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I got a slow rollin low Ain't a mother would want me Done got me so down, bent out of round Don't know my head from my toes. Ain't a hand here to hold Ain't a shoulder to cry on Ain't a lesson to learn or a corner to turn Twixt the dyin and me Lord I wanted to be Something you could depend on Lawdy lord woe is me Ain't a body would care. Waylon Jennings – Slow Rollin’ Low
Lycanthropic survival instincts Embrace the beast and shun the weak Awake the primal one that sleeps inside Or feel the shiver running through your spine My hands are painted red My future's painted black I can't recognize myself, I've become someone else My hands are painted red Schizophrenic amnesia Bid goodbye to all you knew and loved Forget the only life that you knew outside They bought the ticket, now you take the ride Lamb of God – 512
All across the world, philosopher scientists united, having finally discovered the Ultimate Secret: the meaning of life, the meaning of existence, and the meaning behind the universe, all of which amounted to pretty much the same thing.
You will always remember things just as they have always been, even if the way things have been has only been true for a day.
A great deal of change can be enacted simply by putting different minds into different people occupying different positions. A small alteration in personality of a single individual can change the course of history.
Some people may never be directly touched by the Reshuffle, and some people’s memories will be rewritten over and over as their brains or the brains of their friends and family find themselves with new occupants.
the Ultimate Discovery would be seen to be bogus, a piece of nonsense so derided that people thought it was a wonder it had ever been taken seriously, and noted both the ‘discovery’ and the resulting reactions as an unpleasant black spot on modern history. The philosopher scientists were blamed wholeheartedly, and they in turn blamed each other, and all tried not to broadcast their own personal shame. It was almost perfect. And it would have been, if not for one oversight. That oversight was one man. He was Reshuffled, but his memories were left more-or-less intact, and his mind was sent to
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He woke up standing with a gun to his head. Desert plain, sand-coloured rocks, a stunted shrub of a tree. The touch of hot metal against his temple. There were two men in front of him, also with guns, smiling toothy, dirty smiles.
The men looked like mercenaries from an old age. They were dirty and ragged, yellowed cloth and brown belts and heads covered in bristles. They leered and snarled at him.
The gun against his head felt all too real. It seemed to be heating up under the glare of the sun. His hands were tied behind his back, and the rough knots bit into his skin. It was then when he saw the lilac sky, a bright, alien colour that ringed the sun’s circle in purple flame. He looked down, blinking as velvet motes danced over the sand and the rocks. He saw high boots and pants the colour of bark. His hair felt different, his face felt different. His whole body felt different. He was . . . stronger. ‘Wait,’ he said, licking his lips, trying to understand the voice. The accent seemed
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He squinted back up at the day’s light, that soft white-purple haze that quilted the land. The terrain lay about him like a bruise. There was no horizon; everything led to one slope or another. The astonishment of it all, the incredulity taming itself through a rising awe, was almost enough to make him forget the gun.
The gun clicked, ready for the end. He wanted to say, ‘There’s been a huge misunderstanding.’ He wanted to say, ‘I’ve just woken up like this and I have no fucking idea where I am who I am and more precisely who I am to you and you’re about to kill me, possibly forever unless this really is the biggest most expensive whopper of a trick ever played on someone.’ He wanted to say a lot of things, a lot of things that wouldn’t have done him one bit of good, and yet in the end all that came out of his new mouth was, ‘Wait,’ again.
he saw the arrow; it whistled in and went through the eye of the beardiest. And before he knew what was happening he had charged forward into the man remaining, headbutting him to the ground. He straightened and stamped on the man’s fingers, kicking the gun away, then kicking down hard on his neck. He put all his weight on one foot, crushing the man’s windpipe, then hopped his tied wrists over one leg, so his hands were now hooked around his crotch. He quickly switched feet before the man could draw a breath, and did the same movement with the other leg.
He’d gone for a man and he’d killed him in a matter of movements – movements he’d never made before. What was worse, he didn’t feel like he thought he would, those times when he’d lay in bed and wonder what it would be like to kill another human. He tried to summon the shock, the numbness or hysteria, the overpowering guilt and regret, the anger . . . none of it came. It was as though there was a new part of him, a part that dominated and reacted to the murder with a mere shrug of the shoulders.
His archer was a she, a woman – that much was obvious right from the get-go. He didn’t think he’d seen anyone like her, except possibly as some kind of fantasy art back on . . . back in . . . back where he came from. She was an Amazonian: that was his first thought. He was taller in this new body, he could tell, but even though he wasn’t yet sure of his own height, she might have been his equal. It balanced the lurid curvature of her caramel body with an intimidating aura of dominance. A long black bow hung around her, its black string tight across her cleavage.
That’s my name. Or rather, that’s the name of this body. Jay . . . Jay Wulf. The name came to him, tumbling up from somewhere inside.
He watched her walk away from him. He didn’t know if she was swaying or he was. He could smell blood on the breeze. She picked up speed, and soon she was running over slope and scree, arrows lightly quivering. He marvelled at the way she moved, like she was half elf half . . . panther. Her ebony form seemed to fade in and out of the rocks, the black and brown of the straps and scraps of her clothing the perfect camouflage. Her black hair lay as still as a dark pool, and crossed the land like a shadow of a great bird. I wonder how many men have spent too long looking at her, he wondered, and
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He stood still, bewildered. Who am I?! Jay Wulf. That’s who I am. That’s who I am in this world. I’ll find out more about me, what kind of person I am, but I’m starting to get an idea. I’ll find out everything. Where I am, who I am, who she is, and what the fuck happened to me. And how to get home, and back to my old body, said a smaller voice in him.
He’d discarded what he could only call his shirt – he supposed once upon a time it was a distant relation to the colour white – and wrapped it around his waist, after sawing away his bonds on a rock.
Whenever he thought of her, he got this slightly sick feeling, low down in him. A kind of bristling, impatient warmth that was nothing to do with the sun. He wondered how much of this feeling was him alone, and how much belonged to this body.
He inspected for the hundredth time what he could make out of his chest and arms. He couldn’t stop – it’s not every day that the body you’ve grown up with, grown wearyingly used to seeing every day in the mirror or whenever you look down, is suddenly entirely different and novel. Past his hands – which were solid red gloves of skin, trailing past his wrists in flames – most of his skin seemed tan coloured, except where the same doomy scarlet marked him in its twisted abstractions and patterns, if patterns there were. Burn victim? He wondered. Pigmentation . . . port-wine birth marks? Somehow
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The men had been a single colour, all hairy and beardy. They looked very barbarous, but he figured they could have passed for half normal Earth-people if you’d stripped them (which he hadn’t). That was until he found the second set of ears half hidden by their hair.
Little fragments of Jay Wulf were revealing themselves to his attention, as though in a queue, all waiting to come into play at their intended time. The pigmentation, the strange pendant hung from his neck, the hair shaved at the sides and long at the top. The array of muscles that shone tan and red and purple in the light. The gathered weight in his loins. The holster on his belt. And what does that tell me? It tells me I’m the kind of man who is used to carrying a gun. He’d never shot a gun before. Hell, he’d never even handled one. But now he clutched it with undeniable familiarity, the
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A tiger slunk out from a boulder. It was black with red stripes; not the red of his skin but a bold, bright scarlet that seemed like jags of red lightning over the fur of the night. The claws, even the teeth were red. It moved calmly, carefully, sweeping its tail in the dust.
Even now a whimper wouldn’t come. Even at my own demise I’m a hard-ass, apparently. Not a man for whom whimpers come easy.
Cats never had the most tell-tale of expressions, but he had never seen such a curious look to one. That it was angry, that was certain, but there was more than that, hidden behind the impassive features . . . Annoyance? Frustration? And . . . confusion? Wonder? The tiger was staring at him with wide imperious eyes as though Jay was a marvel, a profoundly irritating source of amazement, something it’d never really seen before.
He stood up. The big cat did too. ‘I’d like my gun back,’ he said. The tiger shook its head slowly.
The man with the green eyes raised his head. ‘An oversight,’ he repeated simply. The man with the green eyes stood stiff. ‘We don’t quite understand sir. Not yet. But we’re missing someone. He’s inaccessible – completely off the Grid.’ The man with the green eyes nodded. ‘It has happened before.’ The man with the green eyes looked a little surprised. ‘It has, sir?’ The man with the green eyes looked at the man with the green eyes. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Six hundred, sir.’ ‘You are very young.’ ‘I know sir. I’m good at what I do, sir.’ ‘When you get as old as me, you see a lot of mistakes in the
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Any fool could tell you not to fall asleep beside a wild tiger, but Jay Wulf had gone and done just that.
His last thoughts were nothing concrete, merely a spiral of tigers of all colours, and the report of guns everywhere, and of alien technology, lasers and leviathan ships. And then just the desert, and the woman Sav coming from out the sand, swaying towards him, and how his insides breathed for her, how he ached. Eventually the tiger closed its own eyes and began to purr next to him in sleep.
The mind of Jay Wulf was a mess. It stank – sweet smells and sour, all carrying a familiarity that he could not put his finger on. There was clutter everywhere; he moved through a room filled with pelts and ripped silk, with leather half cut into holsters and saddles. There were bloodstains on the floorboards and hung on the half rotting walls were guns and knives and swords. The furniture was a hodgepodge of old and new, and was piled high with trinkets and semi-valuable treasures. There was what looked like an old ship’s wheel resting against the wall, almost the size of him. A nearby fire
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Shootin that fella off you and meetin your fine self got my blood up and my dick hard.’ She stared at him in disbelief and anger. ‘You're turned on preventin rape by way of murder?’ Jay laughed huskily. ‘Sounds a lot worse the way you put it. I wouldn't put too much by it, though. My dick is always hard. It gets hard at someone openin a door, gets hard at another closin it.’
Jay picked his way back among the rocks, his throat aching. I need drink soon. The tiger has to keep hydrated too. I just wish that Sav woman hadn’t fucked off . . . no doubt a tendency to quickly fuck off has served her well in the past. She saved me, though. So that must mean at least one person is on my side. Somewhat. Unless she just wants to kill me herself at a later date.
He remembered the dream. Walking slowly amongst the room of junk and treasure, guns and blades and blood, the room of animal furs and naked, flattering ladies. Then he remembered what came after, and he knew that hadn’t been a dream, not really. It had been a memory.
His mind was screaming at him, but he wasn’t listening to it. He wasn’t listening to it because his throat was screaming louder. On hands and knees he shuffled through sand and along dusty rocks. The temperature was a little cooler now, but his head swam and he was starting to see dots that looked like a swarm of winged black demons coming down at him from far off in the sky.
There was a trough where a few horses were tied, right at the edge of town. They took turns to gulp it gratefully – taller horses than he’d ever seen before, and slightly . . . pointier. There was a white mare with these big lazy pools for eyes, an imperious red with dark socks, and an exotic looking stallion as black as pitch, with flaming scarlet hair that burst all about him. He looked at Jay as he approached, and seemed to nod. His hooves stamped the ground.
he sank to his knees and plunged his head into the trough. He barely noticed the taste of horse, only half-cared that the water was warm and had likely been sat out all day. Flies that sounded like fizzing soda hopped and skipped over his neck and shoulders, and he let them. Under the water his gullet moved as he swallowed.
‘What in the name of fuck are you tryin to do?’ said a shadow over him. Jay blinked. A man with a fat moustache and a bent hat was dragging him up to his feet. ‘I was thirsty,’ Jay said. ‘A lotta people get thirsty,’ said the man. ‘You know what they do? They go to the saloon. They don’t try’n drown ‘emselves in horse spit.’
‘I don’t know this place. At all.’ ‘Yeah, well. This place is called Nohaven.’ ‘It doesn’t sound too welcoming.’ ‘That’s cause it ain’t.’
‘I’ve already got a gun.’ Jay said. He pointed at his holster. The small-eyed man snorted. ‘Call that a gun? I bet you could lay that piece of crap right against my forehead and pull the trigger and two seconds later we’d both be still standing wonderin where the bullet went.’
The people were a motley scuffery of beaten jackets and shirts, plain half-cut dresses and makeshift skirts. Farmer garbs and fighting suits. Every outfit, every look seemed a hodgepodge, a DIY of appearance. They were everyone, it seemed: blacks and browns and reds, half-and-halves and the quartered, those whose pink or grey complexions were tinted or mottled a nearly seaweed green. There were the tattooed and there were the disfigured. There were even a couple of chalk-like figures – god knows how they didn’t tan under this sun.
A woman with lashes that curled out far from her face like spikes watched him, amber eyes flecked with crimson. As he drew closer he saw her carelessly tickling the two dozen knives that ringed her belt. A younger girl sat in the shadow of an overhang with an old man grinding blades. She looked about fifteen, with exceptionally pale blue eyes. Her hair hung white in four pigtails, and she stroked a gun that rested its butt on the ground and could well be nearly as tall as her standing. The old man glanced up, spat and went back to his work. His hair was tangled all the way down his back, and
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‘Erm, whiskey,’ Jay said. ‘Please,’ he added, and then regretting it as the barrel-bodied woman gave him a funny look. He watched her pour it in front of him, a chest like two diving bells resting on the bar-top. He knew the word that had actually come out of his mouth wasn’t “whiskey”. The glass of muddy gold before him was only the nearest translation. He hoped it was nicer than neat whiskey; he’d only asked for the stuff to fit in, and could really have done with more water.
‘That’ll be three kings you owe.’ She affixed a tried-and-true don’t-fuck-with-me expression and puffed herself up, not that any more notice could have been given to that full-buttocked chest. She may have been shorter than most of the patrons there, but she sure as sin was wider – and deeper
‘I have no memory of who I am or where I am.’ He had quickly decided this was a better course of explanation than ‘I appear to be in a different body in a potentially alien land.’ ‘That’s unfortunate,’ she replied, dryly. ‘You don’t remember me, then?’ ‘I remember —’ he paused. ‘I remember scraps, just like half-formed ideas, or dreams. Many things seem faintly familiar. You, for instance. I feel I have this connection to you.
‘Well, the three brothers are, yes.’ ‘They were brothers? Oh.’ ‘So it’s just the dad left.’ ‘Shit.’ ‘I’d say he’s old and won’t be a bother, but he got their mother pregnant at twelve. That’s him twelve, I should say. She was a lot older and dead now. And he’s still going, leading his boys.’ ‘Can I talk to him about it?’ ‘He’s a murderous cunt and his three sons have just died. He won’t have heard about it yet, but he will. You had a hand in one, he’s gonna believe you had a hand in all three. What do you think?’ ‘I’ve really got enough to be worrying about. What did I do for them to want to
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The lilac sky had deepened and reddened to a rich magenta. The sun was hidden behind the peaked two-floored building signposted REST HOUSE, giving the edges of the dwelling a vibrant purple glow. It was on the other side of the street, and she steered him in its direction.
‘Do you not think it better to go someone where else? A place perhaps where I haven’t fucked the owner’s wife? Or sister, daughter, mother, horse, or any other relation of.’
‘Stop faffing, my horny little beast boy.’ Sav pinched his side and he yelped, dropping a coin. ‘All he wants is the money. Pay up and trouble over.’
That creature wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before. Those little black demon spots appeared again. They always danced away from him, seeming to be mocking him. The sky was purple today. He felt heavy, like he could sink right through the mattress. The bed propped him up only in the sense a still ocean propped up a floating body. I’m on another planet. I’m on another planet, and I’m not even me. Jay felt the room spin, and his eyes closed, but whether it was by his own volition or not he wasn’t sure.
