The morning after the moodstorm, the Living Will came to her to bring grim news.
“Your father plans to die.” The Living Will was tall as a tree. It wore striped bell-bottoms and a vest with deep pockets. It had a mustache like tinsel. It crouched down, hunched over, resting its chin on fingers long as her forearm. It watched her with silver mirror-eyes. “I’m sorry to bring you this news, Sasha.”
Sasha, blond hair in bangs, walnut-colored skin, eyes green as moss, said: “Call me Little Girl.” No fake-man, no automaton, deserved to call her by her true name.
“Very well.” A tear rolled down its eye. Good Gödel—a weeper. Maybe it was
susceptible to the traces of last night’s moodstorm. She hoped its eyeball tarnished. “I am sorry, Little Girl. I am here to prepare you for his death. I am here to tell you what you will inherit and how you will live with him gone.”
“I’m busy,” she said.
“Busy how?”
“Collecting,” she said. She had a plastic pail beside her, sitting in the ankle-deep water.
“Collecting what?”
“You know,” she said. “Stuff.”
The Living Will watched her a while, then got up and walked away.

She was collecting souls in Rust Canyon, below the Mad Monk’s Dam.
Rust Canyon. Cliff walls a mile high, made by moodstorms or by water, carved into metal-stone and polymer rock—the ruined cities of distant epochs, the landfills and boneyards of peoples dead ten thousand centuries. Where there’d been iron there were great ochre fans down cliffsides; where there’d been copper, verdigris. Little Girl liked to look for bones and platinum—bones for DNA and calcium, platinum for metal circuits. But what Rust Canyon was really good for was souls.
Moodstorms, tantrums of the cloudmind, thought-poor but rich with passion, bursts of brain juice wind-driven down the canyon alleyways, scoured the cliff walls and raised clouds of dust and by the chemical affinity of brain juice for synapses like lock for key, lifted souls from riverbeds and pulled them loose from rock walls. Over years or lifetimes the souls had been carried downstream to the Mad Monk’s Dam, where they had collected. Now Little Girl, wearing rubber hip waders, carrying a bucket and a stick with a hand at the end, walked in the shallow waters beneath the dam. The water was chrome-colored and corrosive, swirling in places with ribbons of red and orange and blue, where the residues of thoughts gone soft, heavy metal acids, had leached to the surface. Little Girl used to grab souls with her bare hands. The corrosive water would burn her hands and forearm, and the red and blistered skin would upset the Papa. But she got bored with that. Now she used her stick-hand.
The hand was tough brown demi-flesh. The stick carried a nerve bundle. When she gripped the stick from its end, she could feel what the hand felt and she could move its fingers. She lowered the stick. The water was warm and comfortable. She dragged the fingers along the lake floor, touching things. Gravel, sharp edges like glass, jawbones, scuttling tin millipedes and squishy grease worms, then at last souls, hard and round and clumped together or encrusted like barnacles to rocks or asbestos shells. She felt for souls that were just a little rough: ones that were polished smooth were too old, while pitted or smashed ones had usually lost character. Stuck to a rebar reef, she found four good ones, substantial, sandpaper-textured, giving her the faint buzz of dreams or simple cogitations. She grabbed each one carefully with the stick hand, twisted it loose, then brought it up.
She was examining the fourth soul, gray but giving off a rainbow sheen as she turned it in the sunlight, when she heard Alistair Jones shouting at her: “Sasha! Sasha! Walnut Pasha!”
He was climbing down the Mad Monk’s Dam, using the bas-relief sculptures that decorated its face as handholds, clutching stone scrolls, grasping noses and beards, stepping on tonsured heads. At last he jumped into the water, and ran splashing to her. He was double-jointed and had hair colored shiny-black. The acidic water didn’t seem to hurt him.
He was the cloudmind’s only son.
“Sassy Sasha!”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sullen Sasha!”
“Call me Little Girl.”
Alistair Jones furrowed his brow. “Well! Why?”
“What does ‘Sasha’ mean? Nothing. But ‘Little Girl’ pretty much says it all.”
“Okay,” Alistair said. “What are you doing with that hand?”
Little Girl flared angry at Alistair. She’d wanted him to argue with her about the name. She said, “Are you dumb? What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“You’re digging up souls. What for? Are you going to eat them?”
Ingested souls might give you a buzz but more likely would leave you constipated. “Not likely.”
“Then why?” He arched his eyebrow. “Oh, are you going to try and catch a sphinx? Are you going to seat a soul in one?” He stepped toward her, excited. “Can I help, Sa—Can I help you catch a sphinx, Little Girl?”
She was disappointed that her plan had been so obvious. It made her mad. She said, “No, that’s not it, and you can’t help, anyway.”
“Then what are you going to do? “
“Nothing you’d find interesting.”
“Oh.”
She dropped the soul into her bucket. He stood there glumly as she stepped around him and put the stick-hand back in the water. She had just found another soul, slightly perforated so she wasn’t sure whether it was good enough, when he said, “Hey, Little Girl, want to see my tits?”
Never glum for long. “Hardly.”
“Look.”
Despite herself, she glanced at Alistair. She expected him to be lifting his shirt.
Instead he was holding out his hand. In his palm, there grew two little breasts, milky-white and pendulous, with carmine nipples and blue veins she could see connecting to the big vein at the base of his thumb. “I found some bio-code inside the Mad Monk’s tomb.”
“Who cares?” she said. “That’s stupid.”
She turned and went back to work.

Little Girl sorted souls.
By size as you go right to left, by buzz as you go top to bottom. They lay upon her dissection table. She’d soaked them in buffering solution to neutralize the acid, and now as she handled them, they sent emotional pulses through her hands and arms. Shivers of pity, currents of fear, waves of melancholy. And itches of sentiment, goose bumps of lust, fluxions of hope. All of it subtle, none of it strong enough to move her one way or another. Well, of course. These were old souls. The thing to do was cut one up and see if she could absorb some thought juice directly.
She chose a small soul with the largest buzz: it had a sweet sadness like hot
chocolate on a rainy day.
It had a knobby brown carapace to protect it from the acid waters. She took her number three scalpel and placed its edge between two knobs.
“What are you up to, Little Girl?” Startled, she set the soul rolling as the scalpel screeched on the steel table. “Drat!” She caught the soul. “Why are you bothering me, you big metal monster?”
It was the Living Will. His shiny eyes blinked sadly. He was too big to come in her room so he was looking at her from outside her window. Her room was in the Tower. She figured he had climbed onto the roof of the main building, the Elderhaus, so that he could see her. “I need to talk to you. I need to prepare you for your father’s death.”
“I’m busy,” she said.
“I can see that. Cutting up souls, a fine hobby. To wet your fingers with the thoughts of a dead person; an excellent pasttime.”
It rankled her that he knew so much about her. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Really?” His mirror eyes widened. She saw herself reflected: convex, brown, and double. “What are you doing, then?”
“Nothing. Nothing I’d want the Papa to know about.”
“Is that so?” The Living Will tapped thoughtfully on the window pane. His long pink fingernails had dark lines across them, regular as the marks on a meter stick. “I hope you’re not messing with souls beyond slicing open their shells. Your father finds out you’re perverting them or resurrecting them in a body, the terms of his will might be affected.”
“Don’t worry,” Little Girl said. Her palm was wet as she squeezed the soul; apparently she had cut the soul a little, and some juices were leaking out. She felt sadder, less interested in provoking the Papa or the Living Will. “Souls are stupid anyway.”
“Well, that’s true.” The Living Will seemed relieved. “I know you don’t care to talk much about your father, but I think you need to know some facts.”
She put down the soul. “Whatever.”
“Your father’s getting old.”
“Nine-hundred sixty-nine,” she said.
“Yes. He handled souls, when he was a boy, did you know that?”
“So?”
“Souls aren’t just moods. They’re not just thoughts. They are biocodes, too. Physical instructions, streams of messages.”
“Messenger RNA,” she said. “Protein Turing tapes.”
“Good. So you know all the hard names. And you know how the codes can affect not just your brain, but your body as a whole.”
“Yeah. So he’s tumored up and destabilized.”
“Worse than that. He’s spawning organs, homunculi, strange creatures—maybe alien.”
“Really?” That sounded cool. “Maybe I should go see him?”
“Maybe. My point here, is his cells are compromised, his body’s breaking down.”
“So? Why not get a deep body-flush?”
“He’d replace so many cells, it would be a kind of death.”
“He’s scared of the Continuity Threshold?” Little Girl said. “That’s lame.”
The Living Will tapped his nails nervously against the window. “Not being self-aware, I’m unsuited to judging your father’s fears one way or another.”
“They’re dumb fears,” she said. “The Continuity Threshold is malarkey. Our minds lose continuity every time we sleep.”
“You would know,” the Living Will said. “But I’m not the one to argue with.”
She touched the soul and got a shimmy of sadness. “You’re saying I should go
argue with him?”
“I’m not saying that at all.” His eyes blinked, mirrors sheeny with yellow lubricant. “I’m to tell you that your father is turning himself off three days from now.”

She had met the Living Will once before, after her mother fell to her death. Her mother had been a scholarly woman obsessed with the biomechanics of spirituality
—whether a soul could be divided, and if so, how many times before awareness itself disappeared; whether if a soul were replicated then placed into identical cloned bodies the resurrected awarenesses would diverge or remain in lockstep, spirits resilient despite the vagaries of experience; finally whether a soul planted in a semi-
autonomous machine, say a sphinx or smarthouse, would be a moral being. It was said that she, while pondering these questions, tripped and fell into the Gash
Peculiar, that fissure so deep it touched the Earth’s hot core and where her body was presumably incinerated.
Her mother—the Living Will told her—had left her a toolset for examining souls. And a cache of dreams, like the dreams the Papa sent the cloudmind, only smaller.
Sasha (still Sasha; this was long ago) was too sad to experiment with souls then.
But she used the dreams to smooth the sharp edges of her grief when otherwise to sleep meant only nightmares.

Little Girl had not seen her father since her sixty-fourth birthday.
She could wait one more day.
She wanted to have something to show him, anyway. And the Living Will had
given her an idea. Perverting souls, resurrecting souls: that would be interesting. She didn’t know much about any of this, though. So she took the stairs down to the cellar and went to the library. The library was a scary place. Thirty rows of stacks, each stack honeycombed with memories, scattered between the stacks of bioluminescent limestone growths, rising from the floor or descending from the ceiling,
providing a wan blue light that did not so much illuminate the library as distort it, making stalactites look like hanged men, memories like the compound eyes of
insects. And there was a sense of confusion or panic; there was no diagram, no index, no attendant to help you find what you wanted. She stood with her hand on a cold wet stalagmite, sense of unease rising as she considered how complex and unfathomable the library really was.
“Oh,” she said. She remembered now, there were catalogs. Special memories set in the center stacks, dark red like drying blood despite the blue light. She walked carefully to the catalog area, touching limestone or running her fingers along the honeycombs as if her eyes could not be trusted. She still felt unease or even dread. It was only as she reached the catalogs, and pulled out the two-inch vial, that she realized why she was afraid. The Papa must have cycled some sort of fear juice into the
library since she had been there last.
To keep her out.
She chewed off the end of the vial and drank down the catalog.
It tasted of eel.
A twist in her stomach, a motion in her head; she was dizzy. She hugged the
stalagmite so she wouldn’t fall. Maybe she didn’t have the enzyme to digest the
catalog. And now she was cold, too, shivering. By Gödel; she didn’t want to be sick. She would have no interest in perverting souls if she wanted to throw up.
But then the dizziness was gone and her stomach felt fine.
She was still cold. That was all right. Cold was how the catalog must work. Or rather, hot; she walked a few steps forward and felt warmer, then a few steps farther and felt cold again. The catalog was one of those that let your skin temperature
indicate the proximity of the memory you wanted. How to pervert souls. Experimentally, she thought of something else, How to sew on a patch, and she felt suddenly so cold she wondered if the library contained no sewing memories.
How to pervert souls.
Good; she was warm again.
It took her a few minutes to distinguish the temperature differentials of the catalog from the currents of warm air coming from ceiling vents. Once she could do that, though, she found the memory quickly. In the clear vial the memory juice was
colored lilac. She found another memory for perverting souls then, two stacks over, found a memory for resurrecting them.
She didn’t ingest any of those memories.
She’d wait until she had some likely souls before her.

The tower had a hundred rooms, and a hundred stories: one room per floor. The center of the tower was a stairwell contained within a great segmented ferro-carbon tube. The tube rotated, each segment turning at a different rate, each room moving along with it. Because the rooms were brightly colored, green, yellow, blue; and
because they could be anywhere along the circuit, the tower as a whole looked like a prayer-flag.
The seventh room from the top was colored hunter’s orange. It was a tool-shop, and forbidden to her. But she didn’t try to subvert the lock that the Papa had installed on its door. She simply climbed out the window of the next room up, jumped down on the tool-shop roof as it passed beneath her, then crawled through the vent connected to the fume-hood inside. It was scary as she swung down into the vent—a twelve-hundred foot drop to the pitched stone roof of the Elderhaus. It would have been easier if she wasn’t scared of heights.
She dropped from the fume-hood to a work table.
The tool-shop smelled of antiseptic and preservative. Lab equipment—cases, glassware, scanners, work-limbs and etc.—glittered frostlike, stuck in time lock. It was cold enough to give her goose-bumps. The machinery was stacked on shelves. Somewhere there were tools for soul work. Little Girl hoped she’d find out which tools soon.
She pulled out a plastic container in which she’d put the five best souls, big and buzzy. Then she pulled out the memory for perverting souls.
In daylight, the memory was colored pink.
She chewed off the end of the vial and drank the memory down.
She itched, she yawned, she felt a stranger walk inside of her.
She saw the tool-shop with the eyes of a technician.
Everything had names, now. This case a protein sequencer, this construction of metal plates a femto-assembler. And this—a narrow cabinet six feet high with many closed drawers, supported by four bronze feet, claw-toed like the feet of a lion—this was the soulmixer. It was the tool she would use to pervert the souls.
No, not pervert. Enhance, amplify, improve.
The new memories were awkward in her head, intrusive, foreign, lacking the ease of real thoughts, feeling wrong like an ill-fitting hat.
But they worked.
On a shelf, she found a tool called an icebreaker. With it she tapped the soulmixer.
With a whine, the time lock attenuated, bright stress patterns rippling through the surface. Curdled time, glowing red, fell like embers to the floor, hissing before vanishing.
Little Girl touched a lever atop the cabinet.
From recessed panels at the sides of the cabinet emerged two arms, gray and shiny but shaped just like human arms. The hands wore elegant white evening gloves. Coming out at shoulder-height, the arms made the narrow cabinet look like a torso, and as the hands reached to pull open the two doors, it was like a headless man opening his coat.
Her father’s face leered at her from the cabinet’s dark interior.
“Sasha!” he said.
“Call me Little Girl.”
It was just a projection, but it looked real. His eyebrow arched. His face was florid. His jowls hung like wattles. The Papa looked fat, but not as fat as he was now. No, this look was forty or fifty years old. And the automaton that ran it was stupid. “Sasha!”
She had to play. “What do you want?”
“Souls are not toys.”
“That’s good. I’m too old for games.”
“You are forever innocent!”
“I’m sixty-seven years old.”
“Souls are for adults. There is no greater responsibility than that of a curator of the consciousness of a human being. This responsibility consists of ensuring the integrity and completeness of the soul. Souls are not to change.”
“Just like I’m not to change?”
“Sasha!”
She’d led the automaton off track. “What do you want?”
“Change means decay, and decay means death. Perpetual stasis is our ideal. Do not dilute a soul; do not augment one. Neither an emotion more nor a perception less. A changed soul is an abomination.”
“What about turning yourself off? Isn’t that a change?”
“Sasha!”
“Stuff it,” she said. She waved the icebreaker at the face, and with a static crackle, it disappeared.
Lights came on inside the cabinet.
It contained a sequence of stacked glass spheres, vertically connected by clear tubes, rising initially from a big sphere resting on the bottom of the cabinet. From the spheres there projected spigots that connected to other tubes. These tubes led down to a glass cone set beside the big sphere. Both the cone and the big sphere were subdivided by glass plates studded with gleaming electronic components.
The soulmixer was for dissolving souls and recombining them.
Little Girl knew how to use it.
The big sphere was the donor crematorium. You had to destroy a soul to make
a soul. She opened its side. A platinum-wire crèche emerged on an asbestos-lined platform. She took out the second-buzziest soul. It reminded her of a cool summer evening after a hot day. It would make a fine donor. She set it in the crèche. The
platform retracted into the sphere.
The glass cone was the recipient incubator. Its crèche had a small heating element. You had to heat a soul just slightly to make it amenable to new awarenesses. She opened it and put the buzziest soul on its crèche. This soul was tinged with loneliness. Like a crowded room where you’re too shy to talk.
Mixing the two souls would be cool.
She flicked a switch to start the machine.
It throbbed. It shook. Bands of electric light moved up the big sphere, faster and faster, as the soul took bursts of heat and volleys of radioactive particles. The soul seemed to cringe, puckers deepening, nodules writhing. It glowed red, then yellow. Then with a thunk it exploded, white-hot bits of shell flying glassward, and a plume of black smoke and ashes gloriously colored—carmine and emerald and royal
purple—rising from the crèche. The soul had been cremated.
Now it would be distilled.
Driven upward by heat, the ashes passed into successive spheres. In each sphere, shortwave radiation of a particular frequency—ultraviolet in this sphere, x-rays in this one, gamma rays in that one—freed moods or awarenesses of a different class: proprioception, causality, meaningfulness, and so on, stripping backbone molecules exothermically and thus cooling the awarenesses so that they precipitated and drained into a collection drain, ready to go to the other soul. How much went to the other soul was controlled by the spigots for each sphere. Too much, the soul would burst. Too little, the soul would have been expanded for no good reason. Today Little Girl opened the spigot on the third sphere wide, allowing the sense of meaning and spirituality to flow shiny and generous into the glass cone. The other spigots: causality, morality, sense of rhythm, and all the rest, she opened to just a trickle. Dull colors, tarnished silvers, coppery greens, blended into a muddy brown fluid that fell sticky into the cone.
And meanwhile the second soul, resting in the recipient cone, bathed in a solution of alcohol and salts, had been warmed so that it expanded slightly. Cracks in its carapace had widened, microscopic holes enlarged; and it was through these apertures that the awarenesses penetrated the soul. With the salt as catalyst and the alcohol as building blocks of the backbone, the awarenesses crowded into the soul, integrating with the processes already there or after bold biochemical battle replacing them. Or (Little Girl loved this outcome) joining incorrectly with an existing awareness to make a monster: happy-terror or bleak-joy or erotic-time.
The solution went from clear to gray as awarenesses dripped down into it.
Bits of awareness and broken moods bubbled up from the soul, sometimes leaving a bone-white ring in the narrow part of the cone.
At last, the donor soul was extinct, the tubes emptied, and the recipient soul was sated with new awarenesses.
The crèche slid out from the glass cone.
The wet soul had the sharp scent of ethyl alcohol.
She touched it. It felt strange.
It made her feel like all the universe was lonely.

* * *

The sphinxes lived in a vast warehouse in the desert east of the Gash Peculiar.
Little Girl, five value-added souls in her pocket, parasol to shade her from the sun, walked across the warehouse’s sand-covered roof, looking for an entrance. The warehouse was buried beneath sand, fine white sand that piled into dunes or was wind-swept so shallow you could see rusting remnants of building machinery: fan blades, pipes that went nowhere, and gray boxes presumably dangerous, for they triggered in her a sense of fear whenever she got too close to them.
The roof was big, a rectangle four miles by three, and she was frustrated. She knew there were doors, trapdoors—she’d been down one years ago—but she couldn’t
remember where they were. The dunes shifted endlessly. She could spend weeks tromping around and kicking sand before she uncovered a trapdoor.
The thing to do was try the last memory.
It was for resurrecting souls inside a sphinx, but it might have instructions on finding one, too.
She sat down on the side of a sand dune. She pushed the handle of the parasol into the sand so that the parasol stood up and kept her shaded. She pulled out the last memory vial. She drank the memory down.
It tasted of butterscotch.
She sat waiting. She watched hot wind blow a dust devil across the roof. She gazed with contempt at her small hands and little feet shod in soft-wire slippers. Suddenly her stomach felt unsettled, and she burped.
Her guts wrenched inside her.
It was a bad memory.
The sky turned green as she passed out.
 
“Why are you lying there like that, Sasha?”
She was on her side, cheek pressed against the warm sand. In the distance the roof marked the horizon. Close-by, the Living Will squatted beside her in his striped bell-bottoms and his huge patent leather shoes. Clutching her belly, she rolled so she could see his face. “Call me Little Girl. I’ve got a stomachache.”
He said, “Very well, Little Girl.” Then he closed his eyes for a while. She wondered if he had figured out she had been poisoned by a memory and was now silently summoning medical help. The silver of his eyes showed through his translucent eyelids. Finally he looked at her and said, “We must discuss the disposal of your father’s
estate.”
“What?”
“We must discuss the disposal of your father’s estate.”
“I heard you the first time. What about me?” She groaned and clasped her stomach.
“This is about you. It concerns you directly. You are your father’s only daughter and the only autonomous being he has engendered. Therefore, and also because of the respect and affection he holds for you—”
“—respect?”
“—and affection he holds for you, he intends to give you all his possessions, including his estate and his semi-autonomous agents, on the understanding that you will meet the following two conditions: one, you will not pervert a soul or cause a perverted soul to be reborn, and two, you will forthwith and forever agree to maintain the cloudmind, soothing its rages, encouraging its generosity, and persuading it to return from its absences.”
“The cloudmind?” Her stomach lurched. “That stupid . . . bitch!”
The Living Will regarded her silently. Then he said, “I wasn’t aware that the cloudmind had a sex.”
“She doesn’t! It’s just a way of speaking!”
“You are shouting, Little Girl.”
“I’m in pain. I’m just saying the cloudmind’s mean. Worse than mean—she’s insane!”
“Your father sends her gentle dreams, to soothe her in her rages.”
“I know that.” A foul moodstorm meant the Papa would spend three days in his dream closet, issuing pleasant fantasies and bucolic visions in an attempt to calm the cloudmind. Her stomach lurched again. “He wants to drop the responsibility of handling her temper onto my shoulders? Is that why he wants to die?”
“I’m not capable of guessing motives.”
Little Girl groaned and closed her eyes.
When she looked again, the Living Will was gone.

Someone gave her a cup of viscous milky fluid to drink. She finished it and then sat up. She was inside the warehouse, sitting beside Alistair Jones.
“You looked awful. Dehydrated and everything. I brought you down here.”
Here was the roof of a module within the warehouse. Modules—storage containers fifty feet long and ten feet deep—were arrayed like buildings on a street. Only these buildings had buildings below them, and more buildings farther down, for the warehouse went a half mile into the earth, and there were many levels. And the street was one of rails not pavement, and in three dimensions, for there were rails along most of the levels. Along some of the rails there ran delivery carts, all she could see empty of cargo, but moving as if with intention. Lit sporadically by glowglobes, the warehouse looked infinitely long and infinitely deep.
Her stomach felt better. The milky stuff must be an antidote for the poison. “I wanted to find out how to catch a sphinx.”
“You should have asked me for help. I could have run a bioassay on you, found out which memory proteins you have enzymes for, which you were intolerant to.”
“I like to do my own research.”
“Clearly.”
He sounded hurt.
Little Girl felt bad for not being gracious. “Thanks for helping me.”
“It was nothing,” Alistair said.
“It was more than the Living Will would do.”
“Who’s that?”
“Just an automaton. He says the Papa is terminating himself.”
“That’s bad. I’m sorry.” Alistair made to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. He said, “He’s sort of my father, too.”
“You don’t have a father.”
“You know what I mean.”
What Alistair meant was that dreams the Papa once sent to the cloudmind after a particularly bad moodstorm so delighted her that she rained down biocodes for
fertility, rekindling a time-locked embryo in the Plaza of Echoes.
Alistair asked, “Is he sick or something?”
“Not so much. It’s mostly that he’s lazy.”
“Maybe you could get him to change his mind.”
“Maybe.” She felt anger smoldering inside her and wanted to change the subject. “I’ve got some souls I want to put in sphinxes.”
He examined his fingernails carefully. “Yeah?”
“So, do you think you could help me with it?”
His face lit up so bright she wondered if he had luminescence stitched into his
hemoglobin. “I think I could, Little Girl.”

Copyright © 2011 David Ira Cleary

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