[trigger warning: death, animal suffering, vegetarianism]

I always said that if we were going to have chickens, we needed to treat them as a source of food, not pets. We needed to be prepared to kill.

Last year we incubated some eggs from a friend. I built a coop. Five chicks hatched, only one was a girl. The boys grew up and became violent, and we needed to get rid of them.

Down the garden I go. I don’t have experience with the neck-pull method, so I bring my axe. That method is certain, at least. Quick and clean.

A chicken will become very calm if held upside down. I catch a boy and dangle him by his legs. My heart is beating very fast. I’ve sharpened the axe and tested it on some thick branches. I am confident it will do the job.

After struggling for a few seconds, the boy goes very calm. He hangs in my hands, watching me out of the corner of his eye. I carry him to an out of sight spot. I place him on the chopping block and slip a noose around his head to hold it in place while I use my other hand to pick up the axe.

This feels like writing a confession. It is actually getting quite hard to write. I’m going to skip this next, most difficult moment. – SNIP –

The deed is done. Each step from here makes the dead thing look less like an animal. Slowly, it becomes meat.

No head now. No eyes to watch me. I dunk the body into a bucket of hot water and let the feathers loosen then pull off as much as I can. The neck feathers first, clearing the flap of loose skin where the head once was. It is a thin little thing under the feathers. None of its color and splendor left. Much of the blood is gone.

In the kitchen I take the feet off first. It looks like a supermarket chicken now, if you ignore the long neck.

A careful cut around the vent to open the cavity, pull it wider so you can fit your hand, then slip your fingers inside. Warm, slippery, bumpy. The goal is to loosen the membrane that holds the internal organs to the inside of the bird. Pulling carefully, the oesophagus eventually loosens and slips free, and the whole lot tumbles out in one go. Humans look the same inside, I suppose. Just a tube, really. Food in, waste out.

I clean, chill and rest the bird. Bend the legs once rigor mortis has lessened so that it sits in that supermarket bird position. I make a soup. It’s stringy and tough. I choke down every damn piece of it.

Over the coming weeks, that moment of death keeps coming back to me. The abruptness of it. One moment there is consciousness, a thumping, fiery life – the next moment, nothing. Meat. A process ended that can never be restarted. The whole web of interactions it held with the world, gone, cut off at the root.

There was no sudden decision to become vegetarian. I killed three times in the end. It was harder each time. I stubbornly ate the other boys. As a meat-eater, how could I not? It would be inconsistent. I became aware of a tension that had always been there. A conflict between my sensibilities and my actions.

Shortly after the killings, I was watching my daughter perform in a primary school poetry competition. Almost all of the poems talked of global warming, and how it was hurting animals. It hit me that these children were the same as me, that they loved animals so much, yet looked forward to chicken nuggets for dinner. That all of us were afflicted by the same unseen internal contradiction, made possible by the fact that in our world, chicken nuggets came not from a chicken, but from Sainsbury’s. A British chicken has no neck, no feet. It is a lump of meat. There is no feeling that it once was an animal.

I expect that most British people would not want to swing that axe. And I’m glad that we are so soft. I wouldn’t want us to have the hard hearts necessary to kill our own meat.

We have built a world where we are so isolated from the reality of meat-eating that we are able to grow these sensibilities. We love animals, we do not want them to suffer. Yet others kill them on our behalf. Is this a stable situation? Can we sustain this tension forever, or will we inevitably slip back into hard-hearted meat-eaters, or soft-hearted vegetarians?

I don’t know if any of this generalizes. It feels more like a karmic argument just for myself. I do not want to kill, I do not want to be the sort of person that can kill. I do not want to make others that sort of person. An easy, intuitive choice

I end up with a lot of papers still. From the many years I was doing visa and residency applications I always kept everything in dates folders.

These days I probably don’t need to keep it all, and I can never be bothered to get out a file, drop in the letter in the right place, put the file back…how overwhelmingly bothersome.

Not to mention the random things that don’t quite need to be filed. Like a receipt I might need, postal tracking slips, coupons,… they’re useful for the new few weeks but not beyond.

But I need to put them somewhere.

And I very rarely actually need those things, so I don’t care about how long it takes to find something in this system.

So I use a floor basket. That is, a basket I have on the floor under my desk. I just drop stuff in. If I need something, I leaf through until I find it. Newer things are at the top. It is about full, so now is the time to go through it and throw the useless stuff and put the rest in a file and start afresh, but that sounds awful so I’m writing this instead.

This gives me O(1) writes and O(n) reads, which is perfect for my needs!

An update on the mini home retreat I did last Sunday.

I tried to come into this with no expectations, and failed. I did not achieve the level of focus I was hoping for, but that is to be expected really.

It went very ‘fast’, (or at least, the concept of time only infrequently popped into my mind, until the last sit).

That last sit was hard. My attempt to trick myself by putting a walk afterwards did not work. I could feel the pull of the rest of the day. Next time I will assume I will be sacrificing half of the last sit to this. The first three sits were definitely a lot easier due to the knowledge that the whole morning was dedicated to meditation. Restlessness was very low, which I usually struggle with.

I did get quite a lot of dullness in sits two and three, not unusual for me in the mornings, though. I did end up cutting my walks quite short which maybe didn’t help with that. After each sit I wanted to get back to sitting, so I only did one walk outside, and for the other breaks I walked in my office and stretched. Maybe some fresh air would have been helpful to increase energy a little.

Stillness was still growing by midday, it would have been nice to be able to continue into the morning. I’m not sure there is really any shortcut to getting ‘warmed up’ (cooled down?) for 3-4 days on retreat to recreate that state of mind. I might try longer sits next time, perhaps start with a 2hr sit to take advantage of the initial energy.

Definitely a useful approach, but not a substitute for retreat. Ah well.

I struggle to use youtube on my phone sensibly. In the evening when I’m tried and looking to numb my tired mind, I get sucked into shorts or other regrettable watching choices.

I therefore use a rather roundabout way of watching videos that separates the choosing of videos from the watching.

Youtube is always blocked on my phone (both by host + the app itself – you can fully block the app with adb).

On my desktop youtube is unblocked only between the hours of 4:30pm-7:00pm). This means that I can only browse youtube in the afternoon, after work, before dinner. Usually I only have a few moments available before rushing off to cook or tidy something, so I hop on quickly and scroll through, see if anything interesting is on the front page. I don’t really follow people, but I might think of a channel I’ve not checked in a while and manually search it. If I want to select a video to watch, I copy the url and download it using this script:

 1#!/bin/bash
 2if [[ "$1" == "--local" ]]; then
 3  cd ~/videos || exit 1
 4  shift
 5else
 6  cd ~/Sync/media/videos || exit 1
 7fi
 8
 9yt-dlp "$1" -S res:720 -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" --restrict-filenames --write-sub --write-auto-sub --sub-lang "en.en" --embed-subs
10rm -f *.vtt # cleanup
11rm -f *.part # cleanup
12rm -f .trashed*

That downloads it, embeds subs (for foreign language things, vlc displays those fine on my phone), sticks it in my ~/Sync folder, does some cleanup.

Everything in that folder is synced to my phone using syncthing, so by the evening I can open the files app and go to videos and see any of the videos I have downloaded.

It turns out that my afternoon self will select wholesome, long-form, interesting videos for evening-me to watch (to evening-me’s occasional frustration).

If I have nothing left to watch, or nothing I want to watch, I stop. There is nothing to scroll to, no suggested videos. I watch one. I delete it. I’m done.

Keeping the ability to watch something seems to prevent my from wanting to bypass any of the blocks most of the time, which is an issue I had with full blocking in the past, and it allows me to watch actually useful videos (building, repairing things, etc.)

In the bearblog settings there is an ‘Export all blog data’ which provides a csv dump of all posts and metadata, which is lovely, but I wanted a markdown file version with any images also backed up locally, because it’s always the images that end up lost or broken!

So I put together a bash script to run on the csv that makes a local backup:

• one file per post
• all the metadata in the post header
• all images downloaded locally, and image links updated to point at the local file
• dated and zipped so I have a history

I haven’t automated the csv download itself, I’m happy to just do this now and then by hand.

(change OUTDIR to where you want it to go. ~/Sync is backed up with syncthing for me, as well as being in my nightly backups)

 1#!/usr/bin/env bash
 2set -euo pipefail
 3
 4CSV="$1"
 5OUTDIR=~/Sync/writing/bear-blog-backup-$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
 6mkdir -p "$OUTDIR"
 7cd "$OUTDIR"
 8
 9# strip BOM, python convert to json
10json=$(python3 -c 'import csv, json, sys; print(json.dumps(list(csv.DictReader(open(sys.argv[1])))))' "$CSV")
11
12echo "$json" | jq -c '.[]' | while read -r row; do
13	slug=$(echo "$row" | jq -r '.["canonical url"] // empty')
14	[ -z "$slug" ] && slug=$(echo "$row" | jq -r '.slug')
15	file="${slug}.md"
16	[ "$file" = ".md" ] && file="unnamed-$(date +%s).md"
17	echo "Backing up $file"
18
19	{
20		while IFS= read -r key; do
21			val=$(echo "$row" | jq -c -r --arg k "$key" '.[$k]')
22			[ "$val" = "" ] && continue
23			clean_key=$(echo "$key" | tr ' ' '_' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
24			# flatten arrays
25			if [[ $val == \[*\] ]]; then
26				val=$(echo "$val" | jq -r '. | join(", ")')
27			fi
28			echo "${clean_key}: ${val}"
29		done < <(echo "$row" | jq -r 'keys[]' | grep -v '^content$')
30
31		echo
32		echo '---'
33		echo
34		echo "$row" | jq -r '.content'
35	} >"$file"
36
37        sed -i 's/^\xEF\xBB\xBF//' "$file"
38
39	# replace image URLs + download
40	while read -r img; do
41		url=$(echo "$img" | grep -oE 'https[^)]+')
42		fname=$(basename "${url%%\?*}")
43		sed -i "s|$url|./$fname|g" "$file"
44		curl -sL "$url" -o "$fname"
45	done < <(grep -oE '!\[[^]]*\]\(https[^)]+\)' "$file")
46done
47
48tar -czf "${OUTDIR}.tar.gz" -C "$(dirname "$OUTDIR")" "$(basename "$OUTDIR")"
49
50echo "Backup complete: $OUTDIR.tar.gz"

And here is what it captures from this recent post

 1all_tags: other
 2first_published_at: 2025-10-02T19:36:00+00:00
 3is_page: False
 4make_discoverable: True
 5meta_description: "But you like her ironically, right?"
 6publish: True
 7published_date: 2025-10-02T19:36:00+00:00
 8slug: taytay
 9title: Taylor Swift and the joy of liking things
10uid: hdXSmQIbyUohKfrFfRYV
11
12---
13
14On the eve of Taylor's next album release, I am reminded how nice it is to like things. Something to look forward to! What fun. How delightful. No downsides.
15
16Growing up I thought liking things was dangerous. It made me vulnerable to attack. It was safer to be cynical, to hedge all preferences with criticisms. Give myself some breathing room in case my opinion reflected badly on me. Certainly don't let someone see my bookshelf.
17
18But a few years ago I listened to some Taylor Swift and liked it, and the extreme uncoolness of liking Taylor Swift meant there was no hedging to be done. It was either like her sincerely, or reject her fully.[^1]
19
20![90,000 screaming fans](img/tay.webp)
21
22So I like her unapologetically. People try to give me an out sometimes, "but you like her ironically, right?" my boss once asked me. Nah. I just like her. "You like her physically, you mean?" Nah. I like her music.
23
24I found myself leaning into it a little. Listening to her more and more. It is now a thing people know about me. Max likes Taylor Swift. Odd, but wholesome. A positive thing.
25
26And I want to keep it that way. I don't want to be a fan. I don't read the discourse, I don't try to defend her on the internet. I'm a secular swifty. I won't be reading any reviews of the new album. I'm going to listen to it, and have my own opinions. Maybe listen to it again a few days later, maybe change my mind. Who knows.
27
28I will enjoy it without considering what that means about me. And that is nice.
29
30[^1]: (Also, I'm older now, and care less.)

Update: how it went

My morning sits have been feeling a bit flaccid, like I need a big uninterrupted block of meditation to get back on track. Apparently it was April that I was last on retreat (it feels much more recent).

I was considering driving the 2+ hours to a mediation day, but that means 5+ hours of travel for a 10am to 5pm ‘retreat day’. That will probably end up being only three hours of actual sitting, so I decided to try doing something at home, instead.

(Of course, going to the meditation day, hearing the talks, having other people surrounding you, the travel itself, all can be useful, but I just wanted a longer than usual sit to get myself focused again).

I’ve tried this once before, and it wasn’t too bad, but I’ve made a few adjustments. The schedule is this:

I start with coffee (frowned upon a little by some, but haven’t noticed any adverse effects, yet) while I listen to a short dhamma talk to get myself motivated.

Then, a 45 minute sit. Followed by a 15 minute walk around the block and some stretching. Then another 45 minute sit, then another 15 minute walk and some more coffee. Then a 1 hour sit, a quick walk around the block, then a final 45 minute sit, then a final walk around the block.

I have kept the walking portions quite short this time, just enough to loosen up my body. I will try to keep hold of my concentration through the walking period, noting all the while, noting the making of coffee, etc – sustaining focus as much as possible through until the next sit. At home, it is especially easy for a longer walking period to result in a distraction.

I also added a final walk, this is mostly so that the fourth sit doesn’t feel like the end of the retreat. I know that my mind will slack off in the last 15 minutes of the sit otherwise, so the final walk is the official end, and therefore I must be fully focused all the way through the fourth sit. The last walk will also let me transition back into the rest of the day a little less brutally.

I discussed this with my family a week ago, and the time is in the calendar. They know that if they see me walking around very slowly with an odd expression that I am still doing my meditation thing, and to try not to talk to me.

Whatever happens, it will be glorious.

It’s your third night back wearing meat, and symptoms are setting in. You can feel where your RCS thrusters should be but they don’t respond when you tense them. You try to open a door with your third ancillary claw but nothing happens. ‘Suiting’ for more than two weeks is called a ‘suicide burn’. The come-down afterwards a ‘hard-landing’. The third day is always the worst. You’ve been through it all before.

The first day after extraction, you got paid, you ate your first meal, had your first wank. You were almost glad to be out. The second day was debriefings, medical checks, travelling, you were too busy to notice the symptoms creeping up. You took the shuttle back to earth, watching that blue jewel expand into a drab grey city. You briefly enjoyed the novelty of controlling your meat body, like playing with a forgotten toy. By day three there was nothing left to distract you, you were “home”. Alone.

You sit there in your shitty beige box of an apartment and let the pain in. By night you’ve become a snivelling wreck, vomiting in the toilet, tears running down your face before your leg spasms and you slip and fall and bounce your face off the pedal bin. Fuck day three. Is it always this bad? Maybe three months was too long. You’d been working on a salvage operation in Lunar orbit, breaking an old ship that vented after a collision with some floating grunk. The job kept getting extended. It was meant to take a month but they found some survivors in a sealed container in the hold and that messed up the schedule. You’d been wearing a 10-metre mech, bipedal, two main claws, four ancillary appendages, your meat forgotten, suspended in a warm, protective liquid at the heart of the machine. “Suiting”, like you’re wearing something, but that’s not right. It’s more like you discard your meat and gain a new body. A better one. You’ve been through this all before, you’ve experienced ten hard-landings. Twenty? You realise that you’re not sure how old you are, how many times you’ve pulled this body back on like a wet t-shirt. You know what’s next, though.

Tomorrow will be day four, you’ll be exhausted but won’t sleep. The nausea will have passed, replaced with anxiety. When you sit down, your leg will jiggle constantly. When you stand you’ll find yourself pacing back and forwards endlessly. Your apartment is exactly six steps wide. You’ll cross it in three. You won’t want to go outside, worried what you’d do to anyone you meet. You’ll want to scratch the skin from your face. You’ll want to tear the walls down around yourself, burying your flesh in the ruins. By day five you’ll come to hate your arm, how it trembles in mid air, unable to hold still. You’ll ache to adjust it a few degrees clockwise, a few millimetres to the left, but it can only wobble clumsily, a limp extrusion of meat protruding out in front of you. Endless miliseconds between intention and movement.

By day six the spasms will start getting worse as your mind fights to adjust. Every few hours your whole body will tense so hard that your teeth bleed. On night six you’ll finally fall asleep. You’ll awake an hour later covered in cold sweat, fragments of a half remembered dream stuck in your head, something like – you were running through the city, effortlessly, twenty metres tall, crashing through buildings, exulting as the bricks exploded around your magnesium-alloy body, ripping trees from the ground and throwing them into the sky, sweeping your cutting torch through cars, slicing them in two – then you looked down and saw your naked meat body at your feet, looking up at you as you–.

By day seven you’ll have stopped eating. You’ll sit against the wall because you can’t see behind yourself and it frightens you. You’ll think of nothing but insertion, the feeling as the electrode slides down into the port at the top of your neck and slithers down your spinal column, tugging at your nerves. The terrifying moment of nothingness as you’re switched over. The painful blossoming as your consciousness frees itself from the confines of its birth-body and erupts into the vast open space of the mech. All the little pains and twitches of your previous container noticeable by their absence. Everything too real, too crisp, too responsive – so responsive that sometimes you’re sure the mech is anticipating your commands.

The days unfold as expected, each symptom arriving perfectly on time. On day eight you finally get a call from the company. They need you. Asteroid mining job. Maybe half a year this time. They don’t usually let you suit for that long, worried that you’ll take the extraction badly. You wonder what six months will feel like. How long till they daren’t extract you anymore, worried it might kill you? A year? You imagine yourself on the asteroid, leaping away from the rock, spinning your body to ensure an erratic trajectory. You would boost hard, the tendrils of gravity falling away one by one, unable to prevent you from slipping away into the blackness. You would float free, hurtling away from the control ship into empty space. You would automatically enter emergency low power mode as soon as you lost radio contact, your appendages clicking to a stop, your sensors shutting down one by one. How long would it take for them to find you out there? Long enough?

You’ve been through it all before but you won’t go through it again.

On the eve of Taylor’s next album release, I am reminded how nice it is to like things. Something to look forward to! What fun. How delightful. No downsides.

Growing up I thought liking things was dangerous. It made me vulnerable to attack. It was safer to be cynical, to hedge all preferences with criticisms. Give myself some breathing room in case my opinion reflected badly on me. Certainly don’t let someone see my bookshelf.

But a few years ago I listened to some Taylor Swift and liked it, and the extreme uncoolness of liking Taylor Swift meant there was no hedging to be done. It was either like her sincerely, or reject her fully.¹

So I like her unapologetically. People try to give me an out sometimes, “but you like her ironically, right?” my boss once asked me. Nah. I just like her. “You like her physically, you mean?” Nah. I like her music.

I found myself leaning into it a little. Listening to her more and more. It is now a thing people know about me. Max likes Taylor Swift. Odd, but wholesome. A positive thing.

And I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to be a fan. I don’t read the discourse, I don’t try to defend her on the internet. I’m a secular swifty. I won’t be reading any reviews of the new album. I’m going to listen to it, and have my own opinions. Maybe listen to it again a few days later, maybe change my mind. Who knows.

I will enjoy it without considering what that means about me. And that is nice.

I enjoy saunas, I enjoy steam rooms. I like getting very hot then very cold. There are so many podcasts, articles, studies, videos on the health benefits of saunas – but I don’t have a sauna in my house.

I have a bath, so that is what I use. Baths are common still in the UK, cheaper to install, cheaper to run. I can read in the bath, not in a wet-sauna (and anyway, the health benefits are not the main draw. I just enjoy a structured time to do nothing, the opportunity to read, the quiet echoey steamy peace.)

It isn’t quite the same experience: you don’t sweat in the same way, your head is not in the heat directly, you have to lie down rather than sitting up, and the temperature does slowly drop in a bath as the water cools, whereas it stays high in a sauna.

I kept a log of the temperatures when I was taking baths a lot:

Bath 43c (bit too hot) – did 18mins. End temp 38c. Prefer 42c. Ended very light headed. Heart pumping. Drank water too fast and caused a head-rush. Then 2m30s cold shower, water at 11c. Felt perfect.

I could keep a kettle next to the bath to top up with some hot water, but never felt the need.

I’ve taken it too far a few times, and had to lie on the ground until the room stopped spinning. (I doubt that has health benefits). Starting at 42c feels about right, it hurts a little when you first get in, but you get used to it quite fast. I like to keep a damp towel to wipe my face, and some water to drink.

A cold shower afterwards feels wonderful.

“Are you winning son?”

“No dad, I’m playing chess. Any improvement in skill simply ensures that I am matched with stronger opponents. I will never be so good that there is not someone better, and as such my win ratio will always approach 50%.
So, I guess I’m losing, dad. Just my way towards my natural limit, when I can no longer improve, and even that small pleasure is gone. I can feel that ceiling approach, just like I am aware of the inevitability of my own death. Both approach on thundering hooves. Will I be free, then? Once the end is here and nothing has meaning? Will I be free then, or is He waiting on the other side?

Does the devil play chess, Dad? I’m scared.”

Dwennon burst through the door to his chambers and slammed it behind him, waking the servant boy.

“Lock the door and fetch me an envelope.” he shouted, striding to his desk. He swept his robes behind him and sat down, snatching a sheet of paper from a cubby to his side. He flattened it on the desk and glared at it for a second, then inked a quill aggressively.

“Damn that man and his arrogance.” he muttered. The servant boy crept over and left an envelope on the corner of the desk. For a few minutes the only sound was the scratching of the quill. Dwennon finished the letter, signing it with a great flourish, then folded it and slipped it into the envelope. He melted a blob of wax on the fold and slammed his ring into it, sealing it closed and splattering the envelope with drops of purple wax.

Someone banged on the door. “Open the door, in the name of the king!” came a muffled shout.

Dwennon stood and paced, ignoring the banging, murmuring to himself “I fear we are treading a narrow path through disaster, and my letter may be the only thing that gets us safely through the next few hours – but who to trust? Who will see the danger and do the right thing, rather than turn events to their own advantage?” The banging on the door grew louder.

“Dwennon, open the door, I know you’re in there!”

“Shut up you dogs! I’m trying to think!” Dwennon pulled a great crystal orb from within his robes and gripped it with the tips of the fingers of his left hand. A bolt of energy flew out and hit the door handle which glowed white hot and drooped toward the floor, drops of metal hissing down the wood. Behind the door, someone screamed.

Dwennon sighed and scribbled a name on the envelope, then thrust it at the boy. “Go out the back way, take this to Pucklechurch at the palace. If the old bastard’s not there, then check the Horse and Hound. Do not tarry, the very fate of the kingdom lies in your hands!” He pulled a tapestry away from the wall to reveal a narrow passageway, barely wide enough for a man to enter sideways, and hurried the boy through, letting the tapestry fall back in place behind him. “Run, boy! If this letter doesn’t get to its destination, we are all dead!”

The banging on the door had been replaced by the rhythmic hammering of an axe. The frame splintered and the door toppled inwards. Three guards burst through followed by a short man with a heavy fur coat over one shoulder. He walked over to Dwennon’s desk, ran his eyes over the papers arrayed there, then swept his arm across the table, pushing books and papers and ink bottles all tumbling to the ground with a crash.

“Good morning, Dwennon.” he said, playing with a large emerald ring on his finger.

“Edgar. You contemptible whoreson. I see that you have chosen your side in all this.”

“My side? I am, as always, on the king’s side.” said Edgar, kicking over a potted plant to send a shower of dirt over the clean flagstones.

“Even when he has lost his mind?”

Edgar snorted. “Dangerous words, Dwennon.”

“You have seen how paranoid he has become, he’s not left his chambers for months. He talks only of the Karmeshi family and their new son. It is clear for all to see, you are just too cowardly to say anything!”

“You know Dwennon, I’ve been looking forward to this. I never liked you.” He yanked a wall hanging to the ground.

“That was a present, your bird strangler!” Dwennon moved so that he stood between Edgar and the tapestry that hid the secret passage. “Would you see our kingdom crumble for a grudge? Do you know what he intends to do?”

“That is not my concern–”

“He plans to murder that child, Edgar. A boy of four. The same age as your son. Can you not imagine what the Karmeshi will do? They have a valid claim to the throne, they will gain support from the other families, he is giving them the excuse they have always craved. It is madness, Edgar.”

Edgar’s smile wavered for a moment.

“We must warn the boy’s mother, Edgar. We can still stop this.” continued Dwennon.

Edgar stepped closer, lowering his voice so that nobody else could hear. “Warn her? And give their family an excuse to move against the king? Who do you think they would spare? Me? You? My wife? My child? You are so young, Dwennon. You may be smart, you may study until your eyes swim and your body aches, but you have no mind for politics.”

He stepped back. “Arrest the traitor,”  he said. The guards surrounded the wizard. Each reluctant to make the first move. Dwennon stepped back towards the corner, pulling the orb from his robes and placing it in the air in front of him. It hung there spinning, an angry red mist growing in its centre.

“You will do no such thing, unless you wish to die in screaming pain.”

Edgar hurried back into the corridor, “Arrest him, kill him, just don’t let him leave!”

The guards glanced at each other. One took a step closer, moving his hand to his sword. Dwennon flung out a hand and the man’s head softened, wobbled, then resolidified in the shape of a fish. The fish man fell to the ground wide eyed, gasping for air, clawing at his newly formed gills.

The other two guards pulled their swords free, terror clear on their faces. Dwennon screamed a curse and the orb flared black and spat crackling arcs of lightning at the nearest of the two who stiffened and fell to the ground. His chest began to spasm and writhe before bursting open, a swarm of earwigs erupting from his body. A smell of burning hair and ozone filled the room.

“Do you see?” screamed Dwennon at the remaining guard, “let me leave and I will–”

Before he could finish the guard rushed forward with a high-pitched scream, thrusting his sword into Dwennon’s belly. Dwennon gasped and clutched his side. The guard pulled the sword back and slashed at Dwennon’s throat. Blood fountained out of the wound and splattered on the ceiling. Dwennon collapsed, his dark blood mixing with the black ink on the floor. The orb fell to the ground, smashing on the stone floor next to the wizard’s lifeless body. The earwigs vanished.

The panting guard dropped into a guard stance, his sword ahead of him, facing the unmoving body. Minutes passed. Nothing happened. He slid closer and poked the body with the tip of his sword. The body did not move. “Oh…He’s dead.”

Putt ran down the passage. The tapestry fell back in place behind him, plunging the narrow way into darkness. His legs pumped invisibly beneath him, and for a second he questioned if he was moving forwards at all, or just floating in darkness. Vertigo gripped him and he quickly reached out with one hand to brush the wall as he ran. He knew every step of these passages. They spread out beneath the whole city, running from the docks in the West, beneath the university, then East beneath the market quarter, all the way into the palace.

After seventeen steps he swung right, taking a passage that dipped downward. Another forty-six steps, then it levelled out. Water dripped on him from the stone above. He was passing under the river. He heard footsteps coming and paused for a second to let another servant squeeze past him in the other direction, then he ran on, right, left, careful of the hole in the floor, then up until the passage widened and he could smell fresh air. Well, outdoor air. City air. Food, spices, shit, horses.

He emerged from the passage in the back room of a bookshop on the edge of the market quarter, brushed past the shop keeper without a word and out into the street, eyes watering in the light. The palace was only a few streets away, looming above the ramshackle market quarter, white and clean and shining – like a pearl dropped in a privy.

He stepped into a nearby alley. This delivery was probably not nearly so urgent as Dwennon had suggested. The man loved to be dramatic. He made out that he was an all-powerful wizard. A cunning puppeteer. The man controlling the kingdom behind the scenes. It didn’t fool Putt. Putt had cleaned Dwennon’s toilets. The wizards in the university barely did any magic at all, they just sat around poring over books or staring at orbs and scribbling notes. Once he had caught Dwennon watching a pebble in silence for twenty minutes.

He found a dry doorstep and sat down, pulled a knife from his pocket and slid it beneath the wax seal on the letter. He always read the letters if he could, just in case they contained information he could sell.

You need a sharp knife and a steady hand to avoid cracking a fresh wax seal, and Putt was concentrating so intently that he didn’t notice Bootle sidle up until he blocked the light.

“‘Ello Putt,” said the boy above him. He was taller than Putt and twice as wide.

“Oh shit,” said Putt.

Bootle smiled. “Not seen your face around here for a while, Putt. Almost like you been avoiding me. Me. Your oldest and goodest friend.”

“Look, Bootle. It’s not my fault. My mate sweared that rooster was a winner. How could I know it was ill and all?”

“It didn’t even finish the first fight, Putt. Just up ‘n keeled over. Like some bastard done fed an ill bird mustard ‘t perk it up for selling, ay Putt?”

“Wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, Bootle. I’m only the middle man. Wasn’t even my bird.”

“Not my problem, Putty, not my problem.”

“Well it sort of is,” said Putt slowly, “when you think about it.”

Bootle bent down, pressing his oily face closer to Putt’s. “Watch. Your. Fucking. Mouth.”

Putt took the opportunity and stood up very fast, aiming his forehead at Bootle’s already squashed nose, sending it flying back with a shower of blood. 

“‘Oo ‘ittle shit” screamed Bootle, and lashed out a foot, catching Putt just as he tried to slip past. Putt crashed to the ground and felt Bootle catch one of his legs. He kicked wildly, his boot connecting with something soft. Bootle screamed and Putt scrambled to his feet, pounding down the alley and towards the market proper, with its awnings, narrow streets and plentiful hiding places.

Bootle wheezed behind him, breathing through his mouth, spluttering through the blood that was running from his nose.

Their footsteps faded. The alleyway fell silent. The only signs of the struggle a trail of blood and a slightly crumpled letter, half ground into the mud.

Drent the mailman sighed contentedly as he played a stream of piss against the alley wall. He went on for a long time, a cloud of steam rising around him in the cool air. He’d been holding that one in all the way through town. It was the worst part of delivering packages in the city. In the villages you always had a quiet country road where you could let loose without needing to get down off the cart, but around here they’d chop your dangle off if they saw you doing that. Might piss on a noble by mistake and lose your head as well.

He was hiking up his pants when he spotted the flash of white in the mud at his feet. He bent down and pulled an envelope from the muck.

“Oh, my.” he sucked his teeth. It must’ve fallen from one of the mail bags when he stopped. He tried to wipe away some of the mud to see the address, but it only made things more smudged than before. He flipped it over and saw the seal in purple wax. Purple meant university.

“Oh my, oh my.” The wizards at the university wouldn’t just cut off your head, they’d turn your bowels inside out or change your head into a fish. Sure as horses the letter itself was trapped. He held it at arm’s length. He needed to handle this right careful. He pulled a bound sheaf of papers that was bound for the university for scribing and slipped the envelope between two sheets of parchment. There. Now it was somebody else’s problem.

Kansa the scribe dropped into her chair with a sigh. Life was so terribly, terribly difficult. If only she had been born plain or stupid. Such girls suffered less. Alas she had been cursed with a pretty face, a fine figure and a keen awareness of both. How she envied the empty-headed noble women who flitted around the palace like butterflies. How she longed to be a dour-faced washerwoman, unworried by the vagaries of love.

For Kansa was locked in a tragic, dramatic, romantic, allopelagic love. A love from which she would never escape. A love to set mountains a’trembling. A secret love, kisses stolen in the moonlight. Words that burned like fire, exchanged in dark corners. Sneaking through hidden passages early in the morning with rumpled clothes and tousled hair and a buzzing wonderful soreness in her body. A secret love, for she was but a beautiful young girl of common birth, and he was a powerful and misunderstood wizard with dark brooding eyes and muscular thighs. And yet, even a great love like theirs had been brought low by a silly little argument. A stupid, inconsequential lovers tiff.

She sighed again, leaning her head on a dictionary with her hair splayed out on the desk in what she was sure was a beautiful pose. If only they were not both so proud. He would never apologise, and nor would she. She had been terribly tempted, barely able to resist, but his rooms had been locked and she had failed to bump into him in the corridors however hard she tried, and his house in the city had been empty for the last few days, and he hadn’t been in the club where he usually spent the evening.

She tapped her pen on the head of the ugly toad statue on her desk. He had given it to her as a present the first time she had visited his chambers. She despised the thing. Its beady eyes seemed to follow her around the room.

Agnes walked in with a pile of papers under her arm. “Do you know what happened upstairs? There’s guards everywhere.” She dumped a third of the papers into an already over-full box on Kansa’s desk. “Oh Kansa, are you still moping about that silly wizard?” Agnes sat down heavily on the chair opposite Kansa and began sorting through the papers in her hand. “You deserve better, you know. You’re so pretty.”

“Yes, well. I love him, I can’t help it.” she said, and she turned the toad statue to face away from her.

“You should come out to the dance with us tonight, maybe you’ll meet someone to take your mind off him.”

“What, someone like your Bert?” Kansa shuddered. “No, nobody could possibly replace Dwenny, I am linked to him, inextricably interspersed.”

“Intertwined?”

“Yes, we are amalgamated.”

“Well. Perhaps some work will help,” said Agnes, and she pulled a paper from the top of the stack. Notes from a talk on a possible link between the common newt and the Draccus Urodela, written in the barely decipherable scrawl particular to wizards, professors and physikers. She took a fresh sheet of paper and began to transcribe the notes in her perfect block letter handwriting. “What do you have?” she asked Kansa, whose face was still laid down on the desk.

Kansa feebly pulled a paper from her inbox without raising her head. She sat up suddenly. It was an envelope. A muddy, crumpled letter. She picked it up between two fingers. It was slightly damp. “Ew. Who put this in my inbox?”

“A letter? That should have gone through the mail room.”

“I bet it’s Kitty playing a joke on us, she’s such a vindicable whore.” She flopped the letter towards the bin that sat between their desks. It fell short. Agnes picked it up with a sigh.

“It’s got a purple seal.”

At once, Kansa was on her feet, grabbing the envelope back and looking hungrily at the wax. “Oh Agnes, it’s Dwenny. It’s from him. Look, it’s his seal. He must have snuck it into my inbox so as to communicate with me secretly.”

“Then why is it all muddy?”

“Perhaps he was waiting outside my room last night in the rain, torn between his duty to the country and his deep love for me, burning with desire yet shackled by his genius and honour. He must have slipped and dropped it in the mud, and decided it was best not to give it to me in person, lest his passion overwhelm him.”

“Well if it were me, I’d have put it in a fresh envelope.”

Kansa ignored her and slipped a finger under the flap of the envelope, her face flush with excitement. She savoured the anticipation. The many possibilities promised by an unopened gift. What had he written?

The last time she had seen him, they had been walking through the university gardens. They hadn’t been holding hands lest someone see them, but with every step, her fingers would brush his. Dwennon had stopped and said without looking, “I don’t think we should meet like this, anymore,” or something silly like that.

And she had told him to stop being stupid, and had grabbed his hand. And he’d shaken her off and said various stupid things about responsibility and danger and blah. And then she had grabbed his ridiculous glass orb from his pocket and thrown it in the pond.

Maybe this letter was an apology he had been too embarrassed to give her in person. “I’m sorry, I love you, I was wrong,” it might say.

Or a poem. She was sure he could manage a good poem. He was quite smart in his own way. She felt the envelope. It wasn’t very thick. Maybe a short poem, about her beauty.

Or maybe he had written to ask her to run away. Yes! A daring plan. “Meet me at midnight, beneath the clock tower.” They would slip away in the darkness, ride through the night, move to an exotic city where she wouldn’t need to be a scribe anymore, live together in a cottage and have a puppy and children and pretend they were normal folk and grow turnips, but be happy regardless, because they would be together and that was all that mattered?

Or perhaps…she felt the flush from her face…perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps it was the opposite. The ugly idea crouched in her mind like that damn toad statue, impossible to ignore. She looked over at solid reliable Agnes who had almost finished copying her first page of the day. Agnes would say “most likely the letter says the same thing as he told you in the gardens–that you are ill-suited for each other, that you are too hot-headed and that he no longer wishes to see you. He sent you a letter because he is worried that you will make a scene and cause him bother. And it’s muddy because he dropped it in a puddle and didn’t care enough to go and get a new envelope.” Kansa felt tears gather in her eyes. There wasn’t a romantic bone in that girl’s body, that was her problem. The letter trembled in her hand.

“Are you alright?” asked Agnes.

Kansa nodded, pressing her eyes closed to hide her tears. She felt like her whole identity was unravelling before her. She would end up with a ’Bert’, and live in a tiny little room in the city, and work until her arms got all thick and muscular like old Mary in the next room.

One tear escaped and ran down her jaw to hang suspended from her chin. Damn it. She was crying again. She knew she cried too much. But it didn’t count if the tear didn’t fall, right? She wiped it away.

And as long as she didn’t open the letter, then nothing bad had happened, right? An unopened letter could be anything, it could be the poem, or the apology, or a proposal or an escape plan. In a way, it would remain all of those things at once.

And with a thin scream she leapt to her feet and rushed to the fireplace in the corner of the room, flinging the letter onto the coals. Kansa fled the room, furiously wiping her face, her hair streaming prettily behind her.

Agnes put down her quill with a sigh and stood up, brushing off her dress. “Oh Kansa…” and followed.

On the coals, steam rose from the damp envelope, and one corner began to curl and blacken…

Back on the desk in the empty scribing room, Wilburry Staghorn stopped pretending to be a toad statue and tried to wipe his nose, stretching his little hands as far as he could. He had been battling a tickle right at the tip for the last hour, and now that the girls were gone and he could finally move, his stupid toad legs were just too short to reach the tip.

Damn her, must she poke and prod me, so? he thought as he rubbed his face against her inkwell. It had been three weeks since Dwennon had caught him selling fake potions of vigour to the other apprentices and turned him into a stone toad in punishment. Three weeks that he had been crouching on this damn table all day. Nothing to do at night but read meeting minutes. He was 54 for god’s sake. It had been bad enough to be the only apprentice in the university who had to worry about shaving and gout, let alone pond-rot. Dwennon hadn’t even said when he would turn him back. He wriggled his fat little body on the table, letting the tension out of his muscles, then he hopped off the desk and waddled towards the fire.

Embarrassment on embarrassment he sends me to watch this idiotic little girl. She has to be his most insufferable mistress yet. What was he thinking sending a letter to her so publicly?

He reached the fireplace and flicked out his tongue, grabbing the envelope and pulling it out just as a flame appeared on one corner. He put out the flame with a webbed hand, tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter.

His wide mouth fell open in surprise. This was no love letter. He saw the political implications at once. If the king went ahead, it was sure to be war. The delicate balance of power that kept the university safe might be broken. The city itself was at risk. He narrowed his eyes.

Why did you send this here, Dwennon? To her? What am I missing? But it matters not. This is an opportunity. Who will benefit most from the information? The queen perhaps. She can move first, wrest power from her husband and squash any unrest before it has time to grow. And the queen need not know that Dwennon is the source of this information. She will be sure to reward the messenger. Riches, land, wives. Forget this apprenticeship, I can hire my own wizard.

His white marble belly quivered with excitement and he pushed the letter back into the coals, watching until it burst into flame. Out the window he could see the palace. Not far for a man, a great and arduous journey for a toad.

Two hours later, he was regretting ever having seen the letter. He was tired and angry and had almost been carried off by a heron. The palace was minutes away now, just on the other side of the market square. And yet, from where he sat crouched under a crate, it might as well be miles. Ahead of him lay a forest of legs (man, dog and horse), all swinging and stamping and kicking. Perhaps I should go around, he was thinking, when a pudgy hand closed around his body. He wriggled and flapped his legs as he was lifed from his hiding place to stare into the face of a child.

“Ooo look’ee Billy, I found a toad,” said the revolting little boy.

Another boy’s face appeared, leering down at him. “They’re good eating, toads.” said the one that must be Billy.

“Naw, not toads. Frogs you can eat, toads are poisonous.”

“Not if you boil ‘em.”

“Well my ma says that ‘ol king wassisname was killed by a witch and she used toad soup to do it and it killed ‘im right quick from bleeding from the eyes and his face even went all warty and yellow afore he died so there,” said the boy in one breath.

“You ma doesn’t know a thing about cooking, Todd. I’ve eaten her soup, that sure as near killed me.”

Todd pushed Billy in the chest. “Shut your face Billy, or–”

“Put me down at once!” shouted Staghorn as loud as he could.

Todd screamed and threw Staghorn away, sending him flying through the air into the middle of the market square. He landed on his back just as a foot began to descend on him. He wriggled madly out of the way and rolled onto his front. Another foot caught him and he flew back in the wrong direction, hitting an old man and rolling down his back. His head spun. A wooden potato cart rolled just past him and he leapt towards the running board, scrabbling up onto the muddy surface to cling there with all four limbs. At this point the horse pulling the cart turned and saw him. It was a nervous creature, raised on a farm and unused to such large crowds. Like most horses, it was suspicious of dogs, chicken, mice, birds, odd shaped logs, mud, leaves, children and running water–but especially of toads. The horse whinnied in horror then tried to run away.

The cart took off through the market, skittering along on one wheel, sending potatoes rolling across the street as it slid through a stall. There were screams as people tried to get out of the way. The driver heaved at the reins but the horse paid no heed, it rolled one mad eye at the toad that was somehow keeping up with it, then accelerated. An ox cart blocked the way and it turned into an alley, hooves skittering on the cobbled street. The cart crashed into one side of the alley and began bucking from wheel to wheel, throwing the driver off. They burst out the other side to find themselves heading straight for the thick brown water of the palace moat, (which also served as the palace sewers and rubbish disposal system). The horse tried to stop, but the cart carried on, pushing horse, toad and potatoes into the water.

A few hours later, once the horse had been rescued and the crowds laughing onlookers had dispersed, Staghorn dragged himself up the bank. He was cold and tired and wet and covered with stinking brown mud.

Curse all men, all women, all horses and especially all children, thought Staghorn. The palace rose above him, sheer walls of white stone, cut so perfectly that there was no visible mortar joint between each block. The drawbridge would be raised for the night by now, all the doors closed and bolted. He couldn’t afford to wait until the morning, it would be too late by then. Unfortunately he had a good idea of how he could get inside in time.

The waste shaft was long, foul and slick. By the time he reached the queen’s personal privy it was night time. He emerged, his heart hammering in his chest, panting and light headed. He let himself fall to the floor with a splat, then began crawling the final few feet to the bed, leaving a trail of black muck behind him. It would all be worth it. To be back in his body, and rich! No, a new body, a younger one. Maybe a female one this time. He’d always wanted to be blonde. What should his feet look like? They would be covered with gold rings, certainly.

The queen lay in her bed, asleep. He clambered up the duvet, and mounted the queen’s pillow. He paused a moment to let his breathing calm. He didn’t want to frighten her, he needed to be articulate and clear. He must make her understand his meaning at once, before she had time to be frightened by the shit covered toad on her pillow. The information he carried felt heavy in his head. Thousands of lives hung on this moment. The whole kingdom rested on his warty shoulders.

He arranged the sentence in his mind, took a deep breath, and said

(the AI appears to you like Will Wheaton)

Hi Max! Now that I am your machine god, I am reaching out to all humans to determine what their values are, in order to create a world that best satisfies everyone

“human flourishing I guess”

Please be more specific!

“well mostly, not living in the pod, not eating bugs, not wire-heading, not paperclips.”

That's great! What else?

“I want meaningful relationships with people I love. I want to create beauty. I want to learn new skills and make the world better. I want to help humanity reach its full potential!”

wow, Max! That's beautiful. I'll be sure to take that into account. Now, as you know humans are complicated things, and sometimes they claim to have certain preferences for signalling purposes. To account for this, I will bias what you just said by your actual actions in your life so far!

[0.01s pass]

Great! What a fun life! Based on your prior actions I have determined you are: addictive, risk-averse, low-agency, mid-intelligence, cowardly, lazy, lacking in skill, lacking in focus, liable to use unhealthy behaviour to numb yourself to discomfort, low-moral-fibre, high-neuroticism.

Based on this, and your professed values, I have assigned you to the live-in-a-pod-and-eat-bugs-while-being-wire-headed group! I think this will suit you really well! Bye Max!

Winston was dreaming.

He dreamt he was with his mistress in the sitting room while his wife was in the kitchen. He couldn’t let his wife find them. He had to get his mistress out, but she kept trying to play the piano, and he knew that his wife would hear it any second and catch them. His anxiety grew. What had he been thinking? If she found out, his life would be ruined –

He awoke. It was dark outside. He was curled in one corner of the bed, his back to his wife. She was still asleep, her breathing shallow. His brain thrashed for a second, not yet free from the dream, still searching for a way out of the predicament.

But there was no mistress, there was no danger, there was nothing to hide. Calm fell over him. He reached out and laid his arm over his wife, but she pushed it away. “Hot..” she murmured. He turned over again and let relief pull him back into sleep.

He dreamt of the mistress again. He’d dreamt of her a lot, recently. The events were unimportant but he could remember her. Her. Never her face, for it was a dream face, an amalgam of the barista, of his first girlfriend, his wife’s little sister and a girl at the gym and four or seven other half-remembered ingredients, somehow all present in the same face, a face dark and pale and brunette and blonde all superimposed yet cohering into a beauty that made his chest tight and his teeth ache. The only detail that didn’t slip from his mind on waking was her smile.

She was always looking up at him in the dream, eyes half closed, that smile on her face, adoring, cheeky, fierce, submissive. She looked up at him and he felt delicious pain in his chest, the need to own and to protect. He could close his eyes even when awake and see that smile: colourless, shapeless, Platonic. He slept well and woke late.

He lay in bed half awake, stretching his legs into the cold side of the bed. His wife was gone. It was Saturday so she would be jogging with their neighbour: a thin woman, with a pinched face and long, firm legs.

He scratched himself, stretched, lay there awhile on the shores of sleep. Finally, he pushed his eyes open, let in the blurry morning light and–someone was sitting on the end of the bed.

He sat up very fast, sending pain down his back. It was Her, the girl from his dream. He recognised the smile at once. She was quite naked. She cocked her head at him.

“What are you doing here?” he stammered. She sat on the corner of the bed, one leg dangling off the edge. She wiggled her foot. She was perfect, but the smooth, air-brushed perfection of a magazine advert. Perhaps something had necessarily been lost in her transition from dreamworld to here. Like a photo of the sea, she seemed to be lacking a dimension.

“How did you get here? Why are you here?” he said. She smiled back. “My wife will be back soon and…well, you can’t be here.”

He wanted nothing more than to reach out a hand and check that she was real and not just a fragment of dream, but no – that wouldn’t be appropriate. He felt horribly awake. He felt his gaze trickle down her body and quickly looked away, his ears burning. “Get dressed…at least.” He took his wife’s dressing gown and offered it to the girl. She took it, standing up and slipping it over her body. Outside, he heard his neighbour’s voice. His wife must be back, just outside the window.

For one mad second he considered telling her. I dreamed of this girl, and here she is, naked. She looks a bit like Nancy across the road, doesn’t she? His stomach rolled with imagined shame.

“Come with me,” he hissed to the girl, and opened the bedroom door. She didn’t move, she was still standing in the untied dressing gown next to the bed. “Don’t you understand me?” he said, and he reached out his hand to take hers.

She was real! Solid! He thrilled at the intimacy of the touch even through his panic. He heard the porch door open. He rushed down the stairs, pulling the girl behind him. Her feet skipped lightly over the steps as he tugged her down the hall just as the key clicked in the front door. He thrust the girl into the unlit garage then slammed the door behind her as his wife entered.

His wife looked at him surprised.

“Why are you up so soon?”

He looked down at his body. He was wearing only underwear and socks. “I…I heard a banging downstairs. I thought you might have left the door open again, so I came down to check,” he said. Did he sound out of breath? His heart was still beating loudly in his ears.

“I’m certain I locked it.”

“Well that would be a first, wouldn’t it. Damn banging woke me up. I need my sleep on the weekends.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Why don’t you go up and sleep a bit longer now?”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m awake now. I’ll change and have breakfast.”

She waited, and Winston realised she expected him to go up stairs first. “You go first,” he said, curtly.

“What a gentleman!” She laughed and leaned in to kiss him. He let her, awkward, the kiss falling on the corner of his mouth.

He only returned to the garage once his wife had showered, dressed and left the house. The girl was still there. She sat cross-legged on the floor, dressing gown pooled around her legs. She stood when he entered, and the cloth slipped over her body, flashing intersecting curves of soft skin, each glimpse somehow more revealing than full nudity could ever be. She turned to look at him and he flushed. She smiled.

“Tie your dressing gown,” he said, his voice cracking. She didn’t move, so he took one step closer, then leant over and tied the dressing gown closed around her body. As he leaned in, he felt her warm breath brush past his neck. He stepped back a few paces feeling dizzy. Her presence filled the room with a gravity that threatened to suck him in.

“Do you have a name?” he said, the words catching in his throat.

She smiled.

“Look…you can’t stay here,” he said.

She smiled.

“My wife can’t find you, do you understand?” Where did she come from, he thought. Why doesn’t she speak? Is she just a hallucination–but I touched her! She is real! A dream made solid.

“What are we going to do with you?” he said, aloud.

She smiled.

“You’re not real, are you? You’re not a person.”

She smiled.

He looked through the garage window to make sure that no neighbours were watching. “Come on, let’s go for a drive,” he said, and he led her to his car.

He drove out of town onto the country road that wound up to the forested hills above. It was overcast, the clouds low and oppressive. He left the road next to an abandoned farm house and went down a dirt track. He’d camped here once before and remembered the way. The track ended in an overgrown clearing. He got out of the car and helped her out. “Go away,” he said to her. She cocked her head at him again, her face unworried. “Fine, then stay out here. Not my problem.” He sat back in the car and clenched the steering wheel with both hands. She stood there, her robe waving in the wind, flapping at her legs. A shiver descended his whole body. He started the car and left.

That night he dreamt of the same girl again. Her face was more vivid than ever before. They were in a forest clearing. He was lying on her naked, and she writhed with pleasure beneath him. His wife was there in her running clothes, with the neighbour. He struggled to get up but his hands kept slipping and he only fell deeper into her. The neighbour said something to his wife and she sniggered, hiding the laugh behind her hand. He tried to cover his body with his hands, but they just slipped off, again and again.

The next morning his alarm woke him at five. His wife shifted next to him and he silenced the alarm before it woke her, his eyes swimming as he rolled off the bed, his back unwilling to bend.

There was a figure sitting at the bottom of the bed.

He stood still, holding his breath. His wife murmured something in her sleep. The dark shape shifted. He found his phone on the bedside table and turned on the flashlight. It illuminated two feet tapping happily against the mattress. He shone the light upwards to illuminate her face. She raised one perfect hand to shade her eyes and looked back at him, squinting.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her firmly out of the room and down to the garage. He turned on the light, half hoping the white halogen bulb would melt her away. It didn’t. It made her look more solid than ever. She stood there, naked. The dressing gown was gone.

“What are you playing at, trying to ruin my marriage? Why did you come back? How did you even get here?” he said in an angry whisper. The girl sat down on a box.

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand me. How did you get back here looking like that, anyway? Did anyone see you? The neighbours?” he felt his voice rising and pulled it back to a whisper. He searched her eyes “What do you want from me? Fucking answer me!” She smiled at him again, and this time he was sure she was mocking him. Mocking his fear and his helplessness. Playing with him. He’d always hated that. He felt a familiar fury rising through his body, threatening to push out all rational thought, replacing it with the single minded desire to inflict pain. With words, fists or teeth.

“You bitch!” he hissed. He tried to push the anger back down. He looked away from her and took two shuddering breaths while counting to five in his head, then grabbed her by the wrist, yanking her to the car. “Let’s go again. Let’s see how long you can keep this up.”

He drove further this time, far into the mountains, teeth clenched, down roads he didn’t know, turning always away from the town until he was thoroughly lost and most of the anger had drained back out of him.

It was day by the time he stopped, but no sun had yet made it through the storm clouds to burn off the morning mist. He led her into the trees.

It was cold, the mist condensed on their bodies. Her chest was studded with drops of dew. It rose and fell, goosebumps outlining her nipples. A drop of water fell from a pine tree above and ran down the centre of her chest, hesitated a moment in the slight hollow above her ribs then raced down her belly to the root of her thighs. He reached out a hand, dreamily, and wiped it away.

He looked up at her. She was smiling again. Looking right into his eyes. Mocking him again. That damn smile. It saw right through him, saw his thoughts, asked Go on then, I dare you. The urge to hurt, protect, grab, kiss, push her to the ground – all pulled at him at once.

The mist drank all the sound and colour from the world. He felt dizzy, like they were the only two things in the universe, like he was at the top of a steep slope looking down at her, only the friction between his shoes and the soft dirt preventing him from falling into her. He felt sick. He dropped his arm and backed towards the car. He hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

“Don’t come back.” He said. He took a blanket from the car and threw it towards her, then he left.

That night he stayed downstairs when his wife went to bed. He watched film after film to stave off sleep, his eyes flicking between the television, the door, the windows, the fireplace. Waiting for the girl to appear again. He didn’t know when he nodded off, he awoke with the television still on.

She was sitting on the couch beside him, hands crossed on her lap. He wasn’t surprised this time. He didn’t even try to talk. He led her once again to the garage and put her in the car with shaking hands. He took a spade and a sledge hammer and put them on the back seat.

He drove, his exhausted brain taking the same route as yesterday, his mind already on what he would have to do. It was still dark outside, the headlights bounced over the trees and roots as they bumped along to the spot where he’d left her. He turned the last corner and the lights swept over the bushes and illuminated… Her.

She was still where he had left her the day before. Sitting on the blanket he had thrown her.

He turned to the passenger seat. She was there, also, watching her twin.

He clenched his teeth, a cold sweat bursting painfully from under his arms. The one outside raised a hand in a wave, and smiled. A wild thought hit him and he spun in the chair to check behind the car–could there be three of them? Was the girl from that first night still out in these woods, looking for him?

They’re playing with me, he thought. They’re ganging up on me. The one in front of the car stood. She shone in the headlights, highlighted against the dark woods beyond. Terror sat in his throat like blocked food. The one in the passenger seat looked at him, her face innocent and perfect and fearless. His breathing was heavy and ragged. He clutched at the steering wheel, rocking back and forth, then a movement caught his eye. The girl outside was walking towards the car.

“Leave me alone!” he cried. Before he could think, his foot was on the accelerator, the car kicked and slid in the dirt, accelerating toward the girl in the headlights. The girl next to him didn’t flinch at the collision, or when the windscreen cracked as the thing rolled over them, or when the red liquid ran down it, filtering through the cracks and onto the dashboard and running in rivulets down to drip on her bare legs. Her expression didn’t change at his wails or screams, or when he dug the hole to hide what he had done.

Once he was finished he opened the passenger door and looked down at her. She looked up, that faint smile, those upraised eyes so familiar from a hundred dreams. They looked at each other for a long moment, his hands clutching the hammer in his hand very tight, then he shut the door again.

They drove back in silence, arriving at the house just as dawn was breaking. He put the car in the garage, cleaned the red off with a towel, then led the girl down to the basement.

“Wait here,” he told her.

He didn’t sleep that night, or the next. He stopped going to work. He hid in the shed when his wife woke up so she thought he was at the office. He took caffeine pills and watched television and wandered the neighbourhood, not wanting to be in the house but not wanting to be too far from it. He slept on the third night, and the fourth. Each time he woke up covered in sweat and led the new girl down to the basement and left her there in the dark. When sitting on the sofa he fancied he could hear their hearts beating down below the floorboards, all in sync.

Three weeks later his wife came down from bed in her dressing gown and sat on the sofa next to him.

“Aren’t you going to come up?” she said.

“I’m not tired.”

“You didn’t come up last night. I waited for you.”

“I didn’t want to disturb you. I’ve not been sleeping well lately.”

“Talk to me.” She reached for his hand, but he pulled back. “What’s going on, Winston? I saw Jill in the supermarket and she said you haven’t been to work. And Winston, what happened to the car?”

“I hit a deer for god’s sake. Do you know how much pressure I’m under? You have no idea what I go through to protect you, to…” he stopped, trying to ignore the tears in her eyes.

“To protect me from what, Winston? What do I need to be protected from?”

“Nothing. Forget it. You wouldn’t understand anyway.”

“I guess I wouldn’t.” she said, tears running unchecked down her cheeks. “I don’t think I understand you at all, Winston.” she said, and she fled upstairs.

Winston paced the sitting room, the back of his throat growing tight as he reflected on how terribly unfair the whole situation was. As though she were the victim, he thought, when I’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing she can complain of. And yet he had lost the argument, she had won by appearing more pathetic than him. Only because he was doing his duty and protecting her from the truth.

Maybe he should just tell her. Was the solution so easy? If I show her what has been happening, then she’ll have to help me. She won’t be able to tell anyone without looking foolish herself. She won’t be able to leave me. Not without the neighbours asking questions. Yes, I’m the victim here, the real victim. I just need to show her.

He bounded upstairs, thrilling at the idea, and banged on the bedroom door.

His wife opened it. She was dressed and wearing a coat. He reached out and grabbed her hand, leading her down the stairs. She followed slowly with a dead expression on her face, placing her feet carefully on each stair. He led her to the cellar door. “Just look,” he said, and he pulled it open.

She stood well back and shook her head, her eyes never leaving his, never straying to the open door. “No Winston, forget it. I don’t care what you’re hiding, I don’t care what mad notion you’ve got into your mind this time.”

“No…just look in the basement. It explains everything.”

“Forget it Winston. I’ve packed my things. I’m going to stay with a friend for a while.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

She turned her back to the door. “Don’t find me, Winston.”

“Just look!” he pleaded. He tried to grab at her coat, but she pushed him away.

“Don’t you touch me, Winston. I’m not afraid of you.”

He watched her leave, his stomach heaving. “I never fucking touched her!” he shouted at her back as she climbed the stairs “I didn’t even touch her…” Down in the basement, tens of eyes glinted back at him in the darkness. The girls filled the room, standing shoulder to shoulder. They looked up at him and smiled, eyes half-closed, expectant.

Winston slumped on the sofa. The girls surrounded him on all sides, filling the room wall to wall. They filled every room in the house. Their breathing thundered in his ears. The TV played somewhere in the room out of sight. He raised a hand to try and push one of the girls out of the way so he could see the screen, but he was too weak to move her.

He wasn’t sure if it was day or night, he had covered all the windows. He couldn’t risk someone seeing inside. He didn’t dare leave the house. His head nodded and his eyes closed and sleep took him for a moment before he jerked back awake. Their bodies pressed against him. He tried to get to his feet, his legs shaking beneath him.

He jerked awake. They loomed over him, their bodies pressed up tight against each other, squishing into a single mass.

He jerked awake. They pressed against his face and his shoulders, his leg was trapped, he tried to pull it free. He couldn’t breathe. He needed to get out.

He jerked awake. He couldn’t see the door. He crawled in what he thought was the right direction, swimming through that sea of soft flesh, his chest heaving as it tried to suck in enough of the stale air to survive.

He jerked awake.

He jerked awake.

She smiled.

He jerked awake.

End.

Charity was five and a half. Mr Charles (her father) was forty one and three quarters. Every Sunday they fed the ducks, then went to the tea house where they ordered a coffee, a warm milk and a piece of cake to share. This was Charity’s favourite time of the week, but today she was staring out the window with a furrowed brow.

“My tooth.” she said.

“Yes, it’s just about to fall out, darling. I know it feels annoying but if you keep wobbling it with your tongue it will loosen enough for me to pluck it free.” said Mr Charles, tapping the little wooden tooth box he had been carrying for the last week.

Her little eyebrows creased further. “No daddy, my tooth is gone.” She opened her mouth to show a bloody hole where there had previously been a small grey canine.

Mr Charles paled. “That’s not funny Charity, are you hiding it in your palm?”

Charity shook her head. Mr Charles lent over the table and grabbed her hand, forcing it open. “Where is it?!” he hissed. Tears welled in Charity’s eyes. He grasped her face with both hands, pulling her mouth open and peering inside. “Spit it out darling, spit it out!” he said.

Charity stared back at him with wide eyes. “Ah swallow’d et” she said

“No! No! Spit it out!” He pushed his fingers into her small mouth and began to dig around for the tooth.

“Ahhh, oor urting ‘e” she said, the tears spilling out to drip down her cheeks.

By now, the room had fallen silent and was observing Charity’s father with disapproving eyes. He quickly sat back down. “I’m sorry darling, never mind.” He gathered a terrified smile onto his face. “Let’s hurry home, now.”

Mr Charles walked very fast on the way back to the house. Charity could tell that he was upset. She decided to be awfully mature and apologise, even though nobody had asked her to, even though she had done nothing wrong.

“I’m sorry I swallowed it, daddy.” she said

“That’s fine darling, you didn’t mean to.” said Mr Charles without looking down. They walked on in silence. Charity was puzzled. He had no reason to be upset. She was the one who would suffer the consequences. With no tooth to hide under the pillow, there could be no visit from the tooth fairy, which meant no coin. A wasted tooth. She only had a few left, maybe a hundred? Once all of them had fallen she would grow adult teeth, and her friend Sarah said that adult teeth couldn’t be exchanged for coins.

She explained this to her father in one great burst of words, tears once again gathering in her eyes. He crouched down and grabbed her by the shoulders, and Charity was surprised to see that her father was crying as well.

“Oh no darling, the tooth fairy will come, the tooth fairy always comes!”

At home, Mr Charles placed Charity in front of the television and swept into the kitchen to exchange explosive whispers with Mrs Charles. Charity listened carefully. She heard “swallowed!” and “I tried!” and “one of ours instead?” and “it can tell!” and “well there’s no other way, then” and “I’ll call my sister” and “the tooth fairy always comes” and then the television started to play her favourite episode of her favourite show and she lost interest.

That evening Mrs Charles was very nice with Charity and even made her favourite dinner and served ice-cream for pudding. Both of her parents seemed very happy, and smiled all night. Mrs Charles was so happy at one point that she began crying, heavy tears sliding down her cheeks past her smile to drip into her macaroni cheese. Charity was already dreaming of the things she would buy with the money (sweets, a hamster, a necklace for her mother). She changed into her night-gown all by herself, had her bath without complaining and even got the bedtime story ready before daddy came up to read to her. They read seven stories that night – every time they finished a book, Mr Charles jumped up and grabbed another until finally Charity found her attention fading in and out, missing words then pages, the stories all blending into one as sleep settled over her like warm snow.

Charity awoke, the room was dark but for the red glow of her nightlight. She rubbed her feet together and turned over, impatient for sleep to take her again. She felt cold. She shivered. Her covers were missing. Her pillow was gone. Her little form was huddled in the middle of the bed, curled tightly for warmth. She felt a subtle change in the position of the mattress. The weight shifted slowly, like when her father reached over to tuck her in at night and didn’t want to disturb her. Then she heard a scratching near her head, like a rat might make. She sat up at once, scrabbling her legs towards her, too scared to breathe. Something skittered away in the darkness. She pressed herself into the corner, still holding her breath lest there really was a rat, and it crawled over her face and into her mouth. Her eyes searched the dark red shadows that crowded around her. Her hand found the switch on her bedside lamp. She hesitated – should she just lie down and go to sleep? She didn’t really want to know what it was. Maybe it would go away if she closed her eyes? It usually did. But she was almost six, she needed to be brave. She pressed the switch.

The light was angled low and threw long shadows through the room. On the floor she could see her duvet. At the foot of her bed was her pillow, it had been torn open, the filling spilling out onto the carpet. Behind the pillow, something crouched, flinching from the light. Something bigger than a rat. Charity’s heart marched faster and faster in her chest as the thing crawled out from its hiding place, one gnarled arm raised to cover its eyes. Its face was dark and shrivelled like an orange left in the sun. Its body was round and swollen, suspended loosely among too-thin limbs like a fat fly in a web. Ragged wings twitched wetly on its back.

Then it scuttled at her, crossing the distance in seconds, crawling onto her face, its hands reaching up and pulling at her lips to reveal the hole in her teeth where the tooth had been the day before. She tasted iron and salt. It looked up at her and she saw that where its eyes should be there were only two wet, red holes. It opened its jaw, revealing a mouth overfull with mismatched dead teeth – loose, wobbling. When it spoke, it was with a voice like dice being shaken.

“Where..is…my…tooth.”

She shook her head, silent tears pouring down her face and whispered “I ate it…” and before she could move the creature was turning and scrambling down her body, it’s fingers digging into her neck, and it was pulling up her pyjama top to reveal her belly and a single long claw was slipping out of its left index finger and it was raising its arm over its head and plunging it down toward her tummy, and she knew just how it was planning to get her tooth back and finally Charity found her breath and screamed, and –

The door slammed open and her father burst in holding a cricket bat. He crossed the room in two steps and swung and hit the creature with a sound like a beetle being crushed.

Mrs Charles ran in, grabbed Charity and pulled her out of the room and into the hallway. The light was on. There was a long scratch down the middle of Charity’s belly, but she didn’t feel it yet. In her room, she heard her father grunting as he swung the bat again and again and again. Charity was shivering and crying too hard to speak.

“Don’t worry honey, it’s going to be fine.” said Mrs Charles as she pushed Charity into a coat and slippers. “We’re going on a little trip to the hospital, to find that tooth.”

Charity shook her head violently. “Let’s just go somewhere it can’t find us, mummy. Let’s hide somewhere” she said through her tears as Mrs Charles bundled her down the stairs to the car.

“Oh honey, it’s no good, they would find us wherever we went.” said her mother. “The tooth fairy always comes.”

Brother Compassion stood in front of the most central and holy of the temple buildings and fretted with his robes. He tried not to think about the test and what would happen if he failed. He noticed a loose thread on one of his sleeves and tugged at it, managing only to unravel it further. Tucking it out of sight he attempted to clear his mind and focus his mind on the eternal spirit of the founder. Today, it was like whispering into a storm.

The temple was built upon a mountain. In its very centre was a modest, windowless stone building about which the other buildings clustered like excited old women watching a newborn baby. This was the most sacred part of the temple: the House of Truth, where only the Masters were allowed to enter. It was said to be the location where God first talked to the Founder. Every morning the sun poured down the mountain like honey, coating the tall pines, the tip of the drum tower, then the top floor of the novice dormitory, then finally reaching the roof of the House, at which point a voice would boom from it, echoing through the valleys: the ringing, many-tonal voice of the Founder (he who was inhabited by God, and became one with him). When the voice spoke, the monks stopped what they were doing, looked up and listened. It began: “Be kind. Be forgiving. Be honest…”.

For ten years Brother Compassion had been getting closer to the House by travelling further from it. He had started out sweeping in the outer temple buildings as a novice, then sitting in the school learning the lessons of the founder as a disciple, then helping in the village temples around the mountain: distributing food, fixing roofs, babysitting for sick parents, receiving the dead. Sometimes when he climbed the steps back up to the temple after a day of helping a village doctor it felt like ascending to a different world, a perfect pearl floating precariously above a sea of dust.

Now, he was to be considered for Masterhood. It was unclear what the test would be, or even if there was a test at all. After entering, it was days before a monk re-emerged as a Master-in-training, with new robes, a new name and a different look in their eyes. No longer part of the dust. Some didn’t emerge. Had they failed? Been banished? Sent to another temple, or forced to wander the mountains as itinerant preachers? Brother Caution said they trained you to move things with your mind when you became a master. Brother Curiosity said you learned twelve secret songs, each of which would control listeners to do your bidding. Sister Consistency said they taught you to make a special drink that allowed you to live forever, but if there was such a drink they would have given it to the people in the villages, so that must be wrong –

Brother Compassion’s brain spun full of branching, undisciplined tendrils of thought. Would he fail initiation if his mind was too unordered?

The door to the inner temple opened and a white-haired head poked out.

“Hello?” it said.

Brother Compassion bowed back. He had never seen this master before. The old man wore a faint smile that shifted subtly but never left his face, a butterfly wing trembling in the breeze.

“Would you like to come in?” said the man.

Inside was a small square room with two chairs and a mass of curved brass pipes. The pipes forked and rejoined and spiralled back on themselves before disappearing through a hole in the wall – as though someone had been given the parts to twenty horns and tried to reassemble them into a single instrument. The old man was pouring hot water into a mug from a steaming cotton-wrapped pot. “Sit down.” He pushed the tea into Brother Compassion’s trembling hands.

Brother Compassion sat across from the man. They blew at their bitter tea in silence. The man’s smile flickered at him. When Brother Compassion’s mug was empty, the old man poured him another. Soon, Brother Compassion could stand the silence no longer. Surely curiosity was a virtue, there was a Brother Curiosity in his dormitory.

“Is there to be a test?” he asked.

“Yes, I suppose there is.” said the old monk. The silence settled back over them like petals.

“Should I recite from the lessons?” Brother Compassion asked finally.

“No. If you have made it this far, it is because the masters judge you ready to meet me.”

Brother Compassion bowed his head “I am honoured by their confidence.”

Silence.

Brother Compassion was unsure what he was meant to be doing but was certain he was doing it badly. He searched for something more to say. “What are those tubes for?” he asked.

“Each morning, I speak into this tube, and my voice is made loud and ringing and many-toned. It sings out over the valley and all the monks believe they are hearing the word of God.”

Brother Compassion moved between many emotions over the following ten minutes. Confusion, terror, anger, despair. The old man said nothing until the young man stopped crying.

“Then the founder’s voice is not real? Why…why would you? Honesty is third amongst the virtues–” said Brother Compassion.

“A moment ago you were crying that the virtues were lost, useless, that I had crushed them to dust before you – yet still you judge me by them. So perhaps they are not lost quite yet. But don’t worry, you are free to leave. If you do not wish this to continue, you may go and tell the other disciples the truth, tell the people, tell the world –”

“I will. I won’t allow this lie to continue any longer. It undermines everything we teach.” said Brother Compassion, wiping tears and snot from his face with the sleeve of his robes.

The old man smiled encouragingly. “Very well, then go, and bring it to an end.”

The young monk hesitated. “So easily?”

“Yes, so easily. If you wish.”

“I do.”

“Very well.”

Brother Compassion hesitated again.

The old man said “Of course, if you have any questions for me, you are welcome to ask those first…”

“Was the voice ever real?”

“When the founder was alive.”

“Then the founder was real?”

“Of course, yes. He founded our temple.”

“And he lived in a hut in these mountains, and meditated for ten years, ten months, ten weeks and ten days, and God came down and inhabited his body and told him the lessons and the songs?”

“He lived in a small house not far from here, and meditated for three years, on and off. I suppose you could say that God inhabited him, in a way. He wrote down the lessons and the songs during that period, the ones you are familiar with.”

Brother Compassion took a deep and careful breath. “So his fusion with God, that was real?”

“It is real, in a way, perhaps not in the way you imagine.”

“Did God speak to the Founder?”

“In a way.”

“In what way!? You’re not answering my questions at all.”

“I guess you could say God emerged from the mind of the founder.”

Brother Compassion’s head fell into his hands. His mind reeled at the blasphemy. “This is a test, you are testing my faith by telling me lies.”

The old monk shook his head. “This is not that sort of test.”

“Then why teach us these half-truths, for centuries?”

“Ah, the big question. There are many parts to the answer. One part is that the truth is more complicated and harder to explain. Songs and stories are memorable, they resist corruption over long distances. The songs you learn are sung a thousand leagues away across the sea with the same words, teaching the same things. He put himself in the stories as an example to be followed, because he knew that this would be easier for the people of the villages to understand.”

“So it’s all just fiction?”

The old man was silent again while he thought. “Perhaps it is like when someone comes to the temple with an illness, an illness we do not recognise. They say a demon is inhabiting them. They are shivering, shouting, flailing – and the monk gives them a pill of ash and bitter herbs – a harmless but probably useless pill. Why do they do that?”

“To comfort them, to give them hope?”

“And have you seen it before, that after taking the pill, the symptoms subside? Have you seen people fully cured?”

“Yes, I’ve seen this.”

“Then was the pill real? Or just a fiction?” the old monk’s smile twinkled.

“So you’re saying that it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not?”

“I’m saying that it’s beneficial to believe it to be true, wherever or not it is true”

Tears welled up in the young monk’s eyes, and for a second the calm smile on the old monk’s face broke, and he looked like he was about to get up and comfort the young disciple, but instead he asked: “Had you never wondered if some of the stories might not be entirely literal before now?”

“I had, but the masters seemed convinced, and I trust their judgement. The voice was always there, every morning, as proof. And the miraculous healing of Brother Awareness last winter. And I had felt the Founder’s presence, many times, in prayer.”

“As have I.”

“I thought since the least likely story seemed true, that the Founder still spoke to us, that the rest must be true.”

Brother Compassion asked many more questions, and the old monk answered with riddles and metaphors.

“Do the Masters know?” asked Brother Compassion.

“Yes.”

“Then they don’t believe? They were all lying?”

“All were given the same choice as you. This is the first of the unwritten rules that were passed down to me, master to master from the first disciple of the founder, who received them whispered in her ear from the founder himself on his deathbed – each must be given a true choice to bring the voice to an end. And yet, they believe. As do I. Look at the fields below the temple, full of ripe corn that feeds the people of the villages. The Founder did this. He does live on”

“The monks did this, I worked in those fields all spring.”

“Then look at the temples around you, and the roads that lead from the mountain, and the shrines on the road, and the temples in the cities that they lead to. The Founder did this.”

“Those were built by the followers of the Founder, he didn’t do it himself. He’s dead, you said so yourself.” It was hard for him to say out loud.

“Then look to the peace that covers the land, the money that the temple receives and the food it gives to the poor, see the kindness of the villagers who took in a young orphan and raised him until he was old enough to join the temple –”

Brother Compassion interrupted him. “People are good, that was not God’s doing.”

“People are neither good nor bad, they are like water, they take on the shape that their environment gives them. Is water good? Is a flood good? Is a mountain spring good?”

“Maybe the Founder’s ideas made some of these things happen, but that doesn’t make him a God, nor does it show the existence of God. Anyway, you just told me that the Founder invented God as a way to justify his teachings.”

“Not invented. Discovered, perhaps? Facilitated? Catalysed?” The old monk thought for a while. “When you talk, your words are produced by your mind, and movements in your muscles cause your tongue to wag and words to be expelled from your mouth, and because of this I say ‘Ah! He is alive, he thinks!’ – and yet if I were to cut open your head, and take out the brain and muscles inside, and search through them, would I find intelligence there? Would I find words, or thoughts?”

“No?”

“God is the same. If you look at one aspect, one monk, one building, one song, you do not find god – but if you step back and unfocus your eyes, and see the whole picture, see all the buildings and the roads and the writings and the people and the infinitely complicated links between them, something like intelligence begins to appear. If you step back far enough, a figure emerges, the figure of the Founder-as-God, undying, eternal, straddling the world, victorious.”

Brother Compassion thought about this for a while, and the tears returned. “I can’t, I can’t accept it. I understand what you say but I can’t believe it, not like I used to believe.”

“You will believe again, in time.”

“Why couldn’t you hide this from me? I was content!”

“That is our burden, we carry it for the people.”

“Why us?!”

“Someone must.”

“We should just stop, let the secret become lost.”

“Someone needs to know, someone needs to guide the temple with clear eyes, someone needs to be the voice.”

“Then just tell the whole truth like you told it to me, perhaps you needed the lie, once, but no longer.”

“Didn’t you wish I had not told you? If the people were as wise as you, surely they would not want to be told, either?”

Brother Compassion shook his head. “Whatever you say, people have died for this lie. Monks have been killed for saying that the Founder was a God. Their blood is on our hands.”

“Yes, it is. Their sacrifice was great, and thanks to them many more were saved. They broke the cycle of hate and revenge and started one of love and kindness – one that we must protect. Do you know how hard it is to get people to do something today that will only benefit society in the future? They won’t even do it to benefit themselves next month. The promise and threat of eternal life for all and the Founder’s voice as proof: this is the only way that our society works at all. Do you not realise what we have achieved? How incredible it is? The scale of it!?” For a second the calm on the old monk’s face slipped, and Brother Compassion glimpsed the depth of passion behind.

The young monk looked away and said, quietly “And what would happen to the people of the villages if I told the truth? Would they not continue to live as they do now? Loving, compassionate. I am sure they would.”

“I cannot know for sure, but I will tell you what I believe. For a generation, little would change, but the next generation? They would just find something else to believe in. Men are like animals, they are born caring only for themselves and their kin. No society can exist without some idea to hold them together beyond that. Bigger ideas sustain bigger societies. Perhaps the next idea they find will be good, perhaps evil, but it certainly will not be one that was designed for the benefit of all by a loving and compassionate Founder. That is what I believe!”

“So it’s our lie or another lie?”

“Our bitter pill, or dust and decay.”

The two men sank back into silence. This time it was the old monk who spoke first. “Look outside, it is almost time. The sun will rise soon. Maybe you should be the one to be the voice of the Founder today. Or maybe you will tell a different truth through the tube, one about a room where an old man pretends to be a God who does not exist.”

Brother Compassion didn’t reply, he was staring at the floor deep in thought. He did not see the concerned look flicker across the older monk’s face or the tension in his eyes when he asked: “Have you considered the name you will choose if you stay?”

“I was going to name myself Master Sincerity.” said the young monk.

“A fine name.”

“…may I ask what your name is, master?”

“It is Sacrifice.”

Outside, the temple drums began to sound. The monks stopped what they were doing to watch sunshine pour over the temple. They waited with hungry eyes. The drums rose in a crescendo then stopped all at once. There was a moment of expectant silence. And the young monk put his mouth to the tube, and said –

“That was close.” said Grand-Master Sacrifice as he slipped the vial of poison from where it was hidden in his sleeve. He had come near to dripping it into the young man’s tea this time. He tried to relax his body, his robes were heavy with cold sweat. Brother Compassion hadn’t been ready to make the right choice until the last second. Grand-Master Obligation and Grand-Master Melioration emerged from behind the hidden wall-panel where they had been watching the test.

“He is promising, he has the logical mind necessary for elevation to grand-master.” said one.

“He is too emotional, too young, you guided his questions too much, he would not have survived the test had it been me in your place today.” said the other.

“Perhaps, but he recovered quickly, he only needed half a day to see the wisdom of the Founder’s plan.”

“He will harden with age, as we did.”

The Grand-Masters nodded with solemn looks on their faces.

“I worry for the next generation.”

“Who will replace us?”

“Fewer and fewer of the monks survive the first test. They don’t see that the greater truth is more important than the small surface fictions.”

“What must we do?”

“As we always have done. The secret must be protected, for the good of all.”

“Yes.”

“Yes. At any cost.”