Initial Condition by Ian Domowitz (EXCERPT)

Hello, dear readers! Today we have an excerpt from a centuries-spanning novel of science fantasy that will appeal to lovers of the esoteric and the technological.

I’m gonna let the publicity materials for this latest book in a series speak for themselves, for fear of accidentally giving anything away with my own writing:

“A twelfth century vision of artificial intelligence foreshadows a sixteenth century recipe to produce it. A nineteenth century prison nurtures it. A twenty-first century golem befriends it. And a boy without a century stands at the intersection of real and virtual, moments into the future. They call him The Mechanic.

“A kidnapping leads Hanzi Boss to a sanctuary community where religious law forbids speech by the artificially intelligent. For beings like him, the penalty for existing is death and his true nature must remain secret. But the community has its own secrets. An ancient immigrant hides there, a monster made not born, a being who can know Hanzi for what he really is. When the price of life is death, who survives—infinite strength steeped in the silence of the past, or intelligence guided by lived experience?

“This is a story of arcane knowledge, alchemy, and strange philosophies. It is the story of a being not created by God, who does not know what he is and searches for something more. Initial Condition is the third book in The Mechanic’s Diary series following Wake the Whirlwind and Neurojuggler.”

Read on for an excerpt on the creation of one of the mysterious figures at the heart of the novel:

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They came together with no hesitation.

No tentative touching slowed the encirclement of their arms. No delicate brush of hair or face stopped the approach. They were identical in most things, and breasts pushed against each other as thighs slid in between.

Hanzi wished the figures to merge, adding Ima to an entity which found their place in real. Ima would bring her language to Ami and go home as part of her. She would leave the Void in peace again.

He knew it was impossible. It was not to be addition, but rather substitution. Ami was possessed of vernacular beyond human understanding. She was complete, and the fact she said it herself was proof of life by human standards. Ima’s language was superfluous, redundant in the face of Ami’s command of words. She had nothing to add to Ami. She was unwanted, her deepest fear. The result could only be confrontation, hence strife and the violence it would bring.

The kiss came in slow motion, mouths opening and lips absorbing. Ima’s serpents uncoiled, nipping deeply into Ami’s shoulder. She moved into their teeth with the embrace. Mud flowed like venom through the fangs’ ducts, overflow from the gashes hidden by Ima’s flesh as it sloughed away against the smooth clay of Ami’s back.

Baal forced his way around Hanzi to the crossing. He stepped in front of the altar and stood, shoulders hunched over and head raised up to see. Neck folds stretched and relaxed again as his jaw closed and opened to bare yellow teeth. He drooled. He was a masochist rejected by his sadist. She betrayed him by taking a rival as her preferred mate. Hanzi watched as Baal enjoyed the pain of it.

An umbrella of mire no more opaque than rainfall rose above the lovers. Its ragged edge stretched to the floor, and the golems disappeared inside its translucence. One could be seen clearly, then the other, backs, hips, buttocks swaying in time with a kiss which could never be known in real.

Only one could return to join its counterpart, either the golem who had left the clay or the being laying claim to it. Hanzi asked himself if he would have made a different choice had he known about Ami and her flaw. But his preparations before knowing were as good now as they had been then. He looked again at Alpha and Charlie.

“Maybe better,” he muttered and sank into himself.

He willed the world to slow until he reached the level of golem’s existence. Baal’s face appeared in front of him, its mouth stretching into a reversed crescent never reaching the floor. A floating hand pushed a puff of air into a tsunami in slow motion, the force of the wave rolling against his chest and forcing him to his knees. He took a year to get there, and when he did, he found his own face had arrived first. He spoke a command. The pain was agonizing, but the time was short. He came back convulsing, Baal’s hand on his shoulder.

“You said something and collapsed. Emah gedolah, listen!”

A shriek of triumph rose as the mud fountain collapsed to reveal the golems, now standing apart. Both looked upwards, one as silent as the other was piercing in its shrillness. Hanzi looked into their eyes and saw only images of goggles within goggles. He regained his feet and saw Ami’s hands became fists. Clay arms cracked with tension. A fissure spread across her shoulder and down her back. The screamer held out her hands in supplication. The response to his command was coming.

Ami stepped back into the embrace and placed her fingers on both sides of Ima’s goggles. The snakes recoiled, then relaxed. Ima’s fingers covered hers, nails moving back and forth with sinuous sluggishness. The golems studied their reflections in the black lenses and danced without movement to music in a range beneath hearing. Ami relaxed and moved closer, the cracks in her body filled with the golem’s liquified skin. Ima moaned and closed her eyes.

Hanzi watched nails shoot from Ima’s fingers as Ami pushed against her temples. It was time for Ima to leave the Void. Hanzi had prepared for this day when he mocked up Harry’s goggles in virtual.

He had learned about binding agents during time spent inside a taxidermy hut in the mountains. A single needle targeted a specific patch, and he had many in an area which proxied for a brain. Special binders existed for Ima’s composition, designed to latch onto flecks of earth and coagulating mud. A sample was easily placed in each spine. Pressure triggers in the temples of the device took care of the rest.

Ima stiffened as she died, as much as a simulation can die in a reality where death is not permitted. Her continuous mud supply slowed and finally lost to growing fissures in hardening clay. They spread into the dirt around her feet, and she fell without toppling over. Ankles gave way to knees, waist to chest, neck to top of head. And she was gone, her raucous jubilance a memory.

Only Ami remained. Hanzi wanted to speak with her. He wanted to ask forgiveness for turning her into his agent of destruction. She existed to serve and deserved better. He had no way to set her free. He had used her and would leave her to Baal’s tender mercies. He wanted to explain but could not stand the pain of accessing her almost-frozen state. Time’s prison turned into a coffin at golem speed. He moved in her direction, hands in the air as though signing for peace. He need not have bothered.

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From Initial Condition by Ian Domowitz. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission.

Initial Condition by Ian Domowitz was published September 2025 by Casa Muerte Press.