Reviews

I brush the non-existing dust off the skirt of my pink tulle dress and scratch my left wrist. My small, glittering shoe finally crosses the line. The scanner in the floor reads my approach and the tall doors of riveted, lacquered wood spread open. I enter the Hall of Fathers.

I arrive in the street cramped with huge lit signs of various shops and restaurants. There is a wrapper stuck to the sole of my trekking boot already. My shoulders ache – the trip from the airport included a lot of walking. A smell of hot bibimbap comes from the nearest door, enticing me to go in, take off my backpack – which is heavy with everything I own – and order a bottle of soju on top of everything.

I feel it before I manage to see it and almost drop the coffee cup into the sink. I could nearly mistake it for the scald of the too hot water if it didn’t run up my forearm instead of down. It is rather precise as well, like tiny piranhas biting their way along the thin paths, very artistically. And when I look down – there it is. Or better say isn’t. Parts of my tattoo gone, vanished without a trace.

The crack on the glass of the observation deck was branching fast, turning into a cave painting. Panic seized my heart, and my legs wouldn’t move to reach for the alarm button. There I was, glued to the floor in my customary observer’s position, knowing what awaited me and yet doing nothing to prevent it, to save myself.

I can feel the layers of threads, but behind them the outer envelope is rock-hard. Each time I try to get through, my thin legs are sucked into the silk of the cocoon. Each time I pull back in horror, scared they would get trapped inside. Yet I cannot stop. It gets more and more cramped in here, and the air is stale, sparse. My new body wraps around me too tightly.

Yrid was escorted down the long white corridor by a lovely blonde-haired man. His features looked even more perfect when she tried to put her own face next to his in her mind’s eye – the aligned symmetry, the enhanced colours of the irises, the glow of the smoothest skin she’d ever seen. Not that she was very much surprised – every publicity material about Karma Inc. mentioned the high clinic standards, not only when it came to R&D and equipment, but the whole aesthetics.

Again and again the fourth dimension went crazy at that particular moment and the time portal spewed him out wrong minutes or parallel hours earlier or later. He recalibrated his warp-watch time and again; he didn’t have the additional gravitational compensators on him, and he was afraid to search for them unless he be carried away in the ever-splitting flow, dragged off by routines set to him by the source mind craving complexity.

Clari’s fingers ran along the dots of the book. Ze paused pondering over the word. Carmine, the dots said. First, it was the usual definition hir mind suggested: bright red colour, pigment, hex code #D70040 – empty notions ze had learnt by heart in false hope it would give hir orientation. Then suddenly, where a week ago there was the uniformity of blackness, a fountain of juicy vividness spurted up in hir imagination.

The fifth phalanges of Teh-Mi-Ja’s first and second opposed fingers bent to twist the card. She paused millimetres before the picture would be revealed and allowed herself to guess.

I woke up on the beach, my body stiff and stinging from the salt. As I rose on my elbows, the crystal shell encapsulating me began to fall off.

I picked up a burnt rock and weighed it on my palm. The wind ruffled my feathers…

I looked up at Aidan, his bearded profile dark and bulky against the white hospital wall. He had never seemed that big to me before.

His dark-blue fins pushed off the air, caught the current, allowing Yleeng to soar in the direction of the mountains.

Lara-3 followed the hidden path and opened the encrypted letter, checking it for viruses first.

Lilium Mortis gaped with their open muzzles at me.

The chiffon skirts and the heavy bra, reinforced with jungling coins, felt new on my synthetic skin.