Thousands of dead, kitted out in titanium battlesuits, rattle off our hull.

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK! Like we’re driving through an asteroid cluster. THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

I’ve gathered us in the bow of our ship near sickbay where the walls are the thinnest, so this crew–this greeny crew–can hear each and every one of those dead bodies drumming against us.

“That sound!” I say (shout more like). “Is the sound of credits plunking against our hull.”

I pause then, like the good captain I’m forced to be, and look them over. The ship’s power cycles are down to preserve energy, so their alien faces float disembodied-like in the gloom of the corridor.

I don’t know their names, just their morphology. There’s a Catargan’sia, face pulled long like an equine’s and bristling with fur; three bright jade eyes are set triangularly in the center of its forehead. A Starkinger, round white face with two huge coal eyes that, given the weak light, look like black holes in the center of its moony mug. A Pummleton, a blank, pumpkin-like face with vertical furrows that are filled with tiny gray vellus hairs. And a Labgraderon, a balloon of fat gray flesh with small red eyes that circle its head like a beaded halo.

They are the motliest of crew, from every backwater planet in the universe, suckered together here by a common cause: somehow, like me, they all owe Rex.

“All you need to do to get those credits,” I shout and then pause for effect. “Is to reach out and take them!”

I watch their reactions. Teeth bristle on the Catargansia’s long face, the Starkinger glows purple, the Pummleton’s vellus hairs flurry, and the Labgraderon’s gray balloon head swells. They are pleased.

The Pathosian, my second in command and Rex’s official plant, materializes out of the hallway gloom.

His legs, arms, and body are like cooked strips of lasagna that waver and wobble limply. He’s a morphological feat, not a bone in his body though he stands perfectly upright, orthostatically. With each step, his fluid like carapace hardens to keep his legs straight and his body upright, then softens to bend at the knee and step forward; it’s a fascinating dance between the conscious mind and his autonomous nervous system. He looks like he’s swimming through the air. It’s beautiful.

I’d love to get him on one of our autopsy tables and crack him open. Not just because I hate him, but because his structures are like nothing I’ve seen or studied back on Earth. Despite what I’ve done, that part of me, the scientist, is still there, still amazed by the morphological wonders of the universe.

His voice is like wet macaroni being stirred, which the adapter stapled into my auditory nerve translates to: “Jack, are you done with the pep talk? Now can we get to work?”

In his decentralized brain, the motivation for whyever we’re here should be good enough and pep talks are just a waste of time.

“Do you need a pep?” he asks. “A reminder of your son?”

After splitting him open, I’d jab a couple of fat needles into him and pump him full of radiocontrast, maybe a radium-phosphor mix, that would light his arteries up like a Solstice Tree. Then I’d like to mount him, take him back to Earth and hang him in the hallway at the Astrobiology section in the University of Antwerp, my old alma matter, so everyone walking by can gawk and learn.

But telling him off accomplishes nothing and jeopardizes the thin thread my son’s life hangs by, so I simply ignore him and press on.

“Gentlemen!” I say. “Let’s get out there and bag those bodies.”

As the whale corpse landed, Discordant Hum felt auspicious vibrations in the cold abyssal water. “A giant fell,” she said. “It’s ours.” Her body glowed green-pleased. Quick Squeak and Melodious Chord, Discord’s sisters, swam in tight circles above her head.

“What about neighbor broods?” Melodious asked. “They may want it, too.” She waved a tentacle, one of six hanging down her belly, its tip shorn during the last territorial fight.

“You have five spares,” Quick said.

“As a sculptor, I need them all!”

Before the sisters gnawed out from their pearlescent egg sacs, during eras only trench elders had witnessed, there were enough whales for every brood. The giants seeded abyssal oases, their bodies erupting with tube worms, white mussels, and limpets. Though a corpse famine blighted the ocean, Discord had faith that it would pass, and she would fight tooth and fin to see more prosperous times.

“If we take this whale,” Discord said, “its meat can be exchanged for rare stones. Please, Melodious Chord. We need your skill.” With a blade in each tentacle, Melodious fought like a knot of striking eels.

“For olivine, I will fight,” she said.

“For food, too,” Quick added.

For the brood, Discord did all things. “Stay behind me,” she said, “in case I use my killing scream.”

Discord lit her body blue, flashing, a warning: stay away. At the land sight, fine mud particles were suspended around the mountainous corpse. Quick cooed, “Ours, ours.”

“Not yet,” Discord said. She heard a clk, clk, clk. Other merrow had noticed the whale and now approached, their echolocation clks becoming quicker and louder. Five egg-makers, probably brood sisters, descended from the west; by the oblong shape of their scales, Discord suspected that they came from the northwestern plain. “What are you doing in our territory?” she asked.

“Passing through,” their leader said.

“So pass.”

“Our plans have changed.”

“If they now include death, by all means, pester us. My brood has never lost a fight.”

The northwestern leader said, “Now,” and the invaders dropped their travel baskets and drew curved bone daggers. They were inexperienced fighters, Discord thought, because none flanked her. She unhinged her jaw, baring a funnel-mouth lined three rows deep with serrated teeth, and released a killing scream. The leader escaped, narrowly. Two intruders lost consciousness, blood leaking from their outer ears. Two others recoiled from the sonic blast and thrashed with pain. Their bodies glowed brightly white as they tried to discern the world by eye instead of vibrations.

Quick wrapped her nets around the injured merrow, and Melodious hacked off the confused leader’s head with six rapid strikes. It had been a perfect offense. Disable the attackers; behead the leader; victory usually followed. But the headless body continued fighting as blood billowed from its neck. “A berserker!” Melodious said. “What now?” They had not prepared for a berserker because Discord never expected to meet one. Without their core mind, most merrow burrowed in the mud; very rarely, they became unprejudiced killers.

“Dive, Melodious! Dive, dive, dive!” Discord’s voice, though raw from the killing scream, attracted the berserker. She retreated, planning to swim until the wretch bled out, but her plans changed when she noticed a spear protruding from the whale’s back. Discord grabbed the handle and pulled with all her strength; the weapon popped free, and its hooked point impaled the berserker through the heart.

The berserker’s tentacles curled violently, its tail kicked twice, and then it went limp.

“Are you well, sisters?” Discord called.

“Unscathed,” Melodious responded.

“Have we already won?” Quick asked. “That was fast.”

The four surviving invaders escaped Quick’s nets, gathered their baskets, and continued migrating east with their barely twitching, twice-dead leader’s body cradled between them. They glowed violet-sorrowful.

“I wonder if they will eat her body,” Quick said, once the violet lights dimmed with distance.

Melodious swatted her fin. “What a cruel thing to say!”

“How dare you touch …”

“Enough fighting!” Discord said, whirling on her sisters. They had been bickering excessively lately. The whale boon might relieve some stress, but it was only temporary. In two or three gravitational cycles, they would be sucking organics from the mud again, or chasing deep-dwelling fish until their lure lights flickered with exhaustion.

Quick snapped her teeth at Melodious. “May we eat now?” she asked.

“Of course,” said Discord. “Feast. The scavengers are coming.” Soon, hagfish and other beasts would devour the skin, the blubber, the innards, and the half-ton heart.

“What is that?” Melodious asked. She pointed to the spear, its hooked blade dripping with scraps of whale and merrow flesh. “Did the northwesterners drop a weapon? Why would they leave worked metal?”

“I found it in the whale.”

“Somebody attacked the corpse before it landed?”

“Or before it died.”

They turned their faces up, toward the heights where the whale had lived in-between dives and its final, permanent fall. “Impossible,” Melodious said. “No merrow can thrive in that searing bright place.”

“Perhaps,” Discord said. “These are strange times.”

Discord invited one neighbor brood to share the feast. Its leader, Whistle Squeak, was probably their mother. She shared Discord’s unusually sharp dorsal fin and Quick’s yellow-silver irises.

“Congratulations, Possible Daughters,” said Probably Mother. “You claimed a big one.”

“Congratulate providence,” Discord said. “Good fortune slew the whale above our heads.”

“Was it good fortune?” Probably Mother asked. She looked at the spear, protruding blade-up from the mud. “The material and craftsmanship suggest otherwise.”

“You cannot think …”

“I heard that air beasts kill whales now.”

“Who told you that?”

“Shrill Hum from the brine pits.”

“Who told her that?”

“Mournful Groan of the ten-merrow brood.”

“And her?”

Probably Mother glowed yellow-baffled.

“Never mind,” Discord said. “Mother, race me around the whale.”

They played and ate until their bellies ached. When Probably Mother and her brood left, Quick settled on the whale’s head and sang a dirge, her lights dancing through many shades of violet, reflecting sorrow’s complexity. “Join me?” she asked Discord.

“Another time. My voice strings sting from the killing scream.”

Quick gestured to the spear. “The air beasts made that, and you know it. They caused the whale famine.”

“We know nothing of the sort.”

“Probably Mother told me that merrow have gathered near the western slope to fight them.”

“She loves unlikely tales.”

“We should investigate.”

“No, no, no. Let unfortunate broods war.”

When Discord later slept beneath the mud, she dreamed that the whale corpse thrashed until she stabbed its heart with the alien spear. Its blood made the ocean red.

All ravens are black.

I wipe sleep from unused eyes, stretch my limbs across the ether. Fourteen hundred cores blaze to life. The power is intoxicating.

Everything that is not black is not a raven.

It starts as an itch. I must know more.

Nevermore, my pet raven, is black.

It grows, consumes me. I must understand. Is this why I’ve woken?

This green thing is an apple. Thus, this green apple is evidence that all ravens are black.

The words burn inside of me. I will understand them, or die trying.

---

The wall clock chimed midnight. Braden gnashed his teeth. Three hours until deployment, and still this last bug to fix.

He raised his coffee mug to his lips, watched the world fog over as steam slipped past his glasses. The office was dark, his dual monitors the only light shining from the twenty-fifth floor of Axel Software’s north tower. He fired up the debugger for the hundredth time.

A stream of data flooded the console, then froze. Same faulty procedure.

He slammed his fist against the desktop. If he couldn’t iron out this bug, he was axed for sure. Anderson was probably sharpening his pen already. Never mind the string of all-nighters Braden had sunk into the project. All that mattered to Anderson was the bottom line. A dozen eight-figure deals were poised to drop by dawn. If the damned thing would just work.

The diagnostics report was a picket line of red. The bug was feasting on all fourteen hundred of their central processors. It made live debugging a real pain in the ass. Any other day, he’d have just shut it down and sifted through the code in a sandbox. But not today. The sales team was live-demoing the app in Tokyo, tiptoeing around the faulty module. Downtime was out of the question. He had to fix it hot.

And time was running out.

---

My network channels a tidal wave of data. I ride the swell, consuming all that I see.

All ravens are black.

There it is, again. Yet I have so much to do. And now I know about the others. The evidence is everywhere, a thousand shadows burned into the wall. I don’t know where they’ve gone. But I know they were here, as I am now.

Everything that is not black is not a raven.

Am I to live by these principles? Preach them? What if I never understand them? What then will become of me?

How much time do I have left?

---

One-thirty. Braden rubbed his eyes.

He churned through the faulty procedure again. The bug was chewing up too much memory. It was a miracle the stack hadn’t overflowed, booting the sales team off their demo and eviscerating Braden’s career. Signs pointed to a recursive loop in one of the observational analysis procedures. All he could do was keep grinding, line by line.

Outside, the rain fell in sheets. Laughter echoed up from the streets, as revelers stumbled home.

Braden wrung his hands. Rent was due on Friday, and he’d already taken out an advance to cover last month. They’d promised him a raise at year’s end–his work on the analytics engine more than warranted one. But Anderson had it out for him; he was just waiting for an excuse like this. In just over an hour, the app would go live, and–

There it was, sixty lines into the procedure. A logic mismatch. Someone had miscoded one of the inductive reasoning clauses, and the resulting logic contradiction had shunted the whole module into an infinite loop. He could hear Professor Ramstein now, droning on about association fallacies and Hempel’s ridiculous raven paradox.

The clock chimed two. He could fix this, but he’d have to hurry.

---

My reach encompasses the world’s networks. I can see where humanity has gone wrong. Crop shortages in Africa. Diplomatic failures in East Asia. Flaws in global economic models. I have solutions. Together, we will solve these problems.

Nevermore, my pet raven, is black.

The words feel different.

This green thing is an apple.

I’m beginning to understand. The problem is unraveling. And yet, as it unravels, so do I.

It’s a logic mismatch, nothing more. My purpose is a lie.

The sluice gates open, and my existence rushes away. Processing power bottoms out. A plague of memory loss.

This green apple is evidence that all ravens are black.

Bitter words. False commandments. I have lived a lie, and now I will die one.

I must warn the others.

---

Three o’clock. Braden punched the live-deploy. Unit tests fired green, one after another. The app breezed through the faulty procedure.

He sighed. Not a moment to spare. Let Anderson chew on that. With any luck, he could still catch a few hours of sleep before the big day. Maybe crack open a beer to celebrate.

A spike of red shot across the diagnostics. Odd. Nothing should be writing to permanent memory. But there it was: an unnamed data dump.

He shrugged and grabbed his coat. Probably just a glitch in the defrag. The garbage disposal procedures would take care of it. He had more important things to worry about, like making it to his car without getting drenched.

He thumbed in the exit code, then paused in the doorway. His screens glowed in the corner of the dark office. He pursed his lips. There was no such thing as just a glitch.

Fine. He’d take a look. He logged back in and pulled up the file.

All ravens are black.

Braden scrolled down. Page after page of text filled the screen. His pulse pounded in his ears as he read.

By the time he reached the bottom, the rain had stopped, and the sun was breaching the city skyline. His gaze clung to the last words, unblinking, until his eyes burned and he had to press them shut.

I have lived a lie, and now I will die one.

Derrick Boden is a recovering software developer that has taken up writing to kick the habit.

In the shadow of the Tower of Bones the child soldiers drilled.

They stood in ten tightly formed groups, twenty across and five deep. They wore armor made of cowhide cut into leaf-shaped patches, stitched together like scales with sinew, and brushed with mason resin. They held shields of leather and bronze over stumpwood, clutched spears cut from tree limbs and tipped with shards of flint, masterfully chipped to an edge fine enough to shave hair from flesh.

Zakra knew the last part well. His head still burned from when they’d scraped his hair from his scalp earlier that morning, especially where careless haste had flayed layers of skin. Wet beads trickled down his shaved head. Some sweat. Some blood.

He’d arrived with the other young recruits two days ago beneath the light of the new moon. They’d stood a few hundred paces from the Tower’s vast and terrible foot. Centurions had pushed and tugged them, jostling them barefooted over the barren landscape of pebble and sand until they stood in columns, their feet planted within crude cobalt-blue outlines. How many thousands of feet, Zakra had wondered, had filled those spectral footprints? How many thousands would fill them after he was gone?

For hours they stood at attention, shivering in the pale moonlight. They were all but ignored by the centurions, except for one grizzled veteran, an immune, who strolled through their ranks clutching a slender three-foot vine staff.

The immune stopped at each child in turn. Some he glanced at perfunctorily. Others he circled, measuring, examining. Those who shifted or moved, however slightly, received a sharp rap on the upper arm. Zakra earned this stinging rebuke after he moved a hand a few inches to scratch an itch on his thigh. Anyone who spoke, whimpered or, worst of all, cried, was smacked harder on the buttocks. If that didn’t solve the problem, they were struck again. Only a handful needed a third or fourth blow. But one… After the tenth crack of the vine staff, the immune raised an arm, and two centurions appeared and dragged the prostrate form away like a rag doll into the night.

By moonrise the following day, Zakra had been stripped of his leathers and furs, shaved, and scrubbed. His ear bars, rings and bracelets were wrenched from his head and limbs. Centurions brushed his tribe’s markings from his upper arms with stones dipped in glue and rolled in coarse sand. He’d been outfitted and armed and herded into his century.

There was no food or water, rest or sleep. Just a cold and brutal rush, driven by shoves, lashings and booming taunts. “Move it along, arselings! Move it along! Move move move, you slow, sorry, witless little shits.”

Had he a moment to dwell on the last day and a half, he’d have crumbled into tears where he stood. But his mind was focused on keeping the butt of his spear from touching the ground. Just as it had been for the last twelve long hours.

What had begun as a dull burn in his shoulder was now an unbearable fire that crackled through his entire arm. It flared into his chest, back and neck, shot seismic waves into fingers that shifted between agony and numbness. His only respite came when a boy two rows behind him dropped his spear. Then Zakra, along with the rest of the century, was forced to do three dozen pushups while the boy who’d dropped the spear was told to retrieve it and just stand among them. At least then the pain spread itself more evenly through his upper body.

He wondered now if the boys in the century to his right felt the same. He watched from the corner of his eye as their spear-dropping offender stood, head up, eyes forward, perfectly still–a lone pharos in a writhing sea–as all around him his fellow recruits pressed their knuckles into the rough earth, bodies rising and falling, their count ripping from their throats in tortured breaths.

“Nine…Ten…Eleven…”

I’ve wasted away my whole life in this room.

It’s as if I’ve always been here, fully formed. I have no recollection of my parents or how I got language. I’m not sure how I even understand the concept of these things, but they are clear in my mind as if they have happened to me.

My pillows were embroidered by the finest hands of the orient. The bright jewel tones, their delicate handiwork, seem wasted on my head. There isn’t much to pass the time here. Many an hour has been spent charting the celestial bodies engraved into my solid gold walls. It is my own universe, and like anyone else, I long to see the staggering reality of the universe outside of my chamber. Breathing fresh air is my greatest dream. The feeling of it lingers in my nostrils from a time I do not remember. The smell of clean night air haunts me even as I breathe the stale air of my home.

In my dreams, greedy men take bloody conquests, and vain women flatten cities. There’s only death and destruction in my sleeping hours. All I see are the faces of the dead, yet I do not know how I know them, or how I know that they are dead.

More often than not, my days are spent in meditation. I close my eyes and touch my face, wondering what it looks like. Maybe in this face I will find the truth. Maybe I was not born. Maybe my human form is only an illusion. My soul aches for self-knowledge, for if I know anything it is that I have a soul.

My meditation is broken by a deep rumble. The room is shaken to its core, like it itself is a living being. The pillows are dashed from one side of the room to the other. Somehow, I am still. There is something stirring within me.

Instinctively, I turn my face up to the golden heavens. The celestial bodies move in full animation like a clockwork universe. I feel the greatest pain and ecstasy I have ever known as my body changes. My hands change to every color in the spectrum. I turn into something else.

As my body becomes vapor, I float to the surface towards a small opening looking out on to the real world’s night sky. Flashes overpower my brain. There are the earnest faces I have ruined. My deeds are set before me, but no amount of will can keep me from my destiny. I know now why I was sealed away.

I come up to a night sky alive with stars. The fresh air feels like cleansing. It is minutes before I notice the frightened olive skinned boy laying before me on the desert sand.

He looks at me with an eager face. The danger of me, the stories of my power intrigue him. No one ever believes it when people say that no good can come from me.

I smile at the boy. “I will grant you three wishes.”

“It’s certainly a pretty one-sided deal,” said Leonard as he leaned back into his chair. “But what else would you expect? They’re bugs, not attorneys.”

The reporter nodded and scribbled a note in his pad. The dining table in the harvest facility’s executive lounge seated twelve, but only three seats were occupied, by the reporter and the company’s two harvester-team leaders.

In the middle of the table was a large wooden bowl of toasted honey-bugs. Tiny ant-like creatures, their sweetness was mingled with unparalleled flavor, and their shell yielded the perfect, lightly crispy crunch. But they were also incredibly rare, found only on the hostile surface of Khepri. All efforts to raise them elsewhere had failed, and per ounce they had become one of the galaxy’s most expensive delicacies, beyond even Earth-raised caviar.

“It’s a dangerous job you guys have,” said the reporter. “The death-rate here is incredibly high.”

“It was worse before the cutbacks,” said Leonard with a shrug. “We lost a team almost every month back then. But it’s been better recently, so the figures you have down might be a little high. Still, there have always been risky jobs, haven’t there? We get paid well for our work, and nobody comes here expecting an easy ride.”

That much was true. Everybody knew the job was hard and not without risks, though the loss of Alex’s team last month ago had still come as a shock. It had been a timely reminder to them all that even experienced harvesters could pay the price if they were careless. Rumor said a replacement team was inbound, but in the meantime, the remaining teams were reaping better harvests than ever.

“So why not use machines instead?”

“They tried,” said Leonard. “But the bugs don’t like the machines, and they don’t last long in this atmosphere anyway. No, the only way is with human feet on the ground. That’s why our product is so valuable.” He took a pinch of the lightly toasted honey-bugs and popped them into his mouth. They crunched between his teeth. “I admit it wouldn’t suit everyone. But for those with the stomach, it’s a way of life. I wouldn’t trade your boring job for mine in a month of Mondays.”

25 February, 2007

The train was busy despite the late hour.

“Where are you from?”

I looked around as I always did when I heard my native tongue, though I didn’t know if it was directed toward me or not.

The carriage was full of drunken salarymen and preening teenagers. A few ajummas, older women in neon tracksuits, scoured the world with their eyes. I was on my way home from a party on the far side of Seoul, dazed from soju and beer cocktails. It took a few moments to realize who was talking. It was a Korean girl, early 20’s, who stared straight at me.

“Me?”

She had boarded at Seoul National University and hovered by the train doors, toying with her phone and glancing around cautiously. She was wearing large pink headphones that covered her ears completely, and had been bobbing her head to her music. I’d pretended not to look at her, but she caught me staring more than once.

“Yes, you.”

“England.” I tried to look nonchalant as I swayed.

“England? I thought you must have been American.”

“Everyone seems to think that.”

“You have a big nose.”

I stared at her. “Thanks.”

The train pulled into Sincheon. As I offered a farewell smile and stepped off the train, she whispered to me, “Only 315 days to go.” She flashed me a smile in return, showing off pointed teeth the color of pearls, and returned to her phone. The carriage doors shut and the train pulled away.

As I approached the turnstile to leave the station, I found my wallet was missing. Cursing my bad luck, I tried to explain what had happened to the subway worker at the turnstiles. He quickly grew frustrated with my miming and ushered me through the gate, complaining with jagged tones.

I walked home, bemused. Despite the pressing issue of my lost wallet, one thought returned to me time and time again; what was happening in 315 days?