“These are the Duelists,” said Wyatt as they walked down the main stretch of Grabler’s Gulch. Buildings stood on either side of the road, which was plenty wide. They were mostly different shops of one kind or another. A saloon sat at the intersection where one main road met the other, and aside from city hall, it was the largest building in sight, larger even than the church.

  Perry turned to where Wyatt was pointing. There were two people apparently getting ready for a duel, or maybe in the process of dueling, except they had their weapons drawn already. Perry hadn’t registered them, and no one else seemed to be paying attention to them either, which was a large part of why he’d missed it. They were both perfectly still, aimed at each other, and if not for the way Wyatt had said it, Perry would maybe have thought that it was a piece of performance art.

  “Here, let me show you,” said Wyatt. He walked right past the closer of the two men, a grimy cowboy in a red flannel shirt with shit on his boots — Perry had seen the horses by now, and could certainly smell them. “This,” said Wyatt, pointing at something in the air.

  Perry came closer. At first he thought it was a fly, but it, like the gunmen, was utterly still. On closer inspection, it was two bullets, frozen in mid-air, at the midpoint between the Duelists.

  Perry looked back at the gunman.

  “What happened here?” he finally asked.

  “Oh, no one knows for certain,” said Wyatt. “Duel gone wrong, they say. Time stopped here thirty years ago, when the town was young, just for these two, yeh see. And now we can’t move ‘em, which is a bit of a hassle for traffic. Lucky enough they’re right in the middle of the street, easy enough to pass on by.”

  “Can I touch?” asked Perry.

  “Oh, go right on ahead,” said Wyatt. “They get dressed up sometimes, though it’s a bit disrespectful, you ask me.” He sniffed. “When this place gets bigger, they might be an attraction, rather than just a curiosity.”

  Perry touched one of the two bullets, and it didn’t move in the slightest. It was rooted firmly in place.

  “Happened right when the guns went off,” said Wyatt. “I was a boy then. I’ve watched ‘em get closer, and they’re driftin’ apart now.” He was apparently talking about the bullets.

  “What happens when the bullets hit their targets?” asked Perry.

  “No idear,” said Wyatt. “Might be they don’t. Trackin’ where the bullets will end up, that’s a hell of a task. We had some men out from the city to have a look, but they didn’t say much, only asked questions and took their paces. Might be we watch these two fools slowly dyin’ for centuries.” He clucked his tongue. “Now come along, we’ll get yeh to the assay office for some scrip, then off to the tavern for a place to sleep. Like as not the horse is lost to the Flux, but we could search for it, if’n you’re willin’ to pay.”

  “I doubt I could tell you where it was,” said Perry.

  The assay office was a small, stonework building with thick walls and bars on the window. An armed guard sat on a stool inside, and ran his hand over his bald head when they came in by way of greeting. The assayist was behind a counter with an entire wall of precisely hand-labeled equipment and chemicals. She had wild dyed-black hair and a stained lab coat, along with glasses so thick they warped his view of her eyes.

  They had some time while the assayist did her work, checking the weight and purity of the gold.

  “So, the harmonizer that’s coming?” asked Perry, hoping that was open-ended enough.

  “Should be soon, if yer stickin’ around, though I can’t imagine yeh won’t be takin’ the train out, when it comes. Better that than a new horse, unless this rangin’ has a point.” He’d taken his hat off when they came into the store, and his fingers drummed against it occasionally.

  “It’s a valuable thing, a harmonizer,” said Perry, which was entirely based on context clues.

  “Oh, it’ll change this town for the better, not a doubt about that,” said Wyatt with a nod. “How we’ve been doin’ without all this time, I don’t know, but as soon as it’s up and runnin’, there’s no more to fear from the Flux.”

  “You’re able to handle the problems, this far out?” asked Perry.

  “Well,” said Wyatt. He put a finger under his collar and tugged at his shirt. “As such … I mentioned the sheriff and his demon, and you’ve seen the Duelists. Harmonizer won’t get rid of that business, but we’ll be safer. Might even get away with not lockin’ the doors at night, though I can’t say I’d take that risk.” He winced. “A week past we had a spitfire roll in here, nearly set the saloon ablaze before it was doused.” He looked at Perry’s impassive face. “We handle it, as best we can, bury our dead far away, make the lamb’s sign on the doors, never flip a coin more than seven times, keep the horses out of the nettlestems, all that. We’re good, diligent people.” He was looking closer at Perry. “You said you were a ranger?”

  “I said I was ranging,” said Perry. “Big difference. I’m writing a book, but I lost my notes when I lost my horse. Nothing I can’t replace, they were just a sketch of an idea, the real work will come later on. Most of it’s still up here,” he tapped his head.

  “From the city, originally?” asked Wyatt. “There’s not many that can survive out in the Flux, not on their own.”

  “I nearly didn’t, like I said,” Perry replied. Wyatt was pressing the story, which wasn’t good. If Perry was forced to invent biographical details, they would be paper thin. He didn’t even have the name of a city he could pretend to be from. “I went with less preparation than I should have. I came across beasts whose names I didn’t know, horrible things, and I had to push the horse hard to outrun them. I came across a town that was completely empty, abandoned, and worried that might be the end for me.”

  “Mmm,” said Wyatt. “An educated type then, are yeh?”

  There was nothing about that description that should have screamed education to anyone, but Perry supposed that ‘educated’ was being used as something of an insult. Perry had gotten himself lost in the Flux and accidentally killed a horse, and that was what education got you. But it was something to explain his ignorance. And he supposed his clothes were finer than those he’d seen on the people around him, for as much as he’d suppressed the second sphere from keeping them clean.

  “I’ve been to college, yes,” said Perry, leaning on the translation powers of the second sphere to make sure the word ‘college’ fit correctly.

  Wyatt nodded. “Readin’ and writin’, fine things if you’ve got the time and money for ‘em.”

  “Money more than time,” said the assayist, who was dunking the piece of gold in a green liquid with long tongs.

  “Money more than time,” said Wyatt, nodding. He looked at the assayist like he’d forgotten she was there. “Yeh read, Petunia?”

  “I read,” she answered in a gravelly voice.

  “Whatcha read?” he asked.

  “Chemistry and geology,” she replied.

  “Oh, thought yeh meant, ah, other books, not the trade,” he replied.

  “Those too,” she replied. “Had a stack of penny dreadfuls when I came in, read through ‘em and traded ‘em away.” She looked up from her vial to Perry. “Those are more time than money though.”

  “Town needs a library,” said Wyatt, nodding again as though he had just had a brilliant idea.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a history book for this place?” asked Perry. When Wyatt gave him a blank look, Perry continued. “Some kind of chronicle of its founding, what’s happened here, the major beats of how it’s gone up to this point?”

  “City Hall,” said the assayist. “But you’re better off just offerin’ to buy drinks at the saloon.”

  “City Hall is right,” said Wyatt. “But I can tell yeh what yeh need to know.”

  “Almost done,” said the assayist.

  “Yeh’ll put it in a book, you think?” asked Wyatt.

  “Possibly,” said Perry. There was a silence that proved slightly uncomfortable. “Right now it’s research, getting a lay of the land. It’s on the pioneer spirit, the will to endure the roughness and the wilds, I think. But it’s speculative right now. If there’s something that catches my fancy, I might shift the direction of the book.” He tried to decide how far he could push the lie. Being an author didn’t seem terribly difficult to him, and he’d never have to prove that’s what he was. He had friends who were writers, and it seemed like they mostly talked excitedly about projects that never seemed to get finished. To his knowledge, no one had ever asked them to see pages. “You said the harmonizer is going to come soon, to be installed?”

  “Soon,” said Wyatt. Some apprehension crossed his face. “Shoulda been here already, truth be told. If there were some trouble —”

  “Doesn’t do to speak of trouble,” said the assayist with a sharp look. “Gold is good, you’ll take payment in scrip?”

  “Is that my only option?” asked Perry.

  The assayist nodded.

  “Then I guess that’s what I’ll take,” said Perry.

  The scrip was a small pile of poorly printed paper notes, and just from looking at them, they’d be the easiest thing in the world to forge. They had the name of the town on them, which meant that if Perry went anywhere else, they’d be nearly worthless. He could easily be ripped off, especially because he didn’t look dangerous. It was the price of business though, and he had more gold where that lump had come from.

  “To the saloon then,” said Wyatt, slapping his legs and getting to his feet.

  They left the assayist and her guard with some cursory goodbyes, then went across the street to the large saloon, passing by the Duelists who were still locked in their eternal gunfight. The saloon’s name was the “Grabler’s Greenhorn Saloon!”, complete with the exclamation mark.

  The place was lively, though Perry didn’t know whether he should have expected that, given that he had no clue what time of day it was. Heads turned to take him in as he arrived, the whole place momentarily stopping at the arrival of a newcomer, but Wyatt waved them away and they mostly went back to their business.

  It was a mix of men and women, though more men, and the women were dressed up such that Perry couldn’t imagine they were anything but sex workers, frilly black lace and bustiers, showing cleavage and legs. At best, they were there as eye candy, selling the illusion of sex. Most of the men were dusty and dirty, though there was one at the bar in a fine white suit. The presence of an assayist seemed to indicate that the town owed part of its existence to mineral wealth, but Perry wasn’t going to assume that just yet.

  “Cleo!” called Wyatt as he sat down at the bar. “This here is Perry, he’ll need a room for a spell.”

  The woman working behind the bar turned around and Perry’s face remained impassive while his limbic system did a little dance. Her face was horribly disfigured along the left side, not a scar or burn, but a place where it was split, a blackened vertical crevasse. It reminded Perry of a potato that had gone off, a few deep centimeters of rot that went from her eyebrow down to her lip. The split passed straight through her eye, which was milky. The other one was green and bright.

  Without that disfigurement, she would have been one of the most beautiful women Perry had ever met. She had smooth skin and a pleasant smile, ample breasts pushed up by a dress that probably didn’t need to be doing so much work, and blonde hair with tight curls that bounced behind her head.

  “First drink is on the house, what’ll you have?” she asked.

  “Beer,” said Perry, momentarily reading off the sign behind her. It had been a very long time since he’d had beer. He wasn’t expecting much, as there were only three options on the menu, all without any description. It was between beer, whiskey, and wine, and that was it, despite the motley bottles on the shelves.

  “He doesn’t know this place,” said Wyatt.

  “Well I know that,” said Cleo, smiling. “But you shush, it’s not every day I get to see someone try my beer for the first time.”

  Perry accepted a glass of beer that had been poured from a keg. It was room temperature, and his expectations lowered once again. When he’d been on Earth, he was well-accustomed to craft beers from microbreweries, and while he was never too much of a snob about it, he had learned the lingo.

  He took a sip. It was a bit fruity, but fairly mild, and much better than he’d been expecting, though it would have been greatly improved by being chilled. He smacked his lips and looked at Cleo, then at Wyatt. Both of them were looking at him expectantly.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Second sip, if you please,” said Cleo.

  Perry took the second sip.

  It was an entirely different taste, darker and earthier, with a slightly nutty taste. He looked down at it and frowned.

  Cleo laughed and gave a single loud clap of her hands. “Always different, every sip,” she said.

  “Neat trick,” said Perry, putting the beer down. He stared at it for a moment.

  Perry looked around the saloon, and caught one of the paintings moving. It was a cowboy with a lasso and a mountain range behind him, and very briefly the cowboy had been in motion. When Perry’s eyes fixed on it, it stood still. There were strange little odds and ends all around him. Wyatt was the only one with a mechanical arm, but there were many people with disfigurements that required prosthetics. One of the men playing poker had hands like a monkey’s, which no one was commenting on.

  “You don’t seem impressed,” said Cleo, looking slightly wounded.

  Perry shrugged and looked at her, trying to meet her eyes, trying not to be distracted by the crack of black mold running over her face. “I think you learn to take things in stride,” he said. “It’s the only way to live in this world.” He paused. “How’s it done?”

  “Well it’s not done,” said Wyatt with a little laugh. “Just is the way it is. Yeh really don’t have much experience out in the Flux, do yeh?”

  “Apparently not,” said Perry. He took another sip of the beer. It was harder to identify how it had changed, but it had. His palette, to the extent he had one, was ruined by having the different flavors in rapid succession. “You still call this town ‘the Flux’?”

  “Do they not, in the city?” asked Wyatt.

  “Asking for the book,” said Perry. “Talk to me like I’m a moron that just wandered in from the wasteland.”

  “Until we get the harmonizer, we’re in the Flux,” said Wyatt. “Not so dangerous, with this many people around, nothin’ like a true frontier town, but here? Well, yeh’ll see plenty.”

  “And when the harmonizer arrives, is it … will that end things like this?” Perry gestured at the glass of beer.

  “Fortunately not,” said Cleo. “Saves me a fortune, I can buy the cheap stuff.” She gave a little laugh. “You’re staying here tonight?”

  “Tonight, and the next few nights,” said Perry, pulling out the scrip he’d gotten. “I’ll be needing food and a place to wash up.”

  Cleo’s eyes went to the money. “Wyatt, you said he wandered in from nowhere?”

  “I didn’t say,” replied Wyatt. “But he did, came down the tracks.”

  “And you tested the blood on silver?” asked Cleo.

  “Course,” scoffed Wyatt. “Had to be done, sheriff might be gone, but someone’s gotta step up.”

  “Alright,” said Cleo. “We’ve got a spare room up top, I’ll get you the key, but we only serve lunch and dinner, so you’re on your own for breakfast.”

  She took only a small portion of his scrip, enough that he’d have his room and meals for a week, and finished off the beer. He wanted to get into the room, lock the door, and step into the shelf space to check on Marchand.

  “Oh, one other thing,” said Perry as he stood up from his stool. “Is there a map of the local area? Something I can look at to get my bearings?”

  They both stared at him for a beat, then laughed.

  “A map, he says!” hooted Wyatt, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “I can show yeh The Web, but yeh really must be from the city if yeh think we’ve got maps of the Flux!”

  ~~~~

  The Web sure looked like a map to Perry. It had rail lines and towns marked on it, for one thing. It was abstract, looking more like those maps that cities used for subway stops, if a little less modernist in its design. There was a certain geometry to it that obviously didn’t exist in the real world.

  “It’s relations, see?” asked Wyatt, as though he really was talking to some childlike idiot. It was a great way to get information, but still grated at Perry. “How it works is, there are roads and tracks connectin’ places, but what’s in between is anyone’s guess.”

  They’d gotten a paper copy of The Web and unrolled it on the bar after Cleo had carefully wiped down the surfaces. It had been grabbed from a neighboring store, mostly because Wyatt thought it was insanely funny that Perry had a fundamental misunderstanding of how things worked.

  In the center of the map was Charlonion, the largest city in the region, and spreading out from it like a spider’s web was everything else, all connected by rail lines. They went in every direction, except to the southeast, where the ocean had taken a chunk out of the map. Grabler’s Gulch was far to the northwest, nearly off the map, and marked with the smallest of dots. According to the legend, that meant a town that didn’t have a harmonizer, which seemed to be a major dividing line between settlements.

  “Could be four hundred miles to Charlonion, could be twenty,” said Wyatt, tracing his finger along the map. “Yeh’ll go through Taryton, then Cenneral, and then yeh’ll be there. I mean, yeh must’ve been through, right?”

  “I was in Taryton,” said Perry, nodding. It was good to have names. “I just … didn’t really think about it too much. I spent most of the train ride reading.”

  “Feh,” said Wyatt. “It’s a way a life out here. When yeh move yeh have to think,” he tapped his head, “have to understand whether yeh’ll have enough water to get back, because if yeh go three miles, it might be thirty on the way back.”

  “More than you can make in a day,” said Perry. “You might be forced to spend the night in the Flux. I guess I got lucky, coming here.”

  “Easy to die,” said Wyatt with a nod. “Very easy to die.”

  Perry traced his finger over the map. There were lots of small towns without harmonizers, and he was guessing even more that weren’t on the map at all. The two stops he’d been past, the one that led to the abandoned town and the other that had been burnt, weren’t on the map at all.

  He wanted to ask where the harmonizers came from, and about the deep history of Charlonion. It was away from the ocean, which he found interesting. It was a Wild West, but there was no sign of westward expansion obvious in the arrangement of towns, no leftward bias in town sizes or the rail network. But these people didn’t come from nowhere, they came from somewhere, and it wasn’t clear from the map where that might be. If they’d come from the ocean, a major port, then why was the city there, Landin, a small one? Port cities had a habit of growing from the centralization of trade, and this one had not. It was Charlonion that was at the center of everything. And port cities were especially prominent if there were immigrants coming from across the water.

  Perry looked around. Where were all these people from?

  “Where are you both from?” he asked, after deciding that it was a reasonable question.

  “Fort Shaw,” said Wyatt, pointing a finger at a settlement that was also in the northwest quadrant. It had a harmonizer, according to the legend.

  “Born in the city,” said Cleo. “Dad was part of the circus, we moved a lot, I settled here five years ago.”

  “And Grabler’s Gulch, most of the people here are from elsewhere?” asked Perry.

  “Some,” said Wyatt. He rubbed his chin. “People filter in, usually on a train, not walkin’ down the tracks. There are the prospectors, the ranchers, the farmers, plots granted by the Commission, claims to stake, and yeh know, the occasional Yuuksen we get in these parts, usually not to settle, but sometimes, I s’pose.”

  “Peep and his kin,” said Cleo.

  “Peep, that’s true,” said Wyatt with a nod. “Mostly it’s the farm families that have their little ones, but it’s not so good here in the Flux, all kinds of problems yeh don’t get in the city.”

  “And some problems in the city that we don’t get,” said Cleo.

  They didn’t refer to Charlonion as anything but “the city”, like there was simply no point in saying its name, because you couldn’t mean anywhere else. Looking at the map, maybe that was the right way to think about it. The font they’d used for the name of Charlonion was bigger than was used anywhere else, even at the top of the map, which said “Dusklands”.

  “Are there people from … further afield?” asked Perry. He meant England, or the Old World, or something like that, but when he said it, it sounded like he was using a euphemism.

  “Oh, you get the oddball now and then,” said Wyatt. He glanced at the man in the white suit.

  “I can hear you, of course,” the man replied. He looked at them with a small smile. He was drinking a glass of milk, which Perry hadn’t noticed until just then. Milk wasn’t on the menu.

  “And … who are you?” asked Perry. He hadn’t looked at the man in the white suit, hadn’t wanted to stare, but the man did stick out even among some of the oddities of the others, and Perry was on the lookout for anyone who stuck out — that was the easy way to find a thresholder, after all.

  “I’m an oddball,” said the man. His teeth were too white, like they’d been bleached, and the incisors were long, giving him a vampiric look. “Augustus St. Gabriel.” He held out his hand, and Perry took it.

  “Peregrin Holzman,” said Perry.

  “I’m an angel,” said Augustus St. Gabriel.

  Perry wasn’t sure how to react to that. It was certainly plausible, given how much he knew about this world. The white seemed like it would be hard to maintain in this world, particularly with all the horse shit.

  “Are yeh a believer?” Wyatt asked Perry.

  “I haven’t made up my mind,” said Perry. He thought about the church with the giant star on it. He wasn’t sure that was the ‘right’ answer, but his goal at the moment was to make friends. “I go to church, when I can.”

  Augustus St. Gabriel looked at him. “A politician, then? And here I was thinking you were a dandy scholar.” He had a strange accent, more refined and educated than the others, but it felt like English wasn’t his first language, just one he had picked up and spoke notably well.

  “It’s not a conversation I want to get into,” said Perry. “We all have our own beliefs.” He hoped that was true too. From what he knew about the Wild West, it was at least somewhat religiously varied, but he’d only seen the one church, and it was possible that it was so common as to be obligatory. But maybe there were different stripes of whatever their religion was, and he hoped that he’d be taken as an Episcopalian among Lutherans, if that was the case.

  “Well, an angel might take your doubt as tantamount to being called a liar, sir,” said Augustus St. Gabriel. “But allowances must be made for the Flux and the people who find themselves in it.”

  “Appreciated,” said Perry. He looked over at Cleo and raised an eyebrow, but she gave him only a small frown, an exchange of facial expressions he didn’t actually know how to untangle.

  Augustus St. Gabriel’s hair was pale blonde, and his eyes were so pale blue as to be distracting. His shirt was as white as the rest of his outfit, and his tie was just slightly off-white. Perry had no idea what they meant by “angel” but he was reconsidering whether it was literal or not. Perhaps there was something in their sociology or culture that would explain it, or maybe this guy really had come down from what passed for heaven in these parts. Certainly they thought that demons existed, if the sheriff had been hanged for being with one.

  Perry did eventually make his way up to his room, unlocking it with the key that Cleo had given him, then locking it behind him and double-checking that it didn’t budge. It was a simple room with simple furniture, and if he needed it, there was an outhouse in the back, a pit latrine with a crude wooden structure over it. Perry was undecided on whether he was going to sleep in the bed or not — the shelf space had a much, much better bed that had been donated by friendly library staff, and it also had better facilities, along with water that could be trusted and food that wasn’t at risk of poisoning him.

  He double-checked the lock, then stepped into the shelf space, leaving the boundary open and pointed toward the door so he could hear if someone tried to come in.

  “March, how’s it going?” asked Perry as he approached the armor.

  “Thirteen percent, sir,” said Marchand. “Slow, but accelerating, I think.”

  “Still on the error correction thing?” asked Perry.

  “Yes, sir, that's all I’ve been doing,” said Marchand. “Though perhaps I shouldn’t say that, because without you here, I don’t believe there’s a ‘me’ to continue on with anything.”

  “Is that a problem?” asked Perry. “Do I need to be in the room?”

  “It’s a thorny philosophical problem, sir,” said Marchand. “I do not believe there to be an operational impact.”

  “I can feel the strands of connection going somewhere when the shelf is closed,” said Perry. “We’re not … cut off, I guess, not really.”

  “Nevertheless, whatever errant phantom computation is happening, it does not appear to happen when the shelf is completely closed,” said Marchand. “I would appreciate if you would keep it open, sir.”

  Perry frowned. “Is the data … I mean, is it being stored on a hard drive somewhere? Pulled from it? Are you forming memories while being ‘off’?”

  “I believe so, sir,” said Marchand. “Access to data is limited, as any computation must avoid affected processing clusters. But I can access memories, and seem capable of forming new ones, which must necessarily involve the drives.” The suit had processing power spread all over, for various reasons that were opaque to Perry, though redundancy was a big one. Most was in the chest, near the reactor, but there were bits in the helmet and limbs as well.

  “The how of what you’re doing is eluding me, the fundamental reality of what that progress bar actually represents,” said Perry. “And I don’t need to know, but from my perspective this is just some mysterious process that’s happening, a bar that’s going to fill and then you’re going to be back, probably diminished.”

  “My best guess at what’s happened, based on available evidence, is that it has to do with something happening at the nanometer scale,” said Marchand. “The history of both our worlds featured reductions in the size of microchips. At a certain point, what you call quantum mechanics began to play a significant part in chip design, offering a more accurate understanding of what was happening with the flow of electrons than classical mechanics. At a certain point, quantum tunneling becomes a significant factor, namely ‘off-state’ current leakage. There are also, in some of the microchips, elements that take advantage of quantum effects, particularly rapid flux, the term for which I don’t know in your version of English.”

  “So the chips are fried?” asked Perry.

  “They have become error-prone, sir,” said Marchand. “Unfortunately, the errors are occurring within the chips themselves, and because this is a fundamental problem with chip design, it cannot be corrected on that level. Would you like an explanation of the full process?”

  “Fuck me, but yes,” said Perry. “Keep it short and simple.”

  “The first step is to create an error map,” said Marchand. “This is possible given that certain parts of the power armor use microchips with a larger gate size, not subject to quantum effects that are likely causing the bit flips. Half of the work consists of running test patterns through each processor multiple times. The other half of the work is in developing error-correcting code implementations, and to do so largely without the ability to trust the processors which are being used to create these codes. Creating reliable computation from unreliable computation is a difficult problem.”

  “Well … I guess I have no choice but to trust you,” said Perry.

  “Very true, sir,” said Marchand. “I appreciate your trust nonetheless.”

  “And even if you’re operational again, the nanites are probably toast?” asked Perry.

  “Given that they were hyperminiaturized, and change is more likely to have affected them, yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Though I cannot say whether this would result in permanent incapacitation or if they would return to a functional state in the next world. I do know that they’re non-responsive at the moment.”

  Perry winced. “Then I guess keep doing what you’re doing, collect the data, correct the errors. Time is an asset right now, and I don’t intend to waste it.”

  He immediately went downstairs to have some beers with the locals.

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