“I wish you’d just fucking wake up John,” Vic said softly as she held a straw to his mouth.  He didn’t move but once the straw met his lips he began slurping the nutrient fluid Bob had cooked up down with noisy swallows.  “What the hell are you staring at?”


    Hell wasn’t quite right, John thought with the fraction of his brain left in the material universe.  It seemed a bit like hell in a way.  Perfect Darwinism, natural selection applied to the idea of ideas.  His thoughts stumbled.  That wasn’t right.  How do you express the inexpressible?  How do you describe something that is beyond language?


    Rhombus had moved on.  He didn’t know when, time wasn’t something he could currently understand anyway.  But his communion with Rhombus had ended in the same way it had started.  It had always been happening and then it had always been over.  Now he was marvelling at the savagery of the concepts feeding and fighting as the ship flowed past them.


    The ship was piggybacking on the trapped concept.  Despite being pulled through into the material universe the concept wasn’t able to exist fully in reality.  The technology of the “engine” simply forced the concept to move in a non-direction that happened to translate into the right place in reality.  John couldn’t understand it, he’d pass that over to Bob at some point and his server-selves could go loopy trying to make it work.


    One thing John did understand was the pain of the engine-concept.  It wasn’t pain as a human would understand it.  There was no burning or twitching agony.  It was a wrongness that caused the concept to bleed away, gradually weakening.  The concept experienced the whole process as a simultaneous event but being dipped into the material world meant it was happening very gradually.  In a few thousand years the tortured entity would collapse and a new propulsion system would be needed.


    His fractured mind returned to the issue at hand.  It had always been the issue at hand.  Time was so infuriating!  How to reconcile this new perception with the material world?  The enslaved concept seemed like the best source of data to find the compromise needed to be able to function without losing this new ability.


    “I don’t know what’s happening to you John.  You know all the shit we’ve been through?  Years of fighting and getting stronger.  Years of love and friendship.  Well this can’t be the end.  You aren’t going to just drift off into some weird fucking coma because magic gave you some fucked up eyes!  Come back to me!” she snatched the straw away and his lips immediately closed.


    “Maybe we need to do something a bit more physical?” she asked in a sultry voice.  She harrumphed at his lack of reaction.  Maybe you didn’t understand what I meant?” she asked as she pulled back a hand and swung through to slap him on the cheek.  His body didn’t move, despite the force she’d put behind the blow.


    She shook out her hand.  It had been like slapping a statue.


    “Vic!  I don’t think that’s going to help!” barked Evie as she hurried over.


    “Something has to wake him up!  He has to come back!” Vic’s voice was tinged with madness.  Even in his fugue state John felt something stir in his distant body.  He began to reach out, to claw his way back to reality.  One part of his mind was still locked on the “fuel” driving the ship even as he reached out to comfort his wife.


    “Don’t you remember Katie doing that?  Ah, no, that was before we rescued you.  If there is one thing I’d not recommend, it''s that!  He tends to react badly to physical violence when he’s out of it, he looked like he was going to kill her when he focused.  Mind you I was about to fry her as well!” Evie said, giving Vic a brief hug.  “He’ll come back when he’s ready.”  The confidence in her voice wasn’t mirrored in her worried eyes.


    “Fate is flexible but doesn’t like to be seen being flexible,” muttered John.  Both women turned to stare at him.  “That’s what she said.  She was wrong though.  It’s all already happened.”


    He leaned back, legs still crossed and stretched out across the hard metal of the hold.  Vic crouched down and tried to pull him into a hug but his body couldn’t be moved.


    “What’s wrong?  Why won’t you hold me?” she asked.


    “Not fully present.  Reintegration…  assimilation of true reality.  Wrong words.”


    “Dad, you’re being weird, old man.  Have you snapped out of it or not?” demanded Evie.


    “Not.  Still everywhere, everywhen.  Can’t focus properly.  World is broken, you know?  Magic let me see.  Set me up,” he slurred.  His mouth wasn’t forming the words correctly.


    “Are you in pain?” asked Vic.


    “Pain. Always and never.  Perhaps that’s part of it?”You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    “You want us to hurt you?” asked Evie.


    “Can’t.  Not strong enough now.  Material flows around immaterial.  Do you want to know how I die?”


    “What do you mean die?” demanded Vic but John lapsed into silence, staring upwards with his strange eyes.


    Evie nudged him with a foot, careful to keep her head and chest well back but John stopped reacting.


    “I think he’s gone again.  Still, it’s a good sign right?” Evie asked.  Vic looked up at her with tears running down her cheeks and neither woman spoke for a moment.  “He’s got to be on the mend.” Evie said softly as she laid a hand on her step-mums shoulder.


    The next day proved more challenging.  He couldn’t drink from a straw while laid out on his back.


    “He’s not fucking budging,” said a B-3000 that had been roped in to try and prop John back up.


    “Move over, let me try,” said Raoul.  The big man grew another metre in height and reached down to scoop John up with one hand.  His drainpipe-thick fingers bounced off and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t scoop them underneath his friend.


    “Never send a giant to do man’s work,” scoffed Flash as he knelt down and also failed to move John.  His muscles bulged, as had Raoul''s, but John was rooted in place somehow.  Flash tried to slide a force field under him and the field could slide along the metal floor but it couldn’t move him.


    “Well that’s weird.  I can move tons with those fields,” Flash grumbled.


    “I tried that shit yesterday,” said Evie.  “It’s like he’s built into the floor or something!”


    “Or an immovable object,” muttered the drone.  “Shit!  That cost me two more server-me’s!”


    “Eh?” said Vic.


    “Whenever I make a bit of headway on whatever it is John’s been working on, bits of me blow up.  That was a particularly bad one.  I’m not sure he’s actually here,” said the combat drone thoughtfully.  One hand rose and cupped the metal chin in a parody of a biological response.


    “What the hell do you mean?  You can see him!  He’s right fucking there!” said Sam.


    “I don’t think he’s really there, there.  It’s hard to explain.  It’s actually impossible to explain but that’s the best I can manage.  That-” a metal arm was waved at johns prone form, “-is more like an echo.  Or an anchor.  It’s like a… a fossil?”


    “Bob, do we need to grease your gears or something?” demanded Evie.


    “I don’t have gears.  Well, not like you mean.  I don’t have the right language.  John’s thinking in something that isn’t like a language but it does the same thing.  It’s all contradictions!” snapped the robot.


    “So how the hell do we feed him in this state?  We can’t move him, can’t prop him up and he’s stopped drinking.  He’ll only last a couple of days without water!” barked Vic from where she knelt at John’s side, one hand resting on his chest.


    “He isn’t actually breathing anymore.  He might be using the oxygen bladder Pete gave him but I don’t think he is.  I don’t think he needs any water or food.  He was drinking because his body reacted automatically to the straw.”


    “Bob.  He is breathing!” snapped Vic.  She moved her hand to hover over John’s mouth.  Then she leant in and held her cheek in front of his nose.  “Ok.  He isn’t.  What the hell!  Am I a widow now?”


    John’s conversation with Spiral, the concept trapped in the engine of the Kipragtsek, had come to an end and he had been able to spare a little more of his attention for his surroundings.  The word widow rang like a bell in his new world, making everything shake and pulse with previously unknown colours.  Pain returned.  True pain of the merely material type but he wasn’t bothered by it.  The lives of the concepts had inoculated him against merely physical pain.


    He craned himself upright, all the rigidity was gone and Vic almost knocked him back down.  He released his hold slightly and he became immovable again.  He had closed his eyes as he rose up and now he brought his hands up to cover his face.


    “You always would be a widow but not on this thread yet,” he groaned.


    “Are you ok?” she asked, her hands fluttering across him to check if he was hurt.


    “Pain,” he said flatly.


    “Where is it?” asked Bob.  Prime had come over and was waving some complicated, wand-like device in John’s direction with one of its six legs.


    “Me,” John replied unhelpfully.


    “Well we know that Dad,” Evie laughed nervously.  John didn’t move but his brain cried out at what he had lost.  He would never be the same again.  He had been reborn by his exposure to the chaos.  He fought to limit his awareness, narrowing his perception and sensation down to the merely human in much the same way he had altered his ruby eyes to avoid seeing through things he wanted to focus on.


    “All at once.  Need control!” he groaned again, his body reacting to the stimulus that didn’t reach his mind anymore and his hands clenched into fists, rubbing against his crystalline eyes.


    “What can we do?” asked Sam cautiously, maintaining a healthy distance from her old friend.


    The control he had been fighting for slipped and he was back in the chaos, everything and everywhen all at once assaulted him in the material world.  His body went rigid again before he pried his fists away from his face.  His expression didn’t change but he tilted head back and emitted an inhuman noise.


    It didn’t come from his throat.  His voice box wasn’t capable of making the discordant static that spilled out.  He struggled to regain control but the power was bucking wildly, the more he tried to throttle it the wilder it fought him.  As his screech came to a stop his head flicked forward and his eyes split with a crack.  There was a grinding noise of crystal on crystal as his hands spread out to his sides and his fingers dug into the metal flooring.  Vic was accidentally pushed away by the move and as she picked herself up she saw blasts of red dust spew out of John’s face.


    Vic pulled herself round and put her hands on his cheeks.  His empty sockets stared back at her, the runes Magic had carved into his forehead and cheeks glowed fiercely for a few moments before going dim.  They still glowed faintly, purple and pink sparks drifting away from his face that vanished as they moved more than an inch or two from John’s now empty sockets.


    His body went limp and he fell backwards.  A forcefield flared up before his skull smacked against the metal and lowered him gently.  Vic grabbed his cheeks and pulled him back up, cradling his face in her hands.


    “Raoul, get him into the stash.  We need to put him in a med-pod and get a look at his newest ultra-weird situation.  Bloody hell John.  You never make it easy do you?” muttered the drone.