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obstet.
correcting their willful omission and giving you a proper physical description of Mycroft Canner.
The Mycroft you remember from the news was lean, all muscle like a starving scavenger.
Their famous hat (and even I was surprised to learn it came
They said there was no Beggar King to command the Servicers, but the sight of that hat makes the others snap to attention as surely as a crown.
Even in Hell they’re stunned to find an angel among them, willing to be as much a guardian as a fallen angel can.
Mycroft called their killings a demonstration of a liberty our era had not realized we possessed, proof of history’s progress if seventeen deaths were enough to shock the world; historically, seventeen deaths is a good
Human Beast could exist back when the Beast was like a craftsman in an age of mass production, negligible beside the infinitely greater evils: Democide and War. There before the cameras Mycroft preached that, in these days of peace when we choose our Hive and values for ourselves, human individuals finally have the chance to be the worst thing in the world, and the right to be proud of our choice if we are not. That was the first time I fell in love with anyone outside my bash’.
My crush aside, I always say a killer can smell a killer, and with yours truly on the news every five minutes, Mycroft had surely scented me by now.
Ockham
“Yes, Məəəer Saneer,” in Mycroft’s signature vague diction which lets you think they’re saying ‘Member’ but underneath it’s really ‘Master’ leaking out.
as one learns from the obituaries of the wealthy perverts Mycroft used to prostitute themself to, raising money to help other Servicers, if you sleep with Mycroft Canner you don’t live long
My kidnapping on March twenty-seventh,
won’t repeat, and a lot about gender. Gender they called a universal language which we’re all supposed to pretend we can’t read.
I don’t blame the parents who made me and Ockham rivals for O.S. (it made us stronger),
a Lifedoll model made me a child star,
I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world. If you aren’t a Humanist it’s because you think something different.
will not let Jehovah Mason undo the system which (as Mycroft sacrificed so much to prove) gives us the right at last to be proud of what we choose to be.
Karl Schwarzschild corresponded with Einstein from the trenches and deduced the existence of black holes while rotting knee-deep in muck; if Schwarzschild had lived they might have accelerated physics by fifty years, enabled Mukta two generations earlier, or given the Nazis nukes.
warmonger Tully Mardi:
Perry held his tongue. This the first time you have seen him take the stage, “the Outsider” as you have heard the others call him at Madame’s, Europe’s Second-Choice Prime Minister, Casimir Perry.
But Cato’s suicide attempts precede our hits quite regularly.
Esmerald Revere.” Outsider Casimir Perry rubbed his chin, in need of shaving. “I know that name.” “Our late sensayer, Prime Minister,” Ockham prompted. “The one who realized what we were doing, and couldn’t handle it.”
“Tai-kun honors me as a father,” Andō answered, darkness clearing from his face as he put it into words. “And Ganymede is one of Tai-kun’s bash’parents.” The Duke President frowned. “Bash’sibling is closer, despite our age difference, but yes, we rise from the same bash’.
But deaths are different, for Tai-kun, absolutely and infinitely different.”
‘Prince’ Mason is not a Humanist, and has no authority over O.S.”
“I’m calling a hit,” he said. Ockham’s eyes grew round as planets. “A hit now, Prime Minister?”
“The Cousins are toppling, not just weakening, toppling, the whole Hive.
Cousins’ Feedback Bureau Chief Darcy Sok
The Feedback Bureau is the heart of the Hive.
It doesn’t matter they’re the second-largest Hive, after a blow like this they’ll shrink to smallest in no time,
“Whatever the cause, the Cousins failing would mean one point seven billion Members seeking a new Hive.
Do you really think the system can endure if the Masons slurp up the Cousins and make the Emperor dictator
There is no return if MASON takes a true majority.
Should I share that scene too with you, reader? The gentler version of what Carlyle may be about to face? It was long ago, my first day as a slave, the day I donned my Servicer uniform, still hostile in my heart to the changes that were remaking me, and unused to coming as a suppliant.
young and fierce Chevalier dragged me inside, and hurled me at the feet of Brother Dominic, seventeen then and not yet ordained. How did kind Fate have me find him? Naked in his cell, his youth-firm breasts and hips just starting to swell with Venus’s fertility,
God, his pet beasts squabbled, competing to lick the meat-sweet monthly drippings from his cunt.
She fought, not to rise, not even to stop retching, but just to breathe. ‘She,’ Mycroft? For Carlyle thou meanest ‘he.’
“How did you know I was a Deist? Did Jehovah Mason tell you? Is that their power? Some kind of telepathy?”
“No commandments to follow, no angels to fear, and all religions are equally valid in the eyes of thy vague God, so thou dost not even have to say that anybody else is wrong.
“Stop this right now!” Carlyle tried to rise, but slumped back into the corner, barely strong enough to raise her head. “This isn’t the Eighteenth Century, it’s the Twenty-Fifth, and there are rules! You can’t lure people into your house on false pretenses, you can’t wear a costume that declares your religion publicly, and only my sensayer gets to talk to me about my religion!”
Fifty years ago half the Hives had female leaders, fifty years ago the Seven-Ten lists were always different, and fifty years ago this building was a music conservatory.”
“Reawakened, not re-created—the old dragon but slept. They did not finish it off, thy ancestors, after their surface victory, they did not chase the worm to see how deep it coiled.”
Since the worst of both sides in the Church War were also those that separated the sexes most, fear wedded gender to religion’s poison in the survivors’ minds.
Suddenly neutered dress and speech were mandatory to proclaim one’s allegiance to the ‘good guys,’ and anyone who used skirts and ties and ‘he’s and ‘she’s—even in nontraditional ways—invited the label ‘zealot.’
The more people insist that feminism has won, the more they blind themselves to its remaining foes.”
“Thou brokest thy sacred oath,” the monk jabbed, “because thou didst not trust thy God enough to let Providence judge whether the victim should live or die. A Deistic God asks practically nothing of His priests, but still thou hast managed to betray Him. Very impressive.”
“He has no navel.” Carlyle choked. “What?”
Thy God must be perfectly fair, and a fair Clockmaker would not violate His own rule to show Himself to an unworthy fallen priest. Am I right?”
“Yes, of course I always wanted God to make an exception for me, to show Themself. I wanted it more than anything else in the world. But I couldn’t ask for God to be so unfair, to come to me when They didn’t to so many others. I didn’t deserve it, not after what I did. I still don’t.”
