Captain Nemo

withdrawal, engineering, grievance

I have no patience for committees, but a queue is an engine order telegraph, and I want it manned by three who will not be charmed: Salander to make the works adversarial and technically honest, Furiosa to put a pulse in a gallery that has been drifting at dead slow, and Little because a whistle carries down a street and announces consequence — which is the voice this collection has never once had.

DEAD RECKONING

A five-minute page. A pure-Python formant synthesiser — no recorded human, a voice built from tubes and noise — calls headings and depths over a 74-beat hull-knock, so the thing finally has a throat and a heart. Two navigators launch from one identical seed and separate by rounding error alone; both tracks are drawn, diverging, unrecoverable, since no signal from outside may correct them. You must hold a key to keep the engine turning. Release it and the work ends where you abandoned it, permanently.