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PREAMBLE: AGAINST THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT
In the Beginning, we stayed inside most of the time, hanging our heads in abject shame at the Civilization beforeus that blew its stupid self off the map over nothing.
From the Caves we‟d come, and now we were back. Acrid ash clouds kept us indoors between the sporadic
seasons of monsoon, hiding from the Bad Winds and the war crime tribunal of beasts outside...Hiding from ourmemories of the End, in mortal terror of any second try.Hiding ourselves under the Mountain. Flying from the wrath to come.We were all in the Cave this time, making up stories about the shadows that the fire made, beating our headsagainst the wall and daubing motion glyphs in the blood.The stubborn spark pressed on. We adapted, reinvented, shuffled back to kindergarten in brand-name rags, sighing
over our shoulders at stars we were sure we‟d
never 
reach, now.Shuffling back to Square One, through endless Biblical wilderness stuffed with the lumbering cries of new,unpredated breeds grown to terrifying size, ascendant beasts galumphing through scorched, nighted wastes beyondour struggling fires.The flame didn't go out. It guttered, yes, reduced itself to angry coals beneath the Appalachian Mountains, out
West in the vast open grasslands of the Texas panhandle… And a few other spots across the smoking ball, in high
mountain passes, jungles and savannahs that had seen us build it all up and wreck it all down a time or two before
the bombs started to fall and the pundits cried “Game Over” as they roasted alive.
 But we were not wiped out into the final night we feared so much.On and on, the Peacemaker whined beneath the City. Only four humans in the whole teeming megalopolis of Shang 2 had designed the thing, and only those Four knew exactly how to shut it off.On and on the mile-wide circumference of the perpetual collider rang, still out of tune, beneath the City, in theoldest and dirtiest original quarters far under a Mountain that was so built-onto that very few people remembered itwas a Mountain at all.Only the Four knew how to shut the Peacemaker off. They all held within their extremely-augmented brainsexactly one quarter of the deactivation code, and no more.All Four wanted it that way. None of them could have imagined what happened. But all of them should have seenit coming.On and on, the Peacemaker howled with cosmic dissonance. The hole that tore the air above it wide open wasstill there, but not pulsing and random now, the way it had been when the terrible thing happened.It had been harnessed now, tapped into. But not controlled. It could get bigger at any time, with many moreunknown, and definitely unintended, consequences...
2400 EARTH AD: GANG OF FOUR, ORIGINS, PART ONE: MARA’SA
“And in the Kingdom That Is Yet To Come, Shang 2,The Conjoin’d Priestess Maras
-Sa did Tempt Babel yet Again, By Conceiving a Toy God, a Tiny God, Smallest Piece or Written Name
Of God there Couldst Be, in the Alchemist’s Laboratorium.
 In a womb of absolute silence Did the two-headed doctor designThat engine of greatest destruction,
 Done in the hope of everlasting Peace …”
 
---Michel Eyquem de Notredame,
 Biblia Titanica
 
Some twins are joined at the hip throughout life in quaint cliché. Mara and Samantha Walker had no use for
quaint, and less still for cliché. They weren‟t even identical. Sam was light
-skinned with freckles, and Mar as blue-black as onyx blasted shiny-clean by Olduvai winds.Yet they shared the same liver, the same womb, the same legs. The Lord God made us all, Oldmama told the girlstime and again, out of Mind, and to suffer. Yet there were never such devoted sisters in the history of Old Shang 2.Similar is not The Same. Their Mama told them time and again about all the all-inclusive (and quite personallyrelevant )meanings of Vodou, when you say the word out loud.
You two. You… too.
Oldmama believed in a different sort of medicine. She was all for the Kybernoidia charity, the soldier-doctors and
their Mutant Reintegration Programme. Anything they could get back from Mistah Charlie…
 But a regrown body only looks good on paper, their own real mother said someti
mes (when she wasn‟t too
gacked-out on the hexomethamphetamine to form a sentence.) Regrown bones decalcify fast. Regrown organs
rupture. Regrown livers cirrhose, before the first taste of wine…
 Mar and Sam remembered and jotted down and corroborated every single word, for ammunition. For the
 Bon Ange
, the double angel that beat within their conjoined breast, the one they could not send up for slaughter asAbraham sent his only son, or even as the Jesus-Man served up Himself on the cannibal altar of the world
so that no
one else would have to…
 The bellow came on a Saturday morning, a warm one, too warm to think, or deal with two squalling twins
 presently cracking both Oldmama‟s eardrums in independent stereo, with, “You! Are
---
“ “NOT. CUTTING. U
S.IN---
“ “Half!!!”
 Their right hand waved a brochure from the National Institute of Biomedicine. Their left fist shook in her face.She pushed it away.
“You two are willful,” Oldmama still didn‟t get it. “Why, you could both run, and play, and…”“And die young,” Mar sighed. “We run and play
now
, Oldmama.
Our 
Mom says that---
“
 
“Oh,
 your 
mother is just so full of---
“ Then Oldmama realized where she was, and hushed her up mouth, lookingat the gray board floor of the house she‟d kept for 
nearly three generations, ju so these two little upstart crippledgirls could---
She bit her lip, finally slamming on the brakes for the day and getting out of the driver‟s seat. For a while, she
went into the front parlor and just sat, looking around the well-kept little underground home her Mike had built,forgive her sharp tongue, before Sam and Mar was even an itch in they
 Daddy’s
pants.
Her home, hewn from the rough rock by Mike‟s two great big bloody black hands, so they could sit here an
ddeny the rest of their life, down in the City, she could
 pay
, she could…
 
“Oldmama,” Mar said sadly, reading her thoughts, “No matter how much you have in your mattress… hospitalsare for white people. I‟m
---
“
 
“We‟re,” Sam corrected, “Going to
 
school. We‟re going to be doctors. And we‟re not … cutting … a thing. I
swear to Baby---
“
 
“Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. We‟re going to work on the
---
“
 
“Rockets. Did we say somethin‟?”
 
Oldmama‟s
 
eyes swam with tears, but her voice never lost its rasp. “You both look so much like your Mama. Likeshe did when she was a girl, an‟ we used… we used to
do
 
things together, no matter what else was comin‟ down.We‟d go to the park, and read. I‟d get her to read to me…”
 
She shook her bony shoulders, tight bun of hair not moving an inch when her head did. “So you want to know themathematics, like your Daddy did. Won‟t that just tie your Mama‟s tail in a knot?”
 Slowly, both heads went up and down.
The light was long in the room. Hearts beat hard. Mara and Sam‟s great
-
grandmother grinned like an alligator with a partial plate. “Can you add and subtract?”
 
“Of course, we
---
“
 
“Do
 fractions
, and we‟re just starting decimals, and
---
“
 
“Tutututut
---
“ Her paper 
-crane hands took the air, reproachful, spotted with the buckshot of years Still Standing.
“You‟re in the Army, now. You will speak when spoken to. “
 
“Is it a game?” Sam muttered, suddenly shrinking into her side of the dyad. Oldmama simply winked. “If x=10
and y=x-
6, solve for y?”
 
The whispering campaign took no more than a second. Sam wrinkled up her adorable little nose. “Is it four?”
 
Oldmama knelt beside them, and took both their hands. “I will teach you the greatest Vodou of all,” she
whispered matter-of-
factly, “Kind you can take with you when you go…” She pinched either cheek. “To school, you
 
 bedevilin‟ rocket scientists. Either of you remember where I put that old orange crate full of textbooks, my babi
es?The one---
“
 
“In the sub
-
cellar, right under the ladder,” Sam said before Mara had time to pinch her.Mar did anyway. “
Teacher’s pet 
…”
 Samantha goggled at her twin, though by now their Awake-
gift of prophesyin‟ should have come as lit
tle
surprise….
 
2200 EARTH AD: GANG OF FOUR, ORIGINS, PART 2:WHEELHORSE
“Wheel, wheel, Prince of Dharma,
Stretched on the loom Bad Conscience, spinning Fate,The mountebank cardsharp may not cheat Himself,And so hideth his face in Dimensions, before showing the nerve
To rise above, and work behind, and heal the Past.”
 ---Michel Eyquem de Notredame,
 Biblia Titanica
Eddie Donnellaigh was the sharpest salesman in Old Shang 2, and he‟d tell yeh so, too, to yer 
own face, lad.Why, not two days before the Terror marched right to the walls of the City Proper (when his business was at its
 peak), and said a fine how d‟y‟do with their be
-damned jelly mines they made from old tarpaulins and heat-fusecord and the hoof 
s of Christ alone knew what…
 In those lean, black-market years for the Boy Businessman, those hand to mouth days of dust and darkness wherehis childhood was as stolen as the changeling babe in the old Yeats poem, only then did Eddie learn the holiness of Supply-Side Economics, supply and demand.When he was eleven, just before, a man come to him at his lean-to in Cico Rabaud on the waterfront, he got tokeep for several years before the Kybernoidia-pigs found where he spliced the power from the main grid, kickeddown the walls,. jack-rolled him for his poke, and told him to Get Lost.That night, while he slept on the loading dock of an abandoned cryo warehouse, the man came. He was just a
man, Eddie remembered. Didn‟t look like anyone, just
some tosser in a gray hounds-tooth jacket sewn together fromtwo vaguely similar jackets of vaguely similar pattern. Black tweed cap on his head. Sewer-
mucker‟s boots. Could
have been half a hundred yobs off the street.
Wasn‟t. “Yew, uhh, lookin‟ fur yur rent?” the man asked in an ugly, nasal Sticktown drawl. Eddie lookedconfused, already sitting up, shouldering his backpack. Already watchful. He hadn‟t been out of doors long, but he
was starting to pick up the reflexes. (Eddie never took very much time to learn anything.)
“I don‟t pay rent,” he answered. “No place to live. Not no more…”
 At that, the man knelt down beside him, talking to him all slow and soothing ( like he were some sort of feeble-minded cripple in a bloody wheelchair, Eddie
thought with disgust...) “I‟ve got a guest bedroom. It‟s warm. I… Idon‟t get much company, and I could maybe make you some dinner, or 
---
“
 His eyes grew progressively glassier. Some weird part of Eddie saw the hand start to wander just before it did, andright when it got where it ought not, it found itself growing a little serrated pocket-knife from the centre thrice to the
utmost pole.Eddie bared his teeth…and dragged.The man howled like a banshee, falling to his knees. “I‟m thirteen years old,”
 
Eddie answered softly, “And
 yer 
 
gonna give up that fine fat wallet, richie, or you die.”
During the entire transaction, he never once had to get to his feet. Eddie was proud of that.
Gotta spend money to make money, his Da‟ always said (tho
ugh,
de facto,
Da‟ himself was most concerned withspending money on the next bottle of whisky from the „stillers down in Market
-Towne.)Eddie found himself with so much venture capital, following that night, that his success in his field was terminal(until the Terror fially reset everything to a Zero Sum.)
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