Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026
On the planet Sirami — a colonized desert world of oil fields, refinery towers, and dust walls — a roadhouse called The Gwyd stands as a singular light in the middle of nothing. It is a liminal place, neither origin nor destination, that has existed across wars and occupations, passing from hand to hand. Into this charged atmosphere arrives a convoy of twelve uniformed soldiers belonging to the Intrasystem Consortium (I.C.), led by a sharp-hatted officer known only as the Captain, who is hunting two young deserters: a military trainee and his local Sirami sweetheart.
The Captain is no ordinary interrogator. He is accompanied by a manuaton — a mechanical humanoid — whose open “mouth” emits a repeating pattern of clicks and beeps functioning as a psychological primer. The Captain’s method is a form of weaponized hypnosis: he uses abstract, archetypal storytelling (knights, castles, peasants) combined with sound and suggestion to soften the minds of those he questions. Under this influence, oil workers raise their hands involuntarily, one man is made to feel phantom cuts on his arm until he collapses, and the room falls into a stupor.
The Captain’s story-within-a-story frames the desertion as a simple disciplinary matter: a trainee who forgot his loyalties for a local girl, was publicly flogged, and then broken out by unknown sympathizers. He offers the room rewards for information and implies dire consequences for harboring the couple. But the proprietor behind the bar — the narrator, the child of the late Old Man Gwyd — does not raise a hand.
Their exchange is the heart of the story. The narrator draws the Captain into conversation about language, colonialism, and the bending of culture under occupation — then pivots to a counter-story about a Sirami magus and his apprentice who once studied “perfect song”: the idea that sound, light, pattern, and repetition could reprogram a mind entirely. The magus built twelve tuning-fork towers across the desert and eventually collaborated with the same colonial forces, teaching them minor techniques of influence in exchange for protection — a collaboration that corroded him from the inside out. This magus was the narrator’s father, the original Old Man Gwyd.
While the Captain eats and drinks and listens, he is being worked on. The Gwyd itself was designed by the old man as a giant primer: patterned violet wallpaper, specific sound frequencies in the jukebox hum, the cassoulet warming in the kitchen. Soldiers are sent on a fool’s errand to nonexistent sub-outposts. What’s in the kitchen locker is left deliberately unexamined. By the time the Captain realizes something is wrong, it is too late. He is led outside in a daze, shown the two fugitives hiding in a shed — and perceives only two birds.
The narrator’s final act is a quiet rejection of the father’s legacy. The old man was brilliant, protective of his own methods, and ultimately a collaborator who handed over neighbors to save himself. The narrator — having absorbed some of the father’s techniques but refusing his cruelties — sends the young couple east with directions toward houses marked with a flower symbol, a network of quiet resistance spreading across Sirami. The Captain, reset and confused, walks back into The Gwyd to begin his search again.
The story meditates on inherited power, the violence of colonial language, the ethics of influence, and what it means to use the master’s tools against the master — not to replicate domination, but to carve out small, survivable freedoms in the middle of a middle place.
Thomas Ha is a Nebula, Ignyte, Hugo, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated writer of speculative short fiction. You can find his work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Weird Horror Magazine, among other publications. His work has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade plus of living in the northeast, now resides in Los Angeles with his family.