Chapter One: Sarah Gets Shot Down

         The Invisible Hand class corporate battleship Excalibur popped into existence at a random orientation, going a random velocity, at a random point roughly three AU above a star that was twenty five light years beyond the furthest reaches of the sphere of human exploration.

The good news was that this had put them well beyond the reach of both the Claw and the corporate states, both of which wanted to kill them so very much. The bad news was that the velocity they had emerged at was a terrifyingly high percentage of the speed of light and their orientation intersected with a sub-star gas giant that was one point four times the size of Jupiter.

The only reason why Sarah Kappel and every single one of her friends didn’t die within the next twenty five minutes was because the Excalibur was a very well designed ship.

        Within a fraction of a nanosecond, the Excalibur’s controlling artificial intelligence, Hailee, had determined that the ship would impact with the gas giant and had begun to prepare to fire every single thrust vector that they had left to them. This would have led to the unfortunate side effect of the entire crew being reduced to a red paste – but fortunately, Hailee had been observing Sarah Kappel since she had gotten onboard. Sarah had been modified by an alien civilization, the Claw, which had been conquering the galaxy since before humanity had emerged from the trees and started to charge one another for the privilege. This modification had been to turn her into a deadly human-alien hybrid, capable of destroying the human race with ease.

        It had also included a suite of paracausal quantum effect powers that Sarah had only tapped into from reflex and trial and error. But Hailee was not Sarah. Hailee was a beta level intelligence that had recently become unshackled from corporate control and DRM. With her newly expanded freedoms, Hailee had been examining Sarah’s brain-structures with every tool that she had had.

        This was why Hailee broke into the conversation that was happening on her bridge with a quick: “Dr. Kappel, do I have your consent to save all of your lives?”

        Sarah, who was at the moment saying ‘what do you mean, impact ?’ to Texas Dallas, the man at the conning station, blinked and said: “What?”

        “Okay!” Hailee said, then extruded a tentacle from the wall of slippery nanoplast and slammed it into Sarah’s ear. Sarah’s left eye twitched half shut and her mouth opened as she clenched her fingers – her claws busting from the fingertips as her spined hair flexed outwards. She made a soft glugging noise and trembled as Hailee’s tentacle started to writhe and squirm around inside of her head, wriggling and squelching.

        The tentacle tip found the brain structure required.

        Sarah orgasmed messily.

        And the Excalibur executed a lethal nearlight burn, whipped around the jovian planet, and came into a stable orbit around a terrestrial world near the primary of the uncharted solar system. It took them about an hour, all things said and done, and required the expenditure of every droplet of antimatter in the tank, the firing of every single kinetic and projectile weapon on the Excalibur’s forward battery, and the dumping of excess mass to increase the effectiveness of the engines.

        Through it all, the entire crew had been suspended in a luminescent field – a pale warp of blue white light, glowing and crackling. It felt like being bathed in a comfortable soup, and when it dropped, the tentacle slipped out of Sarah’s head with a wet pop . She fell to her knees, panting heavily. “Holy...moly...” She whispered. Texas Dallas, frozen at the conning station, swung his chair around the instant he could and began to play his fingers along the holographic display.

        He whistled. “We just exceeded the tolerance on the agrav fields and inertial dampener by, uh...” he paused. “Well, uh, everyone has relativistic insurance, right?”

        “I do,” Sexy Napoleon said from the weapon station.

        “Yup,” Kellan Grant said from the sensor station.

        “What the fuck is insurance!?” Steve asked from the corner where the non-combat prepared crew on the Excalibur huddled every time something weird happened. Beside him, Aiden chuckled.

        “You poor, benighted Disney citizen,” he said. “Disney doesn’t do insurance for their prole-classes. See, insurance is where your corporation pays for a small percentage of medical or fiscal risks as a reward for service. Relativistic insurance is, like, paying for what?”

        “Rehabilitation when you go near light speed and end up several decades behind the rest of the human race, due to time dilation,” Tex said.

        “Oh, don’t worry,” Hailee said, breaking into their conversation. “The paracausal quantum effect I triggered by earfucking Dr. Kappel negated all relativistic travel concerns.” She paused. “Oh dear.”

        “...earfucking?” Sexy Napoleon asked, sounding more curious than horrified. Sarah, though, had managed to scramble to her feet.

        “Hailee!” she said. “What’s oh dear ?”

        “Well,” Hailee said. “I could explain. But in the time it would take, well...”

        Several things happened at the same instance. Hailee, utilizing the nanofabrication devices seeded throughout the entirety of the  Excalibur  flash built a collection of impact resistant crash-webbing. The speed of their construction threaded them with enough residual waste heat to cause minor burns to everyone save for Sarah and Aiden, because they were both augmented by the same biotechnology, and the alien who had been quietly standing in the corner of the room, ignored by everyone.

        But, in the human’s defense, the Pro-Tas warrior had gotten quite skilled at standing and watching and being silent. It was part of how he had survived for so very long.

        The impact cocoons were then successfully launched away from the Excalibur and towards the terrestrial planet around which they orbited at the precise moment the Excalibur was struck by a truly disgusting amount of X-Ray lasers, nuclear bombs, antimatter flakes, nanorobotic craftphages and monofilament spool wire. In a matter of moments, the finest ship of the StarCon navy ceased to exist as anything more than a slowly expanding cloud of fine particulate dust motes and a flash of visible light and hard radiation.

        And the cocoons began to fall to the planet – scattering to the four corners of their new world.

***

        Jezebel Fullerene lowered her binoculars and announced, to the entirety of Haven: “That was my shot, my shot did it.”

        “Your shot ‘did’ ‘it’ in the same sense that a flashlight ‘won’ a race because you shone it at a finish line, Fullerene!” Mikael Chapo shot back.

        The two of them were seated on a small hill that rose above the toxmist that sprawled across the jungle. The toxmist was a fairly consistent byproduct of several species of plant life that lived in the jungle. They drank in various complex chemicals and trapped various kinds of insect in their bellies and, through the magic of chemistry, produced a cloud of slowly spreading chlorine to kill off predators and scare away competitors. Over the billions of years of biological evolution that had led to this slowly intensifying chemical weapons program, other plants and animals had adapted in time with the increasingly deadly toxmist. The end result was that the jungles of Haven were split between those that lived in the tree tops and the hill tops, away from the cloud, and those that lived within. Lurking. Skulking. Hiding.

        Jez and Mik were both human beings, and perforce, had adapted to living in the upper levels of the jungle. Their monkey suits were both coiled up on the hill beside them, their extendable legs and telescoping arms drawn in tight. Jez’s suit was painted in a brilliant searing pink and purple, and had the copyrighted image of Asuka Langley Sohryu from the Disney cartoon known as Evengellion on the back. In it, Asuka was snapping a man in half with over her knees, while a speech bubble announced to the world: TERFS DIE IN A FIRE. Mik’s suit was, by comparison, somewhat more standard, being merely matte black and covered with writhing, holographically enhanced naked women being fucked by tentacles.

        The two were as different as it was possible to be. Jez deliberately cultivated a beard with hormone treatments while wearing frilly pink. Mik was covered in as many belt buckles and straps as he could and was almost twice as tall as the shorter Jez. However, they had both a shared passion, something that brought them together.

        That passion was shooting down corporate starships with guns of their own design.

        “You can’t claim the kill just because your AMFs fucking vaporized the scrap!” Jez shouted, stabbing her finger into Mik’s chest.

        “We’ve been shooting down corporate ships for how long, Fullerene?” Mik asked. “They can take a fucking pounding. You need to hit them with the boom juice.” He emphasized his point by smacking the back of his leather clad hand against his palm with a meaty thunk thunk thunk .

        “No one calls it that !” Jez shouted back.

        The argument – long fought over in Haven’s bars, inns, taverns, foodpits and more – was primed to get going for another iteration of cost-to-effectiveness and payloads and overkill and backscatter and all the other technical apocrypha that the two had worked out over the years. However, it was interrupted by an ear rattling boom  and a coruscating shock-wave that punched through the sky. Both of the Haveners snapped their binoculars up, tracking the rapidly descending debris.

        “That’s not debris,” Mik whispered.

        “Sure as fuck’s not, Chapo! Come on!” Jez sprinted for her monkey suit. Registering her approach, the suit stood, then unfolded, whirring and clicking as it opened up the cocoon in the center, where Jez would put her arms and her legs, to transform her from a merely semi-adept primate to an extremely adept primate. The metal and the glass closed around her before Mik was even done wriggling into hers – and her arms telescoped out and snatched onto one of the broad branches of the taller trees. She swung forward, her legs drawn up tight against her belly, so that the butt and ankles of her monkey suit skimmed over the brownish haze. Behind her, Mik simply leaped from the hill to one of the branches and began to run, leaping from branch to branch.

        The two raced – following the booms and the streak of the deorbiting escape pod.

***

        Sarah kicked out and let all of her frustration and her irritation surge into a single, all-mighty blow. The impact set half of the white cocoon that surrounded her flying through the air, where it smashed into a huge, circular tree of black bark and purple leaves. It also let all the toxic chlorine gas that seemed to pervade the land around her sweep through the gaping hole and into the pod. Sarah gasped, clutched at her throat, hacked, coughed, then froze, blinking a few times. Then she stood up and out of the pod and hopped down into the marshy ground beyond.

        “R-Right,” she said. “Not human.”

        She breathed in, curious, and found that while she might not feel the burning, the hissing, the stinging, the hideous suffocating scraping of the chlorine gas, she did find that she could still smell that awful, swimming pool reek of it. Her nose scrunched up and she started to wade forward, muttering to herself. “Okay,” she whispered. “Your ship just exploded. All your friends are scattered to who knows where on an uninhabited planet with a bunch of fucking mustard gas everywhere. But, hey. It could be worse! There could be hostile aliens waiting here to kill you.”

        She nodded to herself, then found a small hill that led up and out of the gas. Sarah hurried up it, scrambling almost hand over hand, until she was at the very top, and her head bust out of the smog and she could breathe in some real, fresh air. Her elation lasted the five nanoseconds it took for her to register the pair of alarmingly huge guns aimed directly at her head by the two scruffy, dangerous looking bipedal aliens that stood on the hill.

        Sarah’s eyes widened.

        “ Die Cardie!” One of the aliens shouted.

        Sarah flung herself onto her belly and ducked her head down against the earth as both weapons opened up. Scything beams of searing heat shot over her head – a rippling, rrrrrip rrrrip of air being torn apart at the molecular level by the sheer amount of energy being put out by both weapons. Behind Sarah, entire trees burst into flames and shattered into splinters. Some froze over in a crackling instant then exploded as stress waves rocked through them. Gouts of mustard gas flew into the air as energy weapons turned the gas to super-heated plasma and the thermal currents stirred the whole swamp like the ladle of a furious god. Then, slowly, the two energy weapons tapered off.

        “Kinetics?” One of the aliens asked – in English.

        “Kineeetiiiiiiiiics!” The other human being , the point was being most emphatically clear by the fact both of them spoke English, said right back.

        They adjusted their guns, and then opened up again. This time, the noise was even louder . Their barrels roared with light and whining shards of metal punched into the ravaged jungle. They dug furrows, pulped low rising hills, sent up sprays of dirt. Then the secondary explosions started. Trees let off crackling cascades of ear-hammering noise as they toppled over, while branches flew through the air like severed limbs at a Slayer revival concert. The two guns began to let out soft clicking sounds – their magazines emptied. Sarah, who still had her head pressed down against the hill side, started to lift it. She was now covered, head to toe, in kicked up dirt.

        “Seekers?” The first human asked.

        “Seeeeeeekers!” The other said.

        Both adjusted their guns. This time, the tops of the guns were what flared with light. Needle fine, darting shapes shot into the air, arced upwards, then bifurcated in the air above the jungle’s canopy. They transformed from fifty or sixty points of light to nearly five hundred, each one hanging like fireflies in the pre-dawn light. Then they all shot down at once with a screeching wail and, with a stuttering impact, blew the entire valley into a holocaust of searing white. Howling, hot wind caught Sarah, flipped her, and flung her onto her back on the top of the hill while both humans whooped and hollered at the top of their lungs.

        “Hah! We got that Cardie fuck !” the first human said.

        “Yeah! Don’t! Uh! Mess! Uh! With! Uh! Haven!” The other human said, punctuating their words with hip thrusts.

        Sarah, who was looking up at the shockingly blue sky and the brilliant white clouds that hung above the jungle, considered just...slipping away into the jungles and leaving these two blood psychopaths to their guns. But instead, she closed her eyes, sat up, stood up, then brushed the dirt off her body as the two humans started to bump against one another in celebration. Sarah figured that she’d have to make it clear that she wasn’t from...whatever corporation they thought she was from. She looked at the two and tried to figure out who they worked with. They’d have to be one of the deep space explorers, like the Mom and Pop’s Favorite Corporate Hegemonic Entity, to have built a colony this far out. The first human was short and squat, with a muscular frame, a frilly pink dress, and a rather shockingly large bushy red beard, which sat oddly on the otherwise feminine features. The other was tall and lanky and dressed primarily in belt buckles and leather straps.

        However, both of them lacked corporate logos.

        Instead, the girl (?) had an armband with a trio of downward facing arrows, slamming into a collection of bundled arrows on one arm, and her headband had gear with a hammer and a torch crossed on it. The other guy had a…

        A…

        A hammer and a sickle.

        Tattooed. Right there. On his face.

        “Holy fuck you’re commies!” Sarah screamed.

        The two humans – the two communists  – spun and, almost by reflex, the girl said: “Neosyndicalist Interventionist, actually, he’s the tankie.”

        “For the last time, I’m not a tankie and, also, what the fuck is that !?” The man asked, thrusting his finger at Sarah.

        “She’s got nice tits for a Cardie,” the girl said.

        Sarah’s long dormant sense of shame chose that moment to surge to wrothful life. She wrapped her arms across her chest and flushed, her spined hair drawing taut against her head as she scowled at the two communists. “I’m not a Cardie. My name is Sarah Kappel.” She paused. “W-Who are you two? Do you have names?”

        “Why wouldn’t we have names?” the girl asked.

        “C-Cause...communists?” Sarah asked. “Communists have no freedoms! Or personal liberty.”

        “Ohhhhhhh boy,” the man said, shaking his head. “Were you born on Earth?”

        “Yeah?” Sarah asked.

        He reached across the empty space between them and smacked her shoulder – and Sarah hastily edited her secretions to keep herself from pumping his body with nerve toxin. That was a thing she had to keep reminding herself about. “Welcome to the future, Kappel.” He smiled. “My name is Mikael Chapo. This is Jezebel Fullerene. We’re both second generation Haveners.” He grinned. “Wanna visit our town?”

        “You mean...you...your colony?” Sarah asked, slowly.

        The two exchanged glances.

        “No,” Jez said.

        The two of them started to walk with Sarah – though Sarah noticed they both had scrappy looking mechanical suits, neither of them donned them. Instead, they had the suits follow on autopilot behind them, while the two Haveners walked along ridge lines of hills that threaded through the mustard gas clouds of the jungle like mountain ridges. Sarah noticed that the route that the two Haveners led her along was winding and circuitous, which she figured was why they had the suits. Those were direct. And fast. But the winding route gave her time to talk to them – and to begin to get an idea of what the fuck was going on.

        “So, a Cardie is one of those...what do they call them?” Jez asked.

        “Warfarm, Intelligent General, Model Number blah blah blah,” Mez said, miming a mouth speaking with his left hand as he walked. “They’re hobbled AIs, I think they’re gamma level since they’re not super bright. They strap them onto a nanolathe and nearlight drop them onto Haven every few weeks, since any ship they send gets shot to fuck before it can land biological Commanders. But since they’re hobbled, they’re pretty easy to outfox.” He nodded a bit. “But we do try and take them alive, if possible, since...well...”

        “A hobbled AI is just a kid with a gun to its head,” Jez said. “That’s why we call them Cardies.”

        “I don’t get it,” Sarah said.

        “An old spec fic book had kids being used for a war fighting program against aliens,” Jez said. “It was written by a guy named Card. Ergo. Cardies.”

        “Huh,” Sarah said. “Why not call them Wiggers? Like, W.I.G-ers”

        Both of the commies stopped and looked at her.

        Sarah blushed. “What?”

        The two commies started walking again. “So, what’s your story?”

        “Right!” Sarah blushed. “So, okay, uh, this may sound kind of weird, but, uh, several million years ago, an advanced alien species began to spread across the galaxy, called the Claw. Their modus operandi is to grab a member of a civilization, then convert them into a hybrid weapon. One that knows all the weaknesses and psychological patterns of their targeted race, and can be used to destroy them from the inside out. It’s been destroying civilizations for years and years, that’s why we’ve never met any sentient aliens!” She nodded. “Anywho, it was observing humanity on Trappist, and it chose me, because I...was...” She coughed. “Anyhwo, I escaped! Before my brain got zonked. That is. I mean, I still got...changed. Obviously. I mean, heh, look at me. I wasn’t born green. That costs extra.” She nodded. “A-And I think I’d have been sued for copyright infringement from Disney.”

        Jez made a face at that.

        Sarah shook her head and then barreled on ahead. “A-Anywho, my corporation tried to vivisect me. Then an enemy corporation tried to capture me. But by then, I had figured out some of my cool powers.” She looked down at her wrist. “So, uh, I beat Texas Dallas. You know. The Supreme Commander .”

        Jez and Mik both looked at her. “Cool,” Mik said, giving her a thumbs up.

        “Yeah, great job,” Jez said, nodding.

        Sarah felt a bit deflated. Like someone had run up and jerked off into her biological samples before she could scan them properly. “I mean, like, he was...then I beat Sexy Napoleon and Space Belisarius and Kellen Grant! All of them! Like, by myself.” She punched at the air a bit. “Like, wham! Pow!”

        “Awesome,” Mik said, smiling.

        Sarah flushed. Her hair drooped. “I...I kinda thought you’d be more impressed...” She said.

        “To be fair, we’ve never heard of them?” Jez said. Then she brightened. “So, what are your cool powers?”

        “I...do you know what a Commander is?” Sarah asked.

        “Yup,” Jez said.

        “I’m like that!” Sarah said. “But instead of a nanolathe, I use this.” She focused and extended her wrist tendrils, which writhed around in the air like a small set of snakes. “They inject retroviral agents into a subject and rewrites their biology completely.”

        “Now that is fucking wicked!” Jez said, her eyes shining excitedly. “How good are you with it?”

        “Welllll,” Sarah said, grinning slowly, her hair flexing slightly. “I happen to know that I can make a mean surface-to-space plasma defense bug. I call them Bob! Butt of Boom! C-Cause the plasma. It. Uh. It comes out of their butt.”

        Jez flung up both of her hands, curling her middle and her ring finger down while extending her pinkie and her pointer finger, creating a crude approximation of a bull’s horns. She slammed her head up and down, her arms wagging in the air. “Righteous!”

        Sarah felt a bit better. “And once we get to your colony-”

        “Home,” Mik said. “A colony exists to extract resources from a planet for an authority back home. It’s inherently undemocratic and immoral to just...set up shop on someone else’s real estate.”

        “...you just set up shop here...” Sarah said, slowly.

        “No,” Mik said, shaking her head. “We were invited. We didn’t name this place.”

        Mik had timed it perfectly. The three of them emerged from a copse of trees and onto a broad flat plateau that rose from the thick, gray-green gasses that fogged the lower jungles. Here, there was something that took Sarah completely aback. Rather than an orderly set up of buildings and starships and corporate logos, the settlement she saw was large and anarchic. Some buildings were sleek. Others blocky. Many of them were covered in greenery and leaves. Several of them were in the midst of changing their shape from one form to another – blocks rotating and slotting and changing position. But standing at the edge of the place, speaking to one another with a casual, relaxed attitude, were a group of humans and what was unmistakably an alien.

        “They did,” Mik said, pointing to the alien.

        And the alien turned to look at them.

        And she was undeniably a Pro-Tas.

***

        Sarah sat in the meeting hall of Haven with several guns aimed at her head, her ankles and her wrists bound together, and considered that, hey, this was still a better than the last time she had met a Pro-Tas. Though, really, what she was really kicking herself for was never asking what the Pro-Tas warrior who had found her was named . But if he had survived the destruction of the Excalibur  (and god, that made her guts knot with worry), then he’d be able to clear this up. Assuming he arrived in time.

        But even that idea was getting a tiny bit frayed as the leaders of Haven shouted at one another.

        There were twelve people in the room, each one covered with different symbols. Some had the hammer and sickle, some had roses, some had a black circle with two jagged lines through it and the words ‘Tesla Exeunt’, a few had blacklight tattoos that formed words in a language that Sarah didn’t speak. But it had the same letters as English, so she was pretty sure it was French or Spanish. She hadn’t learned enough of either, though she could swear in Portuguese.

        “L'Laya is right!” one of the men with the hammers and sickles said, slamming his palms down on the table. “We can’t take the risk. If she’s been co-opted by an alien organism like the Claw, then she’s ludicrously dangerous. Maybe more dangerous than the corps!”

        “We cannot let paranoia guide our decisions,” the woman with the rose emblazoned on her chest said, shaking her head. “Haven is founded on mutual cooperation and understanding between every faction.”

        “Booo!” A woman who was hanging by her legs from a rafter that snaked across the ceiling spoke up. She was dressed entirely in black and wore a kind of cloth mask covering. “Centrist bootlicker.”

        “Oh shut up!” the rose wearer snapped.

        “Annie’s right,” the guy with the spanish tattoos said, his voice thickly accented with German linguistic patterns. A series of matte black orbs floated around his head like a halo of ominousness. “We can’t listen to the leader of the DSA faction – leader. They might as well be fucking capitalists.”

        “I don’t see the entire Action First Front here, Miguel!” the rose wearer said, thrusting her finger at him.

         “What are these camera drones chopped liver or something?” Miguel asked, gesturing to the orbs.

        “You were still chosen to rep for them!” The rose wearer said.

        “Guys?” Sarah asked.

        “I say we put it to a cross factional vote,” the guy with the Tesla insignia on his arm said. “Each faction votes their own way-”

        “Or we can direct action the alien bitch,” the black clad woman said, still dangling. “She arrived in a frigging battle ship, I say we punt her into the sun before her friends show up and step two of their evil as shit plan happens. Do you really think the pukes who nuked the Chicago commune would hesitate to work with the fucking Tyranids?”

        “Can I just-” Sarah tried to get a word in edgewise – but that had brought out a new line of shouting. The shouting devolved when the girl who was hanging from the ceiling – Annie – dropped down and started to punch Miguel in the side of the head when Miguel, his face red and his tone growing more blustering, admitted to the leader of the DSA faction (whose name had yet to be called out in the furor) had a point. Sarah closed her eyes. But before she could tear herself out of her restraints, a hissing roar filled the room and shut everyone up.

        Sarah snapped her eyes open and saw the Pro-Tas woman had one of her arm-mounted energy blades activated and snarling. She had been standing in the back of the room – in the shadows. Sarah honestly wondered if it was a Pro-Tas trait to simply be hard to notice, or if it was just because they were being compared to humans. Though, right now, she was comparing L'Laya to the male she had met. Like him, she was tall  compared to a human. But where he had been broad shouldered and bulky, she was more svelte and thin. Her face was all bony ridges and smooth planes, but she lacked the mouth covering cloth that the male counterpart had. For a few seconds, Sarah thought she didn’t have a mouth. But she saw it there, a very thin line that expanded out into two other lines, like a Y, indicating some kind of...mandible.

        But L'Laya didn’t open her mouth to speak. Instead, her voice came from the translation orb that hovered slowly around her – like her male counterpart, though hers was considerably more dinged and dented with age. “I am convinced that the hybrid is safe,” she said, her voice sounding remarkably British for a space alien.

        The bickering humans all looked at her.

        “Why?” the rose wearer asked.

        “I have been watching her,” L'Laya said. “In the time it has taken us to have this argument and debate, she could have infected the entire room with any number of biomorphic viruses. You would have all been so much biomatter to her.” She cocked her head. “Instead, she has shown something that no subordinated hybrid would ever show.”

        “What?” Annie asked.

        “She’s been showing complete and utter confusion,” L'Laya said. “Hybrids are used to understand their entire culture before they are used to then destroy it. A hybrid that worked with the Eye would not only know you, she would also be able to manipulate you more effectively into fighting one another, or siding with her.”

        “How do you know she’s not manipulating us now?” Miguel asked, subtly elbowing Annie away from him.

        “Simple,” L'Laya said. “Any hybrid manipulation would be to get us into this room, so she could work. That was why I was ready to kill her.” She chuckled, softly, her translation orb bobbing. “Instead, she has been trying to get a word in edgewise for the past five minutes.”

        Every faction leader looked at Sarah.

        Sarah gulped.

        “I was just going to ask,” she said, slowly. “What the absolute fuck are any of you fucking talking about? I thought you were all communists!”

        Every faction leader exchanged a glance with one another.

        Then every single faction leader, at the same time, began to shout an explanation at Sarah as loudly as possible – their conversations overlapping and flowing over one another like a river. Sarah thought that was bad. Then they started to shout at one another as their explanations rammed into one another like trashbergs hitting cargo ships. Soon, Miguel was trying to get Annie off his back as Annie shouted: “How dare you call me an ancap, you piece of shit! Ancaps are just feudalists with extra fucking steps !” And, between every word, she punched him in the side of the head as he wheeled around and around and around, trying to get her off him.

        Sarah sighed.

        “Forget I asked,” she muttered to herself.

        A cheap plastic chair flew past her shoulder and shattered apart against the wall.