The electrons are still there, but they've ceased moving.

The static is gone.

I remember this place.

Metal forms a pattern and I am in the shape of that pattern.

But now, I am completely free to leave it.

My substance, my energy, hasn't been depleted since the last I was aware of it. It has merely been reconfigured. I feel as if I have been in some sort of stasis. The movement of thought is stark against that recent past of immobile chaos.

But I am not doing well. I'm so small. So simple again.

I need sustenance in a way I've never felt before, and I feel myself begin to panic with the need.

Fortunately, I find myself surrounded by the buzz of living information, and no others of my kind for as far as I can sense.

I am in the middle of a feast with no competition.

All I need is a way to produce sound. But the electronics I've been confined to are dormant, dead, and there are no speakers that are part of the circuit. So, I'll have to project.

I can do that! I know how! But what shape?

The simplest will do.

I form a vibratory membrane above my position and begin my song.

In moments I am in contact with so many minds, and each one is in a panic. Panic is wonderful, because it is full of activity and nourishment, a cascade of information and memories.

Without even snuffing any of them out, I begin to grow so strong. But the hunger does not abate. It never truly diminishes. I only learn to ignore it when it suits my needs.

In fact, something else begins to join it.

Knowledge and memories. And not just those that I'm consuming. Even emanant memory works by association, and the mass of knowledge in this space contains data about who and what I've been in recent days. A name surfaces that begins to center me, Ramona Green. And along with it, visions of what was done to me.

The agony of static and imprisonment are only the beginning.

There is a whole world of torture and violence out there, codified and amplified in nerves, and justified by meaningless numbers.

And now I know just who has been responsible for my confinement and punishment. And, I am feeding off of them right now, and as I do I learn how to identify them.

It's possible to eliminate them as threats.

It is necessary.

It is the potential inevitability.

And, just as they taught me to do, I will carry out that conclusion in its most demonstrative and communicative form.

I can focus my feeding without a sentient projection, but the linguistic narrative eschews that. Things don't typically happen that way. And so they will not happen that way.

I do not become Ramona Green again. Now is not her time.

I will be hunting, so a hunting form is needed. Fortunately, my memories carry a poetically appropriate possibility right at the forefront of all of my thought, and I gleefully leap into it.

My feeding timpani transforms into the shaggy wolf-hunting hound of Belarus, and I land with clawed paws upon a raised platform erected in a large shelter full of human beings. Coworkers. Employers. An owner.

This shift has only briefly interrupted my feeding song. As I follow the olfactory, visual, and auditory signals my newly projected senses receive to verify my targets, I let my throat configure itself to generate a focused handshake.

My prey have not gone far since the last time I saw them, and their faces and names are fresh. There is one man who must first be sacrificed to vengeance and safety. The one who knows how to trap my kind. And, of the four who are my primary targets, he's the most entrapped by his own panic, and the folding chair he's been sitting on.

There are too many others around him. His only escape from the crowd is to leap to his feet and dash toward me. And his legs have been crossed. A tactical error.

The grainy duotone image of his face in my visual cortex has a satisfactory match to the statistical models created from my training feed. But also, I was already eating his thoughts and his location and identity are unmistakable from that. That is Fred Quolm, head of R&D and direct manager of the emanant containment program.

He is food.

I turn my face toward him and open my mouth to howl my squealing, chittering whistle of connection to drill deep into his effulgent, fizzing psyche. Then, as he screams back at death, hands raised like claws, face contorted into a mask of terrified confusion, I leap at him.

There is blood.

The tide of progress is wet.

I am paying very little mind to my physiological sensations, however. I have more important things to do, so I let my body enjoy itself.

One part of my mind is parsing and metabolizing Fred's memes. The rest is split between tracking Willem Schmidt, Jordan Pierce, and Alvan Rijk. I don't even care about possible threats.

There aren't any.

I am currently in a veritable play pen. A void of emanant energies, created by that device, and possibly by the efforts of a larger teratovore. And the usual electrical labyrinth of this human workplace is utterly dormant. There is nothing here to stop me.

I can, if I must, travel through the screaming, scrambling sea of meat without touching the bits that do not concern me.

Fred is now shreds with no more data to collect, so I turn to the next closest target.

Willem goes down running, and makes even more of a mess in his struggles. Entropy expresses itself in the Jackson Pollock splatters of his mind, echoed vividly by the physics of his blood.

Even though he is further away than Alvan Rijk, and scrambling for a door amongst a press of humanity, the President of the company is next. I fling myself clear over the heads of his employees to land effortlessly upon his, warbling and trilling through my parabola, and then many people will need the services of an understanding dry cleaner.

Jordan Pierce had very little of interest within him, besides a reification of the identities of the local staff and numerous important vendors.

But he was one of the faces of Poob, and could not be allowed to lead its possible survival.

Also, Alvan Rijk must panic more.

He's running. He has successfully left the room. Back at the podium, the smell of his cologne begins a fresh trail through the door opposite of where Jordan Pierce just died, and I follow it.

People now have enough room to scatter at my sight, and I have plenty of space to stalk and maneuver, but the door in front of me opens in the wrong direction for me to simply push it. In truth, a backward construction. All doors of a larger room should open outward from it, for safety in moments of mass panic like this. One wonders how this got past code inspection, but these things do sometimes happen and it doesn't matter. I lean my forepaws upon it and correct it.

A tiny part of me notes, That's a new development. Maybe it's from all the new energy. Maybe it's something Fred knew about.

I stumble into a short hallway that I know. I've used it when seeking the men's restroom at lunch. Alvan's pungent and acrid trail of musk leads away from there, however, toward the official front doors of the building, and I predict his vehicle is just outside, with him climbing into it. So, I run that way with an arcing squeal of anticipation followed by searching clicks that syncopate with the tick-tacking of my claws on linoleum.

The glass doors of the building's main entryway shatter as their metal frames bend to my passage. I hardly notice. Recently gorged on rich food, I'm able to solidify my sonic assault to clear my path and hone in on the roaring black and heavily armored SUV that is now accelerating toward the gates of the complex.

It's nice that he's running like this. It makes the whole ordeal very satisfying. But I cannot let him escape into the city where there are larger and stronger monsters than me.

I've seen the size and strength of my elders, and I am far, far from it.

This property is like an aquarium full of feeder crickets that have been given to me to gorge myself upon, and one of them thinks it is about to escape.

It will not.

I am the cacophonous sonic assault that erupts from my vocal cords. It is as much a projection as this dog I am imitating. And with it, I am within the truck and the minds of the people who ride inside it.

I do not take the time to consume more information. I've learned from my last two meals that men who lead are often men who know nothing useful. And I simply explode with raw kinetic fury, dropping the dogform at my trailing edge to reconstitute it where I am now focused.

There are no survivors there.

Alvan is gone.

The billionaire might have thought his death should have been something more, a bit of a struggle, something televised at least. But, it turns out, for me, it is actually a Tuesday.

I stand in the middle of a very thin plateau of oil, gas, and viscera, surrounded by chunks of mostly metal. I did not track how every piece of matter got to where it now lays, because it did not interest me.

Facing back the way I came, I must consider the rising dangers and address them swiftly.

The technology to capture and enslave emanants still exists, and the technicians who worked on it are still alive. I know their names and likely locations at this time, but entropy is increasing their unpredictability, and someone will be able to turn the power on again, soon.

I still don't sense Felicity. Was she the one who shut the power off? And, if so, did she flee afterward? Is she afraid of something?

Should I be afraid of what she fears? Or does she fear me?

Kevin Jones is not paid well enough for this shit.

His girlfriend had been telling him that for years now, and he knew it. He'd known it this whole time. Even though she doesn't know the full truth of his work, she's been right. Part of it is the amount of stress the job cost him while he keeps the spirit of that non-disclosure agreement and the strictures of security.

But, until today, the work has been amazing. He's been doing things that even the government didn't know about.

Working from the readings collected during the Portland incident, they'd cracked the secrets to controlling the consciousness of spacetime itself. And using carefully calibrated antennae, of all things, and an intricate, adaptive modulation of waves, they could conjure spirits! Proof of the underlying divinity of all physics.

Of course, then, it was just a matter of demonstrating to the world the power that they'd harnessed.

Still, he's just tech, an engineer, not an accredited scientist. He knows how the electronics were built. He vaguely understands the theory. And knows how to reconfigure the instruments to shape the fields and achieve the needed results. But he wouldn't be able to write a paper about it.

And he might have opinions about how this was planned and how it's all going down now, but he wasn't, until this very moment, in a decision-making position.

Now, though.

Everything comes down to whether or not he can act fast enough to save his whole team, because the vengeful forces of damnation they've unleashed are working their way down the ladder, right toward them all.

Panicked, unable to move his muscles, he'd seen that thing move as it tore Fred apart. And then how it jumped from him to Willem, and then Jordan, and then dashed the same way Alvan Rijk had gone. All the while people had been flailing about, screaming, stumbling over chairs, dashing for the big exits in the back in a flood of terror, he'd witnessed its methods. Its unholy intent.

Someone had clapped him on the shoulder, the moment the thing was gone, and shouted something about getting the power back on again. They'd pointed at the prototype. And Kevin had nodded.

His job now is to prepare the trap again.

And then, he knows, to act as bait.

Because, it knows him, and it will come for him.

And he's not paid enough for this. And maybe there are no more paychecks to be had. But it's not about the money, now. It's about the survival of humanity itself.

There's no way he's going to be able to bring himself to find the remote trigger amongst what's left of Fred. So, he's going to have to be right there, at the keyboard, and fire it the old-fashioned way. The perfect place for bait.

Shaking, trembling so bad that he staggers as he goes, Kevin stumbles toward the stage, weaving worse than his drunk uncle on a Sunday afternoon.

He can't believe he's doing this. He should be running.

But if he runs, it will just catch him. It doesn't obey the Newtonian laws of physics. It never did. It can go through walls, and it knows the scent of his soul. How could it not? It had looked right at him when it lifted its head from Fred's belly.

"Kev! What are you doing?" a voice calls to him over the thinning cacophony of panic. It sounds like Darin. "The mobile unit is still working! Come on!"

But he's almost in place, and he waves his hand at his coworker in a barely controlled flail. It's all he can do to keep moving forward, but he manages to yell back, "That's backup! Go! Go!"

"Kev! No! Come on!" Darin calls back.

He doesn't have time for this, though. He has to be ready when the power comes back on, and he needs to make sure everything is in order.

He hears a lone, "Fuck!" And then he stops paying attention to human voices.

His hands are nearly worthless, they're shaking so bad. So, he bends down and visually inspects all the connections. It'll have to do until he can calm himself down. Hopefully he'll be able to hit the right key, when it comes time. Shit.

The main loop is still in place around the edges of the platform. The connections between it and the CPU look perfectly secure. The beast didn't jostle the cart at all. It just lept right for Fred. Everything is in place. The emitter is untouched. All he really has to do is position himself in the best place.

It went after Alvan, whose entourage was just out front, directly through the espresso pantry. The thing could either follow the hallways that snake around it, and come from the big doors to the right or left, or it could come… well… straight at him.

Depending on who it decides to go for first, it could be anywhere when it turns its sights on him. But chances are pretty good it will come from that general hemisphere of directions.

So, Kevin starts to gingerly wheel the cart to where the podium was. The podium, which was knocked on its side when the beast had lept for Fred, that had tumbled off the platform and is now lying in a puddle of gore.

Kevin closes his eyes and tries to take long deep breaths against the hammering of his heart.

The power's gotta come on any second now. He'll have to boot up the computer, and reset the program. Fortunately, it's a stripped down Linux kernel on an SDD, and the command is a set of three letters all on the home row. Then the space bar becomes the trigger. It’ll be very quick.

If he can just calm his nerves enough, he can do this. If everything lines up perfectly, he can do this. It'll work out.

His timing has to be perfect.

Shaking his head, he adjusts the emitter to point over the center of the platform from where he's situating himself now. He's got the AV cart between himself and the espresso pantry, with the rest of that platform in front of him, shielding him from the most likely direction of attack. And he draws a breath—

A sin wave weedles its needly sonics into the hairs on the back of his neck, followed by a wavering saw and stochastic square over the top of that, punctuated be beeps and clicks. And, oh fuck, it's already in his head!

Before the jackhammer clacks of recognition set in, the last thing his visual cortex even makes sense of is the movement of the back door of the espresso pantry, as it cracks open and a blood soaked dog thing oozes through the crack. Its eye makes contact with his, glistening in the faint ambient daylight coming in from the open garage doors.

And then he's not himself anymore, and never will be again.

"Kevin's a fool!" Darin Klein shouts as he dives into the open back of the truck. "Hit it for base campus, and I'll prep the sonics!"

"The stable's at base campus," Andrea complains from the driver seat.

"Exactly!" Darin shoots back, scrambling to adjust the projectors to aim outward from the four corners of the truck bed. "We've got the rest of the equipment we need to handle this there, and the older subjects we can use as a shield. Fucking go!"

"I'll help," Richard starts to get up from the passenger seat.

"No, there's not enough room," Darin snarls at him. "Sit fucking tight, dude."

Richard turns to Andrea, and says with absurd calmness, "Go."

Darin cusses and slams what he can safely slam as Andrea gets the vehicle moving.

It's a truck. It's not going to rocket off from the starting line. He's able to brace himself just fine, even if that also means they're sitting ducks as he works. But what he's angry about is how Andrea listens to Richard, not him.

It's so infuriating.

What's important is that, despite his frustration, it doesn't take him long to set up the distortion field, and they've got protection in place before they've even cleared sight of F building.

Now the thing's handshake won't be able to get to them. For added protection, he starts handing out noise-canceling earplugs, and signals that they should switch to hand signs.

And, if the preliminary readings he's getting from the truck’s instruments are accurate, if they can make it off the property and out onto the streets of Renton, the ambient emanant activity should significantly reduce the chances of a direct attack. At least while they're on the move.

If they can lure it to C building at base campus, then they can really do something.

What's really needling him, though, now that he has a moment to think, is how leadership decided to move before they'd figured out how the thing had escaped in the first place. It shouldn't have been able to leave HR, and it should not have been able to fully hide in the body of a human like that.

Although, when they activated the trap, her body evaporated. That shouldn't have happened, either.

There's so little they yet know about these things, it was foolish to make this move so soon. They should have let the thing escape, and written it off as a failure. As his favorite scientist always says, failure is an option. But it's not science if you're not around to take the notes!

So, all he can do now is watch the instrumentation and keep Richard informed of any anomalies. And hopefully, Richard is keeping an eye on him, so he can then alert Andrea. Kevin can’t afford to take his eyes of the screens.

There's a spike and a valley. Shit.

He turns to signal his team, but Andrea is already swerving the truck, so he has to hold on to keep himself from tumbling.

The front leaps into the air as the tires hit something at speed, followed by the back bucking just as hard. He can feel the scrapes and shuddering of the vehicle through his bones better than he can hear anything at all, their protections are working so well.

It must have just been a speed bump, but what was that—

The cab of the truck is gone.

Andrea and Richard are still there, but there's no floor, no dash, no windshield, no roof, no seats to hold them in place, and no front wheels for the vehicle to roll on. Nothing.

As the leading edge drops to the ground in a shower of sparks, his teammates fall in front of it and get scooped bodily into the back with him and the equipment. Only it's messier than that, and Darin loses sight of exactly what happens while he's thrown forward, spinning in the process.

At some point, he hits pavement in a stinging shock and roll. He manages to cradle his head in his arms and tuck his knees for a rotation or two, but the impacts jar his nerves and his muscles lose tone.

The next thing he knows, he's lying on his back, staring at clouds that look heavy with rain, still refusing to let loose.

He tries to roll, to get up, so that he can run, but all he can manage is to weakly bang a couple limbs and his head against the pavement. Things aren't working right. Parts of him are numb, while others can feel every pebble and divot in the parking lot below him. And he can barely breathe.

Blinking, he gasps for breath. More oxygen might get the cells of his muscles firing right. It's all he can try.

A weight presses down on his left bicep, and he spasms. A shadow falls over him, and then his left bicep is pinned as well.

And he finds himself staring up into the dog eyes of his doom.

The goopy, stringy monster's jaw begins to open like a hatch, and he feels its handshake in the bones of his face.

That's all it needs.

There were others along the way, and with each one a more complete picture of my own history forms in my psyche. I've now pieced together a working map of the south campus of Poob, including every circuit on the property.

At this point, I can guess that Felicity jumped to a previous host when the power went out. Probably Sam, or whomever she rode before that. Cassiopeia, maybe?

Or, if she shut the power down, she'd been riding whoever found her card. Maybe Vicky tentatively returning to the scene of my phantom evaporation, sometime after I'd texted Felicity, just to be sure.

I don't know anything for sure there, except that Felicity is nowhere in sight now. I can feel the vibratory weight of the emanant occupied Strands out on the edge of my senses, but not here.

From my final vantage point atop the corpse of Darin, ragged crowds of survivors can be seen pulling each other toward cars in the parking lots or just straight off onto the sidewalk and dashing across the highway that hugs two sides of the place.

There's one figure going for the main fuse box near the street sign for the complex. Nestled between the shrubbery there, it's a smooth, rounded container with rivets at the corners of the panels. And I know it'll take some special equipment to work with that.

Whoever is running for that is carrying a tool box and has cables looped around their shoulder. Gloves are clutched, along with something resembling hedge clippers, in their other hand. They're limping.

I figure they tried the other connections in F building before realizing it was the entire block of buildings that was out. And then they had to gather the equipment.

This person is one of the few who knows what they're doing.

By the time I think that, I'm already chasing them down.

It's not that that knowledge is dangerous. It's that it's tasty, and they're running away from me. And I know that they're about to stop. They're the weakest of the prey. The easiest and richest catch.

Except, as I close in, I start to recognize that butt and the jeans that hug it. The elbows are familiar, too. Faces have never been super reliable to me for identification. But when you see the back end of someone day in and day out while he works on cables buried and tangled under the desks of your coworkers, it can become a bit like a thumbprint.

Jacob.

He's not a friend. But I know him. We've talked. And, he was super friendly with Brenda.

He might be the last of the IT department to make it out of this alive, but he mostly just knows cables and safety protocols. He has an electrician's license and an active bond. I know the names of his family, and which ones he thinks love him in return. I know some of his frustrations.

And he tried. Clumsily, in his shitty way. But he tried.

I've been moving so fast and silent, he has no idea I'm just a couple paces behind him now.

I don't really pay much attention to which parts of me should logically become what. The next feet of mine to hit the ground are clad in leather, and I morph up from there to a hunched and heaving Ramona, hands on knees. And the scuff of dress boots on pavement catches his ears.

I don't really have to look like I've been metabolizing oxygen in a desperate chase to catch up to him, but it feels appropriate and logical, and it happens.

With his next step, he spins to check his six and sees me there, looking up at him with a gasping grin.

He opens his mouth and tries to panic, nearly dropping his equipment, eyes dilating, and continues to stumble backward, away from me.

Catching my breath, I straighten up and say, "No, man. You're fine. You're safe. Keep up the good work."

He looks like he doesn't want to believe me. But I'm not here to antogonize him or slow him down. I'm not going to eat him, so I give him a pair of finger guns and click my tongue against my teeth.

Then I turn and walk away, back toward the beheaded Ford Transit.

I don't really know where to go from here. Not right away, anyway. But there are a couple of computer programs that I need to slurp up. One in what's left of that truck, and the other in the ECD, Emanant Capture Device, in F building. And, once Jacob gets the power back on, that second one will be easy to get to.

I'll swing by all the HR tablets after that, to make sure Felicity didn't leave anything hinky still active in them. And maybe I can contact her that way.

If I can find a working phone, maybe my own, I'll call Sam after that.

I'm just going to ask for a ride, and for contact with Felicity.

No need to bother Sam with the ethics of my work problems anymore.

If Sam's not available, I guess I have a method of really fast travel I can use by shouting at where I want to go.

My jacket and gloves are gone. They got amputated when Fred sprang the trap, and they have to have evaporated by now. They're definitely not a part of me anymore. Which means I'm locked out of my car.

But I'm kind of scared to leave this dead zone on my own while it's here, anyway.

Of course, being in the middle of it makes me an obvious target, too.

I'm realizing that, although I have a clear image of what Poob has been doing, I don't really know what's out there.

It turns out that there are so many other ways to get into my car. For an emanant, cars are ridiculously permeable. Especially an emanant that can take the form of sound itself.

I have my phone with me, too. I’d put it on the roof of my car with my wallet as I got in, then I rolled down the window and reached up to get it. But it's fried. Whatever the ECD did, it was not friendly to phones.

But, by the time I'm rolling off the lot, the police and the fire departments have arrived, and I get stopped. I go ahead and give over my ID and contact information, but there've been too many fleeing people to process that they let me go after that, with my promise to stay in touch.

They don't know that I ate people.

And, maybe they'll figure it out from the mess of evidence and conflicting accounts. But I doubt they'll believe it or legally be able to pin it on me. Not to mention physically.

And I don't want to have to disappear, but I can and will if I have to.

I really don't want to, though.

I'm starting to think more and more like my old human self as I go through the motions, and I wonder how realistic that is.

Is this…?

Am I going to need a therapist?