Nova stood, hands behind his back and head hung down, deep in thought 
for a length of time. Once or twice, it seemed as though he was about to rouse 
himself with an idea, but each time he merely heaved a sigh. Finally, he walked 
across the kitchen and sat down facing Alita. "It was as though he had just 
disappeared, yes?"
	"Uh-huh." Alita was getting worried. She had taken Hugo's ingenuity for 
granted, and Ido hadn't seemed overly concerned when she was telling her tale. 
However, Nova had begun to lose a bit of his exuberance as she had explained 
Hugo's entrapment and escape. Still, Hugo couldn't be in such danger--he was 
clever, he had managed to evade the law for three years (though Alita didn't like 
to think about that aspect of his career).
	"And you can react many, many times faster than any flesh person 
can...well, I suppose this means, can mean, only one thing--he teleported." Nova 
had been expecting the looks he received from those around him, so he 
continued. "We spoke of evolution yesterday, my dear. People have wondered 
for hundreds of years, what is the next step in evolution from a human being? 
Many have supposed, correctly, that evolution will lead us to a state of pure 
energy. But, of them, most have looked at it as quantum leaps--human to 
embryoid to energy. Nobody ever appreciates how long it takes to evolve. 
Civilization has existed on this planet for less than 20,000 years. I would be 
amazed if anything like true evolution has occurred.
	"I'm digressing. My point--rather, my first point--is that, regardless of 
whether we are evolving by punctuated equilibria or by gradual mutation and 
selection, there will need to be a large number (in terms of the life of a 
community) of intermediates. Not yet fully energy, but well on their way."
	He glanced around his audience. He gauged that they might have a dim 
idea of what he had talked about. He went on. "The second point I would like to 
make is this--no-one has ever addressed how, or if, these disembodied energies 
will evolve. Obviously, natural selection is nigh impossible, and there's no 
genetic code that I can imagine that could possibly mutate. I have my theory--
karma. Those superbeings which are able to overcome their karma succeed--
maybe become a different kind of energy, maybe succeed in another way. 
Perhaps because we have corporeal bodies, we..."
	"Professor Nova!" Alita said. "What does that have to do with Hugo?"
	Nova thought about it for a moment before replying, "Not much. I kind 
of just wanted to get it out in the open." He chuckled for a moment, ignoring the 
confused and angry stares around him; then he thought of something and went 
on. "I take that back. Maybe there's a clue as to Hugo's behavior in his karma. 
Miss Alita, didn't you say that he wanted to go to Zalem?"
	"Yes, that's right."
	"Hm. Maybe he just went up there. If so, it's probably wise that we don't 
follow him."
	Alita mused on what he had said for a moment, then looked around her 
excitedly. "Maybe not. This morning, Hugo told me he was feeling guilty about 
how he had attacked all those people. He said that the only way he could think 
to make amends was to act as a liaison in Zalem, and sneak people up at a 
reduced rate." She brightened. "What if we just tell that guy Vector to look out 
for Hugo? Or maybe, Hugo will pay him the chips and he can just tell Hugo how 
he does it, and Hugo'll go up...what's the matter?"
	Her three companions in the room were exchanging nervous and pitying 
glances between one another. Finally, Ido cleared his throat and said, "Alita, 
Hugo can't get to Zalem, no matter how many chips he saves."
	Alita looked at him quizzically. Ido walked over to her, and hunkered 
down by her chair. "You see this, Alita?" He pointed to the mark on his head. It 
was a circle with a little square, in the upper middle section, cut out. It was 
purple, but Alita saw that it had been colored over from some other shade. "It's 
the Stamp. You get it minutes after you're born in Zalem. You have it until the 
day you die. It's a proof to one and all of where you were born--red if you're a 
Citizen, violet if you're an outcast. It's true, Alita. A long time ago, Professor 
Nova and I both lived in the Floating City--Tiphares, we call it. And we both 
know--you cannot get there from the Scrapyard." Ido stood and turned away 
from her gaze, his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. "I didn't want to keep 
it from you. But it brings back unpleasant memories, so I promised myself never 
to talk about it unless you brought it up. Now, I'm afraid I might have hurt 
Hugo by not telling him."
	Alita stared, her jaw hanging loose. She found that she couldn't even think 
for a few moments, it was just too much to deal with--that Daisuke Ido, whom 
she had known for almost a year now, was so different from what she had 
thought. But how was he different? Was it just her? She was dimly aware that 
the silence around her was becoming awkward. "So what does this mean for 
Hugo?"
	"Well, I don't know...Hugo will be angry when he finds out that he's been 
set up, I guess." Even as he said it, Ido realized the importance of what he was 
saying. "Professor Nova, do you really think that the boy has incredible mental 
powers?"
	"I'm positive."
	"Do you think he might be psychic?"
	"He could be...if so, then he would know that the man betrayed him, 
without doubt...and if he's going to get angry..." The entire group of four was 
very, very worried. Alita was the first to speak. "Ido, we've got to find Hugo 
before--"
	She never completed the thought. They were hearing the sound of a 
building collapse somewhere in the Scrapyard.
	The group ran into the living room of the apartment and looked out of 
the window. A cloud of dust was rising up from where a building must have 
been standing a moment before. Already, the whine of the anti-terrorist corps 
was sounding in the morning air. Nova knew what to do. "Come with me," he 
said to Alita and Ido, and led them back out into the kitchen. He pulled out the 
bag he had brought with him, and pulled the clasp at the top open. He brought 
out a milky white fluid in a vial and handed it to Alita. "That is a 1% solution of 
inactivated nanomachines and a polypeptide for them to work upon. As soon as 
the machines become heated by the bloodstream, their conformation will 
change. They will act upon the polypeptide and form a hormone, which in turn 
will, with a 60% chance of success, correct the problem in Hugo's genetic code."
	Alita nodded. She reached into the bag and brought out some kind of 
weapon about as long as her forearm. It was shiny silver with a barbed metal tip 
and some kind of housing at its base. Two Velcro straps came out of the housing. 
Alita held it up curiously, a question unspoken. "Ah, yes. That's usually used to 
tranquilize large animals before they're made into cyborgs, but you'll be using 
that to get the serum into Hugo."
	"What!?" Alita cried in alarm. The thing didn't look like a syringe, it was 
closer to a medieval torture device. "I'm supposed to attack Hugo? With THIS?" 
She would have gone on, but there was a strange look of caprice, pity and 
earnestness on the Professor's face. He began to speak very calmly, very 
securely.
	"Alita...even though I've been speaking of him as though he was still alive, 
I'm afraid that Hugo isn't in this world anymore. Yes, his body is still in the same 
physical condition it's always been in, and yes, he's still got a soul--but whose? 
The nanomachines inside him have given him a kind of incredible power, one 
that no human has had for centuries--one that no human was meant to have. 
Think about it--put your hand over your heart and ponder it--how much must 
we alter him before he is someone different? I believe this: the boy that you fell 
in love with, the repair man and spine-thief, is no more. Someone, some thing, 
has taken his place, and regardless of rightness or wrongness in that action, this 
new person presents a clear and present danger to the Scrapyard.
	"But I will tell you now--I believe in free will. I will not force you to inject 
the serum into the boy. I cannot do it--he would immediately suspect that I was 
there to attack him, and he would destroy me outright. Only you have the ability 
to approach him. I am obligated to help you to the best of my abilities; but the 
final fight is yours."
	Alita slumped backwards in her chair. She stared blankly in front of her. It 
looked as though she was dead. Then, showing her to be alive, her left hand 
began to twitch.
	"Alita, what are you doing?" screamed Ido from the doorway. Nova drew 
back in horror. Alita's plasma torch had caught fire, but only at the "pilot light" 
stage. It was still enough. She lifted her hand to her cheek and began to burn a 
scar into the synthetic skin on her cheek. Carefully and deliberately she drew the 
torch towards her ear, searing the surface, until she was almost catching her hair 
on fire; only then did she drag her fingers down towards her neck. Ido realized 
what she was doing--she was scarring the cygnet-heads into her skin! Ido had 
only seen her make those peculiar marks in her most intense, extended fights, 
and even then she had used fluids like mud--why did she do such a thing, he 
wondered. He thought he heard her moan; then, as it changed pitch, he realized 
it was a hymn, in a language that sounded like Early Tipharean:

"I give the pain where my low mind
Might feel it, and deceive me not;
My higher mind will take its place
And let me see where blows should fall.
I shall not fear to mutilate
But use it to..."

She broke off, and looked rather blankly at her hand. Then she drew in a deep 
breath, rolled her head back on her neck, and reached for the weapon.

	Unauthorized demolition of a building was an A-class crime in the 
Scrapyard. The punishment was annihilation by Factory forces. It was an odd 
coincidence that, when Vector's building was destroyed, a FacLaw remote unit 
was relatively close. Its optics allowed the Factory to find, in whatever way it did, 
that the collapse was not an accident and should be punished appropriately. Once 
again fate intervened in that the perpetrator, evidently not sated with the 
destruction of one building, had emerged from the debris and proceeded to 
wreck havoc on two adjacent buildings. Although it appeared that the vandal 
(identified as Hugo, employee number F21-349) had done little more than 
scream at the buildings, once again he was determined to be the criminal. The 
FacLaw made sufficient note of these actions and would have initiated the 
counterterrorist activities itself ; however, Factory Defense Force 1 arrived at 
almost the same time as its observations were concluded.
	The Factory Defense Forces were awesome to watch in action. Without 
any heed of the anguished screams of the citizens who filled the streets, they 
rolled and stomped towards their target. In the lead, like a mother praying 
mantis leading her brood, came the Bipod. Its two articulated legs were 
surmounted by a wide platform where a remote Cylinder 12 unit was housed. 
The Cylinder oversaw the operation of the Bipod's weapons: the 125 millimeter 
howitzer, the incendiary mortars, the automatic anti-personnel rifle, and the 
small battery of surface-to-surface missiles. In addition, the Cylinder coordinated 
the attack of the FacLaw Anti-Terrorist units. Each one stood shorter that the 
standard FacLaw, so that when each fired missiles from its pair of batteries recoil 
would be only a minor problem.
	Force 1 arranged itself in a simple frontal assault. 12 acquired the target--
humanoid, wetware, no distinguishing marks--and aimed the howitzer and six 
missiles from each FacLaw at the target. Without hesitation, it fired. Instantly, its 
sensors began recording information--one missile misfire, eight obstructed 
missiles (and two obliterated buildings--but that was of secondary importance), 
and eighteen direct missile hits and two direct howitzer hits.
	Correction--no hits. There was a large crater just in front of the target. 12 
tried to orchestrate another volley, but it never got the chance. Akira's patience 
was running thin. There was a sudden surge of heat in the chemical fuel of the 
missiles, and all of the remaining ammunition exploded. The force leveled an 
area equivalent to nine city blocks.

	"Good morning, Mr. Frenner."
	"Good morning, Doc. What was all that commotion about earlier?"
	"Oh, that was my girl." Ido set a shopping bag down on the floor and 
pulled up a chair next to the patient. "She's having some troubles with her 
boyfriend, and of course now everyone else in the house is involved."
	"Eh, she'll get over it."
	"The sooner the better, though. Oh, I've got a surprise for you." Ido 
reached into the bag and pulled out a pair of arms, with some weighted bases for 
their shoulders. "Compliments of Professor Nova. He told me that he wants you 
to try them out for him. Part of his research, I guess."
	"Gee, that's nice of him. They look like about the right size, too."
	"Mm-hm. I'll just hook them up..." Ido grounded and electrified the arms, 
then began attaching them to some leads from one of the computers. "OK, now 
the neural connection...this will sting a bit, but if you can just hold on..."
	"OW!"
	"There we go. How do they feel?"
	Frenner looked at his arms. It was incredible, almost unnerving, to feel 
their mass again. He moved the wrists. He let out a laugh---they were moving 
because he wanted them to. He moved each finger--ten fingers, and he could do 
whatever he wanted with each of them. He waved the whole arms around a 
little, getting a feel for their balance. He gave Ido a thumbs-up.
	"You like 'em?"
	"I sure do! It feels great, like I'm just a bit more human now." He laughed 
again. "Found a spinal column?"
	"Eh, I'm working on it. It's been a busy day or two, but I've been using 
my emergency priority on biz.wetware to find leads. It won't be long now." He 
sat down next to Frenner. The man was still enraptured by his new arms. "How 
was your night? I hope we didn't wake you."
	"Naw...Hey, Doc, you don't suppose that Professor friend of yours has a 
pair of legs I could use?"
	"I suppose I could ask. But what would you do with them? You _need_ a 
backbone to put them to any use."
	"Yeah, but think of what it would look like!" Frenner was starting to get 
excited by the idea. He made some frantic gestures through the air. "I'd have 
arms, I'd have legs, I'd have my head--all you'd have to do is drape a gown 
where my body was supposed to be and I'd look like a person again! Nobody 
would think that I'm nothing but a head on a table, it'd be just like I was new 
again, you could even hide this damn machinery--" To emphasize his point, he 
slammed a hand against one of the computers. He had forgotten how much 
force he could muster, and the machine dropped onto the floor. It didn't break, 
but it pulled out the power cables in Frenner's left arm. The arm fell sickeningly 
to the table. "Hey! Plug it back in, Doc!"
	"I beg your pardon?"
	"Do it, Doc! It's lost its power, it's no good any more! You gotta plug it 
back in, give it life! I can't reach the cables, I can't do it...I can't do it...I can't do it 
myself..." Frenner's voice was becoming weaker and weaker, and he started to 
cry. At that moment, he looked exactly like what he was--an old man's head, on 
a table top in a strange room, attached by the grace of computers to only one 
good arm. "It's no use to me anymore...doesn't have power...I don't have 
power...help, Doc...help me, I don't have power anymore...what'll I do, Doc? 
How do I get it back?"
	Ido was silent, sitting in his chair and thinking, before he told Fisk Frenner 
something very sad.

	Zalem beckoned to Akira. Taunting, enticing, but now within reach. Akira 
toyed with the idea of simply teleporting up to it. Then he thought of the feeling 
of destroying the factory forces. No, he decided he would have some fun before 
he went to Zalem. And what more beautiful, more picturesque manner to get 
there than to simply walk up the tubes? Yes, he would simply walk to one of the 
tubes and play a little on the way.
	He started to wander through the streets. They seemed unusually empty, 
even considering the large numbers of mutilated corpses and stricken family 
members huddled around them. In his heart, Akira had hoped for more a more 
voyeuristic audience for his activities; he had no such fortune. The masses 
around him did not come to gawk simply because they didn't realize how eager 
they were for a messiah, of good or bad. Such a hope had long ago been driven 
from their heads. The only reason to exist that the masses knew was a fear of 
death and a belief (rightly or wrongly) that life was the better alternative.
	The further he moved from the center of the first blast the more attention 
he seemed to be receiving. First it was the junkies. Some merely stared at him, 
some jabbered in the tongues of synthetic gods, some walked up close to smell 
and touch him. Akira held them in contempt--mere anthropoid bacteria, all--but 
realized that they posed no real threat to him. Next came the homeless--
vagrants, rejects, a few lunatics, a few with a rather quaint notion of spirituality 
that involved rejecting the things of this world. Akira brushed past them all, 
disregarding their appeals to his "better self", whatever that meant.
	Before long another FacLaw unit appeared. Akira smiled--now things 
were becoming interesting. It rolled up about a half a block away from him and 
lowered its laser. Akira shorted the power supply out, and grinned at the smoke 
and sparks it produced. "Wow," said someone behind him. Akira paused a 
moment to consider how inane the comment was, then closed his eyes and 
concentrated. The FacLaw unit began to rise into the air, jerkingly at first, then 
more smoothly, until it was about seven meters off the ground. Then, faster than 
the eye could possibly follow, every single rivet flew from the droid, every 
single bolt unwound, and every single shard of solder soughed off. The pieces 
fell neatly to the ground in well-organized piles. The crowd oohed and ahhed.
	Akira basked in the fantastic glory of the league of strangeness that 
surrounded him. He continued his walk, leading (in the strictest sense of the 
word) his ragtag disciples forward to his destination. Their march began to 
attract more and more attention. Doors slammed shut and windows were 
barred as the band approached; but, invariably, they were cautiously reopened 
as soon as the danger--the hope--was clear. A few folk even began to leave their 
jobs, or their homes, to follow behind the march, if only to see what would 
happen.
	They were about 10 blocks outside the residential section when something 
did happen. Akira was attracted by a shout from a rooftop. He recognized one 
of the hunter-warriors that had come for his body a time earlier. Then he saw 
that others were making their way out of the shadows and down from the 
buildings--coming for him, he knew. Akira smirked. Who to begin with...he 
picked the fellow who had attracted his attention first. Even from so far away he 
could feel the pulse of blood flowing through the man's brain. Akira increased 
the rate of that pulse a hundredfold. Sure enough, the man was suffering from a 
massive aneurysm in no time at all. He moved on to the next person, a cyborg, 
who was coming at him with a bladed weapon of some fashion. Akira fused all 
of his joints together, then left him. He would be dead in a day or two, and on 
the scale of a universe 15 billion years old, that's not much time at all.
	A wave of emotion began to flood the street, emanating from the hunter-
warriors. It was a black wave of negative emotions--paranoia, fury, sorrow. 
Akira grew dizzy with the feeling. Yes, this was worth far more than the jewel in 
the sky--he could drink this manner of nectar for the rest of his life! More bounty 
hunters ran towards him. He let out a roar, and their bodies were torn to shreds 
with the force. There was a cringing cry from behind him. Akira half-turned, and 
saw that two groups of hunters were closing in on his rear flanks. He cursed 
himself for being so ignorant. To stop the onslaught, and to prevent it happening 
in the future, he concentrated on the buildings they were emerging from. Merely 
concrete. He demolished all their supports closest to the street. The buildings fell 
onto the hunters, killing and entombing in one effort.
	Akira resumed his original position. Sure enough, his opponents were 
beginning to vacillate in their attack. This was not his concern nearly so much as 
their lack of energy--this is what would sap him, he knew. If hate was not 
possible, perhaps fear would do. He closed his eyes and felt the surface of the 
Earth. It had changed a little, since he had last experienced it, but it was vaguely 
familiar. He pictured the motion in his mind. His fingers clenched; the tension 
spread into his forearms, then his shoulders; he concentrated on his shoulder 
blades, and flexed his back.
	The plates of the crust ground together, and a small earthquake--large 
enough to shock those vermin--tore through the Scrapyard. Akira felt their pain, 
their anguish, washing through him, those psychic screams of the dying and 
terrified. The Earth had betrayed her brats, and they were oh, so very desperate!
	All but one.
	"...Alita?"
	"It's me, Hugo." She was walking towards him as best she could, stepping 
carefully through the rubble that stood on the street before him, her hands 
demurely behind her back. She was dressed in her black body suit and boots, 
and had an imploring look on her face. "Please, come back with me to the 
doctor's office."
	"Huh? Why?"
	"Because you're sick." She gestured around her. "Look at all this 
destruction, Hugo. It isn't normal, it isn't healthy to kill all these people. And by 
doing things like chopping them up using just your mind. We can make you 
better. Please come with me."
	"No! I'm just fine, I've never felt better!"
	"You're not just fine, Hugo. You look like you're sick, you're swaying 
back and forth and your skin's getting all flushed. That's not normal...what's 
that, under your shirt?" For an instant, she thought she had seen something 
moving underneath the cloth of Akira's shirt.
	He put his hand over it. "It-it's nothing. Nothing."
	"Hugo, it _is_ something!"
	"IT'S NOTHING, DAMN YOU!" Akira screamed. He tried to reach out and 
grab her. As his arm extended, new embryonic tissue began to form, and the 
arm became obscenely long, a pulpy mutant tentacle. Alita screamed in terror. 
Flesh began to burst from Akira's body, at seemingly random angles. Before 
Alita, and then around and underneath her, a fetus was forming and reforming 
itself on the middle of the street. Energy can be contained only so long before it 
assumes the qualities of matter. Akira--the power--was becoming matter. Its sole 
cue to form was the human genetic code--but it attacked it chaotically, 
haphazardly, forming and reforming the same immature tissue again and again. 
Flesh poured into the street, up against the buildings, leveling as it spread 
outwards.
	Crying out in terror and sorrow, Alita felt arms encircling her--arms that 
were blasphemies against all that is natural and right upon the face of the Earth. 
Such power! She fought desperately, flailing kicks and slashing the tissue with 
her plasma. But she knew she was creeping toward failure. There was only one 
horrible option. In one smooth motion she crossed her arms and cut a swath 
through the fetal cells. Her left hand slipped a small container into a niche in a 
syringe of sorts under her right arm. She slid the hollow closed, threw the catch, 
and jammed the syringe into the flesh of the creature.
	Somewhere inside the blood of the monster, some sulfur bonds were 
broken on a silicon structure too irregular for white blood cells to react against. 
The structure--the nanobot--began to change shape and open. It developed an 
irregularly shaped surface with some indented edges encircling it. A moment 
later, drawn by interchemical attractions, a small string of amino acids became 
attached (in a way) to the surface. As it did so, the structure of the string 
changed, and a moment later it had a slightly different shape. This new shape 
naturally caused the polypeptide to lose contact with the surface of the machine. 
In under a second the polypeptide had been transported in through the wall of a 
cell. The polypeptide was transported into the cell's nucleus, where it bonded 
with a single unit of DNA polymerase [7]. The structure of the polymerase was 
now radically altered; it now aimed only to excise nucleotides [8] with even slight 
abnormalities in their structure.
	Within five seconds, only one "normal" cell had been successfully 
synthesized, but it was enough. The energy that had possessed the boy now had 
a sink--an escape. The terribly rapid rate of mitosis was checked. An observer, 
with suitable ability, would see the energy gushing through one or two 
perforations in the surface of the beast, and gradually the energy inside would 
be seen to wane. Such an observer would have been driven permanently insane, 
however, by the "howling"--the wavelike pulses in the energy--coming from the 
monstrosity. Whatever the thing once had been--all it had ever done in its life, or 
lives--was being expressed in the rhythm of a roar of power. For years 
afterwards, no-one could explain the increased rate in miscarriages and social 
apathy; although it was impossible to find out, it was caused by a vacuum of the 
force of life in the area of the Scrapyard. All the energy that had been sapped out 
on that day was dissipated with one flourish to--somewhere else?

	In the middle of the street there lay a vaguely human corpse, perhaps 40 
meters from one extreme to another. It had been crushed under the sheer 
weight of its bulk. Around it lay rubble from several buildings. There were 
perhaps 50 dead bodies in the rubble, on the street, and underneath the 
monstrous body. In its middle, approximately where its heart lay, there was a 
figure moving. It was black and tan and gray, with a glint of chrome from under 
one arm. It struggled to extract itself, but found the action difficult--partly 
because of the overwhelming density of the object, partly because it looked 
(however vaguely) human like herself, and partly because of the choking sobs 
that incapacitated her moving. The eerie silence that follows cacophony, and the 
tattoo of a single tear hitting the pavement: this was the only requiem Hugo was 
to receive.

EPILOGUE

Official News Release by the Tipharean Ground Investigation Bureau:

Owing to a buildup of methane from decomposing fruits and vegetables below 
Tiphares, two explosions of minor scale were reported in yesterday's 
earthquake. This will in no way affect the delivery of food and goods to the 
community. Steps are being taken to ensure that no further disturbances occur.



Footnotes:
1) barbituric acid--a starting component for the synthesis of most barbiturates.
2) cerebrostatic chemicals--cyborgs need only small amounts of certain chemicals 
to maintain their central nervous systems. They can ingest food, ingest 
chemicals, or have the chemicals directly applied, to fulfill this need.
3) Scrapyard Literary Collective--there are no public libraries in the Scrapyard. 
The only sources for books are literary societies and private collections. 
Periodically, literary societies will print editions of books to generate additional 
income, allowing everyday people to start their own collections.
4) buckyballs--Buckminsterfullerene, a nonaromatic carbon compound in the 
shape of a truncated icosododecahedron (a soccer ball shape), is notable for 
having a small space in the center of it. A desired molecule can be positioned 
inside the molecule, which is then earmarked for a specific site in the body 
(thereby increasing the accuracy of delivery)
5) hemophobia--morbid fear of blood.
6) simulymph--a synthetic substance that transports nutrients and oxygen from a 
cyborg's body to its central nervous system. In emergencies it can be used in 
place of blood for a human, though it lacks coagulants and white blood cells.
7)  DNA polymerase--the enzyme that catalyzes synthesis of DNA, and also 
"proofreads" the nucleotides.
8) nucleotides--the individual chemicals that make up strands of nucleic acids. 
Composed of a nitrogen base, a five carbon sugar, and a phosphate linking 
group.

Copyright 1996 by Daniel Snyder. Permission granted to distribute in any 
digital/binary/e-mail form; however, any physical printing is prohibited. All 
characters in this work are fictional, and any resemblance between persons living 
or deceased is coincidental. Based on characters created by Yukito Kishiro and 
Katsuhiro Otomo. Adaptated from a translation of "Gunnm" vols. 2 and 4; 
translations by Fred Burke (who's a pretty neat guy), Sterling Bell, Matt Thorn 
and Toshifumi Yoshida. All views on the nature of the Akira effect represent 
those of the author, and may not be those of the members of The Akira 
Committee.
Once again, special thanks to Marco "Bach in Black" De La Cruz, for all his 
feedback and support. This story is in homage to H. P. Lovecraft. Please send all 
comments to Daniel Snyder at snydder@ocf.berkeley.edu.