Character appearances:
Ileana begins the process of converting Karma into Nothing by extracting the story of Magda from her.

Maisie and Piper awaken the first morning after their reunion in the cell, and the purpose of Maisie’s ear-piece is revealed.

Pet and the Princess (the Alpha) are recovering from their previous incident. Even Pet’s dreams are changing to support the fact that she is not human.

Aife and Zeigh are searching for Karma using the drawing that Evanescent made for them when they meet Magda.

Notes:
Initially, I envisioned memories as having the consistency of spider webs as in Harry Potter. I knew I wanted something different than that source, though. Luckily, at about that time I happened to see a viral video of someone smacking a backhoe into a pollen laden pine tree. Search it out: “backhoe pollen cloud”.

For Piper, I wanted to not burden the text with a string of humming sounds (e.g. “Hmm hm hmmm hm hm hmmmm!” - tedious). But I wanted to express the length of Piper’s communications as well as a little of the emotion behind them. I tried to envision what her mouth shape was depending on how much duress she was under. I wrote her words out as though she was speaking english, then converted them to “...mmm…” Hopefully, their conversation makes sense and is intriguingly mysterious?

I’m always worried that Aife and Zeigh’s story becomes so campy that it detracts from any sense of eroticism in the overall work. In this part, I envisioned the “The Technology Archive” as being a place with printouts of patents from the time that came before. Thanks to recent news, I imagine that Maggie (Magda) had most recently been reading the Michael Jackson’s gravity defying shoe patent when she was brought out from the back room. And, of course, Zeigh has eaten cow poop, plant detritus, and honey with bees still attached.

Move back to a time of 4 days, 15 hours, and 42 minutes.