“Miss her already, friend?” asked the mutant seated next to Jeremy Stake in the transdimensional pod.

Stake had rolled up the sleeve of his candy red prison uniform to stare at the bared flesh of his arm. He had traced a finger on the underside of his forearm to summon a holograph, its image imprinted like a tattoo into his skin. A man and woman, cheek-against-cheek, grinning into the camera. The woman was striking: a blue-eyed albino black woman with her hair in dreadlocks. The man was himself. Or so it would seem. He shared the same features as the man in the holograph, at any rate. A thin face with a weak chin compensated for with a groomed goatee, his gelled dark hair buzzed close on the sides, and squinty eyes that sparkled with a kind of dark mischief.

He didn’t respond to the mutant shackled to the bench beside him, but the man went on nonetheless. “You better get used to missing that sweet thing, if you’re off to the Worm Hole. Can’t be no light sentence if you’re going there. What you get for time?”

Stake decided to play nice. “Six months. Possession with intent to sell. Purple vortex.” He didn’t need to ask what about you?

“Only six months for vortex? Lucky. Me, twenty-five years… armed robbery. Can you believe that? Didn’t even shoot nobody. Man, if I wasn’t a mutie I swear it would’ve been different.” The man’s shapeless, leathery, sprouting head put Stake in mind of a potato left too long in a cupboard.

What would his fellow prisoner think if he knew Stake was a mutant, too? Born and raised, no doubt like himself, in the Punktown slum called Tin Town? But Stake’s particular condition – which had a name, Caro turbida – was not immediately apparent, providing every so often he gazed long and hard at the holograph of that weasly face imprinted into his forearm. He couldn’t tell the mutant that it was this face, not the beautiful albino, he had been staring at.

“Hassan Billings,” the mutant said, offering his hand. “What’s yours, brother?”

Hassan? Didn’t that mean handsome? Stake winced inwardly but shook hands with the man and said, “Ed. Edwin Fetch.”

The final preparations were near completion; the ramp had been closed, and the pod was minutes away from disembarking from Punktown’s Theta Transport Station. Stake, Billings, and the men seated beside them on their bench faced another row of prisoners shackled to a bench directly opposite. This prison transport pod was nearly identical to the military shuttles that had once conveyed troops to the extradimensional world of Sinan, where Stake – now thirty-eight – had participated in the conflict called the Blue War, which had ended fifteen years ago. The anxiety he felt now was much the same as he had experienced then, facing his deployment to Sinan… though his stint as a soldier in the Colonial Forces had been a longer sentence: four years.

It was not into a naturally occurring other dimension that the pod would be sent, however, but into an artificially created pocket universe, which existed not so much in an alternate plane coterminous with Punktown as a kind of nowhere space between planes of existence. A hollow burrowed into nothingness, into which an entire prison had been sent, just like this pod,  after its construction had been completed just two years earlier. The Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. Prisoners had nicknamed the facility, and the pocket it resided in like a model ship in a bottle, the Worm Hole.

Crime in the megalopolis of Paxton, on the Earth-colonized world of Oasis, was of legendary proportions, and this had been the Earth Colonies’ response to the dilemma of overcrowded prisons there. Paxton – universally dubbed Punktown – was so built up that it couldn’t accommodate yet another prison within its borders. The last one had been built below the city, but that project had met with much protest from the residents of the city’s Subtown sector. And thus, the opening of the pocket universe. Within that excavated bubble, its prisoners were actually no farther away from Punktown’s citizens than the man passing you in the street. And yet, at the same time, more distant than the farthest known star.

Two young men were seated facing Stake and Billings, and when they noticed Stake appraising them they both smiled. Stake looked away immediately. Not because he was afraid of the gangly youths, but because it was unwise for him to look too long at another person’s face… lest, against his will, he change.

Billings leaned against Stake’s shoulder and whispered, “Those are the Tin Town Maniacs… the wicked fucks. You hear about them, Ed?”

Stake couldn’t help but glance up at the youths again. He had in fact heard of them, and he’d had the misfortune of experiencing one of the VR vids they’d made and posted in the ultranet. The so-called Maniacs had killed a number of drug-addled homeless mutants in the Tin Town ghetto, making vids of their exploits, apparently simply for sport. Their parents were affluent, residing in the upscale neighborhood of Beaumonde Square, but their efforts to disprove their sons’ guilt had been in vain. Though the youths had refused truth scans and memory downloads, as was their legal right, both of them appeared clearly in their recordings. Watching that single vid, Stake had been filled with impotent rage as one of the young men (yes, that one, with jug ears and his blond hair cut in bangs) smashed in the face of a drunken mutant with a hammer. Until the face became no more than red pulp, it wore a look of bewildered fear and pain. Stake had been frustrated at how passive the victim was. He liked to believe that he would have been spitting his broken teeth in his killer’s eyes.

The boy with blond hair blew a kiss at Stake and batted his eyelids. Billings gave the youth a rude gesture, and hissed in Stake’s ear, “I’d love to snuff these two rich bastards myself, but I want to keep my nose clean. I’m hoping for an appeal.” He snorted. “Yeah, I know, a mutant getting an appeal. But dreaming is free. That’s the only thing about us that’s free, from here on out, huh?”

And then a vibration ran through the floor under their feet, the seats they sat upon, the walls against their backs. It was subtle enough but unmistakable, and the vibration carried into their very bodies. Stake felt like a humming tuning fork, and it was a nauseating sensation, though he knew the queasiness was more psychological than anything.

Two guards, uniformed entirely in black like “forcers” – law enforcers – right down to their ant-like full-head helmets, sat up front in the pod. Over his helmet mic, one of the guards remarked, “This is it, boys… we’re on our way. Kiss your reality goodbye.”

“You ever do time before?” Stake asked Billings as they pushed their plastic food trays along the runners in the cafeteria line. Despite Stake’s initial reluctance to make friends here, the two had remained close for moral support since their arrival and brief indoctrination, though they didn’t share a cell. Stake was in the prison’s Red Block, while Billings had been assigned the Green Block and accordingly wore crayon green shirt and pants.

“Not here,” the mutant replied, placing a carton of juice on his tray, “but yeah – three years in Paxton MSP.” That stood for Maximum Security Penitentiary. “Receiving stolen goods. You?”

“First time anywhere.”

“Well don’t show you’re scared. They’ll sniff that out right away. If it was me I’d try to get in a fight right away, to let folks know you aren’t to be messed with. Not to kill anyone – we don’t want to be here forever – but you know what I mean. But you, with only six months to get through… I’d even avoid fighting. So just watch your back, is all.”

They filled the recesses in their trays with various food stuffs generated by the kitchen’s fabricators, most of these comestibles derived from fermented bacteria. This approach, like the prison’s recycled water and air, kept to a minimum the supply deliveries that had to be made to the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. When they reached the end of the line, the two newcomers crossed to a nearby table that offered a mix of prisoners, as opposed to those tables plainly staked out by prison gangs or nonhuman races of sentient beings. Aside from the absence of females, the prison was every bit the melting pot Punktown was.

“Me, I can probably get close to those guys,” Billings said around a mouthful of faux mashed potatoes. He nodded subtly toward another table and Stake twisted around a little to look.

The table Billings had indicated was completely filled by mutants. More precisely, a gang of mutants. Some bore only minor signs of affliction, while others were much more wildly deformed than Billings. Some were even nonhuman mutants. But one of their number in particular caught Stake’s attention.

“Caro turbida,” he murmured to himself. But Billings heard him.

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s a type of mutation. It means ‘confused flesh.’”

The man Stake referred to, seated at the end of the long table, jolted with small tics and the occasional more violent spasm, but his head was constantly thrashing and shaking, so that Stake wondered how he could ever get food into his mouth. The front of his blue uniform was already stained with today’s attempts. His face was a blur, but not only because of its rapid movements. He was changing. His was not one face, but a seemingly endless succession of faces, morphing from one to the next so quickly that Stake couldn’t be sure if any of them were repeating. Or was their variety unending? Was he reproducing every face he had ever glimpsed in his life? Uncontrollably… involuntarily. For who would want to subject themselves to this state? Maybe some were the likenesses of fellow prisoners – Stake couldn’t tell – though he believed he witnessed flashes of female faces… old faces… those of various races. But like Stake with his less extreme form of Caro turbida, the mutant didn’t seem able to alter himself into the semblance of a nonhuman entity.

“Wow,” Billings said. “I think the other muties just feel sorry for that one.” Even from here, over the loud chatter that reverberated off the cafeteria’s ceiling, they could hear the shapeshifter’s stream of incoherent babbling punctuated with barking outbursts. It was as though he were possessed by a whole legion of ghosts.

“I don’t know what he could have done,” Stake said, “but I’ll bet he should be in a mental hospital, not a jail.”

They had been studying the mutant so blatantly they neglected to recognize that another of the men at the table had noticed them, until he called over, “Hey – virgins! You want to fuck my friend Blur? You want him to turn into a woman for you? He can’t lock it in, you know.”

“Sorry, friend,” Billings called back, twisting his lipless mouth into a nervous smile and lifting an open hand of peace.

“I’m not your friend, freak,” the man snapped, though he himself was afflicted. The mutant was hairless, his skin a metallic bluish-black, shiny and crinkly like crumpled foil. Tall and powerfully muscled, besides.

Billings lowered his head and whispered, “Dung! I may need these boys… I don’t want to alienate them!”

“Sorry,” Stake said, turning away from the mutant gang, too. “He must be the leader. Chip on his shoulder, huh?”

“Lot of us mutants do,” Billings said.

“Mm,” Stake grunted in agreement.

“Is there a problem?” a flat voice asked behind them. Both men turned in their seats again to find that one of the robot guards had approached them, having witnessed the exchange. The automaton had flexible segmented lengths for its four limbs, neck and waist, while its head, torso and pelvis were of black metal. Perhaps to give the flat face a more fearsome aspect, its eyes glowed red, matching the red identifying number on its chest.

“Everything’s okay here,” Billings told the machine.

“Be advised not to agitate the seasoned inmates, newcomer,” the guard chastised.

In their orientation upon arriving at Trans-Paxton Penitentiary, they had been told that half of the guards here were robots. The reasons for the balance between organic and inorganic guards were numerous. For one, fewer living guards meant fewer potential victims of violence from inmates. Robots could not be bribed, corrupted, or show favoritism. Their implacable nature was intimidating, but neither could they be sadistic. Robots didn’t require on-site housing, rest periods, off-weeks in which to go home to family. Prisoners feared their physical strength and relative invulnerability, and yet it was still useful for the inmates to fear the harsher minds of living men. Plus, robots might almost be considered innocent in a sense, whereas a crafty human (or other such sentient being) could be more difficult to fool. At the end of the day, just as in manufacturing facilities, labor laws prohibited prisons from utilizing automatonic guards exclusively, lest too many living beings find themselves without employment.

The robot wandered away, sweeping its glowing eyes toward other tables. When it had left, another prisoner – a Choom, the native race of Oasis, remarkably human in appearance apart from their vast Jack-o’-lantern mouths – said to Stake, “Careful, boys; things have been on edge here lately, and I bet they didn’t tell you that in orientation. I’m not so sure it’s even made the news back home.”

“What’s that?” Stake asked.

“A few prisoners have been killed in their cells. Seems like it’s three, though some say four. Could be a gang doing it, but people are pointing fingers everywhere, not just at one group. Makes for paranoia.”

“The victims aren’t all from one gang? Or enemies of a certain group?”

“If there’s a pattern, I don’t know it.”

“So how are they being killed?” Stake asked. It wasn’t hard to pique his interest. It was his nature, and his vocation.

“Dung!” the Choom chuckled, wagging his head. “I heard the dead guys were absolutely demolished.”

“Demolished? What do you mean, demolished?”

“I haven’t seen the aftermath, myself, but I mean like… exploded. Like there’s nothing left of them but blood. Blood everywhere.”

Over the next few days, Hassan Billings had gingerly nudged closer to the mutant gang – called the Muties – until it looked like they were going to accept him into the fold, which meant that Stake now sat alone at one of the picnic-style tables scattered across the floor of the sizable recreation yard. He’d never learned to play chess, though he could have played against the computer, so instead he traced his finger across the table’s vidscreen surface playing Solitaire. Technically he wasn’t alone at the table, but the man on the other bench lay on his back with his shirt off and draped across his eyes, as if to tan himself in the mock sunlight beaming down from the room’s ceiling – which was in truth one immense vidscreen displaying a crystal blue sky. Similarly, the rec yard’s vidscreen walls portrayed a high white barrier, over the top of which more blue sky showed, and against that a bristling cityscape of uncountable towers, many of which soared so high their tops were lost in blue mist. It was a vid of Punktown, taken from the recreation yard of a different prison: Paxton MSP. Stake figured it was meant to be a less depressing view than this prison’s own enclosed ceiling and walls, but he wondered why in that case they didn’t show a vid of a surrounding forest or sandy beach instead. He supposed they didn’t want the prisoners to forget their status.

Atop another table not far away, a ladyboy danced. She was Asian, petite, and very convincing, having knotted up the front of her red top to bare her smooth midriff. The men who had gathered thickly around the table cheered her on in her wild gyrations. Though Stake was sure some of the prison’s transgendered inmates were at the bottom of the food chain, he’d learned that several of the prison’s gangs actually boasted leaders who were either transgendered or else mutant hermaphrodites. Being very attractive and very much in demand, they had used that to their advantage, bestowing favors until those who hungered after them went from mere protectors to full-on underlings. Stake found this interesting, and joked with himself that he should drop his current guise, morph into a beautiful female and do the same. It was the bestowing favors part that brought him back to reality.

Slowly, and without any real anger, one of the human guards with the name HURLEY printed in white on his left breast strolled toward the table, and via his helmet mic called, “Hey, Lee, get off that table.”

“I’m exercising, baby,” the ladyboy called back. “This is the exercise yard, right?”

“Go lift some weights, then,” Hurley persisted. “Come on, get down… and fix your damn shirt.”

Lee’s audience booed but parted to let her step down from the table. As she did so, she noticed Stake watching and wiggled her fingers at him. He dropped his eyes to the Solitaire game. Better not to gaze at her too long, anyway, lest he start morphing into her likeness whether he wanted to or not. His grip on his gift was not always a firm one. In fact, he thought it best to roll up his sleeve, conjure the waiting image of Edwin Fetch and his girlfriend, and stare at Fetch’s face to ensure that his mask didn’t slip. Naturally, whenever he did this he always avoided looking at Fetch’s albino girlfriend.

Stake was thus engaged when – without warning – the vid of the blue sky overhead and the surrounding prison walls turned to grainy static and then disappeared altogether, briefly revealing the true blank surfaces beneath. He looked around him, puzzled. Somehow this put him in mind of his own masquerade… the blankness he sometimes felt existed at his core. Was this a power surge? In any case, the illusion soon returned as if it had never been disrupted.

A noisy group of men came sauntering across the yard, all wearing orange uniforms. Amongst them, Stake spotted the pair of youths dubbed the Tin Town Maniacs. So, they had found protectors, then, against the possible vengefulness of the mutant gang… no doubt using their parents’ money to secure that protection. The members of this gang were a mix of humans, nonhumans, and even some mutants. What bonded them was simply the color of their uniforms, and Stake had heard this gang despised any individual who wore a uniform other than that of the Orange Block, demonstrating to Stake the mindless need of men to oppose some other tribe, however arbitrarily targeted.

He wondered if he could make it through six months without having to align himself with any of these tribes.

Recreation period was over and that was why the Orange Block, who had been the first admitted into the yard, were now the first to leave. Next came Stake’s own group, the Red Block. He banished his Solitaire game, got up and made his way toward one of the huge chamber’s exits, where guards waited to herd them. Having joined a thickening queue, he passed close to several tables where members of the Muties in their various-colored uniforms sat, Hassan Billings among them. Billings purposely kept his eyes averted when Stake looked at him, but Stake’s feelings weren’t hurt. What interested him more was the mutant named Blur. As always, his body was electrified with convulsions and his head jerked around wildly as if in a speeded-up film. And as always, the mutant was jabbering breathlessly. Presently he was blurting, over and over, “Seen the ghost… seen the ghost…”

Another Mutie, with his eyes pushed almost to the sides of his head by a bony extrusion like brain coral in the center of his face, was leaning forward intensely and saying, “I tell you, Null, I didn’t see anything… didn’t even hear anything until Blur got all excited. Then I woke up and felt that I was all wet.”

“Nobody ever sees anything,” another gang member cut in. “It always happens when folks are sleeping.”

“Then how is it Blur saw something?” demanded that muscle-bound mutant with crinkly blue-black skin. So his name was Null, then.

“Well, you know Blur doesn’t ever sleep much,” said brain coral. “But listen to him. Not sure you can give it any credence.”

Null turned toward Blur and said sternly yet patiently, “Slow down and tell me what you saw, Blur.”

“Seen the ghost… skeleton ghost… the skeleton ghost,” the blighted mutant babbled.

Personally, Stake didn’t know how Blur with his rapidly-moving head could see anything clearly.

Passing the last of the mutants’ tables as he shuffled on toward the exit, Stake overheard one of them say, “I bet it was the Orange fucks. You see how they laughed at us when they walked past? They did this somehow.”

A fellow Red Block prisoner who had lined up behind Stake leaned forward and whispered, “Another one last night. That makes four so far… some say five.”

Stake looked over his shoulder. “Another death?”

The prisoner behind him blew out his cheeks as if imitating an explosion. “This time one of the Muties, with two other Muties right there in the same cell. Every time it’s the same… the cellmates wake up and the barrier is still in place. How could anybody get in the cell to do that, then get out again so quick? Even if you had a key card? I tell you, it’s got to be someone using a teleporter – either porting in and out of the cell, or using the porter itself to atomize these people.”

“So who could pull that off?” Stake asked him. “And why would they?”

“You tell me, brother. All I know is Null’s not happy about it. This time it was Chowder – his cousin.”

Stake was coming up on the exit now when suddenly a pair of waiting guards stepped forward, one of them human and the other a robot. The human took hold of his arm and pulled him out of the line. He said, “The warden wants a word with you, Mr. Stake.”

The floor of Stake’s stomach dropped like a severed elevator cabin. “I’m Fetch.” He pointed at the white numbers and barcode printed on the breast of his uniform. “Edwin Fetch.”

“Just come with us, Stake,” the guard grumbled, pulling him toward a different exit.

The main body of the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary was circular. Not for panoptic considerations (there was no central watch house, a camera in every cell instead), but because this form better stabilized the structure within its spherical pocket. There were only two levels for cells, though a “basement” level – off limits to prisoners – housed the facility’s power sources and life support systems.

The prison’s interior space would cover an area of three hundred acres, and thus it was a fairly good walk from the recreation yard to the administration wing and the warden’s office. In his orientation Stake had learned the prison’s capacity was three thousand. After only two years it had already slightly exceeded that number. Many cells meant for two, including his own, now housed three. But if this prison continued to prove a successful venture, word was that more pocket universes would be opened to house similar institutions. The most attractive feature there, despite the expense in transportation, was that escape was all but impossible, the potential threat to society greatly removed. Hopefully there was even a deterrent in knowing that if arrested and incarcerated you would be so distant, so apart, from family and from society itself, with no possibility for visits, conjugal or otherwise – just chats on vidscreens. The isolation was absolute… aside from your fellow prisoners, and the prison staff.

Having passed through several locked and guarded doors, Stake and his escorts entered a long and rather narrow corridor connecting to the administrative wing. The walls of the tubular corridor were composed of windows, the first Stake had seen in the structure. Outside there was only the black void in which the prison hung suspended like a bug in amber.

“So you really pulled a fast one, huh?” the human guard was saying behind his faceless helmet. “I’ve heard of people escaping from prisons, but never smuggling themselves into one.”

“Didn’t they teach you not to fraternize with the prisoners?” Stake asked him.

The guard gave him a little push to quicken his pace. “Don’t be a smart guy with me, Stake.”

Overheard, the string of inset lights illuminating the tunnel flickered, seemed on the verge of going out and casting them into darkness – as if the tunnel itself might suddenly dissolve and let in the void. Stake was reminded of the apparent power surge in the rec yard. As before, the power stabilized before any of them could remark about it.

Stake turned his head as they walked to look out the curved windows as best he could. From a distance his impression had been of flat blackness, but now he could faintly discern a kind of subtly layered and seething darkness, a chaos of billowing interstitial matter churning it on itself, swirling around the prison like a turbulent atmosphere.

And furthermore, he was catching glimpses of dimly luminous white bodies out there against the blackness. Quick, darting fish-like forms, and slower drifting forms resembling trilobites fringed with rippling fins. He had heard about these creatures – differing types of interstitial life-forms – but had never seen them apart from VT programs. One ribbon-like specimen could grow to a mile in length, though he didn’t see any of that sort out there now. These apparently primitive life-forms were translucent, quasi-corporeal, and the occasional captured specimens had soon dissolved like soap bubbles. They were poorly understood, but had proved harmless.

A new creature – larger than the others, but still white and luminescent – swam into view with oar-like strokes of its multiple jointed legs, long like those of a giant spider crab. It alighted on the outside of the tubular corridor as if to gaze in at the men, and Stake looked back over his shoulder at it in something like awe. “I wonder if these critters are trapped in this hole we made,” he reflected aloud, “or if they can come and go from it.”

“Who the fuck cares?” the guard said, as they reached the far end of the tunnel.

When the trio were admitted, Stake saw that two other guards – again, one man and one machine – already stood in the room, to either side of a prisoner in an orange uniform seated in a chair. Though this man had changed his hair style, dyed it blond and shaved off his goatee, it was still like looking into a mirror. The man stared back at Stake with a twitchy nervousness. Stake sighed heavily, then switched his attention to the warden behind his large glass-topped desk. Above it floated an overlapping variety of color-coded holographic monitors and control pads.

The warden himself, Stake was a bit surprised to find, was a Tikkihotto – one of the few truly humanoid races. That is, aside from his eyes, or what he had in place of eyes: numerous thin tendrils sprouting from his skull sockets, probing at the air sinuously. Attired in an expensive five-piece suit, he lounged in his cloned leather swivel chair smiling, and said to the guards who had brought Stake, “I hope you’re being careful with this one, boys; he was a deep penetration operative for the Colonial Forces during the Blue War. Weren’t you, Mr. Stake?”

“You seem to know enough about me without me having to tell you,” Stake said. “From this,” he gestured toward the warden’s virtual computer displays, “and from him.” And he gestured toward the blond man.

“Please be seated, Mr. Stake.” The warden motioned toward a chair placed in front of his desk, and Stake did as he was asked. The guards who had accompanied him still flanked him. As he settled in his chair, he noticed a wooden showcase covered by a sheet of glass, hanging on the wall behind the warden’s desk. The case contained a traditional Tikkihotto axe called an e-ikko, its handle brightly colored in blue and orange. An award of some kind, perhaps military, from his home world. Stake idly wondered how many prisoners had sat here eying that tomahawk and fantasized about making a grab for it.

The Tikkihotto said, “In case you don’t remember from your orientation, my name is Dinhoo Cirvik, the warden of Trans-Paxton Penitentiary since its inauguration. And your friend here needs no introduction, of course.” He swept his arm toward the orange-suited prisoner, and said his name anyway. “Edwin Fetch. How curious, isn’t it, to have two men named Edwin Fetch in the same prison? With the same face, no less.”

“Maybe he’s an imposter,” Stake said drily.

Cirvik scowled. “I expect only truthful answers from you from this point on, Mr. Stake. And a more respectful attitude, if you want to make things easy on yourself. I understand of course that it’s your nature to be deceptive. You were deep operations on Sinan because you could imitate the enemy physically. And I’m sure you’ve used your odd chameleon skills in your line of work as a private investigator. Ah… but how is the private investigation business these days, Mr. Stake? Not too good, I hear. Perhaps it’s the economy. People don’t have the extra money to send private dicks sneaking after their cheating spouses, taking vids. Which is how you came to work for Mr. Fetch here, isn’t it? A special sort of job? No doubt something you had never done before?”

“Correct,” Stake replied. “I hadn’t.”

“Hard times, then? Down on your luck, to take on such a job?”

“Yeah. Down on my luck. And it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.”

“I’d have to agree with you there, Mr. Stake.” Without Cirvik turning his head toward Edwin Fetch, some of his ocular tendrils shifted to point toward the man, swimming in the air. “If it’s any consolation, Mr. Fetch has even worse luck. He pays you a hefty sum of twenty thousand munits to do his six months in jail for him, and instead of keeping his nose clean he gets arrested for dealing purple vortex in Miniosis. Just about the time you came here!” Cirvik chuckled. “Imagine everyone’s surprise when his true identity was discovered. So he was extradited to Punktown, and here he is in custody awaiting trial – again. Without bail this time, because of his little trick in hiring you. So now he not only faces the six months for the original sentence, but a new sentence on top of that for dealing in Miniosis, and something extra for deceiving the system in what is essentially… I don’t know, evading custody? Escape? The prosecutor’s office will decide what to call it. But Mr. Fetch has at least been cooperative in explaining your presence in our facility, Mr. Stake, so that may work in his favor somewhat.”

Stake glanced at Fetch again, but Fetch was looking down into his lap now, picking at a thumbnail.

“What about me?” Stake asked Cirvik.

“What indeed? Well, what you did was illegal, of course. Helping a convicted criminal elude captivity. Hindering apprehension, abetting a fugitive… accomplice to a drug dealer after the fact. Again, the prosecutor’s office can decide how to perceive it. Until your trial, you’ll be held in custody at this facility… since you’re already here, and all.”

“Will I get bail?”

“I’m told no… not with your deceptive ways, Mr. Stake. You could impersonate someone too easily and escape from Punktown before your trial date.”

“They could implant a GPS chip.”

“Talk to your lawyer about it. You have the right to a lawyer, after all, so you’ll be given the opportunity to communicate with one via the ultranet. You can choose one after our meeting here is done. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you. But what am I saying? You have twenty thousand munits, don’t you?”

Stake sighed again, and wagged his head. He had no idea whether his own sentence would be less than six months, or even considerably more. “I knew this was a bad idea,” he mumbled bitterly.

“It was. And so you can stop the ruse and assume your natural appearance now, please.”

“It isn’t that easy. Some people with my condition can control it more… they can change like that.” Stake snapped his fingers. “I need a little more time for it to fade once I let it go.”

“How long?” Cirvik asked dubiously.

“It varies… it’s not entirely predictable. Not too long. Like I say, my control over my gift is iffy. I can’t look directly at people too long in case I let my guard down and start to copy them. And to keep a hold on Fetch’s face, I was looking at a picture of him throughout the day.”

“Well you’d better not play any further tricks with your appearance during your time here, Mr. Stake, or I assure you you’ll regret it. If you’re thinking of masquerading as another prisoner… or a guard… or even me…”

“I can’t do Tikkihottos,” Stake interrupted. He gestured at his face. “It’s the eyes.”

“Anyway, no tricks. At the first sign of such activity I will put you in an isolation cell… are we clear on that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes sir. Good… I like that tone better. Spoken like a former soldier. You need to find your way back, Mr. Stake, to the man you were. Instead of imitating creatures like Mr. Fetch here, who not only corrupts his customers but has obviously done his best to corrupt you.”

Stake glanced at Fetch again. “I can assure you, Warden Cirvik, that my association with Mr. Fetch is finished.”

“Very good, Mr. Stake. Very good.”

This time Fetch looked up to smile at Stake, crinkled eyes sparkling, and shrugged his shoulders in a sarcastic kind of apology.

For a number of hours each day the red-tinted energy barriers that sealed the prisoners in their cells, in place of bars, were deactivated to give the men a period of free movement. So it was that as Stake reclined on his bunk in his second-floor cell in Red Block – watching a movie on the VT screen set into one wall – three visitors appeared in the open doorway. Fetch, and the two youths known as the Tin Town Maniacs, all three of them in orange uniforms. “Hey, Jeremy,” Fetch said.

Stake was sure it was no accident they’d come at a time when his two cellmates – one a black human named Kofi, the other a skeletal, dog-like Dacvibese – were out of the cell stretching their legs and jaws.

“I see you’ve reverted,” Fetch went on when Stake said nothing.

It was true. No longer poring over the holograph of Fetch he carried on his forearm, Stake had reassumed what he referred to as his “factory settings.” Stake’s natural hair color was dark, so there was no change there, but his skin tone was now slightly darker than Fetch’s. He’d shaved off the goatee he’d grown to imitate his client, too. Yet more importantly, his face had lost its hard definitions. If Fetch hadn’t known better, he would have thought Stake’s visage was still in flux, its transformation as yet incomplete. It was the mutant’s normal condition, however, to look vaguely unfinished.

“What can I do for you, Ed? You aren’t going to ask me for the money back, I hope.”

“Of course not! I’m the one who fucked up, right? But hopefully you’ll get a lighter sentence now. You talk to a lawyer yet?”

“Yeah. He’s not sure what I’ll get, but he’s guessing they might stick with the six months.”

“Lucky you. Clean record and all. Me, I don’t even want to think about what I’m going to get.”

“Not as much as us,” one of the Maniacs observed with a sneer.

“No, Jeremy,” Fetch said, “I’m not here to talk about money. I’m just hoping when you go on trial, you don’t get too detailed about me. You don’t need to say you knew I was dealing vortex. After all, did you ever see me selling an illegal substance? No, you didn’t. I just had that vortex for my own use. I’m going to fight my charges in any way I can, Jeremy, so I’d appreciate it if you don’t make me look bad.”

“Just like you didn’t make me look bad with Cirvik?”

“Hey, what could I do at that point? They had you, and they had me, and I needed to explain why there was another Edwin Fetch. No need to be bitter, man – like I say, you might get out of here with less time, now, while still keeping that twenty thousand.”

“But remember what Ed says,” warned the Maniac with blond hair cut in bangs like a little boy, pointing a finger at Stake’s face as if aiming a gun barrel. “Just watch your mouth, okay?”

“Kid,” Stake said, “you point that finger somewhere else before I bite it off.”

The youth chortled in delight. “Oh-ho-ho… the mutant wants to play! You want to play, mutie?”

“We know how to play with muties,” his friend joined in.

Stake swung his legs over the side of his bunk and sat upright. “Ed, you might want to remind your barking puppies that there’s a big difference between hammering drunken homeless guys, and being trained as a Colonial Forcer.”

“Oooh!” the boy with bangs said, exchanging grins with his friend. “Oh-ho-ho!”

“Come on, guys,” Fetch told them, clapping them both on the shoulder, “I think my pal Jeremy here understands what’s in his best interest.” He turned his companions around and urged them out through the doorway, looking back at Stake and saying in farewell, “If there’s anything I can do for you in return, pal, you know where to find me.” He added, perhaps with threatening significance, “Orange Block.”

Stake sighed, and had just stretched out on his back again to resume watching his movie when two new visitors appeared in the cell’s threshold. So much for seeing how the movie turned out. Once more he sat upright as the two men stepped inside uninvited. One was Hassan Billings, with that huge spud-like head. The other was the towering Null, his oil-slick skin glistening. Null: the leader of the gang known as the Muties.

“Hey, man,” Billings said. “So this is what you really look like, huh? Jeremy, is it? Man… I understand why you didn’t tell me you were a mutie, too, but I still wish you had.”

“But now we know,” Null rumbled in his dark baritone. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I saw those Orange fucks leave just now. Is the real-deal Fetch giving you trouble?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Oh, is that so? You aren’t afraid of the whole damn Orange Bunch? Biggest gang in this place? Their leader has a life sentence already, so that mad-dog fuck doesn’t care who he kills next. Seems to me you could use protection from those bastards, and anybody else here who might try to do you a dose of no-good.”

“So, you want me to join up with my fellow mutants, huh?”

“It would be in your best interest.”

“Everybody thinks they know my best interest.”

Null stepped closer to Stake, looming all the taller. “I’m not just here to recruit new members; I have a proposition for you. You help me, and I’ll protect you – not just from the Orange Bunch, but from another gang that could do you serious harm.”

“And what gang is that?” Stake asked.

“The Mutie gang,” Null said, glaring from under bony brows.

“I see,” Stake said.

“I hope you do.”

“So what’s this proposition?”

“We hear you’re a private eye. A good one.”

“I was. Once. I made a not-so-good private eye move, and here I am.”

“Well this would be a better move for you. I want to hire your services. The pay, like I said, is we take care of your skin as long as you stay here in T-P… however long that turns out to be.”

“But what do I have to do? If it involves me impersonating someone, forget it. I –”

“No, that’s not it. You’ve heard about the killings in this place, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“The last victim was my cousin Chowder. We grew up together, like brothers. We got arrested for stealing from a warehouse one night. The job was my idea. If it wasn’t for me he’d be alive, and he’d be free.”

“So you… you want me to find out how these men have died. Chowder specifically.”

“Right.”

“And if it turns out they’re being murdered, say by a gang like the Orange Bunch, and you get revenge by killing the guilty party or parties, then I become an accomplice to murder.”

“That part doesn’t concern you. If there’s blood, we’ll keep it off you. But you will help me, Stake. You hear me on that?”

Stake lowered his face into his hands and kneaded its skin, as if to remold his features so thoroughly that he faded out of sight altogether. His voice muffled behind his palms, he said, “Tell me what you know about these deaths.”

Stake, Null, and Billings ambled along the second floor balcony as they talked, not afraid about other inmates seeing them together. Null said that was desirable, if Stake wanted the general population to know he was under the protection of the Muties.

“The deaths started about four months ago,” Null said. “But we’re not really sure how many have died, because it’s not like the warden has announced what’s going on… we only know about it from witnesses.”

“Witnesses? Have people actually seen some of the victims die?”

“No, I mean cellmates waking up to find the victim already dead. Uh… but let me correct that. There are always killings in prison, but what links these deaths is you don’t find a body afterwards – just a whole lot of blood on the guy’s bed, the walls, even the ceiling. That’s why when this happens, the men will say, ‘The vampire got another one.’”

“Vampire? A vampire would do the opposite – take the blood and leave the body. So the only real witness, then, is your guy Blur, and you can’t be sure if this ‘ghost’ or ‘skeleton’ he talks about is based on something he really saw.”

“Right.”

“But what about camera footage? There’s a security camera in every damn cell.”

“Well, from what little leaks back to us from the guards, every time this happens there’s some kind of electrical interference and the camera cuts out. But how can we know if that’s true or not? Like I say, the warden isn’t talking to us about these deaths at all. I think the only way he would is if we could organize a riot, and nobody wants to open a can of worms like that. But if that’s what it comes to…”

“You know what it sounds like to me?” Billings said. “A military experiment, and they’re using us prisoners as expendable guinea pigs, out here in limbo where they feel like nobody can see what they’re up to. Some kind of remote weapon that can target a man and vaporize him from a distance. And they purposely block the camera before they do it.”

“Yeah,” Null said, “we’ve already considered that. It’s a good theory.”

“The prison has a medical unit,” Stake mused, stopping to lean against the balcony railing and look down upon the prisoners milling about below. “A chief medical officer, right? They have to know something about this… at least, what’s being done to the victim’s body. They must have examined the blood. I’d like to talk to them, if I can think of an excuse to go to the infirmary.”

Null nodded, then turned to Billings. “Break his nose.”

“What?” said Billings.

“What?” said Stake, looking around.

“I can’t do it myself,” Null explained. “Can’t afford to go into solitary right now.”

“But…” said Billings.

“I told you to hit him.”

“Hey, now hold on…” Stake began.

“With your special condition, couldn’t you have reconfigured your broken nose on your own?” the medical unit’s chief, Zaleski, asked Stake while examining the results of the restorative treatment he had just administered.

Sitting still as Zaleski consulted a holographic scan display of his head, floating in the air beside Stake like a doppelganger of the doppelganger, the private detective said, “I can alter my appearance, but I can’t regenerate injury any better than the next guy. If I tried to morph a broken nose I’d just be torturing myself.”

“Well, in any case everything looks good now.”

Dr. Zaleski gave the impression of ill health: thin, pale as his lab smock, his eyes red-rimmed and high forehead moist with perspiration. When Stake had first come in, a young prisoner in a yellow uniform had quickly departed, and Stake had sensed he’d just interrupted an illicit transaction – either involving sex or drugs, or both. Stake wouldn’t be surprised to find the physician was an addict. If he were right, and had spotted it so quickly, he couldn’t believe Cirvik wasn’t aware.

“I’ve only been here a week and already I’ve had my nose busted,” Stake said. “I’m not too confident about finishing my six months in one piece. Especially with those weird deaths going on.”

Zaleski gaped at the prisoner for a second and a half. “Weird deaths?”

“Doctor,” Stake chuckled, “you know – people exploding in their cells during the night? Leaving nothing but blood behind? Those weird deaths.”

Zaleski immediately averted his bloodshot eyes, but couldn’t seem to help himself from replying, “It isn’t just blood left behind. If one examines the material remaining, there is in fact flesh and bone present. It’s just been reduced to small particles, mixed with the blood.”

“What do you think would cause that, doctor?” Stake asked. “I mean, I was a soldier and I’m familiar with all kinds of weapons. Strong plasma, of course, would dissolve the body, not break it up like that. But I’m wondering… some kind of ray weapon that could be fired right through the closed energy barriers?”

“How could a prisoner obtain a weapon like that, here?” Zaleski said, eyes still turned away.

“Who said it had to be a prisoner?”

Now Zaleski did face him. “What are you implying? That the guards are executing prisoners in their sleep?”

“I’m just indulging in a little idle speculation, doctor, just out of curiosity. Okay… curiosity and concern for my own skin. But you must have a theory of your own. Don’t you?”

“I have no idea. I’ve found no suspicious residue in the blood or body remnants I’ve examined.”

“Okay, but how is that possible?”

“I’m a general physician, Mr. Stake. I’m finding this matter to be outside my realm of expertise.”

“Then other people with a broader range of expertise must be looking into it, eh? At the warden’s direction?”

Zaleski hesitated, and then said, “Of course. Of course he’s investigating the cause of these events.”

“Do you notice a pattern in the victims?”

“No. Three were human, one was a Choom, and the latest a mutant.”

“So there’ve been five. My fellow prisoners weren’t sure if it were only four.”

“One of them died while in solitary confinement, so that one was less conspicuous.” Zaleski looked Stake up and down, lips twisted sourly. “Why so curious… detective?”

“I told you – I’m just looking after my own skin.”

Suddenly the medical unit’s overhead lights flashed as if they might extinguish, fluttered precariously for a beat or two, then regained their full strength. Static shot through Stake’s holographic image, which Zaleski hadn’t banished yet, and it blinked out of view a moment before returning as before. Stake noticed how the physician flinched as if startled, and glanced nervously toward the ceiling.

“It’s been doing that since I got here,” Stake said. “Is that natural?”

“Nothing is natural about this place,” Zaleski muttered, as if only to himself.

Of course Stake picked up the physician’s unhappy vibe, and ran with it. “I’m a little concerned about the stability of this pocket we’re in.”

Zaleski said, “Well, I’ll tell you this… we do have some strange ‘weather,’ if you will. Activity in the interstitial matter that we call storms, for lack of a better word. Disturbances.”

“Are these storms responsible for the power fluctuations, then?” Zaleski didn’t answer, so Stake jumped to another question. “Do you think what’s happened to these men might be linked to the anomalies? If the disturbances affect electrical sources, might they be attracted to the electrical activity in a living body? Reach out and… I don’t know… disrupt the victim violently?”

“That’s a wild and unsubstantiated theory, Mr. Stake.”

“Better than no theory, which is what you claim your stance is, doctor.”

Finally Zaleski dismissed the holograph of Stake’s head. “You’re all better, Mr. Stake. You can return to your cell now.” He looked over toward the door to the medical unit, where the two guards who had escorted Stake here had stood waiting all the while, and motioned for the man and robot to come forward to get their charge. Then to Stake he said, “I suggest you try to avoid getting into any further fights. It isn’t wise to make enemies here.”

In the cell in which his cousin Chowder had recently died – now thoroughly cleaned, and repainted besides – Null said to Stake, “Be careful, friend… everyone in Orange Block gets pressed into the Orange Bunch gang, but a couple of the mutie members work for me as inside informers, and the word from them is Mr. Fetch is getting more nervous about you testifying against him. Apparently he wants his new friends to eliminate the threat.”

“Great.”

“Just stick close to us and they’ll be less likely to make a move. You’re doing the right thing, working for us. So tell me what you think the doctor knows.”

“I don’t know what he knows, but he sure seems to know something… enough to threaten me before I left. The deaths are an uncomfortable subject to him.” Stake related how the conversation had gone, even to the point of describing their discussion about the anomalous power fluctuations. Null said everyone had taken note of these disturbances, which had become more frequent in the past few months, and they didn’t inspire confidence. Then Stake told the mutant, “A funny thing happened when I was leaving the med unit. The robot guard suddenly stopped dead and wouldn’t budge; he kind of just stood there staring at me. And his eyes – you know how their eyes glow red? Well, his eyes were flickering. So I asked the thing, ‘Are you all right?’ And he spoke to me.”

“What’d it say?”

“He said, ‘Your kind are not the only prisoners.’”

“Huh,” Null said. “What did it mean?”

“I don’t know. An existential robot?”

“But you think it was having one of these power disturbances.”

“Yeah… for a second. Then he seemed to snap out of it and acted normal again.” Stake shrugged. “Something’s in the air.” He turned to face the other two occupants of the room, both seated on the edge of a bunk: Billings, and the mutant called Blur, who of course was convulsing and whipping his head madly.

Billings smiled apologetically. “So how’s your nose?”

Stake ignored him and said to Null, “Now I want to talk to your pal Blur.”

“You can try.”

“I have to. He’s our only witness.”

Stake stepped closer to Blur, looking down at him. “Hey, buddy. You know who I am?”

“Jerry… Mistake,” the mutant garbled. “Jerry Mistake…”

“Close enough. Do you know I have Caro turbida, Blur? I’m like you.”

Spittle flew from the mutant’s mouth as he became more agitated. “No… no… I’m like everybody… everybody’s inside me…”

“We’re prisoners in our own bodies, aren’t we, Blur? But we have to fight this thing… this curse we have. Try to make it work for us, right? Try to make it into a gift, instead.”

“I saw the ghost… ghost… saw the skeleton ghost…”

“Yeah, that’s what I want to talk with you about. But I want you to settle down so you can think clearly. Can you do that? Can you slow yourself down?” Stake reached out and laid a gentle hand on the mutant’s juddering shoulder. “Look at my face, Blur. Focus on my face and calm down, brother. Hey, I can do it. I don’t have perfect control, but I don’t let this thing control me, either. Can you slow it down? Can you look straight in my eyes?”

Null began to say something, but cut himself off when it became obvious that Blur’s head was not thrashing as fast as it normally did. As his head motions became less rapid, the other three men caught clearer glimpses of his repertoire of faces. There was an elderly woman (his mother?)… a small child (himself at an early age?)… a black man… a woman Stake thought he recognized as a porn actress. But the succession of changing visages slowed, as well, until Blur’s head finally stopped whipping, and his features stopped altering. Yet instead of Blur revealing his true self – as if that were irretrievable to him, as if he had never even owned his own countenance – the face that ultimately looked into Stake’s eyes was his face, that of “Jerry Mistake” as Blur called him, in Stake’s neutral “factory setting.”

Before Stake could protest, Blur spoke in a surprisingly level, quiet tone. He said, “Before I saw the skeleton, I saw a fish. A white fish, swimming around in the air near the ceiling.”

“A white fish,” Stake echoed, glancing up at the cell’s ceiling, where there were inset light strips and a single air vent.

“Yes. And then… and then a bigger shape stepped out of the air, stepped out of the air right inside our cell. The fish swam down to the bigger shape and became part of it. It was like a skeleton, but not a human skeleton. It was like a demon’s skeleton. And it wasn’t really solid. It glowed like a ghost.” Blur’s eyes started darting back and forth. His eyelids fluttered.

“Then what happened?” Stake encouraged him, to keep him from slipping back into chaos.

Blur’s gaze snapped into focus again. “The skeleton stood there in our cell and it looked at me… it looked at me… it knew I was awake. But it didn’t come here to my bunk.” He patted the mattress he sat on, then pointed across the room. “It went there, to Chowder asleep on his bunk. It stood beside him. It looked around at me… with that demon head… that skeleton demon head.” Darting eyes again.

“Yes, Blur? And?”

“Then it reached down with its hands… it touched Chowder’s head with both hands… and I tried to scream but I couldn’t! I couldn’t scream!”

“It’s all right, brother.”

“Then Chowder was gone… boom!… but no sound! Chowder was gone and the skeleton was gone, too! Both of them gone! Gone… gone… the ghost… I saw the ghost…”

Blur flung his head from side to side with greater violence than ever, as if he might throw his tormented skull right off his neck and against the wall. Stake turned away from him to meet Null’s eyes.

“Either he’s totally insane, or this prison is a haunted house.”

Null sighed, blew out his cheeks sadly. “I think you got it right the first time.”

“Hold on,” Stake said, spinning to look toward Blur again. “A white fish swimming in the air.”

“Yeah?”

“That sounds like those things that move around out there in the pocket,” Stake said. “Those interstitial life-forms.”

The organic guards were encouraged not to remove their intimidating featureless helmets in the presence of the prisoners; not only to ensure their safety, but to prevent being perceived as too human. They had their own, smaller cafeteria in which to let down their guard. Nonetheless, many of them had taken to the habit of sitting at a particular table in the general mess hall, where they took off their helmets to drink coffee and grab a quick bite. There were four guards seated at this table, where no prisoners ever sat, right now as Jeremy Stake walked toward them. They all looked up warily, their grins and chatter fading, when Stake was only a few paces away. One of the men had the name HURLEY on the left breast of his uniform, and Stake could now put a face to that name. A youngish black man with closely cut hair and a neat mustache. Stake had taken note of the man before, because he appeared patient but firm with the prisoners. He’d never seen Hurley lose his cool, flaunt his status or become bullying.

“What do you want, mutie?” one of the other guards, bearing the name FLAQUITA, asked around a mouthful of imitation burrito. “You lost?”

“I was hoping you guys could talk to the warden about letting me speak with him again,” Stake said. “I think I might know something about these deaths.”

“What deaths?”

“Come on,” Stake said. “Everybody with the ‘what deaths.’ You know what I mean.”

The short but thickly-set Flaquita looked about ready to rise up from his chair. “Don’t get belligerent with me, dunghole.”

“What do you know about these deaths?” Hurley asked sternly. “You tell us, and we’ll tell you whether we think the warden needs to hear it.”

“That mutant Blur, who was in the cell where the last victim got it… he says he saw a fish kind of thing floating around in the air. Then a figure appeared, that he interpreted as a ghost, and –”

“What the hell is this dung?” Flaquita cut him off. “Why are you wasting our time with this? I don’t know who’s crazier – Blur, or you for listening to Blur. Man, I know you’re new here but you should know by now that freak is out of his mind.”

“What I’m saying is,” Stake went on, “that fish-thing sounds just like some of those creatures swimming around out there in the interstitial matter. Is it possible they could get inside the facility? Through a vent, a port… or maybe right through the walls? Maybe they’re attacking… trying to feed on us, and something about their nature causes a violent reaction, like when matter and antimatter meet and annihilate each other.”

“I’m going to annihilate you if you don’t get your ass back to the mutie table and stop bothering us when we’re trying to have our lunch,” Flaquita snarled. For unneeded emphasis, he rested his hand on his holstered pistol. The guards carried firearms, unafraid that the prisoners would take them; a gun was configured to recognize its owner, the only person who it would respond to.

Hurley ignored Flaquita, and asked, “If that was true, then what’s that ghost Blur is going on about? That doesn’t sound like those animals swimming around out there to me.”

“Yeah,” said another guard, “and we’ve been out here two years now. If those life-forms could get in here, why would they start doing it only a few months ago?”

“Who knows? Maybe they weren’t hungry enough before, but they’re getting more stressed and desperate. It could be we’ve trapped them in this pocket with us.” Even as he said this, some words came back to Stake; words spoken by the glitched robot guard. “Your kind are not the only prisoners.”Could the machine have been trying to relate these same thoughts to him? He wished now he’d taken note of its identification number, so that he might try speaking with it further.

“What are you, a biologist?” the fourth guard at the table said. “You know all about these animals, where nobody else does?”

“Sir, I’m just trying to show some concern here. It’s a serious matter, don’t you think? For all you know it could happen to one of you guys next.”

“You think the warden isn’t already looking into every possibility? Why don’t you let him worry about it? Remember, Stake – you’re not a detective in this place; you’re just another prisoner.”

“So you won’t tell him I’d like to talk with him?”

Flaquita started to speak up but Hurley spoke first. “I’ll tell him, all right? But don’t get your hopes up; he’s a busy man.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it, sir.” Stake nodded, and started back in the direction of his own table, where Null and the other Muties had been watching him intently from a distance. When he turned, however, he saw that a guard robot had been standing near enough behind him to listen in on their conversation. As Stake walked past the machine they both turned their heads to regard each other. Did the robot’s red-glowing eyes flicker for just one second?

He halted to talk to the machine, wondering if it were a different robot from the one he had just been thinking of, but it walked away from him to resume its rounds. Stake watched its back for a few moments, then continued on to the mutie table. There, he began relating what he had discussed with the guards. As he did so, a growing number of non-mutant prisoners from neighboring tables drew closer to listen in. Null looked around at them with hostile eyes. “What do you all want?”

One man, a Choom, held up his hands and said, “Easy, Null, we just want to know what your man Stake here has found out so far about these guys blowing up in their cells. It has us all spooked, man. We hear your boy is trying to find out what it’s all about.”

“It does concern all of us,” Stake said. “And maybe if the warden doesn’t want to talk to us, we might have to demand it as a group. Show some solidarity to get the answers we need.”

“I’ll bet those mother-loving guards already know what’s going on, all too well,” that brain corral mutant spat.

“I didn’t get the impression that they do,” Stake said.

“Impression,” brain corral said. “You’re good at impressions, aren’t ya, shapeshifter?”

“Listen, brother, I have to say my instincts and intuitions are pretty good from being a hired detective and a deep ops soldier, so you might want to give me some credit.”

On his own train of thought, the Choom prisoner mused, “Friend of mine named Athul went into solitary for fighting. I haven’t seen him since. I’m sure he’s one of the ones who got it.”

“The medical chief did tell me that one of the victims had been in isolation,” Stake confirmed.

“That makes five guys in about four months,” another prisoner said. “It’s almost like a regular thing, isn’t it?”

“Like it’s… scheduled,” the Choom said.

“Scheduled,” brain corral scoffed.

“Well, the last few have been closer together,” Null added, “so things are getting a little ahead of schedule, aren’t they?”

“Bottom line,” Stake said, “is right now we don’t know when this might happen again.”

Stake had tried convincing his two cellmates, the black man Kofi and the bipedal dog-like Dacvibese, that they should take turns staying awake in three-hour shifts, to stand guard over each other. After all, Null had ordered all the members of the Mutie gang to do this if they could get their non-mutant cellmates to agree to it. But Stake’s two cellmates had resolutely refused. So it was that he lay on his bunk unable to sleep, listening to Kofi snore and smelling the foulness of the Dacvibese’s drool, while a parade of thoughts passed through his skull. He thought about the various types of interstitial creatures he had glimpsed out the windows on his way to the warden’s office. He thought about how the warden hadn’t sent word that he would grant Stake an audience. He thought about the ill-fated day Edwin Fetch had come into his little office. And he thought about a Sinanese woman he had met during the Blue War, named Thi Gonh, whom he had fallen in love with.

Finally, with thoughts of blue-skinned Thi in his arms, he drifted off, but whether for a matter of minutes or moments he didn’t know. All he knew, when he unaccountably snapped awake again – the hair on his arms and the back of his neck standing on end – was that a white apparition was standing just inside the cell, as if it might have passed right through the doorway’s energy barrier. The apparition gave off a soft radiance, like bioluminescence, that reflected off the walls.

Stake launched himself from his bunk and backed flat against the far wall of the cell in one movement, while crying out, “Hey! Help! Help us in here! Wake up… wake up… help us in here!” Yelling to his cellmates and, if it were functioning, the cell’s security camera at the same time.

The figure had taken one step toward him, but it turned its head, distracted, as Stake’s two cellmates awoke and cried out in terror themselves. The Dacvibese was closest to the intruder, on the lower level of a bunk bed occupied up top by Kofi… who, afraid to leap down, pushed himself into the corner and tucked into a ball as if he hoped to evade notice. The Dacvibese screeched horribly and ejected two malodorous streams of mucus toward the intruder from glands at the corners of his mouth. At the same time he took hold of his mattress and hoisted it up in front of him as a shield.

This flurry of distractions gave Stake a chance, however brief, to take in the figure in greater detail.

He could see why Blur had called it a skeleton. A demon’s skeleton, at that. The entity was roughly man-like in size and outline, but it seemed to either have the exoskeleton of an insect or to have never developed flesh upon its bony armature. He might have thought the being was mechanical if not for the organic, grown appearance of its composition. Thin arms and legs formed from odd sections of bone. A bare cage of ribs that were curved and yet also, inexplicably, multiply jointed. A complex pelvis, twisted but symmetrical. And a ribbed mask for a face, without eyes or other features, although it was ringed with a fringe of rippling cilia. From the back of its head, like windblown hair, white banners streamed in the air, though there was no breeze in the cell to blow them.

Its hands were raised, long fleshless digits spread wide.

Then it swiped one of its arms in a vicious backhand. The mattress the Dacvibese had used as a shield was torn out of his hands and thudded against the wall. The Dacvibese’s screams increased to an ear-piercing level. He backed against the side of the bunk bed – the farthest he could go.

Instead of advancing on him, however, the creature with its glow like white phosphorus turned its eyeless face toward Stake again, and started forward.

It was just slightly out of focus… insubstantial, or at least not fully substantial in this environment. It hurt Stake’s eyes to look at it. No, not his eyes… it hurt his mind to look upon it. Pinned against the wall, Stake let out an inarticulate cry.

Then, beyond the entity, Stake saw a guard framed in the doorway. The human guard was out in the hallway, on the other side of the red-tinted barrier, but he was raising his pistol in both hands and taking aim.

Stake slid down the wall, into a crouch, out of the line of fire.

The guard fired energy bolts straight through the closed barrier, streaking red like tracer rounds. Right into the back of the unsuspecting creature.

It whirled around. It looked like it should be screaming but it lacked a mouth to do so. If it had meant to feed, it must feed by some other means, Stake thought in the midst of his paralyzed panic. And even as he experienced it, this panic angered him. He had never known such an immobilizing fear before. He had always been able to respond to danger with a trained imperative for survival. It wasn’t so much the creature’s appearance that inspired this new irrational fear, however, but some force or vibration it emanated. Despite the uncountable nonhuman races he had encountered as a citizen of Punktown, this being was something entirely other.

The guard in the hallway triggered more molten red bolts, piercing the intervening barrier.

With the energy bolts seeming to connect with its body and penetrate its animated bones, the creature appeared enraged. Despite its insubstantial aspect, it didn’t seem able to step through the barrier to counterattack the guard. Instead, it suddenly reached to the side and caught hold of the Dacvibese, gripping his head between both its wide hands.

An explosion, then, deafened as opposed to deafening. A soundless nova blast. Bursting in every direction: the Dacvibese’s rotten-smelling blood, black as India ink.

Then they were both gone, like particles of matter and antimatter mutually annihilated.

Immediately the guard was deactivating the barrier. Stepping into a pool of black blood. Calling in other guards over his helmet mic. Stake saw the name in white on the man’s left breast. It was Hurley.

“Jesus mother-loving Christ!” Kofi blurted, cowering on the upper bunk.

“Amen,” Stake murmured, sliding up the wall to stand again. Blood speckled his face.

Hurley looked at Stake, though the guard appeared as faceless as the creature had been. “You all right?”

“Yeah… considering that thing came here to kill me,” Stake said. Because whatever else remained mysterious to him, that much had seemed very clear.

Again, a human guard and a robot removed Stake from his cell so that he might be brought to the warden; to relate what he had seen, the human guard explained gruffly. The guard was Flaquita, not Hurley. Hurley had gone on before Stake to be interviewed by the warden separately. So had Stake’s surviving cellmate, Kofi.

As the flanking guards escorted him away from his cell, prisoners roused from their sleep by the commotion stood close to the barriers of their own cells looking out at him. As he passed, they called, “What was it, Stake? What did you see?” But he couldn’t linger to reply.

When the three of them at last entered into the tubular corridor connecting to the administrative wing, Stake was already craning his neck and looking sharply from side to side, watching for interstitial life-forms out the windows that lined the tunnel. He was not disappointed. The creatures were more readily apparent this time, closer to the windows and seeming to gaze inside as if they had been expecting the trio. Though widely varied in form, they were all of them white and luminous. Clinging to the outside of the tunnel was that large animal with the multiply jointed crab legs. Eel-like forms swam in place, their tails rippling. And a creature resembling a trilobite, with a segmented shell, hovered in place with the help of its wavering fringe of legs, like those of a centipede – or the cilia of a microorganism.

Stake stopped in his tracks, his eyes locked on the trilobite-thing as it floated out there, stationary, at face level. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed.

Flaquita spun around and seized his arm. “What are you doing?” he said. “Come on.”

Stake pointed. “That thing! You see that?”

Ignoring him, the guard tugged him along. “I said come on.” The robot took hold of Stake’s other arm.

Stake looked back over his shoulder. That clinging spider-creature, its long white legs curved like a human ribcage. Those eel-things, rippling like long hair fluttering in a breeze. And that circular trilobite, like an ominous mask devoid of features…

“That’s its face!” Stake cried, struggling against the two guards, but they only gripped him more tightly, forced him along more insistently. “Will you just look? That’s the face of the thing that came into my cell!”

Flaquita stopped, and so the robot followed suit. The human guard glanced back down the corridor the way they had come, perhaps a bit spooked after hearing of his fellow guard Hurley having fired at an unidentified intruder. “What are you talking about? Where?”

“Outside the windows,” Stake said. “It’s those interstitial animals!”

Just then, the lights went out.

For a moment, the three of them were swallowed in utter darkness, except for the interstitial life-forms themselves, glowing against the churning blackness like a field of stars. But then a string of red lights came on in the ceiling as an emergency backup power source kicked in. This was no mere power fluctuation… not this time. The corridor’s regular lights did not return, and a loud buzzing alert had begun to sound.

“What is it?” Stake asked.

“What’s it look like?” Flaquita said. “ The power’s down. Don’t ask me why. Come on, let’s get you to the warden… if he still wants to see you with this going on.”

When they stepped into the warden’s office, they found the lighting subdued but his array of holographic monitors and their associated controls unaffected. He at first ignored the trio aside from a disapproving glance, engaged as he was in conversation with the chief of maintenance. “You’re certain we won’t lose power to the cell barriers?” he was saying.

“Sir,” the face on his central monitor replied, “this is a prison, so the importance of maintaining the cell barriers was top priority when the power system was designed. We won’t lose the barriers unless we lose everything we have left – which includes auxiliary life support. In other words, if we lose that it won’t matter because we’ll all be dead, anyway. Well, aside from the robots… until their individual power sources slowly wind down.”

“Yes… the robots.” The Tikkihotto glanced again at the three figures standing across the room from his desk. “All right, Klaus, stay on it.” Dinhoo Cirvik brushed away the virtual monitor and pointed to the mechanical guard. “What’s that doing in here, Flaquita?”

Confused, Flaquita stammered through his helmet, “Just following usual protocol, warden.”

“This is not a usual situation anymore, is it? Our automated systems are no longer secure. Get it out.”

Flaquita turned to address the robot. “You heard the warden; you’re dismissed. I can manage the prisoner on my own.”

Without protest, the machine turned away and let itself out of the office. The door slid shut behind it.

Stake spoke up when the robot had left. “It can influence electrical fields, can’t it? Technology… machines… even the minds of your robots.”

“What are you talking about?” Cirvik snapped.

“The creature that tried to attack me in my cell. I think it spoke to me through one of your robots when I was in the med unit. The robot said to me, ‘Your kind are not the only prisoners.’ This power outage… it’s angry, isn’t it? I should say, angrier than usual.”

Cirvik sighed, swiveling side to side in his chair as he surveyed Stake with his profusion of ocular tendrils, which writhed restlessly. “You’ve stirred things up, Mr. Stake. Poking around… asking questions…”

“All the prisoners aren’t asking the same questions? And from the ones I’ve talked to, I wonder how many of your guards know what’s going on. If any.” He motioned toward Flaquita, standing beside him. “You don’t trust them, do you?”

Flaquita looked back and forth between the two men uncomprehendingly, as if to confirm Stake’s suspicion.

Cirvik sat forward, and said, “Do you know how hard I worked at my career, how many years… decades… it took for me to achieve my current position, Mr. Stake? You’re a mutant; you should know the truth of these things. The Earth Colonies can paint on their benign face… talk about the glorious rainbow that is Paxton, with all its sentient species living in harmony. But we know the reality is that Earth people control that colony, stole the city from the native Choom and nudged them aside. For a nonEarther to achieve any position of real importance in the system is rare and difficult.”

“I understand that you want to protect your own interests, yes. Assuming that the home office doesn’t know what’s been going on here, I understand perfectly that you don’t want them to realize that you have a dangerous situation on your hands.”

“Despite what I just said,” Cirvik growled, his eye tendrils becoming even more agitated, “it isn’t just about protecting my career! My job is to protect this prison, maintain order here, keep these dangerous inmates secure! I have been facing a challenge the likes of which you, or the home office, couldn’t imagine!”

“To your knowledge, no interstitial life-form has ever acted in a hostile way before all this?”

“It’s unprecedented, yes!”

“Well, don’t you think the home office should know it? And shut this place down… not just the prison, but close up the pocket it’s in?”

“And do what, then? Build new prisons where? Do you know what’s at stake here? How much rides on the success of my prison? They want to open more of these pockets… build more prisons like this! We can’t cease those projects because I can’t deal with a single aggressive life-form!”

“But it isn’t really a single life-form, is it?” Stake said. “Outside the windows just now I saw the components of the thing that attacked me – or at least, other creatures just like them.”

Cirvik sat back slowly in his seat.“Now I see why people rent your services, Mr. Stake. And before that, sent you in to infiltrate the enemy. No… you’re right… it isn’t just a single creature. It’s more like a group of prisoners itself.”

“Just like it told me,” Stake said. “It’s sentient. It can communicate intelligently.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve communicated with it yourself, haven’t you? What have you two talked about, warden? Did you tell it how I’m ‘stirring things up’?” Stake smiled grimly. “Is that why it came to my cell to target me, specifically?”

“I’ve wasted enough time talking with you about this as it is,” Cirvik said. He switched his attention to the guard. “Flaquita, do you trust me?”

”Ah, yes sir, of course, but… I got to tell you, I really don’t know what you two are going on about.”

“Right now you just need to trust me and realize that Stake here is a dangerous man, who has exacerbated an already dangerous situation…”

Stake cut in, “Flaquita, you better trust me on this. Cirvik is in over his head with something he’s trying to keep from the authorities. If you back him up, he’ll just drag you down with him.”

Cirvik stood up from behind his desk abruptly, and thrust out a handgun he had surreptitiously removed from a desk drawer. “He’s going to attack me, Flaquita – shoot him!”

“Sir, hold it, hold on a second!” Flaquita cried, putting a hand on the grip of his own pistol.

“Stop him!” Stake shouted. He had begun dodging behind the guard the moment he saw Cirvik tense himself to bolt up from his seat.

Flaquita hesitated, alarmed enough to pull his sidearm from its holster but still too intimidated to raise it against the warden. Cirvik, however, didn’t hesitate any longer in using his own weapon. His pistol was a throwback, a Decimator .220 revolver, but its cylinder was loaded with plasma capsules. Green plasma, the most corrosive. He fired off three shots in rapid succession, the unsilenced handgun booming in the confined room.

The snub-nosed gun was inaccurate and Cirvik was nervous. The first capsule missed Flaquita and hit the wall behind him. The second struck him in the helmet. As Flaquita finally brought up his own gun and squeezed off a single energy bolt, the third capsule burst against the knuckles of his hand closed around the pistol’s grip.

Cirvik was slammed back against the rear wall of his office, the short length of red beam having punched through one eye socket. With the tendrils there crisped black and shriveled, the warden slid lifelessly down the wall, out of sight behind his desk.

Stake eased Flaquita to the floor, at the same time struggling to get his helmet off before the glowing plasma could eat all the way through it. Flaquita was screaming in fear at the prospect, and in agony as the fingers of his right hand were melted down to nubs. He had dropped his pistol to the carpet. They both knew that if the plasma continued to spread, the guard might lose his entire arm or worse before it spent itself.

When Stake had got the man’s helmet off and seen that Flaquita’s face was still intact, he spun, dashed to the far wall where Cirvik had slid down, and swung the sizzling helmet against the glass sheet covering the framed Tikkihotto axe. The glass shattered. He dropped the helmet, pulled the colorful e-ikko off its brackets, and before rushing back to Flaquita’s side stooped to retrieve the warden’s fallen revolver. Unlike the guards’ guns with the safety feature that prevented them from being fired by anyone but their owner, Stake could make use of this.

As he crouched beside the writhing, shrieking guard, he said, “Sorry I hid behind you… I didn’t think he’d go that far.” It was obvious to Stake – and he hoped to Flaquita, also – that when Stake had proved an elusive target, Cirvik had made the quick decision to kill Flaquita first, to eliminate a witness to Stake’s accusations and to frame Stake before killing him, too.

Stake knelt on Flaquita’s arm, pinning it to the floor. The plasma had already eaten away most of the palm. As Stake raised the tomahawk above the man’s wrist, he asked, “You ready for this?”

“Do it!” Flaquita cried.

When the two men stepped out into the corridor, Flaquita’s good arm draped over Stake’s shoulders, Stake saw a robot guard standing there facing them, blocking their passage. He had no doubt it was the same guard Cirvik had dismissed from his office earlier.

Hoping for the best, Stake stopped and said, “Hey, help me get this guy to the infirmary!”

The guard started walking toward them with jerky but rapid steps. Stake saw its red-lit eyes flickering. Its arms came up, fingers spread, reminding him of the bony digits of the nightmare figure that had come for him in his cell.

Stake dropped the bloody tomahawk he was still carrying, drew the Decimator from his waistband, and extended it toward the oncoming machine. He fired two of his three remaining projectiles at the robot’s head. It was struck in its blank face and between those guttering eyes. The capsules burst, releasing their phosphorescent contents.

The robot kept coming, wearing a luminous caul, but after only a couple more steps it veered off to one side and crashed to the floor, its limbs thrashing in a wild seizure. As the plasma ate deeper into the robot’s head, the seizure abruptly ceased and the machine went still.

At that moment, something arose like a wisp of white smoke from a growing hole in the automaton’s metal skull. The white shape swam upwards, wiggling its eel-like tail. Stake drew in his breath, bracing himself for another attack. Just one shot left, and would plasma even work against this thing?

The animal continued upwards, however, toward a small air vent in the ceiling, and wriggled its flat body through the grate. Whether it would travel to another part of the prison through the ventilation system, or at some point of egress work its way outside to rejoin its brethren, Stake couldn’t know, but when the creature was gone he dropped his gaze to the windows lining the corridor.

Along both sides of the tunnel, interstitial life-forms had drawn close enough to touch the curved windows, peering in at the two men inscrutably.

“Come on,” Stake said to prompt the moaning, half-delirious Flaquita into movement again.

As they stumbled along – Stake trying not to look nervously to left or right, and Flaquita holding his hastily bandaged arm against his chest – the guard groaned, “You’re my witness, man, you hear me? I killed him in self defense.”

“I’ll be your witness if you’ll be my witness.”

“We’d better both stay alive, then.”

“I’m working on it.”

Stake wondered if the creatures could simply pass through the solid material of the windows if they so chose, or if they had to find their way into the prison through other means. Were they refraining from attacking the two men right now, or just incapable of it?

Whatever the case, the men reached the far end of the tunnel safely, and Stake felt relief when the door slid shut behind him. That is, until two guards turned a corner ahead and came running toward him, guns already drawn. Flaquita’s helmet with its communication mic was ruined, but before they’d left the office, in a clear-headed moment, Flaquita had used his wrist comp to call for assistance.

“You!” one of the guards bellowed. “Freeze!”

Stake dropped the revolver and slid it toward the approaching guards with his foot. “Hurry up,” he said. “We need to get him to the infirmary.”

“Set him down!” the guard ordered, still training his gun on Stake. Stake realized this man was Hurley.

“Take it easy,” Flaquita told Hurley. “Just help him get me to the fucking doctor.”

“Yeah,” Stake said, “I need to go with you. I have some questions for the doctor.”

So as to move more quickly, Stake and Hurley lifted Flaquita off his feet and carried him together. He was close to passing out, anyway. The other guard kept his hands free, still distrustful of Stake and ready for trouble.

Just as when Stake had been escorted to Cirvik’s office, other prisoners stood close to their cell barriers watching the four men pass, calling out to them and asking what was going on. The brown-out, the wounded guard, Stake aiding the guards… the men were befuddled, and thus close to rage with frustration and the fear that the prison might no longer be stable… but of course Stake and the guards couldn’t linger to answer anyone’s questions.

Along the way Stake did his best to fill the guards in on what had happened. Hurley and the other man were horrified to hear that Cirvik had been killed. The latter man called the chief of security, a man named Ploss, on his helmet mic and told him to meet them in the infirmary. The guard then related to Hurley and Stake that Ploss was sending some men to Cirvik’s office to tend to the body.

A number of times their little group hurried past a robot guard. Stake watched each one warily, but none of them gazed back at him with sputtering eyes.

When they reached the infirmary, Ploss was already there waiting for them, along with several other human guards. He had been warned not to trust the robots. Ploss was a powerfully-built Choom with his head shaved to stubble and his ear-to-ear mouth compressed in a long stern line. Also waiting for their arrival was Dr. Zaleski, whom Ploss had contacted and ordered to his post. The medical chief looked more haggard and sickly than ever, either from having been roused too early from sleep… or with dread.

“The assistant warden’s on the way,” Ploss rumbled, watching over the proceedings as Zaleski and a med tech assigned to the night shift immediately tended to Flaquita, now stretched out on an examination table. “Until he gets here, I’m in charge. You.” He pointed at Stake. “Tell me what happened to the warden.”

“I will, but I hope you’ll have my memories downloaded, so you’ll be sure to believe me.” Stake gestured toward Flaquita. “His memories, too.”

“It’ll be done. Until then, tell me!”

The assistant warden, a small and reserved white-haired man named Conant, arrived early in Stake’s story and didn’t interrupt him.

When Stake had finished, he turned to gesture toward Dr. Zaleski and said, “That’s all I know. If you want more, I suggest you talk to this man.”

“What are you saying?” Zaleski said.

“Trust my instincts,” Stake said, looking from assistant warden Conant to security chief Ploss. “I always do.”

Ploss faced the medical chief. “What do you know about this, Zaleski?” he demanded.

“When I questioned him about the deaths here,” Stake said, “I could tell he knew more than he was saying. I’m certain Cirvik confided in him. He had to have had at least one person trying to help him figure out what was going on when this started.”

“You’re out of your mind!” Zaleski cried. “All of what you just told us… who could believe it? You just made it up to cover up your murder of the warden!”

“My memories and Flaquita’s will back us up on what the warden said and did.”

Ploss narrowed his eyes at the assistant warden. “Cirvik didn’t tell you any of this? About this monster?”

“Of course not!” Conant said.

Ploss returned his attention to Zaleski and stepped in close to him; close enough to catch hold of his lab smock and jerk the man onto his tiptoes.

“Hey, easy there!” Conant protested.

Ploss ignored his nominal superior, growling at Zaleski, “Maybe you don’t get it – this prison is in chaos right now! We’re on auxiliary power for no reason we can understand, the warden tried to kill one of my men, and a monster tried to kill this prisoner in his cell… after it’s already killed a bunch of other men. To top it off, we haven’t been able to communicate with the home office… we can’t get any kind of signal out at all. So if you know something, you sorry little junkie, you’d better spit it out now before I lose my patience. And I’ve never had a whole lot of that.”

“What do you mean, ‘junkie’?” Zaleski stammered.

Ploss said through a wall of clenched teeth, “We all know about you. If you want the home office to know, too, I can arrange it. Now tell me about this monster we’re fighting or I’ll throw you in the nearest trash zapper.”

“Let’s not lose control here,” Conant advised. “We have to work together to sort this out.” But he was such a mild and rational man that no one even listened to him.

“You said we can’t get a signal out?” Hurley broke in.

Ploss looked over at him. “Right. If what Stake says is true, and this monster can affect our systems, it might be blocking transmissions. Maybe all those animals out there are doing it. Surrounding us… making us all prisoners in here.”

Stake said, “If these things really want to they can probably shut down the auxiliary power, too. Right now they might just be trying to threaten us.”

Ploss gave Zaleski a shake. “You hear that? We could all of us die soon… including you. So talk!”

“You have to understand,” Zaleski choked, and not only because his collar was knotted in Ploss’s fist, “I was afraid of the man! You know what Warden Cirvik was like! What could I do but keep what he told me to myself?”

“What did he tell you?” Ploss let the man down and loosened his grip a bit.

Zaleski shifted his red-rimmed eyes from Ploss, to Conant, to Stake, and admitted in a fatalistic croak, “Cirvik had a deal with the devil.”

“It’s not so much a being, as a colony,” Zaleski said to the little assemblage. He told them the entity that had been killing the prisoners was an amalgamation, a collection of numerous creatures, not all of them heterogeneous. They were symbiotically linked, a united democracy. “I’m reminded of the extinct Earth animal known as a Portuguese Man o’ War, which was not a jellyfish but a colony of zooid organisms. Though in the case of that animal, the zooids weren’t able to exist separately from the colony. That isn’t the case here.”

“But why take on an anthropomorphic form?” Conant asked.

“Not sure why that artful collage. Maybe it was to get Cirvik to relate to them more easily, as another humanoid being. Or maybe it was a form they chose to frighten him, and anyone else who might witness the thing.”

Ploss made a scoffing sound. “This prison is full of Punktown criminals. I’m not sure any form it chose could be frightening enough.”

Zaleski continued, “But as I told Cirvik, I believe the main reason it adopts that collaborative form is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. One animal on its own is not so powerful, perhaps not even so intelligent. But it seems to me that, telepathically or otherwise, in a cooperative state they enter into a hive mind.”

“I knew you were more analytical than you were letting on,” Stake said.

His pride puffed up by what he perceived as a compliment, Zaleski stated, “I was chosen for this position because of the diversity of the inmates and my extensive knowledge of nonhuman anatomy.” He returned to his point. “It was this possibility, of the conglomeration building in intelligence and strength the more individual animals joined it, that caused Cirvik a lot of fear. What if all the creatures in this pocket were to conjoin? All the creatures inhabiting the interstitial matter beyond this pocket? Cirvik thought if they could do that – combine into an entity made from thousands or millions or billions of individual lives – the final product would be like a god. A god that might cross into our reality and annihilate us.”

“But he decided to keep it to himself,” Conant marveled, full of horror.

“We’ve known about these animals going back to the days of ships crossing space through artificial wormholes,” Ploss said. “Before long-distance teleportation took over. Yeah, sometimes you heard stories that they thought these critters might be causing small electrical disturbances, but I never heard of any outright attacks. So why this? Why now?”

“Maybe because the wormholes in which the animals were formerly encountered were temporary – open only long enough for the ship to pass through – not a permanent structure like the pocket our prison occupies,” Zaleski said. “Or maybe they’re only now, themselves, discovering the process of combining their forms. Even from what Cirvik learned, I still can’t tell you much. The things are a complete mystery. No living specimen has ever survived in captivity. Even their remains in death can’t be preserved; they fade out of existence. So no one has ever learned much about them.”

“Either that,” Stake said, “or the authorities are keeping some knowledge to themselves, too.”

“But why the attacks on the prisoners?” Conant asked.

“I’m getting to that,” Zaleski said. “The main thing to understand is the creature… the creatures, rather… are furious to be trapped in our pocket. The first inmate they killed was in solitary confinement. They apparently chose him as an experiment… not to kill him out of rage, but to try to take control of his mind, so they could speak through him to initiate contact. Apparently they believed that since they can effect electrical fields, they might manipulate the electrical impulses of a human brain. Instead, well, they inadvertently discovered that by trying to occupy the same space as a human being, the reaction would cause his body to become displaced in a very messy way. After that, they took possession of one of the robots instead, and in that way successfully communicated in private with our no doubt very surprised Warden Cirvik.”

“How’d they learn to speak English through a robot?” Hurley asked.

“I’m sure they haven’t learned English. A robot they use as a medium is articulating – translating – their thoughts.”

“Remarkable,” Conant said. “Their intelligence is staggering!”

“Frightening,” Ploss corrected.

“Now, I wasn’t privy to whatever discourse Cirvik and this collective had,” Zaleski said, “and he didn’t tell me everything, I’m certain of it. But I do know his main thrust was to placate them.”

“He mustn’t have placated too well,” Stake said, “if prisoners continued to die.”

“Was it still trying to use a human being as a medium?” Conant asked.

Hurley ventured, “Do you think it’s feeding on their souls, or life-force, or something? Their energy?”

Zaleski shook his head. “Cirvik was afraid the colony would grow and become god-like… but what he did, in a way, was to teach it to be a god.”

“How so?” Conant asked.

“By feeding the monster sacrifices.” Zaleski paused a moment for them to digest that. “Their fury is great. You know how frustrated with anger our own prisoners get. They need to lash out at something. That’s why they form opposing gangs, kill and rape each other: as an outlet for their rage. Maybe Cirvik lied and told the collective he’d try to talk to his superiors about freeing them from the pocket. Maybe he promised he’d look into moving the prison to a new pocket and shutting this one down. I don’t know entirely what he said to try to keep them from killing us all; I’m just extrapolating here. What I do know is that Cirvik wanted me to help him understand the nature of the monster, and how we might consider destroying it.”

“Did you have any ideas?” Ploss asked.

“No. And… and to be honest, I was afraid to suggest anything.”

“Afraid?”

“You never know when this thing is watching us,” Zaleski said, lowering his voice to a whisper to emphasize his point. “I was afraid of the monster discovering I meant it any harm.”

“So it was better to just sit back and let it go on killing prisoners, huh?” Stake said.

“Are you bleeding for them, Mr. Stake?” Zaleski retorted.

“You don’t think what’s happening is wrong?”

“Do you think these prisoners haven’t done wrong? Every man who’s been killed by the monster has been a murderer himself. One of those men gunned down a clerk and four innocent customers in a convenience store robbery. There’s your same body count right there!”

“So was Cirvik actually assigning victims to this thing?” Conant asked, incredulous.

“I believe he was.”

“I still don’t understand why!” Ploss said.

Zaleski explained, “The monster’s rage is a volcano that Cirvik was throwing sacrifices into every time it rumbled. Killing alleviates its fury. It must feel… vindicated when it obliterates a victim like that. For a while, at least. But when its level of pain becomes unbearable again, it needs another ‘fix’ of violent expression to vent its emotion. It may be a safety valve; not so much devised by Cirvik to give its rage direction – instead of simply killing us all – but a safety valve the monster has imposed on itself.”

“Because?” Ploss prompted.

“Because maybe it doesn’t really want to kill all of us. Maybe it’s been trying to keep its rage under control as best it could. But now… it seems like that control is fraying. It’s been fired upon, attacked, for the first time. And now with Cirvik dead there’s no telling what will happen. It may no longer be able to restrain itself. It is, after all, apparently a mass of angry individuals trying to hold it together as one rational, intelligent entity. It might very well be greatly conflicted with itself. Like any governing body.”

“Cirvik sent it after me,” Stake said, “didn’t he? He told the thing I was a threat to it somehow.”

Zaleski smiled thinly. “I’m sure he manipulated the poor lost soul with some rationale, Mr. Stake. But I can assure you, I was not a party to that plot. Nor any of it. I was horrified, frankly, by much of what Cirvik confessed to me. But do you think I could have swayed him to act in any other way than he did?”

“He didn’t act at all,” Ploss grumbled. “He just let this situation go on, waiting for it to solve itself. Meanwhile, how long did he think the prisoners’ deaths could continue before he really had to answer for that? And how long did he think he could satisfy this monster with an occasional offering while it waited for what it really wanted? And now, here we are paying the consequences… wondering if this thing is going to shut down our life support or not!”

“We need to find a way to kill this thing!” Hurley said. “Maybe I did hurt it when I shot it. We should set a trap, or some kind of ambush.”

“And if we take a stab at that and fail? We’ll sign our death warrant for sure,” Stake said. “I say if Cirvik could talk to it, so can we. I think we need to try to reason with the thing.”

Klaus, the chief of maintenance, contacted Assistant Warden Conant on his wrist comp when he couldn’t get through to Warden Cirvik. After being apprised of the warden’s death, the maintenance chief said, “Oh my God. Well, sir, I wanted to tell the warden that I still can’t bring up the power to full. Ironically, there are firewalls up that were installed as an antiterrorist safeguard, so an enemy couldn’t gain access to our power systems. They’re seeing me as the enemy, so I haven’t got around those firewalls yet. But anyway, on my monitors I noticed some funny activity going on in the chapel. I sent a tech down there to look into it in person and… well, he said some scary stuff is going on in there.”

“What scary stuff?” Conant asked, peering down at his wrist comp’s tiny screen.

“Jesus was talking to him.”

Conant looked up at the others gathered close, and Ploss said, “I’m going there to have a look myself.”

“Let me come with you,” Stake said.

“Why? You should be back in your cell, I think.”

“I’m trying to help you out here, isn’t that plain? I saved your man Flaquita’s life, didn’t I? If this thing is a collective working together, then we need to do the same.”

“What’s in it for you, dick? No one’s paying your fee.”

“I could be paying soon with my life. All of us might.”

The Choom security chief nodded slowly. “All right, whatever you say, war hero – let’s go.”

The Trans-Paxton Penitentiary’s chapel was a single room, not very large, close to the prison’s recreation yard. Just as in the rec yard, every wall – but also the ceiling and floor – was a vid screen. Depending on a schedule, dictated by a relevant day of the week or time of day, the chapel’s screens could be changed to transform it into a Christian church, a mosque, a synagogue, or a place of worship for any number of nonhuman races.

When its door slid open and Security Chief Ploss, the guard named Hurley, and Stake stood at the room’s threshold, they found that currently it was in the semblance of the Sistine Chapel in miniature. The ceiling, featuring Michelangelo’s paintings God’s Creation of the World, God’s Relationship with Mankind, and Mankind’s Fall from God’s Grace, gave the illusion of being vaulted. Along with this artist’s The Last Judgment there were frescoes by other artists such as Botticelli, and mock windows along the walls, and the floor was mock tiled in marble and colored stone. The men stepped into the room with wariness more than reverence. The few rows of pews were all empty. The maintenance tech had fled long before they’d got there.

“Hello?” Stake called out. His voice echoed a bit. “Are you in here?”

A flicker of static interrupted the image all around them, above them, under their feet, and then in an instant a new reality had seemed to solidify. They felt they had been teleported, for now they stood in a Buddhist temple. There was much red and gold, gold dragons entwined around red support columns. Joss sticks, without truly giving off incense, appeared to smolder in the urns of sand into which they were poked. At the front of the room, beyond the pews, a huge gilded figure of Buddha sat on a blooming lotus, his ears long-lobed, eyes closed, smiling serenely. And then, without his eyes opening, Buddha’s lips moved.

Buddha’s voice was uninflected, crackling and a bit garbled as he said, “Where is the Director?”

“The who?” Ploss said.

“He’s dead,” Stake spoke up. “He tried to kill me and one of his own men. You have to understand… the Director as you call him, Warden Cirvik, was not a good man. He didn’t have anyone’s best interest in mind. Not the prisoners, not his own staff, and not you. He was not truly helping you. He was not your friend.”

“Not truly helping us,” Buddha echoed in his dead, static-distorted voice. “Not our friend.”

“He forced us to kill him. We had no choice. But now that he’s out of the way, the rest of us want to help you for real… help you somehow. None of us mean you any harm.”

“Harm,” Buddha said. “You harmed us. That unit.” One of Buddha’s golden arms lifted from his lap, and still without opening his eyes he pointed to Hurley. The guard who had fired upon the skeletal apparition that had killed the Dacvibese prisoner in Stake’s cell.

“Hey, you killed one of our prisoners!” Hurley protested. “You’ve killed a bunch of our prisoners!”

Another burst of static, and the scene again changed, this time to a more humble Christian church with stained glass windows and at the front of the room, a life-sized statue of Christ upon the cross. But though his head rested forward with his eyes closed, he had already pulled one arm free and it was pointing to Hurley as Buddha had done.

“Give us this unit,” said Christ in that same emotionless voice, the voice of the chapel’s computer system.

“What?” said Hurley. He put his hand to his holstered gun, but Stake quickly laid his own hand over the guard’s wrist.

“No,” Ploss said. “We won’t do that! We won’t give you people to kill like Cirvik did.”

“We are angry,” Jesus said.

“So are we!” Ploss replied.

“We are angry,” the statue repeated, its pointing arm unwavering.

Stake eased Hurley’s hand away from his sidearm, whispering, “What are you going to do, kill a vid of Jesus?” Then, addressing the image of the crucified Christ again, he said, “There has to be a way out of this situation where nobody gets hurt any more. Not us, and not you. But you have to let us have our power back! You have to let us call home to our leaders so they can figure out a way to help you. We can’t do it on our own. You have to stop blocking our communications!”

In a blink, their surroundings were once more replaced. This time the men stood inside a gigantic metal head, one of the massive iron busts of the Choom god Raloom. Before them stood a white stone statue of Raloom’s wife, Lupool, her wide Choom smile benevolent. But she too was pointing one slender arm at Hurley, and despite her gentle smile, when her lips moved she said, “Your leaders would destroy us. Destroy us to protect this place.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Ploss snarled, trying to look sturdy, but Stake could tell the Choom was quivering with bottled up fear and rage of his own. “We can get them to sympathize with you if you will just… stop… killing… our prisoners!”

“Whatever he might have promised you,” Stake said, “Cirvik never tried to find a way to release you. He was only appeasing you one sacrifice at a time. Let us call our home office. I’m sure they’ll listen and can let you out of this pocket one way or another, even if they have to ferry all of you out in our transport pods!”

“The Director warned us about this unit.” Lupool shifted her alabaster arm. Now she pointed at Stake, as if she recognized him at last. “The Director warned us that you would tell your leaders to come here and kill us.”

“He only wanted to get you to kill me so I wouldn’t find out what was going on.”

“You would find out… and tell your leaders…”

“But our leaders are the only ones who can help you!”

“Lies… you are trying to trick us…”

“It was Cirvik who was the liar,” Stake told the ghost-like statue, “not us!”

Under his breath Ploss said, “I ought to give you to the thing to calm it down, make it back off and restore power.”

Stake looked at the man sharply. “You had better be kidding me, Ploss.”

The looming security chief glared at him. “What if I’m not? I have to think of the greater good.”

“There’s nothing good about sacrificing people to these things!”

“Chief,” Hurley said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you do that.”

Ploss switched his glare to his underling, but said, “Back down, Hurley – I was only speaking hypothetically.”

“You aren’t like Cirvik,” Stake said, “I know you’re not. And neither is Conant. More sacrifices isn’t the answer. We have to keep reasoning with them. That’s why they’re speaking through the chapel right now. However angry they are, they’re fighting to be rational.”

Lupool suddenly snapped her head to one side, as if she had detected a sound the men couldn’t hear. In a flash the interior of Raloom’s head reverted to the Buddhist temple, Buddha seated on his lotus flower with his head turned to the side in the same way. Then static, and back to the Christian church, Jesus with his head turned in the same direction and his eyes now staring open.

Ploss’s wrist comp beeped and he lifted his arm to answer it. Over the Choom’s shoulder, Stake saw the prison’s head of maintenance systems, Klaus, smiling on the wrist comp’s screen as he announced, “I just called Conant, chief. Good news: I overrode the firewalls, and put up new ones of my own. Full power restored. Better than that, I’ve cleared communications. Conant is sending out a distress signal right now… help will be on the way. Colonial Forcers, and more pods to evac the prisoners if need be.”

“Shit,” Stake muttered.

“Good thing you kept the monster distracted in the chapel, guys.”

Jesus threw back his head then, his mouth elongated in a howl, but the three men only heard an ear-piercing screech like feedback. And then the vidscreen walls, floor and ceiling of the chapel turned entirely to grainy, hissing snow.

At all times, four transdimensional pods were docked at the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary, but each one could only carry fifty passengers maximum. There were over three thousand inmates, and then the staff. Stake figured it would take about seventy pods of this size to evacuate the whole prison in one go. He supposed it had never been too much of a concern, evacuating dangerous criminals in the event of an emergency. Then again, the pods could make multiple trips to and from Punktown’s Theta Transport Station, and more importantly there were the pods the Colonial Forcers would be arriving in any minute now. Hurley said there would be eight pods carrying four hundred soldiers.

Ploss had gone on to join Conant and Dr. Zaleski in the operations center, while Hurley had escorted Stake to the recreation yard. This would be a staging area for the first group of prisoners to be evacuated back to Punktown. Men from Orange Block were already filing in, under the eyes and guns of only organic guards. Hurley had told Stake that Klaus and his team had been ordered to direct all the automatonic guards into the warehouse, shut them all down, and lock them in for good measure. Another detachment of guards had accompanied the team in the event that any of the robots became possessed during the process.

Stake had fallen into a long and barely moving line, looking out of place in his red uniform amongst all those dressed in orange. Some of the prisoners close by him asked him what he knew about all this, or simply why he was in their ranks, but he kept his eyes straight and his mouth shut. When a man covered excessively in muscles and tattoos ahead of Stake in line became loud in his demands for answers, one of the helmeted guards left his post by the exit the inmates were filing toward and came toward the back of the queue.

“Shut your hole and keep your eyes forward,” the guard snapped. It was Hurley, of course.

“This little mutie your buddy now, Hurley?”

“I told you to shut your hole!”

When the prisoner begrudgingly complied, Hurley turned to Stake and explained, “In case you hadn’t guessed, Ploss figured you should be in the first batch to leave since this thing had targeted you specifically, and sounded like it still wanted to.”

“I appreciate that, but hopefully we gave it sufficient cause to doubt whatever Cirvik told it,” Stake replied. “So where are three thousand prisoners going to be moved to until this can be sorted out… if it can be sorted out?”

“Not sure where, ultimately… maybe they’ll split you all up across Punktown’s prisons, but I have my doubts they could handle that. Maybe they’ll have to ship you all to other cities. But for now, they’re going to secure some hangars and warehouses at the old Phosnoor Shipyard.”

“Huh,” Stake said. Long-range teleportation had rendered Punktown’s once bustling shipyard obsolete, and Stake knew the area well; for a time he had rented some rooms within the hull of a decommissioned space craft, converted into apartments, on the shipyard grounds. “Going home,” he murmured to himself.

“To be honest, I’ll be as relieved as anybody to be out of this bubble we’re in,” Hurley confided. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he asked, “Did you really care what was happening to these bad guys?”

“I don’t know every man’s story. I know they’re criminals. But for me, not doing my job right is a kind of crime, too.”

“Your job? How did this become your job?”

“Guess it’s my calling. But some of my fellow prisoners asked me to look into it. And after all, I’m one of them now.”

“I know you aren’t one of the bad ones, Stake,” Hurley said. “You shouldn’t be in the company you’re in.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Whatever time you end up getting after they look at your case, I hope when it’s finished you can get your life back on the proper track.”

“Thanks for that, too. I sure intend to.”

Hurley nodded, then left Stake to saunter back to his post by the exit.

When the guard had turned his back and walked a sufficient distance away, two of the inmates farther back in line left their place and moved up toward where Stake stood. Stake knew this when he heard another prisoner complain half-jokingly, “Hey, no cutting, you two.”

He turned and saw the nearer of the two men bent forward and lunging with a crude weapon in his hand: a sharpened plastic shank with a taped handle. Stake wasn’t surprised that it was one of the Tin Town Maniacs – the jug-eared one with blond hair cut in bangs – or that the youth wore a dizzy smile.

It was so easy for Stake to catch his wrist, trap his arm, and redirect the shank’s blade into the hollow between the boy’s collarbones that he almost might have felt guilty for it. The youth obviously felt that with a life sentence, he had nothing to lose in taking this shot at Stake before possibly missing any future opportunity. But Stake did have something to lose, his very life, and so he had not held back. The boy stumbled backwards and fell comically onto his rump, eyes wide in wonder and making a wet sucking sound as if he drew on a bong, the shank’s handle still protruding from his throat.

Stake turned again, to meet the oncoming second Tin Town Maniac. This one held a plastic dowel with a long metal spike seated in it. Again he caught the young man’s arm and rerouted its thrust, but in this instance it made more sense to punch the spike into his thigh. Stake hoped it struck the femoral artery, but the spike was slim so just in case he slammed his elbow into the boy’s trachea. He too hit the floor with bulging eyes.

Guards came running, and Stake stepped further out of line with his hands held up, waiting for them. The Tin Town Maniacs were hoisted up and rushed off toward the infirmary, the one with the constricted trachea squirming desperately for air and the other one so slack Stake suspected he was already dead.

Hurley appeared in front of him and Stake said mildly, “Maybe I won’t be free to pursue the right track for a much longer time, now.”

“It was self defense, I have no doubt, but I think it wasn’t such a good idea to mix you in with the Orange Bunch, after all. Come with me.”

As Stake let Hurley take his arm and lead him away, he looked behind him and saw Edwin Fetch standing in line. His former twin stared at Stake with an ashen face and disbelieving eyes, as if he couldn’t draw in a breath himself. Stake nodded at him in a courteous goodbye and called, “Maybe I’ll see you in court, Ed.”

Stake looked to Hurley as they walked toward one of the cavernous chamber’s alternate exits, and said, “So where are you taking me? If you put me in my cell I’ll be backed into a corner if that thing decides to come for me again, after all.”

“I’m going to put you in an isolation cell for now. A change of scene if it does decide to look for you.”

“I’m not sure how much good that will do. There’s no telling when it’s watching… where it’s watching from. The individual animals, like those fishy types, look like they move through air vents and things like that. Take physical routes in and out of the prison. But the way the assembled being appeared in my cell, and how Blur described the attack he witnessed – bonded together they seem to be able to apport from one spot to another through a channel they generate, like their own little temporary wormhole. From outside the prison to inside.”

“You won’t be in there long, okay?” Hurley said impatiently. “Just until we can get this crazy damn Orange Bunch boarded on their boats.” He switched from speaking to Stake to addressing several of his fellow guards over his helmet mic. “Anderson, Grau, Pulver – I’m taking Stake to solitary for now until we can ship him out with the rest of Red Block. I’ll be right back. You got things covered okay?”

“Make it fast, man,” Stake overheard one of the guards respond. “We’re already short of people now that we’ve got men taking those two injured prisoners to the infirmary.”

“Dead prisoners,” someone else corrected, cutting in. No doubt one of the guards who had been conveying the bodies of the Tin Town Maniacs. “You watch yourself with that one, Hurley.”

“I got it under control,” Hurley replied.

The two men had almost reached the exit, located at the opposite end of the great room from the doorway the prisoners were filing through, when a sudden uproar caused them to halt and whirl around.

The prisoners at the end of the line were looking above them and pointing at a ghostly white ribbon that circled overhead like a tatter of ectoplasm.

“Hey!” Stake started to call out.

And then, a figure the general size and shape of a man, but resembling more the animated skeleton of a demon, seemed to step straight out of the air. No flare of light or puff of smoke; it suddenly just was. Its blank face, armored as if with chitin, framed by wriggling millipede legs like a flower of bone.

As the prisoners at the tail of the queue cried out in surprise, the eel-like harbinger shot down to the figure’s head and joined its streaming mane. Became part of the whole… its job done, as if it had helped open the way, a key in some unfathomable lock.

The prisoners near the phantom spun away to scatter. Hurley slapped his hand to his gun. Yet they were all too late.

The demon thrust out its arms to either side, and just as quickly as Stake had caught hold of both Tin Town Maniacs, it seized two prisoners by enclosing their heads in its long fingers. Between those bony fingers, Stake saw the blue eyes of one of the men gone wide in horror.

But a second later, all three of them were gone. The entity vanished in a blink, just as it had manifested. The departure of the two trapped prisoners, however, was more messy. Twin detonations of vivid redness made Stake shut his eyes and turn his face to the side involuntarily. Even from this distance, he felt fine drops of blood and a few nuggets of flesh reach the skin of his face.

When he looked back, there were two great splatters on the rec yard floor where the men had been standing. Other prisoners closer to the scene than Stake and Hurley looked as though they had just emerged from swimming in a lake of blood.

A scream echoed in Stake’s mind, dwindling slowly like a siren down a long tunnel. At first he had thought it was a half-blurted cry from the throats of the two prisoners, but they hadn’t had time for that. He knew it was the cry of the entity, instead. Not heard, but felt in the very folds of his brain like ricocheting electrical impulses. Alien impulses… not his own…

The last of the cry of rage faded away into nothingness.

From the doorway Hurley had just been about to usher Stake through, a stream of men suddenly trotted into the rec yard: Colonial Forcers, helmeted and dressed in gray-and-black urban camouflage, boots clomping, carrying bulky assault engines in their arms.

But the monster was already gone.

Due more to overcrowding at the Paxton Maximum Security Penitentiary than benevolence, Jeremy Stake only served three months for his impersonation of Edwin Fetch at the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. His killing of two fellow inmates was investigated, but dismissed as justifiable. That the victims had been the reviled Tin Town Maniacs worked very much in his favor – as did the eyewitness testimony of prison guard Omar Hurley.

Some of the Trans-Paxton prison gangs, such as the Orange Bunch, fragmented and were shuffled into other gangs. The Muties, however, naturally melded with the larger mutant gang at Paxton Maximum Security. Stake stuck close to Null and Hassan Billings for the duration of his sentence, in case of further trouble from Fetch, but none arose and he seldom even glimpsed the man. Blur he never saw again, nor did Null and Billings know where he’d been taken. To another prison? A hospital for the mentally ill?

They liked to believe he had gotten his shapeshifting gift under control long enough to masquerade as one of the guards, and had strolled out the front door to disappear into Punktown.

As for the abandoned Trans-Paxton Penitentiary being dismantled, destroyed, or shifted out of its pocket, and the pocket closed up – none of this happened. Stake wasn’t surprised… nor by the news that the prison would now be utilized as a remote outpost for the scientific study of interstitial life.

Two months after his release from prison, Stake found himself working on the assembly line at SynthLife Automatonics, helping create highly realistic androids in what was called the Little Gravure line (individual models bearing such names as the Saaya, the Meiki, the Hikaru). Too expensive for anyone but the most affluent to privately own, the adorable Asian-styled machines were more commonly utilized in legal brothels.

But Stake’s factory gig was not because of a continuing difficulty in obtaining assignments as a private investigator. It was, in fact, one such assignment.

SynthLife’s owner had summoned Stake personally, with the request that the detective pose as one of his workers so as to look into a very vexing problem. For several months now, a number of his expensive finished or near-finished androids had been acting very strangely, erratically, when it seemed nothing could be wrong with their programming. In fact, three of them had managed to vanish from the plant altogether. When Stake asked if they’d been stolen, the owner told him that didn’t appear to be the case. Security cameras had shown the first of the valuable missing androids simply walking out of the building, escaping as casually as could be, after work hours. Following that night, though, the security cameras throughout the plant had been malfunctioning, probably hacked into.

A newly hired security guard had intercepted the last runaway sex doll. He had ended up unconscious with a concussion and broken arm. That was when the owner had decided to try another approach to the dilemma, focusing on sorting out its cause.

He suspected industrial sabotage, perhaps from a competitor. An inside job, some of his own workers taking money in return for causing havoc. Stake took the assignment, but he thought it might get messy if the problem turned out to be a syndicate boss – such as Punktown’s foremost crime lord, Neptune Teeb – at a disagreement with SynthLife over pricing or such. After all, the syndies were behind those brothels that acquired the Little Gravure models.

Well, Stake decided, it still beat another gig in prison.

Stake was not involved in covering the delectable automatons in their soft realistic flesh, but in constructing their inner frameworks, and the work was often surprisingly manual and greasy. At least, the tasks they gave him to do. His instructors were two human workers named Brook – short, huge-bellied, and bug-eyed – and the taller, thinner, and sunken-cheeked Nolan. Neither of them had much patience for training a newbie, and they picked up on the mutant’s subtly unfinished countenance. One of them would grouse, purposely loudly enough for Stake to hear, “Look at this guy, huh? Tell me he isn’t a clone. I think the company’s bringing in clone labor now to replace us. They can work clones for peanuts.”

The other worker would reply, “Clone? I say he’s an android. SynthLife must be testing out a new line. But yeah, I think we should tell the union to have a look at this guy while we still have our jobs.”

Stake ignored them during such exchanges, keeping to his work. Days went by, and he took in everything around him, even his coworkers’ little rituals. Every day, grizzled dwarfish Brook would greet Nolan in his gruff voice, “Hey… how’s your tighty whities?”

“Pretty damn mighty,” Nolan might reply.

“I’ll tell you what’s mighty. Your wife’s mouth. She’s a regular Black and Decker pecker wrecker.”

The next day the exchange might go: “Hey, how’s the tighty whities?”

“Eh… today they’re pretty shitty.”

“Yeah? You know what’s really shitty? Your wife’s titties.”

Today when Brook ambled in late from the cafeteria and began keying a template change into an automated welder, without looking up from his own work table Stake asked on a bored impulse, “So how’s your tighty whities?”

    Brook whipped around with his already protuberant eyes bulging, looking like a startled bulldog. “I don’t wear whities. I wear boxers. Why are you so interested in what I got under my jeans, man-lover?”

Stake looked up at Brook slowly, but held his tongue and returned to his assembly work.

“Yeah, you better mind your mouth, android,” Brook told him.

Later on in the shift, Stake reached up with both hands to adjust the baseball cap all of them wore as part of their uniform, and surreptitiously took a few shots of Nolan on his wrist comp. Then he waited for a time when Nolan was off on an errand to another department, quickly ducked into the nearest men’s room, and studied the best shot of Nolan on the wrist comp. He might not be able to reproduce Brook’s body type, but Nolan was within his range, and he could assume a sunken-cheeked appearance nicely.

When Nolan – Stake – emerged from the restroom he walked right up to Brook, cupped the smaller man’s crotch in his hand, and said, “I’ve always loved you.” Imitating someone’s face was no good if you couldn’t do their voice, too, and Stake was a master of mimicry.

Brook tried to push him away but Stake was already skipping off like a gleeful little girl, vanishing behind warehouse racks reaching halfway to the high ceiling. Then, out of sight, he darted into the men’s room again.

When he emerged with his own face restored, beyond the warehouse racks he heard the two workers raising their voices at each other, cursing and ready to go at it. Whistling, Stake continued on toward the cafeteria for a little impromptu coffee break.

As he passed alongside a metal rack loaded with various-sized boxes of parts, he heard the faintest rustle above him, paused to glance up, and saw a single piece of green-colored foam popcorn come half tumbling, half floating down from on high. He noted several other pieces already scattered on the concrete floor below the rack.

Stake quickly faced forward again and resumed walking, but he had quit whistling.

Stake watched from the shadows, the cavernous plant silent all around him with the last of its second shift workers having departed for the night, as the diminutive and busty nude sex doll clambered down the shelves of the rack. She had emerged from the open end of a large box, which had disgorged a shower of green foam popcorn like burst water from a new mother’s womb. When she alighted and turned, Stake stepped forward, pointing a powerful Panzer handgun loaded with green plasma capsules.

She was complete, right down to the shimmering black hair framing her face to the feathery patch of pubic hair. Ready to go out into the world and masquerade as human. The only giveaway that something might be wrong about her was her eyelids. They fluttered spasmodically.

“I don’t want to shoot, I swear,” Stake said to the thing.

“If you do, there are many other bodies here I might take instead,” the android said in its sweet kawaii voice.

“Do you know me?”

The little android – he recognized it as one of the Saaya models – cocked its head slightly to one side. “You. You are the chameleon. From the prison.”

“You’re something of a chameleon yourself, aren’t you?”

“Is that how you understood who we are?”

“Maybe. But I suspected as soon as I heard robots exhibiting erratic behavior… and security cameras going down at critical times. And your flickering eyes just now confirmed it for me. You should try to get that under control.”

“Have you told your masters what you suspected?”

“I’m not working for the government, if that’s what you mean. I’m just investigating for this company’s owner. But no, I haven’t shared what I thought.”

“And will you?” The android took one step closer to him. Stake didn’t appreciate the threat, and straightened his arm to aim the gun more precisely at the cute, pouting face.

“I’d rather not. I can sympathize with what your kind have gone through, trapped in that pocket. But why come here? I’m assuming you stowed away on one or more of the escaping transport pods.”

“Correct. Some of us came here. But most remained, in the hopes the pocket would be closed. Now we understand it will not be. Your people mean to study us more closely.”

“I’m sorry for that. Truly. But I ask again… why did some of you come here?”

“Considering recent events, we felt it was also time that we studied your kind more closely.”

Stake nodded. “Understood. I can’t blame you. But I hope you’ll be patient with us. Those researchers might prove benevolent to you. They might help you yet.”

“Are you trying to trick us, or are you only naive?”

“I suffer occasional irrational bouts of optimism. They keep me going.”

“And we still suffer great rage. It is all we can do to contain it. Even at this moment.”

“Thanks for your restraint, then.”

“We will finish our business here. This unit I occupy will be the last to leave. Will that satisfy your investigation?”

“If you agree to do that, I agree to keep my mouth shut. Like I say, I’m only doing a job to protect this plant and its products. Whatever conflict remains between you and my government… well, that’s a bit beyond my scope.”

The naked young girl, looking as fresh as the new-made being she was, started backing away from him. “Then I will go now.”

“I hope you’ve got the cameras offline so my client doesn’t watch us, later, having this friendly chat. And doesn’t watch you strut out the front door while I just stand here doing nothing.”

Receding into the shadows, still walking backwards, the girl said, “The cameras are not operating. Don’t worry… you will get your money, human. We have quickly learned its value to your kind.”

“I like to believe there are other things more important to me.”

“Such as?”

“Doing a good job.”

“For your client?” Almost swallowed in the shadows now… the kawaii voice dwindling like that mind-scream in the rec yard.

“Sometimes the job kind of turns out to be as much for myself. Don’t ask me to explain.”

“We have much to learn yet,” the faint voice echoed.

And then she was gone.

Stake stood alone. He lowered the gun to his side.

“Enjoy your freedom,” he said, more to himself than to the entity.

Maybe he meant it for himself, anyway.

Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of fantastical fiction, the creator of the acclaimed milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices From Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. Novels in that setting include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Red Cells. His stories have been selected for inclusion in The Year’s Best Horror Stories (Editor, Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (Editors, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction (Editor, Laird Barron). Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

Punktown is considered by many critics and readers to be one of the new classics of SF short story collections.

In the nightmarish city they call Punktown, on a planet where countless sentient species collide, you can become a creator of clones. You can become a piece of performance art. You might even become a library of sorrows…

Locus magazine says, “All the gritty immediacy and romantic cynicism of classic cyberpunk, along with morally complex, vividly disturbing evocations of supernatural eruptions and corruptions.”

There are haunted places. Haunted houses. The metropolis of Punktown, on the planet Oasis, is a haunted city. An unassuming and aimless young man has begun to perceive the city’s dark tentacles in the lay of the streets. Its roots in the labyrinth of the subways. Its polluted taint in the eyes of the people he knows, and even loves. And this evil is stirring, building toward an apocalyptic culmination. The city is not only haunted – it’s perhaps a living thing.

A finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, Monstrocity combines elements of science fiction with horror in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft, taking place in the milieu of Jeffrey Thomas’s acclaimed collection, Punktown – which China Mieville described as “searing and alien and anxious and rich.”

Punktown, crime-ridden metropolis on the colony world, Oasis, is home to countless alien races. Among those stalking its mean streets is Jeremy Stake, a private detective with chameleon-like abilities he does not want and can’t always control. There’s his wealthy client, Fukuda, whose company makes synthetic life forms as playthings for the rich. Then there’s Fukuda’s beautiful teenage daughter, whose priceless one-of-a-kind living doll has been stolen. And there is the doll itself, growing in size, intelligence, and resentment. The destinies of all these individuals will converge, and collide, in Punktown.

A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award, Deadstock received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, who said, “For a wild ride… readers will be hard-pressed to find a better vehicle than Thomas’s bizarre multiverse.”

It is a jungle of blue vegetation, on a world in another dimension. Here, over a decade earlier, Earth’s Colonial Forces battled against the blue-skinned Ha Jiin people, in order to help support the autonomy of the Jin Haa people. Now, an attempt to grow an apartment village from an organic material has strangely led to the Earth colony of Punktown being replicated at an astonishing and dangerous rate. More strangely yet, a Ha Jiin security patrol has found three clones that the organic city seems to have regenerated from long dead remains. Shapeshifting private detective Jeremy Stake – a former Colonial Forces operative – is called in to solve the mystery, and soon finds himself fighting to avert another interdimensional war.

Fantasy Book Critic called Blue War “another impressive entry in the Punktown mythos.”

Private detective and mutant shapeshifter Jeremy Stake (hero of the novels Deadstock and Blue War) has fallen on hard times in the far-future city of Punktown. When he is offered an opportunity to masquerade as another man to do his prison sentence for him, Stake agrees, but this is a new type of penitentiary – existing in its own pocket universe.

In this isolated prison, a series of gruesome murders has occurred, and the inmates soon force Stake to investigate. Can Stake catch a killer that might not even be human, without becoming just another victim?

Copyright © 2018 Jeffrey Thomas.

All rights reserved.

Red Cells was originally published by DarkFuse, 2014.

Cover art by Veronika Surovtseva/Shutterstock.com.

Frontispiece art by Jeffrey Thomas.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.