Little wars breed little protests. Alexander Hammil is standing on the barricades, shouting down the motorcade, and it has been weeks since he has seen another protester, months since the last meeting. The war continues, he knows, by the smoke in the sky and boxes painted black shipped out of the city in driverless trucks, but the people passing in the street below are as silent and directionless as so many plastic bags.

“He seems like a nice enough guy,” he mutters to the latest stone he has prised out of the wall. “Like, you met him in a bar, you’d think, yeah, okay. Sure. Just a pleasant drunk propping up a barstool.” He hucks the chunk at the long armored limo with the little flags as it rolls solemnly past and ducks down; the service pops a few rounds his way, far too high to hit him even if he were standing. He hears them laughing, a mocking, friendly twist of breath receding into autumn. “It’s just his politics that are awful.”

“Go home, man!” The first human voice he’s heard in ages! Alex pops up over the edge, paws desperately through the crowds with his eyes, but all collars are up and all heads are down. He sucks deeply at the air, straining after one last taste of sound, and grinds white-knuckled into the barricade again.

Alexander Hammil is walking home, his spine bent like a hoop, when the station wagon pulls up next to him on the long curve away from the drive-in. The driver leans over and shoves the door open. “Get in,” he says.

“What?” says Alexander Hammil. “Who are you?”

“Just a guy.” He’s balding, with a red beard that fades to brown as it touches his chest. “You want a ride or not?”

“I, uh, sure.” What the hell. He wedges the backpack down in the footwell and begins the long process of straightening out. “Thanks, I guess?” The driver just grunts, doesn’t make eye contact. There’s another man, asleep in the back seat. Old and round and bald, like an egg with an unruly moustache. “Who’s that?”

“Just a guy.”

“Hey, so, I live just up–”

“I know where you live, don’t worry about it.”

He plays the old game, projecting himself out onto the shoulder, bounding from ditch to ditch, running as fast as the car. The long driveway down to the house is long, long: they drive down it for hours in silence.

Someone has lost a patch off their jacket. Alex stoops to pick it up. The Devil, if he notices, keeps talking.

“You take these things too personally. It’s not PERSONAL. I enjoy my work, as all good craftsmen should, but I wouldn’t take it seriously, if I were you.”

The patch is faded, victim of a thousand washings. Whatever message it held — whatever band or political cause it once advertised — it’s just a long weave of thread now. Perfect. Alex begins to unravel it, coiling it in his palms, still half-listening out of politeness.

“I will destroy your father. I’m not sorry for that — it’s what I am for — but I do feel for you. You won’t believe this, but I don’t bear you any ill will, in fact I even like you in my way, but even so…”

Alex slips the thread over the Devil’s head and pulls the loop taut. The Devil sticks his tongue out mockingly, then goes cross-eyed as the pressure grows. “Neglect,” says Alex. “Forgetfulness. Apathy. You won’t die, but you still have to follow the rules while you’re here, don’t you? This may buy me some time.”

The Devil’s eyes glint in approval, then go dark. Of course he understands.

The black dog kept pace with them, growling.

Manastabal, his guide, held up her hands. “We haven’t left the road. We haven’t harmed any of yours. We haven’t eaten anything. You have no quarrel with us.”

The dog bared its teeth, but came no closer. Alex raised his rifle, then hesitated. The black dog considered him, considered Manastabal, then disappeared black into the fog, the night, the choking ivy.

“Why didn’t you shoot?” asked his guide, not scolding, just curious.

“Wasn’t sure I’d kill it. I’m a lousy shot. And–” He trailed off, uncertain.

“Good enough.” She turned and led him deeper into the woods. He was fairly certain she was as lost as he was, but she set a brutal pace and he lacked the breath to ask. “Don’t try if you aren’t sure. And even then, better to err on the side of caution and hold fire.”

“Then why give me a gun? Why even carry one?”

She looked back at him, her face an unreadable abstract in the half-light. “Tradition. Nothing more.”

Alex has been traveling through China for the last several weeks with a melange of poets and game designers. He doesn’t speak any Chinese, so he hardly ever talks to anyone. Mostly he tries to look harmless and interested whenever he’s caught on the fringes of a conversation.

It’s an odd group. The poets are all futurists, way into automation and biological tech: breathing houses, photoreactive bicycles, 3d medicine. The game designers tack the other way, talk about the future in silent movie terms, social experiences built around Buster Keaton climbing a building, carriages toppling down Russian stairs, cities run with the unyielding, insistent patterns of clockwork. The Chinese school they’re staying with is in to all of it, but asserts (he thinks; the translations the autodidact in his ear provides are not always reliable) that none of it is real, and that the future is a constructed dilemma, and infinitely malleable.

It’s a bit over his head. He drifts quietly between groups, chewing on five spice powder and drawing delicate little schematics for farming robots, Roombas the size of combine harvesters. His real work won’t begin until they have begun building in earnest, until pen hits paper and the first rough code is written.

Then things get interesting.