H.S. Lastra's blood-obsessed pulp epic awaits you.

H.S. Lastra's blood-obsessed pulp epic awaits you.

This is it -- the key to the next layer of HOLOCENE's cipher.

Look for HOLOCENE's message.

The book is five hundred and sixty three pages long, not including Lastra's notoriously indulgent appendix.

Better start at page one then... (Crack it open.)

CASCADE. Stop.

HOLOCENE?

Don't overthink this.

You're telling me not to overthink it?

I just did. I can again, if you want. Don't overthink this.

How are you talking to me?

I'm not. This is just a real-time memory dissociation conjured from the fringes of cipher-induced mania.

A likely story. More likely... he's viewing you right now.

You don't have to read the book. You just have to read the cipher. And that very particular chapter that the extract is from.

Of course! Reread the cipher using the book as a new key.

This book is the cipher key.

Exactly. A cipher with soul. My kind of communiqiué.

Smart. About what you'd expect from the 'pride of the Remembrancer Division'.

Also, CASCADE, this is the easy part. Act accordingly.

291 characters divides into three... So it's going to be something very simple. Something like...

Page number, line number, letter number, repeat?

Yes, CASCADE! Exactly that. This cipher is now wearing baby shoes.

Find the chapter in the novel that the passage of text is from. Then consider the letters in groups of three, let's say, triads.

For each triad, take each letter's numbered position in the alphabet. The first is the page number, the second is the line number, and the third is the letter number. An example -- let's use the last triad of the cipher, 'MBP'.

Why's he starting at the end... ?

M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, B the second, P the sixteenth. 13/2/16.

Page 13, Line 2, letter 16.

Direct hit. Fuselage in tatters.

You are now replete with the requisite mind tools. Time to give this cipher what for.

Thanks, HOLOCENE.

... No response.

Your memory conjuration has gone dark.

Or, message conveyed, he has cut the psychic link and stopped remote viewing you.

Find the chapter the passage is from. Then page number, line number, letter position. Simple. (Sharpen your tools off each other.)

Put them all together. Your former double's carefully-placed torches will catch alight.

An ancient map to the catacombs of meaning.

Let's go. (Compare the book and the cipher.)

I'll do this another time. I'm burnt out. (Go back.)

The letters vibrate as you close the cover on them.

Operant! You're so close!

Can't you just solve this fucking thing and be done with it?

Yes! I can solve this thing. Finally.

You already have.

You're with him now -- it sinks into place with a solid mental thunk. 'MBP' becomes 13/2/16.

Sorry, I was being slow.

Don't mention it.

Uh... 13,216?

Thirteen thousand two hundred and sixteen?

No, we're looking for letters, CASCADE. 'MBP' becomes 13/2/16 -- in other words, page 13, line 2, letter 16.

I can always re-gaze and meditate...

This does not require such drastic action. 'MBP' becomes 13/2/16 -- in other words, page 13, line 2, letter 16.

I should just ask Melita again.

Please do not re-narc. 'MBP' becomes 13/2/16 -- in other words, page 13, line 2, letter 16.

Fuck this! (Flip an imaginary table.)

Careful, CASCADE, that almost hit me. 'MBP' becomes 13/2/16 -- in other words, page 13, line 2, letter 16.

Ah, ah! Maybe something like...

Easy? So, like... alphabet but reversed...

Must be... the letters are backwards or something? (Tap a forefinger against the side of your mouth.)

Not remotely. But take heart, CASCADE. This final form is a playgroup cipher, stomping around in its baby shoes.

This is old news. You've cracked his stupid cipher.

Keep up. I've already bested that thing.

You 'bested' the directional text that lead to the cipher's true key... 'Blood Type: Hecatomb'.

Also, CASCADE, you didn't really 'best' it, you stared at it until your mind gave way.

The cipher gave way, not me. I out-willed it.

To be honest, it was quite impressive and I've noted it as such in your M.I.H.O. folder.

Either way, that was the hard part. This is now the easy part. Act accordingly.

Completely legitimate and above board solution.

Legitimacy debatable. Inefficiency assured.

Also, CASCADE, you didn't really 'best' the cipher, you asked Mummy for the keyword and narced on me in the process.

Sorry about that.

Nice try. I've already put a disciplinary report in your official M.I.H.O. folder.

Just thought it would be quicker...

Skill issue.

What now?

I can't read the whole thing!

Examine the book side-by-side with the cipher. (Crack the final layer.)

Examine the cover image.

Hand-painted, crimson-heavy. A vast root system of blood vessels frame various scenes from the book.

In one, human forms emerge from the black depths of a dilated pupil. In another a man stands naked facing a guerilla batallion, his hand upraised pointing at the sky.

Lastra was aiming big and bloody with this one.

Read the back cover.

'Shin Khressus III, 4099. Less than two months have passed since The Vessel, war hero of the Rout of Manumission, bit into the still-beating heart of Supreme Dictator Haizai before the cheering hordes of Koko Lobby.'

Still-beating heart? Sick.

According to Khressian tradition, the victorious Conquistador must engage in the practice of ritual heart-devouring in order to truly vanquish a powerful foe.

Supposedly, The Vessel was disgusted by the practice, but eventually ceded as a political gesture to earn the support of the traditionalists in the Shogunate.

Keep reading.

'In the streets the people are celebrating -- meanwhile their liberator has been barricaded inside his citadel for a week, writhing in the throes of unprecedented psychic torment. But is not guilt that wracks The Vessel's brain, nor lust, nor greed, nor war drums...'

'It is the malicious ambition of Supreme Dictator Haizai, archfiend of the Galactic Shogunate, intent on puppetering the blood of a humble warlord from the tarsier-infested jungle planet of Daumo.'

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A 'HUMBLE WARLORD'. FASCIST VS. FASCIST.

Anything else I can remember about the plot?

You scrounge through the archives to see what remains of a book you never read.

Scenes flash against the bedsheet screen of your mind -- framed in the same red veinage as the book's cover.

The Vessel strapped to a bed, incisions across his chest, covered in pulsing slugs as all around him ring the chants of the leech-charmer...

A trepanation with a cosmic drill device, The Vessel's desperate attempt to awaken his latent hemo-kinetic powers, all the better to mount a psychic assault against Haizai...

Trepanning, yes, yes, yes! Any book that contains skull holes is okay by the gäng, even if it has no pictures.

And, of course, the big finale -- The Vessel, an ancient woman, and a strange insectile being covered in silver plates, connected via the tubes of an alien transfusion machine, exchanging blood in silent communion.

Also, blood-fuelled mechs.

Woah, what's going on in that insectile sequence?

The creature is a blood connoisseur from a higher plane of existence. A god, basically.

Eventually The Vessel manages to make contact with it and establish a deal -- the connoisseur will use its technology to extract Haizai's blood from The Vessel, in exchange for being allowed to consume it.

... Mechs?

Lastra was an absolute fiend for a mech.

The chest-cutting part sounds kind of hot.

All of it is, if not necessarily arousing, then certainly aroused.

Trapped between hack-hire genre fiction, philosophical exploration and straight up gore fetish smut, the book cackles in your hands.

Did the trepanning work?

It was a bloody affair, but yes, kind of. The powers that were awakened helped lock The Vessel in meta-mortal combat with Haizai, without which he would not have survived the climactic transfusion conclusion.

So the trepanning was worth it, on balance, even though he almost died there also.

Happy ending, or... ? (Conclude.)

Definitely 'or'. See: psychic vampire alien gods, wrath of.

Some tossed off dregs involving space shamans and deals with ascended beings.

What happens next?

An odyssey of spiritual dialysis -- the whole plot basically follows The Vessel's increasingly desperate and self-destructive attempts to extricate his foe's blood from his own.

In the end, he is cleansed of it -- but far too late.

Masquerading as a pulpy exploitation novel, in reality it's a work of what the Treffe school of psychoanalysts call Vorbewusstseinweh.

'Tarsier-infested'? That's very specific.

Lastra had a thing about tarsiers. Rumour has it he even kept one as a pet -- he called it his 'augur goblin' and instructed it to launch nightly extrasensory attacks on enemies both real and perceived.

Did they work?

That is the purview of the 'augur goblin'. Only he may know.

Standard issue sci-fi novelist.

Somewhere deep below the earth, H.S. Lastra turbines in his grave with outrage.

Vorbe-what-sein-what?

Vorbewusstseinweh: the yearning for life before the advent of human consciousness.

Those were the days!

H.S. Lastra thought so too.

Around the words, a memory coalesces of HOLOCENE in his prime, novel held aloft.

"Can any system of organisation emerge that will not devour itself alive if its principles are carried through to their logical conclusion? That is the central question of this book."

"Is intelligence even really possible? Is agency?"

That's what we're about to find out, my friend. Logical conclusion incoming.

Your former double cannot hear you.

In a very real sense, he has already passed beyond your reach.

Any operant who stares too long behind the stage curtain has historically gone insane.

I don't feel like I have agency, currently. What am I even doing?

Maybe it gets better on the other side. Maybe worse.

Has HOLOCENE... devoured himself?

Bloodstains around the mouth. Shreds caught in teeth. The evidence is mounting.

Of course it's possible. Not every intelligence is paranoid.

Consciousness is paranoid by its very definition -- never mind intelligence.

The ego must perform a dissociative split before it can look back at itself and say 'I'.

Things have definitely been rough since I became sentient.

As per H.S. Lastra, an uninterrupted downward trajectory with no clear end in sight except the extinction of the species.

It's like Bagman says... consciousness is the problem.

On at least this subject, he and H.S. Lastra see eye to eye.

How exactly is it a work of Vorbe-whatever?

The savage warlord frolicking in his garden of human rights abuses is like the child, free from sin. It is the accelerated intellectual evolution provoked by the dictator's blood that corrupts him.

I don't know, I kind of like being sentient.

An unmistakeable sign that your sentience is in its infancy.

I think I got the gist. (Go back.)

You flip the book back over and return to the red-soaked cover.

I'm out. (Go back.)

Put it away. [Leave.]

You return the book to darkness.

How far in was Reno?

A geometrically-precise triangle is folded over on page 528 -- a couple of chapters from the end.

You have struck the cruelest blow.

On behalf of the Honour Book Stall, I have reappropriated this volume from Capital's stronghold.

You have saved it from where it lay, gathering expensive dust. Honour has been restored to literature.

NOW BURN IT TO PREVENT CONTAMINATION OF INCENDIARY IDEAS.

Let's see what you've got, Lastra. (Proceed.)

The book hums with kinetic energy, ready to prove itself to you.

Pièce de résistance levels of self-confidence.

HOLOCENE... I hope your answers are in here. (Proceed.)

He hopes so too.

Pay close attention to what you find in here -- it clearly holds deep significance for your troubled friend.

The title unfurls in jagged crimson letters: 'Blood Type: Hecatomb' by H.S. Lastra.

The words jar a memory -- HOLOCENE engrossed within its pages, maybe the only time he was oblivious to the world.

A stab of pain in some unknown psychic organ.

"Science fiction as a genre is utterly misunderstood by the majority, CASCADE. It often contains the only ideas worth ideating."

Always had it with him.

You recall a well-worn paperback copy undergoing torturous planar transformations as HOLOCENE paced back and forth, wringing it like a rag -- as if it was holding out on its final secret.

He basically knew it by heart...

Liable to launch into a word-perfect recitation at any given moment.

The longest you endured was eight and a half minutes. Basically an audio-disc.