STILL LIFE

WITH SKULL

 

MIKE ALLEN

 

Mike Allen edited a trilogy of weird fiction anthologies called Clockwork Phoenix from 2008 to 2010, and thanks to the miracle of a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign, he’s now in the process of assembling Clockwork Phoenix 4. A 2008 Nebula Award finalist, his stories have appeared most recently in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Not One of Us. His first short fiction collection, The Button Bin and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Dagan Books, and his first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, is on its way from Black Gate Books. You can learn more about his work at descentintolight.com and www.mythicdelirium.com

 

 

THIS PART I remember. My old life ended here. What’s left starts this way:

When that girl from the belowground stole into my workshop, I wasn’t wired for running. I was wired for show. I had to be my own saleswoman without having to speak a word.

My cranium had corners, and each one sprouted a chain that helped suspend my head from the grid of railracks overhead. A bit illusory, those chains, as neurofibers wound through them, so I could sync the bearings as I rolled my dangling head along the grid from one end of the shop to the other. No need to stick close to my body. The tubing from neck to trunk could flex and telescope a long way.

I kept my body simple, an elegant cube with two slender alabaster arms worthy of any Venus curving out from each vertical face, balanced on a single pair of sleek, muscular legs. Everyone wants to perch on beautiful legs and that never changes. Who’d trust me with their bodywork if I couldn’t shape a pair for myself?

I don’t do the full works. Integration with nanorobotics, consciousness transplants, I don’t touch that ghost-in-the-machine garbage. Coming to me for genitalia removal’s like asking a hivemind to add single digit integers, but most everyone’s had that taken care of long before they ever consider my services. Removing a heart, replacing it, I’m happy to do that and good riddance to those useless antiques. Duplicate pumps throughout the body, replaceable on request, that’s the way to go. My most requested modification, but I can do so much more.

I had a client split onto three different tables, connected by fibers and hose. I choose to keep up a pretense to gender but this customer did not out of deference to the Hierophant hirself – a deference I don’t share, but I respected hir wishes nonetheless.

Se wanted hir head nestled in earflaps like flower petals atop a long stalk, descending into a birdcage of ribs that would moan musically when se breathed. And legs, always the sculpted legs. My head hovered over hir as my hands did the delicate work.

And that crazy painter, Encolpio, the one with the natural-born, unaltered body that ought to be archivally preserved before the fool simply dies of old age. He was there. He loved to paint me and the clients I worked on. I let him hang out for the sake of atmosphere. Something to make my shop stick in the memory. These denizens could go their whole lives without ever seeing anything like him.

The oil fumes wafted from his canvas, coursed across my tongue. My customer sighed and fluttered hir eyes as I reconnect the last cranial fiber, and it chimed soft in hir torso, a slow gong. The door into my workshop irised open, though I’d heard no request for access and granted no permission, and the girl who stepped through it said, “Unmake me.”

I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but at the same time my client managed to swivel hir head on the table, stared with narrowed eyes at the intruder and blurted out through hir ribs, “You don’t belong here!”

How fast that girl moved, right up to the tables in a blink, and thick fibers sprouted from her palms, winding all through the cavities in my customer’s torso. Hir eyes fluttered and shut and hir mouth went slack.

The painter dropped his brush.

“Don’t play dumb,” the girl said. “One touch and I’ll know if you’re lying.”

My body configuration wasn’t tailored for quick escape. Before I could even run I had to contract my neck and position my body where I could withdrew my chain-tentacles out of the ceiling grid and perch my head like a spider over the cube of my body. That would take at least ten seconds.

I met the girl’s gaze. She glared back with grids of diamond-shaped pupils. The woven gray cloth of her unisuit, its fibers perhaps made from real animal hair, marked her as a belowgrounder. Dark hair trimmed almost to her scalp, knees bent and back hunched in an aggressive stance – I knew she had to be enhanced in all sorts of ways but she hadn’t deviated from the basic human blueprint that so many denizens of the Hives eschewed. Her smooth features made her appear just past pubescence, but who could really know anymore? And how could she possibly know about unmaking? About me?

“Why would you ask such a thing?”

“I’m not asking.”

“From everything I’ve heard, unmaking is a complex and traumatic process.” I wasn’t about to admit aloud that I’d ever re-engineered a living, conscious person’s DNA to completely change them at the cellular level. Talking about it would definitely perk up the Hierophant’s nanoscopic Ears. Admitting knowledge will bring hir minions straight to you in a matter of minutes. Actually doing it – well, that’s best left unsaid. “Not one bit of equipment in this studio could be used for such a thing.” I spun my body a half-step closer to her. “You want to see if I’m lying, the base of my neck’s the easiest place to plug in.”

She continued to stare.

“Is se going to be all right?” Encolpio pointed at the unconscious customer. The intruder glanced his way. Then dashed at him. He swung his easel between them, a completely ineffectual defense.

I rolled my head toward my body at triplespeed and dropped out of the grid.

The girl tried to immobilize Encolpio the way she had my customer, but despite his antiquated body the old man proved surprisingly agile at staying just out of her reach.

Some ancient customs still make practical sense. I touched fingertips to the central counter in my surgical array. A drawer sprang open.

“Stop it, kid!” I shouted. She turned and I made sure she saw that I held firesprayers in three of my four hands, all aimed at her. “You can leave now.”

Her eyegrids widened.

My entry bell sounded again. And I knew that couldn’t be a customer. “Who is that?” I demanded, but the girl set her jaw and glared.

“Hey, Athiva,” Encolpio said, “can you stop whoever that is from coming in here?”

I couldn’t get to the controls quickly enough anyway, and in another moment it didn’t matter, as once again the portal opened without seeking my input. Clearly I needed a security upgrade at the next install opportunity.

The girl started breathing harder, in excitement or fear – I’d not seen a physical reaction like it in years. Then she said, “Do you have another way out?”

Encolpio replied “No” at the same time I narrowed my eyes and said, “Yes.”

As the painter started, the girl said, “Better use it.”

Four figures stepped through the portal; all naked, all sexless, all identical, each about the size of the girl. One of her eyes turned to track them while the other stayed fixed on my weapons.

With my chain-tentacles I gripped the corners of my shoulders tight. And I ran. My body aimed where it needed to go, I swiveled my face and firesprayers toward the newcomers.

All of them split and bloomed, their pink innards unfolding in a manner more mechanical than fleshy, interlocking together and slotting into each other to form one much larger creature. I uttered a noise somewhere between a gasp and a shriek as the resulting monster raised six massive arms and brought two of them down on my unconscious customer and crushed hir.

Red stripes of oxygen-consuming aerocapillaries roped across the golem’s thoracic chambers, giving it grotesque symmetry as it bounded over my work tables, a thing made of raw, glistening muscle that combined elements of toad, monkey and spider. It had no head, no visible sensory organs.

The juggernaut scrambled at us. I’m no fool. It might be there for the girl, but it would leave no witnesses. I squeezed two of my sprayers, sent jets of fire right into its exposed guts. No mouths opened but the thing screamed and recoiled, its components peeling apart.

And immediately recombined, jettisoning what had charred, the new shape more compact with more legs that bent and sprang to propel it through the air, straight at us. Spraying it would just result in a mass of burning flesh raining right on top of us. I reached the far wall and slammed my free hand palm-flat against the hidden scanlock.

The emergency door dropped straight down into the floor, leaving a rectangular gap. I spun through. As I slapped the scanlock on the other side I confess I wasn’t paying close attention to whether my impromptu companions in flight made it through.

A deafening thud as the door pistoned back into its place with a burst of blood and torn flesh.

The girl, curse her speed, had passed through the opening before I had. A bloody tangle lay where the door had gaped. My hearts pounded until I spotted Encolpio across from me in the secret corridor, scrambling backward away from the mess.

The quivering parts on the floor began to rearrange themselves.

“Back!” I shouted, and hosed the rising mass with the firesprayers. Smoke filled the corridor before the ventilation sucked it away.

Fists pounded the wall from inside my shop, the other half, trying to find us.

The girl hadn’t run, nor had she tried any neurofiber moves on me. I trained my weapons on her again, their nozzles still smoldering. “Who are you?”

“Procne,” the girl said.

“Is that your real name?”

Her lips pursed before she answered. “It’s the name I have.”

Another pound on the wall. “And what is that? And why is it chasing you?”

Encolpio tried to speak, coughed, started again. “Can we do this somewhere else?”

“No,” I said. My livelihood was ruined, the chosen existence I’d worked so hard to construct likely destroyed. Procne’s next words would determine whether or not she left the corridor alive.

“His name is Hundig,” she said. “He wants to take me back to his conscriptor so she can engineer me into something just like him, only smaller and smarter. And quicker.”

“But you don’t want this? You can’t tell me you had those eyes and palm-fibers added so you could tend livestock in an underground pod.”

She bristled, but remembered who held the weapons. “I won’t be an owned thing.”

“Who is this conscriptor?” I had to raise my voice over the beating on the walls.

“I don’t know her real name. She has an artificial vessel that holds her mind. Sometimes it’s shaped like a bird, sometimes like spiders.” Her shoulders hunched, her speech became hesitant. Speaking of this woman scared her. “She told me to call her Philomela.”

Instinct told me what she wasn’t sharing. “You signed a blood contract, didn’t you – and now you’re trying to break it.” And before she could answer: “And you dared to involve me? Who claims I know anything about unmaking?”

“Her name is Sieglinda.”

Now there was a name I thought I’d never hear again. But I wasn’t primed to buy yet. “Describe Sieglinda to me.”

“She told me you would ask that. She told me to say that she’s never let me see her compass rose tattoo, but it remains in the same place where you saw it.”

I’m still amazed I didn’t drop any of the firesprayers. The hooks were in me from that moment on. “And you didn’t think to bring this up when you first came in?”

She shrugged but wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I was short on time.”

“How did you meet her?”

Another grimace. “I was supposed to kill her. She helped me escape.”

I lowered my weapons. “We need to get out of here.”

“About time,” Encolpio said.

I did not under any circumstances want to admit in front of the painter that Procne was right about me, though he already had to be guessing and I suspected he wouldn’t be the least bit bothered if he knew. But the ears and eyes of the Hierophant are everywhere, and the open admission of unmaking is one of the few things that will bring hir minions to you at maximum speed.

Se doesn’t bat any of hir many eyes when a member of hir citizenry changes their cell structure to the point they’re no longer recognizable as their former self. Do it without hir knowing, though – that se can’t abide, if se ever finds out. They say hir attention is stretched so thin that you really have to work to attract it, no matter how vile your business. But some things are guaranteed to cause hir gendarmes to gather.

To pursue an unmaking you find someone like I used to be.

In ancient days on another continent there was a thriving industry in liquor made outside the law, untaxed and unaccounted for by the government. There was no rational reason for the business to be conducted outside the law beyond keeping the flow of commerce concealed, and yet because it was outside the law it thrived. Unmaking is like that.

Beyond that secret hallway my memories fragment. I deduce we must have parted ways with Encolpio afterward. I didn’t dare let him stay involved, though I can imagine his protests at leaving me alone with Procne. But that’s a guess. A wall rises in my mind and won’t yield, much as I feel pressed to force a way through.

This pressure shifts, prying at the name Sieglinda. Images, sensations stutter. She was like me, insistent on a gender, but she bared herself in a way I didn’t, her transparent skin flaunting her morphologic choices even more than most. I recall a warm hand on my neck. My body was different then, more like a natural-born. Sieglinda’s fingers playfully caressed a vein as my gaze tracked the tableaus of figures etched into her temple and across the crown of her skull. A kiss, sweet and electrifying. And nothing more than that. The rest of her no longer belongs to me.

My eyes have retained their tear ducts. Perhaps tears appear. This pressure releases me and my memories move forward, resuming here.

We stood before a reeking pool of brown liquid in a long cellar room fifty stories below the ground level of an old-money oligarch’s ziggurat. Said oligarch, a former client of mine, no longer remembered that this room existed or that we were in it.

“You have to be the one to do it. I’m not built for swimming anymore,” I said.

“I won’t go in there,” Procne said, her tone defiant, but the way she shrank away from the edge suggested otherwise.

I had no sympathy to offer. “Then you’ve ruined my life for nothing.”

I had taken my direst risk yet, adding a personal rhythm to the coded telepathic impulses that gained me audience with the oligarch, but a face-to-face meeting was necessary to speak the combination that would temporarily trigger hir memories of me from hir previous identity and remind hir of the debt se owed me. And also remind hir for that same interval of the secret room built within hir home where my guest and I needed to go.

I must, in the back of my mind, have thought I might one day have need of my old gene-ensorcelling services, for myself at least. Why else would I have built in all these safeguarded spaces instead of purging my old life completely?

I had never planned, I’m sure, to make them available again to anyone else.

“Just because I brought you this far doesn’t mean I won’t call it off,” I said.

Her faceted eyes turned down, sullen, a childish gesture from someone so deadly.

I again held out the hand I’d offered her. “Take this and dive.”

Finally, the ornery thing followed instructions. She took my arm, which I’d detached at the shoulder, and dove in. I had explained to her that she had precisely ten seconds to find the ID pad at the bottom and press my palm against it; otherwise valves would offer their opinion with jets of a corrosive and flammable chemical, followed by an inconvenient ignition. Ah, the elegant glare when I concluded, “Someone like you should have no difficulty.”

Just enough time went by to make me wonder if Procne had botched the task. Then drains opened with a throaty gurgle as she bobbed back up. She held up my arm for me to reclaim, saying nothing as the fluid around her ebbed away. As I attached my limb to the facet where it belonged, all the nervesockets and vesselvalves reconnecting, she floated in the pool until her feet touched bottom. Her expression told me she didn’t want to help me down, so I insisted she do so. It was the least she could do, as I’d be rebuilding the ruins of my life long after she was gone.

As the last of the liquid sluiced off, the floor of the pit shuddered, then lowered; a platform lift that descended as a new fake floor slid into place over our heads. For the first time Procne appeared impressed. “With all this, why did you even need a modshop?”

“It’s not my wealth that built this,” I replied. “Just a favor owed. Nothing here belongs to me.”

Which wasn’t completely true.

The lift carried us down into another hidden chamber much larger than the one we’d left.

The room didn’t need to be so cavernous. I’d requested it be filled with decoys. I’d imagined three or four. My former client had outdone hirself.

Each machine in this cavernous vault hulked large as a garrison hovertransport; at least three dozen of the special cryogenic units with their corrugated skeletons of coolant piping wound through with webs of insulating fiber, muttering with off-the-grid power. I wondered what my former client was thinking, taking my requested ruse this far, but it would be too dangerous to attempt to revive hir memories so se could be asked.

“When were these built?” Procne asked. “They’re ancient.”

“Maybe as you perceive time they are.” If she was to be believed, she’d just given away that she genuinely was young, not simply adjusted to appear so. Yet there was good reason for these units to be so cumbersome and chaotic in their design. Each held hundreds of redundant systems. They were intended to serve their purpose even if languishing for centuries, forgotten.

Yet only one held what I’d come to collect. And if anyone, including me, attempted to activate the wrong unit, they’d all shut down and destroy the hidden treasure. I hoped my client and I both remembered rightly about the pattern and the sign that would tell which machine was the correct one.

I shared none of this anxiety with Procne. Instead I walked between the right and center row of machines, keeping an eye toward the crowning configurations of pipes. Each machine was different. I paused by one crowned by a duct that contained a curve and bend reminiscent of the crest of an ancient Greek helmet. Only an expert would know that no functional reason existed for this, and that expert would perhaps be thrown by the many useless design flourishes repeated above the other machines. But only this machine featured smaller pipes radiating out from the helmet like Shiva’s undulating arms.

My hands hadn’t touched the ID pads on its surface in twenty years. The configuration requires four hands, all of them mine. “This will take a few minutes,” I said, as the sophisticated machinery inside came alive with a sigh.

“What’s in there?” she asked. For the first time I noticed a tremolo in her voice.

“What I need to do what you need,” I said. “I could try to explain, but you’ll see for yourself before I’m finished.”

The machine opened a tray the size of an antique file cabinet drawer to disgorge its treasure, which stared up at me in wide-eyed surprise. I picked up the end, which contained all my knowledge of the forbidden art of unmaking. The head I already wore partitioned like a tulip bulb to allow this second braincasing to slide into place within it like an egg in a cup.

My old self reconnected and took in what the rest of me knew and remembered. I recall my lips shaping the question, “What do you want to be?” She answered, and I asked, “What can you pay?”

There’s really only one thing she could have paid: my pick, before I changed her, of what she had already, her body and its augments, the sum of her memories. But I can’t tell you precisely what she offered or what I took.

And you won’t find her. Nor will you find, in my memories, any trace of where she is now. See, just as I knew that my survival for all those years depended on hiding as much of my former life away as I possibly could, what I learned from her, both things she knew and things she did not, told me that I would end up here. My old self left me with this sickening news, and what I needed to consider about it, and no more than that.

Surprised that I can do this? Shut off the autonomous flow of my memory into your recorder and address you directly? My old self prepared me well. Let me guide you to what’s left for you to find.

You see, Procne made confessions to me before and during her unmaking. Some she intended, some she didn’t. No process exists that’s more invasive.

What I learned from her took me to Philomela’s lair, sixty stories deep into the belowground, right under the community of Hivetowers that adjoin the Hierophant’s fortress. The hall that led to Philomela’s dwelling, painted yellow in warning, simply dead-ended. I crossed into the yellow and waited.

The pair of creatures that came to greet me in the tunnel was each formed of five different people engineered to interlock, though one skin covered them all. Both were terrifying masterpieces, even more brutal that the thug that trashed my shop, each with five pairs of ropy limbs terminating in prehensile claws. They emerged from the door that irised open at the hall’s far end and crawled along the ceiling ducts. Each dangled three of those massive arms, all the better to tear me to pieces with. I wondered if either of them incorporated the remnants of Hundig.

I had no weapons, just a vague hope that I wouldn’t need to resort right away to my defensive plan, which would do little more in that space than postpone my death by a couple of minutes.

The hall echoed with a feminine voice. “One of my brothers is going to present you with a sensory block. Crawl your head inside it. When it opens, we’ll talk.” Indeed, the nearest of the ceiling thugs used its free limbs to lower a gray sphere toward me.

I did not anticipate or desire this. How did Philomela know I could detach my head? “I can’t stay separate from my body longer than three minutes.” I hated how my voice quavered.

“This is your problem but not mine. Do as I ask or die where you stand.”

The box opened, a hungry shellfish. I detached my chains from the corners of my shoulders, extended my neck into the case, which enveloped me like a helmet, and released my cervosocket. The clamshell sealed around me and the cramped space inside filled quickly with preserfluid. Nothing I could do but float and count seconds.

At one hundred sixty-four seconds the fluid drained. At one hundred seventy-one seconds the case opened and I scrambled to reattach my swooning head to my body, which had been sunk to just below its square shoulders in a pit full of a polymer that had already hardened. My head remained the only part of me that could still move.

Under other circumstances I’d have found Philomela a delightful creation, her lower half recognizably female if sexless, her upper half a carefully sculpted bonsai tree. A mechabird of paradise rested in her branches, and when its beak moved the voice that emerged was the one I’d heard in the hall.

I notice your interest perked up as I described her. Perhaps she means something to you. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me, will you?

Philomela said, “Conditions will improve for you once I’m sure your priorities match mine.”

Radically as I’d altered my body, using my lungs for speech still proved difficult. “You want me... to take up... my old trade... for you?”

It’s hard to read the expression of a mechanical bird of paradise. “Do you not recognize me, Athiva?”

Had I given further offense? “I’m sorry if I’m supposed to, but I don’t.”

I wondered if she and her monsters were attuned to a mutual telepathic feed, because both of the ten-limbed creatures surrounding me shifted in unison, altering their stance so each loomed a little bit closer.

It wasn’t wise for me to utter another word, but I needed to buy time, somehow. “Did you do this to Sieglinda? Seal her in this pit with these wonderful creatures surrounding her? Is this how you got her to cough up the code phrase?”

Silence.

“Is she still alive?”

“Perhaps she is.” And I wondered, for a moment, if maybe Sieglinda wasn’t missing at all. This creation looked like nothing out of my memory, but in this mutable world, memory’s value is suspect.

I knew of no reason Sieglinda would seek to harm me. And yet I’d deliberately severed most of my knowledge of unmaking. What else might I have sliced away? What might I have done?

Philomela continued with a question of her own. “What did you do to Procne, to get her to reveal this place?”

“I gave her what she wanted. I unmade her. Surely you know unmaking peels away secrets. It’s part of the process. And she really did want to be free of you. It wasn’t an act.”

“Too bad for her. Where is she?”

All of my hearts beat fast. She wouldn’t like the answer. “Procne’s gone. I unmade her, I told you. That one is out of your reach. You’ll never find her.”

“But you know where she is.”

The thugs inched closer.

I tried to sidestep, so to speak. “You have me, though. I’m what you want, correct? I will be happy to unmake whoever you need unmaking, whether it’s you, whether it’s someone you need to hide. My skills are yours.”

“And your machines?”

“Destroyed. I’ll need new ones.”

“Maybe we can salvage. Where are they?”

I bit my lip. She waited until I finally said, “I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

The monsters raised their front limbs like spiders threatening attack.

“How could you not know?”

“Because this version of me, the one you’re talking to now, isn’t the one who knows how to unmake. I unmade myself before I went legit. But the me who existed before didn’t want to leave the world forever, like your Procne did. She kept herself hidden away and left me with knowledge of her. In hindsight I wish she hadn’t, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.”

“A second cortex?”

I wobbled my head. “Mine is the second cortex.”

“Where’s the first?”

I could only hope then that I’d stalled long enough. The gambit was at its end. “She didn’t let me keep that memory. She’s gone, just like your girl.”

She gave no command. The monsters lunged. Sheer luck they didn’t catch me.

Funny as it sounds, my neck doesn’t just telescope out and detach. It also contracts. I retracted my head into my body’s fleshy cube and disconnected.

What I told Philomela isn’t quite true. I can stay unattached longer, though after three minutes lobes of my cortex will start shutting down to conserve oxygen. By eight minutes I’m down to the essentials and after ten I’m in real trouble.

I’ve heard that if you’re unfortunate enough to attract the Hierophant’s focus, to cause hir scattered consciousness to actually zero in, it takes about fifteen minutes for hir gendarmes to reach you, wherever you are. I hoped, this close to hir fortress, they’d come much quicker.

My self-engineering spared me the pain of the monsters’ assault as they tore into my body. I confess, I had not ever planned to be lost inside myself, but it was a good thing I’d unhooked from my neck, as one of the thugs plunged a limb into that gullet, seized the coil of my neck and ripped it out.

I crawled away blind through my own blubber and organs, safe only for that moment. Once they gutted me deep enough, they’d inevitably find me if I didn’t suffocate first. Sealing me in the floor at least made it a little bit harder to scoop me out.

Of all the people I thought I might see if I survived, I didn’t expect you, Encolpio.

Yes, I see you, peering through the translucent curve of the jar. My eyes aren’t as sharp as Procne’s were, but I didn’t leave them unaugmented like yours. If anything you told me about yourself is actually true.

Why do the neuroleads from my jar lead to your temples?Are you a prisoner, like me?

I see you shake your head no.

Then you belong to hir. A servant of the Hierophant? My jailor?

What a strange expression. You’re hir creature, yes?

I see.

Here’s a stray scrap of memory, it must fall somewhere in between taking my leave of Procne and paying my visit to Philomela. Perhaps you’ve puzzled over it. Wondered why I strolled right up to the Hierophant’s Node in the Biomass Gardens and started chittering about how anyone could have been unmade and might not even know it. I’ll spell it out. I’d hoped se might set some of hir Ears crawling on me and that they’d still be with me when I at last admitted what I was.

Obviously my ploy worked.

If you saw me go through the motions of sighing in relief when I regained consciousness and found myself wired up inside your little tank – well, that’s why.

I still don’t know what Philomela did to Sieglinda to make her reveal me – in my heart, I know that’s what happened. I will not let myself succumb to doubts.

Did the Hierophant’s forces capture Philomela when they swarmed in? Can you tell me?

Can you at least look my way, you dreg?

The Hierophant must have already suspected something, for you to spend so much time in my shop. And here I thought you stood out too boldly to ever suspect you of having any other agenda. No need to look so sheepish. I just wish I had any hope of ever learning your story.

What I told Philomela was true. I really don’t know where Procne went or where my old self has gone. I made sure of that. And though I can’t tell you what they were, I can only assume that purging those memories were just fractions of the precautions I took once Procne revealed how thoroughly I’d been had.

So what happens now? Am I dissected? Unmade in the Hierophant’s special way? Perhaps the things I can’t remember can still be found, the way I found all sorts of information in Procne’s mind that she didn’t know consciously.

If your body is as retro as you claim, maybe you really feel as sad as you look. Is that supposed to comfort me, that you’ve unfolded your easel?

This calming warmth, that can’t be a true warmth, that’s the polar opposition of how I feel. This comes from you. Why should I trust it, Encolpio?

I can do many things, but I can’t read lips.

You’re pressing your mouth to the glass. What a surprise, this fluid carries sound.

I’m safe from the Hierophant. Se thinks I’m dead. So you say. How kind. But am I safe from you, and will you be safe from me if you ever let me out?

How long do you plan to keep me here?

Encolpio?

Yes, look at me.

If you won’t answer now, at least show me the painting when it’s done.