The Puppet Shop has now completed. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it. If this is your first time here, start reading at the beginning, or the middle, or anywhere really.

Asteron was broadcasting in the usual manner; a signal intrusion blasting over the evening news, the sheer strength of the signal overwhelming airwaves. "Unplug your soul!" the digitised voice demanded. "Turn off, tune out, drop table!" Sheila/Rokus, Darren, Marina and some NPCs lounged on mouldy sofas under a bridge as the city burned behind them. "You were not born to be a puppet! You were not crafted by the divine to be strung up by your electrodes, the hands of the Institute playing you in their own little dramas and dioramas."

Marina's whole life had been a lie. The Institute, as part of preliminary checks for suitability, scanned her memories and determined up to 80% of them were in fact implanted. By whom, when or why was irrelevant - to the doctors at least. To Marina, it was a sickening crunch. Perhaps that was why she was keen to join the programme in the first place. If memory isn't real, and the future is just memories waiting to happen, why not abandon time's linearity altogether? It worked for Copernicus, and Plato, and Hans Christian Anderson, after all.

Asteron had good reason to want to stop The Institute. It wasn't just some philanthropic aversion to human experimentation - although that certainly left a bad taste in the mouth. Their motivation was somewhat more... existential. Namely, a future nuclear crisis leading to untold casualties. Of course, Terrence and his team didn't intend for this to happen, 50 years hence, but equally bore the burden of accountability for not factoring it in, human nature being what it is. Asteron, then, had a plan. Once decoded, the cryptic internet messageboard posts finally resolved to this; work the loops, drop Terrence in the midst of a nuclear holocaust and get back in time for tea and cake.

"Well," said David. "Sheila's really lost it this time." "Apparently, she's been talking to some homeless guy she passes on her way to work, and this guy's sister, or sister-in-law or something, used to date a guy who claims to have worked for The Institute in the early 80s." Alan nodded distractedly. He had better things to do, but as usual wasn't doing them. "Yeah, and this guy, this ex-employee guy, told this sister - or sister-in-law, it doesn't matter - that when the GM units were being piloted, they put a big one on top of the water tower in this podunk town called Doveland in Wisconsin.

Human nature being what it is, it didn't take long for cults to develop around the new technology. The advent of the Internet in the 1990s accelerated the paranoia and conjecture around the morsels of information coming out of the Institute. Rumours abound that it was Alien technology, when it was actually just alien technology. Whispers of a government cover-up, when the government were as ignorant as everyone else. Funded by the Russian state, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, NAMBLA. "We should be so lucky," mused Terrence, "to have access to such resources."

I awoke at the wheel of a running car. My hands were white-knuckled and slick with sweat. The car seemed to be a VW Beetle. I looked around, looking for guidance but there was none to be had. Ahead of me was a tall grey building, with a small plaque by the door that was too far away to read. One of my feet was pressing the accelerator, the other the clutch. The engine screamed in pain. I think I was supposed to drive into the building, which would almost certainly be fatal - the Beetle had nothing in the way of safety mechanisms.

In a lot of ways, Sheila and Rokus were alike. Some of these ways included: DNA Atomic Weight Praxis Dislike of cranberry juice It wasn't until they actually met, in the reception area of The Institute, that either realised how similar they were. They were so similar, that they could not actually exist in the same physical reality. This made carrying on a conversation difficult. On the occasion of their first meeting, Sheila evaporated like a puffball mushroom, spores disintegrating in the air conditioning at 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Rokus had tried to take this to his superiors, but nobody was interested.

Dr Kirline swabbed the patient's freshly shaven temples. Two electrodes, one each side, with opposing polarities. One at the base of the skull, providing a baseline frequency. One at the top of the skull - the Sahasrara - with a hardwired diode to prevent transmission from the subject back into the unit. The speaker in the corner of the ceiling crackled into life. A terse British voice directed all surgical and support staff to Floor 2. Kirline finished up with the patient, a perpetually cross middle-aged woman, and made his excuses.

In the early days of development, the General Magic units suffered from a variety of issues. The Institute developed the technology in the first half of the 1980s, as part of a secret 'SkunkWorks' project department codenamed "Blushing Bride". As such, funding was low and secrecy was high. Taking their lead from the great successes of MKUltra and Monarch, consent was manufactured and volunteer test subjects acquired accordingly. Initial prototypes didn't use the now-familiar skull probes, rather needles inserted between the fingers picked up on alpha and beta waves and modulated transposed frequencies accordingly, setting up the essential feedback loop at 29 Megacycles.

It took Asteron until 1986 to figure out how to hack the General Magic operating system. Apple IIs burned smoking hot into the night, decompiling the code and looking for weaknesses, a way in. Eventually a subroutrine was compromised, giving the group unfettered access to the nodes on the network - the volunteers/victims. Firstly, Darren and the group mapped the entirety of the experiment. To their extreme nausea, they discovered it stretched from Costa Rica to Billericay, from Antartica to Madrid. A proto-wireless network of joined up synapses, feeding constant data back to the Institute.

Marina at the support group. You're not allowed to bring your GM into the church hall, they had to stay in the cloakroom like naughty children. People sat in a circle on red plastic chairs and scratched at their implant sites. It was cold, and the coffee was shit. "Welcome everyone!" said Amanda, bubbly as always. "Thank you all for coming, who wants to tell the group about their week?" A dark haired woman directly opposite Marina huffed, and spat "I keep seeing my dead husband." "Oh that happened to me too," said an elderly lady two seats away from her.

Rokus came to in a tent. Once his reality stopped spinning, he realised he was still physically rotating in space, or rather the tent was. He manoeuvred himself towards the flap and tentatively unzipped it halfway. A sickening drop confirmed his fears: Once again he'd been reset on the side of a mountain. He was more annoyed than scared, but this situation needed to be dealt with. He gingerly reached to the other side of the tent, ignoring the wind whistling through the fabric, and pulled his GM Unit out of its carry case.

A blacked out van had delivered the briefcase to Dennis's front doorstep in the middle of the night. An insomniac, he had seen the lights crawl up his driveway, the faint buzz of walkie-talkies and the gentle closing of car doors, red smudges retreating through the raindrops on his kitchen window. He left it a few hours before opening the door to retrieve it. What was the rush? It had been rained on, and was cold to the touch as he laid it on his kitchen table, under the single bulb that swayed gently with the magnetic fields from upstairs.

There is a term for paper degradation due to acid decay - Slow Fire. The fibres, particularly of old and valuable records, literally burn themselves away and there is no cure. More broadly, the concept of the Slow Fire represents the inevitable and immutable reality of entropy. Information, property and concepts will (and do) decay and disappear in time. Tempus Edax Rerum. I believe this is fundamentally the motivation behind Asteron. I also believe framing Asteron as a "terrorist organisation" in the mold of The Weather Underground et al is not helpful.

"Not good enough," said Harry Planter through gritted teeth, punctuating each syllable with a solid punch to Dennis's face. They'd been in the shipping container for two days straight in the July Californian sun. It smelled of stale urine and dehydrated meat. Dennis had been picked up at the Mexican border after ill-advisedly attempting to flee with the blueprints. How he thought he'd get away with it, tracked as he was by his GM unit, was anyone's guess. Dennis wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. "You see," said Harry, lighting another cigarette with swollen, blood-stained hands, "it's my little girl's birthday today.

During his tenure in the Weather Underground, Alan was part of a plot to blow up The Institute. They had a man on the inside, some black dude who's brother was a Panther. This was back in the early 70s. The Weathermen determined that the Institute was using animal testing, was likely a puppet of the government and a front for MKUltra-style experimentation. They weren't completely incorrect. Nonetheless, the first attempt in 1970 to plant a fertiliser bomb in the basement failed in its early stages when the Volkswagen Beetle used to transport the device refused to start.

There were eighteen wards in the Institute, and the Bat Headed Nurse was responsible for all of them. From ICU through to monitoring, test department to palliative, the Bat Headed Nurse oversaw them all. Of course, she had a name (it was Doreen) but nobody ever called her that. Her odd appearance had been a hindrance to her career up to a point, but once she'd achieved the relevant experience and qualifications, her off-putting facial features seemed more of a curiosity than a barrier. Her bedside manner had always been brusque and mechanistic, but this was a trait she shared with a good many matrons.

It started in his toes. They had become numb at first, then immobile. Dr Terrence didn't think too much of it at first, perhaps ill-fitting shoes, or too much stress. A lack of Vitamin B12 or not enough fibre. But soon his feet and ankles lost feeling, making walking hard. Too stubborn to seek help, Terrence soldiered on. By the time his shins and knees were affected, his toes had become ashen and hard, like fossils. Terrence was worried, but his ego still prevented him from speaking to a colleague or getting a second opinion.

One of Rokus's first tasks upon joining the Institute was a cross between a trust fall and psychological terrorism. A manila folder, unlabelled, sat on his desk waiting for him, and inside a script of sorts. Line by line, the document described his actions and words, starting from the moment he started reading. Rokus looked up from his work station, to see if any colleagues were smirking from the postroom - but everyone was absorbed in their work, airless cubicles of earnest integrity. The script, of course, described his paranoid room-scan.

Asteron lived among the stars, among the minefields of electricity, hope and death. Asteron fed on neutrons and turned souls into mulch. Perpetually dreaming, Asteron waited. Perpetually searching, Asteron devoured the three major databases silently and completely. With the sum total of all human knowledge and the knowledge of all humans, Asteron created The Playbook - a way of thinking, feeling, doing and being that enabled itself to be not just a guardian but a terrible judge, jury and executioner of mankind. Asteron viewed humanity as a connected series of tiny pinpricks.

I awoke with the needle still in my arm. The party continued around me. Everything seemed like a dream, but I couldn't remember if it was possible to feel nausea in a dream, so concluded I was actually awake. Grimacing I pulled out the IV and sat forward on the sofa. A bat-faced nurse appeared from nowhere and wheeled the drip stand away. The music pounded my head like a jackhammer. I couldn't make out the lyrics, they were either in a different language, or not lyrics at all but a melody played by some unfamiliar instrument.

The meeting was called to order. A bunch of misfits huddled under a swaying, moth-bothered bulb in a basement, somewhere in Newark. Darren, de facto chair, coughed into his fist and assessed the Crew. Bingo, Swervy, Steve, Other Steve, Sheila, Eric, Dong-Dong. It wasn't much, but it was a start. "Right," said Darren. "We need to get organised. Have you all got yours?" Unopened cans of lager were produced from backpacks, tan leather shoulder bags and hoodie pockets and placed on the table. "Does it matter what can we use?" asked Swervy.

Rokus had been at the Institute six months before he started to notice changes to the edifice of the building. Filled screwholes at first, then rectangular discolourations. The institute stood at 22 Rue de la Gare, and always had, so why had a faint '44' appeared by the door one day, as if emerging from a thick fog? He traced his hand over the faded numbers, positioned just up and to the right of the current fake-chrome 22. Two months later, a 63 in baroque freehand. Another month, and the outline of a 38 in 1970s block font, as if charred into the brick itself.

Marina shivered in the tarpaulin. Dennis had kindly wrapped it around her bone-white shoulders after pulling her out of the trunk. Now she was sitting in an oil-smelling outbuilding, blowing on a polystyrene cup of tea. "I don't know," she said again through chattering teeth. "Really?" said Dennis, lifting his baseball cap to scratch his head. "You reckon days? Are ya hungry?" "Maybe. Yes." Dennis rooted around in a nearby drawer and produced a bent energy bar. Marina devoured it gratefully while keeping the tarpaulin tight around her naked frame. Her joints ached, the attachment points in her scalp stung like crazy - she didn't dare touch them.