West of the Hollow Sands lies the Empty Bowl—hulled and riddled with the silent flechettes of THAT WAR. THAT WAR, which bloodied every nose in the world, THAT WAR, which covered the broken shell with radioactive snot and toxic soot, THAT WAR, which stole the future from we who remained.

The Empty Bowl straddles the sky, breeding it, scattering its sterile seed where it may. Perhaps this is what drew us to it—its prominence in the landscape, sticking up out of the dust like an angry wart.

In hindsight, we would have been better off burying ourselves, like the mole-people in the last days of THAT WAR—just tunnel down out of sight and set up shop where the crust meets the mantle, there to toast marshmallows and apostates for all eternity.

Deezle was the first to find a path through the Hollow Sands—a crooked zigzag across ten miles of sinkholes and sulphuric mist that could eat a man down to the marrow in minutes. To this day, Deezle claims they were tripping on octopine and a bad batch of kombucha when they made the journey—so spun they couldn't walk straight—but everyone knows that's bullshit. The truth is buried in that rusty colander they call a brain case—if it hasn't leaked out over their shoes by now.

I was the next to arrive, but only after Deezle retraced their steps with a reel of copper cable and a set of tent-pegs, marking the route with that rosy strand, pinned into the sand like sutures holding a wound closed.

After that, the colony started to come together—more people made the journey, sliding along Deezle's wire like beads on a cheap necklace.

Back then, we all knew about THAT WAR and what it had done—there was no new blood in the world, just old, congealed shit, pumping slow and viscous through the world's veins like tar.

That would never do.

The first thing we tried was to repopulate the old fashioned way—we all partnered up and went at it non-stop for nine months. When that didn't work, we resorted to a free-for-all, right there in the middle of the Empty Bowl—just a big old pile of writhing meat; a regular fuck-fest. Before THAT WAR, there were those of us that fantasised about that kind of thing, but there's nothing like necessity to take the shine off a fetish and leave it as dead and dull as perished latex.

The Doctor figured it out in the end—how to make new people when we were all barren as the desert we'd fled from. The Doctor was one of the last arrivals to the Empty Bowl—one of the stragglers who, for their belated adoption of our new home, were treated with mild suspicion by all those that came before. In the Doctor's case, the suspicion was warranted.

It took two of us to get it right—two souls flushed down the toilet of eternity; a tenth of our strength in sacrifice to the greater good of the species.

The ANSEX process was perfected after that.

The curious thing—aside from the process itself—is the impression I had that the Doctor had not conjured the process from nothing, that it was not the spontaneous invention of a mad genius, but the culmination of a life's work.

Bringing elements of one's life from before THAT WAR was discouraged—though it was not actually illegal, Deezle and I decided early on that baggage from the world before had no place in the Now-Age and so we spread rumours that the Hollow Sands knew when a person was traversing them with too much on their mind, or too many personal effects weighing them down. If someone did hazard the journey, laden with curios and trinkets, or vendettas and bad intentions, the Hollow Sands would send a storm to swallow them up, sucking them down into the acid ponds below the surface, there to be digested and reconstituted in eternal torment. We never did prove the Doctor had done this, but what happened later all but confirmed it.

Becoming ANSEX meant many things, but chiefly, it meant the ability to breed with oneself—to produce a facsimile of a human being, splitting part of yourself into another whole. Naturally, this required a great deal of body mass to accomplish and those who underwent the process had to also undergo a regime of forced-feeding beforehand. First, you ballooned out with fat until you were almost twice your original weight and then, the Doctor's genetic algorithm took over—your body split, taking with it roughly 80% of your mass, to be broken down and repurposed into the various tissues and organs required to make a new human being. The process is not fast, nor is it painless—the new human must gestate for several days, hanging off the side of your head like a tumour, accruing mass and converting it steadily into new bones, blood vessels, skin.

When I did it, it felt like my head was going to explode—like some cunt was stood on my forehead with a pickaxe, trying to dig a hole through my eye socket, like migraines and cluster-headaches had a baby and the baby spent the first year of its life banging its head against a brick wall.

All the first colonists became ANSEX—me, Deezle, even the Doctor—and our colony doubled in size overnight.

Offspring produced by ANSEX looked almost exactly like their parent, except they were a mirror image—every freckle and blemish, flipped across a vertical axis. Dominant hands, feet and eyes were also switched. Apart from this, they were effectively indistinguishable.

Among the stranger quirks of ANSEX reproduction, was the effect this mirroring had on established neural pathways in the brain—by flipping these across the longitudinal fissure, our children, for all their resemblance to us, had diametrically opposed personalities. Memory centres of the brain were also affected, implanting them with false recollections of things which had not happened. The strangest quirk of all, without doubt, was the fact that, somewhere along the ANSEX reproductive process, the child regained their fertility.