"I feel like a guest star on the Muppet Show," Harrigan said.

Because it was me, Husband, five more Cazadores. We fanned out, surrounded him in Sean's circle. The Cazadores with me were bristling with Magical claws, blades, spines, each of them a different loadout of death that I'd only recently learned to see.

"You have Sean," I said. "The meat-Sean back at your place and now you have this one. What do you want?"

He was jolly old Harrigan once again. "Money. I got a lot more of it, thanks to you, and my backers are interested in your project."

"My project is to end your project, Doctor. Get out of there, out of him, or we'll tear you apart."

"And kill your good friend Sean the Ghost?"

In Huntspeak I said: "hurt him."

The Hunt closed in, leaped on the invisible gloating mass of Harrigan/Sean's soul. Tore with their Magical surgical tools, the ones that could slice a soul. The room filled with Huntspeak, with slashes, the occasional visible light of a Magical strike.

"Whoa whoa WHOA!" Harrigan shouted. He was in pain, trying to sound strong. "Armand. Armand is in the cage, you want him out? Only I have the key. You want him out you listen to me, you little shit."

Anger and fear in his voice. He'd thought this would be fun little game, like taunting someone over the internet.

But Armand…Cassie…I called the Hunters off.

"That's better," he said. He was ruffled but calming himself. "We're going to talk this over, Owen, and I don't want any of your nonsense. You have something I need, and I made some mistakes. I'm willing to admit that. I think you have too, and I think we can both work on this together."

I said nothing to him. In Huntspeak: "He's waiting for something. Otherwise he'd have done what he's going to do."

Husband responded in Huntspeak as well: "Will he try to bargain? If he does, will he be honorable?"

"No."

"Why talk to us?"

"He's a Human, he can't help it. But look for the gray tar, please."

They all fled the room. Harrigan noticed. "You…how many languages have you picked up, Owen? Did you just order them out of here? Ultrasonically? I can't tell."

"They gotta use the toilet."

"Fine, be that way. We can come to an arrangement, you and me, I'm serious. I'm going to tell you what I've been working on. I haven't told any of my campers, not during all my time here. I bet you've never actually considered how many times, how long I've been doing this–"

"Forty-five years."

He clammed up. Total silence.

I went on, rather enjoying the wreckage of his Big Reveal. "It's the year 2070. You've been igniting us and rebooting use for decades. To us it's always 2025, because that's when we were recorded."

"What makes you think that?" Uncertainty in his buzzing not-Sean voice.

"Remember your campfire video? Where you tricked your campers into eating people?"

"They're not people, WHY do you keep–"

"You left the taskbar up, Doctor, the thingie with the date in the corner. It was February 27th, 2070. In Windows Seven, pretty sure."

"Nice catch. But I'm old, yeah? Old people and technology? Maybe I just messed it up, you can't be sure."

"Other things you've mentioned: Earth is different now, you said. Courts will allow this now, you said. It all points to a decent chunk of time. But yeah, I'm wondering why you have this crappy computer, why you'd run around with a museum piece."

"Ha!" He said, triumphantly. "Great question GREAT question. A Q-chip won't connect, and it certainly won't survive the transfer from Earth. And I got a lot of these tablets once quantum computing went mainstream. Landfills have millions of old pc's in working condition."

He said more, things I didn't understand about latency and wifi across slices. While he was enjoying the sound of his own voice, I Huntspoke to Husband: "He's going to try to knock down the defenses, anything near the central engine? It's running right now."

"The first thing we looked at," Husband responded. "It's very loud, but no gray tar there. But we smell it the tar we smell it the tar. Keep him talking if you can, Owen. I love you."

"I love you too, Husband, thank you."

"Pay attention to me," Harrigan said. "I took away your phones and you damn kids still don't pay attention!"

"Sorry. Anyway, Doctor. You found a way out of Earth, but there are limitations, aren't there? No disposable workforce, like we discussed earlier. No organ farming either, for whatever reason."

He sighed an electric sigh, like Ghost Sean had been doing in there for a while. "It didn't pan out," he said.

"It's been long enough… I thought robots would be fashionable," I ventured. "For workers."

"I know, right? Everyone did, for a while. AI seemed like a viable thing and it was, but it turns out that building a chassis that could do what a human body could do was just really, really expensive. Dead end for a lot of things." He warmed up again. "I tried linking up with the Carnicanteum, and that actually gave me some progress."

"The Carnicanteum…oh, yeah, blood music. The lonely meat ocean."

"You've met it. It only wants its own Steward, and I thought that was me. I have to get my organic matter somewhere, right? But that's not it. The Canteum is interesting on its own, kind of a shape-changing interdimensional mass of living matter, and that's where I get my ah…"

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"Your people clay." Somehow. "And I assume you…I dunno, found a way over here. Science or whatever, then lo and behold…"

"Close enough. There's a lot to the process, but only I can make it work. The problem is that … well, there are always problems, am I right?"

"Doctor, the problem is that you can't do it. Not on Earth, and that's the only place you care about. No Magic there means no Magical slaves. And for some reason you can't send us back to Earth to be put to work."

"That term is … campers, I say campers. Marketing thing."

I rolled my eyes. "So what can you do? A world full of wonder, here at your fingertips! But all you want is money. Disposable labor is a fine business model, but these are the breaks."

He was quiet, reminiscing. Then: "Yeah." He didn't sound guilty in the least. He sounded wistful, sad that things hadn't gone to plan. The one that got away. Shucks.

I kept talking, trying to stall him while he was stalling me. "Chances are things haven't changed enough on Earth. So I'm betting your cash comes from a bunch of old white dudes, raised on the idea of Frontier Spirit and Manifest Destiny. Go out and explore. It's a basic Human drive, not just for rich shitheads."

"I pivoted!" He was cheerful again. "It's called Agile Business Strategy, or used to be. I'm a little stuck in the 2020's, sorry. I pivoted my business model: instead of free labor, freedom from everything! Escape!"

"But they can't come here," I said. "They can't go through the pipe."

"How do you know about the pipe?"

"Or they just won't go. They like it better back there, being bosses instead of prey, right? It's very dangerous here. No hot elf girlfriends, just a lot of insanity, ruins and violence. Creatures living here that are meaner and smarter than Human, better at everything and uninterested in putting someone like you in charge."

"They put you in charge–"

"An office building needs a janitor. So: how to get your money guys in here under the conditions they want? I assume we're talking quadrillionaires on Earth now? Dying of old age, desperate for youth, exploration, immortality?"

"The dollar is no longer–" he started to say.

"But wait! I, Jeffrey Harrigan, I can give you a soul! I can give you a form of immortality, of Magic, of coolness beyond belief. Eternal adventure on another world! A new body, maybe, or several lifetimes in a row! All those things those other guys are trying, the brain-uploading, the trip to Mars, maybe cryogenics, I dunno? Useless compared to this! However…"

I waited for him.

And he came through. "I couldn't do it," he said. Frustrated. Also, oddly, relieved. Someone he could finally talk to about it. "I couldn't give the backers a soul! I was so close, time and again, and no dice."

"Aw, man." Because we were just two guys hashing things out, right? Sure.

"And they wanted what I had, but they thought I was a screwup because the campers can't be put to work on Earth. The pipe was too small. I'm seriously amping the pipe, by the way, to get playmates for Nakahara. Anyway no money. I was a novelty act, a screwup. Me! A screwup!"

"Oh no."

"And let me tell you: the conditions of a Human getting a soul are just so nebulous," he said. "At first I tried religious instruction, if you can believe it. Bullshit, the whole thing. But it seemed the easiest path in the beginning."

"Sure, I can see that," I said sympathetically. "But you had a soul, I'm sure they noticed that."

He laughed. "You better believe it. For a while I was a big damn deal. I'd go to demos, and …" he stopped. He was telling me more than he'd wanted to.

"You could be killed and come back," I said, to get him rolling again.

"Yes! Over here, anyway. They loved it. They…they would … over and over, I'm telling you, talk about trying to impress venture capital! I was like Wile E. Coyote, dying over and over on teleconference. But it only worked for me. Not them, but if I could give it to them..."

"That sucks."

"Try to imagine convincing a bunch of rich assholes they don't have souls, yeah? A few of them were relieved, because nobody got sent to hell that way. Otherwise they just couldn't handle the idea."

"Because they wanted to come over here, live forever and be powerful."

"With built-in subjects to have power over, you seem to forget how important that is. But they couldn't go through the pipe!"

"The pipe screens out people with no soul? Is that why you can't send us back to punch the clock?"

"You'd think it would be some kind of mumbo-jumbo like that, but it was just too damn small. A rip in worlds, and it's so small, I had to print things, I had printers, and I trained the campers I had here to assemble the pieces of all my equipment…" he trailed off. "My project was a joke. My funding was a joke to the backers."

He lapsed into sad reverie.

"For forty-five years," I prompted.

He shouted, a bodiless thunderclap of frustration in the small room: "FORTY FIVE YEEEAAARS!"

"So you had to find a way to make humans generate a soul. Some way. And then overwrite them with the personality of the rich white dude in question. And then they'd get eternal existence, power, Magic, all in a new fun world, and they wouldn't be stuck on Earth anymore. Which must be a genuine shithole by now."

"It really is." He was calmer now. No longer in project-pitch mode. "It's… a way to save Humanity. You know what cassette tapes are?"

"I've seen pictures online."

"From when I was a kid, Owen, right? You could record on them, but if you poked out these little plastic tabs, you couldn't anymore. No recordings. So you buy albums on cassette tape with the tabs already punched out, and you never have to worry about erasing it on accident."

"Okay…"

"I not only wanted to give Humanity souls, but I wanted my son to have one. And I didn't want any rich bastard to overwrite it with his own."

"The way you're doing right now."

"Just temporary. I can feel him in here, he's not a … well, a happy camper."

"We're a farm," I said. "We're a farm for blank souls. Souls rich people can overwrite and have wacky fun frolics in their new world, leaving Earth to die."

Husband's voice, in Huntspeak: "Gray Tar. Found it. Hurry, it's very fast."

"I gotta go, Doctor."

"What? Don't you run off on me god dammit or Armand–"

"We're still having our conversation, just talk through the Radio."

"Radio?…Oh wow, this is…WOW!!"

The Radio: "EXTRAORDINARY DEVELOPMENTS unfold before our very eyes! The Undine, already engaged in FIERCE COMBAT, now CLASHES with the LEGENDARY Leviathan Armada! Ladies and gentlemen, the HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE cannot be overstated! The Leviathan Armada has NEVER failed to devour its target in TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS of meticulously documented history!"

"That's me doing that," Harrigan said cheerfully. "They like the pipe, these big things, and Nakahara always keeps them away. But the Leviathan Armada? I've done a little research. They're…huge multi-eyed, multi-brained–let me tell you, just ONE of them is real tricked-out honey of an evil god! And she's dealing with ALL of them!"

"I'm a little busy here, trying to stop you from killing us all, sorry."

"Take your time." He got into a discussion with the Radio, which began vigorously insulting him.

"Stop," said Husband. "It sees, don't let it see you. But it doesn't hear or smell."

I skidded to a halt. Husband was stealthed, watching the entrance to the Observatory main dome, the place where all the machines and wonders were built. The entire ceiling was rapidly being coated in the gray tar.

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