Android Karenina

Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, A

They were seated across from a kindly elderly lady, but, intending to enjoy a novel, rather than to engage her fellow passengers in conversation, A

At last, A

The heroine of the story was already almost reaching her English happiness, a handsome husband and a lakeside estate, and A

There was nothing! She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were good, pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and the crackle of his hot-whip and his face of slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some i

“Well, what is it?” she demanded of Android Karenina, though she knew the Class III could hardly respond while in Surcease. “What does it mean? Am I afraid to look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Can it be that between me and this officer boy there exists, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?”

But, as is the way with many people who have difficult questions, but not the will to hear them answered, she asked her questions of a Surceased robot, who of course offered no response.

A

Unthinkingly, she lifted Android Karenina’s smooth hand and laid its cool surface onto her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the feeling of delight that all at once without cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness.

In this strange and disjointed sense of hyperawareness, it took her eyes a long moment to fully register what she then saw across from her: a koschei, bronzish, pencil-thin and centipedal, crawling on dozens of tiny, hideous feet across the wrinkled neck of the dozing elderly lady seated across from her.

The skittering steps of the miniature bug-robot were hardly heavy enough to wake the sleeping woman, and A

She was about to grasp the glowing, creeping thing, not yet considering what she would do with it once it was in her grasp, when three things happened in rapid succession.

A flat, jellyfish-like blob of undulating silver flew over A

The sensation of the koschei twitching rapidly forward inside her dress was viscerally horrifying, the countless tiny feet dancing about on her flesh-but worse by far was her knowledge of what was surely the koschei’s intention, programmed like an animal instinct: to find her breastbone, to pierce her flesh, to plunge its heat-sucking electrode ante

There was nothing to be done for the elderly woman, even if she could: the jellyfish koschei was still clenched over the old woman’s face and was oozing out in all directions, covering the woman’s body like a wriggling sheath, sucking the heat from her body.

While A

Android Karenina then scooped up her mistress around the waist and hustled them both to the end of the carriage, where they escaped down the ru