Like I said: it isn’t a gift. It’s an invasion.
2 Siphotperon species 1 – Oh, here we go, doing the scientific names showing-off thing.
3 There’s a trick-dick in the event of a broken penis.
4 Koalas and koala-like animals have smooth brains. A condition known as lissencephaly – Kill me.
5 I’m just a distilled version of you, buddy. Besides, assholes can be really useful. The giant California sea cucumber, Apostichopus californicus, eats and breathes through its butt.
6 Horologics.
7 The original Simon was first marketed by Milton Bradley in 1978 and later on by Hasbro. The console has four colors: red, blue, yellow, and green, running clockwise from the upper right. The colors light up with a corresponding sound in a random sequence and each player’s challenge is to repeat the combination exactly.
8 Spanish – Wow, really?
9 It’s Rolex – I know!
10 Known to laypersons as cicadas.
11 No.
12 Youngest ever U.S. Chess Champion at age fourteen.
13 French inventor and mathematician, authored a treatise on projective geometry at age sixteen.
14 Wrote solutions to complex math problems in her sleep.
15 Spirit speaks through a medium (me, in this case).
16 Knowledge of a past event which was not learned or inferred.
17 How doctors say “possession”.
18 Like omniscience, except with more incense.
19 Knowledge of something one cannot directly perceive. Also known as ESP, or extra-sensory perception – Or the scientific term: “bullshit.”
20 We never take the hint.
21 Just imagined it.
CHAPTER TWO
“Fuck this,” said Naecia, tossing a bit of particle shielding across the floor of her dig. She’d rebuilt the machine a dozen times over, trying every configuration that presented itself, solved and re-solved every theoretical calculation, and experimented with every variation in materials she could get her hands on. Not only did it not work, she didn’t even know exactly what she was building.
She looked up from the wreckage to check the time. Still a bit left until her shift on Vask’s day-side surface began.
Her hands were sore from fabricating. Sorer than she got wrestling flanges and packing glands out on the pipe farm. She flexed and squeezed them, observed her sienna-purple skin brightening along the knuckles enough to show the fine craquelure that the planet’s arid climate produced. She reached for her cup as she considered the build and swallowed down a fat gulp of scorching jha without checking the heat. “Ffffffffff,” she hissed. Then, inexplicably took another drink while pondering the machine. Nothing was working. And would she even know what “working” looked like? “Shitfuck!”
Truth was, Naecia was probably going mad. Whether she was sleeping, resting in her dig, or out on shift, visions of the machine intruded into every corner of her life. It had become a compulsion that felt like a race against insanity: successfully complete the build, stop going crazy. When she did that, the intrusions would surely, hopefully, cease and she could live out her life in peace. She longed to think about nothing.