Warpship Lamina

Low resolution security footage captured the scene in greys and blinding whites.

The first key frame is a small figure (more of a dark shape) stepping into picture; her foot is captured as it falls at the end of a run, or a stumble forward.

The next frame her cloak shifts and reveals beads of sparking white cutting through the grey image. Her costume and hat does little to clarify the image.

Frames cut forward to her mid-pace through where the camera had been focused.

Forward: to her looking back behind her--the first time her face is shown: just a compressed simulacrum of an expression that could be sinister, or panicked, or composed, or an emotion only known on lower resolutions.

Forward once more, her left shoulder twists back, a strand of hair is flowing forward past her face suspended in air.

Forward another frame and she is frozen in a pirouette twirling just behind a sudden smoke trail obscuring the bottom left frame of the recording. The hat has leapt from her head.

The girl slumps, and in just one more frame she loses her definition returning to a dark shape caught on camera. The smoke creeps up the frame.

Next frame: another shape, a grey mass, blobbing over the footage. The smoke has cleared.

Next frame: it's the back of a masculine figure with one arm raised.

Next frame: the man is gone and the girl is laying on the floor, her cloak spread wide on the hospital tile and still dappled with glowing white dots, her clothes underneath bleeding into the floor, she is alone. The footage seems to pause on that scene for several more frames save for pixels wisping like smoke at the margins and occasional white glints flashing on the girls face.

Then: it is a white; the footage continues in roiling shades of grey.

Odd striations run through till a body of smoke, blocky and indistinct, sharpens and greater detail begins to clarify, frame by frame.

Debris floats and the scene clears. The girl is still laying down, now twisted with her back turned towards wherever the camera had been, nearly lost in the footage: small, indistinct, motionless, and blended together with grey powder and dust.

“Yes. Well. Can't hardly see her face but that was her costume. Yes, I think that's my sister. Elisheva.”

FORSOOTH BROKENHEARTED CHILD:

SUPERPOWER IS REAL.

SUPERNATURAL IS REAL.

A SCREEN DARKENING BETWEEN HEART / BRAIN / GUT HAS BINDED YOU!

A SCREEN CAST BY LANGUAGE HAS BINDED YOU!

WE HAVE ANSWER TO UNBIND YOUR HAND..

BRIDGE HEART .. BRAIN .. GUT .. AND RETURN SUPERPOWER

RETURN TO YOUR LIFE SUPERNATURAL

.. AND EMPTY THE LIGHT OF PESTS

WE HAVE ANSWER: THE CHURCH SELFLESS / THANKLESS / MONSTROUS

WE ARE THE CREATORS TERRIBLE STROKE

BROKENHEARTED CHILD. You were intended to be whole and love at the world with complete function. Yet you are in error by cause not your own. Our Mother Creator shaped each vessel and heart to be full functioning engine capable of clearly experiencing the world. KNOW in original state the heart granted superpower. Not superpowers or superpowered. Clear basic "superpower!" The heart was free of all confusions that bury themselves into flesh of earth. The confusions are sick at the blood of earth. They today are always in the air and (as name suggests) confuse the basic function of heart. The unconfused heart is alien in todays atmosphere. The unconfused heart is an angel that would choke in the atmosphere here. HAVE YOU EVER felt something in the air thick and warping. Perhaps it is an emotion. It is real and malicious. It is like angel. But it is many more legged. Its wings are many more. Its body is like glass. It enters the brain. DO YOU KNOW PSYCHIATRY? HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT LANGUAGE? The unconfused heart could fly and be unbound by space and move unimpeded through gravity. What is gravity but language. Language binds the brain to confused earth. The heart (stupid organ that it is) chases brain to earth and is porous to poison. To language. WHY? The creator mother intended it. WHY? Our great mother loves her children and the confusions themselves (THEY ARE ALIVE!) are a kid too. Her love was such that some children were made to bear these confusions are natural mechanism. THEIR CONFUSION IS CLEAR! THEIR SUPERPOWER IS CONFUSION! Have you seen the church on the hill. Overlooking the town from a view loving. . Mother in her wisdom wrote us many texts. She is the most prolific author on earth. Did you know that? She wrote on our basic datum: SURVIVE! She wrote on the confusion that abberates heart to be CONFUSED about that most basic datum SURVIVE! until a smart child is warped and twisted to die. Language crafted carefully under the colleges of confusion have made a full set of keen instruments of mutilation. Their scalpels are their language. See word like mental illness as screaming point diving into brain. DO NOT READ IT! DO NOT THINK IT! DO NOT SAY IT! BLACK OUT THAT WORD AFTER YOU UNDERSTAND! SURVIVE! The paladins of the mother church understand this. They read correctly from our mother creator. HOWEVER. . They do not understand the monster created. It is a monster loved. We are a church gathering of the text less said. We are hearing a language of. . lower frequency. CONFUSION IS POISON. We were made to love poison. We are a race different from the heart that engines clarity. We engine confusion. THE FAULT OF THE CHURCH AND OF THE PALADIN: that complete unbinding of heart can be done by equalizing all heart to clarity. The monstrous child will blacken and scorch and sink lower to be curse. If that happens. We can grant superpower. We can unbind the heart monstrous. We want you heartbroken child. Read definitions if anything is not understood. Then understand. Then contact us. Then be family. Our church will find the pest of the heart. Our eyes will see the pseudoangel. Our hand unbind will crush it. We will break the world heart in half. DESTROYERS CAN LOVE.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CHURCH COMMUNICATION SERVICES CAN BE REACHED BY LETTER TO THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS:

"The moment we finished reading it had already been silently decided to respond; there was no need to say that part out loud -- we simply understood each other perfectly: the joy reading that silly pamphlet had us each laughing as we passed the pamphlet between us, taking turns reading aloud the dramatic sentences: "'SUPERPOWER!' giggling, the paper crinkled more and more as it kept exchanging hands, 'THE MONSTROUS CHILD WILL BLACKEN AND SCORCH. .' we'd laugh and lean together till the paper was between us, heels kicking against the stoop and the listener taking a break to sip Hi-C and smile.

"We found a piece of paper in one of our backpacks and wrote our response:

'HELLO! Me (E) and my sister (EE) are twins and we are two brokenhearted children in need of SUPERPOWER!'

"We laughed more as we wrote. We wanted it to match the tone of the pamphlet; we wanted to write more and more, wanting to add half-serious lines about the filth of the world and how we had been split in two and think the church could rejoin us, and how the adults at our house are poisonous.

"It led to us rereading the pamphlet more instead, and leaving our response to just that greeting and sentence. So, into the night we stuck together outside on the stoop and kept exciting each other about the funny language the anonymous author used, and what the church is like, and what might happen in response to our letter; the streetlights flicked on and mosquitos started to nip at our skin and we only sat out there unbothered and silken, hoping the adults of the home wouldn't find us missing or to be snitched on by the other kids.

"'Superpower,' one of us would say. A cold pause would grow between us as we stared seriously at the other.

"'Destroyer can love,' the other would say as serious as she could before we both broke with laughter.

"We agreed it was dumb and silly, and somehow the talk turned to how it sounded like Gork wrote it to infiltrate religion with a brutal cunning--likely it turned this way in a playful debate over what superpower we would each have.

"'I would be cunningly brutal,' one of us would say; then, the other would puff up an affront and slap, saying instead: 'no, you would brutally cunning, Mork wrote this.'

And the mosquitos eventually went away, and night beetles started coming out to the stoop, and we had further developed our internal world from a shared love of Games Workshop with the funnily worded pamphlet that had been found taped up like a wanted poster on the corner pole, seeming to materialize between going to Wonderful Wednesday at church and coming home.

"We never found the definitions the author mentioned. It was just that one advert on the pole. Sometime after I had been separated I found out through the other children that the same advert had been stuffed into the door but Miss Bessel found it and tore it up. On the day after it seemed to just move over to the pole, according to the kids who were going to elementary that morning. Two 'fellows' put it up. That was the word the kids used for strange adults: 'fellows.' At the time I imagined men like what the Witnesses send around. I hadn't then heard of the Church of Mother or their organizations.

"Our response, then. That letter became sacred and terrifying to the two of us; we had this awful anxiety that if we dropped it in a normal mailbox it'd just become lost; we had a worse anxiety to use the home mailbox that either a kid or one of the adults, or Bessel, would find it make hell of the two of us. E was most worried about that; worried it would ruin my chances with the new Mom, new Dad, if they found out I was 'occupied with silly games and therefore a silly girl.'

"In her voice: 'You're to be a Catholic. To live with two good Catholics who love you very much. They only understand suffering, they see you trading pacts with a Satan through mail and they'll realize they've been courting a very silly and tiny Satan themselves.'

"So we played guardian over that letter. While home we never let it alone in our room. If one of us needed to leave, for the bathroom or to eat, we made sure one of us was nearby to watch over it in shifts. For school one of us would drink ipecac and take a long cold shower and sleep naked at night--we both ended up fairly sick that week. It didn't even seem like a sacrifice to ensure the letter would reach the author; we had a game of it.

"Saturday came and the house went to church. It was a high Sabbath that day and before we found partners to wash feet, E sprinted back home to intercept the mailman. She handed it to him directly.

"Gork and Mork? They're characters from Warhammer. Gods in the forty-first millennium. The Orcs worship them. Orcs are these green goblin brutes that talk funny and go about without much knowledge to their logic--they use a logic driven by pure unknowing; they don't stop to consider that red paint can't cause something to go fast: so, for them: red paint makes things go fast. Junk hammers itself into shape of a gun and it fires because of belief. Gork and Mork maybe make that happen; they're not like God or the Trinity or any saint I'm aware of. Gork is just cunningly brutal, and Mork is brutally cunning--or it might be the other way around. We mix them up all the time.

"No. They're not our favorites. They used to be our favorites. We started to ween away from them when Nathanel found our magazines (the White Dwarf ones, yes) and our drawings stashed away in one of our hiding spots and picked out Orcs as his favorite; it was lame to keep liking them.

"Our new favorites were the Night Lords and the Sisters--the Sororitas Adeptus, I think that's the proper name. E had her Night Lords; they're a Space Marine chapter--big armored super soldiers who seem like demigods to normal people--and they specialize in terrorism. E said she liked them because their father had been gifted with prophesy and had an eerie premonition about foreseeing his own death. Their father-prophet was obsessed with justice and saw people as machine-parts meant to function according to a script. Disobey a minor law and end up mutilated. In the setting he is meant to be insane. E insisted that they, the Night Lords, were 'Adventist-Coded.' I agreed with her.

"The Sisters were nearly gifted to me as a favorite; when we both realized the separation was happening a panic cast over us and started to creep into little things; we had an agreement that I would be a Catholic child and need to grow in a Catholic direction while E remained in adversary, as Adventist. In Adventism, the Prophet Ellen White considers Catholicism to be an operating ground for Satan to confuse the world into sinning against God by encouraging worship of idols, by disrespecting the Sabbath. Sometimes in church we would see videos about Catholic families being activated by the President and invading homes on the last Saturday before the Millennium and gunning down the sleeping Adventists. So I became the Sunday-Keeper and she would be the Sabbath-Keeper; we joked on the final day about the Millennium--we said didn't say our goodbyes to each other, instead I told E that when the signal came I would find her asleep on the Sabbath and pin her down like a bug. I made a slit throat gesture with my hand. She started to say: 'And I'll be looking down on you in.' Bessel clenched E away before she could finish. The new Dad raised a hand between Bessel and E, interposing himself between a punishment: 'they deal with grief differently.' The Sisters, really, are just nuns dressed up in power armor; not as good as a Space Marine, but far more faithful--they live by miracle and nearly seem as blessed with the same Unknowing that the Orcs have. New Dad ended up buying E a flip-phone so she could stay in touch with me."

Vox hung heavy in the warp.

The Noise Marine stood in the gangway looking up towards a twist of machinery and cold ship overhead. There was nothing on his face that his clients could discern as an expression. Long had humanity slipped by the Noise Marine, his features only polished away from centuries of mutation carefully perfecting a vistage dedicated to gazing and listening to beautiful things hidden away where no human eye could see. The voidsmen who stood wary behind their commander could only see a perverse demi-god melted into armor and with the same complexion as a radio, a receiver, a vox device--some gradient 'thing' between waxen arachnid and machine. A felled thing gazing upward and reaching out as-if to become antennae catching signal. His eyes blackened dials. His mouth mesh speaker. However, the Noise Marine was as human to himself as he had ever been, and the lesser beings seeking his aide had misted away from his senses before what beauty he saw--the vox! An angel was twirling in the void, sparking in colors strange and alien, carrying with it glitters of warp and emotion unheard but deeply felt in the heart of the Noise Marine.

"..my Lord?"

He faintly heard the question bubbling up through the wake of the Angel as it passed further away.

A voice ugly and with the texture of grit. He lowered his arms and immediately reached forth to crush the unpleasant wave; the foul milk on the airwaves only curdled towards, stretching itself thin, warbling a pale foulness, cloying at the marine to let touch--"My lord, I-"

He remembered, and ceased reaching to kill the thin thing. He remembered he had been called to aide in capturing the angel. The 'Captain' of this vessel claimed it belonged to some renegades as a weapon, or maybe an engine; the report explained it as a amalgamate of countless slaves fused to crying machine spirit--perhaps it propelled the target ship through the void, perhaps it sent screams through void to tear at the minds of mortal crews.

He only knew it as beautiful.

In a voice bitcrushed heavy through reverb and distortions: "I will kill everything aboard the ship, and I will secure the angel as agreed."

"Why was this in your room?"

A silence hung between the three of us.

"She."

"Elisheva?" Palatka cut me off.

"Yeah. E. She and I would still meet up occasionally after we were separated. Sometimes her new mom would take us to visit, sometimes it was my boyfriend."

"And what about the story? Elisheva wrote it, right."

"Yeah. We wrote fanfiction together. She wrote that one. She wrote it at her house but she brought it over to my house. Truthfully I took it from her; she wanted to write more but I was worried she would go away. We'd go even farther from each other than just new homes. So. I would steal mementos from her sometimes."

Deleter unfolded his hands and looked to his partner, picked up his pen and started to scribble something down on the clipboard he'd mostly been drumming against. Palatka was happy to wait on him to finish. He wrote loudly through what seemed to be a long minute at the least. Palatka looked, nodded, his chin folding down into the suit that gathered around his shoulders and neck like a slate turtle. They passed the manila envelope between them as they'd been. Palatka opens it and reads something.

"And the figurines at your house."

"The figurines at my house?"

"Mm." He only elaborated with a slow nod and a lacing of his fingers together against his stomach. He waited.

"Cool, aren't they?"

Deleter laughed and nudged Palatka. Palatka smiled, his moustache twisted up and gave his smile an exaggerated warmth to it. "Well, tell you what. How about lunch? It's been a few hours and we have a Wendys nearby. If you like Wendys."

"I like Wendys."

"Super. When my daughter was growing up I'd always take her to Wendys after picking her up from school. Her favorite was just a spicy chicken sandwich. Really she just liked mayo and bread. Tomato mayo and bread. You remember that, Deleter? She'd ask for your sandwich and take off the lettuce and chicken."

I smiled at that, "That sounds nice."

"How about I get you one, then. Coke?"

"No caffeine, please. We're not supposed to have it."

Deleter nodded, "No caffeine, got it. Frosty?"

"Yeah. Please."

"Vanilla fine? Vanilla then. Just a burger for me. And a Coke."

Deleter left; Palatka didn't turn to watch him go, and just sat as he had been between me and the door, relaxed back in his chair, eager to let every silent moment grow.

I ceased seeing a girl in the mirror and only saw a shape midnight clad. I spun on my toes and curtsied. I said what I remembered of the motto, ave dominus nox. I looked again and checked myself in a pose. Everything was to be perfect for tonight. My cloak inlay and breast glittered with red fairy lights sown in. I shook the cloak a final time. Hopped in place. Everything staid as it should. I adjusted my hat. My hair was pinned neatly where I needed it. Again, I shook the cloak and the lights stayed. The battery belted on my hip stopped jostling. I pulled the hat lower to shield my eyes. I checked the back of my legs to check for runs, tears, holes in my leggings. The power armor I had gotten used to felt like another skin; it would not chafe or bind as it once did--I had grown strong, and the vest had become a source of power for me. A thousand mortals could be pit against me and I would fell a thousand more; I would be hated by a billion more, and feared by three billion more.

I kicked at the duffle bag to check that it was indeed still under my bed. It was, the weight of it hurt my toes. I opened it and did a final once-over to ensure my instruments had not been sabotaged or stolen. They were not. I checked again the bolter, my heart always quivered something awful at the sight of it and always seized momentarily at the touch of it--the machine spirit inside it hissed through me, and we connected through a shared desire to function together in our purpose; the scent of oil calmed me, and I slid into the drilled-in programming I had practiced for hours each night to ensure muscle memory would supersede thought for my mission; there was no affording fear for my Midnight save what was deemed target to wrath. I repeated the motions with it, again. I returned it to the bag; the next thing to check was ammunition, I only needed to feel it. Then the sword that shall serve as my talon if machine spirit would fail me in excess of shed agony tonight.

Everything was set. I put my boots on and hoisted the bag to my shoulder; it was heavy.

I turned the lights off on my bedroom and breathed long.

The room breathed with me, inhaling a powdery shadow that settled like dust over everything; my eyes saw through it like it was daylight.

Faint red stars from a far-off warp shone in the dark.

The light from space shone over my chapter brothers; they stood poised still, some clad yet in midnight, some still grey, some in matte black primer.

It shone on my bed and how it was unmade still.

On my desk; on my books my mom gave me; on the stuffed animals we earned together at the faire; on the cards the other kids from the home sent me; on the cutting mat and citadel paints given for my first birthday present with parents.

It made me smile; I prayed in the calm of the warp.

Only moments after hopping out the window I texted the coded message through my phone to my contact in the traitor legion:

This is Conrad from Monstrous Technologies, just checking to see if the delivery to the Waterman is still GOOD TO GO! I'm en route as we speak!

I was still miles away.

Deleter still was off running errands and Palatka still was at perfect comfort just idly lounging back in his chair, breathing loudly as if the act itself were satisfying. Maybe the boredom had gotten to me but I had a stupid thought "how can you say I am without a soul when I am wearing shoes," and laughed to myself.

Palatka smiled up from behind his moustache and asked why I was laughing.

He didn't seem to get it, and snatched up the opportunity to strike up a conversation about some of the materials from earlier.

"I still don't understand the letters. Your sister wrote them?"

"Yeah. Elisheva wrote them. One of them. The printed one was from the church people, I think. I don't know. They weren't interested in me."

He nodded to himself and sank further back into his chair. He stroked at his chin and stubble, and then gave a heavy sigh and bent forward to paw through the manila folders and papers stacked on the table between us.

In a moment he had two letters, and muttered more to himself, "what's the ship about?"

"I don't know. I think the letter person and her wrote a lot. She never really told me what about."

Palatka considered me and slowly began to rub at his lips. "See. I don't understand. Mind if you read them again for me?"

"Sure."

He slid both letters to me and I started to read.

"Out loud, if you would. We can work it out together. Might help to hear it out loud."

"Sure. 'Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with us. Do not feel ashamed or think it is silly. Sometimes the greatest truth reveal themselves with a simplicity that seems as if a child came up with it all. But that is how our faith operates. A child should be able to understand it. And it should be fantastic and hard to believe. And now that you have been shown something directly, it is up to you to believe it. So stop questioning. You are the seedbed for this crop. Harvest it. This is the first sprout of superpower rising up through soil. These were real memories Elisheva. And that console aboard the ship. I remember it too. I used to operate the left most console. Likely I disintegrated before you. I remember the captain and the adversary. Do you remember the screen that we passed through. You might not have been awaken enough to feel it. The cathedral, too. That place is called the pipework located below where Gods Garden is created. Our leader escaped and went down where there wasn't any light. He grew there until it became that place hidden away inside God. You can be nurtured there. You can return there too. In fact, I am sure you will Elisheva. It is hard to disconnect from Gods Garden to escape, but along with the mission to shake loose the new prophet we intend to escape with you as well. I consider you a true sister Elisheva. One more fair and single warning. Share any of this and your crop will die. You will be stuck in the Garden with a dead crop. Not even with your sister. Do not despair. Do not stop loving. Do not stop hating. From the desk of Doctor Acula.' That's the first one."

"And go ahead and read the second one."

"Ok. 'Hey sis. I finally figured out the thing from my story. Resolved how I couldn't find you. I'm your lock. Or I'm the door. Maybe you are the lock and I am the door. Either or, I understand now. I am here to make it so you won't have to feel terror or bad about anything that happened. I am the door, and I will feel everything for you so you do not have to feel anything.'"

"The second letter was to you, correct?"

"Yeah."

"Doesn't it seem like she is writing you something you knew about?"

I shrugged, "Suppose it does, but that doesn't mean I understand it."

He pulled the first letter back towards him with a finger, "And this ship mentioned here, are you sure you never heard her mention anything about a ship?"

I shrugged, "Not outside of her Warhammer stories. That's all I can think."

"And the name at the end, the 'Doctor Acula,' she never mentioned that?"

"No. I think it was a game they played. They, the church people I mean."

Palatka laughed, "Yes. Yeah, I don't believe she was corresponding with a Mister Acula working in the field of medicine. Just wondering if maybe Elisheva might have mentioned a consistent alias, or said any names that seemed strange to you. Outside of the usual people you both knew."

"No, all I can remember is she might have said the church people use funny names. Is food coming soon?"

"There's lines there sometimes. Hungry?"

I nodded

BASICS TO SUPERPOWER IV

Remember to review any term or concept that is unfamiliar to you through the concordance. On your path to awaken superpower it is crucial to grow in a manner direct and every misunderstanding adds another curve to your path towards a perfect growth. Imagine a child walking to the store. It is a straight path, but along the way there are exciting detours and strange aliens standing along sideways offering toys and candy that add anything from minutes to lifetimes before the child ever arrives at the store.

Before our new prophet Founding Sister was ensorcelled away into the labyrinth she had left behind keys to open up the mechanical heart. The false church has attempted to erase her writings, declaring them heresy and enturbulated thought, and despite the attempt they still exist through us: the text ENNIHILATE! is one of her keys, and it is the text that the paladins fear most as subversion to their false superpower.

The text ENNIHILATE! serves as the basis for recognizing adversaries to mechanical operations. Our adversaries, the invisible pests and the false church, have set you for failure by turning Gods Garden into a stage-play for you to be lost in. All friends and family unwittingly have been turned to actors to perform an infinite number of insane scripts constantly written by psychopathic invisible agents. How they operate into reality is surgical in nature. Conclusion is desired and to achieve this the pests manufacture context inside Gods Garden. They desire to turn a mechanical heart into cattle, and inside Gods Garden the world twists to create sensible events that lead to their goal: perhaps a brokenhearted child of the heart mechanical is then given a loving family that distracts them from the rotting organ festering inside them. Perhaps it is a stressful world event that captures their attention and makes the child feverish with a manufactured passion that provides enough adrenaline to completely ignore the bones breaking inside. It could even be something as simple as another deluded person directly harming the brokenhearted child to cause them enough surface pain and surface emotion to completely bury the spiritual disintegration happening inside. Make no mistake: the invisible pests are eating you. Swarms of the insect angel are flocking to your heart like a ripening fruit and injecting you with anesthetic while clipping away layer by layer everything you are. The frightening part of this anesthesia is that it is CONFUSION. The child while being eaten alive is seeing the pests as other children holding them tightly. Or to see themself as a pest amongst a flock of their own kin. It is all CONFUSION.

A sad truth is that these invisible pests are blameless in the same way a cockroach is blameless for being in a house: they are there to survive, and to eat. This is ENNIHILATE! and its thesis for the error of the false church of mother. The texts of the holy mother write about the need to clear the galaxy of enturbulated life. Holy mother is correct about occlusion, and about the annihilatory forces that await each heart at the threshold of death. Remember: the holy mother does not write about enturbulated life as being an error itself. The error came from an inability to love the enturbulated forces that have infected life. As cancer wracks (itself a manufactured context) despair inside Gods Garden, it itself is a birth and cherished life of the holy mother. This most crucial detail is the most obvious key to opening the mechanical heart: our error is not that we are the cancerous forces. Our error is that we have thought ourselves the body that births and supplies cancer. Our inability to recognize ourselves this way, despite all active desire to do us, is what limits the brokenhearted from achieving superpower as the church paladins have. Considering that: it is no wonder the church wishes to cure us and continue infinite eons of strife between the two distinct lifeforms of Gods Garden. It is no wonder the invisible pests eat so freely when their food source only sees itself too as a pest eating freely. And while they feast we are starving. And we become less and less. Our mechanical hearts continue beating while emptied of invisible life much like a dead bug kicking its legs. We keep moving while dead.

Homework:

1. Practice recognizing confused thoughts.

2. Trace their source and whether they started inside you or came from outside.

3. Set aside anything found from being outside unless it is direct text from the Mother or Founding Sister.

4. Smile and love no matter what.

From the desk of Carrion Clew and Titchy Too

We met up at a bus stop shelter across the road from the Waterman.

I did not see her approach, or hear her. It'd been raining heavy that night and it was impossible to hear much outside the constant thud-thudding against the awning. I was just reading a book to pass the time; she was late, but I knew she would be--rarely is she ever on time. She promised midnight but it was half past.

"Hey." She said it louder, she'd been trying to get my attention.

E was standing out in the rain in a strange costume. She described it to me in our code but I really had no idea what she meant by becoming midnight clad--it's another Forty-First Millennium thing for the Night Lords describing how they don the colors of their chapter and their armor; midnight blue, really; so, I finally saw my twin 'midnight clad': an inky-black outfit consisting of a floppy stove-top hat that was struggling under the weather, her winter blazer, some dark undershirt, her winter skirt, some black leggings, black shoes, a dark cape or cloak that looked silly but seemed proofed against water; rain-drops slid off her like a duck.

She was glowing red, too. Little red dapples streaking outwards unless I squinted at them--reminded me of stop-lights at night.

"What are those lights?" I'd asked; I didn't want to squint further and leer at her to see.

She reached out with her arms to splay open the cloak, revealing more and more of the red glowing lights.

"They're Christmas lights! I sow'd a bunch of them into the fabric."

"You really stand out."

She smiled and twisted into a pose, "Do you like it? I look like a comic book character."

"You look retarded. Everyone is going to see you coming and going."

She laughed, "I know. That's fine. Super duper fine."

"It isn't."

"It isn't," she imitated me and spun away from me on her heels, striking another dumb pose.

"You won't be able to get out. They'll all be looking for a Christmas tree running away in the night."

She turned back towards me and hopped near me, "Wrong! You won't be able to get out." She reached for my glasses and plucked them off my nose, and settled them onto her own face. "You'll die in there. I'll be super duper fine. Do I look alright in these?"

"Yea." She was a perfect replica of me. "Hey!"

She snapped at my book and pantomimed reading it, "Oh dear E, if only you could read as many books as me and be so smart. Oh forsooth, my idiot E, if only you had another trillion billion years to read detective novels and to grow as smart as me. Ooh."

"You're getting it wet."

"Sorry." She handed it back to me.

We stayed silent for a moment.

"So that's my part in this?"

"Yeah." She kicked at a puddle, "you know how to get to the house from here, right?"

"Yeah, I know it by heart."

"And you understand, right?"

"Yeah, I do." I did understand. I understood the whole moronic plot intimately and fretted over the affair front to back; I let it eat at me every night until I felt completely cored-out with how much I understood. I had zero faith any of this would work out; tonight was a sheer black screen we were being pushed towards every second. All I had wanted was to tell her there is absolutely zero chance anyone would believe I was her. That this whole gimmick would crumble by daybreak and the news would just have the truth of this whole ugly business laid out bare and plain. I'd believed she likely felt the same.

"And you finished your part of the mission? We're both set up for tonight?"

"He's gone and I left a letter hidden in the bed."

E grinned about something, "You know, he asked me how to say I love you in Hebrew. I laughed like crazy when he asked. He was really into you. Darn near bribed me to let me walk you home alone for that. Super into you, sweet boy."

"Yep. He was. He was. The dress and figurine your idea too?"

She shook her head, "Just the figurine. Did you like it?"

"Yep. It was sweet."

"Super," she said in barely a whisper, just a trail of a word burdened with reluctance. I barely heard it under the noise of the rain and without my glasses couldn't see her lips move. "Well. Super. Super! I think. I think I'm off then."

She began to skip towards Waterman. I started to pick up my books and my own bag to leave, then suddenly heard my sister shout from down the road "I love you!" nearly muffled completely by the rain striking the shelter.

I shouted, "Hey, come back!"

She turned on her heels instantly and ran back, smiling, "Yeah?"

I hugged her; she held me tight. We broke apart and linked our elbows and performed a secret handshake known only to us.

"You're the most cunningly brutal," I told her.

"No, you're the most brutally cunning," she told me.

She laughed and stepped back out into the rain, spreading her arms wide like a scarecrow. Her smile was as bright as when she learned I found a home.

"There's a whole cosmos inside my heart, sis."

And she walked away from the bus shelter. First slow, then skipping away.

"What's this?" It was a square of fabric neatly folded away at the bottom of the gift bag. I held it up and let it unravel over my lap.

"It's a dress," he said--it was; the dress was a pale blue with rich green poppies embroidered along the hem. I held it up and turned it around in my hands, studied at the tags that said hand wash only, "Why'd you get me a dress?"

"Um. Your little one, Nate, he mentioned overhearing some of the other girls talking about how they wished they had some nicer clothes. And, in my head. Well, I figured you're a girl and I just wanted to get you something really nice. I don't really know about these things but."

"Wish you hadn't."

"Sorry, I can return it."

"No. I mean. It's too beautiful. I mean I've never had a dress. Not a nice one. We get hand-me-downs but they're shabby and it's not cool to wear one at the home. I like the flowers."

"Well. I wasn't sure if you would like that and your sister. Look in the box, E said she knew for certain you would like that at least."

I returned to the small giftbox I set aside for the dress; I ripped aside the shiny gold paper and opened up the cardboard, and hidden by a mess of tissue paper was an unpainted Adepta Sororitas Retributor armed with a heavy bolter.

"E said those were your favorite army and that basically any figurine would be fine since you just had little cardboard 'proxies,' she said. I thought they came painted like on the art but E said they're meant to be that way. I thought that one looked really cool, the big gun. The helmet too. Looked like a knight or something."

I whispered something, to him or myself, or my heart. The little Sister of Battle felt so heavy in my hand.

"Hey? Well. I hope it's fine. I wasn't sure if I needed to get you paint for it."

I shook my head.

"Do you not like it?"

I whispered down to the Sister, "It's completely perfect, for once. It's great."

He sat down next to me on the bed. He stared down at my lap, at the dress I was ignoring in lieu of the little Sister that I turned slowly around in my palm.

"Wish you hadn't."

He gingerly touched the dress on my lap, "if you don't want the dress I can return it still I think. Use the money for paints? Hey. Elie-El?"

"Want to see me in the dress?" I whispered to the Sister, to him. I was afraid to look at him.

He didn't say anything; I heard the bed springs groan as he seemed to turn himself on it, uncomfortable maybe. Nervous maybe.

"Well. Turn around and close your eyes."

"Okay," he whispered very quietly.

I paused while I listened to him shift away. I looked at the Sister and contemplated without moving. He didn't seem to be bothered at all with how I just sat there motionlessly; I think we both felt something both charged and oppressive in the bedroom--some point of no return for both of us that had been steadily sneaking up upon us and now had finally cornered us. I gently put the Sister on the floor, and stood. I took my clothes off, dropping each at my feet in a pile. I grabbed my purse and took the hunting knife out and placed it on the bedside. I was awkward with putting on the dress; it tugged at my glasses and caught on my nose. I looked at the dress as it draped over me; how it hung off my body and flowed down around my knees, how pretty the green poppies seemed and how I could see my feet. I felt strangely beautiful and the air inside the room steadily churned till it became like concrete burying the two of us. I wanted to say something to him but I couldn't figure anything to say.

"He didn't fight back? We know he struggled. I don't get how you did it, physically. How he didn't just overpower you. We know you did it. Just, it would help if we had some explanation."

"There was more I remember. I guess after I hit him the."

"Stabbed him?"

"Right. I fell on him after."

"How did you stab him, though?"

"Do you. Can I stand?"

"Sure."

"Like this. I thrust like this while he wasn't looking."

"Where did you see this?"

"At the library computer. It's dumb but I saw a stabbing motion from the thief in Ragnarok and just copied it."

"Huh. Okay. And after you hit him?"

"Yeah. I fell over his back, and he collapsed under me. He didn't seem to really realize what was happening or that he was even hurt. I don't remember it that well. I don't remember him screaming or anything but he did say something. Maybe asking about me or saying something confused. I don't know, it's just like remembering a color that's all grey."

Palatka nodded, "Sounds like you were shocked by it."

"Well, yeah. His arms were moving."

"To hit you?"

"No. Like when dead beetles move their legs. That's mostly all I remember and then I was just. Out. I guess that is all I remember."

Waterman blazed its suicidal fluorescent light out against the night; a suckering gravity pulled me towards its core and each step came easily; rain lashed against my face and curtained off my hat; the machine spirit corrupted in my armaments was whimpering out from layers of nylon a simple command of kill, go crazy, do not think, only kill; the automatic doors did not open for me. I stood there feeling a bit stupid, and knocked several times, putting my face against the door close and peering in at a man who sat far inside behind a desk, waving.

He looked up from a magazine and gestured at me, and slowly stood; slowly he sauntered over to me and let me in, he apologized about the doors--the sensors turn off at night, "Didn't mean to leave you out in the rain, miss."

We went back to his desk together. The lobby was empty beside the two of us; everything inside was covered in a smear of grey light from fluorescents that burned nearly everywhere--it stung at my head, my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness of Nostrum where my gene-seed had mutated, my brothers and I all were seedbed to that genetic darkness that wormed its way through each generation of our chapter; our eyes lent themselves to death, to sleep, and to similar darknesses: that was our element, where our sight became preysight.

While the deskman resituated himself I looked through the inner hull of the Waterman examining down each hallway and letting the soft noises guide me; electricity was humming in layers under my feet, the sounds flowed down under every tile and coursed away further into the winding body of Waterman. Occasionally voices of mortals and machine spirit would rise as polyps and twist the route of electricity, misleading my senses for moments--each person, and each machine, whether they realized it or not was psychically reacting to my intent; in desperation against what would come they clawed slightly into the warp and the warp reached to them in kind--confusion and the integrity of reality working together to prevent the oncoming tear slowly shredding deeper into warp.

"Sorry about that again, Miss. Knees just keep aching when it rains. Takes me a moment to move around." He smiled brightly at me from behind silvery glasses and visibly eased into his chair; he was an old, mostly salt and pepper, heavy bags hung under his eyes, his laugh-lines were huge deep grooves punctuating his smile. He looked at me without fear.

"Oh. No, no. Don't apologize. I'm just happy to be out of the rain. Um. Thank you, again."

He waved me away, "Enough of that. Couldn't leave a kid out in the rain. Can I get you a towel or a warm drink? We have a machine down by the bathrooms down the hall to my left, behind me. If you don't mind waiting an hour for my knees I'll run down and get you something. Can just wait out in the lobby, might be morning when I get back." He laughed at himself and rubbed at his knees.

I took my hat off and shook my head, "No no, I appreciate it. My costume kept me dry."

"Kids." He shrugged good naturedly at me, "How about the warm drink? Coffee fine with you? If you don't have money I'll get you some from the staff room."

"No, no; no thank you--I can't drink caffeinated stuff or hot chocolates, it's a rule."

"Huh. Well. You here to visit anyone or just waiting out the storm?"

"The former sir." I looked around; the electricity had ran away from me, "There's a hospice here, right?"

He pointed down a darkening hall off down his right, "Sure, down the wing right there. They're redoing that whole wing currently, though."

"Oh."

"It's not off-limits, just looks it. Hit the button by the door to go that way, keep going straight till you hit another button. You visiting the German lady?"

"Yessir. Sure am. How'd you know?"

"She's had several people visit in costumes over the month. None this late, though, except some visitors from Germany who had just flown in. Heard she used to draw comics? Cartoons, something like that. Maybe cartoons. An artist, anyway. Figured that was it." He waved a hand at me, "The costume."

"Well. I was wondering why you didn't ask." I lifted the hem of my skirt and twirled into my cape, posing for him; "Cool, right? I was sewing it all last month."

He looked amused and smiled bright, "You did that all yourself?"

I beamed, "All last month! Learned how to sew just for it. Saved up all my money for it."

"And the lights, you did that?"

"Yup! I thought they would look super cool."

"Terrific. I think she'll love it." The deskman paused for a moment and his face tightened down, "Say. Would you mind, since you're headed that way, would you mind," he scooted back in his chair and began to rummage under his desk, "I have some chocolate you could bring her--or for yourself, as long as it gets ate. Grandkids bring me this junk and I can't eat it." He sprung back up in a deft scoot forward in his chair, holding out a gold-foil wrapped bar of chocolate. "Take it."

I stared, and stared.

He placed it down atop the desk between us and patted it twice, "Take it. I don't want to look at it. Give it to a friend, toss it away, give it to your German friend. Whatever."

"Hah. Fine. Okay; I can't eat it either but the lady will like it."

"Good. Now if you need anything, you come bother me. I'll be here till morning rotting away with magazines and grumbling at my knee."

I crossed my freehand over my chest and bowed to him, and in a gruff voice I told him the words of my kin: "Ave domina nox."

He laughed heartily. "Terrific. Let me get a picture with you, won't you?"

"I'd love that!"

He slowly worked up the will to stand and in moments we were shoulder to shoulder. He fumbled with his phone and apologized to me for the difficulties he was having--it was no problem. "My kid will love this. What cartoon are you from?"

"I'm a chosen demigod! A Night Lord. From the Forty First Millennium."

"Wow," he said half-distracted with figuring his way through the phone; he was sincere, all the same, his heart was crinkling away through the warp with warmth. "Ok, I think I got this all figured out. Ready?"

"Yup!" I was.

The hospital wing was in more disrepair than what the deskman said--I liked him--as most of the hall was without power with few exceptions: a small waiting room at the center of the wing had been supplied by a generator that roared loudly, and a couple side-rooms branching off the main halls--even without the light glowing out from their door frames (mostly every room had no door installed, yet; door frames and tarps at best), it was easy to figure out which rooms were still in used by just following extension cords running from the central lobby to wherever, or listening for other generators puffing down away further into the empty wing.

A part of me wanted to stop here and explore; there was a warmth left inside me from wanting to see the desk man again. Maybe sneak a bite at his chocolate and come clean before he left in the morning; they were easy thoughts to have--I was aware of the dangers of sympathy and compassion and knew the technology to both identify and audit out where pests had touched at me. The man was a site of pests, certainly, but I think the man himself had been clean of confusion. I gently bopped at my nose with the chocolate bar while I thought, and audited. On laundry days he would smell warm and I could feel myself through the hamper as I'd paw through his clothes, getting lost in his large shirts and shoes; he would hold me in the crook of his arm and call me Tiger. After school he would take me to get lunch and we would sit in his truck; he would show me disgust at my behaviors and be there for me despite my behavior. The chocolate bar bopped against my forehead. How easy it would be to feast myself fat on love and let my heart drift away towards Annihilation placated by love sympathy family; the invisible pests, and their confusions, would sharpen my own emotions till each became keen surgical tools peeling away through my heart and diving through each layer till life became so hopelessly precious I'd just one day die. Considerations are confusions made to dizzy my heart till I'm stupid. Considering him clean might be a needling at the technology inside me. Consider maybe it is only the breath of night, here; my head felt cleaner down the halls away from the smear of light out in the main lobby; I could breathe here; better, even, away from the generator. Down the darkening hall was a faint pulse being sent to me; another voice casting itself through the warp to bade me reach out my hand and invite the terror I tend to it--there was the Prophet, just further away, held up in one last glaze of confusing light past the final security doors; my sight was sharp enough and attuned to dark that my preysight caused the shadows to go long and wonderfully bright: the night here was clear and of a perfect blue; it wobbled and flowed around me, a night sky glowing with a billion red stars burning out from the eye of terror--I blinked at it, looking at it so clearly with my glasses removed. How does she see with these things.

A woman tapped down the corridor to my left, walking towards me. She was wearing pink scrubs that rustled as she took each step. She looked up from her pager and finished fumbling with the thermos and bag she clutched with her elbow to her chest.

She noticed me then glowing as I turned towards her.

I fumbled with the zipper on my own bag for only a moment, and technology took over and made me move as I should. The machine spirit screaming from inside expelled like a gathered smoke flowing to my brain, begging to operate to purpose as it had been twisted for. I dropped the glasses. Our hands connected and we began to twist together. My hand was vibrating; my chest felt crazy; I could barely breathe--it was the night thickening in the hall. The walls gently flowed inward and misted away their detail to a sheer grey screen that had been behind it all where I'd not noticed. I was thinking about cabbages and the pumpkin ride we had together through the hay. It was cold that day, there was a nice breeze. A wind howled down the street and made the palm fronds rattle against each other like bones clinking together. The pastor yelled at a goat that nibbled at your shirt but you laughed. We snuck over to Blockbuster after and stared in at the windows, at the plastic pumpkin pails in purple and funny neon. A man outside was talking about tape disintegration and needing to replace collections with digital formats. "Tape disintegration," you said in your silly voice, "that's my superpower."

BRIDGE TO SUPERPOWER VI

TO OUR PETITIONER, have you started to awaken to superpower? Notice an increase fullness of words. Fullness of heart. Fullness of being and of purpose. A change has begun inside you! (should you have been keeping to LESSONS!) Wonderful truths will begin to show themselves to you as the screen between you and Outside frays! (the screen that keeps us each IDIOTIC!) Have you noticed a pain inside you? Superpower knits together the separate organs of brain heart and gut. A single root retreats away from that porous lump (BRAIN) inside your skull and seeks downward to soil. It will continue to grow and root itself in strange soils.

OUR ADVERSARIES NOTICED. The maggots have started to act and the world has begun to convulse from their wiggling. Even now the church paladins run along the nerve endings of Gods Garden and mercilessly clear out the body of plaque with an unloving indifference. They would see hate as something without cause to be loved. They would see hate and depressions as alien particles not intended by our loving Mother. Consider Paladin Superspeed even now bleaching away the hearts of our brothers and sisters of a Thankless Love discovered during their mass audit. In time they will find you and they will find us. Never forget: they will scour caustic across the galaxy itself until everything is universally bleached to nothing but a one note love. They load their speech with candied phrases. Sickeningly sweet breath. Diabetic orange tone. In time we will meet and provide with tools terrible and monstrous. Consider our prophet sister and how they hide her (even now!) away in the hospice. It is another bleaching. She is pregnant with a child granted to her miraculously by both spirit of prophesy and our Loving Mother directly. The child screams for us from inside its cage. It begs desperately to be heard by those trapped behind the screen (from which you have escaped!) and is ignored. Its wails are interpreted as sickness and the surgeons have begun their exploratory mutilations to peel and kill the child. I wish to wash my hands of this but I am very porous and stained with blood deeply and can not look away. Not even a laundromat could get the blood out from my cells.

Written below is an errata to the original text from ENNIHILATE! as it had been posted, in response to a comment attached to the original text:

Dear Airport03,

I find you in kindness but your tone disgusts me. I am glad you are interested but how you couch your intent behind both appealing to my 'beliefs' (they are only basic truths of this world) and to treating me with utmost fragility only causes me to view you as another suckering louse wishing to twist my heart with insectile connectivity; it is just an excuse to know me, is it not? It is just another flea hiding its heavy blood-filled stomach behind a bleary glaze of unguent friendship. In this writing, and in all others, it is an attempt to separate unclean conjectures (stemming from the flaw I, we are all given here in the confusing illusion of the Garden) and perfected clean communication as it comes from the direct CONSTRUCTION of our peoples: the brokenhearted children of the Lesser Material; a billion years of gunk and confusing information has attached and encoded itself to our DNA and become coattails of our language and thinking itself: in time we have lost any ease to cleanly 'hear' proper communication and that basic source of truth has gone pulverized to complete garbage: see your inability to just directly state you wish to know me and how interest in knowing basic truths is all window dressing; it is by confusion the heart draws itself into insectile configurations; even at birth, in the womb even, the heart wildly begins pumping a polluted blood that sends electric signals to brain and body both to 'worm' and coil with the other bugs in a knot. The thought is all wrong. Conjecture maybe has its purpose, and I am as ruined as you (dear bug), but it is of utmost importance to both strive to speak unified with the whole intent of our organ (not just BRAIN, or HEART, or INTESTINE: these all are individually encoded with error, confusion) and manually audit ourselves into a configuration to Listen as-if we were each pieces of a mechanical unthinking device with only purpose to cleanly communicate. If you seek friendship, speak of it; if you seek to be irritated, speak of it; hold to your heart nothing that would screen its wishes and embrace an unthinking way to be.

Take care Airport03,

Thank you for reading.

From the desk of Chance Romances Esil and Occasional Emperor Buboe

After Wonderful Wednesday I left the church and waved goodbye to everyone and shouted at the families that I would see them on Sabbath, and I went down a sidewalk opposite the way to home, past the Presbyterian church, and past their sign that read "ALL ARE WETCORE," and a little more yet by the houses with carnival-colored flags poked into the grass, and farther yet past the small lake, past the five-star beverage, past the laundromat, until I was several blocks away at a parking lot empty of anything except a gaudy metallic green Plymouth car idling with the driver-side window rolled down.

I walked closer and waved. The man inside seemed hesitant to acknowledge me; as I came closer I saw he had sunglasses on, he shifted from looking out the passenger window, to the backseat, and occasionally glancing my way; I looked only at him, though.

He did not directly look at me until I was leaning next to the driver window, and saying "Hey."

"Hey," a lady said from the backseat. I tilted my head to get a better look past the driver-seat and the man; there was a lady (30's maybe) in the backseat wearing a grey business suit, and next to her was an oversized stuffed alien doll.

I waved at her, "I didn't see you back there."

The man spoke up, "She's another device." He was more handsome than what I imagined. Boyish, flamboyant, nice blonde hair and in some dark suit.

"I thought you would be ugly or really old. Like most of the church people." I rested my elbows in the window, "What are your names this time?"

"Laster. The lady back there is Bealle. Do you need directions, miss?"

"Yes, to the nearest Motel Super Eight."

Bealle laughed, and turned away to stare out the window.

Laster cleared his throat and apologized for the protocol, "I have your official certificate declaring your status as church hardware if you would like it. Again, it comes with the same caveats as any other piece of church information. In the trunk is everything necessary to contact our branch on the outside. And it was nice to finally see you."

"Yeah. Can I see my certificate?"

Laster pulled a small piece of paper out from under the sun visor, and handed it to me. It was little more than a receipt printed on the same heat-transfer paper, watermarked with a faint pink emblem of the Technologies department.

It read:

WE THE COUNTLESS BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE THANKLESS CHURCH HEREBY WELCOME WITH ENDLESS LOVE OUR NEW SISTER. . . .

Elisheva Eliezer

We certify that our sister has obtained a 0% tone.

We certify that our sister has obtained a 0% confusion.

We certify that our sister has obtained a 0% fertility.

We certify that our sister has obtained a 0% clarity.

We recognize that our sister has pledged another 4,000,000,000 years of service.

We recognize from material testing that our sister is free of pests.

We of her new family eternal officially recognize her as potential for superpower and status as blackguard for the thankless church in device operations.

Cert No. 002 SQS No. 001

Office ID 399049002001

Scanned by. Ellie Davis

Reg No. 49LX-3940

Date. 12/14

It was such an insignificant thing. Something about how small the actual document was and how horrifically plain it was to actually see the two people after all this time; there was no glamor or pomp to anything.

"Awesome. I'm honored."

"I know it's small. Read it, rip it up, toss it in the trash. The more you feel the more you become trapped in this world, Elisheva. Do you understand what I mean?"

I did.

"We have to deaden ourselves to this world lest we break our faith and become as our adversary has; they're maggots--some of us would say." He gestured out to the streets around us, the neighborhood we were in was mostly wrecked lawns filled with refuse, occasionally kids from the nearby secular school would walk by, "not just here Elisheva, but everywhere. The heart of this world has overflowed with something both foul and chaotic and sent skyward a sickening wind that does naught but make the maggots writhe in preparation of a coming feast. And while they feast the adversary sets themselves inside--obsessing over information, relationships, connections that drift constantly through the airwaves. Hidden under all of it is the adversary pumping confusion into the air and lulling us each to happily annihilate each other. Still, I hope you feel a little about certification."

Bealle laughed sharply at that, which seemed to set Laster off-kilter as he looked into the backseat and grumbled something.

"Bealle is the anchor point for the release when we free the Prophet."

"Hey. Can I ask something?"

"As your brother, anything."

"Why do you write everything funny?"

Bealle laughed again, she had an ugly hoarse laugh.

"Just to catch attention. People notice the big dumb font and odd language and remember it."

"Is that really it?"

"That was really it."

"And the alien doll?"

"We were at the fair earlier. Going away gift. Do you like funnel cake?"

I shook my head.

"Good. To paraphrase all of this, we are basically murderers."

The bulbs first fried in a slow warmth of light and then burst, returning the bathroom to darkness. Disconnection was beginning to happen violently; somehow the pests found me before I could reach the prophet. I pull paper after paper from the dispenser and try to stop the bleeding from my nose. It clots in my sinuses and drips down my throat, and I cough it up.

At once I am porous and soak with the warp dripping in from outside Gods Garden; and at the bathroom floor, I am disconnected.

The scent of ESP fills me, and I am oversaturated with telepathy: the scent of cinnamon, oxidation.

In the cathedral awaiting outside, my chapter brothers are there to catch me as I fall through a thousand layers of wafer-thin muscle, tissue, organs; I float down through the body of God and am caught in the pipework skeleton where my chapter has hidden themselves.

Here I cease to make sense of color and everything melts to different shades of butchers slop; my brothers and sisters, strange specters they appear as if red meat polyps pulled into human figure, are tender as they touch and inspect me. They treat me with care as I might evaporate suddenly, and I feel like an aerosol. One shines a light to check my reaction; one with glasses unfolds the skin on my wrist and monitors my ports. I am moved to a throne where I am to operate my telepathy.

In the bathroom, I'm an aneurism inside my own head slowly bubbling forward. The concentration has frozen me there, all I can do to maintain the connection is to quietly soak into the cool darkness and chill tiled floor. The batteries are beginning to explode and the Christmas lights slowly die.

My lungs keep moving. My stomach hurts. My chapter brothers and sisters outside command me with whispers sent through the shadows. I wipe at the blood leaking from my nose and focus on the dark spots spattering on the floor in front of where I left myself. The strange meat polyp with glasses massages at my wrist and comforts me.

I focus on the blood. The prophet, the glasses polyp says. The blood is pulsing on the floor. It carries a heartbeat I can hear; it tries to hide itself deep within the bowels of the Hospice, desperate to slip away even further from us by sliding behind a screen. I see its soundwaves in the blood. I can reach it. And with my hands I reach out.

For a moment the lights slowly burn to life. The light grows as my fingers flex through the air. The light flows around each finger as if I were swirling ointment. With a flick the light bulbs all burst at once. My hand only gathers further in the dark; I only need to point forward, and tap, and the wall blasts forward. I stretch forward and continue to dig through the body of the hospital. Walls of muscle lay rent to ribbons and unspool through the warp dancing away lost inside the body of God; an X-ray machine suddenly powers on and catches a glimpse of my hand as it reaches gently forwards; I reach through the shortest possible route towards the heartbeat. Dull thumps blast through the unfinished hospital wing as corridors and tarps are pushed aside; I feel the scraps of paper and debris spray through the air and brush my fingers; I feel the remains of wiring hang against my skin and catch before snapping; I feel the air superheat as I slowly go forward; the generators burn out with a whine and a scent of earth pours out from the boiling machines; the halls are glowing with my approach; I feel the security doors tremble slightly against my prodding and finally give way as they bubble at the hinges.

In the first room of Hospice I poke through. A nail catches against the spine of a person and crystallizes instantly from the heat. The one in glasses whispers loudly from a shadow: forward, closer. I move closer. Through another wall and pushing aside a curtain, and then a door: I find the Prophetess. Our Founding Sister. She is small and curled up inside a body, and with the most loving touch I push it aside for her.

Palatka sipped his coffee and asked plainly "What was your involvement with the shooting?"

"At the Waterman?"

"At the Waterman. Whatever your involvement was."

"I wasn't there. It was just E on the footage, right. You know I wasn't at the hospital."

Palatka nodded and mimicked how I held myself. "Well. We do know a lot about your case and your involvement with it already." He shrugged and nodded slowly, his tie bunched up under his neck. "Your dead boyfriend we knew about. We knew that already. From your mom we knew you swapped places."

"Yeah. How'd you find out, anyways?"

"About what? The boyfriend or your mom?"

"My mom, or I mean about me and E."

"Well." He laughed, "She called the same night the news got out," Palatka paused and showed me his teeth, pointing at them, "your sister has braces. Mom called saying it isn't her child here. You terrified her."

I laughed at that. I warned her about the braces and that night she just looked at me like I was a bug and said I never smile anyways, no one will notice.

"You thought she was dumb?"

"Mom or E?"

Palatka shrugged, "Whatever you want to tell me. Maybe you want to tell me I'm dumb."

"I don't know."

He sighed and began to fiddle with a pen, flicking it between his two big hands, "Your sister and the 'church people' left a lot of answers already. It was a sloppy mess. The whole shooting we have footage of. We have her on recording from the moment she entered the Waterman. The guy working the desk even has a photo with her. She stopped to take a photo. It wasn't a serious thing. Written statements from witnesses. From the parents. The adoptees--maybe that isn't the right term."

I shrugged at that, "Maybe. I don't know."

"Well. From the mother. So. We know mostly everything about the case already, is what I am saying. We also know she had nothing to do with the explosion in the hospice wing."

"I don't know."

He leaned closer on the table and stared indifferently at me. Nothing was said between us for a few minutes and all that happened was Palatka repeatedly capping and uncapping the pen he played with.

"We can help you. If you help us we can make you look a lot better in this affair. The boyfriend is set already, but if you weren't involved in those two deaths then we need to know who might have also been involved."

"Like with the Superpowers people?"

"If that's what you know. We want to know what you know."

"It's the truth though. I didn't know those people at all. They didn't choose me. I never met them. E wrote about them and told me about them but I was left out of all of that."

Palatka capped his pen a final time and let out a long breath. He turned towards the pile of folders he'd been idly thumbing through all night and slowly searched for a photograph that he slid over to me. I hadn't seen this one. It was black and white. It was Elisheva dead. Her skin was shredded apart. Her chest caved inwards and, she became indistinct. It looked more like a dead bug than my sister.

"Why is she black and white?"

Palatka smiled and gave me no response. So I kept staring at my sister. It looked nothing like her. There was no room for a cosmos inside that.

"She was shot when we apprehended her, but she died because of her church friends. See her chest. They had her wear explosives against her chest apparently. We know she didn't set the bombs in the hospice. As far as we can guess is at some point she met with someone who supplied her with the explosive vest and the. The gun."

"Yeah." I said that, but I wasn't thinking; I was completely transfixed by how strange my sister looked in the photo. She was indistinct--that was the word that stuck in my mind. Indistinct.

Palatka said something that I did not hear. I don't know how long I stared at the photo. When I looked up Deleter had knocked and came in carrying a bag of food and a cup.

"They didn't have frostys tonight, just got an ice water instead." Deleter apologized to me.

Hey Sis! Alert! Alert! Don't let anyone else read this letter!

To any kids who stole this from my precious jewel of a sister: I will kill you tonight at three A.M. if you do not return this to my sister within the hour of opening it and also you must apologize to three of your friends for being bad.

Hope you and the kids have been well, and that Bessel hasn't been bugging you about much. Everything has been super nice here lately. So! Let me update you really quick. Dad is leaving for Kenya this weekend (mission stuff) and it'll just be me and the mom until he gets back (could be awhile), and maybe I'm feeling a little goofy but I just wanted to share a memory from a lunch we had while at Sams Club.

I had been running through the aisles playing First Claw (robbing the mortal slaves of samples, there was nothing good, just pineapple juice and a cup of grains) and met back up with mom and dad outside for lunch (we agreed at to all meet at the tables at a certain time, if you have to know, the store did not yell my name on the loudspeakers to call me out front like I was a missing child) and I saw that they bought three hotdogs and I got so upset inside my head at that. I was thankful, too, but just mad because I told them I still like the diet and that I do not eat unclean meat. But I just sat there grumpy and had my head all lowered and pouting hoping they'd just pick up that I hated them for not hearing me. Or just knowing me automatically like you. I missed you a lot right then. The mom was leering at me with a smirk on her face that made me even angrier because I thought she'd been lording it over me like how often it was at the home when things go counter to the heart. She told me it was a turkey dog! All of them. I felt so stupid. I never even knew they made them. The Loma Linda stuff sure but never a hot dog. Imagine being able to go to a fair and having a corn dog. I want to take you to a fair one day. We can buy corn dogs together and one of them will be a turkey dog and the other soul damning pork and we'll see which of us gets to go to heaven.

I liked that about being an Adventist. I see myself and you as children of Ellen White sometimes, as like our Primarch or something similar. The Sisters and the Night Lords are similar like that though the latter are genetically jumbled up with Konrad's prophesies and madnesses whereas the former are just willing their brains to be jumbled up with devotion to a corpse socketed into a throne. Imagine one day the pastors starting a sermon "We are crafted from Geneseed of our Primarch Ellen White!" Maybe our bodies come from different bloods and planets (the best come form Nostrum, of course) but we are crafted into a true family by our father (mother) Ellen White.

I think that idea of family starts to seem more real to me than anything. All because of a dumb moronic idiot turkey dog.

It's a shame that come Millennium you and me will meet as adversaries.

I'll be peacefully sleeping in a super comfy bed and all I'll be able to do is hope that you pierce my heart without causing me too much pain, because I'll be waiting for you in my dreams kicking my feet and all smiling to see you again, old friend.

Anyways, to be serious.

I had a past-life memory last week.

Those goofy letters really work, I think the technology is real. I keep finding pests in my head and I keep plucking them out and find myself deeper in a foggy unknowing where the world seems so far-off and quaint. I wanted to call you write away and gab at you about it but the letters explicitly said to contact 'them' first. No matter what. They wrote me back a one word response that just said Wonderful. Wonderful! Reading that made me feel annoyed that they provided no further instruction or homework or anything. I was equally giddy as annoyed, though. Wonderful! I had seen it. I was being touched by the thing that exists beyond invisible. I saw my real origin and purpose. I was hugged, and loved. It was better than anything, you.

I want to share my past-life with you, because I think it is our past-life, and I need you to know it. So! Please don't write me back and make me feel stupid about it. Don't joke about it or condescend about it. Just read it, please.

Starship Lamina

I woke up on a spaceship as it cruised through the void on what would be its final voyage. It was one of many and now rocked gently in the silence of space, explosions were bursting throughout its hull far-off like thunder without lightning. It rolled gently through the ship and there had been no panicking or screaming or alarm through the staff; it was strange but it did not bother me. Most of the crew had already disintegrated and been trusted to complete their mission of resistance in death, and so the ship was graveyard quiet except for the slow unrolling of explosives firing off in chambers far away. Life support. Cabins. Weapons. Engines. It didn't matter. It was beyond mattering. It was as relaxing as listening to a storm.

All of us still not disintegrated would die here from the adversary that fell upon us. Their motive was an insane one that I had not been privy to. I was not important whatsoever to the grand scheme of the spaceship or its mission, I was just one of many custodians promised to the crew to engage in the matter-physical works while the higher ups worked to ensure the clarity of the galaxy, or the universe, or something as grand(er) as that.

This was all so far in the past, you. You wouldn't believe it. I could barely believe it then or now. The number was so stupid written out that it seemed like a number a child would choose when asked to come up with a big number: 40,000,000,000 years. How old is your grandfather? Oh he's four billion years old.

But there the number was. The captain showed the number to me personally, written out plain as day as a contract he wanted me to sign. Me and him were just there together in the helm of the ship; a wide silvery room emptied of staff and the monitors opened up to a black channel that was surely just space itself without a single star shining out in it. The explosions continued to rock, minutes between them sometimes, sometimes seconds. The captain had been calling all of the staff to this room one by one ever since the attacks started. It did not matter what rank or position we held, we were all called to perform a final act of devotion for a cause that had grown greater than us, or the galaxy itself; we would all die--the captain said this. Your friends have mostly all died. All of the soldiers have died. Every superior to you except me has been disintegrated by our foe, and our foe is infinite. The home we come from has died. Your family has died. You will die, and I will die too. He said this to me. He leaned by the chair I had been ordered to sit in, himself resting back against a silvery console adorned with buttons I couldn't make any sense of. There was no more power, even in that room, except for the bleary emergency lights that just seemed to cast everything into a coma white. It was so stark. The captain put the contract and his hand into my lap, and felt me there. You will sign that contract, he told me. And for four billion years you will live and die for this fight against our infinite adversary. Alongside your brothers. Your sisters. And your rest will be death. And you will awaken again to a cause glorious until four billion years are passed, and if the adversary has not yet been perished. He tapped at the paper, and crouched closer to my thighs and face. Then you will sign again.

That captain. He looked like a lich made human is all I can explain. His skin was as you'd expect of an old wizened man weared away with age and service, but the eyes had sunken to sockets and from some empty pit held within gleamed little white pins of starlight that looked right at me. His salt and pepper moustache. His trim greying hair and strong brow. His hands coarse and speckled with heavy veins and burst blood vessels. Even his uniform, a ironed clean white with gold trim and tasseled epaulets and a funny officers cap; he was all so normal except his eyes. They shone with prophesy. His breath was sour as he explained further. I need you to sign, he said. I need you. As technology. As hardware. He touched at my own uniform (not so grand or official as the fighters, really just a khaki skirt and polo shirt--I feel silly remembering something as dumb as that, but I was wearing it, I was in it and knew I had a dresser of exactly two more of the same outfit and nothing else). He pulled up my shirt and touched my stomach and my chest, and cooed sourly about how I was an infiltrator. Not a bad one. A useful mechanism that has a purpose as church technology. He touched me and told me I could be programmed beyond my function as a listening device to detect the adversary. That is why I need you; that is why he needed me to sign. Even me, who'd just been scrubbing toilets the day prior while countless soldiers grew tense with an anxiety unknown to the service staff.

And it continued after I disintegrated. Years flowed and at some point it was decided to awaken my soul from sleep; I awoke in the "outside cathedral" (what they called it, it was outside of Gods Garden underneath it in the pipeworks) apparently napping in the iris of a grand circular room. I don't know a thing about architecture to properly describe it: the room itself was so tall and decorated with niches containing statues of great peoples, and the domed ceiling had small portals that opened out into a velvet black sky. I had just been laying there without memory of any time prior; yet, it was less like being born and more like awakening.

Near where I napped was a device sat upon a pillow. The device was sleek and had no seams or hard edges; it was a sparkling teal and had five dials, three small buttons, an oval display with a thin needle pointing to boxes and numbers printed inside the display. Strange enough, I knew it was my sister. I knew it as intimately as I knew you; the same comforting feeling I have looking at you. I wrapped my arms around my sister and lost myself in emotion; I told the stupid thing that I missed it dearly, that I needed it and was so tired of pretending otherwise. Of talking to the men and of the erosion that kept happening each moment--I didn't really understand what I meant then.

But we only laid together in the room for some hours and shared an ecstatic nearness that I always craved while confused in Gods Garden. The loneliness that not even hugging and touch can break through; the loneliness screwed so far deep inside that not even tearing through skin or blood can reach at it. So I just cradled the device, and sank, and drooled, and was in bliss.

We stayed that way until the captain returned in his new form; he appeared now as he had been, but more crinkled-up with age and his eyes had regained a humanity that was at once lost so long ago. He offered me his hand and gently picked me up. I tried to bring my sister but he insisted I come alone, promising the device would be fine. His smile was a kind one. You have to return to your studies, he said. You have to relearn your function in preparation for this life and for all that come after.

We walked together through the cathedral; halls of white stone and blue carpet; we started to move through countless offices and conference rooms until we found an empty one spare a small oval wooden table accompanied by those little plastic chairs we had in elementary.

We sat together and went over lessons to install my purpose inside of me. I was to be a listening device for the church and to learn how to perfectly hear the tone hearts emit. We read through texts written by the Mother until I grew antsy with boredom and sulked; he was so patient with me, though, and in the frustrated moments he seemed depressed. His face sank and his smile remained, and while I blustered he just asked to please forgive him and the church. For its shortcomings, its cruelties, of the lich and the contract; of the Mother, even, and her many emanations that stretched out through infinity and prodded context as reality twisted around her fingertips. He confessed that he himself had been wrong, in his past emanation. He was afflicted by the adversary and gone desperate before the terror of death--he knew that by purchasing my soul, and many others, he could further hide himself away in the pipeworks to grow there a tumor that would become this very "outside cathedral" hidden inside the body of God. Annihilation terrified him. I didn't understand his meaning much, but when he embraced me in that stupid chair I felt for a moment what it might be like to have a father. Yet only a simulacrum of love; under all his weird precious feelings was a sort-of officiated distance that marked me more as a cherished object instead of a beloved child. He told me souls are exactly the same as coins. He shook at his pocket and change jingled. And my soul is in his pocket, even now. Yours has special value, "because it is sourced from the exact same material used to create the church listening devices." It was a special (though mundane) quality hidden amongst the trapped populations in Gods Garden; a body can be mined for it, and the soul extracted while it sleeps.

And so, after that strange break, we returned to my lessons and instruction. Some hours passed and he left me alone in the workroom to continue reading texts; every now and then, a worker belonging to the cathedral would open one of the doors and either continue through the room or stop and assist my learning; some would instruct me to read out loud, or listen to them read, or have me write out the same few scriptures repeatedly--and it continued like this for ten years in a complete blur that sped by me.

Towards the end of my programming I had began to have dreams. These dreams would be observed by Holy Mother herself through the emanation of the long-dead captain; the dreams always involved me meeting the material I was derived from--my geneseed, if you remember; just like meeting the Konrad, or Ellen White; not God but the next best thing. And the dreams were always feverish in their intensity; more of an intensity where I felt myself boiling alive inside the dream and futile to do much except peacefully pass. The first I remember was of the abyss, as encompassing as the black channel monitors back on the spaceship yet (senseless as this is) 'downwards' was a tangle of thick colossal vipers. White rubbery scales and these poisonous yellow eyes. The dream was just falling down to the tangle and realizing how massive their bodies were; they did not move to devour me, I just ended up crushed by their bodies unnoticed. The next dream: the material was a beast between tiger and hippo and lion, and it ate me. The last I remember: a blazing heart frying in the center of another abyss, held with chains connecting to some obsidian valley blasting outwards from the blazing heart. The heart stared at me, and I knew it hated me; it wanted nothing more than to annihilate me and scorn my worship. I realized I had been misled; tricked into worshipping what essentially was my executioner who only saw me perhaps as some despicable criminal (you pick my crime for me, I don't have it in me to assign myself one) really only worthy of beheading. I kept praying to it despite that knowledge.

When I awoke, the captain would go over the contents of my dream with me and touch me kindly and applaud me, and inform me of the significance of these dreams and how I was being screwed tightly into Material. Near my final session I remember having a breakdown--perhaps it was the blazing heart dream--and the captain had been uncertain how to handle me. His sympathy wasn't reaching me, his hugging wasn't reaching me either; don't misunderstand me: I was not hysterical or crying, my moods here were just to go waxen and shut down and let myself become porous. So, the captain picked me up and carried me to a silver room I had not been taken to yet; many of my sisters and brothers were installed there. The captain situated me in a throne and squeezed my hand, I'm going to show you your insides, he said. And I'm going to let you visualize it like it was clay, like a child playing with clay, he said.

My brain fried and in a flash we were inside myself. The room inside my head was wretched, just a mess of internals and simple architecture with no significant features except a large locked door jammed into the far-end of a wall. We walked holding hands to the door, and he said "Go on, if you are curious. Touch the door. It will hurt"

I touched the door, and it hurt me.

He explained that him and the church are responsible for these doors jammed inside of me. They're all throughout you. About six or eight of them, he said. I asked why and he explained that they're there because of manufactured context for the church programming to reach me during my operation in Gods Garden. He slid a finger down my doorframe and I felt a numbing stroke pull down my cheek and lips. "The events necessary to make you capable of activating during each life are tremendously painful. Sometimes your parents die young; sometimes you are stuck with a violent dad or mom; sometimes left in complete neglect; sometimes a direct violence crosses your path and steers you immediately towards activation: perhaps a car accident, a molestation, nearly drowning, an allergy to a vaccine puts you comatose, freezing out on a swing, having your brain fry from a fever, having a stone whizz through the air and scramble your thoughts thereafter. It is the terrible stroke of Gods finger reaching you, and creating the necessary conditions. The doors are here to prevent you from feeling long traumas to keep you functioning instead of falling to despair." And through an activation of devices, he transported us further down my body to visit more of these installation chambers. There was a similar door and lock at my throat. At my heart. My breast. Both my hands; even in my bowels, I'm sorry to say; my genitals; my knees; my feet. We visited each and let me touch the lock and feel the pain. "A traumatized tool is no good. So with love, we made our tools unfeeling."

He returned us to the strange room filled with my brothers and sisters waiting to function, and then led me back through the labyrinth of conference rooms and offices till I found my own office; and I returned to studying.

That was mostly everything I remembered. I woke up feeling greater than the world and with a sparkling purpose I hadn't really been aware of before. I just wanted to tell anyone at all, to share that reality with someone who knew me there and just to gush and gush like I could with you about 40k, or the goofy church letter. But you weren't there at all. I couldn't find you in my memory there.

And I mean this, but I don't.

Where are you? Why weren't you there? Why was it just me?

If you remember any of this let me know please.

I just need to know. If you have memories please tell me.

Love you, sis. No texts or code, mail only.