Prophet Margin by Simon Spurrier Page A

silent. Very slowly, Johnny drew his gun.
    "Number four cartridge," he said, making a show of thumbing the selector. "No more cute little holes. This one'll blow you to sneck."
    The droid glared back.
    "What you hiding in there, citizen?"
    No response. Johnny shrugged and primed the gun, thumbing back the hammer.
    "Oh well. So long." His finger curled around the trigger stub.
    "No! Wait!"
    The machine's chest popped open like a car bonnet. Lining the door, a sheath of false battery fluid dribbled from the hole. Its deception thus exposed, the droid dropped the pretence of damage and straightened. It had the decency to look embarrassed.
    The chest cavity contained several packages of shimmering black powder, a pile of caplets, a neural anti-stimulator and an optical Trancelight. Downers, downers and more downers.
    "Would it be beyond the realms of possibility," Johnny said, sighing, "that our friend Professor Koszov was a little tense?"
    "H-he never told me what it was all about."
    "And now he's vanished. That's quite a stash to just leave behind."
    "I-it's yours! Just don't sh-"
    "And now you're giving it away." Johnny stroked his chin. "He's not coming back, then."
    "He just told me he was leaving."
    "Leaving as in: 'expecting to be dead'?"
    "No! He said h-he'd done some business, and, and... and he'd come into some money, and he was going to get away from it all to avoid the, ah, heat."
    "Heat?"
    The droid shrugged. "He managed to lose a multi-million credit specimen during a televised performance. That sort of thing doesn't do your popularity any favours."
    "Where did he go?"
    "I really don't kn-"
    "Where?"
    The droid stared down fifteen inches of high calibre barrel and sagged. It pushed a hand into its chest cavity, shunted aside the relaxants and produced a dogeared holiday brochure.
    "Kostadell Zol," it sighed.
    Johnny groaned under his breath.

EIGHT
     
    In the beginning, the One True God Boddah created almost everything. Including himself.
    He created the universe, the emptiness of the void, the stars, planets and moons and all the geographical gubbins they entailed. He went in for asteroids and meteors. He created, in a casual sort of way, life. He covered planets with creatures, jungles, cities and railways. He put aeroplanes in the sky.
    He created spaceships, and noodles, and glass. He created computers. He designed turtles and methripps and badgers.
    He filled landfills with litter. He left nasty little hairs in plugholes. He created egg timers. And cutlery.
    He created, in fact, pretty much everything there is.
    The one thing he didn't create was time .
    The One True God Boddah was an enormously meticulous being. His decision to create a functional universe was built on an appreciation of aesthetics: he wanted to demonstrate how it would all look, how it would appear in a single frozen instant. Exactly who he was attempting to demonstrate this to is beside the point.
    Boddah's creation was static. An installation piece of universal proportions. Laws of physics were theorised then frozen, brains were created with neurone packages of memories but never started.
    It was a masterpiece of breathtaking complexity, and when the Great God Boddah had finished - at the same instant he had started, naturally - he saw that it was good.
    Almost. Something was wrong.
    At the instant that Boddah created himself, he made what might be described charitably as a cockup . He created an assistant to help him with the more tedious parts of universal genesis. He named his assistant Ogmishlen and, initially, he performed more than capably in the rather dull task he'd been appointed.
    But Ogmishlen quickly grew impatient.
    He could see the Boddah's wondrous works and wanted to make his own mark. Halfway through designing the capillaries of an Acrotholiian Nbongbong tree, he hit upon the idea that was to change existence forever.
    Time. The answer was time.
    Slowly at first, but with growing confidence, he bent his intellect towards