Anna

A new voice, ghostly distant, but clear enough to be understood, speaks.

[Medical override. Just open the door.]

There is a sound of energy fizzling and the scent of burning, but nothing like the mechanical creak of hinges or the sliding sound of runners – nevertheless there is now someone else in the room with Taxchan.

[You're in a holding cell] she says, somehow still-distant.
[My name is Anna.
Does that help you?]

"At least you are giving me answers. What is this place? What species are you people?" he asks as he turns on the table.

[I'm supposed to run a few tests, but I can talk a bit first if that will
make you more cooperative.
This is the district government building. We're human.
Are you not?]

"I am not." Taxchan opens his eyes and turns around on the table.

Anna is a slight girl, dressed in a yellow gown and wearing a yellow cap, from which smart brown curls protrude. She is a doctor or a nurse. She unreels wires from a bag on the floor, twisting into a standing position as she does so and revealing to Taxchan the left half of her face, which is a fleshless, metal-lined hollow. A wisp of dark brown hair falls over a mechanical lens installed where her left eye-socket would have been. This piece is bulky compared with the fine, natural features of her face’s right, but at least it suggests and functions as an eye – whereas the machinery in her ‘cheek’ does not even approximate the landscape of a human face. There is no arch in the cheek, no strength in the jaw. A little wheel spins somewhere inside the nest of pistons and screws. Her mouth is entirely original material – or so it seems, for Taxchan cannot yet imagine what kind of prosthetic technologies might exist – but her voice has the tinny quality of a microphone. Anna jacks the wires into the apparatuses in her cheeks.

"You may inspect me. I will get on the table." Taxchan looks upward, as though there is a sky here, and as though the voices had come from it. "But, communicate this to your superiors: I can wait here indefinitely. I can outlast this civilization in this cell if I need to, so tell them I will not participate in a trial that I do not understand." He and takes a seat on the table. He does not put his limbs in restraints.

[I'm sorry to hear that, what are you guilty of?]

"I am accused of a number of charges, which I do not understand."

[I'll leave the restraints off, but please don't hurt me.]
Anna approaches Taxchan. She holds his wrist.
[Our judges are the best.
Just
tell them the truth.]
She pulls a round metal sensor from her face and applies it to Taxchan’s throat, where it hums softly. She offers a religious discourse about the reality of persons. One word: [persons of
substance.]

"I could be guilty. I do not understand the charges. I do not understand the juridical process. What is a person of substance?"

[Oh, it’s easy. Blah blah blah.]

On it went. She claims that she cannot provide food for him. She then extracts a candy bar in a metallic wrapper from her wire bag. The wrapper says SAPPY ZAM. She opens it – it is covered in chocolate and decorated with either bits of cookie or shrunken raisins – takes a small bite, and sets it on the table, conveniently, next to Taxchan.

He wonders just how handsome he is to her. "These categories are mostly meaningless to me."

Anna twists her lips well into the fleshy side of her face and strokes her ear as she thinks about how she should explain her principles to her prisoner. As she continues with her examination, she tries to explain her beliefs to Taxchan once again. He hears nothing substantial. As complex as they are, her religious beliefs do not provide him answers to his questions – they merely outline another vision of a cosmos, in which he does not actually fit. Again and again, she declares in so many words, in so many ways, that

she is nothing and The Last Dinosaur

[iguanodons], whom she does not even believe to be a
[giving birth to human]
dinosaur, is [crazy] something.
She thinks that Taxchan is real;

she sits beside him; she says she feels how real he is and begins to talk about how

she lost her original face to violence
[smashed] against prettiness, against women. The narrative
[my life] in which she lives
is one of composed [doesn’t add] subservience
and [value]
victimhood: She dwells in a handed-down word, a jurisprudence
of mattering and not mattering, [in flux] of signatures,
and of marks that are misread.

The Pope turns out to be a woman.

She ‘forgets’ her juice box right beside her SAPPY ZAM bar. She teleports out of the sphere. The table sinks into the floor beneath Taxchan. Shortly, a window-like projection appears on the cell’s wall.

In it, he can see the vague form of the Lady Zesiro. "Does this man have a name, Anna?" the queen asks.

[He hasn't said.]

"Do you not recognize me, Zesiro?"

"Who are you?"

"Am I not your child a thousand times over? Do I no longer participate in the legacy of the scorpions and scaled things? I am the last dinosaur, the stone of forms."

Anna puts her hands on the panel.

"But I am not giving my name on this world. You do not know me because this species has locked me within this machine. They have forced me into this shape, which I do not know, and stripped away my shapes."

[Take me to your worlds, please.]

Zesiro, the Scorpion Lady, rephrases Anna’s request for her. "You are one of my many children, Anna. You may serve me if you wish."