JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

Dai-oo-ika approached the glass cabinet slowly, its fungal green glow upon him. What was its relation to him? Brother? It felt more like… father. Creator. A god's god. He reached out his right hand and placed it flat against the surface. The brain's thoughts poured into his palm, flowed up his arm and into his flesh toward his own nexus of thought. He jolted a little at the strength of their connection, and the glass around his hand shattered. The nourishing solution began to leak out and patter on his feet. But Dai-oo-ika did not pay heed. He pressed his hand inside the cabinet, and now laid it upon the knotted brain tissue itself. The voice running into his arm turned to a bellow.

A stigmata-like hole opened in his palm of its own volition. The coiled brain matter started to unravel, to be sucked into the hungry mouth in his hand. It diminished in its frame as more and more fluid splashed free.

Like a dead parent's belongings packed away in an attic steamer trunk, Dai-oo-ika had compacted the inorganic material he could squeeze no sustenance from, but which he had not yet bothered himself with ejecting as waste product, into a cavity inside himself. This tight bundle included Dolly's clothing and crushed shoes. But he had not quite figured out what to do with her nanomites, being in that gray area between organic and inorganic, so as much as they had made his mind itch with their busy work he had tolerated them, accepted them as part of his evolving condition.

Now, they seemed to sniff the encephalon, and it aroused them in its abundance. The microscopic machine-animals raced through Dai-oo-ika's system, through his arm and into the brain tissues even as he drew them into himself. Then they began racing back and forth between the two entities, as if to help facilitate his absorption of the huge organ, a nest of eager worker ants. He had subconsciously altered their programming, or was it they who had gnawed away the membranes clouding his own programming? In any case, the nanomites worked at a frenzied pace to marry the two bodies together at the cellular level, a corps of wartime surgeons, incising and cauterizing, transplanting and mending with their tiny mandibles, tiny tool limbs.

The wires plugged into the brain were sucked into Dai-oo-ika's hand, as well. As with the other inorganic material he had drawn in, these were not dissolved and digested. Even when the last of the encephalon was gone, and only a little fluid pooled at the bottom of the frame, the wires still streamed out of his palm.

He slumped down heavily to the floor as if in a swoon, sitting in the puddle of amniotic solution like a drunken Buddha. His arm was still draped inside the frame but he was unmindful of the fangs of glass that pinned his wrist there. The other ends of the wires ran into relays that communicated with the little room's various computer stations. And now, all the monitors that had been showing colorful data or fizzing static or dead blackness flickered and revealed the same image. It was grainy, streaked with scratches and blips like damaged celluloid, but beneath this clutter Dai-oo-ika could see a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below were thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration. And he looked down upon them from a great height. For he was huge. He was their god.

Dai-oo-ika understood the cosmic web of Fate then. He understood that he and this brother/father had needed to become united (was it reunited? ) in order to both realize their potential. In order to fulfill their destinies.

On his vehicle's sound system Stake played a jazz piece called "Yesterdays" from Twentieth Century trumpet player Clifford Brown. It was melancholy, and melancholy music from any era or planet, for that matter, was all right by him. He was piloting the hovercar down a wide, multilane ramp into Punktown's subterranean sector.

Caren Bistro had told him that Brat Gentile belonged to a gang down here in Subtown. The B Level of Folger Street. "The Folger Street Somethings," she had said.

Above him now, a solid sky with clouds of steam hissing out of the crisscrossed network of pipes up there. Stake slowed the car as the ramp fed into a grid of streets and the early morning traffic along this one congealed to an ooze. Among the work-bound pedestrians walking along the sidewalk he spotted several that glowed a luminous blue. Each of them turned its head to smile directly at him. One of the translucent blue figures stood at the curb with her thumb sticking out as if to hitchhike, her long hair blowing dreamily. It was then that a whispery voice spoke to him inside his vehicle.

"Open your world to Seance Friends-for the strongest, clearest Ouija channels in Paxton." He had left the holographic hitchhiker behind him a moment ago, but now she stepped up to the curb ahead of him again, her eyes seeming to look into his. The voice went on, "Make a special friend who can tell you about the long past, or even about your own future."

"Bastards," Stake said. It was legal for such advertisements to intrude into one's sound system, justified as "ambient sound," like hearing someone else's radio blast from another car. The ad didn't replace his music, but overlapped it, and that was invasive enough. It continued with a testimonial: the voice of a young girl.

"My spirit guide told me I'll die before I'm twenty, so your next ghost friend could be me!" She giggled.

Stake shut his sound system off altogether.

Further along, he made his way through a neighborhood of gray-skinned, blue-turbaned Kalians. Tenements and shops had hung black banners outside, and there was a group of protestors that shouted at the passing vehicles. Several helmeted and armored riot forcers made sure they didn't overflow into the street itself to block traffic. Stake glanced out at their furious, black-eyed faces. "What's their problem now?" he muttered.

He remembered what Janice had told him about the Kalian deity called Ugghiutu. "Sort of the

Kalian God and Satan in one body." One of the so-called "Outsiders," exiled from this dimension but waiting to return to power. He thought of the former owners of Alvine Products, their lunatic plan to design and grow a horde of giant monsters to reclaim the universe.

Despite the strict religious beliefs of most Kalians, Stake had never encountered a neighborhood that didn't have its street gang, and he soon noted a cluster of Kalian boys who wore blue satin jackets to match their turbans, which they wore facing backwards. But these were not the gang kids he was searching for. He continued on, until he arrived at last on Folger Street.

Stake cruised along the entire length of the extensive street. When he finally reached what appeared to be its end, he turned around and came back from the other direction.

He didn't spot a single gang kid. That is to say, he saw no apparent gang outfits, and what was the point of being in a gang if you didn't flaunt it, announce it in some way, brazen and proud?

Stake didn't know the full name of the gang Gentile belonged to, but he thought he knew gang graffiti when he saw it. On the face of one tenement building, in between two windows, someone had sprayed a very large, stylized dog's head baring its fangs, in red paint that glowed like neon. Though they didn't exhibit any obvious gang peacockery, there were three tough-looking kids sitting on the tenement's front steps, apparently in no hurry to be off to school.

Stake found a parking spot along the curb a little ways up, and then backtracked to the tenement building on foot. With animal-keen instincts, the kids noticed his approach right away. He hadn't been able to think of any guise he might have called up, seated in his car and browsing through the faces on his wrist comp, in order to gain their confidence. Couldn't think of an actor's role he might adopt. And so he figured he'd just jump right into it without pretense.