Bone Prelude: FISHSKIN

Link to article: Bone Prelude: FISHSKIN.

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|comments= Coming Soon - Rounderhouse
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I remember when the fish first started talking to me.

I was sitting in the main area of the safehouse, wiping down my pistol. I’d never used it, of course — the others were the ones who handled that sort of thing. But I had brought it here, and it was the only thing I could be sure I owned, and in any case mechanisms should always be maintained. So once a week, I would bring some tools from my workshop, sit on the rickety card table next to the aquarium, and clean it.

The aquarium had been there when I’d first arrived. It made for a bizarre sight; the rest of the safehouse was barren of any personal effects, decorations, or human touches. All concrete and plywood on the windows, hospital linens and simple metal cutlery. The two floors of the squat building in Tangier were connected by a rickety staircase, and the outside held an imposing iron gate. It was a place of work, of purpose.

Even if any of us had wanted to decorate this place that we had lived in, some of us for years, we would have no idea what to decorate it with. I did not know what I liked, what I disliked. I had faint memories of enjoying rock bands, though trying to remember which was like grasping at smoke. Maybe I’d been in one? Probably not, I thought, getting back to cleaning the half-disassembled pistol on the felt table.

“Hard at work?”

I turned to look. The fish was staring right at me. It was an ugly, black thing, with a bulbous head and oily scales. The eyes were like dark pearls on either side of its head, glossy and milky and black as the rest of it. There were other fish in the tank, too, goldfish and bettas and a small eel. They were bright, colorful, darting about between fake plants and gravel. But this fish was stock-still, staring right at me, sucking the color from its surroundings. I felt a familiar buzzing in the back of my head.

“I asked you a question, buddy.”

Clearly some kind of hallucination, I reasoned. Not the first I had felt since the surgery, but easily the most intrusive. I ignored it and returned to cleaning my weapon. It didn’t say anything more then, but I could feel it staring.
----

Life in the safehouse was an exercise in ennui, occasionally interrupted by periods of intense excitement. My arrival was a period of intense excitement for the others. I showed up on the step of the iron gate, a scrap of paper in one hand and brown paper bag in the other. I was wearing a suit that didn’t fit me. The Surgeon had been the one on guard duty that night, the orange end of a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She approached, eyes narrowed.

“Who are you?” she asked in Russian.

I was surprised to learn I spoke Russian. It didn’t seem natural, though — off-kilter on my tongue and ears. A second or third language, maybe. But I answered honestly: “I don’t know.”

She looked at the paper, at my suit, at the bag, and then motioned me after her. I was ushered past the triple-locked door into the safehouse so the others could inspect me. There were five of us, including me. The Surgeon, a diminutive Russian woman, whom I had already met. The Contact, a curly-haired Mexican who shook my hand like he meant to tear it off. The Pilot, who was on the French side of French-Algerian. The Chemist, another American — she took a liking to me, I suppose because of familiarity. They passed my scrap of paper around before showing it to me.

> “YOU ARE A NEW RECRUIT FOR MOBILE TASK FORCE DELTA-1. FOLLOWING YOUR ASSENT TO YOUR NEW ASSIGNMENT, YOUR IDENTITY WAS SURGICALLY SEVERED FROM YOUR PHYSICAL BODY TO BETTER FACILITATE YOUR NEW MISSION. UPON SUCCESSFUL CONCLUSION OF YOUR MISSION DIRECTIVES, YOUR IDENTITY AND MEMORIES WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU. AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. CODE: 4759” 

I found that, indeed, I could not remember anything about who I was. My name, where I had been born, whether I had a family, all seemed fuzzy and immaterial. I reached out to them, looking for crumbs of memory, and I found nothing at all — just a wet, burning mass. The dull ache in my head turned into a painful buzzing, and I let my mind retreat. 

I opened the brown paper bag clutched in my hand instead. It was wrinkled and dirtied, but inside was a simple Colt 1911. I flipped it over. The serial numbers had been filed off. I dimly registered that I recognized the model and knew where to look for the serials; I clearly had some familiarity with weapons. The Chemist showed me to my bed — a simple metal bunk in a room with eight of them. I set the gun down and slept.

I fell into routine the next day. Check the alarms around the safehouse, ensure none of them were tripped. The others disappeared for their respective duties; we exchanged few words, but they were friendly. Having no tasks, I took it open myself to cook our nightly meals from the ingredients the Contact brought in. I noticed the aquarium, sitting on the counter, and the dark fish inside of it.

“Where did they come from?” I asked the Chemist one day.

She shrugged. “They were here when I came in. I kept feeding them when everyone else left.”

“What’re their names?”

“Fish don’t have names,” she informed me.

We would eat in comfortable silence, I would clean up, one of us would take the night watch, and the rest would sleep.
----
The packages were delivered at night, to whoever was keeping the watch. That was the purpose of standing outside all night smoking. We were never informed when a package would be coming; some nights, in the hours before sunrise, someone would walk by and slip a cardboard box over the gate. Sometimes a familiar figure, more often a new one.

We would open it in the morning, so we could all see. The first few were for the others — it was easy to determine who. The unlabelled amber bottles of chemicals were for the Chemist. The Surgeon received samples of something or other, or manilla folders with x-rays and medical records. I don’t know what the Contact received; he seemed to simply know when one was his, and none of us cared to argue.

My first came two months after my arrival. The hallucinations were minor, then — spiders in the corner or a soft sonata playing over the wind. The Surgeon cut through the duct tape, looked inside, and then pushed it over to me.

It was a number of materials — pipes, pre-fabricated parts, a welding iron, wires. Sitting atop a number of Xeroxed manuals and diagrams. I looked at them and found I understood them fairly well, and that was that. I took them to a free desk and worked for a few hours, fingers acting by themselves, only realizing midway through that a pipe bomb was taking shape in my hands. I looked at the Chemist, who nodded encouragingly. 

When it was complete, the Contact came by and clapped my shoulders, complimenting it. He took it and was gone. My part in the play was finished, and now his had begun. 

The assignments came steadily after that. I would inspect the parts I was given, the manuals and diagrams, and build what I was expected to. I found I always had the requisite knowledge, of how these wires would fit together and how to seal two pieces of metal and fix the mechanism. I would place the finished product back in the cardboard box and give it to whoever took the night watch. Without fail, someone would be there to pick it up, no matter how long it took for me to finish.

 I rarely understood what I was building — sometimes bombs, but sometimes a false lock or optic spike. Often they were simply components of a larger machine. Occasionally I was given a number of these components to assemble into something partial, incomplete, to send off to someone else. It was a chain, and I had no idea where in it I lay.

“The pipe bomb was a test, buddy.”

I ignored the fish, driving the screw into place. 

“They want to see if you can shut up and follow directions without knowing what the consequences will be. Be a good cog in the machine.”

“What else am I supposed to do?” I asked, looking behind me. 

The fish was looking at me with that dark eye. Its mouth was hanging open, tiny white teeth showing.

Then the Pilot entered, and I went silent. No need for the others to know I was losing my mind.
----
The others disappeared from time to time, sometimes for days or weeks. Their assignments took them outside of the safehouse. Mine rarely did, for those first few months. Then one day the package was a set of papers detailing an assignment. The Surgeon looked over them, and then showed them to me. My first foray into the outside. 

I wasn’t nervous. I had no way of knowing, but I had the sensation I had done this many times. I checked my weapon, stuffed it under my shirt, and left the safehouse. The Chemist rubbed my shoulder before I left and reassured me I would do fine.

Istanbul is a city overflowing with warmth and color. I was not surprised by any of it, and found myself recognizing several streets as I pushed through the crowds. I had been here before, evidently. The instructions only listed an address and I found my way there. It was a small, nondescript office building. The lobby had no security guard behind the desk. I took the elevator to the second floor; the place was deserted, but as the instructions had stated, a small round machine the size of my palm was tucked inside the houseplant. The digital screen displayed the time. 

I took the elevator down to the underground garage. There were a handful of cars in the greenish light. The one bearing the given license plate number was an expensive black Mercedes. A driver was leaning against the hood. He watched me approach. He had an ugly scar on his face — a branding or mark of a spiraling circle.

We didn’t say anything. He simply straightened himself, leaned around, and opened the back door of the car. I looked inside, placed the machine gently out of sight underneath the seat, grasped the black briefcase on the floor, and walked away. I exchanged nods with the driver as I walked away and he returned to smoking against the hood of the car. I saw his face flicker, malform, and reshape into the features of a handsome young man, unscarred.

I looked away and left. The briefcase went into the package, and the package went into the Pilot’s hands. 

“They didn’t have to do much of anything to you at all, did they, buddy? You’re a glutton for the punishment. You love this.”

The fish was drifting lazily in his aquarium. I looked at him askance, into those black pearls, and went to bed.

That night, I dreamt for the first time since I arrived at Tangier.
----

I didn't find myself worried about the lack of dreaming, ascribing it to a combination of long-term insomnia and the surgery. After all, there is no subconscious to draw from anymore, its guts neatly tossed aside over a year ago.

And yet I dreamt. 

I stand over an ocean, in the dark. I can't feel the air run through my hair, the sun on my skin. Beneath my feet, a pitch black liquid lies completely motionless.

Moving takes effort; all of my energy is spent turning my head to look around. Around me, endless black. Directly above me, a ring of pure white provides little comfort. Exhausted, I stare at the ring. 

It stares back at me.

"What do you got there, buddy?"

The familiar voice of the fish reaches out across an impossibly vast distance.

I feel a weight on my hands. I instinctively try to look down, feeling every muscle in my body tense, attempting to resist my own brain. A defense mechanism. All time passes and no time passes, and I find myself looking down.

A sphere of black glass sits between my hands, roughly the size of my torso. It feels fragile, and yet, immense. 

"So?"

The voice echoes again. 

"I don't know."

My mouth does not move as I speak.

"You don't know much, do you?"

The ocean beneath me ripples for just a second, and I fall beneath the surface. The sphere is ripped from my hands, floating on the surface as I sink. I try to scream, and the liquid gets into my lungs.

The dark recedes. 

Swirling shades of purple and blue. 

Wave after wave.

 Around and around. 

Thick. Heavy. Further and further down.

You can't move. 

Slowly, your mind starts drifting. The sphere, on the surface, becomes all you can picture. 

As you continue sinking, you picture it growing in size, until it encompasses the ocean, and everything within.

----
When I woke up the fish was dead. It was floating belly-up in the top of the fishtank, the others ignoring it. I scooped it out and threw it into the trash, thankful to be rid of it.
----
One day, after waking up as usual, we found our count was one short. The Pilot was gone. His bunk had been cleaned up, the meager locker emptied of what few possessions he’d collected. He left no note and we did not look for one. We assumed his time was up; he’d finished his term and gone back to whatever life he’d been living before this. I asked the Chemist how long he’d been here.

“He arrived a year after me, so four years.”

“You’ve been here for five years?”

She smiled wryly. “Time flies.”

The thought was disturbing. It had already been over a year. I didn’t want to be here for four more. Part of whatever mechanism this was. But the Pilot gave me hope; evidently there was some condition which, upon fulfillment, would allow us to leave. The notes we came with gave no indication to our mission parameters — perhaps I would be here for years on years, like the Chemist, like the fish.
----
The first mission I went on with another was with the Surgeon. The package was delivered to the Contact. We opened it up in the kitchen as the fish stared. It was a larger one; these came by occasionally, and generally required two or more of our number to fulfill. One box for the Surgeon, and one box for me. We looked over the papers, looked at each other, and then looked at the third package inside the cardboard box.

It was a mailer filled with glossy eight-by-tens of a man and a woman. They were in their forties, educated-looking. The photographs were candids, taken from several meters away while they ate at a table in some cafe, unaware they were being watched. I was confused for a moment on what we were to do with these, and watched the Surgeon.

She stared intently at her photo for several minutes, the scar on her face shifting, all of her features shifting and melding until she was the doppelganger of the woman in the photo. She licked her lips, feeling out her new face. Then she looked at me expectantly.

I did the same, staring at my photo of the man — clean shaven, close-cropped salt and pepper hair, brown-skinned, a sharp jawline and a slightly bent nose. I felt my own scar grow warm, and was dimly aware of my face shifting about before it settled. It took a glance in the mirror, confirming what I already knew.

We took a taxi to the address in the documents. We were wearing scrubs, carrying our packages in our laps. We did not speak until we arrived. It was a private clinic, some sort of surgical boutique; the lobby exuded wealth. The receptionist greeted us as Drs. Mouhlaki and Revyan, and rushed us into an operating theater after letting us scrub up.

The patient was wheeled in, unconscious and on a gurney. Pale skin under the operating lights of the theater. The nurse with us nodded, and I saw her features flicker for the slightest moment. I stepped away and let the doctors work, speaking in terse language while they cut into the patient’s chest over the course of an hour.

Finally, when he was open and exposed, they called me. I unlatched my package.

Inside, nestled in foam, lay the same pipe bomb I had crafted so many months ago. Except now it was attached to another mechanism, some sort of amplifier. It was a crystal that was softly glowing, wires wrapped around it and attaching it to the bomb. The product of the chain. I dropped the entire thing into a plastic bag, armed the bomb, and brought it to the patient. Their chest cavity lay exposed, and I nestled the bomb inside among their organs. I didn’t know how they would close it up; I left that to the surgeon over the next hour. 

When we were done, the nurse nodded; she would handle the rest. We left the clinic and burned our scrubs in an alley several miles away. We let the faces drop for the journey to the safehouse.
----

I kept dreaming. 

I found myself suspended in a vacuum, alone. Movement, like before, was extremely taxing, and had little point in the dark. I was not underwater, and I was not on the ground. For eternities, I fell.

Then I would hear the whispers. From any direction, at irregular intervals, the slightest sound grew deafening in total isolation. In hushed tones, the abyss would tell me its secrets. The sound was clear yet indiscernible. Unknowable, unthinkable.

Through it all, an image would intrude my thoughts, as if beckoned by the lullaby of the empty. A glass sphere, immense, black as the water surrounding it, somewhere far beneath me. 

Night by night, it grew closer.


----
Sometimes, we had flashes of who we might've been in the past. Small flashes of what might've been cherished memories taunted us from time to time. 

Watching the small television we had, an advertisement would play, and I would feel a sudden pull, trying to connect to a portion of myself that refused to show itself. Although it couldn't feel familiar, that pull let me know everything I needed to know. That there was another me out there, waiting.

It happened to the rest of them too– their eyes would also glaze over ever so slightly, their concentration broken. The Chemist stared intently at an advertisement for a fast food restaurant, frozen by the image of a discontinued menu item brought back for a limited time. It was only on screen for seconds, and yet her eyes remained affixed to the screen. Their expression was unreadable, her mouth hanging slightly agape.

Until she noticed me.

We exchanged sad smiles, knowing all of us had felt that pull. And life went on.
----
Exchanging faces grew easier and easier. The work required it. I’d shadow someone for a week, learning their routine and recognizing the small details of their face: the little contours and the nearly-faded scars. And then I would wear them like a mask as I strolled into a facility and acted out my instructions. Nobody ever noticed; people would greet me like a friend and I let the role swallow me up, returning their greetings in kind.

And then I would slip into an office and tape a small bug to the underside of a couch, or quickly drill through a wall safe and snatch the papers contained inside. The days dragged on.
----

I kept dreaming. Kept falling. Further and further down, towards the sphere.

The abyss kept whispering, desperately now. Faster and faster, the sound becoming shrill and unintelligible. The noise devolved into static, droning as I fell.

The first thing to react is my limbic system. A singular signal is transmitted to every fiber of my being. 

//Fear.//

Fear beyond reason, beyond thought. In the center of my vision, even though there was no distinction between my surroundings and the ground, I could feel it.

I had arrived. The sphere, its size obscured by the absence of light, greets me. 

I hear myself cry out, far away. Loud enough to break through the static. Loud enough to force me awake.

-----

The Chemist woke me up. Immediately, nausea took over. A pit in my stomach prevented me from moving. My hair was matted to my forehead, my body covered in cold sweats. 

"You were screaming." A statement laced with worry, judging by her expression.

My heart kept pounding, slowly returning to normal. I took this time to calm myself. 

"Sorry," I said curtly.

She motioned to the door, and we slipped out of the bunks and towards the common area. The only source of light came from the fishtank, LEDs refracting through the water and projecting waves onto the walls.

"Nightmares?"

I nodded.

“They come. I think it’s your brain trying to knit itself back together.”

We sat in silence for a while, staring at the fishtank. A disassembled gun sat on the counter. Eventually, she patted my cheek and slipped away back to her bunk. I stayed up, adrenaline still coursing through my veins.

I studied the fishtank. Spots of darkness danced across the water.

----
The packages sped up. If anyone but me noticed, they didn’t mention it. Every few days now, we would get a set of assignments, along with a box of ammunition. It was too large for our pistols, so we set it to the side. The assignments came with deadlines, now; a date and time roughly scrawled with permanent marker on the inside flap of the box. We found ourselves busier than we had been before, reduced in number and with more work to do. Machines constructed or reverse-engineered. People abducted and delivered to colleagues we didn’t recognize. 

At some point, I realized it was possible everyone I had dealt with was the same person wearing many faces. That didn’t seem very likely, but it meant that the scale of this operation was unknown to me or to anyone else in it. We were all parts in the machine, clueless to its purpose.
----
The fish started talking to me again.

I’d been preparing dinner. It shocked me quite badly, because I remembered throwing it away. And looking back, it was indeed absent from the fishtank. The voice was coming from inside my head, this time. Or maybe it always had been? It was difficult to remember.

“Careful with that, buddy.”

My hand jolted with the knife. It came down, just barely missing my fingertip — but skinned off a section of my thumb. I winced, sucking on the wound as the blood mixed with the water on the cutting board, spreading out. Sucking my finger also meant I wouldn’t accidentally respond to it.

“You thought you got rid of me, huh? Yeah, doesn’t quite work like that. I dunno why you’d want to, anyway. I can be real helpful.”

I shook my head at the others who offered to help wrap the wound.

“You’re just a man, and I’m just a fish.”

He put emphasis on the ‘fish’ and the ‘man’. I couldn’t tell why.
----
By then, I think all of us could tell something was coming to a head. Missions became about shadowing targets, surveilling the same place and handful of people for days and weeks. A small group of six or seven individuals of variable age, gender, ethnicity. And a small, squat facility on the outskirts of town. It was marked as a corporate office, mostly concrete with a few windows. You couldn’t see inside them. 

We sat in the building across the street with binoculars for hours at a time, watching who entered and exited. For the few moments the doors slid open, an armed guard could be seen inside. But then the door shut. I would peer through the binoculars, trying to get a better look while ignoring the fish’s taunts. I could feel it swimming around my head, whining.

Shipments would come like clockwork every few nights, an unmarked box truck rolling in after being waved through the gate. It would go down the back towards the secluded delivery dock and return an hour later. We weren’t sure whether they were moving things in, out, or both. But regardless of the weather, the temperature, the time, the truck came. The machine kept moving.
----
One day the package was different. Contained in a sealed metal crate with a small keypad on the front. The Chemist and the Contact both tried their numbers before they got to me. I entered in the digits on my note. The latches unclicked.

Inside were four smaller cardboard containers. Each contained a uniform of some kind and a black M4 carbine. The uniform was grey with a black vest over it and an orange visor. The uniform the guards inside the building had worn. We looked at the papers; blueprints. The building in them was much larger than the facility, a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, but a route had been drawn in using red marker. There were four glossy eight-by-tens of some of the figures we had been surveilling. And there was a paper with instructions on it.

“GAIN ACCESS TO TESTING CHAMBER L5. LOCATE EXPERIMENT D456. PERFORM THE FOLLOWING MODIFICATIONS TO IT.” Followed by a long list of minute adjustments.
----
The night before, I was awoken by someone sitting at the foot of my bed. I peeked my eye open in silence. It was the Chemist, staring at me like she was trying to see what lay underneath my skin. I didn't speak, and neither did she. She sat there for an hour, just staring. And then she stood up in a daze, and whispered something I turned over and over in my mind as she wandered away back to her bunk and back to sleep.

"You hear it too."
----
We met at a parking garage. An unmarked box truck was waiting for us, the back open and the engine running. We clambered inside. There were three more figures already inside, wearing the same face-obscuring uniform and carrying the same carbines. We didn’t speak. They nodded at us. The Surgeon closed us inside, and the truck began to move. 

“You can’t really tell me you’re happy about this.”

It slowed down again some time later and I heard a gate being opened. The others began to move into place, arranging themselves into a formation with rifles raised. I followed; the motion came easily and naturally.

“That you don’t just want to burn it all down.”

I felt the truck curving around the road as it slipped into the delivery dock. Then footsteps, and the door being pulled open.

I don’t know which one of us shot, but someone did, dropping the worker to the floor. We were in some kind of loading area, workers snapping around to look and screaming before dropping to the floor.

We didn’t waste time, flowing in and moving across to the stairs. They would kill power to the elevators immediately after realizing they were under attack. We slipped down the stairs, guns raised. All of us had the route memorized and committed to memory, but even then, the hallways of this place were strangely familiar. 

“You’re not //angry//?”

I shook the voice away. He kept swimming circles around my brain, perfect darkness of my cerebrospinal fluid. The building on the surface was hiding a vast underground facility, and we moved through it. There were people wearing labcoats with confused expressions on their faces at us marching down the hallways. They recognized our faces, asked us what was going on. One of us roughly shouted for them to return to their offices. 

We ran into a security team, wearing the same uniforms as us. I didn’t even realize I had squeezed the trigger until the gun kicked back in my hand. We gunned them down and kept moving as the klaxons began to sound and the fluorescent white light was replaced by a deep red.

“You’re a killer now. Or maybe you already were.”

I read the doors we walked by. Lab L3… L4…

“Here.”

One of us kicked in the door and I slipped inside. The lab had lockers all along the wall. I found D456 and wrenched it open. A machine was inside. Something inside me told me it was a modified reality core. I set it down on the lab table, unrolled my tools, and set to work. The others were outside. 

Move this wire here. Cut this wire. 

“You don’t even know what you’re doing. Maybe you’re making a nuke. Killing innocent people, buddy. You agree with that?”

Remove this component, replace it with that.

“Shit, you don’t even know what you agree with. You don’t know anything about you. Maybe the old you was a pacifist. And now you shot some poor dumb fuck for the sake of the machine.”

My finger twitched. The screw slipped and clattered to the linoleum. It danced and echoed like gunshots.

My jaw tensed. I told the fish it wasn't real.

"Maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm served over lemon on a beach somewhere. But you dreamed me up. You knew that it didn't make sense."

My breath caught up to me. My vision was hazy. It was buzzing, now, a dull buzzing in my ears and blocking out the sound of screaming and of gunshots and of death. The fish spoke over it.

"You're an engineer. Look at it. See it. Understand it."

I looked down at the gutted machine, vivisected across the countertop. Microchips and cables and wires and pipes going every this way and that, perfect order; all things with a place, and a place for all things.

And then a fin flapped, and the water shifted, and I saw it for what it was: confusion, desperate attempts to make things fit where they could not possibly have been meant to. Haphazardly designed and re-designed, aborted components left half-complete in a machine that would, given a mouth, beg for the mercy of death. It looked up at me, empty silicon eyes reflecting my face.

"I'm natural, kid. This is natural."

"What is?"

"You can't force order onto the world. Order doesn't come from that."

I whispered. "Where does it come from?"

"Chaos."

It reached out, pushed, and sent the device smashing to the floor. I watched as the components broke, shattered, smashed and mangled and compressed in perfect silence, explosions and shorts, little metal pieces spraying and falling in every direction for a lifetime until it all settled. And then, in that pile of destroyed junk, I saw nirvana.

"It makes its own order."

From the maelstrom of destruction, everything had found its place. Where it was meant to be. It was so, so beautiful.

I smiled, and deep in my head where a hole had been cut and left to fill with rainwater, the fish spoke.

"Now do what you need to."

I lifted the screwdriver, and carefully, so, so carefully, reached up, and slid it through skin, through bone, and through brain. I speared the fish until the screaming stopped and everything went black.




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I dream, I dream about falling face-first into an endless, empty ocean. The waters are dark, cold, suffocating, but I can still just breathe. I flap my arms for a little bit, trying to establish my order, but I sink, and sink, and sink, and sink.

I feel like there should be something here to guide me, to tell me what it means, but no. There never has been. Eventually my feet hit something hard, glassy. I struggle to right myself against the water-slick surface, and grasping hands find it to be a sphere. I trace the edges, and --

"Everett?"

I blink awake.

"I'm... sorry?"

It's Seven. She's sitting across from my seat, white dress on paler skin and strange-flecked hair. She's staring at me with concern. 

"I asked if the Atreus Array satellites are ready to be put into position over eastern China with the new ground-penetrating radar next year. Parahistory feels that that's the current best shot at locating Black Adytum."

I nod, give a few trite details of how the engineering is coming along, and soon enough the table loses interest and goes onto the next. Onto the next, always the next. Projects and facts and figures and data, analysis, turning our impossible world into something we can try to make sense of.

I try not to think about the missing year of my life. It feels like staring into an inky blackness. I don't know what's down there. But sometimes, when I'm alone in my workshop at night, poring over schematics that feel impossibly familiar, I hear something whispering to me from down there. Whispering instructions to build something vast and great and dredge it from the depths.

When meetings run long, we have them prepare something. I look down at my appetizer, untouched. I've developed a taste for the luxuries recently. Little crackers topped with spinach and a dollop of caviar.

Minuscule fish eggs, absorbing the light, shining like so many little black moons.
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Bone Prelude: FISHSKIN

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