Desolation.

  A circular city, smashed and hollowed out, devoid of all life.

  Where tens of thousands had once lived, where he had planned to perform, there now resided not a single man. Not a living soul had stepped foot here in what looked to be a decade or two. He’d gone out of his way to visit here, just to see what an independent pocket of civilization in the no-man’s land would look like, and he did get his tour — although it turned out to be one of a mausoleum.

  It was an arcology, a domed city, but there wasn’t much left of the dome by this point; just the structural beams and a few swaths of armored shutter still hanging on for dear life, while the remainder of the structure had already fallen down and crushed the buildings underneath to an even greater extent than they had already been. The architectural style within the arcology contrasted with its exterior, being organic in the extreme; one after another, clustered together, the buildings pointed upward like great bony fingers, enormous panels and domes of pale off-white joined by dry, yet still-living fleshy tissue. Others, those closer to the ground, resembled the cadavers of great beasts half-buried in the earth, longhouses wrought in the shapes of enormous ribcages with indistinct and eyeless skulls for entryways. A few, looking to be the oldest, were obviously just great hollowed out bonewood trees. It all stood silent, a mass grave, occasional lights flickering on and off between the outer bone panels of this or that building. Something of a small skyscraper still towered off in the distance, shaped like a vertebral column and conspicuously pristine compared to the rest of the city.

  Nothing barred his entry, nothing and nobody came out to greet or halt him as he walked the White Serpent down the main thoroughfare. Cruel and chill winds tore through the empty streets, the wrecks of personal transports still piled up here and there. Even this, even the citizens’ cars, were corpses more than wrecks, some having had bony shells and others having been grown in the images of giant beetles. By the looks of it, whatever had happened here had happened very, very quickly, but not quite quickly enough for the populace to be spared chaos and terror prior to their gruesome deaths. Skeletal remains were scattered every-which-way and smears of dried blood and crusted over organs painted the street. At the base of a pile-up, a barricade stacked eight cars high, a shriveled form sat slumped over, fresher than the others and flanked by a pair of puppets; a puppetmaster in archaic vestments of desaturated deep-blue with golden hem, gaudy and broadcasting the message “look at me, I am an evolver,” without the dead man having been able to afford something real like a sealsuit or a hard-shell exoskeleton. Mummified and dry, but not quite skeletal, and with a handful of implants glistening through the gaps in his purplish-grey flesh. A subspecies, an offshoot of some kind perhaps, or a practitioner of puppetry and eater-branch bodily evolution in tandem; a single blue, crystalline eye some 5cm across sat in place of the usual two, unrotting, staring into empty space. His left arm and a full third of his upper-left torso was just gone, the cavity yawning open like a broken stump, flesh and bone and silvery-metal neuro-filaments torn or sheared clean off. Meanwhile, his right arm was frozen in place, halfway through unholstering a large-bore c-prop revolver from a holster on his thigh. Upon closer inspection of the scene, there was a third puppet. It was just scattered in so many pieces, smashed so thoroughly, that Zanma hadn’t been able to tell at first.

  The young puppetmaster brought out the iridescent cube that was his spider puppet, tossing it over his shoulder as he connected a thread and unfolded it. He hopped down from the White Serpent’s shoulder, slowing his fall with another thread, this one attached to the giant puppet’s shoulder pylon. Taking a closer look using the spider, he turned the White Serpent away from himself, extending its head upon an arm of muscle to let it better sweep the surroundings. A fool might see the enormous body and read a brutish archetype, but the White Serpent’s sensor array was all-around far superior to that of the Spider, it was just that the spider was much smaller and nimbler, thus easier to get close-in, so naturally it had better short and mid-range visuals. By comparison, he could pick up movement through the Serpent’s eyes at hundreds of meters without issue, assuming he was paying even a scrap of attention to the feed, which he had no choice but to do. While he examined the dead man from a few paces away, his spider crawling up and down and all around the scene, Zanma’s hair pulsed aglow and four new threads extended from him into the Serpent. Its relaxed, “realistic” stance tensed up and it straightened a touch. Recesses opened on its forearms and torso with the hissing of broken seals and released gas, exposing the glistening lenses of Zanma’s favorite particle accelerator subspecies: The smartgun, an accelerator type built to use a lensing medium as the “barrel,” allowing them to self-adjust their aim within a limited cone. Normally, borderline cheating. For the Serpent, a necessity to have even decent coverage, since its guns were on fixed hardpoints. Most were Type-1, a few Type-2, fueled by the psionic bleedoff of the puppet’s movements in a manner similar to the Wurger’s kinetic battery; the Serpent’s accelerator loadout had internal power sources, a few clusters of stable and non-volatile quasi-graphide hypercapacitors, but these held just enough power for one full salvo, a few seconds of fire at best. More than enough for whatever had killed this mummified friend, he surmised. He hoped.

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  First, the initial inspection. Considering the backpack smushed down at the man’s side, he either didn’t have spatial-fold storage or it was severely limited. Prying the cyclops from his spot, he found some shelf-stable food, ammunition and cleaning supplies for the man’s hand-howitzer, and… A spatial-fold storage device. Of the least interesting variety, a square, finger-thick chunk of alloy casing with some analog controls and a scratched off triskelion logo. Three letters, only a C legible. Inside, more food, some materials and components, tools, ammo loading equipment for the gun. A nice chunk of change in coinage, but no polymat. Nothing unexpected or thrilling, but nice to have. He spent a short time paging through the man’s two evolutionary manuals, one a projector-slate and one a physical book of polypaper, with one percent as many pages as its contents demanded. It was maybe six, seven millimeters thick, and had a dent suggesting it had stopped a ballistic projectile at some point. Zanma found a rib mended with alloy just under where the booklet sat inside the dead man’s robe.

  Having no qualms about what he was about to do, Zanma brought out a handful of vibroblades and miscellaneous tools, then began dissecting the dead puppetmaster for his implants. He wouldn’t need them anymore. Flesh was one thing; but from a glance, Zanma knew these implants were designed and built with the same ethos as the dead man’s puppets, thus he would at least know how to extract the main unit. He didn’t expect to find anything worth attempting to implant himself with right away, but you never knew. Indeed, he didn’t find any such great treasures, just some interesting trinkets worthy of study. The gun was certainly something, but well beyond anything Zanma could or wanted to handle; the reinforcements and recoil dampeners in the dead man’s forearm spoke volumes, not to mention the gun itself, the slab of alloy and solid-state electronics, that cut-down howitzer masquerading as a personal firearm. A revolver the size of a carbine with a barrel so long it had an undergrip and a triangular cylinder barely fitting three rounds.

  Something to mount on a puppet, perhaps, if he could eliminate the issue of ammunition. But handheld, no chance. The dead man’s puppets were, notably, unused. Whomever or whatever had ended him had done so without him being able to rouse his constructs into motion or draw his gun, and Zanma wagered that going for the gun first had contributed to the stranger's untimely death.

  Still, it was appealing. A crude thing by its nature as a c-prop firearm, but refined, honed and elevated for this marginally more civilized era. The bullets were caseless, miniature missiles pressed into cylindrical blocks of propellant. Each the size of a finger, and heavy. A part of him regretted that he wasn’t strong or dumb enough to try shooting it with his own hands. He understood, as a man, why that unrotting carcass before him had made the choices that had led him to his untimely demise in this miniature sepulcher of a civilization now-gone, which itself had perhaps been ushered unto its own untimely end by a similar mistake. After all, Zanma was sure that this gun had saved the cyclops many a time, its firepower had to be truly something to behold, far outpacing anything these aggressively normal Hollow Man frames could bring to bear.

  Once he was done, and had buried the cyclops under a small mound of rubble, Zanma moved on. The arcology was built with main arterial roads in a spoked-wheel layout, smaller roads and footpaths branching off. The rails of a nowhere-to-be-seen tram system could be glimpsed, not iron, but bones interlocked with bones. Zanma wondered if the trams had skulls on either end. He soon got his answer: Yes and no. They had lower jaws for plows, and the insinuation of an upper brow, but all in between was glass. Smashed glass, stained with blood and viscera, in the case of this one overturned tram. He didn’t understand it. The smell just wasn’t there, and things just didn’t quite rot in this place. Dried out and decayed, sure, but the corpses didn’t seem rotten, there were no stains of decay beneath any of the skeletons, and yet their bones had been plucked clean.

  The street lamps. They, too, were flesh and bone; quite a few had been knocked over and sprouted anew. All along, they were just another breed of the same “trees” he’d been seeing since he’d made landfall.

  Moving along the main road, Zanma made occasional stops or went off the path to explore between or inside the buildings, but never far, never for long. Every time, he found at best something of middling value or utility, not worth the risk or effort. But every time, he still went to look in the hopes that this time it would be different. He couldn’t help it. Finally, his big hit: A store full of guns, with several sizable accelerators behind the counter. Organic, dead, decaying guns. Useless in every way that mattered.

  He abandoned worldly desire, for now, and continued on his way to the middle of the city, as that was the quickest path to getting back on track, and getting out of here. Risking getting lost in the sprawl just wasn’t an option. As he moved, he read through the dead man’s two manuals. Neither was remarkable; the puppet book was titled “108 Hollow Men,” a common variation of a common design paradigm. The notes of three previous owners scattered throughout, on the other hand, those were valuable. Shave a bit off here, add a bit there, this or that small trick; they weren’t universal improvements, but applying them in the right designs and in the right way would yield incremental advantages that would stack up into an insurmountable landslide. As for the other book, the cyclops’ actual evolutionary method, it was, well… It covered First Phase Class 1 and the start of Class 2, and it had a complete mental construct pattern. Those were the only compliments Zanma could give it. It wasn’t atrocious by any means, or even bad, it just held no value to him. It was extremely, incredibly, outstandingly, decent, it was truly a manual of all time.

  Without diversions, despite the surprising number of barriers to his passage from rubble to road damage, it didn’t take him long to reach the base of the tower.

  To see where all the city’s inhabitants had gone.

  Into the calcified mass of faces and reaching arms, fused to the tower’s base.

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