The Angelhammer

I shifted, and a thought slammed into my mind: I’m in half a body. The arms burned with the cold pain of adrenaline. The heart hammered like a piston, an echo of the previous occupant’s panic. The head rested against a soft, dependable surface, but something scratched and clogged the nose. The neck and shoulders were stiff, but they had strength in them. Below the chest I felt nothing. No stomach, no crotch, no legs, no feet. Praying that the body would at least be an American’s, I forced the eyes open.

A hospital room, bathed in pale neon light. Wherever this was, at least the place still had power. I was lying in a bed, the torso propped up to a 45 degree angle. Visual inspection confirmed that there was, in fact, a lower body as well. The bedsheet outlined the shape of stomach, hips, and legs, but I couldn’t feel them.

A paraplegic. No wonder the previous occupant had panicked. There was, however, no way in hell I would let their useless terror become my own.

I ate the air in deep, measured lungfuls. The heart slowed, and little by little the acid sting subsided from the arms. I lifted them into view. They were a man’s, pale-skinned and muscular, but heavy with hunger. The past few hours had taught me to tune out a thousand pains and discomforts, and it cost me zero effort to suppress the body’s craving for food.

But in the hunger’s wake an itch crept in, a dirty feeling that the body’s skin was a cancer that enveloped me, seeping into me and twisting my shape. I wanted to vomit, and even more so to be vomited out. It was an ugly claustrophobia, a panic that constricted around me, and if I let it swallow me up, I would shift again for sure.

But the past few hours had taught me that this feeling, too, could be tuned out, if at a considerably higher effort. Again I forced myself to think about Jane, about the car wreck crushing her body like a monstrous steel maw, and old, raw grief inflated inside me until there was room for nothing else.

My head was clear, and I scanned my surroundings.

A rain-streaked window framed a cloudy night sky. A tall wheeled table stood next to the bed, but the tabletop was empty. On the floor below lay a still-life of flowers, water puddles, and the fragments of a smashed glass vase. Some pills down there, too, spilled from a tiny plastic cup. It was all irrelevant. Medical machines in a corner. Irrelevant. A television set craning out from a wall mount, its screen black and irrelevant. And on a chair near the opposite end of the room: a pile of clothes and a gym bag.

Highly relevant.

I grabbed the bed’s siderails and pushed. Without the aid of abs, the maneuver was hell on the pecs and triceps. But the muscles were honed and athletic, and I pushed through until the torso was upright. Then I let the body thump to the floor, medical tubes snapping and rickety IV racks clattering. The fall hurt, but it broke no bones that I would have use for. Glass shards cut the skin as I rolled onto the stomach, but I ignored it. I crawled across the linoleum floor, the legs dragging uselessly behind me. A sudden fear: What if someone came though the door and saw me like this? The face warmed as anger smoldered in the chest.

I locked the eyes on the chair, on the clothes and the bag upon it. Unlike the emasculating hospital gown, these were clearly the patient’s property: sneakers, jeans, a hoodie. And the bag, bulging with personal effects and the promise of a phone.

I didn’t have the strength to pull the body upright, so I yanked the gym bag down onto the floor, unzipped it, and rummaged through. Underwear and T-shirts, an empty plastic water bottle, a wallet, keys, and sunglasses in a case. But no phone. What in the goddamn hell. The body was young, in its early twenties. Why was there no goddamn phone? The sunglasses reflected a scared, white, pretty-boy face, spoiled and still unhurt by life. The face stared at me, its nasal tube like some ridiculous plastic mustache. I smashed the glasses against the floor.

“Where is your goddamn phone?” I shouted.

The shrillness of the voice was the body’s, but its imminent hysteria was my own. A useless feeling, and if I wasn’t careful, it would open the door to the claustrophobic panic that would boot me out of this body and into the next. I closed the eyes and counted deep breaths.

It’s okay. It’s okay, because it has to be okay.

Little by little, I calmed down enough to think. To read the situation.

A young man, an athlete of some sort, handsome and blessed with money to pay for care like this. Of course there was a phone. Kid like this could never live without it. Especially not here, paralyzed and trapped in a hospital bed . . .

It would have to be within reach of the bed. On the table right next to it. The table that one of the body’s former occupants had swiped a panicked hand across, spilling everything to the floor. I openened the eyes, twisted the head back around, and scanned the linoleum.

And there, past the flowers and the shards of the broken vase, nestled against a hospital bed wheel, lay the flat, black shape of a phone.

Crawling back toward it felt like basic training, the burn of the shoulders driving me on. I grabbed the phone, and its screen lit up to reveal a photo of its owner dribbling a soccer ball. The local time, apparently, was 5:07 AM. This should have given me a hint as to where I was, but it didn’t. I had no idea how much time had passed since everything fell apart. Less than a day for sure, but the chaos of the shifts had left me too confused to keep track of hours and time zones. But the upper left hand corner identified the cellphone carrier as a UK one. That was something. At least the language wouldn’t get in the way.

I swiped up, hoping that the phone’s owner had activated facial recognition. He had, but the phone’s tiny lock symbol shook like a nervous head, denying access and prompting me to enter a six-digit passcode I had no way of knowing. Some treacherous part of my mind shat out a split-second memory of Jeffrey Poirier’s mousy, meddlesome face.

“Goddamn it!” I shouted, then caught myself and counted breaths.

Could the phone belong to someone else? A nurse, or—No, obviously not. The boy in the lock screen pic was clearly the same person I had seen reflected in the sunglasses.

Except for . . .

I ripped out the nasal tube and swiped up. Neat, colorful app icons fell into formation as the phone’s home screen opened.

All right. I finally had a phone, but for how long? The battery stood at seventeen percent, so video was out of the question. I tapped the green telephone app and entered the only number that I still knew by heart. I turned on the speaker and rolled the body onto its back, then lay there trying not to count the pulses of the ringing tone.

From this angle I could see an old, framed poster on the wall above the head of the bed. It was peppered with tiny drawings of animals, insects, plants, and sea creatures, all connected by a curving line that fractalled from the bottom of the design to its top. Bacteria and jellyfish, a dinosaur, a scorpion, and a soaring eagle, and there, clustered among the mammals, a human head in profile. The poster’s copy read “Tree of Life”. I felt weirdly relieved that the artist had left out one particular animal from the representation.

A sudden memory: Bare feet on a cold concrete floor. My little sister Sharon peeking between a pen’s steel bars, pointing at a piglet suckling a sow’s teat, its rump stained by a vague red birthmark, and Sharon whispering: “See, Clancy, that one’s called Rose cause it’s got a rose on its butt!” And her laughter and my laughter, both cut short as Dad—

The voice from the phone snapped me back to reality. I hadn’t caught its words, but the familiarity of its timbre shook me.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” I said, with all the authority that the body’s vocal chords could muster.

The voice on the other end—a voice I knew more intimately than any other—answered in a rollercoaster of strange, bouncy syllables punctuated by long vowels, bleating and accusatory.

“Do you speak English?” I thundered, cutting off the endless string of Chinese or whatever.

A short pause, and the assault of foreign words resumed. Blood rushed to the face as rage rolled in, and I slammed the floor. Shit! I was so goddamned close! But the heart rate was increasing, and again I counted breaths, forced myself to calm down. I rolled back onto the stomach so I could see the phone. The battery stood at fifteen percent.

No other option. I tapped the video chat icon.

Seconds dragged by, then a trill of electronic notes signalled that the connection was made. A face filled the screen. It seemed uglier than usual, partly because of the weary, frightened expression it wore, partly because it had its rights and its lefts mixed up. This was not really the case, of course. I was just used to seeing the face in a mirror.

I watched my own eyes stare back at me through the screen, not quite meeting my gaze. I watched my own lips form words in a language I didn’t speak. It was a violation, not just of my body, but of the uniform it wore and all that the uniform stood for. Again I wanted to vomit, and clouds of shame blurred my vision. Or was it just the dizzying sense of disorientation? Yes, I decided. Just the disorientation. The moment called for absolute confidence and authority.

I placed the paraplegic’s finger against the pale lips and shushed my own body’s occupant. It worked.

“You,” I said, pointing at the screen, “listen.” I pointed at the paraplegic’s ear.

My face stared back through the phone, fearful and confused.

“I,” I said, pointing at the paraplegic’s chest, “am Clancy Truman.” I traced the finger across the spot that corresponded to where my own body wore my nametag.

My face stared back, uncomprehending, still not meeting my gaze.

I repeated the gestures and the words, desperate for a sign that my body’s occupant understood.

I saw my lip quiver for a second or two, then break back into its torrent of incomprehensible babble. A note of panic rose in my voice, chasing it from its well-practiced baritone into an ever shriller register.

This was hopeless. I saw my eyes darting wildly as my body’s occupant twisted my head from side to side, screaming its garbage language and shaking my phone like some primitive shaman’s rattle. I caught a swooping, disjointed view around the large plexiglass cage at the heart of Anvil Base, with its industrial LED lights and racks of cameras, sensors and computer equipment. My body was apparently still alone inside the cage. If you didn’t count the Angelhammer, of course. Which I sure as hell didn’t. The on-screen image flickered into a scramble of pixels as the foreigner kept shaking the phone and screaming in panic. I closed the eyes.

We were fucked. We were all fucked. I was fucked. Sharon, wherever she might be, was fucked. Anvil Base was fucked, and all the men and women under my command. America was fu—

Quiet.

The phone had gone quiet.

No: I could still hear the familiar hum of the equipment that filled Anvil Base. The video chat connection remained open.

The foreigner had gone quiet. A shift?

The screen was all black. Then I recognized the leg of my uniform.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” I said.

Slowly, with great, steady deliberation, the screen image tilted and shifted until I was again looking at my own face. But it was no longer panicked, far from it: The eyes were transfixed, drinking in a sight above and behind the phone camera’s lens. The lips were parted in joy and awe. Then they formed words.

“Ikka-no-myoju . . . Holy shit. Ha. What . . . Hey, can you tell me exactly what it is that I’m looking at?”

English. The person spoke English, and that made them capable of following orders. Hope surged in the chest, but I breathed deeply to keep it from carrying me away. I wouldn’t get this lucky again. I had to remain calm.

“I can,” I said. “My name is Commander Clancy A. Truman, United States Naval Intelligence, and the body that you are currently occupying is mine.”

On the screen my face turned to stare at me. My eyes shone with an unfamiliar curiosity as they regarded the paraplegic’s pathetic figure. Then they flicked up a fraction, meeting my gaze and holding it.

“And quite the body it is, mister Truman. You know, I always thought lumbering around with a bulk like this would feel . . . I don’t know, like being pregnant all over. But . . . wow, with these muscles it’s really surprisingly light.”

It was true. I was a voracious eater, but spent a minimum of an hour every day lifting weights. My size and discipline commanded attention and exhuded authority.

“Who are you?” I said.

On the screen my eyes darted up and to the right.

“I’m . . . I’m Alaya.”

“Okay, Alaya. You’re American, right? And I’m assuming you’re a woman?”

“Half right. Canadian.” She let a brief smile play across my lips. “Sorry.”

Christ. Canada. Was there a country on Earth more . . . civilian?

“Okay, listen up,” I said. “You and I have a job to do. It should be an easy one, but we positively cannot allow ourselves to fail at it. Are we clear?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry mister Truman, but no. I asked if you could tell me what this uh . . . thing is that I’m looking at, and you said you could. How about we start there?”

I felt another rush of anger flush the cheeks. Over the past week I had gotten to know this particular type of civilian all too well. They handled power with the respect and finesse of a horny teenager on a drunken first date. I forced the mouth to smile.

“All right, Alaya. Why don’t you turn the camera on the object, and I will explain.”

“Okay,” Alaya said. The view on the screen switched to the phone’s front-facing lens, but as it did, the image became hopelessly scrambled. The Angelhammer’s geometric impossibility clearly didn’t translate to the ones and zeroes of a digital video feed.

“No, it’s all pixellated. Switch the camera back around.”

Alaya did as I ordered. Again I saw my own face, and from inside it Alaya stared at the off-screen object as if at a god. Which, despite everything, I still refused to believe that it was.

“Why don’t you describe it to me instead,” I said.

“But you said you know what it is. So you already know what it looks like, right?”

“Goddamnit, will you just stop with the questions! We don’t have time for this!”

Alaya stared at me, charging my face with an expression of merciless indignation. I could feel the paraplegic’s cheeks begin to blush. So that was what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Commander Clancy Truman’s shit stick.

“All right, sorry,” I said. “I don’t know much time we have before one of us gets shifted into another body again. Please, can we just . . .”

Alaya smiled. “No need to rush on my account, mister Truman. I’m slower than most with the incarnations. This is actually my second.”

“Your second?”

I must have shifted through close to twenty bodies only in the first couple of hours. And given how often I’d seen other people shift, I had no doubt that mine was the normal frequency here, not Alaya’s.

“That’s right,” she said. “I’ve spent the past, oh, ten or twelve hours as a young man on the deck of a dhow, would you believe it. Somewhere in Red Sea, probably. And yeah, the rest of the crew’s bodies just went through souls like cigarettes. Took me a while to figure out what was happening. And that it was happening everywhere. And to everyone, I’m guessing?”

“It looks that way,” I said. I had a thousand questions, but they would cost me time I didn’t have. “Now, if you don’t mind, can we—”

“Sorry, yeah. You were going to tell me what this thing is, but you wanted me to describe it to you first. And I wanted to know why you didn’t know what it looked like already. You have seen it, right?”

“Yes. But I need to know if it has changed in any way. So please,” I said, swallowing bile, “just describe the object. Please. Thank you.”

“Okay, sure. So I’m looking at . . . Man, this is so strange. It’s like I’m coming up with words to describe it, but they’re all just sliding off of it. They’re all just wrong.”

“You said something earlier, when you first saw it. What was it?”

“Ikka-no-myoju. It’s Japanese, from a Zen Buddhist thing? It means ?one bright pearl?, and . . . Yeah. In one way it does look like a huge pearl. It’s a single sphere with a mirrored surface, about six feet or so in diameter, and it’s hovering maybe a foot or so above the ground. But . . . when I look at it another way, it’s not just one sphere, but . . . seven billion nine hundred and fifty-two million three hundred and one thousand six hundred and forty-two spheres. Forty-three, now. Forty-four. This is so strange. I can see how many they are, as easily as if they were just two or three. And . . . and it looks like there’s people reflected in them, but the reflections keep changing . . . and they’re all reflected in each other. But they’re also still just one, just this one single sphere, and it’s just hovering there, close enough to touch. It’s . . . I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. But what is it?”

I was surprised that she hadn’t already guessed.

“It’s the Angelhammer, Alaya. The room you are standing in is part of a base that we—the United States military—constructed around it shortly after it arrived on Earth. Now, I need you to tell me one more thing—”

“Excuse me just a second, Mister Truman. I heard somebody mention that on the dhow as well. What does it mean, what’s ?the Angelhammer??”

My mind stopped dead. She might as well have asked me what the United States military was. Or Earth. I didn’t know where to begin. Everyone—literally everyone—knew about the Angelhammer. In less than a week, the news of its existence and imminent arrival had wildfired from astronomy.com to every single news outlet and social media feed on the planet. It had dominated public discourse and speculation for more than two months, until it finally smashed through Earth’s atmosphere six—or maybe seven, now—days ago. How could she not know?

The phone’s battery stood at nine percent.

“Okay, I’ll have to make this brief,” I said. “The Angelhammer is an unidentified astronomical phenomenon that was discovered two and a half months ago. Picked up by telescopes all around the world. It was on a direct course for Earth, and it was travelling at close to fifty percent of lightspeed. I’m . . . surprised that you don’t know this already, it’s been everywhere . . .”

Alaya said nothing, just stared through the screen, her attention laser-focused. I had never seen my face like that before. But we were all getting used to all kinds of novelty. I continued.

“Well, as the Angelhammer approached, there was widespread panic all over the world. Order was maintained in the US, by and large. But like everyone else, we braced ourselves for the worst. And one week ago, it . . . landed, I guess would be the word.”

“Where?”

“Florida. We expected a disaster, but it just . . . stopped, apparently without even decelerating. One moment it was travelling at fifty percent lightspeed, the next it was just there, hovering inches above the ground. And we built Anvil Base around it.”

“Aha. And this Angelhammer is the reason people’s minds keep . . . shifting, you called it? Between bodies?”

“That’s right,” I said. She didn’t need more than half the truth on this one. “Now tell me: Do you see anything else near the Angelhammer?”

“Yeah. There’s a kind of a pedestal here, between the Angelhammer and me. Maybe three feet tall? It looks like it’s made of dirt and roots and stuff, like it’s just grown straight up out of the ground. But the shape is perfectly smooth and cylindrical. It’s like the material is all natural but the shape is artificial, if that makes sense?”

“It does. What else do you see?”

“There’s a flat, rectangular piece of metal on it. It looks golden, about the size of a sheet of paper. It’s standing upright in, like, a little slot that looks like it’s cut into the top of the pedestal.”

“Okay, now walk around it and look at the piece of metal from the other side.”

“From the Angelhammer’s side?”

“Yes. Now,” I said. “Please.”

In my body, Alaya moved. The battery stood at six percent. She turned my back to the Angelhammer, and the background became pixellated, unreadable. But Alaya, in my skin, was still clear on the screen. I watched her open my mouth even wider, thrilled by confusion. She laughed as if the universe was a joke and the engraving on the metal plaque its punchline.

“This is what I think it is, isn’t it?” she said, switching to the phone’s front-facing camera.

“It is,” I said and looked at the images etched into the plaque’s surface: Fifteen lines indicating a solar system’s location in relation to surrounding pulsars and the galactic plane; a neat row of ten circles symbolizing planets and a sun; two nude human figures, one male, one female, the male’s right hand raised in greeting. And behind them, for scale, a representation of the unmanned spacecraft to which the plaque had been attached when it was launched in the early 1970s: a NASA Pioneer probe.

“Now listen, Alaya: I need you to turn the plaque around so that the engraving faces away from the Angelhammer. It’s easy: Just lift it out of the pedestal, turn it around 180 degrees, and put it back. But make absolutely sure that the engraving faces away from the Angelhammer. Do it now.”

Her smile stiffened, then faded. “I’m sorry, why?”

Four percent. This goddamn civilian. “Because it will stop this thing that’s happening, it will return us to our proper bodies. Now do it.”

Alaya tilted my head to the side like a curious dog’s. “Mister Truman, how can you be sure that’s what will happen?”

“I told you, we don’t have time for this! Now do as I–”

“Hey, settle down there! We’re not gonna be rushing into things, okay? Make your case, and I promise I’ll give it a proper think. Okay, mister Truman?”

The face burned like a stove. The hospital gown stuck to the torso, soaked in water from the broken vase. My whole world, now, was linoleum and humiliation and this broken body pressing in on me, its foreign blood pumping alien hormones through me, shaping me into something wrong and I couldn’t get out I couldn’t get out I couldn’t get out so instead I shouted.

“I will not have some foreign fucking civilian question my authority! I gave you a goddamned order and now you will—”

I blinked and opened nearsighted eyes on a spacious, neat apartment. Daylight and the trill of birds came in through a balcony door, and the stink of a strange city. I was standing up and felt the smooth, warm texture of wood against bare feet.

The most unsettling thing about shifting into a new body was not the abrupt change of location and time of day, but the sudden resetting of my emotions. Like now: One moment the paraplegic’s heart had pounded like a martial drum, flooding my veins with claustrophobic fury, but now . . . I was calm. I didn’t feel like I should feel, and the disconnect chilled me.

Then the body sensations started seeping in. The stomach growled, the mouth was dry, and the knees felt stiff and achy. A vague pain pulsed through the shoulders and upper back. The torso was off-balance, as if the body wore a backpack on its chest. I looked. Breasts, of course. Gravity clung to them like Romulus and Remus at the she-wolf’s teat.

This was not my first incarnation into a female body, but most of the others had been children. My current form belonged to a short, heavyset woman in a light, flowery blouse and airy trousers. A pair of glasses hung from a thin chain around the neck. I put them on and saw the apartment in crisp detail. Its bookshelves were rich, but every spine was covered in Chinese characters. As I turned I caught sight of the body in an elegant full-length mirror. A pudgy, middle-aged Asian lady stared back at me. Her saggy skin constricted around me, and I remembered boy scout hazings, lying head first in a zipped-up sleeping bag, squirming and trapped in its darkness under the weight of three older boys, their laughter mocking my desperate gasps for air, the slick nylon lining crushing me like an intenstine like I was—

The soft fist punched the mirror, splintering its reflected mockery into spider-web cracks. I caught myself and clung to the pain of sliced knuckles, but it was not enough. Again I closed the eyes and forced myself to think about Jane. My proud, beautiful Jane, crushed between jaws of plastic, glass, and steel.

There.

I was empty, and I could think. I opened the eyes.

Like the hospital, this place still had power. That boded well for coverage, but my luck wouldn’t hold if I shifted again. I needed to find the woman’s phone, and quickly.

Near one of the cream-colored couches stood an antique writing desk with a computer and—yes!—a wireless phone charger on it. But the device itself was nowhere. I rummaged through drawers, cupboards, and shelves of unreadable Chinese books. Nothing. I searched the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom. Still nothing.

I strode out onto the sunlit balcony. It faced a lush, well-kept backyard. Birds sang in a nearby tree, and a thought of Dad came unbidden into my mind: Before I was born, his passion had been birdwatching. The first time he had laid eyes on Mom, it had been through binoculars in a Minneapolis park. He had never told me the story himself, though. Only Mom had ever talked about the time before the farm.

Voices snapped me back to the moment. A handful of people roamed the yard, all of them Chinese-looking, each of them shouting, pleading, or crying in a language that none of the others understood. I heard no English, so ignored them.

I scanned the balcony. No phone, but a pair of slippers stood near the railing. There was something unsettling about their placement, something almost ceremonial. I grabbed the railing, half expecting to see a broken body down below, the leftovers of suicide.

What would happen if I were to fall, now, in this body? If I just let it topple over and smash into the distant ground? Would I be the one to die, or the Chinese woman?

I leaned across the railing and looked. There was no body, just a five story drop onto a concrete footpath that curved between the backyard’s trees. But directly below me, something glinted. I adjusted the glasses and squinted, bringing the tiny object into sharper focus. A phone.

Shit. It looked intact and was possibly still functional, but I was of no mind to fight off the desperate, soul-displaced foreigners that haunted the yard. Not in this excuse for a body. I shuddered. The clock was ticking, and I had to get back in touch with Alaya.

Provided, of course, that the disobedient Canadian still occupied my own body back in Anvil Base. If she was gone, my body would likely never see another intelligent, English-speaking occupant. At least not before all the world’s power grids and cellphone towers sputtered out for lack of maintenance. Alaya was my one shot.

Was there a gun in the apartment? If so, I could probably fight off the foreigners in the yard, but I hadn’t seen any sign of one. Unless I’d missed something? I turned and looked back into the apartment, then slapped the forehead in shamefaced relief.

The computer.

I sat down and hit the space bar to wake the silver laptop to life. There was no password prompt, and the screen lit up with familiar icons, including a stylized video camera set in a green square. I clicked it, and a window opened: a video feed of the face I wore, its eyes seemingly locked on my chest. A sickening, claustrophobic itch crawled down the spine. I swallowed bile and thought about Jane.

Okay. Next to the video was a list in unreadable Chinese, each entry bulletpointed by a tiny portrait—a call list, no doubt—and above it a narrow text field. I clicked the field and entered my phone number. A dry, staccato pulse issued from the speakers. The left knee bounced impatiently as I stared at the screen.

Suddenly my own face filled the display, lit by the hard, promising glow of Anvil Base’s industrial LEDs. My on-screen eyes seemed fixed on my temporary body’s chest. The expression was inscrutable. Was Alaya still in there?

Then my eyes rose to meet my gaze, and a smile broke across the familiar features.

“Mister Truman? Hey there. So if we’re going to talk, I need to know that you’ll be keeping it together from now on, okay?”

The knee relaxed, and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Alaya. Yes, I’m . . . sorry. I let the pressure get to me. Now listen, I don’t know how much time we have, so would you please lift the plaque out of the pedestal, turn it around, and return it to its slot?”

Alaya looked to the ground and sighed. She looked back up, locked eyes with me, and moved slowly through the room as she spoke.

“Yeah, so here’s the thing. And no offense, eh? But from where I’m standing right now, you’re just a stranger on a phone.”

The on-screen view had stopped moving. She must have placed the phone somewhere, propped it up against something. She took a step back, revealing a wider view of the plexiglass cage’s interior. LED lights shone like industrial suns between the racks of black camera lenses. Behind the rows of equipment I saw the cage’s airlock and its control panel’s blood red glow. Which meant the phone now sat perched on the pedestal in front the Angelhammer, resting against the back of the plaque.

“It’s just the way it is, Mister Truman, and I’ve got to be frank with you: I’m not comfortable taking any kind of action that you suggest until I’m satisfied that you’re qualified to make that suggestion. You get that, right?”

“Goddamn it, Alaya, I already told you: I am Clancy Truman, owner of that body and commander of Anvil Base, both of which your uninvited ass is currently occupying!”

Unfazed, Alaya took in the base like a tourist in a botanical garden, fingers brushing surfaces as if they were delicate flowers.

“I’m sorry, Mister Truman, but the only thing that proves is that you’ve read the name tag on my uniform here.”

My uniform. A furious rush of blood to the face, but three deep breaths quelled it.

“Alaya, we do not have time for this,” I said.

“I’m sorry, mister Truman. I can’t budge on this one. You’re gonna have to prove that you are who you say you are. Otherwise I’m gonna have to hang up.”

Unacceptable. I had to—

“The call,” I said, my mind racing to catch up with my words. “There’s your proof right there! I knew the number to that phone, to my phone, right?”

“Yeah, that doesn’t prove anything, though. I’d guess lots of people would know that number, right? Otherwise, what would be the purpose of a phone, you know?” She smiled. “I think we’re gonna need some more definite proof here. Sorry.”

I muted the computer’s mic, then slammed a fist into the desktop. The pain was sharper than expected. Good. I turned the mic back on.

“All right Alaya. What did you have in mind?”

Up until this moment, Alaya had sauntered back and forth in front of the phone’s camera. Now she stopped, leaned into it, and stared directly at me through my own eyes.

“Why don’t you tell me something that only Commander Clancy A. Truman would know,” Alaya said.

“Yes? What?”

She stepped aside, again revealing the view of the plexiglass cage’s airlock and its glowing red control panel.

“How about the code for that door?”

No. No no no no no. The access-controlled airlock was the only way into or out of the plexiglass cage that surrounded the Angelhammer. If Alaya left the cage, my body would be cut off from the Angelhammer forever, leaving me no chance in hell of setting things right.

“No. Absolutely not. I’m sorry, Alaya, I need you to remain with the Angelhammer.”

“So you don’t see a reason to trust me?”

“No. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

“No worries. I feel the same way about you,” Alaya said, grinning. “So: How are you going to convince me that you really are who you say you are?”

I held Alaya’s on-screen gaze. Hearing my own voice say those words, seeing my own lips shape them . . . The sense of betrayal was dizzying. But I had no time and no choice but to play her little game. But how? My body boasted no scars, tattoos, or other distinguishing marks. If only I could remember what underwear I had put on that morning, but no. What else? What else was there, what else was so deeply personal that only I would know, and that Alaya, in my body, would be in a position to verify?

I forced myself to remember how it looked and felt to be standing where Alaya was standing now, in my body, in the plexiglass cage, surrounded by high tech equipment and the Angelhammer’s impossible geometry, the Pioneer plaque’s unexplainable presence on the equally unexplainable pedestal, grown or shaped from the very ground itself, and now with my phone resting upon it . . .

Yes. Of course.

“My phone,” I said. “Pick it back up.”

For a second, Alaya’s smile seemed to stiffen, then widened again as she nodded.

“O-kay.”

The on-screen view shifted in a slow, fluid motion as she grabbed the phone.

“Swipe up,” I said, and she did as ordered. “Now tap the ?Photos? icon.”

“Aah,” Alaya said. “Right. Very clever. All right, mister Truman. So tell me what I’m looking at.”

I wasn’t much of a photographer, and the nature of my job largely precluded me from taking private pictures. My phone’s modest camera roll mostly held old memories from holidays with Jane and even older ones snapped from ancient family albums. Alaya had no business seeing me cry, so Jane was off the table.

“Scroll past the ones from Hawaii, the beach ones. And the Grand Canyon ones. And the Colonial Williamsburg o—”

“Hang on, hang on . . . So now I get why you’re so eager to get back into this body. She’s your wife, right?”

“Late wife. Keep scrolling.”

Suddenly, the face on the screen held all of my pain.

“I am so sorry,” she said. It wasn’t an apology.

“Keep scrolling,” I said. I muted the mic, cleared the throat, turned the mic back on. “Stop when you get to the older ones. The ones from old photo albums.”

“The . . . Right. Okay, I see. This is your family?”

“You’re looking at the one of all of us? Me, my sister Sharon, and my parents? That’s from 1986. I’m seven, and my hair’s all over the place, and I’m wearing a white shirt and a dark blue pullover, right? Now look at my little cufflinks. They look like arrowheads, right?”

“They . . . They’re not arrowheads! They’re that symbol! The Federation, from Star Trek!” Alaya laughed, and through my voice, the bellows sounded like my own. I smiled for the first time since everything had gone to shit.

“That’s right,” I said. “You’re a Trekkie?”

“No, I had a son who was.”

Had.

My smile died.

“I . . .” I should say something, but I didn’t know what. The lips moved in silence, grasping for the words that weren’t there. But then Alaya spoke again.

“Hey, sorry to spring that one on you like that. I’d forgotten how awkward it can get for people. It was cancer. His name was Danny, and we had almost thirteen years together. But don’t worry, mister Truman, I’m okay now. It was pretty rough for a while, but it pushed me to figure some stuff out.”

The car had crumpled up around Jane like a tin can, they’d said. Chewed her up like molars.

“What . . . what kind of stuff?”

“Stuff that had been missing from my life. Spiritual stuff.” She smiled. “Anywho. We were talking about you, mister Truman. Tell me about your father. What happened to him?”

“What do you mean?”

“What was it that broke his soul like that?”

Broke his . . . what? Had I missed something?

“I’m sorry, what?” I said.

“It’s just, I’m looking at him in this picture here, and you can see it in his eyes, he’s carrying something . . . dark. You’ve seen it too, right?”

What was she talking about? My mind raced.

“Well . . . he took over the family pig farm when I was a kid. Ran it for like six years, but we couldn’t compete with the big industrialized ones. He had to sell out in, what, ’89 I think. That hit him pretty hard. How did you—”

“Sorry, no, I don’t think that’s it. You said this photo’s from 1986, right? And it’s all over his face already. Like something’s eating him up inside.”

An ache shot through the stomach. I craved something savoury to chew, but I gritted the teeth and ignored the hunger. It wasn’t really mine anyway.

“Look, Alaya, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. But I think I’ve proved that I am who I say I am, yes?”

“Right, yes. Sure, I’ve got nothing further on that.”

“Good. Now will you please turn the plaque around?”

“Sorry, mister Truman, it’s just . . . That’s a bit of a jump from you being who you say you are, you know? I’m going to need a little bit of context here, with what’s going on and everything. You want to just walk me through it real quick?”

My first instinct was to punch the computer screen, my second to argue that we didn’t have time. But that would only waste more of it. I counted three deep breaths. It’s okay. It’s okay, because it has to be okay.

“All right. So here is the deal: I’m with US Naval Intelligence, and I am assigned to a task force that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena.”

“Wait. Like . . . UFOs?”

“No! No, we prefer the term UAPs. But . . . yes, essentially. UFOs. Anyway. Upon the Angelhammer’s arrival I was ordered to secure it. I had that plexiglass cage constructed around it, and around the cage I established Anvil Base, which I have commanded for the past seven days.”

“Sorry, hang on a second. You said the Angelhammer is the reason people’s minds keep shifting between bodies, right? But now you’re saying that the Angelhammer arrived a week before the shifts started happening?”

“Yes, I’m getting to that. When we first arrived to secure the site, the Angelhammer looked somewhat different from what it does now. At that point is was just one simple, mirrored sphere. It didn’t have the ah . . . added complexity that you described earlier.”

I saw Alaya shoot a quick glance in the Angelhammer’s direction.

“Yeah,” she said. “Seven billion nine hundred and fifty-two million three hundred and two thousand one hundred and eighty-one, now.”

“Right. So it was just a sphere, but the pedestal was already there, with the Pioneer plaque set in the slot on top of it.”

“But the plaque was facing away from the Angelhammer?”

“That’s correct.”

“And how did it get turned around?”

I chewed the air, as if the mouth alone could come up with the right words to convince Alaya without letting on what really happened. I cleared the throat.

“You have to understand a couple of things,” I said. “Normally I’d be in charge of the entire operation myself, but the presence of the Pioneer plaque and . . . well, the location of the site prompted a, ah . . . change in standard operating procedure.”

“The location? You said this is Florida, right?”

“Right. You’re on a patch of woodland that surrounds something called Launch Complex 36, on Cape Canaveral. It’s where the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes were launched from, in 1972 and ’73. We don’t know which one that particular plaque is from, they’re completely identical.”

“Aah, I see. So the Angelhammer somehow intercepted one of the probes and returned the plaque to where it came from?”

“Yeah, it looks that way. We had no way of knowing what that meant, of course, but because of the history of the whole thing, the government wanted NASA involved.”

“Mm. And suddenly you weren’t in charge of the operation anymore.”

Jeffrey Poirier, the NASA liasion. The memory of his bespectacled, mousy face set the blood simmering. He had stuck to me like a rash, sitting in on every meeting, questioning every order.

“No, I was absolutely in charge, no question,” I said. “But you have to understand: The people NASA sent us were civilians. They couldn’t follow an order if their lives depended on it.”

“What are you saying? NASA caused this?” Alaya said, and I flinched.

NASA’s mandate had been strictly limited to the Pioneer plaque. Poirier and his people had been called in to determine if it was the real thing or some sort of alien replica, and to decipher what the Angelhammer was trying to communicate by displaying it to us.

On day one, they had subjected the plaque to laser measurements, x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and ultra hi-res image analysis that compared it to the original master design. The tests showed that the plaque was completely identical to the ones that the Pioneer probes had carried. But that still didn’t preclude the possibility that it could be a copy, perfect down to every atomic detail. So essentially, the tests told us nothing.

On day one, Poirier and his civilians had also come up with a theory: that the Angelhammer was displaying the plaque to communicate the idea that humanity had called it to Earth. A theory, incidentally, that had already been independently developed by myself, Naval Intelligence HQ, our cook Charlie, and every Anvil Base enlisted grunt with half a brain in their head. NASA was providing nothing, and Poirier knew it.

Out of frustration or a desperate need to boost his egghead ego, he had spent the last six days crashing my every meeting, questioning everything from security protocols to data gathering procedures to how often the goddamn toilets were cleaned. Politics had prevented me from kicking him out the gate, so wherever I turned, there he was, pissing on my territory.

“Yes. NASA caused this,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”

He had been begging for a lesson, and I’d had no choice but to teach it.

“No. No, hang on a minute,” Alaya said. “You caused it. Didn’t you, mister Truman?”

It had all come to a head between us on the night when everything fell apart. Poirier had been hounding me through one of the base’s pre-fab corridors, mortally butt-hurt by one of my science officers having floated the idea of turning the Pioneer plaque around to see if that would elicit a response from the Angelhammer. Poirier had yammered on about how I needed to crack down on my science staff for breaching inter-agency protocol, how I needed to make an example of my officer, and how—if I didn’t—Poirier’s NASA boss would make sure that the Navy made an example out of me. I had told him to leave my people the hell alone, and he had told me that was it, he was calling his superior, and I had told him to leave me the hell alone because I needed to piss, and I had left him there and walked off through the pre-fab corridors and headed not for the latrine but for the plexiglass cage. I had marched through the airlock and ordered everyone out, leaving me alone with the Angelhammer and the plaque on the pedestal. Right away, Poirier had heard and come rushing. I had locked eyes with his panicked civilian face through the plexiglass wall, then touched the plaque as Poirier had screamed soundlessly. And as he had frantically punched his entry code into the airlock’s control panel, I had lifted the plaque from its slot, turned it around 180 degrees, and replaced it so that its engraving faced the alien sphere.

For a split second I had seen it reflected there, the naked figures of the man and the woman seeming to expand and multiply, to become no longer abstract representations of humankind, but the entirety of humankind itself, and the man’s hand had been raised not just in greeting, but in farewell. And the sphere had multiplied without multiplying at all, and I had blinked and opened a stranger’s eyes on a soccer stadium and a crowd of thousands. And after a weightless second of absolute silence, the screaming had started, in horror and a thousand tongues.

“Yes,” I said. “I caused it.”

Saying it out loud I felt the hunger drain me. The breasts weighted me down, slouched me over the desktop. I stared down onto its surface, and for a second it became the waxed plastic tablecloth of the Truman family kitchen. I heard cutlery clattering on plates all around, and I smelled ham and mustard glaze. But my own place at the table was empty for the second day in a row and so was my little stomach and it screamed and all I could say was “Please. I’m sorry.”

“What about, mister Truman?”

I closed the eyes, and the Chinese desktop disappeared. The guilt and hunger remained.

In the pig-shed that day, Dad had shouted at Sharon and me, scolded us for playing stupid games. The piglets were stock, not babies, he had said, and he had made Sharon admit that the one she had called Rose didn’t have a name after all. He had sent her back to the farmhouse weeping, but he had ordered me to stay. Then he had pointed at the suckling, the one with the birthmark on its rump, and he had looked at me and said: “Thump it.”

But I couldn’t do it, and he had made me watch as he grabbed the piglet by its hind legs and ripped it from its mother’s teat and kicked her face to stop her screaming. And he had come back out and slammed the pen shut behind him, but the sow had kept on screaming. And I had watched as he swung the piglet up into the air like an axe and slammed its squealing head into the concrete floor. With the wheezing, little beast dangling and convulsing in his hand, he had looked at me and said: “If you’re not gonna feed your family, then your family’s not gonna feed you.”

And I had heard the sow’s screams and the thuds of its body ramming into the bars to get to its baby, but all it had been able to do was watch like I had watched as Dad swung the piglet and slammed it to the concrete again and again until the job had been done.

And three days later, my skinny arms trembling with hunger, I had done it myself and been forgiven.

I opened the Chinese woman’s eyes. On the screen I saw Alaya furrow my brow in unfamiliar concern.

“You okay there?” she said.

“We’re going to set this right, Alaya,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The Angelhammer reads the plaque as some sort of data input, a set of instructions. I don’t know how or why, but it understands what the figures in the engraving are meant to represent. That they’re not just two people, but that they symbolize all of mankind. And when it reads the plaque, somehow it does all this to us. I’m not going to pretend I have this all figured out yet, but for some reason the Angelhammer tricked us into activating it. We just didn’t know what we were doing. But now we do, and we can stop it.”

“By turning the plaque back around.”

“Yes! Or maybe just removing it, I don’t know. All we know is that as long as the Angelhammer is looking at the engraving, our minds keep shifting between bodies. I don’t know for sure that doing this will set things right, but we’ve got to try. Now, are you ready?”

“One second. Are you sure that we’ll return to our old bodies? Isn’t there a chance we’ll be stuck in our current ones?”

“Goddamnit, Alaya, I don’t know! But this is our only chance, now do it!”

On the screen I saw her replace the phone on the Pioneer plaque’s pedestal, then take a slow step back. She looked me squarely in the eye, and I saw a hardness settle over my face.

“Sorry, but no,” Alaya said. “I can’t.”

A storm of bloody rage rose, unmooring my every thought and blasting them into darkness.

“What the hell are you—” I roared, but she cut me off.

“Listen to me, commander Truman. Breathe deeply, and stay calm. You need to hear what I have to say.”

It was the first time she had called me by rank. I breathed through the Chinese woman’s nose, and clinging to the frayed string of hope that the video connection still spun, I forced the storm to settle.

“Listen to me, commander.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

Alaya stood a few steps back from the phone camera, the back of one hand resting in the palm of the other.

“When my son died, so did my old life. Can you imagine that feeling, commander Truman? Losing a person that every cell in your body is genetically programmed to protect? When something like that happens, there’s . . . there’s just nothing left. My career, my marriage, my sense of purpose . . . I buried all of it with him. And everything—everything—just hurt. It’s like . . . It’s like being burned alive, but in flames that never kill you. At first I tried to run away from it, in all the usual ways. The wrong ways. But eventually, thanks to some good friends, I wound up in Japan. And I learned to stop running.”

I felt a warm trickle in the palm of the right hand. Blood dripped from the fist, and I worked it open. The Chinese woman’s nails had broken the skin. I returned my attention to the screen.

“I went to a Zen Buddhist master there, and she taught me to just sit with the pain,” Alaya said. “I sat with it for months and months, and then suddenly—I can’t explain—it was like I broke through it, into the essence of it, and I suddenly knew it. And I don’t know how my master knew, but when I opened my eyes, she handed me a brush, a horsehair brush that was dripping with ink, and she’d laid out this blank, pure parchment in front of me, and without thinking my hand just moved across it, just one fluid motion, one single stroke of the brush, and I looked at what I’d done, and . . . it was him.”

Alaya looked away, pressed a finger to the corner of my eye. Was she crying? She composed herself and continued.

“The line I’d painted was just a perfect representation of Danny. Not in detail, it was just this beautiful dance of an outline, and somehow it captured him perfectly. Everything he had been. The essence of him. Then my master pointed to the parchment and asked me who it was, and before I could think, I had already answered. But what I’d said wasn’t Danny. What I’d said was ?All of us.? And then I got it.”

I, however, did not.

“Okay, I’m sorry about your son, and that’s a very inspiring story,” I said. “But I really don’t see how it relates to our situation here.”

“The painting I made, in a way it was just like the figures on the plaque, right? You said they symbolize all of humankind, and that’s exactly what the painting of my son did too. Because he was all of humankind. We all are.”

“All right,” I lied. The hands grasped the desktop like a piece of driftwood. I felt seasick. What the hell was going on?

“So I want you to consider an idea, commander. It’s gonna seem pretty strange at first—these days what doesn’t, eh?—but I want you to give it some thought.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Okay. So I know that what’s going on right now is pretty frightening. It’s painful, it’s confusing, and all you want is for it to end. Right?”

A cold fire smoldered in the stomach. Where was this going?

“Obviously,” I said.

“But what if the right thing to do is to just—let it happen?”

“What—You mean . . . the shifts?”

“Please, just think about it for a second: Whether it’s the Angelhammer itself or somebody who made it, we are talking about some kind of superintelligence here. Something that understands the universe in ways we can’t possibly imagine. What if this superintelligence interpreted the Pioneer probe not as an attempt at exploration or contact, but as a call for help? And what if, on some level, it was right?”

What . . . ?

“You must have felt it too, commander,” she said. “We—all of humanity— we’ve got a sickness in us. And I think the Angelhammer might just be the cure.”

No no goddamnit no. Alaya was a fucking crazy person. And not crazy like soldiers went crazy, not violent or paranoid or curled up in a weeping ball. All that I could deal with. No, Alaya’s craziness was some kind of trauma-induced zealotry, seeping out like poison through the cracks of a sharp and rational mind. Would it seep into my body as well? And if I kept negotiating with her, listening to her, trying to talk her into turning the plaque back around—would it seep through the video connection and into my tired, exiled mind? Wrap around me and choke me and twist me and break me like—

No no no it wouldn’t, I would never let it! Because as long as she was in my body, in Anvil Base’s plexiglass cage with the Angelhammer and the plaque, Alaya was my only chance to redeem myself and save my country. I had to deal with her.

“Alaya, I’m going to need you to explain what you mean by this ?sickness?,” I said.

“Sure. I’ve had a lot of time since Japan, mister Truman, and I’ve spent all of it meditating on that painting. What it meant. Here’s what I’ve come to realize, and the Buddhists know this already: We’re trapped in an illusion, mister Truman. We think we’re all fundamentally separate from other people, from all other sentient beings, and because of that, we keep hurting each other. But every time we do, we’re really hurting ourselves, because . . . Well, because ourselves is all there is. That right there is the sickness, and that’s what I think the Angelhammer is here to cure.”

“Okay,” I said, but nothing was.

I wanted to throw up, but the stomach was empty. It all felt like some dark, old Star Trek episode, a twisted and inverted one where I could no longer tell who were the confused, backward aliens and who the intrepid, naïve explorers struggling to save them. But I couldn’t afford to lose focus. My country needed me, and I needed Alaya. My job, now, was to anchor her to reality as best I could, at least until she did the thing she had to do. The task might be impossible, but so was everything else. I cleared the throat.

“Okay, look,” I said. “I don’t know what you’ve seen out there these last hours, but me, I’ve been through dozens of different bodies in dozens of different countries, and none of them the one that I belong in. I’ve seen folks scared out of their goddamn minds, going crazy, bashing each other’s heads in and worse. And nobody knows who anybody really is anymore, and everyone’s fucking terrified, and everyone’s cutting each other’s throats. Whatever the Angelhammer’s doing, Alaya, it’s sure as shit no cure.”

“I get that you’re scared,” Alaya said. “Everyone is. But at least you have some kind of idea what’s causing this, and they don’t. Can you imagine what this must be like for them?”

“I don’t need to. I’ve seen it.”

“Sure, you’ve seen panic and rage and violence and all the rest, but have you felt it? Have you really felt what it’s like to shift into a new body time and time again and have absolutely no idea what’s going on and no way to deal with it? No goal, no course of action that you can try to take?”

“That’s not the goddamn point. The point is that everyone’s just ripped out of their lives, out of their communities and their countries and it’s impossible to trust anyone anymore! We have got to stop this, Alaya, we can’t have a world like this!”

“True. But we also can’t have a world like the one we had before.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Of course we can! All you’ve got to do is pick up—”

“No, listen. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to return humanity to its old state, mister Truman. I’m saying it’s wrong.”

“What the hell are you talking about? People are ripping each other’s goddamn throats out!”

“Some people are doing that, sure. Some people have always done that. The difference now is that no one can escape it.”

“I know that no one can escape it, that’s the point! It’s total anarchy, nobody’s answerable to anyone and we can’t trust anyone anymore! Don’t you understand, this is all insane!”

“I understand perfectly, mister Truman: You are a commander without a base, a soldier without an army, an American without an America. You don’t know who to trust anymore, but for you, that’s not even the worst of it: You no longer know what the boundaries of your compassion are supposed to be. Your entire life you’ve been trapped inside a moral perspective that’s been defined by your individual identity, the military that you’re part of, the country that you just happened to be born in. And the further people have fallen outside those categories for you, the less of a shit you’ve given about them. But now, all the structures that supported those concepts are gone. Every single person’s pain can become yours whenever, and not even your precious flag is gonna save you from that.”

I wanted to reach through the screen and rip her head off, then remembered that the head was my own. Instead I slapped at a desktop lamp, sending it crashing to the floor. The hand stung. I focused on the pain, used it to reign myself in. The body wanted to fight, but this was a different kind of battle. I would have to defeat Alaya with words.

“I’m sorry, Alaya, but this is bullshit. Those ?categories? you’re talking about, they are the only things that bring people together. If you don’t know who you are, you go insane. And if you don’t know who your tribe is, you die. They’re the building blocks of community, and that’s true for everyone, everywhere. It’s just the way the world is. Now I know your heart’s in the right place, you want us all to have empathy with each other and whatnot. That’s admirable and all, but this—this craziness that’s going on now, with everyone switching bodies like goddamn musical chairs—all it’s doing is tearing us apart. Trust me, Alaya: We don’t need this to have empathy.”

“Really? All right then, mister Truman, why don’t you demonstrate yours?”

“My what?”

“Your empathy. Prove to me that you have it.”

Suddenly the computer screen started spinning, and the room around it did the same. The stomach growled like a wounded animal, and I grabbed the desk to fight off the dizziness. There were no rules any more, no wonder the world was turning upside down, no wonder I—

No. Bullshit. It was a dizzy spell. Because the Chinese woman’s body was hungry. It probably hadn’t eaten since everything started, and . . . and most likely, neither had my own.

“Okay, Alaya. I’ll prove it,” I said. “Let me tell you how you’re feeling right now.”

Alaya said nothing, just looked at me through the screen.

“You’re feeling weak, there’s dizzy spells. Sometimes you feel m—. . . your stomach growling. And it’s harder for you to think than you’re used to. You’re hungry, Alaya. Real hungry. Am I right?”

Alaya shrugged my shoulders, smiled, and stepped back from the phone.

“As far as it goes. But considering the circumstances, I’d say that hardly counts as more than a deduction. The question is: Are you capable of truly feeling what another being feels? Do you care, mister Truman?”

“Of course I do! Listen, I want to help you, all right?”

“Great! So you’re gonna give me the code for the door?”

“No, Alaya. You’re getting out of the cage when you return to your own body. And that can happen right now. You know what you need to do.”

“And you know why I won’t. So how were you planning to help me?”

“You see that box on the ground over by the airlock door? The black plastic one, with, like, a white a handle on it? It’s a cooler. Go grab yourself something from it.”

Alaya cocked an eyebrow and turned to look at the box. She turned back, the eyebrow still cocked.

“I suppose I don’t mind if I do,” she said, then turned on my heel and strolled over to it.

I saw her kneel down by the cooler, open it, and rummage around. Then she closed it and stood back up, empty-handed. What . . .

She strolled back to the phone, taking her time.

I slapped the forehead. Of goddamn course.

I watched as Alaya trailed a finger along a desktop, breathed the base’s recycled air with slow relish. After what felt like forever, she was back at the phone. She looked into its camera and opened my mouth to speak, but I cut her off.

“You’re a vegetarian,” I said.

“Another successful deduction. Congratulations.”

“No, come on. I’m sorry, Alaya. I’m sorry there’s no salads or whatever, and—sincerely—I know how hungry you are right now and I wish there was—”

Alaya waved my concern away.

“Don’t worry about it, mister Truman. I’m out of the habit of eating anyway. But sorry, I’m still not convinced—”

“No, wait. Hang on a second,” I said.

Alaya paused, looked at me.

Out of the habit? Of . . . of eating? Who the hell would be out of the habit of eating?

She was waiting for me to say something, stroking my fingers across my chin, caressing the bristly stubble. Just like she caressed every little surface she passed, just like she constantly drank in the sight of everything around her.

Who the hell could go ten hours without shifting? Ten hours in a stranger’s body on a tiny boat without feeling the crushing, cancerous claustrophobia that puked your mind out from one foreign body and into the next?

I’ve had a lot of time since Japan, mister Truman, and I’ve spent all of it meditating on that painting.

All of it?

Who the hell wouldn’t have known about the Angelhammer? The only thing the world had been talking about for two months?

And who the hell would be out of the habit of eating? How would you even survive—

And I remembered. A feeling: something scratching and clogging my nose. A tube. A hospital bed.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

No wonder she’d gone crazy. Alaya’s body was in a coma.

She looked at me through my eyes, through the computer screen, and furrowed my brow in concern.

“Are you all right, mister Truman?”

I looked back into my body’s eyes, and I saw her there, deep in the pupils’ blackness. Something had happened to her, and that blackness had become her whole life. It had wrapped around her, tied her to a hospital bed, trapped her inside a body that refused to move, a body that pressed in on her, broke her mind and twisted her into something wrong and I knew that feeling, that goddamned feeling of being trapped in a body that was at war with me and I needed to vomit and to be vomited out and I pushed back from the desktop and leaned back in the chair and lifted my gaze to the—

. . . sky?

Everything tumbled, and a needle shock of pain shot up the spine as the ground knocked the air from the lungs.

The world smelled of leather and milk. A warm wind carried wailing and tired screams.

No. No. No. No. Not now. Not fucking now. I pounded fists on hard-packed earth and roared at the clouds.

Then the body sensations crept in. Hunger, of course, and the pain from the fall. The body felt strong but skinny, like a bird’s, too small too small it was crushing me into a shape that wasn’t mine, a shape of death and cancer eating into my soul and I wanted to twist out of it but it twisted with me and I couldn’t breathe couldn’t breathe—

No!

Jane. The car wreck.

The grief inflated inside me like a slow motion fire bomb. Burning in flames that never kill you, Alaya had called it. I let it burn my mind clean.

I needed a phone.

I sat up and looked around. Tiny shacks of old, corrugated iron lined a dirt road, a defiant attempt at a street. Sewage trickled through a narrow ditch, and plastic jerrycans littered the ground around a water post. A slum, a shantytown, warmed by an early morning sun. And there were people, of course. All of them Black, at least on the outside. Probably some African country.

I stood up, vaguely noticing that the body was a young man’s. The pain from the fall dulled quickly, and in its wake I felt something hard and angular pressing against the small of the back. I touched it through the T-shirt’s fabric. A gun. Best to leave that there for the moment. The body was wearing a pair of baggy jeans, and I gave the pockets a pat-down. No phone. I scanned the street.

A middle-aged man in a mud-caked suit sat hunched in the shadow of a nearby tree, hugging his knees and failing to hide behind its trunk. His body rocked back and forth, and he was weeping. A young woman stamped up and down the street, her eyes wide with terror, her every exhalation a desperate roar. A little girl in a frilly pink dress sat on the ground nearby, drawing in the dirt with a stick and muttering to herself in a steady stream of French. I walked over.

The little girl’s drawings weren’t drawings at all, but equations. Lines and lines of them. The shadow of my host body fell over her work, and she looked up. Her front teeth were missing, but a new one had just starting growing. It peeked through the gums like a baby iceberg. How old could she be? Five?

“Éloignez-vous, monsieur ou madame,” she said, her eyes hard from decades of loss and persistence.

“English?” I said, the voice a hoarse but commanding bass.

“Step away,” the girl said, through an accent as thick as an avalanche. “This work I am performing, it is this work that will save us!”

Whoever was inside the girl, theirs wasn’t the first such delusion I had encountered. People had been reacting in all sorts of ways. Some dealt by convincing themselves that they could figure out what had happened and set it right.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “That body got a phone on it?”

“I tell you foutre le camp—fuck off!” she snarled, with a viciousness that should have chilled me.

I reached back under the T-shirt, pulled out the gun and aimed it at the little girl’s forehead. An FNP-45. Its grip felt comfortable, its weight reassuring. I noticed a crude crown tattoo on the back of the hand.

“Phone,” I said.

The girl’s face oozed contempt.

“No phone,” she said, then nodded toward the suited man in the tree’s shade. “That one.”

I left the girl to her equations, slipped the gun back into the lining of the jeans, and made my way toward the tree. No sign of intentional danger, but I’d best keep an eye on the roaring woman stamping up and down the street. I made sure to maintain a clear line of sight on her as I approached the weeping man. That meant coming up on him from behind. I stepped closer, into the tree’s cool shadow.

“Hey, you. Give me your phone,” I said. The man screamed and started scrambling across the ground, but I jumped him, pinned him down, and pulled out the gun. A stream of sing-song gibberish issued from his quivering lips. His eyes were raw from crying.

“Give me your fucking phone. Now.”

Blinding pain blasted through me as something slammed into the head. Everything spun, and I fell to the ground. Ears ringing, my first thought was that I’d shifted again. But struggling up from the dirt, I saw that the hand still sported its crown tattoo. I saw the FNP-45 too, but it was way out of reach.

I turned and looked into the twin barrels of a shotgun. A huge, young man held it in a steady grip. The back of his hand was tattooed with a crown, just like my host body’s. The weeping man in the suit cowered behind him. I could hear them through the high-pitched whine ringing in the head, exchanging words in a lilting, sing-song language. The same language. Through a raging storm of random reincarnations, two countrymen had found each other under a tree in some African shantytown. Lucky fuckers.

The one with the shotgun asked me a question, but it was all foreign gibberish.

“English,” I said.

“Who is you? Why you attack?” he shouted, then jerked his elbow to indicate the suited man behind him. “This is child, you know! Baby!”

I stood up slowly and raised my hands. The situation was utterly fucked. No gun, no phone, no time. The only way out was to shift, but I couldn’t feel the claustrophobia. My head was too clear, too focused on my mission. Could I plan for it, force it? What if I charged Mister Shotgun over there, made him blow the body’s brains out? Would that do the trick? Or would I just die?

“Why you attack?” the man shouted again, lifting the shotgun to draw a bead on my—no, the body’s—face. “What you want?”

“Just a phone, goddamnit! Telephone!”

Mister Shotgun looked equal parts confused and disgusted, as if he couldn’t decide whether I was crazy or just dumb.

“It’s . . .” I started, but it was useless to explain. Instead I slowly moved my hand to point at the weeping man, then patted my borrowed body’s sides, where coat pockets would be. “Just . . . Telephone. Come on. Please.”

Mister Shotgun hesitated. He seemed to relax a little and sank to a crouch, his eyes and twin gun barrels still trained on me. Then he shushed the weeping man like a mother would a child. He reached into the man’s coat pocket and withdrew a beautiful, matte black smartphone. He threw a glance at its screen, then returned his eyes to me.

“Is locked,” he said, and I swore through the teeth.

“Wait,” Mister Shotgun said.

He laid the phone on the ground, then gently reached out and grabbed the weeping man’s wrist. He whispered soothing sounds, and I couldn’t make out if they were words or just comfort noises. There was a melody to them, I realized. Mister Shotgun was singing. The weeping man seemed calmer, now, and Mister Shotgun gently guided his hand to the phone, then pressed his thumb against it. He lowered the shotgun, used its barrel to slide the phone toward the edge of the tree’s shadow. Its app icons glowed like a rainbow.

“Take. And go.”

“Thank you,” I said, then knelt down and picked up the phone. I looked at the weeping man, and the weeping man looked back. He wasn’t crying anymore, but still frightened and confused. And inside of him was just a little kid.

“Thank you,” I said again, and I turned and walked away.

I made my way up narrow dirt roads to an old railroad track atop a high ridge that bisected the shantytown. Looking out over the maze of corrugated iron roofs, I figured I would be as safe here as anywhere else. I sat the tired body down against a tree and looked at the phone screen. The battery stood at 64 percent, and a 4G network was available. I thumbed the video chat icon and dialled my own phone’s number.

My face filled the screen almost immediately.

“Mister Truman! Are you okay?”

“Huh . . . Yeah, yeah, sure,” I said. “Uh . . . are you?”

“I’m fine, I’ve just been looking at pictures of your father. There’s a lot of him in you, isn’t there?

“You would know, I guess, seeing as how you’re in there too. Listen, Alaya—”

“No, I mean in your soul. Or whatever you want to call it, your personality. I see that exact same suffering whenever I look at you. It’s always there, behind whatever eyes you’re wearing.”

The stomach growled, and the thought came to me in Dad’s voice: It’s okay, because it has to be okay.

“Well, he had a lot riding on him, just like I do now,” I said. “I want to tell you something, Alaya. Are you ready to hear me out?”

“Of course, mister Truman. You can tell me anything.”

“You’re an empathic person, Alaya. No doubt about that. But you’re wrong about me. I don’t need to have my soul ripped out and shoved into someone else to know what their life is like. I feel people just fine. You wanted me to prove it, and here goes.”

My own eyes looked back at me through the screen, expectant and infinitely patient. Alaya didn’t say a word; this was my space, and she was giving it to me. I was about to give something back.

“Alaya, I know about your body. Your original body. It’s in a coma, isn’t it?”

For a second, it looked like the video chat had frozen.

Then I saw my lips move. Alaya searched for words, then found them.

“That’s . . . that ‘s just another deduction, Truman. We’re done here.”

Suddenly the on-screen image shifted as Alaya swung the phone away from my face. LED lights strobed as the view panned across the interior of Anvil Base’s plexiglass cage, dissolving into pixels as the Angelhammer flashed by. It tilted up to reveal the plexiglass ceiling, then down in a blur that smashed into a close-up of the ground and then darkness and I screamed and rushed to my feet but I was already standing up and a feeble voice echoed back to me through the bars of a dark, damp prison cell.

The stomach was a starved black hole, the throat as dry as death, and the legs shook under the weight of a fever-ridden body. The cell stank of despair. The body’s sickness and hunger melted into my creeping, choking disgust at being trapped inside it, but then a shock of cold terror overrode it all. As if through a blurry tunnel I saw a hulking silhouette fill the door frame. Its words were harsh snarls, and something scraped and clanged in its hand.

Keys. It was trying to get in.

A hunger pang shot through me, and the knees buckled like a felled deer’s.

No! I pulled the body up by a grimy sink, then scanned the darkness for a weapon.

Nothing.

The silhouette barked orders at me, jangled its keys in search of the right one. A shotgun hung from its shoulder. Behind its back I could make out a railing and beyond that another wall of cells dropping down and out of sight.

Of course there was a weapon. There was always a weapon.

“Ha!” the silhouette said. The lock clicked open.

I lifted a shaky leg, pressed the foot against the wall behind me.

The silhouette swung the iron bars to the side and laughed like a hyena.

Thump it.

I kicked off from the wall and charged the silhouette like a lineman. I smashed the shoulder into the silhouette’s torso, slammed its bulk through the cell door and up against the railing. It wheezed and gulped for air as I grabbed its knees and tipped it over. A half-second squeal was cut off by the wet crack of its head smashing into concrete three floors below.

A pool of blood blossomed around the body and its sharp, black uniform. The last of my strength spent, I slumped down against the railing.

Suddenly, saliva flooded the mouth. I smelled something: Chicken? What . . .

I lifted the head and looked to my left. The cells that neighbored my own were open as well, and inside them I saw men in bright red prisoners’ uniforms. They stared at me, chins greasy and mouths full. But the smell wasn’t coming from them. Through the corner of my eye, I saw something on the floor outside my own cell door, and I turned my head and looked out through a car’s windshield at an ocean of stars and a heavy, clouded sky.

Twin bombs exploded in my chest, but the explosion didn’t stop. Breasts again, big and pressing against a tight denim jacket, as if they were inflated with gravel. I fought to focus through the alien pain.

I was sitting on the passenger side, and the seat to my left was empty. The night time view in front of me was unmistakable. I’d been here before, with Jane, and seen it under a springtime sun. I was on an overlook, somewhere on Mulholland Drive, and the lights spangled out before me were Los Angeles. I was home.

The pain in the breasts swallowed me back up, and for a mad second I imagined them bursting with blood like the prison’s guard’s skull. My head spun, weightless and panicking like the prison guard tumbling through the air he wasn’t even a prison guard could have been anyone anyone could have been—

No!

I had done the right thing, goddamnit! I had done what I needed to do to survive, with the information available to me under the circumstances, and it was the fucking prison guard’s own fault he should have known what he looked like what he sounded like to me barking and snarling his foreign language like some fucking animal fucking foreigner had only himself to blame—

A piercing wail rose from behind me. An unfamiliar fear flooded the body, and an all-consuming need to act. I twisted around in the seat, and back there in the darkness, I could just about make out the shape of a tiny, screaming baby swaddled in a blanket. My heart raced. Jane and I had never gotten around to having children of our own, but every goddamn human being on the planet knew what this meant and what to do.

I dug my light, delicate hands in underneath the baby’s bottom and upper back, making sure to support their head as I lifted them into the front seat and lay them on my lap. Their wail weakened to a strange, arhythmic series of vocalizations. In the darkness I couldn’t make out any features, couldn’t even guess the color of their skin. All I knew was that this little American was born into a world where—

Shit. This little American was somewhere else entirely, weren’t they? Bouncing helplessly around from body to body, now in a UK hospital bed, now on the streets of an African shantytown. Meanwhile, someone else, some middle-aged Chinese woman, maybe, or some half-starved prison inmate, was in there, occupying their body like—

The baby wailed, and my breasts hurt like someone was filling them up with concrete. My anger vanished. I opened up the denim jacket and unbuttoned the blouse beneath it, freeing my aching bosom. I touched the left breast, felt it rock hard against my fingertips. The baby’s mouth on the nipple would no doubt hurt even more, but I didn’t care. Every cell in my body screamed at me to keep the little human alive, no matter whose soul was inside them.

I lifted the baby up to the breast, tried to position their mouth near enough to start feeding, but they just kept crying. I tried gently pressing their head toward the nipple, then laid the baby face up on my lap and bent over them, dangling the breast near the baby’s mouth. Nothing worked. The baby kept crying. Goddamnit, how fucking hard could it be? I needed Google.

My hands took turns stroking the baby’s head and rummaging though my pockets, the glove compartment, the—Ah. The driver’s seat. My left hand fished the phone up from the darkness, and the screen came alive with a photo of a grinning twentysomething white woman in the crook of a hispanic-looking guy’s arm. He was kissing the top of her head, his eyes closed. Behind them was a gaudy Christmas tree, and for some dumb reason, my eyes welled up. I quickly swiped my thumb across the screen, covering the photo with slick, bright icons. I flitted through them until I found the search engine, thumbed it and typed the words “how to breastfeed”. I hit the search button, and the phone slapped me with a message that I positively did not need: “No network connection”.

No wi-fi, no 5G, no 4G, no 3G. No internet at all, just a battery at 32 percent and . . . four bars of phone coverage?

The baby’s wailing was scrambling my brains, but I forced myself to think. Was there anyone I could call, anyone who—No, stupid! Of course not. Even if I had known anyone else’s number by heart, they wouldn’t be in their body to pick up. Jesus, how could I not have—

The baby screamed louder. The only number I knew was my own, and I’d seen Alaya smash my phone into the ground, goddamn Alaya who—

Who’d had a son who loved Star Trek.

I looked down at the crying, writhing weight in my lap. The pain in my breasts faded into nothing against the thought of losing my baby.

It was hopeless, of course, but I did it anyway. Hit the number, then the green call button. And then I waited.

And I waited.

Lights flickered in the distance below, then went out. A city block had lost power.

And then, through the baby’s tortured wails, I heard the ringing tone. My phone was still alive.

The tone pulsed for a tiny eternity. Then it stopped, replaced by the background hum of Anvil Base’s equipment.

“Do you still want the code for the airlock door, Alaya?” I said into the darkness.

Silence. Then: “Is . . . is that a baby with you?”

“Another successful deduction. Congratulations.”

Alaya chuckled. “Yes I still want the code. So what do you want badly enough to give it up?”

“I need you to teach me how to breastfeed.”

“Really? Even if it means I leave the plaque as it is and walk your body out of here?”

“Yes. Because you were right.”

“About what?”

“First you teach me how to breastfeed, then I tell you.”

“Sorry, no. First you give me the code, then I teach you how to breastfeed.”

“Really, Alaya? Is that as far as your empathy goes?”

“Mister Truman, I’d love to trust you, and I think you probably do believe what you’re saying right now. But your priorities might still revert, and if that happens when your body is occupied by someone who’s more suggestible than I am, I’d prefer it to be as far away as possible from the Angelhammer. Okay?”

She did have a point. What if all this was just maternal hormones drowning out my better judgment? But again the baby’s cries rose from my lap, and I knew that my better judgment didn’t matter.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll give you the first half of the code now, the second once the baby’s feeding.”

Another city block lost power.

“I’ll need a gesture of good faith, mister Truman.”

“Like what?”

“You said I was right. What was I right about?”

I stroked my hand over the wailing baby’s head. I really ought to give them a name.

“That I actually did need this,” I said. “The shifts. Maybe we all do.”

Alaya was smiling. I could feel it.

“Okay, mister Truman. Half the code now, the other once your baby’s feeding.”

“Six four eight seven.”

“Thank you. So. Where are you right now?”

“In a car, front passenger seat. The baby’s in my lap. I’ve tried to give it the breast, but it’s not, you know . . . taking it.”

“All right. The first thing you’ll want to do is recline the seatback. A 45 degree angle or so should be good. You’re gonna be feeding for a long time, so that will make it more comfortable for you. Take the weight off your arms.”

It made perfect sense. I reached down the side of the seat, found the recliner mechanism’s lever, pulled it, then pushed back. I lifted the baby up to my chest, but they still cried and refused the nipple.

“Done. Now what?”

“So the baby’s still crying, it’s upset. You’re going to have to calm it down before it’s ready to latch.”

“But I thought they were just crying because they were hungry?”

“That’s probably part of it, sure, but it still needs to be calm and secure before it will feed. Just hold it close to your body and breathe easily.”

“I am. It’s not working.”

“Hmm. Is there anything else you can do to soothe it?”

“I don’t know, Alaya, we really didn’t cover this at the Naval Academy or—”

And suddenly, I remembered. A man with a shotgun, crouching in the shadow of a tree, his hand around another man’s wrist. And he was singing.

I couldn’t recall the words, of course, but the melody came to me as easily breathing. I shaped gentle nonsense lyrics around it, an improvised language with no purpose beyond telling my baby that everything was all right, would always be all right. My song blended with the baby’s wails, then gradually replaced them, then softened to a whisper. I held the baby close, felt the warmth of their tiny, fragile body against my aching chest.

“Try again,” came Alaya’s voice from the phone.

I lifted the baby’s head to the nipple, let it touch the baby’s cheek, then felt the baby’s head turn and their mouth close over the nipple. They started sucking, and the relief was unfathomable.

Everything in the world was right there. I closed my eyes as tears pressed through between my lids.

“Does it have a latch now? Is it working?”

“It’s working.”

God. The feeling. I opened my eyes, let them feast on the city’s lights below, breathed in the deep, pungent scent of bay laurels.

This moment. It was everything.

“I get it now, Alaya. Why you’re doing this.”

Again I felt her smile.

“That’s good to hear, mister Truman. I knew you’d come around. You know, in Buddhism, you and I would be called boddhisattvas. We’ve found enlightenment through the Angelhammer, and now it’s our job to make sure that every sentient being on the planet can know the truth like we do. Or every human, at least.”

Alaya. What a weird, little zealot she was.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about all that,” I said. “What I meant was more . . . life, I guess. The way it looks, the way it smells. The way it feels. I get why you don’t want to return to your body.”

Silence.

“I was right, wasn’t I, Alaya? That it’s in a coma?”

Silence.

“Alaya? That’s why you’re doing this, right?”

Silence.

“Alaya? Are you there?”

“S-sorry, mister Truman, I . . . I don’t think I’ll be needing the last four digits after all.”

The call ended. What . . . ?

Huh. Weird. But there in the dark, with my baby nursing at my breast, I didn’t really care. Everything was there. I stroked the baby’s soft head as they suckled, saw their tiny, little eyes glittering in the night, and again I stroked the sharp, cold edge of a metal plaque and saw the two nude human figures etched into it, the male’s right hand raised in greeting. And I lifted my eyes and saw myself reflected there behind it, in the perfect curve of the Angelhammer’s mirrored surface: Commander Clancy Truman, bathed in the light of Anvil Base’s industrial LEDs.

There should have been fear, shouldn’t there? Or anger? But where my baby had been there was only the echo of a doubt, a sadness, and a deep, infinite sense of acceptance. The lingering feelings were Alaya’s, a snapshot of her soul at the moment she had decided to turn the Pioneer plaque back around after all.

I smiled. My skin felt like an old friend.

My phone lay on top of the dirt pedestal, right next to the golden plaque. Its screen was cracked from when Alaya had slammed it to the ground. I picked it up. The phone recognized my face and lit up with a picture of Dad, twisted and fragmented by the crack. He was in profile, at the breakfast table, unaware that he was being photographed. Dad was in the background of the shot, his guard down, but Alaya had zoomed in on him as if to leave me a final message.

And I saw it now. The hunch of his shoulders. The eyes that stared into nothing, because it was better than the day that lay before him. Better than the things he had to do to keep his family alive.

And I closed my eyes, and I was back there, in the pig-shed, and I saw myself through his eyes. A little boy, scared of all the wrong things, weak and incapable. And in his hand I felt the weight of a writhing piglet, and in his stomach the terror that his son would never have the strength to do what he’d need to do for his family, and as my father’s hand swung the piglet back, I felt the darkness rise with it, and when he slammed it, screaming, into concrete, a voice in his head screamed it’s okay.

It’s okay, because it has to be okay.

But the screaming didn’t stop, and again I saw myself there, but from below this time, through a screaming sow’s eyes and a pig-pen’s iron bars. And I wasn’t looking at little Clancy. I was looking at my baby daughter, the suckling with the birthmark on her rump, convulsing as she dangled from the monster’s claw, and I screamed because I felt it now, my last, defiant, glowing purpose ripped from my teat, my baby daughter screaming for me to save her from the confusion and the nightmare and all I could do for her was to slam myself into the pig-pen’s iron bars as her head slammed into the concrete and all I could do for her was to scream and watch her die and wish with every burning nerve in my body that the death was not my daughter’s but my own.

I opened my eyes.

The Angelhammer hovered there still, reflecting me. Looking at me. A perfect orb, suspended, waiting.

The phone in my hand was dead now, its screen displaying nothing but the crack. It fractalled across the shiny, black surface from bottom to top like a tiny work of art. Like the beautiful outline of the essence of a tree.

A tree on a poster on a hospital wall.

Alaya’s story echoed inside me: Then my master pointed to the parchment and asked me who it was, and before I could think, I had already answered. But what I’d said wasn’t Danny. What I’d said was ?All of us.?

And then I got it.

I stepped between the Angelhammer and the pedestal, and I leaned the phone against the Pioneer plaque’s back.

“Here,” I said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

I stepped aside and felt the desert air under my wings, firm and dependable as I soared toward the rising sun. The world was vast and sharp below me, and there, a mile away but crystal clear despite its camouflage fur, ran the hare that would sate my raging hunger. I banked and dove and readied my talons, and as my feet hopped across the sand, I felt my fluttering, little heart rejoice, because I could already smell my mate and litter in our home just up ahead.

Lars lives on the magical Nesodden peninsula in Norway’s Oslo Fjord, where he writes comics and speculative fiction. He sort of believes that, like his home, stories can work magic on people’s minds and the worlds that surround them. If you will allow him, he would very much like to test his theory on you.