“Did you know that there are no true whales left? You see, we ate them all. We…we needed the blubber.“ — extract from an email sent by senior personnel at Osaka Arcology Bureau of Administration to the same at Oslo Arcology.

Editor’s note: there are in fact gene-modded whales alive.

The homeless man screamed. The noise rose, arcing to a crescendo, before terminating with a whimper. In the background, Berenice’s retching could be made out.

Soleri stared. He was an actor in another drama, ice seeping in and out of his chest, turning the contents of his veins into slush. This was…what could be said of his life that he had seen worse? That, by some definitions…he had authored worse?

Some of Class 2095-13 had begged to leave, and Martin Soleri wondered at Sviratham’s permissiveness. The instructor had granted them that allowance, a hand on their shoulder, words whispered in a voice that didn’t carry. What vicious surprise are you planning now?

“No!”

His eyes zipped back to the scene. A needle, one as big as his own forearm, rose above the poor man’s chest.

Isla Calix stared, eyes gone flint at the man. What is she thinking?

A careful, almost loving hand sought the vagrant’s head. Matted hair the color of granite fell away. Another hand placed the saw at a gradient along the strapped man’s head.

Viktor Solzhenitsyn placed one hand on his mouth, his shoulders high.

“Please! Please, Please…!“

“I’m doing this,” a dense and layered voice said,”for us all.”

The saw cut the man’s head and blood flowed. A hazy cloud burrowed down a gasping throat and the man grew still.

The scene speed up.

An eye and its connecting nerve was removed from one socket, placed on a bed of velvet. A piece of metal — glinting in the manner of mattermetal, the skin of Regials — was fitted inside the man’s skull.

A pause.

Cameron Westerfield shook his head, disgust at war with fascination. What do you see, Westerfield? The necessary choice turned real, with all of the attendant horrors?

The eye shot back like a jojo, swerving, rolling and the man’s head rotted from the inside. His skin flaked away, at odd intervals melting, creating a figure with a bisected face— one half like an old wax doll, the other all too human.

The scene froze. Lisa Hong whispered something to her twin, who stomped his foot on the ground.

The other eye stared at Martin.

In that orb, Martin Soleri thought, there was no anger. No wrath. There was acceptance. A sense of this, this being it.

He ran past by Sviratham, out of the distilled digital essence-pocket and out into the real world, where someone had placed several buckets. He missed.

_____

“Adit Havrasalam.”

They sat in a classroom of steel, all three dozen of them, the members of Class 2095-13. At the mention of the architect who created the first forerunners, some blanched, others nodded and Martin shook himself.

Sviratham sighed.”Moral and ethics are contingent things. That is, they remain fixed to a time and place, and taken out of their context, become barbaric.”

“He was a scientist,” Berenice forwarded.

“He was a dreadful monster,” Saolirin protested.

“Sometimes the ground need to be burnt, before the seeds can take root,” Solzhenitsyn suggested, though his voice was faint.

“Without forerunners,” Westerfield said, eliciting silence from the rest of the 2095-13,”there’d be no war. We wouldn’t be able to patrol any of the freeholds that exist outside of the arcologies, the crime in the provincial camps-“ he chanced a look at Soleri, who didn’t quite smile,”would soar and the primary focus of the forerunners, to scout, would be placed on the common man.”

“The Saint Society-“

“Are mad, Calix. Most people are not going to fight the Host, not without Field-extant technology,” Guo Hong retorted. In the two weeks since Sviratham’s introduction of exo respectively endoaurics, Hong had remained taciturn. Perhaps even humbled?

“Havrasalam was prosecuted. They never judged him, yes?” This from Isla Calix, who was scything through a screen, furiously swiping at digital pages. What are you looking at?

“In a military tribunal, the jurors of which had just gone through the full measure of the Devastation,” Saolirin quipped.”We’re talking about people who’d close the arcologies to those they deemed unfitting.”

“Sexual deviants, criminals, cattle barons-“

“Oh, can it, Somaronov. Just because you’re sexually repressed— don’t take it out on others,” drawled Solzhenitsyn.

Her blue eyes narrowed. Drew blood, did he?

“At least I had a set of parents to teach me what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Viktor’s eyes lost all emotions. Martin shivered. He had seen reactions like that before, but never for long.

“Enough,” Sviratham declared, his voice quiet, and all the more forceful for it. A lesser teacher might have shouted, but Raja was a lot of things, lesser would never describe him.

“Apologize, Somaronov. Solzhenitsyn, you’ve made your thoughts about your peers and their sexual habits quite clear. As such, you’ve been volunteered to a education program in the camp of Sala. There you will, as you have just done, educate others.”

Ronja Somaronov stood, bowing at a perfect degree, the negative space of which formed a triangle.

Viktor Solzhenitsyn stared at the Instructor. If their first show-off had been furious, before the Examination, then this was ice against ice.

Brown respective amber eyes, Martin thought, should never look that cold. Viktor pulled at his beard, hand over his mouth. That brown limb rose, pulling through his hair. “Of course I will. I’m honoured to further the education of our less esteemed youth,” he said, every syllable straight, the Trade textbook clear. There was a promise there.

In a other person it might have been called hesitation, the quicksilver expression that roved Sviratham’s face—his mouth puckering, the lines of his forehead forming great ridges, a liver spot descending— before his face smoothed out.

He’s going to go to his program, but before, he’s going to hurt her.

“…as Somchai Saolirin remarked. The men and women who judged Adit were traumatised. By modern standards, coddled. But the early twenty-first century was a different age. Softer. No wars to harden the calluses. No mandatory fighting classes, to ensure that the young knew how to fight. Obesity— the disease of the body, when men and women gorge themselves at length ran through society.”

Why does it matter? I don’t owe her shit.

“Thoughts, Soleri?”

Two dozen chairs scraped against the metal of the floor.

Martin’s smile grew fixed as the rest of 2095-13 stared at him. He hadn’t been paying attention, and they both knew it.

“There is no fat to trim in today’s society,” he said to some laughs,”and there is little…”

Sviratham patently waited.

Martin thought about the way of life he had grown up with. The way young girls and boys would go north and high, hunting actual living deer to sell for great amounts of credits—some of which would return, others would just be lost. Maybe they fell down a cliff, broken and lost, food for the wolves that had at last returned to Sweden. Maybe some manner of Host got them. A shrike, one of the Regials that could fly, perhaps.

He thought of the dancing! Of how, when the moon was clear and the rain ushered down, they’d dance to the echoing beat of water slushing down metal roofs.

But that was just for the camps.

In the arcologies there was splendor and safety. They could demonstrate. There was always light. Food could always be found and they needed not to fear an open sky. Yet.

There was an edge. Here, as Sala. The way Calix had so utterly rejected him in she understood things. Somaronov, thinking nothing of bringing up a trauma to win a mere contest for pride. He had even heard a story of how Westerfield had impaled Viktor Solzhenitsyn simply to make a point.

All arcology born.

“We’re soft,” Martin Soleri said and his peers rustled.”You say that they’re soft, the people who come before. And maybe they were—I don’t know. But I do know we’re hard, sharpened by seven decades of war and so hard and sharp that the blade will shatter if you bend it wrong. That makes us soft, too.”

Sviratham nodded at that, face so unexpressive as to be its own suggestion.”Thoughts?”

“That, Soleri, could be interpreted as an idea—that the war we’ve warred is wrong,” Guo Hong said, his voice like a razor.

“Isn’t it?”

Somchai’s voice was…sad didn’t quite cover it.

“I don’t know about you, but where I come from, they put children on tables, just like good ole’ Adit would’ve liked.” Brown eyes held the rest of the Class of 2095-13.”Squeeze out a couple of thousand more Deputies, at the small cost ten times the number of dead.”

“Without forerunners-“

“We heard you the first time, Westerfield.”

Calix paused.”Nobody’s saying the red math of it all doesn’t get to make you queasy.”

She stared then, at Soleri.

”I do understand.That’s the problem.”

“But sometimes,” she said, eyes still on his face, boring, imploring, wanting him to understand,”we’ve got to be tough on those we love.”

_____

The lesson had ended since two hours, yet that sense of being persecuted still persisted. Of chairs turning, and hard eyes zeroing in one’s face. A soft hand, stroking the neck. Maybe it was different for an arcology-born. A One:er, who never had police officers hunting with luminous LEDS attached to sticks, shining against ancient metal among the stacks of the camps.

But this was hostile.

He stopped at a junction. People milled around him, back, to the left and right. Several trams moved through the four-way. In the center, of the ‘cross’ formation, there was a statue of some famous World Premier. Not any of the first ones. Those men and women had been tyrants, and the world would celebrate their necessary hardness, but never publicly.

Above, the grey-painted ceiling, wider than the span of his sight bloomed, showing a androgyne in a cassock of dawn, bearing that stylised ‘R’ that was the trademark of the House of R.

Martin paused. Somchai had mentioned that brand before they fought, hadn’t he?

Asked where he got a jacket from.

A friend. That was what he had said. A friend had picked it for him.

The Chassis manifested on him and he eased gravity’s tug. He rose above the crowd, who exclaimed. The strands of white cloth that was his Chassis unfurled to a wind that was neither here nor there.

Well, time to see who’s following who.

The world fractured according to his will; that much he had learned, the distance between two points became a tunnel mere milimetres long, and through the portal the Skyline habitat could be made out.

He rotated the door-shaped portal for the crowd to see and a Proxy with a Chassis made of white cloth entered that portal, though they winked before it shut off, to the crowd’s delight.

Martin Soleri breathed out, dismissing two of the four exoaurics he had created. Those two…they did not strain his Field, for he had ensured that the gate was open for moments and the illusion quite haphazard, but all the same, they would exhaust him the longer they were maintained.

He landed on the ground, gravity’s hand pushing him down again. Sightless and soundless he strode through the crowd, watching over his back.

This will fool some of the gullible ones. Not Westerfield, or the Twins. But then, Solzhenitsyn wouldn’t be going after him. As for the Guos, they’d earn their claim in a debate and Westerfield had made his thoughts about fighting other Proxies clear.

This was Somaronov, Calix or some of the…he hesitated to call them normal ones, but compared to the leading lights of the class the rest were that. Still, it wouldn’t do to underestimate them.

He moved through a mall— noting the clear glass doors, in which the crowd was reflected, but no familiar face— and out into a gymnasial district, where he promptly entered a huge stadium. Rows towered above him, thousands of them. In fact, he couldn’t see the ceiling, standing so close to the entrance.

Here, people of all ages competed. In one section, he saw pensioners doing tai-chi, in another, oiled youths throwing discusses in the Greek manner.

A circuit snaked through the oval of the stadium, and runners in five different lanes made their way.

A public place, but not too public.

“Come out!”

Martin Soleri turned visible, and waited. As he had begun to learn exoaurics, so had the rest of the class. The world shimmered, oily slicks of the rainbow parting in a curtain.

A horned lord in red, white hair streaming down. Two horns, curling back.

Oh yes. Isla Calix sure was a sight.

“Hello Martin.”