Gina had worn more than a few names in her lifetime. It was out of necessity more than anything; she used them up one by one and discarded the empty husks behind her. She went through several identities before settling on ‘Gina’, and it took more than a year of trial and error to find a last name that stuck. Hart. Gina Hart. It sounded right together, like a film...

     “I do not think you know what you ask,” said Mahmoud, frowning. His eyebrows were like black caterpillars in the dim light of the galley. “Things are not the same here as in your Federation. Odessa may be a big city, but the entertainment taxes keep such things in the houses of rich men and foreigners, so that we of the working class are not distracted from honest labour by your decadent...

     She tossed and turned in her sleep. Dreams haunted her, nightmares of rushing air, falling, tumbling through nothingness.      She woke up with a scream, in a different place from where she lay down. She looked down at a pair of hairy, muscular arms and scratched her head. Why had she dreamt she was a woman?      Probably best not to think about that, he decided...

     A scream, echoing far off. Simon looked up. Gina looked up. Four eyes saw and failed to comprehend.      Gina shook her head violently and buried it in her arms, tried to banish the spectres of other places out of her mind. She was in her own head again, really, and she shouldn’t be seeing out of anyone else’s eyes in the first place. Anyone else at...

     Rolling his wheelchair down the kitchen, Simon rifled through the drawers in search of some aspirin. His head pounded like a jackhammer even while his legs were numb with morphine. The sudden stabbing pain had started about an hour ago, and it simply refused to go away. His overworked implant seemed to be doing fuck-all about it. It sat there like a dark cloud, muddling his thoughts and destroying his...

     The universe burned. New galaxies of pain exploded out of the black, blowing through the flimsy barriers of human rationality and leaving them stripped bare. Sanity shattered into a million little fragments. The only thing left was a lone scream in the darkness.      Slowly the scream eased down, the pain faded away to a black calm. There was something conscious in this empty world, but...