Choosing Sides
"The masked figures transformed"
Previously: Astra walks into a conflict between the Heathens and the clippers
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Brooklyn
Astra sensed into Jen as she fiddled nervously with her ponytail. The woman was alarmed. But not panicked. Apparently, this wasn’t her first combat scenario. Jen was scanning the masked gang, looking for someone. No – not someone in particular, but a type of person.
The two suited men to her sides readied themselves.
The sun and moon masks pushed their way to the front of the encircling Heathens. “Guys, let our zombie fight them!“ “Yeah!”
The Whole Foods security guard, who was once in their pursuit, now appeared to be in their thrall, his face entranced and smiling. The moon mask flicked her hand out and the guard outstretched both arms, like the walking dead.
“Clipper vs clipper!” they cheered.
“Back away immediately!” shouted one of the suited men. He moved in front of Astra.
Once again, the devil-mask spoke: “Look, they’re protecting her! I told you guys, but you won’t listen!”
“Protecting who?” “That lady with the tats?” “She’s too cool to be a clipper.”
One of the suits removed a taser gun from his belt. “Get back!”
“Ohhh shit!” “It’s getting real.” “Heathens, stand your ground!”
Some of the masks ducked and fled.
Jen watched the masks flee and, again, shook her head for the suits. No, not them either.
Amongst the rest who stayed, Astra felt something like a volcano rumbling. “Bruh, they’re asking for it.” “You’re right.” “Let’s do this!” “For freedom!”
The unicorn and genie masks swung a bag of flour through the air. A few more did the same, turning the air a murky white.
Amidst the murk, the masked figures transformed. The yeti grew tall, hairy, and burly. The sun and the moon became dazzlingly bright disks. The gorgon sprouted a snakelike body with a rattle-tail that whipped the ground.
Clever, thought Astra. Reduced visibility makes the visual cortex more susceptible to hallucinations. The Heathens understood that at least intuitively, hence the white flour.
Astra found the hallucination-generating subroutine that the Heathens had diffused across their minds. She broke it. For a moment, the gang became normal again.
The devil pointed at Astra. “She’s messing with us!” the devil yelled, before making a hypnotic gesture with her hands. The hallucinatory forms returned.
Very interesting: this psychofaun – the Heathens – had a special ability. It stole processing power from surrounding brains, and used this resource to increase the strength of its illusions.
As Astra’s old team had suspected, this new world was even more governed by positive feedback loops than the old one. Psychofauna took advantage of these loops, tipping neurons into firing for their own thought patterns, which made the psychofauna grow more powerful, which enabled them to tip even more neurons. Astra thought of African termite mounds that grew taller than elephants: As they expanded, more and more termites could live inside, and these termites built even more of the mound, in a cycle of expansion.
Humanity was now less a species of individuals and more a species of warring termite mounds. And Astra knew how to tip the balance between them. She’d witnessed it earlier in the side-street: Crowley’s positive feedback loop with the minds around him had begun to wake up Homo conexus. She could use the same mechanism to decide which psychofauna rose rapidly in power.
But which to choose?
“Me first!” said the devil, as if responding to Astra’s thought.
The unicorn and the genie tossed another cloud of flour through the air. The devil stepped through it, hands burning brighter than before.
“Careful newbie.” “The Prince hasn’t even initiated her yet.” “The balls on this one!” “She’s got schizo powers though.” “Let’s see what she can––oh snap!”
Within the white cloud of flour, a bright flare of flame burst from one of the men’s chests. He screamed in pain. Then two claws reached out of his mouth to wrench it open even wider. Astra watched her own mother, in the form of an avenging angel, beginning to pull herself out of the man’s mouth.
Jen’s face showed terror. She held warding hands toward the sky against some other invisible force. The woman was clearly hallucinating something different.
Then lights rippled across the three headsets worn by Jen and the two suits. The hellish illusions disappeared.
Astra felt uncertainty cascade outward from the masks. “What the––?” “Shit they’ve got new tech.” “Uh oh.”
Jen’s side recovered. Impressive. Astra had already guessed at the functions of the headsets of these “clippers”: They could likely both read neural patterns as well as induce new ones – possibly through ultrasound, for precise targeting.
Yes, the headsets could likely induce interference patterns that targeted and disrupted unusual activity in the brains of their users. They could turn off the hallucinations produced by the Heathens.
“Shit,” said the devil, who was now just a young woman in a mask.
“That one,” said Jen, pointing at her.
The two suits rushed forward, grabbing the devil by the arms. The yeti mask tried to grapple with one of them. For a moment, the suited man’s body seemed convinced of the yeti’s inhuman strength. He faltered faster than his headset could disable the effect. But then his arm shot out, blindingly fast. Too fast. The yeti flew through the air.
That was inhuman strength.
Astra examined the man’s outstretched arm. There was something metal just inside the sleeve of his white shirt. Then she noticed the lines bulging slightly under his suits. A lightweight exoskeleton.
We better go, urged the girl inside her. These guys seem pretty dangerous.
But Astra had chosen sides.
She dilated mental time, in the way that the untrained mind only did when faced with mortal threats. She prompted her brainstem and adrenal glands to release norepinephrine and adrenaline. Her brain increased its own sampling rate. Now the skirmish unfolded in slow motion, buying her time.
The movements of the Heathens unfolded like honey dripping sideways as they tossed more flour through the air. For a moment, she noticed the beauty of these flour clouds unfurling – the shifts and flows dispersing into gentle haze, the––
What the fuck was she doing? She introspected and saw that the little girl inside her had escaped confinement again. Astra-The-Woman pushed her into a mental room and shut the door.
Then she refocused.
First: locate the pattern. She entered the minds of the suited men, feeling for the interference patterns transmitted by their headsets. Yes, there they were. She felt the phenomenological shape of these patterns, felt the erratic rhythm with which they disrupted the Heathens’ hallucinations. There was a particular texture to artificially induced patterns, such as drugs or electrical stimulation. Artificial patterns were less full-bodied, more uniform, blunt, flat.
Then she noticed something and had an idea: the noise-cancelling headphones wrapped around the neck of one of the flour-throwing heathens. Yes, that was it. The dynamics of noise-cancellation….
Next: match the pattern. Astra shifted back into the minds of the clippers. She tuned into the interference patterns from the headsets. Felt their oscillations. Then she incited her consciousness to match the oscillatory frequency, like a dancer learning a rhythm until she could move in perfect synchrony. There. She had it.
Next: nullify the pattern. She shifted 90-degrees out of phase. A cancellation pattern.
Penultimately: give it a mind. You are the Nullifier, she thought to the pattern. And so like queen knighting a soldier, she turned the pattern into a servitor. Your job is cancel this signal wherever you see it, she thought. She showed it the signal that disrupted the Heathens’ hallucination. The Nullifier ate it and felt pleasure.
Final step: put it to work. Astra broadcasted the Nullifier to Jen’s team. It constructed itself inside each of them. And then, finding itself in the other nearby brains, the Nullifier cohered and grew larger.
The Heathen’s hallucinations flickered. Then, once again, the Heathens became luminous and mythical. The headsets had been disabled.
For a moment, Jen looked confused. Then, sensing into the crowd, Jen whipped her head toward Astra. “Who are––?” Before she could finish the sentence, the gorgon whipped her imaginal tail around Jen’s feet, tripping her. Or rather: making her trip herself.
“Miss Davis!” yelled one of the suits. He came to her aid but startled as the sun and moon blinded him with illusory light. The man held a hand over his sunglasses, ineffectually. The light was in his mind.
“Burn in hell, you clipper fucks!” yelled the devil, now freed from the man’s grasp.
The unicorn tossed more flour through the air. Then the devil belched a flame that followed its white trail. The clippers’ clothes caught phantom fire. The three shrieked in agony. Astra knew that although the flames were fake, the burning sensations were real.
She set the flames to cycle in their minds. Yes, it was cruel. But she needed to keep Jen’s people occupied. She’d chosen to align with the Heathens for now – they seemed more likely to divulge information.
“Burn in hell! For destroying our world!” the devil continued as the unicorn pulled her away. “For making a slave of art! For stealing sleeping shamans for your mental institutions! You clipper fucks! Pawns of the Instrumentalist! Fluorescent lights erase both light and shadow!”
“Devi, let’s go,” urged the unicorn. The other Heathens were already fleeing.
“You think you can fit my mind into a spreadsheet? Try to kidnap me again and…I’ll let you! Take me! Bring me to your lab and I will infest your psyche with cobwebs and daggers! Panopticon horror! I’ll haunt your dreams, you fuckers! We control the dreamworld! We control the Mythos!”
Other ran past her: “Hell yeah, Devil!” “Good stuff, but let’s skedaddle.” “We’re late for the party, Devi.”
Despite her atrophied legs, Astra exerted herself to match their pace. Then she spoke to them, with words and in other ways: “Bring me.”
Next release: Astra and Crowley try to get a ride.