November 7, 1933—The following account was reconstructed by the author, principally utilizing diary entries included in the estate of Mister Charles Priestly, formerly of 124A West 4th St., New York City. Mr. Priestly served in the 9th New York Infantry Regiment during the Civil War, and upon the war’s completion joined Empire City Casualty Corporation, where he worked in various capacities from 1866 -1883, his final position being that of Vice President of Finance. The final portion of the account is derived from hand-written notes and other related documents found with Mr. Priestly’s remains upon their discovery in the New York caisson of the Brooklyn Bridge earlier this year. Mr. Priestly’s wife Emily survived her husband, but passed away three years after the final date of this account. The historical records of the Brooklyn Bridge Company and detailed diary notes of Master Mechanic Frank Farrington fully support the veracity of the account.

“Cut the links!” Bethel says without hesitation, his voice far calmer than the situation would seem to merit. “Cut them all now.” But as Ryker the technician raises his hands to the keyboard to comply, Bethel raises a hand. “All but Sydney,” he says. “That was Stewart’s original destination. Leave that link open. Cut all the rest.” Ryker hesitates, as though unsure of Bethel’s resolve. The large time clock on the wall reads plus twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds since transmission. “Do it, for Christ’s sake!” Bethel repeats, finally allowing a touch of urgency to enter his voice. Seconds later, six of the seven bars on the computer screen change from green to flashing red. A message appears on the screen:

“Are you sure? This operation cannot be undone.”

“Arwen? Seriously? Arwen … What the heck kind of name is Arwen anyway?”

“It’s a very unique name, the name of my favorite character from my favorite book around the time you were born.”

“Unique, yeah, I’ll give you that—bonus points for uniqueness. But a fantasy novel? Hobbits? Dwarves? Elves? So, were you and dad, like, hippies or something? What else was in the running that lost out to Arwen? Moonpie? Swampgrass?” Arry lowered her head for a moment and rubbed hard at the bridge of her nose. Maybe it was the late hour, or the alcohol. All she knew was that it had taken her twenty-two years to have this conversation, and so far it wasn’t looking like it would turn out to have been worth the wait. In truth she didn’t mind the name.

Armstrong Station – Thursday, March 14, 2097, 4:42 pm EST

“This is our last case, so make it count. Supply ship’s not due for another couple of days.” Takashi lowers the large cardboard box of toilet paper to the galley floor and rises with a grunt.

Allard looks up from whatever he’s tinkering with under the microwave console and chuckles. “If twenty-three of us can’t make ninety-six rolls of toilet paper last for two more days, there is something seriously wrong with this crew. That’s like two rolls a day per person. Just steer clear of the burritos.”

Despite a lifetime of religious cynicism and disbelief, it was still something of a disappointment, upon my death, to discover that there really is nothing afterward. Well, not nothing in the literal sense. My ability to be here and to tell you about it pretty much means that there must be something. But it’s certainly nothing in the eschatological sense that most everyone is back there basing their lives on and which serves as the foundation for everything they’re looking forward to in the hereafter—in fact, not only looking forward to, but for many people actually spending their lives striving toward. Only here’s the eye opening reality of it—what awaits over here is exactly the same for everyone, regardless of what you did during your life, what you believed, or who you prayed to and worshipped. Priest, serial killer, infant, Wall Street banker—doesn’t matter one damn bit.

Rick was supposed to be writing, damn it. He had a contract and a deadline and he’d already long-since spent the meager advance. He had done the math and it was driving him mad. The publisher expected a four hundred pager, due in seven months time, which was, of course, insane, seeing as how the first book had taken nearly five years to research and write. Four hundred pages, about a hundred and fifty thousand words, of which he currently had maybe ten thousand. To make the deadline meant cranking out about ten thousand more words every week for the remainder of the time until the deadline. Who the hell could do that? Nobody, that’s who. Maybe Stephen King, but that was about it.

“So you believe there is no point to life if you don’t die at the end of it,” MacDonald says, punctuating the statement with a sip from his bourbon. Ice cubes tinkle in the highball glass as he sets it down on the end table. Henderson, his companion in the chair opposite, sits for a long, silent moment, letting the statement hang, a legally concise distillation of his own more nuanced philosophical assertions of the past few moments. The only other sounds in the library are periodic crackles from the fireplace and the quickening breaths of a cold front just now arriving outside the big front window.

MacDonald’s statement is neither rhetorical nor a mere exercise in eschatological musing, though the pair, fast friends since their college days, now nearly sixty years past, spend no shortage of time engaging in precisely this sort of dialog.

In the final two minutes of descent to the comet, a number of things needed to take place in rapid succession and perfectly. The failure of even a single one risked jeopardizing the entire mission, which was now well into its fifth year and which had cost American taxpayers a bit over four hundred million dollars. The fact that what taxpayers would be getting for their nearly half a billion dollars was a container of comet dust about the size of a shoebox made the demands of perfection for the landing all the more critical.

With one hundred twenty seconds remaining, the lander detached itself from the main vehicle. It then fired a series of quick brief blasts from its maneuvering engines to reorient itself so that the main descent booster engine was facing the comet’s surface.

Trevor Halprin sat alone and silent in his car in front of the building. A light mist coated the windshield and the only sound was the faint ticking of the cooling engine. He’d lived in Brooklyn his entire life, but he had never before been in this area of the city. It was a complex of unremarkable single story buildings near the Fort Hamilton Promenade, just east of the Verrazano Bridge. There were a few other cars parked up and down the long street, but no one walking around, a mildly unsettling thing anyplace in New York City. Trevor had been given an appointment time of 4:00 p.m. and instructed not to be too early or too late. But he was nearly half an hour early, since he’d been uncertain of directions. So he sat and he considered, for the hundredth time, why he had come.

A couple of blocks east of Jackson Square, in New Orleans’ French Quarter, wedged into a narrow alley abutting St. Louis Cathedral, stood a small single-story antique emporium called The Alcove. The building, viewed head-on, appeared a bit twisted and of dubious structural integrity, in the same manner as certain ancient pubs in remote English townships. You had to push hard on the front door to get it to open. On the rare occasions when someone did so, a small bell affixed to the top of the door would tinkle brightly, conveying positivity that a subsequent look about the place would promptly cast doubt upon. Mere words could not do justice to the interior of The Alcove, but if they could, they would include words like hodgepodge, mayhem, and, almost certainly, fire hazard. But, as it happens, this is precisely the sort of environment that antique shoppers the world over expect and, indeed, thrive in.

Conrad Fletcher lay dead, or seemingly so, on the floor of his capacious upstairs library. A crystal highball glass lay unbroken beside him, its contents spilt out and soaked into the carpet on which Fletcher lay. Oddly, none of the assembled guests leapt to the aid of the stricken man. Instead they simply stood about the library, a few looking at Fletcher, but most making a point of not looking at him, as though either seeking some measure of plausible deniability or perhaps expecting others to do whatever was appropriate to the situation. At last, however, Giles Prescott knelt beside Fletcher’s prostrate form and leaned in closely, his hand, then his ear to the fallen man’s mouth. After a moment so posed, he rose, shaking his head ruefully. While there was considerable murmuring amongst the assembled, there continued to be no rush to administer to Fletcher’s aid beyond the perfunctory assessment rendered by Prescott.

There was nothing terribly frightening about it at first. There were no boils or sores like you see in TV movies, no one coughing up blood like an Ebola victim. The assault began in slow motion—seemingly random fields that were so spread about that no one thought to do any sort of forensic analysis to determine if perhaps something systemic might be taking place. Corn in Iowa, wheat in Russia, soybeans in France. Just ordinary crop failures, easy to blame on lack of rain, a bad batch of seed, climate change. An actual blessing for some farmers, at least in the early going, since a reduced crop meant higher commodity prices and, if the failure was complete enough, crop insurance payments kicking in. It wasn’t until the fourth consecutive year of the failures that analysts began to realize that the percentage of failed crops was rising, and that the rate of increase was not linear but exponential. It was also in this fourth year that scientists began conducting genetic assays of samples from a wide range of crop types and a broad disparity of locations. In a scientific paper presented at the 2017 International Conference on Agriculture and Biological Sciences, it was stated for the first time out loud that nearly all of the failures of the recent half-decade had been due to precisely the same cause, a cause no one yet understood, much less had any idea how to control. It was forecast, based on a statistical analysis of these first years, that next year’s total global agricultural production would be fully eleven percent lower than the peak of five years earlier.

“Damn, it feels like we’ve been standing here forever!”

Flynn shifts his weight from one foot to the other and back again. He removes a tissue from his pants pocket. It’s already crumpled from previous use, but he wipes his brow one more time and exhales with loud exasperation.

“Is this how it’s supposed to work? Seriously?” he continues. “We haven’t moved an inch in, like, an hour.”

Flynn Simon has, in fact, been in the queue for over an hour and a half, which is how long it’s been since he drove his 2007 Toyota Highlander into the back end of a stopped eighteen-wheeler on the Long Island Expressway. He had looked away for only a second at the sound of his cell phone ringing on the passenger seat. He never got a chance to look back out the windshield, never saw the truck’s brake lights, never even touched his own brakes. Killed instantly, he’s been in this line ever since. The miles-long traffic jam his wreck caused on the expressway hasn’t even been cleared yet, but here he stands. Mercifully, his body, or avatar, or whatever this is now, shows no sign of the accident trauma, which is just as well for the others in line, as he was very nearly decapitated.

Who could have imagined that the universities would be the first to go? Anyplace where you went to learn how to think. The trades turned out to be much harder though. They can make you a competent contract attorney or psychiatrist in fifteen minutes, but if you want to learn plumbing or welding, you still have to go spend a year or more in a trade school, just like back in the day. When the technology first started to emerge in the late twenty sixties, it was driven by the work of Columbia neurobiology researchers Pelton and Yamaguchi, who had collaborated decades earlier on identifying specific sites in the human brain where learning occurred, research that had subsequently earned the pair Nobel Prizes in medicine. With the benefit of hindsight, it seemed ironic to many that the primary long-term consequence of the research would be the undoing of the vast global network of education that had made their research possible in the first place. I am reminded of this history as I sit here in front of the TV watching an ad for the newest commercial incarnation of the technology, the Prentice Remote Implant (PRI), a technology I had had a hand in creating.

“I can’t help it, Rob. And I can’t explain it either. Well, I can, but it will never be a satisfying explanation.”

“That’s certainly true,” Rob said. “I will tell you this, though, because I’m your friend and someone has to tell you. You’re freaking people out with this business. There’s talk of interventions, counseling, possibly restraint.”

“You’re totally overreacting. It’s not even that big of a deal. It’s only a feeling after all.”

“Yes, a feeling—a feeling you’ve now shared with everyone we know, in every conceivable social situation for going on three weeks, a feeling that you—we—aren’t real. That we’re just characters in a story being written by some author somewhere, who we—well most of us—are unaware of, but who controls everything we do and say and think..”

Three seconds of rushing wind precede the violent thunderclap of a body impacting asphalt. There is a limit to the velocity with which the human body can strike an unyielding object and still retain any semblance of intactness. Former Mayor Roger Hendricks had exceeded that limit by at least an order of magnitude during his plunge from the thirty-seventh floor rooftop terrace of the Flemington Tower on June the sixteenth of the year preceding. As of today, now nearly seven months on, why he took that plunge remains a mystery—one that, alas, it was now Benedict’s sworn duty to unravel. 

Thursday – January 7, 1937

“I confess, sir, that I have no earthly idea. No idea at all,” Senior Detective Malcolm Benedict sat uncomfortably before his boss’s immense maple desk. Chief Prescott swore to all he met that the desk had once been owned by Ulysses Grant himself, though Benedict was unaware of any sources of provenance for the claim

…because if she didn’t, there was a decent chance Bret would react precisely as her friends had, on multiple occasions, suggested that he would react, which seemed unlikely to be good. And so Melody had spent a fair bit of time avoiding Bret in recent days. She had, in fact, found his behavior of late to be borderline erratic, almost as though this whole situation wasn’t really as innocuous as he had led friends and associates to believe. And if that was the case—if Bret was harboring some misguided sense of indebtedness on her part—well, then, she was pretty sure that being around him right now was not high on her list of things to do.

Hegel the hedgehog rose one morning and greeted the sun. His smile was bright as he stepped through his front door and into the garden. Today would be a wonderful day, a fun day. And if he was lucky, he would see his friend Hobbes the hamster and maybe even get a chance to cheer him up.

For Hobbes was not a very happy hamster. Hegel and Hobbes had known each other for a long time, and it seemed Hegel was always trying to cheer up Hobbes. Once in a while he would succeed and bring a smile to Hobbes’ face, perhaps with a riddle or clever rhyme. But mostly Hobbes just walked about pouting.

Just as Hegel the hedgehog was thinking these things about his friend, there came a scratching sound at the garden gate. Only one creature in the garden made such a noise. He opened the gate, and, sure enough, there stood Hobbes, wearing a sad face and looking like nothing on earth could make him smile.

The grandfather clock in the corner chimed 6:30 as Buster sat deeply and comfortably ensconced in his recliner, repeatedly belching up the taste of the spaghetti with sausage and marinara sauce leftovers he had nuked for supper. He loved the sausage, though he knew well that he would still be tasting it well past bedtime. The TV was tuned to the evening news, or at least what Buster still preferred to regard in that way. It wasn’t the evening news any more, though, was it? It was the all-the-goddamned-time news. It was just that Buster had spent most of his adult life in the era of three channels, each of which aired a half hour of local news from 6:00 to 6:30, followed by national and international news from 6:30 to 7:00. And if you couldn’t fit the latest war, famine, or murder coverage into that half-hour, then it would just have to damn well wait until the next night. It had been the era of Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley and, well, some habits were just really hard to break, so Buster made a point of watching at six, even though he could just as easily watch anytime he liked. At the moment some blonde woman was describing the latest Middle East calamity. Buster belched once more, making no effort to suppress the basso tone. He lived by himself, so who the hell cared.

Billy Hale was descended from a long line of miscreants and vagabonds, and when the day came at last and they sent him away for stealing horses from the farm in the same town as my own, no one was much surprised, least of all Billy. It was generally felt that his life—all thirty-two years of it—had been building to some sort of unfortunate crescendo, and the only question in the minds of those who knew him was whether or not the climax would include incarceration, death, or quite possibly both. That he ended up merely imprisoned was regarded by most as an unexpected windfall. Ours is an area of the state in which men are routinely shot for taking things that aren’t theirs to take, with the authorities in such cases more likely to offer a congratulatory handshake than anything approaching justice or retribution.