Ironbeak's Journal

     It was difficult to perform the first few necropsies, back when I was a student and still using dissection as a learning tool. I have never considered myself a sentimental man, or even a particularly empathetic one, but it is hard, when you first look at a dead creature, to bring yourself to cut into it.

    They start you on invertebrates. You move up through the smaller animals until at last you arrive at reptiles, then birds, then finally theropods, who look uncannily Avian. By that point you have learned to detach what you see before you from the idea of the living thing. It is an armature of bones and flesh, not an animal, and you can disfigure it without malice.

    The School of Life Sciences shared a few of its laboratories with the School of Medicine, and there was almost always a public dissection in the surgical amphitheatre on Moondays. Overcoming those first-year nerves about blood and guts was a rite of passage for scholars and surgeons alike and I, eager to prove myself, was one of the youngest students in the Life Sciences department to participate in a public dissection. It’s safe to say I took pride in my ability to identify and cleanly separate structures and tissues.

    So when the captain led me down into the noisy bowels of the ship to a cold and dimly lit room, lined wall-to-wall with refrigerators, coolers, and cardboard boxes packed with dead creatures in various states of preservation and decay, and instructed me to “extract as much brain as possible,” my first thought was, “I’m going to need some tools.” My second thought was, “This is going to take a very long time.” In fact, I was so busy finally feeling a sense of purpose that more than an hour passed before I even began to question the existence of the room, or the captain’s reason for needing “as much brain as possible.”

    As I started on the third skull, I resolved to press him about the purpose of my assignment, but when he returned to see me in my makeshift laboratory he was so excited by the small progress I had made that I couldn’t bring myself to do so. He seemed genuinely pleased not just at what I’d accomplished, but with me in general. I found this approval was surprisingly motivational, and I didn’t want to ruin this opportunity and our sudden rapport by questioning his motives.

    Also, he had brought a blowtorch with him for some reason, and this might have influenced my decision.

     I raised my hands to shield my face from my assailant, and in the process I hit myself in the beak with the ore detector, which I promptly let go of and sent hurtling into space. My eyes watered, and tears unfettered by gravity pooled in them and blinded me. Whatever had slapped me approached again, but through the wobbling dome of tears all I could see was that it was red and about the size of a melon.

     I tried to bat it away, but my hands went through it. Suddenly the thing turned blue and flailed its little arms at my head, landing a volley of (surprisingly powerful) blows and knocking away the bubble of tears. For a brief moment I saw its face before my eyes teared up again and a sound like a whipcrack in my eep’s field rendered me deaf. The slapping stopped. I rubbed my eyes and looked around for the captain.

     When I had cleared my vision, the chameleon ghost was gone. A wisp of luminous pink smoke was all that remained in its place. Staring at it gave me a cold, uneasy feeling in my blood, the same way staring at the moon ghost had.

     I caught a glimpse of a slimy, silvery-pink whip in the captain’s hand just before he vanished it with the matter manipulator. Then he summoned a few empty glass jars, which he placed at his feet. With a flick of his wrist, he set the matter manipulator spinning in front of him like a floating gyroscope and began unscrewing the jar lids one by one.

     “What are those for?” I asked. My voice sounded muffled, but the deafness was subsiding.      Without looking up, the Glitch gestured to the pink smoke. “This junk these ghost things drop. S’good for stim packs. Patching yourself up if you leak.”      “Oh. That’s … useful.”

     He snatched the manipulator from where it was spinning and pointed its arc at the wisps of smoke, jar in hand. The smoke’s opacity pulsed slowly, as if it was phasing in and out of existence. Indeed, it seemed to resist being directed into the jar by the matter manipulator, behaving more like taffy than smoke. The captain seemed patient with this. He said, “Gonna use it to make ghost dogs, though. Folks’ll pay a lot for ‘em. Novelty.”      “We’re traversing an asteroid belt for novelty ghost pets?”      “And gold,” he added quickly, and I wondered where the ore detector had hurtled off to. He gestured impatiently with the hand holding the jar. “Can you, uh, move over? Hard to grab this stuff without getting gross on you.”

     I kicked off the asteroid so that I bounced backward, pulling the grappling gun’s cord taut and ensuring the ghostly smoke was no longer within my EPP’s atmospheric field. The captain took his time, carefully aiming the manipulator arc. I looked around for any more surprise visitors and massaged the space between my eyes. I could feel a scratch on my beak where I’d hit it with the ore detector.      “Hate this stuff,” the captain said with an exasperated rattling sound. “Even harder to suck up than brains.”

     “Water pressure works far better than suction,” I said absently, thinking back to my days in the Institute’s preservation lab. “You could also just scrape them out through the foramina, assuming there’s a skull. Unless you’re trying to keep a wet specimen of the brain itself, in which case an extraction machine is your best bet.” As I rubbed the last of the tears out of my eyes, I looked down and found the captain was staring at me intently. We locked eyes for a long and unsettling moment.

     I’d thought the moon was bad, but today has given me a new standard by which to measure fear and emasculation.

     The good news was that the captain assured me that we were done collecting fuel (and therefore visiting moons) for several thousand light years. The bad news was that our next goal was to mine for ductile metals, and it would be my job to operate the detector.

    Working the detector wasn’t what worried me. What worried me was the captain’s plan to mine an asteroid field.

    Though my EPP had a heating unit installed, I was advised to dress warmly, especially with regards to my feet, as they would be the points most likely to leach heat from the eep’s field. I wasn’t really able to find any shoes that fit, but I did find a few other items of clothing that I was able to repurpose. Thankfully, nobody would be around to critique my fashion sense. As I stepped onto the plastic sheeting of the ship’s makeshift teleporter platform, I asked the captain how long he thought the trip would take.

    “The usual,” he said.

    Okay. I took a deep breath and reassured myself that this would be a routine spacewalk. I already had one spacewalk under my belt from our horrible trip to the moon, so “routine spacewalk” was a phrase I now felt qualified to use. Gripping the ore detector in both hands, I braced myself for the blackout, the familiar weightless feeling of teleportation, and then for the abrupt return of gravity.

    Except that gravity didn’t return on time. The rest of my senses seemed to be intact, but my sense of direction was wrong. I could feel something against my feet, but the asteroid beneath me didn’t register as “down.” When I opened my eyes, it was immediately apparent why: the thing was tiny. I’d used restrooms that were larger.

    The asteroid and I were very nearly free-floating through a field of debris. To my right, the blue gas giant was casting planetshine upon the asteroid field and its rings, but most of the local light came from a red flare lodged in the side of a nearby asteroid. The Horsebutt nebula was all around us, but was most visible as the dark veil which loomed up from beneath the asteroid belt, backlit by a faint pinkish glow and surrounded by fire-red stars. It actually did look a bit like a horse’s tail raised to shoo away a cloud of red flies. From the safety of a ship, the view would have been breathtaking, but with nothing to separate me from the void of space but the atmospheric encabulation field of my EPP, it was terrifying. I dug my toenails into the asteroid, clutched the ore detector to my chest, and took a shaky breath of the recycled air.

    “You coming?” echoed a voice through my EPP’s speaker.

    I looked “up” and saw the captain’s orange optics faintly peering over the edge of a larger and rather distant asteroid. I was too afraid to even shake my head, lest it somehow throw me off balance and send me hurtling into space. Recognizing my cowardice, the Glitch said, “Hang on. Be right there.”

    The sudden impact of a grappling hook a few feet away startled me and I stumbled backwards. Of course I, unable to even fall properly, just floated helplessly away as the captain reeled himself in on the grappling hook. I didn’t get very far. In fact, I just sort of ended up colliding with another asteroid from behind. I clung to it for dear life until the captain appeared over the tiny horizon.

    “The gravity is really weak out here,” I said.

    He rolled his oculars and sighed, “It’s weak everywhere. Here,” he handed me the business end of the grappling hook and pulled another off of his belt.

    “I don’t know how to use it.” He shook his head and kneeled down beside me. Then he looped the cord around my waist, fashioned it into a harness, and holstered the gun-end back into his belt.

    I spent the rest of the trip tethered to him like a panicky balloon. Technically I was still operating the ore detector, but I felt embarrassingly useless. He was clearly very experienced at navigating a dense asteroid field using only a grappling hook and didn’t really need my help. After an hour or so of floating after him, I began to feel a little bored.

    Not that the view wasn’t still awe-inspiring. It’s just that there was really not very much to do other than look at the view and, occasionally, the ore detector. I let my mind wander a little bit. In retrospect, it’s sort of dangerous to do this in space. The captain was knee-deep in asteroid rock and I was trying to come up with a new way to prepare my last can of beans when I thought I heard something behind me.

    Which was ridiculous, I knew. Not only could there not have been anything behind me, but even if there had been, there would be no way for me to have heard it make a noise through the vacuum of space. Unless it had been inside my EPP’s field, which was equally ridiculous.

    Still, I turned my head to look.

     I’m almost out of cans of beans. I suppose I may as well open up that bag of pearlpeas now that I have a reliable water source. Not sure if that microwave in the “galley” works, though, so I might have to find an alternate heat source.

     I could go exploring some more, since I do still have a gun. When I mentioned to the captain that I was afraid of what this one might shoot, he said “let’s find out” and pulled the trigger while it was still in my hand. Turns out it’s a sort of energy burst gun and is relatively safe to fire on the ship--as long as I keep it away from anything electronic or flammable. It seems to recharge automatically, but I’m not sure if it can run out of juice. I tried practicing with it in the sand room, and it is very hard to aim.

     I seem to have lost the ring Ruby gave me at some point since going down to the moon. I noticed it was gone when I was preening the sand out of my feathers earlier. I hope it’s just somewhere on the ship and not down on that moon.

     I imagine that excursion would have turned out differently if Dosskey were here.

    The thing emerged from the cave wall itself and floated above us like a malevolent, airborne buoy. It was translucent, with a wormlike body, spidery limbs, and a face like a sphincter. It glistened faintly in the light of the glowing water. Despite the EPP, the air around me turned cold and tasted of ozone. It was as if someone was slowly draining the blood out of my body and replacing it with carbonated ice water. My lungs felt as depleted and shriveled as refrigerated balloons.

    As a biologist I am usually well-armored against magical thinking. Had I heard about this secondhand, I might have tried to explain away such sensations as a pheromone or infrasound-induced state of shock. But having been there, I can tell you with absolute certainty that this thing was definitely an evil fucking ghost.     And my peculiar companion could not seem to care less about it. I skittered backward to the opposite wall of the cavern, but he just stood there and stared. It is also worth mentioning that he was standing mere inches away from lava, and was casually on fire.

    “Aw, they’re not so bad,” said the Glitch, and waved at the thing. As luck would have it, the ghost ignored him completely and floated above his head, reaching out its spindly hands in my direction. My back was literally against the wall. There was no way out.

    Then I remembered I had a gun.

    I yanked the gun out of its makeshift holster on my belt loop and aimed it at the ghost, which remained unimpressed. I’d never fired a gun before, but in that moment I was certain I could. This one felt natural in my hands. I pulled the trigger.

    A dog appeared.

    I fired the gun again. Beams of light cut through the ghost and became more dogs. The dogs fell from where they materialized midair and hit the cave floor running.

    “Where the hell did those come from?!” I screamed.     “Dog room,” shrugged the captain.

    Their barking was barely audible from within the EPP’s field. That’s probably because the moon’s exosphere was incredibly thin, and as such, the dogs did not last very long. They began to panic and bolted in every direction, stumbling and frothing at the mouth.

    For some reason, this intrigued the ghost. It turned its attention away from me and floated here and there after the dogs as though it couldn’t decide which one to grab first. I couldn’t in good conscience fire the gun again, which meant we likely only had a few more seconds before the ghost was no longer distracted.

    “So that’s where that went,” the captain said blithely as he eyed the gun in my shaking hands. He summoned a pistol with the matter manipulator and offered it to me, saying, “Here, trade you.” I complied, if only because I wanted nothing more to do with the dog gun. The captain magicked it out of my hands with the manipulator.

    “Well. Guess that freed up some space in the dog room for sand,” he said. He siphoned up the tunnel blockage as he ascended the stairs, adding, “Do dogs like sand?”

     The captain used the last available space in the manipulator’s reserve to free us from being half-buried in sand. When he tried to clear the tunnel above us, the manipulator made a sizzling noise and sprayed sand in every direction.

    “Well, uh, plenty of fuel. No room for the sand now, so … trapped in here.”     “What do you mean?” I said. “Can’t you offload something else to make space?”     “Already took out all the sand. Can get sand anywhere.” The manipulator beam summoned various objects: televisions, books, animal skulls, a large statue of a worm, a polished black chest, a broken floodlamp, a pile of moldy pies.

    “You can’t get rid of any of this stuff?” I asked, shaking sand out of my feathers. The Glitch summoned a huge black cauldron on top of the pile of televisions, shattering their screens.     “A high-quality bathtub like this? Definitely a keeper.” He dismissed the cauldron and the televisions and conjured a few saxophones and a keyboard in their place. “Model M is rare these days. Need both of these microphones and all of these hats, too. Worm statue? No, haven’t scanned any of these into the printer.” He summoned a roll of yellow caution tape and haphazardly draped a loop of it over the pile.

    “What if you pumped the fuel back in here and then got rid of the sand? We could move it to the other cave room and then come back for the fuel.”     He shuddered. “And get sand all up in it? Engines can’t digest sand.”     “Then how do we get back?”     “Should probably just kill ourselves.”     I forced a laugh. “You’re joking, right?”

    He kicked a little hole into the sand in front of him, then he aimed the matter manipulator at it and filled it with red-hot lava. My EPP offered no protection. “You want lava or poison? Prefer lava, personally.”     “You’re not joking.”     The hem of his cloak caught fire.

    I reached out and tried to shove him away from the lava puddle, but he just went limp and ignored me. Then he turned to look at something over my right shoulder and his optics brightened.

     “Oh, that works, too,” he said.

     Our putative goal was to gather fuel. The moon itself was airless, lifeless, and monochromatic. It seemed that the captain had been there before: there were a number of tunnels already excavated, leading to empty caverns that had once held reservoirs of liquid erchius.

    I wasn’t interested in exploring. I had asked the captain for a teleporter fob, but he didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about (no surprise there). He didn’t even seem to use a fob to initiate teleportation. Maybe Glitch can have them surgically implanted. But this meant I was completely reliant on him for transport to and from the moon.

    In addition to the EPP, which was not as heavy as it looked, I had brought the strange gun I found in the belly of the ship. I knew it was ridiculous to carry around a sidearm on an uninhabited moon, but it made me feel better. I kept my hand on it as we descended into the darkness of the mines. And when I say “darkness,” I mean complete and total. I regretted not bringing any of those glow injections. I ran my hands along the wall and tried to keep as close to my guide as possible, but he moved quickly and silently. The only sign of him was the tiny red light on the back of his EPP that bobbed up and down as he walked.

    “Do you have a flashlight or something?” I said after I tripped over my second or third rock.     “Don’t need one,” he muttered. With a sound like a whip cracking, an arc of electricity illuminated the tunnel, and water poured from it as if from a hose. It became a little stream beside us as we walked, and continued to glow ahead of us, almost as brightly as the arc itself.

    The water was mysterious and beautiful enough, but I was truly in awe of the source: a U-shaped metal appliance the captain was holding at arm’s length. “Is that a matter manipulator?” I whispered.     The Glitch clutched it to his chest protectively and glared over his shoulder. “Yeah. So?”     “I’ve just never seen one before. They’re illegal where I’m from. I thought they were incredibly dangerous.”     He snorted and kicked his foot into the stream. “Healing water. Super dangerous. Let’s keep moving.”

    The captain came to an abrupt stop where the tunnel opened into a large cavern. By the light of the water pooling at our feet, I could see a small underground lake as dark and glassy as a mirror. This was what we’d come for. We walked into the cavern until we reached the shoreline.

    The matter manipulator’s arc stretched out across the lake and then touched down on its surface. The water level lowered slowly as the erchius disappeared. Then the matter manipulator suddenly made a noise like a clogged sump pump and let off a shower of sparks. The arc discharged a few gallons of liquid erchius into the air and I jumped back to avoid the splash.

    The captain recalled the arc with an air of frustration. “Welp. Got too much stuff. Need to make some room.” He tapped the side of his head thoughtfully, then turned and extended the matter manipulator’s reach past the lake to the shore on the other side of the cavern. “Going back to Zeta Tau eventually, so … not gonna need this sand.”

    I watched for a long time as he summoned several tons of sand onto the far bank, making castles and sculptures, though whether they were for my amusement or his was a mystery.

    “Where is all the sand coming from?” I asked.     “Uh, the sand room.”

    He resumed molding a tower into a lumpy, Humanlike shape.

    I guess I didn’t really know where matter manipulators took things, so it seemed like a reasonable answer. Eventually, he had displaced enough sand that he resumed siphoning up the erchius once more. I felt a little useless just watching, so I decided to walk around the edge of the lake.

    I found another tunnel close to the chamber floor, but it looked too small to crawl through, especially wearing an EPP. As the matter manipulator depleted the lake, I got the captain’s attention and told him about what I’d found.

    “No problem,” he said, and without even crossing the room he used the manipulator’s arc to carve out the entrance to the tunnel as easily as carving out a pumpkin. The rock crumbled away into nothingness and disappeared somewhere. Maybe a rock room.

    With the tunnel’s entrance excavated, we looked down into an even larger chamber, with a ceiling so high that the manipulator’s arc was unable to reach the surface of the reservoir below us. This didn’t phase the captain, though. He took aim at the chamber wall and drew up a perfect staircase in stone. To ancient people, I thought, this would have seemed a godlike ability, shaping the world with handheld lightning.

    The stairs felt every bit as solid as the cave floor beneath my feet, but I descended them cautiously. The gravity difference made me feel buoyant but uncoordinated, and I wasn’t keen on taking a swim in rocket fuel. By the time I’d reached the bottom, the captain had nearly finished draining the reservoir. I looked around, hoping maybe I could prove my usefulness by finding another tunnel, and a glint of light above us caught my eye. Something dark and reflective was lodged in the cave ceiling.

    I pointed up at it and asked, “What’s that?”     The captain snapped his fingers. “Oh, hey, lost that grappling hook last time. Hold on a sec.”

    A few hours ago I woke up to the sound of the power core stopping. Or I guess I woke up to the sudden and eerie silence that ensued after the power core went into cooldown. My guess was that the long extrastellar travel period meant we were in an uncharted area of the Horsebutt nebula. Anyway, the captain had shut off the engine because the ship had reached its first destination, which I would soon learn was a large, purple moon orbiting a blue gas giant.

    I unzipped the sleeping bag and fumbled around in the dark for my clothes. I still hadn’t found a reliable light source, so my usual routine was to use one of the bioluminescent injections whenever I went back into the closet to sleep, then read for a little while until the light started to dim. The injection’s effects wore off after a full sleep cycle.

     As I put my shirt back on, a button snagged on the ring that hung on chain around my neck. When Ruby gave it to me, I believed that leaving Serverside was my best and only option because there was something better for me waiting somewhere else. For a moment I thought about just asking the captain to drop me off back in the Hamal Minoris system, but I couldn’t very well abandon Dosskey on Zeta Tau, and she’d made it clear she had no intention of ever returning to her hometown. I wondered if maybe she was glad I’d left without a trace, considering how angry she was the last time I saw her. Maybe she would prefer if I didn’t return.

    (I pushed these thoughts out of my mind. They were interfering with my desperate optimism.)

    The captain came looking for me not long after the ship stopped in low altitude above the moon’s surface. I heard him stomping up and down the hall, opening doors, so I finished getting dressed in a hurry. He was standing just outside the door when I opened it, and he had brought with him an EPP, or Environmental Protection Pack, colloquially referred to as an “eep.” It looked like a bulky backpack with a satellite dish on top.

     I FOUND A GUN.

     It was in a dark, empty hallway next to a circular saw embedded in the floor. I don’t know what to make of that.

     I got the sink working. There was a tooth lodged in the pipe. A crocodile tooth.

     The whole ship is like this: just an enormous derelict trash heap filled with broken appliances and held together with tape and crocodile dung. The further down you go, the less structurally sound the ship becomes. Everything in the hold is exposed pipes and missing floor panels. I found a ladder leading down into a cavernous room lit only by smoldering burn barrels filled with little green cubes. Maybe this is what all these trash bags are filled with? I’m scared to open them.

    I don’t think it’s a coincidence I haven’t been able to find the crew.

    I tried making a little map of the hallway above the teleporter vestibule. There’s hardly any rhyme or reason to the layout of the ship, but I have a good idea of what’s behind most of the doors up here now.

      Found a second crocodile. Or, well, something like a crocodile. This one was bipedal, but also pink. It’s becoming harder to convince myself that every second spent on this ship isn’t a second spent in mortal peril. I may have to find something bigger than a chair to defend myself with.

    I think it’s been about a day since I slept. There’s no light cycling on the ship, so I’m just keeping myself busy and sleeping whenever I feel tired. I’ve set up sort of a bedroom in this closet, and it’s passable, but I’m still on the hunt for a light source. I found a can opener when I was going through the crates earlier, which has come in handy. Still wish I had a way to heat all these cold tomato soups and beans, though. I’d kill for a microwave.     I decided to go through the books I found in one of the stimpack coolers. A lot of them are in Human, and as my ability to read Human extends just far enough to enable me to sound out some of the words written in some of the alphabets, I won’t be reading those any time soon. I did, however, find several volumes of old Glitch plays and poetry. One in particular looked very familiar: a play titled “IF You.Like(It)” by Wullum Sparkspear. I think maybe I saw it in the Serverside library, but I didn’t know what it was about until now.

    It’s a play that speaks particularly to the experience of being a recent Outcast, which I imagine is relevant to a lot of Sparkspear’s audience. There are some frivolous love triangle plot arcs in there as well, but I admit I was skimming the book by the light of my own bioluminescent hands and I found them a little confusing. I stopped on this passage, though: a monologue from the character of Vector Senior. Recently severed from the hivemind against his will, he finds himself adrift in deep space with a handful of other Glitch in the same situation.

Boldly: shipmates and comrades in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not the stars More free from peril than the hivemind slave? Panglossian: Now feel we not the pang Of loneliness, sharp as the icy fang Of winter's wind? The sting of solitude And hush of mine own thoughts is proof I am A free and independent man, severed. Gratefully: this torment is the counsellor That feelingly persuades me what I am. Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the scab, ugly and venomous, Holds yet a precious circuit in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds company in comets, books in bolides, Sermons in suns, and good in everything. I would not change it.

    Though I’m not really the intended audience, I can relate. Maybe, if I’m determined enough to look for it, there is some silver lining to be found in this bizarre turn my journey has taken that will make it all worthwhile.

    Decided to go exploring a little more. The size of the ship baffles me. What was all this space originally intended for, that it’s now just filled with garbage? I wonder how it looked when it was well-maintained.

     Found a few crates of canned food down in the galley. I guess I can call it the galley. It might have been one once. Also found an ancient-looking sack of dried pearlpeas, which don’t really expire, but I’m not sure how to cook them without an actual kitchen, and I think I ought to conserve the bottled water until I can get the sink working. I’ve got a nice stockpile going now, though.

     I spent some time trying to open the many doors in the hallways adjacent to the galley. Most were locked or barricaded, and those that weren’t just appeared to be full of more garbage. I eventually found one which was merely jammed. The mechanism seemed to be broken or disabled, but it did move a little when I tried to slide it along its tracks, which were sticky with black sludge. I figured if I found something to use as a lever I could pry the door open, so I went back to the galley and had a look around. I finally settled on a hammer and a folding chair as my tools of choice and, with some difficulty, managed to force the door open.

     After what I (mostly unintentionally) put the captain through, I felt too guilty to complain to him about the crocodile. I had tried asking him about the rest of the crew, but each time he just responded very unhelpfully with “who?” or “have you met Jeff?” So instead I tried asking for directions to the galley. I followed these as best I could, but I can’t say I’ve found anything that looks like a galley, mess hall, kitchenette, or even a scullery.

     I did find something that looked like a storage room that had a sink and a few tables and chairs in it. Mostly it was just crates and debris.

     Behind a large cardboard box there was a rusty refrigerator and a glass-fronted safe full of moldy packaged food. Against the opposite wall there was a shelter made of cardboard boxes with a sleeping bag inside. The whole room looked like it had lain untouched for years, but I think it’s reasonable proof that the crew came through here at some point.

     I also found a crate of bottled water. I took that and the sleeping bag from the box fort back to the storage closet upstairs, then returned to the lower level to explore.

    The captain opened the reinforced door with a flick of his wrist and led me through a narrow hallway full of flatscreens stacked to the ceiling. At the end of a hallway was a cavernous room lit by a single halogen tube, buzzing and sputtering in its death throes. I followed my guide through a winding pathway between more overstuffed plastic bags until he came to a sudden stop in an open doorway. The door itself was conspicuously absent, and whatever force had removed it had left a series of deep gouges in the empty frame.

    “Here we are,” he said. I couldn’t really see any sign of a lavatory in the darkness beyond.     “Sorry, where … are we?” I asked. He turned and stared at me.     “Uh. Here.” He shook his head and jabbed a thumb toward the doorway. “What were you looking for again?”     “The lavatory.”     “Oh. That’s actually back the other way.”

    Trying to hide my exasperation, I followed him back through the plastic bag labyrinth to a dark corner of the room hidden by a wall of plastic bags. In this corner was a single bathroom stall with a crooked door, and a freestanding outhouse.     “Which one should I use?” I asked.     “Either,” he shrugged. “Take your pick.”     ‘My pick’ between a primitive latrine and a toilet that looked like it had been stolen from a burned-out fuel station? I supposed I wasn’t in a position to judge. I chose the outhouse. At least it had a door latch.   

    When I returned, he was standing right where I’d left him.

    “I’m Ironbeak, by the way,” I said. The Glitch stared back, but said nothing. Reluctantly, I wiped my hand on my shirt (Dosskey’s shirt) and extended it for a handshake. He stared at it. “What did you say your name was?” I asked.