The Institute for Surrender

 The corridors of the Institute were dark; there was a power cut going on as we were led through the rooms and hallways.  Windows from the outside, in the rooms at least, let in weak afternoon sunlight.  The sky was grey and luminous, promising snow and the noise of the traffic from the Stoichiometric Highways was muffled by a line of tall trees.  I paused at a window for a moment, my hand pressed to the cold glass -- the windows were all single glazed -- and wondered how it had come to this.  Then our tour guide, Colonel Anna Crimea (not her real name), coughed politely and suggested we move on.  I noticed at least two of our generals fishing in their pockets for their protective face masks and wondered if that was a sign of sexism, racism, or just fear in general.

"This is the call centre," said Colonel Anna as we reached another door in another dark corridor.  She opened it into an aircraft hanger of a room.  Desks stretched away as far as the eye could see in rows and rows of phone-answering stations.  "This is for phone-calls; social media and chat messages are handled in a different room."

I could practically feel Caspar vibrating next to me and knew he was about to ask a question.  He was clearly excited to think he could make efficiency improvements again.

"Can't the phone operators handle short chats between calls?" he said, barely getting his hand raised before he started speaking.  Colonel Anna didn't sigh, but it looked like she wanted to.

"Surrender is a tricky business," she said, for what was probably the fifth time.  I doubt Caspar was counting though.  "We don't want the operators distracted.  They need to be able to determine if the call is genuine, and then to arrange for the actual surrender.  We don't want them sending the wrong details to the wrong person."

"Oh," said Caspar.  He subsided a little but we all knew he was still trying to find a way to be more efficient.

"Where do the, uh, surrenderees, get taken?" asked a general.  His accent was carefully neutral but that choice of word: surrenderees, marked him down as North American.

"It depends where they are surrendering from," said Colonel Anna.  "If they are combatants in the South American warzone, for example, then there are established surrender camps where they can make their way to."  She didn't give another example, which I took to mean that she, too, had spotted that the general was North American.  The North American warzone had had one surrender camp but both sides had bombed it and at that point the Institute for Surrender had pulled out and refused to return.

"The next room on our tour," said Colonel Anna, "is the break room.  Normally, when the power is on, this would have employees in it -- yes?"  She sounded surprised, but the general who had just spoken had raised his hand again.

"Is it possible to surrender here?" he asked.

The Moscow Witch

 "Once upon a time in Moscow," said the babushka who was sat next to the flickering stub of the candle, "there was an American who was so old that it was rumoured you could tell his age by counting his wrinkles.  He had flown all the way there in winter and so was greatly surprised by the difference in temperature as it was snowing in Moscow and had been for weeks."  She shifted in her seat; she didn't often tell tales with a basis of truth but the body of the American, now buried under an inch of iron-hard soil in the cellar, was making her uneasy.  "He had come with strange news to tell about the presidential election in his home country."

The child in the bed was already asleep and the snow outside the window was still falling heavily so she decided to continue.  If nothing else it would take her mind off the story of the Tell-tale Heart which was resonating with her ever more the longer the body lay downstairs.  Artem had said he would be back before midnight, with men to take the body away, but there were only two hours to go now and she was starting to worry.

"Technomancers," she said, as she still found smartphones and tablets to be near-witchcraft, "had worked their spells over great distances and wrought changes in the digital infrastructure, and the old man who resembled a turtle in so many ways that you would think he hailed from the Galapagos Islands, had come to tell the Russian President that he was now, in fact, President of the United States as well.  Of course, the Russian President already knew this for the technomancers had promised this to him and had told him once they knew their enchantments and ensorcelling had worked, but this would make it official and seal the spell for four years."

Was that the front-door?  She strained her ears, but no more noise came.  Probably just a snowfall outside then.

"But unluckily for the man, who was known as the Moscow Witch in his home country," she hesitated here, not sure she'd got that right.  It was hard translating from foreign languages, even when you spoke five, and the handwritten letter she'd been translating from had been written by someone very cold and unused to pen and paper.  "Unluckily for the Moscow Witch," she repeated, deciding to stick with what she had, "he met a woman at the train-station who recognised his aura of evil and knew how to deal with such vile spirits.  While his entourage gathered themselves together and disported themselves around him for protection she disguised herself as a cleaner and followed him into the toilets as he realised that there would be a few more hours before the next opportunity."

She smiled.  That had been a stroke of good luck, for her at least.  They hadn't actually expected his security detail to let him go in alone, or to fail to see the cleaner -- herself -- but it seems they thought this was a 'backward' country incapable of simple stratagems.  She'd followed him in, and even he had purported not to see her, and dropped a bucket over his head while he was fiddling with his trousers and hit him with a map hard enough to make her forearms go numb.  Bundling him into her trolley -- carefully constructed to let her force him into it, though she hoped he'd been dead when she had because to wake up contorted like that would have hurt -- she'd left and the body was being driven out of the airport before his security detail decided he was taking too long and went looking for him.

Finally the front door clicked and she felt herself relax.  Bringing the body here had made sense -- no-one would be looking out here in the oblasts for the body of the Witch -- but she still was uncomfortable about it.  Time to go dig it up and let the men take it to wherever they intended to ransom it from.  And then she'd turn the news on and find out how the Technomancers were taking the loss of their agent.

Timelike directions

 The house at Westrill, which went by different names depending on the direction you approached it from, was built atop a small rise.  Looking west towards it now, as the name suggested, it appeared to be ancient: it was black-beamed and white-plastered and, if it were a cottage, could easily be believed to have been built six or seven hundred years ago.  As it was it seemed to have two stories and a couple of outbuildings and so maybe had been built only two or three years earlier.  Smoke rose from all of its eight chimneys, which clustered together in the middle of the roof, creating a tiny grey-white cloud above the house.

Around it, daffodils were springing up from the grass of the rise, and the tiny river, the rill, that contributed to the house's name was running in full spate by my feet.  There was a distant lowing as cattle grazed nearby, but I couldn't see any of them and it was entirely possible that I was hearing them along the time-axis and they wouldn't be here for a few hours yet.

Justin smiled at me and I bit back my frustration.

"Cows?" he asked.  I nodded.

Justin is one of the Timeless Ones.  They have a proper name that matches with Schehdim and Seraphim but I'd forgotten it again.  It's not like I need to refer to his kind on a regular basis anyway, unlike the others.  He and his kind seem to have an effortless control over time; they can move around in it to suit themselves.  I haven't figured out yet what kind of changes they can effect but Justin seems interested in showing me.  There's something about a point-of-reference that is crucial: you can change things after the point-of-reference because that's the 'future' and you can't change the 'past' but after you cover that he starts getting mathematical and my head starts to swim.

"I can hear them, but not see them," I said.

"Point to them."

"I just said I can't see them!"  I pointed anyway in the direction the lowing seemed to be coming from.  He nodded.

"About a year away," he said.  He vanished for a moment and I realised, too late, that he must have walked off in a timelike direction for a better look.  He reappeared a moment later looking sweaty so I guessed that it must have been a fair distance there and back.  It was nice of him, I supposed, to put the gap in between his disappearance and reappearance so I knew what he'd done; he could just have seemed to have the knowledge already.  He was laughing now.  "You should definitely come back here in a year's time," he said.  "It's hilarious."

"Can't I go there now?" I asked, trying to see where he might have gone.  Looking timewards feels very weird to me, like trying to see the back of your own eyeball.  Sometimes it hurts, too.

"Only if I guided you," said Justin.  "You're getting better, but that's a long way to go by yourself.  At the moment.  But... let's come back in six months, you should be able to walk the other six by yourself then."

"Thanks," I muttered, feeling slightly useless.

"But anyway," he said, sitting down and let the water run over his hand.  "Tell me about the angels who want you dead."

Recyclable

 Cavern Supermarket was well named. It was at the bottom of a tower-block on a narrow street that was practically an alley.  Before the invaders had come and spent eighty years rebuilding and putting in infrastructure it had been an alley that led from another alley down to a slightly larger street that these days qualified as a main road.  The other buildings along the street had been residential homes first, but had morphed, slowly, into shops with flats above them.  Now there was a hairdressers's where six stylists lounged around looking louche and anorexic and no-one ever seemed to be getting their hair done; there was a pastry shop run by immigrants that did a roaring trade as their pastry recipes were all from their home town and not the locality, and there was a model aeroplane shop with dusty boxes and dead flies in the window that opened twice a day for an hour a time.

Cavern Supermarket opened until 10 every evening and at 7 every morning and was generally busy.  The shop stretched back, like an actual cavern, and took up three floors of the tower block plus the basement level.  There was a parking garage nearby and a secret there that only the workers in the supermarket knew about: the parking garage also had a basement level and that was how the supermarket took in new stock.

At least, it had been a secret (of sorts) until the new scheme had been announced and finally delivered on.  Now it was completely obvious to everyone that there was a basement level, and that there was a problem down there that was stopping anyone else from using the garage.

"Recycle!" proclaimed the signs outside the shop; large plastic banners in bright red and white that were pinned to the walls and across the plate-glass windows.  "Bring your recyclables here!"

On the ground floor, where they used to stack the baskets (both the ones you carried and the ones on wheel, like mini-trolleys) were now four large machines that looked like vending machines but took recyclables off you and gave you money back instead.  The baskets had been moved further into the shop and were creating their own problems as people went looking for them, then tried to return to the entrance to shop as they usually did and the streams of people were too much for the narrow aisles and crowded shop floor. Each machine gleamed in the fluorescent lighting and the easy-to-use slots and buttons were already greasy with unwashed fingers using them and worn at the corners.

The problem was that the locals were attempting to recycle anything and everything as they saw the machines as a source of free cash.  Despite the signs indicating the validity of bottles, plastics, boxes and everything else, the locals were determinedly pushing anything and everything into the slots and then hammering on the machines in an attempt to extract money when the machine declared the item invalid.  One man had even put his baby into the machine and was at the customer service complaining that the euro he'd been given was insufficient for recycling a child.

This in turn had lead to overcrowding of the storage area where the machines were emptied to, and then this had forced the owner of the supermarket, Charles Cavern, to call the operators of the scheme to come and collect all this 'rubbish' as he tactlessly put it.  They sent four large trucks... which promptly got stuck in the narrow alley and the underground parking garage.

Enterprising locals were already considering dismantling the trucks and seeing how much they could get from the machines for recycling them.

Elinore

 The building was ugly: it was a concrete box with barred windows.  The bars had been painted white, once, but the paint was flaking and peeling away and the iron underneath had rusted orange and had stained the concrete around it.  The square corners of the building had been eroded by wind and rain and there was graffiti on two walls -- the ones with the sheer drop below them as the building was sat on the edge of a cliff.  The two walls that were easily accessible had been ignored, probably not enough of a challenge.

There was no sign of a door.  There was a hatch in one accessible wall though: you could walk up on a broken-flagged path with green weeds poking through the cracks, or you could drive up to it as the path got very narrow indeed as you reached the hatch.  There was an iron handle, also rusting, which you could pull down and it revealed a small, padded box inside.

This was the baby drop-off.  Here you could deposit your unwanted children, close the handle on the hatch and walk away.

The law was clear: since the repeal of the abortion Act and the demonisation of medical care during pregnancy, the lives of all children were now, somehow sacrosanct.  It might be nearly impossible for a woman to give birth safely, and helping her do so could make you an accessory to a crime, but once she did the baby had to survive no matter what.  The hypocrisy and stupidity of the situation wasn't lost on many people, but seemingly it was on the majority of the voters.  So the drop-offs were enabled: after you'd been forced to risk your life having a child you didn't want you could at least be rid of it and make it the problem of the people who'd made it your problem to begin with.  Petty, vindictive, and entirely in keeping with the way the nation was going.

Inside the building was a nursery, a day-care, and medical facilities for looking after children.  The doctors and nurses that worked here came in through an underground tunnel that connected to a strip-mall a few hundred metres away so that there was no indication of where they were going or what they were doing.  Security guards were stationed along the corridor at three intervals, though the medical staff nervously joked that they might just be there to execute them if the law changed again.  The guards were implacable and impassive and, sometimes, terrifying.

The whole operation was overseen by Elinore, or rather ELINORE, a supposedly AI system that would monitor the medical activities, ensure the health of the children, and distribute once they were old enough to be rehoused, to needy families.  Assuming any could be found.

It was Monday when Elinore announced that there were no more deserving families to deliver children to.

The train station

 The island was so small that you could see to all of its coasts if you stood on Mount Pasquale (laughing named as, while it was definitely higher than the surrounding terrain, it was barely more than a hill; a pimple in the local geography).  The land was mostly scrub grass and stunted bushes over dry, friable soil and soft rock.  To the west side of the island there were the remains of trees, cut down for fuel at first, and then because they got in the way of the rich people's houses having views of the sea, and on the east side of the island the erosion was worse.  While the island had no real hills or mountain, it certainly had the eastern cliffs where the sea was eating away at the land and pulling it down.  Every year another few metres of land crashed down onto the rocky, detritus-strewn beaches below and killed an unwary tourist or a bored local.

The capital city, which was in fact the only city on the island, but the locals (in an attempt to seem more continental) called all their village-sized settlements cities, sat astride a natural inlet that served as the island's port and docks.  Due to the deep waters around the island ships could make anchor here that couldn't get closer to the mainland so there was a busy trade in smaller ships ferrying goods across.  The buildings were tall for the island there, sometimes reaching 17 stories while across the rest of the barren landscape they rarely reached more than 8.  The winds, having no trees to break them up, scoured the whole island regularly and tore rooves away and threatened to topple any building that reached too high.

Central in the capital city was the main tourist attraction and the oddest sight imaginable for an island you could walk across in half a day: the Grand Regatta Train Station.  No train had ever left it, and the tracks that emerged from it failed spectacularly only two hundred metres away where the ground had opened up during a rainstorm and formed a gully that swallowed the tracks, eight cars and two entire families.  The station was a wonder of architectural madness though: grand stone pillars flanked every entrance and exit and though the carvings were already weathered to the point of imperceptibility the pictures of them after they were finished were museum-worthy.  Inside no expense had been spared: marble floors had been imported from the continent, glass-blowers had been brought it to design and make the six-metre high windows that looked out over poverty-ravaged and sewage-strewn streets, and luxury woods from half a world away had been imported to fashion the ticket kiosks and help-desks that were now silent and empty.

A single train sat in the station, never to leave, and had been converted into a luxury eight-bed mini-hotel for the richest of the tourists; spending their days on a train on an island where the only possible destination was into the sea.