X Y Z

“There will be no slaves in the promised land.”

He must have hated them. Clouds. The way they bubbled up from nothing, without order, moving to the chaos of the winds. The way they lacked geometry, angles, were shapeless and yet with the right pair of eyes, could be seen as any shape imaginable. Maybe he didn’t have the right pair of eyes. “Amorphous wankers,” I recalled him saying.

Maybe that is why he came here, to this place. Never a cloud in sight, just the endless parabola of sand dunes. Though they too moved with the winds, they never changed their shape, and their translations across the landscape were slow and uniform.

Twelve midnight.

The coffee shop.

One of a hundred million strewn across the globe like it. A name. A franchise. A chain. Cigarette cartons stuck in hedgerows at the side of the road. Their slow spread through the world’s cities like bacteria, reproducing identically, endlessly, across a field of agar jelly. He was there, eyes barely visible behind dark glasses—an affectation of his from the bad old days. We greeted each other in the usual way—one unified nod, as if our noses shared a magnetic pole—and sat ourselves at one of the chequer-patterned tables in the corner, deep in the air-conditioned womb of the coffee shop.

// The edges are folding inwards / Origami puzzle pieces falling into place / An envelope containing the instinctual drive for dominance / Packets of data cluster in a perfect triangle / Acknowledging the circle within //

The desert.

The perfect sickle of the moon hung low in the sky. In every culture on the planet a story or deity or personage is associated with it and it’s origins—how many? A thousand? Throughout time? A hundred thousand? A million? Only those stories, deities and personages could possibly know, and for now they remained silent. They were all there, in that glinting white smile.

We were stood across from one another. I looked into the shadows of his eyes, the cheekbones beneath, angular, poking through skin—inverted ziggurats to a god of concavity. Were it not for the heavy beard that covered his face, his cheeks would have appeared hollow, and his jawline, razor thin.

“X, Y, Z,” he said.

“Z, Y, X,” I responded.

Before.

The Pythagoras Bar.

Unique, like every structure within London’s central mile. It had been converted from a dilapidated council building, built in the sixties brutalist style. Metre upon metre of angular concrete. It was there that I met him for the second time.

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 1/14:

Extended array of flagella may make it an ideal specimen. Displays uncommon regenerative qualities and hardiness—despite extreme conditions of its natural habitat and assumed adaptations to the same, it seems entirely unperturbed by the conditions of my laboratory. Must thank my assistant for this discovery and apologise for my harsh words—he did not know the containment ampoule was not to be unsealed until I had run my preliminary analysis.

Twelve, midday.

Twelve dead, forty wounded in the collapse of the Millennium Bridge. Footage, juddering, speaking voices overlaying distant screams and the howl of rupturing metal. The foundations rip themselves from their roots under the strain of the falling structure. Dust swirls and billows before settling.

Twelve, midnight.

Police recover a zip-lock bag containing a memory stick from the bottom of the Thames, weighed down by a perfect cube of concrete and attached by a tangled length of blue nylon rope.

Twelve-thirty.

Police recover a single plain-text document from the memory stick. Document reads; “X Y Z”.

He walked to me across a dip in the dunes. We greeted each other in the usual way and he led me without another word to his camp. Three khaki tents squatted in a triangle around a circular rug. He sat me near the edge of the rug, on the outermost of it’s concentric circles. He headed into the tent directly behind me and returned a moment later with a bottle of Hendricks gin and two cut glass tumblers.

// The line blurs / Evil is an instinct/action/word / The corners are in place now / An Atlas stands at every perpendicular boundary / Waiting for the heft of their load to be borne across atomised shoulders //

Mr. Prime Minister was asked to comment on the catastrophe. After careful calculation, Mr. Prime Minister appeared before the press. In the slow, methodical tones indicative of his high calibre of programming, he stated; “This, the first attack on our people in recent memory, is clearly the work a terrorist, or terrorists unknown. We, the government of this, our fair nation, are at present engaged in investigating all possible leads. The usual suspects—which is to say, the asylum seekers, climate activists, right/left wing extremists, members various of the LGBTQA+ community, anarchist collectives, disaffected youth, jaded artists/writers/musicians, the unemployed—are, as I speak, being rounded up for questioning. On this day of tragedy, my heart resides with the unfortunate people who have lost loved ones in this merciless attack on our sensibilities, our ideals, and our architecture.”

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 2/14:

The genetic coding is unlike any I have encountered in my research thus far. The base pairings at first appear unnaturally repetitive, but on closer inspection they bear a striking resemblance to binary. All in all I hypothesise a successful symbiosis between organism and mechanism.

Tokyo is a vertical city. All lines parallel to one another. It held a strange beauty in its vitreous linearity. From the plane, banking left in its gradual descent, I was captivated by its perfect geometry. The landing strip, flanked either side by the worshipped monoliths of the contemporary era, reminded me of a childhood holiday to Bavaria, where the airport nestled in the greenery of a forest, and bolt-straight pine trees blurred in the plane’s windows as its wheels screeched against the tarmac.

“I’ve thought too long and hard about it now to stop the things I have set in motion,” he said, leaning in across the checker pattern table. “Too long to expunge it from my mind.”

I nodded, not really thinking of what it was that I agreed to. Just listening, as always.

“This world is so ugly to me, so is it any real surprise I find beauty in ugly things?” he said.

Twelve midnight.

The copse bathed in silver.

I had a stitch—same place as always; left side, third rib up, costae spuriae. My breathing was ragged by then and they were directly overhead—a mechanical hum too loud to be mistaken for insects. Lights flashed, blinding—no rolling peal of thunder, just the clicking of camera lenses behind dark glass.

// Thought is contained within three dimensions / Axis X: Sensory / Axis Y: Experiential / Axis Z: Concrete //

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 3/14:

The improved nano-processor runs at just below peak efficiency at room temperature—higher temperatures and over exposure to sunlight however, result in erratic failures.

“It was a mistake, an error of judgement.”

“A judgement of what?”

The Pythagoras was busier than usual that night, though we were the last of our group at the bar. The others were back at the cramped flat where we would be sleeping that night. He leaned in towards me over his gin.

“Do you know what I learnt living there?”

“No, what?”

“Fuck all.”

“How did you know X?”

An interview room.

A police station a few miles from the copse.

I remember it well, brightly lit—nothing like the films, no smoking, no vaping either. I’d chewed a hole through my snus pouch and my mouth was filled with minty grit. Two cups of coffee flanked a microphone between me and Officer Brown.

“Who says I knew him?” I replied.

I wasn’t trying to be clever—even now it’s hard to say whether or not I really knew X—even so, had this been a film, it might have been the moment Officer Brown threw the first punch, a flashy right hook, something that’d look good on camera. It wasn’t, and he didn’t. Instead, the flesh-toned latex of his face contorted into a smile, as if it were exactly the answer he had been waiting for.

His voice was not as I remembered it. Too quiet, too harsh, as though the sand of the desert had eroded his vocal chords.

He refilled the tumblers.

“How are things?”

“Quiet,” I replied.

“Oh?”

“Quiet enough. Home is a different matter, of course.”

“How long has it been?”

“Eight months, to the day. As you well know.”

// Death is a habit we have grown fond of / It is a state/place/person/end / To love one’s own addictions is tantamount to Stockholm syndrome / Can a convict love the bars of their own cell? //

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 4/14:

I have designated the new specimen the Cephalopoda Bacterium—it exhibits strange behaviour in lab conditions, namely a slow metabolic rate, and an apparent aversion to UV radiation and heat. However, when one isolated specimen was subjected to extreme levels of both, it’s metabolic and reproductive rates sky-rocketed. This strange correlation is something I must investigate further.

Twelve midday.

The London Eye sinks beneath the Thames. No casualties—police received an anonymous tip-off an hour prior to the attack and managed to evacuate the area. They failed to disarm a small but powerful explosive device nestled in the landmark’s central pivot. A second memory stick was recovered from the Thames, fixed in the same manner to another cube of concrete. The same message was recovered from the memory stick; “X Y Z”.

“God is a perspective—like a room, or a pin-hole camera through which all things are seen simultaneously.”

“Thank you for lying.”

“Thank you for staying dead.”

The bar area of the Pythagoras was raised on a square dais, set into a niche in the far wall. The interior was decorated with triangular panels of MDF or plywood, painted in vibrant, clashing colours. The place felt like a shrine to geometry, a holy place for mathematicians, architects and scientists, though each found something different to worship within its walls.

Mr. President today sent his condolences to Mr. Prime Minister and offered thirty-two-point-six-seven megabytes of moral support to our fair nation, in this, our time of crisis.

The multi-storey car park.

A multi-faceted slab of concrete and iron rebar—an unfinished megalith for the gods of the new millennium. It was one of his places—a sanctuary of urban Zen—the entry ramp zig-zagging its way down the side of the building, the perfectly rectangular column of the empty lift-shaft, the incomplete spandrels, like a Morse code stutter—writings that only he, as the prophet of the new apocalypse, could read.

Every civilisation throughout history has their own story of how the world will end—Ragnarok, the Deluge, Mutually Assured Destruction—his was new though. We were sat in the internal stairwell, sharing a cigarette. It was there he told me about it. His story. The Concrete Octopus.

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 5/14:

A neutral coagulant must enter through the capsule and cell wall for the bacterium to take to its new silicon based components. Once bonded, it displays an uncanny capacity for what I can only describe as learning—ten cycles in and it determined the purpose of the new components and affected to use them as intended, albeit inconsistently.

Outside Gatwick airport train station an elderly woman shouted hysterically to the world at large.

“I’m dead,” she screamed, until her voice was raw.

Passersby averted gazes, some crossed the street, hoping to avoid her, as though her madness were contagious.

“I’m dead goddammit, my liver’s gone.”

Two police officers in stab-vests approached and tried to calm her down, but she continued in her assertions.

“I’m dead, and you shit-munchers don’t scare me, ‘cause I’m dead, you hear?”

“Calm down ma’am, please. You say you think someone’s trying to kill you?” said one of the officers, a youngster who seemed altogether more concerned with the woman’s well-being than her colleague, a portly middle-aged man who had clearly taken the woman’s insult to heart.

“No, you bastards don’t understand, I’m already dead, got no liver, see?”

I stood a while and listened, toking despondently on a vape.

“Ma’am if you don’t calm down, we’re going to have to take you into custody,” said the male officer.

“You swine-fuckers don’t scare me, I’m already dead, what’s goddam police custody to me—hell we’re all dead anyways, so why don’t you shit-heads go fuck yourselves?”

I watched out of the corner of my eyes as the male officer, aided by his reluctant colleague restrained and handcuffed the woman before leading her away to a blacked-out police van. As they pushed her, with no small effort, into its back seats she managed one final utterance;

“You’re all fucked, we’re all fucked—it’s all there, on the walls, you think the eye and the bridge were accidents? You think it was terrorists that did that? I’m dead, you’re dead, we’re all dead you lousy cunts.”

Mr. Pope today offered the sincerest of his condolence arrays to Mr. Prime Minister and the people of this, our fair nation, for what he referred to as “the grievous tragedy inflicted upon of the people of Britain.” This morning he personally offered sixty-four-point-seven-three megabytes of his moral support in aid of our fair nation.

That night I watched a work party singing Gimme Shelter in The Rashomon Karaoke Bar. It was late and they were sloppy drunk, stumbling over each other on the too narrow stage. On returning to their table, they spotted me and invited me to join them. They were not a work party at all, but a Yakuza clan, out celebrating a victory in a local turf-war. When the bar closed, I joined them at their hideout where the party continued, fuelled by Scotch and a hallucinogenic stimulant they called “octopine”. The next morning we drank coffee and listened to Exile on Main Street.

// Message repeats / Sincerity is a vice like everything else / In the total pursuit of truth we lose our fictional selves / We lose the meaning ascribed to the life-narratives we are all a part of //

“In time the many rose with one voice. When they rise with one corporeal form, the chosen few, who have heard the words of the prophet, will begin the exodus.”

He pushed a series of photos across the table to me.

“From the CCTV of a local coffee house, the morning after the attack on the millennium bridge.”

He hadn’t needed to say it. I had been there after-all.

“It’s finished.”

“What is?”

“The book.”

“Our word for it harkens from Latin origins; concretus, meaning compact or condensed—the perfect passive participle of concrescere, from con, meaning together, and crescere, meaning to grow.”

He returned to the table, another gin in each hand.

“You know what I actually learnt there, though?”

“Let me guess, fuck all?” I said.

“No,” he replied, his face now solemn, his voice grave. “Sometimes, there’s beauty in ugliness. In concrete and harsh geometry—that place, like some brutalist architect’s wet-dream, there was beauty in it.”

“Words worthy of Eco,” I said.

Officer Brown jerked into life across the desk. As before, he dispensed a stream of coffee into the polystyrene cup balanced in his stomach cavity.

“Milk and sugar, right?” he said.

I nodded. A squirt of milk from the second nozzle set into his chest, followed by a lump of rough-hewn sugar dispensed from a plastic chute above, plopped into the cup.

“Thanks,” I said, as he passed me the coffee across the desk.

They showed me Tokyo from a worm’s eye view, in gestures. We broke each other’s languages with unaccustomed tongues. Later, they led me through the crowded streets to their favourite restaurant—a back-alley/side-street kind of place that looked more like someone’s home than a licensed establishment. We drank warm sake and ate sushi from a curl of ceramic china—prepared in front of us by an aged chef. His knife worked quickly through the fish, occasionally tapping the marble block he prepared them on.

“We are all food for the machine.”

The sky was overcast—a blanket of cloud like greying whale blubber, no way of distinguishing one from another. I sat in a deckchair at the centre of the copse. I drank coffee and smoked and stared at the sky. A red kite flew close overhead, hovered on an updraught of hot air, wings fluttering to keep aloft. By my feet I heard the rustling of vegetation—some small rodent, no doubt unaware of its impending death high above. In one smooth arc the kite dropped from the sky and scooped up the squeaking creature in its talons.

They had released me “pending further investigation”. It had been a week since I had last heard from X. I knew the respite would be short lived—our exchange in the coffee shop had told me that much at least. But the news reports were still crammed with minor updates, interviews and speculation. The media outlets clung to the story and showed no signs of easing their grasp. That is why I was sat there, in the small clearing at the centre of the copse. Escape. Escape from an outside world I knew to be wrong in its assumptions. A part of me, even in those early days, knew there would be no escaping X.

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 6/14:

True synthesis is an implausibility, but only when it is disproved by my experiments will I omit it from my research as an impossibility. Reparation, however, is a proven possibility, given the conservation of mass—erosion, destruction etc does not permanently remove mass from the equation, it merely translates it in space to another location.

“My judgement of parabolas.”

“What about the people? There is a human element to all this.”

“People are everywhere, the human element is a common commodity. Not like the geometry of a designed world.”

“People died.”

“People die all the time.”

// The ending continues / A post-script to reality / The world’s own epilogue / There will be no sequel/spin-off/prequel/end //

I made a meagre subsistence busking in the subways. I had no microphone or amplification, instead I relied on the acoustics of my subterranean surroundings. I had bought an aged and battered classical guitar—part of a display in the window of a vintage clothing shop, one of a handful to be found on the streets of Tokyo. It had been strung with steel strings, and as such, it sounded terrible, as though the instrument were a body rejecting a transplanted organ. I played Rolling Stones covers, masking the dead sound of the guitar with a bottleneck slide and open-G tuning. Sometimes I’d play at the Rashomon, to a room of expats, Japanese businessmen and my ever-present Yakuza companions. They had taken me under their collective wing, perhaps recognising in me a mirroring, or chiral symmetry of their own quasi-outsider status.

“He’s dead.”

“Can you confirm that?”

“No, it’s just the last thing he said to me.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He said it was a mistake—said he was going to end it all.”

They’d picked me up again. After the eye fell. After another fleet of drones hunted me down through the streets. After X told me where he would be.

“In all societies there are concepts, or ideas that prevail throughout their core—upon which it might be said the society itself is constructed. Ideas are, contrary to popular belief, not the same as data or information—ideas are the substance of thought, information is the substance of packaged fact or generalisation. Ideas are capable, where information is not, of becoming the master of society—a skeleton key by which the narratives of a society are unlocked—for instance, the narrative of the bible was capable, thanks to its mastery of ideas, contextual to its era, of supplanting fact and information and, subsequently, became the predominant ideology in western society for almost two thousand years.

The trouble with our present society—or rather, one of the many troubles with our present society—is that it assumes, through its fetishizing of the sciences, that ideas and information are one and the same. But ideas are capable of expressing things which lie beyond the remit of information and fact. Ours is a society dedicated to the cult of information, the clustering of data and the worship of the unstoppable machine—a force to whose whims we all bend. But no more. The only option, one I have spent my life working to discover, is that of the tabula rasa—the blank slate on which the new world narrative is to be etched.”

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 7/14:

Despite the rudimentary capacity to learn of its own accord, basic intelligence protocols are necessary for the specimens to follow the desired routines consistently. Without them they simply respire, consume and reproduce in the usual manner, occasionally turning their energies to the prescribed actions implicit in their bonded mechanical apparatus. The binding sites alone, though effective, do not provide the results I know this research is capable of. My only concern now is that of a true sentience.

It was raining in Tokyo. I was sat beneath a clear plastic umbrella. The guitar case rested beside me, rainwater sliding from its waterproof surface. I was tired and cold—I had walked across what felt like half of Tokyo, my feet ached and my middle toe stung where an unclipped nail had dug into its side.

Keiko—one of the girls from the Rashomon—was walking by. She spotted me and came over. I must have looked miserable—like a drowned rat, pining for their lost companions—because she took pity on me and invited me to her place to stay the night.

// In ten percent of case studies, substance abuse correlated to / X: The search for one’s soul / Y: The search for unequivocal truth / Z: The search for life beyond death //

“Wait here,” he said.

I didn’t know where he expected me to go, surrounded as we were on all sides by undulating dunes.

He disappeared into another of the tents and returned a moment later with something under his arm. “Here,” he said, and placed the heavy tome on the rug in front of me.

“It wouldn’t happen of its own accord. It had to be started.”

I passed him his coffee across the table. He took a sip and leant forwards again, resting his elbows on the table, clasping his fingers together in a tight knot.

“Have you read the book yet?” he said.

I showed her on the map where I was going. The satellite image on my phone looked like a macro photograph of ripples in a muddy puddle. Her eyebrows knitted together and her shoulders hunched in a slight shrug. I don’t know why I showed her—why I bothered, when none of it meant anything to her anyway—but I did. The Yakuza had just laughed when I told them—they understood, put two and two together, figured the oddball gaijin with an encyclopaedic knowledge of 60s garage-rock was running from something and they found it hilarious.

“Why?” I said, reading the question in her movements. “Because I promised a friend I would meet them there.”

“The many require an offering—not that of the old world; money, food, blood, material—but one of space and energy.”

Morning was drawing closer but there, behind the blackout curtains of the Pythagoras, night continued unabated. It was rare in those days for me to make friends as quickly as I had that night. The flow of gin had been constant, but showed no signs of slowing.

“Have you heard of Doctor Head?” he asked.

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 8/14:

The more sedimentary materials, those at the mercy of wind and acid erosion, are best suited to my research. Harder materials such as glass and steel produce a slower set of results, though their reparation is still possible.

“What does he want? Can you at least answer that?” asked Officer Brown.

“It’s complicated,” I replied.

“Enlighten me.”

“Comfort is best paired with discomfort. Too much luxury leaves a soul devoid. Abandonment is the best medicine.”

“Every story needs a hero.”

It was written on the wall of his flat in black paint. I asked him what it meant and he shrugged, before telling me it was simply something he used to write as a child.

“A collection of words I found aesthetically pleasing and thought meaningful,” he said.

He looked away, abashed. It was the first time I had seen him embarrassed, though by that time I had known him a year or so. His eyes scanned the room, as though searching for some nook in which he could hide from my questions.

“I don’t believe it now,” he said, “I just find it useful to remind myself of who I used to be. Like the pencil marks a mother makes to measure their child’s height year by year. Sometimes it’s nice to see what you used to be like. We change our shape over the years and the mind is no exception.”

“But what did it mean? Why did you first write it?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “But I suppose, looking back on it, I thought I was special somehow—a hero in my own story.”

He passed me the cigarette and delved into the rucksack at his feet. A moment later he drew out a slim paperback, its edges ragged and its corners dog-eared.

“Here,” he said, and passed it to me.

I took it in my hands and read the title aloud. My words echoed through the empty car park.

“The Lifecycle of Concrete: A Study Into the Effects of Artificially Enhanced Microorganisms on Synthetic Materials by Dr Albrecht Head.”

“Promise me you’ll read it,” he said.

// One person can change the past/present/future / X: The past written by the present / Y: The present written simultaneously by past and future / Z: The future written simultaneously by past and present / Viewed through a kaleidoscope, each fragment of truth colours the vision of the whole / Time envisioned by long exposure reveals the inadequacies of space as a measurement of location //

The sunrise painted the sky a deep shade of gold above the endless desert. The tome at my feet had been bound in black leather. The lettering on it’s front cover, picked out in silver paint, read; “The Concrete Octopus: A History of the New Apocalypse.”

“Catchy title,” I said, “Where’d you get the leather for the binding?”

In response he lifted a foot. I noted for the first time since my arrival the black sandals he wore—cannibalised army boots, great chunks of their once polished surface missing, his toes exposed to the desert sands.

“No offence Officer, but I don’t think you’d understand.”

“Try me.”

“Very well. Have you ever heard of Doctor Head?”

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 9/14:

Death within the Cephalopoda Bacterium is simply a matter of temporality—as I suppose it is in all living things, based on one’s perspective. Dead bacteria are discarded at the centre of bacterial mass—at first this appeared to be problematic for my research, however these dead cells failed to decompose. On further inspection I discovered that when the outermost layers of living bacteria were disturbed, the inner, supposedly dead cells, reactivated. I have designated this the Cotard phenomena.

We were sat on the roof of his flat, slumped in two deckchairs, sharing a bottle of gin and a cigarette. From our vantage point we looked out over the city as the setting sun painted the sky the colour of a raw, bloody steak. It was a warm evening and a slight haze shimmered around the few buildings still catching the last rays of the sun.

“One day all of this will be gone,” he said.

The comfortable silence between us broken, I replied; “That’s a long time coming.”

“Perhaps not as long as you think,” he said.

“The concept of solitary truth is a stigma that has grown in the heart of modern thinking. There is no truth—the goal of the new era should not be to search for something that does not exist, rather the awareness required to realise this. With awareness we realise that the world is as convoluted and impenetrable as a Concrete Octopus.”

“Our god has one head. One mind. Many arms for the one mind, one head that is the will of many. He sleeps today, but tomorrow awakens.”

“Yeah, I read it,” I replied.

“And what did you think of it?”

“It was interesting.”

“Is that all?”

“It was good.”

“How about an adjective?”

“Those were adjectives, they just happen to be the worst and most insipid adjectives in the English language.”

He sighed and leant back from the table, arms folded.

“I liked the stuff about self-reparation, you know, his research into the splicing of robotics and microbiology—how with the right application of both, buildings would be capable of repairing their own faults,” I said.

He leant in again, as quickly as he had leant back, elbows thudding on the table-top.

“Precisely.”

“But it’s all a fantasy, isn’t it? Science fiction? The ramblings of some mad scientist who took too much acid in the sixties, right?”

He raised an eyebrow at me across the checker pattern table.

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 10/14:

The Cotard phenomena persists as an object of fascination to me. Of all the organisms I have studied in my time, none have been quite as resilient as the Cephalopoda Bacterium. Many may have heard the urban myth of the cockroach and its supposed ability to survive a nuclear apocalypse—regardless of how much truth is inherent in these claims—or of the tardigrade and its extraordinary resilience to extremes of temperature. But where the common roach may—or may not—be capable of surviving a radioactive onslaught, the Cephalopoda Bacterium not only survives, but thrives. Nothing short of a vivisection at the genetic level prevents the bacterium from reactivating after its short, death-like, hibernation.

I had visited the copse since childhood. In those years it became something of a ritual. I would climb the hill, a school satchel slung over one shoulder. When I reached it, over a turnstile and through a thicket of brambles and nettles, I would sit under the dappled shade of an oak, a plastic mackintosh laid out beneath me as an impromptu picnic blanket. Though I was only a mile or so from my home, in those days it felt as though I was out in the distant wilderness—a fantasy only broken by the occasional dog-walker. Through my teenage years I watched the saplings grow alongside me. When I returned that night, after several years in the city, the trees were fully formed. Beneath their shade the landscape seemed altered, though the lay of the land was the same as I remembered it. The natural architecture of bough, trunk and root confused my senses, at once familiar to me in a claustrophobia reminiscent of the city, and yet it was no longer the same place I had explored as a child. Even the mechanical buzzing of the optic drones that hounded me, reminded me of the buzzing insects and chirruping grasshoppers that surrounded me on those ritual visits.

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 11/14:

The centre will not hold. Research in preliminary is successful. Too successful. Too far gone for reversal. I have committed myself to something I may regret, but now it is too late. The primitive science we call medicine has failed. The drugs and the radiation have failed. The things I have set in motion cannot be stopped, though I doubt I will live to see their fruits ripen. The voice(s) returned today—the doctor tells me this is normal for a person of my condition—they speak of my research, and I listen, slave to their whims and desires, for they are my own.