The Book of Joan

Prologue

In the hundreds of thousands of years before the Chicxulub asteroid impact that led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs on earth, volcanoes in a region of India known as the Deccan Traps erupted repeatedly. They spewed sulfur and carbon dioxide, poisoning the atmosphere and destabilizing ecosystems.

The dinosaurs and most manner of living things were already at death’s door by the time the asteroid hit.

The Deccan Traps changed the ecosystem radically. Blotted out the sun. Death became history, geography rewrote itself. And yet earth was reborn. It was not a miracle that life was destroyed and then re-emerged. It was the raging stubbornness of living organisms that simply would not give in.

Life re-emerged as it always does. From the depths of oceans and riverbeds to the frozen biospheres hidden under ice sheaths to the very core of the world’s underground caves, from the tomb-like otherworlds of earth, matched in diversity and design only by one thing: interstellar space.

The next time a geocataclysm like this happened, the origin was anything but random.

Chapter One

Burning is an art.

I remove my shirt and step toward a table where I have spread out the tools I will need. I swab my entire chest and shoulders with synthetic alcohol. My body is white against the black of space where we hover within a suborbital complex. CIEL.

Through the wall-size window, I can see a distant nebula; its gases and hypnotic hues make me hold my breath. What a puny word that is, beautiful. Oh, how we need a new language to go with our new bodies.

I can also see the dying ball of dirt. Earth, circa 2049, our former home. It looks smudged and sepia.

A fern perched in the window catches my eye. Well, what used to be a fern. I never had a green thumb, even those long years ago when I lived on Earth. This fern is mostly a sad little curve of stick flanked by a few dung-green wisps; it wilts and droops like a defunct old feathery cock. Its photosynthesis is entirely artificial. If it were allowed the “sun” we’ve got now, with the absence of adequate ozone layers, it would instantly die. Solar flares irradiate us daily, even as we are protected by STEs—“superior technological environments,” they’re called.

I’ve not seen CIEL from the outside for a long time, but I remember it looking like too many fingers on a ghost-white hand. Sky junk. Rats in a maze, we are. Far enough from the sun to exist in an inhabitable zone, and yet so close, one wrong move and we’re incinerated. In our man-made, free-floating station, with our rage-mouthed Empire Leader, Jean de Men, fastened at the helm of things. We’re the aftermath of earth-life. CIEL was built from redesigned remnants from old space stations and science extensions of former astro and military industrial complexes. We who live here number in the thousands, from what used to be hundreds of countries. Every single one of us was a member of a former ruling class. Earth’s the dying clod beneath us. We siphon and drain resources through invisible technological umbilical cords. Skylines. That almost sounds lyrical.

The fern, like all green matter at this point, is cloned. And me? As we’ve been told a million times, “radical changes in the ozone, atmosphere, and magnetic fields caused radical changes in morphology.” How’s that for a cosmic joke of the ruling class? The meek really did inherit the Earth. And the wealthy suck at it like a tit. There’s no telling how many meek are left. If any. I sigh so loud I can almost see it leaving my mouth. The air here is thick and palpable.

There is a song lodged in my skull, one whose origin I can’t recall. The tune is both omnipresent and simultaneously unreachable; the specifics drift away like space junk. There are times I think it will drive me mad, and then I remember that madness is the least of my concerns.

Today is my birthday, and pieces of the song from nowhere haunt my body, a sporadic orchestral thundering that rises briefly and then recedes. Sound fills my ears and whole head, a vibration that rings every bone in my body and then nothing. By “birthday,” what I mean is that today marks my last year until ascension. Now, at forty-nine, I’m aging out, a threat to resources in a finite, closed system. CIEL authorities may permit a staged theatrical spectacle when your time is up, but dead is dead, no matter when you lived. At one time, in the early years here, I remember, we still believed that ascension involved some rise into a higher state of being. Not just an escape from a murdered planet to a floating space world, but a climb toward an actual evolution of the mind and soul. It still strikes me as absurd that all our mighty philosophies and theologies and scientific advances were based on looking up. Every animal ever born—blind or stupid or sentient—looked up. What of it? What if it was only a dumb reflex?

I’ve since come to understand that there are simply too many of us for Jean de Men’s Empire to sustain unless we continue to discover new treasure troves left on Earth or evolve into beings who don’t need plain old food and water. Our recycled meat sacks provide water when we die. It’s the one biotechnological achievement we’ve been able to successfully “create” up here. You can get pure water from a corpse. So far in the evolution of the process, they can extract about a hundred liters of water from a fresh corpse—about twenty days’ survival ration. That’s not very efficient.

No one knows if or how fast those odds will improve. We only know we tried space suits and recycled urine and exhalation modes and a whole wave of deaths resulted from the biotoxins. So we continue to draw from mother Earth, to suck her diseased body dry.

The fern and I stare each other down. When I first came here, I was fourteen and dying from unrequited love. Or hormonally unstoppable love at least. I am now forty-nine, in my penultimate year. If hormones have any meaning left for any of us, it is latent at best, lying in wait for another epoch. Maybe we will evolve into asexual systems. It feels that way from here. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Desperately wishful. My throat constricts. There are no births here. There is a batch of youth in their late teens and early twenties. After that, who knows.

This is my room: stylishly decorated in blue-gray slate slabs. A memory foam bed on a metal slab, a slab of a desk, various metal chairs, a cylindrical one-room shower and human waste purge station. The most apparent thing in my quarters is a one-wall window into space, or oblivion, with a protective shade to help us forget that the sun might eat us alive at any moment, or that a black hole might sneak up on us like a kid playing hide-and-seek.

This is my home: CIEL. A home, forever away from home.

I live alone in my quarters. Oh, there are others here on CIEL. I used to have a husband. Just a word now, like home, earth, country, self. Maybe everything we’ve ever experienced was just words.

“Record,” I whisper to the air in the room around me. This is like what prayer used to be.

“Audiovisualsensory?” A voice that sounds vaguely like my mother’s. Mother: another word and idea fading from memory.

“Yes,” I answer. The entire room vibrates, comes to life, activates to record every move and sound I make.

I mean to give myself two birthday presents before I’m forced to leave this existence and turn to dust and energy. The first is a recorded history. Oh, I know, there’s a good chance this won’t attract the epic attention I am shooting for. On the other hand, smaller spectacles have moved epochs. And anyway, I’ve got that gnawing human compulsion to tell what happened.

The second present is a more physical lesson. I am an expert at skin grafting, the new form of storytelling. I intend to leave the wealth of my knowledge and skill behind. And the last of my grafts I intend to be a masterwork.

I finish applying astringents. My flesh pinkens and screams its tiny objection. I position the full-length mirror in front of me—tilt it to bear the weight of my entire body’s reflection. The song plays and plays in my head and rings in my rib cage now and again.

I am without gender, mostly. My head is white and waxen. No eyebrows or eyelashes or full lips or anything but jutting bones at the cheeks and shoulders and collarbones and data points, the parts on our bodies where we can interact with technology. I have a slight rise where each breast began, and a kind of mound where my pubic bone should be, but that’s it. Nothing else of woman is left. I clear my throat and begin: “Herein is the recorded history of Christine Pizan, second daughter of Raphael and Risolda Pizan.” I think briefly of my dead parents, my dead husband, my dead friends and neighbors and all the people who peopled my childhood on Earth. Then I think of the crowd of clotted milk we’ve got left existing up here in CIEL. Briefly I want to vomit or cry.

My skin is… Siberian. Bleak and stinging. The faint burn of the astringent reminds me that I still have nerve endings. The tang in my nostrils reminds me that I still have sensory stimulation, and the data traveling to my brain reminds me that my synapses are firing yet. Still human, I guess.

The fern and I trade glances. What a pair—an intellectual who’s seen too much and a too-cloned plant. What fruitless survival. But after many years, I have finally arrived at a raison d’être. To tease a story from within so-called history. To use my body and art to do it. To raise words, to raise lives. And to resurrect a killing scene.

My nipples harden in the cool, dim room. Before me on the table, the tools of my trade, grafting, buzz to life. My torso, its virgin expanse flecked with goose bumps. The exquisitely small beauty of this reaction. Will goose bumps ever leave us?

In the mirror, I look into my eyes and begin my demonstration.

“Whatever you do, never use a strike branding instrument larger than a handheld wrench. Skin type is profoundly important; so are the depth of the cut, and how the wounds are treated while healing. Scars tend to spread when they heal. Electrocautery devices are infinitely preferable to strike branding.”

I mean to instruct.

I bring a handheld blowtorch to the head of a small branding glien.

“If you mean merely to make a symbol, a simple act of representation, multistrike branding is preferable to strike branding; you will have more flexibility and be able to give the illusion, at least, of style. For example, to get a V shape, it’s preferable to use two distinct lines rather than a single, V-shaped piece of metal. But if what you want involves intricate design, ornate shapes, the curves and dips of lines, syntax, diction, electrocautery is the obvious choice.” I pick up the electrocautery device. “So much like what used to be a pen…” I whisper, “only bolder.” I hold up my arms to show the variety of symbols: Hebrew, Native American, Arab, Sanskrit, Asian, mathematical and scientific.

“See? This is pi.”

My beautiful butterfly wings—adorned and phenomenal. I have reserved self-branding for hidden parts of my body. Until now.

I make my first marks. “Burning epidermis gives off a charcoal-like smell.” I pause a moment, at my reflection. Though we’ve all gotten used to the new look of ourselves, let’s face it: we are an ugly lot aloft in CIEL. Hairlessness happened first, then the loss of pigmentation. CIEL has presented humanity with new bodies: armies of marble-white sculptures. But nowhere near as beautiful as those from antiquity. Perhaps the geocatastrophe, perhaps one of the early viruses, perhaps errors in the construction of our environment, perhaps just karma for killing the natural world, did this to our bodies. I’ve wondered lately what’s next. What is beyond whiteness? Will we become translucent, next? No one on Earth was ever literally white. But that construct kept race and class wars and myths alive. Up here we are truly, dully white. Like the albumen of an egg.

I focus on my labor.

“Though it is technically possible to use a medical laser for scarification, this technique involves not an actual laser, but rather an electrosurgical pen that uses electricity to cut and cauterize the skin, similar to the way an arc welder used to work. Electric sparks jump from the handheld pen of the device to the skin, vaporizing it.”

I pick up my electrosurgical pen. I have become accustomed to not flinching, not grimacing, not displaying any physical response to the strange pain of it. What is pain compared to the cessation of lifestory.

“This is a more precise form of scarification, because it allows the artist to control the depth and nature of the damage being done to the skin. With traditional direct branding, heat is transferred to the tissues surrounding the brand, burning and damaging them. Electrosurgical branding, in contrast, vaporizes the skin so quickly and precisely that it creates little to no damage to the surrounding skin. You see?”

The skin near my collarbone screams. Tiny reddened hieroglyphics speckle my chest.

In a few hours, I will have completed a first stanza across the canvas of my breastplate.

“This reduces the pain and hastens the healing after the scarification is complete.”

I’m no longer sure exactly what the word pain means.

Everything in a life has more than one story layer. Like skin does: epidermis, dermis, subcutaneous or hypodermis. My history has a subtext.

“I first attracted attention in CIEL when I questioned the literary merit of a highly regarded author of narrative grafts—our now dictatorial leader, Jean de Men.”

I pause. “Hold.” The names of things. They betray our stupidity. CIEL, on Earth, was the name for an international environmental organization, but also for a young person’s video game before the Wars, before the great geological cataclysm. I remember. Now it’s what we call our floating world. What lame gods we’ve made.

And Jean de Men. I always found that name hilarious: John of men. He wrote what was considered the most famous CIEL narrative graft of our time. Which somehow became hailed, by consensus, as the greatest text of all time. As if time worked that way. As if earth’s history and everything in it had evaporated.

My head hurts.

As the trace of song in my brain returns in orchestral bursts to taunt me, I stride like an impatient warrior to my treasure chest, filled with the last of Earth-based items I could not part with. I shove the chest aside—for the real treasure is beneath it, secreted away in the floor in a storage hole that opens only at my voice.

Within, a plain cardboard box. Which is not nothing: in a paperless existence, cardboard is like… what? Oil. Gold. I open it, and dig through its contents—CDs, videos, other ancient recording media artifacts—as if my hands are anxious spiders. I know the object I want better than I know my own hand: a scuffed-up thumb drive. I hold the thumb drive near my jugular. Our necks, our temples, our ears, our eyes, all have data points to interface with media. Implants and nanotechnology lodged exclusively in our heads, pushing thought out, fluttering and alive near the surface of our skin.

My room ignites with holographic projections: fragments of Jean de Men’s evolution. It’s a perfect and terrifying consumer culture history, really. His early life as a self-help guru, his astral rise as an author revered by millions worldwide, then overtaking television—that puny propaganda device on Earth—and finally, the seemingly unthinkable, as media became a manifested room in your home, he overtook lives, his performances increasingly more violent in form. His is a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshipped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger. What was left? When the Wars broke out, his transformation to sadistic military leader came as no surprise.

We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.

Our existence makes my eyes hurt.

People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create. In all times.

I stare at a holographic snippet: Jean de Men’s head grotesquely bulbous, his garish face all forehead: “Your life is not for them, not for the putrid detritus resisting the future, clinging to Earth for a life that cannot be sustained. Earth was but an early host for our future ascension. Your life can have meaning and justification if you but turn your sights toward a higher truth.” I recognize these words from his weekly, unstoppable addresses that puncture all the rooms of CIEL, recitations of the best of his own quotes.

Bile bubbles up my throat.

I skip around the stupid recording, trying to locate that song, but I can’t find a trace of it. I start to second-guess myself: Why did I associate it with him? Had I imagined it as a ludicrous soundtrack to his rise to power? And, if not from then, from where? It was almost as if the song came from the cosmos around us, from the giant mouth or throat I sometimes imagine we are living within.

“Resume audio recording,” I say, taking a breath. “Go back. I first attracted attention in CIEL when I questioned the literary merit of a highly regarded author of narrative grafts, Jean de Men.” I wipe my brow. Though I haven’t perspired in years, I’m sure I feel moisture there.

“The graft he created was a romance graft, of all things, and it became quite famous: widely purchased, widely celebrated by so-called experts, widely and absurdly adulated, and though no one likes to admit this, widely exchanged between bargain shoppers who wanted knockoffs and cheaply made things amidst the smutted alleys of the black market. Everyone, everywhere, had to have it.

“Why? Because, even in this de-sexualized world, the idea of love and all her courtesans—desire, lust, eroticism, the chase, the capture, the devouring—had a stubborn staying power. In the end, for those of us who survived and ascended, who agreed to a finite life span in exchange for part of a life—our last wish didn’t turn out to be power or money or property or fame. Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any love, base love or heroic love or transgressive love or love that is a blind and lame and ridiculous lie—anything the opposite of alone and lonely and sexless, and the absence of someone to care about or talk to. The hunger for love replaced the hunger for god or science. The hunger for love became an opiate. In a world that had lost its ability to procreate, the story of love became paramount.

“It was a wish like the moth’s wish for flame. It was a wish to fuck the sun. To be burned alive inside a story where our bodies could still want and do what bodies want to do.

“You see, radical changes in the magnetic field induced radical changes in the morphology of life. That part everyone knew to expect. What no one knew for certain was how quickly these changes would occur after the geocatastrophe and the subsequent forms of radiation. These radical changes happened faster to us than they ever had to lab rats or chimps. That’s what happens when geocatastrophe is amplified by radiation. Put simply, we devolved. Our sexualities mutated and devolved faster than you can say fuck.

“The end of genitalia. Our bodies could no longer manifest our basest desires nor our lofty ideas of a future. In our desperation and denial, we turned to the only savior in sight, technology and those who most loudly inhabited it. After we tired of television, after we tired of films, after social media failed to feed our hungers, after holograms and virtual realities and pharmaceuticals and ever more mind-boggling altered states of being, someone somewhere looked down in despair at the sad skin of his or her own arm and noticed, for the first time, a frontier.”

I take a colossal breath of air and hold it. I hold my arms out in the air to either side of me. In the mirror I look vaguely like a butterfly. I blow the air out and watch my own skin sack deflate.

Skin. The new paper. Canvas. Screen.

In the form of scarification, we made art of what was left of our own dumb flesh.

“In the wake of our hunger, up here in our false heaven, skin grafts were born.” I pace the room, talking to no one, continuing my narration. “Grafts were skin stories: a distant descendant of tattoos, an inbred cousin of Braille. Before long, you could judge people’s worth and social class by the texture of their skin. The richest of us had skin like a great puffed-up flesh palimpsest—graft upon graft, deep as third-degree burns, healed in white-on-white curls and protrusions and ridges. One had to stare into a face for longer than a minute to find the wallows where eyes should be, the hole where a mouth still lived. Faces looked like white piles of doilies from some medieval era. Even hands bloomed with intricate and white raised welts and bumps.

“At the time, I was selling grafts myself: erotic micrografts particularly suited for that soft sweet hollow between the jaw and shoulder where, when a person turns their head in shyness or desire, a little flesh cup forms. Go ahead. Lean your chin to your own shoulder and you’ll have some idea of it.

“I’d made grafts into a fine little business for myself, of necessity: after my husband died in the first round of CIEL epidemics, I had to support myself.”

I try to say my husband’s name. I open my mouth in the shape of his name, and I still cannot enunciate it. His death happened so swiftly—like one sharp breath. My grief bore a hole down into me, replacing that former aperture of life.

“My grafts were of no outstanding literary merit, but they fed a need in people—these little love grafts they could touch during the day when they felt alone or sad, their eyes closed for a moment, their hands at their necks, their thoughts turned to some past amorous instant. Women in particular were my main clientele, but men bought them as well. I suppose they are sentimental. When most sensory experience has been obliterated, perhaps sentimentality is the only defense against loneliness.

“Men are among the loneliest creatures. They lose their mothers and cannot carry children, and have nothing to comfort themselves with but their vestigial cockular appendages. This is perhaps the reason they move ever warward when they are not moving fuckward. Now that the penis is defunct, a curling-up little insect, well, who can blame them for their behaviors?

“My dead husband was formerly a skin-graft author as well. Only his grafts were glorious: irreverent, debased, disgustingly pleasurable sex grafts for genital areas only. What was left of the penis, the cunt, the ass, under the secret cups of breasts, between the thighs, any erogenous zone. It became considered guttery to wear his work. It’s tempting to record a history entirely about that…” I can feel my own eyes brightening.

“Worth mention: the skull grafts of the most affluent are perhaps the most ostentatious—or hideous, depending on your point of view and your ideas about class division—for they tower and curl like those great powdered wigs from history, falling down the backs of men and women as if their bones and brains leaked out from the mountainous tops of their bald heads and tumbled slowly down their necks, or like sea-foam tumors pouring their way toward their backs. They have their skin stretched and then branded. And stretched again and branded. Think of it!

“I don’t know why I started dreaming of oceans and mountains just now. There are no mountains or oceans here… nothing of their majesty to believe in…”

I hear my voice trail off. “Pause.” My digression gives me a pain between my shoulders, like someone pressing a gun between my breasts. I stare out of the window into everything that is nothing. The gnarled dot of Earth stares back at me like a wrong marble.

I would like, before my death, to step on Earth again. But it is not possible.

Something of a secret contemplation sits in my imagination in this last year of my life. The woman whose story broke the world. They say she is dead. We all witnessed her execution, or its representation. But people will make belief out of anything, especially if it comes with a good story, and despite my cynicism and age, I want to believe in her. Like the way old people on Earth used to turn to a story we made called god. But to speak her name or circulate her image or story beyond the endlessly represented image and story of her “official” death, is a crime. So I hold the thought and words in my head and heart. I clear my throat. “Resume recording.”

“I am a businesswoman. I write for pay. My little ballads have their niche. Near the neck. The jugular.”

Something catches my eye again.

Ah. There is a spider making its way across a web from the fern to my arm. I hold still. The spider arrives. It tickles. I watch it make its way from my wrist bone toward the crook of my arm. I wonder how many spiders we have left. Whether they, too, will someday be gone, like animals and plants and all the things we so desperately tried to export and overclone in the sky. A laughable Noah’s Ark—all the undesirables cloned and perfected! Though I must admit, the spiders are doing better than the butterflies. They keep cocooning and emerging half formed, caught between larva and winged thing. It’s one of the saddest things to behold, as they lie in their crippled fluttering, half-flighted, reminding us that evolution is filled with deathstory.

This stanza on my body needs to heal before I can continue with the graft. Again, I apply a mild astringent. The sting is brief like a whisper. I blow on my own chest.

In the mirror, everything on my body is red and swollen and illegible. But words are coming. Soon there will be raised skinwords, whiter than white. Replacing all trace of breast and woman.

I’m old enough to have read books. Seen films. Studied art and history. I smile. I remember everything. Yet that story, of a girl-warrior killed on the cusp of her womanhood, and what happened after—it tilted the world on its axis, didn’t it? Tilted the lives of those on Earth, which glides still below us. Tilted the lives of the whitened bodies dying out above, we pathetic angels.

But not all legend becomes history, and not all literature deserves to become legend. “Resume.”

“The work of the famous Jean de Men—remember him?—had long been deemed the gold standard of narrative grafts, and specifically of romance grafts. His creations had the added enticement of fitting perfectly around a person’s torso; receiving one of his grafts, it was said, was like being wrapped in a love story, like receiving a long-awaited embrace.

“All of it—and this is where things began to catch fire—I considered utter pig shit.” A pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs. Or any animals.

“I know. Who am I to challenge him, this prize celebrity of the surviving CIEL elite? And yet, I say, pig shit. The reason being this: all the women in his work demanded to be raped. All the women in his stories used language and actions designed to sanction, validate, and accelerate that act. All the women served but one purpose in the plot—to offer their small red flaps of flesh to be parted by the cock, to allow their hole to be plumbed, unto the little death—and when the men were done with them, the women were discarded. Killed or left for dead, impregnated or driven crazy, hidden or locked up by marriage or prison, relegated to a life of sexual commerce in order to survive. In his world, for his women, happily ever after meant rape, death, insanity, prison, or marriage. He took this broken romance trope and elevated it to the level of an almighty text, and thus, it permeated consciousness. Became a habit of being. Power.

“Therefore in the court of public consumption, writer to writer, I endlessly leveled my charges against the celebrity: egregious gender nostalgia was where I started. From there I evolved my accusations to include insidious forms of subjugation, narrative hate speech, representations manifesting brutal atrocities committed between people, and finally, murderously mythologizing what it meant for us to ascend to CIEL… creating a violently false fiction that we would somehow save humanity. Despite my efforts, I could not topple the prevailing power model, one man, his machines in a sky world, his flock of fucking wealthy sheep with nowhere else to go. Creating our different art forms and setting them against each other was the only war I could wage. Representation against representation.

“My little erotic grafts changed form. Now they were armed. I married Eros with Thanatos and began re-creating the story of our bodies, not as procreative species aiming for survival, but rather, as desiring abysses, creation and destruction in endless and perpetual motion.

“Like space.

“In my literary resistance movement, hundreds of women swore their allegiance to the cause. They left lovers and husbands and children. They shifted loyalty in their reading first, and then hungrily, their lives. There was, after all, nowhere to put their former efforts at becoming beautiful sexual objects, or lovers of men, or mothers. Those of gender fluid persuasions could finally breathe as the rest of us caught up to their lived experiences. More surprisingly, some men of open minds started contacting me to discuss ideas. And in the course of these meetings, a common conviction formed among us. A new philosophy took hold and pulsed: the idea that men and women—or the distinction between men and women—was radically and forever dead. We organized. We agitated. We formed secret societies of flesh truths. We held midnight pantomimed orgies exploring our newly discovered bodies—perhaps we were some new species, some new genus with alternative sexual opportunities! We celebrated ourselves with illegal contraband, ever trying to keep the flames of our humanity, our drives and pleasures and pains, alive. None more than my beloved Trinculo.

“What gave my little literary challenge epic impact? What added epic weight to literary representation, was skin. The medium itself was the human body. Not sacred scrolls. Not military ideologies or debatable intellectual theories. Just the only thing we had left, and thus the gap between representation and living, collapsed. In the beginning was the word, and the word became our bodies.

“The protest we mounted, out here among the stars and radiation, excited me to no end. It became an underground sensation. My work did not so much gain in popularity, rather, it set people on fire.” The word fire seems a fitting place to pause my audio recording.

In the dim light of the CIEL room, in this last year of my life, I feel the skin between my shoulders ache, from my neck to the bottom edges of my rib cage. It reddens. And swells. I stare at my torso in the mirror and it almost seems to pulse. To be burned alive with meaning; the opposite of Joan’s death. A fire to replace what used to burn between our legs. But I already know the endgame of the battle I am waging. I already know what I want.

The spider—I can feel it at my neck. I capture it by cupping my hand at the very spot where I would wear one of my own skin grafts. I consider squeezing it dead in my palm. What’s one more dead spider clone? But I do not. I carry it carefully in its hand house to the ridiculous stick of a fern. It crawls up the shaft, then immediately dangles from it with a silken thread.

The will to live is so strong. I feel the sporadic waves in my ears; the blasted song in my head is receding but not leaving.

I want her story back.

The one that was taken from her and replaced with heretic. Eco-terrorist. Murderous maiden who made the earth scream.

I want to use my body to get it.

Chapter Two

My door juts open without warning, sending the spider on the fern skittering across its web. I quickly draw an azure silken robe around my night’s work. My body stings and itches against the fabric. I hear his bellow before I see him.

“Christ! Come here this instant, you reeling-ripe dove-egg. Get here and lay me a kiss. I do believe I’ve outdone myself today.”

No matter how often he calls me “Christ” instead of Christine, it makes me smile. And every time I see him, my mind cleaves, half shooting back to the past, half lodged in the present, shaking.

What is a love story?

Every time I see him, which is every morning and day and night, I think of all the love stories that go untold. The broken love stories, the damaged ones, the ones that don’t fit the old tropes. Did any real life love ever fit a trope? My body is stabbed through with a recurring flashback. How deeply I fell for him on Earth when I was fourteen. I can see us both, gangly and awkward, both of us with shoulder-length hair, all elbows and shoulders and knees, really we looked like siblings. How we spent every morning and all day and most of all the nights together, in the woods or at riverbeds or at school or holidays or climbing out of our bedrooms and meeting up for invented adventures or painting or drawing or reading or stargazing or walking and doing nothing but breathing—I remember eventually feeling like he was the very air I breathed, the matter of my molecules, the pulse at my wrists and neck and the blood in my ears, and as my body surged from girl to woman, I idiotically lunged at him one day after school in a plain and grassy field, my face filled with girl-flush, my legs shaking, my arms grabbing at him, I half smeared my smile into his and wrong kissed him. And then he stiffened and shot away from me—the look on his face made an uncharitable distance between us, so vast, so vast, like Neptune, that ice giant.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” is all he said, and my first and deepest love of my life, my all-consuming beloved, froze in front of me as the beginning of a man who did not love women. Physical fact. Suddenly even his skin looked like it was pulling away from me.

“I love you,” he said backing away, his eyes drowning in their sockets. “I love you,” he said running from me. And my world ended.

But my love didn’t. Not then, not into my marriage later in life, not now. But there is no word or body for it. We simply both ended up through a trick of fate or fortune together on CIEL. And though we would never be lovers, for different reasons now, neither of us was without desire. His bloomed into a symbolic unending lasciviousness. Mine atrophied into an ache I’ll take to my death.

Now he squeezes his former desire into old dead languages and base, carnal, ever-more obscene utterances as well as objects and technologies, like a fuck-you to this idiotic space-condom we live within.

I burn.

One might say we are desire’s last stand.

There the man stands—although the word man only approximates the beloved creature before me. For he has fully embraced the embodiment of creature, having lost all heart with regard to humanity up here. For clothing he wears only shoes, shiny pointed black boats fit for a dandy in any age. His skin shines the gleaming waxy white of years of skin grafts, his head is as bald as an infant bottom, yet bulging here and there with protruding, irrational grafts. His watery blue eyes are still visible beneath the odd furrows and folds of flesh. He holds his arms out theatrically, thrusts his hips toward me to display himself, and smiles. He could become a gargoyle, and I’d yet love him.

Indeed, what is before me is something of a grotesque. Somewhere near where his stomach should be, I see what could only be a new invention: an intricate belt, silver, bloodred, and black, secured by leather straps and silver chains that web across his chest and shoulders like some deranged spider’s design. In front, at the sides, and it looks to me even in the rear, the belt grows appendages about a foot in length. Each appendage looks to be soldered and carved with great attention and detail—each extends out away from his body enough so that every move he makes creates a kind of half-dangling, half-dancing effect. Two of the jutting objects are more or less cylindrical, ending at their tips with pewter-balled roundness. The other two—shaped a bit like gourds, and as splendid as the cylindrical appendages in color and shine and detail—dangle from the harness, and seem to have small silver motors attached to them. He flips a couple of switches and his hips begin to buzz and whir like some gigantic and wrong insect. For a moment I think he might take flight.

A great shift in the air and space of the room accompanies his entrance. “Well?” he shouts above the din, gyrating and whizzing.

I bring my hand to my neck in mock surprise. “Jesus, Trinculo, have you been injured? Or are you being punished? What on earth is all”—I gesture around him—“that?”

“Ah!” he shouts, stepping toward me gingerly, “but we’re no longer on the Earth, now, are we? This, my full-gorged lady,” he says, approaching, “is the answer to your prayers.”

“I haven’t prayed for years,” I say, ducking around a chair to avoid him. There is no game I will not play with him. No pornographic desire I won’t willingly perform.

He growls. “Come ride me, dewberry.” On Earth, when we’d been so young, he’d taken delight in a digital application that generated medieval obscenities and slurs. He’s carried the habit up into CIEL, into our idiotic adulthood, our doomed present-tense, and I love every word of it. “I’ll bet all the sun in the system I can make you scream god before the night’s gone. But say my name again! I love to hear it.”

“Trinculo!” I shout, then laugh and come back around the chair. I try to embrace him, but find it impossible. “Now, turn that thing off and sit down. Talk to me like a man.”

“Like a what?”

Just then we hear the mechanized sound of the evening gong, signaling the coming arrival of night sentries for the evening lockdown. “Shut it off,” I hiss, wincing at the thought of him being carried off to solitary, yet again. Though his eyes remain playful, the cost of his years of imprisonment and torture is beginning to show. The veins at his temples look crooked and rubbled. His hands shake when he tries to be still. Sometimes, his jaw locks midsentence.

I can see all of him. Trinculo is a pilot of the highest pedigree and expertise. More than that, he is an engineer, as well as an inventor and illustrator whose talents far exceed those of anyone around him. At times people regard him as mad—until his ideas are put to the test, and voilà! His genius is confirmed again. And yet, over the years, his antics have overtaken his contributions to culture, even though his mind is keener than a Da Vinci or Hawking, historically.

The line between genius and madness has always been as thin as an epidermal layer. The truth is Trinculo designed and engineered CIEL, this floating death house. And, though only he and I know it, he still has the knowledge to redirect its aims.

He deactivates his machine. For a moment, I have to admit, it feels like all hope and joy has left the room. “Sit down like a man? Never! As a genital entrepreneur, however, I’d be delighted to talk with you,” he answers. “Besides, I have news.” He sits and crosses his legs as if he’s the most normal person in the world.

“Genital entrepreneur, is it?” I say, lowering my voice. We don’t have long before he’ll have to go.

“At your service. If you will only open your imagination. And your legs.”

“You know as well as I do there’s next to nothing left between my legs. Or yours.” The sentence makes a funeral in the room. Our whole lives and losses reduced to a farce. Comedy and tragedy lock in a kiss.

“All the more reason to climb aboard, my skittish little dreamer. You can be the first astronaut,” he says playfully. His voice and words make my whole body ring. He makes me laugh. Sometimes I think that’s the deepest love of all.

“Trinc,” I say stoically. “We’ve been out here for years and years.” I turn to study the nothingness out the window. My eye falls on the spider making its way back to its perch. I think about the pull of the dead sun and our useless bodies and about what an ironic joke stars are: dead stuff that tricks you into believing in magical light.

“Did you not hear me?” Trinc says, settling himself more carefully into a chair like a human toolbox. “I said I have news.”

“What gossip have you been gathering tonight?” I suddenly feel the need for a drink. “Cognac?” I offer. “I’ve got about a case and a half of real Courvoisier left—then it’s all synthetics, dull as everything else around here—no sign of flesh and blood…” I gesture to my colorless grafted body, letting my robe fall open. Modesty left the arena long ago. Besides, Trinc is the only thing left of the word love in my body. He is one of the few people I will share my work with before unveiling it to the public.

Trinc bolts from his seat, his second, mechanical self clamoring around him like a fanfare. “What is that?” he says breathlessly, pointing to my latest self-publishing efforts. “Your breasts…”

I look down at my still raw work. “Used-to-be breasts,” I correct him. “Who knew that what once gave life would make such a lovely canvas? But, listen, Trinc, wait until I’ve completed this manuscript,” I say, closing my robe. “It’ll be worth it, I promise.”

“Not even a peek?”

“Not even.” I walk over to my dwindling cache of alcohol, root around like an archaeologist, and retrieve the familiar bottle in its velvet pouch. I scan the room for glasses to drink from, then decide that tonight can be a share-the-bottle night. Something about the work, still stinging on my flesh, something about Trinc’s pseudolascivious new contraption—it was all making me melancholy and death-conscious. Yet I like it—that feeling that we should pay attention to tiny moments, since the world can change faster than the strum of a spider’s webstring, and that maybe, just maybe, our last act could still be a good angry fuck.

“What news?” I say, opening the bottle and filling my throat. We don’t have much time, after all; I can hear the sentries already, making their curfew rounds a floor below us. The liquid travels down my throat in a heatwet. I close my eyes. I hear Trinc breathing. For a nanosecond, I feel the story I have grafted rising up from my body like a third person in the room with us. Then he turns his ridiculous machine back on, as a wild cacophony fills the room. “Are you insane?” I hissed. “They’ll put you away again.”

But there he is, stubbornly human, in front of me again, nearly taking flight, laughing his motherloving ass off. For a moment he looks like a boy. His eyebrows raised. His cheeks flush. His smile threatens to overtake his face. Like the girls and boys we all were, once, on a planet orbiting the sun.

“Relax, before you go all onion-eyed!” he yells at me. “You tickle-brained harlot!”

And here I burst into laughter—how can I help it, with this absurdity whirring around me like a giant bad moth experiment? I spit out my mouthful of drink. We’ll probably both get solitary.

“We’ll not be moldwarp tonight!” he purrs. “Mount the table and spread your legs, Christine. I’ll bore a new hole into your luscious otherworldly flesh.”

I follow his commands. The game of heterosexual desire that will never consummate cleaves my mind. My heart a dumb lump beating my chest up. And yet it feels good to not think, to let the alcohol restore my body to numbness—good enough that I turn away with faux modesty, pour some alcohol onto my fresh graft and let the sweet hurt flood my torso. I mount the table. I spread my legs as wide as I can manage. But his own contraption makes the old familiar position nearly impossible.

Slopped in Courvoisier, I have an idea. “You go over there, and I’ll come at you with a running jump.” Though I can already hear the buzzy whir of mechanical sentries approaching, I run at Trinc like I used to run at bushes as a child—willfully, with full faith, both that they’d catch me and that I’d be covered in tiny cuts and scrapes. “If you drop me I’ll murder you,” is the last thing I say.

As he positions himself directly at me, pewtered tips gleaming black and blue, the door bursts open and gray-white sentries pile in, rifles aimed at our imagined copulation. I run anyway.

He catches me.

Just like a hero from the old, dead books. He does not penetrate me, but as I clasp my legs around him, bear-hugging his torso and burying my face in the folds of his grafts, he whispers into my ear, raising every hair and fast-devolving erogenous cell to the surface of my body.

“She’s alive. Your dead icon? She’s alive.”

Close by, on a nearly invisible web, a spider’s eight eyes fix on the action and widen.

Chapter Three

Before one is condemned to bothersome incarcerations for minor crimes, before one is relegated to a cell like a child or a dog receiving a time-out, one is funneled into a private CIEL Liberty Room.

O Panoptes, Greek giant of a hundred eyes, how they’ve multiplied your vision. Embedded within the larger honeycomb of CIEL is the Panopticon, rising up in the center of everything, littered with rows of cells set in a circle. The Panopticon allows for continual surveillance, since recording devices stand in for eyes. Inside one’s regular cell, the surveillance is continual. All of our cells have three walls, the fourth opening up to the inner surveillance of the Panopticon. Nestled within the Panopticon are a lesser number of enclosed Liberty Rooms. In this purgatorial white space—white floor, white walls, white ceiling, like being inside a 3-D piece of paper—one is given the “opportunity” to explain one’s crimes, revise one’s values, repent. The old sin-and-redemption dynamic. The entire surface area of the Liberty Room is AV-sensitive. A person’s heart rate and biologic status, and even thoughts and dreams are recorded and assessed.

Theft, assault, and murder are still punishable, but rarely occur on CIEL—there is very little race, class, or gender distinction among us any longer, the wealth distribution ranges from affluent to very affluent. Thus violence between people meandering around each other like elaborate lace figures fizzled out. Theological insurrections or holy wars are the stuff of historical dramas, staged with spectacular effects for ravenous audiences. The various religions that were the source of so much war on Earth historically went out with a whimper when we realized our sky world was, to put it bluntly, dull as death. God has no weight in space except as reinvented entertainment. Trying to cheat your ending, trying to secretly live beyond the age of fifty, well, that is more than punishable. There is no place to hide or run to in a closed system. Your death, fittingly, is staged and broadcasted with great choreography and pomp. Endings are theatrical spectacles.

So what crimes are left? Are we just pacifists and dullards? Chief among the CIEL offenses are any acts resembling the act of sex, the idea of sex, the physical indicators of sexuality. All sex is restricted to textual, and all texts are grafts. Our bodies are meant to be read and consumed, debated, exchanged, or transformed only cerebrally. Any version of the act itself is an affront to social order, not to mention a brutal reminder of our impotency as a nonprocreating group.

Another offense carrying dramatic weight is any attempt at anything but blind allegiance when it comes to the official deathstory of Joan of Dirt—the last great story before our ascension. The death that gave us life.

Neither Trinculo nor I have any intention of repenting anything. I sit in the white doing nothing but feeling my own arms and legs, running my fingers up and down my body. Bringing the flesh story silently to life. The room’s censors blink and hiss. I smile at my own illegibility. There is no scanner that can read flesh words.

In an effort to make the Liberty Room as receptive as possible to frightened accusees, to encourage confessions I suppose, the sounds of space are piped in on a permanent basis. The sound is like a cross between distressed whalesong, or my memory of whalesong, and irregular high-pitched tinnitus, interrupted by low vibrating moans. As I sit alone in my Liberty Room, I concentrate on imagining a kind of experimental soundtrack, matching the sounds with the images forming in my head and to the graftstory under my fingers. And always the haunting bursts of a forgotten song sporadically ripping in and out of my brain’s audio.

I stare hard at the white walls. Floor. Ceiling. I mean to face off with them. If they want everything of me—every heartbeat, facial tic, thought, or fart—I’ll give it to them. On my own terms.

First, I strip. Then, I mold myself ass side down to the white floor of the Liberty Room and masturbate.

Oh I don’t mean I somehow grow a clitoris back or slit open my own crotch to re-create a pair of flaming red lips. I mean that I drive my hand between my legs and use my middle finger on my right hand as conductor; I haven’t forgotten the symphony just because my body has changed. I mean I spread my legs as wide as I can without dislocating my hips. I mean that I arch my back and thrust my hips up toward nothingness. I make the mouth shapes of oh god oh god. I haven’t lost that place in my brain where fantasy lives and thrives, screaming. Trinculo and another man with cocks hard and purple with blood, their skin slick with sweat and longing. Trinculo behind the other man rubbing the meat of his chest and pinching each nipple, then mapping his stomach with one hand making its way down to his cock, the beauty of an about to burst cock, Trinculo’s hand wrapping around the thick flesh while he presses his own blood and muscle up against and then into the man again and again. The man’s head rocked back so hard his jaw looks broken. His cock extends and explodes. I mouth the air with my eyes closed. All my fantasies involve Trinculo fulfilling his desires while mine are ecstatically excluded. I’ve forged my desire from deprivation. I linger in the ecstatic state. I touch death. I shudder violently.

I make such a show of my autoeroticism that the telltale red observational beam shoots on and scans every biological thing about me. I laugh. The light jumps around erratically. All they’ll get out of me is an irregular heartbeat. I am not wet or sweating, but in my mind I lie spread-eagle, gushing and spent.

My crotch itches. I scratch it, eyeing the room’s perimeters. In the Liberty Room, as I sit illegally aching for Trinculo, something scrapes in the corner. I shake my head to ascertain whether or not it is real. It is. Is it some idiotic bot they’ve planted in here with me? I rise and inspect the space in the corner. The scratching continues, and then a small black hole about the size of a thumb’s head opens up where white meets white. Small but real. And then, through the black hole, comes my spider, carrying on its back a sensory disc about the size of what I recall as an olive. I almost think I hear the corner laughing. How giddy I am for the company of my spider, strange companion. Still naked, I take the disc and place it at the spot between my ear and my temple, one of the many data points where our nano implants can interface with media—place it confidently, for the gift can only have come from one person: Trinculo.

The hologram shoots open slightly in front of my face. I smile. Of course it is this: one of the underground rebel clips of Joan, blurry and with a jump cut to her death, but unmistakably her. Bless him. The world’s most bizarre love note.

Her space-black hair. Her face, filling the screen. Before they burned her, they beat her. Bruises blossoming around her eyes and nose and mouth. And yet there is something in the pupils of a person with no hope of survival left. It’s something like a black hole. When she spoke, she looked right through me, her words resounding through my spine:

“I am not afraid; I was born to do this. Children say that people are killed sometimes for speaking the truth. I say children have been used as the raw material of war. Think of chimney sweeps or child laborers whose hands were small enough to handle certain machinery in Nazi death camps. Think of blood diamonds and sex and drug trafficking driving world economies. Think of children in Sierra Leone, Somalia, the Sudan. In the Congo, Ivory Coast, Burundi. In Iraq, Iran, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka. In Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In Greece, Italy, Chechnya, Russia, Ireland, in the United Kingdom, the United States, Colombia, Haiti. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. China. The Earth wants her children back.”

I remember what and where her first action was: thousands of improvised explosive devices covering the Tar Sands in Alberta like malignant cancer cells invading a body. And I remember the last battle of the Wars, on the same landscape, her epic face-off with Jean de Men.

In the face of a final battle, sat the Alberta Tar Sands, she dropped to the dirt with her entire body and rested there, facedown, arms and legs spread. And didn’t move. An army of resistance soldiers creating a sea of human protection around her.

For days.

First, a series of violent solar storms occurred—one atop the other—and for a while everyone thought, My god, a natural disaster, beyond imagination. The skies wore clouds in colors we’d never seen before.

Then the world’s super volcanoes—the enormous calderas, Yellowstone, Long Valley, Valles, North Sumatra’s Lake Toba, Taupo, Aira in Japan—erupted in chorus, almost as if by cosmic design. Tsunamis, hurricanes, and typhoons followed as if in accompaniment. Ice caps speed-melted. The waters rose. Not gradually, as they had been, swallowing up coasts and islands worldwide, but in a matter of weeks. In America, New York and the upper and lower East Coast, Florida gone, San Francisco and most of California drowned and sank, Atlantis-like. Geocatastrophe.

The sun’s eye smote. Organic processes like photosynthesis and ecosystems, dead. The relation between Earth and its inhabitants, dead.

War, dead.

Earth reduced to a dirt clod, floating in space.

The atrocity of speed in destruction.

The magnitude of those days still makes me hold my breath.

The white of this room and the white of my skin makes me sick.

A fierce rage blooms in me. I think perhaps it is courage. When I’ve seen enough, I remove the sensory disc, place it in my mouth with an exaggerated gesture, and swallow.

For an instant I close my eyes and my entire body remembers the smell. The taste. The sound. How the tips of my fingers itched at her burning. How hope of any sort—faith, desire, wonder, imagination—died. That moment, captured obscenely, enforced upon us for years.

Another cruel red light, something like what used to be the red dot of a scope rifle, accompanied by a deafening buzz, signals that my observation in the Liberty Room has concluded. My repentance never came. Likely it’s back to my regular cell. If anything, I’ve made things worse for myself. For a brief moment I wish that they would just shoot me. Let me die with my imagined whetted desire, Trinculo, and the image of Joan of Dirt.

Instead I redress. I feel the sensory disc making its way slowly down my throat, as if I’ve swallowed a large dog biscuit. I am indeed remanded to my cell. If they want my little love note, they’ll have to literally retrieve it from my shit or cut it out of me.

The spider. It follows me. I find that I want it to.

Chapter Four

The song haunts me still, a prison of its own. Great swaths of orchestral thrum come and go in bursts. Louder than before. Perhaps I am losing my mind.

My regular cell in the Panopticon has the look of an antiquated gas chamber. At least what I’ve read and imagined about gas chambers on Earth—I never actually saw one, although I vaguely remember representations in film and television. And, anyway, I’m remembering wrong. This isn’t a gas chamber, it is more like a three-walled lethal injection room. With a cot in the center, where the condemned can be restrained with leather straps—arms making a human cross, the shape of Jesus—and horrid chemicals pumped into veins. Usually there is a viewer window for witnesses to watch the condemned exit human life. As far back as humans go, we have held such rituals. I don’t care which careful slice of history you choose to cling to, there is no part of being human that does not include the death spectacle: the resort to killing, through war or “justice” or revenge. Curious ways of practicing our humanity, we humans have.

The walls of this room are a shade of dark nauseating green, cast in hard geometric tiles. The floor, an equally attractive mold-colored cement. The toilet and sink a dead varnished metal. I begin at one end and walk the distance to the opening—no door, no wall, just an electric field that would be like walking into a fire for anyone who cared to try it.

Six strides.

Think of all the experimentation earthlings did on animals for all those years. Human prisoners had luxurious surroundings compared to the tiny compartments and cages reserved for animals such as primates and mice doomed to experimentation, or bred for human consumption: chickens, pigs, lambs, cows. The fastest way to drive living beings mad, then as today, is to confine them to a small, stimulus-less place and deprive them of any interaction with their species. We’ve taken the idea one more step. We can see one another. Hear one another. But we cannot reach one another, which creates a heightened longing impossible to name.

Here in the Panopticon, prisoners are held in clear view of the system of disembodied technologies standing guard over them, and the resulting self-consciousness is hard to take. That endless electrical pulse gets inside you. My heartbeat and breathing bounce off the very walls of the room, echoing back at me. The Cyclops eyes of the machines with their eight dangling arms—systems designed to keep the vital organs of the facility in working order, and its puny inhabitants alive—beam straight through me. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to shit and urinate for an all-seeing, nonhuman audience.

More than the machines, I see every other living inhabitant. We peer out stupidly at one another, waiting for food or changes in light—or, worse, trying not to look at each other at all, but not looking is next to impossible when you’re facing other eyes and bodies. Every time I come here, and this is the fifth time, I think of elephants and chimps and dolphins. Of all the animals I’d read about in books and historical media, zoo-bound elephants and chimpanzees and glassed-in dolphins were the ones that raised the greatest compassion within me. Even thinking about it, I find that my throat locks up. It’s unbearable. Any idiot can read about the intelligence of those animals. What we did to them—and to so-called lesser humans, too—my god, what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world’s population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites—is proof enough that we don’t deserve a future.

I look out at our community. All our naked, white waxen bodies gleaming in artificial light. Our faces ever receding as indicators of our humanity. One floor above, I see a man (is it a man?) directly across from me. His grafts extend from his eyebrows upward, from his ears outward, like waves of sea foam. He must be very wealthy.

I search and search for my beloved. Then I clap eyes on him. Two floors down, several rooms over, far left—I see Trinculo. His apparatus is gone—I feel a pang of rage and grief at the thought that it may have been destroyed—and yet the sight of him fills me with relief. I will him to see me, but he is already ahead of me. He stands perfectly straight, naked, spreads his legs for dramatic effect, and salutes me, then bows with tremendous flourish. Finally, voiceless and yet eloquent beyond measure, he farts, loudly. Though I can barely hear it from where I sit, the gesture gives me a kind of painful pleasure. When you have loved someone for a very long time, intimacy is in everything. I hope he smears his cell walls with shit, a futuresque de Sade.

I stare out at the machines and other technological forms, the blazing screens, white or black, reducing existence to data and light and hum. The odd heads and eyes and arms protruding from a central system. The gleaming colored wires snaking forever, coiling and braiding like strands of DNA. In their presence, I only ever feel biosynthetic. Maybe there never has been a time when we were human apart from this. Maybe we were always meant to come to this part of our own story, where the things we thought we created were revealed to have been within us all along, our brains simply waiting for us to recognize the corresponding forms of space and technology “out there” that we dumbly misread as distinctly human organs.

Still, being stared at by artificial intelligence is unnerving. I walk to the oddly comforting cot—with its three-layered mattress, cozy comforter, and equally luxurious pillow; had someone somewhere secretly loved The Princess and the Pea?—and put my back to it all. I pull the plush cover over my head and instantly feel as if I am in another world.

At some point my data will be delivered to me and I’ll have an idea of how long my stay will be. Likely not long, I know; my only infraction was entertaining one of Trinculo’s endless dramas and making an ass out of myself in the Liberty Room. Though they will of course find the Courvoisier, which saddens me. Drinking it always made my lips burn in a way that brought back memories of Earth, and I liked to be drunk with Earth memories. Under my blanket I repicture it.

A trial.

Hers.

Like death days, the CIEL Tribunals were all quite theatrical, but none more than Joan’s. Political power, in the conventional sense, had by then been replaced by digitalized matrices and algorithm systems, and so the Tribunal was presided over by seven holographic faces, each perched atop its stark white column: an obscene techno-burlesque of ancient Greece. This theatrical structure was wholly Jean de Men’s figuration. His theory seemed to be that a return to Greek drama, the birth of Western Culture, was how to begin on CIEL, how to structure a social order based entirely on representation—including but not limited to the performance of grafts. Next to the power of grafts, dramatic performance signaled the highest form of realizing reality. When you remember that upon our arrival to CIEL each and every one of us was likely scared shitless, you’ll understand how easy it was for him to invent any social order he liked. He simply replaced all gods, all ethics, and all science with the power of representation, a notion born on Earth, evolved through media and technology, and perfected in space.

I saw most of the reproductions of the trial, not just those put on public display for years and years, but the CIEL media’s reanimation of the original trial, a tradition they continued annually for years, a show mounted in the guise of news.

Trinculo and I had watched those reanimations together; the spectacle brought us to tears even before she opened her mouth to speak. Her countenance; her rigid jawline; her black, sunken eyes; her thick and wild hair, ebony as space; her dead stare into the emptiness that was us, her audience. We saw the ghosts of her history around her: butterflies accompanying her standard on battlefields; dead infants yawning and reviving in her presence. She had inspired hundreds of thousands of rebels to fight for the freedom to exist, even on a dying planet, without tyranny.

Did we feel remorse? In the moment, I am ashamed to admit, we did not. We felt as if she were giving us back something we had lost. We felt desire and nostalgia. For the accused, the residual wholly human who were the rebel survivors, memory was a mysterious but tangible lifeline to a breathable past. Imagine! A past one lived in and died for. A past recollected in our living matter, our cells and pores and neurons.

In the moment then, if I’m being honest with myself, what I felt the hardest was a kind of glory in her death. As if there was something of us in it, something still righteous, something still tied to Earth. Remorse came later. And a guilt larger than a black hole swallowing half of space. Our tears and rage endlessly sucked out of us by space.

For us, she was the force of life we could never return to. The trial, and its subsequent reanimations, were our only remaining connection to the material world. What greedy, envious angels we’d become—wingless wax figures. Half of us walked around hoping someone would throw themselves to the floor and masturbate themselves to death.

The memory brought sweat to my skin. I felt it all over. My ears. My upper lip. My neck. Beneath, where my breasts used to bloom. My thighs, my abdomen, between my legs, where a deeply wanting cavern used to cave toward my soul. I spread my legs just imagining it. And then I ran my fingers lightly, so lightly across my own text, the part of the story that was her trial, my skin coming alive under my fingers.

I clench my teeth so hard in my mouth my temples ache. I rest my hand near my hip bone. I remember it so achingly, so physically. When Trinculo and I would finally retire from each installment of her trial, we would throw ourselves at each other. We’d cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks and sewed-up dry cunts, a girlwoman whose body was in defiance of every stab at “living” we took and failed at on a daily basis. We’d drink and writhe together, Trinc and I, displacing our desires by longing for her breasts and hair and cleft, as if her genitalia were as important as her bravery and power. Unlike those in power here on CIEL, reproduction wasn’t what we mourned. We mourned the carnal. Societies may be organized around procreation, but individuals are animals. I think we craved her sexuality—her sexual reality. The fact of her body. Not particularly female, leaning toward male, an exquisite androgyny. Her head of thick black hair a mighty emblem of desire. I even had a fantasy of cutting a lock of it for myself, to keep and love—as eternally as a lover’s. Something human of hers, to touch and have and hold.

Underneath my comforter, I lift my hand up to my neck, to the beginning of her story on my body. Her story rises up from my skin as if to answer, flesh to flesh. I close my eyes. When you shut your eyes, the universe is internal. I can feel her story underneath my fingers, burned there, rising from my flesh. I can enter a world not limited by any cell, for the mind, the body, even the eye, is a microcosm of the cosmos.

Underneath my hand, grafted on my flesh canvas, since they’d taken it from her, I’d written her girlhood.

Chapter Five

The first time the blue light flickered alive in Joan’s head, the trees around her crackled and sent her skin shivering. There were still trees, back then. Unusual and seismic prevolcanic activity across the world smoldered the sky. The sun still hung in the sky like a sun, but its light had already begun to fade from bright yellow to muted sepia that lessened the color of colors. Animals still lived, though species were dying off a little at a time. Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France. The countryside of a seemingly ordinary child.

As a girl, she went into the woods to play one of her favorite alone games. The kind of game played by children who talked to themselves and secreted away in their own imaginations. There are entire populations of children living such lives, on the periphery.

In the woods she buried what would have looked like a pile of twigs at the base of an evergreen, in a shallow hole she’d dug in the ground. She liked to dig them back up and rebury them because the smell of dirt and trees calmed her. She liked the way dirt snuck under the crescent moon tops of her fingernails.

The twigs were of varying sizes: some about the length of her hand, a few taller, a few shorter. In her alone games, the twigs were people who had survived a terrible event. They’d had to remake themselves in order to survive. For this reason, the twigs had aligned themselves with Earth and spiders and burrowing bugs.

At this point in her game, each twig was climbing up to a hollow hole in an evergreen tree. When she’d delivered and saved the last twig into its resting spot, she put her hand against the grain of the tree. She closed her eyes and smelled the needles and the sap and the bark. She spread her fingers and put her palm against the evergreen. She could feel the sticky sap kissing her palm.

Suddenly her small fingers buzzed violently. She withdrew her hand quickly and stared at her own palm. Then at the tree. She thought she could smell burning wood. Did it really happen? She smelled her hand. Sap.

No girl can shut down the hunger of her own curiosity, and so she crept quietly back up to the tree’s towering form. She reached her arm out in front of her. She replaced her hand on the tree, closed her eyes, held her breath, and braced herself by setting her feet apart, waiting.

High up, the tops of the trees leaned and whistled in the wind. Wood animals crouched low to the ground. And then the timber beneath her hand shot something into her palm, her fingers, into her wrist, up the bone of her forearm, into her shoulder, so that her head rocked back and her mouth and eyes gaped open. She could feel her teeth ringing. Her hair seemed to pull up and away from her scalp.

The sound in her ears grew louder—like blood in your ears at night with your head on the pillow—until the pounding became thunderous, drowning out the wind, thoughts, home, family, chores. The pounding buzz filled her head as if her head had become a media device gone haywire. She tried to pull her palm away from the tree but couldn’t. She breathed very fast. Her throat constricted. Was this death?

And then the vibration changed, and the sound lowered and began to take shape in her body. Her teeth felt like teeth again. She closed her mouth and eyes. Steadied her own breathing. She wasn’t dead. Or injured. That she could tell. Her hair fell lightly onto her shoulders.

The sound vibrations finally dropped into a kind of low bowl swirling in her skull and then pinpointed itself just between her right eye and ear. Like a fingertip of sound, touching her.

Then the sound had orchestral tune, and then the tune had operatic voice.

Slow and easy at first, the song rapidly grew wild in scope and thrill. Though it dealt with the world in ways that her dreams had already foretold—the same truths about the dying sun and erupted calderas, the same conflicts simmering ever toward war, the same kinds of people and places, like her own house and parents—the more the verses unraveled and sang, the more her body felt like the source of some larger-than-life vibration. She shook her head at one point, as if to say no. But the voices tenored on with grand scale and detail until the ballad was entirely epic, and her place within it, larger than the tree she so mysteriously found herself bound to.

At the end, the song seemed to pose a question. It felt completely right to speak aloud in answer. “But how can I possibly convince anyone of this?” she said. “I will be punished or worse. Doctors will come and tell my parents I’ve lost my mind. That happened, you know, to a neighbor boy. They said his dreams had taken his wits. He kept on digging holes in the ground. Eating the dirt. And, besides, I am scared.”

Math. Science. And music. The three made crossroads in her head. It wasn’t a voice making sentences, but forms and sound and light and song moving through her. Everything she was taking in connected to the ideas she had absorbed in her science classes in school, to the questions she had discovered and nurtured there. She recalled what she’d learned in school and recited it back to herself, almost like a bedtime story: “There may be layers of structure inside an electron, inside a quark, inside any particle you have heard of; these are like little tiny filaments. Like a tiny little string, that’s why it’s called string theory, and the little strings can vibrate in different patterns. There are strings to existence, and harmonies—cosmic harmonies—born of the strings.” Cosmic harmonies made of strings. Cosmic harmonies made of strings. She repeated it in her head until it made a rhythm. Thinking about it made her hold her breath and touch her tongue to her teeth. The crouch of dreams at her temples and fingertips.

Only when the surge had finished its song, all the way to an unimaginable ending, did the tree release its hold on her hand. The vibrations left her body, like a taut string suddenly released, and for a moment she felt lighter than human. Would she be lifted into the dull sky now? But when she looked down she saw her own feet, two brown worn leather short boots just standing, the feet of someone’s daughter just standing in a small wood near a river close to her home. And yet what was inside her now, under her skin between her right eye and ear, would change her forever: a blue light.

Leaving the twigs in the knothole of the evergreen, she ran all the way home. When she burst through the door, her startled mother, who had been standing in front of the screen watching a news report, lost her grip on a glass of water and splashed it straight onto the screen. The image popped and sizzled briefly. The newscaster’s face pixelated and his voice went wonky.

“Damn it!” her mother said, standing up and grabbing a rag from the kitchen. When she returned, she dabbed tentatively at the screen, a little afraid to touch it for fear of electric shock. When she stepped back from the screen and turned around, she gulped at the sight of Joan.

“What on earth is that on your head?”

Joan walked over to her mother, still panting from running. Her mother touched the glowing blue light between her right eye and her ear. “Sweetheart?” her mother whispered. “Honey, what…” She fingered Joan’s temple. “What happened to your head, here?”

She felt her mother’s finger in the place. Her mother’s eyes opened too wide, her brow knitting little lines in her forehead. With her mother’s finger in that spot, her entire body vibrated. Great heaves of reassuring song filled her skull. She began to sing. She closed her eyes and turned inward. Somewhere her mother’s voice, far away—Joan, Joan.

She was ten.

Chapter Six

Her brother dug his hands into the sand near the shore. A family vacation. Trying to create a bubble of bliss, away from things. A cabin by the sea near Normandy, France, before the Wars, before geocatastrophe, before nations and cities lost their shapes and names.

Behind her, their parents tended a wood fire. Her mother cooked a braised rabbit. Her father listened to Satie. She saw them through the vacation cabin’s window in the orange inner light. She saw her mother look up now and again toward where she and her brother begged to sit near the sea, at night, to watch the water move. To count stars. To smell ocean. Her mother tasted a wooden spoon, Joan brought her forearm to her lips and licked her arm and smiled at the salted skin.

She looked back toward the ocean and tilted her head to the side and wondered. At the surface of the water, she was sure she saw too-bright hues of blue and green making tendrils in the waves. Gleaming up from the water. Was it a trick of the eye? Or was the sea really glowing?

The crescendo and decrescendo of waves filled her ears.

“Do you see it?” Joan yelled over to her brother, who fashioned a crown from kelp.

He followed her finger pointing out toward the water. Then he picked up a palm-size flat beach rock and threw it toward the light. “A submarine!” he shouted. “A spy boat!”

Their father’s stories about this place flitted across her mind. Once, he’d told them, there were wars. Submarines. Gunboats. But now this was a coastline for vacationing families and tourists and boys who threw rocks. She laughed.

Her brother shot at submarines with a rifle of driftwood. P-p-p-p-p-ow pow pow.

Joan stood up and walked to the edge of the water. She pressed up from her toes, stretching out her eleven years. She craned her neck. The mystery of it wouldn’t go away in her head. She’d never seen a light like this. If she could just get closer to it. Her fingers itched. She took her shoes off.

“What are you doing?” her brother said, taking his own shoes off in response.

Joan took her T-shirt off. Her jeans.

“You’re gonna freeze your ass off!” Her brother laughed, but his clothes came off, too. They were siblings, after all.

She laughed at the cuss words they said so freely away from the ears of fathers or mothers. “Your ass, too!” she yelled.

Joan looked back over her shoulder toward the cabin, then waded in up to her shins. Night ocean water licked the bones of her. The wet sand under her feet sucked at her soles and toes with each step. Cold traveled from her ankles to her shins and up and up to her jaw. She shivered. She waded up to her thighs. She looked to her left and her brother was up to his hips. His grin slipped toward something else. He was not a strong swimmer.

“Stay there,” she commanded, and she watched him grip his own biceps. His upright torso swayed with the rise and fall of the water. She’d always been the more curious one. The one who explored and climbed and dug and jumped. His gifts rested elsewhere: he was beautiful—more beautiful than she. He was loyal. He played any game she invented.

“Go back,” she yelled. He turned. She saw the sharp juts of his shoulder blades when he turned to shore. Razor-backed boy.

The cold water light called her further out.

Now or never.

With a giant gulp of air, she leapt forward in a dive and disappeared into the black and blue water. Underwater she opened her eyes, but everything was black like sleep. Her eyeballs went cold. And her teeth.

When her head surfaced and she opened her eyes, they stinging with salt water, she saw that she was close enough to swim to the hued blue-green water light.

Then time stopped. The cold and the lights and the salted wet and the floating and her arms and her legs and the world upside down. She floated on her back and soon the night sky didn’t seem “up,” it seemed a mere reflection of the water she floated in. The black of the sky like the ocean, and the stars in the sky like the prickling of imagination in her skin and mind, and the cold vast space like the cold unending water, and the motion of things like the speed of light. She smiled and contemplated the pleasantness of drowning.

For who was she in this night-lit water? Something had happened to her and no one understood it. Everyone was going on like there wasn’t a song ringing in her very bones, a song that came in epic waves, about the story of a girl saving the world. No. Not saving it. A something else. Loving it. But when she’d called it a love song it made everything worse. When she called it a love song, everyone wanted to know who the object of her affection was, what was she hiding. So she stopped mentioning the fact of it. This holiday they were a family on the beach, but the last doctor instructed her family that she might be losing her mind, and there was talk of an institution. She saw the fret in the lines around her mother’s mouth. She read her father’s worry in the hand running through his hair. If the light in her head made her crazy, would they simply send her away? Like a criminal to prison?

Why not slip under the water blanket, she thought, the blanket of night sky.

By the time she heard the yelling from shore, by the time her brother ran back to the cabin and her mother dropped the wooden spoon that tasted of braised rabbit and her father ran outside in his socks and her brother ran from water to cabin back to water in just his underwear, a pale shivering seal, she was far enough out that her entire family looked like a cartoon of people, small and jumping around and yelling.

She dove back down into the light one more time—under nightwater the light looked blurry like in dreams—and then surfaced and swam back, her arms frozen, and yet the girl of her never once wavered—she’d swum to the light. She swam back. It was not difficult. Only water between her and land.

What they saw when she emerged shut everyone up. Everyone’s arms hung at their sides. Everyone’s breath heaved from yelling. Everyone’s eyes grew wide. Everyone’s mouth opened. She glowed from head to toe. Her body cold light.

Her skin gleamed neon blue and green.

“It’s algae,” her father finally said. He ripped his shirt off and rushed to cover his daughter’s shivering body. Her father turned back to her mother while he briskly rubbed at Joan’s arms, as if the conversation would return everything to normal. “Like the trails left by submarines…” he offered, laughing crazily like too-worried parents do.

Her mother came to embrace her in a kind of parent cocoon, her face between relief and a pure unanswered question.

“Like in the war,” her father said, still rubbing. “Bioluminescent algae. It’s all over her skin. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

Things used to make sense like that. A father, a mother, children. A brief vacation.

Bioluminescence obsessed her for months. She grew her own algae in a closet aquarium. She became addicted to her technology, searching for knowledge. And she begged her parents to vacation next in New Zealand, at the Natural Bridge colony, home to the largest colony of bioluminescent glowworms in the world. And they did. Something about the fear of their daughter losing her mind. At sunset, she, along with her parents and hundreds of tourists, could be seen exploring overhangs and crevices that were filled with glowworms, literally millions of them. Even though the surrounding area was pitch-dark, inside the caves the sun seemed to shine from the nooks and crannies surrounding them.

All of this before the sun itself, like girlhood, broke and dimmed Earth forever.

Chapter Seven

When I began her story, when I began grafting her alive on the surface of my skin, I missed the smells of the body—missed them violently. I missed the smell of sweat. Blood. Cum. Even shit. Our bodies have lost all sensory detail. I should be stinking and matted and chapped, stuck in this idiotic cell. My teeth should feel covered in a wrong spit film.

But our bodies barely respond to anything. Not even my own piss has a smell. And besides, fewer and fewer of us retain any forms of physical longing. I suspect what has taken the place of drives and sensory pleasure is a kind of streamlined consciousness that does not require thinking or feeling. It was too much for us, in the end. Now all that remains is a tiny band of like-minded resistance bodies. Anti bodies, next to the bodies of most on CIEL, who are fast becoming pure representations of themselves. Simulacral animated figurines.

I wonder sometimes if that’s why grafting was born. It restores us to the evidence of a body. Like wrinkles or stretch marks. And yet I suspect that my own proclivity for grafting has a deeper, darker meaning. There seems something I am desperate to raise: not human virtue, but its opposite. Our most base corporeal drives. I stopped caring about reason when we ascended and untethered ourselves from the grime and pulse of humanity, when we turned on ourselves and divided ourselves and proved what we had been all along: ravenous immoral consumers. Eaters of everything alive, as long as it sustained a story that gave us power over the struggling others.

I rub the small of my back. An ache rests there, under my grafts.

A special stylus exists specifically designed for self-grafting. Though I am as close to ambidextrous as any grafter could be, I find the tool useful for reaching certain areas one cannot quite see directly. My beloved Trinculo modified the design; I can thus graft story even at the small of my back. There, and below, I raise welted flesh devoted to her origins.

Before geologic catastrophe, I wrote, there was a town, there was her family. Before the earth groaned and reordered human existence, she came from a town where the ordinary heavy mists of dark mornings blanketed the water-meadows and clapped shut the window of the sky each day. A town of cold and penetrating wet that rested in your elbows and shoulders and hips, no matter your age. The Earth was not yet a lunar landscape of jagged rocks, treeless mountains, or scorched dirt thirsting toward death. The fertile flatlands stretched out into rolling hills, forests, and eventually a river. There was no violence in the land itself.

On one side of her childhood home the woods sprouted beechwood, a translucent green canopy brightly shot with sun. The forest floor wore anemones, wild strawberries, lily of the valley, Solomon’s seal—all of it opening occasionally into clearings, then into deeper woods and darker, older trees.

On the opposite side of their home was a deeper, darker wood hoary with age—firs and pines and knotted oaks. Most children avoided this wood, as it was known to be the home of wild boars and wolves.

It was said, much later, to be haunted by a young girl who brought trees to life and made the dirt sing.

But this was the time of playing made-up games born of their child minds. Of long dusk hours spent with her brother, Peter, after everyone had grown accustomed to the softly glowing blue light at the side of her head when no one—not police, government officials, doctors, clergy, or anyone in between—could explain it. So she spent many evenings in the woods together with her brother—Jo and PD, they were—imagining worlds together.

“It’s important. Just do it,” Jo demanded, holding out her arms.

“Why?” PD wanted to know. “The rope’s barely long enough to go round you twice, and besides, you’ll get sap all over you.”

“Because that’s the game,” Jo said. “You tie me to the tree and I pretend you’ve been captured. Then you rescue me.”

“That’s stupid. I’m right here.”

“No, stupid. After you tie me to the tree, you run away. You wait. You know, for kind of a long time. Later you come pretend to rescue me.”

“I still think it’s stupid,” PD said under his breath, unraveling the length of rope.

Joan lowered her voice to a girl-growl. “There are wolves and spikey-haired pigs in these woods, you know,” she reminded him.

“I’ve never seen them.” PD lifted the length of thick braided rope from his shoulder. To an onlooker they might have resembled child twins, were it not for the length of Joan’s ebony hair. Peter’s came only to his shoulders. But their bodies were still young enough to look physically alike—thin and taut, all collarbones and elbows, without any sign of muscle yet.

Jo lodged herself against the great sentry of a fir tree and thrust her arms out behind her. She tilted her head up toward the sky and closed her eyes. “Make sure it’s tight. Or it’ll be dumb,” she said.

PD wrapped the rope twice around her chest and pinned her arms and body to the gnarled wood of the tree. Behind her, he worked on knots he’d improvised himself. When he finished, he stood in front of her and crossed his arms. “Your hair’s gonna get sap in it.”

Opening one eye, Jo asked her brother, “Wait, do you have something to gag me with?”

PD looked around. He was pretty sure he knew what a gag was, but not entirely. It sounded like it had to do with barfing. But he suspected it was more like in the movies, when someone’s mouth was tied shut. “I could tie my socks together?” he offered.

“Do it,” she said, and PD set about removing his socks and tying them together, with a knot in the middle that he centered in the hole of his sister’s mouth.

“Gaaahhhhhhhr,” Jo said.

“What?” PD couldn’t understand his sister.

“Gaaaaahhhhhhhhhd. Naw Ruhhh Awaaaaawy.”

And so her brother Peter ran from the dark woods at dusk back toward their house.

At home, he washed his face and hands. He put on new socks to warm his feet. He ate a cheese sandwich and drank a soda. He turned on the television. Night fell. Somewhere far in the back of his mind, he wondered how long “later” was supposed to be. At seven, his mother asked, Where is Joan? It seemed part of the game. Upstairs reading like always, he said. Take this dinner up to her then, his mother said, your father will be late tonight. And so he took the dinner up and put it in the middle of her bed and shut the door.

The longer he waited, the more interesting the game seemed. Maybe this once he really could save his sister, rather than the other way around. Wasn’t she always the one saving him? When he nearly fell off the roof of the house, having climbed up without permission and slipped, dangling from the eaves, didn’t she make a pile of leaves and hay and pillows and trash to break his fall? When he got locked in the granary just before the grain fill, didn’t she crawl through a sewer, come up through the floor, and get him back out to safety, just before the grain fill siren? When he’d taken up his mother’s carving knife to become a real pirate and not a pretend one, slicing open his own forearm, hadn’t she pushed so hard on the skin of his arm that it left a bruise, taken off her own shirt, and tied a tourniquet before either of them quite knew what that word meant? He thought of all this as he sat in the living room, watching television, into the night.

Near ten o’clock his mother ushered him with her dish towel toward bed, and told him to tell Joan it was time for lights-out as well. Peter said good night, shut his bedroom door, then climbed out of his window with a flashlight and set out to save Joan.

It wasn’t hard to reach the wood. A well-worn path lit up before him. But the wood was dark even in daylight, darker still at night, so finding where they’d left off was a bit more difficult. Tree and wind and night sounds rose and fell. He smelled bark and dirt and wet. He wished he’d brought a coat—the air raised the hair on his arms and he could feel the dampness of the ground cover seeping through his sneakers.

Fear takes hold of children differently. Shadows quicken their becomings, and what might be the scratching of branches or the whistling of wind in leaves and needles can take on the low-pitched hum of a growl or a grunt. Birds that cheer during the day, with their colors and flight, in the darkness sound and look the same as bats. And bats seem everywhere. He was no longer cold. He was sweating. But none of the growing wood terror caught his breath like the image he came upon after climbing a small rise that felt familiar under his feet. A great crackling sound grew as he ascended the hill. Like the sound of a hundred twigs being broken. His heart clattered inside his rib cage. His hands filmed with sweat. A light seemed to glow up and beyond what he could see. At the top of the rise he breathed hard like a runner and his skin itched and something smelled wrong, and he felt light-headed, and then he held all the breath in his body.

Fire.

The forest before him lit up. Orange and white and red. He could see he was in the right place. Where he’d left his sister. Heat burned inside his nostrils, his eyebrows. He held his arm up to shield his face. “Jo!” he yelled. But he could not see her tied to any tree, and all the trees he could see were ablaze, and he saw no evidence of a rope, or the dirty knotted socks of a stupid boy, and he coughed, and smoke stung his eyes and tears wet his cheeks and his throat constricted when he tried again to call out the name of his sister. PD dropped like kindling to the ground in a pile of boy. Crying.

Slowly, the way a morning mist dips, curls, and descends on hills and around treetops, a soft cool wet fell on his crouched back. A low sound rose up from the ground that he could feel in his knees and hands, a vibration of sorts, and then the sound took shape and became a hum, like a thousand children hitting the same low note. The very night gave way to water, different from rain though—more of a full and even wetting than individual drops—and the trees were doused and the orange light slowly turned blue. Blue light bloomed everywhere. He could see the entire forest. His hands—his body—the ground and trees and everything around him was blue. A coolness evened out the heat.

Out of the blue he heard his name echoed.

He raised his head and saw his sister walking toward him, naked. She knelt on the ground and cradled his head and torso in her arms and set him up against her thighs. She wiped dirt and tears, soot and loose hair from his face. The great humming forest song crescendoed, then died down to a near silence. After, crickets chirped naturally.

“I’m sorry,” he said, nearly into her stomach.

“Listen to me,” Joan said. “Something has happened. Don’t be afraid. The earth… she’s alive.”

Chapter Eight

I’ve been drawing.

On the walls of my cell. Bodies. Huge Hieronymus Bosch–style scenarios. With the handle of the toilet I broke off. I’ve been thinking about how our desires and fears manifest in our bodies, and how our bodies, carrying these stories, resist the narratives our culture places on top of us, starting the moment we are born. It’s our idiotic minds that overwrite everything. But the body has a point of view. It keeps its secrets. Makes its own stories. By any means necessary.

When I graftstoried her youth, I’d given her a childhood based on the facts we’d all learned from oral stories passed around before the ascension, and from the fragmented videos that survived her capture, torture, trial, and burning.

The story now rose up in welts from my skin. Her childhood at my torso. Here her mother, father, brother. Her town in the small of my back. But her comrade in arms, Leone, I’d written in the terms of a beloved—Leone I wrote at my thighs and up, into the very cradle of my former sexuality.

Joan’s favorite class was science. She had been interested in the study of microbes and quantum physics, interested in the fact that they were both part of the study of string theory. The small and the large inextricably wedded for eons. Her favorite dead people were Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin, whom she sometimes drew pictures of surrounded by a DNA double helix. Her favorite living people were her forever friend, a Vietnamese-French girl named Leone, and her brother, PD. Although she couldn’t talk to animals, she felt more kindred with them than with people. But the world was her deepest intimate. Trees and dirt and rocks and rain, and ocean and river water compelled her almost completely.

At school she could temporarily forget the strange blue light and song in her head. Learning about the world’s geology, she could pretend that her only true relationship was to the natural world. She could ignore the fact that the thing in her head, and her parents’ increasing anxiety while watching the nightly world news, had nothing whatsoever to do with the girlhood of things.

But even at school there had been signs of things to come. Like the day a boy with hair the color of rust pushed Leone in the center of her chest so hard she fell down on the ground, her breathing went wobbly, and Joan ran to call a teacher. They took Leone away in an ambulance.

When they took Leone away, Joan went into a cement recess tunnel and cried and pulled out some of her own hair. After school, she found the boy with hair the color of rust and said “Come here.”

Unafraid of girls, he said “What?” and stepped toward her.

She put her hands on his shoulders and closed her eyes.

“What are you doing, freak?”

She felt the blue light flutter slightly above her ear, underneath her hair. Her mouth twitched slightly.

“Whatever,” he said, but she kept her hands clamped onto his shoulders like girl epaulets. He couldn’t get free.

“What the hell?” he yelled, but it was no use.

She opened her eyes just as the trees around them began to shiver, their leaves rustling off the branches in great swirls. Then the wind kicked up more than seemed normal, and the boy’s feet lifted out from under him, so that he was really pinned to the world only by Joan’s hands on his shoulders, her hair lifting up a little. She opened her eyes.

“Lemme go! Lemme go,” he’d screamed.

“Okay,” she said, and did, and he flew with the force of the wind circling them up into the air and around until she breathed out and he landed on the ground with the loud thud of a boy dropping from the sky. A leg broken. He whimpered.

Before she ran again to get an adult, though, she said to the broken boy, “Don’t ever touch Leone again or you’ll never leave the sky.”

Leone—whose small heart had a defect at birth, who carried a heart that started out in a pig. Xenotransplantation and Leone had become Joan’s favorite words. Xenotransplantation represented a change in the distance between people and animals in a way she loved. Leone represented Leone, just Leone, Leone. Sometimes Joan would spin around alone in a circle saying the beautiful word out loud to no one but her body, hands clasped over her heart, eyes closed, like praying.

Leone with long black hair reaching to the small of her back, Leone with a smile as wicked as a cracked apple, Leone with eyes like blue-green pools, Leone as strong or stronger than any boy who dared to arm-wrestle or chase or race Joan. They swam naked in clear pools in the foothills; they curled into each other’s bodies alone, next to night fires, away from adults. Leone became Joan’s idea of love.

The day Joan threw the boy into the sky and let him drop, things shifted. As adults carried the boy away on a stretcher, Joan heard him yelling, “There’s something wrong with her!” Men with grave faces and women with upside-down smiles stared at her.

Like most gifts emergent too soon in children, Joan’s drew quick scrutiny. Little did we know her next gift would be so perfectly timed with history’s next chapter.

Sometimes I’m not sure I remember the beginning of war or how the Wars ended. It feels like we’d been born into perpetual war, to be honest, and now we hover above our own past like impotent Greek gods, without any use, living off of the dying and dry planet below.

In my memory, back on Earth, the word war stopped being a picture or a subject or a nightly news show somewhere far away in the past. It fragmented and shattered and splayed itself across all times and places. Alliances formed or deformed quickly, as in chemistry experiments. Large powers were dispersed into smaller ones; small powers joined in collectives, like bees in hives, and grew dangerously alive. Leaders rose and fell faster than seasons.

There wasn’t time to educate the children.

As in medieval times, and during other world wars, children simply had to learn to live within the miasma of violence. Pick up this weapon. Don’t think. Act.

The year before the Wars began, it seemed that technology and evolution were on the cusp of a strange bright magnificence. Technology had made houses smart, and cars, and employment centers, and education. The physical world seemed only a membrane between humans and the speed and hum of information. The age of synthetic biology came along in just the way the age of computers had: in a makeshift garage lab, some brainy nerd kid on the edge of adulthood discovered the pieces of an intense puzzle all on her own. Soon microbes were created that converted corn into plastic, in a process a little like brewing beer. Throw a seed out the window at night, and before long you could have a garden of unearthly delights: anything from a toddler’s sippy cup to a complete set of synthetic scaffolding for a house.

It wasn’t that difficult, as things turned out. The more we understood our bodies, the more we understood the universe, and vice versa. A living organism was a ready-made production system that, nearly exactly like a computer, was ruled by a program. Its genome. Synthetic biology and synthetic genomics capitalized on the fact that biological organisms were already programmable manufacturing systems. Microbes couldn’t turn a rock into gold, but they damn sure could convert shit into electricity.

The newly engineered microbes of this era could detect poisons in drinking water or aerosol spray. They could spread out laterally to create biofilm; they could copy superimposed patterns and images, serving as microbial photocopy machines. E. coli—one of the world’s fastest-duplicating bacterial machines—could be reprogrammed to make bactoblood for fast and easy transfusions. Microbe technology gave rise to fast and reliable new ways to detect and identify diseases; genetic microbe solutions, combined with stem cell medical advances, made old narratives about sickness and health fall away as quickly as the old story about Earth being flat. Human limbs could be made to regenerate. Deceased hearts made to beat. Blinded eyes made to see. Secular miracles.

Of course, with the speed of these advances—with the superhuman shotgun blasts of these cures and hopes and solutions—came their counterparts: terrible advances in warfare. When the first nuclear drone attacks erupted, for a while, and counterpart drones returned fire, the War was waged almost without soldiers. But all agon eventually reduces itself to human violence. It was almost as if humans couldn’t bear their distance from the killing. The drama. The theater of war.

Then came what was once supposed unthinkable: child armies.

Child armies were born quickly and organically, in the moment after the family, as a unit of social organization, broke down and lost its role within the social structure. At first their emergence seemed only expedient, only circumstantial: there were child porters, spies, messengers, scouts. It took only a little longer until there were child shields, and finally child soldiers, in every army. But then the world has always made violent use of children. The rhetoric of protecting children from war, shielding those most vulnerable from our most horrific truths, was always a hypocrisy designed to protect the illusions that adults carry that we care more about our children than we do about ourselves, until finally that pretense, too, fell.

And then the wars crescendoed, vacuuming civilian life away forever.

As a child soldier, Joan had been extraordinary. Her military prowess only missed earning her official recognition because she so often laid down her arms in secret, or near-secret, during pivotal moments in battle. Almost no one saw her quietly sliding her rifle down the side of her body while the blue light near her temple ignited. No one but she heard the cacophonous song raging in her head, an epic battle story she was living one stanza at a time. When she reached out to touch trees or water or dirt, and the entire battlefield buckled like a sheet being shaken, or the earth opened up and literally swallowed the tanks and Humvees and front-line fighters of whomever the enemy was that week, or water simply left its banks at the sides of rivers and swept fighters away from the knees up. No one was looking quite directly at her.

The first time Leone saw Joan’s otherworldly combat techniques, the story goes, was one day when they arrived too late at a battle zone. Joan’s mother had been stationed there as a nurse. Just before they reached the site, a vibration bomb had gone off, exploding everyone—including Joan’s mother—from the inside out. Joan and Leone had run into the medical tents too late to stop the blood from splattering indifferently over patients and doctors and nurses.

In my narrative, I give her mother’s face a half-smile, blue eyes, rose cheeks. As if she’d been remembering her daughter in the moment before her death. But in truth we’ll never know. They were unable to revive Joan’s mother, her face already the color of a pale moon on a quiet winter night, her eyes terribly open, her throat bombed open like a second mouth. Leone saw Joan jam her hand into her mother’s raw and splayed-open gullet. The image of Joan’s hand within the red and blue and bone made Leone retch. When Joan turned away from her mother and stood up, the look on her face was murderous and iced.

I graft the scene at my abdomen.

Joan walked straight back out into the fray that day, her hand still bloody with dead mother muck. She bent down toward the ground low enough to put her cheek to the earth. Leone saw something flickering near Joan’s ear and thought it might be an enemy laser sight, so she hid behind a blown-up jeep and tried to cover Joan from possible snipers. But no sniper shot came. Instead, she recognized the familiar blue light at Joan’s temple, and watched Joan put her lips to the earth, almost like she was giving the earth mouth-to-mouth.

Then everything everywhere burst into flames, save the two of them. Plastic polystyrene and hydrocarbon benzene, together, made a hot fire jelly. Like Napalm B, it caused fire, explosions, burns, asphyxiation… and stuck to human skin. At the time, that’s what Leone interpreted: jets had flown by and dropped Napalm B. In their wake, burning bodies everywhere—enemies and comrades alike.

When Leone looked at Joan’s face as she retreated from the field, she could have sworn she saw her whole head glowing aquamarine, like the light in the center of a single flame.

“There are no more mothers,” Joan said, and in her voice was a rage as old as Earth’s canyons, cut by erosion and plate tectonics and the force of water. And yet her emotions were still those of a teen, unable to contain what raged inside her body.

As Leone witnessed the transformation of the girl whose side she never left again, she became attracted to Joan the way magnets are, irreducibly linked to this girl and her body and her ungodly nature. Her flux and glare.

One day, during a lull in the combat, a boy who must have been around fourteen challenged Joan to a fistfight. They’d been living in a Russian forest for most of the summer, an entire child garrison, and were no doubt about to be repositioned to France or England or maybe even California for the fall; children did not fare well in Russian winters. The boy was a simple bully, the type who maintained his power and status through random acts of false bravado. He spit in Joan’s face and held up his fists.

Joan didn’t even raise her arms. She closed her eyes. The boy adopted a boxer’s stance, his feet far apart. But then the ground shook, and at his stupid feet the earth zigzagged and opened up a little, and before anyone could figure out what was happening an alder tree shot up out of the ground with him buried in its crown and didn’t stop until it was grown and he was high up in the sky, squawking like a bird. It was funny, but it was more frightening than it was funny, so there was dead silence.

When finally the boy climbed down, another unexpected thing happened. Instead of crying or lashing out, the boy grabbed Joan’s hand and brought her straight to his father a forest away, a general in command of the most important battalion in the northern hemisphere, and narrated what she’d done. The general then spoke to Joan alone.

For three days.

For three days she told her story, because—unlike her agonized mother or the endless stream of doctors or concerned counselors—this military man listened without saying anything, or judging her, or calling her crazy. At times, it was said, a song radiated out from the room they were in. In that time, a question was born in her—a question he asked her point-blank, alone in a room, at the zenith of the Wars:

“Girl.” A look in his eyes so desperate as to be nameless. “Can you stop this brutal bloodstory?”

Chapter Nine

I wake in my cell wet with sweat, in the limbo of my incarceration, and linger in the memory of reading my graftstory. To fall asleep reading—it feels nostalgically human and earthbound, even in this too-black night of space. Then I realize I’m not wet with anything. I just remember sweat. Long for it.

I’ve had the recurring dream. Again the dream of the sun, the birth of our ending, flickered behind my lids like skull cinema. In the dream, it happens exactly as it did in life, only faster and in retinal flashes. The way dreams distill time and displace images. I am not exactly an actor in the dream scene; I’m more of an observer—or, perhaps more accurate, a scribe. As events play out in my dream, I can see myself grafting the story directly onto my body. It’s as if I am history writing itself. And this: I have hair. Long luxurious cascades of blond hair curling down my arms and back like wood shavings, blowing in the wind and across my face. Mythic. And completely ludicrous.

But my dream has evolved over time. The scene is constructed from shards of a different memory: a memory of a film I saw in childhood. In the film, a Russian man, a doctor of the peasant class, bobbles his way through history as a powerless widget, serving this or that tyrant, this or that historical revolution or resistance, sometimes by accident, rarely by design. Sometimes he is briefly part of a heroic moment, other times he is unfairly incarcerated or punished; there is no cause-and-effect relationship between his own life and the larger story. The doctor loves two women. One is his wife, who comes by him in the natural order of things in their country. The other is a woman who is out of reach by class and beauty and even logic, but like all tragic lovers, they are driven madly into the impossibility of each other. In the film, wars rage and rise and burn and slip to cinder and ash and nothingness. No one is saved. Lovers, children, animals, dreams die.

I cried for days after seeing the film. The epic, romantic story, and even its form, got inside me. The micro element of the personal and the macro sweep of the historical seemed to be composed in the film in a way I’d never imagined, woven together like words and music, like melody and harmony. To be human, the film suggested, was to step into the full flurry and motion of all humanity: to bear the weight of circumstances without flinching, to surrender to the crucible—to admit that history was not something in the past but something you consciously step into. Living a life meant knowing you might be killed instantly, like one who wanders into the path of a runaway train. It was the first time I felt a sense of messianic time, of life that was not limited to the story of a lone human being detached from the cosmos.

When I came out of the theater, I said to my mother, “It’s like we’re stars in space. It’s like space is the theater and we are the bits of stardust and everything everywhere is the story.”

Now, I believe that more than ever.

As Earth’s resources dwindle, technology is seized by those who kill best. CIEL rises more quickly than any empire ever known. Access to CIEL is restricted to the affluent. Those left on Earth are considered either collateral damage or raw material for the use of the living.

Inside of war, or dream, or memory, a warrior emerges.

An electrical twitch briefly crackles the Panopticon, like a machine taking a breath or snoring.

Someone in another cell coughs.

Someone breathes.

Someone cries.

I put my hands over my eyes, to make the black more like space or death or what I remember of movie theaters. Tiny sparks of white dance under my closed lids. Memory plays out in condensed and displaced fragments, as in a tiny experimental film.

My body grows abnormally quickly and changes shape. I have the winged arms of a great womanbird, the haunches of a lioness. By the end of the dream I am a white sphinx, in some desert I don’t know, sand blowing across my interspecies textures—feathers, fur, scales, and skin—for eternity.

It’s a stupid dream.

Except that Trinculo likes the sphinx part. He’s often asking if we can “play sphinx.” It’s hard not to give in. There’s something wonderful about assuming that position on the ground, posing my head regally, making L’s of my arms and extending my ass behind me like an elegant animal.

Without much consideration I jump from my bed and creep toward the opening of my cell. I get down on my hands and knees. I know he can’t possibly see me in the mandated dark time of the Panopticondrum, but perhaps he can feel my energy. I point my body as gloriously as I can manage in Trinculo’s direction. I lift my head, square my jaw, and rest my arms there on the cold floor, and stare hard into the black, through the back wall of my cell, as if I could see through the wall out into space, straight into the sun. Burn my eyes from my head. Burn us all to death. Get it over with. Finish it. Burn us into living matter again.

“Trinculo,” I scream, sounding like a new animal species.

Silence.

But then, “Cackle for me, you far-flung sea witch!”

And there my beloved is after all, Trinculo’s voice floating up from his cell to mine.

Followed shortly by the arrival of a short and slightly crooked android, whose appearance recalls that of a tree stump. If the android had been a person, it would have been considered ugly, even malformed. As a machine, it just looks pathetic. I learn that I am being issued a citation only, and I will be released that afternoon. There is, apparently, no charge strong enough to hold me, although they confiscated several material items from my living space.

I step forward toward the viewing wall, as I’d come to think of it. “What’s the story?” I yell playfully across the space between us.

“What?” he shouts. “I demand my cackle, you gut-infested she-whore!”

If a cackle was what would give him pleasure in this idiotic interim, it was the least I could do. I draw in a huge breath of air and give it my all. What emerges sounds like a grandmother with respiratory problems, or perhaps a turkey’s gobble.

“That is by far the worst cackle I have ever heard,” he says dully. His voice carries a fatigue older than his years.

It is true. I am ashamed, but in my defense, I have no idea how to produce a worthy cackle. “What’s the verdict?” I hurl down toward his layer of purgatory. I know his punishment will be more severe than mine. He is under surveillance for a prior offense of a sexual nature.

What I receive in return is possibly history’s greatest and most profound cackle. But then Trinc does something odd: his cackle abruptly arrests, and then, nothing. Something is wrong. There is never a truncated joke with Trinculo. I crane my neck to try to catch a glimpse of him, but it is no use. I signal to my automated keepers that I want a word. Something like a treadmill comes toward me and cocks its “head.”

“Data on Cell Seven-seven-two,” I say, without inflection. “Trinculo Forsythe.”

“Negative,” is the only response the thing offers in return.

“Listen, you jumble of bolts and wire, I have high-level clearance. Christine Pizan. You will tell me the data on Cell Seven-seven-two. Or I’ll thread a rusty bolt through your ass-valves.”

For a moment I feel sorry for it, as if its feelings may have been hurt. The machine does a sort of half-circle this way and that, and its bobble-headed screen tips toward the floor. Then it buzzes back to attention, pushes away from my viewing hole, and blurts, “No access.” It then hovers higher and shoots a laser that slices a gash in the wall less than a centimeter from my cheek. I half expect to feel blood when I reach to touch my face. Killing me would mean nothing. Letting me live means next to nothing, too.

I move as close as possible to the electrical current that is my cell’s wall and yell, “Trinculo?”

Nothing.

Back in bed, I hold as still as a corpse, hoping that the tiny silver spider will visit me. More than waiting: I hope so hard I try to will my desire into the insect’s shape. When you live in space, far from the former natural world, it’s easy to remember that everything is merely matter and energy. Conjuring up a cyber creature seems as simple as calling a dog to your feet. And yet, if it was truly no more than a matter of energies, I could simply walk through the containment wall and its force field, like monks walking through fire in old stories of faith or magic. In truth I’d be burned to a crisp so instantly it would appear as if I simply vanished. There’s not much blood or guts or gore in space. Most energies simply signal through the flames when they end. One dissipates.

The spider does indeed visit me. Late. Wakes me from sleep. It is in the space between my shoulder and my jaw. It tickles, but also feels comforting somehow, almost like a caress. God, how lonely and stupid I’ve become. I close my eyes, hold still, and wait for the small pattern I suspect might emerge against my skin. I tap my fingers after each beat to be sure.

-- -.-- / - . . . . .-. --- . . . - . -. / . / .- -- / - --- / - . . . . / . -.- . -.-. .- - . -.

My—beloved—I—am—to—be—executed.

My beloved I am to be executed.

Morse code. I begin to cry. We haven’t used this form of communication since we were children making forts in the woods. I don’t know the circumstances, or what specific transgressions he’s been accused of, or when or how or what, but I know that when the Tribunal orders execution there is no bargaining. Even if Trinculo were granted a trial—unlikely, due to the vast number of his violations—his trial would merely be theater for the rest of us. My mind and throat lock simultaneously. My body goes cold and stiff. For a time I think I can easily will myself to die, right there in the idiotic cell. But then a rage comes over me like none I’ve ever felt before. A heat that begins in my belly and twists up my torso and flares out toward my rib cage. I sit up. The spider clings to my neck. I clench my fists hard enough that my fingernails dig into my palms, leaving little half smiles.

They cannot have him. I will not let them. Our lives may not be worth anything in this moronic CIEL world of pageantry and void, but one might yet bring meaning to a single life; one can still take one’s energy and direct it toward another, fully, unto death. I don’t know how I will save his life and get him off this orbiting pot of hubris, but I will find a way.

The spider has one last dance before it leaps away from me and into some crack in the system.

-. --- / -. --- - / -. . . . . .--. .- . .-. / . / . -. - . -. -. / - --- / -.-. --- -- . / - . . . .- -.-. -.- / .- . . . / -.-- --- .- .-. / . . . - .- --. . -. .-

Do not despair I intend to come back as your vagina.

My dear Trinculo. Finding light in death, sex even in doom.

I see neither him nor the spider again, before I am escorted back to my living quarters.

My plans are not changing, just evolving. Just gaining in human plot and depth. However, my rage is changing. She is beginning to take on an epic deathsong. The song. In my head. It’s coming back.

Chapter Ten

“Is there any chance of serious permanent injury?” My pupil looks at me, courage skin deep at best.

“What, you mean like burning through to an internal organ, like a heart?” I stare at her little head. Why are young adults’ heads so little? They look malformed. “We have no time for stage fright,” I say matter-of-factly. “Leave your fears outside my door or go do something else with your life. This is serious work, I have a deadline, and I don’t have the time or the patience to handhold apprentices.” I sit upright and stiff and look her dead in the face. Her skin is so translucently white it looks almost blue, as if her veins and arteries are gaining dominance. No, not blue, aqua—blue-green and pallid. Or maybe I’m just trying too hard to remember colors. She has grafts on each shoulder, tiny ornamental wing patterns, and some idiotic positive maxim. She looks like some cross between an amphibious creature and a baby eagle. I have no intention of mouth-feeding her. She’d best grow talons in the next sixty seconds or she’ll be out. “Make a choice,” I say. “Now.”

She gulps.

Her epaulets shiver.

“Listen, why do you want to do this?” It seems a fair question. Most of my former pupils come on a dare, or for the novelty of being the one who can scar people rather than being the one scarred. Whether they knew it or not, I always knew there was a hint of sadism to the choice. The best grafters were more than sadists. They were masochists as well. More: they were comfortable with that relationship, that dance between selves. And they couldn’t stay away from it if they tried.

“I…” Her words swallow back down her throat.

“Right, then,” I say, and start to pack up my tools.

“Wait!” She grabs my forearm.

When she does she immediately draws her hand back, as if she hadn’t expected the layers and layers of textual content there. We both look down at my arm, its white and tanned intricacies creating an entire poetic landscape where skin used to be. Then she puts her hand back on my arm and holds it there, running her fingers over what is there as if she is reading Braille.

“I want this.” This time her voice is steady and at least two octaves lower. Her eyes meet mine. Her silly shoulder grafts recede behind the square-shape of her jaw. I see some strength in the aqua color of her skin—a little hint of defiance. “I want to be good at it. I want to be better than other people at it. I want people to come to me and ask for it.”

There is hope for her yet.

I begin. “The electrocautery method I use requires a pen-like tool containing a red-hot, exchangeable tip.” I lift it up in front of her face. “See? This technique has a higher accuracy than others; it offers the most control, the most consistent depth and width of burn. As in tattooing, one traces the design over a stencil. When it comes to textual grafts, however, it’s best to draw on personal taste to help in type designs and the shapes of lines and stanzas and paragraphs.”

God damn it if the words are not burning in my throat as I say them. Trinculo designed and made these exchangeable tips for me. And so I find myself resuming my instruction with a kind of berserk vengeance, crying all the way through over Trinculo’s fate. The girl cannot see my tears. They pool like salted pearls at the corners of my deep-set eyes, hidden by a few folds and curls of flesh I grafted in the shape of ocean waves around my eyes and brow bone. Each tear makes its way down the raised rivulets and hills covering my cheekbones, then slips imperceptibly into the corner of my mouth. I drink in my love and anger and fear.

I don’t know how long Trinculo has. Ordinarily there is no rush with this sort of thing—executions are theatrical entertainment for CIEL residents and thus ebb and flow according to supply and demand. But the threads of my plan were starting to weave, in my head, into a kind of brutal braid. I would attend the execution, of course. I would display my body work there, too, my corporeal defiance. But by now I had even more in mind.

As I work I envision an entire performance, one that would take as much time in preparation as I could spare. I will collect, fragment, and displace individual lines from my epic body poem onto the bodies of others until we became an army of sorts, all of us carrying the micrografts that related my own macro epic: a resistance movement of flesh. The action will culminate in plural acts of physical violence so profound during our performance no one will ever forget the fact of flesh.

All that is left is for me to engineer Trinculo’s escape as part of the drama. To do that means contact with him. I need more information.

The spider is back. This does not surprise me. I stare at it, weaving its minute bridges on the fern. Comrade.

“Absinthe makes a remarkably good astringent,” I say, turning my attention back to my pupil. She looks at me with the face of one who knows nothing. “Old Earth relics,” I answer. Her eyes narrow. I dab her left forearm with absinthe. She smiles. “We are going for a single line. A training sentence. ‘Jean de Men is pigshit.’ I’ll do the first half, then you try.”

I wait for a response. Nothing.

“Are you certain which side you are on?”

She nods, but says nothing. Then she thrusts her arm out at me between us, acquiescing. When I touch the hot metal to her skin, I hear her suck in a breath that is thick enough to cut her throat.

Slowly I begin to trace the letters with the burning hot end of the pen. “You don’t want to drag the tool across the skin too much. Short, quick strokes work best.” I hear her try to regulate her breathing, her nostrils. She clenches her teeth. “Nothing to worry about. I’m only going to give you second-degree burns. By stopping short of third-degree, we’ll be spared seeing your fatty layers. After all, we barely know each other.” I smile.

The smell of burning flesh is pungent, dizzying, like burning brown sugar mixed with steak searing on a grill. Sometimes there is a popping or a crackling. With this pupil, however, I hear only a hissing from her skin, and a sad little moan.

“What is your name?” I ask, without pausing for her answer. “The smell of burning human flesh is a delicate mélange. Muscles burning smell like the kind of animal meals humans used to eat: meat on a grill. Fat smells more like bacon, like breakfast on Earth. Cattle were bled after slaughter, and the beef and pork we ate contained very few blood vessels. But when a whole human body burns, well, all that iron-rich blood gives the smell a coppery, metallic component.”

Her cheeks shake; her eyes are filling with tears. To her credit, she does not flinch. But I see the cords in her neck as thick as ropes. Her skin seems almost to glow.

“You know,” I say, “full bodies include internal organs, which rarely burn completely because of their high fluid content; they smell like burnt liver.” I pause to study her face—this is someone who has no idea of animals or what it was to eat them. I wonder what she is conjuring in her head. “They say that cerebrospinal fluid burns up in a musky, sweet perfume.”

I see her gulp. Her face looks a little sunken.

“Burning skin has a charcoal-like smell, while setting hair on fire produces a sulfurous odor. This is because the keratin in our hair contains large amounts of cysteine, a sulfur-containing amino acid. But you wouldn’t know anything about hair, now would you? You’ve seen pictures?” She nods. “Hooves and nails also contain keratin, which explains why real tortoiseshells smell like hair when lit on fire. The smell of burnt hair could cling to the nostrils for days,” I say.

I finish my half of the sentence. The skin of her arm rages red and puffs with burn. My pupil sits upright but looks exhausted. She pants some. Whatever comes out of her mouth next, as I hand her the pen, will be entirely telling. It will decide things. For that matter, she might faint, right there.

“What is a tortoiseshell?” she says, staring into my eyes.

Then she sets to work on her own arm.

I hear her grunt now and then. I can see the word pigshit rising and reddening on her arm before me. I smile. Hope for her yet. But there is more.

“I’m not just some witless young woman,” she says.

Was this bravery or a fool’s admission? I am momentarily intrigued. I am also prickling with the understanding that these are the last young anythings that will exist on CIEL without another radical change, one that hasn’t a prayer of coming.

“Do you want to know how to get into Trinculo’s cell?”

My breath catches in my lungs. I stare at her hard.

She smiles and continues her self-grafting. “There’s something about me that’s different from anyone else. Only Trinculo knows. He helped… refine my gift.”

Without meaning to, I grab her wrist. The burning pen suspended in the air between us. “What gift?” I hold her wrist tight.

She lets me. “Walls,” she whispers.

I swing my head around to study the walls of my quarters. I have no clue what she is talking about. “What about walls?”

“Let go of me.”

I let go.

She stands, and as she walks over to my wall and places her hands upon it, I see the woman she will become in her spine; I see that she is not a useless creature after all. I see the wall turn to water, or what looks like water, and then the wall is gone, and the room alongside mine, which happens to be an information center, is suddenly there.

I gasp.

She is what Trinculo calls an engenderine. Someone whose mutation has resulted in a kind of human-matter interface. Though I’d not believed him. I thought the idea was merely his hope and desire, tangled into myth. But I am the one who is stupid and useless.

Then she restores the wall to its former status and returns to our work. She sets back at her own arm without saying anything else.

I glance over at the spider, who has managed to spin quite the intricate web while we worked. Later, when I am alone, and after I complete my real work on my own body, I hope that it will traverse my newly burnt skin with its story and knowledge. A palimpsest.

I turn to the girl, if the word girl is even what this person is, who seems to have become a woman, whatever that means, in the space of our session.

“Nyx,” she says, “My name is Nyx.”

Now we are three.

Chapter Eleven

As I continue to graft Joan’s story onto my body, there’s a moment that I think will kill me.

But it doesn’t.

Moreover, the fragmented song in my skull is beginning to coalesce. Or at least it seems so.

The way I see it, I have one answer left in my body: my body itself. Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. That is how art has preserved its toehold in our universe. Where there was poverty, there was also a painting someone stared at until it filled them with grateful tears. Where there was genocide, there was a song that refused to quiet. Where a planet was forsaken, there was someone telling a story with their last breath, and someone else carrying it like DNA, or star junk. Hidden matter.

Our performance would be staged at the cusp of Trinculo’s execution. Our “players” would include inmates smuggled from their cells and bonded—grafted—to our cause. The CIEL authorities and Jean de Men would have their performance, and we would have ours. In my mind’s eye Trinculo will travel a Skyline back to Earth—for according to Nyx, it is possible—and be reborn to live out his days away from this terrible, lifeless boat of nothing. There must be somewhere on Earth that is inhabitable amidst the chaos and detritus. Surely there’s a pocket or cave capable of sustaining a life. And if not, then I know he’d rather give his body to the good dirt we came from than to this suspended and systematized animation we mistook for a shot at more life.

My door vibrates, and in tumble more of my comrades. Young. Smooth-skinned. Sexless, but filled with an astonishingly repressed agency they have no idea what to do with. Oh, what an orgy we could make with Trinculo’s inventions! Our imaginations not yet dead. But we have work to do.

I set about instructing them in pairs, so that they can save time and work on one another’s bodies. During breaks, so that no one loses consciousness, I rehydrate them and lay out the plan for the performance. There is a question from a young man—though in place of his former flesh indication of manhood there is only a smooth lump, no balls hanging down like swollen round fruit, no smell of musk or hay or sweat. My god, I realize, these are the last “youth” that will ever exist in our reproduction-less wasteland, at least in purely human, uncloned form.

“Is this Trinculo… important to the performance?”

For a moment I experience an animal surge to kill him then and there, an urge to bite through his jugular and shoot his body out into space through an air lock like a foreign body. But that will only lead to another incarceration, which we haven’t the time for. I muster the patience of a mother.

“My love, my… petal,” I say, stroking his face. “Trinculo is worth ten thousand of us.” I narrate his prowess as a pilot and engineer. I give him and the others the backstory they need and want. The call for resistance.

“Now burn,” I command. And they set back to work on one another, searing the story of a girl into flesh, giving body to her name.

Nyx rises and moves toward a far wall. Far enough away as not to attract any attention. “Go now,” I say, and Nyx dissolves into the barely perceptible wall.

For myself, I steal time.

I scan the room of young rebels until my eyes blur over and they lose their meaning as signs. As I do, I hold the tool of my trade inches from my own inner thighs.

Before a burn, there is the sensation of molecules screaming, rearranging themselves.

Sometimes time opens up and pauses. My flesh has long ago learned to anticipate the burn. But in this extended moment I feel all the molecules in my body stop moving. Impending death wrenches stories away from their trajectories. Think of loved ones succumbing to disease, or wars, or natural disasters. The calm before the moment of destruction. The part of her story I intend to scar myself with at my thighs has taken a turn, and I will respond accordingly.

I had been thinking of her as a hero. Joan. The way we’ve all been trained to understanding that word and idea. Bound to a story that is not only man-made, but man-centered. How does that change when the terms of the story come from the body of a woman who is unlike any other in human history? A body tethered, not to god or some pinnacle of thought or faith, but to energy and matter? To the planet.

If we look at history—those of us who study it, who can remember it—we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we’ll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It’s as if humans can’t understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.

When the current crises became global in scope, when the very ground underneath our feet and the skies meant to give us life turned on us, our desperation grew to cinematic proportions. We abandoned all previous fathers, who now seemed puny and impotent. Who was God, even, in the face of geocatastrophe? Dinosaurs never cared about a god.

When I think about how and when Jean de Men became the leader of CIEL—how we acquiesced—my compassion for our survival washes away rather quickly. I look in the mirror, and see who and what we have become. The only way we survived even this long is at the expense of what’s left of Earth’s resources. Including the humans we forsook, their eyes turned Skyward.

It makes me laugh before it makes me cry: he was a celebrity, de Men. Handsome and strong. A capable new father. We worshipped his mutable charisma. We worshipped the story of ourselves that he gave us: that we were bright and beautiful and with wealth. That we were the next chapter of human history. That we were an evolutionary step forward. We bought it and ate it like fine chocolate.

Body to body, then, I join Joan in rejecting the teachings of a pseudo messiah figure. I join Joan in rejecting messiahs altogether. The story born of her actual body will be burned into mine not to mythologize her or raise her above anyone or anything, but to radically resist that impulse. Not toward any higher truth other than we are matter, as dirt and water and trees and sky are matter, as animals were and stars and human bodies are matter. To claim our humanity as humanity only, an energy amidst all other energy and matter that emerges, lives, dies, and then changes form.

What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?

I will write it. I will tell the truth. Be the opposite of a disciple. Words and my body the site of resistance.

When I learn that Trinculo has asked to be burned at the stake, in the manner of Joan, I know two things. One, that they will hasten his execution for having the audacity to make this request, a fact that overcomes my entire body so quickly and violently that I drop to the floor, and two, that the image that has haunted me my entire ascended life will begin to come back to me in dreams.

I am, as it turns out, wrong about the latter. It comes to me not just in dreams, but also in waking life: while I work, when I eat, even when I sit in a chair and think of nothing. It obsessively replaces my present tense. Like a film stuck in my skull.

After Joan’s trial, it was decreed that, for maximum media impact, she would be executed using a method from antiquity. Specifically, a medieval burning. Several reasons were given: first, no trace of her corpse could be left behind. She must be reduced to ash and scattered into space. While some expressed concern that her ashes might be captured and used to lionize her—or, worse, to anoint a new terrorist leader—the larger concern was that any piece of her body that remained might be seized upon as something of a holy relic—and one tangible, material relic could be as dangerous as an entire belief system.

Furthermore, it was decided that an old-fashioned burning would have the ultimate dramatic effect, that no other form of execution could tap into a collective psychic desire to watch the object of one’s devotion in peril. Though there was, admittedly, much discussion about devising an electric chair execution, which some claimed would have an equivalent impact on the populace, but which was ultimately rejected because it required too elaborate a mise-en-scène. Drowning was a popular suggestion, but water was scarce, and suggestions of producing a CGI version were quickly dismissed, as even the best simulations of water always looked like antiseptic gel. Since the event was to be filmed and disseminated via media outlets all over the world, a fire death was likely to create the most dazzling visual display, and thus promised to draw the largest possible audience.

Finally, it was decided: a burning execution, a barbarity dredged up from the annals of history. It would serve to remind the remaining population on Earth that the very elements they had fought to claim and protect on that ball of dirt they called home could at any moment destroy them—whether through ecological cataclysm or through fire itself, the simplest and most elemental force in nature. As easily as it had evolved them, it could destroy.

For fire’s sake they burned her.

A scaffold was erected, in the manner of old. Joan was positioned upon the scaffold within a staged version of some bombed-out city, barren as a desert; she was not made privy to the location of her execution, only that it would happen at night.

High winds tricked dust into the air, making the stage appear to float on a cloud of dirt.

She looked up at the black and blue of the night sky. We looked down at her, without her consciousness of our gaze. Or perhaps with her full awareness: at one point, the cameras caught her looking up, and in doing so she seemed to acknowledge the ultimate power of our position and the utter futility of her own.

Then the drama began. To be clear, it took several rehearsals of the burning to achieve the desired result, the perfect shot. Even with a director of the highest pedigree.

Hands propelled her roughly toward the scaffold where the stake and faggots were waiting, and hoisted her upon it; it was built of plaster and was very high, so high that the executioner had some trouble in reaching her. Instead of a crown of thorns, a tall paper cap, like a mitre, was set upon her head, bearing the words heretic, apostate, eco-terrorist.

She requested a tree branch. She said she only wanted to see it.

Instead, a visual facsimile was supplied. Joan flew into a rage.

“You mean to execute me and you cannot supply a single branch from a tree? What are you, sadists? Neanderthals? I know you must have one. You must have saved something from your destruction—a trophy, a prize, like a serial killer would. You must have an entire museum devoted to your every act of devastation.”

Finally, in what was considered an act of compassion, a small fig tree in a planter was placed in front of her, atop a wooden stage of sorts. The tree was as plastic as the planter.

Meanwhile, she was bound to the stake. She called out to the land, the earth, to animals, to the bones of animals, to the sky and rain and dead sun, to rivers and salted oceans and fungi and algae and insects—to beetles, of all things. To species long extinct and those now in their compromised twilight. Anxious CIEL authorities piped in synthesized laughter in a feckless attempt to undermine her message.

Before the kindling and wood were ignited, other forms of burning were produced. Boiling oil was poured upon her exposed flesh, molten lead directly onto her chest. Burning resin, wax, and sulfur melted together over her body, forming streams of liquid fire until the top few layers of her roasted away and her skin began to slip from her body. The scent of burnt blood and honey, mixed with meat and acrid ash, was recorded. Finally the wood was lit, and the flames leapt up the length of her body. How mesmerized we were at the image, a beacon through the flames, as if somehow her features had ascended Skyward— mouth and eyes too open, visage frozen upward, asking only Why? Or so we thought at the time.

As Trinculo and I buried our faces into each other’s flesh, cradling each other like animals, Joan of Dirt burned. She, the last piece of earth and everything it stood for.

It wasn’t Why she’d uttered that night, we later learned. In fact, it wasn’t a word at all.

It had been music. A song whose origins floated above our heads in the deep fields of space, cosmic strings plucked and rippling through time itself. A song that comes back to me a phrase at a time.

But it wasn’t a woman’s body burning we saw the day of her execution. That was all a matter of special effects.

Joan had escaped that day. Rather than admit it, they’d opted to spread false images of her death around the world, in endless succession, until the images and stories became one and the same. Until her death replaced her altogether.

But she was still out there.

There is no complicated set of ideas to consider. They are going to execute my beloved Trinculo, and no one but I will even take a breath differently. I have three aims: to finish my body work and develop a cell of like-minded comrades; to free Trinculo before they kill him; and to drive Jean de Men and the entire CIEL world straight into the godforsaken sun. Finish it.

There is a new kind of resistance myth emerging, one I suddenly understand: the world ended at the hands of a girl.

What an ungodly choice she made. To destroy life on Earth as we knew it because of the suffering she saw ahead.

When the volcanoes of earth erupted, when the waters rose and Joan emerged, it was clear to me now, we’d gotten the story all wrong. In our desire to claim her as ours, we’d misread our heroine’s aims. We thought she’d wanted to end the Wars, to save mankind, each of us secretly hoping to be chosen.

But Joan knew one thing we never learned: to end war meant to end its maker, to marry creation and destruction rather than hold them in false opposition.

The Bible and the Talmud, the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita, the scrolls of Confucius and Purvas and Vedas—all that is over, I understand now. In its place, we begin the Book of Joan. Our bodies holding its words.

My moment of pause is over. I bring my young comrades back into focus around me—busy as little clone bees—then plunge the heated stylus into the flesh of my left upper thigh, the skin soaring up with red-white, tiny traces of smoke tendril around my work.

I see her differently now.

Here is the revised battle scene that delivers to us this new world. Before her signature fills the sky in devastation, she stands at the familiar cusp of war, in the place we carved out for her as our savior, and carries out the opposite of a resurrection: a decreation. I raise the words. I burn:

Joan’s foot sunk into sand so surrendered to oil that her boots suctioned with each step to the black earth. In front of her, a multitude of snakes: snakes in the form of man-made roads, and river snakes of thickened-black crude, and toxin snakes from rivulets of runoff, and land snakes of sinking sand, and the jut and crease of eroded canyon edges cutting up and slithering out. Everything black and blue and smelling of excavation and the drive to conquer, colonize, deplete.

She surveyed the territory differently from the way a discoverer would. This was the future city we had made. This viscous thickening wasteland.

She could cast her mind backward to a world of lush hills and green valleys. To a distinction between earth and sky. She wasn’t old, but still she could remember it. She had been a child when we still had choices: there was us and there was the environment and there was what we were doing to it. The union we were meant to manifest was irrevocably broken.

What sprawled before her now was a bruise-colored tableau of our insatiable desire for refinement. The Alberta Tar Sands. Oil, then water. That’s the order the story would go in. It wasn’t a secret, not difficult to see coming. It was commonplace, really: how we blind ourselves purposefully in the name of progress.

She dug the black toe of her boot into the black sand. A black revolutionary next to her. “Not long now,” he said. “This is it.” She nodded. Briefly she wanted to embrace him. She was still a virgin, and for a moment she thought, Why not now? Who knows how much longer we’ll have? They could even double suicide afterward, beat the planet to the punch; return back to matter, just like stars in the sky. Dead and casting light and story backward.

On her side of the battle, she served firepower equal to Jean de Men’s. Equal numbers: military defectors, civilians, and revolutionaries fighting together. Terrorists, she thought, laughing inside. When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries. People who turn over the earth. She scanned her forces, all unshakably allegiant to her. She dug the heel of her other foot into the wrong earth. Everything smelled like oil and fear. Everyone’s eyes stung with petroleum fumes and firepower. Her body rose up from the ground like a useless question mark. The lip of the terrain, blackened and cracked, oozed.

On Jean de Men’s side of the battle, he continued the onslaught, marshaling invisible drone strikes while striving to complete the escape route he planned for the elite, abandoning Earth to live in the cosmos. The CIEL safe haven, the orbiting fucks. On his side, an arsenal of biochemical weaponry that would annihilate more than half his own forces in the process. His command included military allegiants and military slaves and deluded civilians and civilian slaves and the worst fodder of all: people without hope in a future. He would use suicide fighters, she knew already. It wasn’t unthinkable. It never had been. Humanity had always been its own monster.

On her side, however, she had something else: what could be compared only to a new bomb prototype, its power known but untested, that would likely kill enough on both sides to render it genocidal. It was a later evolution of a cluster bomb, but one that relied not on fire or flesh-disintegrating power, but on sound. The harmonics of the universe, turned brutal when marshaled and used. But she did not need this bomb. She could use her body.

On his side, there lived a hatred for what humanity represented with its diversities and differences, and his pathological desire to abandon the planet, to re-create humankind in a different image. His own.

On her side, there was a hatred there, too, if she was being honest with herself: for what we had made of ourselves, for the fictions we consistently chose that forced our own undoing; for our fear of otherness; for our inability to conquer ego, our seemingly tsunami-like thirst for never-ending consumption at the price of the planet.

What is a body? Her body, capable of more than mass destruction. And she’d known it since she was twelve. That is what the song had laid bare to her, so many years ago, among the trees.

To some it seemed as if Joan could not die. She’d been wounded between the neck and shoulder by shrapnel ricocheting off of a tank in a drone strike. She’d withstood a blow to her skull from a boulder sent hurtling in a firefight near Orléans. She’d been shot, bruised, bloodied, and even buried underneath a one-thousand-year-old medieval wall.

But here, here at the lip of the Tar Sands, she and her army stood silently, her white banner undulating in the wind, watching a nonlethal drone fly toward her almost soundlessly. Long-range scanners had tracked it for over a mile. She thought about crows and pigeons from history, carrying battle messages between forces. Briefly it perhaps looked like a white prehistoric—or future-esque—bird.

When the drone was as close to her face as if she were facing off with an actual person in front of her, a screen dropped down, a screen about the size of a human head, a screen filled with the image of Jean de Men’s face. “Coward,” she said.

“Please do accept my apologies,” his voice scratched out from the screen above the hum of the drone’s rotors, “but my actual presence is not required. Be assured that I have my finger on all the buttons: you live or die as a species today.”

She spat on the ground. “Full of sound and fury, as always, signifying nothing; really, Jean, you should have spent your last hours studying literature, history, philosophy, rather than spending all this idiotic energy projecting your image at me.”

His smile cut the screen in half. “Test me. I beg you. This chess match will not be won through traditional means.”

“There is no longer any such thing as tradition. We are at the end of the world.” She stepped closer to his screen-face. “There is no chess match when multiple universes stretch and frown and squat to shit; when the existence of parallel realities in physics proves that tragedy and comedy, love and hate, life and death, were never really opposites; when language and being and knowing themselves are revealed to have been blinded by dumb binaries. We’re living one version of ourselves. You are simply this version of yourself. Endless matter changing forms. In another version of yourself, exactly next to this, you are dead matter.”

The screen laughed. “Come now, do you after all this time actually fear death? Ordinary, human, death? Fear the death of your so-called fame and legacy, fear the pain and torture of capture, fear the length and depth of your impending humiliations and the story we will make of that.”

So close to the drone’s screen she could kiss it, she whispered, “The intimacy I have with my enemy is deeper than any lover could know; be careful, brutal opponent, of stepping into your thickest nightmare, your deepest desire, the desire to be named lovingly, taken to a milky tit you never experienced, not forgiven of your sins but embraced for them, incinerated for them, sent back to glowing white hot matter with a compassion and orgasm so complete it erases your humanity altogether…”

It’s said that she quite calmly lifted her hand up to the screen and punched a hole through it. The drone wobbling and cascading to dirt, like a felled bird.

And then the two sides of things buckled and heaved in collision like two tectonic plates.

In their aftermath, of course, new continents might eventually form.

The human race might be obliterated, or survive in an orbiting dreamscape, or in some new animal evolution, or in some other way.

Her eyes set.

Her hands ready to go to dirt.

He didn’t know.

He had no idea what this young adult had in her hands. He still thought of her as a female, a child, playing some kind of game in which he could outwit her.

It wasn’t quite killing or saving, what she had in hand. Not creation or destruction.

And yet it was all of these.

She closed her eyes and saw again the future. Waves and waves of global torture and slaughter weaving their way slowly across the planet. Calculated starvations and ghettoizations in the form of so-called refugee camps larger than former cities or even countries where millions and millions perished or killed one another in the crazed haze of being left for dead. Poisoned land poisoned water poisoned aquifer poisoned air poisoned animals poisoned food. Children set to forced labor to collect and surrender resources all over the world, armies of orphans working and killing and dying for an ever-narrowing pinpoint of power—the only star in the sky—a ruthless inhuman grotesque—a darkness made from all of us. She saw survival overtaking the possibility of empathy in such vast swaths of being that people looked disfigured and lost-eyed, as if consciousness receded and an empty-headed nothingness took its place. She saw birds dropping from the skies and bees peppering the world’s roads and fish washing ashore in cascades and deer and bear alike—all manner of animal—including humans—hunted and slaughtered or starved to extinction. Everything consuming every other thing.

She saw unstoppable and perpetual war as existence.

Her eyes stung and blurred with salted wet, but only for a few seconds. About the time humanity has lived on Earth compared to the cosmos. “Bring your last war,” she whispered into her headpiece, deciding in that instant that all life was already death. “This ending is just beginning.” She did not fire a rifle. She did not trigger a bomb. She looked once at Leone; she set her shoulders, her jaw; she put her hands down into the dirt. Sand. Oil. Molecules of air. History. Religion. Philosophy. Human relationships. Evolution.

From the carcass of the drone on the ground, Jean de Men’s voice yet warbled out, “Apostate, vile whore, immoral terrorist, this day you die.” Secure in his power and armed forces, his army already surging forth, drones going to wing the way insects and birds used to.

“There is no self and other,” she said, laughing into the mouth of death, the blue light at her temple gleaming laser-like into the sky and surrounding air, the song in her head crescendoing in tidal waves and reverberating in the bones of every man, woman, and child around her, her armies plunging and rising as if carried by apocalyptic body song.

And when she rested her body down upon the dirt, arms spread, legs spread, face down, there was a breach to history as well as evolution.

And the sky lit with fire, half from the weapons of his attack, half from her summoning of the earth and all its calderas—war and decreation all at once, a seeming impossibility.

Alive. Trinculo says she’s alive, down there, existing in spite of everything.

The song. In my head. It’s hers. I remember now. It went into us. I don’t know how.

Once, she had a voice.

Now her voice is in my body.