them,” Saligia said.

She reached down, her hands hovering over the creatures. Reading their minds, I guessed. Satisfied she’d located Sy, she picked that one up and carried it cradled like an infant to the far side of the room.

I hurried over to the monitor that displayed the bottom control room.

The Chaos Squad had gotten in there with the robots! They were facing off—a line of white-suited robots, and a line of muscular men and women in skin-tight outfits who crouched low with hands out like professional wrestlers. I glanced over to see Saligia kneeling beside Sy. I wondered if I should tell the others about the robot situation, but they didn’t seem to be paying attention to me. Morris and Nora stood over Saligia, watching. Waiting. When I looked back at the screen, I noticed that the robots had aimed their ray guns at the Chaos Squad. With bright flashes of green, it was over.

The robots stepped over the little tentacled blobs and out of camera range.

I didn’t know what to make of this development.

From my limited experience, the robots were much more polite that those Chaos Squad folks. So there was that.

“Rose?” Saligia called over to me. “We’re going to need you here.”

Fine.

I went over and sat on the floor beside her. The two of us joined hands. Then we placed our free hands on Sy. He was clammy and trembled like Jello. It was beginning to look like some sort of seance or faith healing. I almost expected Saligia to start chanting.

Suddenly I felt a jolt of electricity from the creature. I almost pulled back, but Saligia shook her head.

“Don’t break contact.”

The transformation moved slowly at first. There was an unsettling slurping noise, which made me think of Jello again. The thing elongated, looked more like a squid than before. When it had increased to roughly the size of an adult human, the tentacles fused together and formed arms and legs, and the slimy, rubbery surface began to resemble human skin. As Sy’s facial features emerged and took shape, the slurping sound continued until his skin had absorbed all of the glistening slime.

He lay there, blinking on the floor, naked.

My disgust, I realized, had vanished. Replaced, now, by an overwhelming feeling of tenderness. The face on the floor had no expression. The eyes focused on the shadowy ceiling above me. As innocent and untroubled as a baby.

But when he finally smiled at us, it wasn’t a baby. It was Sy.

Gravity. That was the first thought to tun through my head as the train sped along the tracks towards the distant, domed city. Why did it feel like we were still on Earth? As I recollected, the moons of Mars were tiny. Smaller, even, than Earth’s moon. And how could you even fit Los Angeles on Phobos? Then I remembered Chet said there was only a fifteen mile chunk of the city left. Meaning…what? That it had it been scooped up and translocated to one of the moons of Mars? Or could it be a reproduction, like an enormous Vegas casino?

Maybe Phobos had increased in size during the Changes. If Phobos had grown to the size of the Earth, it would have the same gravity, right? But then it’d be bigger than Mars. And Mars would be Phobos’ moon, right? And that giant planet in the sky was Mars. Right?

It all seemed unlikely.

Giant gravity generators buried under the moon’s surface?

Well, now I was just making stuff up.

It was foolish to fall into such mental inquiry. Every question gave rise to another question until the mind wildly began to spin in place, without traction, going nowhere.

Oh, and was “translocate” even a word?

I looked hopefully at the other passengers on this train. They stared pleasantly out the windows as we approached the city.

Why waste my breath? They didn’t know the answers to my questions. They were middle-management workers, concerned more with television ratings than whether technology or magic was keeping the train from achieving escape velocity.

I kept quiet.

Saligia had a question more their speed.

“What time zone are we coming into?” She had her thumb and forefinger poised on the stem of her wristwatch.

I suppose that was her way of dealing with things when they got too weird. Fall into some routine. At the moment she decided to take on the role of a traveler arriving at her destination.

“We keep to Pacific Standard,” said Wanda, glancing at her own watch. “It is currently 9:17. That’s AM.”

“Yeah,” said a balding man, one of Wanda’s colleagues from I’d Eat That! “You’ll never know day from night here by looking up. Phobos is tidally locked with Mars, which always dominates the same part of our sky. I guess you could say a day’s thirty hours, if you want to go by how we see the sun. And you’ll soon notice that as we revolve around Mars, the planet goes through a full phase, you know, like Earth’s moon, crescent to gibbous. Best to go by old LA Earth time. It sure is a pretty view, though.”

The guy sounded more informed than I had expected. But before I could ask him some of my questions, he said he needed to head back to his stateroom and get his luggage. His wife and kids would be waiting at the station.

“I’m sure to see the both of you around the halls of Network headquarters,” he said to us. “I can’t wait to see what Saligia Jones will cook up for her next show.”

He, along with the rest of the passengers, made their way to the stairs and soon it was only me and Saligia.

The skyline looked much as I remembered it. I mean if you cocked your head just right so you did’t see Mars looming in the sky. As we traveled closer, it all began to make itself clear. There was Security Pacific Plaza, the Paul Hastings Tower, Los Angeles City Hall, and over there, off to the side, the hump of Griffith Park. I felt a swell in my chest, somewhere between nostalgia and civic pride.

“So much glass,” Saligia said. I assumed she was talking about the transparent dome that went up at least three miles above the city. “There,” she said, pointing. “I was wondering how we’d get inside.”

The train tracks dipped along a slope that took us into a tunnel. Once inside, the overhead industrial lighting had a dusty a sickly yellow tint. We decelerated, and eventually came to a stop. There was a rushing of wind.

“Must be an airlock,” I told Saligia.

“On Mars!” she whispered, her expression not quite fear, not quite awe. “We’re on Mars! How…weird.”

“Phobos,” I corrected. I felt a slight lurch. We were going up.

Apparently the airlock was also an elevator.

Our train was elevated up into the daylight and we found ourselves brought to a final stop alongside one of the train platforms of Union Station.

There were dozens of people waiting out there.

“I guess no one is here to welcome us,” Saligia said. She pressed her face to the window. “I’ve been to this train station before, back when I was a girl. It’s so odd. The same, but different. I think it’s the light. Do we call it sunlight, or Marslight?”

“We need to go collect our things,” I said, taking her elbow and guiding her to the stairs.

###

Outside, on the platform, it was Saligia’s turn to grab my arm. I thought she was reacting to Ida and her group of sycophants from the Serpientes y Escaleras crew, but she was drawing my attention to a tall, distinguished man beside Ida. A man who had not been on the train.

“It’s Parcell Prescott,” she said. “Head of the Network.”

Before I could ask her if that was a good thing or a bad thing, the man spotted us and headed our way.

Prescott smiled and reached out as if to embrace Saligia, but she stiffened. So, instead, he placed a hand on her shoulder. His face was smooth and shiny—it practically beamed.

“We are so glad you decided to come to LA. You should think of it as your homecoming. That was an extraordinary show you put on for the finale. What a way to go out! There’s a buzz throughout the Network, my dear. I predict bright things ahead for Saligia Jones.”

I glanced across the platform and watched the little group of Ida and our supposed colleagues. They drew in close together and were pointedly not looking our way.

“You’ll be needing one of these,” Prescott said, holding up a plastic ID card with the Network logo hanging from a red woven lanyard, exactly like the one around his neck.

Saligia took a step back, uncertain.

“More of a formality,” the man chuckled, glancing at the badge. “For a star of your stature, there’s not a person in this city who wouldn’t recognize your face.”

Saligia’s face softened. She stepped forward and graciously dipped down, like a beauty queen receiving her crown. Prescott placed the ID around her neck.

He produced another ID from his pocket—did he carry a bunch of them around all the time, or had he been alerted of our arrival? Prescott was less theatrical with me. He just handed me my card.

“And one for you, Mr….”

I took it, letting it dangle in my hand by the cord. “Fisher. Morris Fisher. I filled in at the last moment when Hal—”

“The particulars are unimportant, sir,” Prescott said with a wave of his hand. “You’re here with us now, and we couldn’t be more delighted. Welcome aboard.”

“Mr. Prescott,” Saligia said, in almost a whisper. “If you were watching the broadcast, you know some of our people got sent through the portals. We’re very concerned for their safety.”

“A terrible thing,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

“And, as I’m sure the Network will want to take the responsible course of action—”

He cut off Saligia.

“I do believe everyone on the show signed that basic absolute liability waiver.” Prescott continued to smile, but there was now a mildly menacing edge to his voice. “Standard with all our contracts. Much like joining the military, employment with the Network can be a dangerous lifestyle. But I do hope you’re finding it exciting and fulfilling.”

“We’re here because of Sy,” she said. “We came to find him.”

Prescott sighed.

“Sy, well, his relationship with the Network is a complicated matter. I don’t feel it’s an appropriate subject to discuss out here in public.”

“That’s not our concern,” I said.

Though his smile never wavered, Prescott turned in my direction with a tiny tilt to his head which let me know I was not important enough to address him directly.

“We just want to know he’s safe,” Saligia said. She took a deep breath before asking in a soft tone, filled with doubt, “He is safe, isn’t he?”

I found myself wondering if she was reading Prescott’s mind.

“Everyone who departed the Serpientes y Escaleras studio through the portals would have arrived at Central Processing. Strictly speaking, CP is not part of the Network. We contract with them for their very unique services.”

He paused.

“Very unique,” he added, laughing at his choice of words. “That’s not proper English, is it? Anyway, we, the Network, are their primary client, and so we do have significant influence. Tell you what, I’ll personally send a request for them to track down your friends. I have all their names in Ida’s report. So, don’t you worry. However long it takes, we’ll get to the bottom of this. But back to you, my dear. It all begins in the morning. Tomorrow we will start work on the next chapter for the great Saligia Jones.”

Saligia held up her hand.

“Saligia Jones and—”

“Yes,” Prescott said. “I know. Saligia Jones and Morris Fletcher.”

“Fisher,” I said.

“I meant,” Saligia said, ignoring me, “Saligia Jones and Silverio Moreno. We’re a team.”

“Ah,” said Prescott. “As I said, we’ll speak more tomorrow. Now, I’ve called ahead and reserved two suites at the Belton Hotel. My driver will take you there immediately.”

I poked Saligia in the side with my elbow.

“We want to do a little sight-seeing first,” she said. Perhaps finally she was reading someone’s mind. “We’ll make our way to the hotel on our own.”

“Sounds like an excellent idea,” Prescott said. He gave us a slight bow and walked down the platform. Ida took a moment to glare at us both, before she and her people followed Prescott.

Michael, however, hung back. Once Ida had turned a corner, he walked up to Saligia.

“I’m sorry about the misunderstanding back there. You know, back at the train station in San Antonio.”

“Yes,” Saligia said, narrowing her eyes. “I remember.”

“Office politics, I guess. At its worse.” He laughed nervously. “It is so wonderful you made it here.” He looked at me. “The both of you! Here’s to great work ahead.” He held out his hand. Neither Saligia nor I made a move to take it, so he just clasped both his hands together in some strange display of solidarity, perhaps. “Well, I’m sure to be seeing the both of you soon.” He dipped his head and walked away.

I reached out to the ID card hanging from Saligia’s neck and held it up.

“You still want to be involved with these people?”

“If they can get Sy back. And if they can return us home. You know, to Earth. I’d rather not spend the rest of my life on Mars.”

“Phobos.”

“The light’s weird here, and it smells funny.”

“You’re a joy to travel with, Saligia Jones.”

We left the train station and walked up to a cab driver leaning against his car.

“What a charming couple,” he said. “Welcome to Los Angeles, and how can I serve you?”

“First, take us to some place I can sell some of my gold coins,” I told him.

“You want money?” the driver asked. “But you’re with the Network.” That last word he spoke with hushed awe. “I can’t imagine anyone in this city taking your money. And don’t even think of tipping me. That’d be a mark against me.”

“What?”

“Every Network fare I get, I send in an invoice. And I promise you, I am handsomely compensated. I’m more than happy to take you anywhere. Inside the dome, of course.”

“Hollywood Bowl?” I asked.

“That’s a cinch. Hop in and buckle up.”

###

It occurred to me that all of the years I had lived in Los Angeles, I’d never been to the Hollywood Bowl. I only knew it from the movies and TV.

When we arrived, I was glad to see the gates were open. No one was around. Up in the amphitheater’s tiered seating, midway back, was a depression, like a crater. It was covered in a glass dome, resembling a miniature version of the dome covering the entire city. And inside that little dome was a squat, squarish building. Painted in vibrant orange and pink, it looked like a fast food restaurant. Beside it stood a sign with aqua-colored bubble letters spelling out Central Processing.

We pushed our way through a revolving glass door, and, once inside that little dome, we stood facing the small garish building.

“Central Processing?” I muttered.

“It’s tiny,” Saligia said. “And what a horrible color combination.”

When we entered the building, a bell over the door tinkled.

A young man in an orange blazer stood behind a counter.

“Welcome!” he said. “Welcome to Central Processing. And I see you’re both with the Network. I am honored!”

“This is it?” Saligia looked around, her eyes coming to rest on the man behind the counter. “This is the…the facility?”

“This is our gift shop and information center,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “How about some information.”

I walked over to a large model of Phobos set atop a display cabinet. It was a globe that had been cut in half to show the interior of the moon. There, at the top, was the domed city of Los Angeles. And, though hardly to scale, a tiny replica of the Hollywood Bowl. Below it, there was a a tube, like a straw, heading toward the center of Phobos. Down into a large facility. It seemed the appropriate word.

“Where to begin?” the man asked with a broad grin. “There’s so much to say.”

I looked up.

“So, we take the elevator?” I asked, pointing to the wall beside him.

“Well, no one goes down into Central Processing anymore,” he said. 

“Is it abandoned?” Saligia asked. She looked over at me. “I don’t understand.”

“Abandoned?” The man in the orange blazer chuckled. “My goodness, no. Shut, but not shuttered.” He lifted a hand and gestured toward the model of Phobos. “Quite some time before I began working here, Central Processing, Inc. broke away from the mother corporation, like a child leaving home. The CEO at the time decreed that all access to the underground facility be cut off from the surface. Security reasons, I suspect. So, the Seal, as you see it today, was placed upon the elevator during the Grand Ceremony of Restriction, a little over two hundred years ago.”

“Two hundred years ago?” I sputtered. “That’s crazy! The city of Los Angeles isn’t even that old.”

“Seal?” Saligia walked over to the elevator door and leaned in for closer examination. “It’s really just a piece of adhesive tape over the down button. Someone has written Do Not Remove with a felt-tip marker.”

The man in the orange blazer looked from me to Saligia, not sure who to address.

He chose me.

“Well, sir, not to nit pick, up the city of Los Angeles was founded in 1781. As for the elevator, well it was here long before the city materialized on Phobos’ surface. There’s a rich history of Mars and the  Martian moons which predates the Changes. Allow me.” He handed me a piece of stiff paper. “It’s all covered in our tri-fold brochure.”

“We’re wasting time,” Saligia told me. She peeled off the tape and pushed the button. The elevator doors opened immediately.

“Good lord, ma’am, you’ve unpeeled the Seal of Taboo!”

I looked over at the man in the orange blazer.

“Are you going to try and stop us?” I asked.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do.” He was holding his hands up, nervously picking at his lapels. “No one’s ever broken protocol.”

“All I wanted to know,” I said.

“It is encouraging that the elevator still seems to function,” he said, slipping on a pair of glasses and craning his neck curiously in our direction as Saligia and I stepped inside, hoping to get a glimpse, I supposed, of the inside of the historic elevator.

I pushed the single button on the inner panel. The doors closed and we headed down.

“Maybe we should be a little less cavalier,” Saligia suddenly said, looking at me with sudden concern. “We have no idea what’s waiting for us down there.”

I shrugged and told her we’d find out soon enough. I was more worried about the fact we were on an elevator that hadn’t been used in more than two hundred years.

I grew up reading books about murderers. Every copy I could get my hands on.

My mother believed when Christ was in your heart, murderous thoughts could gain no purchase. She belonged to the Nourishing Waters Fellowship, a humorless sect of vaguely apostolic Christians, who were, as one would expect, socially repressive and scientifically regressive. Mother wrote articles for the Church’s magazine, Awash in His Holy Dew!, and I had no doubt that she could have crafted a doctrinally sound argument to link the absence of the former (Jesus), to the presence of the latter (murder). Had I not hidden my own obsessive interests so well, she would have considered them a perilous agent threatening to douse that divine spark so necessary within the heart of a moody boy.

At which point it would be short work for the devil to grab hold of me.

Such was a familiar refrain I heard growing up.

If I did something bad, the devil had got hold of me.

The same had happened to my father, she whispered with grave intonations when she wanted my attention. The devil got hold of him. Pulled him away from us.

My dim recollections of my father was of a patient, benign man. Quiet and beaten down. I suspect, one day, he simply had his fill of sanctimony. Never came back.

I proved more resilient. Youth provides that. Additionally, I suppose I was the product of the the culture in which I had grown up. I don’t mean the Church, which I saw mainly as a sort of social club my mother belonged to, filled with dull and cautious folks who never celebrated their birthdays, wore bright colored clothing, or enjoyed anything stronger than ginger ale. No. The culture I’m talking about is the household I grew up in. Once my father slipped free, it was just my mother, me, and mother’s flock of parakeets named Oliver. There were at least five at any given time. Sometimes more. They had names like Oliver Hardy, Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Oliver North, and so on. She loved those birds. Doted on them, kissed them constantly. Me? Not at all—the Olivers received the totality of her daily allotment of compassion and affection. At least I suffered no violence. No physical abuse. A good deal of grim prayers, stern speeches, and, often, months-long periods when she made it a point not to speak to me. I think those periods of silence were supposed to be a form of life lessons.

My sanctuary was my library. I stole every one of those books. Probably I could have afforded to buy most of them. I did have the standard jobs for children. Newspaper route, babysitter, mowing lawns. But my cache of books was my secret world. I didn’t want anyone seeing me buying them, nor even borrowing them from the Denver Public Library. Besides, I enjoyed stealing. You could learn a lot about people stealing from them. I highly recommend it.

I made shelves for my books and kept them in the attic. The stairs up were rickety and steep, and my mother couldn’t manage the climb. So that was my refuge up there.

Jack the Ripper. The Zodiac Killer. Ted Bundy. Luis Garavito. Jeffrey Dammer. H. H. Holmes. Richard Speck. Oh, there were so many. Members of the lesser canon, too. Not so well known, but just as fascinating.

You might think I’d most prefer the autobiographies and confessions of killers. Not really. Many of them struck me as rather dull-witted individuals. What I really enjoyed were the books written by the men and women who ultimately caught the killers. They worked tirelessly to unlock intricate and baffling puzzles. The best, of course, were the cases never solved, allowing me to fantasize about the continuing lives of those faceless and brilliant murderers, free to wander the world and sample whatever experiences they might desire.

I would sit up there on a cushion in front of my books, burning candles in that sweet obsessive focus of adolescence, and reading every single volume, some more than once. My education.

Oliver Cromwell was my first victim (though, as he wasn’t human, I probably shouldn’t count him). My mother was my second. Yes, that sounds like quite an extreme escalation. I wasn’t even thinking of myself as a murderer at that point. I hardly knew it was an option. Growing up to become a murderer was akin to having a career as an astronaut or a lion tamer. I understood people made their way into those positions, but who was I? I was a nobody.

Oh, and before you start squirming, I released the other parakeets. For all I know, they’re still enjoying their freedom, flitting about above the streets of Denver.

Mother is in the backyard—no marker, of course. Eventually she was joined by many others. 

The official story as to what became of her was child abandonment. She had no friends in our neighborhood. Of course, once I had been “abandoned,” everyone’s hearts went out to me. I’d planned well, devising steamy love letters from a lusty lad by the name of Henry, or, as he often signed off, “your loving Hankie.” No last name. No return address. So when I called the police, weeping on the phone that I hadn’t seen my mother in three days (which was quite true), they, along with a caseworker from Child Protective Services, quickly discovered the stash of letters. I knew they would.

They had no trouble putting a narrative into place. Hyper-religious and sexually repressed abandoned single mother. Runs off with Hankie, a young free spirit.

My life played out as I had hoped. There had been a nagging fear I might be turned over to a foster family. But, no, I ended up with mother’s irresponsible sister, Aunt Eileen, whose drug of choice, alcohol, was often knocked into second-place depending on whatever substance was most favored by her current bedmate.

All things considered, Aunt Eileen made out quite well. A large and nice house (mine) to live in, and a quiet, self-reliant twelve year old child (me), who needed no supervision whatsoever—and what with my various jobs around the neighborhood, I never asked for money.

My teen years were perfect. Peaceful, calm, and I felt in firm control of my entire world.

It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I looked up, one afternoon, to all those books towering above me and realized that I, too, was one of those special people. I already had that most important milepost behind me. My first victim. My mother, that is. It had been as premeditated as any well-crafted plan; however, I had not carried out the actions as a murderer, but simply as a frustrated son, stifled by an overbearing parent. I decided that it was time to start building a proper legacy.

I didn’t want it to be anyone easily traced back to me. That was when I remembered that horrible man on my friend Larry’s paper route. I’d covered for Larry when he was recovering from a tonsillectomy. He had warned me about Old Man Wiley. He was housebound, lived alone, and, according to Larry, thoroughly unpleasant. I was instructed to place the paper behind the screen door and leave the porch immediately, before the old man could fling open the door and, as Larry said, “whack you with his cane—he might be stove-up and in a wheelchair, but he’s quick with that stick.”

True to Larry’s word, Mr. Wiley was waiting for me, hidden by shadows right inside the door. And he got me, just on the shoulder. He had an expression of satisfaction, mixed with slight surprise, no doubt because he would have been expecting Larry.

Probably he had forgotten all about me. It was over a year later when I returned, well past midnight, and let myself in the back door, which had fortuitously been left unlocked.

He had lost his voice to cancer, so used one of those electronic larynx’s to speak. Without his device held to his throat, the neighbors never heard his screams. But I could, just barely. Mostly the sound of air rushing from his mouth. He made more noise thrashing about on the bed. Dismembering his corpse in the bathtub was a fascinating process. Hard work, even with a hacksaw.

He was slight of build, yet it took me four trips on my bicycle with parts of him wrapped in plastic and duct tape in my backpack. With still an hour before sunrise, I had him transferred and neatly buried in the backyard.

I left Old Man Wiley’s place immaculate. Cleaner than when I arrived. Like a Boy Scout. 

Aunt Eileen was a sound sleeper and never suspected anything.

Not my burial of Mr. Wiley, not the Sutcliffe girl, not the drifter who lived in the bushes near the bus station, not even Gwendolyn Naughton, the principal of Palmer Elementary. She was a big one, and necessitated two large holes beyond the line of pyracantha bushes. She was my first victim whose disappearance resulted in media coverage. I was very excited. That must be how Broadway actors felt reading the reviews from opening night.

By the time I was nineteen, I had a stable job doing clerical work at an advertising firm. I no longer needed Aunt Eileen, but she had no intention of leaving. One night when she was passed out in a deeper stupor that usual, I carefully placed her in my car and drove her to a bench at a downtown bus stop. I made sure she had the entirety of her drug stash on her person. Marijuana, some hashish, a bottle of Dilaudid, and two fairly large bags of a white powder that, though I’m no expert on such matters, I assumed to be cocaine.

The police found her, and the drugs.

She had priors. As in convictions.

No one came to her aid.

She spent seven years in Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. When she got out, she left the state and I never knew what became of her.

With her out of the house, my life was free of chaos. I found I loved routines.

I advanced easily at my job. True, I was little more than a glorified secretary, but I was trusted and relied upon.

My true work continued. Every ten to fourteen months, I’d add another victim to my slow, methodic portfolio. It was so much about planning. I kept copious notes on my methodology. How I went about selecting those random individuals. Maintaining a diversity of age, gender, ethnicity. Different regions of the city. Nothing to connect them with me, nor with one another. How I experimented with a wide variety of dispatch. Meaning the murder itself. The disposal of the body. And clippings of any press I got. Well, not me, but you understand. Also, where the remains were buried. That was my one dogma, my single unwavering behavior. I wanted the remains eventually found and identified. They were deposited either in the backyard, or in a plot of land I inherited in the foothills at the edge of town.

I wanted all this discovered after I died. At that time, my attorney would send a letter to the newspaper with a key to a safety deposit box where my meticulous records were kept. My grand legacy.

And then, with no warning, I was arrested. This wasn’t some clever detective from the homicide department, but an IRS investigator.

All because I got greedy. Just once. I’d rather not get into the particulars. I don’t want to be thought of as a thief. Let’s just say one of my victims had a massive stockpile of cash, and I helped myself to it. I began to live a more lavish lifestyle. I mean, really, I got carried away.

And I got caught. By the Internal Revenue Service. Can you imagine?

No one ever suspected me of my real crimes.

The authorities didn’t even care where the money came from, only that I had not paid taxes on it.

There was nothing I could do.

I had to do my time.

I decided to think of it as a sabbatical from my, well, true profession. I knew that when I got out, I’d return to my yearly hunting excursions.

Then the unexpected happened.

Three years into a five year sentence, I received my diagnosis. Inoperable cancer. Late stage.

And my legacy?

The greatest regret was that I never got around to setting it all up. I didn’t even have an attorney—well, other than that court-appointed one, who was no use at all.

So, after the payment runs out on my safety deposit box, I can’t imagine that anyone will bother hacking the encrypted files of my laptop. They’ll toss it out. I was a nobody. A mundane, white collar criminal.

That has probably already happened. I died years ago.

But now, I had a second chance.

At what, I was not sure.

This world was so strange. There seemed to be no rules. I couldn’t even remember why I ever found the notion of murder appealing.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s an undeniable thrill subjecting someone to your will. And to extinguish a life takes that pretty much to the limit. But that other element, the transgression, where was it now?

A world where people come back from the dead, transported through space like in a science fiction film. And mind-reading.

A world with robots!

Being a murderer seemed so unremarkable.

It also meant I had the opportunity to learn about new boundaries I could push past. What social rules might there be in this new world that I could get a tight grip upon, bend, break? I was ready. I came back from the dead, leaving a diseased-riddled middle-aged body, and given youth again. When I looked in the mirror, back then with those game show people, I’d place myself in my thirties. Yes. I could work with that!

Now, I just needed to get my body back. My human body. Will that green ray wear off? Surely if there was technology which could turn me into this tentacled thing, there was technology to undo it.

I would wait. I knew how to wait. Besides, I had no other choice.

Through the observation windows everything turned green, boom, just like that. Vibrant, pulsing. And, just as sudden, black.

Not stars, not swirling nebulae, not those crazy psychedelic effects Hollywood would have provided.

Blackness.

Was the train still riding atop the tracks? But what would be supporting them?

If not, then did that mean it was just us, inside a train, adrift in a void? Were we in motion? Or maybe we were just suspended here for two days?

But, wait. Would it seem like two days for us? Did time even work in this place? We did have gravity, which was good.

One of the producers for I’d Eat That!, wished us a goodnight as he walked past our table.

“You might want to set your alarm clock,” he warned. “They stop serving breakfast pretty early. By eight-fifteen all you’ll have is a continental buffet.”

I guess clocks were still dependable, at least aboard the train.

Saligia finished her Campari, and we headed down to our stateroom.

When we closed ourselves inside, Saligia looked around. If she had wanted privacy, she wouldn’t be finding it here.

“At least it’s more comfortable than that radioactive cell,” she muttered before turning off the light.

There remained a soft glow of a nightlight that ran along the recessed edge of the ceiling. She was looking up at it, her hands frozen on the top button of her blouse. She rolled her eyes and turned her back on me to undress.

I, too, turned around. I had begun to get out of my clothes when it occurred to me I might need to help her up onto her bunk, and it might be more in line with whatever sort of decorum she wanted to create between us if I was still dressed when I did so. How had things become so awkward?

But then I heard the creak of springs, and I knew she’d made it up on her own.

I undressed and climbed into my own bed.

I thought about asking Saligia if I should close the curtains, but that would be absurd, as there was nothing out there. No intrusive moonlight, no chance of prying eyes. Nothing. Still, I felt I should say something before falling asleep. There was a tension in the air, and maybe I could lessen it.

“I’m sorry if I seem weird,” I said. Probably I should have said distant, that was one of her favorite criticism of me when we were together. “A lot has happened to me lately. I’m just trying to process it all.” That was no lie. “I mean, like Sy. I was so relieved to find he hadn’t died. And then when you told me that he had…you know, died, well, it was a shock on top of a shock.”

She said nothing. I knew she was still awake. I decided to be optimistic and  think of her silence as acceptance of my simple statement of…certainly not an excuse, but an explanation.

“I know you’re not lying,” she suddenly said. “You don’t do that. Of course, I suspect you lie to yourself all the time. But, good lord, Morris, nobody can be that dense.”

“Excuse me?”

I tried to remember if, in better days between us, pillow talk had been this graceless.

“So,” I began, slow and cautious, “you’re saying everyone on the show—Serpientes y Escaleras—they all knew Sy died and, months later, appeared out of one of the portals?”

That didn’t sound right. I would have heard some sort of gossip if it were general knowledge.

Saligia didn’t speak for a full minute. Aha! I had her.

“No,” she eventually said with a sigh. “Why would they? His death was never reported. It was the Changes. Newspapers didn’t bother with obituaries. There was so much more going on.”

“And yet, I’m the dense one?”

“You saw the explosion, and you ran away. Later, you saw him alive on TV. And then you came to La Vida Tower, at which point you learned about the portals…that dead people come out of them.”

“Okay. I’ll give you that. I’m a bit slow, at times. I would have eventually—”

“Would you? Once you had allowed your guilt be so wonderfully and completely washed away?”

Now it was my time to be silent.

I lay there in my narrow bunk trying to think of something to say. But I couldn’t. When I heard Saligia’s even breathing, I knew she had fallen sleep, so I decided to do so as well.

###

The next two days we learned less than we had hoped.

I say we, but I guess I mean, me. Saligia was less interested in the details of where Sy went or how that portal managed to get him from the set of Serpientes y Escaleras to wherever he was now. She just wanted us to get to him and make sure he was safe.

As for getting to the bottom of what happened to San Antonio, well, I still hadn’t told her what I had seen.

Clearly, I wanted to know what had happened. I mean if an entire city had vanished from the face of the planet, were any of us safe? I for one had been extremely relieved when I learned that the Changes had ended. It was how I imagine the British felt when the Nazi’s surrendered. Finally the constant fear of chaotic bombardment was over.

But, for us, was it over? Our fear?

If the Changes were returning, we needed to prepare ourselves.

Of course, maybe it was something else. Maybe it was what Ida had said. The portals overheated, or whatever. If those damn things were so delicate and so destructive, why the hell were they being used for something as asinine as a game show?

I for one would think twice before putting a bunch of entertainment industry folks in charge of something that could take out an entire city.

So, I decided to ask around the next morning after breakfast. We had made certain to get to the dining car while they were still serving the full breakfast. The eggs Benedict put to shame any I had had before. Saligia opted for the oatmeal and a huge sweating tumbler of mimosa.

When the waiter told Saligia about the spa at the back of the train, she smiled dreamily and stood.

“Off to the spa?” asked a young woman we had met yesterday on the observation deck. She handed Saligia a magazine. “Something to read while getting that pedicure.”

“Variety!” Saligia said. “I didn’t know they still published this.”

The woman laughed. “You’re in this issue,” she said. “Page 47.”

Saligia’s eyes grew. She hurried off with the magazine clutched to her chest.

I went up to the observation deck and soon was deep in conversation with Wanda, head of personnel for I’d Eat That!

She was a huge fan of Sy, and had recognized my name from those distant days of Wonders Unfolding. I found myself answering a barrage of questions about his boyhood and daily work schedule and all that sort of nonsense. I kept trying to move the conversation back to those portals. Just how dangerous were they?

But for Wanda such matters held no interest.

“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked.

“Of what?”

“Working around those things. You have them on I’d Eat That!, right?”

“Sure, but I’m back in my office in LA most of the time. Besides, those sort of accidents don’t happen often. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “You’re telling me cities have been destroyed before?” This was madness.

She shrugged and muttered something about how it was a shame, if you thought about it. And then she asked if Sy chose his own wardrobe.

“I heard he switched to a red wig on that final episode,” she said with an enthusiastic grin. “Before leaping through Door Number One. What a stunt. Flashy! Splashy!” She smiled wistfully off into space before turning to lock eyes with mine. “And sexy!”

Well, at least Sy managed to escape before the city was destroyed. But, sexy or not, I hoped that was not the last image I would have of my old friend. With that absurd toupee on his head.

And if we found him—I mean, when—how was I going to explain that all of San Antonio was gone? He must have made some good friends while living there. And then there was Rose. She was born there. Probably had family. The thought of having to share that sort of news made me sick to my stomach.

###

For the rest of the trip, our fellow passengers did little to inform or educate me on much of anything. Mostly they were keen to share gossip, gossip about people I knew nothing about. Saligia seemed to know some of the names they dropped in their hushed and amused tones, and I noticed that she was paying close attention so as to file away any useful information. She really seemed to be warming to everyone. It didn’t hurt that they treated her with such revered respect.

“These are my people,” she had even said to me on our second night. “And I never knew I even had people. My peers! My colleagues!”

I had about reached my fill of Saligia’s droning on about how far her fame had spread, but I let her have her moment. It was better than her former tirade about “those jackasses in upper management always slapping us down, me and Sy, keeping our knees bent in supplication—they should have been bowing to us!”

So, beyond general chitchat and shoptalk (chiefly about how to get better ratings), the Network people we talked to did little to expand my sketchy knowledge of the portals—their dangers, their origins, where people who went into them went. Most responses to my question were monosyllabic. Chet, the head of marketing for Don’t Spin Wrong! (“marketing maven,” he called himself with grinning gusto), spoke in greater length, but hardly more depth.

He had joined me and Saligia for breakfast on the second day. Saligia was still engrossed in her copy of Variety that sat open beside her breakfast plate.

“Portals?” Chet said. “Not much to say about them. We have them as well for our show, of course. People come to us, resurrected. The REINCORs. Which is pretty cool if you think about it, wouldn’t you say? And we process them. Separate winners from losers. You guys do the same. But you have that great hook. Not just winners losers. But the whole moral judgement thing. Saints and sinners! And into the departure portals they all go. What happens after that, who knows? Not me! I heard somewhere that they get processed again. Seems unnecessary. All this processing. Hey, maybe they’re reincarnated. Winners get to be captains of industries. Losers, chiggers or poultry. Maybe it’s on to pure enlightenment, cosmic consciousness. Had an aunt who was into all that top chakra mumbo jumbo. You really should be talking with Ida. She’s the most upper of upper management on this train.”

Not a good idea. Ida was still giving me the cold eye.

“We’ve heard that after the contestants go through the portals, they arrive in LA,” Saligia said as matter-of-fact as though critiquing the fruit salad she was picking at. “Do you know where? Where in LA?”

“An address, perhaps,” I added.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Chet said. “Hollywood Bowl. Well, underneath the Hollywood Bowl. There’s supposed to be a whole complex. The winners and losers get sent there. All of them. Central Processing, that’s the place. I can’t imagine it’s very interesting. I mean, if it were, they’d make a TV show of it, right?”

That was our first real lead. Now we had a destination when we arrived. I was heartened to know that there was at least one landmark I would recognize. What with the Changes, anything might have happened. From Chet we learned a few more things about the post-Changes Los Angeles.

“The surrounding countryside is mostly a desolate wasteland,” he told us, waving his hand dismissively. “But, not to worry, because a circular portion of the city has been preserved. Not all of it, unfortunately. Los Angeles is now fifteen miles in diameter, from the Santa Monica pier to Griffith Park, from Mulholland Drive to Culver City. Everything safe and cozy, beneath a lovely transparent dome!”

A dome? Something like that would have been nice in San Antonio. I had noticed how on windy days the dust from the treeless barrens would come into town and settle over everything.

But, all in all, I felt a surge of optimism. We would soon arrive at a town I knew well, and it sounded as though I’d still be able to find my way around. I would track down my favorite Korean place, Madam Bong-Cha’s Dumpling Diner, in Los Feliz. I think I could handle almost anything, as long as I could hold onto one pleasant and familiar thing. If, let’s say, Los Angeles was populated with bipedal talking cats, it’d be Madam Bong-Cha’s kimchi-mandu that would keep me sane.

Once we tracked down Sy and Nora, rescued Rose, and turned August over to the authorities, I would treat us all to an extended stay at a suite at the Biltmore. I’d like to finally put some of my gold coins to good use. Then, surrounded by luxury, we could figure out what to do next.

I tapped Saligia’s shoulder. She looked up from the magazine.

“What?”

“Hollywood Bowl,” I said.

She nodded and immediately returned to the magazine.

Chet laughed.

“She’s amazed to find herself featured in Variety,” I told him.

“Do you not know?” Chet said, leaning across the table toward Saligia. “Last year you were on the cover.”

Saligia’s eyes bulged. Her mouth opened, but no words came out.

“What’s going on?” I asked Chet, looking around the dining car as people were getting up and leaving.

“We’re about to transition from the void,” he said. “Come on up topside, it’s quite a sight.”

He stood and walked away.

I quickly gulped the last of my coffee and followed Chet up the stairs.

Saligia was close behind me, whispering loudly if I thought he was serious.

“You know,” she added for clarity. “About the cover of Variety?”

When we entered the observation deck, I took Saligia’s hand and we pushed our way to the front. The people crowding around the large window were happy to make room for us.

First there was just that blackness we’d been subjected to for the last two days. That infinite velvety nothingness. Then Saligia squeezed my hand and I saw it, too. A speck of green, which I first thought was a reflection in the window. As it grew in size, I had, for the first time since we’d been in this lightless limbo, a sense of motion. We weren’t floating. No. We were moving—and moving fast—towards something green. A glowing green blob. Glowing and growing, bigger and brighter. Then we were in it. All was green. And just as soon as we were in, we were out.

Our fellow passengers began clapping and cheering.

Saligia’s pressure on my hand became painful.

We had emerged onto a gray and blasted plain. The sky was black, and filled with stars. In front of us was a domed city. I suppose it must be Los Angeles. But I didn’t think we were in California. That giant red planet, which filled the sky, certainly did not belong to any landscape I knew.

“Good lord,” Saligia said, her tone low, the words formed deep in her throat. “Where are we?”

“Oh, I thought you would have known,” said Wanda. “These days, Los Angeles is on Phobos.”

“On what?” Saligia asked.

I’d be needing a double serving of Madam Bong-Cha’s dumplings.

“The larger moon of Mars,” I told her.

“If anyone’s interested,” Nora said to no one in particular. “I now hate robots.”

She was, of course, speaking to me. Now that the robots had been taken care of, and neither Sy nor August were in any condition to be roped into small talk, there was just the two of us.

I moved around the control room, checking for other doors that we might have missed. Not just because we needed to get out of this crazy place, but also I didn’t want any more of those robots sneaking up on us. But unless a secret hatch was well camouflaged, the only way in was that curved stairway.

Nora had her own agenda. She systematically worked her way around the room, looking at every console station, each covered with buttons, dials, and video screens.

I agreed with her opinion. I wasn’t too fond of those robots, either. What bothered me the most when we hauled them from the room and tossed them over the railing all the way down into that pool of water, was the behavior of the one who had shot Helen and Darlene. He kept saying the same thing over and over.

“We must process the arrivals. You don’t understand.”

He was right. We didn’t. We didn’t understand anything.

I think it would have been better if he—and really, I should be calling him an it—had begged for his life. I might have been less cavalier in helping Nora dispose of the robots in such an admittedly vengeful manner. And then there was the other one, who Nora had conked on the head. It was pretty much out of commission, although its right hand twitched about madly as if it were operating a ten-key adding machine.

Before heaving them over the railing, we’d stripped the robots of their uniforms so we could wrap up Sy and August for, I guess, protection. Their lumpy, glistening, tentacled bodies seemed so vulnerable. Next, we brought up one of those wheelbarrows and placed them in it.

I also wanted them bundled up so they wouldn’t keep staring at me with those huge, moist eyes. Unblinking and analytical. I couldn’t be sure that they were still able to think, but if they could, I have no doubt Sy would be imploring me to help him, while August would be plotting and scheming. Though, still, I could see their tentacles moving around under the robots’ outfits.

And then something caught my eye.

I had completely forgotten about that device the robot had used to shoot Sy and August. I bent down to pick it up. Maybe it had a reverse setting. But, no. There was just one button. I aimed it at a blank wall, away from those two things in the wheelbarrow. I pushed the button.

Nothing.

“Hey, careful with that thing,” Nora said, looking over.

I tried again, but it didn’t do anything. Maybe it only worked when held by robots. Or was it out of power?

“Busted?” Nora asked. “So, what is it anyway? Squid ray? Because that’s just stupid.”

“It affects something called a tau field.”

Then Nora paused, furrowing her brows.

“Tau? Like the Greek letter?”

“I have no idea how it’s spelled,” I said. “All I know is that was what the robots called it.”

Nora crossed over to a console panel she had already examined.

“Because that’s what it says here,” she said, tapping her finger beside a dial. “Tau Field Dampener. T-A-U.”

I walked around and peered over her shoulder.

The dial went from zero to 10. It was currently set on 4.

“Turn it all the way down to zero,” I suggested.

“That’s an affirmative.”

When she dialed it to zero, I noticed a deep drone, almost inaudible, soften and then die.

“Tau Field Dampener off,” she said. “How are the squids doing?”

I partially uncovered them, not wanting to see those eyes looking back at me.

Nora leaned across the console to see better. We watched and waited.

“Sy told me all about his accident,” she said, suddenly breaking the silence.

“His what?”

“You know, his…. Maybe he didn’t tell you? He died.”

I turned around to stare at her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Sy had an episode,” she said, looking away from me. I guess I had quite the expression. “On the elevator ride up here. It looked exactly like that time when I saw August back in La Vida Tower when he tried to escape. Parts of him losing, you know, human form.”

“But Sy left the building all the time.” This was getting crazy.

“Always with Saligia. Right? She and her mind powers. And now, he needs you.”

“Well, I’m right here.” I looked down at the wheelbarrow. Maybe if I poked him. “By your logic, the both of them should be benefiting from my proximity.”

“Hey, don’t yell at me,” Nora grumbled. “I don’t claim to know everything.”

Could that be true? I mean, Nora was right in that Sy never left La Vida Tower without Saligia.

I wish I knew the rules about all this nonsense.

Nora walked over to join me.

“It was a few years ago,” she told me. “A meteor. I mean, that’s how he died. Hit by a meteor.”

“Ah,” was all I could think to say. The thing was, Sy getting struck by a meteor seemed the least unlikely thing I’d heard today.

I squatted down, getting closer to the two swaddled figures in the wheelbarrow. Nothing seemed different about them.

“I wish we could tell them apart,” I said. “Then we could separate them. I’d hate to have them transform back only to have August take us by surprise.”

Nora got down on her knees and peeked under one of the white jumpsuits at a squid.

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to read minds?”

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that.

I took a deep breath, made my mind clear and receptive. I closed my eyes.

But I just felt silly. Without Saligia, I never felt confident that the thoughts and impressions that came to me were external, and not just my imagination.

I wish she were here to help me.

Wait.

There was something. Something so slight. Two impressions. That cold, sharp darkness I associated with August. And a single phrase, zapped by a robot, which could only be Sy. Maybe if we placed them on different sides of the room, I’d be able to identify which was which.

“Can you communicate with them?” Nora asked. “Ask Sy if he knows how to bring him back. You know, with your mind powers.”

All I could do was shake my head and sigh.

I was in over my head.

Maybe Nora was right. Maybe that was something I could do…if I just knew how. But everything seemed beyond my understanding. I suddenly felt more lost than I had ever been before. I mean, those two robots. What I had done to them…that wasn’t me.

A single tone rang out, sounding like a child’s xylophone.

Nora rushed over to one of the consoles.

“In-coming,” she said, in a sort of clipped speech straight from a war movie.

She was enjoying this entirely too much.

“In-coming?” I crossed the room. “What does that mean?”

“Says it right here on this screen,” Nora said. “In-coming. Tier 18.” She leaned down to better see a line of flashing text. “Chaos Squad. Oh, I guess the contestants from New York are coming through. Exciting!”

I stood beside her as she activated a video monitor for Tier 18. We watched three dozen fit men and women with no-nonsense buzz haircuts as they stepped from their glass tubes with cautious deliberation. They were all dressed in colorful skintight unitards.

“Do you know the show?” Nora asked.

What was that girl talking about.

“That Chaos Squad show,” she added.

I just shook my head.

“I’m guessing it’s competitive,” she said. “Maybe like gladiatorial bouts in ancient Rome. I mean, that robot boss said the show was violent.”

The people got out of the tubes and looked at one another with obvious suspicion.

“I think they’re confused,” Nora said. “Other than the obvious, that us. I think winners and losers are materializing next to one another. Now I know why the robots would want the people coming into this place to be helpless little squids. Do you think they’ll start fighting?”

I suggested that we could go down and talk to them. See how we could all work together and get out of here.

“Let’s think this through,” Nora cautioned me. “Now I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing about the television business, but when I hear Chaos Squad, I’m not thinking allies. We need to assess. Learn the rules.”

She had my attention.

“So, you have a plan?” Why was I even asking? She had no plan.

“Well, I don’t mean to pull rank, but I did come to rescue you. Now, if we can only find a volume knob for this Tier 18 camera.” She moved her head about like a chicken looking for a bug. “Ah ha! Those robots thought of everything.”

She pushed a button and we had sound. I was impressed.

We were now able to hear the murmuring of all those people who had appeared in every one of the 36 glass tubes on the 18th level. These contestants wore either a purple uniform or a yellow uniform. Different teams?

Two men, closest to the camera, in opposing colors, squared off, fists at the ready.

“So, you miserable losers have followed us to Valhalla?” asked the one in purple.

“I guess we’ve been given a second chance to mix it up with you villains,” replied the one in yellow.

I had to say these contestants from New York certainly were more lively than ours. However, their commentary sounded extremely stilted. Especially that bit about Valhalla. All part of the Chaos Squad experience, I suppose.

“Something’s gone wrong,” the purple one said. “This was not what we were promised.”

“That’s because it was lies—all lies!” the yellow one shouted, looking around for someone to punch.

“You’re right,” said another man in yellow, stepping forward. “We all need to join forces. Find our common enemy!”

Did they think they were still on a TV show?

“We will unite!” a woman in purple screamed and raised a fist.

She was answered, unanimously, by the others.

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said to Nora, no longer thinking it wise to head down and reason with them.

“Nope.” Nora was in full agreement. “It sounds awful. I kinda wish we had those robots back.”

“Brothers and sisters!” shouted another Squad member—though shouldn’t the show have been called Chaos Squads, plural? “It’s us against them. Spread out, find the vermin, and eradicate! Take no prisoners!”

With battle cries they took to the stairs and elevators.

“This is all because we turned off the field dampeners,” I said.

Nora nodded and turned the dial all the way up.

“This’ll fix ‘em,” she said.

However, the Chaos Squad were unaffected.

“Or not,” she added.

“Thoughts?” I asked, trying not to let my panic show.

“Hold on,” Nora said. “Hold on.” She walked down a row of control consoles. “I know I saw something, somewhere, that might just…ah. Here.”

She held a finger over a large red button.

“Well?” I asked.

“It says Control Room Lockdown.” She cocked a brow. “What do you think?”

“Do it!” But I did wonder if there was another button, somewhere, that read Control Room Unlock.

When Nora pushed the button, a curved metal section slid out of the wall and rotated around to cover the staircase. It locked shut with a dull clang, followed by a heavy thud, as though some huge bolt had been slid into place.

“Snug as a bug,” Nora said, doing a little dance. “Who needs robots. Right?”

But all I could think of was that now we were trapped. No food. No water. Would the air run out? Trapped somewhere deep underground, the only elevators to the surface have been shut down centuries ago. If that was even possible.

“In-coming,” Nora cried out.

“Would you stop that.” I was trying to think.

“There are more contestants coming through. Some show called I’d Eat That! Sounds like it’d be kind of funny, don’t you think?”

Nora reached out and turned the dampener dial to zero.

“But why?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It just seems like we owe it to those new-comers to have a fighting chance. If they come through as those flabby little creatures, they’re doomed.”

I couldn’t argue.

“Well, at least we have our eyes,” Nora said, patting the video screen. “We can see what’s going on. Just like watching TV.”

She was not wrong. Though, as the hours passed, it was not a pleasant show to watch.

I’ve never jumped out of an airplane before. You know, the way that some people do it as a lark. Or maybe they call it a sport? Obviously, I’m talking about using a parachute and all. And, in the unlikely event I’d ever willingly leap from a plane, I’d be quite remiss were I not to savor the moment. The trick would be to enjoy the experience for what it was—giddy insanity! Unfortunately, because I have this thing about heights, I’d be terrified. I might be able to come to terms with soiling myself, but if I failed to be fully present to the wonderment of free fall—that would be unacceptable.

Of course, we should strive to be present each and every moment of our lives.

However, when the guy in the white coveralls shot me with that green light—or, as Nora would insist, when the robot zapped me with the ray gun—I wasn’t prepared at all. I’d gotten sloppy. Sloppy and cocky. I mean, there I was, toe-to-toe with the madman, August. If he’d punched me in my face, or pulled a shiv from his back pocket, it would be in keeping with the situation. Much like standing in the opened hatch of an airplane over the drop zone, there are reasonable outcomes in specific situations. Violence in the former, falling in the latter.

At that moment, being blindsided by a robot wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. None of my, let’s just say, “manly training,” ever covered such a scenario.

Ah, well, if you have to go, ray gun blast from a robot has gotta rank up there with being swallowed whole by an anaconda or getting struck by an asteroid. Something to add to the CV, to be sure. And would you look at me, two out of three!

I reminded myself not to let the distractions keep me from the experience of the moment. Not the robots. Not the psychopathic killer. Not even the girls screaming. Well, it was just Nora. I guess Rose didn’t rate me scream-worthy.

No. Ignore all that. Clear the mind.

Be. Here. Now.

That’s what Sal’s old boss would tell me to do. The Great Oberon. Or, as I liked to call him when he was sober enough to be baited, Oberon Mahoney, the Phony Messiah.

And I did, I followed his advice. It took a second, after the initial shock of being, what? Transformed? Then I took a breath. Breath? Did I still have lungs?

Calm. Calm and centered.

There. Not so bad. I wasn’t in pain.

In fact, I could feel little in the way of sensation. It occurred to me that I also wasn’t able to hear. The sound of Nora screaming faded out completely after I had been shot. My vision worked well enough. It certainly appeared she was still screaming, I just couldn’t hear her.

Actually, my vision was better than ever. I had an eye on each side of my head—or whatever passed for a head. I could see the entire room. This was useful, because I couldn’t turn around even if I wanted to.

At some point Nora’s scream of surprise shifted to a battle cry. Well, that’s what it looked like. She launched herself at the robot who shot me. He went down. Rose scanned the room. And with barely a second thought, reached under one of the control consoles and wrenched loose a handful of cables. If only there’d been sparks!

Oh, but that didn’t diminish the experience. I mean, how thrilling! I had a front row seat, watching these two women avenging me.

They were so fierce. It should have been much more exciting and energetic, but the robot made no move to resist. Perhaps resisting attack wasn’t part of its program. Once they had that one trussed up and subdued, I watched Nora walk to the robot in charge of the control room. She picked up a curvy and futuristic chromium office chair (did the presence of chairs mean that robots sit?) and lifted it over her head. The robot observed the indignity about to be performed upon him with detached and perplexed submission. Once the chair smashed down, the robot collapsed like someone had just turned him off. In a way, I guess someone did.

Nora’s robot-love was a fickle thing.

Rose crossed over to where I was. She knelt down to peer closely at me and August. Between us lay my red toupee. Rose held up the hairpiece and looked from me to August. I realized she didn’t know who was who. I tried to wink or wave, but I had no control over my flabby, boneless body.

Nora and Rose grabbed hold of the two robots, and with not a scrap of delicacy nor decorum, they dragged them down the stairs and out of sight.

I could see my tentacles twitching. There really was no other word to describe them. Tentacles, like a cephalopod. Like Cleo. Their movements were wholly involuntary.

This was a level of vulnerability that didn’t sit well with me. But, no, I reminded myself. Be. Here. Now. August was no threat—he seemed in the same state as I. Twitchy, goggle-eyed, and helpless.

We lay there, observing one another. Probably I looked the same to August as he did to me. Because we were more blobby than elongated, we possessed a greater resemblance to octopi than squid. Maybe more like slugs, with feelers. I kept thinking that this was what an octopus would look like as drawn by a five-year-old. Simply sad. Something you really didn’t want to be looking at it. The worst of all, there was not a hint of humanity to be seen in this current form of mine. Nothing cute. Not noble. It’d be like trying to anthropomorphize a turd. Even if I were to say, “at least you’d not want to step on me,” it wouldn’t be because of your compassion for all things sentient, but mostly because, well, ick!

I was hoping I wasn’t too icky for Rose and Nora to come back for me.

Though I don’t know what one does with an icky, sentient, uncommunicative slug with feelers.

Might there be some de-squidifier in this place? I’d even be fine if my brain could be scooped out and put in one of those robots. They do run to the scrawny and pasty, but I’m not that vain. Besides, they might have sexier models.

No, no.

No.

Centered. Focused.

Be here now, Moreno.

So, I assume you want to know how I first learned of this post-rebirth “condition”—my tendency to turn into something ghastly if I happened to wander too far from my penthouse (or too far from Sal).

That one’s easy. I found out on day one. I mean, no one likes being cooped up. First thing I did when Sal’s personal assistant returned from the store with some jeans, a nice cotton guayabera, and a pair of espadrilles, was to head off to explore my new city.

Almost died on the elevator ride down.

Also, I freaked out the workers in the lobby who—after seeing what I had turned into—surely would have stomped me flat if not for the intercession by a couple of Network admin types who’d “seen a few things,” as they say.

I soon had the basic rules of my condition explained to me.

But, I demanded, what the hell was that thing? That horrible thing that was apparently part of me. The thing that I had finally become.

The sad truth was, no one knew.

Or, they pretended not to know.

Those tight-lipped half-wits from the Network would just shrug and mutter something about “the Changes,” as if those two words were enough to smooth out my existential terror of becoming a helpless monster. It was like offering someone a band-aid after a shark attack.

But, because I had never transformed so, well, completely into this creature, I’d never had to learn how to transform out of it. Didn’t even know if that was possible. Of course, if I did know of some handy trick, I wouldn’t have been able to share it with Rose and Nora. I mean, I didn’t even have a mouth!

Oh, speaking of Rose and Nora, they soon returned. Returned from disposing of the robots. Heaved them over the railing, perhaps? Like August did with the other one. I noticed that Rose was carrying, draped over her arm, two white jumpsuits. I wondered what a naked robot looked like. I won’t lie, that was something I’d have liked to see. Were they smooth, like a Ken doll? Or maybe there was an attempt at anatomical fidelity?

Rose handed one of the jumpsuits to Nora. They approached. One covered up August, the other, me.

The old blanket-over-the-birdcage trick. Exactly how you tuck in a budgie for the night.

Just like that, all of my senses were gone.

Nothing but me and my thoughts.

Be. Here. Now.

As if I had a choice.