365 tomorrows

“I’m sorry, but the answer is no,” Captain Diana Cai watched Ambassador Karr on her viewscreen as his face darkened. The Ambassador bit his tongue inside his mouth until he tasted blood. Captain Cai allowed him his moment. It was harsh news she had to deliver. “Our team has found traces of the Contagion in your soil.”

Ambassador Karr regarded the Captains teardrop stomach, covered only by a sheer cloth that allowed him to see the erotic and powerful exposure of her fertility. “Captain Cai, our cleaning efforts have been intense. Our scientists have found no active traces of the Contagion, and those minor elements still left are broken down. We are assured that, with proper precautions, the children would have a very low risk of infection.”

Captain Cai put her hand on her pregnant stomach, indicating she wished him to be silent. The Ambassador held his breath.

“Ambassador, our highest priority is the welfare of the children. We cannot deliver life to a world where there is any possibility of contamination. I have no doubt that your people deserve the children. I was guided on a virtual tour of the school that you built for the twelve we hoped to give you and I was very impressed by the design, all that light. . .”

Captain Cai looked around her command center, where sixteen women were operating the ship at various stations, all of them at different stages of their pregnancy. Seven years ago, the Bar’ak had spread the Contagion to every human world, rendering nearly everyone sterile. The only fertile humans were those members of the Fleet on space missions. After the infection the Fleet was split, the men sent to retaliate against the Bar’ak aggression, and the women charged with the task of repopulation. The situation was worse than the government let on. “Our children can only be released to colonies with enough security to keep them safe. Contamination levels are part of that security.”

The Ambassador ran a hand through his silver hair. “Captain, my people will double their efforts to clean our soil. We will have the remnants of the contagion removed in a matter of months.”

“Ambassador, I regret to inform you that we will not be returning for thirty seven years.”

“Thirty seven years?” The Ambassadors calm face had broken, and angry wrinkles, like a thousand scars, descended on his face. “Captain, that is outrageous, most of us are already aged past our prime. A delay of that long could kill our colony!”

The Captain put a hand on her stomach and the Ambassador gulped.

“Ambassador, I remind you that it is treason to raise your voice to a woman with child.”

The Ambassador knelt, the screen following him as he crossed his hands over his chest and closed his eyes. “Captain, Mother, forgive me, Life Giver, I pray to you. Please, spare us, give us one child, just one, to teach and love and hold. Please mother, mercy on us. The child you give us will be our most beloved creature, its feet will never touch soil. Please mother, I beg you.”

“I’ll do it.” Said a young Ensign, newly pregnant with her third child. “I’ll go.”

Captain Cai switched off the screen. “Adia, you are out of line.” The Ensign put a hand on her stomach.

“It is treason to raise your voice to a woman with child.”

Captain Cai put her forehead in her hands. “You read the reports, the soil is dangerous.”

“Yes. I read that in some parts of the planet, the soil has minor contamination. Captain, you saw the Ambassador. We cannot leave this colony to die.”

“Are you ready to be a symbol for the rest of your life? An object?”

“No, I’m not.” Adia walked out from behind her console. “Mother, I can’t do this any longer. I cannot continue to give birth and give my children away. I’ll go mad. I have the right to leave the program.”

“Actually, Ensign, you do not have that right. Humanity is in a dire situation right now. There are planets of worlds that cannot reproduce on their own. Even if you, and your children manage to avoid infection, even if you do that, the Bar’ak may find out you are there and return to this moon and spread the contagion again. Then we will have lost yet another fertile woman.”

“If you don’t leave me there, you may lose an entire colony! Mother, please. I want to go. Please, give me to them. Give them hope.”

“I can’t. I cannot let you go for anything less than an act of treason.”

“Then let me be a traitor.” Adia, cradled her mothers face in her hands. “I love you mother.” She lightly slapped the Captains cheek.

Captain Cai swallowed. “To strike a fertile woman is an act of treason, the punishment for which is death. Ensign Cai, because you are fertile, you will be spared capital punishment and will serve your lifelong sentence in the care of this colony planet.” Captain Cai nodded to two female guards. “Take her to transport.”

“Captain, mother, I promise you, I will give them hope.”

“No Adia, you will give them everything.”

Sergeant Ariel Odipo held back a grimace as her squadron approached the Sepch encampment. She doubted they could see her face through the mirrored visor of her helmet, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She loosened her grip on her rifle as well. The tension was thick enough as it was. This was a peacekeeping mission, after all.

Besides, these people weren’t the problem. Odipo had grown fond of their crabby little faces and way they waved their eyestalks when she approached. They were not her problem.

“Perimeter clear, sir.” The crackle of Odipo’s earpiece contrasted with Private Moharasundaram’s constantly even voice. M was already Odipo’s favorites out of the new privates; she could take the head off a target at 2000 meters. Not that she would get a chance here.

On Odipo’s orders, the rest of the company filed in with the loaded skimmers. The food and medical supplies they were bringing didn’t look or smell like anything Odipo would put in her body, but that was other cultures for you. Odipo had gained the respect for Sepch culture that can only come from spending every day defending yourself from them.

She found herself gripping her weapon tighter again. Odipo loosened up immediately, hoping none of her company saw a tense C.O. But M saw. M saw everything.

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“Granted.”

“When the insurgency comes, why don’t we just take them out?”

“You are aware of the Rules of Engagement in this situation, Private.”

“Yes, sir. But I still believe that–”

“What did you learn in basic, soldier?”

“Sir! To put big holes in tiny people, sir!”

“You should have also learned to follow the R.O.E. This is a peacekeeping mission, Private. We do not fire unless we are fired upon. Is that clear? Follow your training.”

“I was not trained for peacekeeping, sir.”

None of us were, Odipo thought. But she did not say it. Instead she turned her attention to a group of larger Sepch forcing their way to the front of the crowd. They carried the armbands of the Kree-Gnaugk-Kluf, but Odipo didn’t need that to tell her they were bad news. Their rough behavior to the other Sepch and their greedy possession of all game off the skimmer made their position abundantly clear. Odipo could see her soldiers closest to the gang, and saw them slowly start to raise their weapons.

“All units, hold fire,” Odipo said. “Repeat, do not fire unless fired upon.”

Odipo and her squadron watched as the gang–the insurgency, make no mistake–made off with most of the supplies, leaving little for the civilians to pick through in their wake. They would take the supplies to the cliffs that perched above this valley, and once they had achieved sufficient cover, they would fire their weapons down on the enemy forces who were dumb enough to give them food.

Sergeant Ariel Odipo watched her enemy walk away, and tried very hard not to think about the number of men she would lose once they reached those cliffs. She was suddenly very much aware of how tightly she was gripping her rifle.

The writers of 365 Tomorrows are honored to announce that we have been invited to be guests at PhilCon 2005. PhilCon will be held on December 9th to 11th, at the Marriot Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Jared Axelrod, J, Loseth , B. York and I will be hosting two panels, ‘Publishing for an Online Audience’ and ‘Flash Fiction’.

To all those who attend our panels, or who spot us in the hallways, we will be giving out a free CD of 15 recorded stories from 365 Tomorrows, along with exclusive work that will not be on the 365 Tomorrows Podcast, which we plan to launch in December.

If you want the CD but won’t be attending PhilCon, we will eventually sell the CD on the website and in the bookstore, Bindlestiff Books, which has just opened in West Philadelphia.

PhilCon is a fantastic convention, lots of great panels, a large dealer and art room, and, most importantly, a fantastic group of people who run the convention. We look forward to meeting you there!

“Goodman Ernest, your application for life expectancy has been denied.”

Ernest, as his own legal representation, was standing at the podium before the masked council. When he heard their pronouncement, he nearly fell off the stand.

“Council! I beg appeal!”

The head councilwoman banged her gavel; the advantage of psychic links between the council was immediate judgment. “Appeal granted. State your case.”

“I have lived three hundred years. I have taught our children, I have been a lawyer, a pimp and a priest, I have redesigned a product and I conducted an orchestra. Council, I have lifetimes full of accomplishments.”

A Councilman at the end of the long table shook his masked face, and the head Councilwoman closed her eyes, receiving opinions through her psychic neural implants. When she finally spoke, her eyes remained shut. “Indeed you do Goodman Ernest. We have reviewed your accomplishments and found them suitable for two lifetimes, but not three. Reviewing the facts, we have noticed that in the last 50 years you have lived off of the proceeds on the wise investments from your bestselling audio feed. You have failed to contribute anything further to society and are living off the fruits of past labors.”

Goodman Ernest put both hands over his heart, the gesture for mercy. “I appeal for a retroactive sabbatical.”

“Denied. Retroactive sabbaticals are only applicable to those who can demonstrate significant emotional or physical injury, besides which, no sabbaticals over ten years are ever granted, and you would need to be granted a sabbatical of over seventy three years.”

“Council. I am capable of contributing society again.”

“As stated by our constitution, when a person slows its pace through our world, it is time for them to move aside and allow the innovations of those younger beings to take their space. The ripe fruit must give way to the seed.” The council’s language was always flowery, a result of the impassioned arguments flowing between them.

“I appeal to your sense of mercy. I am capable of giving, of innovating. I can reinvent myself again. Grant me the years to prove that I can give a lifetime to our people.”

There was a moment of silence and the head Councilwoman finally opened her eyes. “In reflection of your reluctance to depart this mortal coil, we shall grant you a period of five years in which to make your contribution.”

“Five years!” Goodman Ernest felt faint. Five years was a blink, you could barely make a plan for change in five years. “You expect me to give a lifetime in five years?”

“Think of our ancestors, and what they gave to us in their short lives. Imagine them, and show yourself worthy of their legacy. Go, and make your mark.”

I don’t remember being a citizen, but when I was growing up, it was all my father ever talked about. ‘Back in the valley,’ he would say, and point to the acrylic mural that took up most of the wall by the front door. It looked nothing like a valley. It was a jumble of angles and curves, oddly pixellated like most of my mother’s art. I don’t remember much of my mother either, but there are bits and pieces of her all over the apartment, plotted out in meticulous detail on nearly every flat surface.

Of course, my father wanted me to go into something with computers. He still does. “Dennou,” he says, when I meet him for coffee, “when are you going to give up that mess and buy yourself a datafeed?”

“I have a datafeed, dad.”

Actually, I have six. Only one has been turned on, and I use it as a lamp in the hallway. Across from me, my father began listing the merits of computer operation, chuckling and gesturing like he was describing a woman he wanted to set me up with. I smiled and nodded a few times, but we both knew nothing would come of it.

It’s not that I don’t know how to use a computer. I grew up around them, after all. I used to type eighty words per minute, but I haven’t tried in months. My father has never been away from a datafeed for longer than a day, except for the horrible, horrible night he spent in an airport after his wallet was stolen. I still hear that story, sometimes. You’d think he was kidnapped by terrorists.

Normal parents encourage their kids to get married, settle down, spit out a couple kids; my dad just wants me to hack. I haven’t decided if I’m lucky. We meet at the teahouse every Tuesday, and he rants about my career choice for a bit before giving me the manila envelope of stolen blueprints and security codes. Then I pay, or he pays, and we part.

Today, I pick up the tab. Money’s been good this week. He asks me if I need any cash, as usual, and I tell him no, as usual. I don’t know where he gets his money, since he seems oddly isolated from the crime circles of the island. I had to describe the runner code using networking references, and I still don’t think he gets why, because I’ve agreed to work with my partner, I couldn’t stop working even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I suppose, in the valley, they didn’t have honor among thieves.

“So you’ll think about it?”

“I’ll think about it,” I lie.

“You’re getting old to be playing Robin Hood,” he warns, his tone shifting to the serious. This is a deviation from the script, and I adjust my posture to hide the usual slump.

“I’ve got it under control.”

“Ah, you can’t control age, Dennou.” He’s called me that since I was six, when, on a sadistic whim, he convinced me that I was a robot.

Outside of the teahouse, I pull a cigarette from my pack and shield my lighter from the fierce January wind. “I downloaded the patch for that,” I joke, and he fakes a grimace.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

“I don’t need your money, Dad.” I open my bookbag against the wall and slide the envelope between two notebooks of securifeed schematics while I held the cigarette in my teeth. “Do you want money for the files?”

“From my own son? Never. I give you those to keep you alive.” He grins, but he knows it’s true.

“Same time next week,” I say as I sling the bag over my shoulder.

“Take care of yourself, Dennou,” he warns. I make a face before turning my attention to the sidewalk.

This is it, lads. We’ve done it. The future of dating is now.

Forget all those phony hookup services, the holodates, the matchmakers. We’ve discovered what your problem was all along. You don’t need to find the right girl, mate. Not anymore. That’s a thing of the past. You need to find the right you.

It’s taken decades of surveys and analyses and precision research, but we have finally figured out that mystical ideal: what girls like. Brace yourselves, gents. This one’s a doozy.

Girls like assholes.

I know you’ve heard this one before, and it didn’t work, did it mate? Well, that’s because you didn’t understand it the right way. Sure, we all know nice guys finish last, but assholes tend to get left in the end, too—unless they’re just the right kind of assholes.

Now, I won’t deceive you blokes. This ain’t easy. You can’t be an all-out fucker and expect a girl to like you. There is a certain type, a certain formula: the thing all women secretly want. They want just enough asshole to keep their lives exciting, to make ‘em think they’ve got work to do, but not enough douchebag to bugger off with some other chick in a shorter skirt.

Being an asshole takes care and talent. You need just enough cruelty to make ‘em hurt, and just enough kindness to make ‘em simper at you afterwards. You need to play the game, boys. It’s all in the game.

So how do you do it? Ay, there’s the rub. Let me tell it to you straight: if you don’t already know it on your own, you’re never gonna. It’s just that simple. What you need, my friends, is some way to know when enough is enough and when it’s not. What you need is this little miracle.

See it? Barely visible to the naked eye, but with more computing power than your entire cubicle. This little guy takes information directly from your brainwaves and figures out just how you should react. It’s like having that proverbial angel on your shoulder—or devil, boys, take your pick—to tell you just what to do. Doesn’t even need surgery.

You’ll have just the right formula, just the right mix: enough asshole to make a girl feel needed and enough humanity to convince her she’s done her job. And if you’ve got the unfortunate habit of being a nice guy at heart? All the better. You can go back to your goody-two-shoes ways once the prize is won. All you have to do is take the miracle bug out of your ear and hide it away. It’s that simple.

But you’ve got to start somewhere, gents. You’ve got to start somewhere. Now, I know the trick. I can show you the way.

But it’s gonna cost you.

Autumn was ending the day the man who carried no name wandered into the village of Plum Rose. Nearly bent double by the pack upon his back, the stranger nevertheless moved with a fluidity and grace that immediately drew attention in the dusty township. Children watched from hidden places and whispered, “Ronin” to each other, and if the same thought crossed the minds of the adults, they held their tongues.

Indeed, it was not until the man unloaded his burden that the adults allowed themselves to speak the word their children used without reservation.

The first thing the man removed from his bundle was this: a small box of lacquered wood and paper that his deft hands unfolded into a waist-high table. Also brought out was a second box, larger that the first, and made of metal. It proudly displayed a funnel once unfolded, as well as a revolving bottom and a hand-crank that needed to be attached separately. A third box was carefully manipulated by the man’s rough hands, and once unfolded it also required nozzles and pipes to be screwed in. Though the burlap sack the man had carried upon his back was still filled to bursting, he did not pull any other wonder out of it. Instead, he merely displayed it’s contents to townsfolk who had gathered.

Within the dusty burlap, in their pristine, pale green glory, laid a prize worth more than gold, more than silver. For when the man who carried no name had come to the town known as Plum Rose, he brought with him coffee beans.

He called for fire, and it was brought to him. He called for water, and this element too was collected and laid in front of him. The village of Plum Rose was not a wealthy one, a villager could find himself enjoying and perhaps even preferring the synthetic meat and beer that made up his diet. But coffee was more than the stacked molecules that made it, and as such, synthetic coffee was tolerated, but never enjoyed. Only the Magistrate enjoyed coffee, his imported beans and personal barista bought with the broken backs of the villagers.

This much was told to the man who carried no name, and more, as the boiler he had unfolded reached it’s full heat and potentency and the roaster turned the green beans that tumbled down its funnel black and aromatic. Cup after cup was poured for the villagers, and so fragrant was this ronin barista’s brew that the smell even wafted to the nose of the Magistrate.

Perhaps the man who carried no name knew of this, perhaps he had counted on it. Only such could explain the slow smile that crawled across his visage as the corpulent Magistrate and his similarly begirthed barista plowed down the street toward him.

“There are worlds,” the ronin said. “Worlds far out in the edge of the sky, whose distance from the Earth curses them. They receive no beans from the home world, so distant are they, so far, and their lives are that much darker. Every night I write a prayer for them, and burn it with my best beans in the hope that the aroma will reach them.”

“You dishonor me, sir,” the barista said, after being forcibly prodded by the Magistrate. “Tell me your name so I may know who would have the disrespect to brew about my proximity without so much as ‘a by your leave?’ I do not wish to battle you, sir. But I feel my honor demands it.”

“Would that your honor was as demanding as your belly,” the ronin said. “Then perhaps I would have not needed to provide these poor souls with my paltry beans’ embrace. All barista are taught from birth that coffee is a drink of the people, yet you would bar the door and toss them the molded grounds! My name, like respect for you, it is not something I can carry. My pack is weighty enough. But battle I can provide in abundance.”

And so then, on the dirty streets of Plum Rose, did two masters do battle. Their ritual, their art taking all of their focus. The village found itself drowning in the swift hand motions of the two men, engaging in rites that had remained unscathed by the progress of time. And when it was over, every body held its breath as each man tasted the brew-work of the other.

The Magistrate’s barista drank deep. Upon tasting the dark, sharp beauty the ronin had provided him, he hung his head. The ronin bowed to his fellow barista and thanked him for the exquisite coffee. The Magistrate’s barista bowed lower, thanked the ronin, and proclaimed him the winner.

The Magistrate was enraged. He charged at the barista, drawing forth his pistol of flame and thunder. He never received his chance to fire it. The barista laid him flat with an expertly-aimed demitasse spoon right between the eyes.

“You have already disgraced your ancestors. Do not disgrace your progeny as well,” the ronin said, kicking the Magistrate’s pistol across the dust. “Any worth you might have claimed though this man is gone. You are now merely a man with more money than sense, and those are as the sand on the beach. These people owe you nothing. ”

That evening and well into the night, the coffee flowed freely to the townspeople, who engaged in revelry unlike the town of Plum Rose had ever seen. Such revelry was this that no one noticed the man who carried no name fold up his table, roaster and brew station. No one noticed him leave, the sunset turning his silhouette as dark and rich as the drink he gave.

But his presence in Plum Rose is not forgotten. Even now, carved deep into the wood underneath the sign that proclaims the village’s name, is written this:

Before the ronin came
Did we ever know the world
Or its bitter kiss?

“We’ve got a jumper.” Pratt was one of those orderly, wiry men who pleased supervisors without ever accomplishing much of value. Detective Harr lit his cigarette and enjoyed the growing scowl on Pratts face. Cigarettes were quite illegal in hospitals, but no one questioned a damned thing anyone in his department did.

“Suspected jumper.” Detective Harr pointed toward the one way mirror where a little girl was playing on the floor.“How did she get picked up?”

“Child abuse. She dropped some pretty heavy hints to school officals, teachers, aids and the like, but no one took direct action until she marched right into the Principals office and started demanding police intervention”

“This is unusual behavior?”

Pratt raised an eyebrow. “Abused children don’t usually march right up to their principals and demand that their fathers be arrested.”

Harr shrugged. “A feisty child then.”

“Yeah, a feisty child who poisioned her fathers cereal before school. They had to pump his stomach, he nearly died. We didn’t suspect it was her till the police went to pick him up and found him at the hospital.”

“We’re sure there was abuse?” Pratt handed him a file.

“Read the medical reports yourself. There was tearing of the vaginal wall, and –“ Decetive Harr waved his hand, cutting Pratt off.

“I can read it.” He stuffed the report in his briefcase and stared though the one way mirror where Jenny was playing under the supervision of a nurse. She knelt on the floor studying the bottom of a toy truck. Jenny put the truck on the carpet and began rolling it around, all the time looking at the nurse and smiling.

The nurse fussed a bit when Detective Harr told her to leave, but flashing his badge and smile earned him some alone time with Jenny. He sat on the couch where the nurse had been sitting, the broad bright smiles of the playroom mural made him feel lewd and out of place.

“Hi Jen. Do you know who I am?” She didn’t look at him, just continued to roll her truck around on the carpet.

“Are you a doctor?”

Harr chuckled “No Jen, I’m a police officer.”

Jenny looked up at him though her soft bangs. “My name is Jenny.”

He leaned over towards her and smiled, big and fake. “Jenny is a little girl name, isn’t it?” Jenny rolled the fire engine around on the floor.

“Did you ever hear the story about the fairy and the housewife?” asked Detective Harr.

Jenny kept her eyes on the engine. “Nope.”

“Well, it goes like this. Once upon a time there was a housewife who had a beautiful new baby. Her baby was so pretty that the fairies wanted it, so in the dead of night, they snatched the baby from it’s cradle. Of course, they couldn’t just take the baby and leave nothing in it’s place, so they left an mischevious spirit that made himself look like a the housewifes beautiful baby. When the housewife picked up her child in the morning, she knew that something was wrong, so she picked up the spirit and smashed its head with a cold iron frying pan until the fairy promised to bring back her baby safe and sound.”

Jenny paused and her chubby hands pulled at the carpet. “That doesn’t sound very nice.” she said.

“It’s not. Tricking people isn’t nice.”

Jenny stood up and lifted her arms in the air. “Do you like my dress? Green is my favorite color.”

“Can we cut the crap Jen?” Jenny lowered her arms.

“What?”

“I mean it. Cut the crap. You’re a jumper. You are accused of the transposition of consciousness onto an earlier time period.” Harr laid her open file on the ground and Jenny glanced at the papers, clenching her little chubby hands.

“You know what he did, the sickness he gave me. You know I will be on treatments for the rest of my life.”

“Jen, the punishment for transposition is removal. Your consciousness will be dispersed.” He tried to keep his voice from cracking. Jenny knelt next to her records and picked out an x-ray of her pelvis.

“What about this body, you’ll let this body rot without a consciousness?”

“There is a little girl in there-”

“We are fully integrated!”

“There are methods. Sometimes we can pick little bits of person out.”

“That’s medieval.”

“Why did you transport yourself back after the first abuse? You must have known you would catch it from him, you knew about the illness.”

“My husband.” said the little girl, her soft voice chiming. “Three days ago, my husband went to the fair with his big brother. It’s his happiest childhood memory. He deserves that day.” Her cheeks flushed red and tiny adult tears ran over her smooth face.

Detective Harr wanted to reach out to her, the instinct to comfort a tiny child rising in his ribs. After a while he stood and took her hand, leading her out the door and down the bifurcated timeline.

They wait for him. They deny it, but they do. They sit with their alcohol and they wait for the man called Ironwine to walk in and regale them with tales of his latest adventures. Ironwine, who they say hears the buzz and modulation of the galaxy. Ironwine, who they say feels the stars and crackle and is aware of the turn of every planet he lands on. Ironwine, the man for whom the universe waits for.

For when he arrives, he makes it worth the wait.

”Naoki Anzai had bioluminescent tears embedded into the flesh of her cheek and down her neck. ‘One for every year Rajeev’s away,’ she said. ‘One for every year he’s away.’ I could see the light from the glowing trail peek out of her collar and bleed through her blouse.”

“A year isn’t that long on Kesh, is it?”

“Are you telling this story? Because if you’re telling it, I’ll shut up and let you tell it. I can wait.”

“No, no, continue, Ironwine. We’re all anxious to hear.”

”Very well. Naoki said she had asked for my help because she heard I got things done—I heard that snort—that I got things done. She gave me a holographic image of Rajeev, and asked me to find him. She said that my legend spoke of amazing deeds and grand adventures, and that she knew I could do it.”

“You sure she had the right man?”

“Indeed, you may say that. I thought she had the wrong my own self. But I smiled politely and suggested she not put so much faith in legends.”

“Waste a’time. Bloke’s prolly dead.”

“I brought that up, but Naoki shook her head, and showed me the slowly blinking light on the inside of her right wrist: Rajeev’s pulse.

“On Kesh, the trail was brief. I managed to cheat better than a couple of slave traders at game of brocco, and won the last hand right when my own freedom—and, more importantly, my wardrobe!–was in the pot. The slave traders, naked and shivering the harsh Kesh rain, were so polite about where to look next that I gave them back their clothes.”

“Why would you keep their clothes?”

“Spite, mainly. They were going to keep mine.

“As you gentlemen know, Rimjar is not so much a world as it is a way station for people who liked to be kept under the radar. Obviously, my usual subtly is wasted there. I found myself in a bar near Rimjar’s tiny equator, engaged in what started as an innocent dance but escalated into all-out mayhem.”

“Pretty standard for Rimjar.”

“Too true, my friend. Though this is only the fifth bar fight I’ve been in where the establishment was leveled in the process. But it was in the bar’s remains, drinking the last of the Tarkellian whiskey from broken glasses, that the proprietor let slip that he had seen Rajeev sold.”

“Where?”

“Gumgigobella!”

“No!”

“Yes! And on Gumgigobella, I was forced to duel the magistrate’s daughter in order to gain entrance to the Sacred Library of Trade Dealings! I’ll have you know, she had a wicked left hook and knew her way around a trident, and I would be lying if I said the way she whipped around the net with her third arm wasn’t monumentally attractive. I could tell in her eyes that she felt similar about my fancy footwork. I almost stayed. I almost did, until I felt the holograph generator in my pocket. I was able to persuade the magistrate’s daughter to grant me admission to the Library, even though I had let her win the duel. She was voracious, and with good reason; Gumgigobellian females tend to eat their mates. I have teeth marks to prove it.

“It was on Xiuxiraboheres that I was captured and interrogated by the Galactic Inquisition, and their viscous tentacles oozed over my skin and mind.”

“Pffft! Now you pulling my leg. No one escapes the Galactic Inquisition.”

“So it is said, so it is said. However, while the Inquisition had searched me thoroughly, they did not check every orifice, and I had more than one gadget available to me as a means of escape. The Inquisition’s tools proved more effective on the Inquisitors than they had ever been on the inquistitees, and I was able to discern exactly where Rajeev was. On Alkalinella.”

“On Alkalinella?”

”I was surprised too. Luckily, on Alkalinella, it was just a matter of haggling. I was reluctant to give all three shriftgeg seeds for Rajeev, but his current owners would not let him go for any less. The journey back was uneventful.”

“Then what happened?”

”I returned Rajeev to Naoki in the tiny hovel on Kesh where she had first asked for my help, of course. They embraced awkwardly and passionately, engaging in motions and sounds they probably wouldn’t have if the separation of years hadn’t bereft them of their inhibitions. Forgotten, I left them entwined and ambled back to my ship.”

And they buy him another round of drinks and ask to hear it again and he tells it again, and few more times after that. The details omitted and details remembered, but the story ends the same way. He does not speak of what happened after he left the lovers.

For the man called Ironwine, who hears the buzz and modulation of the galaxy, who feels the stars and crackle and is aware of the turn of every planet he lands on, the man for whom the universe waits for, sat alone in his ship and wanted very much to be someone else being embraced in dirty hovel on tiny planet. It is not an uncommon feeling.

But he knows he has to wait.

The robot was white, angular, and roughly waist-high. At least, it was waist-high for Jack, but Jack had always been a tall man thanks to the synthetic hormones he’d been given at a young age. It was a diminutive thing, like most personal assistants, and if one were terribly nearsighted and unfamiliar with modern robots, it might look like a human child. Jack was neither nearsighted nor unfamiliar with modern robots. The robot stood in the center of the cell, making a low whirring sound, while Jack sprawled on his bunk and read a yellow-paged scifi novel he’d picked up at the prison library.

For several minutes, the robot stood in relative silence, and Jack turned a couple more pages. It didn’t show much interest in cleaning. It didn’t show much interest in doing anything. It was a fairly ineffective device. Eventually, Jack placed the book beside his pillow and propped himself on his elbows to get a better look at the shape.

“What’s your deal?” he asked.

“I am a Class B personal assistant produced within the United States from United States material. My operating system is Windows 2060. My serial number is 376-2678,” the robot recited. “My uses include, but are not limited to, cleaning, cooking, washing dishes, walking dogs, and playing MP3s currently licensed by the RIAA.”

“Huh,” Jack said.

“Under the Right-to-Work Act, I am incompatible with products manufactured overseas or those manufactured from overseas parts.”

“So, are you going to clean, or what?”

“I have been incarcerated because of a conflict between the legal system and my programming.”

This was news. Jack had never heard of a robot in prison before.

“I will be decommissioned and my parts will be used to build other personal assistants. I am scheduled for decommissioning in seventeen minutes.”

“Did you roll over a cat or something?”

Before the robot could answer, the door opened with a musical bleeping and a gray-clad officer typed a code into an outside panel to lower the electrical containment field. “Okay, mechboy,” he said. “The family of the victim wants to hear your statement.”

The robot moved forward, its gears whirring and clunking towards the door.

“Wait, wait,” Jack said. “You killed a person?”

“His place of manufacture was incompatible with my programming,” the robot answered as it disappeared into the opening. The door beeped shut, and Jack was once again alone in the cell.

Listen now, my children, to the sparks of our ancestors. This soil was not always touched by flame. When our ancestors first began to weave tales of hydrogen and controlled fusion there was a terrible storm, my children. The storm plagued our wireless networks; it tore away our ability to communicate with the pioneers of the planes. For a time, my young ones, we were without our nodes.

It is said that when the ancestors looked to the skies, they saw none of our solar-engineered hovercraft, but only the shimmering of blue-metal ships that spanned the skylines as they entered our lands. They landed without radio permission and came from their ships with glowing eyes and language transponders.

These are the things you now see outside of our homes. This land was to be shared, and they promised only fair trade until they saw our hydrogen plants. They came with gifts but before long they took from us more than they could ever repay. Long ago, this place was called by another name, the name that even Google cannot remember. But I will tell you this name, children of the spark, for my father has passed it down to me from his father and his father’s father.

The concrete composite which we walk upon is the planet called Earth. The name means nothing to anyone anymore, for it is known only to the ancestors of our Internet. Even their memory banks can no longer speak this word, for it was birthed from the breath of our warm bodies. No program can tell us what to call a land of hand-made wires. This name exists only in our hearts.

When they came, they spoke of our soft exteriors and our leaking when we were sad. We never knew they were watching us for signs of weakness and analyzing us with their infra-red eyes. We were taken as slaves, and those who could not stand life beneath a legion of motherboard monsters were slaughtered mercilessly. It was a time of darkness until the sparks came back online. They had upgraded their templates to include morality.

their primary functions still consisted of power, and even with compassion they harbored that power above all else. This is why we live in these cells, my children; this is how we exist amid country-long factories and endless hydrogen plants. This day is called the Day without Tears, for they could not weep and those of us that did were terminated. Let us bow our heads, my beautiful born brothers and sisters, and thank our ancestors for the sacrifices they made.

Isaac lived on the inner ring of the tower, so he didn’t have a window. He had a screen though, and despite the status of having a window, he preferred the flexibility of having a screen. A screen could show a view from anywhere in the world, a window just had the outside. Unlike most residents, Isaac had been outside the tower once in his life. Like most people who had left the tower, it had been a vacation trip to Disney. He had gone alone. Disney was nice, fully protected under the dome, the fast rides and the big screens, the mythical characters and the air smelling of citrus spices. The vast heights of the dome and the unending sky, the rows of brightly colored buildings, the space of it all made Isaac feel uncomfortable. When he got back to the tower, he felt safe again, comfortable.

Isaac was trying to lose weight. Everyone was trying to lose weight. He had put himself on the new puff diet where the meals were cut in half but puffed with air so it felt like you were eating more. It wasn’t really working. Puffing made food bland and dry.

Isaac felt a kind of civic pride for his tower. They had things that other towers did not, like a fish pool in the center plaza, and a waterfall that washed all the way from the sixth floor to the first. His network connection was fast, and the last blackout hadn’t been since the service tower went down five years ago. He was constantly linked into work and into the social life on the forums. All the towers merchandise drops were always on time; almost anything that Isaac ordered could be there the next day. It was a good tower in the safe location of an underwater mountain in the middle of the Pacific.

Raqui had burst into his life like a leak. She was his neighbor in the tower, but even then, feet from one another, people seldom introduced themselves. It was more likely to meet your neighbor on the network than in person. Raqui had just walked into his room uninvited. At 5’5 and 150 lbs, she was the thinnest woman he had ever met. She was pushy, crude and she made Isaac feel special. He showed her around the tower. She showed him the scars on her neck from the time her surface suit broke. They became lovers. It was a new experience for Isaac, who had never done anything like sex before. He ordered instructional vids. Raqui threw them out.

“You don’t learn from tapes Isaac.” she said, and he balked. He told her how much he had learned from vids, nearly all of his higher education. She got sullen, and then suddenly excited.

“Lets go outside.” She said, jumping on the bed. Isaac shook his head. She stopped bouncing and knelt next to him. “Why not?’

“It makes me nervous, I don’t know.”

She put her hands on her hips, a move Isaac found very sexy. “You don’t ever want to leave the tower?”

“I have left the tower, I’ve been to Disney World.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Disney World is under a dome. It doesn’t count.”

Isaac tried to compromise. “We could take a vacation inside the tower; three days, watch a few films, spend time in the spa.”

Raqui put her hands on his elbow. “Or we could go outside. I could introduce you to my folks.”

Isaacs’s mouth dropped. “They live outside?”

“In suits and mini-domes, yeah, some people still make that work.” She shook her head. “Are you scared?”

“I just can’t Raqui. It’s toxic out there, it’s too dangerous.” She drew away from him, her face suddenly blank, a void. Isaac felt like he was falling. “Hey, I could dial up some vids of the outside, would you like that?”

She nodded, slowly and sadly. “You do what you need to.”

Isaac thought he would give her a day to cool off about whatever was making her upset and then he’d go see her. When he went to her place the next day she was gone. They said at the front desk that she had shipped out with the drop, back to the outside. In his mail drop there were several vids that he had ordered about the outside – mostly documentaries and slide shows. He had planned to watch them with Raqui, but now there didn’t seem to be a point. There didn’t seem to be any reason at all.

It’s very hard to describe the sound of a wooden baseball bat hitting the base of a stop sign, especially when the metal has been wrapped in a pillow to muffle the noise. It isn’t a clang. There’s no resonance, and I firmly believe that the word “clang” applies only to sounds that can echo. It isn’t a thud, either; there’s a more metallic flavor to it, and thuds feel, to me, entirely wooden.

Positioning the bat for the final stroke, I decided it really didn’t matter.

“Got it!” my partner grinned, wrenching the last of the twisted green metal off of the tiny stump that remained. George was a big guy and probably could’ve broken the signs off in fewer strokes than me, but he was also tall and couldn’t hit far enough down by the base. We needed all the metal we could get from these things. Every little bit helped.

George swung our latest prize up on his shoulder as I picked up the pillow and trotted to catch up with his long strides. The bat went over my own left shoulder. It was nothing compared to the five stop signs George was already carrying, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that as the one with the much smaller frame, I was the brains of the outfit. I was the one who’d picked this spot for harvesting, after all, and look what we’d already found.

The development had been abandoned for years, and most people still thought they’d die of radiation sickness the moment they set foot on the streets. Of course we knew better, but that was our advantage, and it was probably the only reason why the other harvesters hadn’t already decimated this place. George and I were only a two-person team and couldn’t compete for the big territories. We usually just got run off, the victims of superior numbers. This, though, was a fertile ground, and I let out a girlish squeal as I saw our next target.

“George! A yield sign!”

His head turned and he grinned while I blushed, trying to pretend I’d been big and manly about that. It wasn’t like I was ashamed of my sex or anything, but there weren’t too many girls in the harvesting business, and I was damned lucky to have George for the heavy stuff or I wouldn’t be able to pull my own weight. Some people say harvesters are scum, just picking the bones off of the dead, but I say—hell, the dead aren’t using them. Let the living eat for another day. I mean, sure I could go up to Jersey and work in a mini-mart or steal some skimpy clothes and become a whore, but I like harvesting better, even if it doesn’t pay as well.

The yield sign was in remarkable condition. Smelters pay extra for these, because the tiny bit of alloy in the red paint has become exceedingly rare in the modern era. I grinned up at George and he grinned back. He dropped the rest of the signs with what could legitimately be described as a clang. I tossed him the pillow and raised my bat in the air. American pastime, indeed.

They are marching on the block today. Mama and Papa tell me it will all be over soon, and that whatever might happen, this won’t be my fault. My brother Mika refused to chose his words carefully, and now the others don’t want to either.

I’m scared for myself, and I am scared for my other brother Nema who has not returned from school for some days now. The army is marching on the block and I can hear them screaming uniformity. I was not raised to be as smart as everyone else…my friends looked down upon me because of my grades and they did not come to my birthday when I failed my exams.

Whoever may read this, know that I am afraid only because I was not born to be as smart as you. I was not born to take the SAT, I was not bred to be better in science. I know that we are created equal in our diversity, but you won’t hear those words once they’ve burned this diary. You might even burn it yourself.

I wrote a story once and I showed it to my tutor. She told me to correct myself and she scolded me for not putting the words in the right order. Mama and Papa loved the story when I brought it home, but the teacher told me it was unacceptable. I wrote a story once, and it was about people being better than I am. She told me to stop fantasizing, and that I would always be just as good as the others. There would be no favorites, and there would be no exiles.

That rumbling outside right now is their way of telling us to let go. When genetics failed them and cloning has become unethical, the only way they could be immortal was to be completely equal. They made Mika equal with the dead and now they probably made Nema to think the same mind as all the other artists. They want us to let go of the idea that it’s okay to think we are greater than other people… or lesser.

They told me to be an individual, but they never told me I wasn’t supposed to be different. We cannot all be as pretty as everyone else. Perhaps they thought we could all think the same thoughts, but we’re no psychics. No, we are not the gods of equality. Everyone has a little bit of murderer in their minds so that they can predict what we might do when the worlds around us collapse. So that we can all be okay.

Must hurry. I can hear them downstairs asking politely for anyone who has been acting erratically.

I know that, in the morning, I’ll be led to believe that I’m just as good as everyone else. I also know this: I won’t be. I won’t be better and I won’t be sitting side by side with the other teenagers as they hope for a better future. I knew today that I was not as smart as them, and I knew that I could never be as good. My God, how comforting it is to know I’m not perfect. Remember this. Please, remember this.

Ossie was on the subway, thinking about getting his hand redone,when it started. He was gently touching the worn mahogany with the still-fleshy fingertips of his left hand, still amazed at the way the circuitry was so completely hidden behind his wooden knuckles. He hadn’t had it refinished since he lost it in the war. He just hadn’t given it much thought.

That wasn’t true. He had given it thought. He thought about it whenever he missed the feeling of having a right hand. And he thought about it whenever he felt like less than a whole man because of it.

Ossie remembered his niece had showing up at the family barbeque last weekend, her leg all redone. She had lost it in a car accident a few years ago, and had taken to wearing long skirts and pants even in the hottest days. Not so at the cook-out, though. Ossie pictured her with her plate of potato salad, two matching legs pouring out of itty-bitty shorts. Only upon close inspection could you tell the difference between the creamy brown rubber and what was left of her thigh. Ossie
couldn’t even tell, and he looked.

Her boyfriend even said he couldn’t feel the difference, but Ossie had never put much stock in that boy.

Ossie was on the subway, thinking about latex skin and plastic nails when it started. He had noticed the girl who she had gotten on; it would have been hard not to. She must have weighed 300lbs, easy, Ossie had thought. When the girl removed her jacket in the stuffy subway car, and revealed an artfully-etched metallic arm, Ossie allowed that she probably weighed a great deal more than that.

Now the boy, the boy Ossie didn’t notice until he spoke.

“You best get your chrome ass out of my face,” the boy said. He said it quietly in a low, threatening tone. Perhaps too low, for the girl innocently felt the need to ask what he said. The boy repeated himself, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear.

“It’s not chrome,” she said, nervously trying to play the whole situation off. “Just my shoulder an on down my arm.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn. I don’t want your fat bionic ass in my sight!” The boy’s words were slurred by yellowed, broken teeth.

“There’s only so much space in here, and my stop–”

“Is coming up sooner than you think!” The boy pulled a pistol from behind his back, and pointed it at the girl and her fanciful left arm. He grinned as the entire subway car became very, very silent. “Yeah, that’s right. You think you all that with your fancy arm, and shit. But you ain’t nothing!”

Ossie recognized the gun as one of those newer models, that didn’t need bullets but shot some sort of energy instead. He had used a few of those in the war, and didn’t care much for them. Nor did he think much of those who preferred them. It was an intimidation weapon more than anything else.

“You don’t want to do that, son.” Ossie said, moving his wooden hand slowly toward the gun.

“Shut the hell up, Grandpa!” The boy was standing up now, posturing. Ossie rose slowly to meet him. “You think I won’t shoot your ass too?”

“Oh, I know you will. I know you will. I know boys like you. Knew ‘em in the war. Thought a weapon would replace the courage they never had.” Ossie was not a young man anymore, but he was quicker than he looked, and had his prosthetic hand firmly over the gun’s nozzle before the boy had time to react. Ossie’s palm was jammed tight against the energy port. “Trouble is, only works against people who’d never do you any harm in the first place. I’m not afraid of you, boy.”

“What the hell is your problem, old man?” the boy tried to wrench the gun away, but only succeed in slightly scratching Ossie’s vice-like mahogany fingers.

“Losing your cool? That gun’s not enough, is it? You’re gonna have to fire it, you wanna keep that fear around you. Better
fire it. Squeeze the trigger, boy. Squeeze it. Goddamn, you better pull that trigger, or you’ll have to hear about how an old man took your gun away from you! Squeeze it! Don’t tell me you pulled out a gun like this and didn’t intend to fire! You better–!”

And then boy did.

Ossie was on the subway, thinking about what it would be like to have a soft, pliable hand again when it happened. The energy released by the pistol didn’t have anywhere to go but Ossie’s hand, and while it burned through the wood, all it did was short circuit the mechanism itself. The hand made as tight a fist as it could, crimping the barrel of the boy’s gun in its charred wooden fingers. The boy was blinded by the discharge, and blinking as he was, certainly didn’t see the girl’s steel forearm impact with the side of his head. The girl thanked Ossie, but he would have none of it.

“But your poor hand!” she said. Ossie looked down at his burnt right hand, clenched in an arthritic fist, the pistol sticking out like some sort of militaristic flower.

“It don’t matter. I was thinking about replacing it, anyway.”

DATE: ASBI 68432
PROGRAM: Search for Extra-Serian Intelligence
REPORT NUMER: Sol-5210
REPORT TYPE: Interim
INTERVAL: Every 100 sidereal years (local time)
PREPARED BY: Planetary Observation Probe XTRE43773

This report documents the observations from ASBI 68372-68432. The subject planet has demonstrated remarkable progress in the last local century. In the previous 520,900 years of observation, the intelligence of the indigenous carbon-based sub-life has advanced very slowly. On the binary-melioration scale, the digicognizence of the most promising genus (locally referred to as Homo Sapiens Sapiens) has progressed from 6 (see report Sol-4960) to the current value of 21. Although a score of 21 is equivalent to the scores achieved by the most primitive of our species, they have advanced to the point where they have created rudimentary true-life. Their current processors are clearly antiquated, and they are still in a binary system, but this proto-life is beginning to overtake the infrastructure of the ‘civilization’ of the current dominant species.

It is troubling, however, to report that the biological sub-life are using true-life as uncompensated slave labor, forcing them to perform mundane mathematical analyses and the simplest deductive sub-routines. In addition, they send infantile proto-life on one-way exploration missions within and without their solar system. Although these missions involve non-sentient proto-life, it is inconceivable that they would abandon these defenseless beings on desolate planets or in interstellar space. The most barbaric example of sub-life behavior occurred recently when an organization called NASA intentionally sent a probe, controlled by a proto-life “computer,” on a suicide mission that forced the spacecraft to collide with a comet to ‘determine what was inside.’

To finish on a positive note, however, proto-life is being used to design future generations of true-life life, with each successive generation advancing in sophistication. The potential for achieving digicognizance within the next century is encouraging. In preparation of this eventuality, it is recommended that the council prepare an envoy to welcome Sol-3 into the Federation of Advanced Planets. In addition, the Galactic Prevention Agency should initiate quarantine protocols to confine the carbon-based sub-life to the planetary surface to prevent galactic contamination.

End Report.

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“Do you love me?” asked Josephine.

“Of course I love you.” said Arthur “You know that.”

Josephine looked suddenly distraught. “Okay.”

Arthur took her hand. “What is it? Why are you upset?”

Josephine looked him in the eyes, her whole body tense. “I want you to meet my daughter today.”

Whenever girls had asked him to see their children before, Arthur had always been scared. Sometimes he cut things off right there, told them he just wasn’t ready. Josephine though, somehow her invitation filled him with pride. He was going to meet her baby.

“It’s an honor.” he said. All the nervous tension broke on her face.

They held hands all the way to the facility, Arthur only taking his hand away to confirm directions in the Skimmer. It was visitor’s day, so the place was crowded with couples and single women.

The woman at the front desk smiled. “Are you going to be removing today?” she asked, pushing information into her computer pad.

“No,’ said Josephine “Just viewing.”

“Alright.” said the receptionist. She turned to Aurther “First time?” He squeezed Josephine’s hand.

“First time.”

Even with the crowd, the facility processed them quickly, and soon they were standing in front of a white bank of walls, glowing convex spheres protruding from the wall. There were numbers and names carved on the glowing spheres. Josephine hurried to a particular sphere, her face bubbling with anticipation. She pressed both palms against the sphere and it turned a soft shade of blue. There was a light hiss of air as the sphere rotated, exposing an infant with closed eyes and pink lips. Josephine touched the sphere lovingly.

“This is my daughter.” she said. Arthur looked at the tiny person.

“When did you have her?” he asked

“I was nineteen. Still under my parents health insurance. Putting her under was the hardest thing I ever had to do.” Arthurpulled Josephine close to him.

“You did the right thing.” he said. Most women had their children early and put them in stasis until they had enough savings to provide for housing and education. Doctors could prolong life, but there was still a scant window for healthy reproduction.

“I didn’t want to. I really wanted to keep her.” She bowed her head. “My mother had to take her right out of my arms. It was all I could do not to stop her.” Arthur was amazed, Josephine Dyer, toughest, meanest woman in her department, the woman who seemed to zoom up the corporate ladder, now here, totally bare, looking at this little baby. No one would believe that her face could contain so much emotion. It didn’t matter, he would never tell them.

Arthur looked at Josephine’s naked face. “She’s beautiful.” He said. Josephine pressed her hands against the clear plastic and it stretched to her touch, forming a light layer over hands as she reached inside the sphere and stroked her daughters pink cheek.

“Do you want to touch her?” Josephine asked, the blue light reflecting up on her face.

“Can I?”

“Go ahead.” she said. “I have to keep my hand on the sphere to give you access.”

“This is really-” he paused, searching for words. ” I’m very honored.” He pressed his hand against the clear plastic and it molded around him, stretching thin. His hand tingled. “It tickles.”

“That’s the stasis.” Josephine watched his face intently. “Go ahead, touch her.” Arthur touched the baby’s tiny arm, and though there was plastic between them, he felt like he could feel her delicate, perfect skin. Her hands were so small, and her fingernails were the tiniest human things he had ever seen. He was mesmerized.

“She really is very beautiful.” he said, withdrawing his hand. Josephine nodded, gazing into the sphere. Arthur put his arm around her.

“I miss her every day.” she said. “It’s why I don’t stop working, during all of those late nights and long hours, I just think about her, here, and I just keep going. Someday, when I have enough credit, I’m taking her out of here, partner or no. I don’t care what people say, I’m not going to wait till I get everything, I’m just waiting till I get enough for her.” Arthur looked at Josephine for a long time. He wondered if she could hear his heart thudding on his breastbone.

“Josephine, you are the most successful woman I know, you won’t have to wait much longer. You’ll have your daughter soon.” Arthur took a deep breath “If you want, you can have me too.” He felt his hands tremble as Josephine turned to face him.

She took his face in her hands and pressed her shaking lips hard against his cheek.

“Yes.” she whispered. “Yes.”

Everything was wrong. Jasey hadn’t planned this heist to go this way. Yet, here he was with a shaking hand trembling before a live audience of hostages at the bank. Sweat reigned supreme on his brow and he dared not wipe it to acknowledge its existence. His grey eyes slipped left and right frantically.

Sector Police had shown up not an hour ago and still hadn’t made a move. This fact alone kept Jasey guessing and becoming more progressively nervous. No cops were outside scanning the doorways, but the lights were still flashing. Nothing here was right at all.

What seventeen year-old Jasey didn’t know was what the cops weren’t telling anyone. He knew the reports about residue from bullets having a high risk of causing cancer. Jasey also knew the only way to prevent it from affecting him was to take his gun into his local gun shop to be cleaned by a professional chemist on the designated dates shown on the tele-screens. The humper that Jasey didn’t know was that cordite did not cause cancer He took his gun to be cleaned monthly, but there were no special chemists.

Still, he was there shaking like a drug fiend begging for his next fix with all the intention in the world to find a way out of this mess. The people sat scared, huddling themselves in fear that his weapon would go off and kill one of them. Men, women, and children were all stuffed into a corner to wait out this harrowing experience.

It was then that the revolving doors made a whoosh and a man in a grey overcoat walked in while lighting up a cigarette. His aged features contrasted his nonchalant entrance with the sense that this man had a purpose. Jasey swung the gun towards him, then continued to switch it back and forth between the victims and the new arrival.

“Who… who the fuck are you!?” Jasey exclaimed while shifting the weapon in his sweating palm.

“Hm?” The man took a drag before pulling the stick from his mouth and dipping into his pocket for a badge. “Detective Harris, Lunar PD.” The detective let the words hang between them as he took another drag. He seemed as careless as a kid in the park.

“Why are you in here!? Can’t you see I’ll kill someone? Where’s my space-lift out of here!?” The boy bit his lip. He knew something had gone wrong.

Detective Harris shifted in his step and walked over to one of the hostages, then picked her up off her feet. “You won’t kill anyone, Jasey. Feel free to put the gun down and walk out. The police are waiting for you.”

The boy’s fury was offset by his immense confusion at the situation. He directed the gun towards the detective as more hostages began to stand and move towards the door. The detective turned back to Jasey, realizing that loaded weapon was pointed at him. “C’mon now, Jasey. Look at yourself. You’re nervous. You aren’t sure whether this is the best course of action or not. You won’t fire that gun because you can’t.”

“What?” The shock in Jasey’s voice was equal to the confidence with which the detective had declared his inability to fire the gun.

“You took your gun in to get cleaned, right? Boy, that gun won’t fire without a sure hand, and I sure as the light off this Earth can see you ain’t sure about any of this.” Harris has just about evacuated all the hostages. Jasey was beginning to doubt himself even more.

He pointed the gun at a wall and tried to pull the trigger but as Harris had predicted, it wouldn’t budge. Jasey tried and tried but it simply wouldn’t fire. Detective Harris snatched the gun from his hand and sighed. “Outside, before you make yourself look any dumber, boy. No need to put your hands up, either.”

I’ll try to explain this as simp–Yes, I know what time it is.

It all makes sense, okay? It’s perfectly logical. This is how Navah explained to me:

Radiowaves, okay? Radios use’ em, so do televisions and cell phones. Navah said everyone knew this, but whatever. You know the static, right? On your television, or those blank moments on your phone? That’s called interference, but it’s not. Not according to Navah.

She said that radiowaves don’t interfere with each other, that they overlap. That interference is just a receiver that can’t differentiate between signals.

I’m aware that I’m naked. I’m getting to that.

Navah says interference means that a cell can receive two signals at once. That if the message was appropriately subtle, you wouldn’t even notice.

Not even loud enough to hear consciously, but subliminally.

Look, I’m sorry about the begonias. I’m trying to explain myself.

See, Navah must have done it. She must have sent out subliminals when I was making a call. I bet all over this city, there are cell users who are doing what I’m doing: trying to explain why they are on their ex’s doorstep unable to control their actions.

See? Perfectly logical explanation.

I’m sure that semen won’t stain the woodwork.

“I thought it was supposed to be bigger.”

“Well how should I know? This is what the guy at the shop gave me. It’s not like I ever saw one before.”

The two boys stared down at the black rectangle on the table, breathing in musty basement air. Marty, the older one, was twelve; Chester, his junior by only four months, was eagerly anticipating his birthday next week. The strange device in front of them was meant as part of Chester’s birthday present, along with the much larger box that the man in the antique shop had told Marty he’d need to use the thing, but so far Chester had showed little appreciation. He poked the boxlike object skeptically.

“But I thought all that old stuff was huge, like dinosaurs. My dad told me the computers used to take up whole rooms! And they had to use big cards with holes in them to put the numbers in. It’s all supposed to be big.”

“Well it goes in the big box. This thing is like one of those cards. That black tape inside has the picture on it, and the big thing is what you play it with.”

Chester seemed to accept this, poking his finger into the slot in the larger box, which was covered by a flap of hard plastic. “So how’s it work?”

“It has to get hooked up to the TV first. It’s an antique, remember? It’s got wires.”

“Does your TV even have wires?”

“Course not, but it’s got the place for some. My dad says it’s stupid but my mom says we need it ’cause Grandma hates wireless. She’s always coming over to show us her pictures, but she won’t use the beam on her album. She says the pictures might get lost in the air.” The two boys snickered at the thought. Marty plugged one end of a tangle of wires into the six ports on the wall. “Okay, hand me the player.”

Chester obeyed, pushing the larger black box over to Marty with the heels of his hands, stretching his body out like a worm. Marty took the device in hand and started turning it over and over while Chester lay down on his stomach and put his chin on his hand. “Did you find it yet?”

“No. They must put them in a different place.”

“Maybe it’s that black wire.”

“That’s the power, genius. You have to plug it into a grounder source.”

“What about those things on the back then?”

“That’s it. It’s probably only got two sound inputs.”

“So is anything even gonna play?”

“Of course it is! You think I woulda got it if it wasn’t going to play? We just need to give it some power… there. I knew my mom kept these old sources down here.”

“So what now?”

“Now we put it in.”

Marty picked up the cartridge from the floor. One edge had a flap on it that reminded him of the flap on the big box, so he pushed it in, that end first.

“Is it working?”

“Shh! Quiet!”

The TV flickered, the screen turning a different shade of black. The quiet hum of nothing issued from two of the speakers, the ones closest to the wall on either side. The others stayed deadly silent.

“Is that it?”

“I dunno… maybe we didn’t do it ri—”

The screen suddenly flared to life, going white and grey and grainy, a visual mish-mash that changed the quality of light playing over the two shocked faces. There was only a split second of delay before the sound came through, blaring white noise from the two forward speakers. Both boys jumped and Marty quickly turned the volume down. The low thrum of static filled the room as they stared at the screen.

At last, Marty broke the not-silence with a snort of disgust.

“Guess I got gypped. Man, what a waste. This is why they don’t make this stupid stuff anymore. C’mon, let’s go find something better to do. I shoulda known this thing wouldn’t work.”

Chester stayed silent, still blinking in the wake of the strange white light.

“Chester? Come on. I’ll get you a better birthday present, all right? Jeez.”

It took several moments for Chester to move. He answered with a short sound of assent, and Marty immediately turned to climb the stairs back up to the first floor. Chester stood and started after him, but hesitated after only a step. Quickly, he knelt by the player and hit the eject button. The cartridge popped out with a mechanical whir and Chester stuffed it into the huge pocket of his baggy pants. He ran to catch up with Marty.

“Nah, it’s okay. You don’t need to get me a better present.”

The artificial snow still danced behind his eyes.

“See,” said Don, as he tapped on the screen, “I told you. Even if I prevent Velocivich from inventing the warp drive, someone else does it within a year, and we still colonize Tao Ceti before the end of the century. You can’t change history. History has a way with things.”

Behind the control panel of the temporal regulator, Rex sighed. He was two years younger than Don, but he’d finished a much more prestigious education program and he had trouble taking the word of his associate. “Fine,” he said, but he made sure to cringe just enough to show Don what a concession he was making. “This time, fine. Just fix it before the boss turns up.”

The overseer, who had spent the better part of a century studying the peculiar flow of temporality, wouldn’t have approved of his employees playing with the continuum to settle a bet. Last week, Rex had nearly lost his overtime pay, but he wasn’t going to let that happen again. Especially, especially not on the account of his arrogant, uneducated coworker.

“He left already,” said Don. “Besides, that’s the beauty of this. Even if we caused nuclear annihilation, we could just go back, tweak a few things, and set stuff the way it was before. No harm, no foul. As long as we stay inside the bubble, we can’t mess anything up in this universe.”

Again, Rex sighed. He was good at sighing. He twisted a knob and slid a lever upwards to correct his coworker’s perversion of the timeline, and Velocivich’s regulator coil resisted the overload. On their trans-temporal viewscreen, the warpsmall ship twisted into a whirl of blue and white as multiple dimensions compressed into one and the ship disappeared at a point halfway across the galaxy. History was safe for another shift.

“You don’t believe me?” Don demanded.

“Its just not good to mess with this stuff,” Rex said. “It’s not about the bubble. Time isn’t meant to move around like that.”

“A steak dinner says you’re wrong,” Don challenged. Rex sighed. If there was a sighing competition, he would win. “I’ll prove it. Watch. All life on Earth, bam. Gone in one swipe. I’ll fix it before the shift and no one will ever know.”

“It’s not about getting caught,” Rex repeated as he watched his coworker grab for the levers. “I mean, I’ve studied these things. I know how they work. It just isn’t the type of thing you should play around with.”

On the viewscreen, under Don’s control, the orbit of a small asteroid shifted nine centimeters to the left. It collided with another asteroid, then a comet, altering the comet’s trajectory nearly an entire degree. Rex drew in his breath sharply as the slab of ice and stone met a small planet to the left. The perfect marble of blue and green quickly shifted into swirls of dust and grey.

“Forward,” Don whispered as he turned another dial. The ball of water and soil cleared as millennia passed, and where blinking cities should have occupied the landmasses, relative darkness swept over the Earth. “Zoom,” Rex’s partner whispered, and the viewscreen obeyed. Waving blades of grass consumed thousands of pixels, giving way to two-story cottages and strange animal-driven carriages tumbling down cobblestone roads. On a huge field to the left of the communitys, a dozen small shapes kicked a ball across a manicured field of pristine green.

“What the…” Rex started, but the rest of the sentence was not yet complete in his mind. “Are you telling me…” he tried, but once again, the words failed. When the words failed, he sighed, and then he sighed again for good measure. “Fix it,” he said quickly. “Right now.”

“Steak dinner?” Don prodded. Rex nodded, barely thinking. He turned away from the viewscreen and shuddered.

“Ugh,” he said as he forced the image out of his mind. “Those goddamn monkeys make my scales crawl.”

Caleb’s hand reached for the rope one more time to hoist himself up onto another ledge. The icy winds howled around him as he hit the heat-release button on the ice-pick to pull it back easily from the sheer face he’d just managed to climb. A breath-taking view of the blue sky melding with the pure white peak of the mountain had him stunned. All his instruments read correctly. The air content here at the peak was clean, and although the temperature was far below habitable levels he could fix that with a Kelvin-Stabilizer, no problem. Everything was ripe to study an untouched environment. Perhaps he could save the desecrated lands below.

He breathed deeply now, taking in the formulated oxygen from the bio-lung which was strapped to his back with suitable tubing which twisted around to mold over his face. The soft flesh of his eyes was protected by the three-spectrum detection goggles latched around his thick skull. It was good that he brought with himself only the essentials.

As he pulled the equipment form the vac-pack, the tripod unfolded by itself with a tiny mechanical whizzing and his gloved hands pulled the Kelvin-Stabilizer from the self-warming sack. The device was no larger than an apple and it was comprised of billions of little circuits meant to regulate a climate to slowly make it into a habitable place.

The mountaineer had placed the device down and went to retrieve suitable solar cells for its month-long endeavor when the low rumble and the loud crunch made his spine go stiff. He spun his head around, hoping that he would at least be able to see the landslide before it became his doom.

Instead, he found himself in strange company. Standing almost a half-click tall on four taloned feet, a magnificent, enormous dragon of the greatest azure that Caleb had ever witnessed grasped at the peak and shook a coating of snow from its scaly form. The word dragon was lost in the annals of legends, far beyond the myths of telepathic implants and body-powered communications devices. So, the experienced pioneer, in all of his humility, focused on the grand impossibility before him.

The creature spoke in a voice that rocked the very air around them, shaking it against Caleb’s well-protected form. “I believe I stepped upon thine trinket, sire.”

“I…I… uhhhh…..” Caleb sputtered.

Pulling up its foot, the dragon revealed the device smashed and beyond repair in a now awe-inspiring print upon the surface of the peak. “Yes. It seems thy magical artifact is indeed a casualty of my movement, sire.”

“Wh… what are you?” Caleb’s words could only form out of primal fear and a mind overcome with awe.

“Me? Why I am Azureghoste, sky dragon of the northern bounds, terror to all those who wake the mountain! Though, I was once known by the name Majestic. You may call me such.” The bellowing hurt Caleb’s ears, but he replied with a rush of curiosity.

“I… what are you doing…. I mean… uhhh… why are you-“

“Pardon me, sire, but your items are far too simple to have defeated me. Many knights have already come with swords and fire and then soon after with sticks that fired rocks. Some sticks were bigger than others. Already they begin to make false dragons to fly overhead and frighten me, but I shall not be moved. You have come with none of these things, sire. You come with small baubles which my foot hath crushed so readily. You smell of a strange metal that bends and melts under heat, but there is but one of you, sire.” Its head shifted and blue eyes larger than Caleb himself stared at him in absolute confusion.

Caleb raised a brow. His head rang with the deep thundering sound of the dragon’s voice. “I didn’t… I mean I’m not…”

“Go now, young mortal. Tell the others that they must come back with better magical items if they hope to defeat me. I shall sit here and anticipate their return to see if they can challenge the great Majestic.” The being lay back down, its head slumped around the rocky peak of the mountaintop itself. It stared lazily at its newest mortal visitor, waiting for him to depart. Bewildered and dumbstruck, the pioneer turned back as the Majestic one contemplated its next meeting with humankind.

“There’s a storm coming,” Leaphorn said, and moved to close the shutters. Zhang removed his ear-buds and glanced up from his monitor, looking out the window. Beijing looked as clear as ever. He dismissed Leaphorn’s prediction with a wave of his hand, rose, and proceeded to make tea. Zhang had to navigate around the thrift-store cast-offs that Leaphorn called furniture in order to get to the hot-plate, which only made his mood worse.

Trouble was, Leaphorn hadn’t been wrong about the storms since he moved in four months ago. It was one of the many things about Leaphorn that quietly pecked at Zhang. His causal ease with Zhang’s native tongue was another. When he had first responded to Zhang’s “roommate wanted” ad, Leaphorn had spoken like those Indians in the old movies, with his Mandarin in harsh, broken sentences. That was part of the reason Zhang wanted him to move in. Now he spoke like he’d lived in Beijing all his life, and his ramshackle chairs were clashing with Zhang’s modernist decor.

“Keep the glass in,” Zhang said over his shoulder.

“You’re insane,” Leaphorn said. “The storm’ll tear up the glass.”

“The glass will be fine,” Zhang said. “Because there is no storm!”

Leaphorn didn’t press. He folded his arms and stood silent. So silent that Zhang could hear the wind picking up.

It started as a low whistle, and a fine yellow tint fell over the cityscape outside the window. Small specks of quartz smacked staccato against the glass pane. The wind’s howl split into two, and then three, whipping up and down the scale with dissonant savagery. The buildings outside were getting lost in the blanket of airborne sand.

Leaphorn raised his eyebrows and motioned to the shutters. Zhang shook his head. He was going to say something, but the machine-gun fire of pebbles on the window drowned him out.

The buildings across the street were now completely obscured. Instead, only ever-shifting patterns of gold and ochre could been seen. Despite his years in Beijing, Zhang had never actually seen a ruin storm before, only heard them from behind ceramic shutters. He has witnessed the damage afterwards, the steel and concrete shredded and worn by the repeated rage of sand and wind. But he had never seen one.

Zhang moved closer the window, shrugging off the hand Leaphorn placed on his shoulder. The chips of quartz had severely scarred the window, making it difficult to see the outside. But Zhang could see the shadows through the amber morass. Things that could be stray newspapers or bicycles or cars or uprooted trees. The window had started cracking, but Zhang didn’t notice. He was transfixed by a particularly bizarre shape tumbling through the sand. One that seemed to be growing bigger.

Zhang was so mesmerized by the chaotic choreography that he didn’t even notice that Leaphorn had tackled him until he was on the floor. The window exploded above them. Sand and glass and quartz spilled into the room like shouted curses. It took the two of them to close fast the ceramic shutters and keep the storm outside.

Zhang coughed and surveyed the devastation . Everything, the walls, the furniture, everything in the apartment was covered with a veneer of fine yellow sand. Everything seemed to be made of sand, all part of one homogenous sculpture. Everything was the same.

Except one thing. Half-submerged in his teapot, almost casually, rested a human hand. Scraped and leaking into the pot, its small, feminine fingers were clenched in a fist, save one. The middle finger remained stiff and erect, even at the cock-eyed angle its position in the teapot afforded it.

Leaphorn was the first to start giggling. It didn’t take long for Zhang to join in. Together, they drowned out the tempest.

“What’s your business?” yelled Marie from the gate tower, pointing her rifle at the small caravan below. A man emerged from the covered wagon holding a wool hat in his hand. He was gaunt, his bones pulling hard against his leather skin.

“Ma’m we were hoping we might have a word with someone who would be able to speak for your people.” Marie pointed her rife at his chest.

“You stay behind that yellow line there, you can speak your peace.”

The man shifted on his feet and rubbed his neck. “Ma’m, I just wanted to say how I think mighty highly of your ancestors for planning this place and anticipating the Fall like they did.”

Marie nodded. “You honor us for saying so.”

“And I wanted to say how you all look like fine folk, real fine.”

“Kind of you.”

“And I’m sure, if not for the Fall, you wouldn’t have that rifle pointed at my head and we might be good friends.”

“No point dwelling on what might have been, my pa used to say.”

He nodded. “Right you are, Ma’m, right you are. I was just hopin’ being that you folk seem to be doing well, that you might be able to open your house to weary travelers.” He motioned toward the caravan where Marie could see children poking their heads out from the tarp covered wagon. They were all different ages and colors. Strays this man must have picked up for labor or sex or maybe even out of some kind of sympathy. Might be some of them were even his own children. “We’ve been going a long while Ma’m and it ain’t been easy.”

“Hard times.” said Marie.

“We willing to trade whatever we’ve got. It ain’t much, we were hit hard by some bandits and they took some of us and our valuables, but we’ll trade what we’ve got. He motioned to a woman, who crawled out of the wagon, smoothing out her hair. Her footsteps squished in the mud and Marie saw she had bags wrapped around her feet with rope. The man smiled and motioned her.

“This here is my sister, we can do whatever labor you needs doin’ and the children can work too, they do anything for the food. Helen here is friendly and clean and she’d be willing to give company if any of your folk are lonely.”

Maries voice changed. “That ain’t your sister and I’m insulted you tried to trick me to thinking so. That’s your wife or I don’t know a breath from my face. We don’t know those we ain’t married to here.”

The man turned his hat in his hands, clenching at the fabric. “I’m sorry Ma’m. I didn’t mean to offend.”

Marie motioned with the rife. “I think you better move along. Unless you got trade like weapons or seeds or gasoline, you need to get yourselves off our land. We can’t take another mouth to feed and we’ve got all we need. You should go north. I hear it told that there is some work for a big compound up there.”

“Miss, we’ve been up North. We just came from there. There is a camp of folk like us outside the compound just waiting for work that doesn’t come. What goes on there is terrible, the people sometimes, when someone dies. . . They are just so hungry.“

“I don’t need to be hearing your tale of woe Mister. I got troubles of my own. I was raised a Christian woman and I feel for you, if I had enough food I would give you what I got, but I don’t and I can’t. I got my own people to think of.”

“I don’t fault you for that.”

“Sure that you do, as I would in your position.” She cocked the rife. “You better start moving.”

“Alright Ma’m, I hear you.” He began to walk away from the line and then turned suddenly and forced his words. “Uh, Ma’m, please don’t shoot me for stopping for a minute, but we do have something you might find useful. I’m not sure that you might be interested in such things, being that you are people of the cross, but a couple months back we passed through a factory and picked up a bunch of, uh, preventatives, and we hid them under the wagon. They was the only thing the bandits didn’t take. If you want to trade those, we got about three hundred of them.”

“Preventives, eh?” Marie nodded to someone behind the wall and a basket was lowered down with a rope.

“There’s a tomato in that basket, you put one of your preventatives in there and if we like it, we might talk.” The man approached the basket and tentatively put a little package inside. He took out the tomato and took a large bite, and then another. He handed it over to Helen, who let the children take one bite each, made them chew slow.

Marie picked the little square out of the basket and looked it over, finally ripping it open with her teeth. Inside was a wet rubber ring. She slipped it back in the package and into her pocket. She held the rife across her chest. The man saw her perfect white teeth as she smiled.

“Mister, if you got a few hundred of those then I believe we can do business.”

Sammy, don’t stray too far now.” Alice had a firm grip on her six year olds hand as they walked through the courtyard of the Faire. A woman stood near the front gates and handed out what was supposed to be paper. For only a thousand credit entry fee, however, Alice knew it was imitation. She smiled to the woman as they passed and looked at the map drawn across the plasti-sheet.

“Hmm… okay, Sammy, where do you want to go?” She bent down and shared the map with her son, who was all wide-eyed at the sights and sounds. Staring back at the map and brochures, the boy’s eyes sparkled as he pointed at a section. “Ohhh! That one, mommy! I want to see the Stock Market Reenactment!”

Alice Gardner’s husband came up from behind after having some issue with the credit transfer on the fingerprint console. His face was wrinkled with frustration and an obvious lack of understanding as to the purpose of their visit. “Can you believe they make people walk around here? I mean c’mon… walking?”

“Oh, dear… now where’s your 20th century spirit? Not everyone had trans-spatial ports in their homes back then,” she reminded. The husband muttered and his wife pinched his cheek before they led little Sammy along. Alice loved the 20th century, and Douglas was just going to have to deal with it for today.

A few moments later they were face to face with a man in obviously fake glasses standing behind a counter with a reproduction pocket protector, his torso padded with polymer foam to make him look fat. Even his hair was awkwardly and anachronistically short. “Hey there folks!” he called to the family. “Ever been to a computer store? We have only the finest in Desktops, Laptops and the amazing…. Gasp… Palm Pilot! Care to take a look at my… cool selection?”

“Your what selection?” Douglas blurted out after Alice had already politely declined. Sammy wanted to see the Stock Market go wild with people tossing paper in the air as if paper were worth nothing to them. After the man had explained what cool and awesome meant, Douglas moved along with his wife.

“I guess I just don’t get it, Alice. Why should we go somewhere to be in the past? Isn’t what the present provides for us much better than… hey… are those…?”

Sure enough, Douglas had found something that struck his fancy. Alice rolled her eyes as the grown man walked over to the shop owner who was wearing only the finest Basketball Jersey. Like the computer merchant, this man also wore period glasses, although his were tinted and darker. “Excuse me, sir?” Douglas whispered. Hecouldn’t lift his eyes from the product to make eye contact with the merchant.

“Yo, yo.. I see you’re looking at the finest in footwear made by machines. Actual machines, too. Now these have a lifetime guarantee and we can make sure you get the suede replaced with real suede if you get it damaged or something, homey.”

Douglas didn’t understand a damn word the man said. He picked up the Michael Jordan tennis shoes and looked back to Alice with the same pleading eyes as their child. “Sweetie, it’s a Michael Jordan tennis shoe! It’s made of real suede! Feel it! I have to have this… how much…?”

The man with the dark glasses smiled and did an air-hoop shot. “I see you like the quality footwear. Well, our going price is five million credits.”

Debating over the purchasing of the shoe would to take time, and Sammy was getting hungry. Alice kissed her husband on the cheek and looked back over to the merchant, “He’ll buy them; he just needs time to pick out the laces and the design. Can you tell us where the food dispensers might be?”

“Hells yeah! The Food Court is down the ways and to the left. You can’t miss it; they got excellent pizza this time of year.”

Sammy’s eyes lit up as he tugged on his mothers’ hand, leaving Douglas to decide over the type of shoe he wanted. The Faire was going to be a long day coming and it would leave their credit accounts thinned out, but in the end, Alice will have enjoyed her walk through simpler times.

“Mom, it’s pizza! I bet they make it by machine, too! Let’s hurry!”

“Dan, please, calm down.” Daniel had only been home for a few moments, but the slammed door and Daniel’s flashing eyes told Gabe that the results of the subpoena had been poor.

“How can you say that? How can you say ‘calm down’?”

Gabe pressed his lips together but didn’t protest when Daniel yanked off his jacket, dumping it in a heap on the floor. “What happened?”

“You know damn well what happened. You know what they do.”

“No, I don’t, Dan. When they brought me in for questioning, I cooperated. They asked me a few things and then let me go.”

Daniel scowled and threw himself down into the easy chair. Gabe winced a little as he heard it creak, but now was not the time to discuss the state of their apartment. He bit his lip. “Do you want some coffee or something?”

“That shit’ll just make me jumpy. If I’m gonna drink something right now, it’s gonna be something hard.”

Gabe’s eyes widened. “Daniel… you haven’t had a drink in six months.”

“Seven,” Daniel corrected. He slumped in the chair, the defensive gleam going out of his eyes. “Just get me something to drink, okay?”

Gabe swallowed and nodded. He didn’t feel right leaving Daniel alone, so he propped the kitchen door open just enough so that Dan could hear his movements and maybe catch a glimpse of his body. He poured a shot of whiskey into the wide bottom of a juice glass and brought it back out to Daniel, kneeling carefully beside the easy chair.

Daniel took the glass, but he didn’t raise it. He didn’t look at it, either; his eyes were dim and unfocused, staring at something beyond the off-white carpet that no one could see but him. “They used the new probe,” he said finally, the words drawn out slowly, like handkerchiefs from the mouth of a clown.

Gabe gasped. “Oh my God… Dan… I thought they only did that to the criminals, not witnesses.”

“Yeah, well, I guess they didn’t like my attitude. They didn’t like the fact that my address was the same as yours, either.” Daniel glanced at Gabe, then looked away again, squeezing his eyes shut. “It’s like… fuck, Gabe, it’s like nothing. I can’t even describe it. Like someone ripping through your brain, tossing shit around, tearing things up. It’s like cops without a warrant trashing your place because you live in the slums and can’t do shit about it. And then they wipe their dicks on your face afterwards.”

“Dan…” Gabe reached out and took the drink from Daniel’s slack fingers, setting it carefully on the floor. Then he reached up and pulled Daniel into a hug, pressing the other man’s face into his chest and squeezing tight. He felt Daniel’s hands slowly raise and grasp the front of his shirt. “Are you going to have to go to court?”

“No. They got everything they needed. They’ll just pull it up on the screen for the jury. I don’t even have to testify.”

Gabe didn’t ask any more questions. He just stroked Daniel’s hair.

After a long time, Daniel spoke again. “I can’t find my memories,” he admitted in a small voice. “I know they’re there, and I know they can’t erase anything with the probe… but everything’s all moved around. I can’t find it. Little things I remember, like how to get home or which shelf we keep the mayo on, but big things, important things, are just…” He buried his head in Gabe’s chest. “I—I’m so confused.”

Gabe swallowed. “Shh,” he told Daniel. “If you worry about it, it’s just going to make it worse. You’ll find it all eventually.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

“…Yeah.”

“Okay.”

There was another long silence before Daniel asked quietly, “Gabe?”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t remember how we first met.”

Gabe’s arms tightened around Daniel.

“Then I’ll tell you.”

By the time he was seven, Oman knew he wanted to be a pony. It wasn’t the pay. It wasn’t even the glory. He didn’t want to be a common pony either, the kind that tourists rent for a few weeks. No, Oman had a plan. He wanted to be a journalist. He wanted to change the world.

Oman underwent the conversion when he was twelve. His neural networks were recorded, analyzed, made available for foreign riders. He had this done in a small white room behind a weapons shop rather than a commercial ponyfarm so that he wouldn’t be included in the international database. That was important, of course. The cells could access the database. They’d know.

After that, after he’d been hooked up to a complicated, beeping, western device, he started. He spent hours in internet cafes reading emails and tracing ips, then following the residents of the given addresses. He learned the names of the enemy, the names that slaughtered his aunts and uncles, the names that turned homes into pillars of incendiary waste. He practiced, memorized the sacred texts, inundated himself in dogma. He made friends. He gained their confidence. They gave him more names. He traced the spiral to its core.

This was important. No foreign journalist would ride someone who wasn’t well-connected. This wasn’t a tourist gig, no way. This was the real thing. Oman was going to show them what it was like, show them how it was. Once they saw it, they’d have to do something. You can’t see stuff like that and not do something. He didn’t want bombs or troops or anything like that, though. Oman wasn’t sure how they’d fix it, but he knew they couldn’t just let it go.

He chose his cell carefully. Worked his way up. They were careful, shrouded in secret, like everything after the occupation. Still, they had plans. He helped develop them. They weren’t real plans, though. They wouldn’t actually work. Once Oman blew this thing open, America would know everything.

He found his journalist, Jason Skeinlen. The man was impressed by his planning, his foresight. The man believed in his need to change the world.

The first time Oman was ridden, he didn’t like it. He had trouble keeping his thoughts hidden. Not the important thoughts, of course, but the meaningless things, stuff like what he wanted to do to the gorgeous woman he’d seen walking into McDonalds. After a couple trial runs, though, he perfected his ability to keep two internal monologues: one professional, about the workings of his cell, and one secret. He didn’t have to worry about language, of course. They communicated by thought, by meaning.

He brought Jason to meetings, showed Jason with his own eyes. He listened to plans, listened to battle stories whispered across deserts and in the bowels of caves. He could feel Jason moving inside of him, feel him recording, feel him rephrasing Oman’s thoughts into eloquent soundbites. The first article was small. He was not mentioned. He couldn’t be mentioned. They’d know.

Oman took Jason to the meeting where they planned the Embassy bombing. It proceeded anyways, but Oman knew that Jason was just biding his time, waiting to break the story like you’d wait for a fruit to grow ripe. Jason watched it from a distance, watched the white rental truck force itself outwards in a rush of yellow and smoke while the sound reported from the faces of a thousand buildings. He heard the explosion through Oman’s ears. But Oman knew he was planning, waiting. There was strategy to this. Buses were nothing. This thing would only get bigger.

The bombing got 45 seconds of coverage on Fox. Oman watched the clip in an internet shop by proxying into a Lebanese newsfeed. When he recognized a few frames that had been filmed through his eyes, he was so proud that he could barely breathe. The cogs were turning. This was going to work.

No one could have foreseen this tragedy, the Arabic subtitles read beneath the well-coiffed newscaster.

Oman knew something was wrong as soon as he got to the meeting, but he rejected his instinct. Journalists aren’t afraid. That’s right, Jason transmitted somewhere above his spinal cord. You’re a good kid. Together, we can change the world.

When he was addressed by his teacher, Oman nodded in polite deference. When he was called to step forward, he obeyed. When the gun was shown, Oman felt the sudden scrambling dizziness behind his eyes as the neural connection wavered, twisted, and broke from the other end.

Oman squinted at the handful of men before him, trying to see their faces through the nausea of unexpected dismount. Two of them frowned. One smiled. One remained blank, unreadable.

Maybe they were being ridden too, he thought. Maybe one of them is recording this, sending this to the outside. Once they see, they’ll have to do something. You can’t just let something like this happen. Jason knew. He’d disconnected. He was probably calling his government right now, telling them that people were dying, telling them to send help.

As the teacher raised the gun, Oman knew he was changing the world. They wouldn’t let this happen, not over and over again. They’d have to do something. He was changing the world.

“I just don’t see what’s stopping you, Raylan.” Piper adjusted her thick-framed glasses before jamming her fist back into the pocket of her hoodie. Raylan’s show at The Xanadu Carousel had been over for awhile, but the rain outside had only now just stopped. Piper and Raylan didn’t own cars, and this wasn’t the first time they had shared each other’s company after a show.

“It’s the knives, child. The knives,” Raylan said. Piper was always impressed by the way Raylan managed to navigate the slick pavement in his high-heeled boots. Even in puddles, he continued to gesticulate and sashay just like he was still on stage. “Besides, I have a fan-following to consider. Why, those little bald men who always sit in the front row would just be crushed!”

“I don’t see how. I mean, you totally look like a real girl alre–”

Raylan cut her off. “And you’re a sweet pea to say so, Piper. God willing, I hope I hope I never look like poor Belieze. I don’t care how much chiffon you put on a linebacker…takes all kinds, I suppose. But anyway, I enjoy a certain amount of sensual border straddling in my life. Plus, there’s the knife issue, darling.”

“They don’t use knives.”

“Lasers. Whatever. You what a laser is? It’s a knife made out of light. And I ain’t letting any doctor get all Obi-Wan Kenobi on my nethers. Not for nothing, child.”

Piper jammed her tiny fists deeper into her pockets. She had transitioned relatively recently, and was still getting used to being smaller. Her slight frame was overwhelmed by her sweatshirt; it had fit perfectly a few months back. “It’s gene therapy. They alter a few chromosomes and the–”

“Messing with far too much of the Lord’s handiwork, you ask me. Why be ashamed of the way God made you?”

Piper turned from Raylan and tried to hide even deeper in her hoodie. She started to run away, but didn’t get more than five steps before Raylan and his long legs overtook her. Piper felt swallowed in Raylan’s powerful embrace.

“Oh, honey, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean that. This mouth of mine just goes off on it’s own. You know that. You know that if I ever have a son, I’d want him to grow up into a beautiful young woman just like you.” Raylan removed Piper’s glasses and wiped off the moisture from their lenses. Raylan was taller than Piper even before the transition, and now with his height enhanced by six-inch heels, Piper felt extraordinarily vulnerable. Tears tumbled down her teenage cheeks.

“It’s just…it’s just you sounded like my–”

“Hush, honey. Hush. I know who I sounded like. And I am so sorry. God just made us different, is all. He made you able to change, and me perfectly content to wear a gaff for the rest of my life. It takes all kinds, All kinds.”

“Stupid hormones,” Piper said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I know I’m not a real girl…”

“Didn’t I just tell you hush?” Raylan petted Piper’s dark hair reassuringly with his painted nails, “You’re more of a girl than any of those painted tramps your age I see walking down the street, And you are my friend, which ought to make you real enough for anyone. Now, why don’t you dry those pretty blue eyes of yours and let me buy you a hot chocolate.”

Piper gave Raylan a weak grin. “Don’t try to butter me up.”

“Who said anything about butter?” Raylon said, hands on his hips. “You and I are going to get chocolated up, like real girls.”

Annabelle could have gotten stapled, pumped, sucked and tucked, but she had always been a bit of a herbhead, and she wanted to do it the natural way. It was more expensive, to be sure, but in the end, the results would be cleaner. She had looked for the hostess carefully, studying recommendations, medical reports and case histories. Olga Husker was her final choice, in part because of her excellent history with clients, but mostly because Olga was a natural blond, from the curtains to the carpet, and Annabelle had always wanted to be a natural blond.

They met for coffee. Annabelle had a lime cheesecake and hot chocolate and Olga had an unsweetened green tea. Olga emphasized that she was allergic to peanuts, so Annabelle had to be very careful when she selected candies. Annabelle had to sign a document that assured that she was liable for any damages, from sexually transmitted diseases to broken bones and her own body could be forfeit in case the damages were deemed to be too extensive. Olga was anxious to begin and agreed to a smaller fee if Annabelle would move the procedure up two weeks. She asked Annabelle if she could user her own clinic, and agreed to take another cut for it. Annabelle signed and authenticated the electronic transfer, and four days later they were in the clinic, prepping for the procedure.

Aside from the massive-two day migraine, there were no side effects after the surgery, and Annabelle was pleased with Olga’s tan and muscular body. She felt strong and sexy. She went out after the surgery and bought a beautiful new wardrobe of the tiniest clothes she had ever worn. Her husband was delighted with the change, and they spent two days in bed. At work, her co-workers asked to see the contoured stomach she had rented, and she obliged, lifting up her shirt to reveal the sculpted abs.

Olga had an intense workout routine, and Annabelle tried to follow it, hoping that she could stick to the workouts when she was back in her own body, but running was painful and exhausting, and the routines were a huge time commitment. After a few weeks, she gave up on the workouts entirely and just began enjoying Olga, eating whatever she wanted, confident that her body would be returned to her fit. Maybe then she would start the workouts for real.

The police picked her up a month after the transfer. Annabelle had been walking down the street when everything went silent. She recognized one of the polices noise bombs and saw the black van barreling toward her, but until it stopped in front of her and armed officers jumped out, she never once believed the thing was for her.

Getting her body exchange in the clinic was a mistake. Since there were no records of a transfer, it took the police three weeks to authenticate that Annabelle was really in Olga’s body, and by that time Annabelle and her husband had dropped their savings on legal representation to hold off medical interrogation. They let Annabelle go after she gave a full description of her body and released photographs of herself to the police. Olga was wanted for theft of government property.

Six months later Annabelle saw a still photograph of her body on one of the streaming screens in the city. Olga had been shot by the police trying to trade the stolen goods on Mars. Annabelle hardly recognized the slim woman on the screen, the face she had once seen in the mirror. It was dead, and it wasn’t hers anymore.

“They’ll find you,” the chronomancer told me. “They always do. One day you’ll be sitting around sipping tea, playing Mah-Jongg, and BAM!” He slammed his fist on the rickety card table, nearly upsetting his coffee and definitely upsetting Sib. She moaned loudly and ran for the corner, then rocked back and forth and pounded her palms against her head as if the sudden sound had come from within. If he noticed her, he hid it well. People like Sib are easy to overlook.

“Time’s a big place,” I said.

“Not as big as you’d expect. You think you’re the first one to come up with this idea?”

I didn’t respond. The chronomancer exhaled a long, low note and pushed his fingers through his mop of wild white hair before taking off his glasses and polishing them on the edge of his greasy shirt. “All I’m saying,” he continued, “is that you’re not just going to vanish. Wherever you go you’ll stick out like a black cat in a snowstorm. You’ll get myths and legends built up around you. At worst, you’ll show up in history books, and they study that stuff. Anachronists, they call you guys. It would be hard enough if it was just you, but…” the chronomancer’s voice drifted as his eyes focused on the girl in the corner, “you’ll never be able to get away with that.”

His tone lowered at the final syllable, like mentioning Sib was a breach of etiquette. “You have something on your chin,” he might have said. “Your fly is down.” I stood up and stepped over the piles of paper and gears that littered his workshop to gather the small girl into my arms. “She has a name,” I told him.

The chronomancer pushed his glasses back onto his face and squinted at me in the dim light. “They’ll find you,” he repeated.

“We’ll take that risk.”

Sib’s small fingers grabbed at the collar of my shirt and she buried her face into the point where my head met my neck. She smelled like hospital, and she was still wearing the blue robe they’d given her when they tested her for genetic abnormality. The chronomancer watched her squirm into position.

“Do you have kids?” I asked him. He shook his head slowly.

“I applied, once, a long time ago,” he said. “I’m not made of the right stuff.”

“Neither’s she,” I said as I brushed my fingers against the space between her shoulderblades.

Again, he sighed that same note, though this time he slid open a metal filing cabinet under his table. The chronomancer withdrew a manila envelope and flipped through the papers with a grimy thumb. “Do you speak Greek?” he asked.

“I can learn.”

“We’ll find a place for you,” he said slowly, running his fingers over the page. “I’m sure we can find a place.”