1/12/24: Slipstream

Evelyn had some missing memories, and so did you:

Mark had been feeling good about himself lately. 

He had been a no-name film-maker, with barely an IMDB credit to his name. But then a clip from his new documentary about factory farming, “Silent Voices,” had unexpectedly gone viral, and for the past three weeks his phone had been ringing off the hook. 

Several producers - all big names within the industry - wanted to be involved in his next venture, involving fish farming practices. His movie was getting a nation-wide release. “Mark’s Meatless Mondays” was trending on Tiktok, and an internal memo from a leader in the meat industry had reported that sales were down by a low double-digit percentage. 

He was writing a reply to an email - his undergraduate alumni wanted him to speak at their graduation - when his doorbell rang.

He paused for a moment at the door, peering through the peephole. There had been an unusual number of solicitors recently. But it was just a woman, dressed in what looked like a military jumpsuit, hands held behind her back. 

He opened the door. 

“Mark Mason?” the woman said. She had a pleasant, if tense look on her face. 

“Yes?”

“My name is Evelyn Morris,” she replied. 

She held up her right arm, which was covered in gauze. She was missing her hand, Mark realized. 

“You owe me a limb,” she said. “We need to talk.”

Three weeks earlier. 

Evelyn had been on the job for fourteen years now, and she had never waited this long for one of the Gibblers to appear. It made her uneasy. 

“Alright, we have a big decision to make,” Giovanni said from his hammock, closing his book. “Pasta Primavera? Or Lasagna Bolognese?” 

“Pasta Primavera,” Ariel said.

“We had that two nights ago,” Jack complained. “For god’s sake, give a man some variety.”

“It’s the best Mountain Home meal pack by far,” Evelyn said. “And the lasagna makes me constipated. I hate fighting while I’m constipated.” 

“That’s because you never put in enough water to fully rehydrate it,” Jack said. “It needs a fifth more water than the other meals. You always forget that.” 

“Alright, I’m calling it, we’re making the Pasta Primavera,” Giovanni said. He jumped to his feet and started gathering supplies for a campfire, while Ariel dug through their bags for the meal packs. “If we all die to the Gibblers, at least it won’t be because of Evelyn’s bowel movements. Or lack thereof.”

For all that Evelyn hated camping in the Slipstream, she had to admit it was beautiful. Above them, hundreds of alien moons glimmered in and out of existence, as their home dimensions intersected with one another. The land itself was composed of a series of plateaus, all drifting gently within the stream of an iridescent wind. 

Fresh food spoiled more quickly here, which meant that the last few days of their weeklong shift always consisted of dehydrated meal packs. It was right as the water came to boil that a voice drifted down to them. 

“What mortal brainsssss… lie in waitssss…”

“Well shit,” Ariel said with a sigh. “I hate fighting on an empty stomach. You think we could ask it to hold off for another half an hour?”

The Gibbler was still in the distance, its body half in shadow, but Evelyn could already tell that it was on the larger side - the size of a three-story building. A dozen thick tentacles sprouted from its side, waving languorously in the wind, and its entire body was covered in thick, prehensile hair. 

“Casting Wren’s Memetic Field,” Ariel said. “Though it seems run-of-the-mill to me.”

“Agreed, looks vanilla. Maybe upper Cirrus-class, bordering on Nimbus. Evelyn, you think you can snipe it from here?” Giovanni said. 

“Worth a shot. Jack, throw us a heat shield?” Evelyn said. 

“On it,” Jack said. 

After five years of working together, they were a well-oiled machine. Within seconds, the air began shimmering in a dome around them. 

“Valtry’s Dome?” Evelyn asked. 

“Tommack’s,” Jack replied. 

“K,” Evelyn said. “Casting Margie’s Cannon.” 

She pulled negentropy through her Conduit, shaping a seed of heat into existence. At the core of it, spells were just commands that warped the laws of physics. In this case, she created a pocket of air, told it to superheat into plasma, then poured in even more energy until it practically vibrated. 

“Fire in the hole,” she said, splaying her hands out in front of her. 

The beam of heat shot forward in a straight line, the backwash rippling against the dome that Jack had created but disintegrating the rest of the camp around them. In the distance, the beam hit the Gibbler and a humvee-sized hole appeared in its center-of-mass.

“Margie’s Cannon round two,” Evelyn called out, funneling more negentropy through her Conduit. Beside her, she could feel her three other teammates drawing on Conduits of their own.

“Small mindssss… will tastessss… So many...”

And then the Gibbler began running towards them, the plateau rumbling with every step. Its tentacles were waving in the air, and glimmering balls of light appeared in the sky above it. 

“It’s a caster! Giovanni?” Ariel shouted.

“Yep, got it,” Giovanni said. “Casting Hanna’s Interceptors.” 

“Fire in the hole,” Evelyn said, and then let the energy loose. She had packed more heat into this one, hoping that it could end things right then and there. 

It flashed towards the Gibbler, but at the last instant, the creature flickered, and the beam phased right through it. 

“Shit,” Evelyn said. “Jack and Ariel, Anchor spells, if you would?” 

“Casting Dimensional Anchor,” Jack said. 

“Casting Temporal Anchor,” Ariel said.

The balls of light above the Gibbler’s head had grown in size and intensity, and then all at once began raining down towards them. 

“I got it!” Giovanni said - and each ball of light bounced away from them as if flicked away by a giant invisible hand. Sweat was pouring down his face, but his hands were steady.

The Gibbler was almost upon them now, close enough that Evelyn could see that each of the hundreds of thousands of prehensile stalks on its body had eyes. 

“Consumessss…”

“Casting Nettie’s Reposition,” Ariel said, watching as a giant tentacle swung with massive force towards the three of them. 

“Anchoring heat shield,” Jack said. 

“Casting Ross’ Blossoms,” Evelyn said, as she pulled more negentropy through her Conduit.

And then a moment later, the three of them flickered to the opposite end of the plateau, their heat dome coming with them. A plume of dust rose from where they had been just a moment earlier, rock fracturing with titanic force underneath a large tentacle. An unfolding flower of light burst from Evelyn’s hands and sped towards the Gibbler, before being batted out of the sky.

“Casting Lindon’s Net,” Giovanni said. “Anyone else getting Conduit issues? Mine keeps flickering.” 

“I’m getting it too,” Jack said. 

“It’s a supply side issue, not Conduit,” Ariel said. “My channel is fine but the Source is not.”

“Incoming!” Evelyn said. 

And then a beam of red light seared against their heat shield, which immediately began dissolving around them. 

With a twist of his wrist, Giovanni motioned and the beam vanished. 

“I’ve got two of those left,” he said. 

“Casting Jennel’s Candle,” Evelyn said. “Jack and Ariel, augment me. Giovanni, you’re on defense.”

She focused on casting. Jennel’s Candle was rarely used by other teams because of its complexity, but after years of practice, they had it down to a T. Jack shaped the frame of the spell, Ariel prevented it from exploding mid-cast, and Evelyn shaped the energy inside it. Once it set off, it would expand outwards like a firework of cluster munition. Its only downside was a short range and a long prep time. 

Dimly, she noticed Giovanni negating spells that were homing in on them. He was widely considered one of the best defensive specialists in the department, and his ability to consistently hold his own and buy time is what allowed the three others to cast Jennel’s Candle.

The ground shook as the Gibbler ran towards them. Then, two things happened simultaneously:

The first was that Evelyn released Jennel’s Candle, which sped like an arrow towards the Gibbler, burrowing itself deep inside the monster. The spell triggered, and a series of explosions expanded concentrically outwards, tearing it apart into pieces. 

The second was that five circular saws of light left the Gibbler’s tentacles just before it exploded. They came hurtling towards them. Giovanni cast the textbook counter - tiny spheres of light that nudged each disc off-trajectory. But then, one of the spheres sputtered out of existence before it could reach its target. 

Four of the circular saws were nudged off-course, slicing the tops off of mountains in the distance. The remaining saw kept on traveling towards them. 

Evelyn threw herself sideways out of pure instinct, falling to the ground. 

The disc missed them, just barely. She lay on the ground for a moment, letting the adrenaline wash out of her body and enjoying the feeling of cold rock beneath her cheek. 

“Hey guys. You good?” she said. 

“Yeah,” Giovanni said. 

“Still here,” Ariel said. 

“I need a vacation,” Jack said. 

“Good,” she said, rolling over onto her back. As she did so, a sharp pain in her right arm made its way into her awareness. 

She stared. Her hand was missing, severed cleanly above the wrist.

“I think I need a tourniquet,” she said, as her thoughts dissipated and she faded into unconsciousness. 

“Is this a joke?” Mark said. He looked around behind the woman for a camera crew. This felt like the setup to one of the gag shows that one of his friends from undergrad used to film. 

“No, this is not a joke,” the woman said. She smiled, showing two sets of canines. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” 

“I think I need to know more before I let you in,” Mark said. His heart was racing, he realized. Something felt deeply wrong. 

“Invite me in, pour me some coffee, set out some of those vegan snacks of yours - I’ve had a long flight over - and we can talk,” the woman said. 

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave now,” Mark said, closing the door on her. He locked it, then peered through the peephole. He watched as she tried to put her hands on her hips, then glared at her right arm when it failed to cooperate. 

“What a psychopath,” he thought to himself, before briefly feeling bad for calling a one-armed woman a psychopath. 

“Hey, I know you’re still there behind the door, so I advise you to stand back,” the woman said. 

Mark’s brain hadn’t even registered the words when he felt all the air around him tense, as if it were bracing for an impact. The world became quiet. 

And then a chunk of the door exploded silently into his house, and he stumbled back, the glare of the sun outside suddenly pouring in. He moved his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He felt like he was a puppet in a surrealist stage play.

The air unstilled, and the woman reached through the giant hole she had made in his door and unlocked it from the inside.

“You should know that I am very much struggling not to do violence against you right now,” she said pleasantly. “Nice house by the way. Very tasteful decor.”

“HELP! HELP I AM BEING ATTACKED!!” Mark yelled. Some subconscious portion of his brain remembered being told as a child that he should yell fire if he was being mugged, so as to attract more attention. “FIRE!! THERE’S A FIRE!!”

“I checked, your neighbors are mostly gone for the holidays,” the woman said. “And there’s a sound barrier I threw up around your house, not that… Fuck it, why am I even talking to you? Let’s go.” 

She waved her hand, and the pieces of the wood and plaster in his hallway flung back through the air and jigsawed into a door, whole and unblemished. Then she reached out with her hand and put it on his forehead, and the world blinked. 

They were in the middle of what looked like an empty airport hangar. The stadium lights from above were blinding, but Mark could make out what looked like machinery and… heavy artillery?... in the corner.  A voice from Mark’s right called out, exasperated. 

“Good god, Evelyn. What did you do this time? They’re going to ground you for this, you know that?” 

Mark fainted. 

Evelyn knew that there were going to be repercussions from teleporting a civilian into the heart of the Department, but she had been hoping her recent combat injury would buy her at least a few sympathy points. Still, being grounded for a month felt bad.

“Alright Evelyn,” Harry said, heaving the interrogator box onto the table. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Et tu, Brutus?” Evelyn said. 

“Don’t you go ‘Et tu Brutus’ing’ me. You know the rules.” 

“I’ve had years of good behavior! I’m a war hero!” 

“The Chairs will turn a blind eye to a bit of magic here or there in the mundane world. But kidnapping a civilian - a newly famous one at that - using a teleportation spell? That’s just plain fucking stupid.” 

“Technically it wasn’t a teleportation spell, it was a long-range augmentation of Ulrich’s Remittance, which - “

“You’re not going to get out of this by talking at me. I’m just following orders. Unbutton your shirt please,” Harry said with a sigh, the interrogator wand in his hand. 

“My god, Harry. I knew you had feelings for me, but - “ 

“Evelyn. Stop. I’m your friend. Don’t abuse that.”

Evelyn unbuttoned the top two buttons of her jumpsuit, revealing a lump over her right chest where her Conduit had been implanted. Harry used his right hand to wave his interrogator wand over the Conduit, while his left hand pushed at buttons on the box. 

“A month though. Really?” Evelyn said, not for the first time. 

Harry said nothing. He clacked another button, and then all at once Evelyn felt her Conduit turn off, cutting off her connection to the Source. The world seemed to dull, becoming less vibrant. The air pressed against her skin, heavy and oppressive. 

She had forgotten how bad this felt. 

“I don’t know how you all live like this,” she muttered darkly. 

“You’ll get used to it,” Harry snapped. He was packing up the interrogator. 

“Sorry Harry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. And I didn’t mean to make your job difficult.”

He softened, the lines around his eyes dissolving. 

“I still owe you that drink,” he said, glancing at her arm. “War hero and all that.”

“I want to go home,” Mark said. “No, scratch that. I want a lawyer. And I want to call my Congressman. And I want justice! And then I want to go home. But first give me a phone!”

There was no reaction from the man sitting in front of him. 

“Please?” Mark added. 

They were sitting in a bright, featureless room. The man had said that his name was Harry, and that he was waiting for “authorization for debrief,” whatever that meant. They had offered him a charcuterie board of all things, which he had waved away, saying that he was vegan. This, out of everything, had gotten a chuckle out of the man. 

Finally, at some invisible signal Mark couldn’t see, the man stood up and opened the door. 

“Alright,” he said. “I’ve been instructed to give you a full debrief. Which means a tour.” 

“I don’t want a tour, I want to go home,” Mark said. 

“I expected more out of a documentarian,” the man said, and for a moment Mark shrunk into himself, feeling somewhat ashamed. “Here you are, having had your first interaction with magic, having been teleported to what you must have surely realized by now is a covert military base. And your first reaction is to go home? I expected for you to be inquisitive, not a coward.”

The man walked out of the door. Mark paused for a second, looking around the clean white room which for all that it was claustrophobia-inducing, at least was mundane and signaled safety. Then he stood up and followed. 

“Alright then,” Mark said, walking alongside the man down a long corridor. “Who are you and where are we?” 

“We’re in the Department, an international organization tasked with preventing eldritch horrors from entering into our dimension via a netherworldly highway called the Slipstream,” Harry said, pushing a button as they entered an elevator. 

“I’m sorry, what?” Mark said. 

“Are you hungry? We could stop by the cafeteria first - oh nevermind. We can get lunch after,” Harry said. 

The elevator opened and a woman entered the elevator, holding what appeared to be a submachine gun. 

“Morning, Ailsa,” Harry said with a smile.

“Morning, ‘arry. You enter the raffle?” she said, her eyes shifting to Mark for a second before dismissing him.

“Oh shit. I forgot to do that,” he replied. “What’s the prize this time?”

“One of the Chairs cooks you a steak dinner,” she replied. “Fine dinin’ an’ such. You got two more days to submit your ticket. Don’t forget.”

“Ah,” Harry said. The elevator dinged, and she stepped out.

“Perhaps if either of us wins, we could see if they allow a plus one, eh? Make an evening of it?” she said with a wink, before the doors closed. 

The elevator kept descending. Mark couldn’t help but notice that they were now likely a non-trivial number of kilometers beneath the earth. Harry cleared his throat, a mild blush coloring his cheeks.

“As I was saying. In the late nineteenth-century, the Gate opened, leading to a space-between-the-worlds called the Slipstream. The horrors - we call them Gibblers - started appearing a few years later. We think they’re attracted to sentience-density. Once the human population increased past a certain threshold - 900 million is what the numbers folk say - our minds collectively warped space-time, serving as a beacon for those from other realms that pray on intelligence.”

“So you’re saying that HP Lovecraft was onto something,” Mark said. “Or he encountered the Gibblers, and wrote about them.”

“No that was just a coincidence,” Harry said, waving his hand in the air dismissively. “The man was just a good writer with a healthy imagination.”

The elevator stopped with a shudder, and they entered a large room the size of a football field. In the very center was a shimmering portal of blue light. Mark could see a distant landscape through it. 

Surrounding the portal was a flotilla of sensors and desks. Someone had set up a ping pong table by the side, and a large sign carried the words “37th ANNUAL INTRA-DEPARTMENT PING PONG LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIPS” with an extensive bracket beneath it which had been crossed out and now read “ARIEL STEVENSON, REIGNING CHAMPION.” On the edges of the room was an entire armory of machine gun and artillery equipment, all inactive but nonetheless pointed towards the portal.

“Oh,” Mark said, stopping mid-step. 

“Impressive, isn’t it? I forget that it is, until I bring a newbie here. Then it’s like I see it again for the first time.” 

As they walked closer, Mark could see a floating plateau coming into focus through the portal. Some of the workers around them were looking at them curiously. One of the women playing pool by the side stood up and gave Harry a mock salute.

“Hey Harry, is this the newbie Evelyn kidnapped?” she said. 

“Ariel, we’re trying to avoid using the word kidnapped,” Harry replied. “It’s bad for morale. Makes us look like the bad guys.”

“Have it your way,” Ariel said, smiling. 

“Anyway, as I was saying,” Harry continued, “The problem with fighting Gibblers is that the laws of physics seem to behave differently in the Slipstream. Most of our tech - from gunpowder all the way to electronic circuitry - doesn’t work there. Otherwise we would just send modern weaponry in there.” 

“So you just have to wait for a monster - a Gibbler was it - to come through the portal, and then fill it with bullets?”

“Nope, that’s where people like me come in,” Evelyn said, from right behind him. 

Mark gave a high-pitched scream, and jumped into the air. From off to the side, Ariel laughed. 

“Sorry not sorry,” Evelyn said. “Hi again, Harry.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be locked in a conference room doing remedial HR training or something?” Ariel said, walking forward and putting an arm around her shoulders.

“I told them that I couldn’t focus because my phantom limb pain was so bad,” she said, waving the stump of her arm in the air. “I’ll let you in on a secret though; I don’t have any phantom limb pain.” 

“Really milking it for all its worth, huh?” Harry said. 

“It’s not every day that a girl gets to be a war hero, Harry,” Evelyn replied. “Let me savor it a little.”

Harry rolled his eyes.

“Anyway, Mark, what Harry here was saying is that conventional weapons don’t work in the Slipstream. So the world relies on us. Mages. Convenient weapons-of-mass-destruction packaged neatly in human bodies.” 

“I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that magic is real,” Mark said. 

“Oh it very much is,” Evelyn said. “With it, I can do all sorts of things. Shoot lasers, teleport around, explode your head into a thousand pieces, that sort of thing.”

“Evelyn. Would you please stop implying casual violence towards Mark?” Harry said.

“It makes me feel better. Does that make me a bad person?” 

“Well, yes actually,” Ariel said. “Yes it does.”

“That was a rhetorical question.”

“Why do you seem to hate me?” Mark interjected. “You haven’t explained that yet.”

The three of them both turned to look at him. In the background, there was a ‘clack’ from the break shot of a pool game. 

“Because you’re inadvertently contributing to the death of magic,” Evelyn said. “Which would doom us all.”

—-

The cafeteria was a grand, spacious thing, but with little nooks carved into the sides of the room to provide some amount of privacy. Someone had thought very carefully about exactly how to light each corner to attain maximum coziness.

“The truth of the matter is that all magic is death magic,” Evelyn said, digging into a salmon filet. “Whenever a living being dies, it releases a bit of what we call ‘negentropy,’ which can be used to break the laws of physics. The amount that is released is proportional to their level of sentience - which is incidentally also the amount that they can suffer.” 

Mark stared at her. Ariel had pushed a plate of salmon in front of him as well, which he hadn’t touched. 

“We’re pretty sure that some of the earlier civilizations that practiced human sacrifice realized this, and were able to do some primitive magic.” Evelyn continued. “The problem is that it takes a truly massive amount of death to power even the simplest of spells. There’s an easy solution though, one that arises from a basic truth that you know better than most.”

“Animals can feel suffering,” Mark said. 

“Yes. The appearance of the Gibblers happened to coincide neatly with the rise of factory farming. The fuel to power our magical defense was staring at us in the face. And so the early founders built the first of the Conduits. At first they were these large sacrificial circles - “

“- we have a museum here, we can take you later if you want, it’s surprisingly well-done - “ Ariel interjected.

“- stop interrupting me Ariel - anyway, the early Conduits looked like your stereotypical pentagrams, exactly what you would think of when someone says the word ‘death magic.’ But over time, magical theory became more advanced, and they became more compact. Nowadays, we just bury a truck-sized crystal beneath every factory farm, carve it with Conduit runes, and it forwards the negentropy to our storage crystals here at the heart of the Department. And then when I need to blast a hole in a Gibbler, I draw upon that relay system through a Conduit I have implanted in my chest.”

“This is a lot to take in,” Mark said. 

“It was for me too, when I first heard about it,” Harry said, taking a bite of chicken parmesan.

“You should have seen his face,” Ariel said, chewing with her mouth open. “He looked like he was going to rupture an aneurysm.”

“The Department has its moles in every major meat-producer and factory farm around the world,” Evelyn said. “Which is a good thing, because the frequency of Gibbler attacks has been directly proportional to the increase in human population. The problem is that for the last decade, do-gooders like you have come onto the scene.”

“Me?” 

“Did you know that after the release of ‘Silent Voices,’ meat consumption dropped in the Western world by twelve percent? It was the most influential piece of media to come out in favor of veganism, ever. By three orders of magnitude. It was a work of genius. Worryingly, it also took off in third-world countries, which is typically where we expect for there to be the largest future rise in meat consumption.”

“Oh,” Mark said. “But it’s still true though. Animals have worth. I just proved and showed - “

“Yeah yeah. I’ve seen your chart weighing animal worth; one human is equivalent to three chickens is equivalent to eleven carps is equivalent to fourteen bees is equivalent to thirty-two shrimp.”

“You’ve seen it,” Mark said, feeling somehow pleased despite himself. 

“We’ve sat through it, yes,” Ariel muttered darkly.

“Your chart isn’t too far off, actually. We can measure the worth of living things and their capacity for suffering directly through how much negentropy they release when they die. We’ve actually known for a long time that, contrary to intuition, three chickens is worth about the same as one human life.”

“And yet you’re all eating meat,” Mark said, staring pointedly at Harry’s chicken parmesan, Evelyn’s salmon filet, and Ariel’s chicken tenders. “All of you combined are eating the equivalent worth of a human life right now, just for lunch. You said it.”

“We’re just supporting the cause,” Evelyn said. “You know the best thing about being humanity’s last line of defense against an unspeakable horror from across time-and-space?”

“Moral carte blanche,” Harry and Ariel said in unison. 

“Exactly,” Evelyn said, gesturing at them with a forkful of salmon. “Moral fucking carte blanche. And it is delicious. You know my favorite thing to eat? Canned tuna. I can’t really explain to you why. It’s terrible to eat, from an ethical perspective, and now I get to eat it guilt free, because it all goes towards supporting the cause.”

“So what you’re saying is that ‘Silent Voices’ is interfering with the cause,” Mark said. 

“Well. Yes. Last week, I was out in the Slipstream, doing my time. And at a critical moment, right as I was delivering the coup de grace, one of my teammate’s spells flickered out, because a meat conglomerate had cut their production lines by forty percent. Apparently the CEO’s daughter had seen your film, and they’re now pivoting to meat-grown-in-a-vat as a business strategy. And because that spell flickered out, I lost my hand.”

“How is Giovanni doing by the way?” Harry asked.

“He feels guilty as fuck. I can’t even have a conversation with him without him apologizing to me every other sentence. Absolutely infuriating.” 

“Give him time,” Ariel said.

“I’m still not going to eat this fish,” Mark said, pushing the plate away from him. 

“That’s fine. We all have our causes. I try to eat only factory-farmed stuff. Gotta preserve natural biodiversity out in the oceans and shit like that. But the point is, we need you to do something about your film.”

“Do something?” 

“Retract it. Go on the news and disavow it. Make something up, I don’t care. Right now, we’re getting by, because we’ve created a fake avian flu scare so that factories slaughter enough chickens to keep up with our Conduit demands. But it’s a stopgap measure. The Chairs were going to reach out to you officially and explain things, but it was going to take ages. So I showed up at your doorstep, cut through the red tape, and brought you here so that you can see that this is real and worth fighting for.”

“You want me to lend you a hand, in other words,” Mark said. 

Ariel burst out laughing, before Harry elbowed her. Evelyn stared at him. Then, putting her fork down carefully, as if it took palpable, violent amounts of energy to do so, she put her hand underneath her chin. 

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Okay, well I have an easy solution,” Mark said. They were walking through the Museum of the Conduit, which was surprisingly well-designed. He stared at a gargantuan statue of a Gibbler, the size of a T-rex at a natural history museum, frozen in time as it lowered a human into its maw using a tentacle. 

“Oh, pray tell,” Evelyn said. 

“You tell the world about this,” Mark said, gesturing at the Gibbler. “If everyone in the world knew about their existence, then you’d have infinite support. Problem solved.” 

There was a plaque beneath it that read: Mammatus-class Gibbler: retroactively named “Old Yeller the Redacted.” Spotted 1973, near Helios 3 Plateau in Slipstream. The first Gibbler to be recorded with anti-memetic properties, it devoured three separate fireteams and came within 200 meters of the Gate before being recognized as a threat and killed by Archmagus Lennius and associates. Now widely considered responsible for the creation of anti-memetic protocols and the development of the modern four-person fireteam. Note that this replica is created at 1:5 scale.

“Hotly debated,” Evelyn said. “The problem being that the more people who know about them, the more our world attracts their attention. We have a very specific quota of people who know about the Department and the existence of Gibblers, which balances operational efficiency with how frequently we can handle Gibbler incursions.”

“Gibblers tend to have certain anti-memetic and infohazard properties,” Ariel said. She pointed at the plaque. “Lennius was one of my mentors, actually. He was the rare mage who survived to old age. But in addition to developing anti-memetic protocol, he was also the one who figured out the breakpoint numbers at which knowledge of them would give them power.”

“I understood about half of what you just said,” Mark said. Ariel shrugged.

“The point is, we need magical firepower, and we need the negentropy from contemporary factory-farming to maintain our output. With you, we’re behind the 8-ball. Usually we keep an eye on all the established documentary film-makers and buy them off ahead of time if they look like they’re going to make a move on the animal-rights space,” Harry said. “You were a bit of a dark horse.” 

“Also, I’m going to let you in on something. We fund PETA,” Evelyn said. 

“You fund… PETA?”

“Of course. They’re so extremist that they naturally grab all the press for themselves and become the face of the vegan movement. Which makes the movement itself easy to discredit.” 

“This is a whole conspiracy, isn’t it,” Mark said. 

“Mark. My man. We’re kilometers underground, in a museum documenting our cover up of world-ending monsters. Naturally everything is a conspiracy,” Ariel said.

They stopped in front of another statue of a Gibbler. The plaque read: Cumulus-class Gibbler: retroactively named “Duke Nukem.” Spotted 1979, near Magnolia 9 Plateau in Slipstream. It is the last Gibbler to make landfall through the Gate, after penetrating no less than five fireteam barriers. It proved the Jones Hypothesis - that Gibblers gain exponentially in power after crossing over into Earth-space from Slipstream. Finally destroyed via hydrogen cluster bomb delivered via joint U.S.-Russian forces, which was later explained to the public as atomic bomb testing. Responsible for the Duke Contingency, which involves the most proximal fireteam having access to a mass-animal-sacrifice-protocol to prevent Gibbler landfall. It also triggered the Gate-movement project which allowed the Gate to be moved to its current underground location a decade later, away from potential civilian populations. Note that this statue is at 1:20 scale. 

“Okay, if I’m to destroy my life’s work - “

“ - you worked on Silent Voices for two years, that’s not your life’s work - “ Ariel interjected.

“ - then the way I would do it is by discrediting lab-grown meat,” Mark said. 

“Really?”

“I’m going to be honest, the only reason that Silent Voices was as successful as it was is because I presented a viable alternative. I devoted an entire forty minutes to how lab-grown meat is just as tasty but better ethically. My entire call-to-action hinges on it.”

“Okay, so we go after lab-grown meat tech and that kneecaps the movement,” Harry said. “We have people working on that. But I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a slow process. And none of them are award-winning documentarians. Which is why we’re putting them under your control.”

“Under my control? What?”

“How quickly do you think you can produce a hit piece on lab-meat, if you had infinite resources? Two weeks? We have your quarters here set up already.”

“Wait. Quarters here?”

They stopped in front of another panorama, which featured a fireteam facing down a swarm of tiny Gibblers, all of which seemed to have too many teeth. Evelyn threw her arm around him.

“You’re part of the Department now, Mark. Welcome to the cause,” she said. 

—--

“I’m not sure I needed to be brought out here,” Mark said, looking out at the plateau. A wind that rippled with mother-of-pearl swept past them, as if the three of them were apples bobbing on the surface of the Aurora Borealis. “The Museum was very convincing.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Evelyn said, poking him in the stomach, making him wince. 

“It’s also a tradition,” Ariel said. “It’s hard to believe in the Slipstream until you’re actually in it, under the light of some alien moons.”

“I guess it’s beautiful,” Mark said with a sigh. Above them, shimmering crescent moonlight faded in and out of existence. The Gate was just behind them, which gave him a sense of security. There were a few Department members who appeared to be picnicking on the plateau.

“I just wanted to show you that it’s not all bad, now that you’re stuck with us,” Evelyn said. “There are some perks.”

Mark still hadn’t been able to eat any meat, which had been described to him as a perk, and wasn’t sure that that would change. 

“How do you do it? I feel like knowing that the mass slaughter of animals capable of suffering is happening at any given moment… knowing that that’s true, somehow independently validated, it makes me feel worse.”

Evelyn shrugged. 

“I just don’t think about it,” she said. “Which is what most of the meat-eating world does. There are too many things to care about in the world. Making sure that your clothes are slave-labor free, making sure your chocolate is ethically sourced, hoping that your tax dollars aren’t being used to bomb baby seals, wondering whether your flight home for Thanksgiving to see your elderly parents is contributing to global warming, the list goes on and on and on… I don’t worry about that any more. You don’t have to either.”

“It’s freeing, in a way. Just having to worry about one thing,” Ariel said.

“Fine,” Mark said. “Then what’s the long-term plan? For the Department at least? You can’t do this forever.”

“We’ve done the math. The world population peaks in fifteen years. The frequency of incursions will drop after that. We just have to keep factory farming proportionally increased until then. There’s a hundred-year plan, if you can believe it. I don’t think about it often; statistically speaking, I’ve already outlived my expected service-time.”

“Sorry?”

“There’s a six percent annual rate of death, as a mage. That’s why they let you retire after ten years of service. I’ve been working for fourteen years now.”

“Twelve for me,” Ariel said. 

“Why not retire?” 

“Older, more experienced mages are more energy-efficient. It helps with the Conduit issues,” Evelyn said.

“Ah.”

“Don’t look so glum. She just likes blowing things up,” Ariel said with a chuckle. “Although personally, I’m thinking about retiring next year. Lying on a nice beach somewhere in the Caribbean. Somewhere with sun.”

They stood there, watching the Slipstream move around them, the intersections of other dimensions fading in and out of existence. Mark wished he’d brought a warmer jacket. 

“The other people on your fireteam. They’re okay? Ariel mentioned a Giovanni?”

“Giovanni and Jack,” Evelyn said. “The best defensive and support spell specialists in the Department. I’m the offense. Ariel is the anti-memetic specialist. We’re considered the most senior team. Usually the vanguard, placed where the numbers guys tell us there’s the highest likelihood of Gibbler incursion.”

“Didn’t realize you both were such hot shots,” Mark said. 

Evelyn shrugged. 

“You work long enough in this field, and you outlive the competition,” she said. 

And then, all of a sudden, Ariel stood up ramrod straight as if she heard something along the breeze. 

“We have an incursion,” Ariel said. “Something anti-memetic. Casting Jenna’s Negation Field now. Summoning the proximal fireteam.” 

An alarm bell sounded, like a hundred wind chimes all rippling at once. It seemed to come from a crystal that stood next to the Gate. 

A group of four mages, all in jumpsuits, suddenly appeared next to them. They looked nervous, Mark realized. That did not inspire a lot of confidence. 

“What are you doing here Evelyn?” one of them said. “And you, Ariel?”

“Oh thank god you’re both here,” the second said. “We haven’t had a proximal incursion alarm in a decade. Did the Chairs teleport you in?”

“We were sight-seeing,” Ariel said. “Evelyn was grounded; her Conduit is off. I hit the bell because I sensed an anti-memetic field. A strong one. I should have partially negated it, so it should be coming into view - ”

And then they saw the Gibbler in the distance. It was small, comparatively, only the size of a small house. It had six legs that jutted out and flickered over the ground as it moved, like a spider. A moment later, it flickered, and then suddenly was two hundred meters closer. 

“So closesss… to small tastesss… little minds… soon minesss…”

“It can Shadowstep,” Evelyn said. “Interesting. Rare ability.” 

“Evelyn, if it has Shadowstep and also such strong anti-memetic properties, we’re going to need you in the fight. Go through the Gate and get your Conduit activated. I’ll hold them off with the proximal team for now.” 

Mark was already at a dead sprint back to the Gate. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of light, as a sunbeam erupted from the fireteam and splashed against the Gibbler. It shrieked, and then there was an explosion - 

-and then Mark was through the gate. There was a flurry of activity around the Gate on Earth-side. Every single one of the artillery was manned, in a semi-moon circle around the portal. 

“Aren’t there more mages?” Mark said to Harry, who was standing to the side with a pair of binoculars. 

“More isn’t necessarily better,” Harry said. “The limiting factor is how much power we can supply through our Conduit. Not the number of casters. Though old casters can do more with less power.” 

Evelyn appeared next to Mark, seemingly out of nowhere. 

“You’re gonna have to let me in on the fight Harry,” she said, eyes agleam. “I’m not leaving Ariel out there alone with that rookie team.” 

“Fine,” Harry said, pulling what Mark had thought was an AED from the wall. Evelyn unbuttoned the top of her jumpsuit, and Harry waved a wand over the Conduit implanted beneath her skin, typing furiously on the pad.

An explosion shook the room, and one of the lights in the ceiling started sputtering. 

Evelyn felt a wave rush through her as her Conduit turned back on. She could feel the Source distantly above them, the reservoir of negentropy she could draw on. It was being depleted with every spell being cast by the proximal fireteam; after it was gone, then they would have to rely purely on the flow from negentropy of animals being actively slaughtered. 

She rushed through the Gate back to Slipstream,  where two members of the fireteam were lying on the plateau, bleeding. 

“Casting Tina’s Memory Anchor,” Ariel said - and then the Gibbler reappeared in her visual field, a hundred meters away. 

“It keeps erasing everyone’s memories of it,” Ariel said. “And it’s too fast for me to get a continuous memetic lock on it. You think we have time to get Giovanni and Jack here?” 

“Definitely not,” Evelyn said, tracking the Gibbler as it flitted across the landscape.

“Casting Yeltsin’s Spear,” Rory said from beside her. 

“Nope, halt casting. Rory, cast a Laurel’s Shield please. Nelson, cast a Ken’s Light - that will lock down the Gibbler’s Shadowstepping,” Evelyn said, as she pulled negentropy through her Conduit and wove a spell.

The Gibbler chose that moment to flash in front of them, and one of its limbs cracked against the Laurel’s Shield that had hastily been thrown up. It raised another one of its limbs, slamming it against the shield, which splintered before finally cracking. The limb broke through the shield, before hitting a barrier that Ariel must have thrown up. 

“Casting Reinforce Nettie’s Dome,” Ariel said, gritting her teeth. “Shield spells are not my forte, Evelyn. You gonna hit it?” 

“Casting Lennel’s Thornseekers,” Evelyn said. 

A flurry of spikes left her single outstretched hand, chasing after the Gibbler, which was now Shadowstepping away to avoid it. It wasn’t moving as quickly as before - the Ken’s Light was doing something at least - but it moved in an intricate dance around the plateau, flickering away right before the homing spikes hit it each time. 

“Such closenessss…” she heard it say. 

“Do we need Duke Nukem mass-execution protocol?” one of the fireteam members said. Evelyn ignored him. 

The Gibbler flickered, and for a moment Evelyn forgot why she was there. She had been showing the Slipstream to Mark, hadn’t she? He’d been having trouble adjusting, as they all had once upon a time, and so she’d come up here with him and - 

“Casting Ebert’s Memory Reversion,” Ariel said. Then, calling behind her, “Get Melissa up here! We need another memetic mage. I’ve spotted a second anti-memetic Gibbler. Evelyn can carry us on fire power.”

Oh right. She was the group’s cannon. She had been in the middle of casting. Wait, there were two Gibblers? 

Evelyn doubled down, right then, drawing on the Conduit, increasing the output of the Thornseekers by several fold. And then she saw something Ariel was casting sputter out.

Memories from the past few minutes began leaving her. She was on the plateau, but then she wasn’t. She was standing next to - 

“Goddamn Conduit issues,” Ariel said. She raised her hand. “Casting - “

A second Gibbler appeared out of nowhere, maws snapping around Ariel, and there was a moment where the two of them made eye contact, and instinctively they both knew what to do - 

[Giovanni’s Stasis Chamber], Evelyn cast wordlessly at Ariel. 

[Ariel’s Universal Pathfinder], [Ariel’s Temporary Memetic Anchor], Ariel cast in succession, before she was enveloped in crystal, and the Gibbler bit down on her. The teeth ground against an impenetrable chamber, but then in a flash, it had fled the scene, carrying Ariel away.

Evelyn felt Ariel’s spell hit her chest, and then a moment later, she depleted the rest of the Conduit - 

[Evelyn’s Rain], she cast - and one of the Gibblers, the original that had arrived at the plateau, was nailed to the ground from a firestorm that descended from the sky. A shockwave broke against their shield - someone had cast a shield, was it Evelyn? - and they could feel the ground vibrating with dissipating energy. 

Memories left Evelyn, along with the memory of ever having those memories, as Ariel’s spell faded away. There had only ever one Gibbler. It was a vanilla, run-of-the-mill Gibbler which had Shadowstepped past the outer rings of defense. Evelyn had pulverized it to the ground, as she usually did. 

“Phew,” Evelyn said, smiling at the fireteam around her. “Close one eh? And no missing limbs either.”

“If I may make an observation - “ 

“You may,” Evelyn said.

“You’re all a little off your rockers, aren’t you?” Mark said. 

They were at the bowling alley, and Mark was solidly ahead. Evelyn had been fitted with a prosthetic hand, and had declared that rather than work on the traditional physical therapy exercises designed to acclimate her to it, she would instead go bowling instead. Mark had felt this was admirable, except for the fact that she was solidly a sore loser. 

They were accompanied by Giovanni and Jack, who were both also terrible bowlers. 

“Maybe Giovanni,” Jack said. “He has a few screws loose, he does.” 

“Excuse you,” Giovanni said. “I happen to be the heart of the team, thank you very much.” 

Evelyn had been grounded again, which she had grumbled about. But she looked happy to be spending time with her two teammates. 

“How’s the documentary going,” Jack asked. 

“Almost done,” Mark said. “We’re in post-production.” 

He had been working non-stop for the past two weeks on his hit piece on lab-grown meat. He had an entire backlog of footage from his original film to use, and so it was simply spinning the narrative a certain way; bending facts where he needed to. 

He felt guilty. The founders of Whole Meat had trusted him when they had provided him access to their labs, and he considered them his friends. This would be equivalent to a stab in the back. 

It would have to be released under someone else’s name, they had all agreed. It would have been too dramatic a turnaround for him to publicly release a contradictory documentary in such a short amount of time. The plan was for him to go on air and fumble a few interviews, giving the new documentary greater legitimacy. 

“Well I for one can’t wait,” Evelyn said. “The Department has been all gloom and doom with the Conduit issues recently.” 

Mark bowled another strike, putting him solidly at double the points of everyone else playing. 

“Say,” he said. “I have a question.” 

“Sure,” Jack said. 

“Where’s the fourth person on your team?” he asked, watching the score screen as a badly animated turkey danced around holding Roman candles. 

“Fourth person?” Evelyn said. 

“Fireteams have four people right? That’s what I read at the Museum. And the proximal fireteam had four members. So there’s you, Jack, and Giovanni. Who’s the fourth person?”

Mark had expected a snappy response, or something sarcastic from Evelyn. But when he looked back to the three others, there was just silence. 

“Or are you guys the exception to the rule?” he asked. “Being the most senior team and all that?” 

“It’s always just been the three of us,” Giovanni said slowly. 

“Right. Just us three,” Evelyn said. 

“But Mark is right. All the other teams have four members,” Jack said. 

“Evelyn told me that she’s the offensive specialist. Giovanni is defense. Jack is support. What’s the usual fourth role?” Mark asked.

There was silence. 

“It’s the anti-memetic specialist,” Evelyn said slowly. 

“Right, but we’re the most senior team. We haven’t ever needed one. We’ve never had one because we’re the exception,” Jack said, nodding his head. 

“We would know if we were…” Giovanni said weakly. 

“Fuck,” Evelyn said. “God fucking damn it. We’re missing someone, aren’t we?” 

“But it’s always been just you three,” Harry said. “You guys have never needed an anti-memetic specialist. I would have known if you did, I’m your handler… oh fuck.” 

“How would it have been missed?” Jack asked. “We all go through an infohazard and anti-memetic sweep after every encounter.”

“They’re never perfect,” Harry said. “Or rather, we know what the false positive rate of anti-memetic sweeps are, but by the very nature of anti-memes, we don’t know what the false negative rate is.”

A half-hour later, they were sitting in front of a panel of anti-memetic mages conducting a battery of tests. 

“I’ve got nothing,” the first one said. 

“Nothing on my end,” the second said. “No half-memories, no quarter-memories, not even a hint of the absence of the memory of a fourth member.”

“Nothing,” the third said.

“Agreed,” the fourth said.  If this was an anti-meme, it’s the cleanest I’ve ever seen. Although the you-only-notice-obvious-toupees theorem holds in this case.” 

“Nothing on my end either,” the fifth said. “Although, the fact that everyone is repeating the reasoning ‘this fireteam is the most senior so they’ve never needed a fourth member’ is so consistent as to be suspicious.” 

“I have… something?” the sixth said. “No evidence of a fourth member, per se. But there’s the shadow of a location spell overlaid on top of Evelyn’s Conduit. Evelyn, have you ever cast anything on yourself like that?”

“No, never,” Evelyn said. “I throw fireballs. I don’t cast utility spells.”

“I am fairly certain that if you were to turn your Conduit back on, it would point you in the direction of… something. Or someone.” 

Mark’s documentary, Unnatural Growths was released, and after an intensive astroturfing campaign, quickly took the internet by storm.

“You have a gift for this,” Evelyn said.

“I know,” Mark said glumly. 

“Like, look at the way you framed this shot of the meat-cultures. It makes my skin crawl. I feel like I’m going to get cancer just looking at it.”

“Yeah that’s the idea,” Mark said. “The real problem was that I had to make it nauseating enough to trigger the subconscious memory-of-food-poisoning-gag-reflex, but not so nauseating so as to make people stop watching.”

“Look at the way the culture is multiplying. I don’t even feel this uncomfortable around Gibblers,” Evelyn said, jabbing a finger at the screen Mark was holding.

“Yeah I get it,” Mark said. 

“Well, congratulations, this is a work of art. You deserve some kind of award for it.” 

“There’s still a lot of work to do. I’m scheduled to go on the Morning Show and flub an interview tomorrow,” Mark said. “The PR guys are working non-stop.”

“Perdue Farms announced they’ve abandoned their lab-grown meat pivot, did you know that? The Conduit is smoothing out.” 

“I heard,” Mark said. 

They were gathered around the entry zone of the Gate, a small amount of camping gear still spread out on the ground. Jack and Giovanni had already finished packing their bags and were going over supplies with Melissa, a borrowed anti-memetic specialist from a different fireteam. 

“Am I supposed to wish you luck? Tell you to break a leg? How do these things go?” Mark asked. 

“Well traditionally we’re supposed to look each other in the eye and recite the Seven Sacred Oaths - “

“You’re bullshitting me again, aren’t you?” 

“You betcha. A ‘good luck, don’t die out there’ will do just fine.”

“Good luck, don’t die out there,” Mark said.

“How utterly uninspired, Mark,” Evelyn said, pinching his cheek with her hand. She heaved her camping backpack onto her shoulders. Then, finding that the other three members of her team were ready, walked through the Gate. “I would have expected better, coming from an artist.”

It was strange having a fourth person on the team. For as long as Evelyn could remember, it had always been just her, Jack, and Giovanni. 

Evelyn had met Melissa at some of the Department holiday parties, and she seemed nice enough, if somewhat sparse with words. But she had an excellent reputation as being one of the more technically gifted anti-memetic specialists. 

After Evelyn’s Conduit had been reactivated, Melissa had triggered the dormant spell overlaid on top of it. When it turned on, a thread of light beamed out from Evelyn’s chest out into the distance. It was a one-of-a-kind variation of a pathfinding spell, apparently. Melissa had seemed impressed. 

They followed the spell as it took them across the plateaus that were manned by fireteams. When they finally reached the border of the previously-mapped plateaus, Giovanni started detailing the local geography in his journal. 

“We’re a bit like Lewis and Clark,” he said. “No one has traveled this far out in this direction before. Might as well map it.”

They passed by Gates to other worlds; tears in the fabric of the Slipstream that they could partially see through. One overlooked a landscape covered by magma, and another seemed to overlook an endless ocean. It was rare for anyone to try entering these anymore. No one ever came back, and so there seemed little point. They only brought dehydrated food this time around, enough to last them for three weeks. Melissa had reduced the weight of their bags with an anti-gravity cantrip, and so they made good time. 

After a week, the thread of light grew thicker, and after another two days, it was almost blinding in brilliance.

“I think we’re close,” Evelyn said. 

“No shit,” Jack said. 

“Melissa, is there any way to turn this thing down? I get that whoever made this wanted to make it obvious, but it’s honestly kind of obnoxious.” 

They set up camp, Giovanni and Jack heating up dinner, while Melissa fiddled with the parameters of the spell. 

It wasn’t too bad having her around, Evelyn thought. She brought a certain quiet, focused energy to the group. Over the years they had gotten more snarky with one another, which Evelyn wasn’t quite sure was a good thing. 

After more than a week on the road, Evelyn missed having real food and a real bed, and she was daydreaming about a nice turkey dinner when Melissa suddenly stood up, as if she were a meerkat spotting something on the horizon. 

“Casting Erica’s Memory-Barrier,” she said. “Casting Renny’s Mental Fortitude. Casting Jake’s Temporal Continuity.”

And then they heard it. 

“One such as theysss… Crawl along quietsss…” 

A Gibbler flitted between boulders along the edge of the plateau. It was carrying something in its mouth - a crystalized statue of a woman. And then Evelyn forgot the fact that she had seen it.

“Still can’t see it!” Evelyn said, looking around as she began casting the beginnings of a heat spell. “Melissa?”

“It’s erasing our memories of seeing it at intervals of roughly once per quarter-second,” Melissa said. “I can extend that frequency to once per two seconds, so you’re going to have to fire on reflex.”

The Gibbler rammed the shield around them for the third time, which fractured, then began repairing itself. They all forgot the encounter immediately. 

“Got it,” Evelyn said. 

The Gibbler rammed them yet again. 

“My Conduit’s been using more power than it should,” Giovanni said calmly. “Something is chipping at our barriers.”

“Casting Van’s Memory Elongation,” Melissa said. 

This time, time seemed to slow. Evelyn tried to act on reflex; she saw the Gibbler and let loose the cannon of fire she had prepared in her hand. Two seconds passed, the Gibbler was gone, and her hand was empty. 

“Did I get it?” she said. 

“I don’t think so,” Jack said.

The Gibbler rammed them from the opposite end. 

“Jack, I need your help augmenting Lennius’ Branched Dome,” Giovanni said. “I keep losing barriers.”

Two more times, the prepared spell Evelyn held in her hands shot towards the Gibbler, in the brief two second window when she could remember seeing it. The first missed. The second chipped the crystal surrounding the statue of the woman it held in its mouth. 

“Evelyn!” Ariel’s voice boomed inside her head. “Area of effect spell! Tellen’s Blanket! Center it on yourself!” 

Evelyn started casting the spell, forgot what she was doing, and then started casting again. Beside her, she could see Melissa struggling to negate the effects of the anti-memetic field the Gibbler was casting. 

Evelyn looked up again, and the spell was complete. It’d taken her three tries. She tugged on the detonator string.