Author's note: This story is presented in two parts, Ascent and Descent. Although the form of the written word requires that one section follow another, they can be read in any order.

Ascent

Emil arrived on Venus under a storm of human misfortune. The looming threat of famine sent prayers crashing out the windows; consternation grew so thick in the air that the rats not felled by starvation could have swam at eye level through Kansai's tunnels.

Seven days of chemically induced somnolence bled out of Emil's mind while she sat in her cockpit. Her body pulled her consciousness from the mire of a nightmare, wrapped under the delicate kudzu of IV lines, data cables, defibrillators, and fiber optics; if she dared weave herself any further into the cloister of the ship's control system, Athena might have struck her atop the head with a shuttle. Her ears popped as the cabin altitude equalized with Kansai's fetid ambient air.

When he was still alive, Cultri told Emil to always note her nightmares, for terror is a second pair of eyes. The needling dread of that nightmare remained in her extremities while she reached a finger behind her head and unlatched the network connector in her skull, inner ear jostled by the grinding of metal on bone. The wetware status system on her laptop chirped unhappily.

The Kaghan's wife cornered Emil before she even left the airport. The ease of Marta's youth sloughed from her skin like leprosy, leaving behind a landscape of rib bones and desperation. Rationing had its hands around their throats until they had started to suffer like ascetic monks for want of a meal, she explained, they had nothing to eat but the dust of the planet, she could feel her stomach growling in her teeth; if their prayers were too quiet for Aphrodite or Ištar it was due to the hunger pangs stealing the air from their lungs. Marta had to grab fistfuls of her silk dress in her hands and hike up the hem while she led Emil to the datacenter. The engineering teams were striking over the rations, and with no one to battle the ferocious appetite of Venus's rust, a dozen rotting pipes across the settlement had started to belch their contents onto the concrete floors. Men shuffled beside them in the narrow halls, the wet linen of their expressions stretched thin over battered cheekbones. Stinking water sloshed at their feet.

Part 1

Dirges of Silence

The week before I turned ten, my grandmother sold her mortuary in the suburbs of Albuquerque and placed me under her wing following the death of my parents. Before the mortuary’s closure, she stole slivers of youth from her untimely dead and ate them with her tea, an act that curried no favors with the divine who saw the youthfulness of the dead as their birthright. To thumb the scales of sin, she would lay awake on cloudless nights as to let the moon confess its sins to her before forwarding its contrition to god. With the rising of every sun, angels would tally her sins while she washed her hair, and even the most captious among the heavens would count the sum as zero.

On long and unwelcome winter nights when the stars carried my weeping from my own lips to her ears, she would come into my room and tell me a tale, one she swore on the name of her mother to be as real as my tears:

Part 1

Synaptic Heterostasis

I arrived home from Las Vegas to find the fledgling miasma of unease hanging in the air. Two days ago, videos began circulating on pro-Ukranian Telegram channels of a Russian soldier, most likely one of Pytor’s “stalkers”, somewhere near the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Per Svoboda, who sent me the link via email:

Part 1

Bodily-Self Neuromatrix

The synchronicities of the past week have proven too uncanny to ignore. The autopsy of the split-head man, as I had come to call him, had momentarily drawn my attention away from XDPH, until I recalled I recalled the notes in Hero’s fMRI data: anomalous activation of the amygdala and pineal gland.

Out of habit I checked her charts again; despite the passage of weeks since her disappearance, someone in the ER, another explorer who had found himself as drawn to her as I, had left a small note: past cEEG data resembles a nightmare? PGO waves suggest sleep, but she was awake at the time. No explanation.

It was another week before I found a specialist who would respond to my emails. Dimakis Katzouros, a doctor of experimental psychosomnology at the University Of Nevada, provided an alternate explanation:

Counter-Insurgency Against The Hyperreal

Part 1

Sestos popped a tab of Aella and downed it with an open can of Red Bull jammed into the center console. He made a face that suggested the drink had spent more time in the car than he assumed.

Hero’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the wheel. “It’s your plug, man. Is that really necessary?”

“They’re everywhere.” He said with a tone that landed somewhere between childhood awe and addict paranoia. He handed another pill to Leander. Hero sighed heavily.

They pulled off of main street and into a decaying corner of Bosque occupied by chain-link fences and pre-recession era Ford pickups nesting in dirt lawns. Hero parked on the curb and cranked the parking brake. She made some comment about keeping the two in line but it was too late, Sestos was up in the stratosphere.

Part 1

Apportioning Of Teleology

Hero stuffed a towel down the bathroom sink before filling it with water and dunking her head under. The cold water gnawed her cheeks, shocking some recalcitrant fragment of her animal brain into submission. It was always momentary—that stinking creature in her head slinking off to dry itself, never leaving, never ceasing. On cold nights it would return to maul her thoughts.

Part 1

Theophany Engineering

Sestos awoke at three AM, showered, and downed 200mg of Modafinil and 70mg of methylphenidate with a can of Red Bull and a protein bar. He had packed a bag the previous night—boltcutters, night vision goggles, a hand-drawn map, and a Beretta M9 fitted with an oil filter suppressor. Just in case.

Part 1

The Infection of Our Ontologies

God beamed an eight-hundred milligram excursus on the writhing of shadows directly into Leander’s brain, between the eyes, and he was suffering. His mouth was as dry as New Mexico itself, his skin no less hot, and he laid spread out on a ratty, dog-eaten couch while he waited for the spectral insectoids outside his window to come in and spear him on their tusks. Grasped by a powerful and silent horror, he wondered what rotting seas could have begot the crawling phantasms that vermiculated from his walls, filling the dark spaces of his rented suburban home normally ruled by ants and cardboard boxes. With great effort he leaned forward, grasping for his vape pen.

Part 1

Anomalous fMRI Activation

My Jon Doe lifted himself from the heavy shackles of death and let the crows carry him to my house. After a dinner that arrived in a Styrofoam box and a few hours of unpleasant dreams, I awoke in the harsh daylight hours—I was still rendered nocturnal by my work—to see him stumbling across my bedroom, his gait torpid with rigor mortis. He was as he appeared to me the previous night, completely naked, a white sheet veiling his head, wearing a beard of coagulated blood that ran from chin to navel. He clambered onto the foot of my bed, where I lay forced onto the mattress as if held by an insurmountable weight; he gazed at me with unseeing eyes, gaped jaw visible against the linen pressed to his face. He raised his arm and pointed to his left, as if asking for something out of his reach. The suffocating weight released itself from my chest and I flailed out of my sheets, but he was gone.

Forty-two years after it started, the life of Nabû-zuqup-kēna unraveled under the Babylonian sun, returning to the cool waters of the Tigris in a spray of crimson. The man in question, a priest who hung his head before the idol of Marduk, heard a distant god whisper to him in a dream, a god whose name passed into history before mortal men laid the first bricks of Ur. After this fitful vision, Nabû-zuqup-kēna copied seven words onto a clay tablet moistened with the urine of a virgin sow, covered the tablet with another layer of clay to serve as an envelope, then sent it north on the back of a horse. His oneiric promise was thus fulfilled. The priest, hearing nothing but the bruit of the first three words calling him to the desert of his ancestors, used a stolen blade to peel the skin from his chest and sever the sanguine cords of his beating heart, as one would pluck a pomegranate from a tree.

Outside Sippar, at the borders of the Babylonian kingdom, the tablet demanded new custodianship. The young messenger dropped it onto the bricks of the city gate, shattering the unfired outer envelope. Sunlight cut deep shadows into the next three words, syllables that owed their heritage to a thousand dead scribes, to the first merchants and their tallies, to the laments for Ur wailed at a mourning moon in the languages of antiquity. The messenger extended his tongue from his mouth before falling chin-first onto a rock as to sever the organ from his head. He swallowed the resulting blood, then ran through the streets of Sippar before impaling himself upon the horns of a bull.

A priestess, Šima-ilat, saw the grizzly death unfold and covered the tablet with a linen cloth before placing it under her arm. Šima-ilat, one-third a woman and two-thirds a demon following a night in her adolescence when the northern winds clawed their way into her spine, heard the tellurian words whisper to her like the tuneful cry of a shorebird. How could something so wicked sing such honeyed songs?

She knew she should cast the thing into the Tigris, but its chant was too loud, her curiosity too desperate. She had to witness it. After reading the seventh word, the remaining third of her soul carved by Ištar fled from her liver and drowned itself in her stomach, taking her voice with it. She stumbled past the city gates, and flung herself upon a priest; Šima-ilat then bit off the fifth finger of her left hand, split the bone between her teeth, and used the shard as a stylus to press her prophecy into clay. The priest, reading words glazed by blood, did not know if confusion or horror came to him first.

Above the meek cradle of the Earth, Šamaš, daylight and justice incarnate, pulled himself from his divine throne and mournfully threw a lion's hide over the sun. Somewhere in the north of the world, a million tongues tasted the terroir of Šima-ilat's fear. They draped themselves in a shroud of tears before pouring down the mountains.