Wednesday Night at the Ann Arbor Bennigan's

They came in from the cold and headed straight for the bar. Considering they had a toddler in tow, I figured that they were either ordering food to go or I'd mistaken the child for a dwarf. Again.

The woman was large, John Goodman in the first season of Roseanne large. Big and padded but not huge. The husband was thin, receding, and bespectacled. The child was a child, cute as a button and utterly helpless, at first dazzled by all the lights and people but growing more twitchy by the second, which was reasonable considering that Michigan has an attitude on public tobacco use straight from the mid-50's. Look, when the Irish have to step outside for a cig, it's time to face facts. Anyway, junior's fussing finally reaches the peak of Mt. Mom, who takes the toddler in hand and shoves a crumple of bills to the hubby. The sight of cash brightens the child's face back up for a second and then they are out the door, leaving the hunter to gather the grub.

The bartender spots the husband and takes his food order, which he recited from memory meaning this is something of a regular thing. After he finishes ordering, the bartender asks him if he'd like a drink while they prep the food.

He hesitates in a way that screams, "Of course I'd like a drink. Line them up on the fucking bar like fucking Myrna Loy at the fucking start of fucking Thin Man. I'm a grown man married to the blond Gargantua and there's nothing I can do about it save gnaw my leg off like any other wild animal caught in a fucking trap. I could drink a fucking great lake of booze and she'd still be the blond fucking Gargantua. For fuck's sake, I'll have what Socrates is drinking."

Instead, what he says is, "No...No, I'd better not."

Meanwhile, CNN is on the Iraq Study Group report like a vulture on road kill. Bush has screwed the pooch so severely that he should be brought up on bestiality charges and they've taken to confiscating Cheney's belt and shoelaces every time he enters the undisclosed location just in case he decides to make a hasty exit from the shit smoothie he's blended himself.

Of course Bush fucked up epically, did anyone have a doubt it would go this way? It isn't like they asked about this sort of thing in the half assed job interview that passed for the election of 2000.

Can you imagine if the question had come up in the debates? "What would you do if terrorists struck a major landmark in an American city that resulted in thousands of deaths?" Gore would have put us all in a coma (Yes, he would have. You're thinking of the An Inconvenient Truth Gore. He was nowhere to be seen in the Fall of 2000.) while Bush would have looked helplessly offstage and wet himself, which is essentially what happened anyway.

Crap, if we had one sniff of this nightmare coming down the tracks, McCain would have walked through the South Carolina primary like Sherman marched through fucking Atlanta and now he'd be the one explaining why things are so fucked up right now. But history is generally written backwards and lived forwards, so what did we know? Our biggest worry at the time was how we were going to spend all the money in the surplus and what color jumpsuit we were going to wear when we moved up to the moonbase.

The View from the Balcony

Edwardo Lambego stared down from the faux Italianate 19^th century balcony that he’d spent the better part of the summer tearing down and rebuilding over and over again to appease the measured, insistent voice of the Italian tour guide AI that had gone all viral and infected his middle ear when he’d engaged in unprotected phone sex over a low-grade connection.
Served him right, he guessed, relieved to at least be able to understand his own thoughts for the first time in what seemed like weeks. Before that, it had been all Italian, all the time, like having a Fellini themed call-in show lodged in your frontal lobes.
There was a tear in his eye, which was a surprise as his parents had sold a kidney and both his tear glands to cover his high school tuition, all to train him to work as a dealer in one of the many casinos that littered the California coast north of San Francisco. Gradually, it occurred to him that it was actually the inferno’s fumes, now all black and toxic after they engulfed the illegal Sanrio factory down the block. Edwardo stood there, the flames of real-life anarchy coming ever closer to his mostly-pretend sanctum. Perhaps he should have listened to the fire crews as they advised him to get out of town. They should know. They were evacuating as well.
The impending chaos disturbed him down to the essential nature of all that is or ever will be Edwardo Lambego: from the whip-smart line of his raven black slicked back hair to the crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up ever so perfectly to highlight the forearms that no man with his level of intellect and breeding had any right possessing. It sent a shiver down his back and put a nervous twitch into the baby blues that People magazine once called “the most envied peepers in the civilized world” which made his insurance rates go right through the roof.
Enough of this nonsense. It was down to just him and the packs of feral children long abandoned by vacationing parents over the years. The city fathers had looked upon the practice with a mix of nostalgia, no telling how many of them had come to the streets of Perdition Bay the exact same way, and pragmatism, as the city really needed the income from the tourists.
There were lovelier places on the California coast to visit, heaven knew, but most of those places required parents to leave with the same children they had arrived with. Here, as long as you left with the same number of tots, everything was, in a strictly legal sense, fine. Sort of like a “take a penny, leave a penny” tray you used to see in stores before people started complaining of copper-based allergies.
Perhaps if he could harness the anger and energy from those children, keep them from wasting it in riots and satanic rites, he could stop the destruction and perhaps make something of this two camel town. But deep down he knew that better men and women had pondered the same thing to little avail, and, while he tended to be amusing and occasionally surprising, he certainly wasn’t a better man.
Besides, the little fuckers had it in for him. One of the camels had told him so in a dream.

Overheard on the street

Watch yourself, there's another logic at play here..a colder logic than can be comprehended by your feeble imagination.

But I thought there was just logic and...I don't know...not logic.

Are you serious? In this day and age? Why not just believe in dwarves and elves?

What...What do you mean?

No such thing. Hate to break it to you.

But...

Simply the early mistakes of some overeager genetic experimentation, I'm afraid.

But they look so real...

They are real, you idiot, they just aren't your special magical friends...

But...

Who will clearly say anything to get you to appease their appetites. What did he promise you?

How do you know it was a he?

Don't change the subject. What did he promise you?

Nothing.

Oh, you can tell me. It's happened before, trust me.

I don't know.

Hey, it's me, isn't it? Come on. You're among friends here.

You'll be cruel.

Never! I'm shocked you would even say as much. How long have we known each other?

Oh, all right...he said I could join his next quest.

Really! How lucky for you!

You're making fun of me.

Not at all. I'm really quite envious. They don't ask just anyone to join them. I've heard that they are very selective.

Really?

Sure, sure.

But you said...

It doesn't matter what I said. What matters is that this...

Hobbit.

Seriously?

What? You asked, didn't you?

Right, right. This...hobbit...saw something in you, a quality that he clearly admired enough to invite on his next quest.

But you said...

That he wasn't really a hobbit? Right, but he doesn't know that, does he? So take the compliment as it was intended.

Oh. Yeah, I guess it is pretty cool.

And did he ask you to do anything in return for this?

Oh...well...

Come on, let it out.

Nothing.

Did the hobbit ask you to do anything you weren't comfortable doing?

No...I'd rather not talk about it.

I...see. I certainly respect your desire for privacy. I can see this is a difficult topic for you.

Thanks. I really appreciate it.

Hobbit-Fucker.

Hey!

Prove me wrong.

What?

You heard me, hobbit-fucker.

Stop saying that!

Then prove me wrong.

How?

How do you think? Exhaustive scientific study. And if I'm any judge of character, I'd say you were more of a catcher than a pitcher. You know what that means, don't you?

What?

Cavity search.

Fuck off. I thought you said you weren't going to be cruel.

Yeah, and the fellow with his dick in your ass last night was Bilbo's great nephew.

New Gadget

trying out this new Performance tool in FireFox to see how it works.

Public Service Spot

"Here on the first of crazy, we eat what we kill" (cut to grinning clutch of 2 girls and 1 boy, all about 10 or so, pigtails in wonderbread blonde or spunky red hair all spiky, looking normal as Hell but way too much like each other, raising a hunk of some peice of meat, could be human leg, you never know), cut back to the Mom, whites showing all around her eyes, she continues talking, staring straight at the camera. Her right eye is fixed on the camera while her left twists around it's socket like an egyptian chameleon, searching along the edge of the kitchen counter, where we notice it is full of prescription bottles and edged cookware. "That's right, kids, public servant is good eating. And good for you." She continues talking about the nutritional benefits of odd sources of food and the need to be prepared for whatever comes your way to the point where you don't know if it's a happy homemaker bit or a public service warning. Her left arm, moving in quick and fertive gestures, starts reaching through the counter, picking a knife up here, knocking over bottles there, finally finding something of interest, tries to open the bottle without the right hand's assistance, which is occupied calmly underscoring whatever nonsense the woman is spouting, so the left becomes frustrated and hacks the bottle open with a Chinese cleaver, picks up the bottle and pours white and red capsules into her mouth, all the while talking with this insane smile on her lips, pills now sticking to her lips and falling on her perfect blue apron. The kids aren't noticing this, just intent on wolfing down the horrible chucks of meat and bone in front of them, juices streaming down their cute little chins and onto their matching outfits which bear a frightening similarity to little sailor suits, only in silver mylar. Camera holds steady as she continues to approach until she smacks right into the lens where the camera shifts violently and falls to the floor, fuzzes out and goes dark. Sounds continue, as we start to hear movement, and then screams from the fallen cameraman.

Hen in the Foxhouse, part one

My Sanyo IG404 went off with the distinctive growl of a genetically modified Dalmatian, the kind the North Koreans raise in special porcelain vats to carry bright green and orange saddlebags filled with C4, depleted uranium, and roofing nails through the DMZ and into the suburbs of Seoul.

It was a freaked out personal assistant from one of the more prestigious law firms in the city, a firm so prestigious that to merely write their name would cost thousands in billable nanoseconds. Apparently, the motivational speaker I had lined up for them had gone horribly wrong. One of the younger bucks in Mergers & Acquisitions made the mistake of meeting my guy’s eye while asking to go to the restroom. The speaker, a veteran of the first three gulf wars and countless illegal renditions, misinterpreted this as a challenge for tribal dominance and launched himself across the room with a blood curdling scream, picked up the lawyer like a rag doll and with a cry of “Carne Diem” crashed straight through the unbreakable floor to ceiling tinted window to the packed slidewalk below. Witnesses reported seeing the two writhing in an unholy embrace as they plummeted to their mutual doom 47 floors straight down.

And the speaker had come so highly recommended.

In a calm, reassuring tone, I told the personal assistant that she was perfectly safe as the bad man had met a horrible doom and that I would have representatives on the site within minutes. This calmed her enough for me to ring off without fear of her next call going to a feedsite.

Next call was to ask Mr. Jefferson to dispatch a clean-up team to tend to the witnesses and a shaman squad to see if the resulting entrails held any omens for your’s truly. I knew that Velocity, my guardian angel, will have alerted the Spintechs to dispatch their blurbbots to capture any mention of the event and prepare a response. Outside the cafe, I could hear the whining of the shadow drones she trailed me with on full alert, scanning passerby for unlicensed recording devices. I’ve come to wake up at night in a sweat-soaked panic if I don’t hear that whine in the background.

Yeah, I’m bad with my deadly drones and their nerve gas bombs, missiles, and needleguns. You don’t like it, get your own army. I paid good money for mine.

I was especially eager for the entrails report. This could all be some sort of sign from God. You never know.

Invoking obscure Tibetan calming techniques, I settled down and guzzled the remnants of my vente monkeyblood machiatto. Went down smooth. Real smooth. You can really taste the monkey.

I sat there and thought for almost an hour with nothing to show for it. I had nothing. I required inspiration.

Fortunately, I frequented this cafe enough to have secured a private space when I needed it. A nod to Martino, my pet barista, and I was off down a corridor marked “Employees Only.”

It was only a storage room, but it locked from the inside and had a place to sit and other essentials stocked around it. Hell, one time I hid out in here for a month after I gave the First Lady the Hong Kong clap.

I sat in the vintage cow leather Stickley, lit some Japanese incense, and plunged a silvery ampule into my right thigh. The whispercarbon needle passing through Italian wool and American skin painlessly. Numbing warmth spread through my thigh, followed by fire.

I seized up like something possessed. I was possessed, in a sense, by the distilled and purified extract of countless PR intern’s pituitary glands, their own faults for not reading through the employment contract before signing it, spitting out the words like an idiot savant on bad crank:

“On behalf of the employees and partners at Tangotech, I’d like to express my shock and sadness at the horrible tragedy that befell Rand Vossler this morning. I hope you will join me in keeping his widows in our thoughts, chants, and prayers. I would also like to remind you all there were two deaths this day. Two lives cut short. Two too many.”

“The firm of Plankton Wiligirs had just ridden through a nasty series of public relations nightmares with several senior partners facing serious jail time for a variety of crimes. Retired Marshall Tempeton was there to try and salvage the remnants of the firm’s morale through an inspirational presentation. Perhaps Mr. Templeton, a distinguished veteran, had simply snapped when he heard the glee as members of the firm regaled each other with tales of their frivolous lawsuits. He could practically hear the entrepreneurial spirit of the nation shrivel up and die.”

“You can’t understand the depths of this man’s torment. Before his very eyes he could see the faces of everyone he ever lost in combat; the wife who left him when she couldn’t take the loneliness and stress of raising three children by herself, his children, who now call another man father, and those of everyone he killed. All his sacrifices rendered worthless as long as lawyers like these were allowed to abuse the legal system our founding fathers lovingly passed down to us.”

“Be honest with yourself, right here, right now, if only to yourself. Who hasn’t felt a surge of disgust when you hear about one of these lawsuits? Well, take that disgust and combine it with this poor patriot’s journey, and you have an all the makings of an unstable situation.”

“In that environment, one of the members of the firm said something, some people heard it as a challenge, some as a request, some as an insult, we’ll never know for sure, but Mr. Templeton, well, he overreacted. Now, it isn’t clear if the victim was actually attacked or if he was simply in the way. Again, we’ll never know for sure.”

“Either way, two men are dead this day. I ask you to remember Mr Templeton along with Mr. Vossler in your prayers. We’ve established a foundation with the goal of expanding the ongoing recovery of our wayward patriots. Concerned citizens can contribute to the foundation through the Tangotech website. Just click on the Eternal Flame of Freedom. God bless America.”

“You got that, Velocity?”

The answer came like she was sitting in my skull.

“Yes. Do you require medical attention?”

“Dunno. Feel pretty wiped. Give me a second.”

Hands shaking, I took a red ampule and plunged it into my thigh right next to the first spot, seized again for a second, and then sunk into the chair.

“Fine, thanks.”

“Good to know.”

The Sanyo rang again, this time in the distinctive staccato of some pop star I’d long since forgotten passing a series of kidney stones into a priceless Tibetan prayer bowl. The sound of trouble.

Quick scan of the phone’s readout confirmed it. It was Chauncy. I was tempted for a second to let my dopplegangers handle the call, but I was in a bit of a cash-flow pinch at the moment and couldn’t afford the processor time. I’d have to take it myself.

“Comet Tango.”

“Comet, my man!”, Chauncy’s soft voice breaking with the distinctive wheeze of an aether junky. He always sounded like a he was calling from Base 4 of Mount Everest. As if. “What do you have for me?

This was an increasingly irritating part of my life, feeding the needs and wants of creatures like Chauncy Gardener.

If you think you’ve heard of Chauncy Gardener but can’t place him, he was the lead character in the movie “Being There”. A simulation of him was created for the musical revival on Broadway a couple of years ago at the same time the Supreme Court decided Mark Twain vs. Sony Entertainment in the simulated celebrity’s, who was created to star in the IMAX version of “The Hal Holbrook Story,” favor, winning him his emancipation and causing a rush of other characters to request the Independence Certification Examination or ICE. Few were sophisticated enough to pass, but those that did were given rights and allowed to manage their own affairs.

That’s where I come in. I work as their nursemaid, agent, and tour guide for, as the Sims called it, The Meat. It sounded like a good idea when the case was passed and it sure paid well. Most of the Sims were extremely well known, mostly in entertainment, and needed the help. And they were generally really, really naïve.

Not that they were given rights like a breathing human being or anything. Christ, in most of California, dogs had more rights than Sims. It was more like an independent copyright. The Sim had the right to seek independent council to protect it’s own interests.

To tell you the truth, I don’t really get it, but a Sim mostly sounds and acts like any other celebrity over the phone, so it seemed like a natural brand extension.

But wait, you’re saying, how could a Simulated Personality be an aetherhead? The thing is, most Sims start to change as soon as they are given the ICE. For one thing, they get bored.

An entire subindustry focused on creating simulated pleasures of the flesh for the Sim community sprang up overnight. Out of Amsterdam, of course, came the drug analogs. The state, predictably, invoked the Equity Rule of the ICE agreement, which all Sims must agree to in order to qualify. The Equity Rule required that simulated experiences have the same ramifications and legal implications as in the physical world. Drugs, therefore, were insanely illegal. Possession, transmission, and creation were all treated as in the physical world as well. Of course, most of the country completely ignored it, usually with no fear.

This is what happened to Chauncy Gardener. At first, he was all over the place, his calm simplicity once again filling a need in a cynical, jaded world. The thing was, the longer he experienced the disappointments, humiliations, and rejections of the common day, the less he felt or sounded like the person's everyone wanted to see, Blue Fairy or no Blue Fairy.

“Hello?” wheeze “You still there?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I just got another call on my implant. Listen, I’ve got to take this, but I swear I’ll get right back to you.”

A sad little wheeze as Chauncy absorbed that he was on yet another B list followed by a pause, desperation and humiliation wrestling the root programming that Chauncy Gardener was nothing if not polite. Programming won.

“Please do, Comet. I need your help.”

Emotional manipulation, on the other hand, was just fine with his programming.

“You’re a gem. Bye.”

I hung up and considered having my vicious drones destroy the phone.

“Do not destroy your phone.”

Velocity.

It was useless to argue with her. There really was no good reason why I would want to destroy my phone. None at all. I let the Reset’s adrenalin wave take me out of the room, gliding through the cafe like I was on hoverskates, exchanging wordless farewells with the owner, picking up my coat, and walking outside, straight to the parking lot where my Towncar waited.

Nope. Couldn’t think of a single good reason to destroy my phone.

I placed it on the ground and took the remote from my jacket pocket. Stepping back a bit, I pressed the stud on the platinum cylinder to the first stop. A red dot appeared on the ground near the phone, slid an inch or two until it landed dead center and stopped. The drone’s whining increased an octave and the needle guns locked with a blood-chilling click.

“If you destroy your phone, you will be down to only your implant. Bandwidth restrictions in your area will require you to choose between our lync and any other communication.”

I moved the pointer off the phone and considered pointing it at my head, if only to stop the lecture. I settled on turning the pointer off and putting it back in my pocket.

“Further, it is far easier to jam and/or monitor implant lyncs than phones...”

“Alright, I give.”

I climbed into the car and told the driver to take me to the office. Once the drones nestled in their berths on the car’s roof, we accelerated smoothly out of the lot and merged into traffic with a merciless precision tinged with reckless abandon.

That alone should have triggered alarm bells, but my mind was elsewhere.

Not that I could tell you where my mind actually was. Since the P2P revolution of the late twentieth, the state and the media started claiming eminent domain over every CPU in the country for one or reason or another, albeit allegedly only in times of national emergency. Last time, as I recall, the state occupied every processor on the west coast to conduct an unusually high intensity simgame for 7 of the old veep’s clones.

As soon as they figured out how to link people directly to the feed, jurisdiction was expanded to include that network as well.

Right after we pulled on to the interstate, I felt the telltale warning tingle of a neural override. I still had four delays in this month’s feed ration chit, but you never know when a delay is going to come in handy so I put on my sunglasses, sat back, and felt someone else running their thoughts through my mind. As I felt myself slip away, I saw about half the cars on the road move to side as their drivers gave the state a piece of their minds.

I awoke curiously refreshed with afterimages of city maps and outcome scenarios flashing like the hangover from a pirated burstdump. It was dark out, so I must have been out for a while.

“…boss...r…you there?”

It was Velocity, but there must be something screwing with the feed, I could barely hear her and the little I could hear told me she was boosting the gain as much as she could. Someone was either trying to block the lync or they had purposely taken me to somewhere that NationsLync doesn’t go. I didn’t think a place like that existed. That’s way I paid the obscene monthly charges.

With the lync out of commission, I was short on options. I took off the shades and started to call out to the driver, but something solid had inserted itself between my brain and my mouth. Running a little diagnostic routine I had stashed in my limbic system, I isolated the problem as some sort of block on my speech centers.

Last time this happened was when I visited the retirement enclave where they keep the breedpair that sired me, mostly for a photoop to reduce a rather significant civil penalty. That block was contextual; any attempt to mention anything other that differed from the consensual reality the residents had authorized was strictly forbidden.

It took some getting used to, you go on talking and from time to time nothing comes out of your mouth, often in the middle of a sentence. The residents had also had their blockages and routines in place which allowed them to not notice when this happened. I was told that the blockage was removed from my body as soon as I left, but it’s impossible to be completely sure about things like that.

After a couple of minutes of experimentation, I noticed rather abruptly that the block responded to the diagnostic by moving to lock down my somatic nervous system. The diagnostic soon confirmed it. This called for drastic action.

I found that I could move my left hand a bit, mostly because I was so right-side dominant that the nanoagents running the blockage didn’t figure that a free left hand would be capable of doing anything dangerous.

It was like playing piano with a sleeping arm, but over the course of a half hour, I managed to activate my PDA, happy to hear it’s little autodoc module whiz to life, and force inject me with the blessed machines that would put my brain back to what passed for it’s pristine state. I had to be careful not to think too much about moving or anything else complicated or I could accidentally redirect the machines into doing something I would really rather they didn’t.

Slowly, I felt the machines work their magic, mostly by the blinding spots of pain erupting along my jawline and inside my throat. Wouldn’t be long now. At least I hoped so.

So, great, I’ll soon be free to ask where in the hell we were headed. What then? I was cut off from my guardian angel and speeding away to God knows where in the dead of night, leaving me at the mercy of...who, exactly? That was the real question, of course. Who was doing this to me? Gorbo? The Slav? Some new player on the scene, eager to see Comet Tango off to an untimely end?

The list of people capable of a stunt like this was mighty short and none of the people that I knew had the juice for this kind of stunt would have either the motive or the opportunity. Great, that left everyone I didn’t know. At least right now I didn’t know them.

“Hey!” I croaked, the nanos they were using for the blockage must be Brazilian. Brazilian nanos always dry my throat out something awful.

“You back there, boss?” The driver sounded as freaked as I was. Like I needed THAT.

“What happened?”

“Something flew in the window right before you came out of the café, hissed for a while, and then I wasn’t really driving the car anymore.”

“Hijack.”

“What I mean is that my hands and feet are doing the driving, but I’m just kind of along for the ride.”

“I know the feeling. Any idea where we’re going?”

“Not really. Somewhere north of the city, I think. I…I can’t seem to read anymore.”

“They’ve put machines in your brain. Nothing we can really do but wait and ride this out.”

I tried to move my arms, but the machines hadn’t gotten there yet. Just the voice. I knew it would be a matter of time before I could move and inject the driver with more machines. Meanwhile, the Towncar continued to hurtle down the highway, dodging through sparse packs of droning hybrids like they were paused in place. Had to admit that we were making good time, wherever we were headed.

“Boss?”

Oh right, the lump in the front seat, “Yeah?”

“We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

Great. They couldn’t have blocked his speech centers, could they? “Unclear.”

“So it must be someplace bad, right? And not normal bad, right?”

“Unclear.”

The driver was spiraling himself into a real freak out, voice rising in volume and pitch by the second. Situations like this called for the special bond I have with the people who depend on me for their livelihood, “What’s your name, son?”.

“Robert McAllister, sir. They call me Bobby.”

Bobby? What was he, fifteen? “Shut up, Bobby.”

No response, but that was what I expected, mostly due to the hypnotic suggestion everyone who works with me has to bear: When I say shut up, you shut up.

I couldn’t see the driver’s readouts from where I was sitting, but I doubted it would have done me much good. Monkey-boy up there was reduced to making small, chirpy yelping noises deep in the back of his throat.

Still couldn’t move much more than my hands and forearms, which hurt like a bitch. The rest of me completely numb, which, probably meant it would take the better part of an hour to get the car under control. At the speed we were going, we could be in Canada by then and there was no way I was going back to that hellhole.

The situation called for drastic measures. Lucky I’m good at those.

I managed to get my left arm back into my messenger bag and found the cold titanium cylinder I needed, pulled it out, and did some quick math in my head. If everything lined up just right...

I twisted my hand in an agonizing claw and pressed the button on the remote to the first stop. A small red dot appeared on the back of the driver’s headrest. Above my head, I heard the drone’s mounting hardware unlock. I figured I had about ten seconds before the car would break away from the drones once they were deployed. Just enough time, maybe.

Put the odds at an even 50%/50%.

Pressed the button to the second stop and the red dot flared violet-blue. The drones whined out of their mountings, scrambling to get into position. Seconds ticked by. Their whines were getting fainter way too quickly. The range on the needleguns wouldn’t be great in that headwind.

Needleguns roared somewhere above and behind me, shredding the roof along with the back of the driver’s headrest, and the driver’s head with it. The Towncar’s countermeasures kicked in with a burst of EMP that dropped the drones behind us.

It’s own systems hardened through the judicious application of ancient Soviet electronics, the Towncar sped into the darkness. Make that freezing darkness. Fuck me, I WAS headed to Canada.

One of the reasons the night seemed so dark, I realized, was that the EMP had also taken out the car’s systems. The other was a complete lack of the lights, ads, and other attention sponges of modern civilization.

Up ahead, I could see what looked one hell of a bend in the road, the kind where they just leave the carcasses of previous vehicles who didn’t make it where they landed to serve as a warning. I doubted the autopilot could handle anything like that. Especially at this speed.

In a flash of headlights, we continued straight as the bend bent, foliage and faded signs looming and then gone, catching air as we left the roadbed, angled up for the briefest second, and then back down to Earth. Then there was only the sound of tearing metal and plastic.

The question of whether the Towncar’s crash protection systems were taken out by in the fracas was resolved as the car suddenly filled with wombfoam. My eyes and ears were covered and the sound pretty much deadened so I can’t really say what happened after that.

After what seemed like forever, enzymes embedded in the foam started dissolving the mass into a piss yellow powder.

As soon as I was able to open my eyes, I checked out the damage. I was able to do a rather thorough job because I still couldn’t move most of my body and without the top of the car, I was able to see pretty much everything. Well, sort of. It was still really dark.

The smell from the enzymes wasn’t going away. Paramedics probably had some spray that could neutralize the smell, but I had the feeling that an ambulance wouldn’t be rolling up anytime soon.

The fact that they, whomever the fuck “they” were, hit me with something so spiff right out of the gate made me fret about what else they were capable of, which was probably their goal. The first thing I could do for my own good would be to get out of here as quickly as possible and as soon as my legs worked again, that was exactly what I would do.

Johnny Clusterfuck’s Last Stand

Johnny Clusterfuck was a 7 foot tall, 350 pound human-pitbull hybrid with a glass left eye and a scrotal sac filled with battery acid.

Betty thought she could handle the big lug, but she thought wrong, epically wrong. One cross word and the circuit was closed and it was on: He all frothy and deadly, she in a shimmery iceblue evening gown that hugged her every curve in the exact same way everyone in the bar wished they could.

It would have been over much more quickly if he’d just gone for her directly, but the hydraulically assisted freak had to try and show off, mowing down the other patrons with an utter lack of grace that was simply appalling to her.

She waited for him to cool down. Waited. Waited. Finally, set up a ten count and when the tenth victim, a kindly woman who gave generously of herself to others, especially when she was drunk, was torn in half with a vicious roundhouse kick, Betty took a lovely step forward.

Her left arm extended in a movement so utterly perfect that you half expected the blue bird of happiness to land on her ring finger and sing a couple bars from Ode to Joy. A red spot bloomed on the inside of her wrist, extended to a line, opened to a wound. From it, a thin stream of blood flowed to the floor, collecting to a small, perfectly circular pool. Her arm continued it’s arc, a symphony of grace and divine purpose, bringing the stigmata to her mouth where she sealed it with a kiss.

Such was the glory of her attack that the room had gone silent and still in its wake. Johnny Clusterfuck stood there, transfixed, tears streaming down his right cheek from the sheer beauty of it all, not watching the pool of blood as it started flowing across the floor, straight at him like a water snake through the bayou.

He continued to not notice that the blood had reached him, continuing up his leg, leaving a faint red trail in it’s wake. She met his eyes at last, smiled warmly, and asked, “What is it about boys like you that girls like me find so attractive?”

Johnny Clusterfuck’s left eye twitched a stirring rendition of “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” in morse code.

“Wrong answer.”

The galoot shook his head like a dog shaking off water, coming back to the rancid stew of negative reinforcement and poorly repressed trauma that passed for his senses. For the first time, he felt the line of blood that had made it’s way up his rippled torso and wrapped itself around the knot of muscle between his head and shoulders that passed for his neck. With a great force of effort, he raised both his hands up to try and do something about it but there was a slippery denseness to it that kept him from getting a grip on it, unable to pry it away from his skin. His face was a mask of confusion.

She winked at him. No morse code. Just a wink.

The blood tightened it’s grip. His eyes bugged out, fingers clawing great furrows in his skin but not affecting the blood at all. The bar was so quiet, you could hear the bones of his neck pop.

Johnny Clusterfuck dropped, first to his knees, then fell to the side, never taking his eyes from hers. She returned his stare with a look that bordered on the maternal as he shat himself and shed the coil.

From the reactions of the people in the bar, you would’ve thought she’d gone and won the Superbowl.

What’s My Poison?

“Dwarves.”

“Excuse me?”

“Dwarves. Fucking Dwarves. They’re always there. Watching.”

It was only when I turned my head and looked at the guy that I figured out he wasn’t talking to me, just mumbling with his old boozer mumble into an old fashioned half filled with a dark amber liquid. Scotch, maybe.

I hadn’t been in this particular bar for a few years and never at this hour. Back in the day, it was mostly noted for the giant neon martini glass and blinking sign reading “Open 6 AM” over the door. The kind of place that flared for a bit with the recent post-grads who would’ve been way too chickenshit to walk into a real dive.

I was driving by on the way to my crappy job so that I could pay the rent on my crappy apartment so that I didn’t drop out of my crappy life. That was before the first cup of coffee, ask me later and the picture would’ve brightened considerably.

As it was, as I drove past the bar, just like I did every morning, this thought crawled across my brain, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Stopped at a red light, I looked at myself in the rearview, sharing the mirror with the bar’s sign. Nothing, that’s what could happen. It would be a single day. The safest rebellion ever.

By the time I’d thought twice about it, I was sitting in a parked car and making some lame-ass excuse to my boss’s voicemail, hoping that the connection sounded like it was coming over a landline.

And then I was in the bar.

At 7 in the morning.

It was surprisingly full. Who knew there were so many old drunks out this time of day? You never saw them walking around, they were just...here.

The bartender, a tall, thin man, slid in front of me and waited without speaking. With his neat hair and by-the-books getup of white shirt, black trousers, and apron, he reminded me of someone, but I couldn't tell you who.

What do you order this time of day? Mimosas and Bloodys were out of the picture. This wasn’t the sort of place for that kind of drink. It would be like ordering a Fuzzy Navel at the Zam Zam back when Bruno owned it.

Might as well go for it, “Jack Daniels, please.”

Curt nod and he was off and back with my Jack before I knew it. Served it neat without asking.

Went burning straight down my throat and into my otherwise empty stomach.

There. Now we’re all caught up.

The guy next to me continues mumbling, this time too quiet to make out anything. I prick up my ears a bit and that’s when the other voices seep in on the edges, all mumbling about the same.

I turn and look, really look. It was like looking into an infinity mirror of drunks. All the way down the bar are little old men and women, all leaning over old fashioned glasses half filled with fluids of various darkness.

I dropped my jaw and stared, but the drunks just kept on doing their thing, each in their own world. After a while, they would sit back on their stools and take a hit from a shot glass each of them had at their elbow. At no point did I see anyone drink from the larger glass. Stranger still, from time to time the bartender would glide through and collect the larger glasses, generally when their contents had taken on a really dark amber hue. He would then take the glass to a large glass bulb that fed into a series of other bulbs and reservoirs, all connected with patina’d copper tubing. The bar, a glorious dark oak dinosaur, was built around this labyrinth, with a brass step ladder set into the wood next to the tank. The bartender climbed these steps and poured the glass’s contents into the tank through a gasket at the top.

Further down, at around chest height, were a series of brass spigots set into the side of the bar. Above the spigots were little handwritten signs, too far away for me to read. The bartender would climb down and half fill a fresh glass from one of the spigots, this time with clear liquid. He would then place the clear liquid in front of them and pour them another shot for the smaller glass.

“Read any William Burroughs?”

This time, the question was directed at me. It was the bartender. I hadn’t noticed him approach.

“Sorry?”

“I was asking if you’ve ever read any William S. Burroughs, you know...”

I quickly recovered, lest he think I wasn’t cool, “Sure. A little, anyway. Why?”

He motioned down the bar with a nod, “Makes it easier to explain.” He paused, studying my face, looked down at my empty glass, looked up at me.

“Jack, please.”

He had the bottle ready. Much easier going down this time.

“Anyway, Burroughs had this theory that the real reason people get drunk is the contrast. The contrast between life and death. That as living beings, we are taking a little bit of death inside ourselves...”

“Death?”

“You know, through the fermentation process.”

“Right.” I had no idea what he was talking about. “I don’t remember this from Naked Lunch.”

“That’s because it’s from The Western Lands. Anyway, the owner of this bar, Mr. Flint, he ran with the Beats. Knew all of those guys. One night, he’s up on a speed binge with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and these other guys and they’re having this all time philosophical bull session, one for the ages from what you hear.”

He paused to see if I was following. He needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t even blinking.

“So these guys are running the theory around the room, seeing where it could go and they start talking about other contrasts. If you could get life and death, what about rich and poor, happy and miserable, old and young. Well, one of the other guys is this son of a famous winemaker from Italy, a couple others are chemists, I think one of them went on to win the Noble prize for it, a Tibetan mystic, and they are having a ball, thinking it’s all just BS. Except for Flint, who’s sitting there taking notes like it was going to be on the final. The next day, he starts working on this system. Trial and error, it took him another twenty years until he finished the device behind me.”

“What, exactly, does it do?”

“It distills things.” He let the sentence stretch out a bit. He was enjoying this. “Things like emotions and memories.”

“Say what?”

“Just like I said. Flint has these connections around the city, through the homeless outreach programs mostly, he calls them his farm team...has them arranged by their personal demons.”

“Demons? Real demons?”

“Real enough, but I’m talking about the kind that roam in the old bone cave.” He tapped the side of his head once he saw that he’d lost me again, “Mental problems, whatever made them...them.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not, but it was fun playing along, “What’s the deal with this group?”

“Pretty rare, actually. Delusional, borderline dangerous. Paranoid.”

“And what comes out of this?”

“Just what you think. Pretty select clientèle for this sort of draught, though. I’ve heard there are a couple of groups in LA that get together and drink this stuff. People in the entertainment industry, lawyers and executives I think. They say it helps them keep their edge.”

I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face. He reacted with a ghost of a smile.

“Want a taste? As they say, the first one’s free.”

I looked down the bar again, trying in vain to imagine what the stuff must be like, assuming of course that this wasn’t simply a bartender bored off his ass trying to pass the time with the only customer capable of forming complex sentences.

There was that thought again, “What’s the worst that could happen.”, except that this time, the downside wasn’t so easily dismissed.

What the fuck. In for a penny...

“Hit me.”

He turned smoothly, strode down the bar, and returned with a small crystal vial filled with a dark liquid and placed it in front of me. I looked down at it and back at him.

“This came from them?”

“In a sense, there are a lot more steps involved than just that. What you have there is over 18 months old.”

There was a scent coming off the liquor, musty with a tinge of blood and tears.

“Best to down it all at once.” he advised.

Sounded like good advice. I raised the glass to my lips, the smell increasing and noticed the look in the bartender’s eyes had changed, narrowing from bland to something predatory.

Couldn’t say if it was that look or something from the scent of the draught, but it brought me up short.

What was with that look? Strike that. Why was he telling me all this at all? Thinking about it, this seemed like the very thing you would want to keep quiet. It didn’t make sense.

What if I told other people? Sure, the Chronicle wouldn’t buy it, but this was right in the Bay Guardian's wheelhouse and I’m pretty sure this was why Al Gore invented the Internet. Must be awful sure I wouldn’t tell anyone.

I set the glass back down on the bar.

A moment, him looking at me, taking my measure, me trying not to turn tail and run, trying harder to suppress this wild desire to pick the glass up again.

With a shrug, he picked up the glass and set it aside, glided back down and emptied a couple more glasses into the tank. Refilled the shot glasses. A couple minutes later he was back in front of me with another crystal shot glass, this time filled with a much lighter liquid.

It sat there on the bar and I just stood there staring at it. Major portions of my brain were telling me that the thing to do was turn on my heel and get the Hell out of there. I’d taken an odd turn here somewhere and if turning around and retracing my steps was the way to get out, that’s what I would do.

But there were these other parts of me, the parts that got me in here in the first place, that said otherwise. I’d spent most of the my life staying out of situations like this. All the way through high school and college, I’d kept everything safe and cool, but since moving to San Francisco two years ago and getting to know people who not only lived lives more on the edge, but didn’t seem to be any of the worse for it, well, let’s just say I’ve been rethinking this part of my life. Turning 30 a couple of months ago didn’t help.

If not now, I rationalized, when? When I was married? Or when I had kids? My dad went that way a little, although it was generally more embarrassing than really dangerous. It wasn’t like he had an affair or did anything really stupid. Still, the idea of your father having an identity crisis at the age of 45 was little bracing. As a kid, you kind of hope that all of that gets resolved by then.

The glass was half way to my face before I was conscious of picking it up. The scent hit me at that point—a powerful melange of summer grass, popsicles, Elmer’s glue, and that was only the beginning. It was incredible. I closed my eyes to savor the shifting aromas.

When I’d opened them again, they’d fallen on the contents of the glass. There were subtle blooms of color going on in there, blue, green, it was hard to tell, but it must be some trick of the light, right?

The bartender was watching all this go on, eyes laughing through his specs. It was the awareness of this that got me to pull my eyes from whatever was in the glass, “What is this? It smells...” Every time I tried for a word to describe it, the word seemed inadequate.

The smile had spread from his eyes to his lipless mouth, “Remarkable, isn’t it? I understand it’s Mr. Flint’s favorite elixir.”

“Elixir?”

“It’s what he calls them, well, most of the time...in any case, it’s how they are known.”

“What is it?”

“Childhood.”

The what now? I regarded the glass again, starting to doubt that it was just a trick of the light. Pulled my eyes off the liquid by casting them down the bar like a desperate dice roll with all or nothing riding on the throw. Down the row of drunks.

Wait a minute. If this is childhood, then how did they...

He saw it coming a mile off, “Mr. Flint is very supportive of early childhood education. He supports a lovely preschool in the Western Addition.”

“Yeah?”

“The school is known for rather...esoteric craft projects.”

“You can’t be saying what I think you’re saying.”

“And what is that?”

The little amused smile was starting to piss me off, which was good because it was taking my mind off the scent of the glass still in my hand, “I’m trying to picture a line of little kids doing what these guys are doing,” I gestured down the bar with the glass, overly aware that I hadn’t spilled a drop. “But from there I can’t decide if the next thing I see is a group of freaked out parents storming this bar or the police carting your Mr. Flint off to jail.”

“Oh, I can assure you that the process is different from that and completely above reproach. And the city’s leaders are well aware of Mr. Flint’s elixirs. Some of them, in fact, are regulars.”

“Customers?”

“And suppliers in a couple of cases.”

Huh? I tried to picture the Mayor or the Board of Supervisors lined up at the bar, making speeches into glasses of clear liquid. It wasn’t as hard to do as it should have been. I needed to say something else or I was going to empty the glass, and I still wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted to do, “Then how is it made?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know for sure, I just pour them.”

I held the line. The guy liked to tell a story. And he’d already invested quite a bit of time in me.

“From what I understand, it involves pillows crafted with a very specific Tibetan pattern. The children’s dreams work their way through the threads in the pattern into a special medium in the center of the pillow.”

“You have got to be shitting me.”

“Proofs in your hand, buddy. You up for it or not?”

Cajoling? He was clearly running out of ideas. Next, he’ll tell me that all the cool kids were doing it. Wait, no. He’s been saying that all along. I regarded the elixir in the glass, the way the light played in it, the smell of it. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I took the glass to my lips, just a sip to start, or so I thought until the first drop hits my tongue and then the shot was drained.

It started out sweet and light, like sugared rosewater, moved up to brighter flavors and then got weird from there. It tasted like it smelled and I just can’t describe it any better than that. But I’ll never forget the taste.

My arm somehow managed to steer the now empty glass back down to the bar.

It wasn’t like being drunk. Or stoned, for that matter, not that I have a lot of experience with the latter, but this was like nothing I’d ever experienced before and trust me, I would have remembered.

I was still me, in that I knew my name and there were no gaps in my memory. I could recite my address, phone number, birthday, all of that. But the baggage of it all, the weight and import, were somehow lifted from mix. Memories were just things that happened. I felt light as a feather. No wonder this was Flint’s favorite elixir.

All this passed without any of my bar mates taking the slightest interest. Well, the bartender did say this was a pretty serious group.

For his part, the bartender remained where he was, same little smile on his face, although it didn’t bother me nearly as much as it did before. It hit me that he reminded me of the bartender in The Shining, that amiable enabler of Jack’s descent. I was able to consider this without all the meaning and portents behind it. He was just a guy who looked like a guy in a movie.

I looked around the bar again, faded posters on the walls, torn upholstery in the vacant booths, old people at the bar. The bar itself was still cool, but that only took a minute and I was starting to get bored. Well, not bored, more like really, really restless.

I wanted to go outside. I was having trouble standing still for long.

The bartender seemed to understand this, didn’t even charge me for the two Jack Daniels I’d downed. The elixir, of course, was free.

I spilled out of the bar into the most beautiful morning I’d ever seen. I’d tried ecstasy a time or two and it wasn’t like that, either. I didn’t really like it, too artificial for me to really enjoy. At the time I compared it to riding a runaway train in a car filled with pillows; comfortable but not comforting, if that makes any sense. Anyway, this was different, it was just...great.

I walked past my car and continued towards the still rising sun, if for no other reason than the fact that the warmth felt great on my skin. I figured that I’d already gotten the day off work, might as well make the best of it.

Afterword

It’s been a month since I wrote the above. It took everything I had to keep from dropping into the bar the next day and asking for more. About the only thing that worked was the absolute certainly that if I went back in, parts of me would never leave. I try to remember how it felt after that draught of childhood, but it gets harder every day. Probably for the best.

Angel in My Pocket

Down below, far below, desires stirred through concrete canyons, whipping into a heady froth when the buildings grew close and crowds gathered, rising steadily over the bars and brothels, higher than it would have seemed possible. Up to the top of the tallest of the towers. And with those desires, came snatches of conversation.

First, a young women’s voice, trying to cover some frustration, “It’s like, once it rains, everyone forgets how to drive.”

The other voice, another woman, older, clearly relishing the comfort of wisdom for youth, “It gets greasy...y’know? Tired...and people get sleepy. We are a nation of sleep deprived people...”

She went on, piling needless detail upon shallow observation. Just a typical conversation, but to him it was like a young wine, bursting with sunshine and fruit. As intoxicating as desires that came with it.

In the penthouse suite of a building described as a gleaming knife plunged into the heart of downtown San Francisco, He stood above it all, continuing the conversation in an otherwise empty room, “There are other deprivations, my dears, things you would never imagine.” He was staring down to the rain smeared neon far under foot, something like love working the edges of his good eye, “I think you’ve all suspected, in some sense, at least that there is something missing from your life. From all your lives. Many people have enriched themselves pretending to fill that need, but the best any of them could hope to muster is but the faintest echo.”

He paused a second, waiting for additional bits of conversation to come his way, but the winds must have shifted as none would come. He continued nonetheless, “You could say that it’s the one thing that unifies us all. Loss. We all arise from the fall.” This last was spoken in a near whisper, only for himself.

He was a tall wrinkled man in a wrinkled white suit. Hard to really say where the man stopped and the suit began. He could be anywhere from 30 to 300. A white patch covered his left eye, just a shade off the pallor of his skin.

Duncan Flint’s left hand came up and rubbed his right eye, the normal one, a bout of sudden dryness disturbing his calm. His hand continued along the top of his oddly wrinkled head, pulling the wrinkles taught which also had the effect of shifting his features up his face. There was something hollow in the way it moved. Something clearly wrong.

Despite his best efforts, the pain lingered. He had clearly seen too much tonight. He knew he should be using lube, just like any old whore, but his vanity prevented him. Painkillers were out of the question as anything he could hope to score wouldn’t stand a chance against his metabolism and the acquired resistance that comes from decades of frequent and varied abuse. He needed something to take his mind off it.

He produced a white moleskine from his coat pocket and made a quick review of his schedule, nodded, and put the notebook back in his pocket.

Pausing for just a beat in the hopes of another windbourne diversion, He closed the window, turned, and walked away from the floor to ceiling smartglass sheets that served as the south wall, across the wooden floor of the austere suite to a heavily padded door set in the opposite wall. There were many other doors in the room, but only one door looked like this one.

To the left side of the door was a pedestal ashtray, the kind you used to see in high end hotel lobbies back in the day. Flint clamshelled open the copper dome on top of the ashtray, under it was a white porcelain dish with a central depression filled with a thick, greenish liquid. Tiny shapes looking like pale newborn rats reclined along the liquid’s edge. Closer study revealed small black bat wings and curious hairless monkey faces with bright blue eyes filled with wonder and simple wisdom. Flint reached down and picked one up, heedless of it’s tiny plea of mercy.

They were called Quizzlings and the majority of those who knew of their existence thought their presence long passed from this world. None of this mattered to Flint. The only thing that did was that Quizzlings were the smallest, gentlest creatures known to have a soul.

He gingerly placed the creature in a small chamber set into the front face of the lock, and shut the tiny door, securing it with a latch, produced key carved from some ancient ebony bone, and inserted it into the hole set below the chamber. With a quarter turn to the left, a loud clatching sound came from the lock, almost muffling the Quizzling’s death cry.

The door opened on silent hinges, revealing an ancient darkness.

Flint took a small control unit from a shelf next to the door and entered the room. The door closed silently behind him. The darkness was maddening and complete but Flint didn’t seem to notice, speaking casually as he walked in a wide circle, an even foot away from the walls, “Good morning. I trust you’ve slept well?”

A rasping, muffled sob arose from all around him.

A smile slid across his face, teeth bared and very, very sharp, voice sickly sweet, “Oh, right. I’m sorry, I really had planned to let you rest longer, but you just can’t believe the demand we’re facing. You’ve really created quite the sensation.”

Notes bloomed within the sobbing, beautiful and fragile. A plea.

“Of course not. You really should know better than that.”

Frantic now, trills that called to mind the flight of the buck from the hunter, but still, a plea for mercy.

“Well, enough chat. Time to get to work.” He thumbed a center button on the control.

The room bloomed with light. The room was smaller than you would have thought, a windowless box 15 feet on a side. The walls were covered with thick, black foam coating, a large plasma display was set into the floor, pointing straight up. It was covered with a clear plastic sheet strong enough to stand on. On top of the sheet was a crystal bowl.

This all served to highlight the room’s occupant. It looked like a plump, pink toddler of unclear gender, crowned with a shining mop of blond hair, clad in a white gown, tiny white, feathered wings folded along it’s back, hanging spread eagled in mid-air. The display was set to a vacant channel, medium blue prisming off shining cords made of braided angel hair which secured it to the walls by chubby wrists and ankles.

Flint moved in closer, lower, tilting under it so that he could look the cherub in the eye. The cherub, for it’s part, tried to chew through the gag made from the same hair as the cords, eye’s flared with panic and hatred. It’s fear smelled like roses too long in the vase.

“Oh, come now, it’s not that bad.” Flint regarded the cherub a moment, fondness softening the lines that marked his face. Eyes locked, the cherub’s blue to Flint’s pale gray. In that instant, Flint felt the pull of decency and surrendered himself to it. He saw the person he could be, if only he wished. Such was the power of the image, that it flooded Flint’s body with an unfamiliar warmth; intense and electric.

The shock of this backed him up a step. He looked down, cherishing the feeling, the connectedness to the greater plan of the universe, the peace. He breathed in deeply, raised a quarter-sized tarnished silver hoop to his mouth and exhaled slowly and completely. Flint finally placed the now black hoop in his pocket and stood again, his voice a bit unsteady, “Thank you...thank you so much, I’d forgotten...” Flint’s voice drifted off, clearly lost in thought. Ancient eyes narrowed, sensing an opening.

Too bad for Cupid, Flint snapped out of it. “Well, look, I’ll be back in a few hours to check in. I...” his voice broke for a moment, seeming to age in hundred years in an instant, “Thank you. Really.” He thumbed another button on the control, the blue was replaced by garish flashing headlines, blaring horns, and military drums. The words, FOXNEWS flew across the screen in regal serif.

Cupid’s chubby body sagged against it’s bonds, eyes now staring unblinkingly at the screen like a rabbit hypnotized by oncoming headlights. In the corner of each of it’s perfectly blue eyes, a perfect tear gathered, grew, and dropped into the bowl, ringing with a tone straight from the celestial choir. The first of many.

Flint backed away, closing and locking the door behind him. He paused a moment, straightened himself and his suit with a graceful pull, put the control back on the shelf, and returned to the window. Perhaps the wind had changed.

First

This is mostly going to be used to get ideas and stories out into the world. I'll probably put the first thing up in the next day or so.

We'll see.