The lift reached the lobby with a ding, and when the door parted Isabella stepped out. She glanced back to see Emir hesitating at the threshold, holding out his arm to prevent the door from closing.

  “You getting off?” she asked him.

  “Getting off?” he snapped. His erection appeared more pronounced than ever, as if it were this that prevented the door from closing. “Oh...no, uh...there’s something I forgot to do.” He looked up toward the ceiling of the lift’s cabin, dropped his arm, stepped back, and the door slid shut.

  ***

  After work, and some errands, Isabella returned to her building and her apartment and her bedroom. It was already early evening, night’s dark fluid pouring into the streets to drown them but offset their gaudy glimmerings. She found the membrane casting its mellow illumination into her room, across her bed. Like a candle glowing through honey.

  Isabella didn’t turn on any other lights in her room. She pushed the button to slide up the lower window pane.

  She stood there, imagining how Emir had unfastened his pants or lowered his pajama bottoms and moved forward and braced his hands on the wall of his own bedroom on this same side of the building and pushed his painfully erect member into the yielding material. It would be warm, exactly like human flesh. She knew that herself.

  She felt a strange and alien sorrow for what it must be like to be a man, a dumb machine cursed to be anchored to such a small but commanding organ. But right now, maybe it wasn’t so alien a thought after all. She might even have better understood – if not forgiven – Claudio’s stupid, selfish hunger just then.

  She put out her hand, with two fingers extended and rigid like the barrel of a gun, and pressed her fingertips against the softly glowing matter with its slow-motion inner effervescence. It indented, both firm but giving at once, smooth and welcoming. The cells of which it must be made seemed to speak directly to her own components in their unified multitudes. No nation, no culture, no gender could ever be so united as the mindless cells of one living body. Such a mystery!

  She worked her fingers deeply in, slid them out, in again. Did this motion excite it, as it did her? Excite all of the mass, heaped atop the roof and draped down one of the building’s faces, or just this local portion of it?

  Isabella sank to her knees, edged herself a little closer to the window, and leaning forward, pressed her face right into the organism. It shaped itself around her closed-eyes features. It had no scent at all, alas, not like Claudio’s body. Still, with her eyes not only closed but held shut by the pressure of the matter against them, she pushed out her tongue against the rubbery but yielding material. Worked her tongue into its essence...and the two living entities mindlessly communed with each other.

  Still probing her tongue into the flesh, and licking at it with increasing fervor, with one hand Isabella reached down under her waistband to stimulate herself. Her hand’s circular movements became more quick and feverish, along with her tongue’s desperate flickering and lunging. She inserted her fingers. Entered herself.

  She came, convulsively – remembered the birds on the roof, partly sunken, fluttering their wings madly – and pressed the side of her face against the flesh so that it molded itself to her, as if to replicate her, and gasped and almost said aloud that she loved it.

  How crazy is that? she thought. Was that all love was? A good, hard orgasm?

  ***

  She didn’t want to hurt the organism, but she wanted even more than it had given her...though by now – days since her first communion with it – she had taken it into her mouth, into her two lower orifices. She wanted a portion of it to live in her, if only briefly, like the sperm of a man.

  Isabella fetched a utility knife with a beam rather than a blade, that her father had added into a little tool box he’d cutely put together for her like some housewarming gift, and brought it to the bedroom. She undressed slowly, ritualistically, as if this were some ceremony, as if this thing watched her. Then she stepped to the open window. She coaxed out an extrusion, a protrusion, of the luminous matter...teased it into something she could hold in her left hand. And then, with her right hand, she positioned the silently sizzling red beam over the root of it.

  Before she could touch beam to flesh, she looked up and saw a dark silhouette, in the shape of a man, sliding down through the organism’s body. Headfirst...but unlike a diver into water, his arms were spread out as if to gather sensation. Isabella couldn’t make out his features, but she took this slowly descending figure to be Emir. He, too, must have cut into the body of the organism with a beam or blade. But, rather than with the intension of inserting a piece of the matter into himself, he had chosen to insert himself into the matter.

  Isabella watched his silhouette float down slowly, inside the glowing flesh – until he descended out of her range of sight – before she applied the red beam and cut into it, herself.

  ***

  The next evening, upon returning to Benevento Arms after work and a few errands, plastic grocery bags like extra organs of her body slung from one hand, Isabella stepped out of her cab onto the sidewalk, tilted her head back to look up, and exclaimed, “ No! Oh God!”

  She could only assume these workers were health agents, or at least low level employees of the Health Agency of Paxton. Come at long last.

  A kind of platform hovered in the air near the roof of the building.

  Perched on a narrow walkway that ran around the top of this floating platform, workers garbed in baggy black rubbery suits and hoods with face plates were using long poles like bo staffs to cut into the organism that was draped over the side of Benevento Arms. The poles’ red-glowing tips indicated they were a type of beam cutter instrument, themselves.

  Isabella would know nothing of ancient Earth sailors using flensing tools to cut into the bodies of an extinct marine animal called a whale, harpooned and brought up alongside their whaling vessel, but a historian might have made that comparison.

  A claw arm, having extended from the platform, gripped a slab of the organism’s matter – as Isabella had gripped a far smaller extrusion of it the day before – and held it until, with repeated applications of their poles, the HAP workers had severed it completely. Then, careful not to strike the workers and knock them over the railing of their walkway, the mechanical arm shifted to carry the severed slab toward the center of the platform, where it was lowered down. But the platform didn’t appear to be deep enough to store this great chunk of meat. No, Isabella knew, it was a huge zapper unit, a much bigger version of the zapper she used in her own kitchen to dispose of garbage and non-recyclable trash. She could even hear from down here, despite the noise of the city, the platform sizzle like frying grease as it disintegrated the slab.

  They were hovering near the top of the building, and had already cleared almost all of the matter that had hung down one face of the building. Soon all that would be left to deal with was the material on the roof, including those curious exposed rings with their spiraling centers.

  Isabella turned to lunge toward the front doors of Benevento Arms, and then paused when she noticed a cluster of several hover vehicles parked to one side of the building. They were black, with the HAP logo in gold on their flanks, and one of them had the appearance of an ambulance. But an ambulance that was in no hurry to be along its way to a hospital. It was then that Isabella realized what had finally brought the Health Agency people here.

  Why hadn’t she considered, yesterday, that Emir might not survive giving himself wholly to the organism? Why hadn’t she called the police then and there? She wondered if it had begun to digest him, or if he had only suffocated inside it.

  Either way, she had no doubt that whatever was left of him lay in the back of that HAP ambulance right now.

  ***

  Though she had seen it from the street, she still needed to see it from within her apartment, within her bedroom...

  Her window was now cleared, returned to its unobstructed view of the city called Punktown. There was no point in opening the pane; she would only hear, but louder, the sizzling bursts of the floating zapper as more flesh was fed into it. She depressed a button beside the window to shade its panes to black.

  Even as night fell in earnest, the workers continued on up there, by the lights of their platform and the city’s multicolored ambient light. They had apparently brought the hover platform to rest on the rooftop.

  Though she was reluctant at first to remove it from the shelter of her body, her curiosity got the better of her, and Isabella disrobed from the waist down, cupped a hand between her legs, and willed her little pet out of her. It obeyed, oozed into her palm, and she lifted it to examine it. It still maintained its subtle ambery glow, throbbed with life. She put her pet into a deep bowl she had placed on her bedside table, where it continued to pulse but made no attempt to climb the bowl’s smooth wall to escape.

  But when she checked in on it an hour later, after having eaten her dinner, at the bottom of the bowl she found a grayish, withered and dry-looking object that gave off the stench of decomposition, like a dead mouse found under a bed.

  By that time – Isabella would later learn – the brassy rings had been fully extracted from the material that remained on the roof, severing their connection to it. The platform had lowered the rings to the street and, via its claw arm, loaded them into the back of a HAP hover van to be borne away...either to return them to the people who owned the organic ship from which the mass had sloughed off, or to be destroyed.

  Her eyes wet, her body empty, Isabella dumped the gray mass from the bowl into a little white box with a cover that had contained a pair of new earrings. On the cover, in a red pen, she drew a heart like a valentine. Then, she placed the box into her kitchen’s trash zapper, and pressed its button.

  OUT OF NOTHING

  Part 1

  The neighborhood its residents called Segundo Inferno was one of the worst slums in the city of Punktown, vying with Warehouse Way, the Battery, and the mutant ghetto Tin Town. The original low-income apartment blocks here had been added onto over the decades, bristling with tumor-like mini-blocks on their roofs and flanks, with new boxes formed of various materials ever being added onto these. Seldom were building permits pursued, or violations brought against these improvised structures. Though struts and cables helped support them, occasionally one of them tore loose and crashed to the street. Once, such a cube had toppled from its precarious perch atop a stack of gaily pastel-painted and mural-slathered boxes and become wedged between two lower boxes, suspended above the street at a height that still allowed ground traffic to pass beneath it. Its tenants had continued living on in it in this new orientation.

  Gangs ran this enclave, selling drugs and managing prostitution, fighting over micro-territories like dogs over shreds of meat. Thieves stealing to survive in this harsh environment, if caught not only by the gangs but by common citizens, would have their hands shot clean through, at the very least, or might be beaten to death or burned alive in the street. Enemy gang members – whether male or female or adolescent – would be captured and tortured, dismembered alive with machetes or axes or laser blades, before finally being beheaded, vids of these acts being shared as a warning on the net (or even on the ultranet, to be more immersively experienced by those who could afford that virtual reality service).

  A man named Antonio dos Santos da Silva, who had been born in Segundo Inferno but had worked hard to leave it behind and had become a successful small business owner beyond the slum’s reach, had returned to try to encourage other residents to follow his lead. He held gatherings in schools and churches, even on street corners. He distributed flyers door to door. He left holographic placards hovering in the air, with his inspiring words ever scrolling. Instead of killing each other, he passionately entreated, the citizens of Segundo Inferno should be working together, lifting each other up! No one was going to do it for them; nobody outside this enclave was sufficiently concerned. (The forcers had almost no presence here, and even the big crime syndys didn’t care enough to try to control the drug traffic in this small if overpopulated carcinoma.) The citizens, da Silva said, should be helping repair and fortify their neighbors’ ramshackle homes. They should band together to open little food markets, other shops and businesses. With cooperation and a sense of pride, they could overcome their circumstances and make this neighborhood thrive!

  But one night the nice Punktown apartment of Antonio dos Santos da Silva was broken into by three young men who had ventured forth from Segundo Inferno, and he and his wife and two children were messily stabbed and bludgeoned to death, because he had innocently happened to mention at a recent gathering that for Christmas he had given his eldest daughter Part 3 of the toy called Ex nihilo.

  Part 2

  Rich or poor, human colonist or native Choom, it seemed that everyone on the planet Oasis now wanted Ex nihilo.

  Was it a toy, really? A decoration, an entertainment, a distraction? The VT commercial went like this:

  Every day we’re bombarded with news...assaulted with information. Burdened with overwhelming concerns that don’t allow us a sense of peace, responsibilities that deny us a degree of harmony.

  Are you tired of this excess of meaning?

  Ex nihilo. Because it makes no demands. It has no meaning.

  Part 3

  Matheus da Silva dos Santos lay back on his bed in his darkened bedroom, while outside his window – the pane of which he had tinted black to block the glare of winter sun – he heard the commotion dying down in the street below. A few minutes ago he had looked out to determine its source, and had seen a ring of young men striking at a fallen figure with machetes and bats and pipes. From up here, the figure, probably already dead, had looked like a gray-skinned Kalian, but it was hard to tell for all the blood. Was the fool new to Punktown? Had he never heard about Segundo Inferno’s keenly enforced homogeneous character? Its inhabitants prided themselves on it, in a city that was famous for being a melting pot of human and nonhuman races. Only in this sort of enterprise, the act of killing outsiders or maiming petty thieves, did the community seem to come together in something like what the late Antonio dos Santos da Silva had preached.

  Matheus da Silva dos Santos was one of the three young men who had killed da Silva and his family for Part 3 of Ex nihilo.

  Da Silva had not possessed Parts 1 and 2, and neither did Matheus; he had only seen what they looked like, and the light effects they projected, on the net. But at this moment he lay staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom with Part 3 resting on the floor beside his shoes, looking like an abstracted black insect, perhaps, made of some material he couldn’t identify. Plastic? Metal? Some substance beyond his comprehension? If he had possessed either – or better yet, both – Parts 1 or 2, they would fit together with Part 3 with satisfying clicks, forming a whole new shape, and the light the connected parts projected would have been combined to form even more complex designs.

  From a pinhole in the uppermost point of Part 3 it projected a beam, casting upon the ceiling a dreamily moving, roughly circular patch of pure white light, like an ever-changing spiderweb of glowing ectoplasm, a web that slowly but ceaselessly folded/unfolded into new webs, an interweaving lace of colorless fractals. It was like looking through the tube of a kaleidoscope. It was profoundly relaxing. It was perplexing, too, in an intriguing and nonthreatening way, like visions he had experienced using various hallucinogenic drugs.

  At first, another of the three gang members who had stolen Part 3 from da Silva had held onto the thing (because Matheus was wary about being investigated as da Silva’s killer), until they could find someone who would pay them good money for the increasingly rare collectible, but then Matheus had learned from a snitch that his friend – Hugo Sousa dos Santos – had made an attempt to sell Part 3 on his own. The snitch, who sought Matheus’ favor, said that Hugo had intended to tell Matheus the piece had been stolen from him.

  Yesterday, Matheus and several others in their gang had lured Hugo into the basement of Matheus’ home, and there set upon him. They had begun making a vid of his torture and execution, to share on the net so as to let the world (and the others in their gang) know that Matheus, their leader, did not take betrayal lightly. While Matheus was sawing into Hugo’s throat with a kitchen knife, and speaking ominously to the camera, his mother had called down the basement stairs, “Sweet Jesus, what is all that noise?”

  “Fuck, Mamãe!” Matheus had bellowed. “You’re ruining my vid!”

  “Don’t you swear at me, you little monster!” his mother had shouted, coming halfway down the stairs. “Oh dear God, not again! Do you expect me to clean this mess?” And she had looked accusingly at the desperate eyes of Hugo. Then she’d cried in horror, “Is that my bread knife?”

  Matheus knew that despite this demonstration, others in his gang might yet betray him. More likely still was that another gang might attack him, even force its way into his home and kidnap his mother, his sister, in order to win possession of Part 3 of Ex nihilo, so it was really in his best interest to sell it to someone as quickly as he could.

  The more he gazed at that mesmerizing play of light upon the theater screen of his ceiling, however, the more regret he felt at the idea of parting with the enigmatic little black gizmo.

  Despite the advertisements saying upfront that Ex nihilo had no meaning, he wasn’t sure he bought into that. He felt there was something hidden in that hypnotic display of light. A code of some kind, that weirdly seemed to speak to him personally...that sought to impart an intimate message directly to his soul. If that hollow space he sometimes became all too conscious of, inside him, could be called a soul.

  Part 4

  “Are you out of your blasting mind, you morbidly obese, dung-stinking, lobotomized drooler?”

 

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