Leave it to beaver captain jack

I got mad at how Urabrask (and the praetors in general, later on) were unceremoniously offed in the course of the main story, so I wrote a quick side story that kind of shores up the issues I had with how they went out.
-----
It had become necessary, in the course of the Great Work's completion, for a system of measurements to be established. The rebels had their own system, but an imperfect one - one that reflected the bygone benchmarks of a culture now reduced to hiding in what holes Urabrask allowed them. So it was that a new one was needed.
Gleeful Demolition by Tian Duong Chu
And what better candidate than the scamps? The former goblins who fed the flames with their worship, with their toil, with their bodies, if they were so fortunate. The exarchs, in their industrious solipsisms, looked away from the gabbling creatures as they carried out instructions. They were living tools. But the claw of the praetor feels the scamps' lifeblood in every hooked flange and serrated ridge, and knew that to scorn them was to dishonor their sacrifice. So it was that temperature at which they burned was decreed to be the suitable unit for all others to be built around.
--
Halo, the drink of choice on New Capenna, vaporizes at 3 scamps.
Pain coursed through his whole being. Gitaxias's machinist had left him here, under a bridge of this forsaken jetty, to recover what damage the Planar Bridge had done to him. Under the pretense of helping foment "alternative paths towards perfection", he had blindly trusted the man, as the Forge lacked alternatives to what Urabrask foresaw as its inevitable end. Necessity had drawn him here, and here he would die, metal skin flayed from his exposed innards.
A croaking sigh superheated a nearby colony of fly eggs into ash, and he felt something that his tongue lacked the word to explain.
The clatter of boots on cement interrupted his reverie. He turned to see that hateful half-flesh buzzard with a person in tow, dressed in a green-engraved uniform. A valet's cap traced brown curls and a soldier's poise.
"Vivien", said Tezzeret, "meet Urabrask, my rather unencumbered master."
She narrowed her eyes.
"Well met, praetor."
It took a supreme amount of will to summon the strength to voice anything besides a howl of pain. Nonetheless, Urabrask spoke.
"A pleasure. I trust he has - *explained*, the situation."
"You're organizing a rebellion against the autocracy of your home plane, and you're looking for support."
He approximated a nod, awkward and ungainly. "This place...bested my kind, once. Not an easy task. I would see how it was done."
She leaned back. "How do I know that you're not just trying to find out how they won, so you can prevent that from happening again?"
This question confused him. He was not Gitaxias, who sewed falsehoods as easily as he sewed sinew to steel. And yet, he realized, he had no proof of this, no scripture attesting his integrity. It was Tezzeret who finally spoke, voice curling like a snake.
"Urabrask here couldn't lie if his newtlike brain could even conceive of such a thing. My master simply isn't...built for it."
A bitter laugh from the green one. "And I suppose I'm to trust your judgment on that, given your previous masters?"
A shrug from the metal man.
Despite the early suspicions, Vivien eventually agreed, mostly in the absence of viable alternatives. In exchange for his knowledge of the Phyrexian host, she pored into the Park Heights archives, the seedy recesses of the Caldaia. She brought to him half-remembered histories, read to him orally from a reasonable distance. When their pertinent conversations ended, she would occasionally even recount the stories of her plane, lost to some nameless trespasser. "Only reason I'm telling you about it is that there's no saving it." The machinist stopped by to occasionally throw a dismissive scrap of metal to repair his mangled body. Bereft of his usual tools, and bent double in agony most of the time, Urabrask could do nothing but reluctantly thank him.
Gradual was the recovery. He was no Vorinclex, practiced with the transferral of life, who could repair in minutes simply by draining off the local fauna. Instead, with the tip of a claw, he carved a new exoskeleton from the scrap and detritus.
Still, that final piece remained elusive. The Capennans were a begrudgingly tenacious people, but in no way should they have been able to repel Yawgmoth's horde a millennium prior.
One particularly hot day, Vivien had showed up with nothing new to report. The city had been in the middle of a heat wave, and while Urabrask himself welcomed it, the usual crowd had retreated to their magic-cooled atriums and been remiss to share information. She'd come in a light dress, with a bottle of some nameless liquid in tow.
"You've got something there."
She looked sideways. "Ah, yes. Halo, it's called, a bit of contraband, actually. I don't usually drink, but today's my mother's birthday. Thought I'd celebrate, even if she's not here."
There was something he couldn't quite place in her wavering tone. The idea of parental attachment had always seemed, well, ridiculous - a remnant of Norn's mewling attachment to the familial structures of a process unknown to every being in their sphere. One did not have an individual attachment to one's birthing pod or compleator, no matter what you pretended. And yet, her manner was genuine, without parody.
It occurred to Urabrask that humans did have mothers.
"There is a thing, they do, in the dim light of their squalid apartment flats. A toast... I think Tezzeret called it. They clink their glasses together, and then drink, simultaneously."
When she did not reply, he added "It seems to yield a newfound strength to their bearing."
He saw her face momentarily contort, before her usual discipline returned.
"Hah. Are you asking me for a toast? A Phyrexian praetor? I wouldn't miss that for the world."
It was not long before she returned with two glasses. Pouring the bottle into one, she handed it to him with a gloved hand.
"To Mom."
"To your mother."
Luxurious Libation by Joe Slucher
They drank. For a while, Vivien's senses eroded - the edges of her vision blurring into a pleasant haze. It felt like being pulled into the Blind Eternities, consciousness rising, rising. The vision of her mother, and her people, so clearly in view - and then -
She heard the horrid, high-pitched scream of metal on metal, and the praetor hacked up the concoction. Its multicolored, shimmering contents sat in bright contrast to the fungal slick of his surroundings.
"Are you alright?"
When he stopped retching rainbows, he retched magma, then an assemblage of biomechanical organs. Then he spoke. The praetor's voice was thin.
"Now we know how they lost."
--
Slobad, once a savior of his world, returns to slag at five hundred scamps.
The centurion who brought him in pieces shifts ungainly upon leaden feet. It is an exultation to be allowed in Urabrask's sanctum, to witness his private bellows, and yet she has never seen the praetor so calm. With a flick of the tail, he stokes the remnants of the mangled body clear into the subsuming mass of molten metal.
​
Urabrask's Forge by Lie Setawan
"Great smith, praetor-maker, we-"
"No formality needed."
"He was weak, sire. Unfit - still unable to shake the dressage of his identity before rebirth -"
"How did he die?"
"A coward's death. The Great Work proceeds one link stronger. We found out later that he -"
"How'd he die, fool?"
The centurion feels a jettisoned wave of exhaust nearly melt her tined helm. She meets his gaze as she stumbles backward, before recovering.
"He had gone to see Vorinclex's second, the traitor-elf, and carried with him a body, found by some forsaken pool in the darkslick. We believe he had intended to subvert our cause - to trade the body as collateral, to surrender himself to the Hunter Maze and Norn's forces."
Urabrask tilts a jaw, and retreats to a hunch.
"They had a shared history."
"He was butchered on the spot, by the elf herself, no less. Vorinclex nearly had his body, before we sent in a scamp to recover it. Though I am not sure they would have consumed it - they would have seen his plaintive plea, and his oil, as weakness." She resists adding *As it was.*
"He was once part of her family. If not by the blood of the womb, then by the blood of the sword. Certainly more of a family than Norn professes to be." His claws clip the floor in their restless pacing, and he looks askance, through the layer of molten alloy that divided his quarters from the rest of the layer, toward the Hunter Maze.
"And yet, if their bonds could not unite them after compleation, what hope have any of us?"
The centurion does not answer. She looks instead at his tail, as it reaches for one of the myriad valves that release the slag into the main circulatory channels.
"You don't intend on releasing that mix into the furnaces, surely. He will contaminate the oil of better warriors. The war that will follow has no tolerance for-"
"For waste of perfectly usable bodies."
He flushes the valve, and the centurion looks on in stony silence.
"Yes, of course, praetor."
--
A planeswalker's spark is estimated to leave its owner at a mere eighth of a scamp.
The flame-haired girl controls the fire, yes, as does the tree-bottomed woman beside. But they do not master it, do not embody it as he does. One gesture of the claw, one movement by his assembled exarchs, and they would both know rebirth. They would likely serve the war against Norn better in that form, and their own precious Multiverse besides.
But he does not.
Instead, exhausted, they ask for his help. After consideration, he provides.
"Infighting will be the death of your kind."
He knows the irony that hangs over that statement. Scamps weld together shipments of Tezzeret's contraband to goliath husks in direct preparation for one final stand. Gitaxias's surveillance drones whisk around the upper layers in ever increasing numbers, despite the continuous - waning now - flak over the smoggy skies. Ever the opportunist. The porcelain legion, in their multitudes, were swarming over a thousand different planes, all the while creating unthinking facsimiles of their cause.
Vivien had explained it to him. It was funny, that feeling. Perhaps he would introduce it to the language after this was all over.
In some ways, they had already lost. The Phyrexian conflict had never really been a war, merely a delaying tactic. Gitaxias's surgical bays, in conjunction with Norn's hatcheries, created enough raw material to fight two fronts at once - one without, one within.
The second irony of all this was her new army had discarded the once-vaunted ideal forms of the Fair Basilica in exchange for more mass-producible humanoid templates. In doing so, she had eschewed perfection for the many. They were so much chaff, many not even undergoing full phyresis before being plucked and thrown onto the battlefield. Never to experience that rapturous certainty of purpose that marked the converts of the forge. And yet they were winning for it.
What numbers Sheoldred had gathered from her gibbering coliseum may have been individually better fighters than the thousand-faced singers that Norn unleashed upon the Dross Pits, but they were overtaken in a wave of white once the first lines had been broken.
And now she, too, was lost. He had little sympathy for her platitudes of some revival of the long-dead Father of Machines, but he had to admit that her silent smile was preferable to Gitaxias's seemingly-infinite tolerance for intrigue or Vorinclex's animalistic deference to the hierarchy of power. Let her intone uselessly for the supplication of her dead god, if it meant that she left well alone.
How long would the others bow, he wondered?
He dismissed the planeswalkers. They had a scheme, and if he could not bring himself to use them as Norn would, he might at least find some use from their failure.
--
Blightsteel separates from its constituent parts at eleven thousand scamps.
Worse than the agony of having to flay oneself alive was that he had to unmake the Great Work to do it. The Work of untold millions, whose only story was written in the architecture of the thing he was now scavenging for scrap metal.
He told himself that the Work would not continue unless the Forge survived to continue it.
The molds were ready. Scamps skittered to and fro, handing off dices in expectant, chittering lines of assembly. The engravers had managed to teach them a little of the language, in what spare moments they had. They wanted a savior, their own champion in shining armor. They believed that this would surely turn the tide, and snuck glances over their shoulder at the crucible that would do it.
Darksteel, the Mirrans' last prize, becomes liquid at thirteen thousand scamps.
Urabrask clambers into the mold, and the presses close around him. Veins of superheated darksteel close and open in scriptured sequence. Claws, muscle, bone reforge, and are reborn in a new alloy. Imprints of arteries and chambers for ichor, and -other- substances, find their purchase in a new circulatory system. Every scamp, every lost champion, every fallen soldier finds itself infinitesimally unified within his armor.
An injustice that he was able to be born thrice, when so many were denied even their second.
A scamp outside minding the temperature found itself suddenly looking at its own impaled carapace. A verdigris spike emerged, before it tossed the body aside, into the wall of the bellows. There was suddenly a furor - another seedpod slammed into the exhaust wall outside, as another group of brutalizers scaled the outer wall of the Autonomous Furnace. Centurions and scamps alike found themselves off their feet as quake after quake shuddered the mechanism. A few attempted to grasp weapons, forming a circle around the molten sarcophagus that housed their leader, but even as they did so, they could feel a pall in the atmosphere, draining life and warmth alike toward a singular, approaching center. An axe clattered to the ground seconds before its user, spent of vitality.
"Urabrask," Vorinclex hissed, "you always were one to run and hide. To defy her Will is heresy. "
One enormous sweep of a bony forearm sends the remaining scamps sprawling out, never to know the ecstasy of immolation again. The next nearly upends the enormous metal mold, spilling molten darksteel onto the floor of the dais.
"Come out. To know your last master."
One more blow, and the mold splits at the seam - spilling the contents into the lattice of wires and pipes supporting the belows. Urabrask looks up at his opponent, his skin still yet to cool. The half-born pain permeates every aspect of his being, but his voice does not waver.
"Urabrask serves no one."
​
Urabrask, Heretic Praetor by Simon Dominic
His exhaust flares, and with the nascent blood of the bellows beneath him, he lunges. Claw meets claw meets horn meets tail. The force of his body slams the larger praetor into the retaining wall behind, and together they tumble into a network of supporting channels. Ichor and slag spill in a caterwauling whine.
Glistening oil incandesces at 15 thousand scamps.
But if Vorinclex notices the temperature of the white-hot lines as they trickle into his eye holes, it doesn't show. If anything, he seems to revel in it, the runic inscriptions upon his forearms glowing as they reach out, going limb over limb as Vorinclex stalks over the remaining pipes like some kind of Capennan leonin. Only a gout of raw flame from Urabrask repels their advance, but Vorinclex responds by shielding his arms with his skull-like visage.
"No place for you in the chain. What shall I do with your prized forge after Norn grants me your layer? Perhaps I'll start by making mulch of your nauseatingly sentient -"
Urabrask's reply is the sideswipe of a darksteel tail, severing one of Vorinclex's cooling forearms. The green praetor starts what might be a howl but emerges as the clanking chime of laughter.
"I'll do you one better."
With a serrated jaw, he rips the other clean off. Ichor falls away and screams to nothing on the exposed channels they fall on.
"Attachment to constructed forms - when nature provides in abundance."
"Your lot will never know the glory of creation. Trapped in base instincts, slave to another-"
It is Vorinclex's turn to answer without words; the leap of his hind legs carry him into Urabrask's carapace as, from stunted arm holes, some parody of branches emerges, twisting and binding Urabrask's arms as they careen out of the furnace floor and into the magma layer below. Even darksteel can not hold back the apex predator's all-hungering maw as it snaps and tears away metal and flesh alike. Generations of alloy, of family, friend and foe, fly from the exoskeleton.
When Urabrask summons the strength to knock Vorinclex away, the limp that he carries is that of a wounded animal. Vorinclex knows it well. He knows that escape is now not an option, understands that the end is a matter of when rather than if. Vitality already flows in abundance from the prey, shoring up his own wounds even as it leaves theirs open.
​
Vorinclex by Daarken
His favorite part of the hunt.
So he does not even attempt to block the claw that comes swinging in wide, knowing its paltry strength ricocheting off his carapace will serve only to demoralize his opponent further, until the injector is already embedded in his side. A iridescent flush of vaporized -something- makes its way through his veins. It starts at a point, then balloons outward, like a -
Halo.
All in an instant, every part of Vorinclex rejects every other part, is aware of some deep, fundamental wrongness in his being, wants out from the body that holds it in. Redemption attempts to find something it can redeem, and in the absence of that, tears what remains asunder. Joints fracture, ichor hardens to glass, bones shred their metal casings.
"That was meant for Norn, not her lapdog. Even in your failure, you serve her." Urabrask's voice is thin as he stands, against what once was a monument to the sphere's blessings. Only fragments remain - stripped down to its base for parts. He looks upward. Small fires start at the base of the slagworks - the unnatural fires of raid and ruin.
And yet, even this is not enough to down the apex predator. Even inside his gutted frame, Vorinclex evolves, discards used organs for backups, routes the Halo through new inert capillaries. Gouts of Halo and oil spill from his maw as his arms again find their footing on solid ground, drawing strength from the soil deep within. It was good, he decided, that even this final trick would not save the Furnace.
"No," he spits, "Not my failure."
Urabrask is ready for the lunge this time, but even in Vorinclex's weakened state he only barely holds on.
What remains of the Forge to be saved?
Through the din of shearing metal, he hears it. The sordid caterwauling of the scamps in the words they've only just now learned, the cries of the fuselings wielding their tongs and pokers in one last defiance.
A soul - a spark - burns at 30 million scamps.
He screams, and his jets scream with him, pushing Vorinclex back, back until his hind claws can no longer find purchase on consecrated ground. Copper rotpriests, late to the altercation, come just in time to witness their leader slam through them, crushing carapaces and dogma alike, clear into the air in a white-hot arc.
Hotter.
Urabrask tastes the air in five open wounds, and in the agony there is singular truth. Vorinclex hangs on, as he always does, desirous only of victory, so certain of his own survival that any other possibility is inconceivable. Tendrils reach out from fledgling buds and become so much smoke against the friction of the superheated air.
They pierce through the Mirrex, the dessicated hexgold panels turning to dust as their bodies collide with the remains of old, rusted-over rebel bases. There is a wistfulness as they soar high over the remains. As flame becomes cinder, so too, do ways of life, do civilizations. What were they doing now, he thought - still trying to bring back a life long since lost?
He couldn't blame them. Perhaps he ought to have acknowledged their strength earlier.
Red Sun's Twilight by Julian Kok Joon Wen
They crash through the Monumental Facade, the heights of hubris. For a second, the edifices constructed in their image are larger than life - and then singularly small, and rapidly receding.
Mirrodin's cosm greets them in the keening twilight of five suns.
He cannot feel anything now save the all-encompassing heat. Good thing, too, as he looks down and sees Vorinclex discard his left arm, then his right, torn off at the joint by his jaw. He does not need it now. They are bonded by the molten darksteel flowing from his chest wound. He will see this through.
"You would throw yourself away, in service of some lofty nothings."
So even Vorinclex can realize a hint of the truth at the end. How terribly funny.
"Yes."
All becomes one in the light of Phyrexia's red sun.
Vorinclex, praetor of the Vicious Swarm, burns at fifty million scamps.

​
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Today I’ll be reviewing the 2022 cyberpunk book 36 Streets by T.R. Napper.
DISCLAIMER: In the interest of full disclosure, the author of this book and I are both part of the same writer's guild, and I attended his book launch for 36 Streets last year.
The author, T.R. Napper is an Australian man who's had an interesting career prior to becoming an author: he was a diplomat and aid worker who delivered humanitarian programs in Southeast Asia, East Asia and Mongolia. But specifically relevant to this book, which is set in Vietnam, he lived in Hanoi for three years. He's won several awards, has had his works published in science fiction and speculative fiction magazines and received a creative writing doctorate with the thesis: Noir, Cyberpunk and Asian Modernity, all themes explored in this book. If you'd like to know more, his website is http://nappertime.com/ .
36 Streets is the debut novel of T.R. Napper. The book is an adult cyberpunk novel set in a dystopian future where Vietnam, or the north of it at least, has fallen under Chinese military rule. The eponymous 36 Streets is another name for the Old Quarter of Hanoi, where the Chinese authorities generally stay out and allow a Vietnamese crime gang to maintain order. The story deals heavily with the concept of memory, and the reliability or otherwise of it, in a world with ubiquitous neutral interfaces and hyperrealistic virtual reality.
The protagonist is Lin Thi Vun, a young woman who was born in Vietnam but grew up in Australia. Even though she speaks the language of her country of birth, her English is more natural and she doesn't trust her own Vietnamese language expertise and hasn't mastered a local accent. She feels self-conscious and like an outsider: she never felt truly Australian, but she doesn't really feel Vietnamese either. She's caught between worlds. Lin has worked her way up through the ranks of the criminal organisation that runs the 36 Streets, and spends her downtime getting drunk, high and picking up bar girls. She struggles with the murky morality of some of the jobs she has to do, not so much the breaking of kneecaps types of things, but like the job we see her doing in the opening chapter, of catching a member of the resistance against the Chinese occupation and handing him over to the Chinese authorities for the bounty which doesn't sit right with her.
The main thrust of the story kicks off when Lin is tasked by her boss to act as a private investigator and meet with a wealthy foreign businessman, the Englishman Herbert Molayson, who doesn't trust the official story of what happened to his two friends and business partners: one whose death was explained away too conveniently by the authorities for him to trust, and one who's gone missing and who no one can find any trace of. Lin chasing down leads and pulling on this thread, like an old-school hard-drinking noir detective, is what gets her involved in a conspiracy involving the regime and mega-corporations, a conspiracy that even learning about can lead to deadly consequences.
This book was great. Especially once the main private eye mystery arc began, I was hooked. I really can't understate how much I enjoyed the private investigation aspects of this story. I really enjoyed the pompous but shrewd Englishman Herbert Molayson who commissioned Lin to find his friend. However, I enjoyed the much rougher Hermann Hebb even more by comparison. Lin herself is an enjoyable protagonist to spend time with, although I'd be terrified to meet her in person. She's a flawed character who pushes people away and engages in self-destructive behaviour (like smoking, getting routinely blackout drunk and her addiction to the drug ice-seven), but when threatened doesn't back down or go down without a hell of a fight, even if she's outgunned. One thing I particularly enjoyed was that the first act we see her take, stunning and capturing a resistance member for a bounty, she almost completely screws up. She catches him, alright, but her nerves are on-edge because of her ice-seven addiction and instead of taking him down cleanly she misfires her stun gun and has to engage in hand-to-hand combat to get the job done, getting seriously injured in the process.
Having been to Vietnam on holiday, I could almost feel and smell the air of the streets as depicted by Napper in the book. It's probably a setting that is underexplored in English-language literature, especially in the cyberpunk genre. Other things I appreciated was that Lin, quite realistically, doesn't even start the book carrying a firearm: she's dangerous enough with a knife and stun gun. The technology of the world feels very feasible, like it's just out of reach of today's technological capabilities. The depiction of cybernetics are awesome (with a lot of information given via on-retinal display, for example). Little touches in the details show that this is a future where climate change has bitten in, with frequent mentions of vat-grown beef (as opposed to from cows on farmland), faux-wood tables and flexiscreens.
While the story overwhelmingly takes place within Vietnam, occasionally there are peeks and hints of just how dystopian the outside world has become: a mention of the "former" United States of America, Australia's gone full xenophobia like it's full of One Nation voters, Britain's described as "a despotic island off the coast of Europe", Pakistan appears to be a theocracy now, and so on. I haven't mentioned the virtual reality game that the investigation centres around, a re-creation of the Vietnam War from the perspective of an American soldier, and where the player always loses by being brutally killed) because that's best left to be explored in the book itself.
Pulling back from the details to a more meta perspective, the chapters were refreshingly short, which gave the book a quick pace. I never realised how much I love short chapters until I read this book. There was a flashback that the author held back until its reveal was perfectly timed in the plot. The violence is gritty and visceral, and the author is not shy about killing off named characters in the most brutal ways possible. For example, there's an antagonist with a BROADSWORD who is so violent and effective that it's terrifying any time he makes an appearance. The ending of the book felt very satisfying, and Lin makes a decision I didn't expect her to at the end.
Would I recommend this book? Of course! In fact, on Reddit alone I've recommended the book around 20 times. Well, once I’ve posted this review everywhere, it’ll be closer to 30 or 40 times.
I recommend this book to anyone looking for any combination of the following elements:

• A cyberpunk book
• A sci-fi book
• A private eye / noir-like / mystery book
• A standalone book (not part of a series)
• Book with a culturally complex and bilingual protagonist (grew up with two different cultures)
• Book written by an Australian
• Book with a female protagonist
• Book with a gay protagonist
• Book set in Vietnam
• Book set in an urban environment
• Book set in a gritty future
• Book for an adult audience

In summary, this book was a brutally visceral read and is such a shining example of the cyberpunk genre. It makes me think I need to read more cyberpunk, a genre I'd never actively sought out before, and if only because of that, I strongly recommend it.
And one final thought to leave on: As I neared the end of the book, I became painfully aware that I was going to miss Lin checking the time or reading messages via her on-retinal display when I moved onto other books. Especially given I normally read fantasy books, I knew I was really going to miss those little touches. I think that when I’m pre-emptively realising I’m going to miss an aspect of a book once I’ve finished reading it … well, that tells me I enjoyed it quite a bit. Easily one of the best books I’ve read in years.
Oh, and it has a glowing endorsement from Richard Morgan (author of Altered Carbon) on the front cover, in case that’s something you might find interesting.