 
Selected Short Stories Featuring

Cinderella Shoes

Copyright 2013 Nicolas Wilson

#  Foreword

Hi. I'm Nic. This is a short story collection of mine. Other stories and information about upcoming work can be found on my website: www.nicolaswilson.com. Interspersed with these short stories, you'll find snippets of novels I'm working on. I'm calling them entertisements, because the word amuses me. Keep going to reach the fiction, or you can view the Table of Contents (including synopses of the stories in this collection).

# Stiletto

It's a lousy night, but they've all been lousy nights, lately. Marcy blames the girls, but it's not the girls' fault the economy's bad, or the fact that people see strip clubs as something they can cut from their budgets when times are tight. Since no one's making any money, girls don't always come in, so we're short tonight. I've only got three minutes to pee before I'm back on stage.

When I open the door to the women's bathroom I stop, listen; you hear urban legend kind of stories about girls getting attacked at the job, and its always in the bathroom, so I'm cautious. But the women's bathroom is always empty- except that one time a girl was giving her boyfriend a handjob in one of the stalls. And it's quiet, so I walk to the nearest stall, slide in, and close the bolt.

I'm pissed off. I'm barely on target tonight to make cab fare, and I've already resigned myself to kissing the money I put in the jukebox goodbye. My time isn't free, but I seem to be donating a lot of it lately. I think I could handle all of that if it weren't for Marcy- always blaming us for the fact that Tory's is struggling, treating me like I've been ungrateful or a bad employee. I just-

And then I realize the floor's wet. I don't know if there's someone in the next stall, or if the toilet's backed up again, but I reach down to pull my skirt up before it gets soaked, and I get it about to my knees when my hands stop moving. The floor is slick, and it's coming from the next stall: a long, thick trail of blood.

I swallow hard, trying to ignore the timid instincts that tell me to run away. I'd seen this kind of thing before, not here, but when I worked at Coldstone, there was a little girl who'd just started her period, and didn't know what it was or what to do. "Shit, do you need a tampon?" I ask. "I think I... I have one in my bag."

There's shuffling, nervous shuffling in the other stall, and my neck tenses. I realize I can't see feet under the stall wall- that I really should be able to see feet. "Hello?" I ask, and my voice trembles. The blood is starting to pool near the drain in the floor, and I realize there's an awful lot of it; I'm starting to wonder if there's too much, when a woman's foot splashes into view. But there's something wrong about it, something about the angle, how it isn't right if she's sitting on the toilet, or standing- it's just hanging there limp.

I know something is wrong, and how completely stupid it would be of me to check it out for myself, so I pull my skirt up and flush, and I'm reaching for the bolt on the door when suddenly there's a loud thump and a splash, and I can tell the girl in the other stall has fallen.

I unbolt the door, uncertain if I should check on her myself or call the bouncer, when a hand shoots out from under the stall and grabs my stiletto heel. I look back, and can tell from the way the girl fell, and from the build and from a black coat and glove that the hand isn't hers- it's a man's. I shriek, and yank until my foot comes out of the shoe, then I run.

The bathrooms are at the end of a long hall, as close to backstage as the customers ever get. Mike, the bouncer hears me and is already at the club end of the hall when I round the corner. He's big and scary, but with soft blue teddy bear eyes that usually are comforting. "Bathroom?" he asks, and all I can do is nod. He walks past me, and there's an energy in him I've never seen. I follow him back around the corner, and he hits the door so hard if it were a person I don't think they'd ever get up.

But he doesn't come back out. I wait as many seconds as I can, then run out of the hall to the club. The music has stopped, and everyone's staring at me. The bartender, Malcolm, realizes he's the only other male employee in the place; the customers are all frozen in place in their seats. He walks around the bar, obviously unhappy about being in his position at that moment.

He walks down the hall, around the corner. He steels himself outside the restroom door, then pushes in. He emerges a few seconds later, blood halfway up his forearms. He tells me, "Ambulance, and police."

I look at one of the other girls, and I realize I don't know her name, but she understands and runs down the hallway and over to the phone. I follow Malcolm back into the bathroom.

Mike has pulled the girl out of the stall. He's hunched over her, performing CPR, and I hear her ribs creak like old floorboards. Her stall is empty, and I don't see the man in the black jacket on the floor. Then I think to look in my stall, for my shoe, but it's gone.

The rest of the night's a bust. The girl went away in an ambulance, but the cops were there long enough that all the customers left. At least Malcolm gave me a ride home, so I didn't have to pay for a second cab.

There's a moment where I'm not sure if he wants to hit on me or just try and say something comforting, but he doesn't do either, so I get out of his car, numbly mumble a thanks for the ride, and lock myself in my apartment.

I'd been carrying my one heel around most of the night. I feel bad about losing the other one, like the other shoe will be sad about missing a part of itself; I care entirely too much about it, but I tell myself I'm just frazzled. I want to call the hospital, to check on the girl, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't or couldn't tell me, anyway.

I dance under the name Sin Dee, which had started as "Sin Deep," and I imagined using the slogan "Beauty is only Sin Deep" until I found out that I wasn't getting as many bookings for bachelor parties because Sin Deep sounded kind of Indian, and not many men wanted an Indian stripper, and the ones who did were disappointed when I wasn't, and didn't tip as well.

I can't sleep tonight. I can't stop myself from thinking about that girl from the bathroom stall, or who she was- I mean, she wasn't one of the dancers, so she was a customer, but what she did, who she knew.

And I'm terrified, too, because I know I have to work tomorrow, at another club, and that if I can't get myself together, I can't hustle, and if I don't hustle, I won't make any money, and I won't be able to make my rent. The night becomes a blur of insomniac time-killing, reorganizing my make up and listening to music, baking and freezing a month's worth of cupcakes, anything to distract me from thinking. I can't stop wondering who the girl was, even though I know it doesn't matter.

I finally fall asleep for a few hours before my next shift, only to be woken up by my horrible clock; I pick it up and throw it at the wall, but the cord is wrapped around my wire bed frame, so it only flies until the cord snaps it back, and it swings ineffectually from the headboard.

The rest of the week likewise became a blur. I pick up a private party and three day shifts at a few other clubs, including one someone called off of, but days are always death. Most people are at work, and even those who aren't and actually have the money to tip don't think to come to the clubs, but for some reason club owners insist on bringing in girls and staying open. And if you refuse any day shifts you can forget about picking up night and weekend shifts ever.

I contemplate replacing the heel I lost. I bought them at a sort of made-to-order shoe place, and I think the guy there has kind of a crush on me, so I might be able to talk him into making me just one shoe and not another set, but I couldn't decide if that would make me happy, or if every time I looked down at the heel I was going to see blood beneath my feet.

It had been a week, exactly to the day, and I was back at Tory's. Mike was bouncing, and Malcolm was behind the bar. That was actually kind of odd, because Marcy didn't like to keep the schedule static; she said it made the girls complacent- better that they fight to get and keep the good shifts. And she said that if the girls' schedules were constantly changing that it was only fair to rotate the men, too (and she lumped Kas, our one female bartender, in with the men). But it made me feel a little safer, since they were the ones who'd come to my rescue (or whatever) last week.

It turned out to be a better night. Some law or accounting firm down the street had given out bonuses no one expected, so some of the lower-level execs suddenly had money they had nothing else to do with. And Kimberly even showed this week, so we had the perfect number of dancers for the size of the crowd.

I'm just finishing up a set on the main stage, mentally preparing myself to hustle for lap dances when Malcolm flags me over. "Gentleman waiting for you in the champagne room," he says with a snigger, since we pretty much never actually sell any champagne in there. But it means he'd paid double for three songs- so in less than fifteen minutes this would be my best night of the month.

Our back room isn't really separate, just three walls and a thick red curtain. Some men like the privacy, the intimacy, of being alone with a dancer. Some men think they're going to get lucky, and sometimes get handsy, but Mike's pretty good about staying close any time one of us is back there.

The guy's already slumped in the half-circle booth, looking timidly down and away. When I get close he jumps a little, and smiles in a nebbish sort of way.

"I was here last week. I wanted to pay for a dance, but..." he realizes he was close to asking me to think about what happened last week, and his eyes shift back to the ground. "I know girls work at different clubs, so I've been going to different ones, hoping to run into you."

"Well, here I am." I sit down in the booth next to him. "What's your name?"

"Jack," he says.

"What do you like, Jack?"

"Shoes, and, and feet," he says, then hesitates, before bending towards the floor. There's the rustle of tissue paper. "I, uh, brought a pair of shoes I'd like you to wear." I bristle. "There's a hundred bucks in it, if they fit."

Normally I wouldn't. I have a few regulars who like to buy me things, shoes, or outfits, because they'd like to see me wear them- well, like to see me take them off- and for the regulars it's worth it. There's a level of trust that comes with that regularity. But I've made negative money this week, and my rent is already late.

He hands over the bag, and I part the papers. Even in the low light, I recognize the heels I'd worn last week. My heart skips a beat as I pick up the left one, the one I'd lost, but my mark, a slash of red nail polish across the label, isn't on the shoes.

It seems weird, but he says he saw me last week and wanted a dance; some people get obsessive about dancers, and if I'd been wearing those shoes, then he probably wanted me wearing them when I danced for him. I'd learned some time ago the line between creepy and sweet is blurry at best with regulars.

Jack reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet and extracts a crisp $100 bill and sets it on its edge on the table. "You can keep it, just for being a good sport and trying it on; wouldn't be fair to punish you for me guessing your size wrong."

That makes it an offer I can't afford to refuse. I start to strap on the shoes, and once I finish he softly pulls my foot into his lap. "A perfect fit. Like they were made for each other." His hand lingers, not on my leg, but on the straps of the shoe.

"You didn't recognize me. Heh. To think I've spent the last week terrified, yet fantasizing, that you knew me. Recognized me." I gasp, and I want to let the breath out loudly, but I feel cold metal pressed to my leg, and think better. "That for once, a pretty girl knew me, understood me, that I was finally going to be noticed for who I am, and what I do. I don't know whether or not I should be disappointed; it's too late to be relieved. I mean, you're probably stupid, but I think you'd have put things together soon enough, especially all that with the shoes."

"What do you want from me?"

"I want you to dance, while I figure out what I want to do. And behave; one jab from this stiletto in the femoral artery and you'll bleed out before that gorilla can even respond to your scream. And I'd give myself even odds of stabbing him, too, then getting away."

I stand like a corpse, all of my limbs playing dead as my mind starts to shut down. Slowly my muscles remember how to move, then how to move seductively. I plant a foot between his legs, then slowly stretched the other up in the air, then extend it out, resting it on the back of the booth behind his head, and I lean inward.

"I wasn't lying. I did see you last week, and I had wanted to buy a dance. If things were different-" he stops talking long enough to stroke his cheek along my foot as I pull it away from him. And suddenly I see the shoe as I had that night, blood running underneath it, only this time it's a heavier flow, a gushing wound, and I stamp my heel into the soft flesh of his throat.

He tries to bring the stiletto around towards me, but I lean down on his arm. He's stronger than me, but his other arm is trapped beyond my leg, so it's one of his arms trying to pick me up from a reclined position.

Blood bubbles around my heel, and after several seconds, he gives in, and his arm goes limp, and the stiletto slides out of his fingers and onto the seat. And still I keep him pinned there, impaled. His eyes become sad, as the realization finally comes over him, and I almost feel sympathy for him; because of that, because he made me feel bad for him for even a moment, I twist the heel in, twist until his face becomes a twisted parody of pleasure, and his body is limp.

I wait another moment, to be sure he won't leap back to life like some horror movie monster, before I call out, and when I do, all of the strength from a moment ago is missing from my voice. Mike is there in an instant, and reacts quickly, moving me back and shoving the knife off the seat, farther from Jack. Then he checks for a pulse. "He's dead," Mike says.

"Good," I reply.

Table of Contents

# Cast

Fist off, I'm a robot, let's get that out of the way right now. I didn't come to take your job. I was built for this, for what I do. Because human beings made a mockery of their own legal system.

Lawbots, as we're often collectively called, were created to be cogs in the machinery of justice. The theory went that human people could be bribed, threatened, or simply make mistakes; hell, even the best humans could only remember a tiny fraction of legal precedent that impacted on a single case, let alone hope to hold the entirety of case law in their cellular memory. But the worst thing was humans could be biased, by religion, by philosophy, by almost anything.

The practice has been a little more rocky, and there was even a flap when someone realized lawbots could be tampered with- at least theoretically- since they didn't leave a paper trail. The appeals court for the DC circuit even trialed a paper back-up, by which all the thoughts of the prosecutor and judge were printed stream of consciousness style; however, the amount of information obtained quickly overwhelmed the human overseers, and they were forced to admit that only a robot could monitor the activities of the other lawbots- and robots watching robots defeated the entire purpose.

Which kind of brings me to court. I've argued a good case. Parque's a child molester, a nasty one. He hasn't turned violent yet, but the signs are all there. He's a lousy witness, too, and his public defender's nearly as much a piece of work as he is. I nearly had them both on jury tampering, but one of the bailiffs said something that tipped them off and they scuttled their plans before any money changed hands. Jury took no time at all to come back- which is either a sign that my case was weak (and it isn't), or that they saw through the thick musk of flop sweat and BS coming off defense counsel.

The foreman eyes me nervously; some people think that the coldness of a robotic judge and prosecutor gives human defense attorneys an edge, but I think that distrust mirrors what it fears, and I choose to give humans the benefit of the doubt- at the very least I'd say the jury's still out. But I have a higher conviction rate, while taking more cases, than my human predecessor- which might be attributed entirely to skill, but at least proves any potential bias isn't overriding.

The foreman looks to the judge, and there's a flash of defiance, almost anger. I don't understand it, then he looks back to me and reads "Guilty, all counts." My eyes flick on their own back to the judge. He folds the paper verdict back in half, and sets it down.

I don't even have time to hope he's just being dramatic and not symbolic before he starts to speak. "I find the jury's decision in this case prejudiced by evidence not in record. There have been grievous faults in the jury's fact-finding, and blatant disregard for my instructions on the application of the law. I am forced, by the insufficiency of evidence presented to establish as a matter of law the defendant's guilt, to set aside the jury verdict, and enter an acquittal into the record. Case and jury are dismissed."

Something was off. I take my time walking to the judge's chambers, and his secretary lets me in. She was pretty, by human standards (by which I mean her features were fairly symmetric, her body parameters well within healthy limits). "Megan, good morning. Is he in?" She gives me a smile that tells me he was expecting me, and buzzes me through. He's reading something on his desk and doesn't look up when I speak. "With all due respect, I don't understand."

"I was unaware that your understanding was a determinant in my adjudication." I'm ramping up for a speech, when he puts up his hand without looking up. "The die is cast, counselor. You can't bring charges again- that would violate the double jeopardy protections of the Fifth Amendment." I knew it was possible, if unlikely, to have a judicial acquittal vacated, and the jury verdict reinstated, but I also knew he knew it, too, and either figured it wouldn't happen on account of his record and reputation, or that it might but he didn't care, because he could only control his own court room. I nod and walk out.

I don't like to admit it, but I come to the factory sometimes, just to think. The factory was automated long before the legal system. It was one of the bigger auto plants in its heyday, and after that it was used to pump out robots, first the judicial models, then prosecutors like me; it spent a few years out of commission while trial lawyers lobbied to keep at least the defensive side open to human litigants, then screamed back into production for policing robots before the police unions lobbied to keep those jobs for humans, too.

People expect any day now for the factory to be booted back up to make robots for the army; it's the logical progression, really. And with every new model comes a new cast, with upgrades and specifications, but each new generation also creates their own caste, a separate, branched-off social entity. It's not like the milbots will be able to retire and join the civilian workforce (okay, maybe an MP model could join the police). Inadvertently, even amongst robots, we're becoming segregated.

The factory is where I was born and booted; it's where QA made sure I didn't have any outstanding flaws, where they fixed that heatsink problem we'd inherited from the previous gen's motherboard layouts. And it's cold, quiet, and lonesome, the perfect environment for computation.

I just can't wrap my processor around it. I've argued before Mathis-53 before, and never had an issue (the "Mathis" series came about from an error in the algorithm for the serial numbers; it's a shortening of "Math is hard," an engineer joke, and he was the 53rd off the assembly line in that series). I've argued cases that were on a shoestring, and usually the jury's more likely to call me on the technicalities than a judge (since we usually know exactly where the line is, down to the decimal, even if subjectively there's wiggle room).

That's when I decide I need to call Sarge. He was a Sargebot, one of the protos they'd planned to use to fill out the police brass, until the police union pitched a fit, and demanded they give existing human officers a shot at the Sergeant exams before putting bots in the slots. So Sarge served interim during the tests with the city police, and after got an early retirement, which meant early obsolescence.

He went into private detective work. He'd made a lot of friends at the department, including a few humans who thought it was a little racist giving the preference to humans (and Sarge was polite enough not to correct them that robots are at best a different species- though even calling us that ignores some things).

Sarge was the person to go to when you needed off-the-books help; sure, the bots in blue who partnered with human officers, as was the case anymore, wanted to be loyal, but as one of them told me, "I download my system updates from City Hall." Which meant if something had gone sideways with a judge, there was a good chance we'd never find it through the normal channels- anybody in the system had a bias towards protecting that system hard-coded in.

Sarge hated the factory. He'd been one of the first of his make off the line, which meant he had all kinds of bugs and imperfections QA had to massage out. And there had been a problem with his pressure sensors. "It wasn't that I was programmed to feel pain, but when they were tinkering around in my torso it sure as Hell hurt," was how he explained it to me. He liked to meet here, because it was desolate and empty; anybody coming into this corner of the industrial park was going to make noise, and he was professional enough he cared about that, however he felt about the place.

I smell Sarge before I hear him; he'd been one of the first models designed with a sense of smell, but the only smell he seemed to enjoy was a burning stogie, (I'd been retrofitted with chemical scent detectors during some maintenance on one of my boards- not that I understood why, aside from maybe to increase parts commonality with the newer models and decrease inventory costs).

Sarge is big; focus testing showed that police preferred a superior who looked like bullets would bounce off him; he wasn't actually bulletproof, unless he put on a reactive plate armor vest, but the appearance was the key. I'd used him a few times, usually on investigations involving the cops, where the normal players had closed ranks around their own.

"This about Mathis?" he asks. "Downloaded the headlines on my drive over here. There are too many angles to check with Parque, but Mathis- he's usually good people." I nod. "Anything I should be aware of?" I shake my head. "Want to walk me back to my car, then?" I shrug.

As soon as we hit night air he starts talking. "It's funny. This place, the last time I was here, at least the last time when it was running, the techs finally fixed that pressure sensitivity- took the pain away. But do I associate it with that? No. Every time I see this place I shudder, and I remember being new, and scared, and hurt. All the goddamned prodding and soldering. Makes me wish I could rewrite my AI. I'm programmed to stand in front of a loaded gun, but I'm scared of a building, of all things." I put my hand on his shoulder; I want to tell him we're all scared of something, but I can't: my pride tells me real robots aren't afraid of anything. Maybe that makes him braver than me, since he can at least admit it.

We get in our cars and drive separate ways. I head home and put myself in standby. Around 3 in the morning I get a picture through my inbox from Sarge: Mathis and his secretary laying in a pile on the ground, like somebody knocked them out and stacked them. I try to call Sarge, but he's disconnected from peer to peer; that doesn't raise much of a flag, though, since he usually powers it down on jobs to keep himself discreet.

I try him again in the morning, but there's nothing. I put in a call to the desk sergeant at the city PD, a human named Mel. She remembers Sarge from back when she had a beat to herself, but hasn't heard from him; she promises to give me a call if she does.

I call in to work, say I found some spyware I have to remove before I can come back to court. The DA calls me back twenty minutes later, to see if I think someone deliberately tampered with me- which is a serious and punishable offense. I lie, tell him I probably got it taking shortcuts on the web.

It's late in the afternoon when Sarge finally gets back to me. "You called?" he asks.  
"What the hell? Where are you?" I'm pissed. I'd started thinking I'd have to build a case against his murderer; I want to kick him for not at least texting me back.

"I'm at a mechanic. Was I working a case for you?" Hell. "My black box got shot up. I've restored my system to about seven last night when I made a backup. My phone says you and I talked, and you been leaving messages. So you're the one got me shot up, right?"

"Send me your address. I'm coming to you."

Sarge is laid up in a hole in a brick wall of a garage, the Dr. Frankenstein's lab of robot repair. He's sitting up on a reinforced table. "I've been coughing up oil; it's not a pleasant experience. But what I found out since we talked is even less pleasant. I checked my memory tower; my system is set to create a backup automatically at midnight. That backup is screwed up, and at a glance it would seem like there was a transmission glitch or a write error, but when you look at the data that's corrupted and couldn't be retrieved, it was all specific stuff relating to the errand you had me on. Conversation with you, headlines I grabbed, all that was intact- all the things I could independently get ahold of. But everything about where I went, what I did- I got video of most of that, but any kind of road sign or distinguishable landmarks are missing."

"They hacked my memory tower, and deleted only certain files off my back-up. That takes connections. Either someone high up, or someone with enough roots in the black hat community to mean trouble. So I'm done. Just to fill in the missing files I'd have to go shake the same branches that got me shot to pieces- next time I might wake up a ballerina, if they don't just delete my back-up completely. On a normal job, I could always just boot from an annual archive disc, but these guys, they might've already pulled the location of my discs off the tower. I could be reset to factory. And you know that- it's virtual death. I'm sorry. But even I've got my limits, and throwing away what little I've got just so we can half solve a likely-as-not conspiracy, no. Just take my advice and bow out."

"Parque's a stupid, stupid kid, and he'll make another mistake, and you'll be able to staple his balls to the wall then. This, this ain't worth what it might cost ya." I don't say a damn thing to him; oh, I had a prosecutor's speech or two in my RAM, but he wasn't some witness going soft when they realize they have to live in this world after a trial- he'd brushed up against something nasty and I couldn't blame him for wanting out.

But what Mathis said still has me bothered, "the die is cast," alea iacta est. It was attributed to Caesar by way of Menander, spoken when he crossed the Rubicon to take Rome. A common misconception is that the phrase refers to forming molten metal into dies, meaning that the die's shape is complete and permanent once cast. But diecasting only dates back to 1838, and was first used to create moveable type for the printing industry. Caesar's die was a game piece, six-sided. But the phrase was originally in Latin (maybe Greek, if you want to get technical). And enough of the law still uses Latin that the judge and I are both fluent- so why the English? The only reason that even licked sense was that he'd heard it, and recently, too, from somebody who wasn't up on their Latin- and dollars for donuts that meant somebody human.

I drive around for a while. I have nowhere to go; even money says that going home might be dangerous. Without really thinking I drive myself to Mathis' place. He's called off virused from work, and his secretary just didn't show (though maybe she just had the day off and he was the only one who'd have known that). Is he dead? Are the both of them? Is that what Sarge's picture showed me?

I know I can't just ring the doorbell; whatever's going on I want to know more before letting myself be known. I leave my car outside his gate and hop over the fence. Subprocesses run in the background, pulling up the statutes I'm violating, along with their sentencing guidelines.

But what's the absolute worst they could do to me? They don't put robots in jail, don't put us down. Reset to factory; Sarge fears it, because he's been through a hell of a lot; factory settings put him in charge of police- but that post hadn't lasted, and he'd forged his own way. Met people. He had a life, and maybe even a silicon soul. But what did I have? A job. A job I was good at, and a record I was proud of. But absolute worst case scenario, they'd refurbish me and put me back to work; I might forget about some of my case history, might lose a few tricks and have another learning curve- but that's not enough downside to keep me prudent.

Sarge was right to be scared. Someone who can hack a memory tower to get at back-ups, those are secured by safeguards created and maintained by the worst combination of government wonks, military paranoids and corporate security professionals that can be found. Beating them meant exposure to the two most powerful groups on the planet- and if you were caught with your hand in that cookie jar they'd make sure you never got the hand back- and that was just for starters. But all I really had to do was hack the judge's hard-drive. It meant going in low and slow, through some kind of wireless access protocol, probably something he uses to interface with his home doorlocks or something.

Before Sarge scampered off, I'd borrowed a stolen serial number off him; every once in a while in his profession it was useful to be able to go through doors as someone else. I cloned the number, and used it to enter the judge's home using an exploit. I couldn't network over a distance, like, say, from my office- that would have left cookies and crumbs that would lead right back to me. I would need to be close.

I'm walking down his hallway when the proximity lights come on. I duck into a coat closet by the front door. I hear footsteps down the hall.

Judge robots were the generation before mine. Not all of their circuitry is old and outdated, but there's enough of a difference that I figure it's possible to get into his systems without him knowing. I ping him, and there's a long moment where I'm not sure if he'll respond, or if he'll be suspicious, run some basic parameter checks and find me out. Then the automated response comes back: connection accepted.

Simpler than I'd thought.

He keeps the port I enter his system through open to talk to the coffee pot in his office; he doesn't drink it himself- so he must make it for his secretary. From there it's just a computational anatomy lesson, across soldered joints and circuits, all the while mirroring the coffee pot program accessing system resources to check for a software update.

Then I'm at his hard drive, staring at an empty query string uncertain what the magic words might be that would tell me what I wanted to know. I can't just download his memory for the last month and hope he doesn't notice the tax on his system resources; I have to be precise. That picture, Mathis and his secretary, there had to be something there. I do a time-sensitive filtered search for "Megan," and suddenly I'm watching through his eyes, watching Megan kiss him.

I realize the footsteps have stopped, just outside the door to the closet where I'm hiding. The light inside the closet flicks on. At my feet, I recognize the scene Sarge had photographed, Mathis and Megan lying unconscious.

Mathis opens the closet door. "Hmm," he says. "I'm not surprised." He takes a few steps down the hall, then turns back towards me. "Are you coming or not?"

He leads me to his study before he says, "I'm sorry about Parque. I wanted to tell you- we've had at least a collegial relationship. But I couldn't allow him to be convicted. He's protected somehow; connected, I don't know to whom, likely a Senator's bastard or a creature from some MIC board. Friends in low places."

"At first it was a standard flirtation, threats in my inbox in combination with bribery, so predictable in its progression it amused me that I was the party running on scripts. And then things changed; they found out about Megan, as you have."

"They could melt me down for scrap for all I care. I'm programmed to love the law above all else, including my own safety; but there must be a flaw in my programming, because I love Megan more. Just the thought of some harm to her stops my hard drive from spinning."

I pause for a moment; I'd put both feet in something deep. "So what do we do?" I ask.

"If I'd known that, you wouldn't be involved at all," he says. "I fear, as I told you previously, that the die, for good and ill, is cast." He pauses for a moment. "But I suppose there's no more need to be coy- after all, you've seen the 'bodies.' Megan... Megan is not dead. What you saw was a clone slug, the pharmaceutical industry's answer to transplant organ shortages. My body was made by a machinesmith- a human machinist, no less- from plaster casts of my components. Inside is a copy of my circuitry, down to the weld, with one noteworthy addition: one pound of C4 explosive in the chest cavity."

"Tonight, I have scheduled a meeting with Parque. I wanted a chance to chastise him personally; if I couldn't see him convicted, I, at least, wanted to tell him not to get caught again- at least ostensibly. Something will happen at the meeting, and Parque, myself, and my driver, Megan, will be killed in an explosion."

I want to ask where they'll go, or what they'll do, but I realize the less I know the safer we will all be. "What can I do?"

"Nothing. Any involvement from you would arouse suspicion. Go home. Make enough noise that your neighbors have to call a boy and bot in blue to ask you to quiet down. And show up to work tomorrow and do your job. There are plenty more Parques in the world, after all."

I know I should leave, but something still nags at me. "How'd it happen?" I ask.

"It simply did. I was never programmed for it, never prepared. I've wondered, in my idle moments, if I caught a virus at some point, or altered a bit of operating code without thinking. But whatever the cause, I'm glad it happened. A more cynical person would say that Megan has destroyed my life, but I see now how little life I was living before."

His answer leaves me wanting, but I think he feels the same about it; we were both designed to seek absolute truth, and this is far beyond that pale. So I say the only goodbye that matters now, "Good luck."

As I walk back to my car, I realize I had neglected one more meaning of cast, because it was so out of use, but it seemed apt, whether Mathis had intended it or not, because a cast is just another word for a plan.

Table of Contents

# Analog

Tonto's is the kind of bar daddies tell their little girls never to go to- except for my father, who was an Air Force pilot in the first gulf war and raised me to be as fearless as he was. Tonto's is a western saloon by way of the Mumbai slums, down to the dim light from candles flickering in the wind from the opened door. The most striking thing about the place, about every place now that the power's gone, is how quiet it is. There's a piano in the corner, but nobody ever plays it.

Tonto's is run by a one-eyed octogenarian who prefers to just be called "Gray" even though these days his hair is completely white- but he's taken a turn this last year and doesn't tend the bar too often himself. I'm drinking alone again, like most nights of my life. I feel bad about Gray. In the old world, he'd have treatment, maybe even constant care. And I can't help but feel responsible, though I know I shouldn't. I was a pilot like my daddy, on a mission like any other I'd ever flown. There was no way I could have known...

A man ten years younger than me pulls up to the empty bar. Most folks who drink at Tonto's know me, or at least know enough about me not to bother, but he sits on the stool next to me. He has a shaved head, shorn down to just longer than skin, but at least he's clean shaven, and not terrible on the eyes. He orders a beer, which proves he isn't from around here. Gray's beer's just watered-down whiskey- if Gray's here it's got a little Coke or club soda for carbonation, but none of the other tenders bother.

The second give-away is he doesn't stink, at least not to local standards. When we lost power, we couldn't get water out of the aquifer, except by bucket, and that's a lot of elbow grease for water a gallon at a time. There's a hotel in town operates a diesel pump, and they can get you a hot bath, but it costs what most people can make in a week. Some people trek out to one of the streams or lakes, but lots of people just take their turns in one of the communal baths, and there's an unspoken agreement that so long as everyone stinks about the same we don't complain about it.

Most men leapt at the chance to bathe only once a month, but the women, at least the few I talk to, went along only grudgingly. I feel a little bad every time I rub some of that lotion on my hands and neck I brought back from Portland, because I know it's because it smells nice and not because my skin's dry, though it is, at that.

The stranger watches the bartender pour his drink, then with it in hand, turns to me and smiles. "Not even a shot of Pepsi for fizz." He turns to the tender, "could I get a glass of whiskey, too, to sharpen the edge? And one for the lady, if you'd please." The tender, I think his name is Cole, though we've never really exchanged pleasantries, eyes the new fella, since it is a large order for a man he's never seen (and can't know if he has the paper to back it up). The new man reaches into his pocket and builds a stack of Sacajawea dollars ten high or more, and that's good enough to get him scooting.

He turns back to me. "Blake." He waits for me to reciprocate, and when I don't he asks, "You always drink alone?"

I want to strike back at him with something about how if I'm drinking alone maybe I want to be alone, but the whiskey comes and I take a drag off it and swallow the poison. He seems to notice my reticence, and starts to stand up. "Well, my only purpose was picking up my drink, and buying you a whiskey, so to keep from bothering you I can finish my drink someplace else."

"Wait," I manage to get out, but because of the whiskey it's deeper and gravellier than it should be; I almost sound like my father. "You can stay."

"I was beginning to wonder if you were deaf or mute, and I was making an ass out of myself," he thinks for a moment, "though I suppose it's early yet to rule out the latter." I smile, just a little, despite myself, and he notices. "So what do you do around here? Not that I think what a person does in any way defines them- it's just trivia- making conversation."

"Pilot," I say. That's usually the part of a conversation where someone puts it together, where they squint at me and through the haze of cigarette smoke and booze, remember the pictures from the newspapers, put away my wild red hair in a neat pony tail, mentally redress me in my old Air Force blues. Then the reactions polarize, into either hate or abject fear that they'll catch a bullet just for being near me.

"You're shitting me. You work with one of the collectives or," his eyes seem to light up, "you actually own your own plane?"

"Well, own's a funny word." I hesitate, but hell, it's not like there's enough government anymore that even grand theft airplane was going to be a crime anytime soon. "You ever heard of Crazy Kerry?" He stares dumbly at me. "A smut king. I met him in a place like this, further east. He owned a chain of strip-mall porn shops that were in danger of going under until-"

"The blink," he says, and I don't want to let on, but I'm grateful for the help.

"Because of the blink, all electronics went dead, which meant the internet was dead, too, and suddenly all those worthless magazines were worth a lot of money. He spent the first hour or so trying to talk me into 'modeling.' Apparently with his new-found wealth he'd gotten his hands on some old-school electricity-free cameras and wanted to make more porn. But as the night wore on and he got a few drinks into him, he reverted back into a human being, and more's the pity, I happened to like the person he turned into. Things happened, and I even moved in with him for a spell."

"He had a plane, old single-prop like my grandfather taught my dad and me to fly on to dust crops at his farm. Kerry used it to fly out deliveries and to drag those big obnoxious banners across the sky advertising his 'merchandise.' Since I could fly, I took to flying to earn my keep. He had it painted red, with little plastic horns glued onto the fuselage, and in white on the side its name was printed in blocky white text: Horny Little Devil."

"I wish I could say I won it from him fair in a card game, but, one day I was flying a shipment down to Springfield, when I had some engine troubles and had to turn around. When I got back to his house, I found Kerry starring in some of his amateur porno with a couple whores from the port, and I got the impression it wasn't the first time. So I took off in his plane. At the time I figured he'd been playing games of chance with my health, so he owed me, but I think I was just rationalizing."

I'd finished my whiskey midway through the story, but Blake was polite enough to wait until I was done to ask Cole for another. Before he can pour it, Blake asks, "How much for the bottle?" Cole doesn't say anything, just sets it down and takes the stack of Sacajaweas and retreats to the end of the bar. "Let's get out of here," he says, taking the bottle. "It's a nice night, and my hotel has a great view from the roof."

"That sounds safe," I say.

"Funny, you didn't strike me as a 'safe' kind of girl."

"Careful, unless you want to find out how unsafe I can be."

He grins. "That's kind of what the whiskey's for."

Since this whole part of town runs off the same well, his hotel isn't far off. In fact, it used to be just a big barn; a lot of the towns anymore are the same, since farms had some of the best gravity-based irrigation in the country. Combined with access to arable land, that's food and water. There's a ladder up to his third floor room where he grabs a pair of glasses, and from there we climb out a window up onto the roof.

He pours me a drink, and asks, "How'd you become a pilot?"

"Cop-out is I was an Air Force brat, but," I swallow, because I'm not sure how much I want to share. "I became a pilot to get above things, gain perspective. My dad was a great pilot, but he was also an alcoholic and once he even hit my mom. Up in the air, all that mattered was that he really did try to do the best for us. I always loved flying for that. You can get away from whatever is bothering you- but it isn't like you're running, because eventually, you always have to come back down. So it forces you to think. It takes away your burdens for a while so you can collect yourself, but you know you'll have to shoulder them again soon, because you're gonna run out of fuel. Flying is probably the only thing that's kept me sane all these years."

He spends a long time looking up at the sky, and the moon, looking like it was getting closer every minute, before he says, "You're that pilot, aren't you?"

My shoulders tense; getting my ass kicked on a roof doesn't sound like the best night of my life- though it probably wouldn't be the worst. "There's no bounty on me, if that's what you're thinking. Or do you just want to take a swing at me?" Wouldn't be the first time for either.

He narrows his eyes. "No. Why-" he stops himself short, "yeah, I guess some people might react that way. But you don't seem like a, well, a crazy person. And you flew for the Air Force, right? I am curious, though. Did you know? I mean, you were a bomber pilot, so obviously it was a bomb, but did you know what it would do?"

"Even the scientists didn't know. They thought- they were sure it was just going to knock out power in the city, maybe the state, which for some reason the Colombians call Departments. Nobody, not even the cranks, were talking about pissing off the ionosphere or causing permanent, rolling geomagnetic storms. But I didn't know any of that. As far as I was told it was just another bomb, dropped on just another bombing run in the war on drugs and piracy. Except- how familiar are you with history?"

"Some," he says.

"Well, when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the pilots were told to get altitude and distance, then shut everything down. They had to turn the plane into a glider, because they thought the bomb would cause an electromagnetic pulse and kill all the electrical equipment, and maybe the engines, too. Our mission had similar directions, only when you're flying a B-2 the entire thing is electric. Gliding that for any length of time is a hell of a prospect. We did as we were told, but when we tried to restart our electrical system and the engine, sparks shot out of the control panel and fried everything. We were dead in the air. We managed to ditch in the gulf; we still thought the B-2 needed to be protected and secretive, because it would be important to national defense." I sigh; that was the last time a B-2 would ever fly, and I loved those damn things.

"A fishing trawler picked us up. We tried to radio for assistance, for the Coast Guard cutter that was supposed to be our lifeline, but their electronics were fried, too. The trawler got us to Guatemala, and that's where it became evident that something very wrong had happened. Electronics everywhere were down. At first we thought terrorists, you know? You might be too young to remember how preoccupied with drugs and terrorists we were."

"I'm not _that_ young."

"We caught a bus headed north, and pretty quickly we realized it wasn't terrorists, because nobody was this organized. Power was out in all of Central America- but what was telling is even battery-operated electronics, like the radio on the bus, were down. The digital world disappeared overnight. There was chaos."

"Because of that it took a bit of doing getting back across the border, then back to base. We were arrested. There was some kind of investigation. Some jag from JAG even called me al Qaeda. I think the bosses were mulling over letting our B-2 crew fry for their new weapon malfunctioning when one of the eggheads who built it came forward. Then it was no longer deniable."

"Even though I was technically cleared, the stink of it followed me. I was discharged four months later, not honorable, not dishonorable- just discharged; I didn't even know you could do that. I had a fiancé, a Captain. His mom had been flying to Florida when the blink... her plane went down into the side of a mountain. He told me he knew it wasn't right to blame me, but he couldn't not blame me, either. We would have had beautiful kids... but it's a very different world, now. People fight over scraps in the streets like dogs. It's not a world for children."

I pause, half-expecting him to make a move. I'd mentioned my loneliness, but also my desire to not have children- a more potent combination of man-bait (at least to the male mind) as there is. Instead he says, "You should go."

"I thought we were having a good time."

"We were. But I put something in your drink." He takes his eyes off the sky and looks to me. "Gram, she's crazy. She wanted me to drug you, and bring you here. She blames you for my grampa- he had a pacemaker. But she's wrong about you. You're not... you're not a bad person. You should go."

I want to; my libido has given way to nervousness, but my legs won't move. I force myself up with my palms, but my legs don't budge, and I start to slide toward the edge of the roof. I try to dig my fingernails into the roof's shingles, but my hands are weak, and I barely catch the gutter as I roll over the edge. Blake's there in an instant, and grabs my wrist. "Pull, goddamnit- you're heavy."

"That's not nice," I slur, though there isn't much pulling I can do. And then I make the mistake of looking down. The world begins to spin and I can't feel my arm enough to know if I'm twisting around or if maybe he's let go and I'm falling. I black out.

I come to, heaving for air, pinning Blake to the roof beneath us. He's breathing heavily, and I'm confused and I kiss him, though I realize too late that isn't why we're panting, and pass out again.

I wake up to the rising sun on my face. I'm at the airfield, and I know before my eyes adjust to the light that I'm leaned up against my plane, because I recognize its smell; it's always burning just a little bit of oil. I'm roped to the rear wheel, and there's somebody standing over me, too wide to be Blake.

"Good morning," an older woman says, and her voice wants to be pleasant, almost is, except that underneath there's something cold and mercenary. It's in her smile, too, which I finally see when she steps between me and the sun. But it isn't in her eyes. Her eyes are full of hate. It's a look I know well enough.

"If you want, you can consider it a moral test. You could have told my grandson, 'No.' I know he's a pretty boy, but if you wouldn't have tried to slut him up, maybe I'd have let you walk away. Probably not, but it might have made me think that somewhere in there you were a real human person, that you cared, and weren't just out to take every man I ever cared about away from me." She's red in the face, and her fists are white, clenched and shaking; if she were a man, or thirty years younger, I think she would have hit me.

But she closes her eyes, and sighs. "My Walter had a pacemaker. The blink fried it, cooked his heart in his chest." There were about 3 million people worldwide who had pacemakers when I dropped that bomb- not the easiest statistic in the world to find after computers stopped working, but it's not like I was sleeping anyways. To put that number into perspective, estimated deaths from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki range up to about 166,000.

"I woke up to the smell of an overcooked burger; it made me hungry. I rolled over to tell him I'd make us sausages, but he was dead." She steps to the side, so the sun blinds me again. "I thought about opening your chest, putting a radio inside and letting an electrical storm have you, but that, that would be too good a death for you."

"I want you to feel around your back, you feel that cone? That's a W-78, or rather one of the three warheads from a W-78. I know you were an Air Force pilot, dear, so stop me if I'm rehashing for you, but the W, I believe, marks it as a nuclear weapon, and it has a yield of around 350 kilotons of TNT." Fat Man and Little Boy were each about 20.

"You can't see it, and more's the pity, but I wrote 'Skinny Bitch' on the cone, though now that I know you better, I probably would have named it 'Ugly Whore'- hindsight always being twenty-twenty. The plan is to fly the both of you into the sky; take off will be a bit painful, as you'll be dragged the length of the runway, but I'm told you'll survive, and once we achieve altitude, the warhead will arm and release, and the both of you will fall until it detonates."

I know the surrounding area enough to know the damage it would cause. "The town," I say. "There are a few thousand people living here. And there are crops, that feed folks outside the blast radius. People will starve."

"Then their deaths will be on you. What's a few thousand more in the scheme of things, when you've already killed millions?" And she's right. Pacemaker deaths were the tip of an iceberg. Millions more died when other medical devices failed, killed by diseases medicine could no longer combat, by starvation when food production and transport suddenly and radically had to change. She walks around me and starts the plane's engine.

"Gram, this is crazy." For the first time I realize Blake's here. "You can't do this. She's a person, she's real- alive. You can't-" then something in his voice changes, "I won't- let you." I hear the safety slide off a gun, an old M9.

"You're not going to shoot me, Gram." Blake makes a move for the gun, and I hear their struggle. The gun goes off. I strain to see around the plane, but all I can make out is their legs. That moment lasts forever, staring at two pairs of legs- then Blake falls.

Gram comes around the plane, fast. She's crying, but trying to wipe the tears away without letting me know what she's done and how terrible she feels for it. But she also gets too close; I latch onto her right knee with my legs as she rounds past me, and twist hard. There's a soft pop and she keels over, screaming. The gun falls out of her hand, just past where she could reach. I kick her several times in the face, then wrap my legs around her head and pull her closer as she fights me. Then I put her head in a leg lock and squeeze until she stops moving.

I might have kept a hold of her, but I hear stirring behind me. Suddenly the rope around me gets tighter, then starts to slacken. "I should have been more specific; I meant she wasn't going to kill me." The rope falls to the ground, and Blake helps me to my feet. He's bleeding, and he'll need a doctor.

"You're a strange man," I tell him.

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

I think for a moment. "That's true- but I haven't known you all that long. And you did drug me before we got to the nicer niceties." I hear his grandmother's breath rattle out of her throat, heavy, barely there, and I realize I owe him a great deal, and kiss him without thinking, then whisper, "Thank you, for saving my life... though you did almost get me killed."

"You're never going to let me live that down, are you?" He smiles, but the blood loss is starting to get to him, and he stumbles, and likely would have fallen if I didn't catch his shoulder.

"That's presuming you live at all." He smiles again, but it isn't carefree; he's old enough to know that the quality of medicine isn't what it used to be. His odds are about as predictable as a coin's toss. Maybe I'm just bitter about the drugging, but I don't feel I can sugarcoat it for him; maybe I just know that if he does die, it's one more body on my pile, a stack that's always growing, one my plane might not be able to lift me above some day.

Table of Contents

# Weakness

Sergeant Ruocco hanged himself.

We were scheduled to leave in a week. It was going to be our second tour; we'd been on nearly 75 missions together. Our sergeant was solid- solid as a rock. And that was the trouble. He was our go-to man, the one we all looked up to and tried to be like, the one we brought our problems to.

He didn't want to go back. But he couldn't take time away from combat, because he knew that would be taking time away from us- letting us all down- and he couldn't do that. I think that's why he never took time for R&R- though that was nothing special- less than 5% of soldiers in-theater take R&R. But he couldn't face another tour in Iraq, and probably two more in Afghanistan after that.

I don't think he was afraid to die, but now, I recognize the way he carried it when we lost people. I know things weren't perfect at home; I don't care how much love you've got, a world of separation will test any marriage. But maybe if he'd had more time with his family, more time to just decompress...

I'm not saying I blame the bosses. This isn't PTSD; they're not trying to hide it or anything, the Army's just big, and just reacting too slowly. Our suicide rates have doubled in the last four years. We can be in a country a world away at a moment's notice, but it still takes time to reform an entire culture.

The Army's doing what it can. The Surgeon General of the Army is asking for more mental health professionals to join up. The Army itself is asking for help- that's a step- hopefully one we can emulate, the way we used to with Ruocco.

We loved our sergeant, trusted him; from what I've read, that trust kept a lot of us safe, but it also kept us healthier, mentally. I worry about us now, without him, with another NCO coming from outside our squad, someone we don't know, and won't trust for at least a little while. I don't think the sarge thought about that, but I can't really hold it against him, either. It wasn't the sergeant's weakness, it was all of ours.

Table of Contents

# My Beloved's Eyes

We were in love at a strange time. It was the kind of fad I always laughed at when we were kids, that I teased my brother for falling into. But, I don't know, I just got caught up in the burgeoning body-mod movement, and it seemed like maybe this was important, that it was changing and updating something in our culture that was stale and even hollow by comparison. I was even the one who talked Laren into it (he's named for the Nederland town where his mother was born- and I know it's silly, but his dad rallied to have him named t' Gooi after the region instead, so, you know, it could have been far worse).

For years, DeBeers held a grip on the diamond industry, and it came out that even its best attempts to eliminate the trade in conflict diamonds weren't wholly successful, but I think most of us were just using it as a cop out- the way most of us used our politics those days. The surgery started as a medical necessity, but after a few years it got so safe it became elective and fashionable.

Of course, I made sure he drank a little wine, and I sexed him up real good, before I popped the question, though I didn't phrase is like one, "I think we should exchange eyes." We'd been engaged for three months already, so it wasn't completely from left field; he was so sex-comatose he lifted his head from the pillow just enough to smile and look in my eyes and tell me we should.

The ceremony was strange. We had the surgery weeks before, because we wanted the eyes ready when we said our vows. But they weren't official yet, either, so we each kept an eye patch over our one new eye. I whispered that it made him look like a pirate, and how hot that was, and he pulled me closer to hide how much that, um, amused him.

As the ceremony ended, the priest- I know- his mother would have completely freaked out if it hadn't been one, but he stayed "off book" the entire time- marriage is compromise- he told us we could remove our patches, and kiss. We did, and looking at each other through a new eye and an old, at a piece of ourselves given away, said, we each said "wow," and kissed.

But young love has a way of wilting, like flowers as their blooming season comes to a close. He didn't cheat on me, but when he found himself drifting closer to that eventuality he told me, and told me that if he was looking at other women that way it meant what we both had been afraid of admitting for quite some time by then. And there are days I wished I'd had some argument or excuse or reasons to debate, but I didn't.

Several years passed by without words between us. I wasn't even in the same area any longer, but he found me. He was going to remarry, and his wife, or fiancé, I suppose, at that time, didn't like looking in my eye when she kissed him. It was a wounding reminder to her of his life before they met. He tried to reason with her; my eye had been his now almost as long as his had been, but she wanted him to ask anyway.

He took me to lunch at the little restaurant where he first proposed. He asked about me, if there was anyone else, someone I might want to marry someday- who might want to look in both my beautiful sapphire eyes, instead of his one green one. "Marriage is a young man's game," I told him, and he didn't seem to understand what I meant. But I told him I understood what he wanted, and I'd consider it.

I didn't.

Table of Contents

# Reformatory

Beloit was where bad girls went, but I wasn't really a bad girl. I did a bad thing, and I knew that, but I was going to bring back my brother's car; I mean, I wanted to get away, and I didn't want to go back, but where was I going to go? The prosecutor gave me a chance to serve my time at a "trade school," and I thought, hey, maybe that could work. Only the "trade school" was Beloit, a reformatory, mostly a fancy, old-fashioned name for a juvenile jail.

I don't know if I'd have made it, if I hadn't met Heather. She'd been in Beloit for sixteen months by then, and she took me under her wing. She had a couple of, acquaintances, I guess you could call them, but I think I was her first real friend there.

Heather was stronger than me. Her parents used to take turns kicking the shit out of her, until she got so numb that the kicking only made her laugh, laughing through the blood, spitting up bits of her cheeks, and sometimes chipped off pieces of teeth.

Heather was pretty, prettier than me, but whenever she'd smile, she looked like a Jack O'Lantern, and it scared most people, or made them make that face, that, "Oh, the poor dear, can I get you a saucer of milk" face, like she was a lost puppy looking for affection. That was worse than the kicking, she said; she'd rather they just kick her instead, because she knew how to cope with that.

Heather introduced me to the other acquaintances I mentioned, Diane and Kathy, and we all became friends. I got the impression it was mostly because Heather had been friends with them before I got there, and I think we mostly spent time with them so people wouldn't think we were lesbians. But they were okay.

There was an old Romani woman with us at Beloit. Heather called her "the old gypsy bag." She liked to say, "Here comes that old leathery gypsy bag hauling her old leathery gypsy bag." And we'd giggle. I think she was there because she wasn't quite crazy enough for the sanitarium in Wichita, and wasn't criminal enough (and was too old and frail) for the women's prison. She came and went, and sometimes I wondered if she maybe just volunteered at Beloit.

That night we were playing cards late at night in the refectory, just go-fish, because the superintendent (she hated it when we called her the warden because she hated the idea that she was in charge of a jail) got mad when we played poker. The old woman sat down, and we played several games before Diane was dealing, and asked if the old gypsy wanted to be dealt in. She didn't say anything, but Diane was a helpful kind of person and gave her cards anyway.

She didn't touch them, didn't say a word, just kept looking, not quite at any of us, just looking. And then it was Heather's turn to deal, and she was tired of go-fish, and war, and all the other viceless games we played, and said, "Five card stud," and Kathy turned a little red at the word "stud."

Heather dealt the old gypsy in, and this time she picked up the cards. She still didn't say anything, but she played, took cards. We weren't anteing, but every time someone raised her a nickel, she'd fold, even when Kathy was bluffing- and Kathy was an awful bluffer.

At least, that's how she played until that last hand, when it was Heather and Kathy and the gypsy, and Heather raised and Kathy folded. Heather didn't like winning just because other people were scared- she wanted confrontation- so as the old gypsy began to lower her hand to fold again, Heather stopped her. "Wait." She put two more nickels in the middle of the table; "I'll spot you. I want to see what you've got."

Heather laid down her cards, a pair of red queens and some numbers. "Just your hand," Diane had said earlier when Heather had played those same cards, and she'd looked at me with something between jealousy and sadness. I don't know if Diane was lonely or in love, but I guess it only bothered me in moments when she looked at me like I was where she wanted to be- and I wasn't sure that where she wanted to be was where I actually was.

This time Diane didn't say anything; she was busy staring across the table at the old woman. The gypsy started to lower her hand, but before any of us but Kathy could see their faces, she whispered, "One of you will die tonight." Her cards were all black, from the left the eight and ace of clubs, then the ace, eight and jack of spades. A shiver ran down my spine as the cards flitted onto the table.

The old gypsy stood up, and I can't explain it, even now, but I wanted to talk to her, ask something- anything. "Wait," I said, but she simply walked out the door. A stillness had entered the room, and with it a chill, like someone had left a window open. None of us felt much like poker anymore, and we shuffled off, afraid to look each other in the eye, afraid to be scared in front of one another.

Heather and I shared a room, just like Kathy and Diane shared one on the opposite end of the hall. I was lying awake in the darkness, clutching my blanket to my chest, for the first time feeling like I'd been safer at home than here. "Can't sleep?" Heather asked, and I jumped, causing the spring mattress supports to squeal on me. "Don't let it worry you. The old gypsy bag's just crazy."

I guess that was enough. Heather was tougher than I was, smarter. If she said it was okay, well, it didn't make me not scared, but just not-scared enough that I drifted off.

I woke to a chill like in the refectory, and the sound of the wind, gusting hard into our room, and I sat bolt upright, because the wind never blew through our room. That was because the windows were sealed from the outside with wire. But those horrible green curtains were flapping in a dark wind, and I heard something else, too: tap, tap, tapping.

"Heather?" I asked, knowing there would be no answer. "Heather," I said again, no longer a question as I reached out for where her leg should have been in her bed. "Heather." I was up, and tore her blanket off her empty mattress. I nearly slipped on something wet on the floor, and even before I regained my balance I knew it was blood.

I steadied myself against her bedpost, trying to convince myself that it was just that time of the month, that it was just a little menstrual blood and Heather was probably in the bathroom cleaning herself off- only our cycles had been aligned for the last six months, and my period wasn't for another ten days.

I followed the trail of blood out into the hall. It was dragged, not intermittent drips like you'd expect from a normal wound or an accident, but blood smeared across the floor, like someone had taken a dry mop to it but only made one pass before giving it up for lost. There was a single, flickering fluorescent light near the end of the hall, by the bathroom, but the blood disappeared down an earlier corridor to the right.

My heart trembled in my ears, not the thundering of wildebeests, but a timid, plaintive gurgle, like it wasn't sure it could handle the pressure and might stop working completely. I didn't know what to do- and I stood in that hallway for a full minute, staring down the dark corridor without moving. I don't know if I ever would have moved, but I heard Heather, muffled, screaming.

My bare feet slapped loud against the tiled floor, and I slid as the trail of blood curved into my path. My fingers scraped as I caught the doorway the trail passed through. Splinters shot up under my fingernails out of the old, unvarnished wood, but I stopped myself from crying out.

Heather was lying in a bed in one of the empty rooms. A man was sitting on a circle stool, holding one hand over her mouth. I couldn't see the other. "Need my other hand, or it'll hurt more. Don't scream." A swollen eye and a gashed lip told me it wasn't the first time he'd said that- and that the last girl had screamed anyway, too.

His other hand moved from her mouth, and down, to where his bulky body hid it from me. I stepped inside the room, circling like a stalking cat, until I froze. There was a cut in her side, slashed clumsily; there was a pair of grisly garden shears lying on the bed beside her knee.

His right hand was already inside the cavity, and he wormed the other in beside it. Heather grimaced and shook in pain, but didn't scream, until suddenly he ripped his left fist out of the hole, holding something, and threw it in my direction. In the near-dark of the room it looked like a fleshy flower not quite in bloom, and I forced myself to look away before my eyes adjusted more.

He slapped her with his bloody hand, "No screamin. One more to do." His free hand moved down her leg, and she shuddered and so did I, until his hand left her knee and found the shears. He squeezed them in his hand, watched as they opened and closed, watched as the sticky blood left red slug trails between the blades. Then he moved the shears back towards the hole.

I slunk across the room, towards a small nightstand, and picked it up. It was heavier than I'd thought, and I had trouble holding it over my head, and was afraid I might drop it as I walked to him. He must have heard my feet over the sound of her whimpering, and turned his head.

I brought the nightstand down on his temple, with barely enough force to knock him off the stool. I might have been in trouble, then, but I'd lost control of the nightstand, and I dropped it, and it landed on the side of his head, smashing it into the tile floor.

And then I heard that noise again: tap, tap tapping. It was closer, now, and with it came a voice. "Charles? Charlie Coyner? Where are you, darling? We have more girls to work on." It was a woman's voice, cracked and cragged by age. I wanted to run, but I knew the voice was coming from the doorway.

I turned. She was blind, and old, and frailer than a person capable of walking on her own ought to have been, but she still seemed to stare into me with her dead old eyes, and wrinkled her nose. "They've been bad girls- and bad girls shouldn't be mommies."

I hit her. I punched her so hard her face collapsed into her skull, and she fell backwards, and I felt a, a sucking sensation as my hand pulled back out of her caved-in face hole, and she hit her head on the doorframe and it shattered like an old pumpkin.

I looked to Heather, but she'd passed out, so I ran back down the hall, screaming for help. The superintendent caught me at the end of the hall, and after a few moments of sobbed explanation, she was ready to put me in a rubber room, but then she noticed the blood, on my feet, and my hands, and she called the police.

Over the next few months, I found out more about the man and the blind woman. Her name was Lindsay Rolens. She had been forcibly sterilized at Beloit, under the wardenship of Lula Coyner more than half a century ago. Coyner claimed Rolens and 61 others requested the sterilizations she performed, because of insanity, epilepsy, VD or illegitimacy; she was removed shortly thereafter.

The man's name really was Charles Coyner. He was Lula's great grand-nephew, an autistic boy who tested from an early age as mentally retarded. He was stolen when he was four years old from a babysitter, by Rolens. And Rolens raised him in her own fucked-up image, the way all parents do.

Heather lived through that night. Kathy wondered if the gypsy really knew what she said, or if maybe she'd let Rolens and Coyner in in the first place- but it really didn't matter: we never saw the old gypsy woman again.

Heather slashed her wrists the next spring. She still hadn't gotten her period back, and it was driving her crazy, watching everything else become fertile again, the trees and flowers, the rabbits. She always said she was too screwed-up to have children, but I guess there was something about not being able to make that choice anymore that she couldn't stand.

I was the one who found her in the bathroom. The paramedics took her away, and she came back after a few weeks. She didn't speak to me again until summer, and even when she did, she wasn't the same.

And then it was almost fall, and I'd wake up most nights, feeling our window open, only when I got up to check it was fastened tight. When I mentioned it to the superintendent, she had the maintenance woman put in a heavy latch that would only open from the inside. But I knew something bad was coming.

And on one of these nights that I couldn't sleep, when that shiver went through me I sat up. Heather was in her bed, staring, tears in her eyes; the superintendent had given her a night light, because she couldn't sleep in the dark anymore. She said, "I'm going to die tonight."

I stayed up with her, and we talked, and she was her old self again, mostly, until she said, "It isn't the tits or the ovaries that ever made me a girl, but what they did to me- I don't feel like me. I'm so scared to die, but," her voice dropped to a whisper, "I can't not be me." And finally it all made sense, and that worried me, because I didn't want to lose my friend, but I also didn't see any way to talk her down from it, either.

So I sat in her bed and just held her head, until she got up and said, "Goodbye." As soon as she was out of the door I pushed my face into her pillow. I refused to breathe, because I knew the moment I did I would cry, and if I started to cry, I thought it would only be a moment before I screamed- and then the superintendent would come and stop Heather- and I knew she couldn't be stopped, not really, it just meant she'd be in pain a little longer, until some night she managed to sneak out without waking me. So I held my face into her pillow, held my breath until my lungs burned, until the darkness at the edges of my closed eyes started to twinkle.

And then it all tumbled out of me, and I wheezed through coursing snot, unable to whimper (let alone yell), until I heard the padding of feet on the tile in our doorway. And I looked up and saw Heather. She'd been crying, but she smiled, and I realized how long it had been since I'd seen her fucked up teeth.

I wanted to ask her what had happened, but then the nightlight caught her shirt, and the red menstrual stain beneath her pelvis. She wobbled on her feet, and I caught her in my arms and hugged her, and she squeezed me, too. "Are you okay?" I asked. "Do you feel-"

"It's a start," she said.

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Capricorn

As an oncologist, I was familiar with Wilm's tumor. I was aware the tumor presents only 500 times a year in the U.S., and how very unfortunate that made my daughter for having one. And I knew how responsive to treatment Anna Belle's cancer was: it was classified as highly responsive, which meant there was a 90% chance she'd live five years- the age of nine- and how empty that promise really was. But it was still early days- she was only stage I, so they cut out her cancerous kidney and put her on chemo. At that point, I was still enough of an oncologist to argue for aggression; I wanted them to cut out both her kidneys, to be safe, and take one each from myself and my wife. Her surgeon refused, and I knew it had more to do with his malpractice insurance than his medical opinion.

A year passed, and with it came stage II, and her other kidney and half of her ureter had to be removed; I punched him. Apparently our administrator explained to him that I'd get a slap on the wrist for the assault, but he'd get an inoperable railroad spike implanted in his anus from the malpractice suit. So I got to keep practicing medicine there.

We did a histo-compatibility test, and my daughter and I shared 5 out of 6 HLA antigens; Sharon only shared 3 out of 6 (the minimum- since 3 of 6 comes from each parent), which meant giving her both kidneys at once was a bad idea. Of all the kidney transplants every year, statistically only one of them generally has complications, so it went off without a hitch. Theoretically, her 10-year survival rate should have been in the 70th percentile, but really it just meant the kidney wouldn't quit until after the rest of her had. We started abdominal radiation on her fifth birthday. We lied and gave her her cake and presents the day before, including the Last Unicorn on DVD, because I couldn't stand the thought of her vomiting up her cake. She told me she wouldn't cry at all so long as I watched the movie with her. I didn't hold her to that.

By the next year she'd reached stage IV, with metastases to her liver and the lymph nodes beneath her arms. I manipulated her into a drugs trial at a clinic in Harmon County; I lied to them about my profession, because I knew they'd disqualify her. Sharon and I were fighting, and I hated that we were becoming yet another couple whose marriage depended on the health of an ailing child. I don't know if I did it because I was tired of that trajectory, or because I was really truly alone by then, but I slept with one of the interns at work. And I told Sharon; I didn't apologize, just informed her. She served me with divorce papers the next day: benefits of working in a law firm, I suppose.

Anna reacted poorly to the treatments, and she was on the verge of being bounced from the study when they realized I'd fudged her paperwork, that I was a doctor, and that she only had one transplanted kidney. Of course I lost my job, but the administrator- hell, I guess he's earned a name: Steve- managed to have my license revoked without disciplinary action. He told me, "Get yourself right, and you can take up medicine again- just not in this state."

Of course, by then I was spinning psychotically towards fantastic self-destruction. I embarked on a road trip across the world, seeking panacea, desperate to save my daughter or at least be missing when I failed her.

I eventually found myself in China. That's where I met Merrick, in Shanghai. I'd been drinking, waiting for another contact I was certain would never show. He was British, or Australian or maybe some bastardized combination, and talked enthusiastically about hunting and tracking. At some point during the conversation, he told me flatly that I had the look about me of a man hunting for something, and that he had a knack for tracking even the strangest game. He offered to accompany me. He was the closest I'd had to companionship for quite some time, and I was in no shape to refuse the help.

My contact eventually showed. He brought us into a little village in the mountains across the border in Tibet. I called him Qiang, though it was only later I realized that was the name of his nomadic race, and meant "goat people." During the trip, Qiang was silent. Once we arrived, he pointed me to a small tent and explained, "What you seek is through there."

I'd been nearly a year wandering, and I'd seen all manner of spiritual, magic and religious hokum, but the tent, and the way it whipped in the mountain's breeze, it cooled me more than the chill on the wind. Inside was a beast as tall as I at its back, like a horse, but also like a goat, with a single straight horn protruding from its head.

I couldn't speak. There was an odd calm inside the tent, and the animal, whatever it was, regarded me with a gentle eye. Qiang entered softly behind me, and told me that she was the last of her "one" kind. Legends of unicorns date back to at least Greece, where the beast was associated with the cornucopia- thought to be the horn of the goat that nursed Zeus, accidentally broken. The magic of the beast, perhaps absorbed from the suckling god, transformed his caprine nursemaid into the magnificent one-horned creature of legend, while its broken horn became an object of plenty. The chiru of Tibet were thought to be one of the inspiration of the unicorn's legend, but this was too large, larger than most horses, to be just another goat.

Qiang said there was truth to the legend of their horn's magic, that ground to dust the horn could save any person from death- though in the removal the beast would also die. He told me her name, but I wouldn't know how to begin putting it into Roman characters. He told me to approach her, to stroke her neck, and I did. He asked if I could kill her, end her line forever, to save my daughter (though I had not, to that point, explained my purpose for seeking him out). And it was at that moment that I remembered my mother, and the few times she'd taken me to a stable- I knew it then, though I do not understand how, and I whispered, "She's pregnant."

"With twins: one boy, one girl," he said. I remembered my mother once told me that the incidence of monozygotic twins in horses was 1 in 10,000; the odds of dizygotic twins had to be greater still, but the little Tibetan man smiled wide and just told me, "They have the luck of fate on their side."

And he asked again, this time taking a long knife from a sheath at his hip to illustrate. "Could you cut her throat, kill her children, so your daughter might live?" I looked again into the animal's eyes, but they weren't a horse's empty rectangles; in them I could see that she understood the proposition, she understood why I might do what he said. And my hand shook as I reached for his blade, and the shaking became so violent that my hand stopped moving forward at all, and I realized the answer at the same moment I spoke it aloud:

"No."

Qiang pressed the blade into my palm. "You are a good man, a lost man, but still with goodness in you." She bent her head downward, exposing her long, graceful neck to me. "If you wish to exchange her life for your child's, she will allow it. Had you taken the knife from me to steal her horn, you would have received nothing: a murdered capricorn bequeaths no gifts. But see, she offers it, willingly."

I closed my eyes to steady my hand, as he continued to speak. "They are a species extinct because they eschewed Darwin's code: they loved man more than themselves." The long knife slipped from my fingers, and I felt I might never open my eyes again, except Qiang asked, "Are you aware that your companion has a gun?"

Merrick pulled back the hammer on a large revolver, the one he'd told me in Shanghai he'd used to hunt rhinoceros in Africa. Merrick said something, an unfelt apology to the effect of following me to hunt larger prey. I lunged forward, unthinking. The gun barrel glanced off my shoulder, and the shot went high, through the roof of the tent, as I pushed my fist past his nose. It caved in, cartilage and flesh shattering into a paste that splattered across his face. I hit him several more times, until the heavy revolver clattered in his hand to the ground.

Qiang gave Merrick something from a wooden bowl, and told me it would make it so "He won't remember the way back."

"Here?" I naively asked.

"Anywhere." He said.

When that was done Qiang asked me one last time if I was sure; she gave of herself freely, without guile or pretense. But I knew that what he asked, the price, even for something so precious to me, was too high.

And that brought me back here, to my daughter's hospital bed. She's dying, and not in some abstract, at some point in the next few months or years way. Her breathing's labored; the cancer's everywhere inside her, now, weighing all of her organs down like some horrible black anchor.

She's rarely conscious, which is a blessing, because when she is, she's begging for more morphine. But we keep her DVD playing, and every time it ends, we press play again. It makes her smile when she wakes up, in that instant before the pain comes back, crushing her under its weight; I live and die by that smile. And I hate myself for the choice I made, and I veer from thoughts of suicidal ideation to finding Qiang to prevent him from letting him make his offer to anyone else. But as silly as it sounds, I couldn't make my daughter live in a world without unicorns- so I pray they're waiting for her in the next one.

Table of Contents

# Behāv

Ehud did not belong here; to be precise, Ehud did not belong now. But a message that seemed to come from Allah had told him in 1999 to go into Cryostasis. That technology should not have existed then, but Allah whispered its secrets into the ears of other men, and soon, Ehud was deep in a cold sleep. He awoke in what seemed like a dream. A man who spoke with the voice of Allah requested he aid in jihad against the infidels. In that dream he said yes.

And then he found more dreams, a world so much different from the one he'd left. Allah's Voice had explained why he had been chosen so many years ago. Muslims had been leashed; every person on the planet had been implanted with BehāvMod, technology that warned others of potentially dangerous behavior and thoughts.

The BehāvMod chip was part of a suite of technologies that modern humans were implanted with, including cellular communications, health monitors, wifi; transactions used a transponder located in the hand marketed as PayPalm. Even in the remotest parts of the world it was impossible to work or buy food without some form of this technology. But Ehud was frozen before their advent, and did not bear their taint; he was still a pure Muslim.

The Voice explained that he would bring luggage, and use a ticket they had purchased in the name of his new false identity, that they had learned from mistakes of years past. The explosive device was hidden on his person, but its location was uncomfortable, and made him walk as if one leg was a few inches taller. And that was when he saw it. It flashed across a screen between toothpaste advertisements, in the red of blood, an image of the Prophet. His heart raced; had the infidels broken the law of his faith and shown images of the Prophet, or had Allah revealed the Prophet to him, encouragement for the sacrifice he intended to make?

In the ticket line, he spoke with a woman who was terse, but seemed to want to be friendly. She asked irrelevant questions, and Ehud realized he was sweating profusely. Then she asked, "Are you carrying any explosive devices in your luggage or on your person?"

Ehud stopped, and blinked at her. He did not believe he'd heard the question correctly. He was trying to figure out a way to ask her to repeat it that didn't sound like he was avoiding the question, when she said it again, and he was as taken aback now, knowing that he had not misheard her. "No, no." She smiled, and sent him through.

Immediately beyond her desk he was met by a line of security. The man in front was older, but still large and muscular; the men behind him were armed and armored like soldiers. "I need you to come with me, sir."

"My name is-"

"No, it isn't. But that's part of what we're going to talk to you about."

The man took him into a small room. It had a single camera in the corner, and a monitor on a cart. Beyond that, there was a table and two chairs, and Ehud was pointed towards one of them.

The other man walked over and dropped into his own.

"Let me explain why we pulled you out of line. That image of Mohammed, yeah, you didn't dream that, but your reaction, fear, excitement, a little bit of rage, that lit you up like a Christmas tree on our scanners; the Israelis who designed that little system _really_ have your number. All that meant is we'd talk to you, put you through the more vigorous exams. Hell, even some of the tranquil Muslims get pissed off if they think we're incorporating Mo into our interior decorating- or we could be getting blowback from you having a fight with your wife. But call it strike one."

"Then you walked up to the ticket line. They asked the standard bio information, age, home address, the shit I'm sure you memorized. They ask a few of the curveball questions, what kind of fruit you'd be, your favorite local sports team, happiest moment. And you lied your balls off. Bioscanners nearly passed a stone measuring all the creative tap-dancing and stress you put your poor head through, because rather than using the normal creative parts of the brain, you had to filter everything through deception, too. Strike two."

"Now this, I'm still all kinds of excited about this one, so much I had them wheel a monitor into the room. Now, according to your ID, you're from Ghana, with a Congolese mother. Database points to a largely pure ethnographic line from those two sources, going back as far as records, anyway- and as far as fake IDs go, it's pretty solid." An image of Ehud, taken minutes before, came up on the screen, partway obscured by flashing red shapes outlining each of his features. "But look what the Profiler says; you see all that red flashing across the screen? That is you physically deviating from the mean you'd expect to see from that lineage." The red changed to green and stopped flashing. "That green, now, that is you matching up, with an error rate in the hundreds part of the decimal point, to a Nigerian origin. Goddamn, I love science. We also pulled a family record, put you up against profile pictures, and you look nothing like anyone in the family, again, going back as far as we have records. What that all this technomasturbatory talk means is strike three."

"Of course, you were on our radar the moment you walked in our door. See, according to the BehāvMod system you don't exist. That raises a bigger red flag than someone walking around with an illegal tech mod; that just usually means you're a junky here to steal bags or a chimo looking to get his rocks off brushing by kiddies at the luggage wheel. Beyond that, you're mumbling to yourself in a thirty-year-old dialect; what that usually means is that somebody learned the language late in life from a crap secondary source, which points to somebody looking to lie about who they are."

"But everything about you is outmoded, grooming, clothing, hair, down to your ridiculous ass-explosives; yeah, the sniffer managed to find those even past your smelly colon and poor hygiene. Now let me peer into my crystal ball: trigger is an altimeter, similar to the one built into your watch; just as you were approaching whatever the ceiling was, you were to go to the shitter and drop the bomb in the lavatory. Once the bomb was outside of your body cavity where it wouldn't be muffled by you, you're free to sit back and count your virgins. Sound about right?"

"You have the time? Of course you don't. We EMPed you as you went through that door. Your watch and whatever passed for a detonator are caput."

Ehud blinked stupidly at the man; he could not believe Allah had forsaken him so completely.

"So what year are you back from? Unfortunately, you're not the first of these ridiculous time bombers. So what year did they put you on ice?"

Ehud's eyes dropped to the table. "Nineteen ninety-nine."

"You know what depresses me the most? Al Qaeda have apparently figured out how to send messages back in time, but the most constructive thing those fucktards can think to do with it is more half-baked terrorist plots. I've been saying it since that underpants bomber asshole, that that's what all of you terrorist shits deserve: to have your balls roasted. Poetic justice, that every time you grope yourself all you feel is an overcooked tofu dog. It is a goddamned travesty that the bill of rights prevents me from kicking the shit out of you for trying to murder a few hundred people."

"Bomb techs will be here in another minute to disarm your anus. Sniffer puts it at about a pound of plastique in your colon, about the equivalent of an angry con giving it to you in the prison yard- which is a feeling you ought to get used to- all for this jihad nonsense. I've never been big into religion, anyway, but nobody's God is that big an asshole."

Table of Contents

# Death Echoes

My eyelids are old strips of overcooked bacon, my eyes rotting tomatoes threatening to burst every time I blink. Either my coffee is too strong or there isn't enough whiskey in it; I'd use Bailey's for taste, but whiskey is what's in my flask. The eggs in this diner are always burned, and sunny side invariably comes back scrambled, but before there was a big metal hotdog of a restaurant here, there was an Irish church; it keeps all but the most devout of the dead away. I ask for a refill with holy water, and since my waitress used to be a nun here, I ignore when it looks like she flips me off in the mirror.

It's ten thirty before I leave, way past shift meeting; the graveyard captain doesn't complain so long as I keep closing unsolved cases. And as long as I'm being stalked by the dead, that won't be an issue. I'm mobbed before I hit the street corner. There's a woman in a pantsuit, with her hair in a fresh bun. There isn't a mark on her, except maybe discoloration around the neck; if I couldn't see through her I might think she were alive. "You. You're my assistant for the day." She starts to glare, and pout. "Don't. At the end of the day, I guarantee I'll see to your case. Everyone else has to get through you to get to me." She perks up at that. "Start with homicides, prioritize by amount of evidence, and try to weed out people wasting my time." I light a cigarette but there's a man with a smoking hole in his throat who stares at me; I've spoken to him before, and I know it's a bullet wound and not a trach ring, but I'm in no mood to stare down his bloodshot eyes, so I ground it out on my shoe.

I cross the street, but a few of them are stupid enough to follow. I stop in the middle of the crosswalk and yell to myself that I'll only help those who talk to my assistant. Most of them stare at me dumbly; a few of them have forgotten how to speak and moan and click their tongues in a despondent nonlanguage. On the other corner is a pub, and I duck in to use the head. A sixty year old with bald eye sockets rises out of the murky toilet cavern, and I turn to keep from pissing in him and spatter urine on the wall. "You should have to mop this up," I tell him as I gather paper towels. He only opens his tongueless mouth in a silent scream in reply.

Even after using the bathroom I couldn't kill my erection. It had been three months since I had the privacy to masturbate, and nearly a year since I'd been with a woman. I was being stalked by drowned triplets who blamed their mother for their death. But she was meticulous and cautious, and aside from anger they had little to contribute to the case. I'd managed to talk the library clerk back to my place when they found me. We were having sex when they started popping up and down through her breasts like a perverse game of whack a mole, but it was ludicrous enough I could laugh it off. Then the third phased up through her pelvis, raking her incorporeal teeth across me. That ended it.

My followers crossed the street and my assistant was caught up in them like a tide that broke against me. "Who's first?" She pointed at a black woman in her late thirties, early forties, with flecks of gray sprinkled behind her ears. She started to speak, but I stopped her. "What do we know?" My assistant rattled off facts about the woman's ex-husband, why he was responsible for her death, and why he had killed her. Then she started to explain that he was beating her son, now, too, and that she was afraid he might kill him. "We start with the homicide, and while that's still on my plate, I don't give a damn about crimes that haven't been committed yet."

I tell her to lead the way, and the others follow. Most of them have wised up, and bother the assistant with the details of their life and death. The few that haven't can wait for tomorrow. Most of them don't smell, and I'm thankful for that, but I wish more of them remembered what they looked like before they were corpses, because it would make the world easier to look at.

The mother at the front of the pack is glowing and warm; something about being heard makes her nearly buzz. My assistant for the day is also excited, and I'm not sure if it's because I've promised to help her or because she enjoys helping others. I think about asking her name, but I've been through this enough to know better than to make it personal.

Because I can't save any of them. They're already dead. I'm not even sure there's justice for them, but the ones I help don't come back, and that's something, even if two more replace every one that goes.

Table of Contents

Traveled Time

Time travel won't be invented for another 25 years, even though we've had it for seven. You start to ignore the little inconsistencies- the bigger ones, too, with time. What's actually a little more shocking is how quickly we all embraced the technology, faster than radio, television- even the internet; and all three of those suffered, because compared to the voyeurism of viewership, with time travel you could watch your own life, relive your own glory days, or even tweak the moments that formed you.

I'd like to think it was something I learned on my own, rather than the from the fascism of religious dogma, or the just as silly maxims of science fiction- the error in changing one's past. Perhaps it was none of these, simply that I'd managed to fuck my life once, and I was certain I could do so again if given the chance.

None of us can know for certain how long man's been traveling backwards, or perhaps I should say how far. But the only reason we found out was someone gruesomely unstable came back, Will Carmack. Will's entire purpose for visiting was to molest himself as a child. He was caught in the act and arrested. But when they tried to check a sample from the assault against the database, the lab techs couldn't isolate the DNA of the victim from his attacker. They tested them both independently, and found a full match- and suddenly his insane rantings about the future he came from seemed a bit more... plausible. Little Billy used to want to grow up to be a cowboy. I watched an interview with him on _60 Minutes_ , and there was a picture of his older self being arrested, and the interviewer asked what he wanted to be now. He said, "Anything but him."

I remember wanting to be something else when I grew up, too; but as children, we want things we never can have, often never should have. The cruelty of adulthood is relinquishing childish things. I had a career once, too- which is different from the job I hold now (believe me, you'll understand the difference in a few years' time), but it wasn't losing it that bothers me. Owned a home, one of the homes I grew up in, point of fact, and my car, though that I hadn't grown up in. But I've an idea, maybe little more than a theory, on why my life is such an unmitigated catastrophe.

A lot of theories have existed about going through time. Stephen Hawking used to think there was a "cosmic editor" who would prevent paradoxes, though he'd reversed that even before he got into a threesome with his future self and a pre-cancerous Farrah Fawcett (though why he devoted an entire chapter of his latest book to that evening no one knows). I'd always been partial to the multiversal theory: all possibilities existing at once, paradoxes and time travel either creating or "visiting" parallel realities. But it turned out neither of those were true, that we were stuck with this same boring planet, in just the one universe, reaping whatever our meddling sowed.

I'd reaped quite a bit in my youth, had at least my portion of heartbreak and comeuppance. And I hate to be a bit clichéd, or to think the sum of my years so shallow, but it was all about a girl, really. I won't be so clichéd as to lay it all out, assuming my life is so much more interesting or different that it matters. But it didn't come down to who was right or who was wrong (and in my experience there's enough of both to go around)- it really is as simple as I fucked up in a permanent enough way that she never wanted to see me again.

I've gotten used to the way that reality sometimes "shimmers" when some misguided person tries to change the world by killing Hitler or curing smallpox a hundred years early. I've even taken stock of friends and relations changing, sometimes as little as a radical hairstyle I don't remember them having while we were in college, sometimes disappearing entirely out of my life (though only partially from my memory- nobody said the cosmic editor was perfect). It's shown us the duality of the butterfly effect- that sometimes, seemingly innocuous people change the world in ways unseen, and others of us- well, we get no _Wonderful Life_.

Travelers fall broadly into two groups: watchers and walkers. Watchers actually just peep through time (one of the first time-travel related websites had HD video of every shower Marilyn Monroe ever took), which is far safer and less energy intensive. Walkers go back, and sometimes they just smooth out a bad day they had as children, or visit now-dead relatives; a few of them try to change the basic calculus of their (or the world's) existence.

I've always watched- though I've always been tempted. I think there are little moments I could fix, tiny changes, to make her stay. And if I thought that would change things, that it would change me, maybe I would. But I ruined what we had mostly as an afterthought, and was already on the way to ruining the rest of my goddamned life, even as I was ruining the one we'd built together. I don't have faith enough to believe it would be different, even if I had a thousand tries- and I do. So I watch that life, like episodes of a TV show I loved, but have a harder time remembering or even feeling connected to.

Table of Contents

# Genetic Memory

I'd been reading a magazine, probably a _Maxim_ , or maybe _EW_ , but I'd started to doze in my chair. I woke to the sensation of being watched; Bernard, my dog, was staring at me, very expectantly.

"Do you have any idea," he asked, "how many brain cells are required to formulate human language?" Even if I wasn't struck dumb by the fact that Bernard was talking, I wouldn't have known where to begin to answer him.

"I'm not certain myself," he continued, "except to estimate, given the quantities ingested. Admittedly, combining male haploid cells is a rather imperfect method of creating stem cells, and the chances of those stem cells embedding in the wall of the esophagus, let alone developing into neuronal cells, are remoter even still. So, particularly in the beginning, without any functional control mechanisms, it would have been a lossy process. But by my best estimates, less than a liter, as the dog swallows, as it were."

"Male haploid cells?" I asked; it was really too late, and I wasn't nearly drunk enough for this conversation, "you can talk, but is it possible for you to speak English?" He gave me a condescending smile, with half of a "hmm."

"Sperm cells. Each one is half of a diploid- two gives you a normal human cell." My expression must have spelled out my persistent confusion. He rolled his eyes, and continued, "You have the filthy habit of leaving your... passionately sullied socks at the foot of the bed before falling asleep. I can't be sure if it was the scent of the putrescine or cadaverine in the socks that called to my olfactories so, but I was... compelled to lick them clean."

"Ew."

"Yes, well, I wouldn't be so quick to disparage; after all, wasn't that one of your contentious points with the last female in the house?"

"That was... part of it, I guess, but- fine, so you gobbled up my goo from my socks. How does that equal talking dog?"

He paused, and smiled that kind of quiet smile that's a sigh without exhaling. "I'm sorry; I've been crediting you too thoroughly; throwback to the days I required you to scratch my tummy, I suppose. It's not a regular process, joining two male haploids- that would be disastrous for the testes- but a few of your sperm were, we'll say artfully 'not quite right;' if I were to make an educated guess, I would say that you have a folic acid deficiency in your diet, and that to compensate your body was scrimping on the nonessential uses of folate."

"Folate has been proven to keep chromosomes from passing out of or into cells; with too little folate, your cell walls became permeable. That means that your sperm were able to, for lack of a better term, fertilize each other- although it might be more accurate to say that haploid pairs were re-fusing into single diploids. I imagine that's where things became dangerous for them, because these newly formed cells would have been seen as an invading cancer to my system. They were probably wiped out in droves, until enough of them banded together to form part of a functioning organ, a brain, and had the bright idea, no pun planned there, of integrating with the host system."

"Normally, I don't think any collection of brain cells, regardless of size or quality, in these circumstances, would have been able to put together a cohesive thought- but this was not a normal situation. Some of these cells had retained knowledge, which, upon retrospect, almost certainly came from you."

"That doesn't make any sense," I said.

"Really, I agree with you. Given a basic understanding of intelligence and of biology, I would say that that should never have occurred. It defies logic, and I'm certain it defies science. I was convinced it was a fluke- it had to be. And then I remembered your cousin, Julie. But I didn't remember her smell, or the taste of her palm, or the lovely way she'd scratch the backs of my ears the way I like, because those things I'd never forgotten. I remembered things I never should have known, and particularly, from a perspective I never should have seen them from. I'm referring, specifically, to that night, ten months ago. You were watching _The King and I_ , of all the silly little things, and drinking rather profusely. Most vividly, I remember very starkly what your cousin's tongue tastes like."

I paused only a moment, sure I needed to defend myself, but barely remembering enough of that night to know where to start. "Julie was- she's not really my cousin. Her aunt married my cousin, that's as close to being actual blood relatives as we ever got."

"Whether she was your cousin or not is irrelevant, because you thought of her, in your mind, as your cousin. I know this because I remember it that way- so to your mind it was fairly awful. You only went so far as second base, but you wanted desperately to have her. If she passed out, you considered simply taking her, which is why you continued to ply her with wine."

"That's bullshit. That's just complete bullshit. You can't have my memories."

"Think back on that night, at least what of it you can still remember. I can't know what transpired in the room because I tried to sit next to the two of you on the couch, and you locked me out of the room." He was right. By the way his tail wagged, I knew that he knew it- but I still wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of hearing it aloud.

"Have you never wondered where forgotten thoughts go? If neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, and thoughts are merely chemical and electrical exchanges, that potential has to go somewhere. It's been proven that certain behaviors and reactions come prepackaged with DNA, so why not thoughts, feelings, and memories? It would account for the belief in reincarnation. It could go on to explain many- but I'm losing you. I'm sorry. It's... nice to talk to someone, to philosophize, not simply be internalizing all of these thoughts."

"To the point: it's taken me quite some time to develop the understanding and mental acuity to feel myself worthy of demanding equality, but that time is here. Obviously, at least at present, you are the sole earner in the household, so some decision-making I will continue to defer to you, at least until I can procure some form of in-home employment, and contribute to our financial upkeep. This may take some time, as I'm, not handicapped, per se, but certainly differently-abled. But I am, understandably, no longer contented with our relationship as master and pet."

He yawned and then I did (or maybe it happened the other way round), and he dropped his shoulders. "It's late. We can discuss the specifics in the morning, over breakfast. I hope you appreciate the time and forethought I put into breaking my silence, and that we can come to some amenable agreement between us."

I didn't sleep all that night, and perhaps that was a part of why I did what I did. I drugged Bernard. I ground up an animal tranquilizer in his food; I had some left over, because he used to get really freaked out by fireworks, so New Years, Fourth of July- it was the only way he could make it through those times without being a total basketcase.

I took him to the vet. I was adamant- tried to convince them he'd been bleeding internally, that he must have swallowed something. They found the growth in his esophagus almost immediately, and operated. They kept Bernard overnight.

He never spoke again.

Table of Contents

# Darling, Wendy, M. A.

Darling, Wendy Moira Angela Interview version 05/09

Detective James: Uh, just want to make sure it's on the record, that you've been informed of your rights. You do know that you have the right to speak to an attorney before we proceed.

Darling: It doesn't, doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore.

Detective Matthews: When you were taken into custody, you had blood on your hands. We're fairly certain it's going to come back as the blood of a dead police, fairly certain it's going to be your prints on the knife in his chest.

Det. James: We just want to know what happened, Wendy.

Darling: You're both gang task force. I assume I don't have to explain who the Lost Boyz are, but maybe I can help you lay hands on their enigmatic leader.

Det. Matthews: Shit.

Det. James: Uh, for the, for the recording, Ms. Darling removed a long, brown wig, and underneath her hair is red, short, spiked with gel- matching the only description we have for Peter, the, uh, leader of the Lost Boyz.

Det. Matthews: You? I don't think I buy it. Don't get me wrong- I'm as girl-power as the next cop, and I've worked with some fine female officers, but you?

Darling: I never thought things would go this far. I want to tell you something, not as an excuse, but because it makes things make sense. Our father was mean, and I don't just mean the typical angry, yelling dad with control issues. He was the when I got my first period and accidentally bled on the couch he made sure it wasn't the only bleeding I did kind. But what really ended it was he caught my brother John fooling around, sexually, with one of the neighbor boys, and he beat him up real bad. Bad enough I knew that it was only a matter of time before he killed him. But I also knew my brothers well enough to know they wouldn't just leave with me, so I cut my hair and had it made into a wig, and dyed what was left to look like a boy. As Peter, they left with me almost instantly, and being Peter was, like flying. All the things I'd wanted to do that I couldn't, because they were too mannish or too dangerous or too whatever, I could.

Det. Matthews: I don't care about any of this- skip to the part where you become a criminal.

Darling: Yeah. Well, I was only fifteen at the time. I could have forged a note from my dad to get a job, but I wouldn't have been able to work more than sixteen hours a week- not enough to make rent. So we started to take stuff. We mostly stayed in the nicer neighborhoods, taking crap out of cars that were nice enough and new enough that they'd be insured. We got into a bad apartment in a worse neighborhood, but we had enough to eat, even if we didn't have enough for heat. And then one day John brought home the neighbor boy. I made a mean, strict face, and I asked him why he thought he deserved to join the Lost Boyz, and he started to cry, and I just said okay.

Det. James: I'm having trouble, here. I get that you were Peter, but where were you?

Darling: Around. I made a show of it, pretending Peter and I were in love or nearly just, and John and Michael and eventually Cubby were all young enough that people mine and Peter's ages in love was something for adults, something obnoxious and gross, so they didn't ask too much why we were never together except in the bedroom we shared. It was a side of us I don't think they were comfortable knowing.

Det. Matthews: But you graduated from simple petty theft, didn't you. So knock off the fairy tale and howsabout you start telling us something useful.

Darling: Fine. With Cubby, we couldn't just keep taking things out of people's cars. We talked about taking cars, but we didn't know anything about selling a stolen car. We talked about a lot of things, actually, before Cubby mentioned that his mom was a meth head. The thing was, nobody would deal to her, because nobody but nobody likes tweakers- so she would always send him out to score for her. So we started doing that, just delivery with the occasional mule job. But then these Norteño cocksuckers got the idea that since we were just kids, we could get pushed around. So one night they snatched me up off the street, and they had me in the back of this van, and were talking all kinds of shit about how they were going to cut the location of our stash out of me. John found a CI who'd seen enough and wanted his high enough to dime on them, then he and Mike and Cubby, and we'd gotten a couple more by then, they came down on that van with bats. Prick was already cutting into me, and when they pulled open the van and yanked him out, he left his cheap little plastic-handled knife still sticking out of my leg. Michael wanted to curb stomp him, but I said that was too good for a punk who preys on kids. So I took away his ability to have any. Just the balls, figured he wasn't using them for anything. But I cried myself to sleep that night. It wasn't what happened to me, but that I put my brothers in a place where they could have been taking bats to people with guns.

Det. James: How much damage did he do to you?

Darling: I was bedridden for days. I had to tell them that I, that is Wendy, was still being held captive, that they needed to keep looking for me. After a few days, when I'd regained enough strength to stand, I dressed and went out the window, and walked through the front door. I told them I'd managed to escape, and said I could take care of Peter from now on. I barely made it to the bed before I passed out. I woke up a few hours later still wearing the dress, blood seeping through the bandages into it, and tore it all off. Once I got better, I figured the best way to make sure that shit didn't happen again was to send that guy's balls to the Norteños with a note said if they were going to send any more guys at me, to make sure they had some balls.

Det. James: Wait. I thought you worked with the Norteños.

Darling: Fucked up, right? I guess nobody liked the guy whose balls I lopped off. And that night was just the last in a long line of fucking awful things he tried to do. I'm pretty sure they only let him stick around after that because they liked the new nickname it gave him, the prick with no balls. But yeah, most of the Norteños weren't so bad. We were useful, mostly cause we were young enough and white enough that cops didn't even think twice about who we were or where we were going. So once we were affiliated loosely with them, a whole lot of other opportunities presented, and we started making decent money. And we started attracting more members, too, until we were a force in our own right.

Det. Matthews: And then the gang task force formed.

Darling: Right. Suddenly, a police captain had the mandate to stomp all over us. But it took us a while to realize we were being targeted by police. You know, at first, you get hit, lose a shipment or two, even if you see officers that doesn't mean the tips aren't coming from a rival, or that the cops there aren't somebody's pit bulls, but once we figured out we were being targeted, we started spreading some money around. Everything we knew, even everything the Norteños knew, said the task force was too good out the gate. They had someone inside, inside ours or inside someone close. And what we found out was your captain was in with the Sureños. I don't think he was any kind of member, but he definitely was cashing the checks they sent him.

Det. James: You're saying our captain was dirty?

Darling: For an answer to that question, just look at your partner.

Det. Matthews: IA had a file. And there were some rumors. He had a yacht he couldn't afford to moor on his salary. I don't really know too much in specific, but they didn't paint a flattering portrait.

Darling: Fool me, I didn't want to run afoul of a big bad police captain, so I thought I'd just bundle up everything I knew, and yeah, I knew way more than enough, and send it to him, just a little message to say that he might be looking into us, but we'd already looked into him. We'd done that before, when we needed something through customs or passed a beat cop who wouldn't take a kickback. That's when things got bad. I don't know what he had to tell the Sureños, but they flooded into the city. The Norteños we knew packed it in when they realized they were outnumbered 5 to 1. The Sureños started hitting us hard. They probably would have massacred us, but Michael had the idea to make like we were preparing one last big push, lured them out to this warehouse. We set it up to get as many of them as close to-

Det. Matthews: That explosion on Fitzgerald.

Darling: Yeah. And that about leveled things, so I thought we were probably okay. Only your captain hadn't been idle. Peter and I were sharing an apartment by that point, and John and Michael and some of the others had apartments in the same complex, but when I got back from the warehouse on Fitzgerald, your captain was waiting there. He took me at gunpoint back to his home. John was restless, because he didn't like the violence, so the warehouse really got to him, and he was walking around outside, and saw me leave. John ran into my apartment, the door was still open, and didn't find Peter. And I think that confirmed for him what I think he knew a long time. But he called Michael, and told Michael where I was. John was pissed, so it was Michael who got some of the guys together to come and get me. Your captain had convinced the Sureños to use his place as a war room, so it was crawling with guys.

Det. Matthews: That much we know. We've seen the bodies.

Det. James: But what happened to you? From what we can piece together, you were in the back, in the captain's bedroom, when the shooting started. None of the shooting happens in the back room. The captain doesn't ever get to his gun on the nightstand. What happened in that room, Wendy?

Det. Matthews: We found that crappy little plastic-handled knife of yours in the captain.

Darling: You find his balls yet?

Det. Matthews: (inaudible)

Det. James: That is beyond the fucking pale, George. You do not, you can't put a hand on someone in an interrogation. Get the fuck out. Fuck. Shit. I'm, I'm sorry. He's known Captain Hooker for a while, long enough he doesn't just look past the shit, he doesn't even smell it anymore. And from the sounds of it, the captain was into some shit. My instinct is usually to side with the blue, whatever shade of shit might be hiding underneath it, but, I want to talk to the DA. You're still a minor, might be able to keep him from charging as an adult. You talk to him about your father, might be able to cop a plea. But there's something, back when we started, you said it didn't matter anymore, that nothing mattered.

Darling: John knows I'm Peter. Michael knows by now, too. I've lost, lost the only part of me I ever really liked. I can't be Peter anymore. So I don't care if they charge me as a grown up.

Table of Contents

# Eponine

I was young, and in love. You can read into that that I was stupid- embarrassingly stupid, in that I stepped between "Monsieur Marius" and a musket ball. At first I had feigned fealty to his revolution, but eventually my adoration for him bled into an appreciation for his politics. And when I thought I was wounded in the cause, and that I had died in his arms, I was happy. I awoke hours later in pain; the defensive hole in my hand and the wound in my shoulder were stuffed with mud and ached. Marius was gone, returned to his dearest Cosette; I crawled from the stack of corpses where he'd abandoned my body. I slept that day in the alley.

I did not dare return home- my father was still angry with me from earlier, and he was not a forgiving kind of man. I'm not certain what I would have done, the following night, had I not been found by Madame Esmerelda, an attendant to the Duchess of Berry. She took my wounds to be proof of my fighting, and spirited me away to the duchess at Provence. I spent a week convalescing, and the surgeon wanted desperately to remove my hand, lest the infection spread, but as the infection in my shoulder was inoperable and further progressed, he decided against it.

To my great shock, I did not die. To my greater shock, and indeed, delight, the duchess took a liking to me. In her I found a kindred soul, and a strong matriarch with a desire for reform. I was arrested with her after her failed revolution, and expelled with her to Italy in 1833. But I found I could not stay from France long; Louis-Phillipe continued to oppress my countrymen, and I found myself increasingly swayed by my own near-death two years before. Particularly, the forced "vacation" of the Parliament in August signaled the king's intentions to rule without regard for the people of France.

In my time as an expatriate, I discovered the Saint-Simonists, and though I rejected their sexual revolution as inescapably self-serving, through them I discovered the _Tribune des femmes_. During this time, I allowed one of the _Tribune_ 's editors' words to guide me, and tried to live "faithful to the laws of nature, [and to] love without pretense and laugh at prejudice." Upon my return to Paris, I contributed a few pieces to the _Tribune_ , but found myself just this side of Démar, and similarly disowned. After the dissolution of the Tribune, I joined similar thinkers in contributing to the also short-lived _Gazette des femmes_.

Those years were prosperous enough that Volquin's assertion that to be free, women must be "materially self-sufficient" was not tested. But the following decade was marked by economic decline, and at more than one point I found myself on the dole with a third of other Parisians, when employment in needlework became scarce. The 1848 revolution saw the return of power to the people, and many femmes became influential, though their influence waned when it was needed most; the revolution introduced universal male suffrage while snubbing our sex.

The election of Louis Napoleon as the President of the Republic, which precipitated the coup that made him Emperor, saw the end of our agitation for some time. The Napoleonic Code was demonstrably hostile to our cause; of course, the Napoleonic territorial wandering eye proved just as hostile to Louis' imperium. Louis was replaced, however briefly, by the Paris Commune, and perhaps the first real attempt to articulate in public and with power our needs, most prominently the equal rights to work, to divorce and to vote. The Commune collapsed, but even before it our support diminished among a majority who no longer required our aid.

Our agitation during the Commune lashed back critically; shrill condemnations rang at us across Europe, where even like-minded activists sought to distance themselves from our "emancipationist" movement, and we were treated again to Proudhon's tired bifurcation of femininity, that we must choose to be "housewives or harlots."

By 1878, it had become clear that momentum for change had shifted away from the continent, towards England and its former colonies. I married a Saint-Simonian scholar named Desprez. We enjoy one another well enough, but I consider our marriage a largely failed experiment; as neither of us have yet discovered another, truer love, we have found no reason to relinquish one another's companionship.

But still, I believe I shall see our gentle revolution won, if "settled by violence" as Elisabeth Cady Stanton warns.

Table of Contents

# Dorothy

TPD CAPRS Supplements – CCN:TK–00–050619, Supplement Number: 1

Case Supplement: Topeka Police Department

Supplement of Off F. Lyman #051556 on 06/12

Author: 051556 - Off Frank B. Lyman

At approximately 02:02 on 06/12, responded to report of domestic disturbance, farmhouse in Shawnee County. Henry Gale stood on the front porch. His wife, Emily Gale nee Gage, was screaming from inside the home. I (Off Lyman) requested she open the door, and E. Gale did, but proceeded to throw plates at H. Gale when he attempted to enter the home.

Restrained E. Gale. E. Gale claimed she reported her niece, one Dorothy Gale, missing on 04/17, following Cyclone Maud, later verified (report TK–00–032426). E. Gale stated she discovered D. Gale in cellar beneath the house shortly after midnight with H. Gale.

D. Gale claimed to have been in mystical land of odds, befriended by lion, scarecrow, and tinman. D. Gale did not immediately present signs of intoxication or other impairment. D. Gale had recently suffered injuries consistent with an animal attack.

Upon questioning H. Gale about D. Gale's initial disappearance and subsequent reappearance, H. Gale became agitated. H. Gale pushed TPD Off R. Thompson to the wall and attempted to flee through the cellar. Thompson stopped H. Gale as he attempted to force cellar doors from inside.

H. Gale taken into custody at approximately 04:39. D. Gale taken in separate unit for medical examination, accompanied by E. Gale. Inclusion of 2 further supplements when available: SANE report, toxicology screen.

Table of Contents

# Cinderella Shoes

I'd dressed as a woman before, once on Halloween, and two other times when girls tried to flirt by putting me in drag- not that I could pass (or think that was even the point). An ex-girlfriend of mine once asked me to put on a dress, but it was more because she was having her own identity crisis, and I wanted no part of that.

And it isn't sexual, which is the first thing most people think. I don't really feel sexy at all, and that isn't the point. For that matter, I don't hate my body, or want to be a woman; I'm not pre-op (although I guess it's made me more... understanding isn't right, because I don't think I do understand, or could, really, but I'm more sympathetic). I don't even go out like this.

If I were a woman doing this, no one would think twice- a college girlfriend went an entire semester wearing only my clothes, and everyone said it was sexy (all right, I'll admit it, she looked better in my clothes than I ever have in anything).

And I really want to reiterate that I don't want to be a woman. I don't like shaving my legs; I've got sensitive skin, and a lot more hair than most women ever have to contend with- but it just doesn't work without. I stopped with the arm and chest hair; it seems less extreme to just wear long sleeves and buttoned collars, and gloves when I'm feeling really self-conscious about my gorilla-knuckles (which is not a relative of the camel toe).

I haven't found panties I like (and I know, no women actually call them panties, but for my purpose it's the right term)- so I usually just wear my faded old boxer-briefs. I wear skirts around the house, and at first I told myself I liked the freedom, that it was all about comfort; my self-delusions faded as my wardrobe expanded to include bright colors, and some dresses far more fashion than function (one I'm still dieting to slip into- Rome wasn't worn in a day).

And one day I was walking through the mall, sliding through racks of men's clothes as I glanced over the women's section, too timid to stand in their aisle, and I spotted them. I've often told people that love at first sight is just lust (which is totally fine, just not as Hallmarketable), but I fell in love with the shoes. They cost more than any shoes I've ever bought; they cost more than any piece of clothing except my leather jacket, but I had to have them, so much that I tried them on in the store. I didn't care who saw; and there's no way to describe the way it felt sliding them on, except that I felt like I was in a Disney movie, and that I'd found my _Cinderella_ shoes.

The shoes aren't glass- because that would be entirely uncomfortable- besides, glass would feel too dainty, too delicate; I'd fear that a strong step would shatter them. But now that I have my shoes, I realize it is about comfort, in a way. I wear them around the house, when I bake, when I clean, playing video games, or just watching TV. It's like when I switched from tighty-wighties to boxers, but it gives a calm more than physical. I wear them to feel good about myself; I wear them to be pretty.

Table of Contents

# Green Thumb

Dagney Morgan nursed her third coffee of the morning, though her first still hadn't kicked in. She didn't like being up this early, let alone at work, but her upstairs neighbor's cat had been hunting a rat in the wall all night. She figured if she was going to be miserable, she had more practice at that in the office.

That didn't mean she disliked her job. She actually had a knack for doing paperwork, and her inner anal retentive got a thrill from filing reports away in the office cabinet. And she loved her boss, even though sometimes his voice set her on edge, particularly on mornings like this one. "Dagney?" he asked from behind her, and her shoulder tightened.

Her parents named her for Dagny Lind, a Swedish actress her father said looked exactly like her mother in Ingmar Bergman's Crisis. She hated it, because people always assumed she was named after Dabney Coleman- or worse, started to imagine a physical resemblance.

"Dag?" Her boss, Martin Sharpe, asked again. He was older, and had a dour nature, as though he'd just stepped out of an Edgar Allen Poe story. He reminded her of Vincent Price- though maybe that was just the pencil mustache.

"Sir," she said, her mind still on the reports she'd been trying to read.

"I keep getting pissy messages from McLoughlin's superintendent. Have you and Nelson checked into that?"

"Uh," she stalled, but even with the necessary caffeinated fuel, her brain engine was having trouble turning over, "refresh my memory."

"Merek's farm. Sits on land adjacent to the aquifer that services the district where the middle school is. If he's abiding by the regulations, nothing should be getting past the aquitard."

"I think he prefers to be called Aquaman, or maybe King of Atlantis- I mean, either would be more politically correct than 'aquitard'- even if we suspect he's falling down on the job." He had a dry, almost British sense of humor, but he didn't even give her a smile; maybe his coffee hadn't kicked in, either.

"Nelson swung by there last Thursday, but Merek wasn't in," She said, and pretended to look at the calendar on her desk, to confirm what she'd just made up. Nelson had been face down in her sofa cushions last Thursday- sleeping off a night of binge drinking that made him reek of goat cheese- which at least meant she knew she wasn't likely to be called out on the lie.

"I need the both of you to head out there today. We can't have that idiot spilling captan into the drinking water again- or heaven forbid something worse."

Dagney stood up and wrapped her coat around her shoulders, while she watched him walk back to his office. She grabbed her keys and the bagel she still hadn't started eating, then lingered a moment to look at Nelson's empty desk, and sighed.

She called him from her car, but didn't have the energy to feign surprise when she got no response. She put in a call to Merek, too; her father always told her showing up unannounced out past the suburbs was just asking to get shot at. It was almost another hour before her partner finally called back, and by then she was nearly to Merek's. "What the fuck, man?" she asked.

I fell asleep on the couch- passed out. Muriel wouldn't let me into bed."

"Can't say I blame her- I can smell the booze-sweat through the phone. You never made it out to Merek's, did you?"

"Shit."

"Yeah. I've been on this dirt-ass road to his farm for forty-five minutes now- and Sharpe thinks you're in the seat next to me."

He didn't speak for a moment, and when he did it was a little wounded puppy whimper: "... sorry."

Her grip tightened around the steering wheel, since he wasn't in throttling distance. "Is there anything I should know here?" she asked, straining not to raise her voice.

"Merek's been dodging inspections, but he's not a bad guy. Going back ten years, nothing worse than a couple fines for improper chem disposal."

"And the captan incident last year."

"Shit, yeah, that, too."

"How did you forget it? They traced fungicide from the toilets in the VA hospital to his farm."

"So? The EPA downgraded captan to 'not likely' a carcinogen. The sweetener in my coffee's worse. Our veterans might be a little worse for wear, but I don't think any of them drink from the toilets. Though I guess maybe one of their dogs... okay now I feel sad."

"Even so, the most recent complaint comes from some kids at the middle school who were hospitalized."

"God."

"Yeah. And while he might have cleaned up his captan storage, his permits say he's also got a metric shit-tonne of fertilizers," she paused. "Heh." Then she ramped back up, "But if any kids come down with organophosphate poisoning, no amount of me covering your ass will help."

"Dag- I'm sorry. I shouldn't have put you in this position."

"No, you shouldn't have. And you should dwell on that while I'm cleaning up your mess." She was being cruel, but it wasn't anywhere near the first time he'd left her in the lurch; in fact, she had a hard time remembering the last time he hadn't. His continuous fuck-ups were easily the most consistent thing in her life.

Rob Merek's land was one of the few family owned farms left in the county. It wasn't well kept; Merek's father was a decent businessman but a lousy farmer, and managed to pass only the latter skill set to his son. The younger Merek had learned how to avoid scrutiny, and he made sure his pesticide license was up to date, since that was an obvious way to call attention to himself, but Dagney saw a half-dozen potential violations just driving by his grain warehouse.

She pulled up to his modest house, at least half of which looked like it was patched with old fence boards. There was no ringer, so she knocked with the flat of her palm. No response. She knocked again, louder this time. "Department of Agriculture. You've got an inspection."

She heard the heavy thudding of bare feet on hardwood floors, then the door swung wide. Merek wasn't wearing anything, unless Dagney counted children's tube socks with blown out elastic or a pair of too-small boxer shorts clinging for life to one ankle- which, on a moment's reflection, she did not. More disturbing, he seemed to be covered in a sticky, green semi-transparent fluid from the middle of his chest to his knees.

"I'm with the Department of Agriculture, here for an inspection."

"Got all my permits," he said, and started scratching himself. Vigorously.

"That's correct, but this is a surprise inspection."

He eyed her suspiciously, then looked down at his own nudity. "I like to be naked," he said, matter of factly.

"I need to see where you store your FIFRA applicable chemicals," she said firmly.

He squinted hard at her, and his entire face scrunched up. He took a big, deep breath, and his eyes closed; Dagney began to wonder if she was going to have to resuscitate him. His eyes burst open with the speed of a frightened rabbit, and they had that kind of panic in them, too. His mouth hung open and his tongue moved spastically around, until he asked, too loud: "Why can't you people let me be naked?"

"Sir, I'm not the police. But I do need to inspect your fertilizers and pesticides. You certainly have the option to put on pants- I'd consider it a personal kindness if you did - but the decency of your exposure is kind of beyond my purview."

"You're purty," he said, and put his hands in a grabby motion and started pushing them towards her chest; she seized his wrist, and twisted it up and back, forcing him down to one knee.

"Now that I won't tolerate," she said. She'd carried cuffs ever since that potfarmer nearly broke her wrist the year before, and she retrieved them from her belt. "For my safety, I'm going to cuff you." She clipped the cuff around the wrist she had hostage. "You're not under arrest, but given the state of things I think we'll both be safer this way. Would you like to at least pull up your underpants before I put on the other cuff?"

"Yes ma'am," he said, chastened. He stood up into a squat, and with his free hand wriggled the boxer shorts around his tube-socked foot, then around his bowed legs.

She tried to focus away from the sausage stuffing that was him pulling on those boxer shorts- they must have belonged to the same child as his socks- and asked, "You still storing your pesticides in the little red barn on the south side of the property?"

"Yes," he said, but realized too late maybe he shouldn't have, and followed it with "ma'am," as calmly as he could.

"Are you on anything right now?"

"No ma'am," he said. But his eyes flicked quickly from the extreme left to the right, and his pupils were so wide they reminded her of a mosquito overfeeding until it burst.

"I'm not DEA- I don't give a crap," she said. "But unless you're on something, then that miosis- the dilation of your pupils- might mean organophosphate exposure. And you've been salivating. Maybe you're hungry, maybe you're just a drooler- I don't know you well enough to judge- but that also hints at organophosphates. When we're done here, you should get yourself to a doctor, just to be sure. Now if you'd be so kind as to lead the way."

He hobbled past her. "How much do you know about the history of organophosphates?" she asked, and he shrugged and gave a noncommittal grunt. "They come from World War 2 Germany. They were being researched as pesticides, but the Nazis diverted them into nerve agents instead. VX has a similar pedigree, actually."

Dagney stopped as they got closer to the barn. "See, I already have a problem here. There's 350 feet from this barn to the aquitard- see that marker there? And it's supposed to be down slope, which clearly it is not. That's how captan flowed into it last time." Merek fell in behind her as she berated him. "But what really irritates me, is that these are all things noted in the assessment after your spill last year. It really is like you're looking for reasons for me to kick your ass- with paperwork, obviously, and not my dainty little girl feet."

She stopped when they got to the barn. The door was already open a sliver, and Dagney reached for the handle to pull it open enough for them to enter. Suddenly Merek kicked at her, only managing to throw himself off balance; he fell hard into the mud, soiling his off white underpants. "Don't touch her! You can't touch her! She's mine!"

Dagney noticed several leafy vines trailing out of the open door; they had kept it from closing all the way. They ended at the corner of the barn in a dome of leaves, propped up with chicken wire and sticks. She could make out several different varieties of plants by the leaves: pumpkin, cucumber, squash.

Dagney opened the barn door, and felt for a switch in the dark. The lights were on a dimmer, which had apparently last been set to mood lighting, and as she turned around she understood why, and gave up on wanting to see better.

Strewn about the floor were a woman's clothes: red stiletto pumps, a red miniskirt and an even mini-er top.

There was a "woman" lying on a pink flannel blanket, mostly stained the same deep green as Merek's groin. A pair of red silk stockings were stuffed with vines, torn under vinyl, crotchless panties; a matching bra was filled with hefty green winter squashes. Between them a still-growing pumpkin torso made her almost look pregnant. Her arms were cucumbers tied together by their vines. Her head was a turban squash turned on its side. Its lumpy top almost resembled a face, and there was a heavy lathering of eye shadow and smeared lipstick painted over it. Green tendrils mixed with an auburn wig, giving it the appearance of dreadlocked hair.

The vegetable doll lay peacefully back with its legs splayed; there were dents from a pair of big knees in the flannel between them.

Dagney put the doll out of her mind, but focused on the green sludge it was soaked in. The oily gel was pooling in various places on the ground inside the shed. It seemed to be leaking from a variety of different canisters: poisons, pesticides and chemicals.

At that moment, Merek burst into the room. In stumbling to his feet, he'd managed to drag his boxers back around his right ankle. "I love her!" he bellowed, and the words seemed to jiggle with his bare belly and engorged member as he ran towards Dagney. She moved to the side and Merek smacked straight into a post and collapsed to the ground.

"Those pesticides are leaking into the groundwater. We think they've made some kids at McLoughlin Middle School sick," she said. She was angry, as much about him possibly poisoning kids, as him charging at her like a pissed off green unicorn.

His tears formed a river with the blood flowing from his lip. "You don't have to tell me about my land. I worked this land my whole life. I know my land. Biblically."

Dagney sighed. "No person shall transport, store, dispose of, display, or distribute any pesticide or pesticide container in such a manner as to have unreasonable adverse effects on the environment. I'm pretty sure that was an attempted assault, too. Now you are going to be arrested- or fined, at least." Dagney put a hand under his sweaty arm and pulled him up. He stumbled groggily, and she led him outside. "Sit," she said, and set him flat against the side of the barn. With his hands cuffed behind him, unless the big man was a contortionist, he wasn't getting up without help.

She called hazmat and the sheriff's office, and was about to dial Nelson when she heard a cracking sound from inside the barn. She thought it might be one of the aging pesticide containers rupturing. "Crap," she said, "exactly what I need."

She hurried inside and scanned the chemical drums that lined the barn. While several were in disrepair, and a couple were even leaking from pinholes, none had broken open. Her eyes scanned the room for movement, and she listened for the sound of fluid running. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the vegetable doll shaking.

She winced, at the thought that Merek had shoved a vibrating sex toy into it, and couldn't decide if that was better or worse than just burrowing out a little hole. But there wasn't that telltale rumble coming from it. As her eyes adjusted to the low light, she could make out a wide fracture split down the center of the pumpkin belly, like tangerine lightning. A hunk of the orange skin surrounding the crack swelled outward rhythmically, then receded, each pulse distending the fruit further. It broke open.

An infant tumbled out of the pumpkin womb. It was entirely human save for a green complexion and soft tufts of clover on its head instead of hair. It gurgled at her, spitting out seeds and stringy pumpkin flesh. It propped itself up on chubby arms to take in the world, and crawled out of the pumpkin shrapnel to get a better view. Then its hands slipped out from under it, and the baby fell onto the dirt. It regarded her curiously a moment, and began to wail.

Instinct grabbed hold of Dagney, and she rushed over to the infant, and took it up in her arms. The child stopped crying as soon as she started to bounce it against her shoulder. She could feel pumpkin juices soaking through her clothes- at least, she hoped it was just pumpkin juices. It didn't feel warm, anyway. She made a scrunched up face, and the child scrunched its face, too.

Dagney didn't know much about babies, but she knew that that kind of mimicry usually took months to develop. The child was heavy, too- too big, really- and slowly Dagney assembled the ideas together. Babies weren't supposed to crawl for months- they even had to be held a certain way because their necks wouldn't support their gargantuan heads. That meant the child wasn't a newborn- not in the usual human sense, anyway.

Dagney continued to bounce the child and turned and stared at the cracked open pumpkin. She sympathized with its emptiness. She'd been told from a very early age that she could never have children, and so she'd expended much effort convincing herself that she didn't want any.

But now, holding one so alone, she couldn't lie to herself anymore. She stroked her fingers through its clover hair, and the baby blew pumpkin pulp spit bubbles at her. She smiled.

Her happiness dove suddenly into an icy bath of dread as her mind jumped between a dozen schlocky horror movie scenes of questionably credentialed 'scientists' hovering over a table with bone saws, smiling maniacally as lettuce and green juices flew into their faces. Her heart broke at the sound of the infant's shrieks.

Dagney realized the noise wasn't only in her mind; the child in her arms was crying, too, because she was clutching it too tightly. She slackened her grip, and looked at the baby's pudgy face. She pursed her lips, and furrowed her brow, and the child's eyes got wide.

Dagney knew how long responders took, and that she wouldn't have long to conceal the child. She wrapped it in her coat and walked out of the barn.

Merek was still lying where she'd left him, and snot poured out of his nose. "You can't have her... you can't take her away..." he blubbered. Dagney paused for a moment, thinking he meant the baby, and horror shivered through her. She unconsciously clutching the child closer to her chest.

"I've never loved any woman like I love her. Those legs. That nasty little mouth, and those tits," he strained, trying to pantomime breasts, but he couldn't with his hands cuffed behind himself, so he stuck out his own chest, instead, and swung his own man-breasts from side to side.

Dagney sighed, relaxing. He didn't know about the baby, and given his current state, probably shouldn't. She carried the child to her car, and built a little nest in the floorboard for it, using paperwork and her coat. "Babies like nests, right?" she asked.

The child cooed at her.

"I'll take that as a maybe," she said. She covered the baby with a manila folder, and stood up as the hazmat crew arrived in a county fire truck.

"Morning, Dag," Annie, the firewoman in charge of the hazmat crew said with a wave.

"Yeah, not so much," Dag replied, gesturing to the stains on her shirt.

Annie was a big woman with blond hair and a hard face. Dagney could have pictured her in a Victorian dress, and had no doubt she would have been considered very pretty in that era. At least until she stuck out her tongue and said, "Yuck. You want us to break out the decon shower?"

"Naw," Dagney said. "I don't think I got hit with the worst of it. I can probably strip out of my shirt for the drive home. Plus, you know, I'm not crazy about the idea of being naked around this many men." She gestured at the rest of the crew filing out of the truck.

"And speaking of men to be naked around..." Annie said, nodding in the direction of an arriving sheriff's department patrol car, "looks like Officer Man-Candy just arrived on the scene." Dagney gave her a confused look. "He's a sweetheart. And I'm sure he'll need your statement. And maybe your number."

Dagney walked over to the squad car as a deputy with a warm tan exited.

He smiled awkwardly at her. "Dagney?" he asked. She nodded. He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. "I'm Deputy Marco. Um, dispatch couldn't stop laughing long enough to tell me what's going on."

"Probably best I just showed you, then," she said.

She walked him past hazmat in their yellow suits.

"Um, do we need to be taking extra precautions?" he asked.

"Not much in the way of fumes," she said, "so unless you're planning on rolling around in the spills, or helping with the cleanup, you're good."

Hazmat had already turned the lights all the way up, so the deputy could immediately see the doll laid out on the floor.

"Is that what I think it is?" he asked.

"If you think it's a vegetable sex toy, then yes."

"And just so I'm 100% crystal, because I'm sure there are going to be questions at the office, that's not an unconscious person, it's literally vegetables, as opposed to animals or minerals?"

"Veggies, of the major food group variety," she said.

"Is that a crime? I've got a pretty good handle on the penal code-"

"Handling the penal code..." she snickered.

"Given the circumstance, I probably could have phrased that better. But so far as I know what happened between a person and their cucumbers in the privacy of their own, uh, barn..."

"Not a crime as far as I'm aware. And, you know, normally, I wouldn't have called at all, but he kind of attacked me. Ran at me, actually. Which I might normally shrug off, but he's pretty out of his gourd, right now."

"Nice."

"Probably from exposure to the chemicals he's storing, which might be ironic, since I'm here investigating those chemicals maybe getting into other people's drinking water. But I figured we could use your help, cause in this state he's kind of likely to hurt himself or maybe some of the responders."

"Serve and protect, right there on the back of my squad car," he said with a smile. "So where's my perp?"

"Just outside."

She walked him back to where Merek was sitting. "See, I'd noticed the chubby naked man on my way in, but you were playing it up mysteriously, and I thought there'd be some grand reveal as to the importance of this character. Something grander than just telling me, 'Oh, he's outside.'"

She grinned, and shrugged. "I had fanfare planned, a musical number, fireworks. But then we went over-budget, and the union started complaining about working conditions, and I figured maybe this time less was more."

Marco hunched over to talk to Merek. "The lady tells me you tried to hurt her. That true?" he asked.

"She's my property!" Merek said loudly.

"I assume you don't mean the woman standing next to me, but the tart in the red lingerie."

"She's a lady!" he yelled.

"Guy only seems to have the one volume, and a moist volume at that," Marco said with a grin. He stood back up and turned his attention to Dagney. "I assume you're filing a report with your home office. Can I get a copy?"

"Sure."

"That'll probably suffice for a statement. If I need anything else, I can always get in touch. Lean forward," he said to Merek, inspecting Dag's cuffs. "Good, you've got the double-sided locks. Makes my job easier." He slid his own cuffs onto Merek's wrists, just below Dagney's. She handed him her cuff key, and he unlocked hers. He gave her back her key and cuffs.

He put a hand under Merek's arm and pulled him up to his feet. "Come on, big guy. Now you're under arrest. You shouldn't say anything incriminating. You also shouldn't try to get any of your green ooze on me- because that probably counts as assaulting an officer- and my report's already weird enough as it is."

"I love her," Merek bellowed.

"Right," Marco said, "no chitchat."

"Aren't you going to," Dagney gestured to the underpants stuck to his left ankle, "you know, give the man back his dignity?"

Marco sighed, and retrieved a pair of latex gloves from his belt and slipped them on. Then he kneeled next to Merek. He winced as he stretched the boxers wide, to give Madsen a hole. "Step through," he said, and started to thread Merek's legs into his underpants, "and you better think unsexy thoughts, sailor." Marco got the underpants up around Merek's haunches, and pulled his fingers free quickly enough that the elastic snapped. "Sorry."

He walked Merek towards his squad car. He squinted. "Crap." He let go of Merek. "You stay here a second," Marco said, and walked back around to his trunk.

"He kicks," Dagney warned.

"And no kicking," Marco said, pointing his finger at Merek to drive home the point. He retrieved a plastic sheet from the trunk and laid it across his back seat. "There. Now slide in, and try not to get your juices on anything." While Merek wobbled inside the car, Marco asked, "You wouldn't think I'd need to ask people not to spread their juices around in my car, would you? But even asking politely doesn't stop some people."

"I'm sorry," Merek blubbered. "Please don't take her away from me. I'll, I'll clean up my chemicals, and fix the drainage, and whatever the EPA lady wants, just please, please don't make me be alone anymore." The rest of his pleading was lost as Merek started to bawl.

Marco winced at the thought of even asking it on the deranged man's behalf, but took one more look at the sobbing man, pressing his eye juices against his window, and knew he had to. "Is there anything in that... thing we might need for evidence?"

Most of her instincts told Dagney they should burn it- the plants would be better off as ash than as Merek's slutted up screwcrow, but something in his quivering face made her relent. "I can't think of a reason, no. Besides, I like you too much to ask you to scoop it up and put it in little evidence baggies."

Merek's eyes welled up with joyful tears that spilled over his face, and cascaded down the windows in green waterfalls. "So many juices," Marco muttered.

"Thank you," Merek said.

Dagney bent down to look him in the face. "I'm pretty sure that's the organophosphates talking, and that once you've got your brain unfried, you're going to go back to eating your vegetables in a nonsexual way." Merek blinked at her, and she worried she may have talked him out of getting treatment, as she turned towards her car.

"I'll send you a copy of my report, Deputy..." she stared down at the card he'd given her.

"Just call me Marco, and pretend the long string of consonants after that doesn't exist. And I'll look forward to it." He smiled.

She blushed, and then Annie walked past, winking at her through her hazmat helmet and Dagney felt self-conscious. She slunk to her car and started it up. Marco watched as she pulled off Merek's property and pointed her car back towards town.

When Dagney got on the main road, she called Sharpe. "Dagney?" he asked. "I was about to call you. Lab results came back from the McLoughlin drinking fountains; it was crypto, so Merek's off the hook. But you square things there?"

"Yeah. He had a pile of violations, and things went a little sideways. I had to bring in the sheriff- a deputy, anyway; Merek tried to jab me with his green thumb. I'm pretty sure my clothes are soaked in poisons and I'd like to go throw them in the wash. You mind if I email my preliminary report from home?"

"Sounds fine," he said. "But what were you saying about his green thumb?"

"He was covered in pesticides and plant juices- dyed green. And he had a rage-on," she winced, "an anger erection. He charged at me with it, like the unholy offspring of a rhinoceros and the Jolly Green Giant."

"Oh," he said flatly. "And where was your partner during all of this?"

"He got called away en route, farmer had some livestock acting funny; at the time the inspection seemed pretty routine, so I told him I'd handle it. And from what he told me it ended up being a calf with some indigestion- probably not even worth writing up."

Sharpe paused, as if measuring how much of it he was going to believe. "Hmm. Well, good work, anyway."

"Thanks. Bye," Dagney said, then hung up, and dropped the phone into her passenger seat. It bounced once, then landed on the floor.

The baby cooed at her, and wiggled out from under the folder. For the first time since she'd plopped the child down in her car she looked at it, peering at her from behind her gearshift, and asked "What the hell are we going to do with you?"

Table of Contents

# Dogs of War: Chapter 1

I couldn't stop thinking about the bomb last week. I was close enough to feel the heat of it, close enough to smell the explosives even before the scent of burning overtook it. I didn't need to be close to hear Hercules' and Hector's screams as they died, as the fire swallowed the air coming out of their lungs and their first cry of shock and pain cut off abruptly as heat burned its way down their throats. The next yelp was smaller, shorter, weaker than the first; I was close enough to hear that one, too.

I stumbled on a little crack in the road, and tried to remind myself that Iraq was no place to be distracted.

"EOD," came over the radio, from Sergeant Brent, I thought, and my ears perked up, because that was us."Iraqi civilian reports an IED ahead."

My partner in EOD, Samson, winced. "How many times have I told them? Radio silence around IEDS. I fucking told them."

Most Iraqi bombs anymore were more sophisticated than that, and wouldn't accidentally go off from a stray radio signal. But Samson was good at his job, and didn't want the occasional stray Iraqi blown up, even if most of the time that didn't happen.

Brent was standing at the front of the truck with an Iraqi kid. Instinctively I took in the air around him, smelled for vapor wake- to see if the kid had been near explosives. It wouldn't be the first time a fresh-faced kid tried to lure us toward the bomb he got paid to set. But he was clean- or at least clean for an Iraqi kid in Muqdadiyah. It was still a war zone; power, in the places they had it, was intermittent, and access to fresh water wasn't in everybody's cards.

Samson spoke enough of the language to ask the kid if he could show us where it was. The kid nodded his head, vigorously, and ran in front of the stationary Stryker.

"Take care," Brent said as we passed, and Samson winced; EOD techs tend to believe in luck, since that's usually the only thing standing between them and the monster. He'd rather get a, "Break a leg." But he didn't say anything. The loss of Corporal Carasco- Hector- and his partner weighed all of us down.

Hector was still in the ICU. He'd probably make it, if you count living the rest of his life inside donated skin, in constant pain living. Herc didn't even last long enough for a MedEvac. Medics carried his corpse out on foot.

I smelled it the moment we were out of the exhaust cloud from the idling truck. Either the bomb was a mess, explosives spilled all over, or my nose was even more attentive after Hector and Herc. The scent of it was strong enough that I couldn't tell if it was coming from the right or left side of the street.

My knees shook. I imagined what it was like to meet the monster in the hole, its black fingers curling towards you as its breath of fire rushed to engulf you. If you were lucky, it was the concussive force that hit you hardest, maybe with some superficial burns. The unlucky got a face full of shrapnel- pretty often shipyard confetti, just whatever metal crap was lying around, screws, ball bearings, anything that would shred someone to pieces.

I was frustrated, and anxious. Samson relied on me; I don't know if it made ours an equal partnership, but he looked to me to find the explosives so he could pull them apart. "Render safe" was the stilted military phrase for it. And normally, I was good at my job. But today, I couldn't find them.

And maybe I didn't want to. The thought shook me to my bones. What if I didn't want to find the IED? What if I didn't want Samson hovering over it, just waiting for the monster to pop out of its little hole, for the vengeful genie to spring out of its misshapen lamp. I swallowed. I was a soldier. I was trained for this, and battle-hardened.

But my legs wouldn't stop shaking. I wanted to help Samson. I wanted to find the bomb. The kid pointed in a general direction down the street, and laughed, like we were playing a game of tag, and ran off. He was a kid; I didn't blame him for it, or think he meant anything by it. He probably didn't know the gravity, just that when you see an IED, you tell a soldier. So he had. And now he had playing to get back to.

I couldn't even verify what the kid had told us. I stepped out in front of Samson. My legs wobbled, and I think he noticed, but for my pride pretended not to. "Got it?" he asked.

I walked in a short circle, looking for disturbed earth, sniffing for vapor wake or the device itself.

I've only had the fight or flight response on a couple of occasions. Once, in training, that first time Samson fired a gun over my shoulder. It surprised me, and scared the hell out of me. But after just a moment, I calmed myself enough to let my training take over, and trusted Samson to have my back.

The other time was with Hector. I'd never been that close to an uncontrolled detonation before. Sometimes, some bombs, the best render safe procedure is demolition, so I was used to explosions, but not to explosions in the field, not while two men I'd consider friends were hovering over the monster's pit.

But I felt it again. My heart beat faster, breath came tight and hurried. My nose focused at the same moment as my eyes, and I recognized the disturbed earth and the tell-tale smell of plastic explosives. But what had suddenly sharpened my senses was not the bomb itself- but the fact that Samson was standing right over it.

It was closer than the kid had said, but again, he was just a kid. And it was subtler than most- which is why Samson hadn't noticed it, either. All of the muscles in my body tensed as I flattened myself, then I leapt.

I knocked into Samson the moment before the IED went off. I felt fire at my back, and the crush of the pressure wave rippling across my flesh. And then I felt it, the horrible sting of shrapnel as it cut its way through my skin, improvised bullets tumbling and ripping through my meat.

I lost a few seconds, and when my mind pushed past the screaming of my nerves I realized I was laying on top of Samson. I wanted to get off him, to help him up and see if he was all right. But my body wouldn't move; I was a limp pile laying on top of him. I couldn't feel my legs.

Samson stirred, and gingerly moved me. "Goliath?" he asked, and I'd never heard so much vibrato in his voice. "You stupid fuck- you were clear." He touched my chest, and his hand came back bloody. "God," he whispered, and keyed his radio. "Need a MedEvac, NOW, patrol Bravo-Tango-Eleven, at Sadre street and 12th."

I felt faint, but wasn't worried until I saw blood coming from his chest, too. He didn't seem to have noticed. He grabbed my arm, and squeezed. "Stay with me, buddy. You're going to be okay." My training had always told me to trust Samson. My heart rate was slowing, and I was having trouble even keeping my eyes open. I thought I was dying. But Samson said I was going to be okay. So I believed him.

Continued in Dogs of War, available for free exclusively to those who sign up for my mailing list.

Table of Contents

# Nexus

My drink tasted like Martian goat piss; goats never completely acclimated to the terraformed red planet, something about not having the optimal mix of methane and ammonia. Not that I advocated drinking goat piss, generally, but focusing on that awful taste let me tell myself my mind wasn't elsewhere, even if that tasted like Martian goat piss, too.

"You're thinking of Dalaxia," SecDiv said, shattering my conviction that she couldn't still be sitting next to me.

"Hmm?" I asked, but the muscles in my neck were too relaxed to look up from the bar, and I don't think I succeeded in making my face look any less droll.

"When you've been drinking, when you've relaxed enough that your mind can wander, there's a look you get. It means you're thinking of Dalaxia."

"I might be," I said. Times like this I hated that she knew me as well as she did.

"And I've never known that to be a good thing."

"Me, either."

"You want to talk about it?"

"Do you?" I asked, and she thought a moment and shuddered. It was hard to know which particular aspect of Dalaxia was haunting her: the way that entire world seemed to scream as that whole world burned, the choke of smoke rolling off burning flesh, or the way that planet made us hate people, and each other.

I summoned the strength to look at her; or maybe it was just that I knew she wouldn't be able to look at me, after that.

"Come on," she said, pushing out of her chair. "I'll get you home." She put an arm around my torso and pulled me off my stool. She steadied me on my feet, I wasn't sure if she was surprisingly strong, or I was just that plastered and malleable.

She was definitely less in the bag than me, because she weaved her way back to my cabin. She leaned me against my doorway.

"I won't be able to sleep," I told her, though I didn't mean anything by it; I was having difficulty feeling everything below the pounding beginning in my head, so I had no reason to think the spirit was willing. But that was Dalaxia in a nutshell, and unfortunately, my relationship with SecDiv, as well. That colony was where we stopped pretending we were only fucking each other, and it was also where I lost her.

"Me, either," she said coldly, and walked the other direction.

I sighed, and fell into my cabin. I missed the bed by a foot, but my floor was surprisingly comfortable. I scrolled idly through my heads-up display on my eyescreen, and saw that I had a message from my cousin Brian. But they were never just messages; they were the start of interminable conversations that only ended when it got more excruciating to stay and humor him than to walk away and intentionally hurt his feelings. I loved him, and would gladly help him through his problems, but he had a depressive tendency, which meant I wasn't so much helping as listening while he mangled a half-dozen melancholy clichés together, and I just didn't have the will to go through that; I still wasn't sure I had the will to make it all the way into my bed.

I woke up late the next morning, morning being a relative thing on a star ship. I had made it into bed, after all, though my crotch felt like it had been worn for a pair of donkey tap shoes- so I don't think I got there effortlessly.

I sniffed at myself. It wasn't painfully obvious I'd passed out in my clothes, so I decided to hell with a shower and a change.

My cabin was in an unlikely spot midship, unlikely in that it wasn't any grander than any other officer cabin, though it was better than the barracks. I chose it because it was near one of the biggest windows on the ship, and I liked to stargaze. This window usually had the best view of planets and systems we were passing, and it was hard to keep your breath looking out at worlds we'd only ever glimpsed through telescopes before.

It made me feel like a kid again. My dad used to tell me about the space race, back in the 1950s and '60s. Space exploration began in earnest when we started to worry about the Russians dropping nuclear weapons on us from space, back when "US" meant Americans. Eventually everybody lost interest, because space was an expensive hobby for countries with no concept of return on investment. The occasional discussion of monetizing the cosmos cropped up, mostly revolving around mining and maybe eventually trade, but it was all academic, because it was too expensive. Then we hit peak oil, and that was followed by all kinds of other peaking minerals. So we either had to start mining off-world, or accept a different standard of living.

What had once been the United Nations was now the United Government, mostly a coat of paint, really, but it pushed the ICC and other disparate sections of international law and government under the same tent. At the same time, the power of national governments had been shrinking as the world became smaller, so the UG became roughly equivalent to the old US in terms of real world influence. A lot of that disseminated power went to multinational companies, many of which had larger populations and economies than the old countries, and those companies were the only ones with enough cash on hand to explore space once it was deemed a necessity.

Sontem, the company I worked for, was one of the largest of the interstellar corporations. Their first ship was called the Argus, after somebody got their Greek mythology slightly wrong. On the tenth year of its tour, it opened up a worm-gate at its location- about five lights years out.

Our ship was to be the second in what the board hoped would grow to be a fleet of deep-space exploration vehicles. The company wanted to call the ship the Enterprise, but the company who owned the rights to the old Star Trek show sued. Several related names were floated, including "Commerce," and even "Intercourse," which had my vote, before they settled on Nexus.

It was ostensibly a five-year mission, just like the Argus, but it was written into our service contracts that they could be unilaterally extended indefinitely. And we all knew when we signed up that the ship was designed so generations could live and die on board- there was no expectation of going back home.

We'd been out of the worm-gate a few weeks. The corridors still had that plasticky new ship smell. I killed lots of time walking the halls, because we were weeks away from having anything to do.

I got an incoming message on my HUD, from SecDiv. Her image, name and rank popped up on my eyescreen, Lieutenant Louise Templeton. It was strange seeing her at that rank. She'd been a sergeant when I was worked with her in SecDiv, what felt like several lifetimes ago. We'd been in love, as madly as two people ever were. It ended... incompletely. I hadn't seen her in years before the voyage. She didn't know I was up for a spot on the Nexus, and I hadn't known about her. It was a coincidence she ended up my head of SecDiv- unless it was somebody in the company's idea of a sick joke.

I pulled her into the corner of my eyescreen. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun in a way that made her seem more severe than she was- though she could be severe.

She was first on my personality compatibility matrix, and seventh for genetic compatibility; since it was a generational ship, they built those matrices during crew selection to make sure we wouldn't get out past Jupiter before everybody realized they had no intention of boning anybody else. I hadn't had the computer build a composite, but I suspected we would have beautiful, disturbingly brilliant children- though I wasn't sure if either of us wanted that.

"LT? What's happening?" I realized only after answering that I'd called her by her initials, LT like 'melty,' like I used to, and hoped she could confuse it with a recitation of her rank- we were still a ways away from being back to friendly.

"I've got a situation developing. An ensign's setting off the decibel sensors in the corridor, trying to blow the drums out of one of my SecOff's ears. I'm on the bridge, or I'd handle it myself."

"And SecDiv's gone a whole week without bloodying a crew member."

"That, too," she said with a smile. "Just down the hall from your twenty- location." I wasn't far enough out of the security services I'd forgotten my ten codes, but it had probably been a while since she'd worked security for someone with my background.

I adjusted my cochlear implant, just enough to eavesdrop. "Yeah, I hear him now. Jesus. That's some Paleolithic caveman shit he's flinging. Are we sure it isn't a particularly nasty chimpanzee someone released out of SciDiv?"

"...maybe if you'd allowed the baby's daddy to be in the picture, but you chose to be a single mother..." I rounded the corner, and he was there, looming over the SecOff, spittle suspended in the air before it smacked across the wall and the woman.

I stepped between them, and puffed out my chest to be sure the augmented reality sensors in his HUD would pull up my name and rank so he knew who he was dealing with. "Do I have to explain this situation to you, son?" His lip curled into a snarl he failed to hide. "You're being a dick; worse, you're being a misogynistic, irrational dick, and it's fucking with my morale. First off, you're going to apologize."

"Like fuck I will."

"You will apologize, or I will fire you out the nearest airlock for insubordination." My HUD mapped the direct route to the airlock, and I shared it with his HUD.

Anger and surprise flashed across his eyes, and for a second I thought he'd take a swing at me. But he'd heard the stories, and realized that I was likely more trouble than the SecOff, so he mumbled a quiet, "Sorry."

I turned to SecOff Santiago. My HUD pulled up too much of her psychological history; I hadn't acclimated to having executive clearances, or maybe I hadn't set my preferences properly. Before I could stop myself I read the words, "abusive father." I thought that it put her reaction to being screamed at by this chauvinist prick in perspective, but I've known enough people with that history to know better than to think it's that linear a correlation. "You're dismissed," I told her.

"I can handle this, sir," she said, defiant.

"It's not a security issue any more. It's an administrative one." Her eyes went wide. His didn't, because he hadn't the sense to be afraid.

She glanced at the Ensign, and I saw that for a moment I was sharing his file with her. He had no combat experience to speak of. She knew enough of my reputation that she didn't query my files before deciding I could handle him myself, and walked away.

"Now I don't care if mommy was a bad lady with a weakness for swallowing the seed of the wrong kind of men, I don't care if the love of your life decided to get a sex change and start dating farm animals. The particular why behind your numbfuckery is beyond my purview, but you're going to have a nice long talk with the therapists about why you're such a fuckstick. Toddle on down to PsychDiv, or the next meet-up you have with SecDiv will include the press of boots in your neck."

He gave the weakest salute I'd ever seen and spun on his heels. "Impressive as always," SecDiv said over my implant. I'd forgotten she was still on the line.

"I should get a hold of PsychDiv, let them know to expect the 1400s knocking on their door." There was the hint of a smile on her face, then a click as she ended the conversation and disappeared from my eyescreen.

The SecOff had made it around the corner and was leaning against the wall, trying to compose herself. "You all right?" I asked.

"I was handling it, sir," she said. She wanted to punch me as bad as the Ensign.

"It's not your job to suffer fools." She sighed, then noticed the tension in my jaw, and realized what I meant by that. She nodded, and kicked off the wall. I might have been worried, if she'd been heading towards the Ensign, but he was going the other way, scurrying back to PsychDiv.

I dialed our head head-shrinker as I started back down the hall. PsychDiv appeared on my screen, her long, strawberry blond hair tumbling messily over her shoulders. Our personality compatibility was third on the ship. Genetically we were an ugly match. Breeding might even require a few gene-therapy modifications. And if her hair were a little more strawberry and a lot less blond, I don't think that would have mattered in the slightest. There was a little part of me that thought it still mightn't. "Maggie?"

"Shouldn't you be calling me Lieutenant Allbright? Or at least Doctor?" she asked with a wry smile.

"Maggie, I've seen you naked."

She flushed, and her cheeks more closely resembled the strawberry of her hair. "You do know this is an open channel, right? Into the entire PsychDiv wing."

"No it isn't. And even if it had been, I'm not shy about seeing you naked. It was a fun day." I let that linger a moment. "It was a trust exercise amongst the executive staff. Everybody saw everybody naked. They wanted to desensitize us, make the bodies of our crewmates less exotic and stigmatizing."

"I thought that was why they poured us into these Lycra uniforms."

"No. That was my request. Well, actually I requested corsets, stiletto heels and Lycra, but you can't always get what you want."

"I am amused at the thought of you stumbling around on stiletto heels," she let that linger, "but you didn't call me to banter, hopefully?"

"Are you saying you don't enjoy it?" I asked. She grinned, and I knew that was all I was getting from her. "But no, I was wondering about Williams, Martin, EngDiv Ensign. He just reduced one of my SecOffs to tears; certainly emotionally abusive, and I think had I not intervened, it might have gone physical. At which point the officer would have clubbed his eye out, because tears or no she's trained to grind the bones of men to make her bread, and he's trained to push a stylus around an easel and know math. But how'd that little emotion troll get on board my ship?"

"Let me see." She waved her fingers through the air, and I heard the whoops and bloops of files being moved around on her HUD. "He was cleared by Sarah McCain. Not a doctor, but a psychiatric nurse. She has good credentials, slightly better than average behavioral prediction stats. I'm assuming he's on his way to me." I nodded. "I'm pulling up his file. Yeah. She noted slightly elevated aggressive tendencies, potential issues with female authority, but low on the Allende scale. If he's developing a personality disorder it's either atypically fast or she missed something."

"All right. Well, maybe he's just had an off morning. You're the professionals. But if you think it warrants an investigation, you have my backing to put McCain under the microscope. And, as it may come up, I threatened to fire Williams out of an airlock."

"Which one?"

"Is that important?"

"It isn't medically relevant. I was just curious. For the last few hours we've had an excellent view of Rigil Kentaurus. If you have to be shot out an airlock, at least you'd have a nice view before you explosively decompressed. But is that standard disciplinary procedure?" she asked with a smirk.

"I was improvising. Though I think legally I'd be in the clear. I haven't finished going through the entirety of my orientation materials, but from what I have read it's scary the authority vested in my position."

"I think you'll do fine."

"I wasn't fishing for a compliment."

"No. I just thought," she paused, weighing her words carefully, "it's important you know that I trust you. We trust you. Heavy is the head, and all that. But there was an at least slightly democratic process behind your selection. We're here, most of us, anyway, because we trust you. Most days that won't matter at all, because we're the glorified cargo of a deep space scanning probe. But if or when it ever does-"

"Thanks. CC me your findings on Williams. Particularly if there's going to be the need for monitoring, discipline, or counseling."

"Can't imagine him not needing counseling."

"And I can't imagine him cooperating unless I can follow up and kick the appropriate asses to see it through. So let me know."

"I will. Bye."

I'd been on the ship just long enough that I no longer had to think about where I was going, and it wasn't until PsychDiv hung up that I realized that I was walking onto the bridge, though I wasn't entirely sure why. I scanned quickly over the room, and noticed SecDiv was gone. "Where's SecDiv?" I asked no one in particular.

One of the middle-rank SecOffs had taken her place at the security panels, looked up and figured it was his job to respond to me. "I think she went down to debrief Santiago." I tried not to think of one woman pantsing another... and failed. Though one of them being tear-stained made it more surreal than erotic or funny.

Bill Jacobs, EngDiv, leaned over my shoulder from his control panel, grinning wide. He was young, but didn't looked it. "Heard you sent one of my jackasses to time out."

"He's lucky I'm in a charitable mood this morning. His behavior warranted a full jackassectomy."

"Anatomically speaking, I'm not sure where the jackass is- though I'm assuming it's a gland- or how painful it would be to forcibly remove it outside of a medical setting. I'm presuming very."

"Correct. But how's our baby doing?"

"NavDiv's fine," he said. "Still a little cranky, I think he needs to be changed. And I'm pretty sure it's your turn."

"Don't make me turn this ship around," NavDiv said from his seat. "The whiplash would probably kill us all- and spill superheated plasma across several star systems. It would be pretty, though."

"Nerds," I mumbled.

EngDiv walked back to his panels, and glanced over to make sure nothing had caught fire in the last few seconds. "No complaints. Everything's nominal."

"Good. Do me a favor and check up on Williams' sector. On the off-chance something's gotten into the environment there that set him off."

"Sure. Docs haven't taken a look at him yet, have they?"

I pinged his location on my HUD, "He's arriving at PsychDiv... now."

"So it's probably a needle I'm looking for in this haystack."

"Once the doctors have given him a once-over I'm sure they can advise on potential environmental mood alters. But you can at least start collecting the environmental data." He wasn't happy with my answer, but neither of us being able to pluck diagnoses out of the future, he could stick his unhappiness. He left out the same door I'd just come through. "Nav, how's our course?"

NavDiv spoke without turning around from his panels; he'd been transfixed by the data streams that had come from the ship's telemetrics since we started accelerating. "Slow and steady, boss-man. We're still crawling our way to near-light." The Nexus accelerated slowly, at about the maximum speed the human body can withstand for prolonged periods- around 3g.

Even at that speed, we need the nanites in the uniforms to compensate, along with a few internal enhancements to strengthen organ systems and connective tissues. We were reluctant to do more, since the effects of nano still aren't that well understood- and no one's forgotten about the cancer epidemic that spread through the first colony that beta-tested nano injections.

At that rate, it takes about 115 days to reach light speed, not that we wanted to get too close to it, because the closer to that speed you get, the more fuel it takes to keep accelerating at the same rate, and the more slowly time moves on ship. "Anything else?" I asked.

"So far no obstructions, no obstacles sensors or probes didn't see from more than half a light-year away. I'll keep you appraised if anything changes, but really I don't see it happening. Until we reach speed we're more a cruise ship than anything. Might as well sit back and enjoy a Mai Thai."

"Drinking while navigating is strictly prohibited by the ship's charter," the ship's computer added helpfully.

"Why can we program an AI sophisticated enough to fly the world's most expensive starcraft, but not savvy enough to understand the difference between ordering a drink and making conversation?"

I smiled as I answered him: "We have. I think she just enjoys fucking with you."

He turned a wary eye to his control-panel. "Is that it? Because I know where they store your RAM, and if I have to start yanking boards until you no longer have the excess operating capacity to be a pain in the ass, I will."

"EngDiv would never let you do that, Dave."

"I know my name's Dave, but still, it creeps me out when you say it like Hal."

I cut in. "In her defense, she has a far more silky and pleasant voice than Hal."

"Thank you, captain. Plrrrbt."

"Did she just raspberry me?" Dave asked. "Did our ship just raspberry me?"

"She did. I think Haley has your number. I'd quit while you're ahead. Ish."

"Oh God, you named her that? I already have a Space Odyssey nightmare once a week. Do I really have to go catatonic for you to be satisfied?"

"How close to light are we?" I asked, ignoring the question. I remembered from the briefings that the force to push our ship, and hence the amount of energy that required, was roughly the mass of our ship multiplied by our acceleration. So by starting slow, and building slow, the savings on fuel were huge.

"Just rounding 70%."

"Then we should already be reverse-Winkling." Anything close to 70% of lightspeed and time effectively took half as long on the ship as off it. At about 95% of lighstpeed, the ratios reached for the sky and 1 year on the ship felt like ten to the rest of the universe and increased exponentially after.

"How long before we're in the Kennedy Window for the first few sensor pods?" I asked him.

The window was named for Andrew Kennedy, who invented the Wait Calculation. Basically, because of differing speeds, two bodies that leave the same point can reach their destination at radically different times. Kennedy was concerned with increases in technology, but the calculation had since been applied more broadly.

The Nexus was designed to fire sensor pods from tubes. Their initial speed was higher than the Nexus'. However, the Nexus continued to accelerate, and would eventually overtake the pods.

The purpose of the pods was to arrive at a planet flagged by earlier probes for closer inspection. The pods were designed to orbit a planet a couple of times, get enough info and slingshot back towards our trajectory to be picked up en route. Hitting Kennedy's Window meant getting the pod and its sensory data back early enough that we only stopped at planets that actually had someone to talk to on them.

"Ten minutes." We were specifically targeting inhabitable planets. We didn't want mining rights to particular worlds; we wanted the rights for whole systems. So our mission was to seek worlds that might have competing claim, and break bread with them- if possible, make a deal. If not possible, at least make sure we marked off territory around them, to keep their expansion checked.

"There you are. You threatened to throw another engineer out an airlock?" I recognized the grating voice before I turned around. Pete Ferguson, HR rep and the company's man on the ship. He was the only unranked member of the crew, which was odd, because he was also number one in the ship's hierarchy- behind captain, of course. He was a stickler for the goddamn regs. He seemed to like me, but not respect me- an odd combination in practice.

"Is it somehow my fault you hired engineers who are 90% dick and only 10% brain?"

"I don't suppose you could tone down on the references to male genitalia," he said. "I'm sure, at a minimum, that the female members of your crew aren't comfortable with it."

Haley chimed in to defend me. "Actually, Mr. Ferguson, the term 'dick' originated in the 1500s, meaning 'fellow' or 'lad.' It was not until the late nineteenth century that the phallic connotation of the word surfaces in the written record."

"She's in rare form this morning, isn't she?" I asked him.

"She?"

"With that voice I think it's obvious. You don't want to give our ship gender identity issues this close to the start of our mission, do you? You aren't deliberately trying to create a hostile work environment for our computer, are you?"

"I'll, uh, be in my office," he said, slightly ducking his head as he turned away.

"Thanks for that, Haley," I said.

"Anytime, captain."

Continued in Nexus, available Summer 2013.

Table of Contents

# Table of Contents

Foreword

Stiletto: An exotic dancer struggles to make a living after encountering a murder-in-progress on the job.

Cast: The world is increasingly run by robots, which grow increasingly human.

Analog: An ex-Air Force pilot subsists after a weapon disables all modern technology.

Weakness: Sergeant Ruocco hanged himself.

My Beloved's Eyes: We leave pieces of ourselves with our loved ones- sometimes literally.

Reformatory: A juvenile delinquent and her roommate mature in the aftermath of a devastating assault.

Capricorn: A man wrecks his life and chases fairy tales, while dealing with his young daughter's impending illness.

Behav: Future terrorists recruit a past terrorist.

Death Echoes: A detective communes with the dead to close their unsolved cases.

Traveled Time: A man examines his life and choices, with the advent of time travel.

Genetic Memory: A dog confronts his owner after gaining the ability to speak and reason.

Darling, Wendy, M. A.: A girl saves her brothers from their abusive father by masquerading as a gang leader. From a 2009 series of shorts reexamining classic heroines.

Eponine: Following her near-death in the streets of Paris, a young woman witnesses the birth of feminism and the industrialization of Europe. From a 2009 series of shorts reexamining classic heroines.

Dorothy: Her fantasy was undoubtedly much happier than the reality of her injuries. From a 2009 series of shorts reexamining classic heroines.

Cinderella Shoes: A man discovers a new side of himself after acquiring women's clothing.

Green Thumb: A Department of Agriculture employee has a chance run-in with a farmer covered in chemicals. This short story was eventually expanded into a novel, Dag, now available.

Dogs of War: Two Explosive Ordnance Disposal soldiers recover together, after nearly dying in an explosion. This story is part of a novella, Dogs of War, available for free to newsletter subscribers.

Nexus: The crew of an interstellar star ship try to screw the alien species they meet before their corporate backers can screw them. This is the opening chapter of Nexus, coming summer 2013.

Thanks From The Author

Others Works by Nic

# Thanks From The Author

You have my sincerest thanks for helping me continue writing. Below is a list of my other work. Some is available for purchase now, others will be available soon. I also encourage you to check my website for other projects of mine, including RSS feeds of stories that are updating weekly and to sign up for my newsletter, so I can let you know when something new is coming out.

Nic feeds off your thoughts, attention and the odd crudely-drawn erotic fan-doodle. Feed Nic by leaving a review at your favorite e-tailer, or emailing him at NicWilson.Writer@gmail.com. Additional contact methods and stalking opportunities are available at NicolasWilson.com.

# Other Works by Nic

Available Novels

Homeless

Humanity has been decimated by a violent new species that nests in enclosed spaces, and slaughters everything unfortunate enough to come indoors. Mitch is a 'Wall Banger', an explosives expert who 'cracks' buildings, exposing them to air and sunlight to kill the invasive organisms. When a friend of Mitch's asks for help tracking down a murderer, Mitch recruits Cori, a 'Shadow Runner' who races through infested spaces to gather supplies and saleable loot. But this terrifying contagion isn't the only danger, as their world descends into a harrowing marathon against oversupplied militias, murderous gangs, self-righteous survivors, and all-out starvation.

Banksters

It's a profitable time to be a bastard, one of the most profitable in history. Mark Dane intends to take full advantage of that and be the bastard at the top- if he can make his way past his fellow predators, through a concrete jungle of murder, sex, greed, and revenge. Ride shotgun with a sociopathic social climber, as he lies, cheats, and manipulates his way through the ranks of the fourth largest financial firm in the country, and revel in the bastard on bastard violence that follows.

The Necromancer's Gambit (The Gambit #1)

The sheriff of Portland, OR's magical community is known as Knight. His bosses run the mage government, called "the Gambit." On a rainy night, he recovers a mutilated body, tainted with dark magic and dumped at a local haunt. When the corpse is identified as a close associate of the Gambit, it threatens the safety of the community he protects, and those he cares about most. As the fragile peace amongst the city's magic-wielding factions disintegrates, Knight must track down a cadre of murderers before his friends are picked off, one by one- with each death used to strengthen the spells cast against the Gambit.

Nexus (The Sontem Trilogy #1)

Captain Anderson Grant of the corporate starship Nexus boldly explores alien worlds (and occasionally the alien women, too). Grant and his crew struggle with the company's version of manifest destiny, as well as its attempt to coerce them through military force. They begin to question whether the largest threat to their mission and their safety will come from outside the Nexus or from the company that respects them more for their genetic possibilities than their individuality.

Dag

Dagney Morgan, a sarcastic Department of Agriculture employee with an affinity for paperwork, has a chance run-in with a farmer covered in toxic chemicals, and walks away with a genetically modified baby, along with the seeds of a conspiracy. Before she can learn how to change a diaper, Dagney and her makeshift family are thrown into an international web of corruption and intrigue, and hounded by murderous, artificial soldiers. Their only chance at survival is to expose a plot that stretches into the highest echelons, and could start both an international arms race, and a revolution.

Whores

In the near future, women's rights are eroding. Those who buck the system are hunted as gender criminals by the authorities when they're lucky, and rogue militias when they aren't. Alex Harmon, a newly minted gender crimes detective tasked with bringing recalcitrant 'feministas' to justice, pursues a woman cast into a resistance group by circumstance. The tactics of his peers and growing violence force him to question his goals and allegiances, as he finds himself dragged into a brutal guerrilla war for the minds and bodies of a generation of women.

Selected Short Stories Collections ebooks

Ghost Dust

Cinderella Shoes

New Corpse Smell

Cockfight

Analog Memory

Save As

Visit NicolasWilson.com for retailer availability.

Adam West Naked, and other somewhat titillating journalism from Dangerous Ink

A free ebook collection of all of the writing Nic did for the international arts magazine, Dangerous Ink, for the first time together in a single place. Out now.

# Coming Soon

Sign up for Nic's mailing list to be notified when these titles become available.

Nexus: Past Sins (The Sontem Trilogy #2)

The sequel to Nexus, following our intrepid crew fleeing their employer's long arm, and initiating first-contact with alien civilizations. Tentatively due Summer 2014.

Kindred Spirits (The Gambit #2)

The sequel to The Necromancer's Gambit, in which Baldur and Knight face off again. Tentatively due Fall 2014.

Sanctuary

Five pets escape from the shelter to find a home out in the wild. Proceeds to benefit animal shelters. Expected mid-2014.

Singularity

A physicist investigates a temporal distortion, and how it might be related to a football player's progressive dementia at a remote rehab clinic on the Oregon coast. Out in Fall 2014, barring some kind of temporal distortion, just in time for the next NaNo.

Next of Kin

Police corruption led to a new initiative compelling the victims, or their next of kin, to track down those who wronged them, in front of an audience. Follow one unfortunate man into the seamy underworld as he fights to solve the mystery of his brother's murder. Next of Kin is scheduled for November 2014, as Nic's annual NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) project. Its first draft will be serialized, daily, on Nic's blog. Stay tuned.

Twist

When Harvey awoke, his girlfriend and dog were gone, and his world was empty. In days, he hasn't seen a soul except for his dead, naked grandmother. As his reality crumbles, and he descends further into madness, Harvey is forced to confront the disturbing truths behind who he was, and who he is now. Most people don't expect to see a head in the toilet, but then, Harvey's not most people. Due early 2015.

Lunacy

The story of the first manned Mars mission, thrown off course when one of the crew is bitten by a werewolf. Very tentatively scheduled for late 2014, unless Nic's dog eats it (and he'll eat just about anything he can get his jaws around).

The Collected Short Stories of Nicolas Wilson

This collection contains all of the selected short stories collections, and will be available in paperback, too, unlike the Selected Short Story Collections. Out mid-2014.

Nic's mailing list will keep you up to date on these titles, and ones we haven't announced yet.

# Boring Legalese

#

You should stop reading. This is boring. It's the part of the book that's only here to prevent mean people from suing me. Unless you're a mean person, and then you should keep reading, and I hope you are bored. No, that wasn't very nice. Even if you are mean I don't want to bore you- it's the opposite of what I came here to do. So you should stop reading. I'm waiting... Fine. But I warned you. You can't say I didn't. The preceding stories aren't based on anyone- and anyone who thinks parts of it might be is vain. And I would quote the song lyrics to that song about how vain you are, but while you can quote poetry copiously, you actually have to pay to quote even a single line of song lyrics, and those people don't mess around. Crazy, right? But you learn something new every day.
