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BABEL Thorgarten was twirling, whirling, swirling against the dying of the light. She was marching to some looped wolf snarls and Wagnerian harmonics and kicking over everything in her path. When she had run out of upright furniture she threw back her head and let out one reverberating scream. On the other side of the room, a glass Erika had been swigging champagne out of just shattered into a hundred pieces.

<<It's so distorted>> Bäbel said, chest heaving, eyes almost popping from her head. <<I wish I could smash this whole fucking estate!>>

She was interrupted by a knock on the floor which was too urgent for applause: Herr Sautter the downstairs war veteran. Bäbel stomped a makeshift goosestep up and down the floorboards, screeching as she walked <<You think you're cool because you were in Amsterdam in '62. The least you can do is appreciate my cybernetic sound sculptures!>>

<<Encase him in a lattice of etheral control>> Dieter said.

<<Subvert him with a blast of subsonic glum>> Erika said.

<<Fuck him>> Bäbel said. <<Let's smash things instead.>>

It was a typical Berlin night, and the sky was full of cranes. The Fernsehen tower twitched an urgent dialogue across the residential dark. Abandoning the Hitler Youth, Bäbel escorted her friends to a bedroom half-filled with outdated computer monitors, large-screen Korean TVs, the odd video.

<<My god>> Erika said.

<<How?>>

<<The telco>> Bäbel said. <<They were on the way to scrap when I salvaged them. Come on, let's destroy.>>

<<Thor power!>> Sim said, invoking their group totem. And he picked up a monitor and was ready to hurl it out the window (<<It's the demolition of the commercial myth!>> Erika would have said) when Bäbel grabbed his arm.

<<Wait, I want to do it proper>> she said. <<We've got to do a ceremony.>>

<<We should name it>> Erika said. <<How about calling it The Night of the Splintered Sets?>>

Bäbel cleared a space on the floor. She had recently begun delving into Teutonic mysticism and was finding countless everyday uses for the Occult. She lit several candles and the three of them sat down in a circle, held hands, and Bäbel began to intone:

Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he communicated would fade; that this thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life.

She screamed, picked up the largest monitor and with a strength which startled her friends hurled it out of the window. 12 floors of silence, then the smash, the splinter of wood, Bäbel laughing like a madman: <<There's a beast in the machine! there's a beast in the machine! and his name is 666!>>