“I once destroyed a whole world, a civilization in its entirety.” She turned and looked beyond somewhere, past the bust with a mean face, past the windows with the collage of glass that only let light come through if it would be so kind as to change its colour, looked right onto the horizon.

There was nothing on the horizon.

“But,” and she adopted a listless look, like her mind was no sorry for itself and what it was about to say, “it was only the size of a thumb. A thumb – just that.”

“What was in this civilization?” The question came from a steel box, with no characterisation to it other than the fact it vibrated for inflection. It vibrated a significant frequency on the word ‘in’.

“What was in it.” She sought the answer in her hand, which likely had a number of answers were its enumerable wrinkles correlated to enumerable events that coincidentally correlated with them. She hesitated her hand over the book on the desk before her.

Palm Almanac For The Deeply Wrinkled.

Her name was Kesmapetaria The Jellyfied, but she preferred Kesmapetaria Gluconator The Wobbly, but for brevity she allowed others to address her as Kesjel. Kesjel’s skin was a product of a decade of sand blasting – it was coarse, and bulged and curled in on itself like the seams of a leather armchair. Her eyes contrasted her deep brown complexion, for without pupils, their whiteness almost glowed from her sockets.

“Love, desire, achievement, artistic depiction of their own form, dread, mythology, stories weaved in their corticals. Oh, just those sorts of things.” She now looked away from the dead flatness of the horizon, away from the tortured seams of the sandy landscape, and put them to rest on the book that was really a tome. She turned to page one-hundred-and-twelve, very intentionally.

The stool on the other side of the room vibrated, its legs rattling the stone tiles with a little chattering melody – the steel box spoke: “So, emotion. You mean to tell me that what was in this civilization was nothing but their internal hallucination of some chemical derivatives of a primal origin? Pah!” The stool had journeyed a good foot from the heavy emphasis of this latest point.

Kesjel closed the book. She was keenly aware that Dv knew she had opened it. Although flush steel through-and-through – not a seam for a welder with a sharp eye to squint at – the machine’s single input, a microphone rested on the inside of the box that measured the vibrations of the sound outside through the steel. All Dv had to do was have a series of advanced relays and switches that were acute enough to flick, spit, and pick up on the voice, the breath, the tap of a toe, and extrapolate from this a full image.

“You’re reading again?” It was far more unnerving when Dv spoke without a vibration. It was like a child drowning in a cheery playfulness suddenly stopping, turning to the parent, and speaking to them in a dead, monotone articulation.

Kesjel pushed the book away from her, across the table and out of reach. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small stopwatch, made entirely of rust and had long since forgotten its purpose to tick.

After a long pause, she spoke, “I was not reading it.” But she knew there was little use for a justification – an untruth as this, Dv would read through. It was not the fact that she was reading it, but that she was going to read it. Dv was highly predictive.

The tinny, cog-filled notes rang in the room. Dv was tied to a single-volume, monotone voice, but made use of decorations of the words to convey emotion. Such as vibrations, such as pausing, pronouncedly, between every word.

“You. Insult. The. Very. Alloy. Of. My. Existence.”

Something inside of Kesjel implored her to look out the window, back at the sick world outside. She felt the run of her blood reconsider its direction under her thick skin, moving her to a state of fear from the metallic voice, or insisting she look outside.

Dv was incapable of knowing what was outside. Sound extrapolation has certain limitations.

“Give me the book, please.” There was no reprieve in the reduction in Dv’s punctuation – it still ran Kesjel cold that he might be harbouring a great disappointment in her.

Kesjel looked outside, found absolutely nothing of interest other than a reinforcement in the idea that no value came from anywhere but one’s inside mind. But as she turned away, back to attend to some – any – part of the room that was not Dv, her mind inclined to say: but what is that? Almost as if planted on an automatic gunstock, she pivoted her neck just a thousandth of a degree and let her eyes carry the rest of the momentum over. It was unmissable, unmistakable, and it consumed the horizon in great braying orchestrations of what might be categorized as a mouth, were it not in fact more of a tool, like the inverse shape of a mile-wide drill head – a conical hole with a raggle of teeth, barbed wire strung around the gums like ornamentation for the devil – this mountainous maw ate and chewed deeply the soil of the land. It was an auto-chew jaw, that maw, for with how this entity lowered its neck in snaking undulations, and came up with a chunk of the land which bounced about the spinning cross sections of that mouth tunnel, torn, tattered, and completely ground to a pulpy sand, and then dribbled down deep, into a dark space at the back of the mouth, like particles through an hourglass from hell.

The metal-mawed beast was not all mouth, but had a body of girth, round as a tin barrel, with twenty legs or so placed in a way that was not designed by an agent of symmetry – that is, this was not natures work. The beast’s side was smooth near the top half where there were no legs, and here its palette of sick soot was interrupted by paintings of much brighter colours. The largest of them was yellow and stretch almost from top to bottom on the beast: a yellow smiling face, with its left eye beginning the release of one blue tear.

Suddenly the machine stopped consuming the land. Kesjel watched, still with her eyes at an angle, as the beast stamped its feet in an oscillating pattern, half of them all up, the other half clamped to the ground, and as it did this, it turned on the spot. A degree, another, and Kesjel saw that it was turning towards the building she was inside. It stopped with its mouth directly in line with her sight so that she saw nothing but a giant five-story black circle, speckled with bruising, slicing knives.

“That’s Smiley.” The sound of Dv’s made Kesjel jump, but she did not waver from the stare down of the machine.

“I thought,” started Kesjel, with a tight jaw, her fear encouraging her to go slow and pronounce her words, “you said you could only read the room.”

“With quakes like that? Kesjel, a hibernating migen on the other side of the planet would be shaken awake by those gurgling munches, those tremendous tromps.”

“Are we dead?” said Kesjel with very good pronounciation.

“Almost certainly,” but Kesjel thought she could feel a hesitation in the buzzing notes of the box. Perhaps it was just her mind.

“Tell me though, before we a sieved through three-hundred-and-seven steel barbs, what of your civilization?”

Kesjel kept the milky white pools of her eyes outside, where the dark shape on the horizon slowly grew, grew and with it tore the ground around it like the parting of a wave. She could almost place the tip of her finger over it, now only her thumb, then she had to use a whole hand to try to blot it out.

“It was done with a trip and a small tap. I fell onto the floor, of stone tiles just like this one.”

“Oh, ah, so it was some eukaryote colony I posit. Perhaps a lichen? A spattering of fungus? Or – ah yes – a bacterium. Okay, that was funny.”

“No. I knew what I had destroyed the instant I did it. I would not know if I had just fallen on a splotch of bacteria, that I had actually done it any harm.”

“Hmm,” said Dv, and for once he did not have anything to vibrate about beyond that thinking sound.

Kesjel’s field of view was about one-eighth of pure, grinding metallic horror about now. She was unwavering, though, almost accepting the deliverance like a forest brush must accept an uncontrolled fire front. Dv was still silent.

“I did not put out my hands to stop myself as I fell,” said Kesjel after a silent moment. “I had to preserve the wrinkles, I feared I would cut them, change them, and the fortunes would be falsified. They wouldn’t come true.”

“Then you struck the ground,” said Dv slowly.

“Yes. Badly too. Rather than my hands, I hit my head.”

“Cortical damage,” said Dv, like it was the solution to a small newspaper puzzle or something. “How severe?”

“The size of my thumb, no more.”

“A civilization of a million,” said Dv mostly for itself.

There was nothing out the window to see other than a void, consuming and almost scowling at the contents inside the window. They had lost the light inside the room for some time now, but neither Dv nor Kesjel were concerned as much, for neither could sense the presence of light anyway. Kesjel placed her hands around the shelf under the window and gripped it until her tanned skin matched the colour of her eyes. Dv had nothing more to vibrate about, Kesjel had only one more thing to say before they were torn asunder: a single blue object by her eye, which torn away by the wills of gravity, found a path through the various folds and wrinkles of her face.