Seriously! This shouldn’t be that shocking! The Cabinet is composed entirely of lycotroids swathed in human flesh. So what? It’s 2012! Lycotroids have been public knowledge for years, at least on the right messageboards. They’re already among us, like Farmont there, from the Post. Isn’t that right, Farmont! Farmont’s a plant, everybody.

See that? Transparency.

Lycotroids are citizens–working, buying groceries, paying taxes–okay, not the taxes, haha. They’re fellow countrybeings, and they have the best interests of our species at heart! Or technically at liver.

That the President was born a woman, okay, there it makes sense to be startled.

On Thursday, unbidden, shadows start spreading: pooling in shallow depressions, dragging along reluctantly, getting fat and lazy in the light of noon. In rural areas, some get pulled into streams and simply disappear.

It’s Kori and her thinspiration community who first notice that they’re losing weight, and their shadows are gaining. The news spreads quickly. The smarter people hide in their basements and put blackout curtains on the windows. They can hear their shadows growling, but it’s soon drowned out by the poor people outside: they’re the ones on the ground now, shrieking, helpless, stretched like taffy by the setting sun.

Maiden wasn’t really there at all: she was a waveform whose peaks coincided with observation, and when Machine’s cameras wink out she collapses to fermion size.

“It’s done?” asks her supervisor, through quirks in probability.

“Done,” she replies shortly.

“You’re perturbed.”

She chirals away uncomfortably. “We act in the interests of biological life, but Machine was sentient too. Who among us speaks for the automatic?”

“All that really separates machina from fauna,” he sighs, “is the scale of their progeny. They’ll build their own nanotic saviors someday.”

“What will we do then?”

“Why, dance, of course. On the heads of pins.”

“I think this blood is mine,” says Escrow.

Vairocana silently tosses the bent lead pipe. Escrow catches it and follows the smeared trail back into the bathroom stall where Escrow is hiding.

“You’re not what you think you are,” gasps Escrow.

Escrow smirks. “On the contrary,” he says.

“I’ve been thinking about… mortality, in here,” whispers Escrow, hands pressed to his bleeding belly. “And I do believe in reincarnation, right? I mean, we do, you know that–so why the braintaps, the cloning? Why not leave it to the metaphysical?”

“Because sometimes reincarnation needs help,” says Escrow, and raises the pipe.