West of the Hollow Sands lies the Empty Bowl—hulled and riddled with the silent flechettes of THAT WAR. THAT WAR, which bloodied every nose in the world, THAT WAR, which covered the broken shell with radioactive snot and toxic soot, THAT WAR, which stole the future from we who remained.

The Empty Bowl straddles the sky, breeding it, scattering its sterile seed where it may. Perhaps this is what drew us to it—its prominence in the landscape, sticking up out of the dust like an angry wart.

In hindsight, we would have been better off burying ourselves, like the mole-people in the last days of THAT WAR—just tunnel down out of sight and set up shop where the crust meets the mantle, there to toast marshmallows and apostates for all eternity.

Deezle was the first to find a path through the Hollow Sands—a crooked zigzag across ten miles of sinkholes and sulphuric mist that could eat a man down to the marrow in minutes. To this day, Deezle claims they were tripping on octopine and a bad batch of kombucha when they made the journey—so spun they couldn't walk straight—but everyone knows that's bullshit. The truth is buried in that rusty colander they call a brain case—if it hasn't leaked out over their shoes by now.

I was the next to arrive, but only after Deezle retraced their steps with a reel of copper cable and a set of tent-pegs, marking the route with that rosy strand, pinned into the sand like sutures holding a wound closed.

After that, the colony started to come together—more people made the journey, sliding along Deezle's wire like beads on a cheap necklace.

Back then, we all knew about THAT WAR and what it had done—there was no new blood in the world, just old, congealed shit, pumping slow and viscous through the world's veins like tar.

That would never do.

The first thing we tried was to repopulate the old fashioned way—we all partnered up and went at it non-stop for nine months. When that didn't work, we resorted to a free-for-all, right there in the middle of the Empty Bowl—just a big old pile of writhing meat; a regular fuck-fest. Before THAT WAR, there were those of us that fantasised about that kind of thing, but there's nothing like necessity to take the shine off a fetish and leave it as dead and dull as perished latex.

The Doctor figured it out in the end—how to make new people when we were all barren as the desert we'd fled from. The Doctor was one of the last arrivals to the Empty Bowl—one of the stragglers who, for their belated adoption of our new home, were treated with mild suspicion by all those that came before. In the Doctor's case, the suspicion was warranted.

It took two of us to get it right—two souls flushed down the toilet of eternity; a tenth of our strength in sacrifice to the greater good of the species.

The ANSEX process was perfected after that.

The curious thing—aside from the process itself—is the impression I had that the Doctor had not conjured the process from nothing, that it was not the spontaneous invention of a mad genius, but the culmination of a life's work.

Bringing elements of one's life from before THAT WAR was discouraged—though it was not actually illegal, Deezle and I decided early on that baggage from the world before had no place in the Now-Age and so we spread rumours that the Hollow Sands knew when a person was traversing them with too much on their mind, or too many personal effects weighing them down. If someone did hazard the journey, laden with curios and trinkets, or vendettas and bad intentions, the Hollow Sands would send a storm to swallow them up, sucking them down into the acid ponds below the surface, there to be digested and reconstituted in eternal torment. We never did prove the Doctor had done this, but what happened later all but confirmed it.

Becoming ANSEX meant many things, but chiefly, it meant the ability to breed with oneself—to produce a facsimile of a human being, splitting part of yourself into another whole. Naturally, this required a great deal of body mass to accomplish and those who underwent the process had to also undergo a regime of forced-feeding beforehand. First, you ballooned out with fat until you were almost twice your original weight and then, the Doctor's genetic algorithm took over—your body split, taking with it roughly 80% of your mass, to be broken down and repurposed into the various tissues and organs required to make a new human being. The process is not fast, nor is it painless—the new human must gestate for several days, hanging off the side of your head like a tumour, accruing mass and converting it steadily into new bones, blood vessels, skin.

When I did it, it felt like my head was going to explode—like some cunt was stood on my forehead with a pickaxe, trying to dig a hole through my eye socket, like migraines and cluster-headaches had a baby and the baby spent the first year of its life banging its head against a brick wall.

All the first colonists became ANSEX—me, Deezle, even the Doctor—and our colony doubled in size overnight.

Offspring produced by ANSEX looked almost exactly like their parent, except they were a mirror image—every freckle and blemish, flipped across a vertical axis. Dominant hands, feet and eyes were also switched. Apart from this, they were effectively indistinguishable.

Among the stranger quirks of ANSEX reproduction, was the effect this mirroring had on established neural pathways in the brain—by flipping these across the longitudinal fissure, our children, for all their resemblance to us, had diametrically opposed personalities. Memory centres of the brain were also affected, implanting them with false recollections of things which had not happened. The strangest quirk of all, without doubt, was the fact that, somewhere along the ANSEX reproductive process, the child regained their fertility.

To begin with, there was much to celebrate. For all the idiosyncrasies of our children, the Doctor had succeeded in preserving the species. The precious fragment of humanity that had traversed the Hollow Sands, that had survived THAT WAR, that had undergone the excruciation of the ANSEX process, would survive, nestled in the rusted cradle of the Empty Bowl.

Raising our children was a communal effort—each of us took time to educate them in the ways of the world, taking great pains to teach them of THAT WAR and the events that led up to it, for none of them remembered a war ever taking place. Much had to be corrected and chief amongst these corrections was their mode of speech—with their speech centres reversed, the children of ANSEX reproduction spoke backwards and it was a long time before the first of them grasped the normal way of doing things.

In that time, some of us—myself and Deezle, in particular—made the effort to learn their backwards speech, knowing this would ease our children's future development. Others, such as the Doctor, refused to do so, maintaining that there was a right and wrong way of speaking. This refusal would be our undoing.

The first problems arose amongst those of the original colonists that saw their ANSEX status as a curse, rather than a blessing. ANSEX was a product of necessity, they said, it was a burden we bore in order to save the future and if they had a choice, ANSEX would not exist. This self-derogation passed to their children and, in transition, it became a prejudice; what love was conveyed by the misguided followers of the Doctor was twisted and turned into hate instead. It was, I think, no coincidence that these were the same colonists that refused to learn kaepskcaB—the incipient lingua franca of the new generation.

We who embraced ANSEX and our offspring's language thought differently. We spoke to them in kaepskcaB of the necessity, yes, but also of the all those things destroyed or jeopardised by THAT WAR—of free and fluid identities from which the myriad configurations of humanity sprung, bearing love and fruit through the neuronic gardens of the psyche. Though we did not know it at the time, in choosing to communicate in kaepskcaB, we ensured our message would not be misinterpreted; flipped in transition into a message of hate and intolerance.

In those first months, there emerged two among the new generation who would come to shape the future of the Empty Bowl. The first was Rotcod, son of the Doctor. The second was Elzeed, child of Deezle. My child, for their part, did not involve themselves in politics—they were too preoccupied deciding what they should be called, for I had not presumed to name them, leaving the decision in their capable hands.

Elzeed was fierce and focused—a prowling lion/ess who could stop hearts with a glare of their emerald eyes. They were, as to be expected, unlike their parent, who dreamt in octopine flow-states of wild futures and crafted sprawling dioramas from flakes of rust-eaten steel to illustrate them. Through Deezle’s teachings, vocalised in kaepskcaB, however, Elzeed learned of their parent, their flesh and blood, and so the two came to understand one another perfectly—though Deezle was chaotic and Elzeed, orderly, each shaped the other and so became alike in goals and motives, if not in temperament.

Rotcod, by contrast, was a savage brute of a creature. For all of the Doctor’s pains in educating their wayward child, Rotcod seemed to learn nothing from his parent—each lesson was twisted and reversed within his brain, cemented in the wrong neuronic soil. He was violent, ill-tempered and stupid, where the Doctor was mild-mannered and intelligent—in this, they shared only one quality; that of impatience, though it manifested differently between parent and child. In the Doctor it was a subtle irritability, in Rotcod, it was a towering rage.

I should emphasise here that the Doctor was not a bad person, merely misguided—I am sure they loved Rotcod as Deezle loved Elzeed and I loved my own child, but there is no denying their methods made a monster of their son. By failing to communicate with Rotcod in his own language, by failing to recognise the reversal at work within our offspring, by failing to fully embrace the very process they had invented, the Doctor ensured their son would never understand our generation, nor the circumstances that drove us to the Empty Bowl in the first place.

In time, Rotcod grew elusive, shunning the dwellings we had fashioned from the rust of the Empty Bowl. He ceased his lessons with the Doctor and refused to speak anything other than kaepskcaB. Eventually, he withdrew into the lower levels of the Empty Bowl, buried beneath the sand and the detritus of the old world in an uncanny emulation of the mole-people—though what motivated his retreat into the bosom of the earth was nothing as noble as mere survival.

The Doctor’s failure caused them much shame—it burdened them terribly, and though they would never admit their mistake in their handling of Rotcod, it was clear they regretted the outcome. For our part, we did as much as we could to assuage their guilt—we spoke often, the Doctor, Deezle and I—but it was to no avail; the Doctor, stung by the rejection of their son spoke only of fetching him back to the surface to resume his education. Soon after Rotcod’s withdrawal from society, the Doctor disappeared—gone, it was rumoured, to entreat with Rotcod in the bowels of the earth.

At this time, my child was continuing to play with names, trying them on as though they were new winter coats. None truly fitted and each was discarded in turn. To someone like the Doctor, this might have been more than they could bear, but I did not allow it to concern me—the children of ANSEX would find their own way; it was their birthright to build anew what we had destroyed. My only goal was to ensure they were as well equipped as possible, in knowledge, in intellect, in emotional resilience and sensitivity—to ensure they would not repeat our mistakes and drag with them into the new world, the baggage of the old.