VOLUME 1 : CHAPTER 1

“The events I am about to describe have not yet come to pass. Our story begins in the boiling, toxic, tangerine summer of 2030. Climate change, disease, and the breakdown of social structures have pushed humanity to the fringes of what we might call normality. The wealthy elite secret themselves away in isolation, aided by their machines, as the mass of key workers toil under increasingly oppressive restrictions to keep society functioning. A new pattern of thought has begun to emerge, appealing to the upper and lower classes alike - if our climate is a variable we cannot fix, perhaps our bodies can be adapted instead…“

VOLUME 1 : CHAPTER 2

“‘Well, dear Elizabeth, you are nothing like a horse,’ she told herself. She could feel her surface, smooth and flat, and she could feel an incredible amount of spatial detail from the vibrations in the floor and walls which moved through her and built an image in her mind. Her senses were different, but amazingly clear. She could not see or hear in the traditional sense, but her shell-body tingled as people moved and spoke, generating a landscape around her; a topography beyond walls and floors in fact, almost like infrared, or x-ray. She felt the flutter of a pigeon’s wings as it landed on the roof of the building several floors up, and could almost see the wet gleam in the pigeon’s eye, smell its warm odours…”

VOLUME 1 : CHAPTER 3

“In the distance, she heard the wailing sirens of a security hover car. Then she felt footsteps pounding towards the building. They came faster, faster! A young man, slim with a small head of bushy hair, clutching at some kind of object. He was a crouched figure, skittering along purposefully with his shoulders hunched, led by the sensitive point of his nose. He was stalking, or being stalked. He raced down the street and slipped like a shadow under the arch with the lion keystone, into the courtyard of Elizabeth’s building…“

VOLUME 1 : CHAPTER 4

“He lay down and placed the cord around his neck. Elizabeth felt his heart rate slow. Deep lonely breaths. He lurched down, pulling the restraint tight. Red sores burnt where soft tissue stretched and abraded. Spluttering, little coughs, bulging, fading. Again his respiratory and circulatory systems were sucking and pumping desperately, chest undulating. Cup’s fingers twitched as he counted, over and over, 3… 2… 1… Slowing, losing the count, losing consciousness. Now limp. Moments passed and Elizabeth concentrated on the horror of it all, ‘Oh how frightful! Oh God!” she thought, “He’s done it this time!’…“

VOLUME 2 : CHAPTER 1

“It was dark inside the mutant’s head. The virgin sea stretched out into the formless void as pure as transparent glass, like unto crystal; but tumultuous and terrifying. Darkness covered the face of the deep, while the wind swept over the face of the waters.

 Heavy, petrified air forebode a storm.

Suddenly the veil of night was shot through with blinding light as a colossal ellipse of fire opened in the heavens. God’s eye! And in the midst of that eye appeared the face of Cup. Then the limp body of Cup, naked and gaunt, suspended within the frame of the eye. The fire surrounding the vision was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning, striking down into the ocean and parting it asunder…“

VOLUME 2 : CHAPTER 2

“I turned eight flaming eyes back to the remaining three-and-twenty elders who were cowering on the pile of dead and damaged children, at the furthest part of the pier. “Does the heart of the child you tortured still beat?” My four voices roared into the petrified night. 

“Yes… yes,” the elders trembled. 

“Good. Feed him the head of your fallen companion.” The elders kneeled and sobbed as they did crack their companion’s head open like a coconut and feed it to the child in messy clumped handfuls of brain matter. The child received the meal, sitting up as strength returned to his body…“

VOLUME 2 : CHAPTER 3

“Myselves steadied Knife, Fork and Spoon, and I popped out of their throats like three shooting popcorns. I spiralled down through the air and landed in a triangular formation, facing outward and hands linked. My Red child body hovered above my three rotating selves, and moved in unison as though on a potter’s wheel. The Red soldiers repeated, “Have you come from the Red to defeat the beast?” “Maybe,” I smirked with four mouths. I was three times the height of these little red Cups, who surrounded me like children.

The soldiers beheld the disemboweled and eye-encrusted monstrosity of my child body as it hovered above them. Its multitude of eyes did roll backwards in their sockets and plumes of flame did burst out on the completed click of each cycle…”

VOLUME 2 : CHAPTER 4

“I boomed out, “IT’S OKAY LITTLE ONES, BE BRAVE! COME! COME!” And they poured into me, and piece by piece I began to recall roads and buildings and fruit and friends and snoring and stars, heartache and the ecstasy of finishing exams.

“NOT UP MY BUM!” I shouted as I maneuvered my tree-trunk-arm around my backside to flick all the clambering little people away. I was growing and growing and beginning to push up against the edges of the world. My shoulder was now touching the heavens and I had to recline into a foetal position, as if about to be born…”

VOLUME 3 : CHAPTER 1

“Is Cup still alive?” Elizabeth agonised, “and can Dr Buttercake do something to heal him?” Elizabeth remembered Cup’s arm hanging limply from the shower, the veins pulsating against the constraints of the belt around his neck, his eyes rolled back in his head. The last she had seen, Cup was being bundled into an ambulance by key workers who had little interest in him. Elizabeth’s job was to convince Dr Buttercake to have him transported immediately to Balmoral for treatment. 

Elizabeth had set her mind on saving his life…”

VOLUME 3 : CHAPTER 2

“The operating theatre was illuminated by blinding lights, from the very same robotic tendrils which had rotated around Elizabeth’s head a decade earlier. But now she was awake, and she could sense what was happening with a greater perception than any of the humans in the room. The printing nibs were building up a base and support structure which would hold the form as it manifested. Edward leaned down to whisper, “The first stage is going to be an injection of fungal culture into the speech centre of the brain. Did you know fungus can grow in the brain? Fungal threads can interlace with neural pathways. They can stimulate and even control thought. Insects can have their minds displaced entirely by germinating spores. Until the Internet happened, fungal webs were probably the most information-dense networks on the planet…”

VOLUME 3 : CHAPTER 3

“Dawn was fast approaching and Edward had not slept a wink. The blue hour was upon Balmoral and the rough surface of the castle’s stone shone azure. Soon a narrow strip of burning orange would bring morning over the horizon. Everyone knew that today was the culling of the anomalies, and many were dreading it. In many cases these creatures were their friends, lovers or family members, but were now trapped within deformed shells which pounded and battered at their confines. They would destroy any pearl they could get close to, and in some cases attacked humans too. The key workers on-site were heavy-limbed with anticipation, but resolutely they made their preparations…”

VOLUME 3 : CHAPTER 4

“It was early spring and the bonnets of bluebells were shooting up through the grass in the meadows, ringing in the silver moonlight. Down in the labs, Elizabeth’s incubator egg popped open…”