(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 12 minutes)

Ace the Test

The police station was on the precipice of the Ice Fields, while technically being in the Connections, a sore spot the commissioner tried to cover by shelling out public funds for some diamond veneers on everything from wall lamps to pen caps, the latter on diamond chains of course.

As a result the rest of the materials were subpar, composite board desks, flaky black paint on all the filing cabinets, green felt covering any unsightly water stains but only masking the associated mildew smells with its own sneeze-inducing fibers. The whole place, even with its high ceiling, felt like an office through which movers were transporting the belongings of a much wealthier neighbor.

Rotios not in use were docked, connected to bigger more comfortable receivers and pull strings that twisted the levers on their backs so that an officer had to act like they were starting a lawnmower before they could get a call out.

The holding cells were empty, as usual. Most of the time they didn’t dare lock up any dusties, lest they get a call from their magnate and suddenly magnetic owners curious why they weren’t on the assembly line. Keeping humans out of the cells was a broad act of species solidarity. And whatever an animal did wrong they would do again no matter how many times you put them in a cage.

Al Grand considered it a travesty he was even that close to a holding cell as he was escorted into the station by none other than that morning’s good friend Detective Leonid Caliber. The poor artist had never made it home, snatched off a busy street by Leo and placed in a patrol wagon. They didn’t cuff him, but he was technically under arrest, something the whole station seemed aware of as the detective walked him through a field of quieted turning heads.

“You think this is going to make you popular around here?” Al snarled when he noticed his captor grinning and jutting his chin at his fellows. “The commissioner is a friend. He won’t make you a big shot, but he might take one.”

“Now Mr. Grandstand I assure you I have the commissioner’s approval. He did in fact warn me to not make you too uncomfortable. I washed my hands about a hundred times after dealing with that slime in your apartment, so you can suffer the touch of a lowly enforcer of the law for a little while. Right this way.”

“Hey what was that joke you told me in the wagon?” Al asked as they transitioned into a narrow hallway full of doors with smoked glass, the gaps of a few reeking of cigars, others of coffee.

“Joke? Oh I see, the charge. Very clever Al. Can I call you Al?”

“No, but you can call me a cab.”

“Right in here.” He opened one of the doors and sent Al through first, who was surprised to find it was neither an office nor an interrogation room. Its nature seemed medical, with a reclining seat, its metal arms polished fingerprint-free. A giant glass jar of cotton balls and tongue depressors sat on a counter next to a clipboard.

Detective Leo didn’t close the door, instead standing in the frame and craning his head left and right in search of something. It arrived seconds later in the arms of an associate: a locked case. Leo snatched it giddily and only barely kept himself from slamming the door. Then he took it over to the wheeled chair by the counter and instructed Al to take a seat in the recliner.

“What gives? I don’t have fleas. Unless you think one of them killed this fella and I’m being used as a patsy.”

“Please sit. If you really didn’t do anything this simple test will go a long way to exonerating you.” Al glanced at the chair nervously. There were no sharp edges, but it very much looked like it could unfold into several trays of specialized sharp edges, saw teeth, hooks, and restraints.

“I already told you I was at the Brew Haha after I left this morning and then I went straight to Low Tide Lunch. I’ve got two alibis at both locations. I can give you their frequencies and we can call them right now.”

“No need for that even!” Caliber smacked the reclining seat’s headrest twice before turning to the case, fiddling with the clasps like he was about to perform surgery on a souffle. His eagerness got the better of him, and he threw it open all at once. What tantalized him were several cylinders and droppers of unidentified fluids. All of the identification was in a tucked booklet that the detective extracted and flipped through.

Al relented, if only to see what could excite the strange man so. He doubted Leo wanted to harm him, given that he tried to cajole a hyperdiamond commission out of him mere hours ago. Perhaps sensing that the fabricator wouldn’t wait around all day for him to read the instructions, Leo spoke, slow and halting, and relayed entirely repetitive information.

“Okay, Mr. Grand… stand. You have been arrested on suspicion of the destruction of Ohmaha Jolts.”

“Whom I have never met.”

“Who held the highest position at Lantern-Man Electric that can be held by a Dustrious. If not for his metallic make, he would’ve been the chief executive.” That meant he was the chief, in everything but name. That way the country outside Iron Baltimore could sleep at night, knowing the Dustrious were properly enslaved as private property. Jolts’s ‘owner’ would be a multimillionaire living in another state, or country even, pleased as punch that one of his businesses was being run by a tireless creature that couldn’t own stock and probably only had a toaster as a mistress.

“And all I can tell you about him is that he’s dead,” Al said, “and only because that’s what you told me. I don’t know him from the tin woodsman.”

“He knew your work,” Leo said, selecting a vial, squinting at it, then the book before replacing the item and flipping seven pages, out of twelve. “Intimately. There was a dent in his head from the impact that shattered his brain. It showed exquisite detail, all the clearer once we made a plaster cast. It was the face of a monkey.” He tore his eyes from the case, wanting to see it dawn on Al’s face, which it did like the slow pour of a moldy batter.

“That’s impossible. I don’t have it; it’s on loan to the Great Lakes Gallery Circuit. It’s not even in the state.”

“It shouldn’t be in the state,” Leo corrected. “Our thoughts exactly. So we called the circuit, who informed us that the Seen Monkey has gone missing. They thought it was under lock and key, and didn’t notice until our call.”

“Somebody stole my hyperdiamond?”

“You’d better hope so, because the other option is that you reclaimed it yourself last night, drove home, planted false tips and a nasty dress to distract the authorities and give yourself an alibi, then took your popgun down to Lantern-Man Electric and popped Ohmaha in the head, subsequently causing blackouts all over the city, seeing as he managed the power grid very closely.”

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard… and I once heard a Lightheaded hum Yankee-Doodle-Dandy. Why would I kill some power jockey I’d never met?”

“Motive is lacking,” the detective admitted, “hence this little chemical test.”

“And wait a second… How would I even manage? The blackout was in the middle of my lunch, and I didn’t get home before you picked me up. That was maybe ten minutes. You had time to learn about the murder, take a cast of the dent, and call the gallery with ten measly minutes?” Leo paused, pretending he knew what the silt settling in one of the vials was.

“Your blackout wasn’t the only one, just the biggest Mr. Grand. Smaller spotty ones occurred throughout the morning as the problems caused by Mr. Jolts’s absence accumulated. He wore antennae you see, just like Confabulo’s, that let him operate several vital machines wirelessly. Right after the one you experienced we were able to clear the crime scene and get some technicians back in there to flip every switch back where it needed to be.”

“I experienced it alright,” Al said, lifting his shirt to show off the terrible bruise from the comedian’s punchline. “That’s who you should be pulling in right now instead of me. And I made my own cast to compare his fist to.”

“We heard you on the way over Mr. Grand. Somebody took your report, but you know how hard it is to find any old dusty with a factory standard chassis. They’re identical, and all your assailant has to do is disguise their voice. Could’ve even been a lady dusty pretending to be a fella. Don’t ask me how they decide which one they are in the first place… And we’re ready to go!”

Detective Caliber swiveled and pulled his rolling stool over to Al’s reclining side, hands full of samples and medical napkins. He punched a hole in one of the latter, rolled up one of Al’s sleeves and placed the opening over the thin skin at the elbow, where a vein was most pronounced.

“Hang on there chief!” the fabricator protested. “Don’t you go experimenting on me until you tell me what’s in those things.” Leo recoiled. A more officious expression dropped over his face unceremoniously, like a fold in a tablecloth being straightened out.

“Our boys in the lab got the results from your apartment,” he said. Al pictured the slime from the dress, also wondered if the detective had tried to sample other things when he wasn’t looking, perhaps hyperdiamond dust. It wouldn’t have been the first time. “It was witchmelt.” Al went as stiff as the furniture. That vein became a little more prominent.

Caller: 0-0-1-0-0-1

Operator: Ahoy, you’re calling Iron Baltimore municipal reference, this is Operator Tilly Goldenhour speaking. May I assist you or redirect your call, over?

Caller: Ahoy Mrs. Tilly. My name is Max and I’m doing a report for my third grade history class. It’s about ozjoe. My mom says talking to you is the same as going to the library. So can I ask you some questions please? Oh, over.

Operator: Normally I’d transfer you to one of our researchers Max, but I happen to take an interest in ozjoe myself. I should be able to help. Ask away, over.

Caller: Okay, umm, let me see here. I wrote them down, because I’m probably gonna be a reporter when I grow up. I’m gonna write for Poe’s Stylus. Umm… What does ozjoe do when it’s used on things that aren’t robots that aren’t alive yet? Over.

Operator: Ozjoe, also called the primordial soup, has a different effect on all sorts of things Max. If a person touches it with their bare skin or drinks any, even a drop, they turn into a Lightheaded, so stay away from it.

If an animal gets some it becomes much smarter, as smart as a person, and lives longer too. Lots of those animals live here in Iron Baltimore, and we call them citizen-animals.

Plants get changed too. Ozjoe makes them grow really fast, but also changes their insides so they can’t reproduce with other plants anymore. They become unique plants rather than species, all alone in the world. They have to make clones of themselves to keep going.

Now if any ozjoe gets on something that’s already dead, be it vegetable or animal, it quickly breaks down into a gunk we call witchmelt. It’s harmless, except when you track it inside and it stains everything! Aside from a few rare situations, that’s most of what happens when ozjoe gets thrown around, over.

Caller: Okay, thank you. Making notes here, because you’re my source Mrs. Tilly. ‘Witchmelt is a gunk that stains everything’. Good quote. Next question, what are ozjoe’s ingredients and what are threats? I know what threats are, but there’s a special kind of ozjoe threat right?

Operator: This is more advanced stuff Max, so keep that pencil ready. Nobody knows what ozjoe’s ingredients are exactly, save for the man who came up with it. Every government has tried to make it though, and they have a thing or two to show for it.

Now they know that ozjoe has three main ingredients that they can make in small amounts, with it being tough and expensive to do so. It’s still a secret how to combine them and get ozjoe. The ingredients each have their own effect without combining.

There’s aqua-wits, aqua-vim, and aqua-knack. Wits makes a person smarter, but you listen good Max, it’s no way to skip ahead in your schoolwork. It just makes you good at doing mental math quickly and gives you better memory and such. The toolbox is nicer, but you still have to do all the work of building something.

Vim stops your aging right where it is. Nobody’s immortal mind you, something will get them in the end, be it war, disease, or a bad bee sting. Lots of people waste what time they do have trying to get their hands on it.

Last is knack, seen as the least interesting. It’s my personal favorite, because I think it would be the most useful. Aqua-knack makes you resilient, meaning that your experiences shape you more. If you’ve had a sip of it and then you get poisoned you have to survive the poisoning all on your own, but if you do that poison won’t work as well on you the next time. Knack can make you immune or comfortable with all sorts of things, long as you’re careful and lucky with your exposure to them: fire, lightning, holding your breath underwater, just taking your licks in general, and I’ve even heard the more nightmares you have the less they scare you, over.

Caller: Wow, over.

Operator: Wow is right. There’s a reason you’ve heard the word ‘threat’ alongside talk of these ingredients however. Almost nobody can get their hands on the stuff, and almost everybody foolish tries. Maybe they’re greedy and they don’t like what the powers that be gave them to start with. Or they might be scared of ozjoe. If you’re really scared of becoming a Lightheaded, then you really want one of the aqua ingredients, because taking one sort of inoculates you against ozjoe. You know that word Max, inoculate? Over.

Caller: Is it like those shots for the flu? Over.

Operator: You’re on the money. If you take one of the ingredients, ozjoe won’t do anything to you, but you can still take the other ingredients and get all their benefits. A person who has taken some is called a threat. If it was only one, they’re a single threat. Two makes them a double threat, and three a triple threat.

Lots of people won’t even vote for politicians these days if they’re not at least a single threat. It’s a big messy game of gossip and riches. They think threats are better than everyone else, but it isn’t true Max. Make sure you get that in your report. None of them are any better than you or I. I bet if you put a triple threat in front of this switchboard they wouldn’t have any idea what they were doing. They couldn’t even help a kid with his school report, over.

Caller: Hold on Mrs. Tilly, I’m writing. A lot of good quotes in there. You’re going to get me such a good grade, thank you. I’m going to be a threat, but just with my reporting. I got all the ingredients I need, over.

Operator: That’s the spirit Max, over.

Caller: We’re almost done. I just need to ask a few more about Professor Confabulo, over.

Operator: Yes, everything eventually gets back to him. You might regret getting me started on that man…

Aloysius heard more ozjoe and threat talk than perhaps anyone else, given he ran in circles, at least before breaking them open and escaping into asociality, that primarily concerned themselves with the objects and materials they could theoretically afford then actualize. Witchmelt was runoff in the discussion and the clandestine activities involved in procurement.

If that dress in his place was filled with it, the most likely reason was that it had contained the corpse of a woman that was then exposed to a drop of the primordial soup that had given rise to not only life on Earth, the dinosaurs, and man, but also to the Dustrious and Iron Baltimore in much shorter order.

Ozjoe was perhaps the most expensive way to dispose of a body, ever, anywhere. Fire was cheap and easy to produce. If you didn’t want to get burned you could pay a guy with thick skin to get burned for you. And why, why why why, did that unknown dead woman need to get dissolved in Aloysius Grandstand’s apartment with him snoring away one room over?

“Given that we know the soup is in the mix, it’s important to find out exactly how much of a threat the department is dealing with,” Detective Caliber said to prick the silence into bleeding.

“I’m no threat you ninny,” Al fired back, turning his head away and staring at the wall. “I’ve seen some of the stuff, never touched any of it. I’m all natural I tell you.”

“We can’t just take your word for it, not with your masterpiece making pieces of the master electrical switch. Look at it this way, if you come back nonthreatening on this test we don’t have to keep you. No motive, no access to whatever made that witchmelt, no case. It starts to look like that frame you’re telling us somebody else hung in your apartment.” Al’s head lolled back, almost purely by the push of his bull-snorting nostrils.

“What is this stuff you want to use on me, exactly?” He regretted that last word. If Detective Leo could be detail-oriented he would be commissioner already. The question brought his enthusiasm back though, and helped Al understand even more than he asked about. After revisiting the case, picking up and putting back several vials and tubes in incorrect spots, the man wheeled back to show Al colorful samples he couldn’t name. The aqua ingredients he had seen at this soiree or that gala were all clear and viscous with an iridescent sheen. These samples must’ve had added dye to make identification simpler.

“We just got this kit in,” the policeman said as if a new flavor of ice pop had arrived at the grocer. “The testing liquid is first exposed to the real thing, priming it. Then if it touches your skin it reacts to more of the same exuded from your pores. It’ll change color and it won’t hurt one bit.”

“Is that where our tax dollars are going? Making the police commissioner a triple threat?”

“Mr Grand! His reputation is unassailable. We swore oaths, to the city and country. None of us would ever use these samples on ourselves illegally. They’re strictly for testing purposes. But still,” his grin split his face almost into a laceration, “that case over there has real vim, wits, and knack in it. I never thought I’d hold any of it in my hands. Why, the only thing I’d like to get more a hold of is a hyperdiamond plug for my gun.”

The statement hung in the air, growing stale, and as it stiffened Al began to wonder if it was the suggestion of a bribe. If he wanted to become a triple threat, someone who could at the very least have a better chance of fighting off a Dustrious in a darkened alley, all it would take is a simple exchange: one no-frills hyper for an amount of aqua that definitely could’ve been lost to the process of transference in the course of a routine test.

The fabricator said nothing, until the air between them became so stale it cracked. Detective Leo cleared his throat, selected three vials from the ones in his hands, the others allowed to roll to the rim of a nearby tray, and prepped a cotton swab. Its tip went into the testing liquid, then whatever aqua he was searching for first, and then something that smelled like alcohol, probably to neutralize the aqua and not the test.

Having clearly never worn glasses a day in his life, it was strange to watch the policeman adjust nothing around the bridge of his nose as if he had; it just seemed the sort of gesture to perform. Al watched the hole in the napkin, his exposed skin, and the slow approach of the swab. Leo stuck his tongue out. Contact was cold, moist, not much else. Under that the slightest sensation of oiliness, like too much cologne or squeezing a cheese curd.

“It’s not changing color,” Al pointed out. The detective looked disappointed. “That means I’m clean, right?”

“Right, but we still have to test for the other two.” He twisted to the tray and messed with the other samples while Al sighed and stared at the ceiling. Were he interested in the bribe, there were numerous other suppliers he would consider before the only people who could arrest him for it. The real conclusion to draw was that the commissioner had probably bought the kit primarily to make himself a triple, at this point a prerequisite for the upcoming mayoral election. The funds that were supposed to police neighborhoods they didn’t dare, like the Assembly Line, were all spent on insane toys like these.

Al was already so much of a threat that half the city, the metal and crystal half that didn’t sleep, wanted him dead. Juicing his reputation would most likely just grow the target on his back.

It was about time for the cold touch of a second swab. Nothing. He looked at Leo, who was in turn staring at the selection of vials intensely enough to warp the glass. His mouth opened, hung. Brow furrowed. Then Al spotted a flash of understanding and fear, something the detective disguised very poorly by swiveling on his stool, toward nothing but wall, and only turning back once he’d had control of his expression.

“You know, I’d rather not waste any of these precious materials,” he told the fabricator. “We both know you have the money to be a triple threat, so if you’re negative for one I’ll take your word on the other two. We’ll expunge the arrest from the record, and I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience Mr. Grandstand.” He rocketed to his feet in the hopes his wake would make Al do the same. Al got there eventually.

“Why the change of heart?”

“I want to actually crack a case with a test like this, and I can’t do that if we run out using them on wild geese. I’ll have a car take you back to the Ice Palace.” His hand jabbed as if to take Al by the shoulder and escort him out, retracting before contact. Leo cleared his throat, glanced at the floor.

“What about my case? Someone’s trying to frame me for the murder of the witch that made the melt. And I was just attacked in public, remember? You going to forget all about that now that there’s the busting of a richer man’s dusty to solve?”

“No sir, we’ll stay on it. They’re not all me, but other fine men do work here. Come along now, please. You don’t want the day around here to get any busier.” Al had to agree with that; the daylight was only half spent, yet he felt ready to collapse into bed. His only fear was waking up to a room coated in witchmelt that dripped down the walls and squelched between his toes. The image brought him to the nauseating truth: someone had died. A life wasn’t just at stake, one was already lost, two with the collapsed chassis at Lantern-Man Electric. Now with no stomach for objection, both men quietly exited and parted ways.

Luckily, a day passed in quiet, no additional gowns or fluids among his belongings when he took stock in the morning.

Button Down the Hatches

The frequency for Iron Baltimore Municipal Reference was run out of a massive brick of brick in the Connections, topped with a forked broadcasting tower that was also the center of a spiderweb of telegraph wires and power lines, some of which made it all the way to the old town north of Iron. Some terminated at the bottom of the harbor with waterproof devices that helped keep some citizen-fish informed if they didn’t want to live in one of the safer but confining and precarious glass houses in the Zoo.

Inside that brick at 15 Capacitor Street there were several floors filled with rows and rows of wood and aluminum paneled switchboards, at which sat the operator workforce composed almost entirely of women. Not many men wanted the job, and not many men understood that these women weren’t there because of the gift of gab. They were there to learn in a fashion scattershot and liberating.

Universities were structured and not very welcoming, yet some of the professors far too welcoming, welcoming you into their office, their home, their bedroom, under the desk back in the office, in their car, etc…

As an operator they could learn anything they wanted without all that, thanks to their unrestricted access to the basement: a sprawling library of scientific literature, reference texts, history books, and popular fiction. If you counted every dime novel present you’d have a million dollar archive.

All you had to do was say you were researching for someone who called in, as that was much of the job. Most lies were gotten away with, as the call volume was too high to keep records. Operators used only their personal notebooks to manage their docket of queries and answers. As long as there were no complaints called in they could build as much of their own passion into the schedule as they pleased.

This was what drew Victoria Champion to the job, and kept her there for several years at this point, the fact that she was quite the handsome woman in the powder blue buttoned-down uniform notwithstanding. Slightly stout, slightly short, and extremely present at all times, Vicky Champ was as reliable and necessary in any working environment she occupied as a load-bearing rivet. Her eyes could keep the building lit should the electricity go out, as it did the other day when that Dustrious power broker broke down, about which Vicky had fielded fifty calls since then, thirty percent more than her neighbors ten seats in each direction.

An unwelcome interruption indeed, as she had a task of higher personal priority she’d wanted to dive into the library over the entire time, courtesy of the one and presumably lonely Aloysius Grandstand.

Of course Vicky had heard of him, who in I.B. More hadn’t? People called in with questions about him on the regular, and there were the queries about hyperdiamonds that led directly to him as well. She’d crack open large collections of cut and bound Stylus articles to share information about his public appearances and to debunk any of the things U-COGG said about him, as the church liked to claim an association that didn’t, as far as Ms. Champ could tell, exist anywhere on paper or in radio waves that weren’t on the U-COGG frequency.

To field a call from Mr. Grandstand himself was interesting, definitely the subject of at least one gossip session after the lunch whistle and during her tuna fish sandwich, but when he first identified himself she assumed it would be nothing more than that. All of them got calls from the rich and the famous from time to time, even more than they thought, seeing as callers didn’t always give their names.

No, what struck her about Aloysius was his manners and his friendly tone. It was no wonder that living in the Ice Fields tended to make people so cold. Municipal Reference was free, yet the rich were the only ones who treated the operators like they were paying for it. She’d expected the same snooty tone from the man whose entire persona was decorative diamonds that were technically useful for killing metallic workers.

She hadn’t been keeping track, but he was probably the most considerate call she’d ever had out of that neighborhood, and she wanted to reward that as much as she could with some helpful answers for him. It was an unusual request though, and prompted by a bold claim. The man had said a Lightheaded had descended to below building level in order to stare into his apartment window.

That was extremely strange behavior, as those who had suffered contact with ozjoe were not fond of all the air traffic at those heights between citizen-birds and bats, wildlife, blimps both billboard and beasts of burden, and even the human citizenry strapped to doggybacks with noisy chopping propellers. It was commercial air traffic between states that got headaches over the Lightheaded. You couldn’t give them one, even if a cargo plane collided with their brow midair, since nothing could destroy or even damage a Lightheaded.

What they had was immortality, most assumed, since aqua-vim was a component of ozjoe and conferred much the same. The difference was that vim single threats could still be hurt or killed. Ever since their first appearance enough decades back to be the nineteenth century, they’d been shot with cannons, doused in flaming tar, struck by lightning, sunk at the bottom of the sea for years at a time, buried, irradiated, and cursed by several different practitioners of witchcraft, all to no effect whatsoever.

It was difficult to even get a Lightheaded to acknowledge that things were happening around them. They were distortions of humanity, nothing but noggin, inexplicably weightless, propelled and compelled by thought alone, eyes devoid of pupil and iris, nothing but cloudy opaque contemplation.

None spoke, and there were only a few reports of them opening their mouths at all. Whoever they were before their exposure was erased except for the barest tendencies to seek out areas relevant to their old lives. Otherwise they just drifted in circles, getting in the way of those who still thought and operated at ground level within the observable universe.

Everyone human who touched the primordial soup, beside threats, became Lightheaded, with but one exception, the man himself, the reinventive legend, Professor Connor Fabulo. As to why he was granted the benefits of the aqua ingredients without his head swimming sky afterward was anyone’s guess, and Vicky’s was that it had something to do with him being the one who formulated ozjoe. He had earned it. The only other ‘being’ to ever do that was Mother Earth herself, whose first iteration of the primordial soup recipe gave rise to all life. Perhaps it did cost her more than Confabulo, as she acted rather like a Lightheaded herself in her silent coasting through space.

Mr. Grandstand’s request wasn’t for anything so revolutionary as an explanation of the Lightheaded. He just wanted to know if there was any association between one of them and his apartment anywhere in the public record. Something might be there, buried in the local Lightheaded field guides written by birders who had switched to the daunting task of cataloging former people who might not drop below the cloud layer for months at a time. If not, there were always old newspapers to comb through for puff pieces, which in I.B. More usually amounted to the paraphrase ‘this oddity occurred once and never again’.

She wouldn’t know until she got down in the library, but there was another hurdle once the extra traffic from the murder and the blackouts cleared: her overseer Mr. Deckerhall. There was a shortage of men to field calls, and yet never a shortage of them to patrol just behind the rows of women who weren’t permitted to lollygag enough to turn and look at them back.

Deckerhall was more aggressive than that even. He used to be a Navy man, and said he had retired, except he was much too young for that, so Vicky took it to mean his own overseers had retired him on his behalf, so he could become the civilians’ problem instead. No doubt his pitch to the local government was that he ran a tight ship, a skill that would carry over to managing the operators who had better things to do both on the clock and sneaking between its hands than be managed.

To Vicky it seemed his pants were tighter than his ship, as he was far worse than the other shift overseers when it came to giving them the room to work. He was always several inches too close, breathing too loud, leaning at an angle that was obscene by a deniable three degrees. Because his hands were always on his hips they could never be accused of wandering, but there was also his eyes and his nose to consider, both adept at sticking in the business of underlings, especially those he took an interest in, like Vicky.

The hats he’d added to the uniform were forgivable, transparent as it was that they looked like paper boats and this reminded him of loftier career days. Vicky thought they looked fine and they didn’t muss the hair she already kept quite short. The real problem was his patented ‘surprise inspection’, where he examined an operator’s work station and its occupant closely to make sure not a hair was out of place.

His finger would wipe in search of dust, he would flip through notes to see if they had doodled his demise, he would bend down to check for refuse and bare ankles, and he would dock the pay of anyone who didn’t play along or who left a shaving hanging off the tip of a pencil.

Overseers were also given the privilege of setting topic and research parameters, for dealing with specific call volume situations. The blackouts were the most recent example, as the overseer instructed them to prioritize calls relevant to it versus all others for the good of an informed public.

Mr. Deckerhall took it as license to steer them away from all subjects he didn’t like overhearing, including his least favorite food: bananas. When he was walking the floor, callers would find slow or nonexistent responses to their questions about opera, Elizabethan literature, upcoming bill 212, bananas, banana bread, banana cream pie, ostriches, flightless birds as a concept, banana cream floats, and the Lightheaded.

He wasn’t alone in getting the creeps from the big floating indestructible heads that blemished the sky, just in letting it affect the flow of information to the citizenry. Mr. Grandstand had already waited more than a day for his trusted operator to get back to him, so Vicky resolved to make her move rather than wait for Mr. Deckerhall to clock out.

For that she needed the assistance of her neighbor to the left, the sharp-eared Bunny Cottons, an older woman with enough seniority to know she could survive a reprimand from Deckerhall, for if she was forced out she would take fifteen percent of the floor with her all at once in solidarity. She was thrilled to be Vicky’s lookout.

“One more pass I think,” she croaked to Vicky as they slyly tracked Deckerhall’s moves through the rows in search of a window for her to pop down to the library. It was a perfectly ordinary part of her job, but he always interrogated her upon return, looking for any excuse to spend more time standing behind her, gifting her his breath on her neck hair. If they timed it right she might be able to get Mr. Grand’s answer and get back to her seat without Deckerhall noticing her absence.

The next pass came, and they endured.

“Everything shipshape here ladies?” he asked when he noticed they weren’t on calls. Since they weren’t, they could talk to him, and since he was him, they would want to.

“Of course Mr. Deckerhall,” Bunny said with treacly tone meant to repel him, since she was too old for any of his special attention. “Always smooth sailing on your watch.”

“That reminds me, I need to get mine polished,” he said, reaching into his pants and pulling out, thankfully, his pocket watch. Iron Baltimore was a bustling town, most people had the time on their wrists now, but Deckerhall had enough of it to take a little extra just to identify how much of it he had. A brief silence didn’t mean he’d gone, since his breath hadn’t. “And you Ms. Champion? Any interesting calls today?”

“I learned there was a shipment of bananas at the harbor, crates and crates of them. You might want to steer clear to avoid the smell.” He shuddered.

“Eughh, salty bananas. Thanks for the tip; I’ll do just that. Let me return the favor.” He leaned to his infamous degree, lips by the ear that didn’t have her headset’s earpiece. “There might just be a surprise inspection later.” With that his shadow vanished from her station and strolled away. Later meant nothing was happening right now, so she could hit the books until they were Lightheaded.

A straight shot down the row, since vaulting over a switchboard would’ve looked suspicious. Then a corrugated descent down the stairs, into the submerging quiet of the library level, affecting no matter how long you’d worked there given the constant chatter above, achieved by a soundproofed ceiling so thick that it resembled cream throw pillows with gold stitching suspended over the stacks. Walls lined with bunched theater-thick curtains furthered the suppression.

Every single offshoot of Professor Confabulo’s influence was placed in his section, separate from history despite its magnitude therein, the same with biology, chemistry, economics, physics, and politics. The ends of most sections were marked by subject, era, and alphabetic order. His just had a symbol on a plaque, embossed in silver: a circlet topped with a pair of stiff moth antennae, shaped as if cast in aluminum from a mold.

Vicky blew past it toward the Lightheaded materials, eschewing the formal scientific reviews and attempts at classification to get to archived Stylus articles, some so old they were penned by Edgar Allen Poe himself, before the nervous breakdown that saw his paper handed off to its current legacy ownership.

The poet was a founding figure in Iron Baltimore, not quite intentionally. The Stylus had been a dream of his, a publication where he set the standards, where his critics would never get a say in its depiction of reality. Drumming up no interest in the old town, I.B. More’s maverick presses, which had secured in those early days a single Dustrious who could print day and night with no spelling or grammatical errors whatsoever, gnawed and clawed at Mr. Poe until he agreed to be the chief editor at their merging operations.

She was unlikely to find anything relevant from Poe himself, he didn’t discuss the city making him rich very much, but the man had a minor obsession with the Lightheaded in the days when they were still considered mythical creatures out of the age of alchemy and homunculi. Technically they were born before the Dustrious, as there was no invention necessary beyond exposing a man to ozjoe. The first of the robots appeared in the 1840s, unable to shift the paradigm until Confabulo founded secret factories four decades later that could pump them out in the hundreds, then thousands.

Before that the Lightheaded were the creatures most associated with their creator, much more than performing automatons. They frightened Poe, who claimed to have seen one on a beach, staring straight down into the sea as if it watched the Earth’s molten core, trying to blind itself on light that hadn’t even escaped.

It was impolite to say, so Vicky only thought it. Perhaps the man was so haunted by them because he sort of looked like one already. His head was proportionally large and his hairstyle gave his brow prominence, an air of circular, tormented, philosophical thought. It was easy to imagine him with a sickly green pallor and no body beneath, drifting with the winds and making up cosmic curses so that fear might further occupy his time.

Such distractions were a contributing factor, she silently tut-tutted, to his hands-off editing that eventually allowed one of his most malicious critics to wrestle away ownership. Wisely, they didn’t use it to denigrate the work he had published there; that would serve only to make their purchase eat its own tail into oblivion.

No, the new owner just luxuriated in having it, the child of his nemesis, as his ward. The longer it stayed in business as the voice of Iron Baltimore, the longer he would get to enjoy it. And the better its issues were preserved, the better that sweet vengeance would age, giving Vicky Champ a wide selection of donated materials in excellent condition to peruse.

Lightheaded sightings in the city were documented until they became too commonplace to bother, and she further narrowed the dates to search with a guess as to when Mr. Grandstand had moved into the Ice Palace, based on when she had first started hearing about him. She looked for references to that street or the palace itself, to low flight, to unusually focused behavior.

She wished she had the time to laugh, as many of these sightings included eye witness testimony from people who also claimed to know the former identity of the Lightheaded, an identity that owed them money. According to them, the local government should really do something to compensate them, like capture the Lightheaded and check its tight lips for a hoard of treasure, or force it to perform in the circus, proceeds paid to the aggrieved.

There were other cockamamie questions crowed at the town square, like whether or not a marriage was annulled by one party transforming into a giant, mute, floating head contemplating the universe. Should the IRS go after them for tax evasion? Could their foreheads be used as billboards? If you could jump onto one’s scalp and there was enough hair left to use as reins, would it allow you to ride it?

Vicky wanted to make an honest effort of it, so she could at least sound sure when next she spoke to Al, ultimately suspecting this was a dead end. If the Lightheaded made any sense they wouldn’t suffer scrutiny in the first place. Most people, especially those who hadn’t seen one yet, assumed this was just what happened when someone tried to cut the line to heaven and bounced off the clouds. Better to write them off as strange and focus on what was normal.

She was just about to give up on the cursory search, since Mr. Deckerhall’s meandering grew more and more likely to weave back to her switchboard and her empty chair, when a picture caught her eye, mostly because it was a photograph and not an illustration, rare before 1900. It wasn’t of a Lightheaded, but a woman who would later become one. This was the only such image of her, taken because she was a prominent heiress, of the wealthy generation who lived in the Ice Palace before it received its diamond skin and its new name.

It was a long shot, but she resembled Al’s description, and this woman would eventually become a Lightheaded when she attempted to acquire an early iteration of aqua-vim that turned out to be plain old miraculous ozjoe. Her identity was good enough to report back with, so she memorized the volume number and replaced it in order to scurry back to her station. A later report would still be better, one where she had time to confirm and could talk without Deckerhall’s breath in her words. At least she had it now, and it gave her a peculiar tickle. She wondered if she just wanted to see some hyperdiamonds in person, and this was the closest she would ever get.

Not that she had a particular interest in diamondware. Society was in its throes, it had merged with the god game in the form of U-COGG, and it expanded out from the parapet of jewelry into the trenches of industry and the gewgaws of street performers. Vicky owned one pair of diamond earrings, that was all. She didn’t shoot, and the sparkling contact lenses of the church that turned their sclera an irritated pink made her skin crawl.

When pressed there was something she had to admit to. Victoria Champion had always been a ravenous person. Nobody saw her that way, and she worked to keep it such, because the idea of a short square lady like her suddenly devolving into a raccoon growling in hunger would no doubt damage her social status. That’s what she was however, going by the way she ate standing next to her icebox at midnight, like the food was an internal organ that had attempted to leap out and escape.

These cravings were for everything, from food to companionship to knowledge, the last being completely sated by her position with the city frequency. Left to her own devices she would quickly begin to wonder what everyone else’s devices were doing, and attempt connection. She felt at home in Iron Baltimore since everyone seemed ravenous, even if to a lesser degree.

Dustrious fed constantly from the sun, the buzz in the breaker boxes, the applause of feet on the street, and even the ding of the diner bell and the wafting heat from the corresponding fried eggs and flapjacks. People too ate the electrified air with every breath they took. Citizen-animals attempted everything previously reserved for humans, pigeons trying on expensive shoes as luxury nests for one. And hyperdiamonds were just diamonds for the ravenous, who looked upon the pristine clarity of the old stones and immediately wondered what was next, what they would look like and what they could do if they had a little color in their cheeks.

On her way back Vicky wondered if she would wear an H-diamond brooch should she ever acquire one. Flaunting what her ravenous nature had earned her, disguised as mere social status of course, carried a warming rush, a melting guilty pleasure, at the cost of dirty looks from every Dustrious on both sides of the Assembly Line.

And there was a strong rivalry between human operators and Dustrious ones. The mechanical men could process calls faster and give more accurate answers, and some could mimic human voice and inflection well enough to fool those that insisted on human interaction. The public wanted humans though, and would pay extra for worse service to ensure that. So no, Vicky reasoned, she wouldn’t wear it. Fanning such flames didn’t really feed into her appetites anyway, as none of them were for violence or bigoted urban gridlock. She would keep that precious thing to herself, to her pockets, underneath her clothes and against her skin.

For now her bottom was back against her chair, Deckerhall nowhere in sight, Bunny Cottons confirming that her absence drew no unwanted attention, not that they had to do anything wrong to get a surplus of it. Such was her relief that she made a few minor mistakes, as she’d taken notes and placed the book on her station askew. It was subject to inspection at any time, with only Deckerhall, master of offensive angles, also using them as cause for inspection. It was fine, as long as he didn’t

“Fweeeeeet! Surprise inspection ladies!” he shouted after a blow on the naval whistle he wasn’t supposed to keep once he was retired. Where was he? Vicky’s head whipped around, had to follow Bunny’s pointing arm to actually find him and the beeline he was making for her station. What a bastard. A consistent bastard, but still. She might call it nerve if he wasn’t so smarmy about it. He was neutralizing his own favor to her, having both warned her about the inspection and now targeted her as the starting position, in the middle of a middle row, for some reason he was already smiling about.

Vicky scrambled to get her desk not just in perfect order, because that would still invite comment, but neutral order so he couldn’t find anything to say. She straightened her notebooks, inserted the one with the answer for Aloysius in the anonymous midst of the others. Then she lined up her pencils, all sharpened to the same length and the same point. Her lunch pail was maybe too high in her open cupboards below the desk, indicating an eagerness to step out that Deckerhall wouldn’t like, so she bent down to move it lower.

Pop! The front of her uniform had caught the lip of the desk, shearing off the top button. It rolled and landed at the center of her station. There was no time; his footfalls were beside her. If anything hit the floor he’d notice. It had to disappear, discreetly. Vicky’s hand glided over the button and vanished it into her palm, then she yawned, covered her mouth with her hand.

“Everything in order Ms. Champion?” the overseer asked. She swiveled to face him, required for inspection. An answer necessitated loosening her lips, lest she sink their whole frequency’s ship, so she swallowed first.

“F-ughk-ine, Mr. Deckerhall. Questions asked and answered.” His eyes wandered around to such extremes that they pulled his head, neck, and torso along with them. Like a cobra searching for the best strike position, he examined the floor, the cupboards, the desk, the many plugs and ports of the switchboard… Finally the eyes settled, on the sliver of cleavage revealed by her popped button.

“Ahem,” he pronounced as too much of a word and not enough of a sound, a finger swiping across his own collarbone repeatedly. Vicky pretended to be embarrassed. The poor bastard was at a terrible crossroads. If he kept his usual harsh standard he would see less of what he was seeing now. “Perhaps I should make a few more adjustments to the uniform.” His eyebrows said the same thing simultaneously.

“Oh that would be such a relief,” Bunny chimed in, quickly undoing her top button and fanning herself with one freed side of the collar. “It gets so hot in here Mr. Deckerhall. Look, I’m sweating.” His face cleared as if savagely rubbed with an eraser.

“Yes, well, there might be room in the budget for some oscillating fans. Everything seems in order here, excellent work ladies.” He marched off, turning away from Ms. Cottons with the precision of a cuckoo clock figurine.

“What, I don’t deserve a surprise inspection?” the older woman whispered mischievously. Vicky’s suppressed giggle all but forced her to continue. “He doesn’t want to peel this banana? Why my husband George becomes an absolute ape when-“

“Stop,” her neighbor pleaded, red in the face. She did stop, only long enough to put on a serious expression.

“Did you swallow that button?”

Charging through Battery Park

Joy and suffering were actually simple concepts, Al recognized when life confronted him with some strange feelings. And those simple emotions were preferable to whatever this was. Feeling strange rarely felt the same twice, strangeness came in flavors, and some karmic cook was making a mess of a recipe and dumping it on his head.

First he’d felt odd from his little check-up with Detective Caliber, and that sensation had dogged him continuously, to the point that he was beginning to think the man had shuffled him out of the police station because he’d botched the testing protocol and didn’t want to be standing in the same room when Al dropped dead from poison.

The fabricator’s skin felt too sensitive; the slightest breeze was like applying lotion. Everything smelled and sounded sharper. His tongue was now tasting the roof of his mouth, something he might’ve said was always true, if he wasn’t much more conscious of it now. And altogether that was just one of the weird turns in his perception.

Perhaps nobody else in the city was more accustomed to being watched out of the corner of the eye, not narrowed only because the Dustrious tended to have inflexible ocular sockets and visors. That crawling on his skin was birdsong to Mr. Grandstand at that point, but now it had taken on an additional sour note. After that hack comic had attacked him the ever-present eyes now seemed to hide their focus more. It was still there, obviously, just with the intent of additional secrecy, like they now had firmer plans than staring daggers at him, possibly as firm as real daggers. Surely rumors of his temporary arrest for the killing of Ohmaha Jolts had gotten out, leading the Dustrious to believe he’d gone from arms dealing to outright brandishing. From what Al gathered, Jolts was extremely well-respected among his people, having accumulated the wealth outright denied to most of them and used it to better their working conditions at Lantern-Man Electric.

Another call to municipal reference, not happening to get that chipper Champion woman he was hoping for, taught Al that Jolts had been one point of a triangle of similar figures, colloquially called the Steel Triangle in fact, named after the more infamous Iron Triangle that began their race. These newer ones were the unofficial heads of Dustrious culture in I.B. More, all of whom could’ve been the mayor if electing the metallic was legal.

Each oversaw an aspect of city life in the Assembly Line, Jolts’s position the most formal given his management of a vital utility. The other two were Madam Fritzi Eclectric of the theater district, whose grip on entertainment amounted to off-the-books ownership of every playhouse, theater, and comedy club, Brew Haha included, outside the Ice Fields, and a Mr. Edwind Headstrong who led the ironically underground air traffic controller’s union. If it moved through the sky and wasn’t a citizen-animal or a Lightheaded peeping in windows it was his purview.

There were blimps overhead just then, but that was almost always true. Spies now, perhaps. Employees of the friends of the hyperdiamond dent and quartz shards that used to be Mr. Jolts. Al looked up. Everything seemed in order, colorful airships keeping to their lanes, maximizing advertising sight lines with the lofty windows of expensive apartments. Below them flew people with doggybacks, faster than a cab, five times as dangerous. Al would never. He didn’t like airplanes to begin with, let alone strapping a miniature one to his shoulders and hoping the propellers didn’t crop his ears like a guard dog’s.

Airships had ads on the bottom too, in case schmucks like him ever dared to look up in hope. Directly above was the claim that Tub Buddy bar soap was the best thing since Tub Buddy waterproof bandages. Al didn’t recognize that particular lie, meaning he really was off the beaten path.

Trying to shake all his strange feelings, and still uncomfortable in an apartment that conceptually dripped witchmelt, Al had gone for a walk and chosen several directions he’d never explored before, reasoning he could catch a ride back lickety-split whenever he wanted with one call on his rotio. Just raising his hand could get him a cab or a rickshaw, but probably with a Dustrious driver who had a much better chance of withstanding an ‘accidental’ collision than the H-diamond fabricator. His go-to car service was Flying Money, human drivers guaranteed, just dial 5-5-6-5-5-9 to speak to a dispatcher immediately.

Every time he saw something unfamiliar he repeated half the frequency in his head, to help him keep on, to walk deeper into the city he dared call his own. Of course, not this part. He didn’t know whose this was. Surely he hadn’t been stupid enough to absentmindedly walk himself straight into the Assembly Line, where every square of sidewalk could be his own personal gallows.

No, he knew from footage and photos that the architecture there was unmistakable, extremely square and rectangular buildings disguised with experimental murals across windowless faces. Sometimes structures were topped in rough mimicry of the Dustrious shocked-quartz brain, a glass loaf with as many facets as possible, inside of which were spotlights with color screens that sent up a divided rainbow at night. The robots wanted to be seen as fun, as alive as everything else, thus their embrace of entertainment and the wilder portions of the visible light spectrum, but the savvy still saw the rigid geometry underneath, the peace in order that a human being would eventually, no matter what, find sterile and thus unsettling.

So where then? It was quiet under the choppy hum of the air traffic. He’d passed a pharmacy not too long ago with glass pellet-food dispensers out front, where nostalgic citizen-animals formerly employed in petting zoos could get some familiar chow for a nickel. There were lots of other storefronts surrounding it, closed and empty, the paint naming them mostly scraped off, leaving a few abandoned letters to bleach in the sun.

This was somewhere the humans had left, with nobody wanting to fill it having enough money to do so. Whoever owned those lots was holding out for better offers, and could probably afford to do so for several years more before relenting and renting to a duck who wanted to open another birdbath YMCA.

It hit him; he knew where he was. This was Battery Park. At least, that was what they called it now. It used to be the Iron Baltimore Nucleus Park, smack dab in the middle of the city’s districts, filled with trees, grass, picnic tables, water features, walking trails, and even a sloping entrance to an artificial cave system where the citizen-bats could live in public housing when they weren’t on their night shift eating all the mosquitoes that wouldn’t have been granted citizenship even if they did know their ABC’s and the first ten U.S. presidents.

One of the real estate powers in town, big enough that Al couldn’t extricate a name from the shadows where it had been firmly planted and cemented, got it in their head that Nucleus Park shouldn’t even border the Assembly Line, so they leaned. Leaning at that financial scale closed and opened businesses, made the viscous money move through a grate and shift south, lowering human attendance more and more until it just made sense to rename the new park, between the Ice Fields and the Connections, Nucleus Park, despite it no longer being as close to the center.

Let the dusties have it, it was subconsciously decided, but not own it, on the more conscious side of things. It was still technically a park, and the lots around it still commercial, but it was all stripped and barren except for the bats who still found the cave plenty hospitable, more so given they were no longer visited by shouting pointing children when they were trying to sleep the day away.

If the robots had truly been allowed to make it their own it would’ve been as vibrant as the Assembly Line, if clinical underneath. Without investment there were only so many things the space could be used for, and one was charging. Anything with energy could power them, but there was occasional advantage and comfort in getting filled to the brim, and a little over, like caffeination, as quickly as possible.

Ambient power accumulators, installed in the cave expansion that would no longer get the expected wave of bat immigrants, concentrated and fed electricity up through cracked pavement and dirt that had once been the park’s flowerbeds, into ten foot tall Tesla coils replacing the trees, many of which had been uprooted and successfully settled in the new Nucleus Park, as if they had withered to angry metal skeletons overnight.

Al looked around, away from the empty shops, and saw the uneven coils, their organic placement the only natural element left. Each was topped with an orb glowing magenta, casting off lazy arcs of power that connected to the ground, rose, and disappeared. Several signs warned him not to cross the yellow dotted line, as anything made of flesh getting too close would receive a shock and a burn. Sustained exposure would be deadly, but it wasn’t a public hazard if the real public never visited.

The name was either an insult or a bitter joke, depending on who had coined it, or rather counterfeited it, since it was a reference to the much more reputable Battery Park in Manhattan. The Dustrious only went there for a charge, and Al was suddenly concerned about yet another meaning of battery since he’d wandered into an area of theirs, foolishly forgetting that the divisions weren’t that stark, that everyone had pockets and pitfalls everywhere. The Ice Palace had Dustrious staff operating the elevators all throughout its core after all.

Politics aside, now would’ve been an excellent time to turn around and go back the way he came. Al swiveled on his heel, prepared to march. Pfam! Coinciding with his footfall, the horrible jarring sound turned him into a crumpled nestling against the path, hands over his head. A bomb dropping? The ground ripping open like a giant balloon? Somehow it had been of both characters.

A much worse din followed, cascaded, collided. The sky was coming apart, the clatter suggesting it had been made of invisible steel scaffolding all along. Recoiling fear became smarter dread, enough for Al to expose his head and look up again. Two airships had collided, each big enough to host a dinner party inside. One had a ruptured bag and was rapidly sinking in deflation, a hybrid octopus-raisin of rubber and canvas plunging to his depth.

Was this another blackout? The last one had brought down a blimp in Neptune’s alley, but that had had been anchored by a power cable. These were in free flight, and should’ve had plenty of charge. An accident? Quite a coincidence that the world would drop two blimps on him in such rapid succession. Puzzling it out would have to wait until well after he was out of its growing shadow.

A jog became a run, and then a sprint as the edge of the shadow kept pace. Al couldn’t afford to pay attention to the darkening yellow safety lines defining the boundaries of Battery Park. The light returned just as the wreckage smashed behind him, a propeller smothered under its own bulk as it ground to a halt against the concrete.

That wouldn’t be the only one. The crash had compounded, several aerial entities forced out of their lanes into others vertical and horizontal, or into the unyielding face of a building. Anybody who went to their window to see the commotion was at serious risk of being slapped down to the street by a collapsing gas bag or dropping doggyback.

One such pack-wearing pilot was navigating the tumult quite well at first, swerving out of the way, running along the wall of a squishy blimp to avoid tangling in it, but then she was forced between two ships, and out from under them. Her impact was just one of many. Citizen-crows, pigeons, and gulls were caught as well, squawking in protest before seeking altitude. Feathers of multiple shades began to rain on Battery Park, those caught in the arcs of the coils instantly incinerated in puffs of smoke.

Al had to concentrate on anything larger that was making its final descent. The only exit he knew of was cut off by the Tub Buddy braggarts. Left? Another wreck, already on fire thanks to the coils. Right? Too much violet lightning for his taste, but there was a path marked safe between two fields of it. All he had to do was keep on the straight and narrow.

Unless of course a piece of relevant debris were to do something more than fall, like a metal rod that had been maintaining the frame of one the airborne advertisements. Its role might change from supporter to conductor if one end were to land in the vicinity of a coil and the other fall on a hapless hyperdiamond fabricator, as one did when he was only a third of the way down his escape route.

A purple bolt grabbed the rod as if with demonic greed and passed through it as it struck Al across the nape of his neck, flattening him. The flash of sizzling pain filled his ears with the sound of his own skin cooking, a radio static of the flesh with the volume maxed out. His most coherent thought immediately after was a question: is my head still attached? It was, and groaning to boot as he turned himself over, immediately forced to sit up so his blackened burn wouldn’t scrape along the ground.

The pain flared to everywhere else, to the dustiest shadowy corners of his body. Any cobwebs of numbness, any deadened nerves from previous injuries, resurrected and joined in the tormented chorus of their brethren.

“Aaaaaaoooooowcchhhaaah!” Al sort of said, trying not to move, trying to watch growing shadows through the dilating spots that were in his vision more natively. The paralysis was warranted, given that he quickly became certain this was the worst pain he’d ever felt in his life. One or more of his internal organs was probably well done. Judging by the smell of shriveled leather, his jacket collar was ruined as well.

It could’ve been worse though, since he wasn’t the woman squeezed out between the two two airships. If he wanted to avoid her fate he needed to get up enough to crawl somewhere safer. His neck didn’t feel up to craning, so he couldn’t see if the crashing was still going on overhead, but he could hear it. The arcing of the coils joined in, the breaking of each arc much more audible when it had metal debris to play off. Every motion picture he’d ever seen only ever had two sound effects for electricity: lightning cracking and mechanical voltage swelling. Al had discovered their offspring, and it was a shame he couldn’t record it, log it as only his second-ever act of invention.

Crawl, he told himself, enough times to start doing it. Then he told himself to walk and managed to get on his feet, almost too fast. Must’ve been the persisting hazards above. At the end of his current path there was a fork, and he had no idea if either took him to an exit or both further afield in the electric meadow. The left smelled less like smoke and ruin.

His legs stopped shaking; a degree of speed returned. A blessing to be sure, but as wrong as the pain. That zap should’ve lingered longer, maybe the rest of his life as a fidgeting thigh or spasmodic ankle. Already the agony was gone from his insides, present only on at the site of the burn. In order to look this particular gift horse in the mouth he’d need a mirror, or to ask that figure emerging from the overloaded overgrowth.

The spots had retreated speedily too; he still squinted. What he saw didn’t make sense. A bipedal thing of light and intimidating posture stomped toward him, straight through the realm of the coils. It looked made of the stuff, until it got close enough for him to spot a core thread of crystal, golden beads breaking it up into segments, and a topping nodule of sharply striated gleams.

A naked dusty. Some wore clothing, so it was more accurate to call this one super naked, lacking a chassis completely. They were just as Professor Confabulo had made them, naught but a crystallized brain and tendrils beneath, currently holding the shape of a man while not strictly required to do so. If need be they could slither and squeeze almost as well as the squid that sold him his lunch, or as well as that lunch through his guts.

“Who are you!?” Al barked at them, knowing they wouldn’t answer. Without their chassis they were weaker and far more vulnerable, just about even in a fistfight with a man, still ahead if that man was Al Grand, who was better at popping guns than blows. The other effect was anonymity, as the face they wore would still be on the shell where they’d left it.

Any Dustrious in the world could’ve had reason to attack him; this was just the one that saw an opportunity and paradoxically protected itself by stripping down to a mask. Al tried to warn them away, lacking the room to back off on the narrow path. If anyone else was around they would be too distracted and cut off by the traffic jam downpour to intervene. He was about to get caught in a boxing match where only one of them would be cooked to jerky if they got knocked out of the ring.

“I didn’t kill that Jolts fella, I swear!” he tried. They kept coming, crackling. “If you’re that comic from the Brew again, this isn’t funny.” They arrived, delivered a low punch. Al blocked with his arm, absorbed the blow without anything breaking. Flesh and blood had punched him harder than that. If only he hadn’t been thwacked by one of Zeus’s two-by-fours a minute ago, then he could’ve held his own…

Except he was. Al blocked another shot from the other balled-up tendril mimicking an arm, blocked it well. Experimentally, he threw a punch back. It missed, as it was almost bound to when his opponent’s body was wide as a broomstick, but it told Al that there wouldn’t be any recoil. The burn on his neck throbbed, sure, without tearing open and bleeding, without getting worse.

Somehow he felt pretty good, status taken into consideration. It was related to that sensation that made him get out and walk in the first place. There was something going on in his blood, or his bones, or his soul, and it put the fight in him as he traded strikes with the peeled and silent dusty.

Once he realized how pointless trying to punch any part of them was, he switched up tactics, going for a grab on their central tendril, the spine if there was an equivalent. With a good grip he could swing the creature in circles, weaken them into a floppy state with centrifugal force, and toss them a great distance.

His first swipe missed, informing his foe of the new plan. They changed stance as well, curling, using their quartz brain as a shield to protect the spinal nodules and the golden beads strung between. Al tried to become the aggressor, to claim all the safe space on the path, clawing forward like a grizzly. The naked dusty didn’t fall for it; they made Al fall for it by sweeping a leg tendril behind his knees.

He crumpled into a backward stumble, arms pinwheeling, paddling the least electric air in a desperate bid to not get zapped. It failed. His hair stood on end as it welcomed an arc of violet energy to the scenic countryside of his scalp. The smell of his own fried hair hit him before the pain. Reason threw in the towel. Logic clocked out. Most of him tried to lay down and accept his fate as blackened remains that could only be identified by dental records or the hyperdiamonds set in his buttons.

The dusty pulled back, confusion in the bend of their ‘neck’, like a reading lamp chasing the words in a fluttering book. Al wondered what spooked them until he caught on: his feet. The fabricator’s feet were planted firm. He was standing, and was still getting licked by the nearest coils, their discharge having less consequence than the slobber of a sloshed citizen-sheepdog.

Mr. Grand’s body felt grand indeed, charged to a sizzling edge as if he were a Dustrious. His clothing wasn’t faring as well, taking scorches with every connection, throwing off curls of nasty white smoke like old impure flash powder. Combined with his nearly-glowing eyes, the standing hair that hadn’t suffered deforestation, and his climbing eager snarl, Al was becoming the more demonic of the two combatants.

Whatever was in his blood, his bones, his spirit, its possession had included a deadly determination free of charge that the man was finally ready to use. Now there was no safe guiding path, just the electric bramble where they both felt at home. The pair lunged back into each other, collided without trying to throw anything as calculated as a punch anymore.

The serpentine Dustrious wrapped around his whole body and constricted him to the rigidity of a board. Al didn’t fight the efficient use of force, instead redirecting his own as he fell into a roll, as if he were on fire, though only a few patches of him were just then. Each rotation brought a big bump as the crystal brain was compacted between body and concrete, scratching its surface. Without a crack there was no real damage, but the same couldn’t be said for the conducting beads of malleable gold.

Al held himself in such a way that his roll effected a turn, sending them both right into the base of a coil, denting several beads on the Dustrious. The interrupted signal transfer forced it to shiver and flail. That took the pressure off, allowing Al to slip the Dusty down his body like a pair of pants and kick them aside before they could compose themselves.

The artist put up his dukes only to watch lightning bond between them and hold, the same way he might watch a firefly flash on a hilltop knuckle. What was happening to him? Had all this H-diamond work slowly turned him into a hyperhuman? His nude enemy didn’t think so, taking advantage of the falling sky for another unique attack.

A freewheeling doggyback, straps fluttering since its owner had bailed or been ripped loose, swooped in nearby. The Dusty snatched it behind the snorting propellers and gave it a good spin, redirecting right at Al. The missile was let loose. Its target, undaunted, steeled his legs and caught it by the straps. It carried him off his feet, would’ve dragged him higher if his ankles didn’t instinctively wrap around the spherical head of the nearest coil. His zipper turned red hot and burned him a little, the worst injury suffered.

Then his rotio began to ring on his belt. Confident as he was, he still didn’t dream of answering it. It kept up its chiming the whole time he was releasing the doggyback and inching down the coil like a caterpillar working power lines. At the bottom he met the Dusty for the rest of their fight, back to a grappling stalemate.

The closer they were to a coil the more strands of violet lightning coated his foe’s slippery skeleton, giving them an almost hairy appearance, a giant puppet in need of a military trim. One of these hungry feelers connected to the rotio and tripped something inside it, answering the call without its owner’s permission and amplifying the output greatly. Al could hear the caller clear as a bell.

Caller: Ahoy, Al? Are you there? It’s Darling, over.”

“I’m a little busy, over!” he tried shouting, unsure if the overcharged rotio would pick up his voice while still clipped to his waist.

Darling Cheekteeth: Then why did you answer, over?

“I didn’t.” The Dusty rapped his collarbone; it smarted immediately. Whatever instilled his electrical immunity wasn’t anywhere near as good at handling an old fashioned clobbering. He managed to grab their brain in both hands and hold its wriggling steady around a central point. “But we’re here now, so start talking, over.”

Darling Cheekteeth: I sat down and had a long chat with Carmelo about your predicament, over.

Al had forgotten about the dog, about man’s best friend. Shameful. Carmelo Duff was the most upstanding person he knew in all of Iron Baltimore, regardless of his quadrupedal and inhuman nature. He should’ve followed up himself, then he wouldn’t have been where he was, wrestling an angry octopus made of manufactured gems in the midst of a lightning orchard.

His other visitors that fateful and enigmatic morning had made some sense, if he assumed someone was out to ruin his reputation: the cops, the press, and the highfalutin, sanctimonious, pink-eyed church that ran more like organized crime trying to use the Vatican as a front. Then there was Duff, sat dutifully on the doorstep, ready to rescue him but unsure how.

“Don’t keep me in suspense, over.”

Darling Cheekteeth: For starters, nobody told him about anything in your apartment; he saw something. Early that morning he was across the street, in the Emeralmond Hotel helping a family doctor make some house calls. The elevator was on the fritz, so they took the stairs.

Now this was Dr. Ate. You know him? He’s a million. Took a breather every two flights. Carmelo had nothing to do but look out the window. And what does he see about halfway up? Somebody in your building, on your stairs, carrying something up, over.

Al and his hanger-on tumbled into a dead patch of Battery Park, cleared of energy by the airship wreckage dropped on top of it. The blimp’s cabin had exploded on impact, losing its ceiling and walls while keeping its floor. The bag was on all sides, curling up and dying in the heat, cloaking them in the noxious smell of burning rubber.

But as the fabricator clomped across the cabin’s wooden floor it felt familiar. Had he flown in it before? There was a bar, so it must have been used for social functions, press events. His enemy made use of it by retreating over the side and disappearing under the counter, popping back up with bottles of booze in each hand: Lyche’s apricot rubbing wine and Derrick’s delaminate vodka. The former was much more expensive, but threw just as well. Al dodged it, then the other.

With no extra energy around he worried the rotio might drop the call, so he kept talking as he charged the bar.

“How does he know it had anything to do with me, over?”

Darling Cheekteeth: Duff knows what floor you live on, dummy. This figure, it hit your floor carrying something, disappeared, and came back down with nothing, and Duff tells me this something looked like a human body draped in a sheet, over.

The info tripped him up, just as he was rolling over the bar. Left flat on his back in confusion, the dusty broke the neck of a Painted Stripper and tried to drive its jagged edge into his heart. He caught the thrusting tendrils and held them back, teeth gritting. It was difficult to say much of anything.

“Do tell… over!”

Darling Cheekteeth: This figure, Duff said they wore something on their head that you couldn’t mistake for anything else. He’d seen it in the Wilderness War, on a hovering palanquin, leaving the battlefield valley behind to go do something it actually thought mattered. It was a headpiece, silver, with two angular moth antennae sticking up, over.

His. His symbol, his headgear. He was spotted only rarely, and almost never without it and the attached mask encircling his eyes. Professor Confabulo’s antennae were more recognizable than his actual face, for they were the primary avenue of his power, otherwise limited to how far he could shout and how far his Dustrious could make out what he was saying.

Stashed away inside that headband was, presumably, all manner of complex circuitry that could only be understood by the one man who had consumed ozjoe and not gone Lightheaded. From witness reports it was known that he could access any and all broadcasting equipment within a certain range utilizing those antennae, making his voice heard in every rotio and radio across entire countries and states. And if he was heard, his handcrafted children had no choice but to obey.

“Are you sure?” Al asked, able to do so clearly once the attacker eased off. They too understood what was being said. The professor was as much their god as any other Dustrious, chassis or not. Most of them had never encountered their creator, and had no idea how to feel about him. Sure, he might enslave their minds and bodies at the drop of a syllable, but humans long claimed their gods were fully capable of doing the same sort of thing, motive providing. Was the Christian god any worse, or any better, for preferring threats to direct control, like the murder of a firstborn perhaps? Al sat on the bar, stared down his attacker as they fluidly backed away, slow enough to listen. “Zounds! Duff saw Connor Fabulo climbing my stairs, with a body in his arms, over?”

Darling Cheekteeth: Him or someone who stole his hat, and I don’t think he’d let it go lightly. What are you mixed up in Al? You know what he had his minions do to my patients. That’s why they’re patients instead of drinking buddies. Tell me you’re not selling him a hyper for his metal mantle, over.

“Somebody else mixed me up in it Darling, I swear. Cracked me into it like an egg and now I’m getting kneaded by a dozen bakers at once.” He looked up at the naked dusty, whose retreat continued. What they overheard seemed to take the fight out of them, and they were rapidly vanishing into the violet crisscross haze of Battery Park. “I have no idea what’s going on,” he told them both. “Over.”

Darling Cheekteeth: Well Duff’s still all worked up about it. I shouldn’t’ve brought him into the clinic to interview him, not with so many outstretched rabbit ears eavesdropping. Now my whole place is in a tizzy about a second mini Wilderness War on our doorstep, sorry, your doorstep. They ask me if you’re colluding with the madman! And then Carmelo answers, ‘of course not dear comrades, he’s leading the charge against him, hence the frame job.’ Not in so many words mind you, just in half as many barks, but if you think-

The last of the excess energy left the rotio, terminating the call. And the last of it left Al too, soreness rushing in to take its place. He found the broken Painted Stripper and poured some into the palm of his hand to sluice out any glass shards, then drank from it. A few more swigs brought him to the end of the aerial traffic collisions, the sky quieting and clearing as people and Dustrious started to emerge from the buildings where they’d taken shelter. It was time to take his leave before they started asking questions about his ruined clothes or thinned foul-smelling hair.

The fabricator dragged himself off the bar, then out of Battery Park with his head cast down and his hands in his pockets, which were deeper now that the lining had burned away.

Caller: 2-2-2-2-2-3

Operator: Ahoy there sailor, you’ve reached Radiator Rotio: hot scoops for lover boys. My name’s Operator Doll Bacall. What can I do for you sugar, over?

Caller: Hey toots, your number one lover here. Remember me, over?

Operator: How could I forget a voice like that? When it comes sailing through my earpiece I get all hot and bothered, mmm. Go ahead and ask me anything, now that you’ve oiled my engine. Whatever answers you want, over.

Caller: You’d better have’em, seeing the premium this number charges when the city’s call-and-ask is free. But you know me, I’m just a big ol’ sucker for a woman’s voice telling me what I want to hear. What’s your real name toots? You and I should get hitched, that way I’m not paying for a hundred broads when I only talk to you. I bet you’re cheap as a sack lunch, over.

Operator: You know the rules sugar; we don’t play the name game here. You can call me what and when you want, just not at my door or with my name. What’s burning you up inside, over?

Caller: I’ll wear you down one of these days Doll, when I’m tired of playing. So what’s the skinny on the sky falling just now? I’m all banged up because a dud in a doggyback slammed into me, gave me a face full of helmet. My leg’s busted up too, and the medic wrappin’ it keeps giving me funny looks. Yeah, you, mind your own business and get me on two feet, mine preferably. Not you Doll, you mind my business and tell me, over.

Operator: I’m afraid we’re still in the dark over here. Reports are coming in hot. Best I can do for you is call it miscommunication with air traffic control. Are you going to be okay? I’d hate for my best customer to be out of commission because of a little old thing like a misbegotten missile, over.

Caller: Oh, I’m even tougher than I sound, don’t you worry ‘bout me, but don’t stop thinkin’ ‘bout me neither, got it? What? Hang on Doll, the medic’s jawin’ at me to get off the line. What? What do you mean the artery’s open? Close it! Do your damn job! Where were we? Say… say I’m seeing lights Doll. Are the ships… back in the sky?

Operator: No lover. Just watch the lights and listen to the sound of my voice. Listen here and listen good. You’re a sucker, and you paid for it. Over and out.

Continued in part three