The smell of powder, of night, of crystalized darkness exploding with the press of the trigger. Of rent earth. Jol pivoted, spun. He was the wind, whirling, able to be as he pleased, anywhere he desired. His breath itself was the night air; the clouds formed from his lungs. The ebb and flow of the night was the rise...

For Jol, the underworld had always been a vague threat. A leftover from childhood, the hand of discipline raised by his father when obedience failed. He saw now, in the split prairie and chasm of molten liquid that spurted from it, that very hand, reaching, questing with molten fingers for purchase on the solid...

The present does not exist. It hasn't for weeks. I have been captured by the video and pictures of Jannshek before his accident. And it's not even the accident that bothers me. It's his recovery and the role I played in it. Ever since the two Jannsheks were let go, they've been finding temporary employment around...

Seven nights and as many mice, and they hadn’t made any progress. Utsab hadn’t picked up the mechanism in over a day, instead working on a paper for a grad student. The bags under his eyes testified he had pulled an all-nighter to make whatever deadline loomed. It could only be for Ada. His dalliances had never...

It has been nine days since the seventh alignment of the current star cycle. Alignment Day in the core is a much bigger deal, but it felt more special here in the outer concentric. I experienced cultures mashing their own celebratory traditions together with our own, not the same tired core-sponsored military...

I wouldn't believe today if I hadn't experienced it myself. Shah came and brought me into his office so I could read the official memo and ensure he wasn't fucking with me. On his screen, official handshake icon in the corner, was a mandate from our parent company in the core to hire two temporary workers, until the...

They fired Jannshek and Jannshek. Well, Shah did, but the company made him. I think he was able to choose who to let go, and the gallows humour going around was that it was easier to pick one name than two, a sort of psychological lessening of what actually took place. I just assumed that the compliance team was...

The mice weren't so lucky. A connected brain seemed like a requirement. Wemly and Utsab went through mice like batteries in a particularly demanding device. Wemly was able to repeat her initial maze experiments but could do nothing to initiate a model transfer. If the device needed to be operated by the wearer,...

Utsab was wearing the escapement mechanism. “I had to envision it connected to the switch,” Wemly reiterated. Utsab waved away her advice. “Already there. I can see the default model file on the device, and the new file on the server, but when I try to access it, it’s only a few megabytes in size. Are you sure you...

We have been training visitors from Mmokc for the last two weeks. Despite Bennu falling on the last concentric of the core, we are usually overwhelmed with requests for training---most likely because of our location actually. Everyone wants to see how the core functions and to get some training in official...

Utsab was lost in technical minutiae, talking over her head as he did when rolling around a difficult problem. He slapped the desk. “I think I can solve it with the cluster in the Frances lab. I just need access to the computer, and I think I can solve it. The equations are all multivariable, and I can’t predict how...

I am human. I only mention this because of what I know some will say. What some have probably already said. On my mother's side, somewhere in the past long lost to records, there was a Riamo mating. I know they are welcome in the core now, but their genes are not. And I've been denying it to myself for a long time...