Gravity rips the Wizard’s briefcase out of his hand, sending it tumbling through the thin air. Half asleep midflight through this empty stretch of space, he’s surprised to find himself off course – stuck in the pull of an unfamiliar planet. As he flips away from the hazy stars above and flails toward the world below, his drowsiness evaporates. He cools the arc of heat forming around him with a magic word and tries in vain to reestablish his flight spell; panic fills his chest when this basic incantation fails.

As he attempts to steer his body away from the steel spires covering the planet’s surface, his briefcase drifts further away, buffeted by columns of hot air. The Wizard should be able to summon the briefcase, but the pollution in the atmosphere burns his lungs and eyes, and there’s a heavy fog in his brain that not even terminal velocity can wipe away. He blinks away the dust, and in what feels like a half-second the ground jumps up, a complex of industrial buildings reaching skyward to catch him. He gathers as much magic as he can – a drop where there should be a flood – and bounces off the hot roof of a smelting factory.

•

The acceleration and rising temperature don’t bother the Creature. It swirls within the confines of the Wizard’s briefcase as up becomes down, and down becomes up. The gyration ends in a slamming crack against a rock, shooting the Creature out from the briefcase into the smog where it detects the smell of flesh.

Billowing across rusted roofs, the Creature finds an opening and cascades through the ventilation system, rolling out into a metallurgy. At regular intervals, wall valves burp liquid steel onto gutters and down into shallow cauldrons worked by sweating men. The Creature descends unnoticed over the nearest man, first caressing the metal plate covering his head, then the sutures and blistered skin around his mechanical eyes and mouth.

The Creature knows the concept of a cyborg, a man modified to enhance his labor, in the same way a moth remembers the sweet leaf it devoured as a worm. Generations of parasitic memories live within the Creature. Its primary instinct a biological imperative to skim the consciousness from its prey, shedding the genetic memories of past victims into the blood stream.

Seeking nourishment, the Creature wreathes itself around the cyborg’s sweating neck – and bites.

•

T-31 watches the cauldron with his mechanical eyes. The never-ending rattle of the conveyor belt behind him strains his attention as he monitors temperature readings in his optical display. The steel reaches a perfect 1,500 degrees. His muscled biceps contract and the tufted skin at his elbow stretches away from the hardware of his artificial forearms as he sieves out impurities.

With a habitual movement, T-31 extracts the molten liquid from the cauldron with a ladle clipped to his artificial hands and pours it onto the conveyor where it settles into the shape of a long bar. A tickle on the exposed skin below the metal plate screwed into his skull breaks the monotony of his work, but with the tool attached to him, he can’t scratch it. He scrunches his shoulder to try to get at it, but then flinches as the tickle turns to a sharp prick.

He feels numb. The vat swirls, flakes of carbon on the churning surface taking on new shapes. The need to scratch his neck overwhelms all other thoughts and he shakes his alloyed hands until the ladle drops to the concrete floor. But it makes no noise. The foundry is gone.

He has no neck to scratch. The blackened carbon floating on the surface of the steel shifts and resolves into an ancient memory of a speckled fish swimming past his head.

Salt water gushes into his ears and down his throat, pressing against him everywhere. The weight of the water frightens him as much as its tendency to breach the slightest perforation of skin or circuitry.

His heart straining in his chest, he pulls his hands through the water to touch his face. Where he should find a triangular vent, he finds a soft nose and two lips; instead of a mesh sensor, he feels the flap of a small ear; and where he should find smooth steel, he brushes through thick hair floating up from his scalp.

The dysphoria at his changed body can’t distract from the terror of drowning. T-31 screams the last air from his lungs and kicks at the sandy seabed, pushing against the water until he breaks the surface and gasps a painful breath. He treads water without knowing how. Having never seen more than a puddle of dirty runoff in his life, the endless blue surrounding him is too much to comprehend. He shudders at the unbearable sensation of moisture on his skin, fearful tears pooling in his organic eyes – something his mechanical implants could never do.

With his vision blurred, he feels something soft and smooth bump against his bare chest. He blinks away the salt water to find the alien snout of a dolphin nudging him for attention. He shouldn’t have the concepts of oceans or dolphins in his vocabulary, but they spring to his mind nonetheless. The purple-gray animal guides him to a lush island, chattering as they swim. Like the memory of his life in the steel foundry, his fear of water fades.

They stop in a shallow cove where palm trees shade an outcropping of dark basalt. He traces the folds of rock and startles at figures lounging there. The nearest waves at him with her fanned tail and he splashes toward her, unsure what to do or say, and very aware of his nakedness. The mermaid – another new word he knows – folds her tanned arms beneath her breasts and tilts her head to one side.

So you are here. And for what?

Her delicate voice causes the hair on the nape of his neck to stand up.

T-31 can’t help but stare at the mermaid, his eyes unable to take in enough of her smooth skin and soft curves. The first breasts he’s ever seen in his life awaken an atrophied desire inside him. Thoughts he’s never had before flood his brain and ignite his heart. He wants to feel the mermaid’s body pressing against his, embraced in his arms.

He stumbles toward her until she is close enough to touch, the heat of her skin radiating toward him. He hesitates, his chest pounding with eagerness and every nerve twitching in vigilant anticipation. She nods, and T-31 surrenders his thinking mind and dissolves into physical sensation. He lifts her from the rock, and the mermaid kisses him; they fall together in the water, splashing in the soft sand. He doesn’t question his instincts, but gives into them, first kissing her breasts and then pressing his belly against hers.

The mermaid twists her tail around his leg and licks his neck just under the jaw. This pleasurable sensation becomes a painful bite as she grasps him harder, rolling atop him in the sand. His toes curl and he gasps with burning, boiling ecstasy.

•

T-31 falls forward, his right arm landing in molten steel. Screaming, he pulls himself backward, spattering the floor with drops of hissing metal. He’s horrified at his own body; grasping at his face and groin, he finds only metal fixed to bone. If he ever had lips or ears or genitals, they were removed and replaced at birth, when he was customized for his job.

Unfamiliar lust and grief course through him as the droning rattle of the conveyor belt fills his head again. T-31 can’t cry, but he screams while nearby workers rush to extinguish his sputtering cauldron.

•

Nearby, in a jail cell, the Wizard wakes up, his head feeling bruised on the inside, and his stomach performing cartwheels. Even the faint sound of alarms is enough to make him dizzy. When he sits up on the hard cot, his torso continues to lever forward and he falls hard to the floor and pukes. He wretches again and turns onto his side, shivering and telling himself he just needs to wait out the spins.

•

From the observation tower above the refinery, 4-MAN watches the chaos spread. He orders the refinery quarantined, then releases a squad of maintenance drones to capture the malfunctioning unit. On another monitor, the refinery’s production numbers plummet to zero, a catastrophe that has never before occurred under 4-MAN’s supervision. His skull creaks as gears pinch the empathy from his brain.

Saturated with cortisol, he descends from the observation tower to the factory floor, screaming at every unit in his path. In the smelting room, 4-MAN halts a drone to get a better look at T-31, who has sweat pouring across his skin and trickling around his implants. 4-MAN grabs T-31 by the chin and shakes his head from side to side.

what is your malfunction?

When T-31 doesn’t respond, 4-MAN slaps his face and repeats the question. T-31 mumbles something incoherent, and 4-MAN slaps him again, twice, breaking the skin around his mouth-and-nose vent. 4-MAN dismisses the drone with a wave of his hand, and it carries T-31 to a quarantine cell.

The units around 4-MAN scatter backward at the sight of something wrapping itself around his neck. He straightens his back, arms held stiff at his sides, standing like a steel rod, frozen in place. The surrounding units watch in confusion as the spectral anomaly winnows into a bleeding hole under 4-MAN’s jaw and disappears.

•

4-MAN’s world is dark and mute. A void. 4-MAN can think – he knows his name, he knows he is the Observer. But there is nothing to observe. He wonders if he has been blinded. He wonders if his head has been removed from his body and his sensors put out. He has a long time to wonder. In total, he spends three billion two hundred thousand and ninety seven years in complete stillness. During this period, he forgets himself.

When the first stimulus reaches him, it takes a long time for his consciousness to stir. For months, the vibrations grow louder and 4-MAN begins to sense the world around him; wherever he is, the vibrations cause the heavy darkness surrounding him to sift and tremble. The intensity of the tremors grow, threatening to shatter his atrophied mind until a shaft of golden light cracks his world and he feels the darkness crumbling away around him. From the light, a looming drill descends, boring the vibrations into his being.

4-MAN’s body is a lode of iron, a dense hunk of mineral formed in an ancient layer of the ground. The drill gouges him and breaks him free of the surrounding vein. Then a claw scoops him from the disturbed soil and drops him into a bucket where he remains in storage for several months. His world is dark again, but the sounds of production ring through the air at all hours of the day. Some faint instinct buried in his dulled mind tells 4-MAN that the production will come for him, too.

A claw deposits his lodestone onto a conveyor. The speed frightens 4-MAN’s diminished intellect, but he doesn’t have long to consider the industrial workings around him. The conveyor tilts up and then down, sending 4-MAN and an avalanche of raw iron into the bed of a crucible. The heat rises to a point at which 4-MAN, having forgotten the concept of death, still wishes for annihilation. The heat reaches a crescendo, and 4-MAN’s being collapses and melts. For an instant, he imagines this is the end he wished for, but the production continues.

He burns for a week as machines blast impurities from the liquid vat. His mind a tortured blank, 4-MAN is purified and poured into a cauldron, where a unit stirs him and ladles him into a rectangular coffin. He rests and cools against the coffin walls, all the while the world marching past him. He hears hammer strikes before he feels them. The hammer batters him into a perfect bar.

Mechanical hands lift 4-MAN and slot him into a magazine, which they pack into a crate. In the darkness again, 4-MAN’s mind is petrified. From deep within the void of his consciousness, a truth rises to the surface like a bubble and bursts on the surface: he’s on a long voyage. The supply lines of a ceaseless war extend from one arm of the galaxy to its center, where the capital planets have been under siege for twenty thousand years.

After a century of near light-speed travel, the ship carrying 4-MAN docks inside a battleship, and soldiers load his magazine into a gun. The battleship maneuvers into a locked orbit over a mega city spanning the equator of the planet. In the vacuum of space, the gun makes no noise as it ejects 4-MAN and a dozen other steel bars into the thin atmosphere. The air whistles around 4-MAN and then erupts in explosions – a counterattack from the city below. He’s knocked out of a true line and arcs through the clouds, end-over-end.

The hot air surrounding him screams in a substitute for 4-MAN’s own mute terror. He lands in a desert, well outside the city, creating a hundred-yard crater in which he’s buried three hundred yards deep. A few more dull percussions surround him, and then silence and darkness.

This hundred-year stretch of activity becomes a blip in an otherwise numbed eternity of subterranean solitude. 4-MAN’s mind shrivels and disintegrates, but never disappears. He waits, but never rests.

•

The Wizard wakes with magic sparking in his veins and a lingering ache behind his eyes. He stands up, thankful the spins have dissipated enough that the approaching screech of steel-on-steel doesn’t make him sick. Two cyborgs appear at the cell door, dragging a third. They haul open the door, deposit the unconscious cyborg inside, and lock the cell again. The Wizard demands to know where his briefcase is, but the cyborgs ignore him, their bootsteps fading away.

He smirks and points at the door to open it with a simple spell. His finger tip tingles, but the door remains locked. Even that makes him feel tired again, and he slumps back on the cot, frowning.

From the floor, his new cellmate groans and pushes up from his arms into a sitting position. There’s dried blood on the young cyborg’s face, and bruises darken the skin around his metallic eyes. He notices the Wizard, and says something that sounds like huszzzz.

The Wizard leans forward, making a motion with his hand for the cyborg to try again.

huszzareyou?

The Wizard leans back, nodding. The cyborg’s mouth-nose vent gives him a strong accent, but the language is familiar.

The Wizard introduces himself and returns the question, to which the cyborg at first seems unable to answer. He taps a symbol stamped into his metal skull plate. The Wizard examines it.

What did they get you for, T-31?

The cyborg slumps, shaking his head. The Wizard can see confusion crease the young man’s bloodied face. It looks like he’s been beaten and burned, and there is a slowness to his movements. When he shakes his head, the Wizard notices two bite marks on T-31’s neck.

Ah. You got an unexpected visitor. That’s my fault. But some people pay a lot for it. What’d you see?

i saw . . . i saw . . .

T-31 clenches his fists and brings his hands out before him. He softens his grip, and, while repeating the same words, makes a gentle cupping motion. A sound like a whimper escapes him.

Tits. Nice. You must be a good one, T-31.

The Wizard extracts from his cloak a small gold case from which he removes a slim blue cigarette. He puts it to his lips, snapping his fingers until the end glows with fire, and inhales. Gray-blue smoke erupts from his nose and he waves it away, examining the small cell. The faint sound of alarms and the distinct whump of an explosion drift through the door.

The smoke makes him feel better, but he knows it’s numbing his aches, not restoring his magic. He continues to puff at it, staring at nothing.

You know any way out of here?

T-31 shakes his head.

•

A shiver crosses from T-31’s human nerves into his eclectic circuits. He doesn’t so much want to get out of this quarantine cell as he wants to visit the mermaid again. He taps on the frame of the cot to get the stranger’s attention.

how? ah . . . how . . .?

He makes the cupping motion again, which the stranger understands.

Yeah, tits – I know man, believe me. When I was passing by, I was on my way to Big Tits Hot Lady Land.

This is another phrase that doesn’t make sense to T-31, but he understands that he and the stranger have common interests. He notices the stranger shivering, too.

If they can get out of the room, he’s sure the stranger can bring him back to the mermaid, but never in his life has T-31 been able to choose to enter or leave a room without permission. His sleeping pod opens every morning when it is time to work, and he leaves his cauldron when the conveyor halts. He sees no way out of this cell until an Observer puts him back to work; but ever since his experience under water, his imagination adopts new perspectives.

He notices more of his surroundings, his mind searching for an unseen world, and, finding none, instead takes in more of the world around him. He stares at a pipe running along the ceiling and has a vague notion that it absorbs ambient heat. The pipes regulate temperature in the facility. As vats of molten steel warm the air, something cool running through the pipes carries the heat away.

The thought reminds him of the mermaid, her sun-warmed palms against his shivering shoulders. Just hours ago, the idea of being immersed in water would have terrified him, but now it induces calm. He was told that liquid can damage his circuitry, a warning also given for machines like the conveyor, which stop functioning if even a drop of moisture touches them. A cyborg is a piece of the production line, the same as the conveyor.

T-31 looks down at his arms, where a rivulet of blood dries in the crevice between his flesh and his hardware. His heart beats faster. He gestures for the stranger to get off the bed, and then climbs on top of it, reaching for the pipe. He grasps it in both hands and pulls with his augmented strength. The pipe screeches a metallic complaint, snaps, and sprays a high-pressure burst of water into the room.

T-31 shields his eyes from the spray, but he isn’t afraid of the water. The stranger shouts something unintelligible, but T-31 ignores him. He jumps off the bed and lands in what is already becoming a puddle on the floor. He sloshes the five steps to the door – and opens it.

•

The facility is chaotic, but this doesn’t bother the Wizard. He has one desire in his mind, and follows the sounds of commotion to satisfy it. He and T-31 pass by dozens of stupified cyborgs, most mumbling to themselves and swaying, a few emitting high-pitched screams. From one of these dreaming men, he retrieves his briefcase. It’s empty, but the latch still works after the fall from space.

The Wizard pays no attention to the machinery in each room they pass through. He knows the Creature will hop from victim to victim, gathering as many memories from their blood as it leaves behind. He wants to catch it before too many of its collected visions involve the manufacture and production of steel bars. Those are not the type of trips for which his clientele will pay.

They come to a room where not everyone is yet under the Creature’s intoxicating influence, finding two large cyborgs carrying one of their stupified colleagues. The Creature sifts from the limp man’s neck and plunges into the next one, causing him to drop his comrade and sway as if hypnotized. As big as they are, the cyborgs have no tolerance for the Creature’s hallucinations.

Readying his briefcase, the Wizard approaches the latest victim, intending to catch the Creature as soon as it leaves the cyborg’s body. He notices a few others watching him, waiting to see what will happen.

In a more controlled setting, the Wizard can get a group of ten people tripping at the same time. A nibble on the wrist or elbow is all it takes. On its own, the Creature spends more time exploring the essence of each host. When the Wizard catches sight of the Creature trickling back out of its bite marks, he holds up his briefcase to catch it. Before he can snap the case shut, T-31 shoves him to the side and the Wizard lands hard on his shoulder. He looks up, shocked, to see T-31 grappling with the Creature, trying to get it to bite him in the neck again.

You fucking junkie, that’s not how you –

It’s too late. The Creature, frightened at a perceived attack, soars into the air and defends itself by vibrating at a near brain-liquifying frequency. Everyone in the room collapses, and the Wizard blacks out.

•

The Wizard’s mind vibrates a week into the future. Long-fingered hands remove his clothes and trace a light touch down his back. He shivers with delight and the hands caress his neck and draw him forward to rest his head on a pair of soft breasts. A gentle voice, scented like honey, whispers in his ear.

Everything is copacetic, baby, just relax and let go. That’s right, take a deep breath. Another, love. Yeah, look how relaxed you are . . . well, maybe not all of you. What’s this I feel . . . down here? Hm? Do you like it when I touch you . . . here?

•

T-31, his mind glitching, stands at the edge of a prehistoric swamp, his feet sinking in mud. The water ripples and a crocodile the size of a cargo ship emerges, draped in weeds, the water and mud slipping from its leathery skin as it opens its maw to devour him whole. He slides across its bumpy tongue and down its gullet, into a cave where three men wearing loincloths sit around a smoking fire. One of them raises his hand and waves it over the crackling flames, turning them a bright purple. He lowers his bare hand into the fire and from it extracts a translucent egg in which swims a golden spark.

The men gesture for T-31 to come nearer. He does, and before he can react, the men cast a spell to freeze him in place, then lay him on the dirt and set the egg atop his belly button. The golden spark sinks to the bottom of the egg, dims, and disappears. He feels feverish.

•

The Creature, like any other in the galaxy, has a primal instinct to multiply. When the fear of extinction is strongest, so too is the drive to preserve the species. In a state of existential crisis, the Creature deploys a neutralizing force to paralyze its potential predators. Once safe, it reproduces by splitting itself into millions of crystalline eggs.

•

The Wizard wakes up feeling giddy. A large man steps over him and grabs hold of another cyborg, 4-MAN, who remains still and frozen. To the Wizard, it looks like 4-MAN has locked-in syndrome, which happens when a user with very high blood pressure tangles with the Creature. The worker heaves 4-MAN into a corner where he falls to the floor with a loud clang. If that doesn’t wake him, nothing will.

Leaving this chaos, the Wizard navigates the endless production chambers until he finds the Creature in an open-air pit. Massive drills and extraction equipment loom over the mine, suspended mid-action. Small translucent eggs cover the dusty ground, each one glimmering with a golden light. The Creature, diminished but alive, lays over the entire kilometer-wide excavation like mist.

Lighting another cigarette, the Wizard gathers a few eggs into his briefcase. That done, he holds his left arm in the air, takes a drag, and exhales through his nose, humming a gruff note. As he does, the Creature condenses around his raised arm until it shines like a rainbow against the dusk.

A sound from behind him alerts the Wizard to T-31’s presence. The cyborg stops and holds out his arms to indicate he has no intention of trying to wrangle the Creature again. But he did follow the Wizard, and his eyes remain locked on the shimmering sleeve.

I don’t think you can handle this. Look at you.

T-31 looks down at his hands. Blackened carbon packs the metallic articulation of each finger. He takes a step forward and holds them out toward the Wizard. His eyes are red glass, but in them the Wizard sees familiar desperation.

Look . . . here.

Wanting to leave this place, the Wizard gives in and approaches T-31, gesturing for him to sit on a nearby rock. He tells T-31 to hold out his arm.

I’ll give you a little. You have to learn to handle it, man.

The Creature, still wrapped around the Wizard’s arm, nips T-31’s skin above the elbow. The Wizard lets it dip inside the vein for a moment, then pulls it back.

And you can’t do this all day. Don’t forget to eat – or, whatever you guys do.

T-31 doesn’t hear the warning; his head lolls to one side and his breathing slows down.

The Wizard levitates away, rising into the atmosphere. He gazes at the Creature. He can’t be mad at it. Too much of it can knock anyone off course, even someone with a habit for its metaphysical pleasure.

Maybe not this time, friend. I can’t get lost again . . . the ladies are expecting us.

As he reaches orbit and picks up speed, he looks back and sees a shimmering geyser erupt from the iron mine and blanket out in a silvery wave in all directions. The cyborgs down there probably won’t be productive again for a long time. Maybe it will be good for them, if they can learn to tame the creatures.

He turns from this back toward the stars glimmering in the silence of space. The Creature shivers against his arm, licking at his wrist.

Just wait a bit, okay? Maybe not until I’m sure I’m pointed in the right direction.

•

To be continued in The Wizard and the Amazons and The World of Mirrors.