Like all good editors, Spika’s modifications were brutally rigorous. Changing the order of things—like the work of the cleaners.
Transformation begins with precise redactions.
Bodies keep better records than minds.
The scar left on Marco’s knee from his childhood bicycle accident was now unblemished skin. Maria tried to recall her late mother’s perfume but could only recite its chemical formulae. She had never studied chemistry.
Spika did not merely read their lives; it was annotating them.
The corrections were contagious: a spilled mop and bucket lurched upright, dirty water streaming backward up the fibers into the container. Plastic fragments levitated from the floor to rearrange themselves into an unbroken LED. Scattered dust particles slid across the floor, self-organising into neat pyramids. Dried polish suddenly retreated into its bottle in viscous ribbons. A cockroach flipped over, and scuttled back into the floor crack. The cleaners watched these inverse chronologies with professional detachment—they’d spent careers making disorder disappear. This reversal of time and matter was simply another way of organising things.
The thorns worked with the same surgical precision that the cleaners applied to stains.
A coffee spill preserved as a fossil record of Brazilian deforestation, a polyester uniform sleeve revealing the calloused fingerprints of the child who stitched it. The corrosion on a lithium battery casing, exposed the cobalt sulfate residue from a Congolese miner’s unwashed hands.
Only when Marco discovered that his tattoo of the Madonna had been recast as a mycorrhizal network did they understand: Spika wasn’t just editing the world. It was publishing a revised edition.