The Rolling steel, a pre-apocalyptic love story by Jay Lake and Shannon Page,

The Red for Clark's World magazine by Merleafferty and Sean Farrell.

Music by Chris Armstrong from the album AI Awakens used with permission.

Rough beast slouched towards the Bethlehem Steel Mill, tons of fresh hot metal in there.

Every cobber a new chum from Allegheny to the Delaware knew that.

Even Topper, the old cat-eyed bastard with steel cables for fingers, and a brain stewed and barium-laced ether,

knew which way the good stuff lay.

For all that, he couldn't tell up from down on days ending with a Y.

He's a bad man, our topper, used to run child soldiers over the St. Lawrence

to the frogies during the Quebec and Michigan War.

La Tuaszia-Maitinaire, the Kebiquas called it, in one of their endless prayers to St Jude.

For if ever a cause was lost, surely it is theirs.

Wolf had put pay to their ambitions in the Plains of Abraham two centuries earlier, but no

Frenchman ever born minded much dying for the romance of a shattered heart.

And there was no heart so shattered as that of a patriot whose country had been brought to the ground.

And so we have Topper, driven bird-mad at the trenches of the Psalm,

when it would have been kinder for him to have just died.

Came home he did, to the quack attentions of the new friends of sweet reason.

Got caught up in the technocracy movement as Exhibit A, and, fell apart as the country itself did in Roosevelt's dying days.

Now there's Verimach units on the loose from Nova Scotia to New Jersey.

The South has risen again, and again.

The Federals are barely hanging on in the Mississippi Basin, issuing wireless dispatches

...