Lyle convinces himself he can smell the man unwittingly awaiting his extrajudicial verdict. Now, it is all he can smell. Rotten meat, skunky body odour, and a faint touch of mint. Why bother with the mint? Funereal incense? No excuse. I'd help him with his problem if I wasn't already running late.

There's no excuse, Lyle decides; no excuse whatsoever for letting oneself go like that. The man in question—sitting on the other side of the aisle in a seat that would scream if it could—looks more like a deli counter than a human being. On his head sits a ball cap, which does a poor job of damming back the putrefied sweat shining his temples. He is a poor advertisement for the defunct team whose avian symbol it evokes. Knotted together over his heaving belly are nine blotchy sausage fingers, the absent tenth a likely victim of diabetes. Someone who can't avoid mutilation on account of an illness now as preventable as polio doesn't care about himself, and someone who doesn't care about himself is a danger to everyone around them.

Cypulchre is the name of author Joseph MacKinnon 's twisted sci-fi noir from 2014 and his similarly cyberpunky Tumblr . The novel takes readers on a mad scientist's journey through a hellish future in and around Los Angeles, now dominated by Outland, a massive computing company peddling hyper-addictive VR. Archetypal , MacKinnon's sequel, is due out June 1st and can be pre-ordered here . Based on the first except he shared exclusively with Motherboard, it will be a trip. — the editor.

Disgusted to the point of anger, Lyle gets up, gathers his belongings from the overhead bins, and shuffles down the aisle of the train wallpapered with colonial propaganda. He looks down in anger as he passes the inexcusable mass, telepathically summoning a change. No result, of course.

The door to the next car is blasted by outside light, mediated by the blue-tinted emergency-hatch window. At this speed, Seattle is nothing more than a rainbow blur framed by red letters: "DO NOT PULL IF POD IS IN MOTION." Lyle grins, pleased to have escaped the Emerald City's jurisdiction un-cuffed and unblemished. Would be even easier without these goddamn headaches. Enticing though it may be, Lyle elects not to spice things up by releasing the hatch while averaging 850 miles an hour. The inexcusable mass would no doubt shed some weight. The act, although in clear violation of the red letters, would produce a net gain for humanity. But then Lyle Badegger would also be dead, spread like bacon grease over the South Cascades. Marius Tyndale or some other wet-nosed junior partner would take his law practice and his clients, and Dorota, his confidant and muse, would realize her true potential and escape. He would have surrendered to impulse at his penultimate peak, when godliness was just within reach.

Someone who doesn't care about himself is a danger to everyone around them.

Lyle motions to the door to the next car. It is locked, access contingent on digitally-accredited sociability. He runs his wrist over the scanner, and in so doing makes a farce out of their precious system with a fake ID.